Neuroscientists REVEAL How To HEAL Your MIND | Lewis Howes

there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful Over States of Mind and Body thoughts happen spontaneously all the time they're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection but thoughts can also be deliberately introduced for instance to what extent does our subjective narrative the story the story We Tell ourselves actually means something for the body and to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative so this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now and so I do want to highlight that it's ongoing work but I think you know the old narrative meaning a few 10 years ago was that if you're feeling depressed just smile well if that worked right we would have a lot less depression than we see out right right now that does not mean most people actually who are depressed just aren't smiling as well like when you change your physiology doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit the reason I call it a brain body contract early on is that their the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue so you know the idea that when we're depressed we tend to be in more defensive type postures when we're feeling good we tend to be in more like relaxed and extended postures all true but it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind right that's a first step think about like two interlocking gears it's one gear that turns the other but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going that's how you get it to dance together exactly so subjective there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful Over States of Mind and Body thoughts happen spontaneously all the time they're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection but thoughts can also be deliberately introduced for instance right now I can say okay have a thought that just decide to write your name and you're you can do that I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it so that's a deliberate thought which says that you can introduce thoughts so I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them generally they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time but we can introduce a positive thought can you think of two thoughts at the same time probably not so you can only have one thought at a time right but they come very fast but it comes and goes right so you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think otherwise and a spontaneous thought will pop back that's right based on your experience based on sensory based on how you're feeling or perceiving something your environment it's just going to keep popping in right so how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often right so I'm a big fan of wellness and and I think it's a great Community but it tends to run in absolutes and there and there aren't a lot of operational definitions as we say in science and I what I love about your questions you're asking for really getting to the meat of things asking for the operational definitions one of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have what a terrible thing to put on people you know what what a challenging thing I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts I think there is Great Value however to introducing positive thought schemes now the reason is not because I think it's just because I think so but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort and that relates to the dopamine pathway so the molecule dopamine is a reward it's released in the brain when you win a game you you know close a deal like your photo the great love of your life you complete something but most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals it's actually released when we are in route to our goals where we're in pursuit of our goals and we think we're on the right path this is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal because they feel like I'm supposed to feel something greater I felt this thing for two minutes and now that's it that's right High Achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process to the pursuit the day-to-day tasks the the growth the lessons the losses like everything right well and it can be to some wins along the way but growth mindset which is the academic Discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague Carol dweck at Stanford is the Hallmark of growth mindset is really two things one is I'm not where I want to be now but I but I will I'm capable of getting there eventually the other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself in fact don't reward the result reward the effort that's right and if you look at true High performers people that are consistently good at what they do they don't peek and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently those people attach dopamine to the effort process and actually Carol's one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that love doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right so it's like the people love puzzles but in this case they knew they couldn't get it right but they loved doing it and it incidentally or not so instantly these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they they feel some sense of reward from the effort process yeah now the cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled we can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way our interpretation our interpretation and but it has to be attached to reality so you know one should never confuse what is real right so no so if you're F if you're thinking about the effort you're expending so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels and they're setting up a new business for instance and it's hard if they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially that it's giving them an opportunity that it's somehow they are on the right path or if they're not in movement along that path or at least oriented on the right path they're not lying in bed all day they're taking a step they're taking a step if they can reward that process internally two things happen first of all the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine gets stronger so you get better at that process and second and most importantly dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine and what I mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal cell excellent Journal cell Press Journal a couple years ago showing that with repeated bouts of effort we use and we release more and more epinephrine it's kind of adrenaline but in the brain with more effort every time every time you put in effort so every time you make for this let's keep it if I were to keep it in the business context every time you make to write that email every time you let's say it's a person who's a Craftsman and a crafts woman every time you're working in the in the shop and doing every bit of effort you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account you're spending epinephrine at some point those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you you feel like quitting it feels exhausting this was done in a beautiful study actually where um they control the visual environments and they have the subjects exert effort and they can control the visual environment so sometimes the effort of of taking steps and moving forward is actually kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion um would give them the Sensation that they were actually making progress and other times it was an exercise in futility where they would just keep the the visual World stationary and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere epinephrine's climbing climbing climbing and eventually they quit now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you anyone the the feeling that you could continue and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue and you've seen this actually like football is a good example two teams play say the Super Bowl both teams are Max effort the entire time yeah Max effort the team that wins suddenly in a moment has the energy to jump all over the place party for days they can talk I mean they they they're exhausted right before that well that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind except it was neural energy and what happened was effort is this adrenaline adrenaline adrenaline adrenaline eventually people quit they just quit the dopamine is able to suppress that and so then you're expending effort but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it so we need dopamine to keep the effort going is that I'm hearing yourself that's right dopamine is not just about reward it's one of the biggest misconceptions dopamine is about motivation and drive it's like a jet that propels you along a path how do we get more dopamine you practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind like wow okay so that's a great question first of all there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements I want to be really clear there is a drug there are two drugs actually that will cause massive release of dopamine they're called cocaine and methamphetamine the problem what gets us addicted because it feels so good the problem is exactly the problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source it becomes the goal of the path it becomes the path and the destination and you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine and that Baseline on their life goes down because there's no reason to work hard at anything else because you feel good that's right and that's the greatest feeling you'll have so why do anything else when you can have that feeling that's right if you think about remember these neurochemical systems adrenaline cortisol dopamine epinephrine they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build Fortune 500 companies they were designed to do anything they were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances we could adapt so in an animal context an animal that let's say is hunting or it needs food for its young it's going to fuel agitation that's stress that's cortisol it's like hunger my babies might not eat I might not eat maybe it's looking for a mate it's going to feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching foraging is called an animal behavior world it's foraging at some point it might catch a smell of something a potential mate or berries or a stream if it's thirsty at that moment dopamine is released and now it has energy to continue along that path whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain and that's involved in depression and disappointment that if it goes to that place and turns out it was the wrong path there's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine so that you don't repeat that mistake again so you don't give up that's right you just don't repeat it again that's right and those events that reminds you like that's not the path to go down that's right and we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions led to success previously you're going to repeat those those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those so dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path that's right so you asked how do you do this so to really make it concrete and is there too much is there too much thing is there such thing as too much dopamine well if you're not on drugs so cocaine amphetamine are bad because they lower the Baseline on life they make people very focused on things outside of themselves that's the other thing that dopamine does it can be positive or negative but when we have dopamine in our system we tend to be outward facing and in pursuit of things in our environment you can look at somebody on cocaine and realize that that's the extreme version of that but but you know I love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes so it's like get after it you know what do sharks do on Monday or I can't remember the specific things or then they're the like sometimes it's just time to chill well that's a different molecule that's serotonin right and then dopamine is the get after it molecule and epinephrine is effort so so if we were going to break this down really concrete we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort just effort with no subjective label on them good or bad effort whether or not stress or you're pursuing something you want to do it's just it's been exerting effort dopamine is about reward but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards what's the best way to train the emotional part of the brain so so that we are in we have a personal power over it that's a good role that we that we have or or more yeah it depends on the situation we can turn it up or turn it down and we depending on the depending on what's going on yeah maybe we need to be a more emotional in a moment and not be chill and relaxed maybe the moment is so big man it's a of course you're just emotionally yeah over the top so but that but that leaves you a flexibility and it also leaves you without feeling bad like oh I was emotional then now I'm not I'm not a person that has emotional regulation you don't have this brain the same forever it's a constant trimming of the sales modulating tone to me it's a little bit of work if you're in a good spot like hey don't this ain't guaranteed yeah but it's also so much power and opportunity that if