A MASTERCLASS On How To HEAL Your Mind & Overcome Negative Thoughts EP 1290

Today’s episode is a masterclass put together from previous episodes that share tips and methods for healing your mind and negative thoughts. In this episode, you will learn:Why you shouldn’t suppress negative thoughts. How to attach dopamine to the effort process. To reshape how you think about depression and anxiety. Why you should control the sights, sounds, and smells in your life. How to give yourself your unmet needs. For more, go to lewishowes.com/1290Full Episodes:Dr. Andrew Huberman https://link.chtbl.com/1219-podDr. Caroline Leaf https://link.chtbl.com/1128-podJay Shetty https://link.chtbl.com/1003-podMarisa Peer https://link.chtbl.com/1228-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to introducing.

• 0:06Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:30Lewis Howes?

  Welcome to this special masterclass. We've brought some of the top experts in the world to help you unlock the power of your life through this specific theme today. It's going to be powerful, so let's go ahead and dive in.

• 0:48Lewis Howes?

  Say I feel cold and ice, right? I'm in 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?

• 1:06Speaker 00

  To some extent, you can. So I think the question that you're asking is a very important one. It's actually the question, which is to what extent does our subjective narrative?

• 1:18Lewis Howes?

  The story we tell ourselves.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  Actually mean something for the body? And to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative? So this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now. And so I do want to highlight that it's ongoing work. But I think, you know, the old narrative, meaning a few 10 years ago, was that if you're feeling depressed, just smile. Well, if that worked, we would have a lot less depression than we see out there. Now, that does not mean.

• 1:49Lewis Howes?

  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?

• 2:00Speaker 00

  The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that 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 gonna completely shift the mind.

• 2:21Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 2:21Speaker 00

  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.

• 2:29Lewis Howes?

  So how do you get it to dance together?

• 2:31Speaker 00

  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 of 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, just decide to write your name," and 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.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them. Generally, they tend to just wanna continue to geyser up all the time. But we can introduce a positive thought.

• 3:25Lewis Howes?

  Can you think of two thoughts at the same time?

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Probably not.

• 3:28Lewis Howes?

  So you can only have one thought at a time?

• 3:30Speaker 00

  Right, but they come very fast.

• 3:31Lewis Howes?

  But it comes and goes. So you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think, otherwise, and a spontaneous thought will pop back in, based on your experience, based on sensory, based on how you're feeling or perceiving something, your environment, it's just gonna keep popping in.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:48Lewis Howes?

  So how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often?

• 3:53Speaker 00

  Right. So I'm a big fan of wellness and I think it's a great community, but it tends to run in absolutes and there aren't a lot of operational definitions, as we say in science. And 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 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,

• 4:31Speaker 00

  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 close a deal.

• 4:52Lewis Howes?

  Someone likes your photo.

• 4:53Speaker 00

  Someone 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 en route to our goals. We're in pursuit of our goals and we think we're on the right path.

• 5:09Lewis Howes?

  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.

• 5:19Speaker 00

  That's right. High achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process.

• 5:24Lewis Howes?

  To the pursuit, the day to day tasks, the growth, the lessons, the losses, like everything, right?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  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 will, I'm capable of getting there eventually. The other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself. In fact,

• 5:52Lewis Howes?

  Don't reward the result, reward the effort.

• 5:54Speaker 00

  That's right. And if you look at true high performers, people that are consistently good at what they do. They don't peak 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 loved 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 incidentally, or not so incidentally, these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer. Because they feel some sense of reward from the effort process.

• 6:37Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  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 or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the

• 7:20Speaker 00

  effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially, that it's giving them an opportunity, that it's somehow they are on the right path, or if they're not in movement along that path, or at least oriented on the right path, they're not lying in bed all day. They're taking a step forward. 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

• 8:04Speaker 00

  journal, Cell Press Journal, a couple of 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.

• 8:15Speaker 00

  With more effort, we release this. Every time, every time you put in effort. So every time you make for this, let's keep it if I were to keep it in the business context, every time you make write that email, every time you let's say it's a person who's a craftsman or a craftswoman, 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. Now, at some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you feel like quitting. It feels exhausting. And this was done in a beautiful study, actually, where they control the visual environments and they have the subjects exert effort. And they can control the visual environment, so sometimes the effort of taking steps and

• 8:58Speaker 00

  moving forward, this is actually kind of pushing forward in kind of swimming motion, would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress. And other times, it was an exercise in futility, where they would just keep the visual world stationary, and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere. My gosh. Epinephrine's climbing, climbing, climbing, and eventually, they quit. Now, dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you, anyone, the feeling that you could continue, and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue. And you've seen this, actually, like, football's a good example. Two teams play, say, the Super Bowl. Both teams are max effort the entire time. Yeah. Max effort.

• 9:39Speaker 00

  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 have energy. They're exhausted right before then. That's right. 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 you say? 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?

• 10:24Speaker 00

  You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind. Like, how? 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 is- That's what gets us addicted, because it feels so good. The problem is, exactly. The problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source. It becomes the goal- Of joy. And 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 very, very fast.

• 11:07Speaker 00

  Because there's no reason to work hard at anything else, because you feel good. That's right. And that's the greatest feeling you'll have, so why do anything else when you can have that feeling? That's right. If you think about, remember, these neurochemical systems, adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine, they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers, and to hunt and gather, or to build Fortune 500 companies. They were designed to do anything. They were designed to be generic, so that depending on our circumstances, we could adapt. So, in an animal context, an animal that, let's say, is hunting, or it needs food for its young, it's gonna feel agitation, that's stress, that's cortisol, it's like

• 11:49Speaker 00

  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 in 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 that's involved in depression and disappointment, that if it goes to that place, and it 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- So it reminds you, like, that's not the path to go down?

• 12:33Speaker 00

  That's right. And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience. Dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity, because it says, "Those actions led to success previously." You're gonna repeat those.

• 12:50Lewis Howes?

  Don't do those.

• 12:50Speaker 00

  Those actions led to failure previously, and don't repeat those.

• 12:54Lewis Howes?

  So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  That's right. So you asked, how do you do this? So to really make it concrete.

• 13:02Lewis Howes?

  And is there too much, is there too much thing, is there such thing as too much dopamine?

• 13:06Speaker 00

  Well.

• 13:06Lewis Howes?

  If you're not on drugs?

• 13:07Speaker 00

  So cocaine and 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 the, 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,

• 13:51Speaker 00

  we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort. Just effort with no subjective label on them, good or bad. Effort, whether or not it's stress or you're pursuing something you want to do. It's just, it's exerting effort. Dopamine is about reward, but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards.

• 14:15Lewis Howes?

  So how do we learn to reframe our mind or rewire our mind? And so that we can have inner peace when there is trauma or pain around us?

• 14:24Speaker 02

  Brilliant question. It's a skill that we learn, so that's really nice to know. The sooner, it's never too late to start, but the sooner we start, the better. So I have four adult children. They learned this, they grew up with this stuff. And as I've learned new things, they've been my lab rats. So they've been trained and literally had my husband, and they all work for me, by the way.

