The New Science of Success. Stop Sabotaging Yourself, with Motivation Expert Dr. Kyra Bobinet!

[Music] I outed myself that I had been faking orgasm and your habenula was faking orgasm yes your habenula was well you you were performing and then your habenula was like this is not working out this oh my gosh and so I was tired of failing at orgasms and I told him and that just opened up a whole new world of like I mean whose failure is it when you don't have an orgasm doctor I know You're protecting your partners habenula by acting not truthful you're performing as a sexual being it's kind of a whack-a-mole like

if if you're denying that about how you're feeling in this one domain of sex then guess what you're going to eat or you're going to drink alcohol or you're going to numb out in some other way you know or you're going or you're going to look for the next hit you're going to look for the next lover I think that there's just a whole other Level of sex Health that has not been accessed in any way because we are so busy per in either as porn stars or as uh people not telling our truth there's

so much inauthenticity in the sexual relationships with people what is the percentage of people who have faked orgasm for women um it's the majority never thought this episode would go here it kind of seems like the habenula is like this Holy Grail of mental Wellness is that how you see it it's really Becoming this like big uh Revelation and groundbreaking information in science and medicine two areas I predict are going to explode one is in depression anxiety the kind of like mood disorder area around habenula and treatments for that and then the second one is

going to be for addiction because we've now found the culprit it's my and breakdown she's going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two and now she's going to break down a break Down she's going to break it down hi I'm my alic and I'm Jonathan Cohen and Welcome to our breakdown this is the place where we break things down so you don't have to we are talking to Dr Kyra bobinet she's an MD and a master of Public Health and she wrote this book called Unstoppable brain the

new Neuroscience that frees us from failure eases our stress and creates lasting change so if you've ever thought about anything that has had a component of am I going to fail am I going to get this right why can't can't I maintain a fitness routine why can't I keep up with my New Year's resolutions why can't I lose that 10 pounds if you've ever thought any of those things you have to listen to this episode there's a part of the brain that I basically knew as a neuroanatomical marker there's all this incredible new research that

Dr bobinet is going to talk about that reveals that this teeny tiny half centimet region of Your brain called the habenula is the base of monitoring MO motivation and processing failure and it's possibly at the root of so many things that a us I'm going to take it even one step further and say you may not have even realized that you've set yourself up to feel like you failed you may be like I'm G to set out to achieve this new business venture this new relationship I'm gonna start working out and unconsciously Unbeknownst to you

you may be doing it in a way that is going to make you perceive any type of setback as a failure and thus reduce your motivation to keep going she explains to us the new science of how to set yourself up to be successful to increase your motivation to make yourself happier also dopamine fasting in order to achieve more yeah Dr bobinet also talks about the increasingly important role of understanding dopamine and the habenula And also oxytocin so she tells us about the science of how pleasure can both motivate us but also can be a

motivation killer if it's not framed in the right way and she has this really really incredible framework that she gives us and it's called having an iterative mindset and she's going to go through how to have an iterative mindset to basically accomplish anything start a business business have a successful relationship get over addiction and the Notion is not that like we found the Cure All the notion is that knowledge is your best friend and understanding the habenula understanding motivation reward and our perception of achievement and failure even at things that we think we're doing great

like my to-do lists she's going to explain how a different framing can literally make your brain Unstoppable hence the title of the book Unstoppable brain I'd like to welcome to the breakdown Dr Kyra bobinet brain It so great to be here um it's really exciting to have you here I feel very motivated and I don't want to fail so um I I really enjoyed Unstoppable brain I'd like to think that I have an Unstoppable brain but one of the things that was really interesting is I saw a lot of my faulty or perhaps misplaced thought

patterns really throughout the book you you really kind of hone in on places that we either stop ourselves or we don't let ourselves kind Of fully be ourselves so before we kind of get into that I want to start with a a super basic question who did you write this book for like what was the impetus for saying this is a book that needs to be out there yeah so i' I've tried to change the behavior of millions of people in my career um and uh created interventions of all kinds of complexity or Simplicity trying

to get at this problem of you know I know what I should do I just don't do it And I wrote it for people who have that problem which is almost everybody in every way I'm trying to think is there anyone that doesn't have something right right probably not like there's always got to be something absolutely like if it's not weight it's Fitness if it's not Fitness it's work if it's not work it's relationships um do you feel that there's sort of one General problem that Society or even our culture is collectively experiencing that sort

of Also needs this wisdom yeah I think right now we've kind of run a ground in overusing Performance Based tools um and Performing performing performing and being performative and that in particular in this time in history is lighting up the brain in massive amounts of mental health problems and physical health problems and that kind of thing so I think that this is a a right-and turn you know I like to say that there was a Time in medicine before we knew about bacteria MH and we used leeches and we used like weird things and we

had Typhoid Mary and things like that and so after we knew about bacteria then we had antibiotics and this whole new era was ushered in of like how to treat that LE let's go right into this performative notion because this really hadn't occurred to me and you lay it out really really clearly you say that performing as ourselves instead of really Understanding and then being ourselves is kind of the the cause for what you would describe as the disease of failure meaning that we're all not that we're all failures but this notion that we will

fail or that we get stopped because of a fear of failure you know that the the cause of that is this performative aspect yeah so can you can you tell us what does that look like because when I saw the list I was actually or well I made it into a list cuz I make Everything into lists when when I looked at the things that literally can be performative I'm just going to list them yes please the list is New Year's resolutions and so for that one I was like okay well I usually get annoyed

with New Year's resolutions and I'm like I don't really make them so maybe I was on to something social media competitive sports fitness Trends and now I'm like uhoh smart goals which Is an acronym which we can talk about about in a bit dieting habit routines and now I'm thinking like okay Kyra's off her rocker what do you mean habit routines then she went for the guttural to-do lists like my favorite thing yeah and then it expands out lying career goals relationship goals and I literally wrote in my document can I strive for anything so

all of the all of these are what you would describe as falling under this performative category so what does It look like if I'm performing instead of being yeah so performing basically uses a neural network that terminates in the area of disempowerment and extrinsic motivation and so I'm doing it for you or my mental model in myself is I'm doing it for myself right so we're already there and those two neural networks do not cross over um they are completely separate and independent of each other and the reason why that's important is that when I'm

doing it for Somebody else not myself first of all it's a disconnected state but also it sets up my brain to be triggered by any um non-expected result so that becomes a failure I become disappointed frustrated whatever the case may be if I don't have that perfect expectation happen which is most of the time and so the Performing basically sets up a failure field the failure field triggers the brain in this new area of the brain that we're going to talk about the habenula And then that's a setup so you can use performing the literature

shows that you can use performing kind of tools shortterm for short-term goals or for single simple tasks but nothing complex Dynamic irre you know reversible those kinds of things and also I just want to note because of course I'm sure that people like the first thing I thought of and maybe other people think this like but it works it works right or like I lost 50 pounds or whatever it is but I Think what you're talking about is there's a there's a price there's both a neurological price and kind of a neuros pychological price yeah

yeah and I think you can use it you know like you can use it if you know about the habenula because then when you have a disappointment or a discrepancy between what you thought was going to happen what actually happened then you know what to do right now in this history we don't know what to do when things don't Work out perfectly and then we're lost and then we get demotivated and that's this kind of like pervasive motivation loss even Doom scrolling has been shown to trigger the habenula result in motivation loss so basically every

youth in America and around the world who is Doom scrolling at night and also in the morning like my kids um are basically disempowering themselves causing motivation loss in the evenings and the mornings and so then you get this kind Of self-blame that sits on top of that and depression anxiety all that kind of stuff ensues if that's what it looks like to perform right and and the notion also is of course you would say like I'm getting fit for myself but in a lot of cases it is about a metric right or it's about

um if I get to look like this I'll have access to this person this job this opportunity right so that's the the the performative aspect so the the the converse is being yourself so in in Brief what does that look like because for me it looks like to-do lists and you know like all the things that I do having goals and like forming Habits Like that's the old way of thinking what is this newer way do do you mind if I explore the tutos list Jonathan loves when people ask me question yeah so so how

do you psychologically respond when you don't get to all your to-do list things what is that like for you well um I mean it doesn't feel great I mean Literally before we started recording I told you that I made a to-do list for my son because I had a list of chores that I actually needed him to do before he left the house um yeah there's usually I mean there's shame um you know there's a feeling of why did I try in the first place I mean I've also read the book so like I'm you

know sort of like piecing it together um but but the the Practical question I have for you is if I have a list of things that I need to get done What is the better way to do them what would it look like to be myself if I have a list of things I have to get done yeah it's about letting go of the performance and just saying this is an aid this is a tool so reframing tends to be the the sort of wise thing that people who do this right do and so if

you approached it as you know this is a potential list that we will get to or that my son might do right because you can't control another human being Especially a teenager um then the way you hold it seems to be the key you know but the fact that you're having like this I went like here and the fact that you're experiencing shame means that you're holding it in a way you know that it becomes a sharp object got it so then knowing where that sharp object you know happens anything can be helpful as a

tool in performance um you can set a goal you can say I want to run a faster Mile you can do all these things but if it becomes a sharp object at the end of the day then you're harming yourself so okay so that makes sense we now have performative performative me versus just me trying to be me and there's some more reframing to that um but I do want to talk about uh before we get into the habenula in particular um when you talk about that we're constantly failing and you talk about That our

our disease or I like to call it disease you know our disease is is failure what does that mean because like obviously I think of like oh are we failing as a country like are we failing you know because we're not being nice to our neighbors what does this failure look like when you talk about it that way long time ago when I wrote my first book I had run across this paper when I was writing the motivation chapter that failure lit up this new area that I'd Never heard of called the habenula and it

was discovered in like the late 1800s but you know in the last 20 years it's exploding um and in that paper it showed that and then in a different paper it showed that when we think we fail or when the habenula turns on we lose motivation to keep trying something so I was like ah Reese's peanut butter and you know and chocolate kind of like it came together and so then from that point forward it was like oh we need to Manage the failure not the success there's a paradox stocks there because if you look

at even behavioral economics you know we're twice as sensitive to loss as gain like this is the source of the brain that is causing that sort of asymmetry of real pain and psychic pain when the habenula goes on it's your worst situation and then we just try to reach for anything to shut it [Music] up my Alex breakdown is supported by Quint whenever I'm gearing up for my next trip deciding what to pack is very stressful why is it stressful for me you've never packed all the things you need ever I either overpack or under