you're if you're uh not in a good spot like tomorrow can be better and if not tomorrow than the month or the year after right so emotional regulation um the shortcut so now we're getting to like is there a tip you know because I hope people feel like wait a second this everything is possible but it's going to take a lot of work but are there shortcuts because I love shortcuts well la freeways or whatever right ways is good yeah but there are there is one that has stood the test of time and that I can now explain to you based on on things that we do as surgeons uh and that's I refer to as meditative breathing in in my first book but really it's it's pacing your breath and so what is this something you study with actual right uh scans or no no no it's even it's hard I've got a direct feed of the true electricity from the surface of their naked or they're breathing yeah let's well they're sitting there what is what are you seeing on the the brain activity recordings the same thing that we see when we give Valium which is an angiolytic their anxiety level goes down their electricity goes from Fast to medium remember we started this and we're talking about athletes not wanting to be in fast when you want to be in the Flow State meditative breathing led to direct changes in the electricity of their brain as measured not with a sticker on the forehead but with a grid on the surface of the naked brain it's on the brain it's true measurable changes in the electricity there for the mind so meditative breathing that for thousands of years people have said can help you chill out is an anxiolytic and break anxiety well we have proof of that now and I think that's important for people to know that it's not just some you know it's just not a concept that's being thrown around too casually that through awake um direct electrophysiologic recording of seizure planning surgery at Elite centers while looking for the seizures there's a lot of data coming out about let's play video games let's do meditative breathing let's read and then what changes and so that's what I love in book one that I shared was that's raw data that's real data and there's an explanation behind how that happens and so what I would say to people is that's something you have that's free because I'm not selling anything breathing and the pace of breathing and it's a pace that works best I mean there's lots of different techniques of meditative breathing they found you know it doesn't matter you know people say through your nose or mouth and that's kind of the confusing stuff that's out there well the nose of the mouth connect before they get to the trache and it goes to your lungs so it doesn't matter how but it's about slowing the Cadence and making the Cadence more methodical a deep break you know deep breath in and a deep breath out it's no different than what we do in surgery when you feel the case getting a little out of your control what do you do well at first the first thing is I just slow my breathing down and that doesn't mean the solution will arise but I know that puts me in my most calm and focused state to find the solution for the problem in front of me and likely that's what athletes at Thrive do as well you don't want your brain surgery well exactly right but that's what stress does it makes you hyperventilate right absolutely but if you do that's that's a great point if you just hyperventilate just because you're just doing it as just whatever for whatever reason you get physically generous yeah you will give yourself anxiety by just doing that yeah I thought that just for a second I'm showing you the proof on the other side do the opposite of hyperventilation and you'll make yourself less frenetic so how do we learn to reframe our mind or rewire our mind and so that we can have inner peace when there is trauma or pain around us brilliant question it's a skill that we learn so that's really nice to know the sooner it is never too late to start but the sooner we start the basis the thing the biggest thing with the mind and managing mind Lewis is to accept that depression anxiety even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia and then going to the mood sort of things like that we can accept grief anger Etc these are not illnesses this is the biggest message that I probably have the second biggest the first is that mind is the source and if you don't get mind right everything else you can read all the great books you want and go to all the great seminars and self-help but unless your mind is right you won't ever use that stuff it's just data and so you do there's that's there's another step missing and it's understanding that autonomy that sense of agency that we have to manage what's going on around us and to accept part of Mind management is not to make the bad stuff go away but to know how to live in the bad stuff because it's not going away so despair anger depression anxiety these are all complete completely normal responses in fact they're very helpful they're helpful Messengers and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses they are not Neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told they are actually responses and because they are responses of our mind in in the world we only use our brain and body to express them because we've got the mind has to have the brain and body to you know build the thoughts and then from be used there to speak we're using our physical to to store what we've what we've processed and to convert and then to speak so obviously if our mind's a mess our brain and our body will be a mess but because our brain's neuroplastic and we if we manage our mind we can change our brain we can change our DNA literally that's what I've shown in my research you can literally change your DNA your blood markers literally if you change your mind if you change your mind you can immediately influence your biomarkers so for example if you in acute trauma for example and you go just okay let me explain it in a very simple way I'm testing testing out a glucose continuous glucose monitoring device and for some research purposes and I happened to while I was wearing it because you wear it and then you you know you track your levels and I wanted to see for in terms of mental health in the neuro cycle that I've developed I wanted to see the impact and I happened to be going through we experience a very acute mental family over December and in the moment of the trauma I happened to see all my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to 240. now that's heart attack level and I immediately managed My Mind through the neurocycle which is the concept that I've developed which is just a system anyone can learn it and I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level and as it cycled up it cycled I could manage it and in if glucose is at that level your cortisol is shot at that level your dhea's dropped your homocysteines up all that means is that your immune system is going crazy exactly you've got a cytokine storm like we talked with covert and in fact your your brain's immune system and your body's immune system will recognize that traumatic event that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever that it will recognize that as an Invader like a virus like covert so you get the same response to a mind thing a thought which is the consequence of Mind think they'll choose you build thoughts thoughts of made of roots and trees branches which are the memories so thoughts are made of memories like trees are made of branches this is toxic it will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if I had covert or if I had a flu virus or if I had measles or something or any kind of damage in my body the immune system sees that as threatening survival because we we are wired for survival so this is not survival so your immune system says hey that's a threat let's send out the Army til emphasize macrophages let's go fix this thing and it creates inflammation which is a temporary state of healing so initially inflammation is to isolate exactly isolated and then you're supposed to you know fix this up and sort this out and find the root cause and then this goes away in the anti-inflammatory factors come in and the inflammation goes away but if we don't deal with the stuff and we don't deal with our past traumas and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are in in acting um that's a constant arguments or these so you know they all have these toxic patterns well no one's immune we all and and the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety and those are simply telling you hey there's a pattern it's either trauma-based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed but that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress even to the point where your DNA is affected and I showed in my research that you know if you think of the DNA ladder if you pull out a chromosome it looks like an X and where you see my fingernails pink fingernails for those of you that are listening um the pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres and telomeres are a proxy for how you are managing your mind very interesting they also aren't they also based on how long you'll live as well exactly exactly totally so those are under attack and dying you're probably physically going to die as well exactly and that's exactly what I showed so we had subjects at the beginning of our in my clinical trial that I put in this book we had subjects and I've actually got a picture of this person's one of the subject's brains this is inside looking inside their brain and the blue represents someone who's totally depressed Flatline brain Flat Line literally and this person's all their biomarkers were up there in a cortisol information Etc but this shows that the energy levels in the brain are very flat blue means a very very depressed and this person was their narrative was tremendous storm in their life they were offline they were battling with work relationships a lot of stuff everything was off everything was off sleep you name it they were at like 3D to check out what is this on this is on page this one I should tell you I should know the page of my heart um 161. okay cool I think you've probably got it in black and white and then you've got the um um so the this person's telomeres when we looked at their DNA we looked at their telomeres they will tell you how it that the shorter they are the weaker your cells the shorter your life span the more vulnerable you are to disease so they were sitting so that'll show in terms of your biological age so their telomeres were short and unhealthy they their ages were in the of this particular subject and we had a group like this as well that similar they they're biologically chronological the actual age was in their mid-30s but they're biological age 70 or something yes a sickly 70 year old that's crazy within it crazy within nine weeks of Mind management note I didn't work on I don't use drugs I didn't I do talk about that and stuff but in this particular clinical trial it was pure mind management just the neurocycle just get your mind under control and that gray means that the brain stabilized that the brain waves that they were actually managing so here they were saying I am depression I am hopeless all the biomarkers DNA here they saying I felt I now know why I feel depression I'm not depression I now know why and depression is simply a signal of an underlying cause it's not who I am it's not an it it's not an illness by 63 days and these numbers are very significant they were actually seeing Behavior change in their life they were saying okay so I know I'll still get depressed but I know why and I know what to do and there was changes in their behavior they were back at work they were back sleeping 25 Improvement in sleep and I mean all kinds of like the relationships not suicidal anymore and I mean that's I can go on and on and on wow this subject over here was in the control group so they got no mind management and what you'll see is a lot of red and a lot of chaos and that red shows complete brain that is like a tsunami in your brain which the biomarkers are terrible this person's DNA telomeres were very short and so with mind Management in nine weeks we showed how you can literally change your telomeres which are your markers for aging and for health mental health and physical health you know that's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise I like uh you know leafy greens and plant-based exactly which is significant and also admit there's been some work on meditation but there's been no no I think this is the first study that's been done on actually doing deliberate intentional mind work to change and then we saw significant drops as well in information markers and blood markers and but the biggest thing was the narrative the person's story so if we go away from the biology for a minute and we and we listen to the person's story that person was offline they were online they were living again and even though and they had also had this this acceptance and this is what I wanted to kind of circle back to when you started was life and managing your mind doesn't mean that it's going to be one big Rosy you know put on Rose tinted glasses that's crazy it is actually the ability to be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and actually looking for the message and seeing them as helpful we have this really weird philosophy which