 Well, welcome to the show, Lisa. Thank you for joining us today. My pleasure. Thank you so much for the invitation. Well, first things first, Johnny and I were really curious to hear the backstory of this book being a published author, so many scientific papers. What made you decide to write these seven and a half lessons for us? Well, you know, like most things, there isn't really one reason. There were a bunch of reasons that all kind of cohere together. One was that I had already written a traditional popular science book called How Emotions Are Made, The Secret Life of the Brain. And it was a standard popular science book about 300 pages. You have to have a lot of patients to read a book like that. You know, it had, I think, a thousand references. I mean, it was, you know, plus web notes. I mean, it was, I don't want to detract people from reading it. It's a, you know, it's a standard popular science book. But I thought that there were some themes in that book that people were really resonating to, but you had to really read it carefully to kind of unearth them. And I thought, wouldn't it be really interesting to kind of bring them really to the forefront easily for people? And then also, I really love reading essays. I read essays on the beach. I read essays in the bathtub. I love reading essays. And I thought I'd really like to try my hand at writing them. So I thought no one before, I don't think, has ever written like a little neuroscience book of essays that you could read on the beach. And that was my goal. You know, just these bite-sized little essays that would give you a couple of tidbits of neuroscience that you could like wow your friends with at a dinner party, and that wouldn't necessarily answer big questions about human nature, but would invite people to think about these big questions. And the goal really was to have these little essays that wouldn't take very long to read, maybe a subway stop or two, right? But that you'd be thinking about them for a longer time after you read the essays. And so that was my goal. You know, I'd never done anything like this before. It was actually, it's probably the hardest thing I've ever written, I would say. Wow. I wouldn't have expected that, but it was a joy to read. And definitely each lesson left me thinking, okay, what does this really mean? I thought you did a great job there. So the first lesson Johnny and I were joking about before you joined, just how many times we've made this mistake in sharing this neuroscience. We've had guests on the show talking about the lizard brain. And I'm sure many in our audience are going to be shocked to realize that there is no such thing as a lizard brain. Well, a lizard has a lizard brain, but it doesn't justify our behavior. No, no, exactly. That's why I was saying, you know, you have to find another excuse for your bad behavior now because you can't, you can't blame it on a lizard brain. Yeah. So where did that concept come from? And why is it so pervasive in neuroscience? Yeah. So the, the idea that we have an inner beast, right, that we have to kind of wrestle into, you know, to get under control is a really old idea in the philosophy of Western philosophy of the human mind. And you can trace ideas like this all the way back to Plato, right? Plato had this idea that, you know, which he, he dramatized as, you know, two horses, two stallions and a charioteer. And so one stallion is our instincts and another stallion are emotions stands in for the emotions. And then you've got the human charioteer who's wrestling these beasts into submission, or at least under control under, you know, to be under control. And, and this was really not an origin story of humanity. It was more of a morality story of what it meant to be a moral good person that you can control your inner beast. This, and, you know, this was basically an idea that was picked up in the early 20th century and kind of tattooed onto the brain. And it was really formalized, I would say, I mean, there were elements of it there that were there for a long time, but it was really formalized in the 1940s, more or less, with a man named Paul McClain, a neuroscientist who actually worked at Mass General Hospital in Boston, where I also work. And he formulated what's called the Triune Brain, a brain in three parts. First, you know, the lizard brain contains the circuitry for instincts. And then across the course of the span of evolutionary time, new circuits were laid down on top of those for emotions in what's called a limbic system, limbic meaning literally border, the border, the tissue that borders the lizard brain. You know, your amygdala, for example, is a portion of what is referred to as limbic. And then what apparently evolved on top of that was the cerebral cortex. And our cerebral cortex happens to be very big as humans relative to the rest of the brain. And well, I mean, I would say that's true for primates in general, it's not just true for humans. Our cerebral cortex is about the size it should be for a primate of our size who has a brain of our size. So there's nothing special about our cerebral cortex in particular relative to other primates. But in general, primates have big cerebral cortices. And the idea was that that's where rationality lives. And this has been around really for most of the 20th century, but it was sort of formalized in an evolutionary story in the 1940s and 50s. And what's really interesting is that once scientists began to peek into the structure of cells to look at the genetic material inside brain cells, they realized that this story was wrong. And that in fact, what's happening across the course of evolution, so certainly there were big innovations that happened when vertebrates made their appearance, meaning animals with backbones. And it turns out there were a bunch of things that were innovations that evolved, newly evolved, that kind of go together. But the basic brain plan for a vertebrate, so that would be a fish or a bird or a mammal, you know, like a rat or a dog or a cat or a monkey or