Neuroscientists Reveal How To Heal Your Mind [MASTERCLASS] EP 1353

Today’s Masterclass episode is all about healing your mind to help yourself overcome struggles with pain, stress, anxiety and depression. Four experts share their insight into how we can utilize our minds to respond better to adverse experiences and to properly heal from those experiences. In this episode, Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and professor at Stanford University, shares how our minds have an impact on our bodies and how we can utilize dopamine to stay motivated. Dr. Caroline Leaf, neuroscientist and best-selling author, explains how dysfunctional patterns such as anxiety and depression are intrinsic aspects of the human mind and how we can reconceptualize traumatic experiences in our brain to enable our own healing. Dr. Rahul Jandial, brain surgeon, neuroscientist and best-selling author, illuminates the immediate benefits of meditative breathing on our brains. Dr. Wendy Suzuki, neuroscientist and author, offers strategies for how to intervene in your struggles with anxiety and depression as well as methods to overcome past trauma and loss. For more, go to lewishowes.com/1353Full Episodes:Andrew Huberman: https://link.chtbl.com/1015-podCaroline Leaf: https://link.chtbl.com/1079-podRahul Jandial: https://link.chtbl.com/1249-podWendy Suzuki: https://link.chtbl.com/1160-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

  There is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced.

• 0:16Lewis 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.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  To what extent does our subjective narrative?

• 0:45Lewis Howes?

  The story we tell ourselves.

• 0:46Speaker 00

  The story we tell ourselves actually means 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...

• 1:16Lewis 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?

• 1:26Speaker 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 relaxed and extended postures, all true. But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind. 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.

• 1:56Lewis Howes?

  So how do you get it to dance together?

• 1:57Speaker 00

  Exactly. So, subjective... There is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. 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. 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.

• 2:42Lewis Howes?

  Can you think of two thoughts at the same time?

• 2:44Speaker 00

  Probably not.

• 2:45Lewis Howes?

  So you can only have one thought at a time?

• 2:47Speaker 00

  Right, but they come very fast.

• 2:48Lewis Howes?

  But it comes and goes. So you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think. Otherwise, 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.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  Right.

• 3:05Lewis Howes?

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

• 3:10Speaker 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, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress

• 3:54Speaker 00

  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, you meet the love of your life.

• 4:11Lewis Howes?

  Someone likes your photo.

• 4:12Speaker 00

  The great love of your life, you complete something. Most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals. It's actually released when we are en route to our goals, where we're in pursuit of our goals, and we think we're on the right path. This is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal, because they feel like, "I'm supposed to feel something greater. I felt this thing for two minutes, and now that's it." That's right. High achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process. To the pursuit, the day-to-day tasks, the growth, the lessons, the losses, like everything, right? Well, and it can be to some wins along the way. But growth mindset, which is the academic discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague Carol Dweck

• 4:54Speaker 00

  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- Don't reward the result, reward the effort. That's right. And if you look at true high performers, people that are consistently good at what they do, they don't 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

• 5:34Speaker 00

  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. 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.

• 6:19Speaker 00

  So, if you're thinking about the effort you're expending, so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels, and they're setting up a new business, for instance, and it's hard. If they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially, that it's giving them an opportunity, that it's somehow, they are on the right path, or 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

• 7:04Speaker 00

  and dopamine get stronger, so you get better at that process. And second, and most importantly, dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine. And what I mean by that is, there was a study that was published in the journal Cell, excellent journal, Cell Press Journal, a couple 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. 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,

• 7:45Speaker 00

  every bit of effort, you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account. You're spending epinephrine. At some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you, you feel like quitting. It feels 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, of taking steps and 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, the visual world stationary, and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere.

• 8:30Speaker 00

  Epinephrine's climbing, climbing, climbing, and eventually, they quit. Now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you, anyone, the, the feeling that you could continue, and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue. And you've seen this, actually, like football's a good example. Two teams play, say the Super Bowl, both teams are max effort the entire time. Yeah. Max effort. The team that wins, suddenly, in a moment, has the energy to jump all over the place, party for days, they can talk, I mean, they have energy.

