(Major Discovery) No.1 Neuroscientist: Anxiety Is Just A Predictive Error In The Brain!

There are these experiments where they trained people to experience anxiety but as determination because exactly the same physical state could be experienced completely different. And what they discovered is that at first it's really hard but you practice practice practice and then eventually becomes really automatic. So the first thing to understand is that Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett is a worldleading neuroscientist. Her groundbreaking research reveals that emotions like anxiety and trauma are built by the brain and we have the power to control them. The story is that you're born with these innate emotion circuits, but you're not

born with the ability to control them. That's false. Really, what's happening is that your brain is not reacting. It's predicting. And every action you take, every emotion you have is a combination of the remembered past, including any trauma. And so, you don't have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically, faster than you can blink your eyes. How does this change how we should treat trauma? Sometimes in life, you are responsible for changing something. Not because you're to blame, but because you're the only person who can. I mean, I had a daughter

who was clinically depressed, was getting D's in school, she wasn't sleeping, she was miserable. At first, she was so resistant, but then she made the decision that she wanted to be helped. And did she recover? Yes, she did. So, if you want to change who you are, what you feel, understanding these basic operating principles is the key to living a meaningful life. So, what is step one to being able to make that change? So, this has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribe to

the show. So, could I ask you for a favor before we start? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power, me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guest that you want me to speak to and we'll continue

to do what we do. Thank you so much. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, you have a really remarkable twisting career journey. It's almost quite difficult to uh encapsulate in a particular mission or a particular uh summary of the journey you've been on and the the twists and turns you've taken. But if if I were to ask you now what mission you're on with the work that you're currently doing, are you able to summarize that? My goal is as a science communicator is to try to take really complicated science and present it in a way that people

can use. You know, maybe they use it to entertain their friends at a dinner party. Maybe they use it to um help their kid who's, you know, struggling with depression. That was certainly in my case something that I had to deal with. Maybe they're using it to improve their workplace or improve the productivity of their of their peeps or whatever. The point being that that's ultimately that's what science is for. It's for, you know, living a better life. And average everyday people without PhDs can do that if they have the right information. I'm probably attempting

to understand how it is that a brain like ours that is attached to a body like ours that is pickled in a world like ours produces a mind. What is it? What is happening that allows you to have thoughts and feelings and memories um and and actions and somebody from another country, another culture also has a mental life which looks nothing like yours. How is it that the same kind of brain plan with the same general kind of body plan can produce such different types of minds when they are when those brains are wired in

a sense finish wiring themselves in cultural and physical contexts that are so widely different. when you just talked about your pursuit of understanding how a brain like ours creates the mind and the reality that we have. If I'm able to understand all of that as many people who read your book about the brain and emotions were able to understand, what is it that it offers me in my everyday life? Oh my god. It offers you the opportunity to have more agency in your life. And what does that mean? It means you have more choice. It

means you have more control. It means that you can architect your life. I mean, you can't control everything that happens to you. You can't control every moment of feeling. Um, but you have more control than you probably think you do. Everybody has more control over what they feel and what they do than they think they do. That control doesn't look the way we expect it to. It's much harder to harness than we would like it to be. Some people have more opportunities for that control than other people do, but everybody has the opportunity to have

more control. And of course, the flip side is also more responsibility um for the way they live their lives. And I think that's a really good thing. And I think it's a really good thing now when you know world events are swirling around you and you feel like, you know, you're just being buffeted around. Even within that craziness, there is there are opportunities to to be more of an architect of your own experience and your own life. I think a lot of people find that um optimistic and helpful. Yeah. Because life can feel like we

are a puppet and we are just responding to what happens around us. And if it rains outside then we're sad. If person sends us a message, then we're annoyed and that we're just these sort of reactive creatures reacting to whatever happens around us. But you're telling me that if I have a greater understanding of the brain and how it works and emotions, then I can seize back some of that control and live a more intentional life. Yes, exactly. And I think for me, I mean, I started um I started my career studying the nature of

emotion, but really it became a flashlight into understanding how a brain works. Why do we even have a brain? It's a very expensive organ. That piece of meat between your ears is the most expensive metabolically the most expensive organ you have. Um, so what's it good for? What's its most basic function? How does it work in relation to the body? I think that certainly on your show, you've had a number of people who talk about the relationship between the brain and the body in some way, but I think scientists for a long time forgot or

ignored the fact that the brain is attached to a body, right? Because we don't feel all the drama like right now in each in you, in me, in all of our listeners, right? We all have this like drama going on. It's really quite intense and there's a lot of going on and none of us are aware of it. I hope if you are aware of it, I'm really sorry. It probably means that something is, you know, you're not feeling well today. But it's a good thing that we're not aware of what's going on inside our

own bodies most of the time because we'd never pay attention to anything outside our own skin again, right? But the problem is that in science, it often begins with starting with your own subjective experience and then trying to formalize that. And I mean, if you look at any science, physics is like that, too. You just have to go back several hundred years or maybe a little longer to to see it. And so, it turns out that a lot of what you experience as properties of the world, of the way the world is, really is very

rooted in your brain's regulation of your body. Um, and so I guess I'm I started with emotion, but it really became a much larger project to try to understand, well, what is a brain? How is it structured? How did it evolve? How does it work? What's its most basic function? And where do thoughts and feelings and actions, perceptions, what role do they play in that function? So, it's a bit flipping the question, right? Most people start with what is an emotion? What is a thought? What is a memory? They define it and then they go

looking for its physical basis in the brain or in the body. That's a pretty bankrupt perspective from I mean after a hundred years there weren't really good answers. So we flipped it around and we said okay well given that we have the kind of brain we do what can it do? What does it do? And in its normal functioning, how does it produce mental events that in our culture our thoughts and feelings and perceptions and actions? In other cultures, they're different conglomerations of features. Right? So for us, a thought and a feeling are super distinct.

We experience them as very separate. In fact, really since the time of Plato, we've had this kind of narrative where, you know, the mind or the brain is a battleground between your thoughts and your feelings, right? In for control of your action. If your thoughts win, you are a rational creature. You are a healthy creature. You are a moral creature. If your instincts and your emotions win, you know, your inner beast, then you are irresponsible. You are childish. You are immoral. You are mentally ill. That's the narrative that we work in. In some cultures, thoughts

and feelings are not separate. They are really, it's not that you have them at the same time. It's that they are one thing. They are features of the same mental event. In some cultures, your body and your mind are not separate. There are no separate experiences for a physical sensation versus a mental feeling. They're really one thing. So our minds are not the human nature. It's just one human nature. And there are other human natures too. And we have to figure out how general brain plan, a general body plan for a neurotypical human produces such

wide variation um depending on the cultural context in which it grows. as it relates to neuroscience and understanding the brain and the way that we create reality. Was there a Eureka moment for you where you realize that most of us have it wrong or that there's an underlying misconception about the way that our brain creates our reality? I would say yeah sure there was a Eureka moment but it was a long slow burn. When I was a graduate student, I wasn't studying emotion. I was studying the self. How do you think about yourself? What is

your self-esteem like? How do you conceive of yourself? Right? This is a an important topic in psychology. And I was measuring emotion as an outcome variable. And the measurements weren't weren't the measures weren't working. And I thought, well, I need to be able to just literally objectively measure when someone is angry or when they're sad or when they're happy. I don't want to have to ask them because they could be wrong. And in that phrasing of the question, there's a presumption, right, that there is an objective state called anger. That generally most instances of anger

will look the same regardless of person and context. And I very quickly realized that there are no essences that anybody's been able to discover. Right? So recently in the last couple of years um researchers did a metaanalysis which is a big statistical summary of of hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of experiments. And what they discovered is that and this is just in urban cultures, right? We're not even talking about remote cultures now. Just in urban cultures, when someone is angry, they people scowl about 35% of the time when they're angry. A scowl is like a

like a scowl like a right like you know you knit your eyebrows, you you frown, right? So it's okay. But that means 65% of the time when people are angry they're doing something else that's meaningful with their face. And half the time when people scowl, they're not angry. They're feeling something else. They could be concentrating really hard. You could have just told them a bad joke. They could have a bad bout of gas. You know, a scowl is not the expression of anger. It is an expression of anger in some contexts and it's also an

expression of other states in other contexts. So what this means is that you know there's no really strongly reliable expression for anger that is specific to anger. And the same is true for every other emotion that's ever been studied. It's really clear that you're in anger or sadness or pick an emotion. You know your heart rate can go up, it can go down. It can stay the same. Your blood pressure can go up. It can go down. It can stay the same. the physiology that is occurring in your body is related to the your your

brain's preparation for particular behaviors. So let's start with that then. So the the predictive brain is this idea that I only pretty much know from you. I'd never heard it before. When we say the predictive brain, what does that mean and what does it not mean? So when you are living your everyday life? Yeah. Like right now? Like right now. So, right now, I'm guessing that I'm saying things to you and um you're perceiving what I'm saying and then you're reacting to it. That's how it feels to you, right? Yes. Okay. And that's how it

feels to me, too. So, we sense and then we react. That's the way most people experience themselves in the world. That's not actually what's happening under the hood. Really what's happening is that the brain, your brain is not reacting, it's predicting. And what that means is if we were to stop time right now, just freeze time, your brain would be in a state and it would be remembering past experiences that are similar to this state as a way of predicting what to do next. Like literally in the next moment, should your eyes move? Should your

heart rate go up? Should your breathing change? Should your blood vessels dilate or should they constrict? Should you prepare to stand? Right? Movements. And these movements, the preparation for movement, literal copies of those signals become predictions for what you will see and hear and smell and taste and think and feel. So under the hood, your brain is predicting what movements it should engage in next and as a consequence what you will experience because of those movements. So you act first and then you sense. You don't sense and then react. You predict action and then you

sense. So give me a example which brings this to light of how my brain is predicting and then taking action. Okay. So right now you and I are having a conversation and I'm speaking and you're listening and you're what what what's really happening in your brain is that based on many gazillion repetitions of listening to language. Your brain is predicting, literally predicting every single word that will come out of my Yeah. Okay. And how surprising would it have been if I didn't say mouth, I said some other orifice of my body that words were coming

out of. That would have been pretty surprising because your brain is predicting that. your brain is always predicting and it's correcting those predictions when they're incorrect. And you know, I I have this um video that I often show when I'm giving a talk to scientists or to civilians, giving a talk and I I it creates a situation where they can predict something and they can they can feel that a prediction is not just this abstract kind of thought. It's your brain is is literally changing the firing of its own sensory neurons to anticipate incoming sensation.