us, that our brain plans are actually not all that different. And in fact, for mammals, the brain plan seems to be virtually identical. So what's happening really is that as neurons are being formed in an embryo, there are different stages, and those stages run for different amounts of time. And so that changes the frequency with which or the density with which certain types of cells are born. And so basically as brains get bigger across evolutionary time, they're reorganizing themselves. And so it looks like if you just look at a brain, it may look to you like there are these parts, but that's not really the case at all. And that every cell that you can find brain cell that you can find in a human brain, you can also find in a rat or a cat or a dog. And a large proportion of them you can find in a fit like a hagfish or a lamprey or, you know, these like, so the irony though, I think is that right about the time when science when this science was really hitting its stride, which is the 1970s, when a lot of this research was being produced, these discoveries were being made. That was when Carl Sagan wrote this book, right, called The Dragon's Beeden. And it was a bestseller Pulitzer Prize winning book where, you know, he talked about the triune brain, the lizard brain and the limbic system and so on. And so it just became, you know, a very entrenched, it's not really his fault, it was already there, these ideas. But he really did a lot to popularize that view exactly at the time when scientists were learning that this view was completely not the case at all. But I think the idea that we have an inner beast that has to be controlled by rationality, that idea has been around, I mean, it's the basis of economic theory, it's the basis of every legal system in the West. It's, you know, it's a very, very popular idea that your mind is a battleground, your brain is a battleground between instincts and emotion on one side and rationality on the other. And the idea is that if your rationality wins for the control of your behavior, you're a good person, you're moral and you're healthy. If your inner beast wins, you are immoral because you didn't try hard enough, or maybe you're mentally ill because you just couldn't control yourself. But that's the narrative. And it's just not a narrative that is supported by the evidence. Okay, so this opens up to a lot of questions then. And I can't count the number of books in self-development that start with that very theory. And it's littered through existentialism, which is my favorite era of philosophy. So in moving forward, and AJ and I were talking about this, it's like, okay, well, then if we're going to, to adopt this new idea in moving forward, how do we then present these ideas? Because there is a lot of utility in the idea of the lizard brain and the rational brain and overcoming the lizard brain. And it's sort of an easy picture to work around in your mind. So in moving forward, what would you say as somebody who studied us and wrote a book on emotions, how we present this idea and how do we find utility in the self-development round with it? There isn't really one way forward. There are multiple ways forward. But what I would say is the following that, you know, Plato came up with this idea for a really good reason, or came up with it, but Plato is known for this idea, right? And for a really good reason. I mean, he probably didn't come up with it, but who knows? I don't know. I don't know enough about the history of philosophy to know who came up with what. But I would say that we almost always have competing goals. I'm not saying rationality doesn't exist. I'm saying rationality is not the absence of feeling emotion. Rationality is not the absence of feeling. It can't be. That's impossible, actually, anatomically. Your brain is always regulating your body, the systems in your body. That's its most important job. That's why we have brains, because we have big, complicated bodies with a lot of moving parts that have to be integrated and coordinated in a metabolically efficient way. And your body is always sending sense data back to your brain about the state of the body. Because your brain doesn't know. Your brain is trapped in a dark, silent box, your skull. It has no idea what's going on in the body. It has no idea what's going on in the world. It only finds out things through the sensory surfaces of the body, your retina in your eyes, your cochlea in your ears, and so on. And information that's making its way up the vagus nerve and other nerve pathways up the spinal cord. And these sense data that your brain receives are the outcomes of some changes. But your brain doesn't get the cause. It only knows the outcome. So it has to guess at the causes, right? Because a flash of light or a loud bang, like a loud bang could be a door slamming. It could be thunder outside. It could be a gunshot. And what your brain has to prepare you to do is different in those three cases. Similarly, if you have an ache in your chest, that ache could be that there's a lot of uncertainty and your heart is racing. It could be that you just ate a big meal and you've got indigestion. It could be the beginnings of a heart attack. I mean, your brain doesn't know. Your brain has to guess. And the point is that your brain is receiving always sense data from the body. And your brain makes that data available to consciousness as simple feelings, feeling pleasant, feeling unpleasant, feeling comfortable, feeling uncomfortable, feeling worked up, feeling calm. These simple feelings are not emotions, but they're always with you, 24 seven, always. So that means you're never without feeling. You know, when you're driving on the highway or I won't say you when I'm driving on the highway and somebody cuts me off and I think, what an asshole? I'm not saying that for your feeling. You know, there's feeling there. But you know, we experience feeling, I experience feeling in that moment as if it's embedded in the person I'm perceiving like the assholeness is really that person, right? As