Neuroscientist: Build Intense Desire & Attraction (If He Loves You, He Will Do This) |Dr Tara Swart

it feels wonderful to be desired it feels amazing to have an attraction and intense chemistry with somebody when it's with the right person so how do we actually create the love juice known as oxytocin so there's a few ways we could look at this and when I speak about this normally just in a sciency way I basically say that the hormone oxytocin correlates with our feelings of bonding and the main ways of getting that into your life are through physical touch mostly so hugging kissing cuddling handshaking um stroking and then you know if you're lonely if you're if you're not in Partnership self-massage going for a massage having a warm bath so anything that makes you like physically feel warm and have skin-to-skin contact eye contact also does it but to a lesser extent laughing together induces oxytocin too and you know let's State the obvious when we have sex we release a lot of oxytocin fun fact for you women release oxytocin whenever they have sex men release testosterone whenever they have sex but only oxytocin if they're in love with the woman oh my God why is that it's an evolutionary mechanism but it's the explanation for the fact that if a woman sleeps with a man enough times she's going to start falling in love whereas for a man it's not necessarily going to happen and you know that is the basis of so many relationship issues you know you've heard it before let's keep it casual but we are having sex and the you know the woman kind of thinks at some point he's going to change his mind and we're going to be in a relationship but if the if that's what the guys told you from the start physiologically chemically it's not going to change for him it's more of a decision for a man to say okay maybe I want to settle down with this woman and like be in love with her and like you know create a nest kind of thing and then you know they can start like letting the effects of oxytocin have an impact on them um and this you know I you know I never talk about hard wiring I talk about soft wiring so something that's parallel to that that we know about is in history like far back like in the cave um people weren't monogamous and men would have children with multiple women and this was really because just passing on your genes was the most important thing for quite a long time now most societies have asked us to live in a unit family so be monogamous have children with one other person and what we've seen literally only in the last five not even 10 years is that dad's brains are getting rewired by oxytocin so when a man becomes a dad for the first time his oxytocin um levels increase in a burst and make him bond with the baby more rather than than want to compete with the baby through testosterone and actually their testosterone levels drop and if the baby sleeps in the same room as you the man's testosterone levels drop even further so they become much more cuddly and bonded and they want to stay at home and be with the baby they they don't want to go out hunting you know to work basically um or or leave you and look for another partner to impregnate they want to stay as part of that family so we do know that our Behavior can change some of our wiring but it takes Millennia and currently that status of how much women bond with someone that they have sex with and how much men do that hasn't really changed since we lived in the cave men um have 17 times as much testosterone as women circulating during a day so if you think of it like a seesaw for us we don't have much testosterone but like having an orgasm induces so much oxytocin that it really overrides the testosterone and makes you just want to bond but in proportionally the testosterone levels are so high that even if there's oxytocin around because you have been cuddling and you have been having skin-to-skin contact and you do you know you are fond of each other but that actual falling in love that the threshold is just totally different and that's why I always you know if you watch reality shows or you know you listen to your friends who are single it's that you just hear it over and over again this is casual we're not in a relationship and if those are the words that are being spoken to you you need to listen to them because in this case the words are overriding the actions even if the person's having sex with you but I always say these things work in three you know three ways so there's the words that are spoken the body language or the physical actions and that's also eye contact and facial expressions and then hormones and so obviously if a man you know says I love you I only want to be with you I want to marry you um and the actions go along with that then the hormones are there but if they're not saying that because the hormones aren't there then whatever actions you're carrying out is not is not strong enough of those three to make that turn to a different outcome so let's say you're going on a date if you go to a comedy show and so you laugh together that would be a great way for you guys to really Bond yeah yeah that's a that's a really good example I've never thought of that one before there's and so the emotions that correlate with oxytocin and bonding are Joy excitement love and Trust oh so and this is very individual I can't tell you or our listeners what brings you Joy you know if you can work out by journaling or something what brings you Joy what makes you excited what motivates you to get out of bed in the morning what do you love um and you know how how does your trust thresher should work and then equally if you can do that for your partner or you know the person that you're trying to date understand what brings them joy and motivates them Etc then that's a very powerful basis you know upon which to start um and so also understanding that on the opposite end of the spectrum the things that break down bonding and relationship are fear anger disgust contempt shaming guilt so we want avoid th you know inducing those sorts of emotions and then there's a really interesting one in the middle which is surprise so that can tip you one way or the other and the best examples of that are watching a horror movie where you don't know if you're going to like scream or laugh in the next millisecond or being at the top of a roller coaster where you're kind of like exhilarated but also like feel sick and terrified so in real life um doing something surprising can either move you from Fear to trust or trust to fear and when I say fear I mean that Circle of emotions like anger disgust shame whatever and so surprise can be used you know very tactically it it can even be used in the bedroom I mean if you think about the fact that if you suddenly introduce an element or behave a different way in the bedroom than you have previously in the relationship that could be a really good thing right but equally if that comes is a bit of a unexpected shock to your partner that could actually ruin the moment so it's kind of like that so what's happened you said trust what's happening to the brain then that trust is a way of um developing o oxytocin I think that one most things work both ways around but I would say with that one the trust is built through building up the oxytocin you can't really oh do trust do you know what I mean trust really has to be earned and it has to be maintained and it can be lost so so easily so I would say you can't say like oh you know well I did actually say to you before this I trust you but I can't say Lisa you have to trust me that's not going to work I have to demonstrate to you that I am trustworthy for you and then that will start to build your oxytocin levels every time you see me or speak to me and that's you know something that's built over time but the the physical contact that does induce little bursts of oxytocin as you go along yeah that makes sense and then you you laid out all the things that I've kind of think in my head is like the anti oxytocin things um so contempt resentment things like that MH what are the acts that people do that maybe they don't realize are actually um blocking the oxytocin so interestingly in like large pieces of research the one that they've narrowed it down to that is the most damaging in a relationship is a contemptuous facial expression m so obviously you can't unhear words that your partner has said to you but you can kind of talk through that and maybe to a different understanding sometimes but words can be very hurtful and damaging but there are certain facial expressions that if you see your partner make them is very difficult to ever get over especially because if you let's say even just you perceive that your partner has looked at you with contempt or disgust you may or may be correct because you'll be looking through your filters which you know goodness knows what childhood and parental and societal and school programming have built up in your mind about what you perceive as contempt um let's say they even did look at you like that imagine going to your partner and saying the last time we had an argument I think you looked at me with disgust the most likely response you're going to get is no I didn't so how do you actually ever both agree on that it's really difficult whereas if if you had said something like you know I really hate it when you do X you can actually talk through that um so these and and often it's microm muscular changes in the person's face it's just a narrowing of the eyes or a kind of you know looking down their nose at you kind of thing um it's so subtle that it's very difficult to prove that it was done or understand the intent of the person that might have made that face um and also just you know what I sometimes bear in mind that some sometimes people's like just face at rest without them really thinking of any emotion could be enough of a trigger to someone that oh like you know I felt like you thought badly of me when you were looking at me that day and you know it's just two different people's perspectives so um so you you said a couple of the things that signs I guess of contempt um looking down your nose um ium of people like a t and there's a whole study have you heard of the um the Gutman Institute did that one study where they turned off the volume and they had these couples walk into the room and they would just watch them and they would see their body language and because contempt is like one of the biggest signs of a divorce they could um accurately detect I think with 90% accuracy of who was going to get divorced just by the way that their facial structure was because they could sense contempt yeah and so I think it's like the darting of the eyes or the like the roll I should say the rolling of the eyes yeah rolling of the eyes like ignoring walking past brushing off so many little things and interestingly I've never really thought about why this is the case before but it's very small things so it's kind of like microaggressions and you know you can get 10 of those without really being conscious that that's going on till it reaches some kind of Tipping Point whereas you know obviously if there's like domestic abuse or violence you are aware of it you know you may not um necessarily respond to it in the way that people would expect you to um and that's for all sorts of complex reasons but these more subtle micro aggressions are their own thing in a you know different way so talk to me about stress because I've heard you talk um talk that stress when it's something that you do together and you come through the stress together actually that can be a bonding mechanism but stress in and of itself can actually be something that can potentially break a relationship MH yeah I'm glad you reminded me of that cuz you know how you were saying like if you go through something really intense together like whether it's laughing together or just an intense experience that can Bond you so that can actually be a bad experience I guess like we said with the horror movie but um not necessarily bad but stressful like if you do a bungee jump together the fear and apprehension that you have around that can really Bond you and again I I use reality shows as an example because they are basically a psychological playground I mean I watch them because it's it's like tell people that's why I watch them it's all for work people are always so surprised that I watch them and then I basically say it's like sociology and psychology experiments but um often when people go through you know whether it's love island or I'm celebrity get me out of here it's an intense experience that can't be shared with many others you always hear people at the end saying we're going to be friends for life and you know whether or not that turns out to be true it's the feeling of that Shar intense experience that makes people think that that is true um so that can be it can be a negative thing where you were all in fear but you were in it together but then terrible terrible tragedies like the loss of a child increases the chances of a couple getting divorced by a massive amount and that is because the the research talks about the male and female Journey but just let's say it's the Journey of two people who process their emot tions differently means that if you're suffering in grief or stress or loss or scarcity that let's say it was you and I and you know it was just friends that if I process that really differently emotionally and you're going on your journey with the same thing that we've both experienced it's really hard to be there for each other cuz not only are you already struggling with your own emotions but if they're very different to your friends or your partners then it's hard for you to put yourself in their position you know that phrase put yourself in their shoes I always say put yourself in their brain but that is hard to do like it's it's hard to do at the best of times it's really hard to do if you're compromised by stress because when you are stressed we go at the other end from oxytocin so then we have this hormone cortisol and one of the ways that cortisol helps you to get through stress is is it changes the where the blood flow in your brain goes so it brings it down to just survival mode like what do I need to do today to just get through this day minimum it doesn't allow the blood to flow to the parts of your brain that allow you to be creative or think flexibly or think out of the box so it just really shuts down your thinking when you need it the most and that's why it's important to like be mindful of like keeping up your resilience and doing things like journaling and mindfulness which we can come to later yeah that's why I was actually as you were talking I thought wow it would really be difficult if you were um in a relationship with somebody and you're the person that is trying to be mindful trying to work on yourself really trying to be present and your partner isn't and so your development of I assume then the cortisol um as you're trying to kind of lower it if your partner isn't then now you don't become Al line and I always wondered about the child thing like it's I couldn't imagine a worse feeling than losing a child but I always wondered why it never brought people together because I'm like wow this is something you're both suffering with how come you don't bond like obviously it's a horrible way to bond but you would from uh the outside not understanding you know the Neuroscience behind it is I would assume that would bring you together not tear you apart I'm really glad that you said you've you've kind of seen that anecdotally as well because it it does seem odd you'd think that all you'd want to do is cling to each other but I think the the grief is so overwhelming that it's very hard to think of anyone else you know at least temporarily and maybe by the time you come up for air you've drifted apart so much that it's really difficult to reconnect the scary thing about cortisol is that it's not like oxytocin it doesn't depend on actually doing something like hugging you or hoarding you or kissing you it is like other sex steroid hormones like estrogen progesterone it actually leaks out of your body through your sweat so if you are in close proximity to somebody who's really stressed whether they're repressing it or not that is going to artificially raise your stress levels how is that possible it's possible in the same way that women who live or work closely together synchronize their periods within two months that's so quick um and that comes from Evolution we needed to be fertile at the same time so that alpha male could impregnate us or um and we don't need that anymore in this day and age but it still happens and so with stress there's a reason that the leader stress should impact other people because let's say you were at war or you're out hunting you needed to know what the leader was feeling so you could respond to that and we're talking about times where people couldn't speak yet so it was grunting gesturing but it was also like relating to each other hormonally and that's doesn't matter if you're male or female it's who's more senior in the pack or the pair M their stress levels will impact the other one or let's say even if like you're just equal in a relationship the more stressed person will affect the less stressed person yeah um and I've heard you talk about um the impact of the language that you can use and so if you're the type of person that uses a language um that is maybe different to your partners in even the language you use in your mind I assume it will have a different effect and the example that you gave was um the the people that read words around retirement end up moving slower mhm talk to me about that because I found this fascinating again always going back to how that like we don't realize the words that we're may be using and so when it comes to especially my audience if if you've been in a relationship or if you've been heartbroken or if something bad has happened um in that way um the value tagging as you call it attachment to maybe these words of I'm no good or I was you know this was my fault can actually have a massive detriment to then potentially and this is my language but potentially finding someone later because you're so stuck so that was just an experiment that was done on medical students so healthy young people they had to walk between five rooms and in each room there were pieces of paper with five words on them on a table and they had to string a sentence out of those words they thought that was the whole experiment but it was actually a trick in that four of the rooms just had neutral words one of the rooms had Bungalow walk Florida Sunshine beach now if you're an American those words will tag in your brain as something to do with becoming retired really loose Association but there nonetheless and so even though they entered the rooms in different orders because they were all going around in a circle 80% of them walked more slowly out of that room than any of the other rooms just because they were vaguely reminded of retirement so I want to apply that to how that you know could affect us and that is both if you are constantly saying I'm not good enough I'm not thin enough I'm not clever enough I'm never going to get that done if that's your internal narrative just ask yourself now you don't need a neuroscience to tell you what is that doing to your body what up homie I got something free and new to share with you right now how often are you visited by that negative voice in your head telling you that you're not smart enough that you're not good enough experienced enough not fill in the blank one of the most powerful things you can learn to do in life is to turn that negative voice into your bestie and I want to teach you how to do that and so much more in my four steps to becoming confidence workshop and guys the most amazing thing is you can actually register for completely free for this Workshop so click the link on your screen and I see you on the inside yeah that's so and um talk to me about the value tagging that you um cuz this is again so powerful so value tagging is based on the fact that we are bombarded with so much information every day that we have to naturally filter some of that out so for example you're not aware of the clothes on your body all day even though you have like millions of receptors in your skin to feel stuff so we filter that out cuz it's it's not useful information for us during the day and so there's selective filtering then there's something called selective attention which means