Change Your Brain: The Power Of Neuroplasticity And Braincare - Dr Tara Swart

it's actually really related to what I understand about neuroplasticity now because there's a period of time where you make new Connections in your brain and you build up this new pathway and it's almost like there's a Tipping Point where that pathway becomes the way that you think now and your old ways of thinking get overwritten so one of the analogies that I could use is if you came up to a field that was knee-high and grass then the first time you walk across that field you're going to be pushing that grass down with your feet but if you walk that same path every day for a week you probably would have trodden a sort of pathway through the grass that you can walk through easily if you then said okay I'm going to lay down some wooden slabs to make it even easier to walk along there and then you built that further and you maybe like cemented them in then eventually you could make a path that's so easy to walk down that it takes no effort at all and it's exactly the same in the brain when you learn something new we're so bombarded with information in the modern day that what you would read in a newspaper in one day today is the amount of information that some D would have received in their lifetime a hundred years ago the brain naturally filters out things that aren't vital to our survival but if we do something like create a vision board or visualize something that we want then we're training the brain more to be aware of the things that we really want so then when it does the selective filtering it doesn't filter out that person that could introduce you to somebody about your business or that person that could introduce you to somebody for a date that means noticing and then grasping opportunities that can move you closer to your goal hey friends welcome back to Deep dive the weekly podcast where every week it is my immense privilege and pleasure to sit down with academics and authors and entrepreneurs and creators and other inspiring people and we find out how they got to where they are and what we can learn from them to help apply to help live our own best lives what you're about to hear is a discussion between me and Dr Tara swart Tara has a PHD in neuropharmacology she also trained and worked as a psychiatrist in the UK's National Health Service for about seven years before leaving medicine and becoming an executive advice coach type person and then her career morphed into doing talks and exploring the world of neuroplasticity and the world of brain care and the world of how we can learn from neuroscience and psychology and endocrinology and like immunology and microbiology and putting all these sciency things together to help improve the ways that our brains function oh she's also Chief science officer for Heights which is a brain care supplement company which I've also invested in we had the founder of heights on the podcast a couple of seasons ago in the conversation we talk about the somewhat circuitous path she took to get to the career that she is at now and we spend most of the conversation talking about what are the practical things that we can learn from the world of Neuroscience from the field of neuroplasticity that we can apply to our own lives to help reduce our stress to help increase our brain's performance to help make it easier to learn stuff super interesting conversation I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did all right Tara thank you so much for coming on um I would love to sort of just get into a little bit of the backstory so you were are have been a sort of a psychiatrist a neuropharmacologist neuroscientist PhD you're now Chief science officer at Heights you have your own executive advice business where you kind of apply these insights and and I guess coach other people where did all this start how did we end up here yeah so that does sound quite messy when you put it like that so maybe that's pretty cool yeah if we put it in date order then I like you I guess from school I went to um medical school in London did two years of pre-clinical did the intercalated BSC um and then from then got offered to stay on and do a PhD in neuropharmacology which I did for three years and then it was time to get out of London so I went to Oxford to complete Medical School the clinical part um did my first surgical job there returned to London and did my medical job and then started training in Psychiatry at the Royal free Hospital and over the next that that's sort of six years I worked in the west London Mental Health Trust mostly and I also worked abroad in Australia and Bermuda then in 2007 I quit medicine um moved back from Bermuda to the UK did a six-month coaching course and then in 2008 and worked in an office um really going from sort of been quite an experienced psychiatrist at that point to being the absolute bottom of the pile no business contacts um my PowerPoint skills apparently weren't upscratch for what they were needed at that point and then in 2008 started my own freelance practice as a coach and sort of two or three years later made that into a company and did speaking and writing um and then a little bit after that a year or two after that started teaching MIT Sloan so applying Neuroscience to business and Leadership and then at some point I'm not sure of the exact date maybe four or five years ago Dan and his co-founder Joel um found me on social media so great place to like headhunt people and we're looking for a chief science officer for Heights which is a brain care supplement and I think all of the you know PhD in neuroscience and medical doctor obviously um were important but the thing that really jailed us together was that when I was traveling and I was traveling a lot for business at that time I was taking 10 sometimes up to 20 bottles of supplements with me for my travel it was very stressful I was enduring a lot of jet lag I was going to very different places having to switch mode between whether I was coaching or speaking and I wanted to make sure and and when I was traveling I couldn't always eat as healthily as I did when I was at home um so I grow my own food and only eat organic and I cook from scratch every day yeah so when I couldn't do that I was even more aware of making sure that I got all the nutrients that I feel that I need for my brain and that get very depleted by stress and travel so um when I heard about the idea of having one capsule it's a double capsule that had pretty much everything that I would want to take in it I wanted to be part of that and from the beginning I was banging on about magnesium probiotic and and now we are bringing those on as bolt-on products to the original brain care supplement oh okay so so many kind of interesting points along that Journey yeah we zoom in can we zoom into 2007. why did you why did why did you leave medicine what was going on I've been thinking about it for two years because it's a really big decision both personally and professionally I loved Psychiatry and I really cared about my patients and I felt that for a lot of my colleagues it was a lifestyle choice so to leave knowing that people who depend on me who waited for months to see me children the elderly you know really vulnerable people I had to feel that I was definitely going to have more impact on people by doing whatever I was going to do next but obviously the other side of the coin of that was that I'd done my PhD in Neuroscience thinking I was going to become a neurologist when I went to the clinical School I felt like that interaction with people wasn't going to be enough for me with Neurology and Psychiatry where I started to really delve into people hearing voices that weren't there um that your brain could play a trick on you in such a way that you couldn't trust yourself that felt like a really important thing to be part of and try to help with and care about and understand but what I realized as I moved through the different Specialties so I did child psychiatry I did forensic psychiatry vulnerable females the elderly rehab learning disabilities and I traveled around the world with it too was that if I remained in that job for the next 30 or 40 years I wasn't going to get enough intellectual stimulation or challenge to keep me happy and at my best and so I had that terrible dilemma of feeling like I could do this really well for the rest of my life but I wouldn't be living my best life if I did that and so when I finally made the decision to quit and that was after I'd gone through a hundred options of other things that I could do instead of medicine because when you go to medical school when you're 18 and then you're a doctor for six or seven years that's and I was at Medical School essentially for nine years you don't think that you can do anything else so it's you know it's a really big deal to leave so I finally found Executive coaching as the thing that was very much about goal orientation and focus and determination but also quite Zen so that seemed to fit with my psychological skills and when I went to the chief of Psychiatry and said as you'll know you know you have to have a form signed by all your bosses for the last two years to prove that you're not leaving because you've done something terrible um when I asked him to sign the form he said to me this is such a great loss to us because you could do this job in your sleep and I think that was the phrase that I needed to hear which was I didn't want to be asleep for the rest of my life I wanted to be challenged and do new and different things and at that stage I thought I was just going to be a coach obviously I've done like loads of different things since then but yeah i s i um moved countries came and did the coaching qualification had to learn to listen in a way that was completely different to when you're just thinking about what diagnosis you're going to make um yeah I think that's does that answer your question yeah it does oh so it's how okay how how much of the decision to leave was lifestyle versus kind of intellectual stimulation I guess I'm asking because I I mean I still still know about half my friends are medics and the biggest gripe anyone ever has is the lifestyle um usually yeah so that wasn't a thing for me because as I mentioned a lot of people go into Psychiatry because of the lifestyle so it's not you know the on-calls aren't as hard and ever since I was at Medical School um or not medical school but in my first year when I before I got married and I still had my maiden name which was Banerjee people used to pray for a Banerjee night on call because I literally never got woken up and I actually worried when I got married and I changed my surname that my luck might change but it didn't and when I had my sort of six monthly review with my consultant in psychiatry he said you know what's going well what are you concerned about and I said I'm concerned I'm not getting enough experience on call because I I go around the wards I check everything's okay I go to sleep I wake up the next morning he said I wouldn't complain about that um so and then in Australia I could do a lot of phone consultations overnight or it was a 15-minute drive you know it wasn't that wasn't an issue for me the lifestyle suited me um I was able to travel I didn't get too much sleep disruption I'm obsessed with sleep so that would have been a problem if I had sleep disruption so for me it was definitely and and in the end when I felt like how how would I really be able to feel good about the fact that I was leaving behind patients that I could have given so much care to it came down to the fact that in NHS or you know government Psychiatry you're dealing with people in the lowest socioeconomic groups whose families have abandoned them who don't have jobs whose children get taken away from them and so your impact is really high on that one person but it doesn't go much further than that and I felt that if I went into Executive coaching and I worked with really senior people who impact their teams and a company and have Corporate social responsibility you know role models in society that I would be able to touch more people by doing that than I would by staying as an individual doctor just a quick note from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode and very excitingly this episode is brought to you by Heights Heights is a brain care smart supplement that I've actually been taking for the last 12 months ever since I became friends with Dan marisota who was the founder of heights and who we had on the podcast in season one and this season of the podcast we're also featuring Dr Tara swart who is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist so what is height well it's a brain care smart supplement basically it is a supplement you take two of them every morning like I do it's like these two little capsules which have omega-3 oil in them and they've got a bunch of multi vitamins as well they have all of the details on the website in every single ingredient that they've got is super high quality and the great thing is that just by taking two of these capsules every morning like I do you get all of the essential micronutrients that you need without having to deal with drinking sludge or anything fancy like that so the great thing about Heights is that even if you don't have one of these absolutely perfect diets at least you know you have your bases covered in terms of the micronutrients that you need it's very easy to sign up you just go to yourheits.com and then you sign up to the thing and it's a mail order they get to you every month or in three month packets and if you use the coupon code Ali 15 that's ali15 at checkout then you'll get 15 off your first three months of subscription I've been subscribed to this for the last 12 months I also happen to be an investor in the company because I believe in the product and I love how they're fully evidence-based and absolutely everything they do and if you're interested in the evidence base behind all like 20 different ingredients that they've got here you can check them out on the website and that'll be linked in the video description and in the show notes so thank you so much to Heights for sponsoring this episode how did you land on Executive coaching like as I it's only recently I even knew the term existed how did you discover that that was a thing and that that's the career you want to go down so one of my best friends at school who studied you know cycle psychology and philosophy at University and then also did a PhD in the Neuroscience area she went on to work for McKinsey and I went on to work for the NHS and that's where I Our Lives having been at school together diverged quite significantly and she encouraged me to look into the idea