Hello everyone, I'm Diane Gorsell, also known as Silver Disobedience, and this is the Silver Disobedience Perception Dynamics podcast.

And today we're going to be talking with an expert in a about a topic that I think's on a lot of people's minds.

I hear all the time now, and I often think it myself, that my focus sometimes just doesn't seem like what it once was.

Is it because I'm older?

Well, I certainly am.

Is it stress?

I don't feel it, but maybe you do.

I don't know.

Is it the news?

Well, that's ever changing, but it's always been changing.

What's causing people to feel less focused than at other times in their lives?

My guest today is going to help us unlock those secrets and the mysteries of our mind.

His name is Doctor Shrini Pillai.

He's a psychiatrist, a researcher.

He helps a lot of companies to understand their employees, their interactions and how they can do business better.

And he's also a technician in the area of brain science and how we and our operating systems, which is what we explore a lot in this podcast.

So please welcome Doctor Shrini Pillai.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for having me Dan, always lovely to talk to you.

I am so excited to talk to you.

Let's just get right into it.

Do you think there is less focus than at other times, or does it just feel like we're all less focused than we once were?

I definitely think that there's less focus than at other times.

I can think One concrete thing I can say is that in the programs that I designed for corporations, I've reduced the amount of content to probably a 25% of what I used to present.

So I I know that the ability to just stay focused on one thing is very difficult for a lot of people.

I also think there's been a tremendous amount of research done showing that actually our tensional parameters have actually closed in on us.

Why?

What's happening to us?

I think there's, there's a lot of, so there are two sides to this, you know, but my last book is about how we can leverage unfocused.

So I don't think unfocused is all bad, but I do think that in terms of, you know, why a couple of different things.

So one of them is digital distractions.

You know, throughout the day, you get up in the morning, you get a notification from your phone, Alexa saying something, you have the TV on, you get a message, you get a text.

You know, if think about this, before mobile devices were around, the brain had real estate that it had and it had to use its real estate well to be able to focus, to carry out tasks.

Now we've got to do pretty much the same thing while we're attending to 40 messages that come in in one minute.

And we just take it for granted that that's OK.

But when you open up your e-mail box, it's a bit like Russian roulette as well.

You don't know what you're going to find.

No idea what you're going to find.

And as you're thinking about this, you're like, well, you know, this e-mail is okay, this is fine.

So the brain is also on high alert because it's not just that there's too much to process, it's also that there's a lot of unknown and a lot of uncertainty.

So are you saying in a way we're in a constant new, a new form of stress, a constant state of stress?

I think so.

And I think, you know, the world is changing so much that even at the level of the collective, you know, every day, depending on how you consume news, you, you are put in a position where you might have to respond to wars, to financial calamities, to political decisions.

So I think a lot of people feel like there's an onslaught that's coming their way and that their brains are now getting taken over.

And so for most people, they're just trying to keep their lives together.

You know, if they're people with families, for example, they're trying to make sure everything's OK at home.

They're trying to make sure that they get the work that they need to get done on time, but the work keeps pouring in.

And then there's also new stuff.

If you think about AI and how AI has changed things.

If you're not someone who has jumped into technology, and I have partly because I'm a technology entrepreneur, but also because early on I felt this is not nothing.

This is going to change a lot of what's happening.

But if if, if you don't dedicate time, time to new things, you're not going to learn about them.

Now, some people are in the privileged position of not having to learn about them.

So they don't care.

They can read a paper, newspaper and they can go for a walk and they can not care about changes in technology.

But right now, I used to feel like I was just learning from my Instagram feed or learning about the latest thing that was happening.

But now I feel like I have to set aside dedicated time to catch up on the latest developments in AI that are relevant to the work that I do and to my field.

So, so I think in summary, what I'm saying is there are a lot of distractions, there are a lot of new things and there's, there's a lot of uncertainty.

And those three things are putting our brains at risk.

I mean, some people would also say that that post COVID brain fog has increased for people with long COVID.

And then there are people with, with syndromes like chronic fatigue syndrome, for example, which also seems to be on the increase.

And, and one hard statistic is that ADHD is significantly higher than it ever was.

Now the question is, is it really higher or are we just detecting it more or are we overly detecting it?

That that can be debated.

But I, I think if you're, if you're just looking strictly at that diagnosis, that the wait list for diagnosis of ADHD in, in the UK is in the order of years.