has been about 40 years in the west now where we look at depression and anxiety and those kind of things as illnesses and Neuropsychiatric brain diseases and as bad symptoms if you must suppress like cancer symptoms you must suppress so it's been lumped or misery of life has been medicalized to quote a a a brilliant psychiatrist and Joanna Moncrief so we've got to really watch out for that but actually the the real truth is that those depression and anxiety are not illnesses they are just survival instincts it's telling you hey pay attention there's something going on you need to go and understand something's not working something's not working some is not working and it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be addressed and that will block the greatness so are you saying am I hearing did I hear you say that there there isn't a mental health disease it's more of just a a pattern that or something that we should be mindful of but it's not an actual disease that's not a disease and I know this counters this counters the current philosophy but if you look at the science there's a large body of Science in fact if you interpret all the science around this field and you really look at what's being tested you actually will see it's not a they've been looking for the neurobiological correlative you're looking for where in the brain is depression and for years we've been told about the serotonin imbalance causing depression I mean that's not even it was a theory never proven great for marketing for you know fulfilling drugs and also the simplistic way of telling someone hey you're depressed don't worry it's chemical imbalanced let me give you a drug to fix it you know it's it's we want this quick fix mentality so with as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced so we've become very caught up in the Quick Fix and but last not like that mind is not like that mind is separate from brain and body you can apply that kind of thinking not quick fix but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis treatment approach to body to physical brain and body but when it comes to mind that that there's this this gravitational field this Force this thing feel choose thing it's not going to go you know medication is not going to change how you're thinking feeling and choosing it's not going to get rid of this it's just gonna numb your brain so maybe you don't feel this for it while it's working but at the same time as then when that drug weighs off this is still there this is still being recognized by the immune system of your brain as a problem so this is increasing your bone the longer it's there the more you increase your vulnerability to disease oh my gosh you know and this is what gets you stuck and these are the patterns so no it's not an illness it is a normal human response here we go pandemic we all know that everyone's going on about the next pandemic is mental health we if mental health has always been an issue notice from the beginning of time mankind has battled with life with issues with death with fighting with war with whatever so mental Health's not on the rise but the mismanagement of mental health making it a disease has created a whole new problem so here so here we sit with before the pandemic they started doing a population study in the mid 90s and this is when I was still practiced early days of my practicing sort of 10 years into my work and I started seeing this trend of and and I was watching the study where people were where they the decades-long trained of people living longer so we know we all hear this message what this is what we've heard people are living longer because of the advances in medicine and Technology none of us question that but something happened in 96 that did start questioning that by the mid-2000s it was an established researched fact that we don't live longer anymore that the trend of people living longer has actually reversed and that we have a a pandemic of deaths of Despair where people are dying from preventable lifestyle diseases and the age group most being affected but are between 24 and 65. so people at the beginning of their career in the prime of their career and through that that age group are being or dropping down dead like flies and it's death considered deaths of Despair by preventable lifestyle diseases so we have to look at the bone lifestyle disease means that there's something in our body that's that's weaker why lifestyle which is mind-driven how am I eating drinking sleeping but more than that is what's my mind behind all of that how am I actually managing the day-to-day moments how am I managing the patterns the traumas the established toxic habits what am I doing about that stuff and that's when we in all of that because this current trend of science is saying oh those don't matter what matters is the symptoms let's just look for the symptoms checklist diagnose label when you label someone you chop you you chop up to 10 years more of their life you know it's like it's adding on they've shown studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have a chopped their 20 years off up to 20 years of their lifespan people on psychotropic drugs because of all the complications and the changes in the brain and the body chopping up to 25 years of their life I mean this is serious so here we have this already existing then the pandemic hits now another years they said that there's an additional year being chopped off people's lives but there's such a contradiction because they're saying hey this is adverse circumstance grief of loss of people uncertainty medical and you know not knowing if you're going to live or die and how long is this isolation going to go on and economic impact and whatever the whole lot that's trauma and they they're saying that when they're saying but this is the way to treat it let's label it let's diagnosis let's medicate it so here we've come into covert with a problem with that stupid philosophy that's created such a lot of problems and scientifically this has all been researched and shown and now we've got the pandemic and now they want to carry on that system that didn't work to this which is going to make it even worse so we've got to shift our narrative completely and we've got to stop stop saying that mental illness is on the rise and that this one in four people on antidepressants or depressed 100 of people are depressed and anxious and concerned about this covert pandemic 100 of people in the world at some point in their life have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and Terror and despair and one of the others a large percentage of the population and I'm not sure the exact percentage because no one's really done this kind of research but estimates it's probably 30 40 of people will have extreme trauma of from abuse War trauma that kind of stuff where they'll go down they'll continue to sort of the minus 19 8 9 10 if you look at it Continuum of zero to ten zero to minus ten and have things like psychotic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of distress mental distress which are still not diseases they are simply in natural medics situation you're having a traumatic response think of someone who's a war vet I just interviewed a Navy SEAL the other day who was train snipers and I mean the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do you know they come back and try and we all know the problem of trying to you know reconcile back into civilian life after you've gone through I mean you know this is what they'd be experiencing all day long stuff that's completely against survival completely against our human nature and now they instead of them being allowed to process this trauma they're coming back and being told that they're diseased and he would tell me that what they do with a lot of we don't hear this sort of thing but he told me this they they will inject things like Risperidol which is an antipsychotic into the spines of war vets people say but psychotic and they and they're psychotic for reasons they coping they how do you deal with this of course you're going to be angry you're going to be frustrated you're not going to be able to love like you did you have to be able to embrace process and reconceptualize giving them a drug is not going to make it but not going to help it in fact it constrains the brain it restricts the brain you can't there's no a chemical cure for that this this is that's not that's just going to add feel to the fire because your mind's got to work through the brain so now you put chemicals in and now that's not gonna that's not going to facilitate change we have to do something so it's like a narrative do you feel like there I mean is there such a thing as a chemical imbalance in some people uh you know when they say oh I have a depression it's a disease or bipolar or I have this mental health disease or I have a chemical imbalance I was treated with this don't try to say I don't because this is who I am is that do some people have that or is that that's the result The Narrative of I have a chemical imbalance and my depression is from chemical imbalance is a narrative that is the only explanation that people have been given they're not given an alternative reaction I mean an alternative narrative so the most important thing is that anyone listening to this podcast I want to validate your depression your anxiety your grief your despair your PTSD whatever label you've been given I want you to I want to validate that that doesn't need to be validated with a disease label you're not diseased you're not a broken brain you aren't your brain isn't effective you are going through something so you aren't something you aren't that you are going through something you're experiencing something you're experiencing something and you're experiencing and you've coped in the only way that you could cope in that moment so it created this adverse response because it was an adverse situation and you were just trying to cope so what we have to do is go through a process of embracing and processing and reconceptualizing so the important thing here is to recognize nice that chemical imbalance isn't the cause of your despair the cause of your despair is what you've gone through and what you're going through and learning how to and not knowing how to manage it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy and those flashbacks and and the trauma of the flashbacks and going back into those situations of the rape or the abuse or the war trauma or the that it can it could drive a person crazy and that's not crazy in the sense of illness it's crazy in the sense of your mind is like this erratic tidal wave around you and it's going through your brain and you've got these in your immune system and everything screaming after you and saying hey let's fix this so a disease label invalidates it and for a moment it might be nice to know okay well there's a label to how I feel because it kind of gives us a bit it feels like we've got a bit of control so initially that gives you comfort but don't see yourself as that it's better to say I'm experiencing post-traumatic stress issues because of what I've been through versus I am PTSD why had the sickness of PTSD it's better to say I'm experiencing symptoms of bipolar these intense swings because of my whole story then saying I have bipolar I have a chemical imbalance I mean just researchers coming out the other day show that we've got to stop saying this the top psychiatrist that lead this field will tell you we've got to stop saying this that these there's no ways that serotonin imbalance even you can't even measure that there's no Gene for there's no genes or serotonin imbalance causing it it's what you've experienced that's the cause and then that move through your brain in your body so obviously your brain and your body responds so we will see changes in the brain in the body we will see neurochemical chaos not necessarily serotonin imbalance that's just one sometimes it's dopamine and if dopamine's down serotonins often then in anandamides offer then I mean I can give you a list of big chemical terms and that's going to change every function in the structure of your brain and your your DNA and your telomeres and 1400 neurophysiological responses are off so you know that's and that's the response though and that doesn't mean that that you have this thing hidden inside of you the scary thing that's controlling you and I that invalidates if I if someone comes back from war someone's had a sexual trauma to tell them that the depression or anxiety they're feeling as an illness is an insult to what they've gone through but if I say if I say to you gosh that's terrible tell me about it I want to hear your story I want to support you your depression and an anxiety that you're feeling is a signal that there's stuff going on there's an origin story there's a source so can I listen can I help can I support you in trying to recognize the signals and go through the process to find the origin story and then to reconceptualize it and that takes time it's not a 15-minute appointment where I can give you a label that takes time that's not also it's also not the conditioning kind of treatments that are in place that some of them work if they use in the right place but to try and to try and put a veteran who's gone through something back into the situation to try and condition them you can't condition you have to reconstruct so it's kind of like an algebraic