• 9:05Lewis Howes?

  They're exhausted right before that.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:26Lewis Howes?

  So we need dopamine to keep the effort going, is that what I'm hearing you say?

• 9:30Speaker 00

  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.

• 9:40Lewis Howes?

  How do we get more dopamine?

• 9:42Speaker 00

  You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind.

• 9:45Lewis Howes?

  Like, how?

• 9:46Speaker 00

  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.

• 10:02Lewis Howes?

  That's what gets us addicted, because it feels so good.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  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 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,

• 10:24Lewis Howes?

  very fast. Because there's no reason to work hard at anything else, because you feel good.

• 10:29Speaker 00

  That's right.

• 10:29Lewis Howes?

  And that's the greatest feeling you'll have, so why do anything else when you can have that feeling?

• 10:33Speaker 00

  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 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.

• 11:16Speaker 00

  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 that- So it reminds you, like, that's not the path to go down? That's right. Interesting. And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience.

• 11:58Speaker 00

  Dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity. Because it says, those actions led to success previously. You're gonna repeat those. Don't do those. Those actions led to failure previously, and don't repeat those. So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path? That's right. So you asked, how do you do this? So to really make it concrete. And is there too much, is there too much thing, is there such thing as too much dopamine? Well- If you're not on drugs? So cocaine 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.

• 12:42Speaker 00

  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 there are the, like, sometimes it's just time to chill. Well, that's a different molecule. That's serotonin, right? And then dopamine is the get after it molecule. And epinephrine is effort. So if we were to break this down really concrete. We'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort. Just effort, with no subjective label on them, good or bad. Effort, whether or not 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.

• 13:33Lewis 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?

• 13:41Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Brilliant question. It's a skill that we learn, so that's really nice to know. It's never too late to start, but the sooner we start, the better. 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, etc. 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.

• 14:22Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And so there's another step missing, and it's understanding that autonomy, that sense of agency that 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 messengers 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 use our brain and body to express them because the mind has to have the brain and body to build the thoughts and then we use that to speak.

• 15:07Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  We're using our physical to store what we've processed 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 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.

• 15:27Lewis Howes?

  If you change your mind?

• 15:28Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  If you change your mind, you can immediately influence your biomarkers. So for example, if you're in acute trauma, for example, and you go through, okay, let me explain it in a very simple way. I've been testing out a glucose, continuous glucose monitoring device for some research purposes, and I happened to, while I was wearing it, because you wear it and then you track your levels, and I wanted to see in terms of mental health and the neurocycle that I've developed, I wanted to see the impact. And I happened to be going through, experienced a very acute trauma in my 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.

• 16:07Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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 in, 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. 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.

• 16:50Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  So you get the same response to a mind thing, a thought, which is the consequence of mind. Think field choose, you build thoughts, thoughts are made of roots and trees, branches, which are the memories. So 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. 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.

• 17:35Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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, so 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. 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.

• 18:17Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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.

• 18:35Lewis Howes?

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

• 18:39Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Exactly, exactly. Totally correct.

• 18:42Lewis Howes?

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

• 18:47Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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 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 work, relationships.

• 19:23Lewis Howes?

  Everything, everything was off.

• 19:25Dr. Caroline Leaf?

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

• 19:29Lewis Howes?

  What page is this on?

• 19:30Dr. Caroline Leaf?

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

• 19:38Lewis Howes?

  Okay, cool, yeah.

• 19:39Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  You've probably got it in black and white in that version that you've got there. Um, so this person's telomeres, when we looked at their DNA and we looked at their telomeres. They will tell you how, 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. Their, their ages were in the, of this particular subject, and we had a group like this as well, that's similar. They, their biologic, their chronological, their actual age was in their mid thirties. But their biological age.

• 20:14Lewis Howes?

  Seventy or something.

• 20:15Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Yes, a sickly seventy year old.

• 20:17Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 20:18Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Within, crazy. Within nine weeks of 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.

• 21:02Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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.

• 21:17Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 21:18Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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.

• 21:51Lewis Howes?

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

• 21:55Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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 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

• 22:39Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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, and 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.

• 23:19Lewis Howes?

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

• 23:21Dr. Caroline Leaf?