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limited the ASPCA is not an insurer and is not engaged in the business of [Music] Insurance I want to touch on something that that was just said we're twice as sensitive to loss as we are to gain I don't think people really understand the impact of that so I want to like actually go back to the beginning of what you were just talking about in terms of failure what I hear is that people are setting themselves up for failure if if if they make a goal and they say I need to do this because it's

a part of my Self-worth I'm going to be able to lose weight and then I'm going to feel good I'm going to be able to get into this relationship because that means something there's these all these unconscious motivators or values that they're associating with the goal that they're putting up and if they don't get that then that's the setback I I would can you frame a little bit about maybe the very challenging and dangerous situation that people are unknowingly Putting themselves in without realizing it that's a really good way to put that so they're playing

with fire I like I like to call it failure fires you know if you had a fire in your house you would put it out immediately and myself as a clinician a researcher for many years did underappreciated how toxic failure or the thoughts of failure are now I see it as oh that's the most important thing not the setting of the goal and again just like the to-do list It's how you hold it you know if you hold a a smart goal even you know in a way that's flexible or reframing any failure along the

way then it doesn't become a object but most the way that we're doing these things is very linear and very you know win lose and very All or nothing and so that's the way it's being held currently and I think that we can now that this is in this information is coming out to the public then the public can do something more creative And more protective of themselves so they don't keep getting cut by this and and I really I mean fail failure is like an a bad word you know in our in our society

and so I like many others trying to help people never wanted to mention it or never wanted to go there you know nothing's more of a bummer than when you're all excited you know to change your world and then somebody's saying well let's talk about failure let's talk about what you're going to do when this Is doesn't work out like you think I want to talk in particular about this magic habenula because you describe it as a failure detector meaning it detects failure y um for lack of a better word it lights up you know

if you're talking about scans but it's a failure detector and it's a motivator killer so and it's this very very tiny tiny region I only knew about the habenula because it was kind of a landmark in neuroanatomy meaning when You're dissecting a brain it's like where's the habenula oh it's right there like it was question like 12f you know on like my midterm exam in neuroanatomy so um it's this tiny little region why don't you Orient us a little bit because most people who've who've uh you know watched or listened to our podcast know some

things about the lyic brain we talk about the amydala we talk about the thalamus as like a processing center you know my thesis was about the Hypothalamic pituitary axis so like we these are words that people have heard Orient us as to where this special little part of the brain is yeah so it's epithalamic it's above the thalmus and EP is the fancy term that just means above above um half a centimeter large there's two of them on either side but Central in your brain and yeah it's connected to everything it's connected to your um

prefrontal cortex your reward pathway um your lyic system you know it Basically and it's also in front of interestingly of the the pineal gland that's a big important so right because the pineal glands like go and the and the habenula is like stop the pineal gland is actually in in yogic and Eastern practice is um kind of what is related to the third eye center so when you meditate uh in Kundalini Yoga in particular and you look they say to close your eyes and look upward and towards your third eye it's actually uh Pineal gland

activation is what you know sort of the the notion is so um I really like this idea of the pineal and the habenula as sort of you know in in opposition as it were and the research that you talk about in your book you know has links for the habenula to depression to anxiety to addiction to hunger to sleep I mean a lot of the things that the hypothalamus also does these are all kind of homeostatic mechanisms um also connections to Aces Which are adverse childhood experiences and this is a term we've talked about a

little bit here but I think is really important um to mention you know it kind of seems like the habenula is like this Holy Grail of mental Wellness is that how you see it as far as I know because you know I was a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex gal before this I had created I created um you know mindfulness programs at work and things like that because I was like oh it's the it's the PFC you Know it's the rumination that's what's causing the depression and and it really looks like this is the one this this

is the Locust and there's an explosion of literature that is reproducing this in both rat animals and humans and so you know it really opens up the world you know again I say like there's a world before bacteria and now after we're we're in that post bacteria world where we can treat depression differently you know even some of the transmagnetic Stuff that's going on I think that can be helpful deep brain stimulation I mean ketamine is also a really big um there like since I published the book there's been more evidence to support the ketamine

absorbs into the habenula and cures the symptoms of depression you know so treatment resistant depression and so it's really becoming this like big uh Revelation and groundbreaking information in science and medicine I mean I'm still stuck in the at the Beginning I really I really am I'm just thinking about you know making it tangible how people are unknowingly setting themselves up for triggering this system of their brain to help them not succeed that's right and you know we we don't we're careless right now because we don't know how consequential failure or its friends can be

and there's a lot of failure types I started a list in the book and I'm Really interested in seeing what the public has to say about that and saying oh I fail this way but there's there's kind of like you know your brain has favorite ways to fail MH and we did some uh research recently um in oury on failure types across different segments oh and some people who struggle the most with behavior change have a very strong signal around shoting and then people who are successful long-term and iterative you Know which we can get

into have more like I used to be type of failure type so there's really kind of these groups of strategies and also the way that you neutralize failure and what you're dealing with around failure that are very specific to different populations and different people so I have the list of of types of failure I'm happy to um to go there um so what what you describe is that the ways that people it's more like the ways That people feel that they're failing right there's there's certain categories that people fall into and one of them is

All or Nothing thinking MH one of them is comparing there's the I used to be able to there's what you describe as pre-filing nothing works for me been there done that impostor syndrome as a type of failure and then Shing and you know I've heard people say that we we can't should all over people yeah you Know um these These are going to show up differently depending on what what determines the kind of failure that you foresee for yourself I guess is the question I don't know what what I would imagine hypothetically is that you

know the brain is very habitual and so what wherever you got that you know in my family system um you know you're it was all or nothing was a big signal and so I had to overcome that and there's a lot of ways in which I Lose power around things that I'm scared of and that I I preil too and so you know I think that maybe the the audience can tell us you know which of those are most prominent in kind of their their brain habits of how they like to fail you know what

what what gets your goat yeah I mean I think you know just speaking for myself um I I was actually I was very interested in pre-filing can you talk a little bit about that one yeah yeah I think this is kind of the Class of performance anxiety things where you already have forecast that you are not it's not going to work out for youh and so the haben is always looking around the corner and saying is this going to be safe or not is this going to be okay or not you know like is this

going to work out for me or not and so if we if we train ourselves to always listen to that voice I can imagine that it becomes habitual to to pause and and to uh not approach you know whatever it Is we're supposed to be approaching and for me that creates procrastination you know when I'm afraid to fail I I just I dially and I do all kinds of weird things I clean you know I I do weird things and so I think that that is um something that once you know explicitly that you're doing

that and you're not just procrastinating which is more of like a self-blame type of way of experiencing that um then you can say oh you know like my habenula is telling me Something that is not helpful that is not you know I I need to push through that I need to try something else I need to reframe the inevitable failure into like well maybe not mhm talk about imp syndrome a little bit you know this is one of these terms that's kind of thrown around a lot and um I was actually I was um I

was pleased to see it in this context because you know we tend to think of it as like I don't belong here but it's actually a Lot more complicated than that yeah yeah so it's basically you know you have a performing self you know that is at the four that kind of triggers the feeling of imposter because if we were fully ourselves all the time and showing up that way there would be not no problem but you know more higher performing people tend to be susceptible to imposter syndrome in the sense that they step into

an environment and they feel like well I I shouldn't be here I Shouldn't you know it shouldn't be me that kind of thing and that's a form of failure trigger to the habenula and then losing your motivation to keep trying so there's that kind of anxiety that's produced by the habenula of like this isn't working out for me either I just going to find out it's it's kind of similar to pre failing in that way that you're kind of future facing and you're saying you know they're going to find out they're going to kick me

out they're Going to you know expose me that kind of thing I want to talk about um a little bit more about some of these performative tools that that fail can you talk about what smart goals are and what that acronym stands for yeah so smart goals is specific measurable achievable realistic time bound that's literally all the most important things in life Jonathan would you agree 100% so what is wrong with having Specific measurable achievable uh what's the r uh realistic or something realistic time bound what what's wrong with having goals like that yeah it

seems counterintuitive doesn't it because it seems like oh that's Clarity right right but um the way that the clarity gets operated over time is that you have this smart goal and if it doesn't happen exactly like that which is most of the time eventually Eventually it will fail eventually it will you'll need something different then and and the the probability that your past self predicts perfectly what your future self is going to do and how it's going to work out for that person is very very minuscule so everything leads to failure everything you know that