opposed to my brain is actually creating this feeling. And so I think this is a really good example. You know, there may be other reasons for why that person cut me off on the highway that I'm not considering. And maybe that person is late for an appointment. Maybe that person is rushing someone to the hospital. Maybe that person didn't actually see me. And there are a lot of reasons that that could have happened. And rationality in part is about, you know, considering alternatives, let's say, and not just going with the first experience that you have, the first impression that you have. Rationality is also really tied, I think to, so it's not tied to the absence of feeling, but it's definitely tied to doing things in with the amount of energy that you actually have. So what I mean by that is our brain is kind of running a budget for our body. That's a metaphor for what your brain is doing. One of the things your brain is doing is trying to balance the intake of energy and the output of energy. Everything costs some energy. Everything you do, everything you think, everything you learn, every experience you have costs something metabolically. And rationality, you could also think of it as, so for example, we look at someone who is depressed or who is anxious as being not rational. And in fact, actually, the dominant view of depression is that you have overactive emotion circuits in your brain and underactive cognitive control, underactive rationality. Well, you don't have emotion circuits in your brain. No animal has emotion circuits in their brain. And there are no circuits for rationality. Another way to think about what depression is, is a bankrupt body budget that there are real serious metabolic problems. A person who is depressed is basically has there are metabolic issues that cause people to have no energy to, you know, stop exercising, stop moving, stop engaging with people around them to kind of go with their beliefs instead of, you know, trying to forage for new information or paying attention to what's going on around them. And that's actually a rational thing to do. It's rational to stop spending when you're running a deficit. And yeah, and the most expensive thing your brain can do really is move your body, like literally move your limbs. That's expensive. And also learning something new turns out to be metabolically expensive. So if you stop, you know, if you withdraw and you stop moving and, you know, you lose motivation to do things, that's actually in a way that's sort of not spending. It's becoming frugal. Yeah, conserving. Yeah. So depression, we think of as a mental illness and that there's something wrong with the person's rationality. But I would say the symptoms of depression are perfectly rational way to deal with a body budget deficit. And the problem actually that needs to be solved is not an absence of rationality. It's a problem with metabolism. Yeah. And this makes so much sense because for everybody, if they're having any sort of issues, the first thing that you want to look at is that triad of how are you sleeping? What are you eating? And what sort of exercise you are getting? Because that helps process your metabolism and what you're eating and making sure that all that energy is getting spent in the proper manner. And if you're not sleeping correctly, if you're not eating properly, if you're not getting exercise, well, all of that energy that is coming in is going to the wrong places or is reserved for places that is not getting the proper sleep exercise and diet. When I first started learning more about, I guess it was, I'm not sure exactly. I mean, maybe now almost 15 years ago, I had this epiphany. I was sitting in a meeting at the National Cancer Institute and I was watching someone present something about cortisol. And I realized in that moment that cortisol is not a stress hormone. Cortisol is actually, it's a glucose corticoid. That's what it's called. It's a glucose regulator. When your body secretes cortisol, it's to get glucose into your bloodstream quickly because your brain is predicting that you have to do something effortful. So when you wake up in the morning, you have a surge of cortisol. If you're healthy, you have a surge of cortisol because you're about to drag your ass out of bed to go do something. Right before you exercise, surge of cortisol. Why? Because you're just about to actually spend a lot of glucose that you're going to have to, and other nutrients that you'll have to replenish. And so, sure, cortisol is secreted in stressful moments because what is stress? Stress is your brain is predicting a big metabolic outlay. That's what stress is. And if you prepare for this big metabolic outlay again and again and again and it doesn't come, you end up sort of, there ends up being a dysregulation in cortisol metabolism and that is indicative of a problem. We call that stress and sure, that's a perfectly fine thing to call it. But if you misunderstand what the chemical is doing, then you might misunderstand the cause of what's happening. Same thing with depression, right? Serotonin. So the major drugs that people take are serotonin up every uptake inhibitors to keep serotonin floating around in your brain for longer. Well, serotonin is not a happiness chemical. It's a metabolic regulator. It evolved as a metabolic regulator. It's throughout your whole body. Your gut produces most of the serotonin in your whole body as a metabolic regulator. So I think it's really important to understand the causes of things. Like when you hear people, you read in the paper, you hear people talking about, they have this like COVID related languishing. It's not because their fight and flight circuits are overloaded. It's because they're metabolically encumbered. They're running a body budget deficit because dealing with uncertainty in a prolonged way is very expensive, very expensive, and it feels like crap because it's very expensive. Here's another example. You're really anxious. Well, anxious is the way our brain, it's the story that our brain