The #1 Neuroscientist: After Listening to This, Your Brain Will Not Be the Same

through manifesting you're about to teach us how to rewire our brain and train it toward abundance things like manifestation visualization affirmations these are all things that Prime the brain more towards thriving than just surviving let me put it like this if you and I both wanted to learn Spanish yes and you wanted to learn it because you were planning a vacation to Mexico mhm but I wanted to learn it because I had a Spanish boyfriend who do you think's likely to to learn it more or better you yeah our listeners brains are actually going to

be different at the end of this podcast than they are right now I am so fired up that you're here with me this conversation is so exciting Because by the time you're done listening and learning from our guests today your brain is not going to be the same you're going to learn today how to use science to rewire your brain so that it can help you get what you want this is so freaking cool and before I introduce you to today's remarkable expert and we jump into the conversation I have something really exciting that I

want to share with you as a thank you to you for helping make this podcast one of the most popular podcasts in the entire world I created something incredible for you and I cannot wait for you to get your hands on this thing that I've created it's a free gift you can access it in less than one minute all you got to do is go to melrobbins.com makei happen what is it oh you're going to love it it is a two part video training it's almost 2 hours long it's brand new it's backed by research

I created it and I teach it and check this out this two-part video training it comes with a free 25 page workbook I'm holding this sucker right now if you could see me on YouTube you would see this gorgeous green workbook 25 Pages based in science the training is called make it happen and you can access it at melrobbins.com make it happen now this free two training teaches you how to take confident consistent and inspired action and that's important because when you start taking confident consistent and inspired action you tap into the power that is

inside you to create a better life and I know you learn a lot listening to this podcast every Monday and every Thursday and I love that and I love how it inspires and empowers you and I want to remind you though I don't want you to just listen I want you to apply what you're learning I want you to act because nothing in your life is going to change unless you start doing something different and it would be a real honor to spend almost two hours teaching you how to master execution just consider this zeroc

cost training my thank you thank you for spending time with me thank you for spending time investing in yourself by listening to this podcast and thank you for supporting the work that I'm doing just go to melrobbins.com maketh happen super easy to get your access access to this and it's going to help you go even deeper into everything that you're going to learn today on the podcast so let's talk about the conversation we're going to have today because world-renowned Dr Tara schwart Bieber is in the house Dr Tara is a medical doctor neuroscientist psychiatrist and

Senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management and she runs the Neuroscience for business online program for MIT she's also a bestselling author of the book the source and the host of the podcast reinvent yourself with Dr Tara I love her because she's a scientist who used to be a skeptic when it comes to things like intuition and manifestation but today she's here to teach you that yes you can change your brain you can become the person that you want to become you can train your brain to help you spot opportunities you can learn how

to make your thinking more positive you can learn how to lead a company you can become more agile and happy and successful in life and Dr Tara is here to give you the very tactical things that you can start doing immediately based on the best research in the world we're going to cover how to change your brain in three different ways you'll learn the real science behind manifestation and the Neuroscience that explains intuition are you ready I know I am please help me welcome Dr Tara schwart Bieber to the Mel Robins podcast oh Mel it's

so amazing to finally be here in person with you I've been looking forward to this for so long well thank you so much for jumping on a plane and flying all the way from London and spending time with us in person I am so excited and I I I guess I want to start by having you speak directly to the person who is listening to us right now could you share with them how their brain or their life might change based on what you are about to teach them today yeah so one of the things

we're going to be speaking about is neuroplasticity which is the fact that the brain can grow and change throughout life unlike the fact that we used to think that by the time you physically stop growing around the age of 18 that your brain is fixed that your personality is fixed your IQ is fixed we now know that those things are very fluid um depending on what you do but I want to bring that down to the here and now just to make it feel really real which is that by the end of our convers ation

because the brain is being molded and shaped constantly by what you're listening to who you're meeting what you're recording in your memory the emotions that you're feeling our listeners brains are actually going to be different at the end of this podcast than they are right now how does that happen well so neuroplasticity means that the brain is taking in information through the five senses so everything we see hear smell taste touch and kind of in real time thinking how do I need to be to like survive in this world it usually comes down to survival

and what I think I'd love to do today is help people move from the brain reacting for basic survival to what else can you make your brain do to thrive in this world I know we're going to go deep on this but can you just at a high level tick off a couple things that you can train your brain to do that you might not know that you can train your brain to do yeah so things like man infestation visualization looking at vision boards which I actually call Action boards but we'll come to that um

affirmations these are all things that Prime the brain more towards thriving than just surviving because if you leave your brain to its own devices all it wants you to do is live long enough to reproduce so what's it going to do to make that happen make sure you put food on the table that means pretty much that you need to turn up to your job daily and not get fired so you need to keep a good relationship with your course you need to keep a good relationship with the person that you'll potentially reproduce with that's

not enough for most people we want more than that out of life so if your brain's taking care of that anyway what do you want to put front of mind to make your brain look out for opportunities for the things that you dream of that you really really want with what I call magnetic desire magnetic desire how do you define magnetic desire well the way that neuroplasticity works in the brain is through repetition and emotional intensity so let me take it back to the survival things we were just speaking about if you think you know

I want to get married and have a family because that's what all my friends are doing there may not be a huge emotional intensity behind that that may be more to do with societal parental peer group expectation if when you a kid you dreamt of being an actor yep then if you actually try to start doing that even if it's hard that was your dream that was what you feel you put on this Earth to do you will endure barriers and obstacles and refusals and difficulty and keep going whereas for other things you might not

you know we all we know that idea of giving up just before you dig up the gold right if you've got magnetic desire you won't give up that's where the motivation piece comes in and all of these are the science behind what contributes to manifesting what you want so let's talk about manifesting have you always believed in manifesting so looking back I actually think I did it as a kid naturally and it's so chicken and egg for me whether I got drawn to neuroscience and manifestation because that was innate in me from a child or

whether I now live my life in that way because I've done so much research on it I I honestly don't know the answer to that the more I do the research the more I consciously bring these things into my life I look back and think that's what I was like as a kid that's what I was interested in as a kid but I would say that once I studied the Sciences in high school and then went to medical school you know it worked slightly differently in the UK um and did my phdd in neuroscience and

certainly by the time I got my faculty position at MIT I was a complete skeptic about manifestation those two things could not exist in the same world as far as I was concerned and that's partly down to how I had to live my CH Life as a child because my parents were first generation immigrants from India to the UK and I went to school in London and I just wanted to be like all my friends and do the same things as them but I would come home my mother would be in a headstand and there

would be incense in the house um and you know there was meditation and chanting and things like that so I thought okay that happens at home this happens at school and I learned very well to separate those things so then I became a medical doctor specializing in Psychiatry and you know you were diagnosing people with magical thinking and delusions and hallucinations so you couldn't really say oh but I believe in manifestation you know um so again I had to keep those things really separate and it wasn't really until I started doing my research to write

the source that I realized how together these things could be was there a moment where you remember going oh my gosh this is real yeah there are a few because I think these things sort of build up don't they so um I was in 2017 I was the world's first neuroscientist in Residence at a five-star hotel in London so I was already doing quirky things with my career and um because it was unusual there was a lot of press and I was approached by penguin Random House to write a book and they said we've had

really amazing books on you know one on medit one on diet one on sleep one on exercise and we think as a neuroscientist you could bring all of those together and without thinking I said I could do that but I've got an idea about the cognitive science behind manifestation and vision boards um and they just said yes straight away so I think their response made me think that could be a thing but I wasn't convinced myself so before I started writing I went on a summer vacation with my laptop which is unusual for me and

