NEUROSCIENTIST: How To Rewire your brain (neuroscience explained)

All trauma, anxiety, fears, they all map back to stress in some way.

Now, you can have stress without trauma.

You can have anxiety without trauma,

but you can't really have trauma without stress and anxiety.

Even though there aren't really strict definitions of the boundaries between trauma

and stress and fear,

I think it's fair to say

that trauma is a fear andor stress response that's happening at the wrong times.

Right?

It's sort of carrying over from an experience that's making life uncomfortable

or in some cases exceedingly challenging.

So the first thing for anyone trying to navigate stress is to understand what

kind of stress they're dealing with.

Are you exhausted and having a hard time getting your energy up?

Or is your energy too high

and you're having a hard time getting your energy down?

Because the solutions to those are often quite different.

It's very hard to control the mind with the mind.

It can be done.

I say when in moments of stress,

either excessively alert stress or excessively fatigue stress,

look to the body

because there are mechanisms

that have been built into the body designed to do this.

Now the reason I can say

that is that the physiological side the double inhale exhale is controlled by a

specific set of neurons in the brain stem

that Jack Feldman's lab discovered inhale emphasized breathing can be practiced in a way

sort of away from stress in a kind of offline approach

that can be beneficial for raising what we call stress threshold.

So there's a whole other way to look at stress, which is to say,

how do I get calmer in the mind when my body is freaking out?

On the other side of things, when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued,

there are two ways to approach that.

First is the kind of foundation of fatigue,

which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep.

This is something that doesn't get discussed a lot

and I don't think I've discussed this on any podcast previously,

but you know, getting better at sleeping is a whole set of practices,

but sleep is a slow tool.

It's not a real time tool cuz

if you're feeling exhausted

and you have to get up

and have your day,

deal with children, deal with work, deal with life,

>> we can talk about how to get better at sleeping, but in real time,

what you want to do is you want to bring more alertness into the

system. focus and alertness.

The way to do

that is to take advantage of a very wellestablished medical fact.

All medical students learn this.

All MBs know this,

which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe

and your heart rate.

>> So when we inhale, when we inhale, it almost feels like everything's moving up,

but actually what happens is our diaphragm moves down.

When that happens, our heart literally gets a little bit bigger. the volume of

the heart gets a little bit bigger,

which means that whatever blood in there is moving per unit time a little

bit slower and there's a set of neurons in the heart called the cyanoatrial

node that sends a signal to the brain

and says,

"Hey, blood flow is slowing down."

And the brain sends a signal back to the heart and says, "Okay,

let's speed up."

And speeds up the heart rate.

So the short concise way to put it is

when you inhale more vigorously

or longer you're speeding up your heart rate.

This is uh this actually there's a name for it in the medical community

but the important thing to understand is

as you inhale you're sending a neural signal to your heart to speed up

and when you exhale the diaphragm moves up.

The heart gets a little bit smaller literally because there's less space there.

Then there's a signal sent to the brain

and the brain sends a signal back

and says slow down the heart rate.

So if you want to become more alert,

you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous

or a little bit longer than your exhale.

Longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate

and make you more alert.

Longer or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate

and make you less alert. the repetitive breathing more quickly

and deeply.

This kind of thing

or some variant of

that all through the mouth

or all through the nose brings up the heart rate

and causes the adrenal glands

which sit right above the kidneys to secrete adrenaline.

They make you more alert

and you see these big inflections in heart rate

when people do this.

Typically, it makes people feel agitated at first. they feel a little bit agitated.

And then when you exhale

and hold your breath for 15 seconds

or so or what you're doing essentially is you're learning to be calm

as your body is flooded with all this adrenaline

and the heart rate is going.

And that is 100% top down control.

What you're doing in those moments is you're learning to take your forebrain

and say fight the temptation to move.

Fight the temptation to breathe. this particular pattern of breathing 25

or 30 times followed by an exhale

and a hold and

then a big inhale

and a hold.

