Pod Insights Something You Should Know How Your Beliefs Drive Success & The Science Behind Keeping Your Brain Sharp About this episode The average American unknowingly throws away up to $1,500 a year — and it’s happening right in your own kitchen. It’s not obvious. It doesn’t feel wasteful in the moment. But small, everyday habits quietly drain real money from your grocery budget. There are a few surprisingly simple shifts that can stop the leak. https://www.usda.gov/foodlossandwaste/consumers
Your beliefs about yourself — your abilities, your limits, your future — quietly shape your behavior every day. “I’m too old.” “I’m bad with money.” “I’ll never succeed.” The problem is not that these statements are true — it’s that you believe them to be true. Nir Eyal, author of Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results (https://amzn.to/3OLvImC), explains how limiting beliefs form, why they feel so real, and how deliberately reshaping them can dramatically alter your trajectory in work, relationships, and life.
Is memory loss inevitable as you age? Are we destined for cognitive decline? Dr. Majid Fotuhi, world-renowned neurologist and author of The Invincible Brain: The Clinically Proven Plan to Age-Proof Your Brain and Stay Sharp for Life (https://amzn.to/4l5s1nZ), says no. He explains that brain health is deeply influenced by lifestyle — including 14 factors you can control — and that protecting your mind requires the same intentional care as protecting your heart or body.
When you need someone to say yes to a request, one short phrase can significantly increase your chances. It doesn’t manipulate. It doesn’t pressure. It simply taps into a powerful psychological principle that makes people more open to helping. https://brainblogger.com/2015/06/25/top-5-persuasion-techniques-of-2015/
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:23 Mike Carruthers? Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Today on Something You Should Know, how you may be throwing away up to $1,500 without even realizing it. Then, how to stop your limiting beliefs from sabotaging your success and happiness.
1:59 Speaker 01 Many of these limiting beliefs that we have, you know, "I'm not a morning person, I'm always late, stress is bad, the world is dying, I'm too old, too young, too fat, it's too late." The hallmark of these limiting beliefs is that they reduce our motivation and they increase suffering.
2:13 Mike Carruthers? Also, how to get someone to do you a favor? And is memory loss and cognitive decline inevitable? Not necessarily.
2:22 Speaker 02 Forty-five percent of dementia cases in the world can be prevented by addressing 14 factors. And those 14 factors include diabetes, obesity, sedentary lifestyle, air pollution, hearing loss, vision loss.
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4:09 Speaker 03 Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today. Something you should know. With Mike Carruthers.
4:22 Mike Carruthers? If you would like to get a raise without asking your boss, you might find one in your kitchen. Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers. Welcome to Something You Should Know. The average American household wastes hundreds of pounds of food every year. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a family of four loses about $1,500 per year on food that never gets eaten. Groceries that sat too long in the fridge, or got shoved to the back of the shelf, or were tossed out because of confusing expiration dates. And it's not just leftovers. Across the U.S., about 30 to 40% of the food supply,
5:07 Mike Carruthers? the entire food supply, goes uneaten. It's the result of loss and waste from the farm to the table. It's interesting that we're pretty careful at the grocery store, at the checkout line, about how much we're paying for food. But once that food gets home, these small losses really add up. A wilted bunch of lettuce here, forgotten leftovers there, and all those dollars go straight in the trash. The good news is, being aware of this problem and making some obvious small changes in how you shop, store, and plan your meals can dramatically cut waste and quietly put cash back in your pocket. And that is something you should know.
5:53 Mike Carruthers? What you believe. Your beliefs quietly run your life. What you believe about yourself, what you're capable of, what you deserve, what's possible, all shape the choices you make and the risks you're willing to take. The problem is that many of us treat our beliefs like facts. But they're not. If you believe you're bad with money, you avoid investing. If you believe you're not leadership material, you don't apply for that job. If you believe something is impossible for you, you never even try. And that belief becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. So where do these beliefs come from? Why do we cling to them, even when they limit us? And more importantly, how do you change them?
6:37 Mike Carruthers? Nir Eyal has spent years studying the intersection of psychology, behavior, and human potential. He's taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and written multiple bestselling books. His latest is called "Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results." And he's here to explain how to identify the hidden beliefs holding you back and replace them with ones that actually move you forward. Hi Nir, welcome back to Something You Should Know.
7:08 Speaker 01 Hi Mike, great to be here.
7:09 Mike Carruthers? So to kick off this conversation, let me just ask you to state your case, state your premise of what it is you're trying to get across to people.