ideal sets an ideal and everything else the brain is noticing well that's not exactly specific that's not exactly measur like it it has a criteria against Which to fail and so again it's how you hold it if you had smart goals but you had some additional instruction of hey you know if it doesn't work out exactly like this that's normal don't freak out it's okay just iterate and that that in my research has been the Holy Grail solution to the habenula to everything that we're currently using becoming a sharp object for [Music] people my name

be Alex is supported by Better help we all know that we're not supposed to compare Our Lives to others but it's easier said than done try as I might I'm guilty of this all the time and social media plays a big part in Wishing Our Lives look like someone else's for many of us comparison is the thief of Joy it's very easy to Envy other people's lives it might look like someone has it all together on Instagram but in reality they probably don't therapy can help you focus on what you Want not what others have

so that you can start living your best life I spend a lot of time in therapy talking about other people and my therapist gently guides me back to what do you want what do you need let's focus on how your life can look more like what you want instead of trying to compare it to other people we spend a lot of time going over that because I need reminders if you're thinking of starting therapy give better help a try it's entirely online designed To be convenient flexible and suited to your schedule just fill out a

brief questionnaire to get match with the licensed therapist switch at any time for no additional charge stop comparing and start focusing with betterhelp visit betterhelp.com breakday to get 10% off your first month that's a better help hp.com [Music] slre and I want to get to this notion of the iterative mindset um but I think you Know one of the areas that that you talk about a lot is you know one of the biggest money makers in our culture which is health and fitness you know and specifically weight loss yeah and you you talk about you

know kind of the trajectory of what it's like not only to try and lose weight but to keep weight off what what are people doing without even knowing that they're self-sabotaging that is causing this kind of Cycle yeah so I I like to think you know you can use anything to lose weight you know performative tools strict diets you know a personal trainer all that kind of stuff um but the key is does it last and do you know what to do after the part is over and so I started doing research on long-term weight

loss and figuring out what's different about the people who achieve that long-term State and to a person the only thing they had in common is that they were iterating their way Through so even if they did you know a boot camp even if they did a yoga retreat even if they did all these things each one of those was almost like a tile in their iterations of what inspired them at that period of time to keep going or to really get into something and their space in between those tiles was very very small versus other

people who are like oh I used to do yoga and now I don't do it anymore and then failure failure failure Habenula loss no motivation then blaming self for motivation loss all that stuff starts to be triggered off so the notion is not there's anything wrong with goals right the notion is not that there's anything wrong with wanting to get fit right the idea is that the way we frame it and the way we execute it is actually the difference in getting your habenula to help you or to hinder you right or or you know

the marketing the current marketing of you know lose this in 60 Days or whatever the case may be um really hurts us because it sets that expectation that that's going to happen and that it's going to be permanent and all that stuff just sets up the hen you let to be like uhhuh yeah right all right so I'm going to ask a controversial question a lot of people are taking drugs to lose weight and O OIC and what's the other well we don't need to name it mararo I don't remember it Sounds like a mountain

I don't know um so what's happening and you know I live in Los Angeles so this stuff is like it's big news and it's kind of everywhere at the gas station right and and what's happening is that it gets an immediate response right meaning it's such a performative yeah thing yeah are people who are using these methods like are they trying to hack the habenula is the habenula being bypassed is there a component of this where you might say That's performatively positive but what's the long-term implications what's going on yeah yeah I mean nobody's done

that study yet but I hope they do after hearing this interview because my hypothesis is that it's got to touch the habenula habenula controls honic eating it controls satiety um so if you have satiety as part of the main activation of this gp1 which by the way gp1s are a daughter molecule of oxytocin and to me from a public health Perspective that means that we don't have enough oxytocin in our social systems in our society to help people feel good and they feel lonely and scared and they feel like the only worth that they have

is as a performer of some kind whether it's in business or entertainment or those kinds of things online influencers and so yeah it is a performative tool if held that way but I also know for people who have really traumatic childhoods or things like that Where food is the only thing that can shut up their their psychic pain from their habenula having compassion for that situation this could be kind of a a a a a way to put provide a safety net you know and it otherwise frustrating situation where they've blown through so many diets

and they've really wrecked their metabolism set points and things like that it really helps them to kind of have some hope you know um but I don't think that it's a long-term Solution for most people for a lot of reasons you know there's really questionable and I think petera like opened my eyes to this which is like muscle wasting you know like that that's that's the number one thing for Frailty in longevity and so we're playing with fire in that way so I do think that for people who are just stuck in a Whirlpool then

can't get out um this is a good way to kind of fish them out of that Despair and then and and it also because it also You know has some side effects on lowering depression I also think it's activating on the habenula it's got to be so what is the iterative mindset so what I did is I I had a large project for a the largest retailer in the US and their employees health was the the subject of the behavioral research and upon looking at Deep dive into their stories Nationwide there was this subset of

people that changed their health you know got off their medications lost Weight got fit that kind of thing and in the face of the world's worst you know social and economic pressures and time pressures and they didn't know each other and to a person the only thing they had common was that they had this iterative mindset and the way that I um pulled it out of the research is that they would um iterate instead of fail what does that mean for people who are like what is iterate iterate yeah iteration is like versioning on your

Phone you know like version 15 16 17 it's a constant state of improvement through versioning through something so it's like leveling up it's it's leveling up is a is that performative it might be a performative but but it is a natural point of like if you get tired of something and you want variety and you want to kind of like see if you can challenge yourself that's a really good thing to do um but in this case what they would do is for example there was a Woman who was addicted to Doritos and she just

couldn't get off of them and what she did was that she would eat the whole bag every day at Baseline and then when she started changing her behavior iteratively she would eat the whole bag EX except one chip and then two chips and three chips until she was leaving every chip in the bag taking one chip and licking off the flavoring and then throwing the chip away because she had realized tively that like she was Addicted to the chemicals of the the cheese and so that became you know her path of course if you post

that online people might try that may not work for them I would just lick all the cheese flavoring off all the chips every remember doing that as a teenager um so so everybody had their own path and they got there through iteration like does this work experimenting um tweaking things you know tinkering with it adapting it if you know they changed Shifts then they couldn't go to their normal gym they moved they got divorced all those things they iterated their way through so that they found their next thing and that's what made them superpowered and

so the iterative mindset you're continuously improving here's the goal I have to reach I'll say continuously trying MH you you're figuring you're puzzling you might be in the valley you might be like I don't know what to do but I'm going to do this You know I'm going to try this little thing and but the attitude which is why it's a mindset is that this is going to work out for me because I'm going to iterate my way through it iterators never fail is what I've noticed and then the other thing that they do really

well is that they through iteration or even some selft talk they neutralize the effects of failure so people were naturally kind of intuitively figuring out hey failure is not where it is I'm Going to unblock myself tomorrow is a new day whatever little Mantra that they would tell themselves um or try try it with a friend you know try it with my mom all those kinds of things were a way of getting past the failure so you have um a clever acronym I like acronyms and it's for iterates right and um it kind of goes

through the iterative mindset and talk about all these different components the components are inspiration time environment reduce add Togetherness expectations and swaps so these are all different components of the iterative mindset correct these are different these are different sort of like creature uh innovations that I found in re in research that kind of group together into categories so not everybody iterated with one variable or variables or whatever but they but in composite this seems to be a pretty comprehensive pallet of the ways in Which humans are inventive so give me an example of inspiration the

the mantras so you know a mantra that neutralizes failure such as tomorrow is a new day or it didn't take me uh one day to get here it's not going to take me one day to get out those kinds of things where they they set their mind away from the failure give me an example of time where time comes into the iterative mindset yeah and this getss into like current thinking around habit design where you Know you stack habits you know before I brush my teeth I'm going to do this or at bedtime I'm going

to do that oh you're supposed to meditate after you brush your teeth yeah you can't yeah exactly and you can move that meditation around because it might it might not go for you in the morning it might go for you at night like those kinds of things so moving that variable time time can be time of day it could be before or after something like the Habit stacking Example it could be frequency you know it could be intensity of of the time so those kinds of things and when when we talk about environment you know

this is a place where I start thinking of kind of differences in you know how culture distributes resources like there's so many components here um I think especially that are important in conversations we're having about equity and about equality um where does environment come into this yeah I mean It's powerful right if you if you go to you know that in Buddhism there's this idea of s you know and that's like a mini environment it's kind of and people could go to religious ceremonies or or religious uh activities uh even neighborhood that there's there's a

social norming that goes whenever there's people around but there's also the things on your desk there's there's where you place things in your fridge And you know I think there's some some real legitimacy to you know kind of out of sight out of mind you know for things that are tempting and those kinds of things and even you know for me if I really I have a sugar addiction and so if I have a relapse you know like let's say we go and we get ice cream at night and I just I just put it

in the freezer and I forget about it or I throw it away you know if if my lower self kind of did something so I kind of I kind of Regulate you know my environment that way what about reducing and adding this was actually really interesting to me because for me when I think about wanting to expand I or wanting to improve or try it seems like it would would always be adding but reducing can be just as important yeah we find that like there so there's something in the brain called heris sixs right which

is the the way that you like to take shortcuts you know your fast brain Because we can't you know cogitate on everything so in reducing that has to do with the people who you know I'm I'm at a six you know caned soda you know pace and I'm going to go to Five I'm going to go to four so just being able to kind of harm reduce it's called in Psychology is kind of the the variable of reducing things okay and then adding makes more sense to me um talk a little bit about the importance

