The Neuroscience Of Exercise | Wendy Suzuki

What exercise does to your brain—and how to actually do it regularly. Wendy Suzuki https://www.instagram.com/wendy.suzuki/?hl=en is a Professor of Neural Science and Psychology at New York University, where she is also the first Asian-American Dean of the College of Arts and Science. She is the author of two books, Good Anxiety and Healthy Brain, Happy Life. This episode is part of our monthlong Do Life Better https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/new-years-2025-do-life-better series. We talk about: How exercise not only enhances cognitive function but also protects against age-related cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases. The difference between cardio and strength training Whether it matters if you track your steps How to sustain your motivation to exercise And practical tips on how to start, restart or increase an exercise habit We also talk about the brain benefits of sleep, meditation, and healthy eating (with a detour into ways to counteract the potentially unhealthy obsession with being healthy) And finally, we talk about the counterintuitive benefits of anxiety Related Episodes: Do Life Better https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/new-years-2025-do-life-better Get Fit Sanely https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast-playlists/get-fit-sanely Sleep Better https://www.happierapp.com/podcast-playlists/sleep-better The Anti-Diet | Evelyn Tribole https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/evelyn-tribole-rerun-2023 Sign up for Dan's newsletter here http://www.danharris.com Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Ten Percent Happier online bookstore https://bit.ly/46TZglY Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT, Sleep https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF, Relationships https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J, Most Popular Episodes https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc Full Shownotes: https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/wendy-suzuki-888 https://www.meditatehappier.com/podcast/tph/phap-luu-889

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

• 0:05Dan Harris?

  It's the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:20Dan Harris?

  Hello, everybody. How we doing? One of the most popular resolutions, it actually may be the most popular resolution, is to exercise more. Whether or not you already exercise, this episode is designed to be deeply motivational in two ways. First, by laying out in fascinating detail how exercise benefits your brain, as you'll hear my guest today describe it. "Movement creates," and these are her words, "a bubble bath of neurochemicals that lead you to a healthy fluffy brain." The second thing we're aiming to do in this episode is to give you some specific granular advice for actually getting off the couch. My guest is the brilliant and effervescent Wendy Suzuki, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at New York University, where she's also the first Asian-American dean

• 1:05Dan Harris?

  of the College of Arts and Sciences. Wendy is the author of two books, Healthy Brain, Happy Life, and Good Anxiety. We talk about how exercise not only enhances cognitive function, but also protects against age-related cognitive decline and neurodegenerative diseases, the difference between cardio and strength training, whether it matters if you track your steps, how to sustain your motivation to exercise, and practical tips for starting, restarting, or boosting your exercise habit. We also talk about the brain benefits of sleep, meditation, and healthy eating, with a detour into ways to counteract the potentially unhealthy obsession with getting healthy. And finally, we talk about some of the counterintuitive benefits of anxiety.

• 1:49Dan Harris?

  Heads up, this episode kicks off a big, dare I say, huge January here on the show. We're launching a series called Do Life Better. We've identified the top resolutions that people tend to make. Fitness, meaning diet, exercise, and the like. Personal finances, career success, and work-life balance, and reducing your addictions to things like booze and your phone. We will do a week on each of these subjects with our typical blend of modern science and ancient wisdom. And alongside the programming here on the pod, we'll be running a free meditation challenge over at danharris.com. In many ways, meditation is the foundational habit. Mindfulness or self-awareness can fuel the whole process of behavior change. The challenge runs for seven days. It starts today. And every day,

• 2:33Dan Harris?

  you'll get a guided meditation directly in your inbox from some of your favorite meditation teachers, including Sharon Salzberg, Sebene Selassie, and Jeff Warren. And then I'll be doing some live check-ins in the evenings where you can log in and ask me anything. The first of those will be free, but the remainder will be for paid subscribers. Again, the challenge itself is free. All you have to do is subscribe over at danharris.com. If you're already a subscriber, there's nothing more you need to do here. The emails will arrive automatically. We'll get started with Wendy Suzuki right after this. Real progress starts with action. As the executive director of the Honold Foundation, Emily Kitesworth works to expand access to solar energy in communities around the world,

• 3:16Dan Harris?

  supporting locally-led projects that bring reliable power, greater independence, and opportunity where it is needed most. On the podcast Planet Visionaries, professional climber and Honold Foundation founder Alex Honold goes beyond the headlines with Emily to explore practical solutions for a more equitable future. In partnership with the Rolex Perpetual Planet Initiative, this is Planet Visionaries. Listen or watch wherever you get your podcasts.

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• 4:43Dan Harris?

  Wendy Suzuki, welcome to the show.

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me, Dan.

• 4:47Dan Harris?

  Serendipitously, I've just come from a workout, so I feel like I'm well-prepared for this interview. So you say that the most transformative thing we can do for our brains right now is to exercise.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 5:02Dan Harris?

  Say more about that, please.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Yes. So I think people don't realize what happens when you move your body. Every single time you move your body, there is a veritable waterfall of neurotransmitters and neurochemicals that floods your brain. These include neurotransmitters that you've heard of before, like dopamine and serotonin and noradrenaline and endorphins, but also maybe some neurochemicals that you have not heard of before, like growth factors. And this is the elixir that helps your brain perform today, grow tomorrow, and be protected long-term from aging and neurodegenerative disease states.

• 5:49Speaker 03

  And that right there is why I say it is the most transformative thing, that is moving your body is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today.

• 6:00Dan Harris?

  This is fascinating, and I have a million follow-ups. You said something about growth factors? Did I hear that correctly?

• 6:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 6:05Dan Harris?

  Can you teach me a little bit more about that?

• 6:07Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So one of my personal motivations to do my workout every morning, which I do, I wake up, I have my meditation over tea, and then I do about a 30-minute Kind of cardio strength workout is because I know that workout that's getting my heart rate up will help my body release growth factors. And the one that's been studied the most is called brain derived neurotrophic factor, B D N F. And it's released by muscles that are working. It's released by the liver that goes into exercise mode when you start to work out. And it's even released a little bit by fat cells. And so all of those growth factors

• 6:52Speaker 03

  released peripherally go through the blood brain barrier. They go into your brain and they make a beeline for my very favorite brain structure in the whole brain called the hippocampus. The hippocampus is critical for our ability to learn and retain new long-term memories for facts and events. And what those growth factors do is it makes shiny new hippocampal cells grow. And as a neuroscientist who specialized in hippocampal function for the vast majority of my career, I am motivated by shiny new hippocampal cells growing in my hippocampus because it means my memory is better. It means my hippocampus is big and fat and fluffy. And there's exciting

• 7:34Speaker 03

  new evidence that the hippocampus is not only involved in memory. This is the historic, that's what all neuroscience, psychology majors learn, but it's also involved in imagination. Putting things that we have in our brain together in new ways is a really important function of the hippocampus. I want a really strong imagination. It also has affective functions. It affects our mood as well. It does a lot of really fascinating things. And that's what you get when you are literally watering your hippocampus with growth factors that comes with movement, aerobic movement that increases your heart rate.

• 8:13Dan Harris?

  I want to get into the specifics on that, but I also just want to signal that we are going to talk about motivation at some point, because I know that's a huge issue, especially around the new year, like how to actually motivate, create an abiding habit. I love the fact that your motivation is a fatter hippocampus. And so we will come back to that.