of coaching and sent me lots of Articles to read about it and during that two years that I was thinking about whether I would do something different we spent a lot of time sitting in Green Park talking about business psychology and so I really owe it to her to have introduced me to even the idea of that and I was originally going to go and work as a coach for her she was going to set up a business but then that fell through and I literally heard these words come out of my mouth before I decided really and I was like well I'm going to do it anyway that I think that's when I when I I looked for the next opening for the coaching course and I think I'd it was either like quit now and would give you a three months notice and you could do it soon or you'd have to wait another six months and I just I just quit and I think it's actually really related to what I understand about neuroplasticity now because there's a period of time where you make new Connections in your brain and you build up this new pathway and it's almost like there's a Tipping Point where that pathway becomes the way that you think now and your old ways of thinking get overwritten so I feel like that two years of really thinking about should I leave what could I do instead how can I justify this to myself and feel good about it um when something came along that was the right thing I was just able to say okay I'm quitting my job I'm moving countries I'm starting this course on a thing that I I've only read a few papers about but I don't really know what it is um and yeah I just did us that's interesting so like just like this this time last week I I happened to be at San pancreas station and um someone came up to me who recognized me from the videos and she had been a she'd been in medicine for 14 years and was leaving to become a coach and was in the middle of doing a coaching qualification and so it's like and and just earlier today I was interviewing um another friend Simon who's also a coach and it's just like we a lot of interactions with people people who have found coaching as like a career um and even though I feel like I was quite clued into the alternative career thingy just like being a coach just never even even vaguely occurred to me but now I find that you know through the key through YouTube and through the podcast like a lot of people have emailed me like hey do you do one-on-one coaching and I'm always like nope but it's always like a question mark on the end of it yeah so okay so you left Psychiatry and did you have like a backup how were you planning to make money while doing the coaching thing were you thinking I can do a Locum every now and then what was the thought process um so interestingly about the Locum and I'm not saying this is right for everyone at all a lot of people have a side job or a part-time job when they're starting up a new business I think the decision to leave medicine was so emotive for me that I had to burn my boats I was like there's no way back I will never do a Locum I have to make this work and there were times that I couldn't pay my bills and people said Tara please just go and do one weekend you'll earn enough money to pay your rent for six months and you'll you know don't have to worry about your bills and I I said no but that probably says quite a lot about the kind of person I am and that's why I qualified it by saying that's not for everyone so I was married at the time that I made the decision and we did have an agreement that he would you know support me for a period of time whilst I did the course and I once I knew I was going to quit even though there wasn't much time I started saving you know um unfortunately we got divorced during that time so that um but actually he was you know super supportive and still um helped me for as long as I needed and would have continued to help me for longer but there was a point in time where I said I don't need right yeah and so you built up your coaching business I guess from the ground up since then and that's kind of what you do now with along with the height stuff um no it's really changed so I was doing like all coaching at the beginning and then and that was 2008 9 10 around 2010 Neuroscience became a buzz Topic in business and Leadership and people wanted speakers and there weren't that many I mean as a former psychiatrist I fell very much in the gap between psychologists that become coaches and business people that become coaches and I didn't belong anywhere but suddenly um where it was like well who can talk about Neuroscience in business I was like well I can um so I started doing a few talks thinking they would just lead to me getting coaching clients and then I realized very quickly that that could be a revenue generator for my business and it went like this literally like well my money was coming from coaching and none was coming from speaking and then it went like that all the time okay yeah very open-ended question like how how do Neuroscience in business go to go together well basically if you're in business if you're a leader if you're a senior executive if you're a in you know a Trader then you're being paid to use your brain but if if you haven't studied Neuroscience you probably don't know as much as you need to know to get the most out of that really important organ so I can go in and do a general one-hour talk that sort of tells people about how their brain works how to get the best out of it um you know all the foundational factors that contribute to Peak Performance and brain optimization and good mental health and well-being um and then in coaching I can either take that approach which is here's the sort of General ideas for improving your well-being and therefore your your brain performance or I can find out what somebody's issue is and it could be stress it could be travel it could be doubting themselves when they're about to make a trading decision um and then I can go and look at the research and find something specific to help them overcome that particular brain issue that they might have okay so I wonder if we can start general then so like let's say someone's listening to this or even me because I actually don't know much about this um what are the things that we can do to improve our brain performance so we talk about things like rest which is sleep and also sort of downtime nutrition is super important so the brain is obviously a tiny proportion of your body weight um and only weighs a few kilos but it uses up up to 30 of the breakdown products of what you eat so when you're asleep your brain is is eating up 20 of what you ate that day when you're at work um and focused on something it's using up about a quarter of what you eat and when you're stressed it's easing up up to 30 percent oh well yeah and so obviously people think what should I eat if I want to be healthy generally or I want to lose weight or I want to build muscle mass but the sorts of people that you know like you and the people that I work with aren't thinking enough about what should I be eating so I can make the best decisions today what should I be eating so I can solve complex problems what should should I be eating so I can understand what's going on like in terms of interpersonal Communication in my teeth with my team for example and then there's everything from hydration exercise um breathing mindfulness curiosity like there's there's so many factors that contribute to brain health and they're probably not dissimilar to things as a doctor that you would know contribute to cardiovascular health or gastrointestinal Health but you know we at Heights feel that if you approach everything with a brain care first attitude then you're kind of taking care of the rest of the stuff like if you eat and drink in a way that's good for your brain your skin and your hair are going to look nicer I mean and I that sounds like a such a girly thing to say but people make a lot of really important choices based on what they look like and and that's fine and that probably has like beneficial effects on our in our brains and our guts as well but considering this organ is so energy hungry and it's so important in terms of everything else that happens in your body I feel like we need to flip that narrative so that it's starting with okay what can I what things can I do today that are going to be the best for my brain just a quick message from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode and this episode is very kindly brought to you by short form short form is the world's best service that summarizes books but it's way more than just book summaries they almost have a whole study guide for every book that they've got on the platform where they've got a one-page summary and then they also have chapter by chapter breakdowns and it's not just chapter by chapter breakdowns also in between the chapter breakdowns they have interactive exercises where you can engage more readily with the ideas in the book short form covers non-fiction books from a bunch of different genres that you might be interested in for example they've got a load of stuff in the business world so if for example you're an entrepreneur or you want to become an entrepreneur that'll be great for you they've got books in motivation they've got books in education they've got books in lifestyle and communication basically any genre of like non-fiction personal development is self-helpy stuff that will help you level up your life it's all there in short form short form Publishers new book guides and articles every week and if you're a subscriber then you get to vote on what book they cover next and in fact through that system I have voted for various books that they've then turned into summaries for example one book I've recently reread through the short form book guide is no rules rules by Reed Hastings who's one of the founders of Netflix now I listen to the audiobook of no rules rules a while ago and I was sort of applying it to my team at the time but since then my team has grown and the challenges have changed and so I used short forms guide to revisit some of the key lessons from no rules rules around building the appropriate team culture anyway if any of that sounds up your street and you would like to sign up to the world's best service that summarizes books then head over to shortform.com forward slash deep dive and that will give you a completely free five-day trial and you can try out the service to your heart's content that link will also be in the video description and in the show notes and thank you so much short form for sponsoring this episode I wonder if we can start with the nutrition thing then and I guess what should me and I guess listeners and viewers be thinking about when it comes to nutrition like oh or is it all just the stuff that everyone kind of knows but doesn't implement or do you feel like there's actually a knowledge Gap in an understanding Gap or if it's just a actually Implement implementing the things that we all know we probably should do I like to think there's a bit of both so I think there's a lot of things that are in the public domain that people are aware of that we all know we should be doing but we're not necessarily always doing but there are definitely fun Neuroscience facts that I can throw in that that I would guess maybe even you haven't heard of so should we try yeah perfect yeah okay so um I would say like level one is that you eat three healthy meals a day and and maybe you snack in between if you need to and when I say healthy mostly plant-based you know maybe some fish and eggs minimal amounts of of other types of meat um foods that contain high amounts of water and good fats so a bit of dairy fatty fish nuts and seeds berries I mean I'm already going above level one I would say with some of those but but you know three healthy meals a day that kind of food question on that front yeah intermittent fasting yeah yeah so level two oh but that's level two okay if you're not eating healthily generally yeah if you're not sleeping around seven to eight hours fifteen a night drinking enough water making sure you're not sedentary don't bother with intermittent fasting you need to have those foundations correct if you're doing all that good stuff and maybe even meditating then you can take it to the next level which is um the first level would be time restricted eating so for example I only eat between 12 noon and 8 pm so I'm essentially doing a 16 hour fast overnight which has all sorts of benefits on longevity and cancer risk reduction and and once you get used to it it's also it's also good for your your mental performance and then the third level which I'm considering doing again the rest of this year but I haven't quite got there yet is what I think is proper intermittent fasting which is that for two days of the week you reduce your calorie intake to for women 500 calories and for men 600 calories a day and the other days of the week you eat normally but in all three of those stages you still have to be eating the kinds of foods that I mentioned and so this is tell me whether you knew this or not but for in terms of brain optimization eating dark-skinned Foods is much better than just eating general you know the leafy greens or the salads or skinned yeah I mean like blueberries rather than strawberries or raspberries okay purple sprouting broccoli rather than green broccoli black beans and black chickpeas rather than cannellini beans or normal chickpeas so the skin and things like eggplant as well I think this the the um in the skin of Darker foods and actually you'll like this because it does include good quality coffee oh perfect and dark chocolate that's over 80 cocoa um there are substance is called anthocyanins that are really powerful antioxidants and they contribute to something called neurogenesis so there's three ways of growing your brain if you like and I and I use that in a as a metaphor um and the hardest one in adults is for embryonic nerve cells to actually grow into neurons and connect up with other neurons in your brain and so aerobic exercise and foods that contain high levels of anthocyanins can contribute to neurogenesis it's going for a run is good going for a run is good um if you're feeling guilty because you haven't been going for a run then when you do regular aerobic exercise the cell turnover is sort of 13 14 of neurogenesis if you have haven't been doing exercise for some time and you start again it can actually be up to 30 so to me that's the perfect excuse for every time I fall off my schedule of exercise and I start again that I'm really boosting my neurogenesis but you know I'm never sedentary but I'm not always doing like full on aerobic at sort of more high intensity exercise so okay yeah so one mechanism is neurogenesis the one that makes