What Makes a Good Life? A Neuroscientist a Global Financial CEO Answer | TED Intersections

it's really about shifting your mindset about how you think about anxiety most people just want to get rid of all their anxiety they want to think about it they want to kick it out the door but anxiety evolved for a reason anxiety evolved to help protect us it is a protective mechanism to shine a little light oh you should be paying attention to this you should be paying attention to that and that is what people need to appreciate [Music] so can I tell you why I was so excited to be able to talk to you

today and that is that as a neuroscientist I've spent my whole career studying the brain and what works but by contrast I've ignored certain aspects of my own Financial well-being and now I get to sit down with a global banking expert and I know you're going to reveal secrets that I will be able to decrease my own anxiety well that's a conversation we should definitely have because personal finances very very important and what I would love to hear you talk about is a little bit about how do we get people over that anxiety to actually

address their financial services and I think that's really important so very very curious to have this conversation okay great but I'm curious to talk to you as well because I went into Financial Services to to look after people and to care for people my my passion is actually about people and I went into financial services at first thinking you know this is how we help people achieve their hopes and their dreams and their Ambitions and also look after their families and their legacies but what I've learned in financial services is you can't just talk to

people about their fin ances you actually have to understand the whole person um and a lot of that is the work that you do whether it's physical fitness or mental Wellness or social connectedness or belonging you know understanding people in the light of their communities and their personal passions is a huge part of my role but also a huge part of my personal interest so I'm excited to be here absolutely absolutely I mean I think we both have um really unique perspectives on on what makes life worth living I think what makes a good life

is having something that you do that you are just passionate about and that you really want to give yourself to it doesn't have to be what you do for a living it could be giving to the community giving to your own family that goal is so important we know that um that kind of aspiration and the awe that it inspires in you as you think about that that is releasing dopamine in your brain that is what brings a lot of Happiness now how do you get there there is a long uh road to that that

includes you have to be financially able to do that but it also includes knowing how to um regulate your stress levels and deal with the increasing levels of stress and anxiety in our society today but also to catch on to those things that bring joy in your life and I feel like that's what I've come to study as a neuroscientist that is how to maximize joy and those positive emotions and how to better regulate the difficult emotions and use them as um signpost towards what you should be paying attention to you know it's so different

when I as a banker when I started to think you know what is a good life you you might expect and I did my first thought was okay consumption levels income levels you know GDP per capita living standards and all of those thoughts but then I did turn to where you are which is it's more subjective um and we found as a firm we actually couldn't answer that question so what you do if you can't answer that question you go out and ask a bunch of people so we asked 11,000 people how do they look

at quality of life what is quality of life for them and they came back with their top three factors and I think they'll Accord a lot with with the work that you do you know one is physical health another is mental wellness and the third is financial Fitness and those components are critical to what makes a good life and now they're obviously correlated so what we saw is for people who are financially fit you know they have significantly higher 30% higher um perception of their quality of life they're 20% more likely to be physically fit

and they're twice as likely to be above the standard or above the average of mental Wellness so you can see that correlation yeah and sitting back even as a banker but certainly I thought gosh what makes me happy what makes me happy and having a great day is going for a walk and clearing my head talk to my husband my children or my mom or my friends knowing that I'm doing a great job at work and and really fulfilling that part of the purpose in my life whether it's at work or in the community and

I know that makes a great day for me too yeah yeah well you know you're touching on something that we know is so true from Neuroscience research that is our brains evolved to connect with each other there are parts of our brains that evolved just to be able for me to be appreciate the expression on your face what that means how you're how you're connecting with me and uh we all have that and I think that's such an important element to remember when we all spend so much time on our phones on our computers even

with zoom it's not the same as this kind of wonderful face-to-face interaction that we're able to have today and asking yourself is that a good part is that a big part of my day my face-to-face interaction is a really good first question to start asking when you head towards a good life I think so I want to scratch into a little bit because just to balance this concept of a good life these elements of a good life you know there's a phrase health is wealth what does that mean to you I think um for me

um I would modify that phrase into brain health is wealth why because the human brain is the most complex structure known to humankind and it defines everything about us our sense of humor how we uh how we converse with each other whether we're more introverts or extroverts it has to do with the connectivity of our own brains and so I say brain health is Is wealth because the healthier that your brain is uh how do we make the brain healthy with good sleep with good food with good social connections with uh minimizing though not uh