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 8:30Dan Harris?

  But, okay, so you made a nod there towards something that we should discuss, which is the specific forms of exercise that we should be.

• 8:39Dan Harris?

  Focusing on, and let's also just keep in mind that some people don't have bodies that allow them to do all kinds of exercise.

• 8:47Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. So to that point, which is absolutely true, that not all of us have the bodies to do exercise, I would just, and some people say, yeah, I hate exercise. And so therefore, my body and my whole person isn't conducive to that directive. I would remind people that power walking is also a great way to get your heart rate up. People tend to go immediately in their mind to triathlons and these marathon runners when I talk about aerobic exercise or exercise in general. And that is not the case. You can get a workout that gets your heart rate up without changing into expensive fancy workout clothes and just doing your daily activities, including chasing around small kids. They

• 9:31Speaker 03

  can be very aerobic. It is broader than people realize. And when people say, well, I don't have the body to do that, I'm always inspired when I watch Invictus Games or Special Olympics that encourage people of all body types to move in really inspiring ways. And you may not make the Olympics. I will never make the Olympics, but it shows that there are ways for people with any body type to move their bodies, whatever it is, and get their heart rates up. So it's not exclusive. This is an inclusive suggestion that you can use.

• 10:12Dan Harris?

  Let's just drill down on walking for one second.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:14Dan Harris?

  You said power walking. What do you mean by that? And is taking a 30 minute walk just at a stroll pace? Does that not count?

• 10:23Speaker 03

  So walking has been shown to be effective, particularly for mood. There are many effects of exercise on the brain. We jumped into my favorite one, which is using exercise to grow new hippocampal brain cells. That of course doesn't happen overnight. One power walk is not going to suddenly make your hippocampus big and fat and fluffy. This takes time. Cells in the brain or anywhere in our body take time to grow and it takes regular water Of your hippocampus with those growth factors to get those hippocampal cells to grow. But if you want the immediate positive fix with moving your body, that comes with a stroll. In fact, a 10 minute walk has been shown to significantly decrease anxiety and depression

• 11:05Speaker 03

  levels in people that are not in major depressive disorder. And that is a stroll. To get the long term growth factor effect, you need to get your heart rate up. Does a general stroll get most people's heart rate up? No, and that's what I call a power walk. You've done it every time you're late and you don't really want to run, but you're trying to get there. And it's a great way that you can add more aerobic activity to your everyday life. That again, you can do it in your regular work shoes or regular everyday shoes as well.

• 11:39Dan Harris?

  So if, if I'm out here listening and I'm thinking, I don't have time to exercise or I hate exercise, but I want the benefits, of course. You're saying, actually, just a couple of times a day, maybe when you're naturally walking somewhere, just walk pretty fast and you might be able to get that fluffy hippocampus that we all want.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  Absolutely. There are more ways than one than joining the gym and or joining a running club to get more activity into your life. I like to use the example, while I live in Manhattan, my mother lives in a place where there's lots of Costco's around. So taking a, going to Costco, go take a tour around the entire exterior of that warehouse. That is a great way to add more steps, make them powerful steps. And that's part of what you're going to do anyway. So lots of ways to do that. Let me add, walking your dog. You want to go to a museum, go, you know, walk fast around or with a bounce in your step around the museum. So many ways to add this into your life that you don't have to do the traditional gym membership route if you don't want to.

• 12:43Dan Harris?

  Where are you on the whole step tracking thing? And what is that? Do you believe it should be 10,000 steps per day? Or I've asked this to many guests. I'm curious what your answer is.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. So first, let me just answer personally. Do I track all of my steps? No, I've never tracked any of my steps. I've evolved my exercise over time. First, I was an avid gym goer because I needed those great instructors and all that music and all those fun classes to motivate me. And then over the pandemic, like everybody else, it's like, oh, what am I going to do? I found online workouts and I had more time. So I did it and I got really good at doing that regularly. That was one of the best habits that I formed personally over the pandemic is my regular video workout habit that I still use today.

• 13:35Speaker 03

  And so I use not the step monitors. I use my own feeling of how I'm feeling. I know how I feel when I get a good aerobic workout on a regular basis, in which for me, which is every day, I try and do 30 minutes cardio strength every single day. Of course, if I have an early flight or, you know, really, really tired, I don't do it, but that is my regular thing and I could tell how I feel. And I use that as my kind of yardstick for how well I'm doing in my physical activity to improve my brain.

• 14:10Dan Harris?

  And you don't believe in a rest day?

• 14:12Speaker 03

  I did when I was going to the gym and I couldn't control the duration of the class that I went into. And I could have left after 30 minutes, but I don't like to do that. I needed a rest day when I did long classes that really pushed me. This is the other thing I learned personally in the pandemic, that 30 minutes for me is great. I could push myself and the next day I could come back and I still feel good. Sure, every once in a while I'll go to a workout with a friend and I'll get pushed and then I'll need a rest day. So if you need a rest day for the physical healing of your body, absolutely take a rest day. But I've found a pattern that works for me that I could.

• 14:53Speaker 03

  Do every single day and I love kind of strengthening that daily habit. I know we're going to come back to that for the new year, but that I found has been so helpful for me. It keeps it automatic for me. I don't have to think, is this my rest day? Do I get the rest day? No, it's my regular day and I get to choose what I want to do, which does include yoga. So my rest day is mobility slash yoga. It is an everyday thing that I put in my schedule.

• 15:22Dan Harris?

  I just want to make sure we close out the steps issue. We've extolled the virtues of walking. You've said that you don't track your steps per se, but for those of us who are interested in boosting our walking quotient.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:36Dan Harris?

  Is there a number we should be striving towards? Is it eight? Is it 10,000? What? Do you have a view on that?

• 15:42Speaker 03

  So I don't have a clear view on it. And also let me just clarify, if you like to keep track of that, then that helps you keep. I have my own monitoring system, my 30 minutes every single day. That's my monitoring system. It is great to have the steps monitoring system, but for me and the way that, not just the way I think, but what the science tells us about moving the body and how it's helpful for the brain. Yes, the regular number of more leisurely steps is good and important. And we know it has an effect on mood. It's the aerobic steps that are important for that long-term brain health. And so that's important to keep track of as well.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  And I think the steps have been used to help us keep track of our overall general health. Yes, we as Americans need to move more. And if that helps to keep that on a higher level or at a great level. But I don't have a number of steps for the brain. I have kinds of steps that are good for mood and other kinds of activity that's good for your brain. And even if you want me to give people the prescription for exactly how many minutes that you need.

• 16:56Speaker 03

  I have a partial answer for you. And so that partial answer comes from studies that I've done looking at low-fit people that start out my study, working out less than 30 minutes a week for the last three months. So that's how we defined low-fit. And then we asked these people to do an aerobic workout three times a week for 45 minutes. And the aerobic workout was a spin sessions because we wanted to make sure it was really aerobic. They ended up working out between two and three times a week. I think it was 2.6 times a week. And was that enough? Yes, it was. We saw improvements in baseline mood.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  We saw improvements in baseline hippocampal function and baseline focus, prefrontal function, which is the other brain function that is very sensitive to exercise. So I can't say that is the minimum. That is a doable number of times to do a workout that is between two and three times a week, 45 minutes, that will improve your overall brain function in ways that we know exercise is most effective. So that is as close as I could get to a prescription right now, but that is one of my goals, to get closer to a prescription for all categories of people, all your listeners out there, because everybody has their, oh, you know, I'm mid-fit. What about me?