our brain quick grow what are what are the other two so neurogenesis is the embryonic cells growing into new neurons the next one is synapse synaptic connection which is already existing neurons connecting up with each other to make stronger Pathways and the third one which you'll be well aware of is myelination which is a fatty substance that coats some Pathways in the brain and body and there's a reason that so and that leads to faster conduction of electrical signals along those Pathways and there are reasons that we have some Pathways that are myelinated and some that aren't like for example if you put your hand in a fire your reflex to snap your hand out of the fire is a fast myelinated pathway but your pain um pathways are non-myelinated because if you were incapacitated by the pain of burning your hand you wouldn't be able to move or escape from the you know the threat kind of thing but what in terms of what we're talking about which is brain performance um basically repetition can lead to more myelination which means that that pathway becomes a faster conducting pathway for you so something like resisting the urge to you know eat junk food or um like there's crisps so some crisps over there and last night I made the bad choice to eat the crisps and Gordon kind of looked at me and like sighed because I was like whoa there's 200 calories in these and today I didn't I decided to leave the chips as they were well that could be to do with time of day because your willpower also reduces so during the day oh yeah maybe but I mean for me it's mostly about stimulus control which is that I don't keep those things yeah it's a yeah it's a lot easier to resist the chocolate cake if it's not there um Okay so we've got neurogenesis from embryonic cells we've got the synaptic connections and we've got mother nation yeah such a pleasure talking to you because most people are like what were those things again how do we tangibly impact those things so we talked about repetition equals more myelination and I guess this is where sort of repetition when it comes to learning stuff as well like space repetition over time equals more mother nation presumably um what other things can we do to Quick growth brain so I think in real life we don't necessarily need to know which underlying physiological mechanism we're affecting but we need to know we need to see the real life result if I'm trying to learn something or do something differently and it's working or it's not working I think the easiest way to just think about those three is that the myelination is like something that you're already good at that it would be really easy for you to pick up for it to become your superpower basically um so for instance and this sounds and I don't I don't mean this in a boastful way but I've got a friend who's a professor of Neuroscience who plays in a band and I really admire him for being so good at an instrument but it really irks him that I can just learn a new language so easily so that's like one of my superpowers and so I have learned five languages in my lifetime I'm not fluent in all of them at the moment but if someone said to me you know you know do you want to learn a new language I I'd say yeah because I'll probably be quite good at that um but there are lots of other things that would be much harder for me to become good at so that would be for for me that would be like my a grade subject okay when I take that unwillingly because I'd probably find it not too difficult and I'd probably be quite good at it so think about what that might be for you hmm and then synaptic connection is more like your B plus which is something that you're not bad at at all but you don't love and it doesn't come really easy and naturally but if you worked really hard you could make that into an a grade and then neurogenesis in adulthood although There Are embryonic cells around the hippocampus which is where you know we lay down memories and learning it's way less than in children so that would be like well I did I did this I don't feel like me taking up golf um I was really bad at it it took me ages to improve I would have had to give up my day job to become you know any level of decent at it so um it's it's not wise really in adulthood to take on a learning that's so difficult that it's going to detract from your day-to-day brain performance um and in that middle category for me I would probably put something like let the Tango quite well not amazingly improved at tennis taught myself keyboard you know but I'm never going to be like performing or anything so that's that's the easiest way to think about those in your mind like which of those mechanisms might I be working on because it's really to do with the level of how difficult it would be for you so would it be fair to say then that like let's say when you're at University the things you found yourself naturally good at are probably the things that you will find it easier to remain good at or be good at when it comes to adulthood like for you presumably those languages but not golf so you mean when I was except at University well interestingly did you know that in the first in the pre-clinical part of medical school you learn more new words than a language student does in their whole degree really yeah because there's so many Greek and Latin based words and um so I would say probably we're both really good at languages yeah yeah so I want to be a bit careful about saying when you're at University because by then you've already narrowed down what you're doing quite a lot so it might even be what when you're at school there yeah and it might even just be what you're interested in outside of Academia yeah um so I do believe in identifying what your passions are usually aligns with what your strengths are maybe not always but thinking about it that way is a really good way to think about it and not kind of trying to be good at everything play to your strengths the Neuroscience really supports that okay and so to what extent is this relevant when you're for like coaching coaching people in the sort of this executive advice space that's such a good question because actually I often get dragged in because people say this person is really really really good at what they do but they've got no emotional intelligence and unless you can help them change we're gonna have to get rid of them it's that bad like I mean not so much recently but more when I was coaching like around the time of the financial crisis and the consequences of that there were still people that would shout go red in the face make people cry like make people not you know want to quit their team and stuff like that so that was almost me having to do like neurogenesis with them but um I would definitely help them to see what they're really good at and and play to that because those are quick wins and in coaching I would want people to get quick wins because then they'll believe that they can change things and that I can help them and a lot of coaching is about building up that relationship of trust so that it's okay for them to try something and fail because they know that you'll just still be there encouraging and helping them learn from it um it's really it's a very like um privilege like special kind of relationships it's intense it's one-on-one it can be very emotional but the main thing I found that helped these senior guys who are pretty much at the top of their career ladder um don't really have to worry about finances why would they put in that effort that it's going to take for them to now change their behavior and a lot of them said it's too hard I don't understand what I need to do I don't understand what people mean when they say you need to be more caring or understanding or emotionally intelligent and I don't I don't know if I can do it and so I explained neuroplasticity to them like building a brick wall or building a pathway and so one of the analogies that I could use is if you came up to a field that was like knee-high and grass then the first time you walk across that field you're going to be pushing that grass down with your feet and maybe some of it would bounce back up but if you walk that same path every day for a week you probably would have trodden a sort of you know just a a pathway through the grass that you can walk through easily if you then said okay I'm going to lay down some wooden slabs to make it even easier to walk along there and then you built that further and you maybe like cemented them in or whatever then eventually you could make a path that's so easy to walk down that it takes no effort at all and it's exactly the same in the brain when you learn something new and so what I would get these guys to do is I'd say go home tonight and listen to your child for five minutes without interrupting them and not having your phone on your person and that alone was so eye-opening for people because they were never doing it they were always asking how did how you know how was school today did you do your homework did you do this did you get 10 out of 10 on your spelling test and they'd probably be scrolling on their phone half the time and the child would feel that they weren't really listening and this happened with men women all different ages and then I'd say okay now try this with a friend try to like have a you know conversation where you really listen to them and you don't interrupt them and then they do that and then the next stage would be with a colleague but someday they've got a good relationship with and then by the time they started feeling like yeah I can do this I can really listen I don't have to like sort of answer back all the time we'd get them to the point where they'd have a conversation like that with somebody that they haven't been getting on with at work and that pathway was sort of built in the brain by then so yeah what sort of time period are we talking for this to happen it really depends how attention intense the task is so if it's something like I want to start going to the gym three times a week or I want to try intermittent fasting it takes two to three weeks to get that you know to not feel like it's really difficult when we're talking about things like emotion intelligence or Intuition or creativity we're talking more like six to 12 months but I have this new Theory which I haven't really shared before which is that if you really focus on doing this in a nine month period which is the gestation period of a baby so from fertilization to a newborn baby being born you can essentially create a rebirth in your brain by rewiring your neural Pathways oh that's good it's a good theory I like it that's very sticky it makes sense it's like okay nine months just a quick note from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode and this episode is very kindly brought to you by skillshare if you haven't heard by now skillshare is one of the world's leading platforms for online classes for online education they've got thousands and thousands of classes on all sorts of topics from business entrepreneurship lifestyle design cooking interior design loads of stuff and very excitingly I've actually been teaching on skillshare since 2019 and I've got 13 classes on skillshare yes 13 classes and you can access all of them completely free of charge by going to skillshare.com forward slash Deep dive and that link will give you a free one month trial to skillshare during which you can watch any and all of my classes one class you might be interested in is my YouTube for beginners class if you've ever thought about starting a YouTube channel this is the class for you I'll take you step by step across like three four hours something like that through all the steps you need to take to make your first two videos on YouTube how to do the channel a lot if I think of a name all of that fun stuff and loads of people have taken that class and said that that class was so good that they would have literally paid hundreds of dollars for it but you get it completely for free on skillshare by going to skillshare.com forward slash Deep dive after your trial's over you can choose to continue the subscription if you like and you can access the thousands of classes skillshare house from other teachers including people that I know people I'm friends with like Thomas Frank and Nathaniel Drew but yeah the main reason to check out skillshare of course is that you want to check out my classes if you want to learn about productivity and video editing and youtubing and even cooking so head over to skillshow.com forward slash Deep dive and thank you so much skillshare for sponsoring this episode any other tips for developing emotional intelligence uh asking for a friend oh I love that um well so emotion intelligence is two things which is one that you actually understand and are able to regulate your own emotions and then the second part is that you understand what's going on emotionally for somebody else and you can respond to that in an appropriate manner compassionate but not getting sucked in so in terms of the yourself part just like naming how you're feeling so finding a word for how you're feeling and you know and I say this with from a position of really caring but it's it's harder for men to do that than women because of the way that we're still brought up in society which is Big Boys Don't Cry and um you know don't don't be sad or sort of so having a wider vocabulary for your emotions and you can start off by either just you can check in with yourself every hour and say how am I feeling emotionally you can do it one to four times a day you could Journal um and then in terms of other people just spent listening that's why that listening exercise is so important and listening without interrupting and looking at people's facial expression and stuff like that and so I would say to you and this is obviously isn't going to apply to everybody else but just in the exact same way that you learned to do a physical examination on a patient you kind of go through that checklist of like okay these are the things like what am I seeing here is this person smiling at me are their eyes welling up with tears are they starting to raise their voice is their voice quivering just really paying attention to those things so these high flying executives are coming to you for help with a thing it sounds like emotional intelligence was like a big part it was a big stress and so resilience distress and emotional intelligence as a former psychiatrist those were my bread and butter of financial crisis resilience distress how how does one train that back to those Basics and I'll always keep coming back to those Basics sleep diet hydration exercise and mindfulness um and then yeah that that's the five like really easy ways to think about it but we