that the brain directs us to things that are of interest to us like surviving and thriving in life and value tagging sits behind that and tags in order of importance the things that it wants us to attend to and there's two systems within that one is logical so that's literally don't like step into the road without seeing if a car's coming you know literal like your life yeah and then there's the warm or emotional part which is the things that you really want in your life you know whether that is a partner or um a family or travel or you know Be Your Own Boss kind of thing the things that mean something to you deep down and longer term which naturally we don't attend to every day because we're busy so you know it's sort of what we have to do is is ramp up the importance of that emotional stuff and not just be living on the this is what I need to do to survive today um but when I talk about distractions I want to add in another one that relates back to the language thing that you mentioned which is we all have our own internal narrative and we may have people you know be our cheerleaders or criticize us and we may be very conscious of being able to respond to that but this is where gaslighting and microaggressions come in which is people just making snid little comments that maybe it takes you a bit of time to realize that actually that's chipping away at my self-esteem um so again if you think about the impact of mind over matter if somebody says to you every day Lisa you look um you look really good considering that you've put on a bit of weight since last year you know but you're looking really good what's that doing to your body already did you feel something yeah and that's like so scary and it's obviously not true at all no I don't take you person me but it's I I said it without warning you because it makes people shudder because you immediately think is that actually true um have I put on weight since last year and even if you can very quickly come to the conclusion that it's not true it's already done some damage yeah God this is so powerful I'd love to even go a bit deeper um so a lot of my my audience they'll write in the comments a lot the time especially when I talk about relationship sh like well I'm just not going to have a relationship you know I've guys guys are terrible um there's no good men out there um I've given up on love because I was hurt before which I completely understand why people shut down as a protective mechanism but explain to me what that's actually doing to the brain um in everything that we're talking about with the language that we speak and then the value tagging yeah so like you I also think it's perfectly natural to feel like that after the breakdown of a relationship um but what we need to be mindful of doing is not letting that last forever because of course we're going to protect ourselves if we've just had our hearts broken but what I the way that I work with people is with those statements when they're ready not like straight after a heartbreak is I ask them to not justify it to me but to go home and ask yourself are those statements actual 100% fact is it actually true that there is not a single good man out there is it actually true that all men are awful is it actually true that if you ever dared to open up your heart again the only outcome is that it would get broken if you really think about it the answers to those questions are no so then you have to make a decision that okay everything that's happened to me in my life so far has put me in this place where I don't want to risk getting married again and because I don't want to get hurt again and I have seen several examples of men that have treated myself or other women badly and that's you know the data that I'm basing this statement on so what you need to do is first of all decide if because of all those reasons you really want to be on your own for the rest of your life um and whether that's actually likely um one of my kind of much older Mentor friends um said to me when I once said to him you know um I'm just not interested in in um having a relationship again and he said the problem is Tara men will still be interested in you and I never forgot that so you know to also ask yourself that however much you're saying I'm never going to like trust someone again or be in a relationship again chances are you know I guess depending slightly on how old you are that someone's going to come along who's really sweet and really nice and really genuine and hasn't had that backstory and just wants to give it a go then you need to collect dat to the contrary of what you've made yourself believe so look around you know even if you've had a really bad experience and some of your girlfriends have um you must have friends who are happily married or you know have had a heartbreak and then found somebody really lovely or you know even in the absence of finding a partner just being able to work on themselves and get themselves back to that place of my heart's open now even though I never thought it would be again so Gathering evidence that is positive for you and I think again not what you have to say to your friends or Justify to your family but you know deep down if you would love to be in Partnership again then just for yourself gather evidence that that's possible yeah once you believe it's possible everything else will start to change you don't actually have to do anything that differently you don't have to go on a 100 dates you don't have to tell everyone that you're looking for someone you know if you do that internal work things will shift in the world around you I love that so much and you also say that like it becomes the self-fulfilling prophecy explain that to me so what we don't believe is possible doesn't tend to happen and the most classic example of this is a tangible one it's not like a love one it's um a human being able to run the 4minute mile so we literally did not think that was possible that you know there was a time within which the fastest man on earth could run a mile and it was over four minutes and for all sorts of you know whatever the apparatus was that we had at the time physiologically it was believed that it is impossible for a human to run a mile in less than four minutes and then Roger banister famously ran a mile in less than four minutes well within two or three months of that seven or eight other people suddenly did it having like no one else has ever done it in the world before so it's once we knew it was possible I don't know if people actually did things differently or they just went out there thinking that it's possible and they ran and it happened but let's just like bring that back to the example that we're giving Which is that you've been through heartbreak that makes you feel like you just never ever want to let anybody let you feel like that again so you are going to be closed protective you know not take up opportunities what if you can give yourself enough examples of friends or maybe not even people you know but just like you know high-profile people or stories that you've heard of people who have overcome that and then been really happy afterwards what's the danger of showing yourself as many examples of that as the bad examples that you've got and I've actually have a quote of yours you meet people at the level of psychological wound that you have um is that kind of like what we're talking about here was if you if your so a the belief to get it but then also if there's a wound that maybe you don't um you don't actually work through then you're attracting other people that have that similar type of belief and the way that that manifests is that you'll really get each other because you'll be coming from a very same story very same you know similar narrative and filters in life somebody who's very whole who's evolved spiritually who's worked on themselves who's done that psychological stuff to manage their emotions isn't going to be in a relationship with somebody who's got trust issues it's just that doesn't happen you you meet people who are at the similar level to you interestingly since I made that quote somebody wrote on social media I guess you leave people for the same reasons and that hit me like wow that is profound and it's so true so I don't know I can't remember the name of who that was but if you're listening thank you um so yeah if you are in Partnership or in friendship or in a group and you start doing that work and evolving emotionally and spiritually chances are you will lose some friends and maybe even lose your partner um but you've got to be able to think of that as a good thing yeah um I read a study once that said I think it was Forbes that said there's something called divorce contagion and if your friend has got divorced or someone that you know has got divorced your there's 75% more likely to also get divorced yeah explain that to me CU I don't quite understand it okay so um it's actually under an umbrella of something called social contagion which is that things that your peers do impact you so it's not literally like oh you know Jane got divorced so I'm going to get divorced it's if there were underlying problems in your marriage but nobody in your social groups divorced you're going to just bury it and keep going right as soon as somebody else getss divorced you might think well actually they've been brave to leave their marriage and my marriage isn't really you know as great as I say it is when we're all out to dinner together and you look at this person and you see them you know be brave move on maybe meet somebody you know that's more on their level and that makes you think that that could be the outcome for you um and it you know absolutely doesn't have to include them meeting someone else it could just be that not being in that relationship is is better for them and if you identify with that it might just give you the confidence and the courage to make that step that you wouldn't have made um so it probably usually takes somebody who cannot tolerate being in their relationship anymore to give permission almost for people who kind of were you know on the on the fence to say actually I think it might be better for me to to leave this marriage and so um weight is another one I mean you rarely see a group of friends where um you know everybody's kind of at a average weight and one person's really obese or one person's like super skinny or vice versa you rarely see a group of friends who are all overweight with one friend who's of you know average weight so um what tends to happen is that if you feel a bit of societal pressure to stay in a certain shape because of the people that you hang around with if they all start putting on weight then it's kind of okay for you to um and you know most people put on weight in the pandemic right and there was a definite kind of camaraderie from saying oh my goodness I put on so much weight because of like the stress or because we're eating like you know so well at home or you know we're eating more junk or whatever it was um people could connect with each other because a lot of people put on weight during the pandemic and there would definitely be groups of friends that once that was you know behind us to whatever extent it is would just say well you know this is the weight I am now and they'd all say yeah you know me too um that's not going to change now at our age and but you know I was definitely in the group of friends that were all like we need to get back to our pre pandemic weight you know um so of course you're influenced by the people around you because if nobody else around me said I want to get back to my prepandemic weight maybe I would have let it slide I don't know um but I wasn't in that group so for me that didn't happen but for a lot of people it would have yeah I can also understand though like if you're with a group of friends and let's say there's five of you and everyone's getting a salad well it's you're more likely to go for the healthy option then go I'll have like the the french fries and the you know deep fried chicken um so that kind of Habitual type thing when you're around other people I can get but the divorce thing really hit me and I love that how you broke that down in that it's giving you somewhat permission but my question now is if you were around people that were truly in beautiful relationships would that also have a POS that same effect on you yeah so if if that's if that's what you see and a lot of people say you know my parents were married forever and they really loved each other and so that's their model of what a relationship should be um and equally you know you see I I see I hear this more in the younger age group now that you know all my friends parents are divorced so that obviously normalizes divorce um doesn't mean that you think it's a good thing to either stay together forever or get divorced it's just what's normal for you so if you see most of your friends making choices of somebody that is loyal that you know is family focused that um is you know dependable and faithful then you're much more likely to make that but you know if you're seeing if it's like oh I like a bad boy you know the the most important thing to me is that he's really good-looking then you're probably you you're not going to want to have the ugliest boyfriend of your whole group are you you're going to want that's that type yeah that's so fascinating and would the same then apply if you were single and just hanging around single people it definitely normalizes it so it doesn't mean at all that you you know that you can't meet someone but it makes it easier to stay single for sure because because you don't feel like the odd one out um and of course what what happens within that is that and I think this is an understandable narrative but a lot of people will say well I'm perfectly happy being single you know I don't want to compromise the things that are really important to me for someone else and so you know what I've kind of always tried to do as a bit kind of to give people permission is you know at the times I have been single is to say I'd actually really love to be in Partnership again and I find that every single time I say that the person who's just said well I'm fine being single um says actually yeah I would too so it's quite interesting um I think there's a lot of you know we do have to put on a lot of bravado because I still think Society judges you for being single so if you are even if deep down you don't want to be it's like it feels like you have to justify that you're fine with it and it's not actually what you want and you know there are so many jokes about people saying you know all my parents want is for me to get married and have children and settle down and that's not actually what's most important to me because I you know I love my career or whatever um but I think if you can be really honest with your friends and say you know it's great to have a wonderful career and you can have both and maybe you would like love you know to get the benefits of being in a relationship too then I think you know people are really honest I think it's it's kind of like fear and shame that makes us say that we don't and you know obviously there are people that don't want to be in a relationship but I think there are a lot of people that do that find it hard to admit that they want that when they don't have it yeah it seems like it it's definitely a protective mechanism which I completely get especially if you've um been hurt before and you can't imagine ever you know giving yourself over to somebody again but going back to the thing that we were saying earlier if you're just if you deep deep down do want to and again zero judgment if you don't like respect that you know what you want but if deep down you do but you're saying you don't now I can imagine there's a disconnect between basically the brain and the Heart oh that's such a sweet way of putting it yeah and I think the way that I would put it is that this can change for people at different times so if I even think of my own story I was you know married for about 10 years got divorced in my mid-30s and definitely said I will never ever never get married again oh did you yeah but I didn't want to feel like that again that disappointment and that loss and the you know there is a bit of Shame associated with it but it was mostly for myself the completely broken heart I just never ever wanted to like go through that again so I did date but I didn't like give my heart to anyone and then I remember when I met my second husband I remember the moment I was standing in the garden that I thought this person could totally break my heart now and instead of feeling fear I thought wow you have got over what happened before and brought yourself to the place where you've put your heart on a plate for someone else again well done what did you end up doing to be able to go from heartbroken to be able to put your heart on a plate again um well it took a lot of time um but I really did delve into the spiritual work so for me I became very interested in Buddhist teaching ings and yian psychology and you know I don't know why I went down with a rabbit hole with those two things particularly at that time but I did and I think you know that at any time or for any person it could be another um form of psychology or manifestation or another like spiritual philosophy whatever works for you um and yeah so I just really worked on myself and based on you know what we were discussing earlier which is you going to meet someone at the level of psychological wound that you're at I wasn't doing it to meet someone I was doing it to build myself back up again because you know I had got married quite young so my sense of identity of who I was you know not in partnership with my first husband was I didn't really like know what it was um so I had to just kind of like get a really good sense of who I was again and around that same time I also quit my job as a medical doctor and started up my business and moved countries so there was a lot going on so I did need to like really like gather myself together and be like okay you know there's this is a whole new big start how do you want this to pan out who do you want to be like what's going to make you proud of yourself and because I did that I got myself to the place where I was like I was B the way I'll put it I was somebody that someone would want to marry I wasn't that before you know it was like along the way several times with because I've got really good friends I was like would I want to marry me right now no that's a strong question to ask yourself yeah how were you able to say no without eroding your self-esteem because my self-esteem was where it was I was just being honest it was literally would I you know am I marriage Mater am I like a great catch right now for someone or for myself like if I met somebody that was like me right now would I think I want to spend the rest of my life with this person and they'll always have my back and be my best friend I knew I wasn't capable of that at that time so um and I didn't want to do it for someone else I wanted to do it for myself so I I had self-esteem and it was only when I had self-esteem that I actually met someone else as a neuroscientist I really want to understand addiction and addiction in there you didn't expect that one did you well it's actually very much connected because there's a a lot of people that I know especially when I was younger that were addicted to a uh to the drama of a relationship and it becomes like this toxic cycle that you're in but even when it it had nothing to do with abuse it wasn't like they couldn't physically leave but they would just became addicted to the highs and the lows and I've heard so or I've seen so many relationships where people like they're screaming at each other yelling mad hatred and the next thing they're doing is having crazy ass sex so what is happening to the brain why do people get addicted to that cycle I think a message that I really want to put across quite strongly is related to what I said earlier about it took me quite a lot of time is that age does play a part in it so the way that our brains develop is um from zero to two obviously a baby goes from being completely helpless can't control its own bladder or bowels or anything feed itself to walking talking sometimes up to five languages at a time can you know make choices eat go to the blue um and then from two till let's say Teenage that you know it just grows and becomes more cemented and you become like more solid at everything and then around