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Actually, I have a prescription for you too, which is, this is a faster one. Everybody working out, you already work out two and three times a week. There's a lot of you out there. That is great. That's already helping your brain. And the study we did there showed that the more you work out above that two to three times a week, the more brain benefit you get. That is, exercise for your brain is democratic. The more time you put in, the more benefit you get. And I love that message because it says, whatever you can do more is, is good. Every drop of sweat, every turn of the wheel is going to help your brain.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  And I think that is an optimistic, doable message for everybody out there.

• 19:07Dan Harris?

  I love that. It's actually very motivating. Just to say very tactical and granular here. In my understanding, much of our discussion thus far has dwelt upon cardio.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 19:19Dan Harris?

  There was one brief reference to strength and another brief reference to mobility and yoga. So how do we think about weight training and strength training and also flexibility training, like stretching and yoga?

• 19:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So there is good evidence that yoga is great for mood states. Here's the thing. There's the most positive evidence that cardio workouts will get these long-term brain changes that we've been talking about. Growth of new brain cells in the hippocampus. We didn't talk about this yet, but the other brain area that is benefited from long-term exercise is the prefrontal cortex, critical for your ability to shift and focus attention. That doesn't grow new brain cells. It tends to grow new synapses or connections between the brain cells that are there. And then everybody who loves weight training says, well, what about weight training? I love weight training.

• 20:14Speaker 03

  And there's more mixed evidence that weight training can be beneficial. There's not nearly as many studies on weight training as there have been on aerobic exercise. So it could be that weight training sweet spot has not been found yet. Or it could be that weight training is helping your brain in as much as it increases your heart rate. So it's not that weight training, that I do cardio weight training because I know I need the cardio for my bones at the age that I am. And I also know that it ups my cardio when I add weights to the workout. So for me, it's a win-win. If you like weights alone, it could be that that, well, I don't know. We're still trying to figure that out. I wouldn't say, don't do it.

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Keep that in your exercise regimen because it's keeping you going to the gym. But we know the most about the benefits of aerobic exercise to give you those long-term brain benefits.

• 21:11Dan Harris?

  I have a close friend, his name is Strauss Zelnick, and I interviewed him on this podcast many years ago. I'll drop a link in the show notes. And Strauss does these group workouts at his house. Well, he lives in the city. He moves between the city and the country. He's quite a successful businessman. In the city, he does these group workouts at a gym. And then on the weekends, when he's at his country house, which is near where our only house is, he does them at his house. And he does these group weight training, but circuit workouts. So you're with a bunch of people and you're moving quite rapidly among a group of weight, like you're a lat pull down, or a bunch of pushups, or some sort of abs stuff. And I find when I do that with him, I am kind of simultaneously getting a cardio

• 21:56Dan Harris?

  workout because I'm moving so much so quickly.

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. So it's not pure strength and pure cardio. There's a big mix in there. And so that's why it's unclear what exactly is going on in the weight training kind of studies that have been done. And I don't think it's been controlled well enough exactly how much your heart rate is changing with these strength workouts. And we know so many different workouts out there are a combo of both. So that's an important unanswered question at this point.

• 22:25Dan Harris?

  Yeah, I'm thinking like Barry's Boot Camp, but that's a combo of both.

• 22:28Speaker 03

  Oh, God, I sweat and I have a good heart rate workout for Barry's. I mean, it's half running on the treadmill. So that's pure cardio.

• 22:38Dan Harris?

  Yeah. And then it's half running and then there's this stuff that they do on the floor with the weights. And I'll say one thing, we'll come back to this, but just very quickly about the Strauss workouts that I've recently, I've known Strauss forever, only recently started really going to his organized workouts. The community aspect, the social support aspect of it, the fact that I'm looking forward to being with a bunch of people who I like, even though I just met them, although I've known Strauss forever, but a lot of his friends who also work out are new to me, but I really like them. And, and there's a lot of camaraderie and high fiving. And that is massively motivating for me. And, and there's a lot of data here to show that in terms of creating a habit, it creates a kind of accountability that can get you off the couch.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  Absolutely, absolutely. In this age of loneliness, having that community, that in-person community that will give you a high five and you sweat with, I'm a big supporter of using that as a motivation. Social interaction is also good for your brain, good for your brain long-term. And we know that the people that have the longest and happiest lives are those that have the strongest social connections. So we cannot ignore that in overall brain health and in our exercise, how we exercise. So yeah, very important aspect.

• 23:58Dan Harris?

  Okay, so as promised, we will come back to the more granular discussion about how to actually boot up an exercise habit. But I do want to stay on a high level for a moment on the health benefits, specifically the brain benefits of of exercise. And one of the things that we haven't really talked about that much yet is protection against Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia.

• 24:18Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 24:18Dan Harris?

  And I'll take this as a point of personal privilege, because I'm going to ask kind of a personal question about this. But both my dad and my father-in-law were marathon runners who have dementia. And I'm curious about, like, are those outlier cases? Or, I mean, obviously, you don't, you're not treating them, so they're not your patient. But I would very much like not to develop dementia. It doesn't look super fun. And I've got a lot of up close experience with it. And yet I look at these two men who were so fit and developed it nonetheless. I will just throw in one last piece of information, which is that both had severe and untreated sleep apnea.

• 24:57Speaker 03

  Oh, wow. Yeah, that's so interesting. And also, as you pointed out, I'm not an M D. But I will say that the promise is never that if you are a marathon runner, you will, you are protected 100% from dementia. That is absolutely not what the science shows. Here's what the science shows. The science shows that the longer, more regularly, you are moving your body in an aerobic way, you are giving your brain this, what I like to call the bubble bath of neurochemicals. Every single time you move your body, you get this bubble bath of neurochemicals in your brain.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  Including all those growth factors, but all the other feel-good neurotransmitters. Imagine doing that for 50 years. You're a marathon runner for 50 years. So what you're doing for those 50 years, you are maximizing the growth factors that are going to your hippocampus. You're growing more cells in your hippocampus than somebody who is not doing marathon running. You're also growing more synapses in your prefrontal cortex than somebody who is not marathon running, specifically because of this aerobic activity. So now, 50 years later, you have a bigger, fatter, fluffier hippocampus and prefrontal cortex than you would have had if you had not exercised.

