Moment 111- The Unexpected Health Benefits Of Travel Everyone Should Know: Max Lugavere

Have you ever felt like your life is stuck on repeat and you are just doing the same things again and again? In this moment Max Lugavere discusses the dangers of becoming stuck in a rut and how our brain removes joy, excitement and happiness to save energy when we become fixed in our routines and habits. This is why when we grow older time seems to move quicker, as when we are younger every day is different and new. To combat this, Max discusses how new and novel experiences such as travel are hugely important for the brain and can even create new brain cells. This is part of not just living a longer life but living a fuller life. Listen to the full episode here -https://g2ul0.app.link/04wJkhTdUzb Watch the Episodes On Youtube - https://www.youtube.com/c/TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Max: https://www.instagram.com/maxlugavere/?hl=en https://twitter.com/maxlugavere?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business, Marketing & Life' per order link: ⁠https://smarturl.it/DOACbook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Steven Bartlett?

  One of the things that really did catch me off guard was it was in your book, The Genius Life, where you talk about this study with the mice and you make the case that travel is a has positive relationships with health, it has health benefits. Not something I've ever heard anybody say before, that travel is good for our health.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, wow, I'm glad you brought that up.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Because this that also kind of parlay is into another concept that I've been lately thinking about a lot for the first time. Well, first of all, so the study that I talk about in the second book, The Genius Life, is the fact that they, you know, just how important novel experiences are for the brain. They will take mice and keep them confined to, you know, like a very limited area. And they see that they're they suffer, they suffer in terms of their bodies and their brains. And then they let that mouse or they let, you know, intervention mice go and explore what they call enriched environments. And they see something like fourfold, you know, like they see like an upregulation

• 1:09Speaker 01

  in various indicators of neurogenesis, which is really important. It's like the creation of new brain cells. So all that is to say, like, you know, it's important to do novel things. And as I say this, you know, this is something that I struggle with in my in my in my own life, because I am a creature of habit. And I would routinely get the sense, this gnawing sense that I'm living Groundhog Day over and over and over again, where I I wake up and I do a few things like work related, I work out, but ultimately, like, I've got like this routine that I love, and I tend to do that on script every day. But I started to get this feeling like I'm just like waking up, doing a few things, going back to bed, waking up, doing a few things, going back to bed, like before I know it, like, my head is just like on my pillow again.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  And it's it started to get like really frustrating to me until I discovered that Groundhog Day Syndrome is actually a thing. And essentially, what it is, is, you know, our brains are, and this ties back to the mouse study, our brains are efficiency machines, right? It's conservation of energy. Our brains and bodies don't want to do any more work than they absolutely have to, right? Because, I mean, now we know that food is like ever-present, always at arm's reach, but for the longest time, that wasn't the case. And our brains are massive energy consumers. Our brains speak for 25% of our basal metabolic rate, despite accounting for only 2% to 3% of our body's mass. So, anything that the brain can do to make its functioning more efficient, it'll do.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  So, when you do the same things every single day, what does your brain do? It prunes away excitement, joy, happiness. Like, the dopamine response is just completely blunted. And that's why, as you get older, people universally, right? It's like a human universal. People report that time just accelerates, right? Like, where did the last decade of my life go? It's not that time accelerated, right? It's just that your life has become so routine.

• 3:09Steven Bartlett?

  It's interesting you say that, because there's also the other stereotype that you get grumpy.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:14Steven Bartlett?

  The word, yeah. It's quite typical in the stereotype that people will get older and a little bit more grumpy.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, they get grumpy, they get stuck in their ways, they get, I mean, yeah, that's definitely the case. But they probably are getting grumpy because their lives lack the joy and excitement that they once felt, right? Time is just like accelerating, that moving walkway that we are all on, towards the inevitable decrepitude of old age, right? Like, it seems to go faster and faster and faster the older we get. But it's not because time actually is moving any faster, it's because we get so stuck in our ways. Like, we get so, our routines become so cemented. And what we fail to realize, and hopefully this, you know, me saying this, like shakes people out of their comfort zones, you know, and inspires people to shake things up a little bit.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  This Groundhog Day syndrome, it causes our brains to just like shear away, for the sake of efficiency. I mean, it's got, it's got good intentions, right? But it shears away, like, all the joy. So, you just become like this rote automaton. And, and the joy, the excitement, it just, you know, it's something that like... You cease to experience, you know, you cease to experience it. Whereas when you look back at like your youth, for example, it's not that like time actually moved slower. It's that every day was different. And, um, and so that I think is, is really important. And, uh, and yeah, we should challenge ourselves, whether it's to travel. I mean, travel is like, to me, the epitome of exposing oneself to an enriched environment because everything is new.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  But if you can't travel, you know, like go to a different gym every once in a while. Look, you know, try shopping in news in different supermarkets or change up your wardrobe. Or take on a new creative project, like start a new hobby. There are all kinds of things that you could do to shake yourself out of this like perpetual routine that I think has a real cognitive and health cost.

• 5:12Steven Bartlett?

  So I was looking at a study they did on rats and habits. You probably know the study with the rats, the chocolate and the maze.

• 5:19Speaker 01

  I think so.

• 5:20Steven Bartlett?