equation x is is the situation why is how you should want you want to function for mental peace so you've got X Plus Y and so here we are in our X situation with either sort of human experiencing life you're supposed to be at Y and you put the two together and what the current treatment says is that okay now we're going to create Z we're just going to ignore X and Y we're going to create a new thing and that new thing is you deceased but that doesn't work it's actually X Plus Y equals X Y X is what you're going through Y is where you want to find mental peace and you want to put the two together to live together so that you can change how the past plays out into your future oh man just like any skill or anything you learn you got to go from thinking to doing to being you got to take knowledge you create the experience and if you keep doing it over and over again you start getting a skill or you start getting wise about how to do it and you you know that you know how to do it well in the last 10 years we have assembled the scientific team and let's see if you can really make significant brain changes I I don't want those changes to just be in your mind I want them to be in your brain I want to be able to see before and after pictures to say that person has a significant change after a traumatic brain injury or anxiety or depression or a cyclic mood disorder or a stroke we want to see that there's been significant change at the same time let's measure your brain in real time and let's look to see what that transformation process looks like and in the discovery Lewis of that process we gained so much knowledge about what that transformational process looks like in other words I can tell you without a doubt that if you're analyzing your life right now within some disturbing emotion that 100 of the time you're going to make your brain worse you think about your life if you're stuck in an emotion like you're frustrated you're angry you're fearful resentful resentful and you're thinking within that emotional state in other words you can't think greater than how you feel that means then you were thinking in the past because those emotions are a record or residue of the past so we see people in the in the process of change that aren't analyzing and uh in in Duality or polarity that kind of drives the brain into higher states of arousal and and further away from True change so we did we've done thousands and thousands and thousands of brain scans and and we now know that there's a formula to create greater brain coherence greater brain efficiency to make your brain work better and when your brain works better you work better at the same time it requires a clear intention and an elevated emotion to begin to change your energy and to change your life and nobody changes until they change their energy right so then how do you get a person out of resentment frustration into joy and freedom if why would they feel grateful or joyful or free if the experience hasn't happened so most people are spending the majority of their life waiting for something out there to take away their emptiness or pain or the resentment in here well if they're they're waiting their whole life in separation or lack then and and we create reality then the lack is driving certain thoughts which is creating more separation and more lacks so teaching people then to begin to condition their body emotionally before the evidence takes place in their life is breaking a significant habit right so instead of living by cause and effect now we're beginning to cause an effect so the moment you start feeling whole and grateful we now know your healing will begin at that moment yes the moment you start feeling um worthy and abundant your wealth is coming you know you're generating a certain amount of energy a certain amount of wealth and so how does someone feel worthy though if they've always been told they're not worth it yeah well so before that's the story they tell themselves yeah like I'm not worth it because yeah she didn't say yes when I asked her on a date right because he broke up with me because I got fired because my parents left me how do they how am I worth it when there's so much evidence or story around a negative well thing let's stop telling the story of your past and let's start telling the story of your future and and people who aren't defined by a vision of the future for the most part are left with memories of the past that your brain is a record of the past it's an artifact of everything you've learned and experienced in this moment so most people wake up in the morning and they start thinking about their problems yeah and those problems are memories that are tattooed in the brain that are associated to certain people and things at certain times and places so the moment the person wakes up Clean Slate they start thinking about the problems they're thinking in the past if you believe your thoughts have something to do with your destiny well it's a possibility that your past is going to be your future every one of those problems has an emotion associated with it so then the moment you start recalling the problem you start feeling unhappy now your body's in the past because thoughts of the language of the brain and feelings of the language of the body and how you think and how you feel creates a state of being so people reaffirm their identity based on the past right and it turns out that well the redundancy of doing that conditioning only requires it requires an image and an emotion and most people are unconsciously conditioning their body into the familiar past into the known so now if you're in the familiar past and in the known you're going to Crave the predictable future right right that's the known as well and there's only one place where the unknown exists and that's the Eternal present moment that's The Sweet Spot of the generous present moment so you gotta you gotta labor to get that person beyond the emotions that keep them tacked or anchored to the past and yes it takes an effort to do that but if you keep working with the formula you'll reach that elegant moment where there's a liberation of energy and now your body as the unconscious mind the objective mind is not believing it's living in the same past experience 24 hours a day because you're liberating the body from that emotional state so you ask a person why are you so unhappy why are you so frustrated why are you so resentful the moment you ask that their brain is going to associate that emotion to a past event into a memory into a memory that's because they have nothing to look forward to in their future so if you're not being defined by a vision in the future it just means to me that you're more in love with your past than you are with the future so how do you teach people to believe in a future that they can't see or experience with their senses yet but they've thought about enough times in their mind that their brain has literally changed to look like the event has already occurred the latest research in Neuroscience says that's absolutely possible we know that and how do you teach a person to select a new possibility in their future and begin to emotionally Embrace that future before it's made manifest to such a degree that their body is their unconscious mind is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment and they're signaling new genes in new ways ahead of the environment now till their body begins to change to look like the event has already occurred we've proven that that's possible now think about this so the more you think about your desired future The Joy the Gratitude the uh the feelings you want to have that are more positive the more you think about it as it's as a future thing happening the more your body shifts now exactly so your body is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment now think about this from some condition in your life the more altered you feel inside of you the more you narrow your focus on the cause and the brain freezes an image and takes a snapshot and that memory now is embossed in the brain it's branded in there so then people think neurologically within the circuits of those past experiences and they feel chemically within the boundaries of those emotions and the stronger the Betrayal the stronger the trauma the more the body's living in the past right so then so how to reverse that so now if you truly got passionate about a future we've all done this you get a wild idea in your mind and you start holding on to that vision and you're preoccupied with it all of a sudden the thought in your mind becomes the experience and you start feeling the the energy of the future now the stronger the emotion you feel from that Vision the more you're going to pay attention to the picture in your mind and now you're remembering your future and vice versa the stronger you pay attention to the feeling of the past pain you're going to create the pain in this moment exactly so then so it requires a coherent brain and we now know that there's a formula for that and we've got beautiful research to show that people can do it they just have to practice and it requires a coherent heart because resentment frustration in patience creates a very incoherent heart yeah and when that heart becomes incoherent you stop trusting yourself there's no energy you stop trusting in your future so then if there's physical evidence in your brain and body physical evidence to look like the event has already occurred it's quite possible you'll be thinking neurologically within the circuits of your future and you'll begin to feel chemically within the boundaries of that emotion of your future and how you think and how you feel is your state of being and now your state of being is living in the future instead of the past now the moment you disconnect from the emotion of your future because traffic or some co-worker or your ex or whatever people come up with now you're back to the energy of your past and now you're going to start looking for it analyzing why hasn't it happened well if you're feeling the emotion of your future why would you look for it because you would feel like it already happened and that is the place where the magic happens so then you can't just do this get up and then return back to your old state of being you got to maintain that modified State well let me finish I want you with a phase right now how do you mate well of course of course I mean we all take blows in our lives and and we all react emotionally but the question is how long are you going to read right right so then if you can't mediate and regulate your emotional reactions and those emotions linger for days for some people mood and then a month's temperament years personality trait so then the person's personality is literally based on the past but they don't know that because they're doing it over and over again it becomes a subconscious program so now if it requires a coherent brain and a coherent heart then we have to train people how to self-regulate so we've done thousands and thousands of measurements we've partnered with the heart math Institute to teach people how to create and sustain heart coherence how do we do it well besides going to your Workshop what's the simplified version I'm sure it takes more time than well it really doesn't it really doesn't it just requires getting still closing your eyes putting your attention on your heart changing your breath so that you move into the present moment and when you slow your breathing down you slow your brain waves down when you slow your brain waves down now you're accessing your autonomic nervous system so then you train a person how to open their heart and feel an elevated emotion and it takes a little practice and just like a flower that takes time to bloom it takes a little bit of time but if you work in trading the resentment the frustration or the impatience for gratitude appreciation and thankfulness and you keep at it there'll come a moment where that system switches on and now you're feeling grateful for no reason at all that's that's not a bad thing because gratitude the emotional signature of gratitude means something's happening to you something has happened to you you're receiving something or you just receive something so your body then when you're feeling gratitude is in the perfect state of receiving so then that means then you'll accept believe and surrender to the thoughts equal to the emotional state of gratitude if you're living in resentment you're living in fear you're living in in patience you could say I'm healthy I'm healthy I'm healthy I'm wealthy I'm wealthy I'm with all you want and that thought's going to stop right at the brain stem and never make its way to the body because the body is not failure because why because you're feeling resentment and that thought isn't that thought is not consistent with the emotion of resentment resentment has a different set of thoughts right in other words once you start opening your heart it begins to move into coherence it begins to produce a measurable magnetic field up to three meters wide now that's frequency that's energy and all that energy that frequency carries information carries an intent so then when you're feeling gratitude and your heart is open you're broadcasting energy into the field the frequency a frequency you lay the intent of the thought of your health or your wealth that frequency can carry the thought of your wealth it can carry the thought of your health if