• 26:27Speaker 03

  And so what this is doing is not curing specifically Alzheimer's disease or any other kind of dementia. So Alzheimer's is the most common form of dementia. There are other forms of dementia, like frontal temporal dementia. And you're not exactly curing aging at all. But here's what you're doing. You are making two brain areas that are susceptible to both aging and Alzheimer's disease as big and fat as fluffy as they could be in you. So these are the areas that start to have plaques and tangles in them, particularly the hippocampus with aging. The bigger it is, the more cells you have to damage to start seeing those early signs

• 27:11Speaker 03

  of dementia. That is what you're doing. So the argument from mainly correlational studies is that your dad and your father-in-law likely would have started to show those signs of dementia and Alzheimer's disease significantly early if they had not done that running. And we cannot control when that, you know, there's early onset Alzheimer's disease. But that is what you're doing. That is the image. That's my other big motivation, because my father also passed away with diagnosed Alzheimer's disease. So my motivation to do this regular 30 minutes a day, seven days a week, is that I want

• 27:51Speaker 03

  a big, fat, fluffy brain so that I live the longest number of years, months, years, minutes with a strong cognition before, if this disease is in me, it starts to manifest. That's what you get with regular exercise.

• 28:09Dan Harris?

  That's really well said. And just to repeat back the headline of it, that exercise is not guaranteeing you anything. It's not guaranteeing you a cure or that you'll never get Alzheimer's if, as you said before, the disease is in you. But it may well be delaying the onset, given the brain benefits it does confer.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 28:27Dan Harris?

  And I would add, just specifically as it relates to my dad and father-in-law, just to double click on the fact that sleep also has a massive effect on brain health. And if you have prolonged untreated sleep apnea, that could be devastating.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  It can. And that's also what tends to happen, poorer sleep in older age, which is the, it's not that, what's the opposite of a cherry on top? That is-

• 28:53Dan Harris?

  Bag of poop.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. Okay, let's call it the flaming bag of poop that comes with age. Like, you're trying to battle, keep your brain as healthy as possible. And we know that sleep becomes harder as you age. And you just have to really work extra hard to make sure that you get as good a sleep as possible. And that's the other thing I, I focus on, is my own sleep patterns and making them good. I mean, that's why I gave up alcohol. I noticed how much alcohol, even a single glass of my still-mist cocktail or, you know, prosecco, I could feel it that night. My, I couldn't fall asleep as well. My sleep felt much more shallow.

• 29:37Speaker 03

  And then I gave it up and it's like, oh, I hate noticing how much sleep is so much better with no alcohol. But it was for me. And generally, it's not just for me. Generally, that is the truth for most people. You will get better sleep with either less or no alcohol.

• 30:00Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Wendy Suzuki talks about how to improve your sleep, the brain benefits of meditation. And also, we get very practical for people who are looking to start, restart, or boost an exercise habit.

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• 32:14Dan Harris?

  First, let me just say to the listener, I've done a lot of episodes on sleep, so I'll drop a bunch of links in the show notes if you want to go deep on sleep. But while I have you, Wendy, can you say a little bit more about what you've done and what you might recommend for those of us who want, in this new year, to improve our sleep?

• 32:29Speaker 03

  Absolutely. So here's what one of my many personal experiments that I did over the pandemic was to ask, what if I allowed myself to sleep as long as I wanted? And how much longer would that be than I'm allowing myself, because I'm a busy New Yorker, and I need to get up and I need to be active? And I found that that was almost a one to two-hour differential. So you always say, oh, you know, I don't want to use alarm. Like, if I didn't use an alarm, if I don't use alarm, I sleep about eight, sometimes nine hours. And so I found that, and I tried to maintain it.

• 33:11Speaker 03

  And on top of that, I did all the things that you're supposed to do from all the books you can read and just Google it online. What can I do to get better sleep? I did all of them. The hardest was to give up alcohol, that I previously mentioned. But I also took all screens out of my bedroom. I did a ritual. I made my bedroom colder. I did a ritual, and so I turned off the screens at least a half an hour before, and I read before that. Maybe this'll speak to females out there. I did all my hydration early in the day, and I used to like to drink a cup of chamomile tea. I was like, how many times do I have to go to the bathroom with one cup of chamomile tea? Too many times, so I cut that out.

• 33:54Speaker 03

  And so that decreased the number of times that I went to the bathroom, which, of course, disrupts the sleep. And so now I have a regular eight-hour sleep cycle that I preserve and I protect. And I feel better. I feel much better.

• 34:12Dan Harris?

  I love all that. And by the way, the late in the day hydration is an issue that I think many men will resonate with as well. I'll just add personally, a couple of beats to what you just said.

• 34:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:24Dan Harris?

  Plus one on literally everything you said. And for me, two things have been helpful. One is the major variable for me in my sleep is my anxiety level. And if I'm really anxious about something, I'm not going to sleep well. And so what I've really allowed myself to do is to not catastrophize about that and to learn how to talk to myself in those situations.

• 34:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:44Dan Harris?

  In a way that I'll just say, dude, you've had many sleepless nights and you've always been fine the next day. You're going to be fine tomorrow. Get out of bed. Don't teach your brain that the bed is a place to struggle. Get out of bed, go do something fun, read a book, catch up on work, whatever it is. And then if you get some sleep, great. If you don't, you don't. The second thing I do that's been really helpful is that for me, anxiety late in the day often manifests as an overwhelming physical restlessness. And so walking meditation,

• 35:14Dan Harris?

  which is a great practice, a deep practice for me. I just do it now every night before I go to bed. It's part of my ritual. And if I can't fall asleep, I get up and do more.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  That's beautiful. Yeah. I mean, you're giving a beautiful example of something that I discovered for myself and I talk a lot about, which is that personal experiment that is being introspective enough to know what happens. You have this anxiety that happens right before you go to sleep and trying different things. I'm sure you didn't discover this the very first thing you did. There was a struggle and but it's being curious and exploring all the different modalities of meditation or relaxation that there are. And some you hate. It's like, oh, God, who would like to do this? But then you find one that resonates with you. For me, the meditative resonance came with my morning

• 36:05Speaker 03

  tea meditation. I was a yo-yo meditator and I, you know, was like, okay, now I'm going to follow Deepak Chopra. No, now I'm going to listen to Oprah. And it would work for a week and oh, they have beautiful voices. But then it's like, oh, no, it doesn't work anymore. Until I found this monk.

• 36:22Speaker 03

  Who taught me how to do this morning tea meditation, which is brewing of not, this is not tea bag tea meditation. This is putting tea leaves in a pot and going through the ritual of boiling the water at the temperature that is right for those tea leaves and waiting it for it to seep. And then warming your cup and doing all that and doing it over and over. So I sit in tea meditation for 45 minutes every morning. And it's because I have this, also, I love tea. So also, if you hate tea, then it might not work, but I love tea, I learned. And I love that ritual. And there's always the next step that you must do. And it keeps me in this ritual of making and drinking and then brewing, making and brewing and drinking that I love.

• 37:07Dan Harris?

  Now that we're talking about meditation, I want to hear your view on the data around the brain benefits of meditation. But is there anything more to say on sleep before we leave that subject?

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Yes, actually, you just reminded me with your additions that something that I discovered was so powerful was when I used this app that helped me prepare for long distance flights. So you put all of your flights in, if I'm going all the way to Asia from New York, and it tells you three days before, go to sleep at 8:00 PM and wake up at 5:00 AM. And it shifts you gently so that you're much less jet lagged if you follow all the instructions. And it reminded me that I love when I fall asleep, like I can't wait to go to sleep and I really fall asleep.