I just started looking into the laws of attraction and trying to figure out is there cognitive science that can explain these things and for somebody listening who does not know what the law of attraction or manifestation is could you give us your definition mhm they're basically all about the fact that if there's something that you really want in life then if you think positively about it or you believe in certain vibrations of attraction in the universe then you can bring that thing into your life and manifestation is bringing into reality something that you want but

until I started looking into the cognitive science behind it all the explanations so far had been to do with quantum physics and for me as an empirical scientist that wasn't enough for me to believe in those things and equally I I felt very disempowered by the fact that it was happening because of something outside of me I wanted to feel like it was happening because of my brain power and that I had some autonomy over it and do you believe based on the research that you've done that you attract things into your life because of

your brain power I believe it 100% when the book came out people that I knew personally who were not scientists at all said I've always been interested in this but I've never actually acted upon it because I couldn't understand how it worked but now that you've explained the science I'm actually doing the steps that you know I've heard of before actually but that you've repeated in your book so the writing process did bring it together for me quite a lot but it was actually the the response from other people so it started with people I

knew and then it started on social media just being thousands of people that I will probably never meet in my life saying because you've put the science to it it's completely changed my view of of these topics so so what are the steps to manifesting based on the research so you attract what you want in life so it starts with abundance now in the brain we have the strongest gearing that we have in our brain is called loss aversion or loss avoidance and that was the survival mechanism from when we lived in the cave which

was that if you saw you know a juicy apple on a tree and you really wanted it but you ignored the fact that there was a saber-tooth tiger standing next to you you would die so we had to want to avoid loss more than we wanted to get reward so you've got to avoid the tiger more than wanting the Apple exactly and and so we're wired toward as you mentioned earlier survival absolutely and through manifesting you're about to teach us how to rewire our brain and train it toward abundance yeah we I'm not going to

completely wire it the other way because there we still need to be safe yes even in the modern world where the threats aren't so much physical Predators there are psychological threats to our safety like job loss relationship loss Etc um but it doesn't serve us to be that strongly geared to loss avoidance so what we want to do is balance that out a bit more or in a safe situation understand that we absolutely can take healthy risks and you know believe that there's enough for everyone and and not kind of live from that scarcity mindset

so that's the the first piece the second piece is magnetic desire which we've already somewhat discussed but once you're feeling abundant then if you can be really aligned in your head your heart and your gut about what it is that you want um then that you know that desire that motivation will keep you going and you know help you get the things that you want that you might have given up on um so there is an element of patience required because this process of neuroplasticity involves neurons wiring together to form new strong Pathways that are

stronger than the pathways that you had before and so that means that it feels like a lot of hard work is going on psychological work is physical work going on in the you know Pathways in your brain but that nothing's changing in the real world and there's a real Tipping Point where there's enough neurons in a pathway that certain new habits and behaviors or you know being patient becomes easier and it kind of feels like nothing nothing nothing and then suddenly oh you know things are happening things are changing I'm getting the things that I

want um so if you put those three behind manifestation then that is about priming your brain to notice and grasp opportunities in the real world that can bring you closer to the things that you want it's exactly the same process as if you buy a new car you suddenly notice that car all over you know it's the same so it's a it's a brain priming process oh well well that makes sense it's why you suddenly see Jeeps everywhere when you are looking at buying a Jeep can you explain the kind of neuroscientific I don't even

know what the right word is what is the scientific explanation for why you see cars when you're interested in buying a car or how the new neurop pathways are changing your brain in real time what is actually happening when you tap into magnetic desire so basically we're overloaded with information constantly and the brain has a natural filtering mechanism called selective filtering and this relates back to what I was saying about if you leave your brain to its job of just you know making sure you survive it will filter out all those other things that you

actually really want but they're not essential to your survival so that's why you have to make a list or make the vision board or you know remind yourself every day of what it is that you truly you know magnetically desire to put that to the top of the list for your brain because after selective filtering it does selective attention and that is noticing the red car or the Tesla or whatever it is that you know you're noticing um so once you filtered out the things that you don't want to notice then you you know you

narrow it down to the things that you do want to notice and then the third part is called value tagging which is the brain actually tags those things in order of importance H and it does that in two lists so it does it in a l logical list and it does it in an emotional list and that's where the magnetic desire is important that's where you say no brain I don't want it in that logical order I want it in this order this is what is really important to me this is what makes me feel

alive this is what makes me like understand that I have a purpose for my life and it's not just put food on the table stay in your job stay in your relationship it's so much more than that so A Classic example is I really want to find a partner and settle down and get pregnant yes how could you go through the steps of manifestation to help you achieve that I would explain the process of manifestation that's underpinned by neuroplasticity which is a four-step process raise your awareness Focus your attention do deliberate practice and hold yourself

accountable and it starts with raised awareness I always say that's 50% of the battle cuz sometimes we don't really know why we're not doing the things we know we should be doing or why we're potentially we're self-sabotaging those behaviors but instead of taking the supplements that would set my body up for good fertility I'm going out partying because that's the way I think I'll meet a new partner um so the awareness piece comes very much from journaling or not so much speaking with friends sometimes because if they're on you know in the same place or

everyone has an agenda for you know your single friends might want you to stay single that kind of thing um but you know maybe talking to a therapist or a coach um or doing some proper soul searching and trying to understand why you're not doing the things that you you could be doing why some of the things that you know you're doing really easily why are they so easy how do they fit into your lifestyle so well and and really what it is that you actually want do you actually want to settle down and have

a family or fine you know if you actually want to be out partying fine fine just say that and do it you know and be aligned and and don't kind of do the thing that you want but pretend that you want something else it's all about that so so that step one so step one and let's just stay with your example somebody who is single who really wants to meet a life partner and be in a committed relationship and start a family that the first step is for you to take the time to get very

clear with yourself about what you want and why and a wonderful exercise for that is to place your hands on your for head okay and ask yourself logically is this what I really want and why and then write that down and then take five deep breaths and put your hands on your heart and ask yourself emotionally why do I really want this and then write down the answers another five deep breaths and then hands on your belly intuitively do I really want this and again write the answers down and you know if they're all aligned

happy days if they're not we might have a little bit of rethinking to do when I've done this with clients one of the things that's come up is I really really want a baby but actually I don't really need a partner to get there so you know that could that could change the I need to meet someone and be in a loving relationship and have a baby could just be actually what I've always really wanted as a child I'm getting to a certain age where waiting to have a partner be part of that might mean

that I don't end up with what I really want got it so you know that's the most important step okay so let's say you've gone through step one and your your mind your heart and your kind of gut your soul your intuition is all aligned yes I want this the second step is focused attention so that is at least a month of just noticing what you're doing what you're not doing in regards to moving in that direction what are you noticing um you know depending on what your goal is it might be yourself it might