7:18 Speaker 01 Yeah, my assertion is that beliefs are tools, not truths. Beliefs are tools, not truths, and that most of our interpersonal problems, our personal problems, our political problems, come from this misunderstanding of what beliefs are. That beliefs are not facts. Facts are objective truths. They're true even if you don't believe in them. Beliefs, however, are convictions that are open to revision based on new evidence. And we could live a lot better lives if we held these beliefs lightly and recognized these hidden limiting beliefs that we all carry around with us that hurt us, that hurt our relationships, and make the world a worse place.
8:01 Speaker 01 And that we would be a lot better off if we turn those limiting beliefs into what I call liberating beliefs.
8:07 Mike Carruthers? Great, well said. So give me some examples of limiting beliefs that many of us may have that we don't necessarily realize are limiting, but they just are beliefs.
8:18 Speaker 01 The most common one I hear these days is "There just isn't enough time." That's probably the most common one, but I hear, you know, some version of that. "It's too late," "I'm not good enough," "I'm not sure how to do this," "This hurts," "The world sucks," "Exercise is terrible," "I have this diagnosis that prevents me from doing it." You know, "I'm a Sagittarius," "I'm not a morning person," I mean, all these things. They're not, they're not facts. They're based on belief.
8:47 Mike Carruthers? I sure don't want to meet that guy. God.
8:51 Speaker 01 Well, this was me, actually. You're meeting that guy because this is exactly what I have learned over the past several years, that I used to have these beliefs that I thought were facts, and they weren't. They were just in my head, and they were keeping me down.
9:04 Mike Carruthers? So these beliefs that we have, well, wait a minute. If somebody says some of those things that you just said, like, you know, I have this diagnosis, or, you know, it's too late because I'm 85 years old and I don't think I can make the Olympic team.
9:20 Mike Carruthers? You know, those aren't beliefs, those are truths.
9:24 Speaker 01 They can be, they can be, right. But most of our life decisions are not based on these truths. That truths are objective, right? The world is more like a sphere than it is flat. That's a fact. Doesn't care what you think. Then we have matters of faith. Faith are, matters of faith are convictions that do not require evidence. But beliefs are these things that we base our decisions on that don't have a fact behind them. They're about something that happens in the future oftentimes. So for example, should I marry this person? Should I take that job? Should I buy this product? These are all things that are not, are decisions we make that are not based on fact. They are based on beliefs. And many of these limiting beliefs that we have, you know, I'm not a morning person, I'm always late, stress is bad, the world is dying, I'm too old, too young,
10:06 Speaker 01 too fat, it's too late, whatever you might have. These limiting beliefs, a hallmark of these limiting beliefs, is that they reduce our motivation and they increase suffering. Whereas a liberating belief increases our motivation and reduces our suffering. So most of our, if our, most of our life decisions are based on these beliefs, we better get them right. Now, they are, the definition of a belief is that they are open to revision based on evidence. Of course, we, you know, they are not blind faith. So we do need to take into account, you know, what reality tells us. But for the vast majority of our decisions in life, it is really a matter of belief. And so when I hold a belief, let's take for example, aging. We know that people who have a negative view of aging live seven
10:49 Speaker 01 and a half years less. Now, to put this in perspective, seven and a half years, this effect of just having positive versus negative beliefs around aging.
10:59 Speaker 01 That effect of seven and a half years is a bigger impact than the effect of diet, the effect of exercise, or the effect of stopping smoking. But for all we hear about diet, exercise, and smoking, we almost never hear about changing your beliefs. Well, what does a negative versus a positive belief around aging sound like? A positive belief around aging might sound something like, growth is possible at any age. Okay? That's a positive belief around aging. Growth is possible at any age. A negative view of aging might be something like, aging involves inevitable decline. Now, which of those is true? They're both true, right? They're both facts. But someone who has a positive view of aging, that growth is possible at any age, how will they behave differently?
11:42 Speaker 01 Well, a person with a view that says, "I can grow at any age," is more likely to go out and garden, to see friends, to contribute to the community, and it turns out that those behaviors, it's not magic, it's not that beliefs magically change yourselves, it's that beliefs change your behavior, and your behavior changes your biology.
11:59 Mike Carruthers? But you could hold both of those beliefs at the same time.
12:03 Speaker 01 You can, and in fact, they are both facts. But which one do I reiterate to myself? Which one do I choose to remind myself on a daily basis? Do I say to myself, "Ugh, I'm having a senior moment," and then what does that do? As soon as I tell myself I'm having a senior moment, I move less, I think less, now I'm diverting my attention towards the negative versus the positive, and so that affects my behavior.