• 14:41Lewis Howes?

  They're either, they're either all amazing kids or messed up kids.

• 14:45Speaker 02

  Totally, yeah, yeah. We'll have to ask that question. Well, Dominic's my producer, so I think she's sort of doing okay there. But yeah, no, the thing, the biggest thing with the mind and managing mind, Lewis, is to accept that depression, anxiety, Even the scary words like bipolar and schizophrenia and then going to the more sort of things like that we can accept grief, anger, et cetera, these are not illnesses. This is the biggest message that I probably have, the second biggest. The first is that mind is the source and if you don't get mind right, everything else, you can read all the great books you want and go to all the great seminars and self-help, but unless your mind is right, you won't ever use that stuff. It's just data. And so you, there's another step missing and it's understanding that autonomy, that sense of agency that

• 15:30Speaker 02

  we have to manage what's going on around us and to accept part of mind management is not to make the bad stuff go away, but to know how to live in the bad stuff because it's not going away. So despair, anger, depression, anxiety, these are all completely normal responses. In fact, they're very helpful. They're helpful messages and warning signals as opposed to being scary illnesses. They are not neuropsychiatric brain diseases like we've been told. They are actually responses and because they are responses of our mind in the world, we only use our brain and body to express them because we've got, the mind has to have the brain and body to, you know, build the thoughts and then from, we use that to speak. We're using our physical to, to store what we've, what we've processed

• 16:13Speaker 02

  and to convert and then to speak. So obviously if our mind's a mess, our brain and our body will be a mess. But because our brain's neuroplastic and we, if we manage our mind, we can change our brain. We can change our DNA, literally. That's what I've shown in my research. You can literally change your DNA, your blood markers, literally. If you change your mind? If you change your mind, you can immediately influence your biomarkers. So for example, if you are in acute trauma, for example, and you go through, just, okay, let me explain it in a very simple way. I'm testing, been testing out a glucose, continuous glucose monitoring device and for some research purposes. And I happened to, while I was wearing it, because you wear it and then you, you know, you track your levels, and I wanted to see if in terms of mental health and the neuro cycle that I've developed, I wanted to see

• 16:54Speaker 02

  the impact. And I happened to be going through, experienced a very acute trauma in our family over December and in the moment of the trauma. I happened to see on my glucose monitor that my glucose had shot up to two hundred and forty. Now, that's heart attack level. And I immediately managed my mind through the neurocycle, which is the concept that I've developed, which is just a system, anyone can learn it. And I dropped my glucose levels within seconds back down to a normal level. And as it cycled up, it cycled, I could manage it. And if glucose is at that level, your cortisol's shot up at that level, your DHEA is dropped, your homocysteins up. All that means is that your immune system is going crazy. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly. You've got a cytokine storm like we talk with COVID.

• 17:37Speaker 02

  And in fact, your, your brain's immune system and your body's immune system will recognize that traumatic event or that established trauma or that mismanagement of whatever. That, it will recognize that as an invader like a virus, like COVID. So you get the same response to a mind thing, a thought, which is the consequence of mind. Link, field, choose, you build thoughts, thoughts are made of roots and trees, branches, which are the memories, the thoughts are made of memories, like trees are made of branches. This is toxic, it will stimulate the same response in the immune system as if I had COVID. Or if I had a flu virus, or if I had measles or something, or any kind of damage in my body. The immune system sees that as threatening survival, because we, we are wired for survival. So this is not survival.

• 18:23Speaker 02

  So your immune system says, hey, that's a threat, let's send out the army, T lymphocytes, B lymphocytes, macrophages, let's go fix this thing. And it creates inflammation, which is a temporary state of healing. So initially, inflammation is to isolate and fix. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, isolate and, and then you're supposed to, you know, fix this up and sort this out and find the root cause. And then this goes away and then the anti-inflammatory factors come in and the inflammation goes away. But if we don't deal with the stuff and we don't deal with our past traumas and we don't deal with those patterns in our life that we are in, in acting. Um, that the constant arguments or the, you know, we all have these toxic patterns or no one's immune, we all. And, and the signals of those are things like depression and anxiety and those are simply telling you, hey, there's a pattern.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  It's either a trauma-based pattern or it's a toxic habit you've developed. But that pattern is actually putting your body under tremendous stress, even to the point where your DNA is affected. And I showed in my research that, you know, if you think of the DNA ladder, if you pull out a chromosome, it looks like an X. And where you see my fingernails, pink fingernails, for those of you that are listening. Um. The pink fingernails would then represent what we call telomeres. And telomeres are a proxy for how you are managing your mind. Very interesting.

• 19:37Lewis Howes?

  Aren't they also, aren't they also based on how long you'll live as well?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. Totally correct.

• 19:44Lewis Howes?

  So if those are under attack and dying, you're probably physically gonna die as well.

• 19:48Speaker 02

  Exactly. That's exactly what I showed. So we had subjects at the beginning of, in my clinical trial that I put in this book. We had subjects and I've actually got a picture of this person's, one of the subject's brains. This is inside, looking inside their brain and the blue represents someone who's totally depressed, flatline, brain, flatline, literally. And this person's, all their biomarkers were up, their in, in, um, cortisol, inflammation, et cetera. But this shows that the energy levels in the brain are very flat. Blue means a very, very depressed. And this person was, their narrative was tremendous torment in their life. They were offline, they were battling with, um, work, relationships.

• 20:25Lewis Howes?

  Everything, everything was off.

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Everything was off, sleep, you name it. They were at like ready to check out.

• 20:31Lewis Howes?

  What page is this on?

• 20:32Speaker 02

  This is on page, this is on, I should tell you, I should know the page off my heart, um, one sixty one.

• 20:40Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  I think you, you've probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got there. Um, the, um, so the, this person's telomeres, when we looked at their DNA and we looked at their telomeres. They will tell you how, the, the shorter they are, the weaker your cells, the shorter your lifespan, the more vulnerable you are to disease. So they were sitting, so that will show in terms of your biological age. So their telomeres were short and unhealthy. They, their ages were in the, uh, of this particular subject, and we had a group like this as well, that similar. They, their biologic, their chronological, their actual age was in their mid thirties, but their biological age.

• 21:16Lewis Howes?

  Seventy or something.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yes, a sickly seventy year old.

• 21:19Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  Within, crazy, within nine weeks of ma- mind management. No, I didn't work on, I don't use drugs. I didn't, I do talk about diet and stuff, but in this particular clinical trial, it was pure mind management, just the neuro cycle. Just get your mind under control. And that gray means that their brain stabilized, that the brainwaves that they were actually managing. So here they were saying, I am depression, I am hopeless. All the biomarkers, DNA. Here they're saying, I felt, I now know why I feel depression. I'm not depression. I now know why. And depression is simply a signal of an underlying cause. It's not who I am. It's not an it, it's not an illness. By sixty three days, and these numbers are very significant. They were actually seeing behaviour change in their life.