So you start to feel these sensations before the signals actually arrive for you to perceive them. You start to have the experience before the world gives you those signals. I read I think it was in your book but it might have been elsewhere about the example of being thirsty. Yes. So, um, when you, um, drink, so say you're super thirsty and you drink a big glass of water, when do you stop being thirsty? Almost immediately. But actually, it takes 20 minutes for that water to be absorbed into your bloodstream and make its way to the

brain to tell the brain that you are no longer in need of fluid. Because across millions of opportunities, you have learned that certain movements now and certain um sensory signals now will result in that mental state. Or here's another example. So right now, keep your eyes on me. You're looking right at me. And in your mind's eye, I want you to imagine um a Macintosh apple. Like a not a computer, but like an actual piece of fruit. Okay. Can you do it? Yeah. Can you see it? Yeah. Um what color is it? Green. Okay. Does

it have any red? No. Okay. So, it's a Granny Smith apple. Yeah. Okay. What does it taste like? Like, imagine imagine grabbing it. Yeah. biting into it, hearing the crunch of the apple. What does it taste like? It's like sweet. Like a little tart, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is it juicy? It's very juicy. Yeah. Okay. So, if I were imaging your brain right now, what I would see is I would see changes in the signal that is um related to neural activity in your visual cortex even though there is no apple in front of you.

And I would see a change in activity in your um auditory cortex even though you didn't really hear the crunch. My mouth is watering as well. And your mouth is watering. And in fact, every time you sit down for a meal, your um brain directs your saliva glands to produce more saliva to prepare you to eat and um digest the food. So that usually happens in advance of even sitting down to a meal. That is all prediction. That's all of that is your brain preparing itself for what's coming. Um because predicting and correcting is a

much more efficient way to run a nervous system, really any system, than reacting to the world. Here's another example. Do you drink coffee? Yes. Okay. Do you drink coffee every day at the same time? Usually. Yeah. Okay. And are you one of these people that if you miss having coffee at that time, you get a headache? I mean, it's happened before. Yes. Well, I used to be a person who drank a lot of coffee. And um and I love coffee, but I don't drink it anymore. But I loved it. And I drank it always at

the same time every day. And if I didn't drink it, I would get a at that time of day, I would get a massive headache. And the reason why, and this is true really of every medicine you take, every everything which anything which affects your physiology, if you do it on a regular basis, your brain will come to expect it. And what that means, come to expect it, is that coffee has chemicals in it that will constrict your blood vessels um everywhere. But in the brain, the brain is attempting to keep its to keep the

blood flow pretty constant and even. And so if every day at 8:00 in the morning, you're drinking something that's going to constrict your blood vessels, then at 7:55 approximately, I don't know the exact timing, but a little bit before uh you know, 8, your brain will dilate the blood vessels in preparation for that constriction. So they remain constant and if you don't drink that substance then you have this big dilation and you get a very very bad headache. I was just wondering then about as you were talking I thought you were going to talk about

how sometimes when I set an alarm I seem to wake up like 5 minutes before the alarm. Yeah, sure. That's an example. Here's another example. Exercise. Okay. If you wanna if you want to play tennis better, if you want to run a a faster mile, what do you do? Train. Train. And you do the same thing over and over and over and over again. And you get better and faster and you burn fewer calories. You get more efficient. Why? Because your brain is predicting really well. That's what muscle memory is. It's not literally a memory

in your muscles. It's a memory in your brain. Your brain is controlling your muscles. And so if you practice the same set of movements over and over and over again, you just get really efficient at them because your brain is able to predict better. Now, if you're somebody who's exercising because you want to become healthier or you want to lose weight or you right, you don't want to practice the same exercise over and over and over again because you will be burning fewer calories because you're being efficient. That's the goal, right? So instead, you do

interval training, right? If somebody's calling out to you every 30 seconds a different set of movements and you can't predict what they are, then your your brain will make a prediction. It'll be wrong. You'll have to adjust and so you end up burning more calories and you end up throwing yourself out of balance um which we call alostasis. So you become disregulated and then you your brain has to work to get itself back in again. And so that's a different kind of workout. These two different kinds of workouts are completely predicated on the fact that

sometimes you want to be able to predict better. Sometimes you want to be able to disrupt yourself and get back into the pocket quickly. Right? So basically you're learning how to um take in prediction error things signals you didn't predict and adjust to them. What does this say about the nature of trauma and other mental health illnesses like depression, anxiety, etc. Because is this a misfiring of my predictions? I say this because predictions reliant on something happening in the past and forming a pattern like a pattern recognition system. So if I grew up and there

were certain patterns that are now not the case, so if I grew up and every time a man walked into the room, he hit me. And now when a man walks into the room and I'm 35 years old, I'm getting that same sort of prediction in my brain. So I've got a fear of men, for example. Is this does this somewhat explain childhood trauma and why it's so hard to shake and why as adults we can sometimes have dysfunctional lives? I would say as a general principle, yes. Um there are a lot of you know

the devil is in the details, right? But yeah, sure. Um, so trauma is not something that happens in the world to you. Everything you experience is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. So there could be an adverse event that occurs. You're in an earthquake. Someone dies who's close to you. Something bad happens to you. Someone hurts you in some way. Um, there could be an adverse event that is not traumatic to you because you're not you're not using past experiences to make sense of it as a trauma. On the other hand,

something that is could be like an everyday experience to somebody else to you, it links to a a set of memories that are very traumatic. We're very traumatic. those events were very traumatic. Um, and so to you it is a trauma. So trauma is not an objective thing in the world. It's also not all in your head. It's a rel trauma is a property of the relation between what has happened to you in the past and what is occurring in the present. So here's an example. There is an anthropologist who works at Emory University and

she studies um people um in in a lot of different cultures and she studies trauma in a lot of different cultures. And there was this one girl that she she wrote about, a case study of a girl named Maria um who was a young adolescent girl and she lived in a culture where it was more normative for men to physically be very physical with women and and girls. So in our culture, we would we would say it's physical abuse, but in her culture, this is just what men did. She didn't exper would slap her around

and she didn't like it, but she didn't show any sign of trauma. The way she made sense of it was that men are just It was very much a this is not about me, this is about them. It's not pleasant. But she slept okay. Her grades were okay in school. She had friends. She didn't have any signs of trauma at all. Then she watched Oprah and she heard all of these women talk about having been the subject of physical abuse from their boyfriends or their fathers or, you know, their husbands. And she recognized the similarity

in the physical circumstances of these women's descriptions and and her physical circumstances. And she also observed them experiencing traum traum like you know symptoms of trauma. And all of a sudden she started to um have difficulty sleeping and she her grades dropped and she had trouble concentrating and she became socially withdrawn. her way of making meaning, her way of, if you think about physical movements as actions, she made different meaning of those actions and she experienced trauma where she didn't before. Now, if you're somebody who believes that there is an objective world out there where,

you know, cause and effect, Yeah. that that really there was some kind of latent trauma in her and she didn't experience it before but then it was like triggered and then she be you could tell a whole story like that and people do tell whole stories like that but that's not what the best scientific evidence suggests is happening. What's happening is that the physical movements were the same. The psychological experience of those movements was different because experience is a combination of the sensory present, the physical present and the remembered past. And the you need both

in order to have a particular kind of experience. So the way to describe what happened to Maria's trajectory was that she experienced something as an unfortunate aspect of like physical life and then it became about her. It became something not not this person was doing something bad but this person was doing something bad to her because of who she is. And she was also shown how she should be responding to that by watching Oprah's show and watching these other individuals responding in a certain way. Right? So it became about her as a person, not just

about, you know, her stepfather was an And if you think about it, what we do in this culture when when people go into therapy for trauma, right, is we're attempting to to actually reverse the narrative. So, we try to teach people that it's not when something traumatic happens to them. It's, and I want to be really clear what I'm saying, right? I'm not saying that when people experience trauma, it's their fault. I'm not in any way saying they're culpable for what's happened to them. But sometimes in life, you are responsible for changing something, not because

you're to blame, but because you're the only person who can. The responsibility falls to you. And so in this culture, we try to teach people who've experienced trauma that they can experience those physical events that happened to them in the past in some other way. And when they do, they no longer feel traumatized anymore. My mind's a little bit blown for a number of different reasons because it's a real paradigm shift to think that we are giving meaning to the thing that happened in our past and sometimes that meaning is coming from watching other people