have at Heights we have some like more pillars around that like curiosity and um and then I would use heart rate variability technology to see what was actually and show them what was actually going on in terms of stress like how well you're sleeping how stressed you are during the day if there are any periods of time hopefully whilst you're sleeping but also during the day that you find a way to recharge and like rejuvenate your nervous system what does that mean okay so firstly like what's the deal with heart rate variability I've heard a few Tech Bros talk about oh hvr with sleeping and stuff yeah never really know anything about it and then what do you mean by rejuvenate your nervous system okay so these days you can um get all sorts of gadgets from the aura ring to the wood bracelet to the Apple watch to the Fitbit that can monitor your heart rate variability but I'm talking quite a you know a decade or so ago I was using um a heart rate variability monitor that people would wear with like a a gel gel sticker on their chest for three days and three nights and I and it's just color-coded data which shows it's like turquoise when your um your body's in the parasympathetic state which is like Reston Digest um and it's red when you're in the sympathetic state which is stress and then it's light blue or dark blue depending on whether you're doing moderate or high intensity physical exercise okay so if you're doing a high intensity exercise you would expect it to be in sympathetic and then that's no no no because it Compares heart rate and heart rate variability if your heart rate is elevated and therefore you're physically exercising it's going to be dark blue but if your heart rate isn't elevated then depending on how your your heart rate variability changes it shows up more the psychological side which is whether you're in sympathetic or parasympathetic and so is it is it overly simple to say parasympathetic good sympathetic bad um no I mean that's true you know it's true but there's a reason that we have an Adaptive response to stress which is that sometimes you need to get away from something that's bad for you so we we do need that ability to get get into the if you think about we say these words without ever really thinking of them but it's fright flight fight and a fright is a threat so you need to be able to you know get away from a threat and that's the response is that either flight you run away or fight you respond to that threat in a in a sort of equal manner and then parasympathetic which is Medics we would say is rest and digest but I prefer to say rest and recharge because you're not always digesting um is when you recover from whatever stress response you've had to go through um during the day so in if if we're thinking kind of Ideal ideal work day would would you always sort of be in parasympathetic chill mode or is like in sort of laptop work is it ever useful to have a sympathetic response to a thing I mean I think we have I it's very different for different people so and interestingly a study um showed that a nurse who was giving cancer related um news to patients and families all day was actually in a flow State because that was her purpose she was even if it was bad news she was there for the people um the kind of people that I work with they're in sympathetic all day really yeah and sometimes even at night no wait yeah that sounds terrifying that's why I work with it that's why they want they want to work with me I guess um because I guess in like super high flying careers where making like massive trading decisions where there's billions on the line when their job is at risk like that's a high stress environment and they're multitasking all the time and they may be traveling a lot and they may be jet lagged and they're entertaining every evening and um funnily enough one of the patterns I saw which I laughed with the person the first time I saw it but then I saw it quite a lot was that they may be you know moderately stressed and at some points maybe have flow States but it was rare during the day at work but they'd always be more stressed when they got home and they had to see their kids so that was interesting he's he's Executives were were stressed during the day but it was kind of something that they could control but then when it was like home and young kids or Screaming kids or just being pulled in two different directions they they found that really stressful oh wow okay so what do you think I can look at my heart rate variability and it will give me an idea of how stressed I am throughout the day is that it's really important to look at Trends rather than a okay momentary but we yeah I mean we could look at that story yeah um okay rejuvenate your nervous system what does that mean well we should assume that we're quite stressed during the day so there are loads of Statistics that support that 70 75 percent of people in the western world are way more stressed than they should be all the time but they're like chronically depleted of magnesium which is a micronutrient that gets leeched up by the body when we're stressed which is why right from the beginning of working with Heights I was like we need a magnesium sort of flux um so we actively need to do things to help to push our body into a state where it can recover now you might ask and people do ask me well when we lived in the cave we didn't have to like do mindfulness but actually when we lived in the cave yes we hunted and we had to avoid predators and we had to avoid like extremes of cold and hot and things like that but we spent all our time in nature we walked barefoot in nature we sat around the campfire every night we looked at the stars in the sky every night there were natural ways of recouping our resilience and life was a lot more like a short-term acute threat and then the rest of the time a lot of recouping of resilience these days we're bombarded with information 24 7. we can be online across time zones all the time you know all day if we want to and so unless we specifically do things to try to reduce that stress that our brain and our body are under that you know we basically essentially lead to burnout so what are the Beyond sleep hydration exercise rest the the basic stuff that we we've kind of talked about and would be good to explore those more in more detail what are some easy I guess easy actionable things that people can do to reduce stress levels before I answer that I do can't go on without repeating the importance of Str of sleep because there are still a lot of people that say well I can get by on four or five hours sleep or I don't need to sleep that much or I'll sleep when I die I mean these phrases are still around right but actually getting enough sleep is probably the single most important foundation to being able to recoup your resilience during the day the second one I would say we've talked a lot about nutrition so I'll go on to um oxygenation of the brain and that is either through formal exercise but what I find with stress is that people start to breathe in a shallow manner or they hold their breath so a lot of people when they're scrolling on social media are actually holding their breath and they don't really realize that and now that I've said this to you probably when people hear it they will start realizing that they might be doing that and you're already smiling so I'm wondering if you're thinking that you do it so just remembering to breathe deeply is if you are at a desk um you know on the laptop a lot of the time then each hour when you check in on okay how am I feeling emotionally also just check in on like How Deeply you're breathing and maybe just do 10 deep breaths for the sake of it anyway why why does deep breathing help because it really does like I like anytime I have like even even earlier when I was having the conversation with Simon who's also a coach and this morning interviewing Jim who we were talking about compassion and stuff breathing came into it somehow and I found myself being like and realizing oh I actually have some I actually don't read deeply very much um and I tend to take very shallow breaths and my singing teacher even point that pointed the set he was like a massive problem with your singing you don't breathe anyone near deep enough so when you're in the shower in the morning you need to take 10 deep breaths and it's just something that I just don't do and there's something about it that feels really good so what's what's going on there well it's good that you're doing singing Because at least you're paying attention to breathing which a lot of people wouldn't so it's one of these things we're not very conscious of old eggs obviously it's happening 17 18 times a minute we can't be paying attention to that all the time um stress is definitely the biggest contributor to shallow breathing and breath holding um so if we weren't stressed we probably would we well not probably we would naturally be breathing more deeply and even if we're breathing normally it's still good to take 10 deep breaths because it does give that boost of oxygen to the brain that's why it feels so good because the brain's resources are glucose and oxygen right I mean you know that from basic physiology so as long as you've eaten enough and supplied the the glucose that the brain can take up within two or three hours of eating then the second thing that you can supply your brain with is oxygen if you're tired but you don't have time for a nap do you have time to go for a walk if you don't have time to go for a walk 10 take 10 deep breaths at your desk it it makes a difference you mentioned nature and looking at the stars and stuff what's inherently good about nature yeah so this has really come up as a big one in the last few years and I don't I'm not sure if it's coincidental with the pandemic and having been locked up or or locked up but also had more opportunity to maybe commune with nature than we did in our hectic Lifestyles before but the brain benefits of time spent in nature are massive and I whenever I'm asked a question that I don't necessarily factually know the answer to straight away always take it back to evolution there's a reason that our brains were wider in a certain way and and when we first became you know homo sapiens we walked on the Savannah we we walked in the land we we ate what we could hunt fish or heart or harvest and so our relationship with nature was was you know we were dependent on it but it was also a huge threat to us floods storms you know fires um it's the symbiotic relationship and what we've done through Agriculture and construction is just move ourselves further and further away from that and even if you just think of one like super scientific example of that is that the quality and diversity of our gut Flora has diminished so much since we lived in the cave it's it's like reduced by I don't want to get the number wrong but it's a shocking Factor like hundreds um and agricultures contribute to that antibiotics have contributed to that to that like obviously antibiotics save lives and you know it's been an amazing advance for us as humans but um the fact that we eat food that's not as diverse as it used to be that we don't necessarily eat those Natural Things the Prebiotic and Probiotic foods and supplements that allow our gut bacteria to flourish and we eat so much processed food um and that stress alcohol and antibiotics or damage I got microbiome that's one of the huge consequences of of um having moved away from nature and people ask all sorts of questions that we don't know all the answers to yet about why do we have more diseases like me like Ms like autism like add and some of the answers lie in that disconnection from nature and what that's done to how that's shaped our bodies and our brains right um and how we live as a result of that damn cool so okay um I mean I'm I'm just about to move to Marley Bone which is fairly close to Hyde Park so I I like the idea of uh dab I've been dabbling with taking up running and just running across along Regents Canal at the moment but I really like the idea of kind of running around Hyde Park that seems there's something about that that feels nice so we'll give it a go and try and try and maintain the Habit do another little thing for me when you do that which is just take one minute to look at a leaf or a petal or a squirrel or something like that's like close up right in front of you in great detail and then take one minute to look at a really large tree or building or a cloud in the distance and just see how that resets your nervous system so there's a couple of so that that's basically taking yourself away from sharp Focus to a wide Vista which is part of like living in nature and on the Savannah is that we we love having an uninterrupted view of the Horizon it's really restful for the brain yeah and then as well as like 10 deep breaths you can just do like you can take you can do a sharp intake of breath and just do like a really long sigh as well that's a nice little way to reset your nervous system um and then I did this reel on Instagram that is called the half salamander and it's a way to reset your nervous system and I had no idea it would get like 1.7 million views yeah yeah so um it's a bit difficult to explain but now but you look at that too so those are three things the the sort of looking in detail to looking in the distance sharpen take a breath and a big sigh and then this house up there are three really easy things that you can do yeah this is something I I came across on the huberman Lab podcast recently and around like most of us spend most of our time looking at near a thing and we almost never actually look at something in the distance and apparently there's something like super legit about that is that it's not partly why you know speculating it feels so good to sort of you know an ocean view where it's like you can see the Horizon there's something about that she's like stupidly relaxing um maybe there's something there okay so we we've talked about stress the end so okay so when you say reset the nervous system by that do you mean that most of us tend to be in sympathetic mode in our work days and just taking that moment to pause kind of the Apple watch watch Breath breathing it's just like okay we can chill it's all good Tiger's not coming like it's all good like body can relax and switching into parasympathetic mode into rest in recharge mode um naturally helps us kind of reduce the code according to the level of release of blood pressure it makes us feel great and also has all these positive health benefits it's all of that stuff that you said and for me the additional benefit of it is knowing that I can control that and that it's not completely dependent on outside factors so you know