you're suffering you can't the suffering does not carry that energy does not carry the thought of your wealth it carries a different set of thoughts so then so then we're teaching people how to self-regulate because if you're going to believe in that future that you're imagining with all of your heart it better be open and activated right and you better know how to self-regulate and you have to know the moment you disconnect from the energy of your future because of some circumstance in your life and you lose that feeling if you're practicing it on a daily basis with your eyes closed then the next level is to be able to open your eyes and do it right in the moment and be able to self-regulate and change the the frustration from some experience in your life back to the energy of your future now that requires Great awareness and great effort but if you have a commune of people that are practicing this on a daily basis and they're connected to their future because that's where their their mind is um they begin to want the future more than the emotions of the past so we've done enough measurements now Louis to know that we can teach people how to do that and we have evidence that people can sustain it for 45 minutes to an hour it's a skill now they know that they know how to do it so now they have brain coherence and heart coherence well once the heart begins to become orderly and coherent it acts as an amplifier and it drives energy to the brain so now the brain is getting more energy once the heart is open and then you're thinking a different set of thoughts and those thoughts produce different chemicals for you to feel more of that and here comes nitric oxide from oxytocin and then all of a sudden your heart literally starts to swell one of the experiments that I did in my lab this last year was trying to find the most um the easiest shortest intervention that we can do with students that would decrease their very high levels of anxiety what was that and so we we tested many things um just to walk outside uh share yoga all these things they can do online this was all virtual but one of the things that was very effective that I was so excited about is a mindful conversation so what we did is we didn't go deep we didn't want to have them reveal some you know deep dark secret but what we did is my student researchers had a script they shared a real story about a favorite vacation why it was favorite it was real they were really trying to share this this experience with them and then invited the student who they didn't know who was our experimentee to share the same thing and in that year where everything was virtual and it was you know professors just said okay now learn these five chapters go ahead and do it and to have somebody there listening to their story listening deeply and asking real questions because they were and it was only 10 minutes completely decreased their anxiety really by them sharing and someone listening or by them also listening to someone else's story you know I think it was really the sharing and have somebody else listening because the first part the my my students always went first they didn't know what exactly was going to happen so that was just to lay the groundwork and um I think the the interaction and the Good Feeling started to develop when they started to open up sharing this story and seeing Oh my God somebody is really listening to me they're asking me a question about about this event that meant something to them and that it just shows how powerful social interactions are and even the short 10-minute thing between we were we thought about should we get two friends to try and have a conversation that was too hard to control but I could control we could control exactly the protocol of this stranger student and the kind of interaction they have interesting yeah do you is there any research on if men or women are more anxious do we is there any research around this like um I know men have more anxiety or stress or women have more anxiety or stress I think this stat I should know this are we just all messed up equally I think we're all messed up equally there's more women with depression depression and anxiety are are related but but you know have different symptoms um but I think it's pretty equal okay for anxiety the reason I was I'm curious is because when I was studying about masculinity years ago I wrote a book called The Mask of masculinity which is kind of the mask that men wear to project and protect themselves from showing emotion and showing revealing themselves um and when I was on tour talking about it I would always ask in every city and about 50 men and women would show up and I would always ask like okay for the for the ladies here raise your hand if you have a girlfriend or girlfriends that you talk to once a week about your stress your worry your challenges in life your work issues your your body issues whatever it might be dealing with that you have someone one or multiple girlfriends you speak with on a weekly basis yeah and pretty much the entire room of women raise their hand said yes every week I have at least one person and I said keep your hands up if you do this every day you call a girlfriend on the phone you have lunch you're just talking about something for a few minutes yeah and I go how does it make you feel to be able to talk about these things and like it feels great yeah to be able to share yes yes yeah and say okay for the men in the room raise your hand if once a month you get together with a guy friend and you talk about your vulnerabilities your insecurities your body issues your your challenges at work and you really open up to this other male friend yeah maybe one or two guys and out of hundreds would raise their hand yeah and the and I was like and I would say you guys are part of a church group right where you meet once a month and you say like for an hour and you do these things yeah yes yeah and I say okay I go back to the ladies and I'm gonna say ladies imagine not being able to do this once a month only doing this once a month how would it make you feel they're like I feel more anxiety more stressed right and I go imagine these men who never do this yeah in the room they never share these things yeah I'm not saying all men but a lot of men don't feel like they have one guy friend they can open up and reveal to yeah and I feel like uh maybe there's another symptom maybe it's just like they just wall themselves up and don't share emotion and there's other internal factors or physical ailments that they're caused from that stress yeah but um I think it's yeah either way I think it's important for everyone to learn how to share these things and based on that study you did I think it's when we share right whatever it is yeah even if it's five ten minutes it decreases yeah the stress and the anxiety it seems like it goes down yeah and I feel like if we got to create better friendships or relationships or therapists or whatever that we can connect to and have that consistent communication stream yeah because otherwise when we trap when we hold on to it just bad things happen yeah yeah absolutely so what how does that work what is the what is the change that we need in raising boys and talking to boys this is a whole I mean this is a dynamic I mean I grew up in the 80s and 90s I was born in 83. and uh it was just not accepted to show emotion in elementary school middle school high school it wasn't acceptable especially as an athlete growing up in Ohio it just wasn't maybe in some you know part of Beverly Hills you know you know or some like Posh School in New York City I don't know maybe In Pockets there's some more acceptability of younger boys showing this type of emotion yeah I don't know what it's like in 2021 but I just know that you were laughed at you were made fun of if you cried if you showed emotion yeah I remember wanting to put my arm around like guy buddies of mine and them pushing me away and saying don't be gay you know or just don't be a little girl you'll be whatever the term is right that was Associated around something negative yeah yeah for them and so you learn in order to fit in to wall yourself or to or to not share yeah the things that people won't like about you and I'm not saying that's okay and we all have our response abilities yeah but as young boys growing up when we're conditioned that way it was hard to break that for me personally yeah and it took me a long time until I realized like wow this isn't working for me yeah I have more stress and anxiety it was really Decades of stress and anxiety and not be able to sleep at night that that was the the thing that the Catalyst that you talked about that was like enough is enough yeah maybe for you as a social anxiety but finally there was a teacher like okay I've got to show up differently to not stress all the time yeah and so eight plus years ago I finally started to reveal myself I was just like okay I'm I can't live like this anymore so everyone can know everything about all my shame because I'd rather that happen and be alone because I feel so much stress all the time yeah yeah and then it gave me a lot of Peace yeah and then I learned the process of healing and therapy work and workshops and all that stuff but and just healthier relationships in general yeah I don't know the solution I don't know a solution but I know I'm trying to be a better model for other men to witness that's beautiful I'm trying to bring other men on yeah and have these types of conversations so that younger men could see like okay here's someone that maybe I like what he does or what he's very he's an athlete and I can understand and relate to that yeah hopefully I can start to do this with my own life or maybe with my girlfriend or my guy friends yeah try to have some of these conversations but I just think it's challenging in general yeah it's challenging when you're younger and you're trying to have a few friends and they don't accept it yeah exactly that's tough yeah yeah because no kid wants to be alone no no they want to just hang out and go on the playground and just be with their buddies yeah so it's it's really challenging yeah I don't know do you have kids no I don't yeah I don't have I don't have a solution to that but I think uh as a you know I don't have kids either but if I was a parent I would just encourage showing emotion with my with my sons or daughters and be the example be vulnerability with them yeah allow myself to feel allow myself to cry if I'm watching a movie or something happens in my life when I'm feeling it yeah to not wall up but to allow myself yeah this is I mean we're going up another topic yeah we're going on another topic here for another conversation but as an academic as a neuroscientist and a study of a psychology and the brain and all these things you've come from a very academic approach to your research but a year ago you unfortunately lost your father and your brother yeah around the same time yeah and while you're writing the book and so you had to kind of shift some of the stuff right in the book because you were experiencing it on an emotional level what you were kind of researching yeah yeah can you share more the biggest lessons you learned from these types of losses for yourself and how you emotionally had to navigate it when maybe you didn't have the answers yeah and what did you learn from those that experience yeah so it really was uh the week that I was about to dive in and start writing the real chapters of this book good anxiety and um and that was when uh my younger brother passed away completely unexpected younger brother my younger brother um just three months after our father had passed away so so we were just healing still wrong from losing my father our father and then um he he had a unexpected heart attack really and um so first just that pain and and grief that I was experiencing is not the same as anxiety it shares some of those negative emotions this was just grief sadness grief sadness it was it was so angerful um like how how could this happen it it feels like a different reality um everything looked the same but it just felt so interesting different and um and and it it forced me to explore these feelings that I'd have had inklings of in the past but never to to this extent and kind of in this wave of first my Dad and then my brother and um I slowly came back from it and I used some of the tools that I talk about in the book that were already in place for me morning meditation so I do morning tea meditation team meditation team meditation uh which I describe in the book which is a meditation over brewing and drinking tea for me that was that was the Magic Bullet for meditation because um there's a sequence for brewing tea you boil the water you put it in the tea leaves you let it seep and then you pour it out and then you drink it and and that kind of sequence kept my meditation going so I always had something to do I was waiting I was waiting for the tea to brew I get to drink the tea now I get to be mindful about how does the tea feel how does it how hot is it how does it taste and um I really uh I really came to appreciate that there is this moment and yes everything on the outside of my meditation feels like it's different but this moment still feels like every other moment that I enjoyed my tea meditation so that that helped me help me come back to I am alive I'm so lucky to be alive and perspective yeah so lucky to have the family that's still