give it meaning and we're inheriting that meaning that oh yes, that's called cultural inheritance. It's like a cultural it's like a contagion. So it turns out that you know there's there's one kind of old evolutionary theory right this is called the modern synthesis where inheritance is really your genes you inherit in you whatever you inherit you inherit by your genes and then natural selection you know chooses some gene patterns and not others and and that's really how inheritance works across generations. Most evolutionary biologists don't don't hold to that view anymore because for the most part

there are many many ways to inherit things and a lot of what we think of as inheritance is really more what's called epigenetic meaning it doesn't really involve DNA very much and I would say the way I like to say it is that we have the kinds of nature that requires a nurture we have the kind of genes that require experience before anything is wired into our brains. And most of our characteristics work that way. Very few characteristics work just by genes alone. What always happens in a neurotypical uh brain is that you're born with

your brain incomplete. Right? An adult brain has has this we we say that it's wired to its world. That world includes its own your own body. Um, but a baby um is not a baby's brain is not a miniature adult brain. It's a brain that's waiting for wiring instructions from the world and from its own body. So your brain is wired for you to see out of eyes that are the exact distance of your eyes from each other. If somehow, you know, magically we could transplant your brain into somebody else's skull, you would not be

able to see out of that skull. You would not be able to see out of those eyes because they're not in the right place. You hear with ears. You your ability to hear comes from signals that are shaped by the shape of your ear. So your brain is wired to hear out of these ears. Not any ears, these ears. Similarly, you as a baby, you are taught the meanings of physical signals. You're taught how to make sense of these things. That's called cultural inheritance. Many things that we think of as hardwired into the brain are

actually culturally inherited across generations. That's how people survive in a particular environment. You know, so like in the 1800s and 1900s when explorers would go off and they would go off to Antarctica or here or there and they would very quickly die. The Inuit live there, they live perfectly fine. How? Well, because they had culturally inherited knowledge. We're always transmitting um knowledge to each other and that knowledge becomes fodder for our own predictions. So your predictions don't just come from your personal experience. They also come from you watching television, you talking to guests, you reading

books, watching movies. Um also your brain like most um human brains can do something really fantastic which is you can take bits and pieces of past experience and put them together in a brand new way so that you can use the past to experience something new that you've never experienced before. You talked a second ago about therapists try and make you think about the past differently, but I do think there's an underlying belief in our culture and society and on social media that if something happened to you, almost like this Freudian approach of if this

happens to you, this is who you become. And I was reading that book, The Courage to be Disliked over Christmas. And it kind of it changed my view on this quite profoundly and in an important way because it helped me to understand. And I think it basically says that what happens to us doesn't create who we are. We use what happened to us and we apply meaning to it which then determines the behavior we have. And really interestingly in that it means that many of the beliefs I have about myself, who I say I am,

my identity and therefore like the ways that I behave every day, whether they're productive or unproductive are actually just choices I've made to apply meaning to the past. Does that make sense? It's completely makes sense. And this is really this is such like a profound I don't know if the whoever's listening now understands what I'm saying here but we said at the start of this conversation you go through life thinking you're a puppet and you're being controlled by what happened to you who you are your identity but actually your identity is just this this construction

of meaning that you've given to the past so to serve your purpose now as it says in the book. Yes, I would say it slightly differently, but the message is the same. I think um there are in the sensory present, right? There are sightes, there are sounds, there are smells, some stuff's going on inside your own body, right? And these signals are are going to your brain. They have no inherent psychological meaning. They have no inherent emotional meaning. They have no inherent mental meaning. What gives them meaning is the are your memories from the past.

You are creating you are a meaning maker. Meaning isn't a set of features like a dictionary definition. So meaning the meaning of this cup isn't that it it's made of metal and that I mean we certainly can talk about those features, but the meaning of this cup in this moment is what I do with it. So it could be a vessel for drinking. It could be a weapon. It could be, you know, a flower holder. It could be uh a measuring cup. It the meaning of the vessel is what I do with it in the

moment. That's its meaning. And so the meaning of the vessel isn't in the vessel. And it's also not only in my head. The meaning is the transaction. It's the relationship between this the features of this vessel, this object and the signals in my brain which are creating my actions. In fact, even the fact that this is a solid object, the property of solidity is not in the object. It's because I have a body of a certain type with certain features that makes me experience this as solid. The solidity isn't in me and it's not in

the object. It's in the relationship between the two. That means everything everything you experience is partly of your own making. You don't have a sense of agency about it because it happens really automatically. It's happening automatically now as we're talking. It's happening faster than you can blink your eyes, but it's still happening. And that means if you are partly even if you even though you don't have a sense of agency you are partly in control and also therefore responsible for the meaning that is being made. And when I said at the outset of our conversation

that my goal was to try to, you know, as a science communicator was to try to explain to people that they have more control over their lives. They have more control over who they are in any given moment than they think they do to give them more agency in their lives. This is this is exactly what I mean. You you don't have an enduring identity. You are who you are in the moment of your action. And actions are a combination of the remembered past, so stuff your brain is using to predict that's how it's that

your brain's assembling super automatically and the sensory present. Right? So if you want to change who you are, you want to change what you feel, you want to change what your impact is on someone else, you have a couple of choices. You can try to go back into the past and change the meaning of what's happened before so that you'll remember differently. You'll predict differently in the future. That's what psychotherapy is. That's what you know, heartfelt conversations at two o'clock in the morning or with your friends or whatever. That's really hard Doesn't doesn't always work

so well. The other thing that you can do though is if you realize that whatever you experience now becomes the seeds for predictions later, then you can invest in creating new experiences quite deliberately for yourself. Now you can expose yourself to new ideas. You can expose yourself to people who are different than you. You can practice cultivating particular experiences like you would practice any skill. And that will any new concepts you learn, new experiences you have in the moment, if you practice them, they become automatic predictions in the future. So let me take that and

try and apply it to this example of this silver cup in my hand. So psychotherapy would try and go back into the past and explain to me why this actually isn't something I should drink out of and that it could be other things. Whereas what you're saying is another approach is if I go and get some flowers right now and I put them in there, I'm creating a new prediction for the future because I've created a new pattern in the present of this actually being a vase for flowers. And I can start to create a

new pattern that silver cups like this one aren't just for drinking out of. They are also vasees for flowers. Exactly. Okay. So, I can either go back in the past and try and convince myself that the cup isn't a cup. Or I can in the present moment create a new pattern which will mean that in the future my brain will predict next time it sees a silver cup. It won't just think drink out of it Steve. It will think pop some flowers in it. Right? And remember it's it's actually the thinking comes after the action.

Right? So what will happen is the next time that you are approaching a table where a silver cup might be your brain will already be starting to prepare the actions to go get the flowers and then you will think oh right I can use this as a oh look there's a great vase right so in your brain it's action your first your brain is controlling it's preparing the actions of the visca what we call visceral motor so does your heart rate need to change do your blood vessels muscles need to dilate? Do you need to

breathe differently? It's basically anticipating the needs of the body and attempting to meet those needs before they arise. That supports your physical movements, right? So, if you're going to if you're walking over somewhere to pick up some flowers and cut the stems and whatever that those are all physical movements that require glucose and oxygen and like so all of that has to get prepared in advance, milliseconds before the actions start to be prepared. So it's not what you think determines what you feel. It's what you prepare to do determines your thoughts and your feelings and

the sights and sounds and smells and sensations. That's how it really works under the hood. So meaning is in terms of what you do and then as a consequence of that it meaning is a a consequence it becomes what you feel and what you think and so on. So let me give you some specific examples then. So if I'm scared of spiders, how would I go about overcoming that fear of spiders using route number two that you described there? So one of the ways that you change to change predictions, you can't just will yourself to

change a prediction. I am really afraid of bees. I I had a traumatic experience when I was five. I'm afraid of bees. I know a lot about bees. I'm actually a gardener and I I and I know a lot about the evolutionary biology of bees. But when I am outside, if a bee comes around, my first reaction is to either run or to freeze. Right? I'm afraid of bees. I could talk to myself until the cows come home. It won't matter. I can't. Right? So, what I have to do is dose myself with prediction error.

Meaning I have to interact with bees in a way that changes my actions which will change my lived experience. And I can't just do it all at once. It's not like a good idea would not be for me to say would not have been for me to um go to like um somebody who has beehives and you know put on a suit and go work. I mean that would be like overwhelming, right? So instead, maybe I don't run. Maybe I stand and watch. Maybe I get closer to a bee. Maybe I plant bushes and flowers

that bees like a lot to bring bees to me so that I can sit and just be around them while they're buzzing and doing their thing. Maybe I deliberately let myself get stung at some point, which I did. But you know you're dosing yourself with your brain is making a set of predictions. Those predictions there are a set of predictions. That means your brain isn't preparing one action. It's preparing multiple actions. So you need to prove to your brain that those predictions are wrong. Yes. So exactly you need you are setting up circumstances so you

can prove to yourself that your predictions are wrong. If you're predicting well you have a few action plans. If you're predicting poorly let's say overgeneralizing maybe you have a hundred plans. It's like if there's tremendous uncertainty your brain doesn't know which action plan to so there might be many of them right sensory signals are coming into your brain from the sensory surfaces of your body from your retinas from your cookia you've got sensory surfaces on your skin inside your body in your muscle cells all these signals coming to your brain they help select which prediction

signal will be completed as action and lived experience. Okay. So let's say you put yourself deliberately in in a situation where the incoming signals will not select any prediction because there's too much unpredicted signal there. It's error. There's another name in psychology for taking in prediction error. Exposure therapy learning. Oh okay. Yeah. Exposure therapy which is a kind of learning. All learning all learning is you taking in prediction sign prediction error signals you didn't predict or there's no signal that you did predict. You predicted a signal it's not there. So what you do is you