Well, do you think that's because they're on that particular one?

Could the wait list to get diagnosed with a DADHD go up because you get testing accommodations?

And yes, you know, there's a bit of a scam in that too, which I'm sure you've seen.

Yes, I've not only seen the scam in that I've seen it all over medicine.

Yeah.

So, so I think it's, there are a lot of amazing things about the medical system and a lot of ways in which the system serves us, but a lot of messages that reach people are the messages that are best marketed.

I thought how you addressed ADHD in your book Life Unlocked was phenomenal.

That was one of the most intriguing ways because you tied it into fear.

Yeah, because because a lot of people don't realize that in the brain, the fear center, which the amygdala is a big, plays a big role in, that is actually directly connected to the thinking brain, which allows you to focus and pay attention.

And so when I used to run the anxiety disorder service at MacLean Hospital, which was at Harvard, I used to think to myself, what's going on here?

Like is the primary, the presenting problem would be I just can't focus.

But when you take a deeper history, you realize this person's actually has this chronic worry and a baseline anxiety.

And when you have these earthquakes going on in the anxiety center of the brain, it spills over to the thinking brain.

And so you can't really attend.

And So what I would find is that in certain instances, by treating the anxiety, the attention gets restored.

And so I think if you have a problem with attention, it could be a problem with attention, or it could also be a problem with your emotional system that's not cooperating and blasting through your attention.

And can we talk about that?

I mean, it's anxiety.

You can't scroll through Instagram without seeing the word anxiety.

And it's not something I follow.

So it's clearly got to be there a lot.

I mean, I follow puppies and babies.

So like, I don't, I don't think I've ever like hit on anxiety thing.

So clearly it's posted a lot.

You see people talk about my anxiety.

You know, it's, it's almost like people, it's become a identifier for people.

It's clearly up because it's a highly searchable term.

And I want to ask you about anxiety.

You talked about the dinging going off all the time, which then we answer that the dopamine drain that could be going on.

I want to hear from a medical perspective, are we draining out our dopamine at a rapid speed each time we respond to one of those Dings?

And is it elevating anxiety?

What's going on?

Well, firstly, anxiety is the commonest mental disorder, so it is.

So I don't think you're seeing those those things by chance.

It actually is.

It is the most common.

OK, how do you define anxiety?

What's the definition?

Well, so we could get into this in a number of different ways.

So there's there's the the the diagnostic institution.

Your stage.

Well, anxiety is, is a response to a presumed threat.

And I think if you're anxious in the presence of an actual threat, it's not pathological because it's not disrupting your life, your life, it's helping your life.

However, if you're anxious and there's no real reason that you're anxious and it starts to disrupt your life, then you're responding to to a presumed threat that probably doesn't exist.

And that's when anxiety starts to take over people's lives.

But I think in the current environment, there's a theory of that's called the theory of constructed emotion by Lisa Feldmann Barrett, which is, which is a new definition of of any emotion.

And what she says is emotions are signals that come from the brain telling the body to prepare for what's next expected.

So if so, it's basically a metabolic signal that is supposed to be there to help your body say, OK, we need to hold on to our our glucose stores.

We need to figure out whether we need to feed ourselves, you know, prepare to flee.

Now the, the issue with anxiety is that it's fine if the signal is correct, but if it's a malfunctioning signal, that's like, hey, hey, hey, be careful, be careful, be careful, which is the message we get.

If you look at any news, that's the message that's coming across.

So the brain is getting trained to actually create these inaccurate prediction signals.

That's making everybody feel extremely anxious.

And so I often say to people, you know, 1 short way to think about managing this is a is a mnemonic that I came up with called Circa, which is, you know, it's, I'll tell you what each letter stands for.

First C is for chunking, The I is for ignore mental chatter.

The R is reality check.

The second C is control check and the A is for attention shift.

And I'll tell you what each thing means.

So the chunking is essentially reminding us that the brain goes into this anxious state when you're flooding it with information, right?

You know, like you get up on a Monday morning, you open your e-mail.

Whoa, what just happened?

And if you actually tell yourself, let me just take a minute and, and, and just chunk out this.

I'm going to check e-mail at this time.

I'm going to try to figure out what I can get done in the morning, in the afternoon.