12:24 Mike Carruthers? But you also have to be realistic, too. Like, so I can feel like I can grow at any age, but if I go down to the high school track and, you know, run 10 laps, I'm gonna fall over and die from a heart attack, most likely, because I'm 80, I'm not 85, but somebody that old, you see, I mean, you still have, there are some limits to this, it would seem.
12:45 Speaker 01 Well, so here's the thing. So what does it actually do in terms of our day-to-day life? So I'll tell you exactly what happened. When I went to the track field at a high school, and I met a group of 70-year-olds in Singapore called the Singapore Strong Silvers. Now, this group of guys, they have an Instagram account, and people call them the grandfluencers. And I'm telling you, I saw these 70-year-olds. Doing more push-ups than the 20-year-olds. No kidding. They were doing, some of them 60 push-ups when the 20-year-olds were quitting at around 30 push-ups. Now, they clearly, we all have limitations. We have limitations based on, you know, on physics, right? You can't change the laws of physics just because you don't believe in them. Those are facts.
13:26 Speaker 01 But beliefs are convictions open to revision based on new evidence. So, most of us carry around these limitations. "Oh, a person my age can't do that." Well, guess what? A person your age who believes they can't do it doesn't even try. Whereas those Singapore Strong Silver's, because they have had these positive views about aging for years and years, they do more and they, they prove to all of us that our limits are far beyond what we think they are.
13:53 Mike Carruthers? So, I realize, I just did something in this conversation right now. I took an extreme example, a ridiculous example of, of you can't be 85 and join the Olympic team and, and so therefore I'm trying to negate everything you've said, which I think a lot of people do. Well, you know, here's an, here's an extreme example. See, it's not true and so nothing that you say is true. And people who do that completely miss the point. Well, I didn't miss the point. I got the point, but you know what I mean.
14:28 Speaker 01 They miss the opportunity. That's a very astute observation because what, what I'm saying and what the research, the literature shows is that we are capable of things that we can't even imagine. If you can't imagine it, you can't do it. I'll, I'll give you a wonderful example of this that came out of a study from the 1950s. Uh, there was a, there was a researcher by the name of Kurt Richter. And Richter was testing the stamina of wild rats. And he takes a wild rat, he puts it in a cylinder of water and he counts with his timer. He, he counts how many minutes a wild rat can swim in a cylinder of water. Okay? At about 15 minutes, he observes that the rat gives up, drowns. Then he takes a new group of rats and he takes a new rat, he puts it in a cylinder of water and he starts his timer.
15:13 Speaker 01 And at about 15 minutes, when he knows the rat is about to give up, he reaches in, pulls out the rat. Dries it off, lets it catch its breath and plunk puts it back inside the cylinder of water. And now with that conditioning, he does this a few times. With that conditioning, he wants to observe how much longer the rats can swim for. So the rats originally swam for about 15 minutes. So now I'm going to ask you, with this intervention, how much longer do you think the rats swam for? You know, there's a trick, you know, there's some kind of, you know, amazing result here. How much longer than the 15 minutes did they swim for, do you think?
15:49 Mike Carruthers? Well, I would have normally said another five minutes, but as you just said, it's going to be some amazing number. But I would have guessed, had you not said it's going to be an amazing number, I would have guessed another five minutes.
16:01 Speaker 01 Another five minutes. Okay, so now they're swimming 30% longer. It wasn't even close to that. Let's go even farther, maybe twice as long. Maybe they swam for double the time, for 30 minutes, not even close. Maybe four times. Imagine what would happen if there was some kind of intervention that made you have four times the stamina. You could swim a marathon for four, run a marathon for four times longer than you thought possible. That would be absolutely amazing. That would be earth shattering if we could figure out such an intervention. But that's not what happened in this case. That the rats didn't go from 15 minutes to 60 minutes. No, they went from 15 minutes of swimming to 60 hours of swimming.
16:43 Mike Carruthers? No.
16:43 Speaker 01 60 hours. They became 240 times more persistent. When they knew that something might save them, that salvation might be possible. Now, what changed in that intervention? Nothing in their bodies. They didn't suddenly have more physical stamina. Nothing in the experiment changed. Their environment didn't change. It was the same exact cylinders. Something we think changed in their brains. Now, we can't ask rats what they believed, how their beliefs changed. But we think that the promise of salvation, that hope was now possible, caused them to persist, caused them to keep swimming. And so what's amazing about this study, and I think what it demonstrates is... That the power of belief unlocked something that was already there. It wasn't magic, it wasn't woo woo, it wasn't vibrations.
17:28 Speaker 01 It was that they had this power all along, but that they were limiting themselves as to what they believed was possible, and they gave up after 15 minutes. So all of us have these un- these hidden opportunities, these hidden possibilities that we can't even imagine unless we change our beliefs of what's possible.