• 22:03Speaker 02

  They were saying, okay, so I know I'll still get depressed, but I know why and I know what to do. And there was changes in their behaviour. They were back at work. They were back sleeping, twenty five percent improvement in sleep. And I mean, all kinds of like, their relationships were not suicidal anymore. And I mean, that's, I could go on and on and on.

• 22:19Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 22:19Speaker 02

  This subject over here was in the control group, so they got no mind management. And what you'll see is a lot of red and a lot of chaos. And that red shows complete brain, that is like a tsunami in your brain, which the biomarkers were terrible. This person's DNA, telomeres were very short. And so with mind management, in nine weeks, we showed how you can literally change your telomeres, which are your markers for aging and for health, mental health and physical health. And that's pretty unusual because most of the work on telomeres has been done around diet and exercise.

• 22:52Lewis Howes?

  Right, right. It's all about like, you know, leafy greens and plant based.

• 22:56Speaker 02

  Exactly, which is significant. And also there's been some work on meditation, but there's been no, no, I think this is the first study that's been done on actually doing deliberate intentional mind work to change. And then we saw significant drops as well in inflammation markers and blood markers. But the biggest thing was their narrative, the person's story. So if we go away from the biology for a minute and we, and we listen to the person's story, that person was offline, they were online, they were living again. And even though, and they had also had this, this, this acceptance, and this is what I wanted to kind of circle back to when we started, was life and managing your mind doesn't mean that it's going to be one big rosy, you know, put on rose tinted glasses. That's crazy. It is actually the ability to. Be okay and at peace with having moments of depression and actually looking for the

• 23:41Speaker 02

  message and seeing them as helpful. We have this really weird philosophy, which has been about forty years in the West now, where we look at depression and anxiety and those kind of things as illnesses and neuropsychiatric brain diseases and as bad symptoms that we must suppress, like cancer symptoms you must suppress. So it's been lumped or misery of life has been medicalized, to quote a brilliant psychiatrist, Joanna Moncrief. So we've got to really watch out for that. But actually, the real truth is that those depression and anxiety are not illnesses, they are just survival instincts. It's telling you, hey, pay attention, there's something going on, you need to go and unpack.

• 24:21Lewis Howes?

  Something's not working, something's not working.

• 24:22Speaker 02

  Something's not working, and it's manifesting as a pattern that needs to be addressed, and that'll block the greatness.

• 24:27Lewis Howes?

  So are you saying, am I hearing, did I hear you say that there, there isn't a mental health disease, it's more of just a, a pattern that, or something that we should be mindful of, but it's not an actual disease?

• 24:38Speaker 02

  No, it's not a disease. And I know this counters, this counters the current philosophy, but if you look at the science, there's a large body of science. In fact, if you interpret all the science around this field, and you really look at what's being tested, you actually will see it's not a, they've been looking for the neurobiological correlate, they've been looking for where in the brain is depression. And for years, we've been told about the serotonin imbalance causing depression. I mean, that's not even, it was a theory, never proven, great for marketing, for, you know, for selling drugs, and also a simplistic way of telling someone, hey, you're depressed, don't worry, it's chemical imbalance, let me give you a drug to fix it. You know, it's, we want this quick fix mentality. So with, as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught up

• 25:21Speaker 02

  in the quick fix. And, but life's not like that, mind is not like that, mind is separate from brain and body. You can apply that kind of thinking, not quick fix, but you can apply a symptomatic diagnosis, treatment approach to body, to physical brain and body. But when it comes to mind... That that there's this this gravitational field, this force, this think, feel, choose, thing. It's not gonna go, you know, a medication's not gonna change how you're thinking, feeling and choosing. It's not gonna get rid of this. It's just gonna numb your brain, so maybe you don't feel this for it while it's working. Wow. But at the same time as then when that drug wears off, this is still there. This is still being recognized by the immune system of your brain as a problem. So this is increasing your vulnerability, the longer it's there, the more you increase your vulnerability to disease. Oh, my gosh.

• 26:04Speaker 02

  You know, and this is what gets you stuck, and these are the patterns. So, no, it's not an illness. It is a normal human response. Here we, a pandemic, we all know that everyone's going on about the next pandemic is mental health. We, even, mental health has always been an issue. Notice from the beginning of time, mankind has battled with life, with issues, with death, with fighting, with war, with whatever. So, mental health's not on the rise, but the mismanagement of mental health, making it a disease, has created a whole new problem. Wow. So here, so here we sit with, before the pandemic, they started doing a population study in the mid nineties. And this is when I was still practicing, early days of my practicing, sort of ten years into my work.

• 26:44Speaker 02

  And I started seeing this trend of, and and I was watching the study, where people were, where they, the decades-long trend of people living longer. So we know, we all hear this message, what this is what we've heard. People are living longer because of the advances in medicine and technology. None of us question that. But something happened in ninety six that did start questioning that. By the mid two thousands, it was an established, researched fact, that we don't live longer anymore. That the trend of people living longer has actually reversed. And that we have a pandemic of deaths of despair, where people are dying from preventable lifestyle diseases. And the age group most being affected, but of between twenty four and sixty five.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  So people at the beginning of their career and the prime of their career and through that, that age group are being, are dropping down dead like flies. And it's deaths, considered deaths of despair by preventable lifestyle diseases. So we have to look at the vulnerable, lifestyle disease means that there's something in our body that's, that's weaker. Why? Lifestyle, which is mind-driven, how am I eating, drinking, sleeping? But more than that is, what's my mind behind all of that? How am I actually managing the day-to-day moments? How am I managing the patterns, the tumors, the established toxic habits? What am I doing about that stuff? And that's when we when we ignore all of that, because this current trend of science is saying, oh, those don't matter. What matters is the symptoms. Let's just look for the symptoms. Right.

• 28:08Speaker 02

  Checklist, diagnose, label. When you label someone, you chop, you you you chop up to ten years more of their life. You know, it's like it's adding on. They've shown studies of people with a mental health diagnosis have chopped their twenty years of, up to twenty years of their lifespan. People on psychotropic drugs, because of all the complications and the changes in the brain and the body, chopping up to twenty five years of their life. I mean, this is serious. So here we have this already existing, then the pandemic hits. Now another year, they say that there's an additional year being chopped off people's lives. But there's such a contradiction, because they're saying, hey, there's this adverse circumstance, grief of loss of people, uncertainty, medical and not knowing if you're going to live or die, and how long is this isolation going to go on, and economic impact and whatever, the whole lot.