to be honest sitting here with you and chatting with you even though obviously I'm thinking it feels like really nice and relaxing and like we're resonating we're both former doctors and you know there's something it's very like warm about that but let's say if you were a different kind of person and I felt maybe that you were like really quizzing me with challenging questions on purpose to try to trick me up then I could have a fright flight fight response to that or because I've trained myself in these like ways to reset my nervous system and longer term ways to build my resilience I could find a way to not let you push me into that state and knowing that that I have the choice to do that that's really really empowering yeah what are some longer term ways to build resilience so here we're talking more like the things I said would take like nine months or more to build up so that's having a really long-term journaling practice long-term gratitude practice practicing meditation yoga regularly spending time in nature um curating the sort of news and social media information that you allow into your brain being very careful about the kind of people that you hang around with I I made a video recently uh where I sort of had uh experimented with journaling for 90 days and it was great like it was so great and I now I've continued journaling started bullet journaling as well and I have this little smart typewriter thing on my desk at home which is like it's literally a keyboard and all it has is one of those e-ink Kindle like screens and all it does is that you write on it and it just connects to Wi-Fi and syncs it up with whatever so you can't physically can't get distracted doing anything other than just the writing and so I've been using that journal each night along with the bullet journal and there's something so nice about journaling um what does the Neuroscience saw evidence say around why journaling is legit yeah so um at the very minimum it's like a download of your emotions and so with your you know any emotions uh negative thoughts unfinished tasks if you keep them in your brain body system by just thinking about them in your mind then you actually increase your cortisol levels and cortisol correlates with stress so it's like it's like a pressure cooker building up if you speak it out loud write it out into a journal or do physical exercise and literally sweat out some of that cortisol then you're releasing those negative emotions negative thought patterns anxieties you know worries about the future from your brain body system but I have and I'd love to know if you've done this or not I have I had an Insight which I just stumbled across by myself but it really makes sense obviously from the neuroplasticity point of view is that if you go back and read over your Journal you see your thought process laid out in front of you you see your patterns of behavior you see like your decision making tools whether it's more logical or more intuitive you see what you've written about your relationships with people and seeing that in your own handwriting or you know even if it's been synced up and typed out for you just just seeing knowing that it's your words and what you've thought and what you've said you can't run away from that so it can be like so insightful and enlightening and I've had that definitely with all of that stuff like emotions and thought patterns and intuition but I also had it when I was I used to go to Boston twice a year to teach at MIT and I remember with the travel and the jet lag just feeling that I was having these small muscular twitches and it was noticeable in bed at night and I decided to read back out not for that reason but just anyway I decided to read back over my journal from six months earlier when I was last in Boston and I'd written in my journal I'm getting these little muscular twitches and so I worked out that I'd become magnesium deficient by flying and so I basically hence why I was carrying so many bottles of things with me when I was traveling really upped my dose of magnesium um for the trips and it never happened again oh wow and if I hadn't read back I would never put two and two together I would have thought it was just happening now and it hadn't happened before what is the deal with magnesium so I mean there are a lot of essential micronutrients but magnesium is one that underlies lots of different physiological mechanisms in the body so everything from sleep to mood to um neuromuscular Junctions um to our joints our skin and so and and it's very very easily depleted by stress that's the thing so it's an important mineral but there are quite you know there's also zinc and calcium and other important minerals potassium but it's one that's very easily depleted by stress and that is a big you know impactor on our brains in modern and Western Society um or really just in the modern world so when we're stressed and and the stats show that 70 of us are sufficiently stressed to be magnesium deficient you cannot eat enough leafy greens and nuts and seeds to replenish that you have to supplement and supplementation by powder or capsule or tablet is fine but it's best taken transdermally it's it's studies show that taking magnesium transdermally through the skin yeah like magnesium patches um not so much patches but gels lotions I've bathing I bathing magnesium flakes every day no way yeah wow okay so sorry I'd rub you so Studies have shown that there was a study that showed that it was equivalent to taking IV no way yeah bloody hell that's cool yeah how so how how much rois are on this like should I start bathing in magnesium flakes for the minor benefit well I it's not online it's not a minor benefit I can physically tell the difference if I haven't and if I you know choose to shower for a couple of days in a row instead of have a bath then I put three handfuls of magnesium in instead of two if I'm if I'm doing it if five days a week let's say I'll do two handfuls um what difference does it make what have you found um it helps with your sleep if you do get so the one of the biggest signs that your magnesium deficient is that when you get one Twitchy eyelid you ever get that maybe I do but I don't remember but a lot of people say say they do get it yeah so um I never get that if I'm regularly bathing in magnesium um but I you know I can get that especially around the time of a lot of travel involving jet lag um other little most you know musculoskeletal Twitches as well um mood and just emotional regulation your response to stress you know it's it's like some people say I can just about hold it together when I'm at work but when I get home if you know if my partner's too demanding or my children are playing up I just snap so it's like how much does it take you to snap if I um you know if people are severely deficient in magnesium then it's just it's harder work to do the things that you need to do to regulate your emotions if you haven't put in the ingredients that you're required to be able to do that yeah and I guess like you know so if someone has a seizure or something like magnesium is is often on the list of things to just whack in IV or something yeah and if you know like the biggest thing that I saw in medical school that was just like such a shocker like so easy to correct was when I did care of the elderly and uh people got UTIs and just how disorientated and confused and how how bad how awful it looked like the state that they were in and you could just like put in a bag of saline and it would make a massive difference you know and and obviously then we you would check electrolytes and yeah that's good so I I I'm not sure if it's just me but like I feel like there's a lot of skepticism around the idea of supplements the idea that I oh I'm fine uh like diet supplement companies equal scam all of this kind of stuff and a lot of Medics I know are also very skeptical about supplements because like well yeah you know there's a normal range most people are in the normal range Etc et cetera but just like intuitively if someone's electrolytes are a little bit off it can make a massive difference to them and you'd obviously you know whacking the electrolytes if someone's fluid deplete then it makes a huge difference to how unwell they look and how and well they feel and you give them from saline and so and it's all good and yet especially Medics even Medics like should treat like drinking water like you know most people I knew including myself uh were more dehydrated than our patients were when we were working because it's just like you wouldn't take the time to have some water and you'd you know have a wee once a day and it would be super concentrated and you're like oh it's fine but you'd measure someone else's uh you're an output and you'd be like oh hello that doesn't look very good two liters of saline and apparently nurses get more kidney stones than like most other professions because they have the same thing they don't have time to age to do or drink water um yeah that's a really nice way of putting and I would also say that for a start most people are not in the normal range for vitamin D for example especially us with like darker skin but pretty much you know in our in our English weather a lot of people regardless of skin color are vitamin D deficient and that has a really um important correlation with future cancer risk as well so you know it's an important one to to supplement if you are deficient and I would go back and say that I agree ideally we would all get all of our nutrition from our really nutrition dense high quality organic you know biodynamic food but the reality is that most people are not eating in that way and I do try to eat in that way as much as possible and but naturally I'm vitamin D deficient I can't eat enough food to correct that I have to supplement in the winter months um so and magnesium I I know that I have to and a probiotic I know makes a massive difference to like my my gut health my gut brain connection my immunity um so I do think it's really important to know yourself really well but not everybody's a medic and and Medics like you said are often the worst at neglecting themselves I feel like since I've left medicine I've had more personal benefit from the knowledge that I have as a doctor that because I'm now in health and well-being um you know I'm one of those people that can tell like two days before I'm coming down with a cold or a flu and I can sometimes even like well I haven't had a cold or flu for years as long as I can remember um and then at the other end of the spectrum there are people who like the day that they go on holiday they get sick because they've kind of been saving up all that stress and like just trying to get through the deadline kind of thing so I think knowing yourself and then understanding strategically which areas you may need to supplement and that can be from a blood test or it can be from just understanding that if you're really busy and stressed and you're feeling fatigued that probably a vitamin B complex could make a difference to that try it if it doesn't make a difference you don't have to take it again if it does then keep taking it what sort of time period would you expect a noticeable change I'd say one to three months depending on the level of depletion okay and is this the sort of thing that you have to actively monitor your own response to it that in terms of how am I feeling today and Sample that or is it like oh damn I feel so much better than I did three months ago like what what sort of response do people have um I would say the SEC the latter is more realistic right so just like a well oh wow I've I've noticed myself I mean okay if let's say you're going to invest in taking something like heights yeah which isn't cheap because it's doesn't have any fillers in it or caking agents and it's got high quality ingredients and everything then even then I mean let's be realistic you tell me would you write down how fatigued you're feeling every day I mean like I've been taking Heights for a while but and I've been but but I wouldn't be able to even like I can't tell the difference in my focus levels when I'm dehydrated versus when I'm not because of just like I I feel like I'm just like this but I'm clearly not like and so there's this level of self-awareness of our own levels of focus and our own levels of stress in a way and if I were to pull myself at almost any day it's like how how how's my contentment level I'd be like honestly it's like 10 out of 10 like I can't imagine being any happier and so I've I find it hard to imagine a noticeable effect of any kind of dietary supplement if that makes sense so I'm actually I'm actually the same as you so I obviously look at all the studies that and the surveys that we do for Heights and so I have seen the percentage increase that people have reported in things like Sleep Quality and uh memory and concentration it doesn't make a noticeable difference for me because of the way that I live and eat and the supplements that I was already taking but I'm pretty sure that if I stopped taking it and didn't eat quite as well as I do I would notice a deterioration so I think it's like the Delta it's like how much difference is it making I apart from vitamin D and probably magnesium I'm not as far as I know deficient in anything else but I'm assuming that the way that I'm eating is enough to kind of keep me you know head above water but if I supplement then I'm not risking going below that threshold yeah I mean that's why I subscribe to Heights because I'm just like you know what I don't want to even run the risk of a deficiency in any of these things it's a fairly small price to pay in the grand scheme of things so why not and good studies good and quality ingredients I'm never going to eat 45 blueberries a day so why not you know all that kind of stuff I'm getting the um the Omega oils in a palatable way is quite difficult as well and and with Omega oils you do actually have to like take them consistently and I found that the heights capsule is the easiest way to do that so you know I'll have a spoonful of fish oil I don't care about the taste but it's it's harder to make that into a habit put it that way yeah yeah I did a blood test uh with uh the stuff when was it it was a couple of months ago now um I had a high Omega six to three ratio which apparently means I eat too much red meat and not enough fish yeah so I am now making more of an effort to eat more fish and eat less red meat um that's good yeah Okay so we've talked a lot about stress um you throughout the term gut health and probiotics oh I and the gut brain access what what is going on there like I feel like this is such a a thing that some people talk about six years of med school not once did anyone