The Science of Success: Harnessing the Power of Positive Thinking, Dopamine, and Mindset EP 1447

0:01Calling all conscious achievers who are seeking more community and connection, I've got an invitation for you. Join me at this year's Summit of Greatness this September 7th through 9th in my hometown of Columbus, Ohio to unleash your true greatness. This is the one time a year that I gather the greatness community together in person for a powerful transformative weekend. People come from all over the world and you can expect to hear from inspiring speakers like Inky Johnson, Jospree Singh, Vanessa Van Edwards, Jen Sincero and many more. You'll also be able to dance your heart out to live music, get your body moving with group workouts, and connect with others at our evening socials.

0:44So if you're ready to learn, heal, and grow alongside other incredible individuals in the greatness community, then you can learn more at lewishouse.com slash summit 2023. Make sure to grab your ticket, invite your friends, and I'll see you there. The brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to it. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness.

1:24Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

1:33Welcome to this special masterclass. masterclass. We brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful. So let's go ahead and dive in.

1:50The question that you're asking is a very important one. It's actually the question, which is to what extent does our subjective narrative, the story we tell ourselves actually mean something for the body? And to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative so this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now and so i do want to highlight that it's ongoing work but i think you know the old narrative meaning a few 10 years ago was that if you're feeling depressed just smile well if that worked right we would have a lot less depression than we see out right right now that does not mean most people actually who are depressed just aren't smiling as well like When you change your physiology, doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit?

2:39The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. So the idea that when we're depressed, we tend to be in more defensive type postures. When we're feeling good, we tend to be in more relaxed and extended postures. All true. But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind. That's a first step. Think about like two interlocking gears. It's one gear that turns the other, but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going. So how do you get it to dance together?

3:11Exactly. So subjective, there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. To answer your question, can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold? So a couple of things that are important. First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced. For instance, right now, I can say, okay, have a thought that just decide to write your name. And you can do that. I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it.

3:51So that's a deliberate thought, which says that you can introduce thoughts. So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them. Generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time. but we can introduce a positive thought. Can you think of two thoughts at the same time? Probably not. So you can only have one thought at a time. Right, but they come very fast. But it comes and goes. So you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think. Otherwise, a spontaneous thought will pop back in. That's right. Based on your experience, based on sensory, based on how you're feeling or perceiving something, your environment.

4:26It's just going to keep popping in. Right. So how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often? Right. So I'm a big fan of wellness and I think it's a great community, but it tends to run in absolutes. And there aren't a lot of operational definitions, as we say in science. And what I love about your question is you're asking for really getting to the meat of things, asking for the operational definitions. One of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have. What a terrible thing to put on people. You know, what a challenging thing.

5:00I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to introducing positive thought schemes. Now, the reason is not because I think it's just because I think so, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort. And that relates to the dopamine pathway. So the molecule dopamine is a reward. It's released in the brain when you win a game, you close a deal, you meet the love of your life. Someone likes your photo. Someone likes your photo, the great love of your life.

5:36You complete something. But most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals. It's actually released when we are en route to our goals, where we're in pursuit of our goals, and we think we're on the right path. This is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal because they feel like I'm supposed to feel something greater. I felt this thing for two minutes and now that's it? That's right. High achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process. To the pursuit, the day-to-day tasks, the growth, the lessons, the losses, like everything, right? Well, and it can be to some wins along the way.

6:11But growth mindset, which is the academic discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague Carol Dweck at Stanford, The hallmark of growth mindset is really two things. One is I'm not where I want to be now, but I'm capable of getting there eventually. The other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself. Don't reward the result, reward the effort. That's right. And if you look at true high performers, people that are consistently good at what they do, they don't peak and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back, and their life is a cycle of ups and downs, but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently, those people attach dopamine to the effort process.

6:52And actually, Carol's, one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that love doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right. So it's like the people love puzzles, but in this case, they knew they couldn't get it right, but they love doing it. And incidentally, or not so incidentally, these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they feel some sense of reward from the effort process. Now, the cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled. We can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way.

7:32Our interpretation. Our interpretation. But it has to be attached to reality. So one should never confuse... What is real? Right. So if you're thinking about the effort you're expending, so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels and they're setting up a new business, for instance, and it's hard. if they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially that it's giving them an opportunity that it's somehow they are on the right path or they're or if they're not in movement along that path or at least oriented on the right path they're not lying in bed all day they're taking a step they're taking a step if they can reward that process internally two things happen First of all, the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger.