• 28:53Speaker 02

  That's trauma, and they they're saying that when they're saying, but this is the way to treat it. Let's label it, let's diagnose it, let's medicate it. So here we've come into COVID with a problem, with that stupid philosophy that's created such a lot of problems. And scientifically, this has all been researched and shown. And now we've got the pandemic, and now they want to carry on that system that didn't work to this, which is going to make it even worse. So we've got to shift our narrative completely. And we've got to stop stop saying that mental illness is on the rise, and that there's one in four people on antidepressants who are depressed. A hundred percent of people are depressed and anxious and concerned about this COVID pandemic.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  A hundred percent of people in the world, at some point in their life, have and will be anxious and depressed and in grief and sadness and terror and despair. And one of the others, a large percentage of the population, and I'm not sure of the exact percentage, because no one's really done this kind of research. But estimates, it's probably thirty, forty percent of people will have extreme trauma of from abuse, war trauma, that kind of stuff, where they'll go down the continuum to sort of the minus nine, ten, eight, nine, ten. If you look at a continuum of zero to ten, zero to minus ten. Um, and have things like psychotic breaks and hearing voices and extreme states of distress, mental distress, which are still not diseases. They are simply in that traumatic situation, you're having a traumatic response. Think of someone who's a war vet.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  I just interviewed a Navy SEAL the other day who was trained snipers. And I mean, the things that he had to do and that his teams had to do. You know, they come back and try and we all know the problem of trying to, you know, re reconcile back into civilian life after you've gone through. I mean, you know, this is what they'd be experiencing all day long, stuff that's completely against survival, completely against our human nature. And now they, instead of them being allowed to process this trauma, they're coming back and being told that they're diseased. And he would tell me that what they do with a lot of, we don't hear this sort of thing, but he told me this. They, they, they will inject things like risperidol, which is an antipsychotic into the spines of war vets because they're a bit psychotic and they, and they're psychotic for a reason. It's their coping. They, they, how do you deal with this? Of course you're going to be angry. You're going to be frustrated. You're not going to be able to love like you did.

• 31:03Speaker 02

  You have to be able to embrace process and reconceptualize. Giving them a drug's not going to make it, not going to help it. In fact, it constrains the brain. It restricts the brain. You can't, there's no chemical cure for that. This, this is, that's not, that's just going to add fuel to the fire because your mind's got to work through the brain. So now you've put chemicals in and now that's not going to, that's not going to facilitate change. We have to do something. So it's like a narrative.

• 31:28Lewis Howes?

  Do you feel like there, I mean, is there such a thing as a chemical imbalance in some people? Uh, you know, when they say, oh, I have a depression, it's a disease or bipolar or I have this mental health disease or I have a chemical imbalance. I was treated with this. Don't try to say I don't because this is who I am. Is that, do some people have that or is that?

• 31:49Speaker 02

  That's a result of.

• 31:51Lewis Howes?

  Go ahead.

• 31:51Speaker 02

  The narrative of I have a chemical imbalance and my depression is from chemical imbalance is a narrative that is the only explanation that people have been given. They're not given an alternative uh reaction. I mean, an alternative narrative. So the most important thing is that anyone listening to this podcast, I want to validate your depression, your anxiety, your grief, your despair, your PTSD, whatever label you've been given. I want you to, I want to validate that that doesn't need to be validated with a disease label. You're not diseased, you're not a broken brain, you aren't, your brain isn't defective. You are going through something. So you aren't something, you aren't that, you are going through something.

• 32:31Lewis Howes?

  You're experiencing something.

• 32:32Speaker 02

  You're experiencing something and you're experiencing and you've coped in the only way that you could cope in that moment. So it created this adverse response because it was an adverse situation and you were just trying to cope. So what we have to do is go through a process of embracing and processing and reconceptualizing. So the important thing here is to recognize that chemical imbalance isn't the cause of your despair. The cause of your despair is what you've gone through and what you're going through. And learning how to, and not knowing how to manage it and how to deal with those thoughts that are driving you crazy and those flashbacks. And the, and the trauma of the flashbacks and going back into those situations of the rape or the abuse or the war trauma or the, that it can, it could drive a person crazy.

• 33:13Speaker 02

  And that's not crazy in the sense of illness, it's crazy in the sense of your mind is like this erratic tidal wave around you. And it's going through your brain and you've got these and your immune system and everything screaming out to you and saying, hey, let's fix this. So a disease label invalidates it. And for a moment, it might be nice to know, okay, well, there's a label to how I feel because it kind of gives us a bit of, it feels like we've got a bit of control. So initially that gives you comfort, but don't see yourself as that. It's better to say, I'm experiencing post-traumatic stress issues because of what I've been through versus I am PTSD. Or I have the sickness of PTSD. It's better to say, I'm experiencing symptoms of bipolar, these intense swings because of my whole story.

• 33:59Speaker 02

  Than saying, I have bipolar, I have a chemical imbalance. I mean, just researchers coming out the other day showed that we've got to stop saying this. The top psychiatrists that lead this field will tell you, we've got to stop saying this, that there's, there's no ways that serotonin imbalance, you can't even measure that. There's no gene for, there's no genes or serotonin imbalance causing it. It's what you've experienced, that's the cause. And then that moves through your brain and your body. So obviously your brain and your body responds. So we will see changes in the brain and the body, we will see neurochemical chaos, not necessarily serotonin imbalance. That's just one. Sometimes it's dopamine and if dopamine's down, serotonin's off and then. And anandamide's off and then, I mean, I can give you a list of big chemical terms and that's going to change every function in the structure of your brain and your, your DNA

• 34:44Speaker 02

  and your telomeres and um fourteen hundred neurophysiological responses are off. So, you know, that's, and that's the response, though. And that doesn't mean that, that you have this thing hidden inside of you, this scary thing that's controlling you. And I, that invalidates. If I, if, if someone comes back from war, someone's had a sexual trauma, to tell them that the depression or anxiety they're feeling is an illness is an insult to what they've gone through. But if I say, if I say to you, gosh, that's terrible, tell me about it. I want to hear your story. I want to support you. Your depression and, and anxiety that you're feeling is a signal that there's stuff going on, there's an origin story, there's a source.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  So can I listen, can I help, can I support you in trying to recognize the signals and go through the process to find the origin story and then to reconceptualize it? And that's, takes time. It's not a fifteen minute appointment where I can give you a label. That takes time. That's not also, and it's also not the conditioning kind of treatments that are in place, that some of them work if they're used in the right place, but to try and, to try and put a, a veteran who's gone through something back into the situation to try and condition them. You can't condition, you have to reconstruct. So it's kind of like an algebraic equation. X is, is the situation. Y is how you should want, you want to function for mental peace. So you've got X plus Y.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  And so here we are in our X situation where we as a sort of human experiencing life, we're supposed to be at Y. And you put the two together and what the current treatment says is that, okay, now we're going to create Z, we're just going to ignore X and Y, we're going to create a new thing and that new thing is you diseased. But that doesn't work. It's actually X plus Y equals X Y. X is what you're going through. Y is where you want to find mental peace.

• 36:37Lewis Howes?

  You talk a lot about practicing meditation and also prayer. And you say something that was interesting, that you said about using silence to hear in between the lines. So can you share what that means to hear in between the lines through prayer, meditation, mindfulness? And kind of what this all means? How can we understand this? There's a lot of noise about it, but what does it really mean?

