(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

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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 can you see it um what color is it green okay does it have

any red no okay so it's a Granny Smith apple 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 and the willingness

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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

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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 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 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 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]