be your interaction with others it might be feedback from others but it's kind of a data collection period because what we what won't work very well in in uh manifestation underpinned by neuroplasticity is just jumping into doing without being first okay so you know raising that awareness might have brought up things that you've never consciously known in the past you can't suddenly then say okay I'm like on all the dating apps you need to look you know sit back and and see what is it are there patterns of behavior that I'm doing that are leading

to a bad result um is there something that's holding me back from taking the first step that I really need to take so taking you know and longer than a month if you need to get to the point where you feel like I have enough data about myself that when I act now I'll be able to give myself really good feedback so the third part is deliberate practice and that is doing the things that you know you need to do to bring the goal into your life so whether that's taking certain supplements whether that's going

to sleep earlier than you usually do whether it's being more socially active than you used to be and then practicing and that's an experimental phase you might still make mistakes in that phase but course correcting as you go on because at this third stage this is where people could give up yes and so the fourth part isn't really a stage it's something like a theme or an umbrella overall of this which is accountability so how are you going to hold yourself accountable that you will actually see this through now the easiest way to do that

is with an external party like a coach or a therapist but ways to do that yourself are um by recording it in your journal and reading back over your journal and you know continually reinforcing why I did this why I didn't do it what happened when it went wrong I use an app called habit share because what I learned for myself and this won't be for everyone but um it's quite a good one for a lot of people is that it's easier to build up micro habits than to start the year or you know your

birthday or whatever it is with one big this year I'm going to meet the person that I'm going to get married to and I um so I set out 12 micro habits at the beginning of the year and I pick three to focus on for the first quarter of the Year okay and I track them on this app until they become like so habitual that I don't need them on the app anymore and then I move to the next three when I've done that instead of s instead of setting big goals at the start of

the year I've come to the end of the year and found that I have 10 habits that I I'm no longer even conscious of that I'm doing all the time that are leading me towards that bigger goal or those bigger goals that I really want why are there only 10 if you start with 12 well they don't all stick you know I find that kind of along the way I just didn't actually make one or two of them into a habit it's still a bit of a struggle and I either decide that I'm going to

drop it or I'll I'll carry it on into next year how would you recommend you kind of like make micro habits or where would you start cuz I know we're going to get flooded with questions about this so I'm going to talk really directly to you like I would as if you were my client great which is that the Habit that you're working on is not the other person and the relationship it's yourself so if the goal is a partnership with someone else the habits are all around your selfworth your deservingness what you have to

offer in a relationship what boundaries you will have have about somebody treating you in a certain way um and I'm sure a lot more but those are the first ones you know that come to mind so for example a lot of people cast a list of what they want in a partner and there's two things around that one is make a list of what you have to offer in a relationship compare it to the list of what you want in a partner and where all the gaps are make those your micro habits okay we got

to stop right here and highlight because we've all been in that situation where we have a friend and we keep seeing this person that we love dating people that we do not believe are up to their level yeah and you do make the lists of what you want in somebody else I've never made a list of what I have to offer no no neither had I till someone told me about that and it doesn't even occur to me that I would make list about what I have to offer how does just making the list of

what you have to offer change the way you view yourself so so there's two things one is it might highlight gaps between what you think you know what you want but if you're not there why would that person want you so if you've got self work to do let's start with that you know that's why I said I will speak to you really directly like I went to a client which is like we need to start here if you want it if you want to get there the other one is that the focus can be

so outward and external that you actually are you know not always aware of how much you have to offer and that's why when unfortunately in this day and age the sort of behaviors that I'm hearing about on the dating apps you could succumb to those but if you have a very strong idea of what you have to offer you're more likely to say no to bad behavior right yes it's true yeah I I just think about this for my own life that in periods of my life where I was uh in distress or disassociated or

in Peak toxic Mel mode in the past college and law school come to mind um I had no clue what I had to offer which is why I kept finding myself engaged in toxic Behavior patterns and with people that I was perpetuating them with and so it makes a lot of sense that if you're not even aware of what your value is how could you possibly attract something that's of a higher value or equal value or equal value you know one of the things you you speak about Mel is um the fact that we love

our friends and family and children and pets more than we you know show that same care to ourselves and so you know if a habit that you have with your partner is writing them a little Post-It note of 10 things I love about you well obviously if you're in Partnership and they're doing back that back to you that's great but if you're single write down 10 things that you love about yourself or say to a friend I'm going to send you a list of 10 things I love about you could you please send me a

list so I can see how I'm viewed you know by another person that I know cares for me um so obviously there are affirmations but you can also bring your tribe into you know saying don't forget this is what you have to offer this is how lucky someone's going to be to get you and I don't think we do that enough either I I'm just stopping to think about this because it's kind of sad that we don't do this and how common is it that you're working with somebody in your practice and you ask them

to make the list of 10 things and they can't do it I feel like we all have some kind of like Angel inside us and if you start you'll be surprised that things will come out and that is such a good feeling um and they you know they can be really tiny things um and they can be physical attributes or they can be like your kindness and your creativity but they can also be like your vulnerability or um you know the fact that you maybe like didn't used to be good at asking for help but

that's something that you've learned to do you know there's so many things it can be um so yeah I would I would love to think that people would go and do it and I would love to think that people would be pleasantly surprised and if not then reach out to your tribe because I'm sure you know you'll get inundated with with things that people could say about you so whether you're going to use manifesting to look for a job or look for a committed partnership or to I guess they shouldn't even say look for whether

you're going to use manifesting to land a job or to land funding or to uh fall in love and be in a committed partnership or to achieve a health goal Step One is the self-awareness that comes from from you doing the work to get very clear about what you want and you gave us that beautiful meditation of going from your head to your heart to your gut and asking yourself if you really want this and you say we should saturate ourselves in the self-awareness of it right by journaling and talking to a therapist or a

coach or a friend that you trust about it and then the second one was noticing yourself are you acting consistently what is happening what's appearing around you the third one is take actions that are consistent with somebody who is landing their dream job or who is attracting a committed relationship or a becoming a parent and then the fourth is patience is that did I get it the fourth is accountability accountability that's right I don't want that one that's why I forgot it I want it to just happen like magic so accountability meaning what accountability meaning

mean that you don't give up that you are still doing the consistent behaviors that you need to to bring the thing that you want into your life um and that either you know you find a way of doing that yourself with technology or your journaling or an external party you know that they'll be asking you in a month's time did you go on the number of dates that you said you were or did you like send your resume out you know to as many places as you said you would and and you know with in

my work I always say if not why not that if if you didn't there's a learning opportunity there but if you did great what else can we do in the next month kind of thing I love this topic so much Dr Tara I could just keep on going on and on and on but I want to take a quick pause hear a word from our sponsors we have so much more to cover don't you dare go anywhere because when we come back we're digging deeper into manifestation and of course you're going to learn the mistake

that you're making it has to do with vision boards and using glue all of that and so much more coming up when we return stay with us hey it's your friend Mel and you know I've been thinking it's time that you and I take our relationship to the next level that we get off social media and do something a little bit more serious together I had this gift that I've been wanting to get you maybe a little forward but whatever I'm going to shoot my shot I have created a brand new free two-part training called