set up situations for yourself that you will take in signals that are novel. Right? And this seems like an easy thing to do. We people actually sometimes seek novelty. All right. But too much novelty, it it is not necessarily a good thing all the time. Particularly if you know you're metabolically it's expensive metabolically to take in prediction error and learn something new. Like the biggest costs that your brain expends energy on are moving your body, learning something new, and dealing with persistent uncertainty. Those are really expensive things for us. So, if you're metabolically encumbered in

some way, say you're depressed or you have anxiety disorder or maybe you have heart disease or diabetes or you're living under chronic stress, you don't have the spoons necessarily to take in prediction error. You're just going to go with your predictions. You aren't going to learn. You aren't going to be able to update those predictions. You're going to be stuck. You're going to be stuck in your head, right? every experience, every action a combination of the remembered present, the remembered past, the predictions and the sensory present. But the sensory present is there just to select

which remembered past you're going to act on. And sometimes under in moments of great metabolic load, the brain just goes with its own predictions and ignores what's out there in the world. I was thinking earlier on as you were speaking about this sort of social contagion where we can apply meaning to our lives and what happened to us and then consequently make ourselves sad because we see how other people on Tik Tok or Instagram are feeling. And it made me think that you must you must think the world is crazy to some degree. You must

see social contagion in the world where suddenly everybody becomes traumatized because trauma's become almost popular, you know, to think about what happened to you and create meaning to it and then suffer that meaning. But there's other types of social contagion where which are spreading through society. I mean, young people are getting more and more anxious. They're getting more and more depressed. We're self diagnosing ourselves with different illnesses and different things. But now you've explained to me how the brain works, I'm thinking, gosh, as a society, we are bonkers. Well, well, we're living out lies. Yeah.

I think I guess the way I I I do I do find it frustrating at times, but but but only because I think we are meaning makers as an animals are meaning maker. We create meaning. We create meaning by virtue of living like by virtue of interacting with with things in the world by interacting with each other. Very few meanings are given that that is that they exist independently of us. And so what I find frustrating is that there's a lot of suffering and understanding these basic operating principles of the brain will not remove all

suffering but it it could ameliate it could remove some. And people don't understand that they are sometimes making their suffering worse than it has to be. You pulled on the word responsible. Well, I want to be really clear that again I'm not saying people are are to blame. Culpability and responsibility are not the same thing. Culpability is blame. Are you blamew worthy? Right? You can nobody I'm not saying people are to blame for their own suffering. I'm saying that people can be more responsible in by taking more responsibility they could reduce their suffering some. That's

not the same thing as saying you know that they that it's their cause their cause to begin with. So I'll give you an example. Social contagion. Contagion is an interesting word. It means that you are infected by something even a virus. There are these experiments that were done 15 20 years ago where um these are done by Sheldon Cohen who is a psychoimmunologist which means he's a psychologist and he studies how immunology um that is your immune system is related to your psychological state. And so what he did across a number of experiments is he

took people and he sequestered them in hotel rooms. And then he took the same dosage, the same concentration of virus and he put it in every person's nose. And then he controlled how much they slept, how much they ate. He measured their symptoms. He like weighed their tissues after they blew their nose. I mean like he did right just really really really really careful metrics and across these experiments somewhere between 20 to 40% of people became symptomatic with respiratory disease. That means the virus is necessary but it is not sufficient to cause illness. Another necessary

but not sufficient cause is the state of each person's immune system. That is your brain and your immune system have to be in a particular state in order for you to be infected by a virus in these experiments. So the point that I'm making here is exactly the same about suffering. Al so let's take anxiety for example. You know, we in a as this in a culture, we automatically make meaning of certain types of signal patterns as anxiety. When there's a lot of uncertainty, um there's an increase in in norepinephrine and some chemicals in the

brain. Um that often goes with an increase in um heart rate and so on. And we automatically make meaning of this physical state as anxiety. But exactly the same physical state could be determination. It could be just pure uncertainty. Again, meaning making is about action. Right? So when you are un when you are experiencing high arousal, even if it's super unpleasant as as determination, you do something different than if you experience it as anxiety or uncertainty. So here is an example. There are people who experience test anxiety. Really serious test anxiety prevents people from finishing

courses or graduating from college. People who graduate from college have a lifetime trajectory of earning that is hundreds of thousands of dollars more often than somebody who drops out of college. So test anxiety over the long run, it's more than just a bit of discomfort. you know it has serious implications for o your earning potential across your life. There are these experiments that were done where they trained people to make sense of high arousal uh physical states not as anxiety but as determination. And these people learned to do this first they practice like a skill.

It's like driving. At first it's really hard. you have to give a lot of effort to it, but you practice, practice, practice, and then eventually becomes really automatic. And then what happens? They are able to take tests. They're able to pass tests. They're able to continue taking courses and so on. I watched this actually happen right in front of my eyes. My daughter, when she was 12 years old, she was testing for her black belt in karate. Her her sensei was a 10th degree black belt. This guy, a 10th degree black belt is the highest

you could be. Mhm. This guy could break a board like by looking at it. He was a scary scary dude. And my daughter was like not even 5t tall when she was 12. And she's she's this tiny little thing. And she's got to spar with like these hulking like 15, 16, 18 year old boys. She's got to actually spar with them. And so, you know, she's and this is across several days. She's got to do this really. And so I'm sitting there, her, you know, I'm her dad and me were sitting there. We're watching her.

And so her sensei, you know, saunters up to her and he says, "Sweetheart, get your butterflies flying in formation." And I was like, "That's amazing. Get your butterflies flying in formation." He's not saying, "Calm down, little girl. That would actually be bad. You don't want to be calm. You need that arousal. It's there for a reason. It's uncomfortable, but you need it. He's saying, "Use it." That to me was like a perfect example of find a different meaning for that arousal. And that meaning is the action that you will engage in. No matter how hard

it is, no matter how much it doesn't really look like what it's supposed to, the control is there. It's there. It's not there all the time. It's harder to get all, you know, yada yada, but it's there. And it means that you have more agency. You have more control. You're never going to have as much control as you want. It's always going to be harder to get. Your options aren't always going to be the same, but you can always find a little more control over what you do and what you experience and that's the key

to living a meaningful life. Are you somewhat concerned about the world that young people are growing up in where they're scrolling on social media and social media is telling them what certain feelings are? So they are just being programmed constantly. Yeah, they are to be anxious, to be depressed, to be sad. They are. Yes, they are. And think about it too. Social media is pernitious uncertainty there. You know you first of all even when we're sitting face to face we have all of these cues we have all these signals I can see your face I

can hear your voice even when all this information is there's still some uncertainty right we're not reading each other bodily movements are not a language to be read it's a bad metaphor right we're guessing we're always guessing And we're using a lot of signals to guess. But when you're on social media, you have have very few signals. There is a lot of ambiguity. There is a lot of uncertainty and the only thing that you can do is fill in that uncertainty with your own guesses which could be bad. Right? So people who go on Tik

Tok and whatever are giving up, they're like volitionally giving up their agency and they don't know it. What do you mean by that? They're choosing to be led. They're choosing to be influenced. I I'll give you an example. I've listened to podcasts about metabolism. I've listened to podcasts about, you know, skin care. I've listened to, you know, I'm curious. I'm curious about like what kind of information people put out there. I probably turn off 90% of the I get like 10 minutes into something and I will turn it off. That's what it means to be

a consumer. You have choice. I think people are they don't realize that by virtue of what they do and what they don't do, they are making choices about what will be retained in their heads that will then be used automatically later. Brainwashing a little bit except that you're you're the one who's you're you're choosing it. You know, I'm empathic and I'm not blaming people, but they could things could be better for them. You know, I mean, I had a an a daughter who was clinically depressed. That was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever

had in my life in addition to being really tragic. I mean, I can talk about it now without breaking into tears. That took a long time. But at first, she was so resistant. Eventually, you know, she made the decision that she wanted to be helped and then we completely changed her life. But she had to make that decision. I couldn't force her to do it. And I feel like a little bit it's the same kind of situation now where there's so much out there in the wellness industry. There's so much, you know, um, swirling around

on Tik Tok and on other areas of social media and not all of it is useful and some of it's really harmful. Do you mind if I pause this conversation for a moment? I want to talk about our show sponsor today, which is Shopify. I've always believed that the biggest cost in business isn't failure, it's the time you waste trying to make decisions. Time spent hesitating, overthinking, or waiting for the right moment. When I started my first company at 20 years old, I had no experience and no money. What I did have was an idea