• 36:59Speaker 03

  When I hear the word mindfulness, to me, what it really means is intentionality. What I mean by that is, are you crafting, designing, and intentionally creating your life? Or are you just coasting in the passenger seat of your life? Which is just dragging you and driving you wherever it's taking you. And so it's the difference between being the driver or being in the passenger seat. And so to me, living intentionally is what allows you to live a life of by design. And so I'll give you an example of what mindfulness can look like. There's something in the book that I talk about called the three S's, which are sights, sense, and sounds.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  Now, if you think about that, we're exposed to sights, sense, and sounds every single day. Every single day. But how many of us have crafted those to be sights, sense, and sounds that we want in our life? So this is what I realized. When we were monks, one of the most important things was, what was the first thing you saw, the sight, when you woke up?

• 38:05Lewis Howes?

  And right now, most people are probably seeing their screen.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think 80% of people look at their screens first thing in the morning and the last thing at the night. So you're seeing your screen first thing in the morning, but what are you really seeing? You're seeing everyone else's priorities. You're seeing everyone else's issues and challenges. You're seeing everyone else's messages to you, which means you're already starting your day off reactively. But what if you started your morning looking at a painting that inspired you? Or a picture of a loved one that brought joy in your heart? Or your favorite quote by Lewis or by anyone else that when you read that in the morning, you were like, oh yeah, I feel in charge today to make a difference in the world. So imagine the first thing you saw in the morning was something inspiring. How much would your day change? That's mindfulness. Mindfulness is being intentional and mindful about what you are exposing yourself to.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  Let's talk about sounds next. So sounds were something that I started to study actually much later from a modern life perspective. But when we're monks, we would wake up to birds, we would wake up to water, we'd wake up to gongs or cymbals.

• 39:07Lewis Howes?

  Chants or.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  Chants, exactly, which are all beautiful sounds. Now, the crazy thing is, all of us wake up to something called an alarm.

• 39:15Lewis Howes?

  Uh, uh, uh, right, just like.

• 39:17Speaker 03

  Literally, I don't know why anyone would want to wake up to an alarm. Why would you want to wake up alarmed? It means now your system is alarming. Like, why would you want to do that? Why would you want to wake up in shock? In a state of like a jolt? I don't think that's a positive way to wake up. So changing the sound that you wake up to. Now, I'm not saying that everyone can wake up to nature sounds. Maybe you're one of those people who just hit the snooze button again. But what if you woke up to a sound or a song that brought you joy? Now, when I lived in New York for two years between twenty sixteen and twenty eighteen, I started to feel quite exhausted by the end of the day and I was really looking into like, why is it that I feel tired? And I started to realize, I came across this term called cognitive load.

• 40:01Speaker 03

  And what it means is that a lot of the sounds that you hear in New York City are sounds that are insignificant for your mind to process. Drilling, construction work, taxis honking, driving, cars screeching, scratching.

• 40:16Lewis Howes?

  People yelling at each other in the streets.

• 40:18Speaker 03

  Yelling at each other on the streets, saying, all of that sound is called cognitive load, where your brain is now trying to make sense of meaningless sound.

• 40:26Lewis Howes?

  Well, it's also just like, should I be afraid? This is a loud sound. Does my brain go into fight or flight? Like, I need to protect myself. So you're always being alarmed.

• 40:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And you hear sirens. The amount of sirens that I remember hearing on the streets. Now, when you hear sirens, sirens have an emotional trigger. And they have an emotional response to them. So think about your day. Think about when you come home from work. Well, now you're working from home.

• 40:50Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  What sound do you want to hear when you're working? What sound do you want to hear at the end of the day? When you sound design your life, that's called mindfulness. That's being intentional. And then finally scent. Uh, scent is such a powerful sense that we're not even aware. How many of you, when you smell your favorite food, can't already wait to eat it? Like, you can almost taste it.

• 41:12Lewis Howes?

  Salivating.

• 41:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're salivating. You can taste it already without, just through scent. Why is it that every time you walk into?

• 41:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, my favorite, yeah, I think pizza has one of the best scents.

• 41:23Lewis Howes?

  Your wife Roddy's got some amazing food. That was amazing scent. When I walked in the kitchen last week, I was like, this amazing.

• 41:29Speaker 03

  That was for you. That was special. That was for you. That was for you. That was a good meal. That was a really good meal. Uh, she really appreciated that you love to eat too. Like she was happy. Her heart was full.

• 41:39Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. Bring a former jock into your house and you'll, you'll clear all the food out.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  She was like, I've never seen someone eat that much. And I was like, you know, this like big American dude. I was like, this is like, you know, he can eat. And so, no, it was great. She was so happy that you appreciated it so much. She, she really appreciated that.

• 41:56Lewis Howes?

  But the scent is important in your life.

• 41:58Speaker 03

  When you walk into a massage spa, it's the scent, the eucalyptus, the lavender, the sandalwood.

• 42:05Lewis Howes?

  It puts you in a peaceful state.

• 42:07Speaker 03

  Dude, scent puts you in zen without trying. And so mindfulness is intentionally creating a life that makes you feel what you want to feel without having to just create the feeling from inside. You may say, Jay, you know, I really struggle trying to be positive. I struggle trying to deal with anxiety. I struggle trying to be focused. Your sight, sense and sounds can help you do that.

• 42:31Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 42:31Speaker 03

  And you start creating an environment where you naturally feel that. Like today, when I walked into your studio, I saw your books. I saw all these motivational quotes. I saw a boxing glove. And it's like, all of a sudden, you're like, oh, I'm in a uplifting environment, right? So you already get triggered.

• 42:47Lewis Howes?

  Exactly. Yeah, I think a friend of mine mentioned one time on the podcast, Chris Lee said, you want to create an an environment like a rainforest where things can thrive and grow as opposed to having an environment like a desert where things go to die.

• 43:00Speaker 03

  That's beautiful.

• 43:01Lewis Howes?

  And if you have sights, sense and sounds that are like a desert for your life or your heart, and it's gonna be hard to grow those things from your heart. But if you create an environment of a rainforest where things can grow, water, nature, you know, cool air, things like that, then you can really start to cultivate that growth. You mentioned about creating and designing your life. How much of the world do you think we receive by being here? And how much of the world do we create ourselves?

• 43:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a beautiful question. It's, it's a complete dynamic dance between what the Vedic tradition would call fate and free will. So fate is what is already created for you. And a good example would be the place you were born. The type of family you grew up in, the socioeconomic background you had, it was already there when you walked into the world. But within that, you had choices where your free will came about. You had the choice to either do what everyone in your neighborhood did, or to do something different. You had the choice to have a relationship with a particular person or not. So what happens is that we're constantly creating

• 44:15Speaker 03

  new spaces from which we have another choice.

• 44:18Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  And so you kind of see it as this dynamic dance between, okay, now I'm in this situation, and now what is my choice in this situation? So I would say, I wouldn't, I'm not saying it's equal. I'm saying it's a dynamic balance and a switching process where you're constantly creating a new level, and then now in that level, you have a next choice.

• 44:38Lewis Howes?

  Because we didn't have the choice to be created here. We didn't, we were here, and that wasn't our choice. Now, everything after that is our choice, right?