mention the phrase got brain access except maybe in a post script in a physiology lecture in first year and we had maybe two lectures on nutrition which were awful in first year and beyond that no one cared anymore like what is going on with gut brain access gut health like what is gut health how how does it affect our lives so I don't know when you're at medical school but a lot of research has been done quite recently on the gut brain access so we've we've always known it existed like you said it I think it was mentioned once in pre-clinical but now well and this is a really exciting I'm really excited about this area of research so the gut brain connection is now agreed to be bi-directional so we used to think that the quality of the gut microbiome had an impact on your mental state and and your brain power but now we know that it's both it's it goes both ways and that it is through um certain nerves but actually it's through a much wider network of nerves than we ever knew before it's through um cytokine messaging which is chemical messages that get sent in the blood and again are by bidirectional it's also through hormones um so basically it's a complex dynamic bi-directional system and that sounds like I'm saying like everything and nothing in one phrase so an interestingly all the factors that contribute to gut the health of your gut microbiome so the back to the good bacteria that live in your gut are the same things we've talked about already sleep because when you um are jet lagged your gut bacteria get jet lag too that's why you go to the Loo at the wrong time of the day and you're hungry at the wrong time of the day hmm okay and um obviously nutrition and hydration would affect your gut and we don't really understand why but doing exercise improves the quality of your and diversity of your gut bacteria as well and then the psychological aspect so some psychological therapies like CBT cognitive behavioral therapy and mindfulness practices um we know more about the effects that they have on certain receptors in the brain but they also have Direct effects on the gut bacteria do we know how or is that our active area of research I mean I think we know that when we're stressed the gut can become leaky and it can leak um hormones into the bloodstream that then has an effect on you know an inflammatory effect on the rest of the body so I think at the minimum we know that it's reducing the pro-inflammatory effect okay how do I know if my gut health is good or not good is it the quality of my poo it is so and actually you can have your stool some thoughts sent off to a lab and they can actually give you the breakdown I I am going to do this with Sophie from heights yeah like in the next couple of weeks yeah um yeah yeah I think she loves poo apparently um so as a doctor again of course you you know you could examine it but most people aren't going to do that and they wouldn't know really necessarily what what it meant by the the color or the consistency and the frequency and that kind of what does it mean like uh what is Guy gold standard when it comes to poo I um I I I I haven't been a doctor for way longer than you you should be answering that no you've got the whole store chart thing but they're like oh broadly if it's not like a five or six on a still chart it's probably okay but beyond that yeah I mean I think you know regular yeah and that's anything from one or a few times a day to like a few times a week um it's just very individual so you need to know what's right for you like the color I would say either looks like what you know you've eaten so for example don't have a heart attack that you've got blood in your stool if you ate beetroot the night before um and you know the consistency is basically if it's too hard you're constipated if it's too runny it's diarrhea and anything in between is is fine and then things like blood and mucus yeah there's also things to look out for obviously um but mostly if people do do a food diary and they want to connect that to their bowel movements and their mood then it's yeah it's kind of sort of like once or twice a day if you go daily I would say probably looking out for any change is is the most important thing so and that's with your urine and your stools but if you really want to know about your actual gut microbiome you do have to send a sample off so what does that tell you I think it actually tells you like the names of the different types of bacteria that you have I haven't done like this myself but I've been I've been offered to have my poo sent to America but I've declined um because I eat so healthily and I take probiotics I don't feel and you know there's no issue in that department and in particularly feel a need to go that extra step with that testing okay what are probiotics and should everyone be taking probiotics so I'm going to go with the second part of that question first because I I don't like a one-size-fits-all solution I mean I think it's a general advice to take probiotics if you're traveling a lot if you've taken antibiotics if you are feeling stressed if you do eat a lot of processed food then it's not going to harm people you know and and like with everything with medicine and looking after the health of my loved ones often I do come back to this Do no harm um so I think a good quality probiotic that's out there if you took it for 6 8 12 weeks it's not going to harm you and it's probably going to benefit you um I take one all the time and I I was I was doing the after travel or a 12-week Course once a year just to like give myself a boost but from the beginning of the pandemic I started taking one every single day what does it do like um benefit DC so it does help you to go to the new regularly and it basically it it replenishes the good bacteria that are already in your gut and then the Prebiotic foods like onion garlic asparagus artichoke they actually feed the bacteria that are then multiplying in in your gut the good bacteria and so for example when you take antibiotics because that's killing bad bacteria in your body wherever it is it also kills all the good bacteria in your gut um so and then you can have an imbalance with things like um fungus and so it's basically keeping your gut in good balance so that it can digest your food not leak bad things into your blood system not cause you to get bloated or irregular and and send good signals to the brain and and there is a connection between um the bone marrow cells that are responsible for our immunity and the quality of our gut microbiome as well so these kind of longer connected Fields like if when we connect up Endocrinology which is the hormones with Immunology which is our immune system and psychology and neurology um there's such a thing as immuno psycho um you know Endocrinology which is the connection between our mental state our hormones and our immune system and so all of our systems I think are connected in a much more complex and dynamic way than we understand but that gut microbiome does seem to be almost like stem cells for a lot of you know others important systems in the body and when it comes to food choices that are good bad for your gut is that like an individual thing like some people resp some people's guts respond really well to red meat and others don't or are there some general principles around what what sorts of foods are good for your gut so there are general principles like um plant-based and hydrating foods and hydrating food like cucumber and melon so foods that obviously have a lot of water in them because you actually retain more water from food that is high in hydration than just drinking water that's that tends to run through yeah um foods that are high in antioxidants um the good fats pretty much everything that we were saying earlier so like you know that healthy diet bit of fish and seafood not too much meat the real no-nos are processed food smoked food um too much alcohol antibiotics and and the real kind of yeses for the gut microbiota the fermented foods that's sauerkraut kimchi Cafe kombucha I try to have one of those things almost every day and then there are some more genetic things to think about so for example for a while coconut oil was a big craze particularly for the medium chain triglycerides the MCT oils genetically come from a country where coconut trees grew you're more likely to be able to tolerate coconut oil in your gut and for it to not affect your lipid profile too much then if you start taking a lot of MCT oil in your coffee but genetically you weren't really made to metabolize coconuts that well and so the meat thing is probably also along those lines so depending on where your genetic Heritage came from um whether a lot of meat was eaten or not having read your book it strikes me that you are somewhat into Eastern spirituality practices like yoga meditation manifestation affirmation type stuff and I first read the secret a couple years ago and I was like there's no way anyone can take this seriously and then I saw how successful it was I was like oh wow people are taking this seriously and then I read your book recently I think it was like last month yeah yeah very recently um and I was like oh you know maybe there is something to this manifestation type stuff but then around around the same time I've started to dabble with books around spirituality and basically 100 of them talk about meditation and like 90 of them talk about yoga and so clearly there's something going on here which benefits us and which science seems to have sort of scratched the surface of but not really what is your take on all the stuff how should a normal rational thinking person approach the realm of spirituality broadly um well I've probably been on a similar journey to you in that it was very difficult for me to accept something that wasn't evidence-based and I partly started the research from my book to to convince myself that there was an Evidence base for the laws of attraction that's where it started I spent one summer holiday researching what the laws of attraction were finding out that there wasn't even necessarily agreement about exactly what they were but kind of you know whittling it down to the most commonly agreed 10 or 12. and then just trying to apply the cognitive science to it because I'd heard about all the the quantum science and the vibrations and things but I felt like well if it's to do with the power of your thinking surely it should be explained by cognitive science so let me see if I can do that and it was surprisingly easy to explain most of the laws of attraction through cognitive science and the one or two that maybe I couldn't find evidence for I sort of came to that point of where what I said to you earlier which was I don't think it's going to harm you so if you're happy to do it without the evidence do it and if you don't want to do it without the evidence then don't um and then through that I became much more interested in visualization but I had personally been doing vision boards really successfully for over a decade by the time I wrote my book um and so understanding more about the Neuroscience of The Selective filtering that your brain does and the selective attention that you can choose to page certain things and the way that your brain tags what's important in value to it in your brain you know that was all like okay wow and and what was really gratifying is that people who weren't scientists at all said that understanding that the science that there was science and what it was made them actually do something like a vision board or visualization where they'd heard of it before but never actually bothered to do it and but then being a you know senior lecturer at MIT and my previous book being Neuroscience for leadership and working with the kind of people that I do in financial services I suppose it was a bit of a risk to go out there with a book that's about science and spirituality and suddenly start being more open about the fact that I do yoga and you know I grew up with meditation and um but the response to my book that actually had a huge impact on me so by doing the research I was I was like yeah this is legit um and now I understand even better like how it works and that contributes to me being able to do visualization and manifestation better but just seeing like the amazing impact it had on people seeing just seeing the numbers go up of the international translations I mean on the day that my book came out in the UK I'd already signed 24 International translation contracts and now I think we're up to 38 and that means it's having global appeal that people of all different races and cultures and religions and belief systems it's it's got that appeal and and you know I absolutely love neuroscience and psychology and neuroplasticity and so that tells me that personally that Journey for me was that it's okay to go out there and talk about stuff that you believe in in private and not keep it completely separate to your professional life and so yeah you know I grew up with yoga and meditation in the household but I just wanted to fit in and be like my friends in London who didn't grow up with those things and those things circled back to me later in life and now it's cool to be into those things anyway so um but the bit you know both yoga and meditation are forms of mindfulness so I use that as an umbrella term like sport and then under sport there's all sorts of different sports and under mindfulness there's meditation there's yoga there's spending time in nature there's barefoot walking there's eating mindfully there's paying attention why is mindfulness good for you I'd love to put that back onto you and say how could it be good to be mindless you know thoughtless not paying attention like Okay so this the specific citizen scenario I have in mind is um so I walk I walk here every morning I have a nice half an hour walk by the canal it's all very nice um this morning like most mornings I have an audiobook on at like 3.5 times speed and I was listening to the Bomb by some author which is about the history of the nuclear Arsenal and how that evolved from the 1960s up to up till the present day because I was just like I want to learn more about the topic it's kind of cool and so I've got this like if if someone were to see that they would be like this is the archetypal example of toxic productivity this guy is a psychopath and a sociopath he's office rocker like what what the is he listening to a book of 3.5 times speed can't even understand what's going on about running like nuclear arms proliferation and I quite liked it I was like you know I was walking by the canal and listening to this book I've got like three podcast interviews today where I can have cool conversations with people like life is good but part