Sometimes doing more inh inhaling and exhaling type repetitive breathing.

>> That is really somebody training themselves how to self-induce stress.

And we know from some good literature

and some emerging science that's still ongoing >>

that it is possible to get comfortable in these agitated states

so that your mind is okay feels okay

when the body is feeling like it wants to tremble

or move that you can learn to suppress

that activity.

>> The ice bath is another good example of this.

Some people go straight to the ice bath

because cold water will almost always induce a low level of stress in people.

You have to you have to kind of fight it.

Even if you learn to love it,

>> you still have to every time jumping in there.

Okay, I got to control the mind essentially to calm.

>> Exactly.

So the body is saying this is really cold.

>> Get out.

>> This is really cold.

Get out now.

And you're pushing back on that.

It's top down control.

It's pure top down control.

And you could do this any number of ways.

There's actually a uh something called the hour of pain.

The um the hour of pain was actually described to me by a a

friend of mine,

former military special operations guy who said

that you they place you this wasn't through military

but this is a kind of outside the military >> extracurricular extracurricular activities of

placing you into one position on on the floor

and you have to stay there for an hour

which can be excruciating.

There's so much limbic friction where you want to move

so badly because the stabilizing muscles of the body

and the feedback and our muscular skeletal system says move,

move, move.

I just want to move the tiniest bit.

And so all that practice is it's just a different version of the ice

bath.

>> Yes.

>> It's you're learning top down control.

>> So, you know, we started off with a question about trauma.

Yes.

And we'll get there.

But I think it's very important just to kind of summarize

that people understand to just ask themselves the question,

am I am I feeling too much agitation

or am I feeling too much exhaustion?

If it's too much agitation, emphasize exhales and do the physiological sigh.

Yoga nidra is also a wonderful practice

that is kind of the mirror image of uh super oxygenation breathing.

It involves long exhale breathing, lying down on your back, completely relaxing your body,

and learning to completely turn off thinking, which sounds hard,

but you can learn how to do it very quickly

if you do that practice for about 10 minutes a day.

>> Yeah.

>> So, I think

that one of the most important questions

that we should all ask ourselves anytime we want to learn

or we want to relax

or we want to sleep is ask ourselves,

you know, where are we on this continuum of alertness and and sleep?

As a culture, we've spent a lot of time thinking about kind of the

core things like get a good night's sleep

because obviously um the way I think about sleep

and rest is when you're not getting enough

or and it's different from everybody for everybody,

but if you're not getting enough sleep on a regular basis

or you're just too stressed out,

it's like the hinge on that seesaw is loose.

So, it's like >> you're up, you're down, you're all over the place.

And so there's some foundational practices of sleep, hydration, exercise, social connection,

um good nutrition, whatever

that means for for the individual

that put you in a place to be able to manage things really well.

But what we've been talking about up until now are these what I call

real time tools.

You know, I love the ice bath.

I I done tumo breathing.

I still do it.

I really believe it in its virtues.

There's some good science about how it helps activate the immune system,

all these other great things.

But the ability to adjust in real time is what it's about.

Cuz that's I think where real confidence comes from.

Like you do a lot of public speaking.

I do a lot of public speaking.

And there's still days where I'll show up and I'm, you know,

all of a sudden like I'll feel my cheeks getting flush.

I'm like, "What's going on?"

I have to be able to adjust in real time.

>> It's not sufficient to be like, "Oh, you know,

I'm going to go meditate for an hour

or what did I do wrong the day before?"

And this is what it's it's a lot like driving a car.

Everyone should know how to manage their internal real estate,

their mind and their body with do dos

and don'ts of physical practices of just you know practices with

that don't involve ingesting anything.

It also puts you in a position to better navigate those extreme states, right?

I mean, the person who decides to dabble with nicotine, like not by smoking,

but taking nicotine for focus,

if you can't handle and manage your mind in a very alert state,

it's just going to make things worse.

>> You'll think that you're in a in a tunnel of focus,

but you actually are in a tunnel of high stress

and nothing good comes out of

that.