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there are some, there obviously there are some traditions, and I'm a, I'm a big diver into like reincarnation and past lives. So according to the beliefs of reincarnation or past lives, you have at some point made a choice to be here. But taking it more simplistically, the truth is that when you're brought into a situation, it's, the best analogy that I've heard and it's been told for years is of, a father is an alcoholic. One of the sons that he has decides to become an alcoholic, because his father's an alcoholic. The other son decides to never drink alcohol, because his father's an alcoholic. So they were exposed to the same situation and same scenario.

• 45:24Lewis Howes?

  Same environment.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  Same environment. But they both made different choices based on their experience. And that's the choice element. That's the element that we should be trying to empower in our lives. Because we can constantly say, I'm limited by my environment, or I've been restricted by my environment. And hey, it's true, there are so many of us that have been limited and restricted. But by now, you repeating that, you are going to repeat that restriction in your life.

• 45:51Lewis Howes?

  How much of a positive environment? Supports us in our growth or hordes us back. There are some people who have the perfect family situation, resources, beautiful backyards and nature, who are lazy. And there are others who have divorced parents, abusive parents, abusive friends, an environment of a desert.

• 46:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:16Lewis Howes?

  And they figure out a way to thrive.

• 46:18Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 46:18Lewis Howes?

  How much importance does our environment play in our overall success?

• 46:23Speaker 03

  If you look at the examples that you just shared and you really analyzed life, you'd see very little because you see people craft their own life. So a good example for me is that when I came back from living in the ashram and there were other people who may have been monks who'd also left the path. And I came back to a not financially successful or supportive family. So my family doesn't have abundant wealth and couldn't necessarily have taken care of me or paid for me forever. And I had to figure out my own life. And that to me was a great sense of impetus and incentive to go and figure it out and learn new skills and network and meet people. And I saw other friends who'd parents had like a property portfolio

• 47:07Speaker 03

  with like 10 properties ready to hand them over. They had a BMW the second that they came out, whatever, you know, from their own life.

• 47:14Lewis Howes?

  Yep.

• 47:14Speaker 03

  Or I even have friends that had all of that and didn't become monks and didn't even find careers. So I've also got friends that I went to school with that today don't even have careers, even though their parents were really well established.

• 47:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 47:26Speaker 03

  Which has, all of these examples have continued me to believe that we truly have influence in our, more than our environment. Our environment affects us for sure. It plants seeds and weeds into our life, but there is still a choice. And, and I think even if you feel there isn't a choice. Simply by accepting that there is, it means you have a chance to get out of there. And I think that's what.

• 47:51Lewis Howes?

  Because if you don't accept that there is, then you're just gonna stay stuck.

• 47:53Speaker 03

  Correct, like, there've been so many times in my life, and there's a beautiful quote from Edison. I don't think I said this last time, but if I did, it's worth repeating. He said that, "When you believe you've exhausted all options, remember this, you haven't." And the reason why I love that is, your mind continuously feels stuck when it's tried the obvious. And that's why a lot of creativity and focus studies say that the first ten ideas that come to your mind are never the most interesting. It's when you get into the eleventh idea that you start breaking the pattern. And so if someone asks you, "Oh, what's your best business idea?", your first ten ideas are probably not that innovative. And so the mind constantly gets stuck on that train. And you've got to keep reminding yourself that there is another door, there could be another pathway.

• 48:38Speaker 03

  I was thinking about a piece of advice that, so, one of my closest spiritual mentors, who is in London, I knew him since I was probably like twelve and probably since I was eighteen. He passed away this year from stage four brain cancer. And he'd had brain cancer for about, I think, like, three, three, four years now, and so I hadn't really had a real interaction with him for the past few years, because every time I saw him, he wasn't fully functioning in his short-term memory. His long-term memory was there, but his short-term memory wasn't. And I remember speaking to him, probably about seven, eight years ago, and asking him the question. I said to him, "You know, I've got so many ideas. There's so many things I could do. Where do I start?" And, and he said this beautiful thing to me. He said, "You know what?

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Your role should be to open up every door possible." And he said, "Let the world close the doors you're not meant to walk through, and walk through the ones that remain open." And what I realized is, most of us are just not opening up enough doors, because we think we only have the option of two doors. We look at life as binary. Zero and one, zero and one, right? It's just A or B, this or that. And, I mean, I, I think you'd say this too, about you and every guest you've ever had on. I don't think life is ever this or that. It's like this, that, and that, and maybe that, and that. And there's always a gap.

• 49:53Lewis Howes?

  Of course. The challenge that people have, that I've sensed a lot, is the fear of criticism when you go after something that you weren't supposed to do, or that people don't think you're supposed to do. Why do so many people fear criticism from peers, family, friends, the media? Why is that such a big fear? And how do we overcome criticism from others?

• 50:16Speaker 03

  Psychologically, we feel a sense of safety and security when we think people agree with us. Right? That is just psychologically true, that we would rather avoid conflict and sit in a space where we agree, and therefore we have something called confirmation bias, and the echo chamber, where we keep surrounding ourselves with thoughts and ideas that are similar, and reaffirm our beliefs. Now, I think that you can have that, and at the same time entertain ideas that you're not sure about yet. And so one of my favorite examples was MIT did this study where they asked people which person was more creative and innovative. And they showed two charts.

• 50:58Speaker 03

  One chart was employee A, and the other chart was employee B. The chart for employee A, all of the people they knew knew each other and knew them back. So it was almost like a closed loop. And employee B, they knew lots of people who didn't know each other. And they found that people who have more people in their network who don't know each other are more likely to be creative and productive.

• 51:22Lewis Howes?

  Really? Why is that?

• 51:23Speaker 03

  Because they expose you to opposing ideas, and they may counteract how you think. So one of my favorite examples of this is a conversation between Mark Zuckerberg and one of his mentors. So Mark Zuckerberg told this story at the Facebook headquarters a few years back. I wasn't there, I've seen it on video, I'm sure it's available. And he talks about how, when he was struggling with the direction of Facebook in 2009, he approached his mentor. And his mentor happened to be Steve Jobs.

• 51:54Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 51:54Speaker 03

  Pretty cool.

• 51:55Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 51:55Speaker 03

  Pretty cool, I wish. Really cool. It's so cool, man. And so anyway, so Mark Zuckerberg goes to Steve Jobs and he says, I'm struggling with the direction of Facebook. Remember at that time, Facebook was five years old. There was no fan pages, I don't think. I don't, I don't think it was, there was no creators, there was, I don't think there were fan pages. It was very much used by university students at that stage. Like, I think it was mainly like Ivy Leagues. College kids. College kids. And I don't even think it was international in a massive way, very early days, and now we can't even think of that. But two thousand and nine, I mean, you know, you just about had the iPhone and just about had Instagram and YouTube. So he ran up to Steve Jobs and he said, you know, I'm struggling with the direction of Facebook. What do I do?