the teenage years there's a lot of pruning away of um Pathways that you don't need anymore like maybe you're not using all of those languages or you know you don't need to like remember how to putty train anymore and you you start to learn how to socialize how to be in relationship how to experience your emotions but that's very active until we're about 25 and I think people really don't realize that they think you're 18 you're an adult behave yourself now but actually we're very volatile emotionally till we're at least 25 and then depending on the kind of family you grew up in you know if it was a family with high expressed emotion so a lot of like raising of voices or crying or throwing yourself to the ground or you know just kind of gesticulating and kind of not having boundaries then it's going to be harder for you to re that in this what you call addiction to the highs and lows I would actually say is an inability to manage the extremes of your emotion and what I have leared over time therefore with age is that you need to manage the range of your emotions if you can be like screaming and hating one second and like you know having crazy sex the next that's CU you're ex you're range is out here if you can bring your range like and however good it gets it's going to get that bad that's what you need to understand so I'm not saying that you can't have good sex but you know if you can have that within you know either a trusting relationship or an absolutely transparent you know just you know casual relationship and you've got you hold your self-esteem within that you understand what the expectations are then at the other end you're not going to have the fall off a cliff heartbreak kind of like you know wanting to crazily hate and stalk that person you're going to be like you know what I kind of wish that turned out differently but it didn't but I can be okay with that I'm probably going to go into a corner and like lick my wounds for a while but I'll I'll come out I'll come back okay um and it's just it's not even that's an example but with emotions it's like how happy and excited you feel that's also how sad you're going to feel if something goes wrong and what we don't want is to be here and not right completely n no but we equally don't want to be out there there's a normal range for human emotions where the hormones and transmitters are you know within the normal range of chemicals and we experience emotions in a healthy way and that involves both survival emotions and bonding emotions or attachment emotions um so we experience the whole Spectrum but just not too much or too little of any of them thank you for correcting me I never thought of it I it seems like an it seems from the outside and not understand this you know the brain um that it was more of an addiction but I totally understand your the spectrum of things and then you actually mentioned where like you go into the stalking mode I've seen amazing well put together women go off the rails if they've been heartbroken and all of a sudden they're stalking or they're doing I call them driveby where it's like let I'm just going to see if his car's there um or if they're in a relationship and they're worried about they cheating and then all of a sudden they they become a different person what actually is happening there that is to do with psychological safety well I I have to separate the two because if you're in a relationship and you have suspicions then what you're doing is to maintain your psychological safety to like give yourself data and evidence about whether you should trust that person or not um the one about after a relationship has broken down would be more about the in in ability to accept that fact the inability to regulate your emotions around it and therefore difficulty letting go so I think they're two they're definitely in a subset of things together but they're slightly different so one is to do with not let being able to let go and the other one perhaps is more to do with being able to let go if you get the right evidence so it's checking should I let go and it may be followed by the former state in that if you do have to end the relationship because of trust issues you would still be heartbroken and you might still want to go and check if their car is there or someone else's car is there but I think they're just they've got slightly different motivations in the brain um and it kind of you know it makes sense because if you've been in a relationship with someone you've either lived with them or spent a lot of time with them and suddenly that changes it destabilizes your whole just dayto day you know from the minute that you wake up because either you've gone from waking up with that person to waking up alone or you've gone from waking up thinking I might see him this weekend to I'm never going to see him again so it's actually okay to have those temporary periods of not being yourself and kind of losing your ability to behave in the way that you normally do but it just can't go on for too long and I remember you know when I was like first getting divorc for and because I was a psychiatrist at the time and I'd had patients on the ward who had like tried to kill themselves because their relationship had ended I remember thinking if I didn't know all the things I know now I can see why you could end up on a psychiatric ward um so it's very interesting that I've you know seen kind of the most broken result of a you know a relationship ending or a cheating happening and being through a version of that myself and really understood like how that can happen but thank goodness had the emotional regulation to like not go down that path but it really made me actually so non-judgmental about how difficult that is and how if you don't have the tools within yourself or the right support around you it can spiral out of control um I think that even in terms of like time bound that even like very very supportive friends will let you have that period of time where you're just like crying and talking about it all the time and wanting to message him or whatever but there is going to come a time where people are going to say you know what you're better than this like you can start to move forward now other people will like be so Keen to be with you and and that's what that support Circle helps and so you know I really feel for people that don't have that because it's very hard to navigate all these things by ourselves we as humans aren't meant to deal with these things by ourselves we're meant to be part of a tribe so is it having people around you that can help you get out of that and then also having the ability to emotionally regulate yeah so absolutely you know building up yourself the like emotional regulation and that can happen through journaling through therapy through talking with friends um through like introspection um but the circle that you have around you bring it back to everything else that you've picked up today you know the words that people say the examples that they give you um you know if if you have friends around you that are saying yeah well you know why not just like text him and see if he replies versus friends who are saying like you know what it's time to put this behind you and there's a time and a place for both of those but it's just being very conscious that you've got the right advice around you yeah thank you for saying that all because I think that so many of us will beat ourselves up over an act where it may not align with the person that we want to be and so um that can trigger you know the shame is like I can't believe that I acted like that and then that shame then can just spiral down instead of giving yourself the grace that's like yes this is actually a moment in time I'm having an emotion this is very valid this is very reasonable I won't stay here but right now not to feel the shame and that you're just freaking human yeah I think thinking of it as temporary um you just made think for a really funny analogy I don't know why but I was like you know that's breakup Barbie breakup Barbie can be in your life for a certain period of time but not forever yeah that's amazing I love that and you actually also mentioned the psychological trust so talk to me about the the power of trust and actually the connection of trust and um being able to orgasm so that phrase is called psychological safety and it comes from how we existed in tribes when we lived in in the cave so when we lived in the cave if you mistakenly let someone else into your tribe that could bring in disease it could let lead to like theft um um you know it was a risk so we had to like keep our tribes like together and separate from different tribes and in those days the way that we recognized our tribe was through skin color hair color hair texture eye color and eye shape mostly so it's very racial right um so these days it's not based on that although that is still part of it but when we meet a new person we actually Peg them on up to 150 identified stereotypes whoa um and that will now in the modern world include things like social class how much you earn educ ational level which sports team you support which political party you vote for um physical attractiveness and and like many other you and thing obvious things like age and gender and and race you know um so it doesn't mean you have to be the same to be in the tribe but but you know you'll make a picture of someone and think okay this is someone who's about the same age as me who's a woman that comes from London you see where I'm going um gotcha you're in my Dr um so so the safety issue came from the fact that you had to stick together as a tribe to be safe and any external element was was a potential danger so now it's based on a wider range of of stereotypes so even if you don't match on those stereotypes once you've become in Partnership or in tribe or whatever there is a level of trust okay now the risk of that being broken and it's not just in Rel relationships it's losing your job is a is a psychological safety Factor because obviously that's what you rely on to pay for your life so your relationship with your boss your relationship with your team um we're constantly our brain is constantly looking out for threats to our survival that is its main job it wants us to live long enough to reproduce sadly and so to achieve that we have to sleep eat be hydrated be healthy be fertile that all our brains actually care about that's how basic we actually are but we are living a richer life than that um but in terms of what the brain is doing all it you know its main job is is there a threat to my survival right now when I meet a new person could this person like somehow threatened my survival as soon as I've decided that that's not the case then I can think about okay do I want to trust you do I want to be friends with you do I want to like bring you into my circle um so that's that's what psychological safety is and then bringing in trust and orgasm so obviously you can have an orgasm with somebody that you don't necessarily know if you can trust because you can have a one night stand um but oxytocin does underly both love and trust and orgasm child birth breastfeeding so hormones and neur transmitters have more than one um they can underly more than one pathway so for example dopamine which most people will recognizes the reward chemical so that's released when you get something that you like so like eating a bowl of ice cream yeah um also underlies motivation so it's the hormone that will drive you to get to move towards a goal that you want to achieve but it's also very much part of the movement system so in different Pathways of the brain dopamine is doing different things um so let me just give you some really uh tangible examples so when dopamine is reduced in a certain pathway in the brain that's when you can see symptoms of Parkinson's disease so Parkinson's disease is a movement disorder that's what I did my PhD in and it's reduction of dopamine in the nigral pathway of the brain in schizophrenia you have an increase in dopamine in the misol limic pathway of the brain so forget the terms necessarily but they're just in different places in the brain same hormone going up or down so with oxytocin when it's um underlying an orgasm it's having it's it's you know working differently to how it does when it's underlying breastfeeding or childbirth or trust or you know obviously love and orgasm tend to be more connected but yeah so just you know there's this there's so many systems and subsystems in the brain and they've got all sorts of different chemicals like racing around in them we try to simplify it by saying oxytocin is for bonding but it's actually way more complicated than that but you know it would go on to say that you're much more likely to have more orgasms and better orgasms certainly as a woman if you're in a trusting relationship um than if you are having serial non-trusting relationships yes thank you because this I've spoken about this you know behind the scenes with a lot of like you know my girlfriends and we've all spoken about like oh the second that we have the trust it's like multiple orgasms you know um I was with a guy before my husband and I been orgasm once and now my husband is like you know a lot so um so I've just spoken to a lot of women and I had no idea why and I couldn't you know I do kind of uh the safety element I think is a big deal because especially as a woman you're just you're giving yourself over so completely that you were leaving yourself completely susceptible to so much but I didn't understand what actually was happening in the body or the brain for that to be true and look let's be realistic because I think people will comment on this if we don't which is that it's perfectly possible to have an amazing orgasm or multiple orgasms with a complete stranger it is possible um but in terms of evolutionary wiring and long-term satisfaction it's just a different you know it's like watching an advert instead of watching a movie made that up that was good I am so obsessed with understanding the brain and evolution because anytime I just I'm going to go to myself anytime I don't understand myself why am I doing this why am I adding like it doesn't serve me I go back to oh it must be an evolution you know something's happened back in the cavem men days that's led me to feeling like this it's a different world Lisa doesn't mean you should be like this but at least once I understand where it comes from it allows me to just take that and then go cool now I get it now how do I change because you know if I want to try and be better improve um and yeah like it just the orgasm thing was definitely one of the things that I was like when you come on I'm definitely asking you this one um can I just say something please I know I'm the guest but I think that sound bite from you of whenever I'm feeling a certain way I go back to Evolution and I say Lisa it's a different world now what do I want to do with this if that is the one thing that people take away from this conversation I think that is potentially life-changing wow coming from you thank you I think you've dropped so many bombs in this interview that that isn't accurate but I appreciate the that's very sweet um I want to go back to something you said earlier about um if you've come from a family where you've seen divorce then it lets you know that oh divorce is okay um can I just cave at that slightly so not if that's um very unusual I if so what I think what I actually said was that there's a generation a younger generation now they say like oh most of my friends parents are divorced yes so that's the fact that it's multiple cases if you come from a divorce of course it's also normalized it for you but if all of your friends parents are still together you're more likely to be traumatized by that than actually normalizing it so so you're potentially likely to say I don't want to do what my parents did I want to be like my friend's parents so I think it's more to do with the number of cases with that thank you for correcting me cuz I think that's actually super powerful because I came from uh divorced parents okay but back in I'm 44 so back in the day divorce wasn't common I was the only kid in my entire school that I KN actually I knew one other girl um she never knew her dad but other than that every other family was together and so I remember when I met my husband the one thing I was like we we don't even say the word divorce in the house like we call it the dword and it's kind of like Voldemort where you just don't say it you know and you don't repeat it in the house because we don't want to ever um have that as an I mean look again if we were profoundly unhappy and we worked and we did everything we possibly could we pride being happy as individuals so yes we would get divorced but like we never really talk about it because we don't ever want that to go into our conscious mind so thank you so much for correcting that um and actually on that point I have a very old friend who is actually a devout Catholic so that's not really a word that but she got into a really really bad habit for a while of every time she had an argument with her husband saying we should get divorced and they actually were on the brink of divorce but I remember saying to her You' got to stop saying that like unless you mean it you can't just be saying that every time you're having an argument you can't be saying it to your own brain and he also can't unhear what you've said so I do think it it is a word and there are many words but you know that is a word that one does have to be very careful yeah and then I assume going back to something you said earlier then also that threat the fear like you're really kind of solidifying that and that's not bringing you guys together that's not creating a bond all no it's definitely not bringing people together but I think also it becomes like you know it can be weaponized as a word and then it can be actually made like really weak because it's used so much a th% Yeah the more you say the more he like uhhuh I heard you say that 30 times yeah you not really going to divorce me no so yeah toally quite true um so I've heard you say pregnant mothers if they're really stressed um then the child can be have the stress hormone MH I was wondering the same about if the mother is truly in love and has like the the the lovely the hormones oh my god this is my husband and I'm pregnant does that then um impact the child as well and the reason why I ask is going back to how was I born like I look at like when I had gut issues I looked back at my ancestors and I was like look at my mom's gut look at my grandmother's gut like how did that all happen so that again just so I can understand and then act in accordance and so yeah when I heard you say about the stress I was like oh is it the same thing with love that is such a great question but I need to break it down into about four or five parts please do so I think what you're asking about is involves epigenetics generational trauma potentially how the microbiome is passed from mother to child what happens in utero and um how hormones transfer from the mother to the baby so yeah five let's do it girl um so let's I'll take them kind of like the short shortest one first so obviously the um plac placenta is the blood supply for the baby but the mother's blood is running through the placenta so everything the mother eats you know if okay let's again give a very tangible example to make it easy to understand if the mother's a heroin addict is the baby getting heroin yes exactly so if the mother's stressed or the mother's in love is the baby getting cortisol or oxytocin yeah um and and what we do tend to see is in even in very women they tend to become a lot more like cuddly and dependent on the husband when they're pregnant because they have so much oxytocin going around so in the absence of stress and and let's be very clear you cannot help what happened in your Generations before you you cannot necessarily help how stressed you feel when you're pregnant um so all everything that I'm going to say is for you to have that awareness like you mentioned about Evolution and then to give you tips tips and tools for what you can do about it so um yeah this is the reason that people play like classical music to their baby and like go to like prenatal yoga classes and like massage their belly with oil and stuff like that it's it's to induce all of that beautiful oxytocin and you know to um be with the father of the baby or like other family members or close friends and