constructs to make sense of high arousal states. High arousal states happen when there's a lot of uncertainty because there are certain chemicals that help us learn better that are high arousal. They create these high arousal states and they help us learn better. So when I was feeling very high arousal, unpleasantly very high arousal, right at the beginning, right before the COVID pandemic was announced, I was in New Zealand and my daughter was flying over to meet me for her spring break and she's over the Atlantic Ocean and I'm thinking, should I just meet her at the airport and go home or like, what should I do? And if my brain had created anxiety out of that high arousal state, I would withdraw and I would probably just do the first thing that I thought of. But arousal is an indicator of uncertainty. And if you know that and you have enough energy, then you can forage for information and then make a decision. Yeah. So that's what I did. One point that I want to make, which is this high arousal state, and you mentioned this also helps us learn better. And I'm going to guess the reason being is it opens up pathways to take in information. And something that I keep remembering was about some new music that I was listening to during that time when COVID was coming in. And if I hear those songs right now, they take me back to the uncertainty and what I was feeling. And I can look back upon it now with fondness and go, oh, I remember that. But it was, of course, it was an incredibly tense time for everybody of not knowing what was coming and what we were looking out for. But those tones and those songs take me right back there. Because your brain is always, what your brain is learning are patterns, entire patterns, ensembles of signals. And so those sounds go along with other signals, other, you know, in the patterns that your brain learned at that time. So with the second lesson, I think many of us have the misconception that we have this photographic memory. And our brain is just making perfect sense of the world around us. When in actuality, it's trying its best as it can to map what's going on. But a lot of it's just based on past information experiences. So it feels to me like the more experience we can introduce a child to or in our own life, even as adults, the more rationality we open up. You know, if you grow up in the inner city in Chicago and all you hear is gunshots, then any time you see a loud, hear a loud bang or a flash of light, well, rationally speaking, your body and brain have been primed to believe it's a gunshot. And then you move to a safer city, you're still anticipating that it's a gunshot, even though there's no rational reason in that area to feel that way. But it's very rational. That's the thing. That's the thing is, is, you know, your brain wires itself to your body in your world. And, you know, scientists talk about an ecological niche. It's like the parts of the world that matter to you. There are some parts of the world that don't matter to us, right? And so your niche, your world, your brain wires itself to both of those things. So what this means, though, is that experience wires your brain. And if you grew up in an environment where there were lots of guns, the probability, the base rate of a loud bang being a gunshot was very high, then when you move to a new environment, it's perfectly rational, perfectly rational to predict that those loud bangs are gunshots. The thing is that when you move to a new environment, what you have to do is forage for information to tune your predictions, to, you know, scientists call it your internal model. Your brain is running a model of your body in the world. And you have to update that model. And that means learning new stuff. But if you're metabolically encumbered, if you have a lot of stress in your life, if you actually have a metabolic problem in your body, you will have a hard time learning new stuff. You'll have a hard time updating that model. And so, again, I would say it's not because people lack the will, you know, it's because there's something interfering with their ability to learn. And that's the important thing to focus on. So, we've heard the phrase, can't teach an old dog new tricks. Oh, yes, you can. Oh, yes, you can. Yeah. It just takes a lot of energy. What does neuroscience say for us to actually rewire these pathways if we've grown up in these environments or had certain patterns of behavior that have been attuned to the environment we were in previously? Well, I think learning is like driving, really. You're just, it's like learning any skill. You have to give a lot of energy and effort at the beginning. And then eventually, over time, stuff becomes pretty automatic. So, if you grew up in an environment, I mean, you're not responsible. Here's the sucky thing about the way things are with the brain. You're not responsible for the world that was curated for you as a child. It's not your fault. And it's not your responsibility as a child. You know, other people, adults who take care of you or don't, are curating a world for you and your brain is wiring itself to that world. But here's the sucky bit. As an adult, it may not be your fault. You may not be culpable for the wiring that you have. But you are responsible for it. And the reason why you are is because nobody else can change it, but you. And that feels unfair. And it is unfair. But it's also the way things are. And also, I would say, you know, it's very easy for me as a scientist to say, oh, well, you just have to curate new experiences for yourself. You just have to expose yourself to new information. You just have to practice, you know, but a lot of people don't. I mean, I grew up in poverty, and I know how hard it is to claw your way out of it. And I have to even though, you know, I mean, and I'm a woman. So that was a mark against me. You know, but I'm also in this country, you would call me white. So that was a benefit. So, you know, I had some advantages and but people, a lot of people don't have a lot of choice in their lives. But I guess