The 10 Steps To UNLOCK THE POWER Of Your MIND Today! | Lewis Howes

and in an age of information ignorance is a choice they could have the reasons and purpose they could have the energy unlimited energy but they don't know where to start a journey of 1000 miles is made up of you know single steps but the key is to reward the harder steps not the easier ones and not the ones where you get the thing that you want our minds can be so powerful but we are often limited by our way of thinking that's why in this video i'm talking with the top brain experts in the world about how to unlock the power of your mind this will change your life does the mind have 100 power over what the body feels no but it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a significant control over it say i feel cold and ice right right i mean ice it's 30 degrees can i control my mind to say you know what this is actually a hot tub and you feel warm and you're feeling hot right now or is it too much physiological barriers to break through that uh to some extent you can so i think the question you're asking is a very important one it's actually the question which is 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 means 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 ten 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 and how do 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 to answer your question can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold so a couple things that are important first of all just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are 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 um just decide to write your name and your you can do that i'm gonna 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 they ten 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 you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think otherwise and a spontaneous thought will pop back into 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 wow 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 you someone like to love your life someone like you likes 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 enroute to our goals 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 dentally these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they're 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 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 they're 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 thinking 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 get 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 look for this let's keep it if i were to keep it in the business context every time you make write that email every time you let's see it's a person who's a craftsman or crafts woman every time you're working in the in the shop and doing that 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 exhausted this was done in a beautiful study actually where they control the visual environments and they have the subjects ex exert effort and they can control the visual environment so sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward is actually kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress and other times it was an exercise of 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 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 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 what i'm hearing 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 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 and if you think about do 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 um let's say is hunting or it needs food for its young it's gonna feel 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 gonna feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching foraging is called the 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 interesting 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 that 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 if we were 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 in exerting effort dopamine is about reward but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards and then we'll get to it in a little bit but serotonin is a different source of reward but it comes from more relaxed states and it resets the whole system and it's associated with things like sleep and gratitude and meditation and especially gratitude and then just i guess to round this out the cortisol system is more of like a longer term stress [Music] i now know i mean we've measured genetic changes hormonal changes neurotransmitter changes we've measured immune system responses by trading fear for gratitude we've measured gene expressions we now know that people can signal the gene to for to reduce cancer and tumors the signal the gene to grow new neurons we've measured this signal the gene for for stem cells to go to damaged tissues and repair them oxidative stress genes signal we've we've seen that in our in our students now here's the deal after all of those studies in the last six years you can't tell me you're too old to do this work can't tell me that we got people in their 80s doing miraculous things you can't tell me you're too sick to do this work the people that work the end of their life stage four and we turn that battleship around you can't tell me that you had two turbulent of a past to do this for people that were really rough paths that are now free you can't tell me uh you're not you've never meditated for where people have never meditated before the most profound mystical experience you can't tell me you're too overweight too underweight too out of shape too in shape you can't tell me that anymore because all colors all races everybody can do it that's the cool part about it and when you get a community of people together and you move them from one state of mind to another there's this moment and i can almost predict when it happens the second or third day where people just start hooking up and then when they start hooking up you know we start we're seeing now in our events i mean a lady that was blind from birth five percent vision by the end of the event was seen i mean how do you explain that we had three people in the last two events that were deaf that are hearing now wow people with crutches that were limited or walking without crutches and canes spinal cord injuries i mean parkinson's disease in a week like um that's got to be like it doesn't doesn't wake you up to what's possible and you're witnessing a tumor and a woman's thyroid that was there at the beginning of the event it's gone at the end of the event i mean like you you gotta scratch your head and just go wow reality isn't at all the way i think it is right and so there's this humility that comes like well i don't know anything but i'm willing to go down push the envelope a little bit more so we're only as good as our ability to execute this right but as we get better consistency of it too yeah consist i'm all about consistency and i'm i'll be the first guy to say do the blood test do the scan let's do the test to make sure that it's just not in your mind it's in your brain that's no so so now so now the evidence then supports it the the the testimonials support it and all of a sudden people now are beginning to wake up uh to what's possible and just like the four minute mile the formula mile was broken once it was broken we pierced the valley everything so we're just seeing now the same thing we've pierced the vowel and people are just just all in it's they're not 50 and they're all in and my goodness we're creating this kind of wake and momentum but not just for healing but for creating new jobs and new relationships new opportunities abundance everything whatever it is that they want people come people come to the work for all kinds of reasons sure and i don't really care but by the time they start doing the work all they really want to do is give because when you feel so amazing and feel so great about yourself that you no longer want anything the first thing you want to do is give i mean when we see that brain scan moving into coherence and those two hemispheres come together and all of a sudden we see that heart just start going boom boom very orderly and see the more energy going in the brain the brain goes into super coherence you can walk around and look at that person who's getting the brain scan and there are tears of joy rolling down her face she's feeling so whole that it's impossible to want how can you want when you're whole now you feel like you already need anything you you feel like you have it already that's the moment the magic happens so she's no longer creating from lack and duality and separation scarcity yeah scarcity she's feeling like it already happened that's that's a very profound signal in the field that's dropping a big stone in the water and it's producing some big waves and things are starting to manifest she's attracting she's synchronicity now she's drawing it to her so then so then if you're doing that to answer the original question is that then if you keep practicing that then you've got to get up and maintain that modified state of mind and body your entire day and it's just a practice and as you do that and you start seeing all the fun things happening it's not like oh i got to go create my life today you're like you're like i gotta go because i don't want the magic to stop so i just do it because i love the crazy magical wonderful things that happen that that i would just just never anticipate in my life and so people are catching on to it and they start coming for one reason you know they're they want money or they want to help but it's not about your money it's not about your health it's not about your new relationship it's not even about the mystical moment it's about who you become in the process because overcoming all those limitations to become somebody else nobody can take that away from you wow and do you feel like you've answered those questions for yourself who am i why am i here what am i doing yeah i think so i i think those are questions you still have an answer no i mean it's not that there's questions that i still haven't answered it's just that i'm i'm always changing my answers because i'm not i mean even my definition of surrender just from six months ago is not even close to the same definition that i have today what's the definition now well surrender i mean it's just greater degrees of letting go and trust everything well i just like like if i like when my world is going sideways and my staff is just freaking out i'm always like oh i'm just gonna let go i'm just i'm not gonna control anything they're like what the ship is thinking like yeah but i gotta go against the chemicals and i gotta trust because if you're gonna stress in that moment and have anxiety you're gonna create more of that oh you're going to make things worse so i just let go all the way all the way and and and you got to lay down the very thing you use your whole life to get what you want for something greater to occur and that's not that's not one bite that's not one leap it's a practice and so letting go a little bit more entrusting if you if you over surrender that's that's lazy and lethargic if you over intend that's trying and forcing so there's this razor's edge between intention and surrender right you got to be able to be able to take action right yeah right right right but you don't want to get in the way right so and that's just it's a lot of trial and error you know but you figure it out right wow yeah what do you feel like your mission is right now then wow so um for me right now i mean my passion is our these week-long events uh how many do you do a year we do about 10 uh about just a little less than once a month you know around the world and it's usually about a thousand people uh and now what we're doing is we're doing this whole another level uh we're doing two uh really cool things one is a challenge activity and what i want to do is uh we now know that our students can create a lot of brain and heart coherence but they can do it with their eyes closed in a room with a thousand people and soft music playing they feel safe but now let's get them in a situation where that would normally elicit fear or some emotion get him in the real world get him in the real world and get them up somewhere where they're feeling a little uncomfortable or they're being challenged through endurance and let's see them create brain heart coherence right on that spot like this is this is the moment this is this is your life like you got to be able to do this right now you can't say i can't it's too hard i can't do this i'll start tomorrow i don't want to that's not the moment that's what you do in your life let's put you there and instead of just white knuckling and pushing through let's get really conscious surrender let's get really present let's create that heart and brain coherence and let's work it and then make the move when you're in that state you know rhythm through that resistance create that kind of coherence and and and i was just at the heart math institute who we partner with and we were doc children the guy that created heart math he said it's all about rhythm through resistance it's about that ability to create that kind of internal order when there's chaos going on around you so what's the relevance of that a person who's going through a challenge activity that's a huge obstacle course and they have the belief that they have a spinal cord injury or they have ms or parkinson's disease and they never try anything in their life and we got them up there and there's people rooting for them and they're in that state and they're in that heart coherence and they go through that whole course and they've overcome they're going to walk back in their life and whatever challenges that they have they're going to be like there's nothing i've just reset the scale so the other thing is that people move past where they normally can go there's a liberation of energy and that's a valuable energy that just needs to be organized so they start organizing that energy then they're doing magic the other thing we're working on is um is non-local healing what we call the cage we have personal lay down with a health condition we get eight people around them we teach them about energetic coherence we talk to them about the science that it's not matter that emits a field it's the field that creates matter change the field you change matter we give them the science and the understanding and then we let them go and we have seen people all kinds of healings take place in 10 minutes like how do you explain that how do you explain a person laying there who isn't even being touched and their entire body is moving in all these different directions by with energy it's incredible so i want to develop that why i want to get so good at that louis that 50 of those people that are laying down get up healed we're going to walk into a city when we do a week-long event we're going to call the children's hospital we're going to say send those kids with cancer down we're going to we're going to we're going to change futures right and and and men you know you talk about opening your heart but if you you you think you open your heart when you get an opportunity to give and and you and these people have been working all week long when it comes time to heal they're not saying oh my back hurts they're not saying how long is this going to go am i doing it right transform someone's life yeah they left that they left those attitudes on monday yeah this is friday this is saturday they're not they're hooked they've been connecting to the field all week long they're not they're not in their analytical mind they're beyond their body they know how to get beyond their environment they don't need to be on time so when it comes time to execute they've been practicing all week or they've been they've been in camp they've been practicing so so you get a group of people doing that together and all of a sudden the energy we've measured the energy of the room and the energy of the room always goes up it just goes up and that's available energy to heal that's available energy to do the mystical so i just want to get consistent and i want to get really good at it and it and it's not about me not get out of yet well we were making great changes in like unbelievable changes in people's health but before i step out into the world and say let's go to the children's hospital in toronto and let's call up the oncologist there and say hey we'll never touch the kids right we'll just lay them down yeah it'll just be half an hour they'll just be laying on the ground and then we'll be done and develop a relationship i want to be good enough that when we do do it that we're going to execute an outcome yeah and and and that way we're beyond reproach it's no longer a bunch of spiritualists doing this there's a science behind it and we now know it right thousands of cases yeah we've got we've got tons of cases now exactly but i don't know the statistics we're going to start doing the statistics now and we're going to start tracking those changes so then i can say without a shadow of a doubt yeah we're at 30 percent on the last three events we have 30 remission not just like it goes away for a little bit but it goes away and stays away that's cool and some people go to the healing they get in the cage for their knee problems and they come out hearing better that just happened to a guy the other day he he had a bad knees and he was he went in to get his knees healed but he forgot that he's you know he didn't think about his hearing problem he got bit by a poisonous snake when he was like a three-year-old kid and always had hearing problems whereas hearing aids the whole bit comes out of the he said he never felt in that amount of love in his entire life and that's the common thing that people say the woman that got her vision back that's not what she talked about she didn't talk about the fact that she could see all she kept saying was i feel like a child again i feel like a baby again i feel fresh i feel like i'm newborn i feel clean she kept talking about how she felt then she said oh yeah and i can see faces now and there were these two big flower arrangements on the stage and she said i thought those were guards guarding dr joe the whole week she couldn't even see the flowers she just saw the you know the form and she goes i can see the flowers now but but the first thing was how they felt and he the same way he said i had never i was sobbing i never felt so much love in my life it wasn't like i was trying to feel it it just happened and he said i got up and all of a sudden i could hear dr joe talking without my hearing aids and i'm just kind of like you think my knees were a little better but my hearing's a lot better you know so you never know right you never know everyone's got to get in the cage [Music] life is the c between the b and the d life is the c between the b and the d and people listening thinking this guy speaks in tongues says he's like okay i'll give you a hint what's the b and d b is birth oh and d is down so what's life is the c choice wow like let that sink in life is a c between the b and the d and c is choice life is all about choices because we are you are sitting here right now the sum total of all the choices you've made that's true that's true and i'm saying like everyone you know who are you gonna who you're gonna date how are you gonna break it up yeah where are you gonna live isn't it crazy that you could be you know you could be making all the right choices your entire life and make one wrong choice and set you in a prison or make you go bankrupt or whatever or in the opposite right you make all the wrong choices and make one right choice to set you on a path of greatness because one step if you're going this way here to here and you take one step in another direction it completely changes your destination and your destiny so the good news is yeah you could make one choice that takes you off of tangent but one choice or the right about who you're going to spend time with what are you going to eat today you know whether you're going to move today if you're going to listen to this podcast if you're going to look at you're going to focus on crisis and and all the the terrible things in life are you going to focus on like wow how people are stepping up and how they're doing other things but the second thing i learned besides out of my sleep doubling down on skills and capabilities you know i always tell people don't downgrade your dreams to fit your current reality upgrade your mindset your motivation your methodology to really meet your your your destiny the things that you want most in life how important are skills so acquiring new skills at any level absolutely critical absolutely critical even coming back to the second gift i got from lack of sleep the second gift besides doubling down on all my skills was protecting my time okay so here's something when you have a finite amount of energy and you only slept two hours or three hours or four hours last night you don't over commit and i find one of the things that drains energy from people that makes them stressed out of their mind is they are saying yes to way too many things and when you lack sleep every single day and you're exhausted you only do the things that you're supposed to do meaning that you don't have the luxury of saying like right now there's nowhere else i'd rather be no one else i'd rather be with than right here with you and there's a power in that so whether i got three hours of sleep last night or got off a plane