like you know experience that Joy of this of what's coming all of that absolutely is inducing oxytocin a baby's definitely going to feel that and so okay how the gut microbiome passes from mother to baby so your gut microbiome is partly genetic so you will be getting it from your mother and your father but in the birthing process when the baby um comes out of the birth canal it swallows a lot of vaginal fluids also if you've seen child birth I don't know if you have but not in real life bit I have seen it in real life cuz when I was a medical student you had to deliver you had to watch five and deliver five so there is quite a lot of mixing of of of feces um at the birth canal so the baby can swallow some of that too that's actually a really good thing oh because that seeds the gut microbiome um and then breastfeeding you also get um immune cells from your mother's breast milk which seeds your got microbiome so in fact if you have a cesarian they actually take fluids from the mother's birth canal and swab it into the eyes nose and mouth of the baby to improve its immune function by seeding its microbiome and before we had that practice children who were born through cesarian section or who weren't breastfed had um the risk of of you know less strong immunity so it's actually really important that that happens so if your mother's gut microbiome was compromised or you had a cesarian birth and you didn't get swabbed with the mother's fluids or you didn't get breastfed that does have an impact on you in future but again that can be mitigated by a really good diet by fermented foods by probiotics um by reduction of stress and other healthy lifestyle factors everything that's good for you is good for your gut so exercise sleep mindfulness varied diet hydration Etc what's then the impact on a microbiome and the the love hormone or how you feel when then bonding with people is that that's good question we normally answer that by talking about the effect of stress on the gut right so if you have high levels of so the gut and the Brain communicate with each other through the vagus nerve which is the longest nerve um that goes from your brain to your gut other nerves hormones cyto kind messaging which is other chemical messages that that go into the blood um and communicate between the gut and the brain so if you're stressed we know that it leads to things like bloating and leaky gut and you know potentially IBS other autoimmune diseases indigestion reflux Etc change in bowel habit um if you're not stressed so if we think of oxytocin and cortisol and seesaw then usually they're kind of mutually exclusive of each other so if you're not stressed then maybe you're neutral but if you're also happy and trusting and in love then yeah that's going to have a beneficial impact on your gut microbiome your immunity your skin your hormones everything I mean that's it's really stress is bad for all of those things and oxytocin is good for all of those things and that's why the loneliness epidemic is such an issue because it's not just that oh you know I'm bored at the weekend it's your immune function is affected your gut microbiome is affected your skin is affected um your sleep can be affected and your longevity is affected I mean you know your risk of having a heart attack is higher if you're if you're chronically lonely yeah that's crazy yeah so generational trauma and epigenetic Trauma so generational trauma refers to an incident that happened in a particular generation that then does have knock on effects on future Generations so a group that was marginalized in a particular generation will tend to not only themselves have felt but pass on more sort of psychosocially things like You're marginalized you're you're on the outside you're not part of the tribe you're alone um so those are emotions that get passed on but epigenetic trauma is when something actually affected you physically either very shortly prior to conception or in the first second or third trimester of pregnancy and the biggest examples of this and that's probably bit of crossover between the two types of trauma are Holocaust Survivors and Dutch famine survivors and slavery is another example the Vietnam War probably like goes across both of those types of trauma but with epigenetic trauma it actually switches on or off certain genes most of the research has looked at stress and resilience so if your forefathers went through a very stressful period this can either make you more anxious or more resilient and that can change in the Next Generation and then in the grandchildren and the great grandchildren and it's quite an emerging field it's a bit more established now but we don't exactly know why it can lead to a good or a bad outcome and in which generation and why but we know that there's all sorts of combinations and permutations um so basically you know if let's say you're a great grandchild of a holocaust Survivor and your grandparents didn't have a very good diet and your mom was stressed during pregnancy I mean you can see how there's all sorts of different you know factors that can play into this but also what's going on in the household when the baby is in utero has much more of an effect than we ever thought before and then obviously like the first few months and year of life kind of what's going on in terms of stress and stuff a lot of you know my friends who've got young kids now say about the difference between their first child and their second child how you know they were so ill equipped for like the sleeplessness and having this like vulnerable you know new human in their life and second time round they're a lot more chilled and just the difference um and and not just in terms of parenting but for a lot of people you know let's say in the last 5 to 10 years we've all just understood a lot more about how to be healthy so we may have changed a lot of our practices and that may have been different for the first child than it is now for the second child um so so it's really complex and a lot of it is out of our hands like it happened before so the main thing to understand is that you can yourself and teach your child how to regulate your emotions better that's mostly through mindfulness but it's also through not having high expressed emotions in the household a lot of immigrant families like yours and mine lot of high expressed emotion in the household um and why is that because they've gone through so much hardship yeah usually yeah and it may be cultural so you know Greek and Indian families tend to be quite expressive anyway even if they've stayed in the Home Country um and then if you have you know made a difficult immigration it it could have like added to that um and then you know not being in a place where you have access to like the foods and the spices that are like for your good for your microbiome and you know of your culture maybe to a certain extent loss of language or having to speak another language all those things are really stressful so even as I'm saying those things I'm just thinking it is so so multifactorial and there isn't like a human alive that could work all of those things out and try and do everything that you can to mitigate them so it's really about being present and like in every minute decision of the day trying to make the healthiest one or the best one or making it for the right reasons at least um and understanding that you're going to make mistakes but that's human and that there's always something that you can do to lessen the consequence of that if you choose to thank you so much for breaking that down um the reason and I think I said this already but the reason why that's so powerful is you even have people in the same family that think completely differently or act differently one person has more trauma than the other even if they um have had somewhat of the same upbringing and I think that there's so much complexity to everything that you just said to the brain to the microbiome to everything that first step is don't be yourself up and don't shame yourself yeah and again if I understand now I really do release the shame like it's like oh well it was my great great grandmother you know and not to blame her poor woman but like but again it just allows me to know okay this is just how you are it's genetics it's the microbond iome it's this it's this what happened now what are you going to do about it how are you going to make sure this doesn't then become your to your destiny because I'm such a person of I want the knowledge and I want to have my own power I don't want to give my power away to circumstances and so knowing it now gives me the foundation to be able to then go okay now how am I going to build a stronger house yeah and I think here I should probably mention the word neuroplasticity um so it's everything that you just said but it's you you know people might listen to you and say well it's okay feliss to say that because you know she's got her life sorted and um she's got a lot of help around her so she's got the luxury of maybe saying I can think about how I you know rethink my choices um but I want everyone to know that it's possible and I want everyone to know how much potential they have in their brains and it is this thing called neuroplasticity which is the fact that the brain remains flexible throughout our lives and so it is the reason that we can change the way that we think the way that we behave the things that we believe the relationship patterns that we have at any age at any stage of life and with any mindset so even if you are one of those skeptical people that thinks you know you can't teach teach an old dog new tricks or a leopard can't change its spots or I'm not going to change now this is the way that I've always been please just take away just just put like a seed into your brain this idea that actually you can change I mean it's the reason that I was telling you my podcast is called reinvent yourself with Dr Tara because you literally can change you just have to want to and there is this amazing ability of the brain to make new connections overwrite old Pathways even to grow like baby cells into like fully formed cells and like create whole new Pathways in your brain and all of that under writes your beliefs your thoughts and your actions and those are the three things that make your life what it is basically I love that you said that and it I guess it doesn't dawn on me that people may not know my story but my you know my father grew up in a tiny village in the mountains of Cyprus they didn't have running water and a toilet was a hole in the floor for him that was my dad so that's literally just one generation my mom was brought up in a Convent with nuns so that's you know again just one generation um my mom was um growing up she was borderline anorexic I was the person that um when I said about the the the addiction to the highs and the lows I was actually speaking for myself because my last my boyfriend before my husband that was the relationship we had it was very turbulent he was very verbally abusive to me I had zero self-esteem I was bullied and teased for my looks and so that's why I believe I was like okay I've got a choice either I accept that oh my god this is my life but the that horror of going this is going to be your life with this guy in this turbulent relationship always feeling like this or and I don't think I had the words for it back then but it's like what life do you actually want and that became so powerful to me so empowering to me that I've then since lived my life like that and you know going from a stay-at-home wife for eight years believing that I was you know being brought up Greek Orthodox that's what's expected of me to then coming out of that telling my husband I don't want to be stay home wife anyone actually don't want to build a business and now you know getting in front of the camera which I would never have thought I would do 5 years ago has all been an evolution of me taking the facts of my Heritage my mom's microbiome and everything and then saying but now how do I change what is that life I want how do I reinvent myself and you're such an amazing example of it and you know I think it's not always I'm almost tempted to ask you like what was that moment what changed but we don't always know and it's also not always helpful for other people because it's not going to be the same for them but just knowing that that's what you've come from that's what you personally went through and how much you have turned that around if that is not enough for people to just at least question themselves you know I don't know what is um and I love I I mean I think that and I have a you know not the same but a similar trajectory if you like so yeah yeah I mean reason 732 why I freaking adore you and I'm loving this conversation so much is to give people the knowledge and that's why it's so freaking important to me because to your point don't you can't teach you know Old Dogs new tricks I was brought up with that idea that that's what I was told by everybody around me and so the idea that neuroplasticity exists and so anything whether you're 60 I'm looking right into the camera whether you're 60 70 years old my mom lost £10 in her late 60s wow she went from the woman that was saying I can't I'm too old to then changing her mindset you want to talk about what happened she just changed the mindset she was like oh hang on a minute if I decide that I want to get up and walk even if it's raining outside and England I'm going to she actually did this drove to a grocery store and walked five miles in a grocery store because it was raining so much and in her 50s or 40s or 30s she used to tell herself that she wasn't worthy enough or that she wasn't good enough or she didn't deserve or she couldn't change and so when I can see that in my mom and still know she's in her 70s and she walks over 5 miles a day even now like that idea if I could pass on from like these interviews and being with women like yourself like the amount of people that we can possibly change the way they think about themselves is just so beautiful and gorgeous but you actually said that um if you're journaling or you know um I think you said to do visualization even sometimes before you go to bed and because sometimes you can if you're scrolling on your phone and you're seeing things that are giving you either a cortisol rush or something that becomes you know is negative you're going to go to bed thinking about that um and so I was wondering if um even with like the manifestation of like okay this is what I want what do I have to do to get it would that then be true if you were looking for somebody to love in your life like would you want to watch like a romantic movie or have like a photo of like you know the the the perfect person that you would like to be with um so I so I wouldn't want to use the example if you're scrolling on your phone and causing cortisol because I'd rather talk about the tetris effect did you play Tetris on a Game Boy did of course because we're about the same age so yeah so if you remember that you had the Game Boy I can't believe I was allowed to have it in bed when I was a kid but I was nice um so you'd be trying to fit the bricks into the shapes and you'd see the bricks falling and you'd move them around and then when you had to put the Game Boy on and go to sleep when you closed your eyes you literally could see the bricks falling because it's made an impression on your retina and through your optic nerve it's gone into your brain and then because that's the last thing you look at when you're asleep when you're asleep it's actually like having an effect on your subconscious so be really mindful what you look at last thing so you said a photo of the person that you want to be with but I have my vision board next to my bed and um so in the one I made in 2015 which was for 2016 had an engagement ring on it um and that was after like I said years of saying I will never ever ever get married again so I started to kind of tried to shift that but didn't really believe it and then eventually I was like come on Tara you've made this work for business let's see let's just see if you can make it work for love and so it was like big bold you know engagement ring um but the thing I would say about the romantic movies I'm hesitant about that one because I worry that it could could heighten for people what they don't have oh so I think maybe people need need to make that judgment call for themselves but a vision board won't do the same that thing on the vision board you have intentionally put onto it what you want when you watch a a romantic movie I just think about the conflicting emotions of watching it and thinking yeah that's what I want but really realizing that you don't have it whereas on the vision board it's very intentional I have decided that this is what I want what I ask people to do is to look at it regularly preferably daily to visualize it being true and to give gratitude for the fact that it has become true already because then you moving your brain from cortisol to oxytocin because oxytocin is love and trust and joy and excitement so gratitude builds that up I just worry that a romantic movie could induce feelings of Envy yeah yeah so I think you would have to watch one for yourself and see how it makes you feel and then decide if that's right for you or not that's fair um when you just said um The Envision that it's possible and then be grateful that it's true even if it's not true yeah how do you do that and isn't that like kind of falce Hope what up homie I got something free and new to share with you right now how often are you visited by that negative voice in your head telling you that you're not smart enough that you're not good enough experienced enough not fill in the blank one of the most powerful things you can learn to do in life is to turn that negative voice into your bestie and I want to teach you how to do that and so much more in my four steps to becoming confidence workshop and guys the most amazing thing is you can actually register for completely free for this Workshop so click the link on your screen and I see you on the inside it's really a practice so it's not it's not kidding yourself that it's true but it's sitting there in the visualization so let's say it's like a dream home so you close your eyes and you would see yourself walking through that home and you would picture the details of it and given the fact that my manicure completely matches your cushions and your mugs I I would be seeing you know pink soft furnishings and fluffy stuff um no but you it's almost like imagine yourself walking through that house smelling it touching the textures like seeing the you know whatever um art or kind of wood that you've chosen that you really love like what your bedroom looks like what your bathroom looks like and you know just almost like visualizing it in a delicious way and then just feeling so grateful that that could even be possible and you know if you're able to like feel it that it's true at the time that you're visualizing it just give gratitude at that time what is it actually then doing because the thing like I over time have really understood and embodied the you know if you don't believe it then you won't act in accordance but if you believe it then you will act in accordance but I do struggle with you know um what was that the very original the secret the secret thank you where it's like visualize a parking space and you will get it like I just kind of dismissed it um and so help me understand what that is doing to the brain and why it actually works because if it's super powerful I want to make sure that I hear it um but right now it doesn't feel true it just feels like I'm envisioning something that may not be and let me just caveat when we were growing Quest when Quest was nothing we were struggling I'm in freaking ugly hairnet all day no one's buying a protein bar me and my husband would drive around Beverly Hills and we would look at the houses but that was more of as an incentive to be like okay keep working hard and you could get this so what's the difference between that and what you're talking about okay first of all really valid question um and then I'll give you the brain part and then I'll give you the next part which you've kind of answered in your question which is amazing so um so you're doing one thing which I've already mentioned which is the practice of gratitude moves your brain into that attachment state which is correlated with the bonding hormone oxytocin And the emotions of love trust joy and