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

• 23:26Lewis 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?

• 23:37Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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 the 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, it's, we want this quick fix mentality. So with, as medicine has advanced and technology has advanced, so we've become very caught

• 24:19Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  up 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.

• 25:03Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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, it, 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. And I started seeing this trend of, and and I was watching the study,

• 25:46Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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. So people at the beginning of their career, in the prime of their career, and through that, that age group are being, are dropping down dead like flies.

• 26:30Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And it's deaths, considered deaths of despair by preventable lifestyle diseases. So we have to look at the bone, 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.

• 26:47Wendy Suzuki?

  Uh huh.

• 26:48Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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 traumas, 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.

• 27:06Wendy Suzuki?

  Right.

• 27:06Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Checklist, diagnose, label. When you label someone, you chop, 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.

• 27:51Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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 this, 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 is all being 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.

• 28:31Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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 it 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, 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.

• 29:15Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  Think of someone who's a war vet, 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 to.

• 29:30Lewis Howes?

  Very challenging, yeah.

• 29:31Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  I mean, you know, this is what they're 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 live like you did. You have to be able to embrace process and reconceptualize, giving them a drug's not going to make it, but 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.

• 30:14Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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.

• 30:27Lewis 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?

• 30:48Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  That's a result of.

• 30:49Lewis Howes?

  Go ahead.

• 30:50Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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 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.

• 31:29Lewis Howes?

  You're experiencing something.

• 31:30Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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, 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.

• 32:11Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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 in your immune system and everything's 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, 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

• 32:56Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  my whole story. 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 respond. 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 andandamide's off. And then, I mean, I can give you a list of big chemical terms.

• 33:38Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  And that's going to change every function in the structure of your brain and your, your DNA and your telomeres. And 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, the scary thing that's controlling you. And I, that invalidates. If I, if, if someone comes back from war, or 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.

• 34:22Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  There's an origin story, there's a source. 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 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.

• 35:07Dr. Caroline Leaf?

  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. And you want to put the two together to live together so that you can change how the past plays out into your future.

• 35:38Rahul Jandial?

  Oh, man.

• 35:41Lewis Howes?

  What's the best way to train the emotional part of the brain? So that we are in, we have a personal power over it. That we're in control, that we, that we have.

• 35:51Rahul Jandial?

  Or, or more. I mean, it depends on the situ-

• 35:54Lewis Howes?

  We can turn it up or turn it down and we are-

• 35:55Rahul Jandial?

  Depending on the, depending on what's going on.

• 35:58Lewis Howes?

  Maybe we need to be more emotional in a moment and not be chill and relaxed when there's an attack.

• 36:02Rahul Jandial?

  Well, maybe the moment is so big, man, it's, of course, you're just emotionally over the top. So, but that, but that leaves you a flexibility. And it also leaves you without feeling bad, like, oh, I was emotional then, now, I'm not an, I'm not a person that has emotional regulation. You don't have this brain the same forever. It's a constant trimming of the sails, modulating tone. To me, it's a little bit of work if you're in a good spot, like, hey, don't, this ain't guaranteed. But it's also so much power and opportunity that if you're, if you're not in a good spot, like tomorrow can be better. And if not tomorrow, then the month or the year after, right? So emotional regulation, um, the shortcut.

• 36:46Rahul Jandial?

  So now we're getting to like, is there a tip, you know, cause I, I hope people feel like, wait a second, this, everything is possible. But it's gonna take a lot of work. But are there shortcuts? Because I love shortcuts, LA freeways or whatever.

• 36:59Lewis Howes?

  Right, ways is good, yeah.

• 37:01Rahul Jandial?

  But there are, there is one that has stood the test of time. And that I can now explain to you based on, on things that we do as surgeons. Uh, and that's, I refer to as meditative breathing in, in, in my first book. But really, it's, it's pacing your breath. And so what does that do?

• 37:21Lewis Howes?

  Something you study with actual, uh, scans or?

• 37:25Rahul Jandial?

  No, no, no, it's even, it's wild than that. I've got a direct feed of the true electricity from the surface of your naked brain.

• 37:32Lewis Howes?

  While they're breathing?