  Where they get the, the rats to run through a maze to a piece of chocolate. But the first time the rat runs through the maze to the chocolate, they, they monitor the rat's brain. And there's a ton of cognitive, cognitive activity, right? You, you see the rat observationally scratching around, sniffing around. Eventually it finds the chocolate, it gets the reward. When they put the rat back into the maze for the second time, cognitive activity is gone because a habit has been formed. So that as they, as I looked at the brain scans of those rats, it was just completely flat because they were on autopilot. Again, the brain is conserving, conserving its need to function so that it can focus on other things, other threats. It can conserve energy, as you say.

• 6:02Steven Bartlett?

  And that's what our lives become like we don't, when we get out of bed in the morning, our, our route from the bed to the kitchen is not one that requires me to have any sort of cognitive activation. I fly and therefore also I don't remember the journey.

• 6:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:15Steven Bartlett?

  I just, I just fly down there.

• 6:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're on autopilot.

• 6:18Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah. And our lives become autopilot. And it's interesting, I'm trying to figure out as you were talking there, like. You said shearing away the, like, the happiness. Why does being on autopilot cost me happiness? And why does it make my, did you say it made my brain smaller?

• 6:33Speaker 01

  Not smaller.

• 6:34Steven Bartlett?

  Okay, thank you.

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Well, it probably, I mean, you know, if that mouse study holds true in humans, it probably doesn't, it doesn't support neuroplasticity.

• 6:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, there's no need for my brain to.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's an efficiency machine after all, so.

• 6:50Steven Bartlett?

  The happiness point, though, why does that, why does living a life on autopilot have an impact on my, on my happiness?

• 6:56Speaker 01

  Well, there are probably, I mean, there are definitely benefits to routine, right? Like, there are not to like, some of the benefits to routine is, are, can be that you, you know, you have your, for example, your diet dialed in, or you have a, you know, you have great connections in your community, you know? So I'm not telling everybody to, like, throw their lives into upheaval. But, but, you know, it's just like when we start to do the same things every day, we, it's, the scientific term is habituation.

• 7:27Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Speaker 01

  We habituate, right? It becomes habit, right? And we feel this way, like, we see this with that car that we've pined for, and suddenly it's sitting in our driveway. And yeah, it's exciting for the first month, or two months, or three months. But after a certain point, you know, that, that level of excitement that we once felt towards that car, or maybe even if it's, maybe sometimes it's the person that we're sharing our beds with, you know, like, this is just an inevitability, an unfortunate inevitability of the human condition. And so I think there are ways to hack it. I think there are ways to, you know, travel with your significant other, or break the routine with your significant other.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Or, you know, invest in things that have emotional value for you, for example. So, I mean, the car might have not been the best example, because, like, some people do have emotional connections with cars. Like, I bought a guitar, you know, recently that I love, and I have an emotional connection to it because it was played by one of my favorite artists, you know?

• 8:28Steven Bartlett?

  So you're talking about that, really, it's the decline of meaning that is associated with habituation?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:33Steven Bartlett?

  So, and that makes us unhappy, because, as, you know, creatures of meaning, we do need things to remain meaningful in our lives.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's like, it's these, like, rote, routine behaviors that are not all that productive or meaningful.

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Those are, you know, it's like driving the same route to work every day, shopping in the same supermarket every day, eating the same foods every day. Like, challenge your preferences, you know? Like, there are foods today that I enjoy that I didn't like 15 years ago. And I'm always willing to challenge like my own preferences about things. But it's like when you do the same things every day, you tend to start to overlook them. It's difficult, if not impossible, to maintain an appreciative relationship with something that's always there.

• 9:23Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny, it reminded me of a study I was reading about regarding music and how there's almost an optimal point with a song that we love, where it can be repeated over and over again. So say if we're listening to a hit on the radio, it's repeated, say, we listen to it 50 times. There's a point where we've heard it so many times and it's become habituated that we love it at optimal level. And then it declines when we've heard it too much because it loses that sense of meaning. And I just remember reflecting on that, how the record industry want to put things in our lives that have a certain level of familiarity, but not too much familiarity, because then we'll dislike it. This is why they do remixes, because there's a level of familiarity there.

• 10:03Steven Bartlett?

  So we like it, but it has that novel nature, which we also really value to make us interested.

• 10:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:10Steven Bartlett?

  Which habituation obviously kills, like habituation and novelness are inversely, you know?

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, it's true. It's, um, there's this quote that I love. I'm a huge James Bond fan. We were talking a little bit about like, you know, before we started rolling. But like, in the latest film, there's this wonderful Jack London quote at the end of the film that they, uh, that they use to, to kind of commemorate Bond. And the quote is something like, "I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." And I, I love that line so much. And I think it's such a, it's such a good. You know, like, it's so emblematic for, I think, the life that we all deserve, you know, that we all ought to be living.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  I think like occasionally in this conversation about how do we live longer? Like, that's a nuance that gets lost, you know? It's not just about living longer. It's about living more fully. And, um, and so, yeah, I think that that's like, that's part of it, you know? It's like breaking the routine and, and like getting back some of that joy and excitement that we have about life, you know?

• 11:19Steven Bartlett?

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• 12:03Steven Bartlett?

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