make it happen just for you it is a video training it's got two different lectures in it it is so freaking cool I made this for you because I want you to stop wasting so much time on social media I want you to stop thinking about what you want to do and I want to support you in taking action and making something amazing happen the next 6 months of your life could be extraordinary but it's not going to happen by accident it'll happen because you decide to make it happen and because I want to take

our relationship to the next level I thought I'd invite you to jump in this training just go to melrobbins.com makeit happen to get this free gift for me and let's take our relationship and your life to the next [Music] level welcome back I'm Mel Robin I'm thrilled that you're here today we're learning all about the science of manifestation and intuition and how to wire your brain to thrive and be more successful with neuroscientist Dr Tara schwart Bieber so what are the three ways that this changes your brain or you can change your brain so the

three mechanisms for neuroplasticity are myelination synaptic connection and neurogenesis now myelination people who do sort of like repeated weight training be quite familiar with that it's myelin is a fatty substance that coats some neural Pathways making them fast conducting Pathways and there's a reason that we have fast conducting Pathways and slow conducting Pathways so for instance if there was a fire on the table here between us and you put your hand Into the Fire your reflex to physically snatch your hand out of the fire is a fast pathway for obvious reasons so you don't burn

but your pain pathways are slow pathway ways because if you became so incapacitated by the pain of the fire that you couldn't move you wouldn't survive oh and that works for many different types of Pathways as well so but to make a pathway more efficient we want it to be melinated so if we're working on a manifestation obviously we want the pathways for the behavior that will lead us to that goal to be more efficient so just basically repetitive practice leads to more myelination of Pathways okay so that's relatively easy to do the the middle

one in terms of difficulty is synaptic connection so that's where neurons that we already have in our brain but that aren't necessarily connected to each other at the end of every neuron there's a bulb called a sinapse and neurons communicate with each other because chemicals flow in the gap between those bulbs and form new Pathways so making new synaptic connections is uh Step Up in terms of difficulty my favorite analogy for this is learning a language so I think when we talk about manifestation or other you know psychological behaviors it feels very intangible but the

process is exactly the same as learning a language so you go from not being able to speak this language at all to picking up the basics to becoming semi fluent to potentially becoming you know completely fluent in the language and everything that we have spoken about so far it's exactly the same process in the brain so the myelination is when you start listening and you pick up you know the alphabet or a basic you know very basic vocabulary like my name is and then the Coptic connection is when you can say some sentences that's maybe

enough for you to travel to that country on vacation and you know at least make an effort yeah um and then the hardest one in the adult brain is neurogenesis and that's because Genesis means growth so this is growth of baby neres cells into fully formed nerve cells that then have to make synaptic connection with other nerve cells and potentially those Pathways get melinated so you can see how it's a building up process yeah yes and you had said magnetic energy magnetic desire magnetic desire is one of the fastest ways to change the brain or

it's a required way talk to me about how that stimulates one of these these processes happening yeah okay let me put it like this if you and I both wanted to learn Spanish yes and you wanted to learn it because you were planning a vacation to Mexico mhm but I wanted to learn it because I had a Spanish boyfriend who do you think's likely to learn it more or better you yeah magnetic desire a real you know deep reason for wanting to be able to speak that language what I love about this example is that

that I now understand why manifestation works good so magnetic desire which you are helping us tap into by asking ourselves by putting our hands on our head and our heart and our gut what do I really want you're tapping into the deep-seated magnetic desire behind any change that you want with that you are fueling the change in your brain to help you both see more opportunities around you mhm and also to help you stay motivated to do the actions so it's like training for your brain to be doing the work to make something happen in

the future and to help you do it all of that and I would just add even when it you feel like giving up even when it feels like it's not going to happen that's the difference between someone that will manifest and someone that will continually take it this far but never actually manifest is there a trick that you uh teach people that are uh very negative or resigned or have a you know difficult background where they just have a very hard time believing things are going to work out is there something that added that you

would suggest to somebody who's like well that's never going to work for me I've tried that you know that your resignation stands in your way of the patience yeah you know I actually always struggled with that because I felt like it was such a privilege in luxury to be manifesting in your life um the first time I was challenged on that it was when I had my friend Chanel Haynes on season one of my podcast she played Tina Turner in London's West End I asked her the same question and she said manifestation isn't a luxury

it's an essential and you know she came from parts of New Orleans that people would be scared to go to and she built herself up through manifestation to having the career that she had and being the oldest person that ever played Tina Turner in London um so I think finding success stories like that there's another piece of science that says if you are trying to achieve something that you've never achieved before find an example of a person that you resonate with who's achieved the thing that you're trying to achieve so you know anything from playing

Tina Turner in the West End all the way down to um where you were saying somebody who's got a lot of adversity who's had difficulty in their life breaking out of that like there are examples of that in the world of course um and and interestingly because you've already mentioned this the third part of that is changing your negative selft talk how do you do that when that is part of the wiring in your brain you cannot undo wiring that's already in the Brain before we understood about neuroplasticity say that once your brain was in

adulthood and certain Pathways were set up as they were like things about low self-esteem or you know things never working out for you you that that it was impossible to change it because like it's impossible to change your height once you've stopped growing right but we know that's not true in the brain anymore so we know that there's an opportunity for rewiring but it's not through undoing wiring that's already in the brain it's through overwriting it which means repeating a new thought or behavior so many times with such emotional intensity that it becomes an more

energy efficient pathway for your brain than the one that you've had until now how do you do that so one of the ways of doing it is through positive affirmations so it can't just be a random one that you make up so the way that I help people to find their affirmation is if you have a recurring negative thought it's not your thought that is wired into your neural Pathways it's the belief that underlies that thought can you give us an example that's never going to happen for me that's a classic one things like that

don't happen to people like me so and the answer to this will be different for different people it could be different for you and I and you know anyone who's listening but you need to either through therapy or you know by sitting down and really meditating on it say what is the evidence that things like this do not happen to people like me and keep asking yourself that question until you come up with the answer and if the answer is because I'm a woman woman or because I come from a lower socioeconomic background or because

I'm a person of color or because it's never happened to anyone in my family before let's say going to college mhm no one in my family's ever been to college before so what are the chances that I'm going to go um so once you've understood that it's because it's never happened to anyone in my family then what you need to do is is create a mantra or an affirmation that says I could be the first that's just one that came into my mind but into my heart actually I really felt it there but you know

it'll be very different for different people that emotional intensity is important and that's why I can't give the answer to you because it has to be your answer when you said could I deeply felt that because for me it allowed the possibility that it might not but there is something about the possibility of I could be the first to that opens the door to then wanting to try well trying yeah yeah wanting to try and then trying and then if you keep saying something that has that magnetic desire mhm that's how you start to re

what did you call it reprogram re rewire or just you know overwrite over wiring yeah I love this affirmation I could be the first because it makes me believe that it's possible because it's of course it's possible of course it's possible and I I'll just share quickly like I I delayed starting this podcast for so long because I just felt like there were already so many out there if I had had this affirmation but I could be the first or could be successful even though there's already all these podcasts if I had had that I