last night or i'm still doing this with focus with energy it's because i made the decision to do this and everything as you've heard everything is like heaven yes or heaven no right like if you don't feel completely like yes then you say no and here's the thing a lot of people feel they're burnt out because they're doing too much i don't think you're burnt out because most people are burnt out because you're doing too much i think you're doing too little of the things that make you feel alive you're doing too little of the things that really matter in your life and saying you're saying yes to things that don't matter exactly so the second gift i got out of years of not sleeping was you said no to everything yeah exactly and i only do the things that are important because one of the lessons i got from spending time with elderly because i lost my grandmother and i spent all the time in senior centers and nursing homes and training them and helping with them the gift i got back i always get a gift back from working with anybody is i heard stories and so much wisdom of generations that have gone through you know like real hardship right i mean our lives compared to theirs is you know now is it's there's no comparison but one of the things i do hear because i do believe genius leaves clues and when so when somebody asks me what's the definition of genius i don't think it's iq it's not this number that you test at eight years old and that's your number when you're 88 years old you know i demystify you know iq and everything else in this book that everybody can learn to be better in all these areas interpersonally you know with their focus with their memory everything one of the things that i that i've learned is that um with working with these seniors is that you know there's a lot of a regret at that place when you're at when you're taking your final breaths you know my definition of genius is pattern recognition that you could see patterns like you know someone who's you know a genius at greatness you see patterns and what you know everybody who sits across from you you see like they're doing certain similar things certain habits certain mindsets certain certain drives or they're eating a certain way there's a commonality with that so i believe genius leaves clues and geniuses can be built not born and that's a big part of part of my training but the other thing i learned from these these seniors is these regrets they come out and the biggest regret always is that somehow they lessened or limited their life because of other people's expectations because they were fearful of other people's opinions about them they didn't date that person or marry the person because of what society would think or they started a career because their parents wanted them and expected them to do that and and i'm here to remind everyone it's not a pleasant conversation but you know when we're thinking about our mortality and you know one of the things that was the impetus for this book was you know i was i had like a a near-death experience like in a car accident and it made me think about legacy and ask a new question like i was like wow i'm gonna i wanna get this book out because shame on me if somebody's struggling and suffering the way i was with distraction with memory loss with overload overwhelm not feeling good about themselves and i didn't help them so i feel like what gets me on stage even if i am an introvert and shy is that i'm focusing on on them right right and that's that's my focus but the regret people have when you're taking your final breaths at the end of our life none of other people's opinions and expectations will matter what will matter none of our fears will matter what will matter is how we lived how we laughed how we learned how he loved you know that that's really what's going to matter and one of my mentors dr stephen covey another great book seven habits of highly effective people one of the habits of the most highly affected people is begin with the end in mind you know and then the ultimate end is like when we're you know when we're passing because when you think about being in that box that coffin there's no room in there for possessions and i'm all for people having toys and everything else like that but there's not you can't take that with you and in that coffin there's no room for regret you know one of the things i learned from jim carrey and i'm dropping a number of names and the reason why is because when you see their movies you see you know sonic hedgehog or you watch another will smooth it reminds you of the lessons it triggers so that's how human memory works i was spending the day with him and he was like you know jim i want to get really smart before filming dumb and dumber i'm like that's that's that's ironic but that's really you know play dumb you have to be really smart to do that right and so i spent the day with him at his home and we take a brain break it was a long time ago yeah it was when we were at his home we were taking a brain break and we make all these brain foods during lunch and i wanted to know motivation again i want to get into this model about motivation because i'm always curious what drives people and i found out i was like why do you do what you do and he was like jim he was like i act like a complete fool on camera so extreme because i want to give people watching permission to be themselves he's like my religion is to free people from the concern of others because that's what limits us and isn't that interesting how adults what keeps us limited are sometimes the expectation it puts us in a box right we don't want to look bad we don't want to make a mistake and yet children are really they have this limitless mentality right where they can do anything you don't look at a child you know for people who have children they're learning to walk or talk how many times do they fall thousands yeah exactly and never after the 500th time they fall do they say okay sometimes for me yeah exactly i'm not going to walk that's not right but as adults they take a spanish lesson once and we still exactly they take a salsa lesson yeah and they're like okay this is not for me too much embarrassment and i always encourage people to at least you i'm telling you we have one life to be able to figure this out so you try new things the brain thrives on novelty right to build your brain cells two things just like your body novelty and nutrition and obviously rest and sleep novelty you give it stimulus you work it out and then you give it nutrition to feed that muscle same thing with your mental muscles to create neuroplasticity right you all you need to give is novelty you learn something new every single day and then you feed it the right nutrition so it could build but i would recommend everybody try something at least three times if you feel called to it i challenge everyone watching this and even post it on social media tag us both because i'll repost our favorite try things three times number one to get over the fear of it yes right number two like you know karaoke or you know be doing stand-up or something just to get over the fear of it number two just to get a little competent at it get get good at it and then try it a third time to see if you like it or not because we don't really find our passions like we have to put ourselves out there right and give ourselves stimulus just like with kids you know we have a whole we have a bonus chapter on how to be limited raise limitless children but part of it is giving them enough opportunity by giving them a stimulus to see what they get drawn to and what they want to be able to develop but my other thing with with sleep is i just got obsessed about you know like how do i honor my time and how do i say no so i can say yes to the great things right good degrade i'm going to recommend a lot of books right because we have a book a week club because we teach you know this three the speed reading program one book a week will change your life 52 books a year leaders leaders or readers but yeah good to great say no to good so you could say yes to great and again i really feel like say yes to great by saying no to a lot of things exactly because here's the thing especially for self-care a lot of people think that self-care is limited to bodywork and meditation part of self-care and self-love is when you say no and when you say yes to somebody or something make sure you're not saying no to yourself i really want this to sink in for people that part of self-care is when you say yes to somebody or something that you're not saying no to yourself right right part of self-care is putting boundaries and borders on your time borders and boundaries on your heart and your emotions and everything because that it's so important and part of self-care is also self-love you talk about this so much right when you and i have had conversations about you know about your previous books and everything it's just you know how can we fall in love with that person in the mirror who's been through so much but is still standing right because i feel like no external source of love is going to match what your soul needs from yourself yeah right yeah i this is i mean i've wanted to stop you nonstop for 20 minutes but it's also good i wanted to go back to uh the choices we make you know you we talk about choices you talk about habits mindset habits physical habits in here with food the way you think all these different things i really believe that habits allow us to make better choices automatically as opposed to should i make this choice today yes or no should i make that choice you know every day we have the opportunity to make different decisions and habits keep us on the right path to making better decisions and choices every day the mindset and you're you know you've got mindset motivation and methods which is your your whole limitless mindset process the mindset will keep you on the right path the skills for whatever reason skills i think is one of the most important things more than habits in a sense because when you acquire new skills you become bulletproof limitless to any economic downturn to enemy breakup in a relationship to any career change you become limitless when you have a tool belt of skills at your disposal and it takes courage to create new skills and it takes learning how to learn to get a lot of skills because it takes time to master a skill if you don't know how to learn the right way and i've learned all the wrong ways over the years and found out for me that learning the right way is throwing myself in immersion of it yeah within three months going all in physically tangibly feeling it emotionally connected to it getting messy for me that's what works for me and when you have the skill you have it for life yeah you know it's like you learn how to ride a bike it might take you a few weeks it might take you a month of falling a bunch of times but i haven't been on a bike in years but i know i can go back on it maybe i'm not as fast as i used to be or maybe i don't have as much control or maneuverability but i'm 89 of the way there yeah same thing with salsa dancing i learned that it took me three and a half months of misery of embarrassment of fear anxiety of stepping on girls toes constantly but now i can go anywhere in the world not speak the language of the community but i can speak the language of salsa and i have it and i have that skill set where i feel motivated to put myself out there so yeah same thing with public speaking you know when you mastered it it's like now you can go into a room and even if you're not prepared for the speech yeah you know you can do a pretty good job yeah someone said hey jim come up here and teach us something for 15 minutes and you've got this skill set yeah and i think that gives us confidence that gives us self belief with the more skills we have we've all heard the sayings you know how do you you know journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step or how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time or you know they're all these sayings and and it goes back to the bible and earlier right i mean this is not new these are not new sayings but they're showing up in different forms what's lost in those short descriptions however is that every step is not equivalent if it were just that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step everyone would pursue their goals everyone would push back against adversity everyone i mean you can read the inspirational stories as many times as one needs and i do think inspirational stories are very high value in fact i think they're vicarious dopamine i think they give us the sense that we could which then orient hope which then orients us to the world they start yeah it's part maybe it's possible for me that's right so let's say um let's take the example of somebody who's um because for finnish that's that story of it's not about just taking a single step and one step at a time is it because there's adversities every 10 steps you go and so it's harder and harder well it's just very non-linear you know it's it's some days go you know i know this from my scientific career it's you know some days it's easy some day is hard it's all over the place right so i think the thing to remember is that dopamine is this incredibly powerful molecule that allows us to buffer the effort process it allows us to be an effort longer and it allows us to actually eventually enjoy the process of effort and not think about the reward but just say oh i'm enjoying the process right well you just described the first step the first step in learning to attach dopamine to the effort process which is the key operation in order to succeed is to be very careful about how much you focus on the end goal keeping the goal in mind is important for like a proper orientation you have to know the ultimate destination but if at any point we were to evaluate our progress relative to that end goal or if we don't know what the end goal is there's a huge gap there and it can feel overwhelming and depressing and i'm not good enough that's why i should just give up what am i doing this for that's right those thoughts will affect us and they're very realistic right i mean as carol will say and other people said in the psychology field you know positive self-talk oftentimes unless you do it correctly you're badly wrong you know lying to yourself won't work saying saying i'm i'm a winner i'm a winner i'm a winner when you haven't lost or you haven't won yet is is great but that's not the most effective use of these systems well you're also being out of integrity with yourself you're you're telling yourself a lie right you're like and then you're losing your ability to have confidence because you just lined yourself right and if it's really extreme there's a name for it it's called delusional right right and people will start to point that out and then it becomes harder to recruit people into your your goals so i think the key thing is to attach that sense of reward to the effort process it's saying look i am oriented in the right direction and rewarding the things you're not doing i'm not back on my heels i'm not just staying you know i'm bad yeah a good example this came to me recently i have a good friend he did nine years in the seal teams his name is pat dawson and and we were talking about you know the admiral mcraven thing you know get up and make your bed and you know and they they really do that and i think the way it was described was um you know so at the end of the day even if everything doesn't go well your bed is still made for me that's not that big of a reward frankly right but i and so i said that and i i love it though i make my bed oh i definitely made my bed in the morning but i mean going back and seeing that at the end of a hard day it's not enough i felt like there was something else there so i asked him he said well it's very interesting because part of it is about not just making your bed but it's the things you're not doing by making your bed you're not lying in bed and ruminating you're not back on your heels on your phone that's right yeah when so when you look at and you have spent a lot of time with people in high performing communities mainly through some consulting work but what you find is that you know we can all either be back on our heels flat-footed or forward-centered and when you look at people who are in these high-performance communities they try and keep their center of mass forward almost through what seemed like trivial things like making your bed or making the cup of coffee but it's not just about what you're doing it's all the things you're not doing that can put you down the path of ruminating or put you down the path of unhealthy behavior so the key to this is if we want to be very concrete we should probably focus on actions and i'll use fitness as an example because it translates to everybody whereas you know people's circumstances differ let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine they hate running or they want to lose weight in a healthy way this kind of thing so we've all heard the example well you put your shoes by the door on day one day two you put them on day three you go out the door day four you walk around the block and then you know and then eventually like they're running marathons okay great but to sustain that behavior or even to make the behavior pleasurable and to give you energy the key is to subjectively reward those steps so it's not going to be let's say i go out and i run a mile and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks the key is as you're in the strain of that mile the hard part you want to tell yourself this is the good part this is the part that gives me energy and i'll be very surprised if people don't actually feel like they could continue further so it's a journey of a thousand miles starts with the single is made up of you know single steps but the key is to reward the harder steps not the easier ones and not the ones where you get the thing that you want don't reward yourself for putting your shoes on and taking a step outside you could if that was a huge barrier for you it was very hard it was very hard for you running the 10 miles that's right find the wall and push a little bit further through that wall and reward that process so this is why i think reps in the gym the final reps like reps to failure are usually not the best example first of all most people aren't doing reps to failure and it doesn't translate to young kids and stuff where they probably shouldn't be doing heavy reps to failure this kind of thing what you want however is if you're going to go there to think about these are the this is the hard part because that's when adrenaline norepinephrine are getting maxed out and that's when you have an opportunity to bring dopamine in and teach those neural pathways to slam that back down and i don't want to um highlight them too much because they are a very niche and specialized community but you look at people in special operations you look at the process like the whole evaluation process of who gets in and who doesn't it's really about putting people into stress and seeing who can not just make it through that stress but buffer that stress reward the process through teamwork reward the process of stress through some internal dialogue that has everything to do with not being back on your heels not being flat-footed but center of mass forward and i should also be clear i'm not talking about everybody being super aggro and always like you know work work work in fact if you're spending too much epinephrine if you're too much of an adrenaline junkie you will burn out eventually unless you can find ways to recover yourself or to buffer that with dopamine and the recovery process is especially important there's a second reward system so you've got the dopamine system and i guess to really put a box around it the subjective reward needs to be done at the hardest portion of a process the tough conversation with a significant other it's like when it's really tough and you want you just that's when you want to start telling yourself this is the this is the good part because i'm not speaking or this is the good part because i'm not reacting right i'm not reacting or this is the good part because i'm probably not doing it correctly but i'm on the right path right um they're upset they're not feeling your empathy you know this kind of thing or you're not really understanding what's going on you're getting frustrated but if you tell yourself this is this is the neural pathway getting ground in there like really dialed in so that then the next time this i'm going to breeze right past this that's really how the process works because dope remember no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear even if you get a billion dollars or you win a nobel prize or you win the presidency it's all internal these neurochemicals are all internal and while some of them are designed to be released in response to things very reflexively like um you know food sex sleep you know all these things will trigger these neuro chemicals we have this big forebrain which allows us to place subjective context on things how do you do it then how do you bring dopamine in your brain subjectively through daily conversation with yourself so um there's a process i'm going through right now where i'm trying to write a book and it's hard and it's hard and i was told that the harder it is the better i'm probably doing it i was like great and my editor's ready to kill me and because i'm slow and i and i know and i'm a very slow person i i drive people crazy i'm like glacially slow