with me yes and exercise my first book healthy brain happy life was all about the transformative effects of exercise on the brain so after I meditate I I do my workout in the morning and it was really one day I was doing my workout it's a video workout and the trainer said it was a hard workout and she said you know in working out with great pain comes great wisdom oh I love that and I was like oh my God I that that is what I need to hear not just for working out I've just gone through the worst pain in my whole life and I do have more wisdom that wisdom is based in the love that was left behind yes and not just left behind that sounds like it's leftovers the love that that is here yes you know that that's still here from from my brother and my father and that's when I started to think about this book good anxiety in a different way because anxiety is an everyday kind of pain and suffering that we all go through and what if that leads to wisdom what what does that look like and I needed as much wisdom and power that I needed and so the book became searching for the power and the wisdom in everyday anxiety it never would have been that if if I hadn't had this this event happen can you tell us why our thought around stress is more important than the stress itself yeah so I do try to avoid the language of like if you think about stress the wrong way it will kill you in part because I actually came to regret um that I had done a lot of teaching and speaking and writing about how stress itself can kill you so because I'm a health psychologist I was trained to view stress as the enemy and if you look at the science you can find evidence that stress increases your risk of everything people don't want from you know heart disease to depression all of it but uh almost 10 years ago I came across this study that made me really rethink stress and it was a study that um tracked about 30 000 adults for almost a decade in the U.S and at the beginning of the study they asked people first how stressful is your life and then also do you believe that your stress is harmful do you believe that stress is bad for your health and so they follow them to find out like is it true that stress kills and what they found is that for the subset of people who had a very stressful life and most strongly believed that their stress was harmful they had a 43 increased risk of dying from any cause over the next decade but the people who had the most stressful lives and did not strongly believe that stress was bad for them they were the most likely to be alive at the end of the decade and you know this study caught my attention because first of all it suggests that stress is not always the enemy at least it's not always a risk factor in the way that we think about it but then also it was making me think like how many of those deaths was I personally responsible for by going out there trying to convince people that stress was bad for their health and that you know the stress will kill your brain cells and eventually kill you um so that was kind of like a wake-up moment for me to start to want to investigate is it possible that how you think about stress can interact with stress to help you avoid some of the consequences we don't want and maybe even something good about stress worth embracing so that your mindset could help you harness some of your personal strengths help you harness the strength in your community um to get some positive outcomes we maybe don't usually associate with stress so I think I'm trying to from the idea that like stress isn't bad unless you believe it is which is sometimes how my work gets um summarized that's that's not the case I mean like you said I'm a scientist so you know I understand data stress is a is a paradox stress is not something that we often get to choose so it's not like even if you had a wish list and you could say I want this much stress and this type of stress it's not like we have that opportunity so what I'm really interested in is this idea that we now call it the stress mindset effect that there are ways of thinking about stress that can make your body's response to stress healthier that can change what happens in your brain in moments of stress that make you braver more resilient more willing to accept help from others and that these mindsets basically change the trajectory of how stress affects you that's the big idea that I hope to share with people when do we know that we are experiencing good stress versus bad stress yeah no such thing as good stress or bad stress I want to say that is again another I think a big misconception around stress because you know people will say things like oh good stress it's like the stress of getting a promotion or the stress of winning the lottery or the stress of doing something really exciting that you're good at you know that's good stress bad stress is all the stuff we don't want it's the pain it's the suffering it's the loss it's the uncertainty it's uh what we actually mean when we say we're stressed it's all of that so I you know forget good stress bad stress because it sets us up to think that if we're experiencing what all of us will instinctively say didn't want this like the bad stress um that's that's the real stress for most of us and again most of us don't get to choose how stressful our lives are how stressful the world is I mean this the time we're living in now is a perfect example of that and if you label things good stress bad stress it can lead to things like believing and let's say you're trying to homeschool your kids right now and it's enormously stressful and you're feeling like a bad parent and a bad teacher and you can't figure out how you're going to get through today let alone tomorrow you if you believe that's bad stress you're going to believe I'm not cut out to be a parent there's something wrong with my kids there's something wrong with you know my life and I just like let's no here's the here's the distinction that I like to make life can be difficult so that good or bad but stress is what arises in you when something that you care about is at stake so it's your thoughts it's your emotions it's your biology it's the stress hormones it's the adrenaline it's your desire to reach out to others it's sometimes a sense of outrage and anger it's all the stuff that emerges to help you meet a moment that matters and so what I like to focus on is in moments of stress some of those instincts are going to be healthy and helpful and others are not so rather than like stress being good or bad it's about learning more about your stress responses the repertoire that's available to you and how do you get good at stress so that you can tell in a moment of stress is this a moment that requires slowing down and going Within or is this a moment that requires being vulnerable and asking for help is this a moment that requires ignoring everything else and rising to the challenge because it's an emergency and I need that adrenaline to let to do it there's a lot of different ways to be good at stress and that's that's the good that I like to focus on yeah I'm a big believer that our life is an interpretation and the language we use dictates the way we think and feel and the more we say I'm stressed I'm overwhelmed any word that we use after I am we start to manifest more in the mind and the body and they connect and we create that I'm sick I'm not feeling well the more we say these things now we should be aware of these things and not uh just act like it's not there but I think when we use language and almost eliminating the word stress or overwhelm and reframing it can be a powerful thing as well what is your thoughts on how we use words around our our stress anxiety loneliness depression how how should we be using words language during that time there are a lot of examples that I can go into but I want to start like from an overview this is where that improv idea of yes and can be really helpful because and I know you've talked with other guests about this too sometimes there's a tendency to want to be so positive that we ignore reality and uh you know one of the things is uh one of the reasons that I'm drawn to the research that I do and the topics that I talk about is because it is not in my nature to be positive right so anytime you're a negative person uh pessimistic anxious overwhelmed existential dread terrified by life from birth the world is against you yeah and like I not because not because uh necessarily life experiences that have shaped that world view I mean I believe a lot in genetics also so I think that's my temperament so I'm drawn a lot to these ideas of um like choosing positive emotions reframing things because it's the antidote to my my habits that can become destructive so I think like part of this is that's another way like you could you could introduce me to somebody who needs to seriously come to terms with the reality of suffering and I'd push them in the opposite direction and you know oh no I'm never stressed oh everything happens for a reason I want to be like I would want to ground them in the opposite that is also true so but let's get back to the idea because there is some truth to um positive language and mindset a really simple example we know that the physiology of anxiety and excitement are really similar in your body and in your brain and if you were to take someone who's feeling really anxious measure their heart rate look at the ratio of stress hormones that are coursing through their bloodstream and you look at someone who's really excited they're almost identical one of my favorite studies was actually they had people jumping out of airplanes and some people were terrified and some people were like this is what I live for physiology looked exactly the same right the only difference is the story that they were telling themselves about this experience you know whether they felt capable of it and so there's research suggesting that in moments of anxiety even if truly you're anxious you're not excited in that moment yourself all right well my heart is pounding this means my heart is in it my heart is giving me energy to meet this moment and you try saying to yourself like I'm here for this or whatever your version of uh if saying I'm excited feels like too far just I like to say my heart is in it which is a step from anxiety towards excitement yeah it's not about lying to yourself or faking it to you make it it's about saying okay my body is getting ready for this I can feel my body in this moment so let's roll you know to subtly shift their physiology in a way that actually is a little bit healthier than like a fight-or-flight response yeah so you know more in their favor is against them yeah it's yeah you get more energy less inflammation in your body you're starting to move towards a stress state that really is just helping you have energy and courage and enjoy the moment and it also increases positive emotions like like confidence and enthusiasm it makes you better able to connect with other people too I mean their studies that do a similar kind of mindset reset for people who are about to enter a stressful conversation and like you know one of my favorite studies I found that people made more eye contact and they were more likely to mimic the other person's body language in this really natural way that helps build rapport just by reframing their um anxiety as energy that they could harness as a sign that they care so that's one example and that's you know that's a far cry from something like saying this is good for me therefore it is there's something you know these resets are pretty specific because they're grounded in biological reality I'll give you one other example one of the biological things that often happens when we're stressed is changes in our brain and in in the hormones in our body that make us lonely and you can start to feel really alone and what most people don't recognize is that is your just like when your heart is pounding it's your body trying to give you energy to act when you feel lonely that's your brain and your body trying to get you to connect it is making you hungry for support for connection for allies for teamwork and cooperation and so it produces like a hunger for social contact and community and too often people feel that loneliness and what they think is it's because I'm alone it's because no one understands it's because I'm the only one and they mistake what the signal is and they tell themselves a story that actually makes them further withdraw so that's another type of like stress signal that when you understand what's happening in your biology you can embrace it and say this is a sign to reach out wow so when we feel lonely we shouldn't continue being lonely we should actually reach out and create connection and not say no one's going to understand my pain right now so I'm gonna stay in my bed for two weeks and watch Netflix alone and get more depressed that's not the solution yeah often the you know it's interesting I mean this is sort of speaking more broadly a psychologist I often find that the beliefs that people tell themselves that are most painful are almost always it's just telling you what you care about like if you when you're telling yourself a story about being alone and lonely what you're what you're actually revealing is like you know people care about you and you need to reach out like you need your people you need your community no one's really thought I never really thought about