excitement rather than the stress state which is the fear anger disgust shame sadness which correlates with cortisol um what you're also doing is giving your brain a practice run so do you remember how I said your brain is constantly looking out for threats to your safety anything new is a threat to your safety so if you have imagined yourself dating or engaged or married or in relationship or in a different home or in a different job or running your business just by imagining it you are actually activ ating the same brain Pathways that would be activated by you doing that so then when it comes to going on a date or um you know it's making a real estate inquiry or quitting your job and changing careers or quitting your job it's not 100% new to your brain because you visualized it and in a much smaller scale if I was giving a big lecture I would like to go and see the room before I actually have to step into it to give the the lecture so let's say I arrive in La the night before and I'm speaking the next day I would always say can I go and see the room that the audience is going to be in and so obviously with you I looked on your Instagram at clips of you interviewing other people so I kind of knew what the setup was it is actually a coincidence about the nails but I wonder how much I primed my brain yeah sub subconsciously because I didn't do it on purpose but I wonder if it was subconscious um and then the other thing is what you said about you and Tom which is that it cannot be an unrealistic thing that you make no action towards you were wearing a hairnet and working like a dog you weren't sitting at home visualizing Beverly Hills mansions were you no no exactly so it can't be something like you know you are in a job that pays a certain amount of money that currently is never going to afford to buy a Beverly Hills mansion and you put a Beverly Hills mansion on your vision board it could be that you put owning your own home on your vision board um so it does have to be somewhat realistic it can't be a fantasy and also I actually don't call them vision boards I call them action boards because you have to be doing something I say every day getting yourself towards that goal even if it's getting up in the morning and going to your job whilst you're planning to like start up your own business you know it's kind of and I'll give you my own example which absolutely isn't for everyone but it is my example of that intention and that really strong desire which is that when I gave up medicine and obviously I was getting divorced at the same time I was you know my husband helped me out as he had promised to um until I didn't need him to anymore but people did say to me Tara you could go and do a one weekend shift at the hospital and you'd be able to pay your rent and your bills cuz I was getting to the point where I wasn't going to be able to and I knew for me that if I went backwards that that would be failure for me and that I had to like burn my boats and make it like I had no choice but to to make it and that worked for me equally there's loads of people that hold down a part-time job whilst they're starting up their business and that works for them but without the action none of that stuff is going to come true like and also I wouldn't want it to I would want to feel like I earned that not that it fell out of the sky like because I sat at home on the couch thinking about it so I think when Neuroscience informs visualization and the Law of Attraction it gives you autonomy it puts you in the driver's seat if you know the ways that it was explained before through vibrations and um the universe basically makes you like a passive you know part of that story and that's not for me and you know I I think it has had some good effects for some people but for me I wouldn't want it that way I can't imagine you would either no not at all which is why I've always been reluctant to do like vision boards and things like that because I always felt like it was setting people up for failure where it's like well hang on a minute I'm visualizing it and nothing's happening and I'm so action oriented that the way you just broke it down was freaking amazing like I've never heard it been broken down like that before and it makes complete sense to me and so now again I'm like a okay now that I get it and it doesn't feel abstract yeah I'm like oh maybe I'll do an action board I can't wait to hear if you do I know um the action board in my head it's always been like more goals like okay I want to reach this but I've never done like an actual like print out or cut out um way of doing it um so thank you for breaking that down you can do a list as well in fact this year I've done a list I I've I've heard of people saying it before and I've always I've done like 15 vision boards in the last 15 years but for some reason this year I thought I'm going to try a list and see what happens so I'll also update you on that yeah cuz I assume though that like a vision board with photos like I I'm such a visual person and the act of like cutting things out and like it makes you much instead of like what you saying like instead of being passive it actually makes you much more um connected to that that because it's tactile and it's color and vision so I've always said that's the reason to do a vision board and all of that is in my book The Source um but I also like to change things and try things so having had a lot of success with vision boards I'm just experimenting with a list now partly so that I can share if like how it panned out yeah yeah and then also even with list like I've had a lot of um interviews or I've interviewed a lot of people who are therapists or in the relationship realm and a lot of what they say is like write down what you want that person to be not like I want him to look like Brad Pit but I want him to be kind generous andite it's now you that connection between you meet them you to recognize versus like oh my God he's so handsome so I absolutely do that work with people and my friends as well which is that the qualities of the person that you want to meet on a list um but I add something to that which is ask yourself if you are all of those things that's so powerful yeah I love it and then work on that because that's the thing you can absolutely influence meeting that person you can there's a lot of things you can do to try and make that more likely but you can't absolutely influence that but the one thing you can do is make sure that you're kind you're generous you're giving um we cannot leave without going back to the thing that we said about an hour ago about the microbiome and your partner I'm just like going to geek out over again explain that to me and why that matters and why it's important and then how we can use that to empower ourselves yeah so so so the so the fact factoid that you're referring to is that your microbiome is affected by your partner or the person that you people that you live with and that is because we don't just have a gut microbiome we have an oral microbiome which is in our mouth and a skin microbiome which is all over our skin um and interestingly your oral microbiome actually affects your lung function quite strongly because they're close to each other in this area um so you know that's to do with brushing your teeth and flossing and um all of it is to do with not taking antibiotics and processed food and stress and stuff like that but yeah so the the people whose skin you touch the people that you kiss the people that you have sex with um the people that you sleep next to you at night the people that you eat with share your Crockery and Cutlery with share your bathroom with share your towels with all of that is causing an interaction between your microbiomes um and what tends to happen is that the microbiome goes down a gradient so the person with the healthier microbiome will be donating cells to the person with the less healthy microbiome so when I was speaking to a professor who's an expert on this he said well you know watch out that you're not meeting somebody with a less healthy microbiome than yours because then you'll be losing and I said I'd probably be quite happy to donate some microbiome cells to the person that I love um you know so I guess it depends which way you want to appro it but yeah so it will tend to go from the healthier to the less healthy and then like kind of bring you all onto the you too or your family onto the same level so is that another reason if you're around somebody or you live someone that is like in chronic stress and um would depression be the same then um depression has a a connection to your gut microbiome yeah so it changes it's two- way right so um your mood impacts your got microbiome but the healthiness and diversity of your gut microbiome also impacts your mood M um so not so much really people that you work with or hang around with but definitely people that you live with will have an impact because um and now I don't want to totally dero but I find this stuff so fascinating um when I had just such bad gut issues um at the time one of the only ways they would they thought that they could help me like solve me was to have a feal transplant yeah and then I just to do a lot of research CU like oh God that sounds terrible but hey I don't try I literally try not to shut myself off to any advice I tried to do my research figure it out and then see if it makes sense and then in that research I'd heard that if you get a fecal transplant from someone that is depressed you are actually way more likely to become depressed yourself not more likely you will become depressed I wasn't sure if I could like make a like that so in the rodent studies where they took literally poo from depressed mice and injected it into healthy mice the mice became depressed and vice versa yeah that's crazy and so I want to bring it round to really understanding why this is so important is I really do think like if you're in a relationship with somebody is you know um chronically uh stressed out um that will have an impact on you and then I assume then that's going to have an impact on your relationship um and then the same with um yeah if you're like if you if your microbiome is just all out of whack or your partners is that also will have an effect on your relationship but remember what we said about I know we talked about meeting people at the level of your psychological wounds but it's it's at every level it's physical mental emotional and spiritual right because if you or I suddenly started dating someone that was chronically stressed I don't really think that relationship could last so I think a really good question to ask yourself is if your partner is chronically stressed and obvious you know you can see some symptoms of having a deranged gut microbiome what's that saying about you and what do you need to do to make yourself healthy and if you do might that mean that you're not going to stay in that relationship and is maybe that fear holding you back you know sometimes we don't want to shine our light because we're afraid of what that might mean because it might mean then that the relationship's not going to I mean you do know the statistic about if a wife starts earning more than her husband the divorce rate goes up why is that unfortunately I think it's still because the stereotype in society is that the man needs to be the bread winner and it's quite difficult for that to be tolerated um so I do think there is an element there of if you repair yourself whether it's physically or emotionally what that might mean about you know what Falls by the wayside yeah oh interesting yeah t i can I can literally sit here and just pick your brain for hours this has been so damn fun where can people find you in everything that you're doing thank you so much I just want to say that you have definitely brought things out of me that I haven't said before so you're an amazing interviewer um I'm most active on Instagram where I'm Dr Tara SW Dr t a r a s w a r t I have my podcast reinvent yourself with Dr Tara um and my book The Source if you want to learn brain hacks that build your confidence keep watching the best prescription that's given to Alzheimer's disease patients is actually not pharmacology it is exercise in the form of resistance training now let's go back to women CU you know and I always preface yes I am a woman so I'm I attack myself a lot a women are afraid to lift weights in fear of getting big and I have to tell tell you stop it okay you are not going to get big it is so hard I try I try to get big uh doing wait I'm not getting there you have to consume a maximum amount of calories and protein and you have to be lifting a lot of volume MH so you're not going to get there to stop it that's just an excuse so girls protocol what is it you need to be lifting weights at least three times times per week hard hard weights and in fact if you look at the science it shows the correlation between brain health and leg strength all right here's another interesting fact we lose as every decade we lose three to five or No 3 to 8% of our muscle mass per decade so we're already losing that okay so you have to work even harder to not lose that but to grow and so just to stop you there that's why I believe that you can eat the same thing right at 20 and not put on a pound and then eat exactly the same thing in 20 years and put on weight because your muscle mass has declined and your muscle is what burn helps burn the energy it's a it's a storage unit for glucose yeah that's correct yeah you have to work harder and it's specifically I heard you say quads right like work your quads um do you know the glucose goddess okay so she I had her on my show as well love her she's amazing and since she's told me about how like if you eat certain sugars um to help you with your glucose level basically do squats so now every Saturday I always have a cookie like my little like snack that I can stomach I always have some dessert but then I always do squats specifically and when I heard you say straight after you eat it no it's usually actually and I it's probably better that I do it straight after but um at least as I make sure that I do it that day so that night I make sure that I do like 100 squats or something like like that um and then when I heard you talk about the quads I was like oh I wonder how much those all are connected like specifically the quads and if you mind explaining why your quads okay it just comes down to Vector size so you've got quads four you've got four muscles that make up you know this area the front part of your of your leg and they're big okay now what happens when what what's in what infiltrates we've got vessels but we've also got veins so every time that you actually contract these big units here you are Contracting these veins now veins are different to arteries veins are one directional pumps so when you squeeze them together because that's what happens when you work out you squeeze these veins shoots up blood to the brain we want blood right we just need that blood flow and so that's one part of it but the next part is we have so our muscles contain a lot of mitochondria okay mitochondria we know is the PowerHouse of the cell the energy happens within there we've got mitochondria in our brain as well obviously so therefore if we grow bigger muscles in our legs we have more mitochondria as well more mitochondria means more energy better ability to fight off diseases better immunity uh better everything really thank you for explain that I love knowing the why to things as well um because it really does help me know in that next time where I really can't be bothered to do the squats right like I just want everyone at home to know like I freaking hate squats yeah but once I understand why every excuse I'm giving myself in that moment least you're too tired it's a Saturday like all those reasons that could may be valid right like you're busy you're stressed whatever like give yourself a break I just go back to the why once I know my why oh okay Lisa what you're doing is you're actually sending the blood from your legs up to your brain it's helping your brain you don't want to get Alzheimer's like I just like coach myself in those moments yeah and here's another really great reason why we need great strength okay I said to you that 3 to five 3 to 5% of muscle mass okay Mass decreases we actually get a larger decrease in strength and strength is what we need okay let's talk about when you're 80 we can fast track from the age of 80 or even 70 we can Fast Track our way to all cause mortality which is death through many different ways but one of them is through falling okay you fall you break your hip that's it you've just fast tracked your way to death because you break your hip right you go into surgery your um post-operative infections will increase and just you know then you just start to leave a sedentary lifestyle so you don't want to break a hip but we a lot of old people are falling okay my my Yaya my grandmother she fell at the age of uh 85 great Jeans by the way she lived until 95 but um she we I saw a massive decline in her and you don't want that how do you prevent yourself from falling increase stability and muscle strength and muscle mass especially in the lower body because that's what's going to like stable you as you walk so we need that also the glutes as well and and everything okay does that make sense is that even more of a no I think that's so important and this is also why I think um I post a lot on my social these old older women that I found in their 80s and 90s doing these epic things in the gym like deadlifting doing these squats doing box jumps and stuff like that and the reason being is that I I it's important to show examples that when someone is like well I'm too old right everyone gives that that kind of excuse oh I'm too old to do that it's like no you're not here's an example of someone doing it one more thing that I've added on moments where because since I heard this about the quads and the squats is so important um people are going to maybe say they don't have time guys just do it while you brush your teeth like I actually do it when I brush my teeth because I'm like okay well I got an electric toothbrush and I know that I can get about 80 squats in with my electric toothbrush and so I just not I mean they standing there well I'm doing something I'm going to have to argue with you right now oh please uh while I am um for or you know always trying to find a way to exercise the truth is uh we need to be lifting around 80 to 85% of our one repetition Max so we can't just our body weight it needs to be yeah back to the little pissy weights that girls are using okay I'll reference my mother the poor thing I always pick on her sometimes she goes into the gym and she's lifting these tiny one pound weights and I don't know what she's doing it's not going to have an effect lift hard lift heavy and do it three to four times a week okay so I need just need to get a okay I need to get a weight vest then that's my conclusion to doing well brushing my teeth yeah actually get a weight vest and um we can go for a hike because that's a great way to oh yeah you're right that's not even Okay Okay so we've got the exercise down packed but then we're going to move on to neuro Athletics this is so exciting neurocognitive training so your map okay let's go back to the city okay every single part of your brain is accounted for okay we've got this little creature called the homonculus if you look up homonculus it's like you'll see this you'll see this outer portion of the brain it's sliced into a a coronal section you'll see this weird looking creature that kind of looks like this it's like and okay and it's basically showing you what every part of the brain is responsible for Okay so we've got you know the reason why you've got this motor cortex that sits across here every part of the brain is accounted for as we get older and especially when people retire you stop using different areas of the brain right as we get older we're not climbing trees we're not doing you know many hand eye coordination like we did when we were kids so the brain has this kind of theory okay and it says if you don't use me you lose me so different areas of the brain begin to shrink because we're not using it so let's also take a bit of a neur anomy I want you to do this with me just get your right hand okay and just just put it against everyone at home come on let's do this together guys put your hand on your pH it's not much it's just that okay just here like this okay yeah so that