It might sound silly, but actually the brain starts to calm down once it knows that you don't have to do everything at once, which ties into the second form of chunking, which is basically ruthless prioritizing.

So say to yourself, I'm probably not going to get everything done today, but what do I have to get to?

And then the the third piece of chunking is delegating.

We think we have to do everything ourselves, but actually there are many things we could actually delegate.

So that's the chunking.

The ignore mental chatter is essentially mindfulness.

So it's sitting back in a chair, closing your eyes, paying attention to your breath and then keeping your attention fixed like a flashlight.

And you just, you just observe yourself breathing in and out.

Now, that might sound ridiculous, but studies have shown that the amygdala, one of the key parts of the brain involved in anxiety, actually decreases its activation if you If you engage in a regular practice like.

And I'm a big believer in that.

Yeah, I've done that over almost 25 years.

And I think it was a lifesaver for me, actually, almost 40 years.

And actually there's a, there's a, there's a technique called cyclic sighing that's recently been studied at Stanford that was actually shown to be superior to mindfulness.

And so if you're someone that says I can't sit in a chair and focus on my breath, then try this.

Try breathing in to 3/4 and then and then, and then you go right to the top and then you breathe out through your mouth slowly.

You do that for 5 minutes and it actually helps to reset what's going on in that amygdala.

Also, this, this practice that you're talking about is, is actually something that can protect genes.

At the end of our genes, we have telomeres which get shorter and shorter as we get older and when we get illnesses and then we die.

But Elizabeth Blackburn, who got the Nobel Prize in medicine in her preliminary studies found that you might actually be able to protect those telomeres.

So ignore mental chatter has a lot of benefits.

Then reality check is simply self talk, which is this too shall pass.

You know, those days, there's no silver lining.

There's nothing.

You just can't see the good in the disaster that just unfolded in front of you.

But what we often forget, and the brain forgets this, is that this will pass.

Yes, think about any adversity you've experienced in your life.

When you're experiencing it, it's like it's going to last forever.

But if you remind your brain, you know what?

This actually is going to pass.

We were talking about the ocean earlier.

I was trying to think of it as, you know, it might feel like it's coming in like a tsunami, but it goes out.

Right.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And then and then there's control check, which is basically the Serenity prayer.

What can I control?

What can I not control?

Do I know the difference?

Lady Gaga is a great example of someone who actually used this, you know, on her own.

She was talking to students at Yale and she said I reached a point in my career where I was just totally burnt out and I didn't want to sing anymore.

People were like, what do you mean?

Like, you're like such an amazing singer and we got such a huge fan base.

So I just realized that I didn't want to do what I was expected to do.

I didn't want to take selfies.

I had more to offer the world.

I didn't want to sell perfumes.

I don't even like perfumes.

And so eventually I'd go home and I'd look at myself in the mirror because I would say no to some things.

And I would say you, I can sleep with any day because you have integrity.

You're standing for what you believe in.

And it was, it's kind of an amazing wake up call to what can I control?

What can I say no to?

And and if I'm not going to control something, why do I want to fill my brain with all kinds of nonsense that has nothing to do with you know who I am?

And then the last A is a tension shift, which is we get stuck in the problems, but but we rarely shift early enough into solutions.

So how do we take the brain's attentional system?

You know, people will go on about, oh, this just happened politically or this just happens like, well, OK, so you, we've identified it's a problem for you.

What's your solution?

Because if we spend more time, even if we don't know the answer, if we spend more time, and that's where the unfocused mind can help actually trying to figure it out, the answers often arrive.

The answers are not always sought after by the brain and caught.

Sometimes there's an intelligence in waiting.

And so my so basically just to round off that idea, there is a lot of anxiety, there's a lot of uncertainty.

And by using a technique like circa, you can use that every Monday whenever you're in a high pressure situation.

At the beginning of each day, you can use some of the steps.

Not all of the steps, but you can know that if you use any of those steps, you will change your brain for the better if you're feeling anxious.

I would totally believe that because it gives someone a sense of control.

And if we, you know, often that anxiety is triggered because someone's feeling everything's out of their control.

So if you can immediately say, well, I can chunk my day, I can look at, you know, divided into what I can do and what I can't do.

Look at those priorities.

You know, I know I drive everyone in my house nuts because they'll say, you know, mom, what's happening, You know, they'll talk about something three weeks from now.