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shopify.com/bartlet. The advantage you have as a objective on Looker is you have a huge amount of information and knowledge, which is guiding you to make better decisions. But a lot of people don't have that information and knowledge. In fact, they have counter information and knowledge. So, when I think about what it takes for someone to make a change in their life, um whether it was your daughter or whether it's someone else who feels like they're stuck and they feel like they're trapped in an algorithm or trapped in a life that they want to break out

of based on everything you know and based on the experience you had with your daughter. What is step one to being able to make that change? Because I'm really curious as to what it was about your daughter that made her decide that she wanted the help. Well, I think that the the general answer is baby steps. It rarely works to completely change everything all at once. I'm not saying it never works, but it rarely works that way. Um it so for example, you know, you could deliberately get off social media for one day a week

or do something else instead with a friend or go for a walk or just and build it into it. Build it into your day as a scheduled thing. So that's the other thing is that you can't do things because you want to do them. You have to force yourself to do them. So for example, I had major back surgery, major back surgery, very serious. And um I knew that um after I had back surgery that I was going to experience sensations I had never had before. Just like you know if you go for a filling

in your tooth, right? And then you know something's there that wasn't there before and then your tongue is like constantly poking at the tooth and you're not supposed to but you do anyways because your brain is foraging for information. It's foraging for prediction error. Mhm. And then eventually it adjusts its predictions and then it ignores the sensations because they're not relevant. Right. So that was going to happen on a massive scale for me and I knew that I had made a plan before surgery to dose myself appropriately with prediction error so that I would not

develop chronic pain because chronic pain is like a set of bad predictions that that don't update. Right? So your brain still believes that there's um tissue damage in your body when there's no more tissue damage. So does that mean that pain often is just a figment of your imagination? No, that's the wrong way. That is the wrong way to think about it. The way to think about it is every experience remembered past and sensory present. So pain is in your head, vision is in your head, hearing is in your head. You don't hear in your

ears, you hear in your head in your brain. You don't see in your eyes. You need your eyes. You need your ears. But you don't see in your eyes. You see in your brain. So pain is a combination of the just like vision is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. Okay. Okay. So it's both. So chronic pain happens when your brain was receiving signals from the body that there was tissue damage, no susceptive signals they're called, and it was making sense of them as pain. And when you're recovering from an illness,

that's metabolically taxing. So there's not as much metabolic re there's not as much of your metabolic budget devoted to learning. So you can be in a situation where your brain doesn't update itself and you still experience pain even though the the um the tissue damage is no longer there. It's just like seeing a a green apple in your mind's eye when there is no apple in front of you. It's not all in it's not all in your head in the in the you know insulting sense. It's just it's a normal consequence of how brains work.

The injury is gone though but the signal of the injury is still replaying itself. Yeah. Exactly. Just like um it's like a phantom limb. It's like tinidis is also like that. Oh gosh. Yeah. I had that for a little while. Yeah. So, um, so I I tried really hard to set a schedule for myself, um, you know, um, that would allow me to sort of like optimally dose myself, but with prediction error, but that meant, you know, that I I had to follow that schedule. And I think if you're committed to changing your habits, this

is how you change any habit really. you change the context and you um and then you practice you practice new um new behaviors. So with my daughter, depression, we think about depression in our lab um as um let me back up and say your brain's most important job really is not thinking. It's not feeling. It's not even seeing. It's regulating your body. It's regulating your metabolism. Basically, that's your brain's most important job. Your brain's most important job is anticipating the needs of your body and preparing to meet those needs before they arise. The metaphor that

we use for this predictive regulation of the body, which is the formal term is calledasis. Um that's the scientific concept, but the but the metaphor is body budgeting. It's running a budget for your body. Your brain is running a budget for your body. It's not budgeting money. It's budgeting salt and glucose and oxygen and um potassium and like all of the nutrients and chemicals that are necessary um to um run an energetically costly body. You know, you've got all these really low-level kind of processes. You can just think of them as vital parts of to

keep yourself alive. Mhm. So, some of your energy budget goes to that. Some of your energy budget goes to repair and growth. So, you get if you get taller, you need more cells. When you learn something, you have to thicken up your myelin and your your neurons. You've got to grow more receptors and stuff. That's, you know, the kind of growth and and repair. And then the rest of it is all for anything effortful. What is effortful? like work or going to the gym, dragging your ass out of bed in the morning is effortful. Yeah,

learning something new is effortful. Dealing with uncertainty is effortful. Everything we call stress. Stress is just really your brain is predicting a big metabolic outlay because there's some effort involved, right? Some motivated effort involved. So those are the three things that make up your energy budget. And the really important point, you as an organism have a fixed amount of energy that you can produce in a day. Meaning ATP, like these little chemicals that these little protein things that you know your cells use as literal energy that come from glucose and and other things like fats

and so there's nothing I can do to increase it. Well, you're in a range. Okay. But there is a finite limit upper limit for that range because you are a because you're a human organism and you've got to do these three things these right vital functions growth and repair and then everything else. If you got a lot of psychosocial stress going on or you have some kind of disease that's taking up, you know, much of the budget, then you don't have a lot of budget left for other stuff that you need to do, right? So,

what your brain will attempt to do is to cut costs. If you look at the symptoms of depression, they are um symptoms of um that are related to cutting costs. distress, fatigue, problems concentrating, um lack of sensitivity to the context that you're in. All of these things are indicative of um reduced um metabolic outlay. And then depression also has symptoms that are related to increased costs like 70% of people who are depressed have uh inflammatory problems. So they have enhanced inflammatory um systemic inflammation and and your your immune system is a very expensive system to

run. So if you have persistent and um systemic inflammation, you're that's like a persistent tax on your budget. you're, you know, meaning things are costing more than they necessarily need to. And even, you know, like there are these really interesting studies. I think they're interesting as a scientist, as a person, I find them like slightly horrifying, but you know, like if you within two hours of eating a meal, if you encounter stress, social stress, it's as if you ate 104 more calories than you actually ate. So you're so inefficient in metabolizing that it's like it's

like having eaten 104 more calories than you did. And the your even good fats will be metabolized as if they're bad fats and potentially stored as Yeah. So if you if you add up 104 calories at every meal for a year, that's almost 11 pounds. That means that if you are in a stressful environment and um for a year and you ate exactly the same thing as you ate the year before, you would gain 11 pounds. In depression, we know for example that um there's cortisol dysregulation in depression. That means there's dysregulation in um metabolism

because cortisol is a metabolic, you know, it's it's a metabolic chemical. Um people who take uh SSRIs they take for depression anti-depressants are SSRIs usually or SNRIs that means they are acting on serotonin to keep more serotonin in the in the juncture uh between neurons. Serotonin is a metabolic regulator. Norepinephrine is a metabolic regulator. These are um chemicals that are directly involved in your metabolism. So it's not an a belief that depression is a metabolic has a metabolic basis to it. I think the question is what is the elixir of all these metabolic influences that

would lead somebody to um develop a depressive state. Um, but the point, the simple point that I was making is I actually came to this idea about metabolism and depression because I was doing a ton of reading trying to figure out how to help my kid. What were her symptoms at that time? Just if there are any parents that listening right now that can relate or anybody that's listening that could relate. Yeah. Well, I will tell you that I've given this talk before um about depression in adolescence. Adolescence is a um it's like a it's

like a perfect storm of metabolic u vulnerability for many many reasons. You know your brain is trapped in a dark silent box called your skull. It's receiving signals from the body and from the world. It doesn't know what the causes of those signals are. It's receiving the effects. It has to guess at the causes. What are the guesses? Predictions from the past. Right? So it doesn't know about hormone surges immediately as they happen. It, you know, it takes 20 minutes or so or sometimes a little less depending on where the hormonal changes are and what

their origin is for the brain to receive the signals of those changes and then it has to guess at what the causes are. The narrative that's used in psychiatry and medicine is a narrative that goes something like this. It goes back to this like your brain is a battleground, right? So the idea is that you know you're born the the story is that you're born with these innate emotion circuits. You're not you don't have innate emotion circuits. You don't have any emotion circuits actually, but the narrative is you're born with these innate emotion circuits. They

work, but you're not born with the ability to control them. That has to develop over time. So in adolescence, the idea is that um mood disorders arise because you're you don't have enough cognitive control and you have too much emotion. So you've got this unbridled emotion and that's the problem. That's a really compelling narrative. It's just neurobullshit basically. There's not a good evidence for that narrative. I I heard it was a chemical imbalance. Yes. Well, the sometimes people talk about that chemical imbalance in terms of serotonin being a happy chemical and dopamine being the reward

chemical. And that's also uh that's such a simplification that it's not even wrong. Okay? Dopamine is not a reward chemical and serotonin is not a happiness chemical. They're both metabolic regulators. You see increases in dopamine in some uh neurons during episodes of punishment. And serotonins does many things in your body in many places. But one of the things that it does in controlled experiments is it allows animals to spend to forage to engage in activity physical activity and learning when there is no immediate metabolic uh reward at the end. There's no there's no deposit at

the end. Mhm. Um so dopamine is seen more I think now by many neuroscientists as a a chemical that is necessary for effort whether that is a physical effort or learning something a mental effort of learning something it's not really specific to reward per se. So, at first with with my daughter, you know, she went from being a a really exuberant, engaged, socially, very socially connected kid, um, who, you know, she did great in school. And it's not like she had, you know, it's not like she was a perfect kid, but she was pretty in

enthusiastic and pretty exuberant and had a lot of friends. And and then, you know, by the time she was in 10th grade, she was withdrawn. She was getting D's in school. She couldn't concentrate. She wasn't sleeping. She um she was miserable. She was really suffering, but she was miserable to be around. And and to be honest, at the beginning, we thought she was being lazy. We thought, you know, she didn't want to do anything. She wanted to spend all this time in her room. She didn't, you know, she wanted to get rid of all of

her activities. And we thought, come on, man. Step up. Like, why are you, you know, we thought she was being lazy. I mean, really, it just never occurred to me in a million years because she had no mood symptoms as a kid. Like, none. And then all of a sudden, she just she appeared to have no energy to do anything. But it to us it looked like she was being lazy and she didn't want to do her homework and she seemed really disengaged and and and it it took me a while to realize, oh no,

this is something else. She was having trouble remembering conversations that we had. And at first I thought, oh, you're not paying attention to me. But then it seemed really clear that even in day-to-day conver she couldn't tell me what was happening in her day. She just had no details. That's also a sign of depression where you lose the episodic memory of details of the day. You can only talk in gists. You can't give specifics about times and places and events. You just lose, you don't retain that information long enough to be able to remember it

later. There's no consolidation of that information. And um when she was in 10th grade, you know, she came home with D's in school, D's in mathematics. And this is a kid who was doing fun, you know, she was doing rudimentary algebra when she was eight. And um we told her that we she had to be we had to have her assessed because we just didn't know what was going on. And that's when we realized that she was clinically depressed. The other thing I I should say is that, you know, she had very bad menstrual cramps.

