You’re Destroying Your Brain - 5 Ways to Defeat Stress

hey friends welcome back to the channel so I recently spoke to a neuroscientist about how to reduce your stress levels so this is endorphins with endorphins I'm basically going to give you an entirely different perspective on how humans should be managing stress and stress is a huge topic it's part of being a human it has benefits and it has challenges like stress can actually help us to advance as a human and hyperfocus our brain when we're under stress and also if it's too chronic the stress can be challenging now chronic stress is a huge problem

apparently around a third of adults in the US are overwhelmed by stress on most days which is kind of a big deal but TJ power is a neuroscientist who runs the dose lab which specializes in understanding the four main brain chemicals that influence our day-to-day lives dopamine oxytocin serotonin and endorphins and very excitingly we are exploring each one of these in this four-part video series and in this last video we're going to be looking at how endorphins work to reduce our stress and then we're going to be talking about five actionable things we can do

to increase the release of Endor within our own systems part one the law of endorphins so in Northern Tanzania the hza tribe are one of the last remaining groups of hunter gatherers on the planet and researchers have done lots of studies to find out what their daily life actually looks like and how it affects their health now what's actually quite surprising from this study in 2020 is that the hza tribe spend around 10 hours every single day not doing any physical activity and this time spent sedentary is similar to that found in industrialized populations but

the key difference is that sedentary time in hunter gatherers is often spent in postures like squatting that lead to higher levels of muscle activity than chair sitting so they're basically doing what we call Active rest and the researchers of the study came up with this idea of the inactivity mismatch hypothesis as humans we evolved to engage our muscles all throughout the day through both walking and running to hunt and gather food and these forms of active rest but now when we are relaxing either we are sitting at our desk or lying on a couch or

on a bed and all of our muscles are totally relaxed and this is where it's not good for us being completely sedentary for long periods of time apparently increases our risk of death and diseases like heart disease and cancer and it can build up lots of stress inside the bodies as well which just adds to all of the other stresses we have going on in our lives now if we think about how we evolved there were just two main forms of stress hunger and danger when you then look at how we would respond to those

two experiences one thing is in common that we'd have to do which is physically exert our body pretty hard in order to get out of the stressful state so we' have to fight an animal we'd have to run away from another human we'd have to deeply try and pursue finding food but the one thing in common is our body had to physically work pretty hard and when you look into this effectively when our body is Extreme experiencing extreme physical exerion in order to help us cope with the experience of that stress it begins to release

endorphins which will calm our brain down endorphins are essentially our body's feel-good hormones there's about 20 different types of them in total and they are released from the brain when we feel pain or stress this then does two things so a it helps us cope with the pain or stress and B they also weirdly improve our mood beta endorphin was the first one of these to be discovered and it's often linked to the idea of Runners High which is where apparently people who are into running feel really good after they've gone out for a run

I've tried this I never feel good after a run but apparently you have to do it for a while before you start like really experiencing the Endorphin release and what's cool is that it turns out that beta endorphin is actually a much stronger pain reliever than morphine and as you might know one of the best ways to trigger the release of endorphins in general is to physically exert our bodies and all of that gets us to the fundamental law of endorphins which is move your body every day part two five actions to increase endorphins action

number one walk runs the law of endorphins is physically push your body every day and this is interesting because like there's different approaches to like how much movement should we get how many gym workouts and so on but if you have a fundamental principle that the body has to work hard every day in some form that's a great goal okay so we know from studies that the more intense your exercise is the more endorphins you're going to release because your body enters a more stressed state so something like high-intensity interval training releases more of these

Feelgood hormones than just walking or cycling casually but that's not to say that you won't feel good after any form of exercise and actually moving your body pretty much always improves your mood afterwards and that's why it's not that surprising to see that exercise is a great way to reduce depression and this big study in the bmj the British medical journal found that the most effective forms of exercises were walking or jogging yoga and strength training now the most important takeaway from all of this stuff is that the key thing is to find a form

of exercise that you actually enjoy and you can do consistently if you're approaching exercise with a H I really should exercise that you know this word should it's going to create a lot of Shame it's going to create a lot of resistance when we find a way to a do the things that we enjoy and B enjoy the things that we're doing it becomes more sustainable it becomes way more energizing in my case I really enjoy walking I go on the Walking crack outside of my house I put on my airpods I use an app

called voice pal which is an app that me and my team have built and I use that as a sort of AI ghost writer and I can kind of talk to the app and then the app will sort of ask me follow-up questions and then that's how I get my writing done that's how I script these YouTube videos by the way voice pal is available on both IOS and Android if you fancy checking it out if for whatever reason you would like to make your writing more fun as well the other thing I really enjoy