17:48 Mike Carruthers? I hope to God that somebody saved that rat and let it live out its life on a farm in Vermont after doing that.
17:57 Speaker 01 I, I hope you're right, but I don't think that was the case.
17:59 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, probably.
18:01 Speaker 01 It was the 50s. We don't do that stuff anymore, but back then, you know, the rats are already dead, so at least we can learn from them.
18:06 Mike Carruthers? But wow, I mean, that's, that really is incredible. I'm talking to Nir Eyal. He is author of the book Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results.
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19:18 Mike Carruthers? So Nir, your rat example is, I mean, it's just incredible. But what about some examples of human accomplishment that doesn't involve vermin?
19:30 Speaker 01 Okay, I'll give you another example. And the research literature is just full of them. But this is an anecdote that I love that comes from Wimbledon. That when Serena Williams was playing in Wimbledon, she was psyching herself out. She was convincing herself that she wasn't any good when she rushed the net. And so her coach, Patrick, came up with an intervention. And he came up to her and he told her, "Look, when you rush the net, you score 80% of the points." And she says, "What are you talking about? You're crazy. I'm terrible at the net." He says, "No, no, no. The statistics don't lie. This is what's going on. 80% of the time, when you rush the net, you score a point."
20:14 Speaker 01 And she says, "Well, okay, I guess if the statistics are what they are, then great. That's fantastic. It's the best news of the day." Turns out, this was a total fabrication, that her coach had made this up. And yet, because she now had this new belief that she was good at rushing the net, she performed better and ended up winning Wimbledon that year. Now, her coach, Patrick, when people approached him and said, "How could you lie to your athlete like that?" He said, "Well, look, the lie became reality." And he's saying something very insightful there. The biggest critique of my work is something similar to what you were just saying earlier, is that, "Are you telling people to lie to themselves? Are you telling us to gaslight ourselves? Well, here's the newsflash: You're already lying to yourself.
20:59 Speaker 01 You already gaslight yourself. But you're gaslighting yourself with your limiting beliefs. We tell ourselves constantly how we're not enough, how we can't do it, how there's conditions that prevent us." And some of that is fact, but most of it is just a cage of our own creation. So what he did, what Patrick, her coach, did was take her limiting belief, which was also a lie. She was lying to herself, telling herself that she was bad at going to the net, and he replaced it with a more liberating belief that served her, under the principle that our beliefs are tools, not truths.
21:32 Mike Carruthers? What is the process, though, of... It's one thing to point at an example and say, "Okay, well, see, it worked for them." But how do you pull this into your life and use this as a process to decide, "Do I do this? Do I not do this?" How does it work in everyday life?
21:50 Speaker 01 Oh, it's wonderful. That's a great question. Because our hidden beliefs are, by definition, hidden to us. Because these limitations, they feel like facts. And so, the brain has this immunity to change, just like our bodies have an immune system that if you get a splinter in your finger, it creates an infection in order to neutralize the pathogens. So, your body wants to get rid of anything that's not supposed to be there. And that's what our brains do. We hate changing our minds. We hate updating our beliefs. It's very uncomfortable, because it turns out that our default state is passivity. We used to believe in something called learned helplessness. And this kind of made the rounds in the psychology community. It was kind of accepted as gospel for years and years, the work of Seligman and Meyer.
22:34 Speaker 01 Turns out, a few years ago, they completely changed their minds. We now know that helplessness is not learned. Helplessness is our default state. We always will go back to that default state of what has been safe in the past, especially when we're stressed, especially when we're under pressure. We default to our initial state. If you think about how we're born, a baby is born completely helpless. It has to learn hope, based on agency, based on feeling out its environment. It learns what it's able to do. And so, knowing that, that our default state is passivity, is hopelessness. We have to teach ourselves agency. We have to constantly update these. So, these hidden, limiting beliefs, we need to think of them almost like our face. That we all have a face.
23:18 Speaker 01 We carry it around with us all day long. We can see other people's faces, but we can't see our own unless we have a mirror, unless we reflect. So, you know, I could prove this to you. If you think about the closest people in your life... I bet you can think of the limiting beliefs that pretty much everyone you know has, right, that they all have some kind of limitation, but your own, it feels like a fact. It feels like it's a truth, when it's also just a limiting belief. So the practice has to be taking out those limiting beliefs and assessing, are the, is this belief serving me or is it hurting me? And then what we do to make it very practical is we do a turnaround. Now, a turnaround asks us to do something completely ridiculous and uncomfortable, which is to ask ourselves, could the exact opposite be true?