• 37:32Rahul Jandial?

  Yeah, let's, while they're sitting there.

• 37:34Lewis Howes?

  What is, what are you seeing on the, the brain activity recordings?

• 37:38Rahul Jandial?

  The same thing that we see when we give Valium, which is an anxiolytic. Their anxiety level goes down, their electricity goes from fast- To medium. Remember we started this?

• 37:48Lewis Howes?

  Uh huh.

• 37:49Rahul Jandial?

  And we're talking about athletes not wanting to be in fast. We want to be in the flow state. Meditative breathing led to direct changes in the electricity of their brain as measured, not with a sticker on the forehead, but with a grid on the surface of the naked brain.

• 38:06Lewis Howes?

  On the brain.

• 38:07Rahul Jandial?

  It's true measurable changes in the electricity there for the mind. So meditative breathing that for thousands of years, people have said can help you chill out, is an anxiolytic and break anxiety. Well, we have proof of that now. And I think that's important for people to know that it's not just some, you know, it's just not a concept that's being thrown around too casually that through awake, um, direct electrophysiologic recording of seizure planning surgery at elite centers, uh, while looking for the seizures, there's a lot of data coming out about, let's play video games, let's do meditative breathing, let's read.

• 38:47Lewis Howes?

  Wow.

• 38:47Rahul Jandial?

  And then what changes? And so that's what I love in book one that I shared was that's raw data, that's real data. And there's an explanation behind how that happens. And so what I would say to people is that's something you have that's free. Cause I'm not selling anything.

• 39:04Lewis Howes?

  Breathing.

• 39:05Rahul Jandial?

  And the pace of breathing and.

• 39:08Lewis Howes?

  What's the pace that works best? I mean, there's lots of different techniques of meditative breathing.

• 39:12Rahul Jandial?

  They found, you know, it, it doesn't, you know, people say through your nose or mouth and that's kind of the confusing stuff that's out there. Well, the nose and the mouth connect before they get to the trachea and it goes to your lungs. So it doesn't matter how, but it's about slowing the cadence and making the cadence more methodical. A deep breath, you know, a deep breath in and a deep breath out. It's no different than what we do in surgery. When you feel the case getting a little out of your control.

• 39:38Lewis Howes?

  What do you do?

• 39:39Rahul Jandial?

  Well, I, I first, the first thing I was.

• 39:42Rahul Jandial?

  I just slow my breathing down. And that doesn't mean the solution will arise, but I know that puts me in my most calm and focused state to find the solution for the problem in front of me. And likely, that's what athletes at Thrive do as well.

• 39:56Lewis Howes?

  You don't want your brain surgeon being like.

• 39:58Rahul Jandial?

  Well, exactly. But that's what stress does. It makes you hyperventilating, right? But if you do, that's, that's a great point. If you just hyperventilate just because you're just doing it as just whatever, for whatever reason, you'll get physically jittery. You will give yourself anxiety by just doing that.

• 40:15Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, I thought that just for a second.

• 40:16Rahul Jandial?

  I'm, I'm showing you the proof on the other side. Do the opposite of hyperventilation, and you'll make yourself less frenetic.

• 40:26Wendy Suzuki?

  One of the experiments that I did in my lab this last year was trying to find the most, the easiest, shortest intervention that we can do with students that would decrease their very high levels of anxiety.

• 40:42Lewis Howes?

  What was that?

• 40:42Wendy Suzuki?

  And so we, we tested many things. Just to walk outside, chair yoga, all these things they can do online. This was all virtual. But one of the things that was very effective that I was so excited about is a mindful conversation. So what we did is, we didn't go deep. We didn't want to have them reveal some, you know, deep dark secret. But what we did is, my student researchers had a script. They shared a real story about a favorite vacation, why it was favorite. It was real. They were really trying to share this, this experience with them. And then invited the student, who they didn't know, who was our experimentee, to share the same thing.

• 41:27Wendy Suzuki?

  And in that year where everything was virtual and it was, you know, professors just said, okay, now learn these five chapters. Go ahead, go do it. And to have somebody there listening to their story, listening deeply and asking real questions because they were, it was only 10 minutes. Completely decrease their anxiety.