because science is slow and i like to get things right i want to rush it i like to get things right but i'm very proud of the fact that everything we've published i can stand behind it was the best we could do with the tools at the time and i just know that when i look back on a writing career or a scientific career i want to be able to say you know every journal we put it in was rock solid everything was rock solid we had fun doing it the relationship so i go slow yeah but as a consequence what i'm finding is there are a lot of interferences these days i'm i'm i think social media is great i teach neuroscience on social media because i think it's important to do public education distraction too but it's incredible and it's it's incredible how much time and energy it can take so what i've started doing now is i turn off my phone and i lock it in a safe and i experience extreme anxiety right it's so weird why is that is it because it gives you so much dopamine that when you're not having it well this is scary because i actually think um brief anecdote on the weekend i was driving there's a kid that i mentor and i picked up my phone and i was texting while i was driving and he said to me it was really embarrassing for me he said you know i wish you wouldn't text while you drive and i put it and i put it down and i realized this is crazy i know that i that my life in his life is far more important and the lives of the people around me are far more important than any text message which means i wasn't doing it rationally it's just pure reflex at this point so i would i don't think i pick up the phone because i'm i don't even know what i'm looking for there anymore it's just become reflexive so for me lately the longer i can keep that phone in a safe and write on a grant or my or this book what i tell myself is the agitation is good i'm it's at least i'm not doing that and then i find that as i start to write and i get into the process i start feeling good about it and i'll pause and say okay i have control i have ultimate control over my behavior i can put that thing away there might be a nuclear war out there and i'm just doing this anyway i have control over my thoughts my feelings and behavior so i tell myself that and then i find i have immense energy and all i want to do is write and i kind of tunnel into the process wow and i think that sometimes people need to write these things out for themselves so it's really concrete i think some people are so unskilled at subjective rewards that writing it out is really powerful so what would you write out for yourself as a subjective reward for this experience as long as i'm writing i'm on the right path as long as i'm not writing and looking at my phone i'm not on the right path because for me the the two or three things that are most important for my career are writing grants working on this book manuscript and writing scientific manuscripts i mean there are other things as well anything else that you're not doing is is holding you back from doing that that's right so you need to be focused center mass forward on doing those things that's right so i don't do any jumping around power poses things like that i will use tools to kind of ramp up my dope i mean there are certain songs that are really embedded in my emotionally my emotional thing that go back to you know when i was a you know while you know skateboarding punk rock teenager that will get me fired up and i think there's real utility that's pure dopamine that's just but it's not sustainable you have to subjectively keep yourself motivated i guess that's right and so and then if i finish a chapter i will stop for a moment and i'll just kind of smile and laugh at myself i'm big on like self-reflection with humor and just thinking this is crazy you know my brain is under my control there would be people out there that say there's no free will but i do not believe that i put my hands in a lot of brains you stimulate certain brain areas people do things you stimulate other brain areas people think things ultimately unless you have electrodes in your head and someone's stimulating them we are in control of our thoughts and behaviors we can't control all of them but my goal is to be as you know deliberate and non-reflexive as possible in life that's my goal from when i wake up in the morning until i go to sleep how do we get to that place little by little and by rewarding each thing if you get up and you use to make the bed exam make the bed you're you're not back on your heels you make a cup of coffee you sit down you script out something in a journal you exercise maybe you call a relative that you think might need to hear from you or that you'd like to talk to you do something in a deliberate way just being deliberate and learning to push away the things that are trying to make you reflexive is so important i think the same thing as reactive or what's reflective yeah so um there are two modes of brain operations so now this is um getting a little nitty-gritty but one is deliberate where we're in thinking duration path and outcome what should i do what you know how long should i do it and what's the outcome deliberate yeah intentional and it feels like work this is what people need to understand that deliberate thought deliberate action writing the book doing the work out you don't want to do whatever it is having the conversation it's supposed to feel hard hard supposed to feel hard but you should subjectively reward it so that you get better at doing that so it's supposed to feel hard because it's associated with this release of these neurochemicals that create this agitation the mental strain you feel when you're learning something is the trigger for neural plasticity for your brain to change it let's say that again the mental strain you feel while doing something is the what is the trigger for neuroplasticity which neuroplasticity allows you to expand your mind to do more things that's right so neuroplasticity is a process of taking something where there's duration path and outcome where i'm working hard i'm thinking hard maybe it's a hard conversation maybe it's a business plan maybe it's a scientific career and the goal of neuroplasticity is to make things reflexive so you don't have to think about them right for instance i just started taking spanish class one-on-one and it's extremely hard it makes me want to say why am i doing this this is going to take me years until i'm conversational who knows how long so i'm fluent you know if it's this hard as like this stage man is it ever going to get easier i have those moments every time i'm doing class i'm like this sucks right because i'm because i'm like i'm 37 can i learn this language it's so much easier when you're five now it's almost impossible i watched your video on this a couple days ago on social media and and the video you talked about this is yes it's harder when you're older to expand your neuroplasticity but it's going it's almost the what i'm hearing you say is like it's the only way to live is the older you get you need to constantly be expanding it otherwise you'll be going backwards that's right so you know when you want to learn something new like spanish or new physical skill your mind shifts over the forebrain comes on and says okay we're going to pay attention to things and now what am i doing and i get so tired i'm like and we get and we start doing evaluative stuff to other people to ourself and you can start using all sorts of examples like wait you know i was a professional athlete in that case or i want to be clear i was never a professional athlete but you were a professional athlete you've been successful in other regimes of life but it still feels like effort right yeah and so but that effort is because two things are happening one is adrenaline epinephrine is being released so it doesn't feel great it's not fun it's like and then in addition to that by bringing focus to something you're recruiting a neuromodulator called acetylcholine which is associated which is the molecule of focus now it's important it takes energy and effort it takes energy and effort you feel it in your body and in your brain and it tends to highlight acetylcholine will highlight the areas of your brain that are active during that learning phase when the teacher is talking or you're talking and making that effort it's paying attention how you're moving your mouth what it sounds like to you feedback cues and it's marking those brain areas for change and then later when you sleep or when you work out or when you're having a conversation with somebody that's actually when the brain changes occur so during the actual activity that's right it's when you're not doing the activity resting or recovering when it starts to expand or it starts to it's when the so neuroplasticity which is the brain's ability to change in response to experience and is the main way in which we go from deliberate action duration path outcome stuff to reflexive action and thought that process has two parts one is the trigger which is in adults is triggered by focus and attention and even a heightened state of agitation the more frustrated you feel the more you're actually triggering learning it's saying this is important this is important because the brain just wants to do whatever it wants to do it needs to cue itself to oh this must need to change and then the second part is deep relaxation meditation in particular a form of meditation called yoga nidra which we could talk about but forms of deep relaxation deep sleep like slow wave sleep that's when the connections between neurons called synapses actually get stronger that's when the the connections that you don't want get removed and that's also in certain cases where you get new neurons actually born in your brain to help these circuits speak spanish this is why in sports growing up i remember i would go to like basketball camps in the summer and i would always learn new footwork and i always just wanted to be like the fancy guy doing like whatever uh finger roll lay-ups or something as a kid but then we would go to these basketball camps and we'd just work on the fundamentals and the footwork and like all this different stuff and i remember being in the moment of being very frustrating and challenging i was like i don't get this and i would suck at it but then the next day i'd come back and i would all of a sudden like have it after a few times of doing it but i never learned how to do it in the moment it was always like okay i made it got it once but then i fumbled on it it was the next day or the next few days where it's like oh i can just shows up it shows it just shows up and that's because when the mind is able to relax it's then making the connections on how to do that thing yeah so in deep deep sleep and rest is when the connections actually get built up it's sort of like in with um resistance training right the gym is a little misleading resistant training because people get the you know the famous pump and so they get a they get a visual glimpse into what they might look like later but then of course it goes back down right um but so but actual hypertrophy the enlargement of the muscle fibers and the strengthening of the neural connectivity is later when you sleep so it's the same thing with neuroplasticity yeah how important is it for us to constantly be learning and challenging our mind the older we get well i believe it's very important for living a full life um and you know my hero in this uh two heroes actually is i would say um richard feynman the great physicist who had a very playful attitude about learning that's one thing that i really should illustrate if you are in frustration and strain a sense of play is great because in play you have focus you have intention and alertness and it keeps you light enough that there's that dopamine release is dopamine is released in play for a reason because kids and animals young animals and young children learn social interactions through play yeah a puppy bites another puppy and it the puppy barks out loud that's why they have those sharp puppy teeth to say that's too much of a bite then they play a little bit more it's their phone they're finding the boundaries they're finding the the limits to which they can use physical force for hurting another or just for playing they learn soft bite play in animals is an ancient form of sampling these neural pathways and as adults we tend to be more demanding of ourselves we don't tend to embrace as much play richard feynman is somebody who really incorporated a lot of play into his adult life he learned how to in addition to being a nobel prize winning physicist he also you know played bongo drums he would be learned how to sketch and paint late in his life he didn't float tanks he was kind of a wild man but he had a lot of fun and he was a lifetime learner so i think it's important because it's a great way to learn dopamine release right and it's a great way to um expand one's experience of life this is when we were when i was in poland with wim hof earlier this year i took a group of like 13 guys and we were all nervous to get into this ice dub together for 10 minutes like up to here and for the first two minutes it was not fun we were just like this sucks this is cold but then all of a sudden we were like let's have fun we're gonna be in here for eight more minutes we might as well try to enjoy it so we started chanting we started singing we started like just like in a rhythm together like smiling it was like it's more enjoyable it's still going to be challenging but you might as well try to have the most fun in the challenge than just suffer right yeah team and community not by coincidence is a powerful tool for buffering stress um again you know look at high performing teams like seal teams or other special operations units they the team is a big part of it for being functional in the actual job it must be impossible to do it alone if you're new navy seals yeah there are other divisions of special operations where actually it's more focused on solo missions yeah where and so there are people that are very good at that but teamwork is a great way to buffer the stress response yeah and so earlier you asked is there any way to make it not cold uh i guess the answer is no but there is a way to make the cold not painful right and so that's where dopamine intervenes the other thing that's important because we talked about neuroplasticity you trigger it with focus and energy you know and effort and strain is you know children can learn very easily their brain is hyperplastic and very quickly is the whole job of the young brain is to take things that it's taught and very quickly pass it over to reflex including right morals and beliefs automatically yeah and this is what's scary it's also you know the things that kids hear and they belie and they're exposed to those beliefs become reflexive now around age 25 or so the brain is still plastic and forever for the entire life but then you need more focus and you need what's called self-directed plasticity neuroplasticity self-directed meaning the only person that can change their brain for the better after about age 25 is the actual person you can't force neuroplasticity on somebody positive neuroplasticity so the other element that's really important to plasticity is this deep rest phase and it's associated with the release of the molecule neuromodular serotonin serotonin is a reward molecule just like dopamine except that it's released in the brain in response to the subjective experience that we have enough resources so when we eat a big meal or we enjoy even better when we enjoy a meal with friends or family and it just feels like one of those incredible evenings you know you're reset you feel it's that feeling of being reset it's as an anti-depressive effect when we are um when you hold you know if you hold your child or or a partner that you love or your dog if you love your dog there's this feeling of having enough and so whereas dopamine is really the molecule that makes us look at things outside the boundaries of our skin like to be in pursuit of things this really is the pursuit motivation molecule serotonin is really about feeling like we have enough in our immediate environment and it's so powerful because unless that dope that excuse me that serotonin box is checked off periodically we cannot lean back into the dopamine outward pursuit process for very long so we need serotonin absolutely to feel more what complete whole safe safe once you feel this is where people you know i think that the go-getters get it wrong no pun intended where getting after it and being hard driving is really important but you know we've all seen examples this i've seen a number of these in silicon valley friends that did very well in tech get to the point where they reach that finish line and then they don't have a whole lot or a whole lot of people to share that with and they end up very isolated and depressed and they go through this whole cycle of trying to find themselves and um you need to balance serotonin and dopamine maybe across the day maybe across the week you know i think in religious practices um all religions really there's a kind of sabbath there's a rest period you know for many many or i think all of them um that makes sense because there needs to be a renewal whether or not people have a religious practice or not there needs to be a renewal or a recovery a recovery to recover the immune system you can't drive the immune system all week all week all week you need to recover this is why i love sports analogies because there's uh a pre-season there's a season there's a postseason where you're really in high stress and emotion and then there's a postseason there's an off season right for a reason you can't be in season 10 years yeah you know in a row you've got to find time to relax and have a bye week it's like if you don't have a bye week you're probably injured eventually so it's just like trying to create that in your own life [Music] why is this stuff really taking off now in the last year year and a half because you've been doing this work for a couple decades now right yeah two decades yeah just about yeah almost two decades and you've been in tons of documentaries movies you've been in doing interviews for a long time but really it's taken off in last year and you said because now we have evidence of about a lot of things that you're working on the things that you've been believing for so many years that you knew worked for you and you saw transformation with yourself we're not going to go into your accident because that's in the last interview but now we have proof and evidence and science backing all this and how did that start to happen yeah it's a great dialogue because i think this is a time in history where it's not enough to know there's a time in history to know how and if you rewind the tape 10 years ago you know information was the thing that stimulated thought stimulated new ideas and and as we learn new things we make new connections in our brains so as we begin to add new stitches into that three-dimensional tapestry in our mind we're beginning to cause our mind to function in new ways but the key then is to apply it to personalize it to do something with it in in 10 years ago when i went got in front of an audience and talked about the application nobody wanted to step outside that philosophical theoretical intellectual realm right because doing something means you're going to have to change something about yourself yeah you're going to get uncomfortable right and um i think we're in an age of information and in an age of information ignorance is a choice and because of technology we have access to so much content and information creates awareness and awareness is consciousness and you can't have consciousness without energy there they work together so there's an energetic change i think that's taking place in the world right now where people are so informed that old models old paradigms are beginning to break down whether it's the medical model or the religious model the education model journalism the economy you know politics it's all beginning to come to the surface because something else has to come out and and i think that one of the things that uh people are realizing is that you don't have to be a buddhist monk to do this or a nun with 40 years of devotion you just got to understand the formula and 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 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 if 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 are 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 lack 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 that's the story they tell themselves yeah i'm not worth it because yeah she didn't say yes when i asked her on date right because he broke up with me because i got fired because my parents left me how did that 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 your brain is a record of the past it's an artifact of everything you've learned and experienced at this moment so most people wake up in the morning and they start thinking about their problems and those problems are memories that are tattooed in the brain that are associated with certain people and things at certain times and places so the more 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 are 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 the redundancy of doing that conditioning only requires 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 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 the 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 to a memory to 