of togetherness yeah nobody changes alone in my research if It shows that like you know nobody changes alone they always have a buddy or they have a group or they have cooworker usually spouse is number one and then followed by another family member or friend and what is it about that togetherness that kind of helps with iterative mindset um it's kind of a micro environment for social accountability and social support I would say that accountability is is very perform it can be very performative so We got to be careful with that um but it is

somebody else who's doing you know people like me do things like this you know per Seth Gooden's definition of tribe um it's it we're just so wired for social that it would be neglectful and it's not successful if you don't have it tell me about the expectations component of this mindset yeah so that's where we were getting into smart goals earlier where um um if you expect something to happen it doesn't happen you've got to Do something about that so reframing is the number one way that people neutralize failure that is kind of live in

their system you know when something didn't work out the way they thought they tend to you know change their what they expected you know well maybe you know it'll take a little longer or maybe I didn't try that hard or that kind of thing to make it okay because if you leave that live like that then it becomes a failure sharp object in your Habenula on and the final uh the final of This Acronym what about swaps what are what give me an example of a couple good swaps that that you can do yeah these

are clever people you know I mean I me we have zoodles for noodles these days and and um you know people who hack their sugar drink with stevia like those honey like those kinds of things are you know neuros similar sensory similar um crunchy for crunchy um you know salty For salty sugar for sugar you know sweet for sweet that kind of thing is what people do even if you are you know struggling with with alcohol addiction you go to a party and you have a non-alcoholic beer but the whole sensory experience is otherwise the

same you know like those are swaps that kind of trick the brain into thinking like okay we're all right you know it's familiar on page 133 of your book this is a very very sexy Heading it says the biggest mistake people make about habits what is the biggest mistake that people make about habits that well two things um one is that it is uh permanent and that it is um going to happen in 21 days you know and so really understanding that um habits is not a marketing term it is a neuroplastic change that happens

at about a year you know firmly and that it takes a year to construct That automatic way of being I don't want to hear that I know I know it's it's super sad it's super sad it's super sad but it also you know what it does is it it highlights a much larger concept that you are trying to communicate to people which is that there is no quick fix there are changes that can happen quickly yeah right yeah like if you stop using the drug that you are addicted to right see some changes pretty quickly

you'll feel all the things that you were Trying to unfe when you were taking the drug but the notion of having a different mindset that is something that is a a life commitment yeah and mind mindset moves faster than habits so the good news is that if you work on your mindset it's going to be very rewarding it's going to be you know the opposite of depression is not happiness right it's it's getting rid of the failure mhm and you know when people get mired down in Depression they cannot get out of it's because they

have an active set of failure fires wildfires that are going on in their being and they can't figure out how to extinguish them what is depression in the framework of failure depression is is fed by failure so if you don't have an idea or notion of failure anymore whether it's because you you know some people meditate and they kind of go to this you know metacognitive State and they no longer They can observe the brain and people do compassion practice other people do service leadership um other people you know at work out like whatever works

for them but there's a way to counteract the idea of failure in whatever area that you're failing and we talked about the beginning there's different domains of life right so I might be succeeding um in at work but I might be failing as a parent and so we're just underappreciate how uh the parenting Failing can C depression and this is also a place where a lot of people misunderstand when someone is depressed because what they'll say is you you have a beautiful house you've got a great job you have a husband that loves you or

whatever you have kids and this is a place where you know the kind of old thinking was what do you have to be depressed about and for people who understand major depressive disorder which is a distinction from I feel Depressed or it's a distinction from I God forbid you know lost a parent and I'm having appropriate reactions which are called a depress a depressive episode but when you talk about major depressive disorder and this is sort of you know I love to point out when people are using nomenclature in Psychiatry that's inappropriate I if you

have quote no reason to be depressed from an outside perspective and you are still depressed Right chances are you probably need a lot of support because you likely have major depressive disorder right right I mean that's like a sort of a an armchair you know analysis yeah is that there's a there's an abstract notion of what should you know allow people to feel depressed which is completely arbitrary and inappropriate but what you're talking about is if someone's personal meter for failure right is so out of whack I mean if their habenula is you Know exhausted

depleted you know rung out no amount of external success will feel good no and and we're kind of at that you know uh place in Psychiatry where we're not I mean we we honor the content but we realize that the content can be secondary you know and the chemical even the neurochemical environment can be secondary it can be just a neuron Network issue electrical problem you know and so you know this was no more Illustrated than that case Study that I cited in the book where there's this German woman and she has recalcitrant major depressive

disorder she's very suicidal and her husband's really worried about losing her and then they did a deep brain stimulation of her habenula and boom that the husband's like this is the woman I married like she's back you know so we didn't have to do therapy we didn't have to like make her happy we didn't have to talk her out of her Misery we didn't have to do any Of those things she an electrical signaling problem she chemical problem also exactly um so deep brain stimulation do you want to explain to the good folks uh what

that is it's you know there's there's a few there's a few categories that we use um DBS deep brain stimulation for but can you describe what what deep brain stimulation would look like for the habenula yeah I mean for me it's n there just one point but they're doing it more in animal models Right now in terms of like being able to turn off certain areas of the brain so a probe um you can do it other ways again trans magnetic is is really um where you kind of do the same thing you're sending like

surge of magnetic energy and electrical energy to this particular area to change its activation level and so if you're trying to turn off the habenula this basically overwhelm it yeah yeah and and we don't know again lateral medial you know both sides you Know we don't really know what's going to work and I don't know the protocol that they used for that particular woman yeah I'm picturing I mean for deep brain stimulation we first started hearing about it when I was in grad school you know in the 1700s um and they were doing it for

Basil ganglia stimulation for Parkinson's and they were able to see you know people with active Tremors and you know that sort of parkinsonian mask and it literally was like it it would it Would you would it would light up I mean it was yeah I think of it like a long acupuncture needle Valerie was like are there side effects yes it's like a probe in your brain so you have to be extremely precise like it's a whole mapping thing which is why you know they're not doing it at time yes it it is invasive but

but really fascinating yeah so when we think about dieting when we think about Fitness you know in some ways I feel like when you look at the List of the the performative tools you know that are bound to fail my to-do lists went in the garbage you know um our experience on social media New Year's resolutions um you know places in in relationships where we have goals I I guess the question is is there anything that we can strive for in a healthy way and is that where the iterative mindset comes in yeah so you

know in my research on thousands of people tens of thousands of people um the key the around the Habenula or to keep it quiet because you don't want to poke the bear is iteration and this is something I first saw at Stanford we had a panel of expert patients who were leaders in their disease area whether it was liver cancer or heart disease or diabetes and to a person they were all kind of iterating through their disease to really Inspire other people who were having trouble where where we go wrong on social media is that

you follow an influencer and you Take verbatim their workout routine or what I eat in a day or whatever for models or whatever that that is um and that becomes performative as opposed to understanding the pattern that hey that person is iterating on how they're using uh smoothies or how they're you know getting their heart rate up or whatever and being able to say like what would it be for me to iterate my way through that and that's an empowered State as opposed to a disempowered somebody else I'm Trying to be somebody else I'm trying

to be this influencer or I'm trying to not be myself and so that seems to be the key to keeping somebody safe from their habenula and keeping the habenula happy and quiet well also I I can't help but but point out that you know almost all those things that you just mentioned are a predominant feature of being a teenager absolutely you know being a young person AB you know and I would also argue like we have a little bit of An extended adolescence I think um you know my son tells me every generation thinks that

about the Next Generation but I really think it about this one um there just seems to be a little bit of an extended you know kind of period of of uncertainty and you know kind of trying to find your way and being uh very very impressionable so how do we navigate you know either having kids or you know ourselves feeling like we're impressionable like how do you navigate That when that is also a feature of development you know I did did one thing right as a mother which is that I taught my children you know

the number one rule of life is change and the number one thing you can do is figure it out and I didn't even realize my own future self would find iterative mindset and that this was actually a thing so I think that the safest safety rep safety vest whatever You want to say for teenagers and for all of us is to teach them to iterate um Carol D's early work divided the world into performance mindsets and learning mindsets and then she went down the rabbit hole of growth mindset from there and growth mindset is essential

but it's not sufficient to undo the barrage of what's coming at our young people and so I would say I would argue that iterative mindset is at least in my 30 years of researching all this stuff the most Protective factor that you could give a young person or an older person to navigate this world of failure triggers that we're immersed in I wonder if you can talk a little bit about addiction um you touch on it um here and there in the book um but I wonder if you can kind of lean into it a

little bit more because this is one of those things you know um I'm thinking about people who are chronic relapsers right which is a a very special category okay sogar yeah so Um you know there are chronic relapsers and obviously sugar can have significant consequences but I also think about people who you know see their lives crash you know lose their homes lose their money lose their spouses their job their kids lose their entire way of being get clean and still will relapse right and the notion is you think like oh once someone's hit bottom

right you want to believe that's the bottom um but I wonder if you can speak to sort of What might be going on in the habenula and what are some of the you know kind of deeper ways that we can understand the addictive process in this framework yeah um so before people started looking at the habenula there was this um you know addiction medicine 2.0 kind of idea where like if you have a number line and you have the person try to get pleasure you know through their addictive substance they'll go one point to the

positive for the moment and then again Loss is twice as powerful as gain you get two marks negative on the number line so now you're at negative one then you try to get back to homeostasis at zero and then you get punished negative2 so now what's coming out is that the habenula is the source of that negative2 for every one step towards something pleasurable and that's why doctors are recommending or playing with dopamine fasting because there's no other way you can't get there through happiness you Have to get there through managing the failure through managing