8:29So you get better at that process. And second, and most importantly, dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine. And what I mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal Cell, excellent journal, Cell Press Journal, a couple of years ago, showing that with repeated bouts of effort, we use and we release more and more epinephrine. It's kind of adrenaline, but in the brain. With more effort. Every time. Every time you put in effort. So every time you make, for this, let's keep it, if I were to keep it in the business context, every time you make, write that email, every time you, let's see, it's a person who's a craftsman or a craftswoman, every time you're working in the shop and doing that, every bit of effort, you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account.

9:14You're spending epinephrine. At some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you feel like quitting. It feels exhausting. And this was done in a beautiful study, actually, where they control the visual environments and they have the subjects exert effort and they can control the visual environment. So sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward, this is actually kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion, would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress. And other times it was an exercise in futility where they would just keep the visual world stationary and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere.

9:53Epinephrine is climbing, climbing, climbing, and eventually they quit. Now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you, anyone, the feeling that you could continue and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue. And you've seen this actually, football is a good example. Two teams play, say the Super Bowl. Both teams are max effort the entire time. Max effort. The team that wins suddenly, in a moment, has the energy to jump all over the place, party for days. They can talk. I mean, they have energy. They're exhausted right before then. Well, that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind, except it was neural energy.

10:33And what happened was, effort is this adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline. Eventually, people quit. They just quit. it. The dopamine is able to suppress that. And so then you're expending effort, but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it. So we need dopamine to keep the effort going. Is that what I'm hearing you say? That's right. Dopamine is not just about reward. It's one of the biggest misconceptions. Dopamine is about motivation and drive. It's like a jet that propels you along a path. How do we get more dopamine? You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind like how okay so that's a great question first of all there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements i want to be really clear there is a drug there are two drugs actually that will cause massive release of dopamine they're called cocaine and methamphetamine the problem is addicted because it feels so good the problem is exactly the problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulates so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source.

11:38It becomes the goal and the path. It becomes the path and the destination. And you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine and that baseline on their life goes down. Because there's no reason to work hard at anything else because you feel good. That's right. And that's the greatest feeling you'll have. So why do anything else when you can have that feeling? That's right. And if you think about, remember these neurochemical systems, adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine, they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build fortune 500 companies they were designed to do anything they were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances we could adapt so in an animal context an animal that um let's say is hunting or it needs food for its young it's gonna feel agitation that's stress that's cortisol it's like hunger.

12:29My babies might not eat. I might not eat. Maybe it's looking for a mate. It's going to feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching. Foraging is called in the animal behavior world. It's foraging. At some point, it might catch a smell of something, a potential mate or berries or a stream if it's thirsty. At that moment, dopamine is released, and now it has energy to continue along that path. Whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain that's involved in depression and disappointment, that if it goes to that place and it turns out it was the wrong path, there's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine so that you don't repeat that mistake again.

13:07So you don't give up. That's right. You just don't repeat it again. That's right. And those events that - So it reminds you, like, that's not the path that go down. That's right. Interesting. And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience. dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions led to success previously. You're going to repeat those. Those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those. So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path. That's right. So you asked, how do you do this?

13:40So to really make it concrete. And is there too much, is there too much thing? Is there such thing as too much dopamine? if you're not on drugs? So cocaine and amphetamine are bad because they lower the baseline on life. They make people very focused on things outside of themselves. That's the other thing that dopamine does. It can be positive or negative. But when we have dopamine in our system, we tend to be outward facing and in pursuit of things in our environment. You can look at somebody on cocaine and realize that that's the extreme version of that. But I love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes.

14:15So it's like, get after it. What do sharks do on Monday? Or I can't remember the specific things. Or then they're the, sometimes it's just time to chill. Well, that's a different molecule. That's serotonin, right? And then dopamine is the get after it molecule. And epinephrine is effort. So if we were going to break this down really concrete, we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort, just effort with no subjective label on them, good or bad, effort. Whether or not it's stress or you're pursuing something you want to do, it's exerting effort. Dopamine is about reward, but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards.

14:55What is the difference between a habit and a behavior, and which one should we be focusing on more in order to get to where we want to be? Changing our behaviors or changing our habits? A habit is a subset of behavior. It's a pretty narrow subset, actually, if you look at the true scientific definition. So Wendy Wood of the University of Southern California is, I think, the world's expert on habit. And she would define it pretty rigidly as something you basically do automatically without almost, you know, consciously realizing you're doing it, right? Like you sort of make the coffee in the morning with the coffee maker, you hit the buttons, you don't even remember.