And I always think I'm on an ad as need to think about it basis, you know, there's enough I'm thinking about now when I need to think about it.

I never miss anything, right?

But I'm not going to spend much time thinking about it until I have to.

Yeah.

No, absolutely.

If you fill your brain with all the stuff that you have to do, you probably will just go to sleep and not want to get up.

Yeah, it's a yeah.

But to this point about the unfocused, the reason I wrote Tinker, Dabble, Doodle Try was because I wanted people to recognize that there is a focus brain that can be helped when you address emotions using techniques like circa.

But there's a part of your brain that only turns on when you unfocus.

It's called the default mode network.

We used to think of it as a do mostly nothing network, the DMN, because like people would be like, yeah, this network only, only lights up when somebody's not focusing.

And they were like, well, what could possibly be the use of not focusing?

Well, it turns out that this is one of the most intelligent circuits in our brains.

And a lot of people live their days with focus, focus, focus fatigue and then they're out for the count, but they don't spend time strategically unfocusing and.

Oh, my gosh, Trini, you just have resolved something that has fascinated me.

I recently was unloading, you know, just kind of clear stuff out of our house, and I found all these notebooks from our son from calculus his junior year of high school.

And I'm looking at these and I'm seeing all these formulas that are making me break into a sweat because I don't remember calculus at all.

I'm not even sure I took it.

It looks like Greek to me.

But on every other page there are these elaborate graffiti drawings and like drawings on every page in between the calculus formulas and everything else.

And I'm like, how did this kid ever do so well in calculus?

And now you're pointing out that maybe it was because he was doodling.

Well, doodling can actually improve memory by 29%.

Really so?

What?

Why is that?

Well, part is, your brain is metaphorically speaking, if you're all tense and you're focused, your brain is like a stiff sponge.

It's not going to absorb information.

But if you relax into something enough it, you begin to absorb information.

But so, so doodling, I mean, doodling, the studies have been initially that it improves memory by 29%.

Then people said, well, actually you should be doodling about about something that's relevant to the material.

So for any fact I state, there's always a counterfact.

I think it it depends on the individual and it depends on whether that works for you.

But doodling is a form of unfocused that I talk about in Tinker Dabble, Doodle Tri.

And what I explain is that the circuit, the default mode circuit in the, in the brain, the, the, the default mode network is actually a network that is responsible for abstraction, for processing complexity.

So when you've got 10,000 things you have to figure out how to bring together and you don't know how to do that, your focus network is not the network to turn to.

It's the reason you have some of your best ideas in the shower is because that's when you're unfocusing.

And so, and, and, and it's also called the crystal ball of the human brain because it's the part of your brain that's responsible for prediction.

And I have so many thoughts about this because I I just did a.

Let's hear some because it's fascinating, the part of our brain that's the crystal ball.

I think everyone would like to hear more about that.

Yeah.

Well, if you think about it, I mean, if you're a fund manager or you're trying to someone who's trying to predict things in stocks, if you focus all day but you don't have these periods of unfocused, you're not activating the crystal ball of your human brain.

And so you're not actually allowing your brain to go into prediction mode.

And it's those people who've learned how to focus, unfocus, what I call cognitive rhythm, focus unfocused, focus unfocused.

Those are the people who learn how to use their brains best.

You know, Albert Einstein said that his discovery was a musical perception.

It wasn't a logical perception.

He found it in a musical way and then he was able to derive the logic.

So what I say to people is if you're one of those people that says I've got to focus to get stuff done, well, it turns out we spent close.

We actually spent close to 50% of our days with our minds wandering.

Our minds need to wander to figure out who we are.

You know, if you are just, if you were your LinkedIn profile, then focus would be fine.

But everybody knows whatever your LinkedIn profile is doesn't describe who you are and it doesn't describe what it feels like to be with you.

So what what we know about focus is that it can drain energy from the brain.

So there was a study done that looked at people who were focusing on a video and people who were just watching it as usual.

And at the end of that of of that time, they asked, they gave them a dilemma.

Who would you save in this particular situation?

The people who were focusing couldn't care less.

They were like, let them all die.

Like I can't, I don't have the energy.

And then when they fed them glucose, they started to care again.

So when your brain is drained, you, you can't even care about anything.

And so focus is problematic in that way.

It's also problematic when you don't pay attention to what's going on around you.