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 is 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 as their unconscious mind is believing it's living in that future reality in the present moment and they're signaling new genes and new ways ahead of the environment now to 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 the stronger the emotion you feel 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 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 and when that heart becomes incoherent you stop trusting yourself there's no energy that you get 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 statement small let me finish if i punch you with a face right now how do you maintain well of course of course i mean we all take blows in our lives yeah and and we all react emotionally but the question is how long are you going to read right so then if you can't mediate and regulate your emotional reactions and those emotions linger for days that's years for some people mood and then months 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 and 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 received 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 and wealthy and wealthy and with all you want and that thought is going to stop right at the brain stem and never make its way to the body because the body is not failing here 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 frequency the 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 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 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 community 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 they begin to want the future more than the emotions of the past so we've done enough measurements now lewis 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 different set of thoughts and those thoughts produce different chemicals for you to feel more of that and here comes uh nitric oxide from oxytocin and then all of a sudden your heart literally starts to swell it literally begins to open up and there's more energy going there and now you're coming from a different level of mind what's the process of them learning how to master a new skill when it's challenging when it's scary when it's uncomfortable when it's works i'm excited to learn spanish right now but i've tried to learn for 20 years yeah eight years of classes i you know i've traveled to different spanish-speaking countries it's just like man how do we learn how to learn something that we want but it's really challenging let's deconstruct this okay so this this is this is the key um so you mentioned two interesting words with confidence and confidence yes and in psychology there is a competence confidence loop that the more competent and skilled you get at something the more confident you get at it of course and because you're more confident you're more likely to do it and you get better at it and gives you more confidence right yes and so if i could play golf like tiger woods i would be playing a lot more i would get better i'd be more confident of it i remember um years ago i get a a call on a friday evening and i don't know the guy's voice i didn't know to see the number and i'll recognize so i pick it up and he was like you got you got to help me we have this mutual friend and this uh my speaker tomorrow in new york city cancelled because of an emergency and i i need i need a speaker please and i'm like well this is not usually how you know the night before exactly it's usually like a six month in advance process but the mutual friend was a very close friend and i was like um you know look i me maybe i could help you but what's the topic and he tells me what the topic is and i'm like i don't know anything about that topic why are you calling me he was like well he wrote a book i'm like so he was like well my friend says you're a speed reader and i'm like okay he's like well can you come a little early and i'll give you his book and then oh my gosh and i was like i was like this is going to completely crazy this is i have to do this but this is going to it's going to cost you but it's going to make a great story and what ended up happening was i show up at 10 o'clock i read his book and i give the keynote that afternoon and humbly it was the highest rated talk of the event wow and i don't take credit for that because i've never you know had training in public speaking but when you understand how people learn you could you know present it and so i read the book i remembered everything that i needed to say because i train a lot of ted speakers how to memorize their speech and i know how to be able to present in a way that that's interesting and and also sticks with people but i say that because that's what i mean about i don't have to you know just like will smith i know i don't have to get ready i i stay ready and that's the power of skill development and there's one skill to master it's our ability to learn it's called meta learning this book fundamentally was going to be called meta learning but people are like oh no they're not compilative as learning and you know the title right and but meta learning is learning how to learn and that's a meta skill and it helps you to learn salsa or spanish or anything else better and so let's deconstruct how to do that confidently the limit we'll start with the limitless model all right so this book used to be a book completely on skill development which was all methodology it was everything that i teach about how to read three times faster how to learn a language how to remember names how to do the things that how to get to inbox zero how to do the things that how to be focused concentrate critical think solve problems all the important things that really is our life right but then when i finished it you know i talked to friends like you and every and everybody else was like this is a really good self-help book but if somebody found it just on the street they still even they know what to do they still wouldn't do it like how come you want to learn spanish or something else and you put it off or it takes longer than you should because method is only one of the three parts and so this is the limitless model and i want everybody to think about a subject or some area of your life where you're feeling held back it could be your relationship it could be you're not making progress in your career it could be maybe in your physical performance or wellness think about one area where you're stuck in a box right now box is like a cage 3d box and 3d is three dimensions what keeps you in the box three forces and these are the three m's and i want everyone to draw a circle and in that circle we're going to draw a venn diagram you know what a venn diagram is three intercept circle circles and the first circle is your mindset three m's and i always alliterate everything because it helps you to be able to remember it better first one is your mindset now your mindset are your assumptions your attitudes about something now let's break that down for me functionally what your mindset is about this subject i want people to make this very personal think about something an area you're held back this is what you believe is possible is your mindset it is what you believe you are capable of it is what you believe you deserve is your part of your mindset because that's a big thing that's your thermostat right if somebody has a mindset of like i could teach someone the method of how to remember names but their mindset is i'm stupid i don't deserve to remember names i'm not capable of it exactly or exactly or i'm too old or whatever it is that's their mind brain doesn't work that way exactly then the method won't have won't take hold it won't matter exactly so this is this is the formula here i've how process called unlimiting it's a word that i coined years ago unlimiting is different than unlimited unlimiting is like the process of removing limits limiting beliefs exactly our behaviors or or are habits right so unlimiting is an active word where it's you're redrawing the boundaries and borders of your life limitless is not about being perfect limitless is about advancing and progressing beyond what you believe is possible that's what this book is about now i apply that towards accelerated learning so you can learn your languages and you know give speeches without notes and all that stuff but really it's a process of liberating yourself out of that box so one of the dimensions that keep you in that box is your mindset right and we can go deep into how to change negative beliefs and everything i talk about the seven lies lies for me again is an acronym lie is a limited idea entertained because it's not true it's not true that you don't deserve it it's not necessarily true that you're stupid but it's an idea we're giving energy to we're entertaining that idea in that moment i show people how to unravel it in the three-step process but that's the mindset okay all right now the second m you can have the greatest mindset and believe everything is possible you're capable you deserve it but if you don't have the second m which is motivation you're not getting out of that box right not in your career i believe i can do it but i'm going to sit here and eat chips on the couch exactly yeah and so your motivation for me is your drive it's your purpose it's the vitality that you bring to something now most people think motivation they'll say motivation is a lie and in some respects it is because the way a lot of people perceive motivation is just rah-rah get excited get hyped up and next day nothing changes so my evidence the evidence of motivation is something is happening there's an action there's a new action taking place and if you're not doing that action you're not motivated no matter what you say if you're not doing it it's better well done than well said even like a lot of people on social media they promise things but prove it right don't say it show it right you take it to action yeah because knowledge is not power it's potential power applying it makes it powerful so motivation for me is a three-step formula and here's the formula and i go deeper in this book because there's a chapter on each part the key to sustainable motivation how to overcome procrastination if you're putting things off this is the key it's this p times e times s s3 now this is a formula for sustainable mode not just a surge of motivation right we've all watched the limitless movie where he takes a pill and he can learn languages and and read really fast and remember everything and and dr mark hyman who wrote the the forward of the book who's a mutual friend of both of ours and i know he's been on your show he says that there is no genius pill but jim gives you the process for a brighter brain right like it's the process and there's no side effects right yeah that's good but going back to this you know when he had a surge of motivation but then when the pill wore off it goes back to no motivation but this is the key there's no pill there's a process and these three things p times e times s three is sustainable for the rest of your life because i've lived on no sleep for over a decade right my sleep has gotten much better since of recent you know um just some some breakthroughs this and um in medicine and everything else like that but you know i had sustainable motivation i was still doing all the conferences still doing my podcast every week still speaking and traveling and doing all this stuff because i had these three things number one so the p stands for purpose now again if you feel not motivated in any area of your life pick no some people could have motivation now some people are very motivated to sit on the couch and binge watch netflix they're highly motivated to do that right but if you're if you're lacking motivation to work out consistently and now here's the here's another lie limited idea entertained is that you have to enjoy the activity right like you know it doesn't mean that you have to do that like i was having this conversation with with uh tom bilyeu right and he was like i work out four o'clock five o'clock every morning i was like do you enjoy it he's like no i don't like working out at all you know but he's motivated doesn't miss a day so he has the motivation so motivation doesn't mean you enjoy it like every morning i do my cold showers you know like wim hof yeah right you know fun all the time but exactly i hate i grew up in the northeast i hate the cold right but i do my cold showers or my ice baths you know i post all the time on instagram about doing it because i know i have a purpose yeah right so i don't enjoy it but the p and the formula is purpose reasons reap results and if you get the reason so even if i'm not you know getting my sleep i have a purpose i have a reason to help people every single day i want every single person that comes in contact with me whether it's on my podcast or a video or a book their brain is better off because of it you know and so that's my reason and and really you know my story like my first student three decades ago almost she read 30 books in 30 days and what was her purpose her mother was dying of terminal cancer two months to live 60 days and the book she was reading health wellness energy right and she ended up saving her mom's life wow and that's when i realized that if knowledge is power learning is her superpower and i dedicate in my life to make that kind of difference yeah and that's what that's what so i have my reasons to do something so i don't have to pump myself up so p is purpose tap into your reasons and it can't be intellectual you know you have to feel it of course right and even you could even feel the pain like who's counting on you to do this activity you know who's watching you who's role modeling you right who's counting on you to to show up today you know it could be painful too but if it gets you to move that's what's important have that reason the purpose this e now i now hear my mind does this thought experiment scientific experimentations right if somebody just has a reason do they are they always motivated are there any cases where they're not motivated and i said yes if they're lacking the e energy so somebody could have a reason to uh work out or they could have a reason to read you know or learn spanish but if they're trying to do it late at night and they didn't sleep before or they had a big processed meal it's hard to have the motivation exactly and their food coma they can't be motivated because they lack energy so in the book i talk about 10 keys for brain energy the 10 things that i do to light up my brain and one of them is our brain foods another one is optimizing your sleep so i do a whole area of what i've learned really moves the needle for maximizing your sleep because how's your how's your thought process if you don't sleep how's your focus how's your memory you know how you're making good decisions right i i heard that that was the advice you know presidents give other presidents is like don't make a big decision if you didn't get a good night's sleep right so i talk about sleep so in the book in motivation we do a whole section on finding your purpose and even life purpose and passion and a whole area on optimizing your energy now you have energy to do it i ask myself okay you have a purpose for something to work to work out or whatever you have or started this business you have the energy in what case if you're like doing this critical thinking in what case won't you be motivated you like let's say you want to start a business or whatever you're you're just procrastinating on starting that business number one you have the motivation you really need it and you know why you have the energy because you're eating the right foods you maximize your sleep with not energy vampires yes there is s3 what the problem is is you're making it too big in your mind that will keep you from being motivated starting a business like where do you even start or getting getting that perfect relationship or having perfect health that's way way too big so what do you do small simple steps that's what will keep people unmotivated they could have the reasons the purpose they could have the energy unlimited energy but they don't know where to start and because they make it too big in their mind and a confused mind doesn't do anything confused mind doesn't do anything so clarity is power i like that so a small simple step all you have to do is ask a magic question what is the smallest action i could take where i can't fail it allows me give me some progress but i can't fail what's the smallest step and i cite the work in here of the habit experts that you and i have interviewed you know dr bj foggs or the uh the the james clears atomic habits and really my take on how to make sustainable habits because what you do repeatedly becomes that habit but it starts with a small simple step what's an example of that i want people to read a book a week it will change their life i think if there's one thing people could that would change their life immediately long term just read every day reading is to your mind what exercises your body even more than audio and i my podcast and i do everything on audio i still encourage people to read because it activates a different part of your brain also and i listen to audios when i when i drive when i work out but when people are tested in terms of what they read in terms of comprehension what they listen to reading the actual more and they'll understand more you know why is not only does it activate a different part of your brain because it's active because listening can be passive like watching a movie or anything can be very passive you don't get involved but reading forces you get involved but the second reason why is because usually when someone's listening to something they're doing something else and they're trying to multitask they're cleaning their house they're working out they're driving so they're not their attention attention's not fully on what they're listening to so that's why the comprehension is down but reading every single day is a great activity but i don't tell people you know read an hour a day a small simple step to get someone reading is read one sentence that's a small simple step open up the book that's a small simple step that you can't fail right and nobody's going to stop at one sentence you know the example dr bj fogg talks about with tiny habits is hey we know flossing is good for your longevity still one tooth one tooth and who's gonna stop at one tooth right so how do you break it down and really motivation is energy management it's really about energy management meaning when you have clarity and purpose it gives you energy right when you have energy like if you activate you eat the right foods and everything else vitality you have energy and small simple steps requires very little energy requires very little effort output and there's something in memory called the zygarnic effect it's by a psychologist a woman who in europe noticed that at the cafe she frequents that the wait staff would remember all the orders until they were delivered and once they were delivered they would forget it and the zeigarnik effect which is her last name means that the mind doesn't like open loops so like oh and and and all of the the series on that you binge watch knows this because at the end they open up a loop and you're like one more who does that like one more and you end up watching until like 2 a.m 3 a.m because it doesn't like the open loops well starting something like an order remembering someone's order and then it delivered it closes the loop well when you start something anywhere it for your mind still keeps an open loop about it so it's more likely to finish and that's another way to overcome procrastination break it down into small simple steps where you can't fail yeah that's the three-step formula so i do a chapter so this is really three books in one it's a whole book on mindset on how to eliminate negative self-talk how to be able to get rid of negative beliefs that you don't deserve it you're not capable of it how to have optimization so a chapter on on purpose a chapter on energy a chapter on small simple steps and then i added a chapter on habits and flow because the ultimate state and you've had stephen coddler and all these amazing people on here talking about flow state is when you're in the zone where you lose flow states is you lose your sense of self you lose it's effortless and you lose your sense of time and there's no motivation required because you're just in his own you know that as an athlete when you're in the zone or you're on stage and it's just coming through you right we all have those moments so we debunk and apply this method for a whole chapter on on flow and then finally you could have the mindset and motivation and stills be stuck in that box because again let's say you're you believe everything is possible and that's your mindset and you're capable and you deserve it and you're motivated but if you don't have the last m which are the methods and you're stuck in that box okay you could have be believe that you deserve this income you could you could work with motivation but if you're doing the wrong things then you're not going to get the result if you're doing the wrong marketing tactics or if you're doing the wrong things in a relationship right if you're using bad advice and in here i document the example of learning because we learn very poor antiquated methods of learning in school it was rote repetition to learn something repeat it 100 times in your mind and the problem is it just takes a lot of time that's