15:28Brush your teeth, you're just like showering. You shampoo your hair, right? And you're like, did I do the shampoo? I was thinking about something else. You go to work and you don't know how you got there. You're like, what? Because you're on autopilot, right? So that's like, those are the really rote activities. Like you hand sanitize if you're working in a hospital and you didn't even notice you did. Did I do that already? Those are habits. I think there's been a lot of excitement and growth of like in the popular press, the idea that a habit is anything that you want to repeat. And I think that would actually a lot of the things that we think of and that we talk about casually as habits are probably more in the category of routines, which is different.

16:05Like often it's like if you're going to the gym, is it really a habit? it, you probably remember deciding to go to the gym. Maybe you do it at a consistent time. Maybe you do it a lot. But I would start calling a lot of these things more like routines if you want to talk about the non-academic. At any rate, a little bit like inside baseball, who cares? But I do think it's interesting. There's distinction in the processes that drive one versus the other. I study behavior, which is like a super category. It's even above routines or habits where it's just all behavior change requires different behaviors to happen some of them are gonna be on autopilot some of them are gonna be routine and some of them are one-time decisions that have big implications for your life so I actually think having all of those categories in mind when we think about change is really important as opposed to narrowly focusing so what is the definition of a behavior like what is a behavior a A behavior is an action you take.

17:08Like really, everything is behavior. If it's inside your head, it's not a behavior, then it's like a judgment. But any actual action you take is a behavior. Any action you take. So what are the most common behaviors that we have that I guess hold us back? And then what are the behaviors that... Okay, I thought you were going to go with most common. I was like breathing. No, the most common behaviors that hold us back. Yeah. And then the most common behaviors of the ultra high performers successful, you know, in business and sports. What are those behaviors that they tend to lean into versus the ones where people are stuck?

17:48Let me start with some of the most common behaviors. That keep us stuck. That keep us stuck. Yes. Yeah. I think common behaviors where we get stuck are, and this is like, you know, what are the most common New Year's resolutions? They're to change those behaviors that we get stuck on. So the most common things we get stuck on are things related to our health, right? We aren't making good decisions about what we eat, what we drink, whether we smoke, whether we're physically active. Those are really common points where we get stuck. Our finances, right? Making good financial decisions on a daily basis about how we spend our money, how we save, who we give our money to.

18:26Those are places people often get stuck. We can get stuck in bad social loops. We sort of started by talking about relationships. So I think that's another place we get stuck, whether it's we're not, we feel like we're too shy, we're not meeting enough people, we're meeting the wrong people, we're in the wrong relationships. That's another area where we get stuck. I think education and career are sort of, I'd put them because they're like one follows the other. And that's another category. Like if you're a student, you're trying to achieve, but we often get stuck on not really studying rigorously and, you know, putting the time and the focus in.

18:59And then that converts to work where we're not being as productive as we could be. We're not setting ourselves up for success. Ultra performers or the elite who are accomplishing all their goals and pursuing their dreams. What are those behaviors that they do really well? So I have never gone and interviewed the ultra performers and said, like, list for me all your behavior. So instead of answering your question perfectly, what I'm going to do is tell you some of the behaviors that research shows lead to great outcomes. And then certainly I have seen lots of top performers where I go, oh, they're totally doing that.

19:34It's great. So I think one of the most important things is like leaning on structure as opposed to expecting to just sort of follow the Nike, just do it mantra. And by the way, when you talked about how you're training for your marathon, I noticed you immediately went to all the structures. schedule structure accountability coaching investing like money into it all so there's more investment in it so it's like you've got to show up yes that is like for me it's so it's so ingrained in me that if you want to accomplish your goals you got to schedule these things you got to do on a daily basis and make it like break it down what's the daily goal what's the daily when are you going to do it what's going to cue you to do it who's going to watch you do it everything everything what's at stake for you what's it you know at stake for other people what's the higher purpose that if you don't do this, who are you going to be hurting?

20:26And who is literally holding you accountable, right? You've got your coach involved. So those are the kinds of things. So structure is one of the leading academic, the research that shows which will help you get more results. Yes. And there's so many pieces of that. And like each one of them, we could unpack and talk about studies from, you know, okay, a big one is too often people say, I just have this big goal, you know, this big, I think if I set a big audacious goal and that, by the way, that's good. It's good to set stretch goals, but then you've got to break it down, like into the, you know, what are you going to do this week?