• 37:56Speaker 03

  And it reminded me that I could do that if I wake up early and get a really hard, good workout in. There are things that everybody can do to make that evening so that you, your head can't wait to hit the pillow. And going through that as we time shift reminded me, and I don't do it all the time, but when I need or want a really deep sleep, a particular night, I will wake up extra early. It's not rocket science. There is a sleep pressure that builds up and you have no sleep pressure right after you wake up. Well, put yourself up for so long that you experience when you go on a flight and oh, you cannot wait, I just need to sleep.

• 38:40Speaker 03

  And I love that feeling. So you can, everybody has the capacity to do that every day. And it's fun to play with that because it feels so good to really want to go to sleep.

• 38:52Dan Harris?

  Yeah, and I heard two things in there. There's if you really want to create some sleep pressure, you can get up earlier than you might otherwise get up. But then also you can work out.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  Absolutely.

• 39:01Dan Harris?

  Back to exercise. I remember you've given a couple of TED Talks. I've only given one. But I was so nervous to give that TED Talk that, and you know, having been to TED, you go to TED and you're there for a couple of days often before you have to give your talk and you're watching all these other people give their talks. For me, I was just getting increasingly anxious. And so the day before, I worked out three times. And I slept that night.

• 39:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:25Dan Harris?

  It really helped. Really helped.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  It makes you feel really good. And it just highlights how sleep is one of these tools that is so important for both everyday brain health and long-term brain health.

• 39:39Dan Harris?

  Well, let's quickly get back to meditation for a second in terms of brain health. And just to say to the listener, we're dwelling in this first half of the interview on Wendy's first book, Healthy Brain, Happy Life. We're going to pivot at some point to talking about her latest book, which is about anxiety and with the provocative title of Good Anxiety, which I love. But staying in the realm of your first book, what's your view on how strong the research is around the brain benefits of meditation?

• 40:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think they are strong and helped unusually, but beautifully by the Dalai Lama himself, who I think that collaboration between the Dalai Lama and Richard Davidson, a really wonderful meditation-focused neuroscientist, has done a lot for the depth of that research. Having said that, I think it's important for people to understand that we know more of the mechanics of what exercise does for your brain, because one can study the effects of exercise on brain structure, function, anatomy, physiology function in experimental

• 40:48Speaker 03

  animals. And that has brought a lot to our understanding. People have said they can teach rats how to meditate. I don't believe them. They can put rats in very relaxed environments. Is that the same as meditation? I'm not sure. But that, it's a funny thing to think about. But it is a difference between what we know about the detailed physiology of what exercise does for your brain and what we know about the effects of meditation for the brain. But yes, the work that we know is strong for meditation in the human brain. Absolutely.

• 41:20Dan Harris?

  Okay, finally, let's talk about the thing that I keep teasing, which is how do we start or restart or increase our exercise habit in this new year? It is the number one resolution that people make, which is to get fit or exercise more, whatever it is. So we talked about social support as being a great way. What are some other ways that we can actually do this thing that we know is so good for us?

• 41:48Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I like to say, keep it short when you're starting, right? It's like, oh, I haven't done it for so long. Keep it short, keep it fun, and keep it in the realm of things that you already do or have loved in your life. So think back, you were a kid once. What did you love to do then? Or back when you were in high school, what did you love to do? I think those are great areas to start. I see so many people trying to go to our classes and Barry's Bootcamp, and it's just too much and too overwhelming. And then you're too sore the next day, you never want to go back. And maybe it's not even fun. Have a friend come along.

• 42:33Speaker 03

  That's the keep it fun. Keep it short is do something online or a class that is short so you can get the benefit and you want to keep yourself wanting more. That's what I always like to do when I'm designing programs for my undergraduates at New York University. First time, get them hooked, make it short, and make sure that they end with wanting to come back. Do that to yourself with things that you know will be engaging. And be, I'm going to add another one, which is be creative. Using the idea that you can use power walks. So it's not the traditional, I have to join a gym. No, you don't have to join a gym. Add one power walk a day for 10 minutes.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  That 10-minute power walk should not only improve your mood, but will get you on the road to adding that in multiple times a day. So those are all the tips that I give to people, because of course I get asked this question a lot as well.

• 43:31Dan Harris?

  I'm sure you do. To say to the listener, a couple of days ago, I posted an episode, a solo mini podcast episode, just me summing up everything I've learned over the past 10 years about the science of behavior change. And so I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And it's brief and really runs through all the data that I've seen around what works to help people create habits. And Wendy just covered some of the things that I talk about. Make it short, make it fun, make it flexible. I would add just one other thing, and it taps back into something that Wendy and I discussed earlier, which is make it meaningful. And both you and I, Wendy, share this desire to live long and healthy and productive lives. And

• 44:16Dan Harris?

  we've both seen our dads struggle with dementia, and that's a powerful motivator, and it makes the daily practice meaningful.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  That's a great one. Absolutely.

• 44:28Dan Harris?

  Anything else to say about brain health before we move on to anxiety, which is one of my favorite topics of all time?

• 44:35Speaker 03

  I wanted to give an image that I use. We talked about sleep and the importance of sleep. And sleep does many things for our brain long term. I just want to highlight this because I don't think people have this image. And again, one of the images that I use to motivate me to keep up my sleep habit, which is that sleep and the complex cycles that you go through is when all the metabolites of your brain function, the biggest user of oxygen in your whole body, there is so much activity going on in your brain all day. All

• 45:15Speaker 03

  of the garbage that, to use a technical term, the garbage that gets produced in running a cell, needs to get cleaned out, and it gets cleaned out during sleep. So the image that I like to give myself is those nights when you get the short sleep, including when you're traveling, you end up with a garbage filled brain, a brain that has not had the time to clean. Out all those metabolites. And that's just one night. Imagine sleep depriving your brain for years and years with the motivation of, oh, I have to get up. I have to work harder. That is building up in your brain. And it is affecting the long term health of your brain.

• 45:59Speaker 03

  It's affecting the power that your brain has to, to fight diseases that will come on like, like Alzheimer's dementia. So it's like I picture this little garbage truck going from brain area to brain area. And I think that's one that, that helps me, motivates me for sleep.

• 46:17Dan Harris?

  Would it be safe in summation to say that the three biggest levers we have to pull when it comes to improving our brain health are exercise, sleep and mindfulness?

• 46:27Speaker 03

  Those are three big ones. It's hard to order them because as I like to say, people often ask, should I wake up early if I'm so, so tired just to work out because you told me that exercise is so good? And I have to say no, because you can stop moving your body for the next 20 years and it will not affect your mortality. But if you stop sleeping, if I prevent you from sleeping, that is in fact a known form of torture and you will die if you cannot sleep. So sleep is such a core physiological need in us that no, I cannot recommend that you drag yourself out of bed because I said that you should exercise. You need sleep, but sorry, I digress.

• 47:11Speaker 03

  I wanted to add two more to the list. One we've talked about, which is social connection.

• 47:17Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  Social connection is so important for the brain. You know that, I know that. And in this age of loneliness at NYU, we're looking forward to a talk next week by Vivek Murthy about loneliness and how it affects everybody from our kids all the way up to our adults. And the fifth one that I'll add to your list is the fuel that we use for our whole bodies and our brain, which is food and how important that is long term. So those are the five things that I put in my fluffy brain class that I teach to my NYU students to teach them how to use those to get the most out of the four years that they have at this institution of higher education.