• 41:48Lewis Howes?

  Really? By them sharing and someone listening? Or by them also listening to someone else's story?

• 41:53Wendy Suzuki?

  You know, I think it was really the sharing and have somebody else listening. Because the first part, my students always went first. They didn't know what exactly was gonna happen. So that was just to lay the groundwork. And I think the interaction and the good feelings started to develop when they started to open up, sharing the story and seeing, oh my god, somebody is really listening to me. They're asking me a question about this event that meant something to them. And that just shows how powerful social interactions are. And even this short 10-minute thing between, we thought about, should we get two friends

• 42:38Wendy Suzuki?

  to try and have a conversation? That was too hard to control. But I could control, we could control exactly the protocol of this stranger student and the kind of interaction they have.

• 42:48Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 42:49Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 42:50Lewis Howes?

  Is there any research on if men or women are more anxious? Is there any research around this?

• 42:59Lewis Howes?

  If men have more anxiety or stress, or if women have more anxiety or stress?

• 43:05Wendy Suzuki?

  I think the stat, I should know this.

• 43:07Lewis Howes?

  Are we all, or are we just all messed up equally?

• 43:09Wendy Suzuki?

  I think we're all messed up equally. There's more women with depression. Depression and anxiety are related, but have different symptoms. But I think it's pretty equal for anxiety.

• 43:23Lewis Howes?

  The reason I'm curious is because when I was studying about masculinity, years ago, I wrote a book called The Mask of Masculinity, which is kind of the mask that men wear to project and protect themselves from showing emotion and showing, revealing themselves. And when I was on tour, talking about it, I would always ask in every city, and about 50% men and women would show up, and I would always ask like, okay, for the ladies here, raise your hand if you have.

• 43:54Lewis Howes?

  A girlfriend or girlfriends that you talk to once a week about your stress, your worry, your challenges in life, your work issues, your body issues, whatever it might be dealing with, that you have someone, one or multiple girlfriends you speak with on a weekly basis. And pretty much the entire room of women raised their hand and said, yes, every week I have at least one person. And I say, keep your hands up if you do this every day. You call a girlfriend on the phone, you have lunch, you're just talking about something for a few minutes. And I go, well, how does it make you feel to be able to talk about these things? Like, it feels great to be able to share this. And say, okay, for the men in the room, raise your hand if, once a month, you get together with a guy friend and you talk about your vulnerabilities, your insecurities, your body issues, your challenges at work,

• 44:39Lewis Howes?

  and you really open up to this other male friend. Maybe one or two guys out of hundreds would raise their hand. And I would say, you guys are part of a church group, right? Where you meet once a month and you start for an hour and you're doing these things. Yes. And I say, okay, I go back to the ladies in the room. I say, ladies, imagine not being able to do this once a month. Only doing this once a month, how would it make you feel? They're like, I'd feel more anxiety, more stress. And I go, imagine these men who never do this in the room. They never share these things. I'm not saying all men, but a lot of men don't feel like they have one guy friend they can open up and reveal to. And I feel like maybe there's another symptom.

• 45:22Lewis Howes?

  Maybe it's just like, they just wall themselves up and don't share emotion. And there's other internal factors or physical elements that they're caused from that stress. But I think it's, yeah, either way, I think it's important for everyone to learn how to share these things. And based on that study you did, I think it's when we share, whatever it is, even if it's five, 10 minutes, it decreases the stress and the anxiety, it seems like it goes down. And I feel like we've got to create better friendships or relationships or therapists or whatever that we can connect to and have that consistent communication stream. Because otherwise, when we trap, when we hold on to it, just bad things happen.

• 46:04Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah, absolutely. So, how does that work? What is the change that we need in?

• 46:14Wendy Suzuki?

  Raising boys and talking to boys.

• 46:18Lewis Howes?

  This is a whole, I mean, this is a dynamic. I mean, I grew up in the eighties and nineties. I was born in eighty-three. And it was just not accepted to show emotion in elementary school, middle school, high school. It wasn't acceptable. Especially as an athlete, growing up in Ohio, it just wasn't. Maybe in some, you know, part of Beverly Hills, you know, or some like posh school in New York City, I don't know, maybe in pockets. There's some more acceptability of younger boys showing this type of emotion.