that way and saying like if I feel lonely it means people care about me and I need to reach out because they want to get connected too your your body and brain they aren't stupid if nobody cared about you you wouldn't actually experience a desire for community and contact the brain is very interesting it's like you know it's funny with depression often one of the the most Insidious things about it is depression will actually start to lie to you and it will start to tell you there's nothing you can do and there's nobody who cares and you actually have a very suppressed stress response and I don't mean you're not suffering but stress is you know it's a physiological thing and it often involves hormones and energy and brain activity that is trying to push you in the direction of meeting life and when you're depressed um you actually stop feeling like there's anything that you can do to meet this moment or that there are other people who could help you and support you and like that's that's what's so Insidious and ugly about depression is it's a lie if you're not in that state you can really start to read a lot of these signals that we experience as difficult emotions or annoying physiological symptoms of stress as actually pointing you to the strengths that you have and uh and how you can respond and what you need in this moment what's the reason for depression for human beings why do we why does it happen to so many people when it doesn't feel like there's a good purpose for it yeah what is that reason there are a lot of theories about this so I won't say that I I know any of them to be better than other theories but I do I do subscribe to the idea that you wouldn't see something in humanity that has no purpose so a lot of the things that that we experience as not like not something we would choose for ourselves things like grief anxiety depression anger they serve a function so one of the thoughts is that depression in its sort of initial form is meant to help you conserve energy and and withdrawal from from reactivity and and and giving away of your energy and attention so that you can kind of pull back slow down pause and process what's happening in your life and that's that's you know psychologist sometimes call that like reactive depression it's normal it's typical when things in your life are difficult and um you feel completely overwhelmed completely stressed people don't understand you and you're just like okay I need to take a break to actually reflect on what's happening in my life almost in the way that if you were you know if you were running an ultra marathon you get tired and your body work and brain work very hard to convince you to slow down and take a break because it's in your best interest now so that's one Theory um another theory which I find very plausible is that depression is the equivalent of what you see in animals called the defeat response and this is if you are an animal in the wild and you experience so much um rejection from your community your family your group so you've been ostracized um you have very little access to resources on your own you can't like find a way to survive on your own you will see these changes happen in the brain and body that they're called the defeat response but it's this biological Cascade that basically convinces animals to crawl away and die to give up on life and so like if you if you stress out um rap Enough by say putting them in a cage with a bunch of rats that bully that rat incessantly and the rat can do nothing to escape and you're not giving it resources and it's got no purpose in life you will see changes in the that rat's brain and biology but then if you throw the rat in a bucket of water it doesn't even try to swim it just speeds up and drowns so I think that a lot of what we experience as depression um and why depression is an epidemic in so many cultures right now so many societies is that a lot of people are experiencing kind of the equivalent of being in a cage and being bullied and not being clear about what can I do to improve my circumstances um who cares about me who can I how can I contribute to the world yeah and I'm not saying it's necessarily true I mean you can feel that way even when something is possible right that that um it's part of how like and sometimes it actually is true like sometimes you really are in circumstances that can trigger defeat response I think that's another reason why depression might exist which case it's doing nothing for you and that's I mean it's worth knowing that depression can make your brain turn on you because the depression is not thinking about your well-being no that's crazy what do you think are the three or four things that can help us get out of a depressed state of being whether it's been for weeks months years or moments yeah well here I will go to both of the Sun the Sonic experience one of my big interests in life is helping people who find themselves in circumstances they would not have chosen for themselves and grief is a big one yeah or trauma so what the science says and what I have seen in people's lives in my own life is if you're on a do-it-yourself path so first of all let me say obviously you use whatever resources are available to you therapeutically and medically now that's not my role so I don't write prescriptions I don't do therapy um so I I'm not out there in the world sharing that with people but obviously everything from antidepressants to you know new treatments like deep brain stimulation and and a magnetic stimulation of the brain uh therapy group therapy one with all of that stuff obviously use that and and and I believe in the power of sort of all of the evidence-based treatments okay but I I don't know how to do it so I'm not out there sharing it so if you're on a do-it-yourself supportive pathway in addition to or instead of that other stuff uh exercise number one and I know how that sounds to somebody who's depressed I know because I've actually been in the state where where it was so hard to move I I would have punched someone who told me to exercise if I had the strength to punch someone who told me an exercise so I understand what it can be like to be in a physical state of depression or grief where every cell in your motor system is saying don't move making it impossible to even get to to put one foot in front of the other that said there is nothing else you can do that more dramatically and profoundly changes your brain chemistry immediately and in the long term to relieve depression whether we are talking about the brain chemistry that kicks in the adrenaline and the dopamine that just gives you a little bit of energy even if you're depressed that tends to kick in immediately to over time as your brain learns how to benefit from exercise you will start to get an exercise high that you know gives you high levels of endocannabinoids and dopamine and endorphins that that just transform your outlook on like the day that you exercise and then six weeks eight weeks months later you see changes in the structure of the brain that can only be compared to what you see from the most Cutting Edge neurological treatments for depression things like deep brain stimulation so yeah the exercise actually changes your reward system the structure and function of your reward system in ways that can help it recover from depression or addiction which can absolutely wreak havoc in the brain's ability to experience joy and anticipate pleasure and stay motivated depression grief and addiction all it's like they all have a very similar effect on the brain's ability to experience positive motivation and take joy in in everyday life and exercise is as far as I can tell because I looked for it in the research as far as I can tell it's the only thing that you can choose to do that has that kind of impact on your brain in the long term wow that's number one I could keep going but you want someone I want to give me a couple others okay number two this is gonna sound super cheesy but I believe this is find a way to be of service to others I mean the research really supports this as well but if you think about you know we talked about depression as being possibly for some people it's like a defeat response where you've had experiences in life that have misled you into believing that you don't have value or that you aren't cared about or there's nothing you can do to make a difference in your life or in the world and the fastest way to get contradictory evidence is to volunteer to help someone life when I was struggling where I re-engaged with not not just like donating money when I can but to show up to a place and help people um first was when I was in graduate school and was working in a food kitchen and preparing food and serving food and then later on I'm starting to work as an adoptions counselor for animal rescue organizations where I would actually go and adopt out animals who otherwise might be homeless or even euthanized when you do that the thing that's so great about about helping others are volunteering is people see you differently in that role there already was in you that good like whatever good is in you often when you're in a situation of being able to help others it just gets reflected back to you and the same thing is true for me I always say like my students like me so much more than like my family members there's something about a role where you're trying to help others where they see you differently they appreciate you more it's such a gift if you have a voice in your head that says you have nothing to offer nobody cares about you there's no good in the world because there's you get this sort of reciprocity where you tap into your desire to do good you see first of all that you aren't the only one suffering that's another great thing about helping others is it makes visible what might other people are struggling um with food scarcity how many other people are struggling with addiction whatever whatever capacity you're able to volunteer or serve in you start to realize you aren't alone even if that struggle is different than your own you see the common Humanity of it and again that people see the good in you so that I'm sure that's sounds cheesy but I'm gonna I'm gonna stand stand in the truth of that and and not only that um you know I mentioned this in my TED talk so of course you can always find studies showing that stressful life circumstances are bad for your health so if you lose your job if you get divorced um If you experience trauma could that increase your risk of physical health problems diseases new mental health challenges yes but there are these studies showing that if you are someone who regularly volunteers or you have a caregiving role that is not in and of itself a major source of stress I mean there are caregiving roles that are enormously stressful but if you're able to to give care in a way that is not that extreme that those events don't take the same toll on your physical or mental health you know like there are studies showing that that literally you can you know get fired or get divorced and you would expect it to cause all sorts of problems for your health and your mental health and that Trend or that effect disappeared of people who are regularly giving back to their communities or providing care to others so there's lots of great research it's powerful and then the third thing I will say is we and I were talking about this before we went live uh is Rescue an animal because one of the only things that can really help again Beyond like get get on the right antidepressant medication if that's for you but one choose in any given moment that is incredibly helpful for depression or grief or trauma is to have a relationship with an animal who depends on you and who you can have that success experience of providing the care that they need and actually like in many of my books I've written about um research studies done with with groups of people who are healed through their relationships or providing care to animals you know people who experience enormous childhood trauma and came to view themselves as essentially like broken or unlovable rejected and then to then go out and adopt or train an animal who is going to be euthanized because it was violent or it was rejected or it was abandoned and that you you know in providing that care and you see the enormous Beauty and wonder and that animal and they see it in you um wow that's your three tips you know it's interesting would you have a fourth one so I can tell you what my own research has looked at in the past decade is meditation every word you say is a blueprint that your mind body inside here working to make your reality so we we make our thoughts and our thoughts make us then we go out into the world and we justify our thoughts every day but we our words are a blueprint and when you know that you think well I better pay attention to that blueprint I better not say this kid is killing me my job is making me want to die I'm so stressed out by what the queue in Hughes Market well go to Zimbabwe where there is no Hughes market and there is no queue and there's no money to buy food and then you can say you're stressed because your problem the Q and arrow on and the bill is someone else's fantasy dream come true you this freeway is killing you you have a car yeah look at the people on four buses I used to take my daughter to school when I'm in one day thinking that oh my God this commute is hell and I saw someone at a bus and