Whereas, if you've already mastered what it is to be really alert

and focused and you want to take

that to the next level

and you're an adult

and it's,

you know, appropriate for you and your health status,

then you're going to get that much more out of it.

And whereas I think a lot of people look first to like,

what's the thing I can take?

It's like, well, the thing you can take is master your sleepwake cycle.

Master your moment to moment kind of autonomic regulation. this calm down, alert,

get more alert and do it with some breathing.

Or if you like the ice bath, do that.

Or if you um if you want to, you know,

run up a steep hill

and then see how quickly you can calm yourself down using double inhale,

exhale type sign, that's cool.

There's a huge play space that you don't need to take anything.

And then once you feel like you're working well there, well then sure,

maybe it's appropriate to go down the avenue of, you know,

supplementation or other things.

When people are confronted with an anxietyprovoking scenario, in our case,

we do this with virtual reality

because we need to do it in the laboratory.

We find that we find their pain point essentially.

And by painoint, I don't mean extreme fear.

I mean the thing

that can raise their autonomic arousal

that has them in a mode of considering different options

and trying to figure out what is strategic

and what they're capable of in

that moment could be heights could be confrontation with a predator animal.

It varies by person people

but everyone has their pain point even uh even Navy Seals

that we've brought to the laboratory

or other people from the special operations community.

They all each and everyone has their pain point.

What they do in response to that painoint is really what's interesting.

And what we found was

that the pause or freeze response certainly was associated with autonomic arousal with stress

and anxiety.

We measured this in the brain and body.

And then we found

that there were subset of individuals

and animals in the parallel animal work

that would confront a fear not necessarily reflexively

but after some consideration they would lean into the challenge essentially confront the thing

that was making them feel anxious.

And it turned out

that that response surprisingly was associated with the highest levels of autonomic arousal there.

The insula took on essentially a a change in its activity patterns.

This gamma pattern, the heart rate increased, breathing increased, sweating increased.

So these are all the marks of an anxiety attack.

But here, if you were to just look at the behavior of the person

or the animal,

what you'd find is that they were marching forward toward their fear.

One reason to suppress the sematic response, the bodily response,

is that tends to be a unitary interpretation,

meaning at this moment I feel alert but calm, so I feel good.

But I'm I'm guessing there's a lot of signals coming from the body

and in fact there are to my brain,

but I tend to just say I feel pretty good.

Those tend to be very kind of um binn responses

and they're fairly generic. you know,

I I guess we can look to some of our podcasting um colleagues like

the the Jaco Willinks

or the the David Gogggins,

you know, who are um either forcing themselves uh

or are somehow up at 4:30 in the morning

and train pushing through

that what I call limbic friction.

You know, the lyic system is saying I'm tired

or I'm anxious and you know going against

that.

So there's there's literally a a there there's a required suppression of the bodily

response in order to imagine how we would feel

when we complete this.

If we want to be very concrete, we should probably focus on actions.

And I'll use fitness as an example because it translates to everybody.

Whereas, you know, people's circumstance is different.

Let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine.

They hate running or they want to lose weight in a in a healthy

way.

This kind of thing.

So, we've all heard the example, well,

you put your shoes by the door on day one.

Day two, you put them on.

Day three, you go out the door.

Day four, you walk around the block.

And then, you know, and then eventually like they're running marathons.

Okay, great. but to sustain

that behavior or even to make the the behavior pleasureful

and to give you energy.

The key is to subjectively reward those steps.

So, it's not going to be let's say I go out

and I run a mile

and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks.

The key is as you're in the strain of that mile, the hard part,

you want to tell yourself, "This is the good part.

This is the part that gives me energy."

And I'll be very surprised

if people don't actually feel like they could continue further.

So it's a journey of a thousand miles starts with with single is made

up of,

you know, single steps.

But the key is to reward the harder steps,

not the easier ones

and not the ones where you get the thing

that you want.