is racket Sports of binton tennis and squash and I find that starting the day or in the middle of the day or at the end of the day or pretty much any time I play any of these racket Sports I feel so much better afterwards I'm so much more energized and even though it takes energy to play a game of squash or tennis or whatever the energy that it generates is greater than the energy that it seems to use and if you want to do some more intense exercise to really maximize the release of your

endorphins then TJ has a fun way of making your body work harder and he calls it a walk run and it's basically where you go out on a walk without your phone or headphones and when you're out there you try and pick three moments in that walk where you're going to effectively artificially run away from a bear so you're going to put your brain through that experience in that moment if you have three moments you're on a walk 20-minute walk Three moments where you just go oh my God this B behind me and you just

run as fast as you can you're then going to every day be getting this activation of this chemical that's constantly de-stressing your brain on hearing that you might be thinking oh my goodness people are going to think I'm weird if I go if I'm walking and then I suddenly go for a Sprint what I would say is that's a good thing it's generally good to do things where people think you're a bit weird because a it helps you realize that no one actually cares and B even if they do it doesn't hurt you it's not

going to kill you and I think that sort of don't give an f approach uh applied to a small thing like running and then walking actually bleeds into other areas of your life like if you're struggling to start a YouTube channel or you're struggling to do something a little bit risky cuz you're worried about what other people will think doing these little micro habits micro experiments where you're like not giving a toss about what other people think for a small you know a small tiny sliver of time I think that just boot boosts the general

ability to stop caring what people think action number two heat therapy all right so there is a region of the brain called the hypothalamus and that essentially acts as our internal thermastat the hypothalamus monitors our core body temperature and it sends signals to the rest of our body to increase or decrease our temperature so that it stays constant at around 37° C the hypothalamus communicates with the pituitary gland in our brain and the reason I'm telling you all this is because when we get hot the hypothalamus tells the pituitary gland to release endorphins into a

bloodstream anytime in which you put your body in a hot envir environment your body experiences this thing called a heat stress response where similar to running away from the bear the physical pain that it would get from that it actually perceives heat like a sauna or a bath as a similar experience it doesn't necessarily know that you're not going to stay in that sauna for hours so it effectively starts preparing itself for physical danger now as we've already seen with endorphins they help us a cope with the heat as a form of stress and also

increases our mood but there's actually something even more interesting going on so our endorphins have these two key effects on our bodies through binding to receptors called muop ID receptors but we don't just feel better in the moment after heat exposure it actually lasts for a long time afterwards because the heat increases the number of mu opioid receptors in our brain and bodies so what this means is that the heat makes us more sensitive to endorphins and this means that they have a much bigger effect and the effect lasts longer so for example if there

was something that you were kind of excited about like I don't know playing World of Warcraft or going for a run or playing squash if you have exposed your body to heat before doing the thing then you should feel even better as a result of doing the thing because of this upregulation of mu receptors so the key takeaway here is to try and expose yourself to heat as often as you can to increase your core body temperature how long should you spend trying to be hot well it takes around 15 minutes for our body to

release endorphins and so saunas and hot baths or like Jacuzzi or whatever are probably the best way to do this because you would need to stand under a hot shower for a long time to get this effect action number three the song habit singing does have a very euphoric effect on our brain and coming back to the rule of physically pushing your body if you really sing it actually puts your body through physical work and you'll notice if you hum a song or if you really sing a song you'll enjoy singing it much more from

a neuroscientific perspective that's cu the endorphins are releasing as a result of the body going through physical effort it was really interesting me hearing this because I've been singing pretty much my whole life and I actually often found that like when I would be procrastinating from making YouTube videos or back in the day when I was studying for exams and stuff and I'd be procrastinating from doing this thing that I had to do I would often just like pick up my guitar or ukulele or set at the piano and just bang out some tunes and

sing quite loudly and if there were people around me they would join in with the songs and stuff and it would help me kind of ramp up and get into state to do whatever I wanted to do I do this so often with my team around me that they actually created a meme for this then yeah singing just makes you feel way better and if you're feeling self-conscious about it again this is one of those things no one cares no one cares if you are singing unless you're like doing it in a big corporate workplace

but you actually can just start singing especially when you're at home probably sing in the shower singing in the shower is great you could also sing when you're at your desk you could sing when you're going up and making a couple coffee and TJ our neuroscientist friend recommends that we try and sing for at least 5 minutes whether that's in the shower or in the car or when you're on a walk because it definitely will make you feel a lot better by the way as you might have noticed singing with a group of people or

doing exercise with a group of people or working with a group of people makes whatever you're doing feel much better and that is where the sponsor of this video comes in which is actually me because this video is sponsored by our own product productivity lab if you're the sort of person who works from home a lot maybe in your day job or maybe on your side hustle or your book project or your Memoir or your YouTube channel or whatever and you find yourself sitting at the computer and then not actually doing the thing that you

intended to do then productivity lab is going to be absolutely perfect for you essentially productivity lab is an online platform and community of entrepreneurs and creators and professionals and we all get together and we work together through Focus Labs we do reflective workshops each week where you reflect on how your week has gone and set goals and plan your next week so it's sort of serves as an accountability mechanism and I like to think of it as like CrossFit or pelaton for productivity you're joining a zoom co-working session with other people I join these for