there is your frontal lop and it's about these size of your palm okay it's the biggest part of your brain okay and it houses the prefrontal cortex which is known as the CEO so I told you your brain is a federal government then that that this is the CEO of the entire brain it's the dictator and it says it's involved in your cognitive functions decision making Focus attention uh everything you your ability to think fast process information it all lives right here okay then you've got another area of your brain which is called the cerebellum it's my favorite part of the brain it's called mini brain okay it sits at the back you know just behind the brain stem at the back of the brain that's involved in coordination we start to you know we don't do things with one-legged anymore you know as we get older so when I talk about neuro Athletics training I'm talking about neurocognitive training things that are involving every area of the brain for example reaction time you know and the way that I would tell everyone at home to train these areas of the brain is just get a tennis ball so easy right very costeffective get a tennis ball start throwing the the ball to the wall okay you're getting hand eye coordination you're getting reaction time you're getting visual processing you're getting everything the reason why I brought up the cerebellum is stand on one leg and throw the ball you you'll see yourself you know kind of trying to balance that you're training that area of the brain so you're strengthening it okay so every single part of the brain needs to be accounted for and in fact we now know that even um hearing loss okay or hearing impairment is a very strong predictor of Alzheimer's disease oh yeah so doing things with sound for example I do these things with my and by the way I'm doing these with the most elite athletes in the world that's what I was going to say this is not a a secret yeah actually before we go on to the hearing thing i' actually love a bit more with the the hand eye coordination stuff because you I heard you say that you do this with your athletes um because things like I think you said Michael Jordan or something but it's like Michael you know does a catch one second makes a difference between it being Michael Jordan and him no longer being able to play for the NBA yeah and that's reaction time so um you know with neuro Athletics when we bring on a new client we do a decode phase which you know we get to know everything we do blood work we do V2 max testing we also do a brain scan okay and in neurophysiology you would go and see a neurop physiologist if you had you know for example a seizure you know they'd scan you brain deceive maybe you've got epilepsy or why the Caesar occurred I use these scans to figure out visual accurity first and foremost and reaction time you know I'm trying to figure out okay when you see a stimulus how you know when you catch a ball and throw it can we decrease that reaction time cuz that's the difference between LeBron getting 15 points in a game or getting two points in a game yeah and then when I think about myself things I react to so even in this episode right it's like it's a back and forth I have to hold a lot in my brain of what you're saying I have to remember some of the questions I have I have to remember something that you've said and so when I'm thinking about my reaction time and my brain capacity and being able to hold things and be able to ra react to something that you're saying well I'm still holding on to this well I'm still very aware there's a you know a bunch of cameras around I'm like this is the sort of thing that I need to know and anyone listen at home and why that's important to him cuz I don't want people to just miss go well I'm not going to be in the NBA I'm not Serena Williams it actually doesn't freaking matter driving accidents actually a huge cause of driving accidents is um reaction time so I love that and now I'm just being me and getting a little obsessed I like to know the exact so underhand throw the ball okay has to be overhand well it you should do overand like neuro Athletics like we we're doing overhand throws okay so overhand and then I know that you've said that like the right side the right side of the brain control controls the left side of the body and vice versa so when I'm on one leg Yeah should I be throwing with the opposite hand okay yeah you can do you can do ipsilateral which is you know all on one side or you can do contralateral doesn't really matter that this is the key it has to be stressful so a rebuttal to this well Louisa I do sodoku no okay it's not yes sodoku is fun you got to stress the brain you've got to put it under a bit of and this put some people may be saying but you've then never done sodoku yeah that's actually quite true um but it I literally look at the board and it just stresses me out already but it does take it into consideration so right now you're you're you've trained your brain because you studied you told me last night you watched some of my episodes you were studying and it took you a long time so we have to throughout our lifespan we have to be always you know neuro we have to be working our cognition in some way okay so it's doing it so you're stressing it out yeah but it's momentary stress versus lifestyle stress correct we don't want chronic stress being in a chronic inflammatory state state we just want to be able to and I tell protocols don't only do this for 10 minutes a day that's what I was going to ask you okay so I'll do this 10 minutes a day every single day yep for the rest of my life the rest of your life Jes all right you can have some weekends off okay thank you and would it get easier though like um in fact I believe you said like put a blindfold or like an eye patch it's funny when I first started off I bought these eye patches just from you know CVS now we've upgraded we've actually got like goggles that we put on that they black out you know they're like professional ones now but put an eye patch on cover one eye because you then you've blacked out completely 50% of your of your brain really or your eyesight so it makes it hard it's like doing weights for the brain and I love this because it's really cheap right it's a tennis ball that's like a buck and then an eye patch that another bu correct you can do so many different things you can even get your husband or wife or a partner involved in that too oh it's kind of a fun activity throw the ball to each other yeah so there are many different things that we do in that area but I just wanted people to know that exercise for the brain is that's what's going to keep it alive and thriving it has a lot to do with Evolution too but we don't have to go there but that's the exercise portion so what else would you do apart from the ball what other things can you do from new Athletics oh it's really funny so we have a we have a number chart for example I would say it's this big and the numbers you know about this big and they're 1 to 60 let's just say on one chart it is so funny okay so I will get one of my players to go up to the Chart get two index fingers and just find the numbers in chronological order M and actually this is really important for some reason most of the men when they get to number 14 they can't find it okay they begin to think that I'm tricking them they're like you actually haven't got 14 on here they can't find it most women on on the first go get up to 20 wow I don't know why but it's it's unbelievable but listen to this I get them to step back and take a breath I stop the timer I say find 14 they find it why because under stress Under Pressure your brain is only Built To Survive so it shuts everything down and it makes you not be able to find that number that's what happens in a game okay when you're stressed and anxious in a game it's like you can't find who to throw the ball with or what to do you can't find you're you know when you're stressed and angered you're fighting with someone you're having an argument you start to say things that just don't make sense because your brain is like I can't operate you if I'm under so much stress but then you take a moment you breathe you activate the parasympathetic nervous system and then it's like okay I can think now there must be some hereditary thing going back into cavemen days of why men stop at 14 but women can go all the way to 20 yeah it's like a woman can't just shut down like I honestly inherently believe it's because evolutionarily okay we would have to go out and hunt and what would happen is we would activate our sympathetic nervous system fight or flight in order to run away from the tiger or find food okay and that's what the the Mal's job was and I think that women inherently now have having to do everything be a you know grow a human for nine months okay really that's a big undertaking you know get the human out that's another big undertaking then be the primary caregiver also put the food on the table be a housekeeper and go to work as well doing everything so we manage being able to manage that over time maybe that's what it is but don't quote me on that yeah I yeah but it feels right it really does um and just like in general when it comes to male and female brains you know I I've read the have you read the book the female brain yes oh my God I love that book it was one of the first books that I ever read in fact this is what initially got me interested in the brain in general was I just I mean my husband are exactly the same right just like he he's different you know yes he's got testosterone I got you know what estrogen but other than that like I always just thought our brain structures were the same and then I read the book the female brain um and just literally follows it through you know when you're in the mother's womb to all the way to when you die and understanding how certain parts of our brain shuts down you know I guess it shuts down I'm not sure if I'm using the right terminology but as you get into your teen years because there's certain things that a female will need more nurturing um but a guy needs more of the aggression because of the hunter gatherer um and so kind of like understanding that and then that led me to understanding you know when you go into a cupboard and a guy like is like I can't find it and you're like it's right in front of you and they literally can't see it my husband still thinks I trick him cuz he's like there's no way that was there and I'm like yes it was testosterone you know what's interesting as well cuz you you you've and I want to point this out cuz you keep talking about your husband and there was a a wonderful Harvard study done and it was actually um just put out not long ago and they tracked people over an 80e time frame yeah so that's why it was a very big study okay what they found was that guess what the number one key was for lasting brain health love relationships isn't that unbelievable I only guessed it because of what you you said up I relationships yeah and for many reasons okay it could be hormonal reasons but it also could be the fact that men you know it turns out which I I hate to say but uh married men live longer than married women and this is generally because the male is getting looked after by the female I see this in my parents uh in 2019 my dad had a stroke uh a minor stroke but we've seen a lot of you know we've seen a lot of downhill cognitive changes since then and my mother has taken on every role for him she is the the carer the doctor the mother the wife she's doing absolutely everything and then I see my dad and he's just he's like ah I feel great he gets up and he's because he's now got someone fulltime that is looking after him but my mom's also looking after herself and it's you see what's happening over time so I think maybe that has to do with it but also the fact that you can get challenged as you get older because you have someone to talk to every day you have someone to go to bed with so then you've got the oxytocin then you've got the love you've got the serotonin you have someone to go out and maybe travel with and enjoy time with not just that your brain wants to feel safe here's the key thing as well you mentioned confidence every put your brain in a safe environment and it will Thrive how do you put it in a safe environment you nourish it with good food you don't deprive it of sleep you give it exercise and you give it hydration it will feel inherently safe when it feels safe you won't feel the need to be negative and you won't feel as if I'm the victim and I'm at the mercy of this person and I have to stay in this toxic relationship because when it's unsafe it's thinking if you are in a some form of you know abusive relationship if I go maybe I will be even more unsafe than what I am now yeah wow I never thought about like the brain and the safety thing that's so powerful um and the thing about women taking care of men like and relationships actually it does really go back to even what I was saying earlier whereas like I want to take care of myself and not get Alzheimer's for my husband's sake like and to be honest so I smoke weed and that's like my one wife I know I know we got to talk about it we must talk about because I'm in a place where I don't deny whether something's good or bad right and so I really want to know the truth I know I want to know what I'm doing um but I I do like it and so I was like yeah you know I have a viice but now I'm just knowing everything that I know learning everything that I'm learning especially when it comes to the brain I've done so much research and my own studies on the gut because I've had my own gut health problems and one of the things was have smoke weed it will make your gut feel better and so I really learn into that but now obviously realizing how much damage it's doing to my brain I want to for my husband's sake I want to now actually change cuz I'm just like I actually like it enjoy it and so if it actually trims off a couple of years going back to people people just need to make the decision for themselves I'll go you know what I'd probably sacrifice that but because of my husband I'm like I know what it would do to him yeah this is a great segue into sleep and I want to tell you this and I don't know who needs to hear this but weed isn't helping you sleep it's also probably not helping you calm down okay so we need to cut the weed a lot of my athletes actually are smoking it and I said just I will you if you don't stop you you get kicked out of neuro Athletics because I can't do my work and and do what I need to do if you're going to be smoking and drinking interesting so why do we let's not even focus on weed let's focus on the fact that we need sleep sleep is a core pillar now I know there's mothers out there and they're going to attack me and say Louisa I've got newborns I don't sleep I understand that and it's hard so we need to figure out we need to understand what is sleep so we can get on board with it and I treat sleep as if it's an Olympic game treat it as if you need a train for sleep you need to warm up for sleep and you need to prepare for Sleep the moment that you wake up in fact you need to prepare for it the night before okay so sleep is broken up into four stages so we've got stage one that's when you're falling asleep stage two you're in light sleep so if you hear a loud noise you probably wake up then I would say within like 40 45 minutes you're in stage three now the the only two that I want people to really be aware of is stage three and stage four stage three is slow wave sleep it's also known as deep sleep and as nonrapid eyee movement sleep so freaking important two things that happen in this stage okay first of all we get the release of hormon hormones women we get you know estrogen gets released men testosterone is getting released during this stage okay we also both both genders get a massive release of growth hormone growth hormone is responsible for protein synthesis so it's responsible for the repair and regeneration of your muscles so if you are going to the gym you're repairing everything that occurs at the gym during deep sleep okay that's the first thing the second thing that happens is we actually clean our brain like a washing machine during deep sleep so you know our body how we've got a lymphatic system we've got one in our brain called the glymphatic system now we have specialized nerve cells in our brain they're called gal cells it comes from the Greek word glue okay okay Gia it means glue and that's what they do so they stick to other neurons now what happens during deep sleep specifically they shrink so if they're over here they shrink in size and this allows for the fluid in our brain cerebral spinal fluid to wash through like a washing machine it's called the it's called the um the paravascular space so inside and the cerebral spinal fluid goes through like a washing machine and it gets all of the tox from the day the debris and it cleans it out and it only shrinks while you're sleeping in that deep in that deep sleep now get this one of the toxins that builds up is amalo beta amalo beta is one of the Hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease which makes sense right because Alzheimer's disease patients the pathology of it right they don't get to sleep much because of you know this state they don't you know they have disrupted sleep but because of disrupted sleep we can raise our risk of Alzheimer's disease so it is a cycle right so we need to be sleeping so what's a good marker of this well you can wake up because you don't have to have an aura ring or a who strap if you wake up and you're groggy you've got brain fog you're cloudy you've probably not tapped into that system okay so deep sleep we need to be getting into it what blocks deep sleep I'm sure you're going to say weed weed and alcohol and light exposure ethanol which is the active ingredient in alcohol is killing your brain cells no amount of alcohol is good for the brain I don't care if you say to me Louisa what about the people in Sardinia who are drinking red wine my rebuttal to that is the people living in it IA in these Greek Islands don't have the stress that we have they also don't have the food that we have and they're probably sleeping a lot better so imagine your brain as a bank right federal government your brain is a bank you're if you withdraw from the let's say the Sleep bank that's not good okay but you need to make sure that you've got reserves around here as well so don't drink because you've already taken maybe some sleep away if CU you're we're all human you're not going to be 10 out of 10 for absolutely every single account so if you have a glass of alcohol if you maybe smoke some weed you also don't sleep well you also don't hydrate you also had a bad day look at all the the money that you are withdrawing all the accounts okay so no amount of alcohol is good for the brain now how can I back this up by signs of is's a wonderful study that was done in the journal Nature really high stringent Journal I posted about this and it showed that moderate drinkers for women this is seven drinks a week and that means seven drinks at within a 7-Day time so you can have your seven drinks in one day or you can have them spanned across the week it doesn't matter okay so seven drinks a week you are now classified as a moderate Drinker for men it's 14 right by the way it does not matter if you're getting three glasses of vodka okay and four glasses of red wine it it's seven drinks right what they found in that individuals who are having seven drinks or becoming moderate drinkers either male or female you are getting a decrease in Gray matter volume and white matter volume so exp Blain what that is mind our brain is compr comprised of gray matter that sits on the outer portion of our brain it's like the cerebral cortex gray matter just means it's got the cell bodies got okay that's where all the nucleus is involved now remember at the start I told you about the axon that's the white matter okay that is where all of our myelination happens have you heard of myelin MH okay this is where conduction happens okay conduction of thought conduction of muscle movements it all happens down that milin okay so it's melinated neur that is called white matter so that's the white matter this is the gray matter you are killing both areas of the brain through drinking so ethanol is not just disrupting sleep you're not just blocking sleep you're also killing neurons and can you get those neurons back if you stop drinking adult neurogenesis does not exist in humans so in England