24:03 Speaker 01 Could the exact opposite be true? That person was trying to hurt me. That person was not trying to hurt me. I'm not a morning person. I am a morning person, whatever the case might be. You can take out that belief and the goal is not to change your mind. You're not going to change your mind. You're just collecting a portfolio of perspectives, just different options, different lenses with which to see the world through, so that you can try them on for size and see which ones serve you better, regardless of whether they are true or not, because you're not going to know if they're true until you actually try them out.
24:36 Mike Carruthers? We haven't really talked about it and only have a minute or two left, but, but the whole idea of, of goals, aspirations and things, I suspect that this plays a big part in that, that we, we get what we believe we can get.
24:52 Speaker 01 Absolutely, that's a good part, that's a, that's a great point. And in fact, I think the way we look at motivation towards those goals is completely wrong. That I used to look at goals, and I think most people look at motivation as a straight line. So if I want this benefit, I have to do this behavior, right? It's classical economics, right? If I, if I do this, I get that. The problem is there's a missing link here, because if it was easy enough to just know what to do, which today we all know, you know, if you don't know how to do something, ask Google, ask ChatGPT, you can find the answers of how to do something pretty easily these days. And even if I want the result, so I can do the behavior and I want the benefit. Many times I don't do it. If it was that easy, we would all have six-pack abs and we would all be multimillionaires. But it's not that simple. The reason it's not that simple is that there's something missing.
25:36 Speaker 01 That I can have the, I can want the benefit and I can know what the behavior is that I need to do, but if I don't believe, then I'm not going to sustain my motivation. And sustaining motivation turns out to be the most important trait in who actually accomplishes their goals. So for example, if I don't believe that I will get the benefit, let's say I have a boss who I don't think has my best interests at heart. Well, how motivated am I going to be to continue to work with them if I don't believe I have any chance of getting the benefit, getting the promotion, getting the, the raise? I'm not going to be very motivated. And, and conversely, if I don't believe in my own ability to do the behavior, right? If I think I'm limited in some way, and so I won't be able to do that behavior to get the result, well, then I'm also not motivated. So motivation is not a straight line.
26:21 Speaker 01 It's a triangle. You need to know what to do, the behavior. You need to want the benefit, of course, but you need to have the belief. The belief is at the bottom of the pier, of the triangle that holds it all together.
26:32 Mike Carruthers? Well, this is fun and really eye-opening. It makes me think, make, I'm sure makes everybody listening think about what things do I think of as facts really are beliefs that could be holding me back? Nir Eyal has been my guest. He is taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He's written several bestselling books and the one we've been talking about today is Beyond Belief: The Science-Backed Way to Stop Limiting Yourself and Achieve Breakthrough Results. There's a link to that book in the show notes. Nir, this was fun. Always a pleasure to have you on.
27:07 Speaker 01 Thank you. And likewise, I love the questions because, you know, many people just say, okay, fine. I like that you push back because it's the greatest gift someone can give you is to change your beliefs and, and help you see reality more clearly. So I appreciate that.
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28:21 Mike Carruthers? We've all seen it, maybe even experienced it. The forgotten name, the misplaced keys, the moment you walk into a room and then don't remember why. As we get older, we're told that cognitive decline is just part of the deal. The brain slows down, memories fade, and for some, it progresses to something far more serious like dementia. But is that really inevitable? Is mental decline simply the price of aging? Or are there things we can do to prevent it? What if your brain is far more adaptable, resilient, and capable of renewal than you think? Dr.
29:01 Mike Carruthers? Majid Fatouwi is a world-renowned neurologist, adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins, and author of a book called "The Invincible Brain: The Clinically Proven Plan to Age-Proof Your Brain and Stay Sharp for Life." He argues that much of what we assume about brain aging is outdated and that there are specific, science-backed ways to protect and even strengthen your brain over time. Dr. Fatouwi, thank you for being here.
29:28 Speaker 02 Thank you very much for having me on your podcast. I appreciate that.
29:32 Mike Carruthers? So I would imagine most people believe that brain decline is inevitable as you age, just because every other part of the body declines as you age. You can't run as fast. You can't do a lot of the things that you could do when you were younger because the body seems to slow down and somewhat deteriorate. So one would assume that the same thing is true for the brain. Is it inevitable that your brain will decline?
30:00 Speaker 02 A small amount of decline happens with aging, about 2%, 3%.
30:06 Speaker 02 But it depends on how well you take care of yourself and how well you take care of your brain. There is no need to lose cognitive decline to the point of not being able to function. You may be a little slower in remembering things. You may be a little slower in, you know, using an app or setting up a podcast. But, you know, you should be able to have a full life, enjoy life to the fullest.