• 47:59Dan Harris?

  What are your overarching guidelines when it comes to food and brain health and how do you deliver those without? Provoking, and I learned this word a couple of years ago, and I like it, orthorexia, an unhealthy obsession with being healthy.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:14Dan Harris?

  How do we eat in a healthy way without actually perversely degrading our health?

• 48:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a great question. So for the approaches that I've been using in undergraduate students, which is my population, I have 9,000 of them that I'm in charge of. It's really about choosing those, those areas of eating that are easiest to address. And the easiest one is sugar levels. So it's not going to kill you if you cut out all sugar. They're never going to do that. They will start to be more mindful about how many bubble tea drinks they drink with the high sugar level. You can drink bubble tea, put the low sugar level. So many different ways to do that. Also, you can add in, it's never about, I'm not a dietary expert, and it's common sense eating.

• 49:04Speaker 03

  Lots of fruits, lots of vegetables, low processed sugar. Can you add more vegetables or fruits? Your choice. You can choose whatever one. Just add more into your diet. So, so I don't feel like I get to the level of making people unhealthy with their food choices.

• 49:19Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 49:20Speaker 03

  Because I approach it at, you know, at a very, very high level.

• 49:24Dan Harris?

  I hear a lot of flexibility and open mindedness there. Just to say for context, I've been really deeply influenced by the work of Evelyn Trubaly, who's one of the godmothers of something called intuitive eating. And what I hear in your advice there really jives with Evelyn's approach, which is, yeah, we know what's good for us. Maybe try to do a little bit more, but you don't want to cut out whole groups of food as quote unquote sinful.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Right. Exactly. I shy away from the grapefruit diets or any other of the named diets except for Mediterranean or Mediterranean related diets. And that really has so much evidence for it. And now it's been refined. You can get the brain diet or, but it's low saturated fat, lowish sugar. It's, there are trends there that I think can cover lots of people, whatever their food preferences or food histories are.

• 50:22Dan Harris?

  Yeah, that all makes sense. Just for the listener, I'll just say my own personal approach jives with what you're describing. I generally try to eat a lot of fruits and vegetables. I'm not heavy on meat for both ethical reasons and health reasons, but I do eat some animal protein. And last night I had a little bit of a fun fatty cookie, and I didn't feel one bit of guilt about it. And so it's just like having a balanced approach to all of this.

• 50:46Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. It does, again, self experimentation. I don't feel good when I eat too high fat. I'm a savory person, so too much salt, I will feel it. That's how I felt the effect of alcohol on me. I guess I'm, I think I'm more sensitive now than I used to be. Maybe it's age, I'm not sure. But that self-reflection is a very powerful tool for long-term health in general.

• 51:14Dan Harris?

  Yeah, it seems like self-awareness is probably good when it comes to, and I don't know if there's data on this, but just intuitively, it seems like it would be good for habit formation. Like, we know there's a lot of data around tracking, if you're into that kind of thing. And one of the benefits of keeping a little journal on whatever habit you're trying to boot up, exercise or whatever, is you can see, oh, yeah, I'm more likely to do it if I do it in the morning. And so like, that kind of self-awareness, listening to your body, tracking, is super helpful in so many areas of our lives, and not a thing that we're like, sold on Instagram that much.

• 51:49Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, well, it's noticing. I mean, that's a big part of my Fluffy Brain course, is actually giving students a workbook, to be able to do a real personal experiment on themselves with a control week, and an exercise week, and measurements to take, so they can make their own conclusions. And then we come together and discuss it. And you find things that, like, students who tried a new exercise regime, found that they couldn't eat the fatty breakfast that they had been eating, and they opted for oatmeal. And they were surprised that they were, they're eating more healthily, because they wanted to do a better workout, and they felt like that was better. So, not the most controlled

• 52:33Speaker 03

  exercise, but if I get that student and all the other students to move towards this direction of, I mean, this class is about brain health for academic performance. That is my goal.

• 52:47Dan Harris?

  I love it.

• 52:49Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Wendy talks about some tools we can use to reduce anxiety, including ways to counter program against our evolutionarily wired negativity bias. And she talks about her favorite discovery from her book, Good Anxiety.

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• 54:09Dan Harris?

  Okay, your newest book has a helpfully provocative title, Good Anxiety.

• 54:16Speaker 03

  Good Anxiety, yes.

• 54:17Dan Harris?

  What does that mean?

• 54:19Speaker 03

  Yes, so, good anxiety means that it acknowledges the fact that anxiety is a normal human emotion, that everybody has anxiety, and that all of our emotions evolved for a purpose. Anxiety together with all the, let's call them uncomfortable emotions. And generally, these uncomfortable emotions are there to protect us. The title Good Anxiety acknowledges that this emotion kind of...

• 54:49Speaker 03

  From an evolutionary point of view, helped us get to where we are today, the evolved species that we are, because it protected us from when the female 2.5 million years ago was going to sleep and there was anxiety because there was a noise. What was that noise? She got up and she got her baby out and she wasn't eaten by the wolf, which was the main danger way back then. And so it evolved for a good reason to protect us. Now, unfortunately, our emotions and the brain areas that are important for regulating our emotions have not evolved as fast as our culture and our news cycles, where everything gets dropped on us on a daily basis.

• 55:33Speaker 03

  And there's so many ways for us to get informed about the scary things that are happening throughout our world. And our body is responding with that same fight or flight, this could be a life or death situation kind of response. And we are keeping ourselves in a more constant state of anxiety. And that is not good for your brain. And that is what I call bad anxiety. And so the book Good Anxiety first acknowledges that there is a protective element to your anxiety, encourages you to find what that is, but also gives you tools and acknowledges the fact that nobody can do anything productive if your anxiety is way off the scale.

• 56:17Speaker 03

  So what are those tools that we have to first bring your anxiety down? And then, again, a self-reflective exercise. What does my anxiety over work performance mean? Well, actually, maybe it means that I care about work. I love my job. I want to bring the best education that I can to the students that I serve. There's nothing wrong with that. But maybe you want to turn down the anxiety that's keeping you from performing at your best. So you can get back to the values that that anxiety is highlighting for you. Maybe you can use your anxiety as just a spotlight to what you hold dear in your life.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  That is the core of what I wanted to try and convey in my book, Good Anxiety.

• 57:06Dan Harris?

  It really rhymes with something I talk about a lot, which is learning to draw the line between what I call constructive anguish and useless rumination, or destructive rumination.

• 57:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And there are many steps, and it's not that easy. But I started with, and I spent the whole, at least a third of the book, on tools that everybody can use, neuroscience and psychology-based tools that I know, and I know you've shared that with all of your listeners, Dan, starting with breathwork, the oldest form of meditation. And I love seeing the reemergence of all of our knowledge of how different patterns of breath can truly affect us in lots of different ways, not just calming, but energizing in a positive way. I'm an aficionado of some of the fun breathwork classes here in Manhattan,

• 58:03Speaker 03

  and have been really impressed with and stunned sometimes with the kind of journey you go on with the different patterns of breath that have been studied. It's not new, it's very old. It's a very old study of this form of meditation, but can be very effective. And of course, everybody knows just deep, slow breathing, that's easy to start with. And that's one of my number one tools, because it activates the parasympathetic nervous system, the part of the nervous system that everybody has that was designed to calm us down. Everybody knows about the fight or flight part of our nervous system, and it can tell me all about it. But when I ask people, have you heard of the parasympathetic nervous system? They say, what's that?