eliminating all stress cuz stress can be good it drives you towards the things that you you want to achieve that will give you the longest possible healthy good positive cognitive life that you could have so for me brain health is wealth and I I Define wealth as as that long good cognitive life see I think the long life concept's really important so when I look at that phrase I think about longevity and and I think you know back in the 50s globally we had a life expectancy of around 47 which is shocking and now we're

up in the 70s which is a huge Advantage but and that's so we're much longer lifespan but when we look at at Health span still about a fifth of your life you're living with illness um and that means we're actually living longer with sickness yes which is a very challenging thing to to recognize so I think the first factor is absolutely everything that you say which is what can we do to ameliorate that and making sure that we stay healthy um and you know there's a dreadful there's a dreadful investment analogy which I will use

which is your health is your only personal asset it's not transferable it's not diversifiable there are no Alternatives it's your most important asset and it's intangible and you've got to look after it yeah but there's some financial implications of that as well which is if we're talking about living longer while we're sick we need to actually have some longevity literacy and realize that we want to live longer we need to save and invest and plan for that and if some of that's going to be while we're sick we actually need to make sure that we

can fund our sickness as well and make sure that we have a quality of life while we're sick yeah um and that obviously is pure savings and Investments but then it gets into protection whether that's health insurance to allow people to bounce back and progress forward because life has never a straight line you know never know quite when you might get sick you might not be at retirement it might be before that so making sure that you have health insurance to get that bounce back and then life insurance for peace of mind to look after

your families should anything awful happen so I look at health is wealth and I think ooh longevity Health span savings and Investments to make sure that you can look after yourself and insurance so that you can bounce back and you can look after your family you make it sound so clear and easy but it's very scary for somebody thinking thinking about that you know how long how much do I need I what do we know I mean what would you say to somebody who listens to that say oh gosh I'm not sure exactly what to

do who should they go to do your reading online there's a lot of education online a lot of financial education online and there are even some digital tools now where you can look at you know can outline what your goals are and save for each of those goals individually and have that looked at and I think there are some tremendous tools for financial Fitness and I the first step is curiosity and asking that question and the second qu step is education and having the conversation but please don't forget to act on it making sure that

you save and invest is really important with a little bit of protection yes yes well I mean we talked about long-term Fitness and financial Fitness but I wanted to ask you about your own personal fitness because long-term health is is so important for our long-term wealth what has been your personal history with physical fitness I wouldn't be sitting here right now if it wasn't for fitness exercise and Sport um I am a huge proponent of team sports for girls team sports for girls is a great actually there's a de study about it team sports for

girls gives you team building problem solving leadership skills understanding other people empathy how to win how to lose how to compete and and the rules of the game and I think that's a tremendous thing um I was a rower I was a swimmer I was an athlete I've seen it in my sister my mother and my children and I think that team sports for girls just sets you up for Life yeah that being said right now I travel globally um team sports is not where it's at but I love to swim so my personal Adventure

in every city I go to is to find somewhere to swim so it might be a lake in Switzerland it might be you know the beach in Asia on the weekends though it's my local public pool in London with a bunch of wonderful ladies we get there at 700 we have a swim and then we have a big Giggle and a coffee afterwards oh that sounds great that sounds great you know I grew up in California outside I played tennis I was on basketball teams and softball teams so I grew up in the same way

you did with that team sport mentality and learned so much from it but it took a big lesson a big kind of kick in the pants if you will for me to really realize how important exercise was and this was a moment when I was trying to get tenure at New York University which is a very very difficult thing to do and uh my strategy wasn't optimal I decided to do nothing else but work for six years I I could do it for six years and I tried and uh didn't do so well and was

was not very happy and and didn't have a lot of social life and was eating way too much takeout and um uh discovered that going on a river rafting trip to uh the Wilds of uh deepest Peru um I felt so good and I oh my gosh what's what's happening here and that it actually changed my whole research Direction I I started to study the effects of physical activity on the brain and now I can tell you exactly what was happening to my brain so so my um workaholic brain was being infused on this river

rafting trip with a whole bunch of neurochemicals including dopamine serotonin noradrenaline as your brain is in your morning London swims I like to call it a bubble bath of neurochemicals that make you feel good uh it gives you an immediate Bo mood boost it gives you an immediate Focus boo boost so when you go back into work you can focus on what you need to do it changed my my life and it changed my research towards that um to try and understand what is that prescription what should we all be doing at different ages and

so yes I am a big proponent of exercise and of course I try and do what I preach and do what I study so uh even this morning we had to get in here pretty early uh I I I got in a good 20 minute uh yoga workout so I'm impressed and it sounds like you enjoy it how do you how do you link that concept of play and fun to a good life yeah so you know I have come to realize that finding my own Joy what what I love to do is is so