of me is like yeah but what if I did what if I took the airpods out what if I just kind of enjoyed the walk and walked mindfully and stuff and I've tried that a few times and I haven't noticed a I don't feel as if like I'm suddenly way more stressed if I'm listening to an audiobook at three times a week to compared to if I'm not and so but I wonder if I'm missing something that's that's kind of why I ask okay yeah so am I your third person of today yeah yeah okay so and I'm using that to assess you because I know that three in a day is like the maximum that I can do and with that third one I start feeling a bit like did I ask that question to Taro or did I ask that person you know that question to the person that was with earlier because it all starts to like merge into one a little bit so you've you feel so alert and engaged I think you're like definitely in your happy place and good at this and like nothing's detracted from your mental performance and you know you're also at that stage in your life like your age and and where you are with your business that you want to be absorbing all this information and doing like as much as as you can but maybe it's about just understanding that there's some there is definitely there is something good in terms of cortisol levels and um about spending some time where you're not always doing okay yeah and I'm guessing and we'd have to keep in touch to prove that this is true that as you get older that that might change so I think I don't know how old you are but I'm pretty sure 28. okay so I'm a lot older than you well okay um so yeah when I was 28 I could I could do you know I mean I because of how long I was at University I was probably a junior doctor when I was 20. I think um how old was I around that time 27 28 um yeah 27. so yeah you know I did like weeks of nights on call on a vascular surgery Ward and like got up and went on holiday the next day and like still socialized and yeah okay now that I know how young you are that yes it's your age you're able to do all those things okay so if I so is it is the idea and I guess for people listening to this that if if someone does notice a deterioration in their mental performance and or like oh I find myself unable to concentrate at that point they're like okay let's assess and figure out what you're doing across all these different domains so I would say that you know you're so young and and obviously you said that you're very happy so I'm assuming that like nothing has like seriously affected your health or your mental health or whatever so but so but I wouldn't say wait till that starts to deteriorate because one of the things that I really really felt for myself during the pandemic was how much better off I was because I had been proactive about building up my mental resilience and my mindfulness so for example I have always as far as long as I can remember since I was a child I was taught it as a child but as an adult it was such an ingrained Habit to eat mindfully so I always pause before I take my first mouthful I always give gratitude I try to not speak when I'm eating I don't mind if other people do but I try and I never ever watch television or have it on in the background or have my phone anywhere near me when I'm eating and so what I found in lockdown where obviously we were forced to be in a way that wasn't natural for us that we didn't necessarily want we were also in terrible fear of what could happen to us if we you know didn't adhere to these restrictions that I didn't really have to think about being mindful because I had those three meals a day where I was that was a mindfulness practice for me I was very fortunate I was able to spend time in nature and just the way that I chose to interact with people because suddenly when you're working from home I started off sitting at the kitchen table and that meant that anyone that walked past me thought I wasn't working so they would just talk to me and my first response was to feel like I'm trying I'm in the middle of an email like that's a bit annoying and then I thought what's more important this email that can finish in five minutes time or that a member of my family wants to talk to me and so then I would turn and give my full attention and say yes I'm really interested in you know what what you have to say and then not you know within a few weeks I've moved myself out of the kitchen um so there were there were times that I thought this is such it's not life or death it's not important but I became so depressed at one point that we couldn't go on holiday and and I just had you know a really down day where I felt really sorry for myself and I allow myself that from time to time but you know I I did think if I hadn't done all of the Gratitude and journaling and you know that kind of stuff before there were quite a few things that could have dragged me like downwards much more than they did yeah so when it comes to yoga for example and like yoga and meditation it seems like at least from the stuff I've read and the way people describe it there is something more than just mindfulness going on uh but where people describe kind of these out of body experiences and kind of the death of the ego and like connecting with the world and feeling energy and all of that stuff have you had experience of that like how do you how do you think about that as like a scientist and a doctor um yeah a scientist and a doctor I wouldn't use that terminology um yoga actually you know in Sanskrit means Union and it's the union of the mind and the body and mindfulness and in meditation are that connection between the mind and the body so understanding that the the mind is embodied it's not just in your brain it's everywhere and and being one so Union in that way so I would I would say that those things are mindfulness that when you practice them regularly your cortisol levels are lower than people age matched people of the same gender that don't I I can't speak to those individual experiences but that's not phraseology that I yeah awesome yeah um yeah I'm 16 days through the uh Sam Harris waking up meditation course um I was reading some stuff around non-duality non-dual meditation and sort of this how people who unlock the ability to experience that and feel like it's been life-changing and so I was like I mean that sounds pretty cool so I'll give it a go see see what happens well let me know how you go at the end of the 30 days yeah we'll do it yeah we'll do like there's some Studies have been done on that app that found that I think like uh the start I read was like 10 of users who complete the 30-day course say that they it taught to them non-deal meditation and of those half of them said it was like the most life-changing thing they've ever done okay those are sufficiently good odds that yeah I expected value why not but I I would really really like trust and respect your opinion on your experience at the end of it you would oh yeah yeah yeah I'll I'll report back when it comes to mindfulness and this genre of stuff um again what are some actionable things that someone listening to this could do that are fairly non-oruduous that would have a big uh or a potentially help them level up in terms of kind of stress reduction spirituality this sort of thing I mean some of the things that we've discussed already so like paying attention to your breath that's a really minimal one mindful eating is a favorite one of mine what is mindful eating like well the way that it started for me in lockdown was that because I had no boundary between work and home I I sort of had I could either do a time like six o'clock because that's I can do all my us work in that time and still not be too late and then my like chopping of my vegetables in the kitchen and preparing dinner that was that was like a mindfulness activity for me um so I'd be like very very focused on that not didn't want any distractions around well so you're not listening to a podcast or an audio oh my goodness okay um I said occasionally I might but but really really occasionally like not not Morgan you're just fully focused on like chopping the thing yeah okay yeah peeling chopping and because I compost so they're knowing that it's going back into nature thinking about things like the bite size that it's going to be for the person I'm going to present it to like really like thinking it all the way through and then mindful eating is just that you sit down you're mostly you're quiet that you give gratitude for your food and then you just you you just eat your food you don't do anything else oh my goodness yeah what a radical thought and you appreciate the flavors and stuff like without watching TV without like doing other stuff yeah because I find that if I'm like I'm often so mindless while eating oh I've just eaten a whole plate of stuff I don't even know if I was full like I haven't really enjoyed the food but I've just been like watching a YouTube video a double speed or something while doing so oh my goodness and then my girlfriend is big into mindful eating so occasionally like you know we should try eating mindfully yeah that's a good idea you know let's try that no that's good you've got that influence and look I'm not one of these neuroscientists that doesn't watch TV I love TV I watch so much TV including trash so it's not a comment on that at all it's just about if I'm picking that as one of my mindfulness activities then I've got to be focused on that at the time and I you know I also do a lot of barefoot walking um well what's the deal with that like why is that just because it feels like a connection with nature yeah it's like it's it's a grounding practice so it is it it just can it connects you to Nature um some people believe that it has you know an effect on the electromagnetic field but it's just it's more just being in nature and being Primal like we were when we lived in the cave and yeah that you know that's an exercise of staring into the distance I really love that one but I think probably the most important one in life is paying attention to people that you love because you can be half paying attention whilst you're watching a YouTube video on two point five times speed and that's not really love is it you know so I think having that time with people where you're like together you're giving each other that eye contact your like genuinely listening to that person you're sharing things that they know are it's special that you're sharing it with them um and just share you know sharing experiences but also kind of doing it mindfully I think reading can be mindfulness and for me swimming is like my most mindful activity so I do I do like running I do like my my exercise bike but swimming is the most mindful one for me amazing um we talked a little bit about vision boards like what is a vision board and how like how how do I get started with making a vision board if I want to do the thing okay so a vision board is essentially a collage made by hand where you actually have magazines and you cut images out and stick them down you can do it digitally um but I actually prefer to call them action boards because a little bit like what you were saying earlier about the secret is that and I'm not saying this is said in the secret but there is this idea that you can create this fantasy of the life that you want and sit at home and wait for it to come true and do nothing about it and I think the science but also just my like way of going about life is that yeah create that dream that ideal and and and do the collage and have it somewhere in your house that you look at it all the time and visualize it becoming true but also you have to go out there and do things to make it come true you know if you say oh I really want to get married and have a baby well then start looking after your health and meeting suitable people rather than going out partying all the time you know if you think I really like hate my job but it pays the bills but I'd love to you know go off and be a freelance whatever then ask yourself what you can actually do about that who can you are you know ask your network to introduce you to that might help to move you closer to that um so everything from like really really little steps all the way up to perhaps bigger things that you could do that maybe you have to build yourself up to a little bit but so so I really say yeah I make a board once a year I keep it somewhere visible and it's fine to keep it visible only to you and not necessarily visible to others but I keep mine visible to others so I'm like I have No Reservations about talking about these things that I want I'm not ashamed of them I believe that I deserve them so anyone can look at them and when I started up my business that included the amount of money that I need wanted to earn each year so you know the kind of thing that not everybody tells everybody about but I for me like it's out there um and then looking at it at least well looking at I say at least daily I keep Mine by my bed so I can look at it twice daily or I naturally look at it twice daily without even thinking um believe visualizing it becoming true and having the absolute belief that it will and one I've added in more lately is like giving gratitude that that this is coming true like it's unfolding now even if you can't see all of it yet um and then going out there and doing something however small to move yourself towards those things and what's the science behind how this stuff works so it is back to something I briefly mentioned earlier which is selective attention selective filtering and value tagging and that is that we're so bombarded with information in the modern day that what you would read in a newspaper in one day today is the amount of information that somebody would have received in their lifetime 100 years ago and even a hundred years ago people were overly bombarded with information so it's gone exponential and so for similar reasons to how we're not aware of our clothes on our body all day the brain naturally filters out things that aren't vital to our survival and if we are not mindful then that's being chosen subconsciously without us having any you know impact on that and but if we do something like create a vision board or visualize something that we want then we're training the brain more to be aware of the things that we really want so that so then when it does the selective filtering it doesn't filter out that person that could introduce you to somebody about your business or that person that could introduce you to somebody for a date it you know because you might think well that's not really important for me today I need to put food on the table I need to get this document done but those sort of more long-term important things the brain will just not filtered them out and