• 58:47Speaker 03

  And it is that equal and opposite, the rest and digest nervous system. And everybody should learn how to turn that on, which is basically a fancy way to say, learn how to relax yourself. And one of the most powerful and fastest ways to do that is deep, slow breathing. It will activate that, that whole part of your nervous system that will calm everything down.

• 59:10Dan Harris?

  So for those of us who aren't going to go to one of these classes, I've put myself in that category, how can we very simply integrate deep, slow breathing into our day, not only simply, but in a very detailed way, like what do we do to operationalize this advice?

• 59:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So the instruction that I love to give is to a box breathing technique. A box has four corners. All you have to remember is the number four, and it goes like this. You inhale on four counts. You hold that breath in for four counts. You deeply exhale on four counts, and then you hold it at the bottom for four counts. And you can't see me, but I was making a box with my finger. And I recommend that people don't try this for the first time in the heat of a very anxiety provoking moment, but you do it in a calm moment and just notice the effects on how you're feeling and get used to that.

• 1:00:08Speaker 03

  And you might say, well, Wendy, that's boring. I hate that. Well, I say that is what YouTube is for. There's only thousands of short breath meditations that you can get for free on YouTube. And even if they're longer, just use it in a short way. Again, one of those tools to build a habit, make it short. And there are lots of different practitioners and lots of different forms, and I guarantee you will find one that is pleasing to you. And do that today. You can start it today, right after this podcast.

• 1:00:40Dan Harris?

  I don't know that we need, I mean, great if you want to go on YouTube and find a deep breathing guided session, but box breathing is so simple, we can do it on our own. How long would you recommend we do it for?

• 1:00:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Again, starting short, I would pick a number like 10 rounds. 10 rounds of breath meditation will probably take you a couple of minutes to do, but really focus on this. Really try and focus on the instruction, the breathing itself. And that's my recommendation for starting small.

• 1:01:14Dan Harris?

  And why did you say we shouldn't do it when we're in the throes of real anxiety?

• 1:01:21Speaker 03

  Because breath meditation takes a little time to get it in your body so that you know intellectually what it's going to do for you. And frankly, it's hard to make it work because in the throes of an anxiety provoking situation, you are competing against the shallow, short breath that we all come to. And so you have to kind of fight against that to go deeply. And it's just better if you appreciate the calm in a calm moment. So you have a goal to get you to when you bring it in. And I think it's always good to practice that. And if that's too much, then go for that 10 minute walk that will decrease your anxiety levels.

• 1:02:04Dan Harris?

  I want to talk about some other anxiety reducing tools in a second, but just to stay with the breath for one more beat.

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:02:11Dan Harris?

  If we have brought on board some sort of semi regular deep breathing practice, and then we find ourselves in a deeply anxiety provoking situation, is there a good use case for breath work in acute situations, once we have some experience?

• 1:02:29Speaker 03

  Absolutely. And this might be one of the most powerful reasons why you want to have that breath work tool that you like in your back pocket. And the reason is, everybody will notice if you leave the room to go for a walk, you can do these breath work techniques, particularly box breathing, in the middle of an uncomfortable conversation, to try and just calm yourself down. And nobody knows you're doing it. You are just focusing on that internal breath. And I say this with experience. I have used this in situations where anger is coming up, and I really want to, you know, my jaw is tightening, and I pull out my box breathing technique, just a couple of rounds. I'm not saying go back

• 1:03:12Speaker 03

  to your 10 rounds, but start to feel that relaxation. It intellectually lets you step back for a moment. And maybe after that, you have the peace of mind or the presence of mind to say, can we step, can we hold on? Can we take a pause for just a second? So we can just think about what the next thing might be together. And it's a great reminder to be able to pull out those just conversational negotiation skills that could help deescalate your anxiety provoking situation.

• 1:03:44Dan Harris?

  I love it. You said in the book that you dedicate about a third of the book to tools we can use to help us get less of the bad anxiety. We've talked about taking a walk and breath work. What else do you recommend?

• 1:03:59Speaker 03

  I'm gonna share with you my favorite anxiety reducing tool, which is what I call joy conditioning. So joy conditioning is a response to fear conditioning that we all experience. It's dependent on a brain structure called the amygdala. And it's a protective thing that we've all experienced. I'll give you an example from my own life. When I had lived in Washington DC, I came back on a Sunday late afternoon and I walked around the corner where my door was and the door had been crowbarred open. I was robbed. And I should have run and found something, but I just walked right in. Like, what did they take? And so they took all, all my best clothes. I don't know why they, I had them all in

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  one garment bag and it was very traumatic. And so for months and months after that, whenever I walked around that corner, which I did every single day, I would get this fear that somebody had broken into my apartment. That's fear conditioning. And it took a long time for that to be released. And everybody's experienced some form of fear condition. Joy conditioning is not dependent on the amygdala, it's dependent on the hippocampus. That allows us to form and retain memories from the events of our lives. And joy conditioning goes like this. Think back on a joyous or funny or just lovely memory that you have and play it back in your mind. Because when you play it back in your mind, those positive

• 1:05:28Speaker 03

  emotions come back and you can actually relive those experiences. And so I realized that, why am I dependent on my amygdala to keep bringing up these negative emotions? I have to counter it. And because I studied what the hippocampus does, I knew that every time I revivify wonderful memory, it gets stronger. And so by reliving these memories, and you can do it by yourself, or you can just talk about with your friends and family, it will Rebalance your affective life and really allow you the opportunity to think back on the time that you laughed the most with your family or your friends.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  I mean, there's so many wonderful memories and I realize how much I don't think about them. And so that was my personal favorite discovery of the whole book is this idea of joy conditioning. And so I added it into the toolbox to decrease your anxiety.

• 1:06:27Dan Harris?

  And this is a thing you've studied.

• 1:06:29Speaker 03

  I've studied it in the sense that I know how episodic memories work, memories for the facts and events and what happens when you retrieve those memories. It's the information, but it's all of the affect that comes back. So personally, it's a part of my work and lots of other people in the learning and memory area has uncovered this. And this is just kind of repackaging it as a tool that you could use every single day. So this is not so much anxiety reducing as joy enhancing.

• 1:07:04Dan Harris?

  It's kind of like counter programming against this evolutionarily wired negativity bias that we have.

• 1:07:11Speaker 03

  Love that. Counter programming against negativity bias. Can I use that?

• 1:07:14Dan Harris?

  Of course.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:07:16Dan Harris?

  It's all impersonal, anyway. The related practice that comes to mind for me, and I just want to say this whole idea of joy conditioning is actually incredibly compelling to me. The related practice that comes to mind is just gratitude.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Yes, absolutely. Gratitude is great and I do practice that, but the joy conditioning, I don't know, it just brought up all of these memories of moments when I couldn't stop laughing. And I've never sat down in my gratitude practice and thought about that time with my cousin when I couldn't stop laughing. And so it brought up, it just expanded, perhaps you can say that it expanded my moments of gratitude, but it felt different when I did it as I was exploring and kind of trying to find as many examples to put in the book.