And so a lot of one um one treatment for bad menstrual cramps is to put girls on birth control pills because it it evens out the um hormonal fluctuations of the month and it does actually improve menstrual cramps. But it's pretty well known now. It wasn't so much known then that um there is somewhere between a 40 and 70% increase in the likelihood of major depressive episode in young women who use birth control pills. If it's a combination estrogen progesterone pill, it's more like 40%. If it's a progesterone only pill, which a lot of young

women take because it has fewer side effects, you have a 70% increase in in a ma in major depressive episode. And this is in the first study that I read about this was in a million women. And when I read that study, I remember exactly where I was. It was like a flashbulb moment. I read the study. I called her pediatrician, my daughter's pediatrician, and I said, "She's coming off pill today, today. So, tell me if there's anything. Are there any side effects or can we just stop it?" And he's like, "Well, in my opinion,"

and I'm like, "I don't give a about your opinion. I have just read a study that is like, you know, it's a large-scale epidemiological study of a million women today. She's coming off today." And this was after or before she was experiencing depression. This was after it was it was um maybe a year after she was diagnosed. Much later I read um I was reading a book by uh Naomi Orescus the historian of science and she wrote a book called Why Trust Science? And it's a wonderful book. But in the book she talks about she

gives examples of places of phenomena where the public didn't trust science and they should have and this is one of them. Apparently it's been known for a really long time. And I just want to point out that estrogen, progesterone, testosterone evolved as metabolic regulators. I'm highlighting it because in a lot of because in a culture that separates mental from physical, we don't think about the role of metabolism in vision or in even in mood. That's a really recent thing. In our lab, we one of the things we study now is the role of metabolism in

in really basic really really basic psychological phenomena. um like just as a fundamental building block of your mind basically. So your daughter exhibits those symptoms. I'm really curious to hear what conventional medicine at that point told you you should do with a daughter in that situation at that time versus what you did. You have this wealth of information. You you have a medical background. Yeah. So I should say this was you know this was um some years ago, right? So currently there is a kind of a revolution going on where um there's actually something called

metabolic psychiatry. Now back when this was when you know when I was reading about this it sounded crazy when I saw what my daughter was what that she was suffering like really suffering. It's really hard for me to talk about this because as I'm talking to you about this, I'm thinking I I just I wish that I, you know, I wish that I had figured this out earlier. But, um, but anyways, what we did was I we found I found every possible route that I could think of to target her um her body budget. So,

basically target her metabolism. And then we we we basically came up with a a daily routine which she participated in making um to see if we could put her on a different trajectory, you know, and that involved everything from getting off social media because first of all, she was using like a lot of kids do, she was using um her screens late at night and at that point and again this was something I just happened upon right but it actually at an at a NCI at a national inst cancer institute meeting um you know we

have retinal ganglen cells we have cells in our retina that um regulate circadian rhythm and they're sensitive to light at the wavelengths that comes from your screen from a screen. So if you look at those screens at night, your brain thinks it's daytime, like your circadian rhythm. You give yourself a circadian rhythm disorder basically. And it will be harder to get um into a regular sleep cycle. And you need that regular sleep cycle in order for toxins to clear and in order to consolidate um what you've learned during the day so that you can remember

it later. And there a whole bunch of restorative things happen during deep sleep that you really need. And if you can't get enough deep sleep, that will make your budgeting problems worse basically. So we targeted her. We got her off social media. Well, first of all, off screens after, you know, like 7:00, 8:00 at night, no screens. Um, off social media to reduce social uncertainty, social stress. I got up with her at 5:30 every morning. made her breakfast, sat with her while she ate breakfast. So, made sure that she was eating nutritious food, not pseudo

food like, you know, Pop-Tarts and like that. We had to start her like exercising again. So, she started to walk long distances. We she started doing Pilates like not not Pilates on a map, but like Pilates with a reformer that would make anybody cry, you know. Why exercise as it relates to this budget and the metabolic functions? Because exercise um basically um exercise throws your throws your it's like your brain it's like you're you're throwing yourself out of uh metabolic balance so that the brain can learn to get itself back in. you're basically improving the

resilience of your of your physical systems is is basically the way to so she's not you know she needed something more like interval training which is what these Pilates classes were as opposed to you know practicing to play tennis or whatever something that would would where she you know after a certain period of time she'd be disregulated metabolically and then she'd drink water and you know eat something healthful and um and then her system basically was learning to become more flexible again not so stuck. Mhm. So again it it was like dosing with prediction error

or like showing the providing the brain with opportunity to learn that it was wrong. And then um omega-3s. So we we took I can't remember the exact dose, but I I do it out high omega-3s, low omega sixs. With her doctor's permission, we also used a baby aspirin once a day with on a full stomach to reduce systemic inflammation. um before bed. I mean, before bed, we had always done um like a cuddle, you know, like when she was little, we would read a story or whatever. And in her early adolescent years, you know, she

rejected that and then we brought it back. So an hour before bed, we would either me or her dad, sometimes all three of us, we would read a book together or, you know, he would read a book to us or we would I I she we would sit and talk and she would tell me, you know, all the things that were happening at school that she could remember and sometimes they were really horrible and I just had to empathize. That was really hard for me because I just wanted to fix it. I just wanted to

fix it. And it was really I had to really draw on my own um experience as a therapist to just sit with the distress and empathize rather than say do this, do this, do this, do this. It took me a long time to learn that and I'm still sometimes struggling with that. Why was that important? because then she feels heard and and she feels understood. And when you It took me a long time to learn this. When she when she would tell me that, you know, someone had done something terribly mean. If I did anything

other than empathize, she would feel like I hadn't heard her. And social support is a major I mean, we are the caretakers of each other's nervous systems. Humans are social animals. It's hard to believe. Uh I think in a culture like ours where we're so individualistic, right? And it seems like a political statement or something. It doesn't really matter what your political views are. We evolve the way we evolve, man. We are social animals. We affect each other metabolically. We can add savings and we can add taxes. And you know the best thing for a

human nervous system is another human. The worst thing for a human nervous system is another human. The wrong one. There are so many experiments showing such I mean I just saw a set of experiments from one of my former postocs that was just amazing. um where she looked at glucose metabolism in mothers and babies and I think she also did it in dating partners if I'm not mistaken and she looked at them alone and like and then together like alone during a task and then together during a task and mothers and babies that are attached

well they're actually their glucose metabolism is more efficient like literally more efficient and I believe she I I believe she also showed this with dating partners too. You know there are these studies these old studies showing that um that you know it's like less calorically demanding to walk up a hill with a backpack if you're with a friend than if with you're with a stranger. And I mean there's all these really batshit crazy findings that if but if you realize that humans are literally affecting each other on a physical basis whether they're aware of it

or not whether they intend it or not it's completely irrelevant or it's unnecessary I would say to have that effect um to have the effects be there um then it starts to it starts to make sense you know like the idea that and again meta analyses show that you will live years longer years on average years longer if you are in if you have a a social um life filled with people who you trust and who trust you. So is that why you got the family around just before bed because it was regulating her nervous

system, her her body? Yeah. Sometimes she she sometimes she still says this to me actually. She'll say, "Can you just be my friend for a minute and not my mother? I'll be like, "Yes, I can." And then I actually have to do it, which is sometimes hard. Or I will say to her, this is for parents, anybody who has an adolescent or an adult um child, this is this is like one of my I I don't know how I came up with this, but it's like golden, right? I say to her, "Can I I'm having

a mother moment where I feel the need to nag you about something, and if I can just nag you for a minute about it, I I won't need to tell you again." So, I'm basically asking her permission. Can I tell you this thing, which I really want to tell you, and I know you don't want to hear it, but you would be being doing me a real kindness if you would just listen to me for a minute. And I know it's me. It's all me. It's not you. It's all on me. this is me, but

I just I would be better if you could just let me. And most of the time she says, you know, with great forbearance, right? Like, sure, mama, go ahead. Sometimes she says, "Not today." And then I actually have to listen, you know? So, yeah. But there were probably other things I'm not thinking of right now. I've written them all down because a lot of people have asked me this question. And what I like to say is this is I'm not a physician. This I'm not a psychiatrist. This is not a recommendation or recipe for your

children. I'm just telling you what I did as a scientist. And you wrote down what you did. You still have a copy of that. So I can link it below for anyone that does want to read what you did. Yes. But it's again it's I it's what you did for your daughter at that time. Yeah. just as a person who had read the literature I it's not a it's not um this is not medical advice it's I'm really strongly and also I should say I you can't force your adolescent to do anything you can't even

force your kids really to do anything unless you threaten them with physical harm they have to make that choice themselves right and did she recover yes she And I think one of the reasons why she is good now, it's not that she never has challenges with her mood, but she understands them in physical terms. She doesn't understand her mood as being a psychological problem. She understands it as a symptom or a barometer of her body budget. This is something I learned from your work while I was researching which was really really helpful to me. And

it's pretty much exactly what you just said, which is sometimes I'm in a not so good mood. And if I'm not conscious about that, then the bad mood can wreak havoc, right? It can I can be short with people or whatever. And when I was reading your work and thinking about bad or good moods through the context of this body budget, it makes you pause for a second and go, what am I missing? And it makes you very conscious of what you then do. It almost makes you suddenly take hold of the wheel and go,