thought how lucky I'm in my car I've got the heating I've got a cup of tea I've got an hour to listen to something I can talk to my kid I keep saying I want an hour to myself well here it is and I learned to stop doing that but when you said how are you a nightmare it is torture what the traffic yeah the traffic the queue people keep ringing me the phone ringing it's torture well maybe if it didn't ring that might be worse some of my clients or models will say my life is hell because people look at me it's like really well one day they won't and then you won't miss it if I get on a plane a guy's hit on me it's a nightmare we'll put on a baseball hat and glasses then they'll leave you alone but that's not a nightmare it's just mildly inconvenient it's not hell right it's not killing you but we use these incredible words this is torture this is killing me this isn't my this is a disaster what is well I went to the bathroom and I forgot to pause my movie oh disaster but when you use those words because your mind can't differentiates to feel like it really is a disaster on the flip side of this the beautiful part if we when we understand and appreciate that our thoughts and different things yeah we can create the life of our dreams as well we can start to manifest our thoughts by by visualizing by telling ourselves what we want who we want to become yeah we're taking those actions toward it we can manifest our dreams you really can you can stop being ill you can change the shape of your body you can change your digestion you can have physical things you can change the way you interact with your kids the way they say here's a good example my kid is a nightmare change that to my child is age-appropriate um that's this bill doesn't go oh my God that's a disaster but a good Builder goes a challenge when you said talking to girls is terrifying you just change that it's challenging but hey there's hundreds of girls out there there's a numbers game one will say yes and even if they say no the only risk in life is not to take the risk that's the risk if you don't say when you take the risk and it goes wrong you learn something it gives you feedback yeah we show up differently the next time my girlfriend's a doctor of physical therapy and when she works on people she would agree with everything you're saying because people's bodies are so tight yeah because of something they tore or something sore but it's because they're holding onto something emotionally and she says once they start to talk their bodies relaxed yeah pain goes away yeah I know that pain where they can't lift their shoulder they can't turn their neck once they let it out their feelings yeah about their relationship or their insecurities or whatever it may be yeah that's when they have a pain-free because the body keeps School the body holds on to pain and stress and tension and grief and we carry around all this stuff and yet we really don't have to if just more people knew even to say I'm enough every day yeah and to say another of my favorite things to go is I'm choosing this and I'm choosing to feel great I'm choosing to work on my website organ I'm choosing to go to the gym I don't love it but I love having a six-pack I'm choosing to say no to Krispy Kreme donuts and yes to Apples I love Krispy Kremes do you I could eat 12 of them right now oh so good but I choose yeah and if you say I'm choosing to do this and choosing to feel great about it your mind has a very clear image the way you feel about everything is down to two things the pictures you make in your head and the words you say Joseph there's nothing else so if you choose to run going I'm running so I'm raising money for charity so I'm going to complete this run even though my feet hurt my knee hurts because I'm going to raise money but you could run going oh I hate this it's so I could be at home watching Netflix I haven't eaten and now my knee hurts and then you'll have to stop so when you keep saying I'm choosing it because yeah so if you're an Olympic Athlete you would choose to get up at 4am and train if you are a diabetic you choose to put a needle in your arm if you wear lenses you choose to jab your finger in your eye but you don't go oh I hate it I don't I can't accept it and I can't change it and when you say I'm choosing to study to work on to go and talk to this girl I really like or to put good food in my body and I'm choosing to feel great about that too there is there is no reason when you go I want donuts and I can't have them I've got to eat this freaking rabbit food what your mind does is it increases the desire for donuts because you said I want donuts but I can't have them I want pizza I'm eating kale I can't have these but I choose to use I can eat pizza every day when I'm 95 I'm Gonna Knock myself out with pizza but right now I actually want to look really good in my clothes maybe out of them too so I'll save the pizza when I'm 80 because that door was probably shut then anyway then you can have loads of pizza every day but you have to reason with your mind and negotiate and your mind will always do what it thinks you want that's its job and if you could only tell your mind what you want using relevant up to the minute words you'll get exactly what you want what do you uh struggle with telling your mind is there anything that you um it took me a long time to tell my mind not to eat sugar I still look at it and go it looks so nice that's me but um I still look at Canby the other day I was really tired and I went into a shop to get a coffee and they had jars or jellies and I thought I could eat all of those all of it but I'm choosing not to and I just had the coffee so working out you know I were on a schedule sometimes just finding the time to go to the gym or do yoga making the time yeah that's probably the only two really eating healthy food all the time even on a plane even sometimes where there is no healthy food then you've got to wait and choosing to make myself excellent I don't want to but other than that nothing really because I'm I couldn't do what I do unless I was really good at dialogue my mind is my best friend it's my the best PA I've ever had and it does what I want because I give it clear instructions what do you say yourself on a daily basis is there like a process in the morning afternoon at night or what would it be like actually when I wake up the first thing I always say is I love my life I love my linen and I love my cup of tea I always wake up going I love my life and then when I make like I love this tea I love the coffee I love the shower gel in my shower because I I really believe that if you can make your mind get excited by little things then big things every day is like Christmas and I think when you wake up you should go oh what have I got today oh a world of stress I've got this this this this this so you should always wake up and go I love my life I'm alive in a free country I've got all this stuff to make tea and life is great so I do that the second thing I do is I tend to stay in bed and do all my emails because then I feel like I'm not working because I'm in bed propped up drinking my tea and I get all of that out of the way yes that's true relaxed more relaxed not stressed I try not to have to rush to go to ways but sometimes I do and um I mean I'm very lucky because I love what I do and I do I obviously you work really hard to go I've never worked a day in my life I don't know what that is I don't have to go where's my life is a weekend I will say oh the week and I go what's the weekend I can take time off yeah I mean I love my job because I get to make such a difference so I don't really have much to moan about maybe communicating with my daughter is sometimes a challenge because I'm so positive that she occasionally wants me to be super negative why is that well I guess because you have to be the opposite of your parents so I do all these positives she's an artist and she does lots of negative statements on her paintings on her T-shirts because that's the deal you've got to be the opposite of your parents but I understand that but she's great but really I don't have much to complain about you have a positive conversation with yourself pretty much 24 7. yeah what about a nightly uh routine Do you have a boss you say to yourself what do you see for me I really believe that first it's what you do and then it's who you are so first you're doing it and then it's who you are and it's so who you are that it wouldn't occur to you to have to make yourself do it see I would never sit on the couch okay my my case is lost I just know it it's all going to go wrong there's no cabs out there this is a horrible flight I now have a belief and it really gives me that there's no such thing as being bored if my flight is late I mean I just get on my laptop on my phone I mean it's I have 24 entertainment empty out my emails look at something the days of having to wait and being bought even waiting in the car my little phone is like everything books messages videos Esso I love that I don't really mind about missing staff and being late anymore in fact when I was last Landing here two weeks ago I was hoping to remember because I was so into this movie Sometimes hopefully it's delayed yeah it was delay when the pilots have we've got to go around oh that's so great that's exactly how long is left of this movie but I think it's important for people to understand that it isn't what you do it's a bit like people who say I've done yoga every day and now it's just my soul like Meghan Markle said that yoga is in my soul I don't do yoga yoga is part of my life it's like you don't say I walk my dog if you've had a dog for 20 just get up pick up the lead and it's it's who you are not what you do and so for me it really isn't what I do because it's so a part of me and I like it and so I'm quite lucky that I'm pretty happy and positive but I really do love my life and that's a good thing was there ever something in the last 10 years that questioned everything that you've done or that question your ability to say I love my life you know so I did get very sick like a year ago and I thought wow how could that happen you know I'm so happy and positive and eat well so I was a bit surprised when I got sick the same thing the thinking the belief I decided I'd focus on massive healing I kept telling my body that it was a cancer-fighting machine I was making all these NK killer cells and I did actually go home the next day I was on stage a week later and my doctor was like wow you become the poster girl for just going on with your life and now I look at one particular um YouTube I think that's so bizarre I had like major surgery just a week before that and you'd never know but um again it it's it's a belief I decided I do Wellness I said I was right I need to go home I want and I went and got into my own bed I watched um Ray Donovan I think this is it I'm doing Wellness here I'm not going to lie in that bed where they keep trying to give you pills and I didn't feel any pain at all because I just kept telling my body to heal itself and then later I thought maybe it's good I got that because I can help other people and I go look you know it life throws stuff at you but you get to choose how to deal with it yeah and even then I noticed that I was very positive because I you know I had actually got womb cancer on a stroke of block to get worm cancer I don't need a womb it's done its job I've had a great kid I talked to my womb and said thanks for giving me this great kid but now I've got to get rid of you because I've got to stay here and raise this great kid and I thought that's good I mean imagine if you get brain cancer or bone cancer I felt very lucky it was a disposable organ they'd done a great job I didn't need it and so I think once you you become like that it's just who you are so I never had oh my God I'm gonna die because I thought no I'm not going anywhere it is all perspective I mean I still you know people will say to me but I thought you were so healthy how could you get that as it turns out I have some that same G in the Angelina Jolie has but but then of course Bruce Lipton will tell you can turn off a gene you can you can mentally remove that Gene so even with adversity because it's quite good in a way because people think oh your life's just you're like Pollyanna just tripping along having a wonderful life that's not true I've still had adversity but your mind will always kick in when it's well trained you go this is a blip just just a blip just carry on and so you've got to train your mind like you train a horse you know I say your mind's like a Ferrari and if you've never driven a Ferrari it's going to go all over the place but if you have Ferrari driving lessons you're going to run that Ferrari the Ferrari should not be running you whether you meditate or you're under that you the two minute drill in football or you're a ballerina and you have that that perfect you know dance routine coming up or maneuver um you are actually disengaging some of the things that would get in the way of you releasing a performance you're not thinking the performance you're getting out of the way you're being you're just yeah and that has a different measurable electrical Flow State

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 98,487

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation

Id: JyZwiJ_L09A

Length: 108min 25sec (6505 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2022