• 1:08:03Dan Harris?

  Any other tools that are worth mentioning as we think about what we can do to reduce the unhealthy variety of anxiety?

• 1:08:12Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm gonna share one more that I practice regularly, which is, and I'm sure this will resonate with you, tools that get you out of your own head. It's like, ah, my, my own anxiety, it's not the whole world. And so what does that is generosity to the outside world. And so one of the tools that I talk about in the book is choosing something that you do really well, that other people appreciate and making a practice of doing that. And the example I give is a funny, unusual one because I happen to be very good at brain dissections. So I've dissected so many sheep brains that I could do it in my sleep.

• 1:08:53Speaker 03

  And so what I like to do once a year or so is gather all the friends, all the kids of my friends that haven't done sheep brain dissection. I bring them into my lab and we all sheep brain dissect together. And then we go out for ice cream. And I love it because I am educating the future neuroscientists of the world. It's a great learning moment and it's this weird, special thing that I do. Other people can cook cookies and stuff like that. That's great too, but that's what I do because I'm really good at brain dissection.

• 1:09:26Dan Harris?

  I love that. I'm much more interested in the ice cream part, but I still like it.

• 1:09:30Speaker 03

  That's good too.

• 1:09:32Dan Harris?

  Dr. Suzuki, and I'm going to ask you the two questions I habitually ask people as we wing toward the end of an interview. The first, is there something you were hoping to discuss that we didn't get to?

• 1:09:44Speaker 03

  Yes. What I would love to share with your listeners is my favorite discovery of the book, Good Anxiety, because I think one of the things that makes it unique is that it's not just turning down this horrible thing of anxiety and then you'll be better. Once you get it low enough, it's good. The premise of the book is that your anxiety can help you. It can be a gift to you, even though it might be hard to appreciate that. And what I wanted to share was my favorite gift or superpower that comes with your anxiety. And that is the gift of empathy.

• 1:10:26Speaker 03

  And so I discovered this as I was trying to find all the gifts out there of my own anxiety. So I went back to my oldest form, my personal oldest form of anxiety, which is a form of social anxiety. So I was a very shy kid, hiding behind my mom's legs. But when I got into school, I was really interested in academics. I became an academic, but had years of struggles. Like, oh, I want to ask a question. And I struggled with that for years and years. But I went into academia and one day I was in the front of the classroom. And I realized that there were 60 or 80% more hands that had a question than actually went up. And that they were just like me, they were too shy to ask a question.

• 1:11:08Speaker 03

  So I would come early and stay late and make sure that everybody could ask me the question. And I realized that became one of my superpowers of teaching. But it was a broader tool that my own form of anxiety gave me the empathy to understand a situation that I was so familiar with and to do something about it. And that's not just special to me. It's applicable to everybody out there because guess what? We all have very similar forms of anxiety. And so I love the invitation to people to think about that common anxiety that you have and just look around.

• 1:11:50Speaker 03

  Because you see lots of other people with that anxiety and give a helping hand. Just invite them into the conversation. Easiest thing to do, because that's so hard, the social anxiety. Just invite them in. That's it. That is your compassion. That is your empathy that you're giving. And that comes from your own anxiety. And that is one of the gifts that we all have.

• 1:12:12Dan Harris?

  I really love it, just to build on it. Speaking from my own experience, anxiety and really any kind of suffering or challenge. Can, if held in the right way, lead to more empathy because you understand the universality of this vulnerability we all have in a world where everybody's born and will then die. I would say that it's key to hold it in the right way because there's a way in which anxiety can increase self-centeredness and you're really stuck in your own problems. And this relates back to your point about generosity being an anti-anxiety tool. There's a little bit of a glib line that I used at the end of, we were talking about TED Talks earlier.

• 1:12:56Dan Harris?

  I use this at the end of my own TED Talk and I say it a lot. And it's a little glib, but the view is so much better when you pull your head out of your ass. And you know, it's, there's a way to use anxiety to access its opposite. Well, what's the opposite of fear? Love. And anxiety, one of the gifts of anxiety is that it is a portal to externality or other orientedness or love or compassion or empathy, or whatever you want to call it. The other gift that I want to ask you about, and it's something I talk about a lot with my son who's 10 and has had very bad separation anxiety, which he's actually made a lot of progress on, I'm very proud of him.

• 1:13:39Dan Harris?

  And we talk a lot about anxiety and panic because I have my own very severe and public struggles with it. And one of the gifts I think is that, again, if held in the right way, it boosts your inner strength, it boosts your resilience. Alexander has had to overcome obstacles that many other children his age have not had to overcome. And the forthright facing of his fears and, you know, saddling up anyway, even though he's scared and consistently doing that as a practice in conjunction with his therapist and his parents, is building a, it's a pain in the ass and it's building a strength that will be with him the rest of his life.

• 1:14:22Dan Harris?

  And that is a way that all of us can reframe anxiety.

• 1:14:26Speaker 03

  Absolutely, totally agree that that deep learning that comes from trying and failing and trying again. I think that is such an important lesson that we forget in this success oriented society that we live in today. And yet so many have and struggle with anxiety and that fear of failure. So that's a beautiful reframe, totally agree.

• 1:14:50Dan Harris?

  Dr. Wendy Suzuki, this has been an absolute pleasure, one of my favorite podcast interviews of recent memory. I said I had two final questions. I asked one of them. The second is, I just want to get you to shamelessly plug a little bit. I have mentioned your two books, which are Healthy Brain, Happy Life, and also Good Anxiety. But what else have you put out into the world? Like, you have a website or social media that I can link to in the show notes so that people can get more from you if they want it?

• 1:15:14Speaker 03

  Absolutely. I think the best thing are my Instagram account, Wendy.Suzuki, and I do have a website, WendySuzuki.com. But I'm posting really regularly on my Instagram account, and I'm really enjoying it. So please come and visit me there.

• 1:15:29Dan Harris?

  I'm going to follow you as soon as we finish recording. And I also will put links in the show notes to your two TED Talks.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 1:15:36Dan Harris?

  So lots of Wendy Suzuki material available to the interested. Thank you so much for making time for this. It's just a total pleasure.

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  Thank you so much, Dan. What a great conversation.

• 1:15:52Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Wendy. Great to talk to her. I'm going to drop some links in the show notes to some episodes that I referenced during the course of this episode, including my conversations with Strauss Zelnick, Evelyn Tribole, and Richie Davidson. I'll also drop a link to an episode I did all about how to actually keep your New Year's resolutions. I dropped this just a couple of days ago down the feed, but I'm going to drop a link in the show notes to this one if you want to listen. If you're a subscriber at DanHarris.com, you will already have in your inbox a cheat sheet, which includes a summary of the major points from this conversation, plus a full transcript. And if you're a subscriber, you'll be able to hop into the chat and talk to me and your fellow listeners about what you

• 1:16:34Dan Harris?

  heard from Wendy today. So come check it out. Oh, also, don't forget, if you sign up at DanHarris.com, you'll be able to participate in the meditation challenge, which starts on the day that this episode drops, January 6, 2025. Can't believe it's already 2025. Anyway, let me finally thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer, and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:17:17Speaker 07

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