the the negativity and a habenula that's on all I can say is like it's such a psychically itchy state that there is a natural proclivity for us to numb out to distract to to do anything to get that because it's it's got a a strangle hold on our dopamine it controls serotonin you know it has the most nicotinic receptors of anywhere you know so there's there's a lot of operant in the Habenula and addiction and they there was one study where they had young men who unfortunately lost their lives to overdose uh of heroin and

they found that their habenula was shrunken down so you could imagine like that repeated you know a wash Of The Addictive substance kind of suppressing the habenula and the habenula stopping you from doing something maybe wrong for you or threatening to you just their brakes went out in their car and they drove Over the cliff you know because they didn't have habenula breaks anymore and so you know it's very consequential I think that two areas I predict are going to explode one is in depression anxiety the kind of like mood disorder area around habenula and

treatments for that and then the second one is going to be for addiction because we've now found the culprit for something that we've observed in people's lives you know I want you to talk a little bit more about This notion of dopamine um you know this is a very hot chemical and we obviously you know it comes up here a lot um but you said something about um you know kind of why dopamine fasts are are recommended I wonder if can you explain a little bit more um that pleasure is not kind of what will

get you there it's being able to modulate kind of the distribution of pleasure yeah if anybody's known somebody who really struggles with addiction what they'll Say is I'm not trying to get high I'm trying to feel normal so they're trying to get back to that zero point on the number line that that equilibrium and they can't because they're slipping further and further at you know to your point around like hitting rock bottom that's when you've tried so many times to get back to the zero on the number line and slipped further and further away from

it because of this plus one two Equation and so in terms of you know the the habenula and and what it's doing to you you're trying to shut it up with the addictive substance The Addictive substance at one point I think just gets rid of your habenular activity whatsoever because you won right but then you're pursuing you're a fiend for that dopamine and you're not able to feel that high and so the the current thinking is that if you just stop pursuing the pleasure It's called withdrawal and the habenula causes the mo is the cause

of withdrawal symptoms it's nasty it's a nasty little half centimeter thing yeah um I mean like I went to Fez once and we there was camels with like little rings in their nose so there's this giant animal and it's LED around by this ring in their nose so I'm almost thinking that the habenula is kind of like the ring in our nose that we can be led around by you know whether it's by other people or Addictive substances and so you know this this psychic pain is just like itchy and it's whatever and like you

know shut it up shut it up and so if somebody can get through that that I think a month-long real painful period Then they can start getting some of their homostasis back they can get some of their like normal dopamine and normal normaly can we talk a little bit about how it can influence people who just feel generally stuck there are so many More people out there these days that just kind of feel numb you know they they have this malaise about themselves uh and about the world around them and they're just stop really enjoying

things they kind of are going through life in a bit of a fog and maybe it's endless scrolling maybe it's just feeling overwhelmed by the news but more and more people are you know not excited by things that either used to bring them excitement or that you know decades ago Before we were endlessly connected people would go outside and play and you know there used to be more of a sense of oh I'm just going to enjoy quote unquote the simple things so whenever somebody is in a state of anadon you know that's her State

below or above depression you know um before depression sets in um that is by definition a habenula on state now that we know that habenula is the cause of that and so when that's on again it's An itchy experience and then there is a natural proclivity towards reaching for something to numb or something to entertain or something to distract and so that's basically the the loop that you're describing and so the answer off off the the Margo round is to iterate your way out of that um dopamine fasting is an iteration I don't think it

is important in all cases there's weird people who can like you know cold turkey them when they when they kind of wake up To oh that's not working out for me I'm just going to cold turkey you know is that the dopamine fast that you say like I'm not going to get a dopamine hit from this anymore those people I don't even know they're freaks of nature they like it's it's a permanent dopamine fast for that and maybe they maybe they you know their addictive mind goes to another domain nobody's I think really articulated that

that I know of um but I would assume that's what's happening um But yeah they like just quit smoking one day because something clicked and they're like it's not going to do this anymore you know and and those kind kind of of you know kind of Miracles of behavior change but for everybody else you know being able to do harm reduction dopamine fasting that kind of stuff even the gp1s is kind of like a you know inducing that you know where you're not able to like get the pleasure out of the food and all that

yummy num you know all That kind of stuff is not going on because it's kind of stopping you and it's giving you that pleasure in a way or that need for pleasure Downstream of oxytocin um that satisfaction that satiety and then also dampening your anadon your your depression at the same time so it's replacing something that's been lost by your own spinning in the way that you're living your life so the question I have because if we're looking at the habenula Sort of overseeing a variety of different you know aspects of motivation and of Notions

of failure um does that put a different lens on let's say fitness goals and weight loss do we get to look at it in the framework of not just the addiction to food that might be driving you to let's say be a compulsive overeater um but the notion is that we become addicted to this process right we basically our habenula is so depleted deprived compromised Right that we have created an addiction of trying to fix an addiction that's right yeah you're kind of adding insult injury you know when you're reaching for the wrong thing so

it's the wrong view you know when we have habal activity and this is something I'm I'm I'm L this is my Edge right now is when I see myself not motivated to do the thing that I should do for myself what is different about me because I have a jump on this Information is I start looking for where did I think I failed and then dealing with that because it's not going to come through distraction or numbing or pursuing pleasure pleasure or um you know aversion of any kind but this takes a long time and

people don't want that they want I mean they want like the fast you know that is fast though you know I think it's equally as fast to really spend your energy being like Oh like This isn't working out for me like really reframing that it's just that we don't have the right instruction right now I was just going to say I didn't I didn't mean to say that people don't want it but in our fast-paced culture where you know we're kind of like scrolling all day and like looking at the puppies blowing bubbles you know

like that's a lot of where a lot of our energy goes or we're trying to escape from the realities of politics and the World and just everything is crazy this is hard for people also we're not taught to think about hey where did I think I've failed and finding that psychological trap that we may have set for ourselves what we're taught is I'm going to focus on all my strengths and if I just focus enough on my strengths that's what's going to help me get over the next T but actually going backwards and auditing that

is a really powerful practice to say where have I tricked Myself into thinking or set up an expectation for myself that I haven't met yeah in my research I saw two groups of people one is that they would go and um look at the why you know why did this happen that tends to be me you know maybe overeducated people do that more often um um but then the other there was another group people that just okay that's broken I'm just going to iterate not going to think about it generally men you know and so

there's there's a Couple ways say more they just start solving they go into problem solving mode and and they iterate oh you know whenever they are not getting my husband did this he's very successful at certain things because he's just like I'm just GNA figure it out and I'm going to do it yeah exactly so if I see myself watching too many puppies with blowing bubbles then I iterate I just iterate on what is what is going to cause me to you know Rightsize that in my life and and I so to recognize the problem

right I I see that I there's something I don't want and there's something I do want and then you know certain people are just like I'm just going to start puzzling over here I don't have to like analyze why this other thing is happening I don't have to get all caught up in that I had been off news like I had been I I had to do a news fast it was specifically really bad for you know call me whatever You want I'm a highly sensitive person like all the things like yeah so I had

gone on a fast and then um you know things happen and then you come off the fast but I realized I was having reactions that were pervading my day midday and night like what specifically if I would wake up and the first thing I would go to was to check the news I would feel my heart start racing and I would feel like I'm putting all these chemicals of you know and legitimate Chemicals meaning I'm outraged I'm scared I'm sad like whatever those feelings are but I'm putting them in my brain first thing in the

morning and then expecting to not feel grumpy or out of sorts right and also I would then like you know send things to Valerie or Jonathan like look what I saw in the new sharing sharing the trauma right I'm making everyone else feel trauma with me and one of the things that um I did which you know I'm already judging it Like I'm not entirely pleased with the solution but I started playing word games instead meaning I really love like crossword puzzles and I I got into Wordle like 10 years after everyone else did um

and I started like doing easy sodoku because I knew that my brain wanted to it wanted to it wanted to chew on something but I gave it something that wasn't as I don't know hurtful a swap I did a swap you did a swap I did a Swap yes you did I want to do all of them yeah so so you noticed you noticed you know the thing that was kind of causing you more and more suffering right um and by the way you know exposing your brain to the news which is I think it

should be called the bad news because it's misnomer um it sets up expectations that there's something you know positive or helpful and um and then you're you're a wash and your habenula is on and it's not my habenula is always On it's not the problem of like taking in information for which you will have a compassionate response that's not the problem the problem is that you have no way to do anything about it well and there may be some people for whom they don't have that specific response like my dad used to read the New