what I'm trying to suggest to people is that even though none of us have as much or very few of us have as much choice as we'd like or want, we all have more control than we think we do. And that means that it's not as easy to change that wiring as, you know, we're making it sound, it's actually pretty bloody hard. But it's like any kind of skill, you have to invest a lot of energy, practice a lot. And then eventually it'd be like driving, you know, it becomes pretty automatic, but it takes a while. And sometimes it feels bad, because you know, think about when you're exercising. So, you know, for me, I'm about maybe it takes me I get to about 20 minutes into a workout. And then I'm feeling not like I just want to stop. I'm not feeling good. I'm not one of these people who, you know, has a runner's high or whatever. I've never been that person. I wish I was that person. I am not that person. I'm the person who wants to stop. I'm the person who doesn't even want to run to begin with. Okay. But I know that sometimes feeling bad doesn't mean that something's wrong. It just means you're doing something hard. Right. So I think about, you know, the Marines, right, you know, pain is weakness leaving the body. Right. I love that. Right. I love that saying because it's really, you know, you're doing something hard. It feels like shit, but you have to push through it. And in the end, you will be stronger and healthier for it. And it's the same thing about, you know, retraining your brain, so to speak, you know, when you're learning something new and you're learning a new skill, it sometimes doesn't feel bad. It doesn't seem to feel good. It can feel bad, but it doesn't mean that you're doing the wrong thing necessarily. It doesn't mean something's wrong in the world. It just means you're doing something hard. I think it's so important to hear the metabolic component of it. So one of the first lessons we teach in our X Factor Accelerator is looking at your health, looking at what you're eating, how you're moving your body and getting enough sleep. And of course, you know, people joining the program are looking to build better relationships, communicate more effectively, be a leader. And they're like, well, why am I learning about what I'm putting in my body? But it all comes at a cost to learn this new skill, to be more persuasive, to change the wiring and the patterns that have been built up in your brain. You're going to expend a lot of energy to start wiring your brain in this new direction. And I don't hear that shared enough when we talk about a lot of these strategies in self development. It's just like, well, you got to make the choice. As someone else did it, they gridded through it. Well, sometimes metabolically speaking, we're not in a healthy enough place to even make that choice. I would also say that that word metabolic and metabolic health, to me, it seems like it is, it's always been there, but it's now moving to the forefront as more and more information comes out about what we're eating and how it affects us. In fact, we're going to be interviewing a heart surgeon who is a big proponent of metabolic health and looking at the way it is affect you and making sure that you're eating for your metabolic health and just not eating what people were telling you just because that's what they eat. So it's good to see these ideas making their way to the forefront, because as we had just been talking about it, everything that you're putting in does have a cost and it does have an effect on your cognition, your energy and how you see the world. In fact, from what we were saying earlier, I know at the end of the evening, I get more frustrated about things that I'm learning or working on than I do in the morning when I'm just worked out, I had my coffee and I'm fired up. I can breeze through anything. If I'm doing something in the evening, if I'm writing a blog article in the evening, I'm driving myself nuts over it because my energy has been spent. You're right. Our brains are wired to initiate actions before we're even aware of them. And I think a lot of times again, going back to self-development and pop culture, there's a lot of guilt tied to these behaviors. I'm falling into this pattern again. Why couldn't I control it more effectively? And then the guilt that comes with it that leads to even more inaction. So if you could just unpack for us what it means to control our actions and what this really looks like, especially around these bad habits and default actions that we've built up in our lives. Yeah, for sure. The story that we've been told for a long time is that something happens in the world. We see it, we hear it, and then we react to it. So there's a scientist we call that a stimulus. There's something in the world that causes our brains to, our neurons to fire in our brains. Then we evaluate it and then we plan an action and we execute the action. So stimulus, response. And if we want to control ourselves, sometimes that means putting the breaks on that response and planning a different response instead. And I would say if you have to put the breaks on, you're already 70% and 80% of the battle is already lost, really. Now, that's not to say that that never happens. It does sometimes happen that we put the breaks on one response, hopefully before Will Smith should have put the breaks on. But I would say that the most effective way to build in control is to understand that your brain does not react to things in the world. It's predicting. So your brain is always predicting. And predictions are not these abstract mental plans. Your brain is changing the firing of its own neurons to anticipate what's going to happen next and plan for it. And actually, the real crazy bit of this is that if we were to stop time right now and look inside your brain, your brain would be, like having a model of, it would be modeling what it believes to be happening in your body and in the world. And it's going to predict what's going to happen next. And predictions begin as motor plans. So the last time