• 46:48Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 46:48Lewis Howes?

  I don't know what it's like in twenty twenty-one, but I just know that you were laughed at, you were made fun of if you cried, if you showed emotion.

• 46:56Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 46:56Lewis Howes?

  I remember wanting to put my arm around like guy buddies of mine and them pushing me away and saying, don't be gay. You know, or just don't be a little girl, don't be whatever the term is that was associated around something negative for them. And so you learn in order to fit in, to wall yourself or to not share.

• 47:17Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 47:18Lewis Howes?

  The things that people won't like about you. And I'm not saying that's okay, and we all have our responsibilities.

• 47:24Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 47:25Lewis Howes?

  But as young boys growing up, when we're conditioned that way, it was hard to break that for me personally.

• 47:30Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 47:31Lewis Howes?

  And it took me a long time until I realized like, wow, this isn't working for me.

• 47:36Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Lewis Howes?

  I have more stress and anxiety. It was really decades of stress and anxiety and not being able to sleep at night. That was the thing that the catalyst that you talked about that was like enough is enough.

• 47:49Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 47:50Lewis Howes?

  Maybe for you as a social anxiety, but finally as a teacher, like, okay, I've got to show up differently. To not stress all the time.

• 47:58Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 47:58Lewis Howes?

  And so eight plus years ago, I finally started to reveal myself. I was just like, okay, I can't live like this anymore. So everyone can know everything about all my shame, because I'd rather that happen and be alone because I feel so much stress all the time. And then it gave me a lot of peace.

• 48:15Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 48:15Lewis Howes?

  And then I learned the process of healing and therapy work and workshops and all that stuff, but and just healthier relationships in general.

• 48:23Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 48:24Lewis Howes?

  I don't know the solution. I don't know the solution, but I know I'm trying to be a better model for other men to witness.

• 48:30Wendy Suzuki?

  That's beautiful.

• 48:31Lewis Howes?

  I'm trying to bring other men on and have these types of conversations. So that younger men could see like, okay, here's someone that maybe I like what he does or what he's been. He's an athlete and I can understand and relate to that.

• 48:44Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 48:44Lewis Howes?

  Hopefully I can start to do this with my own life or maybe with my girlfriend or my guy friends.

• 48:48Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 48:48Lewis Howes?

  Try to have some of these conversations, but I just think it's challenging in general.

• 48:52Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 48:53Lewis Howes?

  It's challenging when you're younger and you're trying to have a few friends and they don't accept it.

• 48:57Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 48:58Lewis Howes?

  That's tough.

• 48:59Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:00Lewis Howes?

  Because no kid wants to be alone.

• 49:02Wendy Suzuki?

  No, no.

• 49:03Lewis Howes?

  They want to just hang out and go on the playground and just be with their buddies.

• 49:06Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 49:07Lewis Howes?

  So it's, it's really challenging.

• 49:09Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 49:10Lewis Howes?

  I don't know. Do you have kids?

• 49:11Wendy Suzuki?

  No, I don't have kids.

• 49:13Lewis Howes?

  I don't have, I don't have a solution to that, but I think as a, you know, I don't have kids either, but if I was a parent, I would just encourage showing emotion with my, with my sons or daughters. And be the example, be vulnerability with them.

• 49:28Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 49:29Lewis Howes?

  Allow myself to feel, allow myself to cry if I'm watching a movie or something happens in my life and I'm feeling it.

• 49:35Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Lewis Howes?

  To not wall up, but to allow myself.

• 49:38Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 49:38Lewis Howes?

  This is, I mean, we're going off another topic here. We're going off another topic here for another conversation. But as an academic, as a neuroscientist, and a study of psychology and the brain and all these things. You've come from a very academic approach to your research. But a year ago, you unfortunately lost your father and your brother around the same time.

• 49:59Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 50:00Lewis Howes?

  And while you were writing the book, and so you had to kind of shift some of the stuff writing the book. Because you were experiencing on an emotional level what you were kind of researching.

• 50:10Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:11Lewis Howes?