probably would have started this sooner so what do you do once you create this affirmation for yourself and let's just run with this one I could be and then fill in the blank what's the step I have one for you that just really like came up in my mind that you could have had which was I could create a unique Niche CU even though there were so many out there I think your affirmation would have been I to create something that's not out there yet you know I think for a woman you're just such an

icon in this space so anyway regardless of what it is I love that because I also do think my husband right now is finishing a master's and working on his first book and what he battles every day is this has already been written this has already been written and so many of you listening have something that you want to do and you're like but there's already a bakery but there's so many real estate agents but but but there's YouTube there's this that if you start to take this one I could do something unique I could

fill a gap I could do something different I you know like I love this so how do what do we do once we have something that feels like oh yeah that's it I could be so remember we based this on an underlying belief that you know to do with sort of lack of deservingness every time you have the thought that that belief underlies so um I shouldn't bother applying for that job or that's not going to happen for me or that's already been done every time you have a thought like that you replace it with

your affirmation and you just say it to yourself you can say it in your head you can say it out loud you can write it out and have it on your bathroom mirror the the one time I remember it got like quite I was glad I'd been practicing it was someone openly verbally challenged me and I actually burst into tears but then I said I think I can wow that makes a lot of sense and I want that for everybody like I want I want you listening to us to believe that you could be the

first whatever or that you could do whatever and so I think it is really important that you tap into and find the right sentence that kind of has that door open for you when you say it so for season two of my podcast reinvent yourself with Dr Tara I've actually focused on the new science of ancient wisdom yes so what's interesting to me about this one is that Buddhists have known forever replace every negative thought with a positive thought that is part Buddhism now fast forward tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years

Neuroscience says you can overwrite a negative you know thought or belief with a positive affirmation I mean Hello as long as you have magnetic desire attached to it and I think that's the piece that is really important here that there is this charge in the feeling around it that is really important for you to do the work to figure out for yourself you just have this way of explaining very dense things in a really inspiring and accessible way and I just love that about you Dr Tara I want to take a quick pause hear a

word from our sponsors who are bringing you this information at zero cost stay with us hey it's your friend Mel and I'm so excited because I can finally tell you about a free gift that I've been working on just for you it is a two-part video training called make it happen with Mel Robbins it teaches you how how you go from thinking about what you want to actually doing it and making it happen I'm doing this because I want to thank you thank you for being here with me on social media thank you for being

a fan of the Mel Robbins podcast you made us the fifth most followed podcast in the world last year wow so I poured my heart and soul into this free two-part video training just for you as a thank you I want to teach you how to apply everything that you're learning to make Real Results happen in your life life how do you jump in great question go to melrobbins.com makei happen last year when I did a training more than half a million of you took advantage of it this year's training is even better again go

to melrobbins.com make it happen welcome back I'm so glad that you're still here with us I'm Mel Robbins we're learning all about the science of intuition with the amazing neuroscientist and Senior lecturer at MIT Dr Tara schwart Bieber so as a PhD MD what's the first thing you do when you wake up so I I literally do live my life in in the way of everything that we've been discussing so I'm just going to tell you the truth please as soon as I am aware that I'm awake I snuggle my face against my silk pillowcase

and I say I love my silk pillowcase and then I say and I love my Sid sleeping pillow and I love my wool mattress topper and I love I've created a bit of a Haven in my bedroom I I I love this I'm like I'm right there with you so what else do you love let's keep going so grateful for my silk duvet I'm grateful for my mattress I'm grateful for my bedding um you know usually that's the minimum I might do the temperature in the room or how quiet it is um do you say

it out loud or do you just say it to yourself I say it in my mind um then I just do some deep breathing you know in kind of every direction of of my chest like it's a barrel and just have a feel for if there's any areas of tension um then to actually get out of bed I start thinking about how much I'm going to save in my cup of tea um and then I go downstairs and I take my probiotic and then I because I have to wait 10 minutes until I have my

cup of tea I do my oil pulling and then I make my cup of English breakfast tea or match a like a complete ritual and sit and really save for it and enjoy it um and then I pick up my phone and look at my messages how does this help you and how does this help your brain so I think the thing about this gratitude practice that's to do with the tangible things that around me is that it stops what usually happens to people is that you start thinking what do I have to do today

what time is it you know what what kind of what am I going to wear today and because I obviously I don't keep my phone in my bedroom I can't reach for that and start like getting bombarded by the outside world before I've had a chance to to set myself up how I want to there's a lot of scientific evidence for the benefits on your mental health and your health and your longevity of gratitude um so basically I'm not letting my my brain kick in I'm just doing I'm I'm going straight to the Gratitude so

I can't even think about anything else and of course then that makes me feel good already what are other key habits that you have as a neuroscientist throughout the day that continue to help your brain to thrive like this I'm going to be really honest with you you and say I'd prefer to start by going to the end of the day because those are the real key anchors for me and and I just want to keep it really real and say that there are days where I don't do anything else consciously in the rest of

the day and I just like live like you know just do my day um but I I will come back to there are some things so will'll come back to them but I would say second in importance is the fact that I have my vision board next to my bed so it's the last thing I look at at night let's talk about the vision board because you called it an action board yeah what why does a vision does a v vision board work I've been doing them for 15 years and I've manifested a lot of

things through my vision board like what what have you manifested through a vision board Dr Tara um so I started when I quit my job as a medical doctor and I started my coaching practice so I literally had no money no clients um got to the point where I wouldn't be able to pay my rent and my bills so at that stage I did include an actual amount of money that I needed to earn and so for the first three years of running my business I doubled that figure um each year and then after that

I just put symbols of abund abundance because I didn't like need it to be a specific amount I've manifested a lot of travel but sometimes spooky so I saw a picture of a tanned girl snorkeling and I love snorkeling so I put her on my vision board just to have like a a vacation that was that kind of vacation and um at this point I was single and I used to go on like Christmas vacation or Hol the holidays with my best friend who lived in Australia and we would often choose where to go because

I would see how many air miles I had and say oh I can get a flight to this place so so the year that we decided we would meet in Rio de Janeiro I was because that was the only flight that I could get with my points and I suddenly had this inkling that I hadn't been aware of and I went and looked at my vision board and in tiny writing under the snorkeling girl it said Rio de Janeiro I have so many more examples of things like that as well um well what I also

love about this is that you take it a step further and you don't say what a cool accident you say I manifested that and how how does a vision board which you call an action board MH program your brain for thriving so um it it is a vision board in the sense that most people will know what a vision board is but the difference is like I said about kind of you know quantum physics before I wrote it through cognitive science did give an idea that you should create this Vision either in your mind or

on a board of often it was quite Fantastical compared to what the person's life was actually like and I do believe it's got to be somewhat realistic um and then sit at home on the couch and wait for it to come true wait for the check to come in the post wait for you know the dream partner to bang your door down I just don't believe that that's possible I believe that you have to be out there doing things to move yourself towards those goals so that the board is simply a reminder to do the

selective filtering selective attention and value tagging to your brain to keep those things at the front of your mind and not let life get in the way cuz it's so easy to you know just get busy with kids and work and um forget you know not every day remember what's what's the what are the things that you want but if you're seeing the board every day then it does just help to bring it back to the front of your mind and also some people can't do visualization so especially for them actually having the visual images

like ready to look at allows you to get into that next step which is visualize it being true so close your eyes after looking at the board and immerse yourself in the feeling of those things actually being true like you're in Rio de Janeiro you're with your loving partner you're doing really well at work like feel that through your five senses and then give gratitude for the fact for that feeling of like wow you know with my eyes closed I can feel that I'm holding my partner's hand and our feet are in the sand in