York Times every single day yeah every day of my H every day of my life my dad would sit down and like you didn't interrupt him or like I would learn to like read the Newspaper with him which was like my hands would get all you know the print on them but like that was a thing and sometimes he'd get upset about things but like mostly he just seemed to like read the paper but I don't know if it's that the news has changed I think it all changed with like the political situation where like

everybody like where it was on Twitter and like I have to know what the president is tweeting while he's sitting on the toilet like Things like that that it just became so so much a part of our constant culture well news used to be more boring because it wasn't monetized and so once it became monetized and also competitive with outrage with things like social media and stuff like that then it did become super super charged right it's super charged the language if you I'm sure if you pulled archives the language was a lot more straightforward

and and Bland In terms of what your dad's brain was drinking in every day what I'm hearing about mim's experience is it's less important and maybe even counterproductive for her to go through a whole evaluative process of why am I being drawn to the news and what in my past is making me want to chew on something right now and more important to really quickly iterate on a solution to get her chewing on something that is less activated that's right and my my Own with New York Times specifically my own iteration was to delete the

app because I put friction in the way of this is one of those ads ad friction um I put friction in the way of between me and having to like type it into my browser you know to get the fix and you know I also do a lot of a solitaire game just like non-op to social Just Me Myself and I doing Solitaire it's soothing exercise so I think that you know there's productive ways to uh Redirect that energy when you're feeling overloaded especially for sensitive people like myself yourself uh there's a lot of iteration

that needs to happen I I wanted to talk about and I guess this Falls a little bit under inspiration from the the iterative mindset um you you mentioned something and there's a couple points in this book that are that get very transcendental you know you have indigenous lineage and so you there's some really beautiful kind of Stories that you weave through and and traditions and um and in some cases some some ritual aspects um that you weave through um you also do talk about the use of psychedelics you talk about a particular um you know

really kind of therapeutic Journey that you took but there was one section of the book that just it it stuck out to me not because it didn't belong you talked to about I am which is soam in Sanskrit and um this is a mantra that is used and um there's Actually one of my favorite um in uh in Kundalini Yoga there's a lot of songs that we listen to and there's a lot of like there's bands that just sing like Kini music and one of my favorite pieces is just the words I am and it's

a beautiful piece and it's like over and over I am I am and you know we're all singing and we're weighing but you you talk about the significance of owning this notion of I am as part of Shifting out of this failure mindset into the Iterative mindset can you talk about I am yeah so you know our ruminative brain we have a narrative self um within that and so that's something you know I'm I'm telling myself right now that I'm on this podcast you know you're telling yourself that you're my biic it's there there's a

there's a subconscious aspect of that that's going on at all times um in terms of how we locate ourselves and of course with psychedelics um that's all scrambled you know when the person Is in a journey um the I am is kind of disorganized gives you a break because what if your I am is I am the worst person on the planet you know and so how you know what mine was sometimes sometimes not not having an I am is good um but the the main thing is that we do need to with failure kick

out any Notions of I am a failure you know in in some way transform those into I am learning you know I am iterating whatever it is that I am focused on you Know that I'm telling myself that I am to reidentifying about ourselves and so that's something that is unless we deal with that sort of chamber of uh the bank of I am and the narrative self we're going to be kind of spinning is this notion of I am like is this positive thinking for lack of a better phrase I think optimists um you

know if you look at the literature optimism is a very protective Factor but Just like growth mindset like I'm not you know a failure I'm I'm not um it's not over for me that that is very essential but it's not sufficient mhm and so I find that the iteration on top of that is really the operant part of getting out of any you know destructive negative a aspects of notion of self I mean I just want to hear more stories about people who uh like the Dorito addict had had ways of successfully changing their behavior

is fascinating Maybe maybe we could uh throw out a couple would would you mind if I threw out a couple scenarios okay Jonathan why don't we throw out a couple scenarios yeah one that hit me was the procrastinator or the person that assumes they're going to fail how does that show up in relationships yeah so you know in animal Behavioral Science there's this kind of shortcut of approach a void right and so the habenula we've established is the Avoid part of that equation and so if I am wanting to be in love or I'm wanting

to approach my partner with um something that's really vulnerable for me or that kind of thing then I may have a prefilling notion of like well this didn't work out before I was never received I was never listened to that kind of thing I might hesitate and my habenula is already preil me into not connecting that's avoidant attachment yes you just designed You just defined Avoidant Detachment I feel like this is like the answer to everything like you talked about Holy Grail it's like oh everything goes back to the vula right because it is everywhere

all at once um and all of our behavior and so then if I don't do that then I don't form a bond with my partner then the relationship ends you know so so there's a lot of consequences in me not being able to wrestle with my habenula and get it to quiet down so that and again I don't Mean to throw avoidant attachment out there but if it if you have this notion that I'm afraid to approach and attempts are never going to be complete because there's always going to be that you know habenula pulling

you back right this then becomes a a loop that's very difficult to break out of because you've just had reinforced that you will fail that's right that's right so how do you hack that how do you if You are an avoidant attachment person let's say because of your habenula you can't just say like sorry it's my habenula how do you hack that I hope people start saying things like that I really do it's not me I want this to like enter the zy gist um so yeah I think that iteration is the the golden ticket

to everything you know I iterate I I might try like a little bit of a you know maybe being more vulnerable in this moment I might go to a support group for That I might you know read a book on that like those kinds of things are iterations and everything is going to be different you know each person will be unlocked by a particular Source in a different way and so you know it's just about finding again it's like finding what it is that's going to turn off your habenula in particular I I want to

give an example about eating and food um you know you talk about it um quite a bit in the book Um you know in in the category of overeating um I have decided let's say let's say I make the decision I'm only going to have one helping right like this is like a thing I mean the standard American diet is usually the portions are super large but then like I always also like will be like well I want seconds so my my notion and it it's part of its Pleasure Principle if something's good more of

it is better that's not always true especially if you're trying To control your caloric intake how do I hack that so the iterations for overeating um that I've seen work for people is to again throw away the food as soon as possible to split it and save it for later to um cancel their order if they if they ordered it you know in a moment of weakness um to reducing the number of bites and some people can kind of um and then if you also just blow past all of those Gates of safety and you're

just ravenous and you're just the Inner monster has taken over then as soon as possible get off the you know get out of the relapse you know the people who succeed long term right keep diving in and being like I messed it up I might as well keep going it's slippery you know like you can you can just go all the way to the bottom of that but people who are more experienced with themselves start to get more better and better at pulling out of that tail spin faster and faster And that tends to be

um built on iteration but also their mindset is they have right view as they say in Buddhism you know like like they're seeing it clearly that oh I'm in a relapse and now I'm going to you know know dream my way out of this into or I'm just going to forgive myself um here's another one some people when they wake up in the middle of the night go to the fridge what not naming any names what is that How do you hack that so there may be a a disempowered state of the habenula before bed

um there may be a habit around going to the fridge and so it's Comfort it's it's familiar um and so again iterations for late fridge is to have something as as healthy as possible at the FL of that fridge and hide everything that the monster might you know go after that would be counteractive for oneself and just say like this is satisfying and Also even you know people do mindful eating so if somebody has a presence of mind not usually in a groggy sleepy state but again making the good thing easy and the hard thing

hard or the bad thing hard is kind of an adage that we have in behavioral design okay so we did a relationship example we did some eating examples um Jonathan do you want to Jonathan is very uh into like Fitness and things like that why don't you give us um a a fitness challenge like you Know something that's challenging in the fitness uh world that that we could try and figure out a hack for well there's more Fitness influencers on Instagram and elsewhere than I think maybe anything else so if someone is trying to develop

a new fitness routine if they're trying to get over uh a hump or set a goal what's the best way to be successful so iterations in Fitness as you mentioned are there's a plethora of information the main thing is that you Know in hold in trying those out that they don't become sharp objects because Fitness can become so easily performative but if you look at people professional athletes when is it not performative I think when you're when you're seeing the performance as the iteration there's there's a meta there that I think that some people some

super smart people are doing and I hope other people copy that not their workout and so if I see a great inspiring workout Like there there's kind of this notion of let's see in the selft talk world you know like let's see if I can get myself to do this let's see what percent of this let's see how long I can get myself to do this for but the expectation out from the get-go on every workout should be at one point this will fail me bore me and I will need to I will need to

iterate you know so if I go into it Eyes Wide Open that way then I will keep going where other people get caught up In I'm not doing zumba anymore huh yeah that's interesting because I've noticed that Jonathan who who does look at Instagram and things like that he'll sometimes get an idea for something and he'll be super into it and I'm like okay this is his thing now yeah but then it will run its course and he'll find another thing and I find that very confusing because I'm a little bit binary about it you

know like what's your right well it's like you know I Started doing Taekwondo and I worked my way up to a black belt now I have a black belt like that's my thing and now I work for my second degree black belt you know whereas Jonathan is like I hang from the ceiling on these things and then like I'll play pickle ball and then I want to pull a sled he really wants to pull a sled through the backyard because he keeps seeing people pulling a SL then he keeps showing me this guy who runs

on all fours and I'm like is this my life Now he's going to start running on all for us his limbs are so long but like that's kind of how it goes and I think you know for me like I I am very performative you know I mean that's just I think I was born that way even before I started being an actor but I kind of feel like I've put my performative needs on him like is he doing it to the degree that he wants and then why is he stopping did he fail like