• 52:36Speaker 03

  Now, Steve Jobs, at that time, obviously was already the founder of one of the biggest brands on the planet, and obviously the brand still is. He had access to investors, he had access to business coaches, I'm sure he had access to life coaches, he had access to. Health experts and everything. He had access to anything. Like, I don't think there was anyone. Scientists, whatever. Scientists, PhDs. I don't think there's anyone in the world who Steve Jobs couldn't have called up at the time. And Steve Jobs said something amazing. He said, you know what, Mark? I think you should go and live in an ashram in India. He did not. He did. No way. True story. He goes, and when you go to live in the ashram in India, that's where, if you spend some time there, that's where you'll find your answer. Shut up. And Mark did it. No way. Went to the ashram. It's a true story. A lot.

• 53:19Speaker 03

  I, I believe he was there for, I believe, I've seen two online, I've seen two versions of the exact time he was there. I've seen some people say it's a couple of days or a week, or some people have said it's a month. So I think it's, it's hazy how much time he actually spent there. But, but he went. And he says that based on that experience, that's where he found the direction of Facebook, to be connecting people. Now, the reason why I love that story is because it's the unobvious, alternative, random connection. And when Harvard did a study of three thousand executives, they looked at and asked them, what's the number one skill for being a good leader? And a lot of people would say communication, a lot of people would say. Vision. Vision, strategy, humility. And the number one answer that they got from three thousand executives

• 54:05Speaker 03

  was the one word which is called associating. And what that means is the ability to spot patterns where everyone else doesn't see them. And that's the connect that real leaders can spot patterns and connections in anomalies. So most people would be like, what has an ashram got to do with a tech platform?

• 54:24Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  But that is where you expand your mind to find answers that you never expected.

• 54:31Lewis Howes?

  How important is creating alone time with noises, people, busy work to allow your mind to expand? Is that the only time in that silence? I think you mentioned it. Silence to hear in between the lines.

• 54:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:47Lewis Howes?

  Is that where we start to hear what we're supposed to be creating, where we're supposed to be heading, our mission?

• 54:52Speaker 03

  That's, yeah, I'm really glad you brought that back. I wanted to get back to that. So when we talk about, there's a beautiful statement by David Lynch, who's movie producer and a deep meditator. And he says that prayer is how you talk to God and meditation is how God talks to you.

• 55:10Lewis Howes?

  Ooh.

• 55:11Speaker 03

  And whether you believe in God or the universe or spirit or divine, whatever it means, the point is that there is a dialogue and a conversation.

• 55:18Lewis Howes?

  Prayer is like you're speaking, you're saying, here's what I want.

• 55:21Speaker 03

  Here's how I feel.

• 55:22Lewis Howes?

  Help me.

• 55:22Speaker 03

  Help me, yeah.

• 55:23Lewis Howes?

  And meditation is more receiving.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Receiving, yeah. And so I love that statement because I think it makes it very clear that we have to have a dialogue with the universe. We have to have a dialogue with people in our lives. We have to have a dialogue and there's both giving and receiving. So when I talk about hearing in between the lines, the best example I can give you, Lewis, is let's take a look at you and your relationship and mine and my wife's relationship. One of us is always traveling.

• 55:50Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 55:51Speaker 03

  So you travel, your partner travels, I travel, my wife travels. Sometimes we're missing each other. Imagine you've got really busy and hectic. Do you think, and anyone listening or watching, you can ask the same question, if you were really busy and hectic and stressed out, do you think your partner feels comfortable to tell you how they feel and get your attention?

• 56:13Lewis Howes?

  If I'm busy, stressed out, overwhelmed, will my partner tell me how I feel about themselves or about?

• 56:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, do you think they would feel confident to be like, Louis, I need to tell you something really important?

• 56:23Lewis Howes?

  I don't think they would.

• 56:24Speaker 03

  They wouldn't. They really wouldn't because

• 56:26Lewis Howes?

  They don't want to stress you out more. You're not present, all these things.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  Exactly. So exactly that. And so what happens is when you're still, your mind and body actually get to speak to you and give you signals of how they feel. And so when you're still, that's when you notice that ache in your foot that you haven't noticed for a month. Sometimes when you slow down, that's when you get sick. Because your body wasn't allowing itself to be sick because you were pushing it to get through stuff. And so just like your partners can't communicate with you until you slow down, your body and mind can't communicate with you until you're still. And so there's a beautiful Buddhist teaching that says what movement does for the body, stillness does for the mind. And so when we find that space, stillness and solitude,

• 57:14Speaker 03

  you really are able to hear your deepest desires and challenges, your physical pains and areas of growth. It's one of the reasons why when people meditate, they feel sleepy afterwards and they think they're doing it wrong. But actually, they're doing it right. Meditation just told you you needed more sleep.

• 57:31Lewis Howes?

  You needed to rest.

• 57:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, meditation was just a signal. So sometimes when I meditate with people that I'm coaching.

• 57:36Lewis Howes?

  They're like, pass out.

• 57:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, some of them, some of them will be like, I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry, Jay. I'm just feeling so tired. And I'm like, no.

• 57:43Lewis Howes?

  Then sleep, the rest.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what your body's telling you because you finally listened. And some people are like, oh, Jay, I feel so energized. And I'm like, yeah, because you allowed yourself to be in line with your body. I know your body's saying that you feel energized. And that's great. You've got that energy. Go work out, go build something. So.

• 57:58Lewis Howes?

  Or you've cleared out those negative thoughts, or you've let go of those distractions or that resentment. And so you're not feeling this weight, so you feel lighter.

• 58:05Speaker 03

  Correct. And so that stillness and silence is one of my favorite ways for you to actually build that relationship with hearing your inner voice.

• 58:15Lewis Howes?

  Is there too much silence? Like if you say, okay, five hours a day, is there a tipping point where you're like, okay, I think you do two hours every morning, but a lot of people say, well, I've only got 20 minutes, maybe. Is five hours too much? Is an hour, you know, what is the maximum or minimum sweet spot you think for people to be silent every day? To live a great life?

• 58:37Speaker 03

  I think, I think twenty minutes is a great starting point.

• 58:40Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 58:40Speaker 03

  Because twenty minutes is significant enough time for your mind to switch off. So, we hear that studies showed that we have sixty to eighty thousand thoughts a day.

• 58:48Lewis Howes?

  And a lot of them are repeating.

• 58:49Speaker 03

  Eighty percent are negative, and I'm guessing a lot of them are repeating. And so, if you're only gonna say I'm gonna do five minutes, it just takes five minutes to switch off. Like, it takes five minutes to just overcome that noise. And so I'd say that twenty minutes is a good amount of time. And hey, you're not trying, and I think this is the challenge with meditation mindfulness, you're not trying to empty your mind. You're just trying to be present with it. And actually, and listen to it, and experience it.

• 59:17Lewis Howes?

  How much of the actions and being integrity with our word to ourself is necessary as well?