Rio and we could afford this vacation because both doing really well at work cuzz what you're really summoning is that magnetic energy that you talked about like what's actually happening in your body and in your mind when you go through this process of creating a vision board and then visualizing it and allowing the wave of gratitude associated with that happening to fill your body what happens in your brain so when you visualize something really strongly and you integrate your senses your brain can hardly tell the difference between that being true and that being a created

Feeling by you and because anything new is the biggest threat to the brain uncertainty and Novelty are the biggest threats to the brain the more you visualize and embody the thing that you want the more likely you are to take healthy risks to get it when it appears around you in the real world so when you're feeling fear or shame or sadness your blood is circulating a lot more of the stress hormone cortisol when you're feeling love and trust and gratitude you're circulating a lot more of the bonding hormone oxytocin and those hormones are kind

of on a seesaw so if you're giving gratitude then you're um improving the release of oxytocin and that's relatively reducing the stress hormone so basically love or gratitude trust those sorts of things can't can't coexist with fear and shame and sadness so the more you push your brain into those emotions which correlate with that hormone the less you're living in that state of fright flight and scarcity so simply visualizing and feeling that wave of emotion that comes from being grateful for the visualization of something that hasn't happened yet coming true changes the chemical balance in

your body when you are immers in that feeling you know and and and think of a couple of the things that you'd like to happen right now and how good it would feel if they were true you'll release dopamine the reward chemical so that's very that has a you know really strong impact on your body then when you move it into and now I'm giving gratitude for that then you're also releasing oxytocin um so you've got this cocktail of like really feel-good hormones what is one mistake that people make when they are making a vision

board I have now learned to leave a lot of space on my board because I don't believe that my brain is capable of knowing how much I could manifest in this world so I love to leave a bit of room for magic in the book where I do the chapter on actually how to make the board I say you know get the the board lay the images onto it um really ask yourself do I want everything that's an image on there and if there's something that you thought you wanted but it doesn't resonate remove it

have another flick through the magazines and if there's an image that isn't something that you thought you wanted but it really speaks to you try fitting that in leave it overnight and I specifically said in a windproof childproof that proof place um and then come back the next day after having slept on it and if you're sure that it's correct then glue it into place and then I start speaking to people who say to me yeah I've done all that but I just haven't glued it yet and and so I said oh you know did

you do it yes yesterday no months ago and I just can't bring myself to glue it down I don't understand why and I had you know having been an experienced coach now for 15 years I just had the answer to that just came into my mind through my gut and it was you don't want to glue it down because you don't really believe that you deserve it and the tears just came you know and it was it was the truth so it was these are the things that I want but if I glue them down

I'm saying that I actually think I should get them and deep down I don't believe that and that's why I haven't gled them down so you might be listening now and think oh yeah I've done that too but I didn't really know why so hopefully it will help what is the act of gluing signal to your brain in terms about what you want and would you do that gratitude wash as you're doing it as a way to tap into magnetic energy because that's probably very thick old wiring I actually said that to somebody recently where

I was like I don't even want to tell you that because I'm I feel like in like scared to say I want that thing yeah yeah yeah I I feel like if you're gluing it down you really mean it right um and so if there's hesitation that could be hard I have never thought of this before but your idea is brilliant if you do it whilst giving gratitude it'll probably make it feel much easier it's a bit more like I'll just be so grateful if this comes true and and I'm you know I'm happy to

partially put it out there and partially make the effort to do it when I had my first one you know when I was really broke um it was in I was living in a studio apartment and it was in the bathroom which meant that anyone that came to my studio would see it and it had a specific amount of money on it and it's very unri to talk about money and it how much money was on it 35,000 so really not very much um and so I thought okay this is a bit embarrassing but then

I thought well anyone that I actually invite into my you know apartment who who then uses my bathroom has got to be a close friend so so that just has to be okay and I got so much positive feedback from people saying oh yeah I looked at your vision board and you know um I can help you with that thing that I saw and it's it was so sweet I I can hear everybody now moving their vision boards from their bedside table to the bathroom okay we're going to put this right in the bathroom what

are some of the other habits that you have every day that keep you resilient that keep your brain wired for thriving okay so I would say my next one which is sort of like a ritual too but also so very good for your stress levels is that I bathe in magnesium flakes huh why is that good for stress because when you're stressed your body leeches itself with magnesium so magnesium helps you deal with stress but it also gets used up in stress and the best way to take magnesium is Through Your Skin rather than through

a capsule or a tablet really and so I find the easiest way you know with English weather is to bathe um there are also gels and sprays and lotions that you can use but I I like the uh ritual of bathing um so a little bit like when you're training for a marathon and you would eat more protein when you're stressed you need more magnesium and the best way to check if you need more magnesium is if you ever get that Twitchy eyelid yes I've had that yeah well some people get tiny Twitches in their

fingers or their toes as well but the eyelid is quite a good sign that you probably need to top up with magnesium because it's a sign that you're stressed well the I the twitching is an actual sign of magnesium deficiency but the reason you would be deficient is probably stress wow nobody's ever told me that before and it happens quite a lot well try try the B you can do a foot bath if you don't like a bath oh I I take a bath every night I love a bath but I've never done the Magnesium

flakes I am doing it so you take a bath with magnesium what's something else that you do um so so so by this time it's getting close to the time that I would eat because I do Tim restricted eating so I only eat between 12: noon and 8:00 p.m. um so you know I would obviously deal with any work admin or home admin that I have to but then I would I would cook while we're on the topic of food what are the four foods that you eat for better brain health yeah so the first

thing I would say is that I make all of my dietary choices based on brain health um and if you think about it people choose what they might eat based on you know it's delicious or I'm trying to lose weight or I'm trying to build muscle but I feel quite strongly that if you make your choices based on brain health then it's actually good for your skin your hair your gut the rest of your body so um on that I would say the dark- skinned Foods I've already mentioned hydrating Foods because you actually keep in

more hydration from food than you do from drinking water so you know your leafy greens and your salads kind of thing um and maybe like fruits like melon and then the good fats this is the probably the largest part of my dietary intake so um oily fish eggs avocado nuts seeds mhm and the fourth category is fermented foods like kimchi sauerkraut Keir and kombucha what I love is that at the very beginning of our conversation you talked about the fact that our brain really was wired for survival m and mating and that you are teaching

us strategies based on cognitive science based on Neuroscience based on all of this research about how to program your mind for thriving for longevity for happiness and every one of these examples whether you're talking about the ways in which you can use this magnetic energy and these deliberate practices to wire your mind for thriving and attracting and spotting what you want or whether you're now talking about the deliberate things you say to yourself and the deliberate practices and actions that you are creating in the morning you are showing us exactly what you're doing to make

