[Casey Neistat gently humming] "Dude get off my back what the hell" Just kidding, there's no vlog. That counts for an April fool's joke right? So this video is actually about willpower. Specifically how just slowing down my breath
has really helped me to do the hard thing in several situations. On March 3rd , I found myself in a quite ironic
situation: While listening to “The Willpower Instinct,”
by Kelly McGonigal, I was lining up to buy something that would end up undermining my
willpower. The problem was that the new Zelda game was
way better than I anticipated. I would set aside 30 minutes to play which
would quickly turn into an hour then two hours and so on. So after investing way too much time into
finishing the game and finally starting to shift back into my creative and productive
mode, I noticed I had less capacity for willpower in general. It wasn't so much that Zelda was preoccupying
my mind, it was just more difficult to get to work and stay focused in general, and a
lot of times I would diffuse that uncomfortable tension by zoning out on my smartphone or
on social media websites. So, in these uncomfortable moments of really
not wanting to do the harder thing, I started using this breathing technique I picked up
from the Willpower Instinct. Basically you just breathe in one breath for
10 seconds and breathe out that breath for 10 seconds. Five to ten minutes of this was usually enough
to dissolve that tension and give me the willpower to focus on work. This kind of breathing is significant because
it improves something called heart rate variability. When people talk about heart rate they are
actually talking about the average heart rate over one minute. You know the kind of scene on House where
they inject the dying patient with some unexpectedly effective thing like snake venom and the heart
monitor shows a pulse and you hear a ping ping ping. The ping is when the heart contracts, this
generates a bit of electricity which the machine can read. So heart rate variability refers to variations
in the time between these pings. If there is precisely one ping every second,
then your heart rate is 60 beats per minute but you have virtually no heart rate variability. If there’s .85 seconds between the first
two pings and then 0.90 seconds between the second two and then .95 seconds then .90 seconds
again and so on, then you have some heart rate variability. This is a good thing. Everybody’s heart rate changes throughout
the day and even moment to moment. Your heart speeds up a little bit when you
inhale. It slows down again when you exhale. A smooth variation of heart rate is good and
means that your heart is getting signals from both branches of your autonomic nervous system:
one is the sympathetic nervous system, which speeds you up and is responsible for things
like the fight or flight response, and the other is the parasympathetic nervous system,
which promotes relaxation and engages during processes like digestion. Studies show that people with higher HRV are
better at ignoring distractions, delaying gratification, dealing with stressful situations
and are less likely to give up on difficult tasks. Because of this Heart Rate Variability has
been called the body’s “reserve” of willpower. This is because Heart rate variability is
the single best physiological measurement of something called the "pause and plan response." Pause and plan is essentially the opposite
of the body's fight or flight response. When your environment presents you with stressful
situation, the brain switches on the fight or flight response, and as much energy as
possible is directed to the body to help you run or fight. This means energy is directed away from the
brain. The pause and plan response starts when the
prefrontal cortex identifies that another part of your brain is asking you to do something
that may benefit you now but is not helpful for long term goals. It could be something like wanting to drink
a beer at lunch or eating cake for breakfast. To generate the self control to slow down
and make the decision to not do these things, energy needs to be transferred from the body
to the brain. To do this, your prefrontal cortex will communicate
the need for self-control to lower brain regions that regulate your heart rate, blood pressure,
breathing and other automatic functions. Then all these processes slow down and self
control improves. When people successfully exert self control,
the parasympathetic nervous system steps in to calm stress and control impulsive action. Heart rate goes down, but heart rate variability
goes up. Suzanne Segerstrom, a psychologist at the
University of Kentucky, observed this physiological signature of self-control when she asked hungry
students to not eat freshly baked cookies in front of them. As they sat there resisting the cookies, their
heart rate variability went up. Variability in other participants who were
free to eat the cookies stayed the same. Heart Rate Variability is such a good indicator