Find the wall and push a little bit further through

that wall and reward

that process.

Um, in fact, I'm not telling people do anything.

I'm just saying that there's our biology is primarily for taking us through these

adventures of arousal and relaxation.

Waking up in the morning is an exercise in in autonomic arousal.

Cortisol hits when you wake up.

Boom.

Can you do that without losing your mind in thought and obsession?

>> Can you put your head down at night

and fall asleep without losing your mind in the previous day's events?

These are skills that we have to cultivate.

What does your morning routine look like at the moment?

>> Morning routine is,

and I have to be careful here

because whenever I've described my routine in a little bit of detail,

people always say, "I can't believe you don't go to the bathroom."

And it's like, "Well, of I."

So, I want my pants.

>> Exactly.

Right foot, left foot.

So, I want to be clear.

I Yeah.

I take care of my basic functions.

Um, but when I wake up, I make a beline for sunlight.

Uh, so I'm going to get sunlight in my eyes for the, you know,

I'll probably go into the grave saying this,

so forgive me if people have heard me say this before,

but the single best thing you can do for your sleep, your energy,

your mood, your wakefulness, your metabolism,

is to get natural light in your eyes early in the day.

Don't wear sunglasses to do it.

Takes about 10 minutes or so.

Um, if you live in a cloudy area,

if you're in the UK in the winter, yes, or the summer.

>> Or the summer, maybe you resort to some artificial light as a replacement.

But as much as one can get bright, natural, and if not natural,

artificial light in your eyes early in the day without sunglasses,

contacts and eyeglasses are fine.

Don't try and do it through a window or windshield.

It's going to take far too long.

This sets in motion a huge number of different neurobiological

and and hormonal cascades

that are good for you.

Reduces stress late at night, offsets cortisol,

a million different things really that are good for you.

So, I get that.

So then I come back inside

and then I do not drink caffeine right away.

That it's important in many ways to delay caffeine enough

so that you can clear out some of the chemical signals in the brain

and body that lead to a

that lead to a feeling of fatigue.

So the longer you're awake,

the more a molecule called adenosine builds up in your system.

And when you sleep, you push that adenosine level back down.

When you wake up in the morning, that adenosine level can be zero.

But often times there's still some hanging around.

Caffeine is an adenosine antagonist.

It blocks adenosine function.

It's a little more complicated than that.

But that's effectively what it does.

So if you wake up

and you've got 20% of your adenosine has still hasn't been cleared out.

That's sort of a drowsiness that you woke up with.

>> Then you go

and you drink your coffee

and you crush that

that uh ability of adenosine to have

that effect,

but it hasn't gone away.

So that when your coffee wears off midm morning now

that adenosine is there

and you feel like there's a midm morning crash

or an afternoon crash.

So I delay my caffeine intake for about 90

and ideally 120 minutes after I wake up

because in that way you bring your adenosine level down very very low to

zero and then you don't get this rebound crash in the afternoon.

For years, I would get this post-launch crash, and I thought,

maybe I'm eating too much for lunch, which I probably was,

or maybe I'm eating the wrong foods.

Turned out it was all related to my timing of caffeine,

and your system learns how to wake up naturally, >> right?

>> You get the natural cortisol and adrenaline.

>> Give it the time.

>> Give it the time.

And people hate this one

because it's it's a little painful for the caffeine addicts,

but I'm a pretty serious caffeine addict, and I embrace that.

And I'll tell you,

it also makes the joy of the coffee so much greater.

>> You're like waiting for that. you're savoring, you're like, "Oh, my first >> Oh,

it tastes so much better."

Um, and that relates to the dopamine system,

which I know we're going to talk about later.

>> Just how triggering are our phones when it comes to dopamine?

>> Okay, great question.

We often hear that, you know,

that social media getting dopamine hit after dopamine hit.

When we first get on social media after for the first time

or after a long period of time,

the amount of dopamine that's released we think is quite substantial.

It's novel.

Remember, dopamine is about novelty, surprise,

and the sense that we are on some exciting track.