your brain function in a way that helps you thrive I would love to talk to you about intuition I mean you teach a course at MIT called the science of intuition what do we need to know about intuition so it's so interesting because I've been teaching at MIT Sloan for 10 years now and 10 years ago people would stand up in the class and say okay this is really interesting but I'm obviously not going to make an important decision like fire or higher based on intuition and what I did see was that the older people

would say well actually I that's exactly how I would make that decision and I've seen that change over time which is so nice which is now that more people get it and it's just because I've just explained the simple simple science so um there's a process in the brain called heian learning it's named after the neuroscientist Donald Hebb and it's basically neurons that fire together wire together and so the things that we need what we call our working memory to live every day are kind of like held at the top of our mind the things

that have become um like habits and behavior patterns they've been pushed deeper into the sort of the lyic system of the brain which is the size of your fist and it's in the center surrounded by the cortex but also apart from formal learning you pick up life lessons you've picked them up throughout your whole life right wisdom but you can't remember everything that you've experienced in your whole life but that learning has been pushed deeper into your brain stem your spinal cord and your gut neurons and there is a massive connection between your gut neurons

and your lmic system which is where your intuition um and your wisdom you know arises from in the brain and so that's basically how intuition works so you're tapping into your lifetime of wisdom and knowledge that has been push down from your conscious mind all the way through your brain down through the neurons that connect the brain and the gut into your gut so it's basically like tapping the eyecloud of your body and your history yeah how does somebody learn how to trust their gut for me journaling was the absolute key to that so journaling

and reading back over your entries so you know every time you make a decision whether you made it by Logic or intuition whether they aligned or not recording that but then also seeing the patterns over the last three months the last 6 months so that's how how I honed my intuition but I think people will remember this more when you're stressed when you're bloated when you've got like indigestion symptoms isn't it true that you find it harder to access your intuition that's how connected the brain and the gut are can you talk about how high

levels of stress impact the functioning of your body and your brain so cortisol is known as the stress hormone and it absolutely correlates with emotions such as fear anger disgust shame and sadness cortisol isn't all bad you know we need it to wake up in the morning we need it to have an Adaptive stress response to you know a car driving too fast on the street that we're trying to cross um so as long as it stays within that range that's fine but when something super stressful happens like the saber-tooth tiger you know that we

spoke about earlier the cortisol level will Spike and that enables us to run away to warn our tribe and it should go back to normal levels you know quite quickly in the modern day as I mentioned earlier we're so overwhelmed with information there are so many psychological threats to our safety that it's most people unfortunately the levels are high and they're either at the higher end or higher and that's pretty constant whereas they should be you know kind of undulating through between that range when that happens because cortisol is carried in the blood supply around

the body and it crosses the blood rain barrier there are receptors in the brain that monitor the levels of cortisol in a way to sense threat in our environment when those levels are high most of the time or all the time or higher than the the you know higher end of the threshold the brain immediately thinks I'm about to die what is the biggest threat to my survival and in some ways because it's from so long ago we're wired in such a you know cave person way the first threat that the brain will consider is

starvation even though that's for most of us thank goodness not the biggest threat to our survival in fact quite the opposite so to try to protect us from dying of starvation one of the things that cortisol does is lay down extra fat in the abdominal fat cells so that if we are unable to hunt or gather for some time we can digest that fat and stay alive until a food source becomes available wait so are you saying that stress is causing belly fat yeah it's not just causing fat it's specifically causing belly fat so you

may not have changed your shape in the rest of your body but if you're noticing that your belt has become tighter that's a sign that you could have chronic cortisol and the other thing is that it's fat that's particularly stubborn so if you do notice that the belt is Tighter and you think okay I definitely need to move a bit more or eat a bit less and actually start doing one or both of those things but the belly fat doesn't change because the cortisol is driving the fat there regardless of your behavior um in the

physical world and that's all initiated in the brain because the brain is picking up on higher levels a cortisol yeah how does high levels of stress impact the functioning of your brain so I'm going to do brain and body if that's okay yeah so so this think of this cortisol as a corrosive agent that's literally flowing through your entire brain and body so in the body it starts to erode your immunity so you might notice more colds and flu more often or ones that last for weeks and weeks I mean I certainly remember during the

financial crisis when I worked with a lot of banks and hedge funds people saying you I've had this cold for four 6 8 weeks but but everybody has it and and I had to say to them do do you hear what you're saying that that it's not normal to have a cold for 6 weeks um and this is cortisol and at the extreme end of that people were dropping dead of heart attacks on trading floors so you know lowering your immunity and corroding your body that much can cause everything from colds and flu to heart

attacks and Cancers in the brain what happens is what I call low power mode like on your phone so once those receptors know there's an imminent threat to our survival think of the highest functions of the brain thinking creatively thinking flexibly solving complex problems overriding our biases and regulating our emotions what what are how are those going to serve us now that we're just just trying to survive physically we don't need those things don't send any blood supply to those higher functions bring it right down to get up in the morning go and sit at

your desk look like you're doing your job even if you actually can't really do it this is the reason that presenteeism costs businesses more than double what absenteeism does in that low power mode it would be better to stay at home for two days and recover and then come back to work and actually function and you know work with your team um because stress impairs the higher functioning of the brain it just moves the blood supply away from it because you're not going to give up your precious resources for functions like that and and just

to um put that into context for you Mel the brain is a tiny organ it's you know it's a tiny percentage of your whole body like maybe 2 or 3% but it's it uses up 20 to 30% of the breakdown products of what you eat wow yeah that's how hard it's working it's using up 20% of what you ate that day when you're asleep it's using up 25% of what you eat when you're working managing leading running your family um you know just thinking like right now we're probably both using 25% but if you're stressed

it's using 30% what uh Dr Tara is stress contagion so let's take this back to a couple of evolutionary mechanisms okay so when we lived in the cave we lived in tribes and we were either really quite nomadic or at least the men would go off to hunt for a few days and then you know return to the cave but at the more extreme end of being nomadic if the men went off Hunting and they went so far that they came to another Cave of the same tribe they would actually just stay there and never

return to the original cave um so think back to what I mentioned about survival and reproduction in those days that was it that was the only important you know they were the the only important things so before leaving a cave the alpha male had to make sure that his genes would survive in that cave in case he never came back and in those days with predators and hypothermia and you know obviously like miscarriage and still birth and stuff like that he really had to impregnate five women to make sure that at least one of the

babies would survive so to be able to make sure that five women would get pregnant at the same time they had to be fertile at the same time and that's why we had menstrual synchronization and obviously we don't need that there's an evolutionary reason for syncing up your menstrual cycle yeah wow let's just start with how we synchronize first okay so that is because steroid hormones such as the sex steroid hormones estrogen and progesterone okay leak out of your skin through your sweat wait what estrogen leaks out of your skin through your sweat yeah the

way that it works is through physical proximity so obviously in the cave we slept in a huddle mhm so if you live with your daughters or you work in a you know office with a lot of other women and you're in close proximity with each other then then because your you know sweat leaks out around you about this far around your body then well hold on a second for people on YouTube they saw about a foot oh sweat leaks out a foot from your body well okay try not wearing antiperspirant and smelling how far you