• 59:23Speaker 04

  So, you're starting from I'm lovable. And I'm gonna go on dates, and I want this person to say I'm lovable. But if you're eating burgers and fries and staying up all night and turning up with chipped nail varnish and dirty hair and a stained t-shirt, you're not really saying I'm lovable. You're not really saying I'm a catch. You know, if some guy turned up with a beer all over his t-shirt and an egg in his beard, you wouldn't think, oh, he's a catch. Any more than a guy would think you've turned up in dirty old leggings with chipped nail varnish. So, you, you, when it's, again, that's abusive behavior. If you want someone to believe you're lovable, you have to believe you're lovable. First, you believe it, then you start to act in a way that says, yeah, I'm lovable.

• 1:00:08Speaker 04

  I should take myself to bed now. I don't really need to watch any more episodes of Catherine the Great tonight. I can do it at the weekend. I don't need eight slices of pizza. I can have one. So, it goes back into the message you're sending out. When you know you're lovable, when you resonate it, you act in a different way. You're not a people pleaser. You help. You're nice. You wouldn't go, oh, I have what you're having. I do what you want. I don't care. I'll go wherever you wanna go. You, you have an opinion, and you'll say, oh, no, that's not my thing. I don't really like that. And I don't wanna do that. I'm not gonna drive for three hours to see you. If you're not prepared to meet me halfway, then it's not a good place to start. If I've gotta pay the bill all the time.

• 1:00:54Speaker 04

  If you never, if you never ask me, how, how is the conversation going back and forth? If someone... Listening to you, are they transmitting or receiving? Some of you will just transmit, they go like a hairdryer, they go boom. And the whole day is them talking to you and they never ask you how you are. So. And that's not respectful. Respect was saying, oh, did you, you keep interrupting me, you're not asking me anything about me, I've been on a date, there's only one thing about me. And I realized I don't need to put myself through that. And if you have enough respect, you'll say. You know, we've been talking for an hour, this is actually not a match. I wish you great success in finding love. But you're not for me and I'm not for you. And you have that sense of, rather than dragging out another six hours. Just try being nice.

• 1:01:38Speaker 04

  I don't, I deserve better. And you know, again, it comes back to your needs and. In the beginning, when I was, all my clients have what I call unmet needs. They come in and they go, I wasn't loved. I wasn't nurtured, I wasn't praised, I wasn't supported, I didn't feel safe. And when a child has an unmet need, and and a baby's need is very simple, the children need to feel safe. Secure, loved, connected, significant. And as we get, oh, we need all of those, we also need you to feel proud of us and. We need to feel interesting and worthy. And if our needs aren't met at an early age, we give up the need. Or we give it away.

• 1:02:17Speaker 04

  And you see that in relationships so much. I've given up the need that that you care about me, but I'll care about you. Or I'm giving it away, it's your job now. You're gonna have to make me feel attractive, interesting, sexy, worth being with. I'm giving my need to you. It's a lot of work. Yeah, a huge work. Because now you're still needy, but someone else's job is to meet your needs. And they can do it very well for a while, but then they get bored, they have their own needs. So if you give the need up, no one's gonna love me. I I expect all relationships to, I always get ghosted. I've now given the need up. I've got my cats, I've got my Ben and Jerry's in the freezer. My Netflix.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  And I'm just not gonna even bother. I'm gonna, I just know it's not gonna work. I've even stopped dating. So I've given the need up. I might, I've even given the need up to have a great job and I'm living a life. It's not very satisfying, but I've given the need up.

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:03:13Speaker 04

  Or I've given it away. Someone out there is gonna have to turn up and meet my need. I need to feel the same thing. Significant, connected, loved, safe. You you've got to do that for me. But there's a third way, which is meet the need yourself, as weird as that sounds. If I need to feel safe, my husband's out of town, I go, hey, how can I feel safe? You've left town. I lock the doors, have a little alarm thing that I never use, but when he's out of town, I know where it is in the bedroom. You know, one of my clients said, well, my husband goes away, I have to go and stay with my mother of eighty-five to feel safe. I'm like, what's she gonna do? She's eighty-five years old. How can that be that you've given your need to be safe to someone of eighty-five?

• 1:03:57Speaker 04

  Every time your husband leaves town, you take your kids to your eighty-five-year-old mother. So she's given the need away, but the idea is, okay, I got a phone, I got an alarm. I I got a great system, I know, or just to believe you're safe. So. If you look right now at your unmet needs, they're always gonna be the same. Connected, safe, secure, significant, valid, worthwhile. Need someone to be proud of me. I need to feel I matter. And it may sound kind of weird to go, okay, I'm gonna do it. I matter. I'm significant. I'm secure within myself. I I'm proud of who I am. If you decide to meet your unmet needs, you feel so complete.

• 1:04:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:40Speaker 04

  But then you'll meet other people who can also meet them. But it's the opposite of needy. And that's if I'm in a relationship, like, okay, I've got a list here and someone's gonna have to tick all these boxes. And the second thing with needs is when you find someone to have a relationship, where you've got to put your needs in three piles. So, I'm gonna use all these cups.

• 1:04:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:05:00Speaker 04

  So you have to say, okay, this need is non-negotiable. You're gonna have to meet that need. I need to always know where you are at two in the morning. I need to know where you are. I need you to call me. I need you to be home in time for dinner. I need you to put your underpants in the laundry basket. That is a need I'm not prepared to sacrifice. That's okay, but then you might go, you know what? I can put the underpants in the laundry basket. Is it really worth all the arguments? So the second you think, you know what, I can meet this need. I need a clean, tidy house. My husband doesn't even see mess, but I'm just gonna do it myself. Or maybe we can get someone to come in. But the second need you meet it, and the third need, just give it up.

• 1:05:40Speaker 04

  It's, someone says, it's just not worth it. See, if I said I need my husband to make a huge deal about my birthday, and go, hey, this is a need. Birthday is a huge, I want a gift, I want it wrapped, I want ribbons. I can say meet that. I can say, you know what? I can find myself a great gift. I can do that myself if it's not that important, or I can go, is it really important? I've got every, do I need all these gifts, actually? It doesn't matter which one it is, but no one can meet all your needs. You've got to have, that need is non-negotiable. That need, I can meet it, and that need, I'm gonna give it up. So, my daughter is an artist, and I realized I needed the need for tidiness. There's just no way, because people who are messy don't see mess. They can't meet, you go, oh, yes, I'm so, they don't see it.

• 1:06:24Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:25Speaker 04

  So I couldn't say to her, hey, you need a tidy room all the time.

• 1:06:28Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  I couldn't, I could go in and tidy her room every single day, but you know what? I just learned to shut the door. I gave up that need, and it made our family so much happier, because she lives in chaos. And I don't, and she's a painter.

• 1:06:42Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  And one day, when I stapled plastic all over her walls and her carpet, and that was, that was great. I never worried about it again.

• 1:06:50Lewis Howes?

  Thank you so much for listening. I hope you enjoyed today's episode, and it inspired you on your journey towards greatness. Make sure to check out the show notes in the description for a full rundown of today's show with all the important links. And also make sure to share this with a friend and subscribe over on Apple Podcasts as well. I really love hearing feedback from you guys, so share a review over on Apple, and let me know what part of this episode resonated with you the most. And if no one's told you lately, I want to remind you that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And now it's time to go out there and do something great.