where drinking is legal at the age of 18 in Australia is probably quite young yeah if brain hasn't fully developed not just that let's not even talk about it's You're Building habits oh yeah okay remember every Behavior your brain will learn good or bad good behavior it learns it because you you produce something and you go down this highway yeah okay the axon that's when you go down the highway your Mile and sheath gets thicker okay you go down that Highway again it learns that highway so it's like okay it's a habit the more times you drink the more times you reinforce to your brain it's okay and then also so again I want to make sure I personally never have judgment on people in that sense of if you hear the information and you still choose to because that's the life you want amazing I'm always just trying to make sure that we don't trick ourselves and so that's why even though I smoke weed it's important for me to talk about because I don't want to trick myself I don't want to trick myself into the old belief system that I had that actually served me at the time right which is like no no smoke weed it's going to be great for your gut um and so it's super important that we talk about this I don't want people to at least for me like I'm not judging them go ham guys if you really want to I would just advise if you want to have a healthy brain and everything that we're saying don't do it and then one thing I'd also like to talk about when with the alcohol thing is just the inflammation and what inflammation does to your brain and then the things that cause inflammation yeah this inflammation thing is really is really tough right so remember how I told you about the arteries okay and then the walls of the arteries what happens in cardiovascular disease okay or even in brain health okay these arteries like I said they are responsible they're like tunnels or tubes and they that's where all the blood flows with cardiovascular disease what happens is we either get narrowing of those arteries okay and we get plaque that builds up insides which ends up being an occlusion of of blood what happens then in our heart we get a heart attack in our brain it's called a stroke in our lung it's called a pulmonary embolism but I want people to understand that a stroke is the exact same everywhere it's an occlusion of a blood vessel we can have a stroke in our brain we're can have a stroke in our heart it's just called a heart attack or a stroke in our lung okay pulmonary or a brain attack how do we get narrowing well if our tunnel okay or this tube is if the wall of it becomes indented it becomes smaller right we'll get narrowing of that one way that that happens is through inflammation it makes the lining of that artery weak okay so that's one reason why chronic inflammation is bad another reason is it disrupts the mitochondria within our cell and metabolic dysfunction is at the heart and I would say at the center of a lot of these disease States cancer neurodegenerative diseases and cardiovascular disease and in fact I think what we need to talk about as well is energy we all want energy we need energy to survive we need energy to think and focus how do we deplete our energy it's with disrupted mitochondria M okay so this is another reason why we don't want to be you know inducing that inflammatory response yeah the only time you need inflammation is when you are exercising really because you need an inflammatory response to get a h hypertrophy and strength which by the way yes you've totally ruined my uh cold plunges that I was doing right after my workout because I literally just adopted it like a week I'm going to do a cold plunge every day I'm going to do right after my workout and then I heard you say yeah don't do cold plunges as soon as you've worked out because you want your muscles to have a bit of that inflammation yeah you do so you block this hormetic response so you need the inflammation the inflammation gets driven to the muscle and it regenerates and it gets stronger and bigger but if you go through and block it because that's the beauty of a cold bath that blocks the inflammation then you block what you've just done at training yeah so protocol 3 hours outside of exercise before or after get into your cold plunge cuz cold plunge is amazing oh my God it it I being Greek I'm I'm always like my blood in I would my genetics don't like the cold and so again every time I realize I'm giving myself an excuse over something I have taught myself out of a habit to go that means you have to do it Lisa so when I was like cold plun could never do that like my blood I'm a Greek person guys and then I was like oh [ __ ] that means I have to do it give it a week like that's always what I'm do it for seven days yeah if you after 7 Days Lisa you choose not to do it at least you've given it a shot but now you know it's not the excuse part and I started to do it and as I'm doing it to me it was about doing the hard thing so it was like I freaking hate the cold I don't want to do it oh my God I just did it wow yeah you go Lisa like that encourag thing yeah oh yeah yeah you're right not just that when you actually get into cold you get one of the best things about cold is you get a profound release and Rapid Release of norrine and what does that do neurop nephrine is beautiful it's both a neurotransmitter when released in the brain and it's actually a hormone when it's released in the body but in the brain this neurotransmitter is involved in vigilance and focus which is why when you get into it you feel feel a lot I can take on the day yeah so it's great so um how long is uh ideal that I should do it for because I need to know how many songs I have to play because again that's my thing if I'm going to be in there I have to sing what temp temperature is it um in Celsius or inhe I know no it's like 55 okay you should be generally doing that for how long are you getting in the bath for I was only doing it for like a song so 3 minutes well that's fine if you're if you're doing it at if if you're doing it over 50° maybe you want to stay in there for around you know 5 minutes okay but instead of getting caught up on the timing because everyone's different get caught up on when you start to shiver m okay you want to induce the Shivering response but you also don't want to stay in the you kind of want to get out when you are comfortably cold meaning so you get in isn't that an oxymoron that's how it is in science it's like comfortably cold so you want to get in where you're shivering and it's like I'll get out when I just am about to faint really but don't faint okay yeah don't faint but I actually want everyone at home guys if you're listening I bet try try it for 7 days just give it a shot if you hate it you can tell me drop in the comments that you hate it but I'm telling you give it a shot for seven days and then let me know how you feel I guarantee you freaking love it also start with a cold shower if you don't want to yeah start just start to work your way up okay um and then sorry I completely dered sleep der us from sleep deep sleep okay so you've blocked sleep so we now know that alcohol and and weed is blocking our sleep it's sedating us so you're just knocking yourself out yes sedating that's deep sleep so we now know the importance of deep sleep then we have stage four which is rapid eye movement sleep you'll see it on your aing REM sleep it's involved in memory consolidation and learning so this is where when we're in this phase and actually on an EEG what you see is you have horizontal eye movements so your brain actually you're completely paralyzed from the neck down but your brain actually mimics an awake person so you're right that's where the name came from Rapid eyee movement sleep your eyes are going in horizontal motion and that's why we know you're in rapid eye movement sleep things that block it or exact same thing stress uh light exposure alcohol sleep um if anyone does have a wearable in terms of times and percentages your total sleep time so 20% of your total sleep time should be made up of REM sleep H is there an ideal amount of sleep for a man versus a woman my husband always gets way less sleep than I do and he feels great does he yeah so that was a sarcastic so how many hours I don't know how many hours but look everybody is different okay you know LeBron big man obv obviously is exerting so much energy throughout the day would most likely need a lot more than other people it depends on your first of all it depends on how much output you are doing throughout the day but as a general rule of thumb you do want to be sleeping minimum s and a half to 8 hours because the we know that the studies on sleep deprivation which is 6 hours or less which is by the way most of New York and probably most of of of mothers as well we know that there is a there's a wonderful study in um pnas okay really another high stringent Journal where they took a group of healthy men okay middle-aged healthy men they subjected them to one week of sleep deprivation of six hours okay this is what they found they found a change in 711 genes now 711 what okay there's 25,000 genes in the human genome that means you have an epigenetic change of 3% through sleep deprivation this is what they found half of those genes were upregulated half of them were down regulated now the genes responsible for tumor growth were upregulated the genes responsible for immunity were downregulated so through sleep deprivation classified as 6 hours or less in these human males resulted in an epigenetic change of 3% so you are changing your genome through lack of sleep and you know what the fact that this is one other thing we have to point out who are you giving your sleep deprivation to are you giving it to social media cuz that's so that's really quiet like you should smack yourself across the face you know like who's responsible for your epigenetic change in your diseases is it social media all right so what if if it's your kids and that's a different story that's what I was going to say so let's actually talk about that because so for healthy men God bless them after a week like that's obviously very damaging that's massive so now actually let's talk about women who have three children I know who do this for 20 years is yeah what what does that actually look like and look again there might not be a solution right cuz someone's like well look I don't have a nanny yeah my husband isn't around or I don't have a partner and now I'm looking at so they may not have a choice so assume actually some people may not be may be in that situation yeah I get that and I'm so empathetic to it and my as I'm getting older and as a woman I've I've kind of think that this is the way I would say it because it doesn't change just because you're a woman let's go back to the multiple accounts at the bank if you know and I actually do this in my life if I know I'm going to be sleep deprived one night because I've got an early start and I have a crazy life right on and off planes if I know that I'm going to make sure that I'm 100 on my hydration on my eating on my supplementation and on my exercise not just that take breaks during the during the day so at neuro Athletics we have a 10 minutes okay I I don't know what to call it but I call it shut the [ __ ] up times okay that's what it is and I love that I was so taken that it's because I have look 99% of my clients are men and it's I have to change so many things just to cater for their vocabulary and they don't like meditation they don't like mindful so I said okay just shut up then for 10 minutes a day and I get them to completely it's like sensory deprivation okay that's what I was going to ask what do they do in that time earplugs okay eye mask just sit there I don't care whether you're laying down and it's only for 10 minutes okay if you don't want to fall asleep then don't lay down but that's basically just shutting down your body for 10 minutes a day that's all it's better than telling them to go to sleep it's better than telling them to do mindfulness because all you do is just put your mask on put your earplugs in sit down in a quiet room don't do anything for 10 minutes don't move and what do you see the benefits of that oh my god well a they're completely lowering whatever stress that's happen I get them to do it at 2: p.m. okay that's at the peak of when you're like I'm at the most stressful stage okay you're adding to the bank the Sleep Bank as well if you end up falling asleep for 20 minutes that's fine because napping I I don't see a problem in it I don't see a problem in napping so yeah that's what I was going to ask you I heard you talk about binge sleeping um and that ideally it's not the best thing to do it's not okay because sleep isn't like a debt again that we can repay at the bank you can't expect to sleep 12 hours in one day then sleep 6 hours the rest of the week okay so I call it bench sleeping I say because we're humans just focus on sleeping well 80% of the time and that's because we are humans if we could do it 100% of the time great but you do again maybe sleep five nights a week perfectly and just cater for those two nights that you may be out or sleep sleep deprived okay I'm now going to block at 2: p.m. every day unless I'm shooting a shut the [ __ ] up time Lisa um I askk an ear plugs you said y I love that and it needs to be quiet not like music yeah no that's what that's what the earplugs are because you've got all these sensors okay you don't want to be touching anything you just want to lower the sensors as much as possible if you Google I also want you to Google the homonculus okay I'll tell you how to spell it after this I've got a little homonculus figure but what you'll see is is this little guy his hands are obnoxiously like large which means that your hands take up a lot of surface area in your brain and they're just these little structures but we know that through grip strength through opposable thumbs through um we've got these you know these receptors all over our hands so don't touch anything just completely sensory deprivation deprivation yeah actually when you say um grip strength I forgot to mention that earlier that I heard you say you know when you were talking about the ball like it specifically is throwing a ball versus hitting a ball with a bat yeah look I love tennis um I've just started taking it up and it's great for hand eye coordination great for the brain be this you know but it also involves grip strength as well but this one is also you're really just you know pulsating that grip strength as well okay so I actually would love to go through now someone's I hopefully they're all bought in I'm going to get better I understand why now let's go through how people get bed asleep because again I'm so freaking tactical and I just beg of people to try this for seven days in fact would you recommend seven or is like I just worry if I say 30 people aren't going to do it I want people to try what you're about to explain of how to get a Best sleep possible I was actually going to do in July I was going to do a challenge for everybody yeah which was just a 14-day challenge okay and that is just 14 days of doing everything as in like we're not we're not smoking and if anyone's drink uh actually smoking sming cigarettes which we didn't touch on I don't assume that's a I'm yeah so we won't even talk about the cigarettes we're not going to be smoking weedd we're not going to be drinking alcohol and we're going to see it's like a sleep challenge 14 days let's try and sleep for 7 and 1 half to 8 hours if you wake up okay just due to Natural Body clock and it's only been 6 hours just lay there and force yourself back to sleep if you can so if someone was to do that now for Sleep specifically what are the things they need to try um that they can do yeah immediately first of all timing let's talk about that we need to be sleeping at an appropriate time neuro Athletics lights out is 10: p.m. so we want to be getting you into bed by around 9:30 and I have a question for you there does it depend on um the time of year because 9:30 in La it's just gotten dark um but in the summer but in the winter at 5:00 p.m. it's p black no because we work on so our so that's a really great Point our cating Rhythm is a 24-hour clock and you need to be in alignment with that so your body knows when it's waking up and when the 24 hours and it does matter on the time it's not like you can go to bed at 1:00 and have the 7 and a half hours sleep please explain that because I didn't understand it until I started diving deep into sleep yeah so if you're going to sleep from 1:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. that 8 hours isn't the same as sleeping 10:00 a.m. uh 10: p.m. to 6 a.m. the reason being is really got to do with light cuz if you are awake you're generally getting light of any form because you're not going to be sitting in a pitch black room now what happens is from the time of 10 uh from the time of 10: p.m. and 4:00 a.m. we that's when we get the release of our dopamine which when we wake up tells us okay we are up we are thriving we are excited we are ready to go light exposure actually blocks the area of your brain that releases the dopamine during that night which is called the habenula it Rel it stops the release so you wake up and you immediately have a blockage of that doine therefore you don't get a head start on your day and you want to talk about being grumpy all day and irritable not just that you also need to take into consideration Mother Nature okay she you need to be waking up with the Sun essentially if you're going to sleep and waking up at 9:00 a.m. then you're essentially telling your body the following night not to get tired until 900 p.m. cuz it's the 12 and 12 so you really want to get on this 12 and 12 hour clock so 1000 p.m. is lights out so what do we do working up remember it's an Olympic game so we need to warm up we are we're not going to eat okay we're going to have 1 and a half hours prior to going to bed of not eating M that's because digestion takes 90 minutes you don't want to be digesting food in your sleep I found 3 hours for me as the perfect amount see everyone's different 3 hours for me what would happen is when I go to bed I'd be starving and nothing's stopping me right yeah yeah yeah know thyself yeah I I will get up and I will eat and I'll be ravenous and then that would just mess me up and a lot of a lot of my guys as well are the same really so it's like an hour and a half if you can go to then go to second thing is we really want to minimize light right we our our eyes are just extensions of our central nervous system so our central nervous system is awake when it sees light so Trying to minimize light overhead lighting okay that's that's coming into our eyes we want to minimize that so I have floor lamps in my apartment so that means that the I'm still getting light so I'm not Pitch Black very dim and these are lights that are on the floor beaming up at you instead of coming down at you correct yeah and they're very dim so it's like yeah so you got to have good eyesight in my apartment blue blockers if you don't have those types of Lights I caution against that to me it's 95% marketing I wear them um but are they really do maybe doing a 1% really that's it yeah wow okay your eyes are really susceptible to light at night so you're really they're weak so any type of light will will affect it Okay so we've got light exposure then something that I've been dabbling with I don't know if you've done this is temperature mhm Game Changer so how are you doing it um I so I've done it with the um with our AC in our room and then our AC broke one day and I had one of those um cold mattress things um and I loved it and then I took it away once our AC started again and then obviously I dive into your world and I was like all right got to bring it back out well that's yeah that's really important because because we now know that in order to fall asleep and stay asleep cuz that's a that the two biggest complaints people have is trouble falling asleep or trouble staying asleep yeah so in order to fall asleep our core body temperature needs to drop at least 2° core now AC is ambient temperature so we need to drop at 2° so if we need to be cold throughout the night because our the reason why we wake up is we get an increase in body temperature which then releases cortisol cortisol is our stress hormone wakes us up gets us up ready to run away from the tiger so we need to remain cold throughout the night if even if it's 1:00 a.m. and you get a rise