can smell your I guess that's right because I'm not thinking about the fact that the odor is actually you emitting something yeah oh does that happen with stress too so yeah oh wait let's say cycle sinking I'm sorry I'm so fascinated by this I think we've kind of done that we've said that we recognize it as a phenomenon I've given you the evolutionary reason we've talked about the physiological mechanism of it so what I want to do now is bring that same physiological mechanism to regardless of gender cortisol is also a steroid hormone oh and

but there's so there's no gender issue here but there is a hierarchical issue so the Silverback gorillas stress levels affect the other gorillas more than gorillas of the same status and so it happens in business and so it happens in the home the leader in quot marks of the entity their stress levels will impact other people more than the other way around or people of equal status so you know the highly stressed boss as an example the the highly stressed parent interesting yeah well it makes sense because if you think about it whether it's in

the example of the silver back or you take a family system or you take a work system that if the person in charge of your paycheck is stressed out that that their stress is a direct threat to your financial survival and that's why it triggers you like that and so that makes a lot of sense that stress would be contagious and affect everybody around you so if stress is contagious how do you protect yourself from other people's stuff um well I think the answer to that is both how do you reduce your own stress if

you're the stressed person and how do you protect yourself from other people's stress it's mostly through mindfulness activi so activities that connect the brain and the body because like I said the the glands in the brain are talking to the adrenal glands and creating this stress situation so the way to decrease their activity is through activities like meditation yoga time in nature um journaling gratitude all of those things that reduce levels of cortisol move your autonomic nervous system which is a nervous system in your body rather than your brain from sympathetic which is Fright flight

fight to parasympathetic which is rest and recover um and you know lower your heartbeat lower your blood pressure so simply lowering your own stress insulates you from other people's stress yes but with both versions of it whether it's your own or others addressing the root cause is important because what you don't want to be doing is just continually shielding yourself from something that's not changing and the reason why this is important if we bring it back to the brain and your ability to keep your brain in a mode for thriving and helping you attract what

you want is because when stress levels are crazy high it impairs your brain's ability to do the higher functioning because the blood goes somewhere else yeah so interesting what impact do your friends have on your brain so have you had that phrase you're the sum of The Five People You spend most time with yes so we do believe from a neuroscience perspective that you have a tribe that influences your behaviors so for instance if your you know immediate friend group is overweight then you're more likely to be overweight and this is not because it's contagious

in the sense of what we've discussed before but because of what becomes socially acceptable so again like if most of your friends are really into exercise and healthy eating then it's more likely that you're going to be like that as well but there are some stats on social contagion um that for example things like if someone in your Social Circle gets divorced you're more likely to get divorced now again it's not because it's contagious but it's because if your relationship was already struggling but everybody else in your group was married and it felt shameful to

be you know the one to break that then if someone else does it's almost like you then have a choice of either staying in a relationship that's not working or deciding that actually it's okay to to end it h um does it work in the positive meaning yeah yeah absolutely so because I tend to hear that the examples of the negative right that if you are around smokers you'll smoke if you're around drinkers you drink but it works in the positive ways too as a neuroscientist mdphd is there anything that we can do to motivate

or change other people is absolutely anyone capable of changing yes any age any stage any mindset um and I get a lot of questions from people who are neurod Divergent and neuroplasticity literally is hope for people and what is the biggest barrier to somebody changing not wanting to so when people are like when people come to you with excuses and time and self-doubt and past stuff and neurod diger like every excuse in the book for you as a neuroscientist it still comes down to not wanting to well or you know not and that sounded very

negative so I'll give you like I I actually don't think it did because I I believe you're saying something extremely profound and way deeper than a desire to change at the surface level yeah because you have very clearly stated Dr Tara that from a from a neuroscience standpoint absolutely any human being can change your brain structure can change in three different ways that your brain can be rewired to align with the person that you want to become the behaviors you want to exhibit the mindset that you want to have it is scientifically proven it is

possible we have the evidence there's no debate here MH when you say the word whether or not somebody wants to MH can we go about seven layers deeper and can you explain what you're talking about and and that was very much the answer to you know the biggest barrier so there are obviously other things as well but it's easy to say not wanting to but it's that that there's a reason that deep down they believe that they shouldn't be doing this thing and and the cutest reason I can think of is when I was working

with a dad um who was a banker and he had become quite overweight as well and he wanted to get back to his running which was like three times a week half an hour and he said to me but you know Tara I got married late in life and we had a child later in life and I feel terribly guilty about not spending all my spare time with my child I work long hours already and so I said you know what I completely get it you would have to think that taking one and a half

hours a week out of a way from your son is going to make you a better dad otherwise you're never going to do it and I'm not even going to try and make help you to do that if that's what you believe and he just suddenly said of course it's going to make me a better dad cuz it's going to make me live longer cuz right now in my state of health I don't know if I'm even going to see him turn 18 and it was just like that and and I'm I'm not saying I

make that kind of change with my clients all the time but I just knew there was no point trying anything else if he thought it was going to make him a worse dad he just was not going to do it um but when he had that Insight himself he yeah he started running and um you kept it up for a long time and like lost all that weight and it was really lovely that makes what you're basically talking about is having it tied to your deepest value yeah in life and that's a super clear example

what final words do you have for the person listening I really want people to realize how amazing their brains are and how much potential they still have in their brain regardless of you know the age they're at or the job they're in or um I think for me the thing I'm most passionate about is helping people get unstuck and so a new way that I've I've got people to ask themselves the question that gets them unstuck is when was the last time you were really seen for being who you want to be and what's the

first small step that you can take to get back to that beautiful well Dr Tara thank you so much for being here for giving us such specific actionable strategies that we can use in our life starting right now tonight tomorrow I'm grabbing my glue gun I'm making another fishing board it is time um but I just want to thank you with all of my heart it was just absolutely fantastic to finally meet you in person and to learn from you and to be in your spirit and in your presence and I just love everything we

learned today so thank you you're an amazing interviewer and it's like I said to you offline like I admire you so much and I'm so Greatful that I got to be interviewed by you oh well we're we're the beneficiary of that and I want to be sure that you know as you're listening to us in case nobody else tells you I wanted to tell you that I love you I believe in you and I believe your ability to take everything that you learn today and get serious about training and wiring your mind for abundance for

thriving for success for happiness you now have the strategies the tools the things you need to eat to do that so go do it and I'll talk to you in a few [Applause] days I would like you to teach Mel about menstrual synchronization it's about to happen we better buy some tampons right and some Diva cups okay oh M awesome well we'll have to do more together yeah it do for sure that's for sure that's for sure we loved meeting you we loved being with you so proud of what you're all achieving like in a

man's world is really special thank you thank you and for you here with me on YouTube in case nobody else tells you I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you I believe in you and I believe in your ability to create a better life and I know that everything that you learned today from The Amazing Dr Tara is going to help you do that if you haven't subscribed to our Channel yet do not make me Manifest this just do it I am asking you for what you can do to support me

so please please please because your support helps me bring amazing people like Dr Tara to you at zero cost and if you love this conversation with Dr Tara just go right here to Dr Daniel aan one of the leading experts on the brain on the planet and five simple ways to improve your brain health