That's what dopamine is really about.

It puts us into states of readiness, anticipation, looking, seeking, etc.

Almost always for things outside the confines of our skin.

One of the key takeaways from that book, Dopamine Nation,

that I've incorporated in my own life is

that there are certain activities like cold water

that create long lasting arcs of dopamine.

Those can be very useful for putting us into long-lasting motivational states.

These are not big peaks and troughs.

These are the pain of the cold water followed by this long,

long arc of dopamine.

Wonderful.

It's a kind of an anti-depressant positive motivator, natural stimulus.

I always say if you don't have access to an ice bath, cold showers,

yes, will work.

If you have a shower that doesn't get cold enough,

keep in mind that the original studies showing this dopamine increase had people get

into 60° water,

which is not that cold for 45 minutes to an hour.

So, your water bill might go up,

but you could just draw a kind of cool bath

and get in that up to the neck.

So, cuz I realized there are sometimes some cost barriers to people.

They not everyone has an ice bath.

And I have to say, even though I describe my routine accurate,

my morning routine accurately, if I were to really optimize it,

and I I've done this from time to time, I would get up,

I would hydrate, and I would immediately exercise.

I would use that early, you know,

peaking of the cortisol response

that comes with waking to get the body into action sort of Joo Willink

style,

right?

The 4:30.

I always see his posts, but I see them at 7:00 a.m.

>> Yeah.

Yeah.

Precisely.

Let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine.

They hate running or they want to lose weight in a in a healthy

way.

This kind of thing.

So, we've all heard the example, well,

you put your shoes by the door on day one.

Day two, you put them on.

Day three, you go out the door.

Day four, you walk around the block and then, you know,

and then eventually like they're running marathons.

Okay, great. but to sustain

that behavior or even to make the the behavior pleasureful

and to give you energy.

The key is to subjectively reward those steps.

So, it's not going to be let's say I go out

and I run a mile

and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks.

The key is as you're in the strain of that mile, the hard part,

you want to tell yourself this is the good part.

This is the part that gives me energy.

And I'll be very surprised

if people don't actually feel like they could continue further.

So it's a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single is made

up of,

you know, single steps.

But the key is to reward the harder steps,

not the easier ones

and not the ones where you get the thing

that you want.

>> Don't reward yourself for putting your shoes on and taking a step outside.

>> You could if that was a huge barrier for you.

It >> was very hard.

>> If it was very hard for you,

>> running the 10 miles is hard. find the wall

and push a little bit further through

that wall and reward

that process.

These are the this is the hard part

because that's when adrenaline nor epinephrine are getting maxed out

and that's when you have an opportunity to bring dopamine in

and teach those neural pathways to slam

that back down.

The other element that's really important to plasticity is this deep rest phase

and it's associated with the release of the molecule neuromodular serotonin.

Serotonin is a reward molecule just like dopamine except

that it's released in the brain in response to the subjective experience

that we have enough resources.

So when we eat a big meal

or we enjoy even better

when we enjoy a meal with friends

or family and it just feels like one of those incredible evenings you know

you're reset it's that feeling of of being reset has an anti-depressive effect

when we are um

when you hold you know

if you hold your child

or or a partner

that you love or your dog there's this feeling of having enough.

And so whereas dopamine is really the molecule

that makes us uh look at things outside the boundaries of our skin like

to be in pursuit of things.

It's really is the pursuit motivation molecule.

Serotonin is really about feeling like we have enough in our immediate environment.

>> And it's so powerful

because unless that dope

that excuse me that serotonin box is checked off periodically,

we cannot lean back into the dopamine outward pursuit process for very long.

>> So we need serotonin >> absolutely >> to feel more what?

complete whole >> safe >> safe >> you need to balance serotonin

and dopamine maybe across the day maybe across the week you know I think

in religious practices um all religions really there's a kind of Sabbath there's a

rest period you know for many many

or I think all of them >> >> um

that makes sense because there needs to be a renewal