then you're more likely to pay attention and basically that means noticing and then grasping opportunities that can move you closer to your goal and the value tagging is a system that literally tags in order of importance of things that you want in life but it's partly logical and partly emotional so logical will be the very basic fundamental these are the things I need to survive and then the emotional will be more like your wishes and your desires um like the innermost things the longer term things and often logical trumps emotional so you have to like move that balance and keep reminding yourself these are the things that I really want and then your brain adapts to you rather than you just being kind of not the kind of driver of the journey okay yeah so I remember this was one of the things that most struck me when I was when I was listening to the audiobook of your book while doing this canal walks actually I was thinking okay I'm gonna make a vision board and then I found some online whiteboardy software I think Ian started posted a photo of Zac Efron with six-pack abs on it I was like cool body gold and then I just never looked at it because it was never a thing that I would look at but since I've started building uh since I've started bullet journaling recently this is now a thing that I look at every day where I've got my my goals and things that I was like oh yeah I did have try and do a stand-up comedy thing on my list of goals and so yesterday I was interviewing someone who's done stand-up comedy and I remembered oh yes I was like hey do you want to do a YouTube collab or you helped me do a stand-up comedy setting yeah sure and I think I I wrote that goal like two months ago and had I not looked at it I would would have forgotten that that was even a thing that I wanted to do because I was so focused on like you know let's let's make this podcast good that's like every every other thing that got in the way so I love the idea of having like a physical board where I can like stick stuff on it and actually just shove it on my bedside so I can look at it twice a day and I feel like that would almost certainly have benefits um how how like how do you do it do you divide it life into eight different areas and do it like that or what what's your kind of actual process for this see and do it like that like that comb love Health whatever but um you don't have to but I I pay more attention to I do tend to group things and I like to leave some space because I am not arrogant enough to think that I can think of all of the most amazing things that could ever happen for me so I like to leave a bit of space for Magic I do choose which sections touch each other and which sections don't so things like home and life they have to be in Balance but you know some things like my own personal like fitness goals don't necessarily have to be completely connected to those two things um and I think positioning is important so things like and it's just what it means to you you know things that are at the top could be like that's top priority things at the bottom could be that's foundational you know it just kind of depends but I think it's good to be intentional about that yeah how big a canvas do you use I don't use a massive one I use a half the size of that oh okay yeah and then do you get print off images but I've had a bigger one than that as well in lockdown I did a really big one nice yeah and you print things off would you buy some magazines and cut things right so the reason I wanted to come back to this because you said you did a whiteboardy thing is the reason I do magazines is that if you print stuff off that means you are limiting yourself to what you can think of because you've got to go and search for it when you look through magazines you'll find images that you're drawn to and you need to work out why or so I try not to use words that much but sometimes there's a phrase that really just captures what you want and so it is good maybe if you're very sure about some things sure look them up and print them off but do go through some magazines because then you might see something that you didn't expect oh that sounds great I'm just imagining like this this will actually make for an interesting video as well like starting like you know I tried a vision board for 30 days you know starting with the science of manifesting and how that works and then being like all right if I want to do it like this year rather than in January yeah yeah well you need to do it before January so it's like fully set up for January oh yeah nice that's a good shot actually yeah and it doesn't even have to be January September's like back to school yeah okay cool I'm sold when's your birthday May okay so it's another time yeah that's a great shot okay I'm sold Vision boarding here we come um I'm gonna buy some magazines cut some things out I've I've really started to like the analogness of stuff since starting the bullet Journal thing and getting like a Polaroid camera and this is something nice about you know flexing that like old Secondary School muscle just like highlighting things and making stuff look pretty and yes the the tactile nature or something in an otherwise very like sort of online digital type life well that's actually part of of the of my process as well which is that when you do a vision board it's it's color it's tactile it's not just you know it's different to writing a list so it is stimulating your other senses well what sort of stuff Have you had on the vision board in the past that's kind of come true um yeah sounds weird to say but yeah true so I've had a lot of things um one of them was in the first year of my business the thinking about how much money I wanted to earn and working out how much I needed to live and then a friend challenging me and saying well that's not really very vision board like you should double it and I said but that's absolutely not realistic for this you know first year and but I did I found the number that was double and I liked it and I put it on there and sure enough I uh so so I was like okay or I could double this again and so I did doubling for quite a few years and then then eventually it flat out because I can't like I'd have no more hours um yeah and when I was buying my first flat after I got divorced I found a picture of a kitchen and a bathroom that I liked and they were on my vision board and I liked the kitchen but it had one orange wall and I didn't like the orange wall but I liked everything else about the kitchen and the bathroom I liked everything about it but it had a wooden Lucy which I didn't like either but I liked everything else and the first flat that I bought the kitchen had an orange wall which my ex-husband then painted white for me and it had a wooden seat which I also changed um and then I you know lots of travel specific travel places I wanted to go to lots of Business Schools writing the book you know had like an old-fashioned typewriter on my vision board one year and then in 2015 I realized you know I've been divorced for quite a long time I was working like a maniac and I just realized that I was kind of running away from opening up my heart again so for the year of 2014 it was all travel and business and I put a tiny heart on it and like nothing happened so at the end of 2015 I thought okay if I really believe in this vision board stuff I should open myself up to doing it for love as well as like work and travel and um and I found a picture of like a a prominent engagement ring in a newspaper and I put that on the top left because left is like left hand and heart and everything and then I found this phrase and I don't like I said I don't normally use phrases but it said Joy comes out of the blue and it's just really really spoke to me I can't tell you why and I put that top Center and then I had some Housey stuff and I had a rhino and a tiger because I was interested in conservation um I'm trying to think what else was on it that those are the main things and so I made that in December 2015 in on the February 2016 so like a month and a bit later I met the person that I was going to marry on a plane so that's Joy comes out of the blue because we met in the sky and three months later we were together six months after that we were engaged a year later we got married and we didn't ask for gifts we chose Charities and I chose a conservation charity and the Housey stuff that I'd put on there looked exactly like the house that we then renovated I mean that that vision board stays by my bed because it's a reminder that that's how specific you can be and like how things can come true and it's really incredible and since then it's been more back to like work work stuff and travel yeah that's really cool um so someone a bit skeptical listening to this might be like okay come on you've been Vision boarding for 10 years let's say you've got 20 items in a vision board that's 200 items worth of stuff like almost by chance some of them are bound to come true and then you're going to tell yourself a story that oh these things came true and therefore Dot and I think it's similar to the skeptic attitude towards like oh I was thinking about this person and they rank it's like well you you probably think about 20 people a day and they don't ring but the one that works at the one that you remember um how how do you think about like that versus yeah that kind of response to Vision body manifesty type stuff which I've I've come across on the internet yeah so there is such a thing as confirmation bias which is obviously that when something gets proven right that we we take that as evidence that we were right and when something doesn't get proven right we forget about it there is you know there is that I'm not going to deny that but I personally and and I have so many messages from people who read my book and listen to me on podcasts have been so specific about the things that I've asked for and if I look at the ratio of the things that I put on my board that have come true some of them have taken longer some of them haven't come true yet it's it's an impressive statistic if if you know it was going to be random it's way more than random so and and it really comes back to the fact that it must be true that if you know what you want and you put your mind to it and you take steps towards achieving it it's more likely to happen and so with these sort of ideas that well it could be just that you're noticing it because of confirmation bias or it could be that you were lucky or it could be that you've got more opportunities in Life or whatever all of those things could be true but you could also make your life better and get more things in your life that you want if you were just open to these things absolutely I love it um final thing I'd like to ask you about if you're open to it and we can absolutely cut this if you're not um so and I'm asking for selfish reasons um any lessons like that you're taking away from Marriage number one that you're applying to marriage number two that could abstract to other like relationship advice for for other people yeah that's I don't know um I mean in general I would say that my journey between marriages was when I you know I got divorced when I changed career so all of that stuff like reading jungian psychology looking into Buddhism looking into like the laws of attraction um soul-searching for myself and starting really on the path of more mindfulness and gratitude and journaling and and resilience training all of those helped me to become the person that I was by the time I got married again and it was nine years between marriages so quite a long time and obviously my career had completely changed and look like a normal human I carried some of the the issues that I had from the first marriage into the beginning of the of the relationship but I'd have to say obviously I was more mature and I I knew more but really one of the biggest thing I learned was that even though I'm a doctor and I got a PhD in neuroscience and I've done a lot of personal development I just met someone that was so lovely and amazing and kind and generous and tolerant of all my little bad habits and stuff I uh it was just easy I was lucky yeah um it may not have worked out like that but yeah yeah but people often say that like oh it's we can marriages are hard and it's the effort you put into it and stuff and then some people are like well if you find the right person it doesn't feel like effort yeah it sounds like you're more in the second count well I think I mean I I'm probably not giving myself enough credit for all the personal development that I did but I also met somebody very compatible so yeah I didn't it didn't take that much effort but and also my my first husband is still like an incredible person as well so we were just young yeah exactly well Tara thank you so much it's been wonderful um any uh final asks that you have for the audience who might be watching or listening to this well it would be lovely if they follow me on Instagram at Dr Tara swart and if they were interested in reading my book um but they can also listen to me on podcasts and I actually have my own podcast launching called reinvent yourself with Dr Tara which is about neuroplasticity and it's stories of people's life changes so if they'd like to listen to that too that would be amazing fantastic and we'll put links to all of those things in the show notes and the video description and of course a link to Heights which is a supplement that you work with I'm an investor in and both of us take on yeah on the daily that's a sotara thank you so much thank you all right so that's it for this week's episode of Deep dive thank you so much for watching or listening all the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are going to be linked down in the video description or in the show notes depending on where you're watching or listening to this if you're listening to this on a podcast platform then do please leave us a review on the iTunes Store it really helps other people discover the podcast or if you're watching this in full HD or 4k on YouTube then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode that would be awesome and if you enjoyed this episode you might like to check out this episode here as well which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode so thanks for watching uh do hit the Subscribe button if you aren't already and I'll see you next time bye

Channel: Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal

Views: 192,929

Keywords: Ali Abdaal, Ali, Abdaal, Ali Abdal, Abdal, Deep Dive With Ali Abdaal, Deep Dive, Ali Abdaal Podcast, Deep Dive with Ali Abdaal Podcast

Id: njhNz6irWws

Length: 121min 10sec (7270 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 20 2022