in temperature you will wake up naturally right so how do we do that if we don't have a temperature controlled mattress and especially when women if you're going through like menopause um I can imagine that would well that's why these temperature control mattresses are great because it splits the bed so if you sleep with someone who's not as a hot sleeper you can turn their temperature one way and you can turn yours down yeah so what I like to do is you release heat through your the pores of your hands and also from your feet I tell people sleep with the your feet outside of the sheets and your hands outside that's such a smart little genius yeah a little hack that you can do maybe you know switch the AC on as well I know a lot of AC's have timers so you can switch it on and off when you need to um so temperature is another big one for training for sleep then another one don't answer emails don't don't get on the phone with somebody you know I've got a lot of relatives that you know really can hype me up I wouldn't call them at you know past 8:00 p.m. you want to be relaxed you want to get your brain and body into a state of relaxation so it's primed for sleep or like that person in your life like you said either it's family or friends that maybe is the person person that always is a Debbie Downer or that um you know your partner that may be kind of a a bit of a wet blanket or someone that's always very negative like staying away from those people before you go to bed have you noticed a pattern which I'm hoping everyone at home has noticed the pattern in this entire podcast is you are in control of your brain okay and you are also to blame for the state at which your brain is in we have access to free education you're doing this podcast people are putting information out there so then it comes down to control and discipline so you do have the control to do this I'm just every time I talk to you I'm reinforcing the fact that you are to blame if you wake up and you're tired okay apart from genetics or something that has happened like you do have control over the way that you sleep you just have to be disciplined I love that you yeah like I want you to blame me like that I feel the thing when you say we're siping that's how we got we we're being blamed for everything we are yeah especially as women um but look that language speaks very well with me like I when I wake up when I had the brain fog I was like well Lisa you have to figure this out and it isn't easy and so finding the right people to like that's part of the show right it's like the the Trojan Horse like this is for my audience but really it's for me um because I I want to improve and I want to get better and with things like this I think of myself okay there's so much messaging out there right A lot of it is definitely for guys so having you come on that is very much understands us women is super important and then giving us the information so that I've got the opportunity to make a pivot because you better believe Girl by the end of this I'm I'm buying a tennis ball I'm buying an eye mask I'm buying earplug but all of these things now go okay I didn't know this I don't blame myself for it but now that I do what am I going to do about it and when I was waking up with brain fog feeling like I was when I had the worst gut issues I wasn't sleeping my hormones were all over the place and that's the worst I've ever felt about myself yeah and I was bullied and teased as a kid and it was my gut issues that made me feel badly about myself because I wasn't sleeping because I wasn't being I couldn't exercise like everything that you're talking about and it never went straight to the brain I kind of always thought was like maybe it's my hormones and that's why but that's why this is so important because someone out I'm really hoping people right now they may feel lost and they're like I have this I didn't know there was anything I could do I thought I was stupid I thought that I was born like this I thought I thought I thought and now with everything that you're saying is now we have the opportunity to step up and all I say to people is if you don't do it and you wake up and you have brain fog or you don't have the clarity or you haven't built the confidence because of your hormones and your sleep patterns exactly like look at yourself and I mean that with compassion and love because I do that to myself as well yeah no absolutely and you know what the exciting thing is you can make more money with a higher performing brain you can get a you can secure a better job with a high performing brain you can secure a better partner a better life partner with a high performing brain because you start to see things if you have a weak brain you're kind of like you're a bit lazy and you miss things you missed those red flags oh did he just do that oh it's whatever I don't care cuz it's too lazy because your brain is also Imagine a a cup if you will okay and the water in the cup this is your brain the water in the cup is the energy with every gulp that we take every sip we're just taking energy away from our brain the sips are thoughts okay that so the more thoughts you have the more sips you take and if it's all the way depleted and then you see the guy that you're seeing at night okay and you've depleted all your energy you've got a weak brain you're not going to see the narcissistic qualities you're not going to see the red Flags you're not going to see the other girl that's texting him you're just going to let it fly because your brain's just like I just I'm just here to survive cuz I've got no energy left so build the energy build the cognitive Reserve build the resilience so when you do see him at night at 600 p.m. and he does turn up half an hour late you can be like red flag you're if you're that strict no I know but here but also I mean the boundaries thing is something that we talk a lot about here and boundaries the big part is how do I set the boundary and so I've done multiple episodes like that but also how do I have the confidence to set the boundary in the first place because that's where some people get stuck and in everything that you've just laid out in so many beautiful ways to really bring it down to how we can understand it and then what we can do about it it's given us so many tools that people can immediately start yeah absolutely so let's close off sleep so we now know that sleep is fundamentally a high performance tool that we have un hero okay unsung hero it's free we've been doing it for centuries and we need to do it more okay train it's sleep Fitness okay how fit are you in bed really oh sleep Fitness I like that oh actually there was one more thing though about sleep that I haven't tried and I've heard you talk about it and so I need you to convince me to try it um mouth tape yes okay um mouth tape is great so mouth breathers you know this changes your entire face so if you're breathing at night you're not getting the adequate amount of oxygen that your brain needs so sleeping you know if you are healthy maybe if you sleep with somebody else just in case something happens try mouth breathing I try M mouth taping I actually do this when I'm exercising to reinforce nostril breathing yeah so you take it you don't find that tough I mean do find it tough I do yeah I do and um a lot of athletes are doing this now and I know a lot of guys in the bodybuilding space are doing this as well so tough so explain it to me so the oxygen you're bringing through your nose is more than the oxygen through your mouth and it's purely that simple yeah that's it we don't even need to go into the mechanism there yeah I just want people to understand that you're getting greater amounts of oxygen through nasal breathing and actually if I you know I I just go a bit more into it there's a really great book called breath or breathe okay and he talks about the fact of it talks about our jaw structure and that it's getting smaller because we are mouth breathers now how is that even possible it's unbelievable yeah you should like I don't know too much into it but I read that book and it changed my life and that's actually why most people are now using strips for their mouth cuz they want to have a nice jawline they want to have a nice jawline yeah especially the men but isn't it interesting it kind of goes back to looks yeah like I wish that there was a way that we could see our brains and it became just like you you know people look at cup sizes or booties where it's like what's your brain like oh my gosh and you should see as you get older if you compare a 20-year-old brain you do an MRI scan so your brain you know it's your brain and then there's some fluid and then there's like the um you know the Jura matter the peia matter it's like this coating you know and then your skull so between this space it's very thin okay you've got fluid the cereal spinal fluid but as you get older that space ends up getting thicker because your brain shrinks and it's unbelievable I can actually send you the scans of a 20-year- old brain and then like a 90-year old brain and your brain is shrinking because parts of it is shutting down your brain shrinks because that's what we do as a as we get older and then there's neurodegenerative diseases lack of oxygen by the way remember how I told you about the capillaries and the Brain the blood vessels the first ones to go are these little capillaries they're one cell thick they're the diameter of a hair and when we get stressed out or when we have H tension which is high blood pressure they are the first ones to go therefore lack of oxygen to that little area of the brain that the capillary is supplying your brain with atrophy imagine over the span of 80 years if you've just completely [ __ ] up your brain and your blood flow you're going to shrink your brain I don't want that whoa holy smokes girl I literally could talk to you forever we haven't even touched nutrition yeah um if there's any tips you could actually give on nutrition very fast I'm not nutrition is a nutrition science space is insane but I'll I'll talk about some supplements because everyone loves that and I think they're great I think we all need to be taking you know a more than better than actual the food itself depends okay for my favorite supplement I'll go to my grave saying that everyone should be taking this is EPA DHA so omega-3 fatty acids it comes from fatty fish mackerel and salmon they have omega3 fatty acids and it's broken up into EPA DHA and ala now ala is the plant form you can get this from flax seeds and chia seeds but I try and say stay away from that okay because you need a greater amount of it to get the necessary quantity that we need your brain 57% of your brain is made of DHA whoa okay so we need to be feeding our brain what it's made of so if you can get some high quality EPA supplements my recommendation is 4 gram a day which is two gram of each 2 gram of EPA 2 gram of DH and is there a brand cuz I actually it never dawned on me I don't know why it never dawned on me but I was like no you said that there's some that just completely misleading yeah so the FDA don't regulate supplements so it's an extremely unregulated industry meaning that anybody in the back of their truck can fill a capsule up a vegetable capsule put a slap a label on on it and call it a supplement you don't know what it's laced with so you need to be making sure that you're getting one that has been certified okay so I take momentous supplements and they have been triple certified they get certified ones then again and then just for good luck we've got it certified three times so you know that it's pure okay there's you know some other great supplement companies out there as well that are doing just make sure it's being certified now epad DHA is absolutely fundamental it helps with inflammation bringing down inflammation it helps with cell membrane fluidity we want fluid cells to be able to just move and glide through all right so and of course our brain is made of it and so repeat the what is um foods have this yeah so fatty fish yeah now you said can we get this from our foods have you seen SE spiracy it's a Netflix Doo no but I can guess what it's about it'll scare you it'll show you what's happening in our oceans and all of the fish that we're eating is farmed okay unless you're going to a Greek I just went to Gastel oror and we were eating fresh fish that was caught from the ocean we don't have that here in America so most of the fish you're eating is farmed so it's completely stripped of the EPA and DHA so that's another hard thing and then in sepy you'll see even if they do catch the fish you cut it open and all this plastic is coming out of the because the fish are eating the plastic oh God so what do we do about that well we eat the the supplements yeah okay the second thing for ladies that I really want everyone to know is creatine so we used to think that creatine was a bodybuilding supplement that just helped with you know making bodybuilders bigger but we now know that it's extremely apparent in the brain so creatin monohydrate act it's a naturally occurring molecule but it helps with Cell Energy metabolism we should be having it we should it's a cheap and it's the cheapest and safest supplement on the market you should be having creatine every single day ladies are scared to take this because they're scared of getting bulky but they're also scared of getting bloated it doesn't do that abely so you can be doing this and having at least five grams a day okay okay it won't make you bulky it won't make you blo so what does it do it helps with Cell Energy metabolism so you know ATP which occurs within yeah it helps with giv US Energy it actually helps create that got it so um it will help with our energy in general and we should take that on a daily basis no matter what especially if you are a A working woman who needs to be like Louisa I need my energy needs to be soaring until like 8 9:00 at night it helps with that Focus endurance all right that's what I was going to ask like with your athletes and you know your high performers and CEOs what is the thing that is important for them is it usually before you do this big thing that has a lot of pressure like an hour before like how do we um if we do the daily things right the creatine do that daily no matter what is there anything that we can do specifically on days where we may have this high pressure or to your point right okay the family's coming into town my in-laws are here um I've got to do extra hours at work and my kids are off school and so now I need more energy yeah one thing that your brain doesn't like it doesn't like to be shocked it loves routine which is why I say try and go to bed every night at the same time so if you yeah so let's just say you've done everything you've done you've slept well I've eat I've hydrated with water and electrolytes electrolytes okay which actually help your synapses okay the the chemical reaction that occurs between two cells when they fire and create a chemical synapse they are firing through sodium and potassium so these are electrolytes so make sure you're feeding that and just add that to your water add that to your water let's just say you've done all that how else can we prepare for that moment of being under pressure I like to create a list okay here's another thing I created with my athletes because when you're under pressure you can come up with so many things that could go wrong I get a piece of paper and literally I I say what's the worst that can happen I get them to write out everything I could lose money I could get fired I could do this I could do and if if the word death isn't on there I tell them to just stop it I say that's I said this is all obsolete these are just made up thoughts in your head that you have gathered through information because you're lazy you're Gathering these information you're making up thoughts in your head okay to make yourself feel better and to get yourself out of it get rid of those thoughts Because unless it's death you have nothing to worry about okay but also if you wake up every morning and you've got a list of things to do you're also not going to you it's going to be better for you and better for your brain because you're not going to shock your brain so true um okay is there any other kind of supplements or so we've got EPA DHA we've got creatine the last one is just make sure that your B vitamins are intact so you can go and get a blood test if you're low in B vitamins um just you know start to take those we know that they're implicated in neurodegenerative diseases um all of these three supplements by the way are also neuroprotective there's really great studies that are done on high school NFL athletes or High School footballers where they dose them with 20 gram of creatine per day and it actually helps offset some of the damage that happens from a concussion so creatine is not just useful in Cell Energy metabolism but it also offsets the damaging effects of concussions how the hell do you get people to be compliant and what I mean is is that everything we've laid out today I get so excited about honestly I like I di vure well for like at least 6 hours and I've had the most fun and I've seen all your interviews I'm I'm literally keeping an ongoing note of all the things that I now need to do what I need to change because I'm so obsessed with how do I show up and perform at the highest level because I got a big freaking audacious go homie and I know it's going to take me years to get there and so how the hell do I shop every day with enthusiasm excitement energy confidence and just keep going um but I don't think everybody has that now look I decided not to have children so I could do this so there's a lot going on like the decisions that I've made that have led me to this but I'm just taking let's say someone at home right now that's got their everyday problems and they've got family pressures and all of this stuff it's a lot for them to do and so what are like how do we help people stay compliant to maintaining their sleep doing the exercise um and then I'm going to guess your answer but if someone says I only have time for one which one should they be doing that wasn't going to be my answer kind of my answer to that is ask yourself this question how do I want to spend the last 10 years of my life you can very well live okay to 100 but what is that worth if the last 20 years you are demented and on a bunch and you are a self Pharmacy you've got all these medications and you can barely walk so you have to think about that and that should be your driving force if you have kids you should think to yourself do I want to be able to communicate with my kids as I get older do I want to be a burden on my kids as I get older figure out your why that's that's that's actually the first thing thankfully for me I do work with 20 of the world's best athletes so they are naturally driven they are naturally wanting to and you know it's hard because when you already the best they're like well how are you going to get me better I'm already the best so I have to get them better than themselves so that even makes my job even more difficult so you have to figure out your why where does your motivation come from now let's actually talk about what you said if I only have room for one that's hard because I say well I think you should first get your sleep just you just work on sleep I don't say you only have time for one okay for 2 months just work on sleep because even if you are completely sleep deprived and you try and exercise is you're not going to get the effects you're not going to push yourself as hard and you're not going to regenerate through sleep so just work on one just get build up the reserve just work that's all just and because I do have some elderly population people that come and see me as well and I'm like let's just work on sleep for the next two months that's it we'll build up the pyramid when we've got you sleeping well and you've built all that up let's now get you exercising and then we can we can top it off the top of the pyramid for us is nutrition if you want to learn how to stop anxiety overwhelm and stress in their tracks then click here right now whatever it is that we pay attention to recalibrates the entirety of the way the brain operates that's pretty powerful

Channel: Lisa Bilyeu

Views: 685,939

Keywords: women of impact, woman of impact, lisa bilyeu, tom bilyeu, impact theory, quest nutrition, motivation, inspiration

Id: Bm72fy89N10

Length: 173min 15sec (10395 seconds)

Published: Wed Nov 01 2023