"Okay, so there's a problem here. It's a physical problem. I didn't get sleep last night. I haven't eaten." Whatever it might be. Be really aware of what this makes you do or feel or think and hit and the actions you need to take are maybe cancel everything you were planning today and go back to bed. Well, but I think that you just put your finger on the really important thing. It's that it changes what you do next. Yeah. And that changes the trajectory of what happens. And I think this is this is really it's not

like a magic cure. But it and again, you know, but when someone is when when you feel really distressed, you either look to the world like what is wrong with the world or you look to yourself. What is wrong with me? And really it could be maybe there is something wrong with the world. Maybe there is something wrong with you. But most likely it's something there's a body budgeting problem. Even if it's the case that there's something wrong with the world, you're better equipped to deal with that thing. If you are managing your body budget,

you really do need to design your calendar as much as you possibly can in the confines of the profession you have around that body budget. And for me, the big a big change I made two years ago, super privileged that I get that everyone can do it. I couldn't do it when I was working in call centers was I implemented a rule where there's no meetings before 11:00. And it just means for me that I never set an alarm. So I wake up when I'm fully recharged. And it was like the most profound thing. I

should have done this way sooner. But it's had such a big impact on my life because you can almost guarantee that it's very very rare for me to be underslept. Although it happens because I have to travel and stuff a lot. But that really had a profound impact on my life. Yeah. And I think you know and as a leader and as a Exactly. And I think honestly if leaders take this seriously then the hope is that there'll be some realization that this is also important for for everybody and you know we have a society

that is structured in a particular way but there's no requirement that it's structured in this way. There's, you know, the biggest predictor of work productivity after, you know, is sleep and hydration. And after you take away sleep and hydration, I think exercise is up there, too. You know, some of us have more choices than others, right? But it's important I think for people who are people who are CEOs, who are who are leaders, who are business leaders to understand that um there's there are good business reasons, there are good economic reasons to take this seriously.

Am I right in thinking that alcohol impacts your body budget and it therefore makes it harder for you to exhibit all the other behaviors and expend energy in other areas and also therefore increases the probability that you'll be depressed. So um I should say that I am not an expert in the metabolism of alcohol. So I'm going to extrapolate based on what I do know. And what I would say there is that sometimes people will drink alcohol like they will eat chocolate or um you know they doing it for the taste or for the experience

of you know the ambiance and experience of it, right? But a lot of people end up using alcohol. They might start that way or they might start because they're doing something with friends but then they realize that it has a mood um it affects their mood. Anything which affects your mood like people talk a lot about emotion regulation but it's actually mood regulation. Again you know your mood is this these simple feelings that are with you all the time. You know your brain is always regulating your body. Your body is always sending signals back to

your brain which it out of which it makes mood. So mood is a property of consciousness. It's with you always. Sometimes in moments you will make sense of the signals and the mood that goes with it in terms of the outside world and that's when you experience emotion, right? Where your actions are relating the two together in terms of your mood. But a lot of the time we don't we we just experience mood as a property of consciousness. You know, this is a delicious drink. That guy is an You're very trustworthy. The mood is embedded

in the perception of the world. And when people, it's just like actually sometimes o opioids have this effect also. They are they're mood altering, meaning they're they are if they're manipulating your mood, they are manipulating your metabolism. And when people get addicted, they often get addicted because they're regulating their mood. They're attempting to reduce their suffering. the problem with or a problem I shouldn't say the problem because I don't know exactly how mood h exactly how alcohol affects metabolism my my expectation is that it's not just one it's not just in one way and also

I do know there are context effects actually so you can drink exactly the same amount of alcohol and it can have different effects in different contexts that totally blew my mind when I saw that research so I'm thinking it's not a simple relationship but one thing I do know is that your predictions become um sloppier and you don't take in prediction error. you you don't learn. You you won't you you won't update any, you know, so there and so and your behaviors are not necessarily well calibrated to the situation that you're in, which can have

all kinds of downstream difficult problem. You know, you can make things uh in the downstream worse for yourself um and make it harder to do budgeting later. Isn't it incredibly annoying when you're in a rush to leave your house, but you can't find your phone or your wallet? Now, because of Apple, if you have an iPhone, you can usually track it using Find My. But until recently, the same hasn't been possible if you've lost your wallet. But that has now changed because of today's sponsor, Extter. Extter is the first of its kind. By partnering with

Apple, they've created a trackable wallet so that if you ever lose yours, you can find it within seconds. And this is it. And you might recognize Extter from their collaboration with Leon Messi. It's super slim, made from recycled aluminum with built-in RFID blocking properties to protect from identity theft. And with one click, all your cards pop up so you can tap and go. I often talk about 1% improvements. And when I look at Extter, to me, it's the culmination of so many 1% improvements on the traditional wallet. So, if you're looking for an upgrade, head

to extra.com and use code Steven for an additional 10% off their spring sale, which ends on May 19th. Head over there now and check it out. And you also get free shipping and a 100day trial. That's extra.com with code Steven. I wanted to um ask you about something I heard you say and I've I've actually had other guests on my podcast say it and I wasn't ever sure if it was true until I heard you say it which is that we can change our emotions by smiling because if if the brain is predicting then presumably

if I do a big smile and I go yes then the brain is going to predict good feelings and going to cause good feelings etc etc and going to cause me to feel nice about self. Well, yes and no. I think um you know people smile when they're not happy too. People smile when they're angry. People smile when they're plotting the demise of their enemy. You know, people smile for all kind. People smile when they're when they're afraid. But can I make myself happier technically by smiling? The metaanalytic evidence suggests that there is a slight

effect that it's that there's um that there's a small Yeah. Yeah. Crinkle your You have to crinkle. There you go. It's like putting put a pencil between your teeth. Go. Go ahead. Yeah. Now smile. Now crinkle. Okay. So, it's like that. And I And the the the So, what I would say is it's a it's a minuscule effect size. It's like it's very small. I do feel happier. Do you? Yeah. But that's because I made you do something silly. Maybe. Maybe. Okay. But anyways, the point being that it's overblown as a as an effect. Um

I think um there's a small my recollection is that the meta the last meta analysis I read was that there was a small effect, but a small effect means it doesn't work for everyone and it doesn't work always. it it's just really really a very very small effect. You must have a perspective on ADHD which has become a huge topic of conversation in society. I I was diagnosed with ADHD. I don't necessarily take it to mean anything because I've seen so many variations of ADHD my friends but there's been this big rise of ADHD and

linked to the work that you've done on the brain being a predictive tool. So my general response is the following that um people there's a rise in people self- diagnosing and in using diagnosis as an explanation for behavior or for their why people experience what they experience or whatever. Diagnoses are not explanations of anything. They're descriptions. They don't explain anything. And to treat a diagnosis like it's an explanation is a form of essententralizing which is not a good thing. Okay? It means that you're assuming that there's some kind of underlying unchanging essence which is responsible

for in fact there is something called psychological essentialism where you don't even know what the essence is. You just assume it's there and that it's the cause of all these symptoms. But a diagnosis is just a description of symptoms. And diagnosis are mostly useful for billing hours of treatment. They're not optimized for pockets describing pockets of behavior that are, you know, or collections of behavior that tend to go together because people sometimes think that serotonin and dopamine are the reason why someone has ADHD. That's like one of the theories that I've So, there are multiple

serotonin receptors. There are multiple dopamine receptors. They don't all do the same thing. Serotonin doesn't do one thing. Dopamine doesn't do one thing. Does different things in different places of the bo in the body and the brain depending on what the receptors are. And also, every resource of resilience and every symptom of difficulty has a context to it. There are requirements the way our society is structured. There are requirements for sitting and paying attention to something for long periods of time. Mhm. And that requirement is hidden in the background. It's there so frequently that we

forget that that's the conditional that's the condition upon which diagnoses are made. So whatever first of all ADHD is not one set of symptoms. It's a variety. It's like it's a you know there's a lot of variation in the way that in you can have different symptom profiles and have the same diagnosis because it's just descriptive and there are lots of symptoms. Some of those symptoms also occur in they overlap with other syndromes, other diagnostic clusters. But the point is that they all when you diagnose someone it makes it sound like that's a property of

that person. Yeah. But it's not. It's a property of a person in the context that they're in and social expectation by by many respects like can he pay attention in school? Well, right. And the way that school is organized is, you know, you sit for long periods of time. Well, it it may be that um there are other circumstances in which not holding your attention on one thing for a long period of time could be advantageous. So my point is that there are very few things that are just categorically good or categorically bad. There's always

a hidden condition. There's always a hidden context. And so I think it's really important to foreground that context. You're not broken. you're just your suitability to a certain context has been deemed to be un like doesn't fit. It's not productive for that context and that may sound like weasel words or it may you know but it's not because because it's important that competencies are by context and the and again I would say this is not you know being me being a bleeding heart you know progressive or whatever. I mean I am a bleeding heart progressive

but this is not an example of that. This is an example of me being pragmatic. You can regulate each other. Something you talked about earlier on which I found really really interesting. Um I was reading about a study where of 25,000 people and they found that people having a heart attack were 14% more likely to survive if they were married. Um, but the other thing that I found interesting is that we can we regulate each other with words and I think you did a study on assessing the power of words to facilitate emotion. You were

co it was a study you co-authored. Well, we've studied the power of words in many contexts, including words as invitations to make sense of, you know, so if if a an instance of emotion is you making meaning of what is going on inside your body in relation to the world, then you can you invite pe every time you use an emotion word, you invite people to make meaning in that way. So you've proven then that certain words can calm us down. Well, yes, but I wouldn't say I've proven anything. Scientists don't, you know, shown, demonstrated.