not the optimal way the brain learns the human brain doesn't learn through consumption it learns through creation right the human brain does not learn by consuming it learns by creating and so we also learned a bad habit a method of reading which was sub-vocalization sub-vocalization is have you noticed when you're reading something you hear that inner voice inside your head reading along with you yeah hopefully it's your own voice it's not like somebody else's voice the reason why it keeps you reading slow is if you have to say all the words in this book you can only read as fast as you could speak that means your reading speed is limited to your talking speed so how do you not your thinking speed how do you limit the conversation in your mind that's interesting right because the question becomes everybody reads about 200 250 words per minute because that's how the average person talks but do you have to say the question becomes do analyze it common sense do you need to say all the words in order to understand what those words mean the truth is no like when you see a stop sign you don't say to yourself stop but do you comprehend what that means of course 95 exactly and just like symbols in the book periods punctuation marks you don't say question mark when you read or comma when you read you know so the and there because of all those are sight words and you don't have to pronounce them by sound you pronounce it you do them by sight and fastest readers actually only subvocalize the more difficult words and so i'm not saying you really i know you just kind of skip through and just go through you you read all the words you know you read all the words but you don't have to say all the words and so that that sub vocalization is my example of an old method an antiquated method that will keep you in that box of learning slow so let me let me do an example here's here's a sentence from your book part two about mindset yeah and if i were to read this i would read it slowly just because that's how i'm used to it i would say and i already get nervous reading out loud from my childhood fears of you're not you're not stumbling you know deeply held beliefs attitudes and assumptions we create about who we are how the world works what we are capable of and deserve and what is possible yeah mindset so let me let me show you how to actually so so one example and um there's a link in my in my instagram for a free master class on reading like a whole like one hour tutorial in real time here when people are reading what i would recommend is sub vocalization the key here is first acknowledge that it's there and don't try to fight it not don't try to not sub-vocalize because if you you know this from your study of the mind you can't not do anything you can't not think of a purple giraffe because you have to do it so the more you try not to say the words the more you're going to do it plus you're going to be talking to yourself am i really understanding this and you're not going to understand it because you have two things going on oh yeah right exactly and so the goal here is when you when you read past a certain speed 400 there's a sub vocalization threshold where you can't possibly talk any faster than that but you can understand it oh perfect example when you listen to your podcasts or audio books many people exactly exactly and you can understand it but you can't speak that fast so that's proof you could think that fast but not understand it and so here one of the hacks that we teach in in the book is to use a visual pacer like when you use your finger while you read most people think this is an old antiquated method they say don't do that because that will slow you down but in actuality i challenge everybody to take that master class on that link and what you'll find is test yourself read without your finger and then read for another minute with your finger count the number of lines just underlining it that second time will be 25 50 percent faster and just kind of forcing your finger to go a little faster than you would normally you could actually go regular because what happens is you don't regress a lot of people have another bad method going back to limited methods and we want to unlimit their methods of regressing and back skipping you know have you ever found yourself rereading words or rereading 25 of our time could be wasted doing that and that's a bad habit that we learned when we were kids why do we do that why do we repeat a sense yeah the same reason why we saw vocalized because we were taught that remember back in school we were taught so public speaking when we got in those circles and we had to pass around that book and that book comes closer and closer and closer fear and anxiety about calling my name exactly and that's where i believe we learned that public speaking was something to be feared and that's where it was imprinted on us and like some for some people and it was good intention but people can be sincere teachers but be sincerely wrong and i got that i couldn't even read at that time so when i when that book came to me i would just look at it and it would look like hieroglyphics exactly and i would do that and i would i would like cry like it would be so embarrassing because everyone's looking at you and you have to perform and that's where i think my fear of public speaking why i wouldn't do the book report or speak on it and everything came from but the other thing teachers had you do is once they know you could pronounce and you had to say it out loud to make sure the teacher knows you're pronouncing it phonetically right but later on your teacher taught you with the limit with subvocalization because he or she said all right read quietly to yourself or read silently to yourself and that's where you took that external voice and you're like in order to understand it i have to hear it if not outside then inside and it's been there ever since so this book is about unlimiting those bad habits of learning of rote memorization of bad habits we make about decisions like why are we always why are people dating the same people or making the same financial mistakes and everything else it's not insanity doing the same thing over and over again it's a bad memory and we weren't taught decision making so like in the book i talk about four super villains that hold us back and it's really because i talk about super powers four super villains and i'll go back to the model and make this very like aha to everybody four super villains that are holding you and your team back your children back your team back your employees back your spouse back number one and they're all driven by technology digital deluge digital deluge is this information overwhelm it's like do you feel nowadays like you can't keep up it's like taking a sip of water out of a fire hose yeah and here's the thing people buy a book but they don't read the book right it just sits on their shelf it becomes shelf help not self-help right and here's the thing buying a book is a different skill set than reading them i'm really good at buying yes i mean i'm not gonna read it i can buy books all day long exactly but reading is a different skill set but digital deluge is a real medical condition they call it information fatigue syndrome higher blood pressure compression of leisure time more sleeplessness and this is happening if you own a business or you have managed a team that four or five hours a day on estimate are we spending processing information just think about your team how much they have to process a lot right that means half of their salary is being paid to process and learn and read so if someone's being paid 80 000 40 000 is just to read something like that so if i could double their reading speed that's like that's a huge that's a huge amount of time like if it normally takes four hours to read something and you read it in half the time two hours what's two hours of the course of a year that's all i'm about and we can't even do it because that's another one of the digital challenges um but but that's two that's even if you save one hour a day 365 hours a year all right 40 hour work weeks how many 40 hour work weeks nine two months of productivity we get back to saving one hour a day on something ubiquitous like reading that's why this book will help you read every other book okay save you time so digital deluge number two digital distraction with every ring and ping and and ding every app notification social media alert it's training our distraction muscles and we are so good at being distracted that's why so much in my morning routine that's that people do like something simple like brushing your teeth with the opposite hand right because it engages the opposite side of your brain which is good for making new connections neuroplasticity but it's also good for making you present you have to focus right it forces you to be in the moment so it's something you do every day that little things where you get novelty where it focuses you to be here as opposed to about everything else right and how you do anything is how you do everything so if you wake up first thing in the morning and touch your phone i think you should have a to-do list i think you're not to-do list don't touch your phone yeah don't touch your phone first hour a day it rewires your brain to be distracted and also it rewires your brain to be reactive i can't stress this enough when you pick up your phone the first hour a day and a lot of people talk about this and we have videos my video with simon sinek has 28 million views on just this thing on facebook it literally just says don't touch your phone because it rewires your brain to be distracted and reactive because you're fighting fires you're on the defense like why are you going to check your email and voicemail and takes you off tangent and you're not even focusing on what's most important like in terms of your win our friend brendon burchard says this exactly and you're like you have a lot of quotes that you remember but he says your inbox is nothing but a convenient organizational system for other people's agenda for your life boom wow brendon burchard your inbox is nothing but a convenient organizational system for other people's agenda for your life so don't don't go on the defense so don't pick up your phone because when you're wake up you're in this relaxed state of awareness you're very suggestible so you're training your distraction and your reaction you have to be proactive you want to be a thermostat not a thermometer a thermometer reacts the environment a thermometer sets the environment so digital distraction second third super villain that's driven by technology that's that's you know potentially holding you back digital dementia digital dementia is where our our phones become an external storage device it keeps our to-do's right it keeps our phone how many phone numbers did you know growing up a lot growing up yeah how many do you know now one like is there's one person my own one i know my mom's because i've had to like write it down it's like emergency contact exactly but if you don't if you don't have your phone with you or you you're the phone as battery's dead you can't now here's the thing nobody wants to memorize 200 phone numbers i don't want to do that but isn't it concerning that we've lost the ability to remember one or a passcode or a conversation we just had i believe two of the most costly words in life yeah in life our business i forgot every time you say the words i forgot you lose credibility you lose trust you lose you you don't show you care about the person you think you lose a sale i can't tell you how many clients come to me saying look i forgot i called this person by the wrong name and he was so offended that he didn't do the deal with me i lost a million dollar commission like those kind of things right and how are you going to show somebody you're going to care for their future their finances their health their family if you don't care enough just to remember their name right so we do 13 14 tips on just how to remember people's names we covered in the previous episode also as well okay so digital dementia is where it's a real source i mean dr daniel ayman has talked about it other people have talked about don't be over relying on technology to do everything memory is a muscle and it's use it or lose it that's why i'm such an advocate for mental fitness i remember i walked into the office one day i picked up the phone first thing in the morning and a woman's voice was like i love you i love you i love you i'm like whoa who's this she was like i found it she went through our online memory course and she she she was given a family heirloom a necklace by her grandmother it didn't go to her mother or her three sisters it went to her and she hid it somewhere in her house i forgot she forgot and she thought for three years she thought it was stolen she felt so much guilt and she got so much shame from like her family and she just you know passed on for generations and after going through this course and she she woke up at 2 a.m in the morning ran down two flights of stairs went behind the boiler in her basement pulls out this crevice the necklace wow and i was like i didn't teach you a method on how to find lost items in this program she was like i don't know what it is but my focus i'm just remembering this without even using a method it's just she was like thank you for giving me my brain back because she felt like her brain was 20 years younger because it was fit and that's what i'm talking about mental intelligence is very important yeah facts figures foreign languages you learn how to do that in the methods of the book mental fitness and mental health you know that's also very important where if you're you're you're physically fit right so if you're going to go up runyon canyon or wherever if somebody is not physically fit they're going to have to use more effort more energy because they're not trained and so if you're an athlete you could train you could help them as a coach in two ways you could show them the strategies like how to do a forehand or a backhand or a hit up golf ball and you can take them in the gym and optimize their fitness you know their heart rate variability their their foods and everything so get people mentally fit digital dementia and finally the last one that we talk about in the book digital deduction right i always iterate ddd so digital deduction is where we're our phones and our smart devices are doing the thinking for us because it just it literally because it's just spoon-feeding you and i'm not just talking about fake news i'm talking about algorithms everything but you don't have to think anymore and we've lost our thinking abilities to the point where you look at a menu and you're like i don't even know what to eat because normally an app tells me what to eat or what what to watch next or what to do everything they're seeing kids they have lower ability to critical think critical thinking abilities analysis ability reasoning ability because of phones because our smart devices are making us stupid and so in the book to overcome these four digital super villains we teach for digital deluge speed reading and study like how to study anything whether you're a student or not students absolutely technical material will help you overcome digital deluge digital distraction we have to do a whole chapter on focus and concentration literally how to functionally improve focus digital dementia the biggest chapter in the book is memory training like how to learn languages how to remember names and then finally digital deduction we do a whole pro chapter on how to think clearly how to make good decisions how to really solve problems step by step how to solve problems how to make a decisions because as we talked about you know your life is the c between the b and the d how do you make those choices who taught you how to make choices right like and how to see it from different angles right and so we we teach that to alleviate those so you can not only catch up but you could actually get ahead and that's really the goal [Music] how much does the body control the mind and the mind control the body are they very connected or is the mind in complete control that's a great question the short answer is the body has a huge and profound influence on our mind and the reason is that we often talk about the brain and we think the brain the brain the brain the brain is important but the brain and the spinal cord which is makes up what we call the central nervous system are extensively connected with the body and the body is extensively connected with the brain and spinal cord so the spinal cord is connected to the brain that's right the back it comes up the neck the actual nerves are connected inside of your brain that's all the way down to lower back yeah yeah so basically we are a big tube uh or our nervous system is a big tube so your brain obviously is the thing that's shaped like more or less like this and then the spinal cord extends off the back and all that is housed in skull except for two pieces of the brain uh which are the eyes which are actually two pieces of the brain that are outside the skull the eyes are part of the brain they are absolutely a part of the brain their central nervous system so it's eyes brain and spinal cord they're all connected they're all connected and if you took that out of the body they would all be connected that's right they're contiguous as we say they're just one unit they're one piece that's right and when sometimes they get challenged people say the eyes aren't part of the brain well then that means that the spinal cord is part of the brain too and i want to be really clear this is not semantics there is a genetic program that ensures that early in development during the first trimester when we were all in our mother's bellies the retinas the neural retinas and eyes were deliberately pushed out of the skull and the reason you have those eyes outside your skull is so that you can evaluate things at a great distance from you right because otherwise everything would have to be in contact with you other animals do this mainly using smell we are very visually driven so a lot of our genome is devoted to vision and understanding what's going on at a distance from us and that's afforded us a huge evolutionary advantage to survive to survive because the the more that i can anticipate events at a distance the more that i could coordinate with my environment like daytime and night time but also when objects are coming at me or things i want to chase and kill or um you know you think about mating behavior and hunter-gatherer behavior all of that evaluating faces and face facial expressions without actually having to come into contact with people afford a huge evolutionary advantage but i want to make sure that i answer your question thoroughly the nervous system includes the brain which we now know includes the eyes as well the spinal cord and then what's called the peripheral nervous system all the connections with the body and every organ in our body our heart our diaphragm our lungs our spleen our liver all of it is as as we say innervated it receives nerve connections to the brain that's right from the brain and spinal cord so much so that if we were to just dissolve away everything except the nervous system if we had a human nervous system splayed out here on the table in front of us it would look like a human being there would be a connection at every level down to you'd be able to say that's the big toe and that's the pinky and that's where the heart would belong because it's almost like a silhouette of our entire body and so when we think about the nervous system it's really important i think for people to understand that the nervous system is all of that brain and body and all the connections back and forth and you know there have been thousands of years of debates about what's the mind what's the brain etc the mind body problem all that i think it's fair to say in 2020 that states of mind include the brain the activity of the brain and the body those two things coordinate the brain and the body and have a sort of what i call a contract there's a brain body contract that gives rise to things like states of mind so feeling of depression or a feeling of awe or excitement or happiness which is a state of mind is what i'm hearing you saying yeah i i mean we could talk about why an emotional experience is a state of mind that's right i prefer to talk about states and states of mind because they include the brain and body so just by saying mind i don't mean just brain they include the brain and body and also because when you say start interrupting the brain and body means thought and feeling yeah so you're asking the key questions um emotions are very hard to describe in an objective way whereas states have certain properties that allow us to study them in different laboratories and from one experiment to the next so um some people may have heard this before but we really the brain does really five things we have sensation which is you know we're constantly bombarded with sound waves and light and smells and things and that stuff is ongoing and you can't negotiate that it's just you have these receptors in your body that allow you to evaluate those things a sea turtle has magnetoreception it can navigate by magnetic fields we cannot do that but they can because they sense it you know infrared vision in a pit viper or something so unless you put on you know night vision goggles you can't do that then there's perception which is which sensations you are paying attention to so as you write with your pen if i say