important and yes I stuck with my workouts after you know trying to work so hard to get tenure because I found things that were fun um I love dance classes I love this workout called intensati that comine combined physical movements from kickbox and dance and yoga with positive spoken affirmations so you'd have to yell out in class I am strong now I believe I will succeed once you get over the the um uh awkwardness of yelling things out with a whole bunch of other sweaty affirmation yelling people it feels so good to just get it

out of your system and yell with everybody else in unison with the music in Rhythm uh it's a little bit like singing together in a sweaty chorus it's great um I I love uh I love it and so that made me realize that there were so many other things that I haven't hadn't even discovered that could bring that kind of joy into my life and that's what I I look for so that sounds like a really connected experience and and giving you that sense of belonging know one of the things that we see is being

part of the community and social connectivity really increases people's quality of life you know in fact two times um can you talk a little bit about how you see that through your work yes well I can turn to the research literature the longest study on happiness that has ever been done is still ongoing at Harvard and now is run by Professor Robert wallinger at at at Harvard um and they asked um what makes a happy life and the answer was the more social connections that you had they didn't have to be deep ones that you

you know give presents to at Christmas every year uh they that included a friendly interaction with the Barista at Starbucks that that counts the more you had the happier you were in life and it goes back to the evolution of our human brain that we have so many areas evolved to help us figure out how to have these social interactions it's because that social connection uh is so important to us not that every social connection is POS positive there are you know difficult social connections too but that is the Crux of wa what makes us

human and we know that the more positive ones that you could create in your world the happier you'll be so that's a pretty simple formula that anybody can use today can I say hello in a more friendly way to more people that's going to increase your happiness and I love that because it's doable for anybody anywhere yeah it's it's so true you know one of the some of the saddest conversations that I occasionally have with with some of our wealthier clients as people who have really separ they focused so much on one thing in their

life that they haven't spent time with friends or family or their Community um and as they've aged you know they've left work and suddenly you know they're more alone and the statistics that we see is that a third of older people over 65 really do experience much greater sense of of loneliness yeah and as we look around the world that that seems to be true know whether it's in the UK or in China or or here in the United States um and I think it's incumbent on all of us whether it's Financial Services institutions or

or um universities or governments to to find a way to address that and keep those people engaged in the in the community so I'm a professor at New York University and um uh I think everybody can relate to the anxiety of you have a question do you really want to raise your hand and ask it in front of the whole class I had that same anxiety through my entire educational experience and but I went into Academia so one day I found myself at the front of the classroom and I knew that 80% of those students

had questions for me but you know we were anxious about doing that and so I used that knowledge about my own anxiety to um relieve their anxiety so I came early and I stayed late and I answered any question I just hung out by myself so they could come up and ask me and I realized that was a superpower of my own anxiety that I turned my own anxiety and I turned it to on the outside to outside and I um I made it an act of compassion or empathy to make sure that everybody could

ask the question and it's not just this take your biggest anxiety take your financial anxiety you know can you can you have a conversation if you had a great conversation with your banker and learned a great banking Tri uh trick that relieved that anxiety can you share it with people so I think that is a wonderful way to take the resolution of your anxiety and help others with it and that's also a form of generosity it's fascinating so how do we take that anxiety Then and turn it into a good thing yeah yeah and and

we could take the financial anxiety or any other anxiety how do people feel that and I think in your book you talked about anxiety as a warning sign yes it's something that maybe you should be dealing with how do we get people to to use that um and to act on it yeah that's such a good question and it's really about shifting your mindset about how you think about anxiety most people just want to get rid of all their anxiety they want to think about it they want to kick it out the door But anxiety

evolved for a reason anxiety evolved to help protect us it is a protective mechanism to shine a little light oh you should be paying attention to this you should be paying attention to that and that is what people need to appreciate think about do you lay awake at night thinking oh my God I didn't get to watch that last series on Netflix I I'm so worried about that no you don't worry about that you worry about your work your finances your relationships these are things that matter to you and so what your anxiety is doing

is really showing you what matters most and and actually going back to our first question what makes a good life for you if you flip it that way and start to use your anxiety as a signpost to um um realize it is helping to protect you from things that could be uh danger then it becomes a tool that you can use to order what you're going to do in your in your day and in your week and in in the next year that's fantastic so anxiety as an opportunity alerter and a risk mitigant management that's