30:32 Mike Carruthers? But some people who have cognitive decline, whose brains don't work as well as they used to, that they have dementia. It's a disease in some cases, right?
30:44 Speaker 02 Yes, that's an excellent question, Mike. Only about 5% of people, based on my experience of having seen thousands of patients, have a predominantly genetic reason for having a disease. There's an overlap of a disease process and the wear and tear that happens with aging. For example, your ability to walk is fine as you get older, but you just walk a little slower. However, some people may have a muscle disease and they really can't walk. The percentage of people who have a muscle disease is very small. And the same way, the percentage of people who have a pure disease process that affects their
31:26 Speaker 02 brain is very small. Now, let me clarify something. There's an early onset Alzheimer disease and there's late onset Alzheimer disease. Early onset Alzheimer disease is a disease, is a pure disease. It's like 90% of it has to do with the genetics and you could slow it, you could make it a little less severe, you could postpone it a little bit, but it's a disease. What happens to grandparents is, you know, about 5% disease and 90% lifestyle factors, medical conditions, childhood, environment, and so forth.
32:02 Mike Carruthers? So in the cases where cognitive decline is because of environmental factors or lifestyle factors, then you would assume you could do something to prevent that?
32:14 Speaker 02 You're absolutely right. And that's the whole point. Now-
32:19 Speaker 02 The paper was published in a prestigious journal Lancet by a group of international researchers, about forty of them. And it looked at what factors increase the likelihood of dementia. And it concluded that forty-five percent of dementia cases in the world can be prevented by addressing fourteen factors. And those fourteen factors include things like diabetes, obesity, sedentary lifestyle, air pollution, hearing loss, vision loss, being feeling isolated, and poor childhood education. Now, that doesn't mean that only forty-five percent can be prevented. Based on the data they had, they came to that conclusion.
33:04 Speaker 02 For example, it was difficult for them to evaluate the effects of sleep, the rule of insomnia, which we know is a strong factor for cognitive decline with aging. Now, I have been seeing patients with memory problems for about thirty years. And most patients who came to see me improved with this twelve-week program that I put together. And the program is based on identifying factors that have the potential to shrink your brain and promoting factors which have the potential to grow your brain. So let me give you an example. Many studies have shown that obesity is a risk factor for cognitive decline through shrinking your brain.
33:48 Speaker 02 And on average, and it's very important to keep in mind, on average, people who have a larger belly have a smaller brain. Now, just to be clear, doesn't mean that every person who's obese has a smaller brain because they don't have other risk factors. So for example, if somebody has chronic stress, that is a major risk factor for shrinking the brain, and especially the part of the brain for memory. Which is called the hippocampus. Now, the things that can shrink the hippocampus include obesity, diabetes, hypertension, poor diet, and sleep apnea. These are just some of the factors that can literally shrink the brain in a dose-dependent manner.
34:32 Speaker 02 And hundreds of studies have shown this. It's not just one or two study here and there. There's consensus in the literature about those factors shrinking the brain. On the positive side, there are at least five factors that literally grow the brain, especially the part of brain called hippocampus. This part of brain is roughly the size of your thumb. You have one on the right, one on the left. And so, exercise, physical exercise grows the hippocampus. The more fit you are, the larger will be your hippocampus, and the less likely it is for you to develop Alzheimer's disease. Second is proper sleep.
35:12 Speaker 02 People who sleep fewer than six hours a night have a high possibility of shrinking the brain by about 50%. Their hippocampus can go to half its original size if they've had chronic insomnia for 20 to 25 years. Poor diet. People who eat a diet that's high in trans fats and high processed food, on average, have smaller brains, and those who eat a Mediterranean diet have a slightly larger brain, especially hippocampus. People who eat a Mediterranean diet can keep their brain up to 18 years younger. Yeah, so the other two are meditation, slow breathing, and brain training.
35:53 Speaker 02 So those five pillars of brain health have been shown to increase the size of hippocampus in a dose-dependent manner.
36:02 Mike Carruthers? And so are those things, those five things, that help prevent your brain from shrinking?
36:10 Mike Carruthers? Do they also treat your brain once you've shrunk your brain? Or is this all preventative stuff you have to do in advance?
36:19 Speaker 02 You're asking the great questions, Mike, I must say. So there are things that can reduce and mitigate the abnormalities that have happened to the brain due to what we call Alzheimer's disease. Let me just step back and explain something a little more clearly. So there are two baskets of things that can shrink your brain. One basket is the disease process, the Alzheimer's disease footprints. And footprints are the collections of these proteins that aggregate and form these things called amyloid plaques and how tangles, you can think of them as a little piece of gum or pieces of pebbles that become insoluble inside the brain.