what does that pen feel like in your hand now you're perceiving it but the sensation was always there those receptors were always sensing it so the sensation being the actual feeling of the actual visual the perception is your interpretation of the feeling ah so i would say that the perceptions are where your attention is which sensations you're attending to and then you have thoughts and thoughts get a little complicated for us to parse because they are a little bit abstract but thoughts are a combination of our perception whatever it is we're attending to and they have context memory you know they're tacked into our you know they're tapped into our memory systems right because if i say a pen and you're like i don't know what your relationship depends is but mine is kind of a trivial one i write with one but let's say i come from a family that i don't know had a pen factory in germany in the 1930s then there's a whole or you got stabbed by a parent right so it's very contextual yeah so thoughts are like perceptions but they carry memory and context thoughts are memory in context yeah they include that and then there are feelings slash emotions and this is where it really starts to get abstract and kind of hazy and where there's still a lot of debate because for instance if i ask you how you're feeling and you say i feel most people say i feel good well what does that mean i mean that's not a feeling so if you ever do personal development work they're always like don't use a don't say good or bad what do you feel and people say well i feel calm and excited or something like you know when it and it starts becoming very abstract and so emotions are a real thing and they certainly perhaps more than anything else recruit the brain and the body when we feel depressed we occupy certain postures we feel it in our gut we feel it in our limbs we can feel fatigue we can feel anxious and so the emotions are really where you capture that mind the brain body contract and relationship very very intensely and then the fifth thing is actions and what i love about actions and behaviors is they are very concrete you're writing with your pen now i'm speaking i'm moving my hands you can measure those things you can analyze them we know exactly what the neural pathways are so we've got sensation perception emotions in action thoughts and then of course beneath all that you've got memories and um people always like to raise intuition you know they always say what about that sixth thing intuition and we could talk about intuition but the reason i like to talk about states and the reason we study states in my lab is that states have two properties that are easy to study somewhat compared to emotions and that's how pervasive they are meaning how long lasting they are states tend to have a beginning a middle and an end whereas emotions that sort of like they're more in combination states are more like the primary colors from which you mix all the you get all the emotions and the other thing is that they have an intensity that we can measure you can have a state of being very alert or very drowsy or asleep and you can say from a one to ten how are you feeling in this state that's right and we can measure that experience yeah that's right and we can correlate it with things like heart rate heart rate variability breathing speed sweating levels of neural activity and brain areas that control wakefulness and so i will be the first to say that i would love to be able to say that in my laboratory we are studying or someday we'll study awe and flow and all those things but those are higher up on the ladder than we can get to right now i think with the current technology we can understand states and from there i do believe that we can make a significant dent into certain mental health issues and optimize performance in certain uh you know communities that are trying to optimize performance and in the general public but the the states that we're focused on are very concrete for instance alert and focused that would be a wonderful state to understand and be able to direct ourselves toward when we're not feeling alert and focused how to get into that how to get into that state we could talk about tools for that if you like sleep sleep is so powerful and so important i think now people really understand the extent to which it's important in large part because of matt walker's book while we sleep and the important work that he's done in his lab at berkeley and many other labs as well of course so focus sleep creativity stress these are the the kind of core states that we would like to tackle first because we believe we can and then hopefully in my career but if not in my career then maybe one of my scientific offspring or another laboratory you know 10 20 100 years from now we'll be able to understand things like how does one get into a state of um empathy like i mean we could spend the whole hour talking about empathy but it's hard and it's a fascinating topic and it's so important but it's just very hard to understand at a neural level so we're starting with the basics with the confidence that by understanding those basics they will build up to richer representations and understanding of things like empathy someday yeah would you need to be studying the heart as well to understand empathy or does it all come from the mind that's a great question so we to understand any state a we believe that you have to study the brain and the spinal cord and the body so in my lab you know we talk about being neuroscientists for me that means we study the nervous system the whole thing so people who come into my laboratory we put them into vr environments that simulate some experience and i realize it's not as real as being in the actual experience in the real world but you get enough presence especially because it's very visually and auditory auditorily rich in those environments people get what's called presence they forget that they're in a vr environment at least for moments and in that time we're measuring heart rate variability we're measuring sweating we're measuring in many cases we also have electrodes lowered into their brain because we do this with neurosurgery patients and so we have access to the brain we have access to the body and it's really by recording from all these areas of the brain and body that we can get a fuller understanding of what a state of safe focus or stress or anxiety really is if we were just looking in one little corner of the brain or just in just at the heart we wouldn't be able to do that and so that's a kind of a a center piece of our lab is that brain and body the whole nervous system is key you got to look at all of it [Music] just 10 minutes a day three times a day with 120 people trading resentment frustration fear for gratitude appreciation and thankfulness measuring their immune response the the chemical immunoglobulin a your primary defense against bacteria and viruses the best flu shot you'll ever get lives innately within you turns out when you're frustrated when you're impatient when you're fearful the immune system dials down because you're an emergency it's not it's all your energy is going for some threat in your outer world there's no energy in your inner world for growth and repair but how do you turn that around so then as people begin to open their heart can that chemical begin to to elevate four days fifty percent change in the 120 people their their iga levels went up 50 in four days that's your body's immune system is now up regulating genes that are making proteins and immunoglobulins and antibodies that you don't need a flu shot in other words your interstate is greater than your outer world so then just by doing that we now know that your immune system is going to get stronger by the same means take 120 people or 50 people and measure 7500 gene regulations okay in four days two genes that suppress cancer growth and tumors are activated and up regulated the genes that stimulate stem cells that go to damaged tissues and repair them up regulate them the gene for oxidative balance is upregulated anti-cancer anti-aging anti-heart disease anti-stroke anti-neurodegenerative anti-inflammatory antimicrobial just your body's naturally doing this the gene for neurogenesis the growth of new neurons in response to novel experiences and learning this is four days the gene switches on the the gene for more balance in the pituitary in the pancreas the gene for the microtubules of the cells the little little fibers that respond to energy and frequency so in four days we now know that you can change your genetic destiny if you just practice the inner work we have research to show that 60 days of meditation five days a week will lengthen your life the telomeres the little shoestrings on the end of your dna get longer that means your biological age is changing so we we have the evidence now to show people what's possible we have brain scans that that are so outside of normal that when neuroscientists see them they're blown away because the amount of energy that's in the brain during this transcendental moment is uh hundreds of times outside of normal wow i mean you can't make your brain do that something is happening to you and that person's having a transcendental moment and we now know that we can predict it and we now know that we can induce it so then there's the evidence there then you take our community and you see people with stage four cancer with parkinson's disease with myasthenia gravis with with lupus with ms with brain injuries with rare genetic disorders with vertigo tinnitus kidney failure all kinds of health conditions come to a week-long event and then at the end of that event they make significant strides in getting beyond the emotions of the past now think about this the science says that the environment signals the gene that's epigenetics the end product of an experience in the environment is an emotion so as long as you're living by the same emotion every single day you're signaling the same gene in the same way and if that gene is related to a survival emotion a stress hormone then you're down regulating the gene and you're creating disease so when the person trades that emotion and really breaks free from the chains of their past and now they're feeling an elevated emotion well now they're dialing down the gene for ms and they're up regulating the gene for health and balance and so the person will say to them where's the disease well i'm not the same person i'm not and and the side effect of that is a transformation in healing so the funny thing about it is the person who has the healing is not talking about the healing whether it's blind people seeing deaf people hearing hearing we have crazy evidence now what they're talking about is how amazing they feel because they're refreshed they're they're they got a new lease on life and so now we have evidence in our research and that silence is the critic to show that what's possible for people and now we have evidence and testimony that we have evidence where people will stand on the stage and say hey i broke my back in three places i haven't been able to stand up straight i came into this event hunched over i couldn't lay down and now this guy's jumping around on the stage he's laying on his back he's touching his toes he's he's you can tell i mean this is is he's he's having his moment we freed we changed somebody someone with parkinson's disease can't swallow can't chew can't blow our nose can't stand up one moment one moment the next thing you know she's blowing her nose chewing swallowing we changed her body we changed her life and we changed her future and she doesn't look like a movie star and she doesn't look like she's a vegetarian and she doesn't look like she's buffed she just looks like a normal person now the person in the audience who's watching that and looking at this person and seeing that they're no different than them it just starts to cause them to think if someone else can do it i can do it so you see the person with the stage four cancer that got the you know the voodoo curse that they have three months to live and now they have no evidence of cancer in their body and they're standing on the stage telling that story and somebody in the audience is checking her out going i have the same condition and if she can do it i'm going to step right in that footprint i'm going to do it the way she did it and all of a sudden you start seeing this change in the community in a week-long event because once there's a breakthrough right i mean it's like a four-minute mile it's in the field you know but it's not only in the field you're seeing evidence in three-dimensional reality and evidence is the loudest voice right now and so people don't want to see talking heads anybody can see on the internet information is readily available what they want to see is evidence and so when you have evidence in the scientific realm and then you have evidence in a in a community of people and you're not doing anything that's so extreme that that that excludes anybody it's inclusive and we're using science as the contemporary language of mysticism it is science that's going to demystify the mystical if i talk tradition culture religion any of those things spiritual principles people are going to shut off you're going to divide an audience but science creates community so so by building a scientific model i don't subscribe to any type of meditation because i i look at the evidence of what we've gathered in let's see by applying this formula to what extent can we prove to human beings how powerful they really are and i think that that has become something that has mystified me because when i see blind people seeing in our workshops i have to tell you that i'm more surprised than anybody i'm standing up there shaking my head and and we have we have great evidence this you know one woman was she's a nurse and um one day she just uh uh wakes up and she's got a blind spot in her eye she can't see in the lower left-hand quadrant of of both eyes six o'clock to nine o'clock she goes she's a nurse she goes to see her colleagues they do a scan stroke on the optic nerve and now she's uh legally blind she can't drive her car she runs her own company she can't run a company she can't type she can't use the computer she's compromised in a big way now with a stroke you have two weeks really that's the window and if nerve cells are going to come back online it's going to be those first two weeks if they don't come back the prognosis is live with it whether you have paralysis or whatever that if a stroke causes brain damage in usually two to three weeks you don't see many much change so they gave her the you know the prognosis you have to learn to accommodate and live with it and so she she she wasn't satisfied with that answer and she goes to one of her dear friends who's a physician and the physician says go check out the spenza guy and she says why don't you come with me so they come to our event in brighton in in the uk within the three weeks or was this later do you know oh no this is a year later wow this is a year later and so it's supposed to be irreversible at that point and so um she comes to the event and then she comes to the event for two reasons to listen to this to learn how to live with her handicap that's the extent of what's possible to have more money yeah and and then create a non-profit to help people those were her two things so somewhere in the middle of the event or she it occurs to her that she could actually possibly heal her eyes so she goes for it she lays down after one of the meditations we lay down at the end and all of a sudden like in her head she starts feeling this heat and this crackling sensation now you have one of two options when something like this happens you get scared you get scared it's the unknown you contract your brain goes into high beta and you just something's wrong right like hurting someone yeah i'm having another stroke whatever or you surrender and relax into it yeah you go in and she she let go and she she had the most incredible experience she laid there for the longest time opened her eyes and she said it was like the lights came back on she said i could see completely we sent her for a scan the monday morning after that week-long event the scan that had the left lower quadrant on both eyes from six o'clock to nine o'clock was black the post scan there isn't one black spot wow anywhere on the on her eyes she'd already done a scan a year prior yeah yeah yeah she had the scan so we'll we'll give you that we'll give you the evidence but but that is not natural wow that's not normal but but how do you explain that in conventional science i mean the truth is is that we have incredibly powerful innate qualities for regeneration and healing once you hit that button so then she stands in the audience and gives her testimony other people are going to begin to realize that they can heal from a stroke and that's exactly what's happening a collective consciousness is happening what is the the moment of transformation for someone like that like when is someone because i know that healing can happen in an instant so how what's the thing that triggers that instant for someone to go from disbelief to belief and it actually transforming them the physical body yeah we've studied this and there's no linear correlation because think about this that woman is a pragmatist she knew nothing she's not wasn't spiritual in any way she just read my books and then started practicing the meditations now she was practicing those meditations for months before the event because she wanted to come and be fully prepared for it right so so from the from the outside you see this one one moment but what you don't see is the number of times she worked in overcoming herself in getting beyond whoever she is and getting into that place where she's far enough outside familiar territory neurologically chemically genetically that all of a sudden she connects to this she connects there's like she starts connecting to that invisible field called the quantum field and and you can't connect as your body there's nothing there's nothing physical to connect to there you have to get beyond all your associations you know it's interesting i think i'm going to talk to you about this last time that i grew up in a religion called christian science that talked a lot about this you know i it was embedded in my mind that i'm a spiritual being and i can never be physically hurt like there i'm not a material body that there are no accidents that there's no injury and it was always embedded in my mind that i can never be physically harmed or i can be instantly healed and so my entire childhood i had all these incredible healings quickly and i witnessed it all the time from other people and everyone was always like housed as possible yeah so i don't know if this is something i was practicing you know right different in a different way as a child but it's it's always fun for me to come back around now even though i don't practice that that religion necessarily anymore or go to the church i still believe the same final principles that i hear you talking about in a more scientific way it's a good belief to have yeah and and you you program children like you program your children that the body has an innate capacity to heal yeah and and all of a sudden you're less reliant on something outside of you to make something go away inside or something else whatever it is shopping yeah video game everybody's relying on their outer world relationship to change their inner state problem is the moment you start feeling emptiness or lack your brain is going to start to look for something outside of you to take it away the problem right the problem is is that normally the stimulation that's created from those outer things give the body a rush and so the receptor sites on the cells recalibrate so you need more the next time to turn it on right so now top you can buy the new fancy car and it's fun for the novelty wears off and it's a week and then it's a day you're like it's never enough and that feeling never goes away and so the only way that feeling is actually going to go away is when you start going inward right and so so we've seen significant changes with people and and having that belief should be tested we should test our belief around that and my lesson through all of this is that i'm starting to realize how conditioned we are into believing how limited we are and as you start peeling those layers away and you break through those beliefs those self-limiting thoughts and emotions on the other side of that is where the miraculous happens so you got to be willing to be in that place of discomfort long enough to reorganize order and begin to create more coherence and then all of a sudden you get this recalibration that goes on in the brain and body and then the extent of that is that the ultimate thing is you start to see feedback in your life those synchronicities those coincidences those opportunities you're scratching your head going everything is falling into place yeah i'm in the right place at the right time i think about just comes to me because your energy is synchronized it's look i mean when you have coherence in the brain and heart you have a laser of energy and it could read information much better you're living in stress and your brain is shifting its attention from one person to another problem to another thing to another place to go each one of those things there's an assignment of neurological networks in the brain so the arousal of the stress hormones drives the brain into this high frequency and you're trying to control and predict