I was in this situation with this pattern of sense data, what did I do next? And that is what your brain starts to plan. It starts to plan the action. And as a consequence of that planning, it also starts to plan what you will start to anticipate. What will you see? What will you hear? What will you smell? What will you feel? So it's not the case that you see first and then you act. It's that you prepare the action first and then you see. And you know, when I'm explaining this to audiences, I usually, I have some fun examples. But one of the best examples actually is explaining how baseball works, like how, you know, what a pitcher and a batter are facing each other. I have to admit, I mean, I live in Boston, so I'm not allowed to say too loudly. So just between us and our list, our like millions of listeners, like I'm not a real sports fan and I, I'm not a Red Sox fan, but just because I don't, I didn't really understand baseball very, I wasn't really interested. I actually come from Canada. So I wasn't thrilled with hockey either. But I have to say that now I'm very much, you know, not just hockey and baseball, but like I just started reading about total football, which is a kind of soccer that gets played. And I'm like, this is amazing. Because sports, everything to do with sports with where there are balls and maybe, you know, equipment and multiple humans is the perfect set of examples to explain how prediction works. If your brain wasn't, if brains didn't predict and they only reacted, there would be no baseball, you know, because a batter can't wait until he sees the pitcher release the ball and then prepare the motor response. If he tried to do that, he would miss the ball every single time. It's just physically not possible. So your brain is starting to prepare your actions first, and your experience is a consequence. It's conditional on what you see, what you hear, and so on. Conditional on those motor preparations. What does that mean? What that means is that if you want to control your behavior, you have to architect your environment correctly to help you engage in the actions that you want to engage in. A simple example is every day around five o'clock, I really get hungry. Now, am I really hungry? Not really. I'm probably really fatigued. And I think that if I eat, it will give me more energy, right? And what do I want to eat? Do I want to eat? You know, if there are potato chips around in the house, I will eat them. I will eat them. Yeah. So what do I have to do? I have to have no potato chips in my house. Now, that's a trivial example, but it's an example of what scientists call niche construction. The parts of the world that matter to you that are important to your well-being are your niche. And if I make sure that I don't have potato chips in my house, that's a form of niche construction. If I make sure that I keep my windows open and to get fresh air or light or I go for a walk, that's niche construction. Because what I'm doing is I'm constructing my environment in a way that will help me engage in the behaviors that I want to engage in. So we do things like we have these little programs or apps that will lock us out of our phones. That's niche construction. And then I would also say, though, that for humans, a huge part of our ecological niche are other humans. And the best thing for a human nervous system is another human. The worst thing for a human nervous system is also another human. And so the way you treat other people, how predictable your behavior is to other people influences how they treat you, how predictable they are to you. And so the way in which you treat people is also a form of niche construction. It directly influences, it directly impacts your well-being. And I think that if you understand these things, if you understand that the brain is predictive, if you understand that that basically automatically your brain's going to predict what to do next. And if you don't want to have to engage in the energy, the effort of putting the brakes on, you can try to architect your environment in a way to do niche construction in a way that will allow you to engage in the behaviors that are the ones that you want. Absolutely. One of the simplest exercises we do with our clients who are looking to grow socially, get over some social anxiety, or they move to a new location, for many of us, meeting absolute strangers is a huge metabolic cost. So tying that to something you enjoy doing already, like an exercise or an activity or a hobby, and looking to start socializing there first in a niche that you're going to be a lot more comfortable, you're going to be feeling a lot better, because you have something in common that you already enjoyed doing is a lot easier than saying, oh, just pick a random restaurant or bar and strike up a conversation with anyone you see. So we have this control if we start to look at our goals and then map an environment around those goals that's conducive. But I would even say, I would even say, if you know that you have to go somewhere brand new, let's say you've moved to a new city, you have to go somewhere brand new, you've never been there before, you have to meet these new people and do this really hard thing. If you have the time, go the day before to this place and scope it out, find out where the bathrooms are, learn your way around. So that will reduce the arousal. Because remember, arousal is not always our go-to way of experiencing arousal is as anxiety or tension. But arousal, you can deconstruct it basically into, okay, this is an uncertain situation and my brain is attempting to learn. And I have to say that I've grown up in North America my entire life. I've lived in North America in various places. And so my brain makes anxiety like everybody else's brain. And then I have to remind myself that, no, this is arousal. It just feels like shit. But it's actually just arousal. And that means I'm probably, there's probably uncertainty here. And that means I have to figure out how to make things more predictable for myself. So