  Can you share more the biggest lessons you learned from these types of losses for yourself? And how you emotionally had to navigate it when maybe you didn't have the answers?

• 50:21Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah.

• 50:22Lewis Howes?

  And what did you learn from those, that experience?

• 50:24Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah. So it really was the week that I was about to dive in and start writing the real chapters of this book, Good Anxiety. And, and that was when my younger brother passed away completely unexpected.

• 50:44Lewis Howes?

  Younger brother?

• 50:44Wendy Suzuki?

  My younger brother.

• 50:47Wendy Suzuki?

  Just three months after our father had passed away. So we were just healing, still raw from losing my father, our father. And then he had an unexpected heart attack.

• 51:00Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 51:01Wendy Suzuki?

  And so first, just that pain and grief that I was experiencing is not the same as anxiety. It shares some of those negative emotions. This was just

• 51:12Lewis Howes?

  Lost grief, sadness.

• 51:14Wendy Suzuki?

  Grief, sadness. It was so painful. Like, how could this happen? It feels like a different reality. Everything looked the same, but it just felt so

• 51:27Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 51:28Wendy Suzuki?

  different. And it forced me to explore these feelings that I'd have had inklings of in the past, but never to this extent. And kind of in this wave of first my dad and then my brother. And I slowly came back from it. And I used some of the tools that I talk about in the book that were already in place for me. Morning meditation. So I do a morning tea meditation.

• 51:58Lewis Howes?

  Tea meditation.

• 51:58Wendy Suzuki?

  A tea meditation, which I describe in the book, which is a meditation over brewing and drinking tea. For me, that was the magic bullet for meditation because there's a sequence for brewing tea. You boil the water, you put it in the tea leaves, you let it seep, and then you pour it out and then you drink it. And that kind of sequence kept my meditation going. I always had something to do. I was waiting for the tea to brew. I get to drink the tea now. I get to be mindful about how does the tea feel? How hot is it? How does it taste? And I really came to appreciate that there is this moment.

• 52:41Wendy Suzuki?

  And yes, everything on the outside of my meditation feels like it's different. But this moment still feels like every other moment that I enjoyed my tea meditation. So that helped me come back to, I am alive. I'm so lucky to be alive.

• 52:59Lewis Howes?

  Yes, perspective.

• 53:01Wendy Suzuki?

  Yeah, so lucky to have the family that's still with me.

• 53:03Lewis Howes?

  Yes, yes.

• 53:05Wendy Suzuki?

  And exercise, my first book, Healthy Brain, Happy Life, was all about the transformative effects of exercise on the brain. So after I meditate, I do my workout in the morning. And it was really one day, I was doing my workout, it's a video workout, and the trainer said, it was a hard workout, and she said, you know, in working out with great pain comes great wisdom.

• 53:30Lewis Howes?

  Oh, I love that.

• 53:32Wendy Suzuki?

  And I was like, oh my God, that is what I need to hear, not just for working out. I have just gone through the worst pain in my whole life, and I do have more wisdom. That wisdom is based in the love that was left behind.

• 53:50Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 53:50Wendy Suzuki?

  And not just left behind, that sounds like it's leftovers, the love that is here.

• 53:56Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 53:58Wendy Suzuki?

  You know, that's still here from my brother and my father. And that's when I started to think about this book, Good Anxiety, in a different way. Because anxiety is an everyday kind of pain and suffering that we all go through. And what if that leads to wisdom? What does that look like? And I needed as much wisdom and power that I needed. And so the book became searching for the power and the wisdom in everyday anxiety. It never would have been that if I hadn't had this event happen.

• 54:41Lewis Howes?

  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 episode with all the important links. And if you want weekly exclusive bonus episodes with me personally, as well as ad-free listening, then make sure to subscribe to our Greatness Plus channel exclusively on Apple Podcasts. Share this with a friend on social media and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as well. Let me know what you enjoyed about this episode in that review. I really love hearing feedback from you and it helps. helps us figure out how we can support and serve you moving forward. And I want to remind you if no one has told you lately that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter.

• 55:24Lewis Howes?

  And now it's time to go out there and do something great.