I'm all up in his performative habenula business I Think after this conversation you're going to see the world differently I think so I think going to see Jonathan differently and I think you're going to see he just one big AB waiting to fail I think you're going to see the sled as an iteration I think you're going to see the animal flow as iteration I think you're going to see it differently and then be supportive in a way that you probably can't even predict right now I haven't been supportive of my friend Jonathan because my

habenula has been compromised I'm gonna blame the habenula for everything you're in the middle of a lifelong relationship with ta kwondo I thought you say with my habenula yeah well also that but um but but the taekwon D at some point will fail you right it may be you know in the last couple months of your life as an old frail woman who knows you know but but everything expires got it yeah yeah one thing I do with some of these exercises I find also is that I will not do them D exactly because I

have a hip replacement I'm always just sort of inching into things seeing how much they impact me can I recover fast enough and then I'm like oh so for me it's research I don't have a personal trainer it's a lot of like can I gather the information can I remember it I get bored easily and then I try to implement it and then the other thing that I'm you know hearing here and I get stuck in a Lot is like oh if I miss a week if I miss two weeks do I not get upset

about the time that I lost and just say okay I can come back and reinforce the positivity of starting again that day and trying to build the next momentum that's going to carry me forward versus sitting in the momentum of not having done it to prevent me from actually getting back in that's right and you know that's where it could become a pointy object is In the week or two uh you get sick you're traveling whatever the case may be um all kinds of Life happens right and if you wallow or you interpret that as

failure watch out because you're havea on and then you won't feel like doing it more and then you're in this big long relapse period you know and and so it's just about like get back up get back up get back out there you know do do anything and I've seen that I've seen myself say like I made this commitment I Was going to have all this progress in this in this next month but I missed two and a half weeks look at all the pro and so I've lost this progress and I'm sort of hard

on myself for not having gotten there cuz I'm like oh I go play pickle ball or I go do something and I'm like oh I'm a little sore imagine how much less sore if I had just done those two and a half weeks I would have had all these gains and so it's interesting that I'm I'm hearing and I'm seeing myself Grieving the loss that we spoke about and I also see that if I can put that away if I can actually just focus on well I'm I'm today I just did it let me feel

how good that feels and if I can focus on that it will lead me more to be able to do it the next day versus the other you you're sounding very iterative as your main fuel that you're fueling which is why you're able to keep going um but then there's these little catches of where you think you have to be Performative and that so what I would say is that if you held the performative aspect which which does it's exciting it's like it's like you know jet fuel performative stuff it's like o there's a high

at the end of it if if you if you do what you say you do and you get the results or you win the race or that kind of thing but then know that there's a lull you know after the concert's over after the rock star and there's that big high or the awards show or whatever That's when people underestimate the habenula is going to come on and do a negative2 on you and you got to be ready for that I think I have extra hulas you do you got extra gruesome I do um this

is a question you don't mention at all in your book I want an entire book on it I want you to talk about sex M because this is an act that is by definition yes performative yes and also can be can be and also should be ultimately and ideally a true expression Of you being yourself and I'm thinking about especially with hookup culture right yeah what what is the habenula doing when you're having casual sex versus committed connected sex so this is great this is all very hypothetical so I'll just say that up front but

um you know my favorite kind of science when I was 30 with my first husband um you know I don't think I'm revealing anything um I outed myself that I had been faking orgasms and your habenula was faking orgasms yes your habenula was well you you were performing and then your habenula is like this is not working out this oh my gosh and so I was tired of failing at orgasms and I told him and that just opened up a whole new world of like I mean whose failure is it when you don't have an

orgasm doctor I know but then but then you're protecting the the man's habenula if you're Heterosexual and so and so you're protecting your partner's habenula by acting not truthful you know you're you're performing as a sexual being and of course with so much pervasive porn which is an addiction which is which is dopamine seeking and then you know habenula is going to come right after that so right after you know the masturbation um that's the for men especially that is the biggest surge of oxytocin that they get is post Ejaculation and so then you've got

this like dopamine seeking thing you've got you know the habenula punishing you in the negative Direction you know look you're lonely nobody loves you like you know they they're calling you afterwards like all that kind of stuff comes into play and so in hookup culture you may be enjoying the dopamine in the moment but the next morning the reason why you feel so horrible is because the habenula is punishing you with that negative2 Thing that's doing and then and then you want more then then you want to go into or you push it aside because

I know a lot of people like I don't feel horrible I feel amazing there's a notion also of of pushing that aside because if you look deeply at and again like there may be people who like to hook up with people it's like not for me to say but I'm thinking about in this scenario of if there's a loneliness behind it if there's an emptiness if there's a Aspiration if there's getting involved in situations that are dangerous and you know it and you're putting yourself at risk right like that's where your habenula is like I'm

at the party yeah and and most people don't realize when they say I'm fine they're just remembering how good it felt to feel connected in that moment because they have this surge of oxytocin which is stronger and more pervasive in terms of receptor sites than dopamine is that Always true if I'm fine you're thinking back to when you were fine so yeah like yeah maybe maybe but it's a story it's not really how you're really feeling because I I know this because I've talked to so many people in depth about their lives it's kind of

a whack-a-mole like if if you're denying that about how you're feeling in this one domain of sex then guess what you're going to eat or you're going to drink alcohol or you're going to numb out in some other way you Know or you're going or you're going to look for the next hit you're going to look for the next lover okay let's get back to you and your first husband because that's very interesting I want to consent him for this convers no but we're good friends no but my my question is once you've made that

admission right is that then a place that you get to say I want to step into my authentic self and I'm either not going to have an orgasm or it's going to become a Priority for me in my habenula oh my gosh it just it just throws a gauntlet down doesn't it between you because then they have all kinds of benal activity around like well this whole time I haven't been as good of a lover as I thought so I'm failing as a lover wow right and as a sexual partner and then you know men

especially you know with erections things they're really sensitive around that and so how do you then you know I don't know what what Role it played in our divorce but you know two years later we got divorced um I mean he had trouble with Intimacy in general you know um so I think that there's just a whole other level of sex Health that has not been accessed in any way because we are so busy performing either as porn stars or as uh people not telling our truth right I mean that's what it is yeah there's

so much inauthenticity in the sexual relationships with people It's really funny because um I'm just going to go ahead never thought this episode would go here me neither I have never I've never in my life faked an orgasm ever ever ever ever ever and well thank you but I remember that when I would hear that women would do this and you know you learn about it in magazines or something you know and I was a late bloomer for those of you playing bingo at home um I was a late bloomer but I remember that when

I heard that that People did that I was like why would you make someone think something about themselves that that they could do that just isn't true wow meaning it just it it boggled my mind and and that's not to say that you know I absolutely have the best sex life of any human on the planet but I'm just saying that like it never made sense to me but it's interesting because in so many other aspects of my life some might argue all the other aspects of my life there is a very Strong sense of

how's the other person and what do they need and am I making them happy and like my job as an actor is to make other people say yes you got the job exactly so this was like the one Arena it's the the island of uh the island of orgasm isolation good for you good for you I mean you're you're you know also never had an orgasm that I'm just kidding but you know you're in the minority I guess but like I said it Never made sense to me and you know I was like a young

empowered feminist like why would you make someone think that they succeeded in pleasing you if they didn't because then you're missing an opportunity to teach them what actually makes you feel good now you're making me interested in polling feminist versus non-feminist and finding you know where that breaks do you have a feminist habenula or not that's the title of this episode exactly did your habenula have An orgasm last night what is the percentage of people who have faked orgasm it sounds like you've done a little research in the space for women um it's the majority

and I don't remember that it's been years since I've seen the actual numbers and it's not coming to me let's touch on pornography for a moment and the impact that you see it having on people's feelings of authenticity versus feelings of of Shame when you think about Performative versus authentic expression um there's a larger question to be had about pornography yeah in terms of what impact it has on our ability to then either mimic in a performative sense or is it a neutral way to get in touch with a variety of things that we're learning

about is pornography impeding my ability to be my authentic self the very nature of seeing other people in a pornographic sense is not in itself harmful mhm um I think that kind Of like what we're talking about with the news if I could make a weird analogy there um the porn industry is fueled by outrage you know that they're they're competing with each other for you know race to the bottom of the brain stem as Tristan Harris calls it and so it's an attention economy and it's set up to be an addiction economy I I

was just going to say one of the components of of sex addiction in this arena is the need to Keep upping the stakes which is I think also what that sort of proliferation in outrageous porn you know is sort of getting harmful abusive correct but there's a notion of needing to sort of up the stakes which addicts themselves don't always enjoy meaning it's a it's a compulsive machine that's right and so you know that that hyper stimulation is always you know kind of a a reach for when your habenula is on and you don't know

it's on you know I mean I think it Just cannot be overstated that the habenula is doing this in a silent quiet way there's no like ouch my habenula is on like it's just it's very secret you know just it's stealthy and so in a person who's using porn as their drug to quiet their habenula they're on that number line one step towards dopamine pleasure two steps pain One Step pleasure two steps pain so they're falling down into a hole where they've got to do more and more drug the more More rough drug and harsh

drug and things like that in order to get to yeah yeah and then you know it's the same result iterate your way out of that um you know dopamine fast whatever can get you out of that terrible terrible state of helplessness and powerlessness against your addiction I can't help but think about things like chronic pain and things like um you know for for those of us with autoimmune condition right where There's for lack of a better word iterative you know iterative um aches pains you know things um I you know I'm a person who like

my back will go out you know twice a year and it's always the same thing and it's the soas muscle and like it's the muscle of change whatever I'm like done changing um but I was thinking about the the role of the habenula because if we're talking about addiction you know the brain is very redundant it doesn't have as many Communication Pathways as there are pathways so it's a it is a redundant system it uses a discrete amount of chemicals it uses a discret amount of receptors and channels and things that open and electrophysiological changes

so it's a very redundant system but you know I'm kind of buying into this like holy grail component because obviously there's never one thing in the brain that we can say for some people the habenula may be a really really Important hot point and for someone else it might be hypothalamic it could be it could be amydala like it could be a lot of things but I think about addiction and I think about patterns and I think about you know these these grooves that our brain will go into I can't help but think about things

like chronic pain and things that we used to call psychosomatic illness I mean people used to be told it's all in your head then we shifted to psychosomatic and now we're Shifting into more of the Dr Sarno conception of like the mindbody syndrome right so where does mindbody syndrome and sort of the intersection of your thoughts and your physiology where does that play in into the sort of patterns that the habenula is going to try and tap into as well yeah and this is a very recent study like a week ago kind of thing you