37:01 Speaker 02 They attract inflammation and that shrinks the brain. And then there's another basket of life-related factors that shrink the brain. For example, when you have insomnia, the natural rinsing and cleaning that usually happens in the brain does not happen. And so as a result, these chemical byproducts accumulate and that causes a problem. Similarly, when you have obesity or you have poor diet, there is increased inflammation just because of the food. And that inflammation can shrink the brain. So the two baskets are Alzheimer's pathology and life-related pathology. And every person has a mixed bag of these two things,
37:45 Speaker 02 which I call a soup of problems. So for example, I, I'm doing everything to prevent the things that will shrink my brain. Because I know all the factors, all the 14 things I mentioned and other things. So I eat right, I sleep right, I train my brain and all those things. Now the question becomes which of the factors, which of those five pillars of brain health can reduce the pathology? Which of them can increase brain resilience? And which can do both? Exercise does both. Exercise reduces, actually, exercise reduces the plaques and tangles in the brain. Incredible. And exercise grows the hippocampus. So exercise, good for both.
38:29 Speaker 02 Insomnia is, treating insomnia, sleeping well, actually works more on reducing the pathology.
38:38 Speaker 02 It sort of improves the rinsing in the brain and reduces the collections of these plaques and tangles. Poor diet does, no, healthy diet does both. When you eat healthy, you have, for example, fruits and vegetables that are high in antioxidants, and that reduces inflammation in the brain. So even if you don't have any pathology in your brain, your brain's gonna be healthier. And if you do have pathology, then it reduces some of the inflammation. As I mentioned, people who eat a Mediterranean diet have brains that are up to 18 years younger in terms of collections of these plaques and tangles in the brain. And stress really works on reducing pathology.
39:20 Speaker 02 So it's so fascinating that if you do slow breathing exercises, like breathing with a count of six, hold for a count of three, and breathe out, and just do that for 10 minutes, that has been shown to reduce these collections of amyloid plaques in the brain. Isn't that incredible?
39:40 Mike Carruthers? What about drinking? We've heard that, you know, drinking kills brain cells, which conceivably would mean that it's bad for your memory and bad for your cognitive process. Is that true?
39:53 Speaker 02 Yes, and that's why I sort of emphasize the five pillars of brain health. There are major things that affect the brain, and there are minor things. For example, what supplements? No, is this supplement I'm gonna eat, take, and suddenly I will never get Alzheimer's disease? No. So there are things like air pollution. If you live in New York or large cities, the air pollution is gonna be bad for you. So breathing that air is gonna be bad for you. However, our brains, our bodies have a lot of resilience, and in an ideal world, you have zero bad things happening to you. But in real world, you can't have a sterile life. You know, you'll have stresses, you have financial problems.
40:38 Speaker 02 You drink once in a while, you eat bad food once in a while. Fortunately, our brains have a healing mechanism. That's what I think is fine amazing about our brain. Our brain has a repair kit. One of the molecules in that repair kit is called B D N F, brain drive neurotrophic factor, which actually increases when you exercise. So if there are minor wear and tears, our, our, the, the healing mechanisms in our brain fix those things. So if you drink two glasses of wine, I'm not promoting wine. I mean, I, I think ideally you should never smoke. You should never drink. You should never do drugs. You should never be stressed. You should sleep, you know, perfectly all the time. But the thing is, if occasional things happen,
41:21 Speaker 02 our brain have a healing mechanism. Now, I don't want to go on and on and on, but and as a neurologist, I see people with large strokes who recover. I mean, sometimes kids have a problem and you have to eliminate and actually aspirate half the brain and they still do well. This is what I call the invincible brain. Our brain has a huge capacity for growth and recovery.
41:46 Mike Carruthers? Good lord.
41:47 Speaker 02 That's incredible, incredible, incredible. I mean, I look at the MRIs, half the brain is not there and the kid is playing. It's like, how could this possible? Like if you don't have the right part of the brain, the left side shouldn't work technically. But, you know, the kid is running around and playing and, you know, seem to be fine.
42:04 Mike Carruthers? So really, leading a healthy life, what, what we've come to know as a healthy life, eat right, sleep right, reduce stress, that kind of thing is very good for your brain.
42:15 Speaker 02 Yes, absolutely.
42:17 Mike Carruthers? So it isn't magic. It's just, in, in some ways, it's just common sense to, you know, be, be good to yourself and, and do what you know is right, rather than what you know is not right. But I guess there is a tendency to maybe, well, worry about this later when I'm old. You know, I don't, I don't need to worry about this now. But I imagine the sooner you start, the better.