20:58What are you going to do today? What are those component parts? And people get a lot further. Research by Albin Jura, the late Albin Jura of Stanford, great thinker, sort of did some of the pioneering work on this. We just did a field experiment where we tested with thousands of people who wanted to be volunteering 200 hours a year. and they had committed to that goal. And we found that just sending them reminders not to volunteer 200 hours a year, but to volunteer four hours a week led to vastly better performance. Just that really simple change, even in the way you communicate about this. When you invite someone to start saving$5 a day instead of$150 a month, you get vastly higher take-up.

21:40Interesting. But it's identical. So just little framing shifts where you think about, let's break this down into the bite-sized component. Now, it's harder to procrastinate on it. You can see how it's doable. It doesn't feel overwhelming. So you're saying, if my goal is to save$105 or invest$105 a month or whatever this is, are you saying it's not the best approach to say, I'm going to invest$105 a month, but I'm going to do$5 a day? Yeah. I can't remember what this is. Yeah, it's$150 because it's like 30 days roughly in a month. $150. As opposed to saying, I'm going to save or invest$150 a month, trick your brain and to saying, I'm going to invest$5 a day.

22:19Right. You're saying by doing that, what should happen? Many more people raise their hand and say, I can do this. I want to separate behaviors and emotions. So usually when people say they're having a bad day, sure, certain things may have gone wrong or something that they tried to do didn't work out. All information and experiences are processed at the non-conscious brain first, and then it gives rise to something we call a feeling. So emotions are processed non-consciously. The electrical and chemical reaction to that is called a feeling. So when I'm not feeling the way that I want to feel, I don't focus on the feeling.

23:05I focus on the cause, the neuroelectrical charge that's occurred in my brain. And in most cases, it's something that you're doing to interpret an event that's causing the neuroelectrical signal, causing the feeling. So in meditation, for example, why do you meditate? Well, obviously, it's great for a whole host of health reasons, whether it's less stress, lower blood pressure, less cortisol release, etc. But the one thing meditation does more than anything else is it gives you the ability to have a pause of awareness so that you sense what's happening at the non-conscious level and what's happening outside of you.

23:53So when somebody behaves a certain way, it's processed at the non-conscious level, it gives rise to your conscious mind for you to respond. And so when something happens, I like to be able to check in so that I don't react and I have the ability to respond. And if you do that enough through mindfulness, being aware, just being aware of exactly what's going on, then you have fewer and fewer of those times. So, you know, something happened last week. I was in a hotel room and I spilled some water on a shirt that I needed for a wedding that we were going to. And my wife was like, oh, fuck. She was going off deep and I was just calm.

24:39Yeah. And she goes, aren't you worried about this? I said, will it help? Right. No, let's just figure out what to do. The accident already happened. Why are we so wired to react in situations as opposed to be calm and say, well, this reaction is not going to serve a solution? Well, we have a misunderstanding of flow of information and the way information is processed. And so the reaction happens, again, at the reptilian non-conscious level. So every external stimuli, if you get into some of the brain, which again is my passion, is one of my friends, Dr. Evian Gordon, kind of with a great model.

25:19He says, you know, the number one thing to understand about the brain is safety and comfort first. Right? So in the environment that you're in, whether you like it or you don't, is irrelevant. Your brain finds that comfortable because it's the homeostasis. But safety first. So any loud noise, any type of real or imagined present or future pain based on the interpretation at the non-conscious level gives rise to automatic feelings. So the signal is sent from the reptilian or lizard brain to the emotional brain. And it's only later logically understood if we take the time to be aware of it. that's why people react so much in traffic instantly that's right instant reactions yeah but here's something you could do quickly it's called a reframe so so let's say you're driving in traffic and let's say somebody cuts you off and you've been sitting at the same spot for you know 20 minutes like i did this morning and somebody you know you're you're maybe looking down at your cell phone because you have some time because you're parked on that right and somebody cuts you off so you could automatically react go son of a bitch i can't believe he just did that and just use all of this energy, the cortisol, epinephrine, adrenaline that's flowing through your body and causing stress in your body.

26:37Or you can say, well, what if that person just found out their dog died and they're really trying to get home quickly? You go, okay, I guess it's okay if she or he cut in front of me. Or they just got a call from their mother, their mother fell. Would you change the way you felt about it? And the answer is yeah, probably. And the reason is because you changed the frame. so you can learn how to create frames for yourself, how you see the world, how you see failure, how you see effort, how you see your habits, how you create frames in advance that actually serve you through awareness and response versus reactivity.