absolutely fantastic thing I mean in a sense Bankers are your anxiety detectors for for your finances this is what they they know in great detail what you should be looking for and they cut that off at the past and give you tools to be able not to worry about that and I say that I talk a lot about my own Financial anxieties in the book because it's not just mine it's everybody's everybody's worried about finances no matter who you are are you doing it the right way are you investing what is investing start with with

the basics so so um it's such an important one to appreciate um um how you can flip the script and use it to your advantage now we recognize that you know unfortunately for all of us two out of five of us will find some period of financial instability in life you know we'll lose our jobs our children will get sick we might get sick so understanding and having the financial literacy to understand that that might happen and thinking through ahead of time what might I need to prepare for that is also really important so that

cash on hand or if you do have the ability little bit of insurance to cover some of those things really really important but again going back to our conversation on curiosity making sure that you've taken advantage of the digital tools the planning tools there are so many goal planners and trackers and budgeting tools online almost all banks provide them and certainly we do have a look at them and really just get financially educated cuz I think that relieves a lot of the anxiety yes really does yes yeah no I think that that will help a

lot of people it it made my shoulders go down you go so I'm was really curious world famous neuroscientist what is the one thing that we should all be doing for our brain every day what should we be doing I'm going to say moving your body just 10 minutes of walking that everybody anywhere could do decreases your anxiety and depression levels because you are flooding your brain even with a 10-minute walk with this neurochemical bubble bath of dopamine serotonin nor adrenaline and then think about what that does that bubble bath of neurochemicals if you do

it regularly not just for a day but over weeks over months over years you are literally giving your brain um not only good neurochemicals but growth factors you are making it as I like to say big and fat and fluffy and for this you can start anytime maybe you're a couch potato until you're 75 guess what you get up and start walking you get that bubble bath so moving your body is my answer to that question so for you I would love to ask a more long-term question what advice would you give to young people

about how to start planning their financial future so to get ahead as a young person you've got to get started it's as simple as that you've got to get started so what am I saying to get started by doing you've got to start to save and invest early and often and it's not complicated it's not rocket science um on the saving side it's the power of compounding interest and on the investing side it's better to it's time in the market rather than timing the market so just put your money in the market and get started

that's the most important thing to to do to start now if I were looking at my children I would also say and pay down that that expensive credit card debt please because there's not much Point investing if you're paying significant charges on on expensive debt so make sure that that's gone and once you've got it that started that's a wonderful thing and we're seeing actually that the generations are starting earlier and earlier so gen Z they're starting in their early 20s the millenniums started in their mid 20s Gen X we started in our early 30s

the Boomers in their mid-30s so they're starting earlier that's fantastic and I think some of that's technology and some of that's realizing that now you can start saving investing with less you don't have to have a lot of money just put away a little bit make sure that you're consistently putting away a little bit so you get the benefit of that time in the market and that compounding MH now as you get old obviously you got to make a plan um you got to make sure that you can pay for that first Department that you

can start to think about paying for the other expensive things in your life um and you know people like me you're going to make sure that you can pay for those College fees um these are things you got to say for as well as your retirement yes um and just a shout out for women in particular given I'm looking at you you know this you're going to live longer yep um sadly statistically women are going to earn less so it's even more important for women not to just think about their children and what they need

now but to make sure that women also save for retirement because you're going to be retiring for longer I want to make sure that you've thought that through and you've really got the longevity literacy to Think Through I got to make sure they got a plan yeah great I think that's so important and and it's so great that there's so many different options out there out there now the most important thing is starting and staying curious because your needs will change and whether you learn digitally or you learn talking to people doesn't matter stay curious

stay engaged and start you know that's so funny because that's exactly the recommendation that I give about brain health stay curious about your brain health stay curious about what is the effect of sleep on my brain what is the effect of alcohol on my sleep and then on my brain if I do the movement that Wendy says to do do I feel a difference and you will and that kind of self-experimentation is equally true for your brain and body Health as it is for your Financial Health it seems and that key is really the Curiosity

of um maybe I could ask this person maybe I could explore uh not just sleep and movement but maybe meditation is good is there information about that yes meditation is wonderful it's a de-stressing tool but um it's so uh it's so interesting to see that that the same tools that are so valuable for Good Financial Health is are also so valuable for good brain and body Health as well and I think it ameliorates that that uncertainty yeah you know you talk about anxiety and uncertainty the more Curious you are the more you know the less

you feel that uncertainty and less anxiety I think you feel thank you so much for this conversation I've learned so much and my anxiety level around finances has significantly decreased what a pleasure to speak to you today it's been such a pleasure I can't tell you I will be going out I will be exercising more and getting moving towards that big fat fluffy brain it sounds fantastic thank you so much