of willpower that you can use it to predict who will resist cravings. For example, recovering alcoholics whose HRV
goes up when they see a drink are more likely to stay sober. Recovering alcoholics whose heart rate variability
drops when they see a drink - have a greater risk of relapse. In fact, your body, brain and mental willpower
are so well connected that people with strong self control can actually stay a bit more
sober on the same amount of alcohol when they need to. A report from the University of Kentucky compared
alcohol metabolism in a group of men with similar body compositions. The men went through an evaluation process
to assess their ability for self control, then they drank the same amount of alcohol
and their blood alcohol content was measured afterwards. They found that the men who ranked higher
in self control were actually less drunk. The study gives an example where two men with
different levels of self control each have two drinks “Then, their supervisor from
work arrives unexpectedly, and they spend the next 30 min regulating their behavior
so as to appear sober. All else being equal, the present results
suggest that the man with high trait self-control will likely have a BAC around .026, and the
man with low self-control will have a BAC around .032 – approximately 20% higher." So why do some people just have better heart
rate variability and better self control than other people? Many factors influence your capacity for self
control- things like anxiety, anger, depression, poor sleep, loneliness and even poor air quality
are all associated with worse heart rate variability. Things like regular exercise and proper diet
can improve HRV. Practicing meditation or the controlled breathing
technique I mentioned earlier also increases heart rate variability. One study found that a daily twenty-minute
practice of slowed breathing improved HRV and reduced cravings and depression among
adults recovering from substance abuse and PTSD. But whether you’ve been practicing this
or not, at any time you can take a moment to slow your breathing down to manually improve
your heart rate variability and self-control in the moment. In this presentation, Dr. Alan Watkins actually
demonstrates how breathing like this can quickly improve your HRV. A volunteer is hooked up to a device that
measures the change in his heart rate and as you can see when he first walks up on stage
his heart rate is quite erratic, but after he begins to breathe in a slow rhythmic fashion,
you start to see nice smooth waveform. The thing that’s happening when you breathe
like this is: you’re simply destressing yourself and creating the physiology of calmness. As mentioned earlier, the stressful fight
or flight response diverts energy from the brain to the body. When this happens activity in the prefrontal
cortex decreases. This is good in some situations, you don’t
want to have to slowly decide to run from a bear, but some situations you really don’t
want your prefrontal cortex shutting down. It lowers your willpower and you become more
impulsive, but other forms of self control suffer. With less prefrontal cortex activity, you
may yell at your spouse, forget how to use words during a job interview, and you might
find yourself saying “Hi there, my name is come here often.” to an attractive woman at the bar. This slow and controlled breathing engages
the pause and plan response and directs more energy to the prefrontal cortex giving you
better control over yourself. This brings me to my favorite point in Dr.
Watkin’s talk: There is something even more fundamental,
down here in the basement of the human system is your physiology. If you want to be brilliant every single day
you've got to get a grip of every single level. At the root of behavior is physiology. If you want to improve your behavior, you
need to change how you think- and if you’re in a negative emotional state it’s quite
hard to change your thoughts. And Most emotional states are determined by
feedback between the brain and the body- your physiology influences emotion. This is why you feel jittery or anxious when
you drink too much coffee, you don’t just calmly observe your heart rate rising. The hard thing about having a powerful imaginative
human brain is that we can turn anything into a source of stress. An offhand comment from your boss or simply
the absence of a text message from a person you’re attracted to can be interpreted by
your brain as a threat to survival. This causes your body to express the physiology
of stress which affects your emotional state which affects your thoughts which affects
your behavior. If you want to better control your behavior,
one thing you can do is invest a couple minutes into controlling your breathing and changing
your physiology which is the root of your behavior. Quick thanks to SeraNova for the drone, if
you're in Japan make sure and check them out. They're a drone rental service. Also, thank y'all for being patient on the
part 2 to the video about the internet's effect on your brain. I'll have that one out soon.