42:39 Speaker 02 Your brain is an organ made up of cells. They need oxygen, they need nutrients, uh, they're, they need vitamins and they have operations. Just like your heart has cells and individual cells need oxygen, they need energy, they need glucose, they need vitamins. And so if you have a high stress life and the cortisol levels are high and adrenaline is high, your blood pressure is high. Those cells cannot function, those cells in your heart and your skin and your brain cannot function optimally. What I find interesting is that the same things that are good for your brain are also good for your heart.
43:21 Speaker 02 And those same things with some minor variations are also good for your liver and for your kidney. One of the things most people don't appreciate is that all your body organs are in a dynamic network of interconnections. Like if you have liver disease, uh, ammonia level goes up, affects your brain. If you have kidney problems, nitrogen urea levels go up, affects your brain. If your heart is not functioning, forget it, you don't have enough blood, your brain can't work. If your lungs are not functioning, then not enough oxygen, your brain won't work. Your muscles produce something called myokines, which are these, you know, hormones that are protective for the brain.
44:03 Speaker 02 And so in order for us to have a healthy brain above our neck, we need to keep our body strong below our neck. As you said, it's common sense, I, but I think the problem is, you know, I give a lot of lectures around the world, I've been like forty countries. I teach at Johns Hopkins, I teach at Harvard. And everywhere I go, what I find interesting is that people don't realize the brain is an organ. To most people, the brain is like this mysterious black box. Many people think that the brain is like a computer that gets old and rusty with aging and that there is not much they can do. In reality, I think people need to think of their brain as a garden. If you take care of a garden, you know, the plants grow.
44:47 Speaker 02 If they're any fruit plants, they produce fruits. The weeds will not be there. And if you neglect that garden, the weeds grow and the plants won't grow and it's a mess. And if you take care of the garden by, you know, remove the weeds and water it properly, you know, give fertilizer regularly, you'll have a beautiful garden that blossoms. And the same applies to your brain.
45:10 Mike Carruthers? So you had mentioned a few moments ago about how you could do things like slow breathing and but like, how much like you have to do it every day for 20 years? Or if you do it for a week, you'll notice a difference or like, give me a sense of that.
45:27 Speaker 02 Again, that's a great question. I've been studying these things for a long time. So I have taken care of many patients and I've come to appreciate that 12 weeks seems to be the sweet spot in order to see noticeable improvement in your cognitive function with lifestyle modifications. First of all, you don't have to run a marathon. Just walk 3,000 to 5,000 steps a day or just walk, you know, exercise three hours a week. You know, make sleep a priority, sleep seven to eight hours. Do something like meditation or slow breathing 10 minutes a day and get a habit of learning things. So if you do five things that are part of your daily routines, you really don't have to do anything extra.
46:06 Speaker 02 You don't have to like buy equipment or buy expensive supplements or do anything extraordinary. Just make those five pillars of brain health a simple part of your daily routine and you will notice that your memory is a little sharper, you think a little faster. Many patients, they say a fog has been removed and 12 weeks is not years.
46:28 Mike Carruthers? Well, there's a lot of good news in what you've said because if if people understand and know what the risk factors are for cognitive function, then you know, you're armed with the knowledge and then you act accordingly. I've been speaking with neurologist Dr. Majid Fatoui. The name of his book is The Invincible Brain: The Clinically Proven Plan to Age-Proof Your Brain and Stay Sharp for Life. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, doctor.
47:01 Mike Carruthers? The next time you make a request of someone, whether you're asking for a favor, or a commitment, or help with something, add a simple phrase like, "But you're free to say no." Psychologists call it the "but you are free" compliance technique, and research shows it significantly increases the chances that someone will say yes. A meta-analysis of over 40 experiments found that simply reminding people that they're in control of the choice makes them more likely to say yes. And this was in contexts from giving money to completing surveys. In one classic study, adding a "freedom reminder" phrase like that
47:44 Mike Carruthers? boosted compliance from about 10% to nearly 50%. The psychology behind it is pretty simple. When people feel their freedom isn't threatened, they experience less resistance and are more willing to help. So, the next time you ask for something, try, "Can I ask you a favor, but you're free to say no?" And you might be surprised how often the answer is yes. And that is something you should know. It would be really helpful if you would help spread the word about this podcast by telling someone or sharing this episode with someone. People actually like to get recommendations for podcasts, because you know, there's so many of them. It's nice if somebody actually recommends one.
48:28 Mike Carruthers? And so, you could recommend this one. It would be appreciated. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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