even though, you know, I mean, for me now, it actually is almost like second nature to not experience anxiety. And this is by the way, not just these aren't just like, you know, word games or like Jedi mind tricks that you can play with yourself. You actually can practice to cultivate different experiences out of the same, you know, raw material, if you will, right? So you can out of high arousal, you could experience determination. You can experience getting your butterflies flying in formation, you know, you're about to do something hard. You need that arousal actually to do that hard thing. But it doesn't necessarily mean that something is wrong or that there's a threat. It can just mean that there's something uncertain and that what you have to do is to make things more predictable for yourself. And then it won't feel, there won't be so much arousal and you won't feel so bad. Part of the X factor accelerator, which is what our mentorship group comes in, in order to learn their own triggers and mechanisms to this arousal. So they can identify it when it's happening again and they can choose to turn towards it rather than turning away from it. And once they recognize what that is, they find themselves doing all of these things that they've always wanted to, because they can identify those feelings, they know they're an arousal and they can turn that arousal into excitement for what they're doing, rather than the fear of what they're doing. And that exposure is important, right? Because if we only have one experience in that arous state, our mind is drawing from that one pattern and it's predicting a negative consequence, failure on the test, going to an event and no one talking to you, or even worse, someone rejecting you. So it is important through exposure to gain more experience in that arous state and see all the different outcomes that can come out of it instead of holding on to that one negative experience. Absolutely. And in fact, there is research to show that people who suffer from test anxiety, really debilitating test anxiety, the kind of test anxiety that keeps people from completing college, which has a huge impact on their future earning potential, right? You don't want to teach them to experience, to have to reduce the arousal because they need that arousal to perform well in the test. Instead, what you do is you teach them to make sense of it differently, to experience it differently. And when people learn to experience arousal as an invitation to a challenge, to work hard, like determination, or getting your butterflies flying in formation, that not only do people, are they more likely to take a test and pass, they're more likely to complete the course, and they're more likely, that will eventually result in them not dropping out of college, which changes their earning potential in the realm of hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifespan. So it's a hard thing to do, but it's like exercise. It's an investment in a stronger, healthier you. You just have to practice it, practice it, and then it gets easier. Well, one of the things, just to go back to that sports analogy, you always see athletes trying to fire themselves up. And then once they have that first contact, they sort of settle into that arousal and then can focus on the game. Myself, I'm a performance artist. I love playing in bands and performing shows. And before that show, all day, the tension and the anxiety in me continues to crank as until showtime. But the minute I'm on stage and those first few notes begin to ring out, then we start to settle into the set that we're doing that can be focusing on the task at hand. And for a lot of our clients, same thing of get yourself fired up. And if it is about putting yourself as a networking event, you start talking to a few people and you'll settle in to having that anxiety beat excitement and focused at the task at hand. So really all that's changing there, though, Johnny, is that the brain is making sense of those arousing feelings in a different way. The arousal doesn't decrease. It's just that the brain experiences that arousal in a different way, makes sense of that arousal in a different way. And you have a lot of control. You have more control than you know. None of us have as much control as we would like. But we all have a little more control than we know. And that's really what the first my first book was about actually was in large part to explain to people how that works. And there are two or three chapters really, that talk about how to practice these skills so that you can use them, you know, really pretty efficiently, pretty automatically in difficult situations. My husband came up with, you know, a great way of making sense and great way of changing the meaning of something, you know, when you're in a situation where you feel like you're being evaluated by someone negatively or uncertain. I mean, listen, if I want to stress people in the lab, like subject test subjects, I can show them negative awful images for 30 minutes and maybe, you know, move the needle, or I could just make them believe that maybe someone is evaluating them negatively, not for sure, but just maybe there's uncertain uncertain negative evaluation from rather human two minutes and their cortisol is through the roof. My husband, though, said, you know, one thing that he does is he when he's in a situation like that, he he just imagines that, you know, all all that negative evaluation is just electrical activity in somebody else's brain. And then poof, doesn't matter anymore. It's like, well, it's just you've reduced it to this, you know, to electrical to signals in someone's brain. And that just removes the sort of the power of that negative kind of wave. Why love that second lesson so much? Because even if someone has that negative perspective of you, it's completely incomplete picture. It's it's them and their predictive qualities of their brain and past experiences, much less anything to do with what you did in that exact moment, thoughts, feelings or emotions