everything in your life and those your brain circuits are firing like a like a lightning storm in the clouds when your brain's incoherent you're incoherent and and you can't you don't have a signal you're you don't have a wi-fi signal not connected to the field how could you how could you connect to energy and information if your signal hasn't become orderly so that when people synchronize their energy into coherence they can synchronize to a possibility in the future and the synchronicities that are feedback from the environment are just a reflection of your energy and that's the universe saying follow the breadcrumbs do it again follow it again do it again and now all of a sudden the person's not waking in the morning like oh i gotta meditate now to create my future they're kind of going like i'm getting out of bed because i don't want the magic to end right they want to they want to sustain that state so that the old reality that they've lived in begins to transform into something new and because there's no longer a vibrational match with everyone and everything in their past present reality there's a vibrational match to their future and now their future is starting to give them signals there's a model that you give that i think we should start with yeah there's a method that you give or a model for how to become limitless and if we don't follow this model then something's going to be broken in our life isn't that right yeah does this model really is a framework for learning anything faster so for people who are listening and watching and they want to learn a language they want to learn mandarin music martial arts management marketing any skill i think if there's one skill to master in the 21st century it's our ability to learn faster like if there was a genie and a genie can grant you any one wish but only one wish what would you wish for if it was only one wish what would you wish for uh you know most people would say money or this or that but you think learning is that i mean i think a lot of people i think being the matrix like downloading the matrix yeah that's where i can learn jiu-jitsu in a second exactly i can learn a language in a second if i can have this skill so i think the the hack a lot of people would do is if it was any one wish they would wish for more wishes right for infinite wishes so the equivalent if i was your learning genie and i could grant you any one wish to learn any subject or any skill just like become a master at it the equivalent what's the equivalent of the answer of asking for infinite wishes would be learning how to learn because if you can learn how to learn the world is yours especially today because nobody who's listening watching gets paid for their brute strength it's their brain strength it's not your muscle power it's completely your mind power and the challenge is your brain doesn't come with an owner's manual it's not user-friendly and that's the reason why i wrote this book but the limitless model is an explanatory schema a framework for learning anything faster and not only that but really for accessing our human potential because i think if there's one infinite limitless resource on planet earth it's human capability there's no limit on our determination there's no limit to our imagination there's no known limit to our creativity and yet we're not shown how to be able to access that and so this framework is a three-part framework and what i would offer everyone to do is i'd love to turn this into like a little master class make it really engaging and so don't listen passively because we don't learn through the human brain doesn't learn through consumption it learns through creation and creativity and getting involved in things i know a lot of us learn faster when we actually roll up our sleeves and do it so i would encourage everybody as they're working out or cleaning the house or whatever they're doing at the same time to try to get involved in this i think as an athlete i can speak to that because for me in school it's really hard to remember or learn things because i didn't feel like i was participating in a way that worked for me but as an athlete playing basketball yeah when a coach would tell me okay i want you to watch this video and then automatically shoot in a certain way with your hand position this way and follow through this way just by watching a video and not actually implementing and practicing it he would take me out on the court and we would practice it and do it over and over again and he would correct me and i would learn through muscle memory as opposed to just watching something and then thinking i can do it without actually practicing right so putting it into practice quickly for me is how i learned sports and it's how i try to apply it in other areas of my life as opposed to just i'm going to learn and then okay i know it i feel like i need to work in it i feel you get dirty you know what i mean i do i do i think a lot of people this is the thing it's not how smart you are it's ha it's not literally not how like how smart you are it's how are you smart it's not how smart you are or how smart your kids are or how smart your business partner is it's how are they what's the deal are you smart what's the difference so you are smart through experiential learning like in the book we talk about are used exactly it's not how smart somebody is like their iq or their intelligence how are they smart and it's always context dependent and so some people learn we talk about learning styles in the book it's like if have you ever been interested just like you were saying you're interested in a topic but you're not getting it because because sometimes the way you prefer to learn is different than the way the teacher prefers to teach and it's like you're two ships in the night and you pass each other and you don't even realize there's no connection you don't even realize the other one is there and it feels uncomfortable like if i asked everybody as an exercise to take out a piece of paper i encourage everyone to take notes because i'm going to drop a lot of like practical methods when you're taking if you were to write your name first and last on a piece of paper actually you can do it right now first and last and everyone encourages you to just to do this or imagine you're writing your name first and last on a piece of paper and then when you're done i want you to switch hands and in your opposite hand right below it write your first and last name with your opposition i don't even know if i could take me ten minutes and so while people are doing it you'll notice when you're doing with the opposite hand as we're doing it that's actually pretty good that if i was to ask you which one is the which one was easier first or second and you would say the first was easier which one is is uh more comfortable first or last the first one the first one so not only was it faster it was easier and then which one was higher quality let's check that out this the personally the first one hopefully the first one is higher quality also as well and so here's the thing that means the second time it took longer the second time it also was not as comfortable and the second time also the quality wasn't quite as good and here's the thing when i'm saying it's how you learn some people are trying to learn something with the opposite hand so it takes longer it feels weird and the quality is not quite as good as opposed if you're using your dominant hand how do we know how to learn with our dominant hand as opposed to the opposite hand yeah and that's a metaphor for how we like to take in information some people like to learn by reading some people they just cannot get through a book though they have to listen to that audio or that podcast other people or watch someone lecturing it or talking exactly and so we all have different styles and it's not right or wrong now we can actually improve our ability to read we actually can improve our ability to listen and apply so if there are areas where we feel weak you know this book is a guide guidebook to be able to level up those areas so you can be more of a whole brain learner also as well but really when it comes to accelerated learning it's not again how smart you are it's how are you smart and that honors us and it takes the judgment out sometimes in school it's like the top 10 percent get a's another 10 get b's and then 80 were like you and i it's like it's like we're it's like we're failing school as opposed to the way school maybe is failing us because school teaches you what to learn what to focus on what to think what to remember but not how to learn and how to think what teaches you how to think and learn in one way exactly exactly and when i talk about in the book i talk about the the four super villains that are holding you back in your work in your schooling in your life is driven by technology but one of them is digital deduction where we're where we're depending on technology to tell us what to think we're not even using the children right now they're finding that their reasoning abilities their ability to analyze critical thinking is not as sharp as where it should be because because of technology because technology is doing the thinking for us and our mind i'm going to say this repeatedly is like a muscle it's use it or lose it and just like when you go you have your personal trainer to make your muscles stronger more energized more flexible more pliable you know more you want your mental muscles to be stronger more energized more pliable more more flexible of course and so many people refer to me as a brain coach because what i do is i train your brain because i think we're in the millennium of the mind and it's really about mental fitness our ability to adapt our ability to think our ability to solve problems and this really is everything when people see me wearing brain shirts all the time or pointing to my brain the reason why i do that is because what you see you take care of you see your hair you take care of your hair you see your skin you take care of your skin you see your clothing take care of your clothing you don't see your brain exactly and that controls everything and so when i point to the brain or how honored with their shirts just like people have their emotions on their sleeve you know i have my brain on my chest because i want to put it forefront to remind people to love their brain to care for their brain yeah i think it's i mean that's why a lot of people uh doctors and nutritionists are talking about gut health it's like we can't see it but we can start to feel rashes or we can start to feel the effects of it i think it's also heart health is a big thing right now it's just like the emotional health self-care self-love you know mental health and emotional health kind of come together and i love your work because you bring that to to everybody to the world and it's all connected i talk about in the book you know there's this heart intelligence and also your gut as you mentioned a lot of people call it your second brain it's the second highest concentration of nerve cells and so and there's and it's connected too and and sometimes what you eat affects what how you think we know that because of the guess we've had on our shows and everything else that when you eat junk food which is not it's not really a thing there's junk and then there's there's food there's sugar exactly and what you eat matters especially for your gray matter i remember in our previous episode we did years ago i showed people how to memorize the brain foods and and all of the best neuroprotective this area of neural nutrition it's really fascinating that your brain has different nutritional requirements than than the rest of the rest of your body but i'm going back to the limitless model there are three keys to reaching your goals and this is my distinction here because originally i remember years ago when you prompted me to write this book you're like jim you know it's been you know over two decades you've got to do something put something in this book and um so because you know fundamentally i'm a reading teacher and you know somebody has decades why i love reading if somebody has decades of experience and they put it into a book like you and all of a sudden people could read that book in a few days they could download decades in the days and readers are leaders we know that reading is to your mind what exercises your body it's the best mental fitness and so the limitless model as an exercise what i want everyone to do so it's not hypothetical because in part of the book i demystify the three the seven lies of learning there are seven lies that hold you back to learning and one of them is knowledge is power we hear that all the time i've even said it also as well but when we think about it is it really true right is knowledge just knowing something gives you power no not unless you act on it not unless you apply it so knowledge times action equals equals power and so i would encourage everybody as you're listening to this to take immediate action and there are three questions i want you to ask as you're listening to this episode to make it very valuable and i would encourage you to write these down three master questions um you know we were talking about some of the um famous actors that i work on before we started filming and uh where you know will smith did the cover endorsement of the book that says you know jim quick you know it gets the maximum out of me as a human being i've learned so much from this this man just being around so many around clients and what have you learned from will so one of the things is this this idea of we were in uh toronto and i help actors speed read scripts help them to memorize their lines faster i mean you imagine like 30 pages of scripts there's a lot of information a sentence there's a lot right and some of them have their strategies and and no matter how great somebody is you know this because you still you make you know your life about studying and researching greatness it's they always know there's another level and they get really good at the fundamentals and the basics but one of the things when we're when we're there we spent the day together and it was winter time in toronto they were filming from 6 p.m to 6 a.m which can you imagine like so hard like overnight time that's very difficult but during the day i went we went through an exercise and i believe so in there i talk about how we have 50 to 70 000 thoughts a day right and these thoughts are controlling our lives and a lot of those thoughts are questions that we ask ourselves you know thinking is that process of asking and answering questions and if people are asking is that true notice you had to ask a question to define if it's true or not right and there's certain questions we ask more than any other question so so here's the thing i talk about dominant questions that you have one two three questions that you ask a lot and i want everyone to think about what your dominant questions are including you and i'll give you a couple of examples to get you started so for example i uh one of my friends we went through this exercise of meditating and writing journaling down we found out her dominant question is how do i get people to like me how do i get people to like me now she asked that question all the time and you don't know anything about her you don't know her age you don't know her background you don't know what she does for a living you know what she looks like you know where she lives you don't know anything about her but you know a lot about her if you ask yourself how do i get people to like me hundreds of times a day what what's her personality what's her personality going to be like what's her life gonna uh well i guess it could be it could be either side of the spectrum she could be super outgoing and super adventurous to try to get people to be more attracted to her or she could be super shy and introverted because she's so worried about what people think about her yeah so that's the first thing i thought of but i'm not sure if that's true and it's absolutely true she actually does both of those things really i mean if you ask yourself how do i get people like me then what are you doing you're people pleasing all the time you're you're a sycophant um just uh saying yes to everything yeah you people take advantage of you because you're martyring yourself because they're always trying to you know they're making themselves less than or or their their personality is never consistent because their personality changes the chameleon the change for people exactly and you know all that about her and you only know one question she asks herself and that's one of her dominant questions i would i would offer everybody who's listening to this what do you think your dominant question is because questions are the answer you know this from the work that you do in high performance and greatness that the questions you ask determine what you focus on you have part of your brain called the reticular activating system ras for short and it's your filtering system so at any given time there's a billion stimuli that we could be paying attention to and primarily your brain is a deletion device it's trying to keep information out otherwise you would go crazy right if you paid attention to everything yeah so what gets in so for example years ago my my little sister started sending me emails and postcards and pictures a photograph of a very specific kind of dog it was a pug dog you know those little dogs exactly yes exactly very smooshy faces they're very compliant you could dress them up as ballerinas and they don't they don't care and and she starts and i didn't know why so my question was like why is she sending me these pictures all the time that became quite a dominant question of the day and then i realized her birthday was coming up so she's a smart marketer right planting those seeds and here's the magic though i started seeing pug dogs everywhere everywhere i would go to the grocery store i'd be checking out and i swear to you a woman's carrying a pug dog at the register i would be running and jogging in my neighborhood and somebody's walking six pug dogs now my question for everybody is where where did these pug dogs magically appear all of a sudden in the world no they were always there but they were not i wasn't paying attention to them because they weren't important because i wasn't asking that question once you ask a question you start to pay attention to those things and that focus determines how you feel determines your behaviors and primarily it's so interesting it's kind of like social media there's an algorithm to your mind like there's an algorithm to facebook and instagram that what you engage with the most you like and you share you comment you start seeing more of those kind of things right and so just like your mind what you start engaging with you start watching all this news about fear and all the things that are going on you start paying attention and your mind just starts focusing automatically it becomes a reaction a reflex and you start to attract more of the fear and anxiety or worry that's in the world that's being posted very much so you start to subscribe to whatever that is to receive more of it exactly what you're thinking about so just like on social media if you start just liking all the cat stuff and everything else they'll just start feeding you cat stuff and same thing with negativity and same thing with opportunity also as well so the questions make a difference so questions are the answers what are the two questions you've been that are dominant in your mind over the last five years the most yeah so for learning because i grew up with the broken brain many people know my my story from the last episode when they see me do these demonstrations at summit series or it's you know events you and i remembering a thousand per people's names right 10 minutes all of that kind of stuff i say that i don't do this to impress you i do this express to you what's possible because the truth is we could all do that and a whole lot more we just weren't taught if anything we're taught a lie that somehow our intelligence is fixed like our shoe size but i do it as a demonstration because i grew up with learning difficulties right i had my brain injury when i was five i fell i had a very bad fall when i was in kindergarten um rushed to the hospital before i was curious and very energized my parents would say but then i became very shut down and my superpower growing up was being invisible it was shrinking because i didn't want the spotlight i didn't want to be called on so i was literally physiologically i was always trying to look smaller to protect myself so teachers wouldn't call on me or i wouldn't be bullied or something like that and i would do that as well except i was just a giant in the class so right how to do that it was always picked on so for me i would actually be sitting behind you and i would that would i'd be guaranteed no one would be able to see me but going back to my question my question became all the time first of all when i was nine years old i was slowing the class down and the teacher pointed to me and said that's the boy with a broken brain and that label became my limit and so we have they think about when you're listening to this what are the labels that we put on ourselves it's like we're not born we're born with a blank slate right but through experience through expectations of other people um through our environment we learned that we are limited and the good news is we can unlearn it and that's that's that's the point of the book but because i was in the