Yeah. Demonstrated in a, you know, in a context, right? Like we, you know, scientists don't like the f word, the fa fact. I like the other f word, but that fact. Fact. That's a tough one because it means something that holds under all circumstances in all contexts and that's very rarely the case. So, but yes, we have. So, and I mean so if you've done it probably a million times, you text things to people, do you not? Yeah. Yeah. And when you text a couple of words to your partner or your friend, you can change

their heart rate, you change their breathing rate, you can change all kinds of chemicals, all kinds of protein synthesis just with a couple of words. Again, you know, we live in a we, you know, free, you know, free speech is important, freedoms are important, but freedoms come with responsibilities. Like it or not, we regulate each other's nervous systems in all kinds of ways, including with words. And um for better or for worse. For better or for worse. Exactly. So you you really made me think differently about stress as well generally because if I think about

my life through the lens of this metabolic budget and stress is a burden to this budget then if I don't limit my stress I'm much more likely to go over budget and if I go over budget my immune system might be the thing that I cut the costs of or uh something else right I mean I mean there's good st you can't be without stress that would mean you'd be without effort. So you know sometimes scientists will talk about good stress and bad stress which really just means stress that is planned and where you replenish

what you spend and stress that is pernitious and you don't chronic stress then chronic stress or you know so what I would say is just you know if you're in a stressful meeting a meeting where it's affecting your mood that means you've there's been some metabolic impact take into account what that means. With all that you know about the brain, I wondered if you if it's changed your view at all on religion and God and spirituality and if there is a higher power at all. The brain is such a wonderfully complex beautiful thing. You know,

as the objective observer in 2025 looks at a brain goes this is fantastic. Many people then conclude that there must be a creator of that brain. But also we've talked so much today about meaning and the point of it all. So, everything you've learned about the brain and neuroscience and psychology, has it made you believe in a god? No. Has it made you more atheist or agnostic? I'm pretty firmly an atheist. Um, I don't think that the wondrous complexity of nature or or the brain or the nervous system requires a designer. And that logic doesn't

make sense to me. So this is obviously a terrible leap, but do you therefore think that there's no inherent meaning to life outside of, you know, the like reproduction? And I'm just reading for the second time this book. It's called Open Socrates. Okay. And it's a really wonderful book and I've learned a lot about Socratic philosophy that I didn't know. And one of the things that Socrates thought was important was asking this question of what is meaning and that you shouldn't be asking this question in 15minute increments. You should be really asking this question about

the expanse of your life. And so I think if anything being a scientist who studies how a brain in in constant conversation with a body and the other brains and bodies in our world and even the physical nature of our world. How that creates lots of different kinds of minds including our very western mind. that makes me um think uh more about the importance of philosophy actually because I think philosophy is asking the same kinds of questions that religious belief tries to answer and for me that's a better path. I think it's a more comfortable

path. I've often been asking questions like this my whole life actually. So it makes me feel more like what's the point? Like what is the ultimate point? I think the answer for me, the ultimate point is to leave the world a little better than I found it. It's like the Johnny Apple Seed, uh, you know, philosophy. Um, you know, like as a scientist, scientists often, you know, a lot of us, we don't do what we do for money. Money is not bad, but we don't do what we do for money. We do it for other

motivations, right? To know, to be, to be curious, to try to discover things. And at some point we start to think about well what's your like what's your legacy right most of us are not Darwin um we're not William James we're not you know Heisenberg we're not you know most of us are not those people so what's your legacy and in the end I realized that I've published a lot of peerreview papers when people introduce me you know they give some kind of like you know about my citation you know people whatever Dr. Lisa is

one of the most influential figures in the field of emotion, neuroscience, and the nature of the brain. She is among the top 0.1% cited scientists in the world for her revolutionary research in psychology and neuroscience. Yeah, that's all nice, super nice. Um, but actually my legacy is really the people who I've trained, the minds that I've had the opportunity to engage with. And if I were going to be bean counting, I might be bean counting the number of laboratories that now exist that didn't exist before. um gener several generations of scientists who I trained or

who who you know and also who trained me I mean along the way. So that's my legacy in some ways really. It's the people. It's the people and the ideas. And I would like to think just to actually to just wrap up to where we started. Um, you know, when I when I used to do a lot of classroom teaching, I I would feel like what I told myself is if I can change the the trajectory, the outcomes of just one person in this class, just one, then I will have done my job, you know.

And I kind of feel that way a little bit sort of the same about the public the public face of what I'm doing, right? public uh educa public science education. If I can help, if something that I've learned or something I've communicated can help somebody else live a more intentional life of agent with agency where they're choosing and they're impacting their loved ones or their children, then then That's my then I've done my job. That's my legacy. And the hard thing about that kind of a legacy, a legacy of ideas impacting people's lives, is that

you don't ever know what your impact is. But that's part of the deal. We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest not knowing who they're leaving it for. question is how to live a life without attaining anything. I have some context on this person. They are a black belt shaoling monk. So they talk a lot about identity being sure and they and living without um encumbrances and attachments and so on. Right. It's it's it's it sounds like a very Buddhist question. Yeah. The the problem

is that I think even a Buddhist attains something. They attain enlightenment. So they don't have attachments necessarily. They don't have wealth. They don't have power. They don't But they attain something. They attain enlightenment. They attain tranquility. How about then how to live life without your identity making you unhappy? Well, I think it's important to remember that you don't really have an identity that is separate from the moment that you're in. It's not like there's an essence to you. And what I would say is that every everything you experience, everything you do is a combination of

the remembered past and the sensory present. That means to change who you are, you can change what you remember or how you predict or you can change the sensory present. You can change the sensory present by literally getting up and moving somewhere else like going for a walk or or you can change the sensory present by what you pay attention to. Mindfulness for example, right? you there are there are some sensory signals that are front and center in your attention and there are some that are in the background lurking for example you can right now

you're not paying attention to some sensory signals but the minute that I say them point them out you will be like the pressure um of the chair against your back and your legs now they're in the forefront of your attention because I just mentioned them so what I would say is that there is no essence to who you are you are what you do in the moment. You are what you do and you can change what you do. You can change what you experience the consequence of the lived experience which is the consequence of what

you do by what you remember and what the context is. So that's my answer. If you always remember that you will never be attached, you will never crave or strive, you know, to have things and like all of these artificial things which prop up the illusion that you are and you have an essence to you that you c that you know is unchanging across situations. Yeah, we um I we um are very quick to fall into the trap of thinking we are what we did and that's um I much prefer I am what I do

because that means that I have agency to make a different decision in the moment irrespective of what I did in the past. But it but that's the trap we fall into. In 10 minutes time I bet I'll be downstairs and I'll be back into the trap of thinking that I am Steven Barllet who did this thing for 32 years or did you know Lisa thank you. Thank you so much for um thank you for everything that you do. I've I've you've changed my mind in a really profound way and that's quite hard because I sit

here quite a lot so have lots of conversations about the brain and about lots of lots of new studies that have come out etc etc but you've completely changed my my mind and made me think from in a completely different way which I'm really grateful for. So, thank you so much because that's a gift and that's not a gift that I always get doing this job, but um it really is a gift and it's one that I think will help me to live a better life ultimately. But hopefully also for everybody that's listening and thank

you for stepping into the uh public communication side of your life because I was going to say it's um someone that knows what you know and that has done the work that you've done. It is so important to the to the extent that I almost consider it to be like a really critical responsibility because there's people like us that sit on these podcasts who aren't in the laboratory that are getting our information from social media, Tik Tok or any any odd person that says anything and it's really really important that people like you step out

more and share what you know. Um and thank you so much for writing these books because they are absolutely brilliant and just like you've changed my mind today. I think these books will change a lot of people's lives. I highly recommend this book. how emotions are made. I'm going to link it below. The secret life of the brain and also for something a little bit shorter but equally accessible. Um this book here, seven and a half lessons about the brain. Thank you so much. We're done. Thank you so much. I'm going to let you into

a little bit of a secret. You're probably going to think me and my team are a little bit weird, but I can still remember to this day when Jamaima from my team posted on Slack that she changed the scent in this studio. And right after she posted it, the entire office clapped in our Slack channel. And this might sound crazy, but at the Diary of SEO, this is the type of 1% improvement we make on our show. And that is why the show is the way it is. By understanding the power of compounding 1%s, you

can absolutely change your outcomes in your life. It isn't about drastic transformations or quick wins. It's about the small consistent actions that have a lasting change in your outcomes. So, two years ago, we started the process of creating this beautiful diary, and it's truly beautiful. Inside there's lots of pictures, lots of inspiration and motivation as well. Some interactive elements. And the purpose of this diary is to help you identify, stay focused on, develop consistency with the 1% that will ultimately change your life. So if you want one for yourself or for a friend or for

a colleague or for your team, then head to the diary.com right now. I'll link it below. This has always blown my mind a little bit. 53% of you that listen to this show regularly haven't yet subscribed to the show. So, could I ask you for a favor? If you like the show and you like what we do here and you want to support us, the free simple way that you can do just that is by hitting the subscribe button. And my commitment to you is if you do that, then I'll do everything in my power,

me and my team, to make sure that this show is better for you every single week. We'll listen to your feedback. We'll find the guests that you want me to speak to, and we'll continue to do what we do. Thank you so [Music] much. Heat. Heat. N. [Music] [Music]