that go along with it. Now, one of the main lessons in the book is our brains are working together with other brains, socially. And of course, on this show, we talk a lot about the importance of building strong relationships in your life, the health benefits that come from those relationships. So I'd love for you to unpack for our audience how our brains are wired to work with other humans brains, the mirroring that goes on all the way from child rearing up to adulthood. Well, we are social species and we're social animals. And what that means is it means several things, actually. But for the purposes of this discussion, what it means is that we make deposits and withdrawals for other people's body budgets, not just our own. And we didn't evolve to manage our own nervous systems on our own. We are the caretakers of other people's nervous systems. And they are the caretakers of ours. And what that means is literally that we can affect the metabolic health of other people by what we do and what we say. And that is something Americans don't like, I have to tell you as a general, well, I shouldn't say that. So that's maybe sweet, but when you say something like that, and I say, well, listen, I have a whole talk on how the words that we speak actually have a metabolic impact on other people. But, you know, I mean, I can text three little words to someone halfway around the world, and they don't have to see my face or hear my voice. I can change their heart rate. I can change their breathing. I can change the metabolism. I mean, I, you know, it's right. I think that we live in a culture that prizes individual rights and freedoms as we should. I'm part of that culture too. So I learned that too. But we have socially dependent nervous systems where we can influence each other with a look, you know, with a tilt of the head. And that's a really hard thing, I think, for people to deal with. And in the essay, I was basically trying to explain, first of all, that it really is the case, you know, if two people are in a room, they could be complete strangers. If they like each other and trust each other, their heart rate synchronized, their breathing synchronizes, they start to mirror each other's actions. The parts of the brain that are most important for understanding and using words, language, are also literally the same parts that regulate your heart, your lungs, your immune system and so on. So this is an important thing for us to think about, particularly in a culture where we prize individual rights and freedoms. You brought that up in the book where you're trying, well, at least let's lay out the, you laid out the discussion in a roundabout way of we have all this technology and we're connected to all these people and not everyone's brains are the same and we have different values and we have different cultures. So how do we move forward knowing that we, creativity, communication, copying, cooperation and compression is what we use to construct social realities and I think that works really well when we all live in the same culture but when we have different cultures going on, that becomes incredibly difficult and now here we are, what, 20 years down the road with social media and we're seeing its direct effect on rewiring the way we work together and see the world and I'm not so sure that we should be so connected with so many things that disrupt our niche construction as you had put it. I'm a scientist and my job really is not to tell people how to live, it's to explain where the conflicts are or where are the opportunities for gains or so my job isn't to tell people what to do, it's to really invite people to understand what's at stake and what the options are and to stimulate dialogue. There are a couple of places in the book where I take my lab coat off, I try to really signal, okay I have an opinion here and now I'm going to tell you my opinion not as a scientist but just as a human, this is my opinion. But when it comes to things like our very social nature or the fact that we are socially dependent on each other, even though we live, we have these socially dependent nervous systems, we are the caretakers of each other's health, each other's well-being, whether we like it or not, whether we believe it or not, it doesn't matter whether we believe it, it doesn't matter whether we like it, well so what are we going to do with that, right? It's not my job to tell someone what to do with that but what I will say is that while you are free to do and say for the most part, you know there are some restrictions, mostly what you want, you are not free from the consequences of what you say and do and you don't have to be a Buddhist and you don't have to believe in karma, okay, to understand that your actions are niche construction for other people, you're influencing other people who will be influencing you one way or another and but you know what you make with that of that, that's for you to figure out. I think we're all trying to figure that out right now due to the place that this technology has thrust us in that niche construction and our connectivity to everybody. What I find exciting about that is you then making the choice of how you want to show up and how you want to be a caretaker for others and if you make the choice to be supportive, to be cooperative, to be someone who's adding value to other people's lives, you're lowering their metabolic load and in turn they're going to want to spend more time with you, you're putting their mind at ease, you're putting them in a comfortable state and that's a much more powerful way to look at it I feel. Yeah exactly and for really you know what the book is attempting to do is invite people to think about human nature, what it means to be human and to think about the kind of human you want to be, the kind of human you are, the kind of human you want to be without telling you what to do or say or think, it's really meant to as an invitation to think about these things. It was great having you, thank you for stopping by. Yeah no, it's my pleasure.