broken state i would always ask myself you know you know why am i why am i broken why am i the stupid one i started getting answers of why i'm so stupid right every time i did badly on a test i would be like oh because i have the broken brain right if i was in pick in sports i'd be like oh because i'm the broken one and that became my self-talk adults have to be very careful with their external words because they become a child's internal words but later i started get so frustrated because i started asking getting curious and when you're curious you started to ask different questions i was like why is that person so why are they are they so smart and how come i'm studying three times harder and getting less grades than than them right and i started getting answers my primary question started my dominant question end up being like how do i make this better but the three questions that i focus on and uh let me tell you first what wills is will smith's one of his dominant questions when we went through this exercise is how do i make this moment even more magical how do i make this moment even more magical it used to be every moment or like an hour this moment any moment like and it shows up right in his in his life because later that night when we're filming it was like two o'clock in the morning and his family we're all outside for the superhero movie that many people know of and it was really cold because it was in toronto and it was it was winter time and we're all just waiting and just waiting and waiting and waiting because people think that and you meet all these people all the time on your show and and you they think it's so glamorous they're just gonna wait exactly and i asked him this question because i believe genius leaves clues i was like you know how do you how do you prepare how do you get ready when the director you're just sitting here for hours and then the director calls on you how do you get ready and he was like jim i don't have to get ready i stay ready and i'm like wow that's good to be a will smith it's hard to stay ready for six hours yeah exactly but that's just who he is because i believe the life you live are the lessons you teach the life you live are the lessons you teach others going back to his dominant question his family was there also at the same time visiting the set and um you know from westfield you know you know the song yes and we're all outside and shivering and when he wasn't shooting he would he would bring us blankets he would make hot chocolate and bring it to us he would crack jokes he would live that cut that dominant question because the life he lives he like how do i make this moment even more magical now before it was like how do i make this moment magical then we played with it like even more magical presuming it is already magical and amazing and so these questions we ask are very important now there are three questions when i said there's turning knowledge into power that i want everyone to obsess about i mean this will make you a master okay and if you get a this is it three questions to turn knowledge into power because knowledge alone is potential power number one how can i use this when you're listening to this podcast moving forward uh every time you listen to it i want you to ask yourself how can i use this get obsessed about this like even write it down and this is where your mind can be very creative because i in here i teach the power of uh note taking because people don't realize this when you listen to a podcast or you go to you know a summit or an event or have a great conversation with somebody within two days eighty percent of it is gone we forget it they call it the forgetting curve and one of the ways to retain it is to by taking notes exactly what you're doing now i encourage people to take notes a very specific way is to take put a line right down the page and on the left side of the page i want you to take notes and on the right side i want you to make notes so on the left side of the page you're taking notes you're you're going to list the right you're capturing information yeah you're like this is how jim remembers name this is how jim reads a you know a book a day or whatever it is so you're on the left side you're capturing but on the right side you're creating now that's a subtle difference on the left side your note taking on the right side your note making what's the difference again on the left side you're taking notes you're writing down the quotes and the strategies the processes but on your right side what you're doing the right side creativity instead of your mind being distracted when you're listening have it be distracted on focused on how can i use this on the right side is where you're writing your impressions of what you're learning how can i use this another great question second dominant question i would ask is not only how can i use it could you come up with all these answers just like i see you start seeing pug dogs everywhere it's like oh this is how i could use this in my relationship this is how i could use it you know in my career second question i would ask is why must i use this why must i use this you know we know one of the people that endorsed my book he's on your show is simon sinek and you know one of my favorite books i'm going to mention a lot of books including your own start with you know his star with why yeah right and so why must i use this so once you have all these ideas how can i use this why must i use this because if you don't have the reasons you won't get the results right you won't care enough about it exactly reasons reap results i'm gonna give a lot of people a lot of quick isms here because it goes from your head to your heart to your hands you could affirm things in your head all day set goals in your head all day but if you're not acting with your hands you're procrastinating putting things off check in with your second age which is your heart which are the emotions right because we are not logical we are biological dopamine oxytocin serotonin endorphins these this chemical soup drives us to act just like people don't buy logically they don't fall in love logically they do these things emotionally so find your emotions and in this book we do we really uncover and i decode motivation not motivation getting hyped up and dancing on chairs and then the next day not changing we figured out this formula of sustainable motivation in in this book but the second question is go back to why must i use this because if you don't have the why you won't do the what and then finally the third question first question how can i use this write all the answers down think about that second question why must i use it gives you the energy and the fuel and the drive to do it and finally when will i use this when will i use this because we know that one of the most important performance productivity tools that we have is our calendar yeah right if it's not in our calendar it just doesn't get done yeah how many people will go you put doctor's appointments there you put you know pta meetings you put meetings with your investor there but are you are you scheduling your real your workout are you scheduling your meditation time are you scheduling your journal or your white space just so you can be a creative thinker and if we don't write it down it comes at the end and then you just you know you never get to it and so those are the three dominant questions that you want to ask to take knowledge and turn them into power so as you're going through this ask those questions you'll get better answers and you'll learn it deeper it'll deepen into your nervous system so much more before we continue this video make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day i've got things i do each day and i've got things i do on a weekly basis i'm less good about the annual vacation i've never done it so i've been doing science 25 years i i you know there's a i i'm sure some of my uh former relationships will be like that's right we never actually took a proper vacation yeah my former girlfriend i was like we'd go to like paris england and we would reach germany and i was giving talks and talks and then i'd get sick and then one day she was so understanding it's like i i still feel some guilt about that but we would take an afternoon and go to a gallery but then i was like right back at it you know that's been my life too it's it's hard i mean you have to find that balance you know luckily i was in my 30s then and when you're in your 20s and 30s you can get away with less serotonin in your system but now you need more serotonin oh absolutely so what do you do every day to get more serotonin absolutely sleeping an adequate amount is key the the practice that served me the best has not been a meditative practice there are two practices one is called yoga nidra which is doesn't involve any movement you just it literally means yoga sleep this was introduced to me about five years ago just laying on your back you listen to a script there are a lot of scripts on youtube and it teaches you to there's some breathing involved but it's really a body scan you learn to go into deep relaxation i do this once or twice a day if i wake up and i haven't had enough sleep i do it first thing five ten minutes uh there's a 20 minute script i like there is a 10 minute script that's out there too i can give you the links to these if people are interested in them i have no affiliation with any uh yoga nidra businesses but i love what the practice because i feel like i recover the sleep i didn't get i then feel really alert in the afternoon if i'm feeling tired i'll do yoga nidra it also involves some intentions which has a kind of pseudo-self-hypnosis component and i have a colleague david spiegel in the department of psychiatry who does clinical hypnosis and these intentions that we do in states of deep relaxation are known to have positive effects on thinking in action they are in pain mitigation and even breast cancer outcomes david's work has shown that so we're not saying stage hypnosis with like a pendant we're talking self-hypnosis self-hypnosis or medical hypnosis it's like you said deliberate thought as opposed to reactive thought right and you're in going you're teaching your body and brain to go into deep relaxation deliberately you're doing it and that's i think a power you're saying okay relax lay down relax your body relax your face calm you know breathe slower you're telling yourself to do it you're using the body to control the mind that's again and you're deliberately turning your thoughts off most people can't do that and so for me yoga nidra has been a absolute amplifier accelerator whatever you want to call it on my career and life and well-being it also gets you better at falling asleep because one of the reasons why people have trouble falling asleep is they can't turn their thoughts off so you're training your nervous system how to do this i should say because it sounds a little bit out there in the um kind of new ag space there are several studies imaging studies positron emission tomography studies and others looking at yoga ninja specifically this wasn't worked on by my lab although we are exploring it in my lab as a tool for stress mitigation anxiety mitigation but these studies show that 30 minutes i believe it was of yoga nidra resets the levels of dopamine in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia which prepares the brain and body for action so these deep relaxation states even if we're wide awake still allow the nervous system to reset so that it can get back into action so for the go-getters if you're really if you want to have a long career you want to high-perform your whole career you want to have tools that allow you to reset that dopamine level because that is accomplished that has a huge effect excuse me on buffering adrenaline as we said earlier but in addition to that serotonin is what resets the dopamine pathway so now there's sort of what we're seeing is kind of a logic to it you need to all you need to alternate rest and effort you need to reward effort you need to understand with rest with rest so there's yoga nidra and i would say the best time to do is first thing in the morning before you go sleep at night or any time of day in other words i believe everyone should have some deep relaxation process that's deliberate that doesn't involve ingesting anything you know not food or wine for some people you know a drink is fine i'm focused on behavioral tools you know supplements and drugs have their place and you know so they're clinically depressed people that need a boost in dopamine or need to boost in serotonin and i'm i think even though drugs like prozac get a bad rap those drugs have also saved millions of lives there's just an appropriate dose and context and some people shouldn't take them well people also what i'm hearing you say is you can should take them when you need them when you're unable to physically create those habits for yourself and routines for yourself but then once you take it you're always going to need it until you can learn how to behaviorally change your actions that's right right it's like the obese person that finally you know if they really can't move right you know maybe they do need to do some sort of surgical procedure or they need it or they do something that but then once they start exercising you you i believe you always want to go behaviors focus on behaviors first get the behaviors dialed in everything we've talked about today is free everything we talked about is is self-directed so it's behaviors then i think it i think diet and is very important or nutrition i think supplementation definitely has its place i think we are past the the ridiculous idea of the 80s and 90s like oh can't you get everything from what you no one can even agree on what we're supposed to eat right every scientist i know who's serious about their mind and body takes supplements yeah i don't have a supplement company i'm very clear about this but they all have their regime for them and i think we're seeing a tide change now where supplements are no longer being thought of as this like niche thing that only bodybuilders and like people are selling snake oil are about there is a lot of snake oil out there but there are also some supplements that are powerful for the sorts of things that we're talking about for sleep and all the others we could talk about them if you like but i think it's behaviors nutrition supplements and then there is a place for prescription drugs there are people that are clinically depressed and suicidal and need help and they need to talk to a board-certified md and get a hold of in some cases the opinion of whether or not they should take these drugs doesn't mean they should take them forever but you know we tend to jump to drugs and that's why i think a lot of those drugs they won't change your behaviors you still need to change your review that's the easy way out to start is taking the drugs but what you should be doing is the behavioral nutrition supplements if you do us three things first you should start to feel better oh absolutely yeah sunlight in the morning the things we've talked about breathing relaxing yeah all these things i have a friend he's an md and he says it says it beautifully he says you know better living through chemistry still requires better living right there is no pill or substance or psychedelic that's going to completely rewire you it's not even clear what that would look like and then there's a fifth category that's starting to emerge now which is brain machine interface things like devices that people put on and to adjust their brain waves enhance plasticity there are great devices out there for what i would say reading and measuring from the nervous system monitoring sleep for instance um monitoring brain waves we're still in the infancy of good commercially available brain machine interface but i think that will eventually show up the the other thing because you asked about tools each day i have a daily practice of doing yoga nidra um for me that's my form of meditation and sort of serotonin reset the other one is gratitude i know gratitude gets a lot of discussion nowadays but i always want to point out that gratitude is it's not complacency people think it's navel gazing and it's but it it has been shown to increase levels of serotonin in the brain it's a scientist now it's i did an interview with um dr lori santos so she's the yale professor science of happiness at yale yeah i had her on and i was like okay what are the top scientific reasons for happiness right now that are proven and she was like gratitude is like one of the top three or four it's like okay so this is not woo-woo anymore she's like no this is scientifically proven that gratitude makes you happier i think gratitude is wonderful it resets the system so that you can be in pursuit i think gratitude sounds like complacency and people like oh i don't want to be a naval gazer i'm just then i'm not going to be content then i'm excuse me then people fear that they're not going to be complacent they're like i'm just happy with where i'm at but serotonin resets dopamine which puts you back in the fight and allows you to fight longer and further and i guess i'm doing this a lot today but i've had the great you know privilege of doing some work with these communities if you look at high performers in these very high risk consequence special operations communities they have gratitude practices really they do then they incorporate them and so you know people think there's like some secret sauce or there's something you know and they are very unique individuals and very special individuals but they but they have those practices they have the same tools that adam boarding can use that's right we all have these tools you do yoga nidra you do gratitude practice throughout the day what else do you do so the first thing i do when i wake up in the morning is i actually is a gratitude no matter what pops in my head i reorient to being grateful that i'm waking up i mean you know it's uh you know i've had a number of close calls in life i've lost people like everybody i'm 45 so you know seen a lot of babies born seeing a lot of uh people die that's just the way it goes but just i express some gratitude for just waking up yes and that puts me in forward motion and then i can do things like make my bed reward that that i'm not doing something else that you know and start getting into things and i tend to reward uh relationships in a big way my dog's 10 years old i raised him since he was a puppy he's getting he's a bulldog he's probably getting to the end i try and really just focus on the sheer pleasure of having a bulldog there are such characters and him in particular relationships of all kinds like if i spend time with people or just i just try and think about mentors people that got me where i where i am i do that all the time and i'm pretty as you probably imagine i talk fast i work a lot i'm pretty intense but i finish my days now not feeling ground out and depleted doesn't mean i'm grateful for every opportunity or everything that comes my way i have to be conscious of it but i think a deliberate practice that of relishing or enjoying what we have is so powerful and not just going through the motions if we're not enjoying it and we're just waiting for the end result we're going to be unhappy absolutely and there's something called dopamine reward prediction error where people work work work work work or they expect something to be great and as you do that you actually raise the level of dopamine that's required to make it feel good when you get there this is why people you know achieve great things and kill themselves it's crazy you know the failure to respect these neurochemical pathways in these neural pathways the is actually i mean it it's basically throwing away everything that we were given in my opinion and i don't want to give the impression that people have to follow these protocols because i'm talking about them we were all given these you know people will sometimes ask me they'll say you know is there an app or a product around this i just say look mother nature has the patent for this you know whatever people's beliefs you know this stuff was built into us for whatever reason and we can use these different neurochemical pathways to organize our life in a way that really serves us and the people around us best and the gratitude practice can be one second long it can be 10 minutes if you want people do love and kindness meditation i've never done that i've always had a hard time being in meditation for a long period of time i'm not good at mental visualization yeah um so i tend to gear more towards behaviors when you're you're a neuroscientist you're not good at mental visualization well i you know i try but i think some we all differ in our ability to um hold on to a mental imagery and mine is kind of fleeting so i tend to write things out but yeah gratitude practices i get try and get sun in my eyes i mean exercise i love i'm fortunate that i love exercise and training i think that got into me young um for people that that's harder to do then you know you just build these things up through subjective rewards yeah if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 845,623

Rating: 4.829144 out of 5

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, unlock the power of your mind, joe dispenza, andrew huberman, jim kwik, super brain, success mindset, mindset, growth mindset, mindset motivation, thoughts, wisdom

Id: iBB_45xoWgM

Length: 183min 21sec (11001 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 14 2020