3 hours each morning morning because I just get way more work done when I'm in a focus lab session knowing that other people around me on screen virtually are also doing their work and doing this stuff every day pretty much doubles my productivity and we've had so many success stories from students in productivity lab who've said things like hey you know I've been procrastinating on starting my YouTube channel for ages and then I joined Focus lab sessions and now I've actually done it or things like you know I've spent 5 years planning to make this

new IOS app that I've been planning to make and then I never actually did it but then I joined a few Focus lab sessions and now I've built my minimum viable product and so students in productivity lab getting a lot of good results there's a link down below you can check out productivity.com and you can see if it's a sort of thing that might be right for you and who knows maybe I will see you in one of our co-working sessions or in one of our reflection workshops or in one of our planning sessions or

in one of our book clubs or maybe in one of our in-person meetups as well action number four the habit of laughter okay so this cool study in 2017 scanned the brains of a group of guys when they watched funny videos on YouTube in a room with two of their close friends and what they found was that laughing increased the levels of endorphin in lots of different areas of the brain bra so you can see the brain scans here and the hot colors show where there are more endorphins and we know that these regions of

the brain are involved in things like pain processing reward Pathways and how we feel so laughing is a really great way of triggering endorphin release right even fake laughter eventually fake laughter be becomes real laughter this is how I do thumbnails by the way when I'm doing thumbil with these videos my team will often think I'm really weird because I'll be like and I put all these faces in it sort of other people can't help but start laughing and it just generally increases the vibe in the mood of everyone around us now the reason why

we think that laughing has this effect is because when we laugh we engage lots of different muscles in our body like face and stomach and diaphrag and because the law of endorphin is that physical movement causes endorphin release the theory is that maybe because laughing is activating all these muscles that is what is causing the Endorphin release the only question I like would guys some to ask himself is if you were to rate yourself on a scale from 1 to 10 how much laughter do you think you have in your life right now if you

answer that in your mind you might discover that that score isn't 10 it might be more like five or six of how much laughter we've seen over our training that we've averaged a number at 5.7 in terms of the amount of laughter people feel they're having so whilst we know it's something we desire it's something we're not necessarily getting enough of so the way to find yourself laughing more other than faking laughter is to put yourself in environments where you are more likely to laugh like for example you might call a FaceTime a friend if

you're really lonely and you're in a new city like I am right now or you might arrange to meet up with people more often you could join a local comedy club the Instagram reals you could train your algorithm so that it gives you funny stuff rather than sad stuff you know there's all sorts of ways to increase the amount of laughter in your life all of them are going to feel good for our endorphins level they're going to be good for our stress levels they're going to be good for our life overall action number five

up down twist so this last action action number five is very much aligned with the law of endorphins now as we saw before yoga is one of the best forms of exercise for reducing depression and actually according to this meta analysis it is almost as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy and this makes sense because yoga has a lot of benefits like reducing your cortisol levels and stress it activates the parasympathetic nervous system which is all to do with relaxation instead of the sympathetic f-flight response nervous system yoga also promotes mindfulness it also releases muscle tightness

and increases the flexibility and all of this helps trigger the release of endorphins yoga also has all sorts of spiritual benefits I am just now starting to get into it because I'm doing a little bit of a spirituality era in my life but yoga is probably not for everyone and some people do find it hard for various reasons so the simple Act of stretching is actually a good alternative so I developed like a more simple practice which I call UPS downs and twists which I do when I wake up in the morning and before I

go to sleep UPS downs and twists is literally reach up as tall as you can reach down to the floor and then twist your spine like this oh feels good down I really need to get better at touching my toes like like this is how far I go and twist I need one of these evidence-based stretching routines but you get the idea up down twist and all you need to do is go through these movements twice a day once in the morning and before you go to bed and this would be a very nice way

to trigger endorphin release and to reduce your stress levels and this stuff is actually evidence-based so you might as well it's just free happiness points that we are otherwise leaving on the table so that brings us to the end of the video if you have not yet seen the other three videos in the series there are going to be in a playlist over here just underneath this R Ravenclaw poster and those are about the chemicals of dopamine and oxytocin and serotonin thank you so much for watching and I will hopefully see you in the next

video bye-bye