know with um rheumatoid arthritis and depression and what they found is that Habenula mediates the depression of rheumatoid arthritis wow and and mediates the rheumatoid arthritis so there's something really intriguing about that that of course like what comes first right yeah yeah we don't have that all worked out you know so that's the area where I think science is going to explode is figuring out you know chicken or eggs on those kinds of things or even how the cycle get started and then also how to un undo it yeah and Jonathan and I did a

talk at South by Southwest on the intersection of Science and spirituality but a a huge component of this was you know it's very hard to know what comes first right are people who are depressed you know well we know and Gabor mate has done you know all this work and Bessel vanderock we know that people who have let's say adverse childhood experiences children who witness trauma children who experience trauma themselves right this is all Setting the stage for I would say a habenula that is struggling a lyic system that is on fire right an amydala

that doesn't know real from imagined right yeah so then you have this notion of those people are susceptible to autoimmune disorders right we talk about the the personalities associated with multiple sclerosis you know with epilepsy that there's a personality that often even with cancer you know these are some of the hardest statistics but It's really interesting because and this is you know for For Better or Worse you know this is where animal studies come in to try and figure out what is the mechanism is it the depression that is opening up to a range of

autoimmune dysfunction is it the habenula that is compromised or that is you know lacking appropriate connections let's say to other places um but especially I'd be fascinated to see if for things like chronic pain or things like these Autoimmune conditions um I'm so curious where more research will lead in terms of the Hula's role me too and again it just it gives me that image of you know the the camel with the little nose ring you know that the habenula is that little nose ring it's so out outp powerered and out you know undersized but

it is overpowering everything on on it's honestly the most powerful behavioral control I've ever seen in my career unbelievable yeah the the title Of your book is Unstoppable brain and um I want to have an Unstoppable brain and I think a lot of people do and I know it's hard to ask you to sort of like sum up you know your book in a top three things but if if I were to say to you you know I feel stuck I feel whatever it is depressed unmotivated I can't move forward whether it's work weight Fitness

relationships what are the three things you would suggest that I do to go from a stuck brain to an Unstoppable brain yeah So stop overperforming everything you know right siiz performance where it is beneficial and then don't go when it becomes a sharp object stop wow the second is um turn off the habenula by talking yourself out of or letting go of or doing anything you can to neutralize failure or prevent failure you know failure thinking and then the third one is iterate the [ __ ] out of your life that's what people do that

succeed long term that if if you look at any Successful person in any domain um what's hiding in plain sight is the amount of iteration that person is using to do that superhuman thing um I I have kind of a rudimentary question um and I know that there's you know a lot of research and a lot more research coming out about the habenula what happens if you just section out the habenula what does Behavior look like yeah I have no idea so there's a medial and a l we didn't get into this detail but you

know This is okay medial and lateral and the lateral seems to be most operant when it's active in causing depression Etc all the kind of psychic pain the medial may be mitigating that but it's like a giant jigsaw puzzle and we've only got a few pieces on the board so there's no way to tell exactly how those are parsed out yet but I'll say that you know there's even a more recent study that came out last week where they took mice mother mice and they killed they they Cut off their um lateral habenula activity and

what they found is that they stopped mothering their pups and so it's just so consequential that the different things that people are trying to see you know how each of these parts of the habenula activate Dr Kyra bobinet the book is Unstoppable brain the new Neuroscience that frees us from failure eases our stress and creates lasting change it's really been so great to talk to you um We covered so many things in the book book not in the book but I highly recommend people get the book It's a Wonderful reference to have um there's so

many sections that you can pull up when you're in a particular situation um it's really a wonderful book to have um on your shelf in your mental health and Neuroscience category so um it's really been such a pleasure talking to you thank you yeah thanks [Music] So so Jonathan Dr bobinet predicted that we would look at the world totally differently now that we've spoken to her and learned about the habenula you now want to push my sled too I want to push your sled too also we can pull it it's it's a dual Direction sled

I think what what I found interesting about sort of her statement around that is that we can sometimes even in I'm imagining even in work relationships and in personal relationships and I mean especially with Our children we can have performative expectations for other people it's not just for ourselves I was thinking about I mean parenting is like a whole other aspect like I want her to write a book about the habenula and porn habenula and parenting like all the things I was thinking about how much of what we want for our kids is often what

we think looks good right and so much of I think our culture lends itself to you know almost adults Acting like adolescents in terms of like I want it to look good I want it to look good for him I want him to have the car he wants I want her to have the shoes that she wants or you know we we're going to go into debt so that I can give them this trip that we can't afford you know how much of our Lives is this conflict between my performative self and what I think

I should do so that I'll look a certain way versus my authentic self I think people have Mostly been programmed not to even know what their authentic self is how do we get to that in a modern-day Society where we're overrun with images of what other people are doing what we think will make us happy I mean I see my son who is 16 now and he's really into uh training for tennis training for pickle ball but on YouTube Reals he sees a lot of bodybuilders and I see him comparing himself to these these bodybuilders

and like and Looking at his his traps and being like do I have big traps am I broad my friend has this muscle over here how do I get that muscle and in some way tell him to look at his father he's going to have the same exact body and in some ways that information is available when I wanted to lift weights I had to like go read Arnold's uh body book uh bodybuilding manual and flip through the pages and now he has access to all of these different Exercises at the tip of his fingers

but on the same regard I'm like how much of this is driven by his need to look good to versus have his body perform well in the activities that he's passionate about that motivate him that's a slippery slope um when we listed the performative tools that fail um so I just want to go over them real quick New Year's resolutions social media Sports goals Fitness Trends dieting habit routines To-do lists lying was one of them career and relationship goals and then those smart goals those like you know specific kind of metrics goals Jonathan what's your

what is your most reliable performative tool that you might want to change I've really been working on being consistent with working out and it's I'm trying really not to base that on any sort of metrics for visual appeal or building a type of muscle versus functional performance meaning I know That to be healthy to increase lifespan as Peter AA talks about that building and maintaining muscle is super important so instead of doing it of I want to get Jack to look great in for summer I'm doing it much more so with the mindset to not

have it be a sharp object if I do not uh execute five days a week or six days a week or lift this number of plates but really iterating so that I know what exercises I can do that I can recover from that I can stay Consistent with and if I do miss a day or if I'm not hitting it that I'm not beating myself up for that I really like that and I think that notion that it's not bad to have a habit it's not bad to have a to-do list it's not bad to

have a career goal or a relationship goal but it's all kind of about the framing I'm also curious um Jonathan if any of the types of failure like the the types of ways that you that we tend to sort of think about failure if any of those were Relatable to you so the choices are all or nothing thinking that's kind of my special uh comparing I used to be able to preil impostor syndrome nothing works for me been there done that or Shing like I should have done this he should have done that I can

relate to shing for sure oh I should do this and then I will have gotten that result um I mean impostor syndrome you know when we first started this podcast I didn't think I was going To have a microphone sometimes you ask me questions I'm like there should be a doctor or someone to speak to this who might us say any of this uh so I struggle with that for sure um preil I have definitely thought about like oh is this worth it you know is should I go down this path of like learning something

or exploring an Avenue how much time effort is that going to take and trying to do mental gymnastics to try to think about the cost benefit Ratio I've had a handful of friends in my life where I can recall them dating someone who was really smart and charismatic and fun and seemed to be really ambitious but had what they described as a fear of success as opposed to a fear of failure but when I was looking at this list the been there done that is actually kind of it's a way of being afraid of success

because it's like oh I've already done that or I don't need that and I just Thought it was kind of interesting because it's a component of this larger notion of a fear of failure and you know I think everyone can relate to one of these if not more than one right but for me the all or nothing thinking or I used to be able to right like I used to be more fit or especially like as our bodies get older and especially as women like I used to be able to do this why would I

even try you know I have friends who started running triathlons in you Know their late 30s and they were able to push past that you know like nothing works for me I know people who get in that ruminative depressive like should I try you know actually black and white thinking is a big one I used to think things were much more binary I can do this thing or I could do that thing but they can't always fit together even when one of those two things that I would juxtapose neither of them felt right and what

I've seen more and more is that Often the solution is some combination there's actually a joke when I'm presented two creative options my answer is always can we take a little bit of each of them and there's a strategy amongst amongst creatives where they'll give you two or three polar they'll give you the the goldilock scenario you know you take this option you take the middle option or you take the extreme option and almost always I'm trying to blend things To create the ideal well I think that um that's really the iterative mindset you know

and I thought that was interesting that she mentioned that there may be some gender differences in how people organize around the iterative mindset um but yeah that's you kind of adding right it's it's you adding that was one of the aspects right inspiration time environment reduce ad togetherness expectations and swaps um I really do uh appreciate this New Perspective um I Don't know if it's going to make my brain Unstoppable but um I I definitely I'm going to try and incorporate more of this iterative mindset to be constantly trying that's how I'm uh continuously trying

that's how I I kind of feel like I'm going to take on the day if by Unstoppable she means an Unstoppable juke box with songs in your head then you're already unable Unstoppable today Unstoppable I'm unstoppable day it's a seea song stable Today today skip oh you want to skip no I'm not playing that game from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have we'll see you next [Music] time break she's going to break it down for you she's got a neuroscience PhD or two one fiction and now she's going to break down

so break down she's going to break it down