You know, like Anne Wang, who discovered the word processor so focused on on version #2 he didn't notice that the PC was making an entrance into the market.

And so he was focused but not paying attention to what was around him.

And it's the same thing with not being able to.

If you're focused with your nose to the grindstone, you're not paying attention to upcoming trends.

All of a sudden, you're sideswiped.

Your job is gone.

You're like, what?

What happened?

Well, you were not paying attention to what was around you.

Also, when you want to innovate, you usually have to join one or two points.

And so if your focus is just one point and it turns out that you do have a self, a kind of self, which is the embodied self, which is served by the focus network, which is like, you know, when you're in the one or when you watch a tennis player, just sort of like, they're like, perfectly tense and relaxed.

You're like, yeah, that's an amazing thing.

But the unfocused circuit is the part of your brain that is responsible for getting together the puzzle pieces to be like, this is who I am.

And, you know, we evolve all the time and, and we are constantly changing who we are.

And in fact, I think it's to our advantage if we can change the the arrangement of these puzzle pieces.

But something has to put it together.

And if you're focused all the time, the pieces are just going to be scattered in your brains.

Like, I don't know what happened.

You know, I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've seen over the course of my life who are brilliant, highly accomplished, the whole world admires them.

Kinds of people who are like, I don't know what happened in the last 20 years.

I honestly don't know.

I feel like I was so focused in solving this world problem that I never picked my head up.

And now I'm thinking what happened in my life.

And, you know, some people have have been in extreme distress about that.

So I always like to remind people that unfocused is helpful to your brain and, and there are ways you can do this.

You can do this, you know, either by taking a booster break.

So instead of working the whole day 15 minutes, go on a brisk walk or.

A Think of how I I've read a lot of Thomas Edison biographies and he would work, said he really never slept any extended periods, but he would work for three to five hours and take a 5 to 20 minute nap and then work and and he often said sometimes he wasn't even sure he was napping.

He was just not thinking is how he described it, which is I guess, you know, today we would call it meditating or getting into that one.

Right, or strategic unfocused, you know, strategic unfocused, activating the default mode network in your brain, you know, cause 'cause.

So things like booster brakes can help.

There's a type of daydreaming that actually helps.

It's called positive constructive daydreaming and it was first started by Jerome Singer in the 1950s.

And what he found was that it doesn't help to sit at your desk and just Daydream.

And it doesn't help to remember the prior night's indiscretions.

Like, Oh my God, what did I say at the party?

I shouldn't have had that much to drink.

I'm not sure how why did I handle it that way.

But what does help is positive constructive daydreaming.

And to do this just three steps.

Number one, you have to be doing something low key.

Like if knitting is your thing, then knitting or gardening or going for a walk, but not stationary.

You have to, your body has to be moving.

And then what you do is you take your mind.

We spend our whole days perceiving, right?

Everything is looking outward.

We don't spend time going inwards.

And that's what imagination is about.

So in that time, whether it's, you can start with 5 minutes and build up to 20 minutes, if you can just then turn that attentional apparatus inward and you imagine something wishful or joyful like lying on a yacht or lying on the beach or running through the woods with your dogs.

You, you actually activate circuits in your brain that enhance creativity and you're basically relaxing the focus part of the brain.

You know, you were asking earlier, like, why are we not focused?

Well, because we're focusing too much.

Why don't we actually take this time to allow, to, to activate our full intelligence so that we can get to a place where we're, we're harnessing everything that we have.

I I think one of the biggest tragedies that I see in human psychology is that is that people do not listen to themselves.

They listen to everything else.

They listen to the news, they listen to someone else's opinion.

But when they have a hunch telling them, I don't know why I'm having that hunch, but hunches are there for a reason.

And if you took a little of that unfocused time and you didn't think about anything but you just tried to think about about that, yeah, I guess I, I am learning about.

If I, if I think back of any thing I might call have called a mistake in my life, I had some kind of gut instinct that I ignored.

There was something that made me question it, but I rationalized it.

My rational brain just came in and said no, or my forceful personality said I'm going to handle this.

But there was something there was some instinct.

I'm such a believer in listen to that instinct and we've also talked about hypnosis.

When you talk about visualizing something, it's why love, you know the concept of hypnosis, because you're giving, you know, that visual that you can give someone that maybe can't get to it themselves.

Yeah.

And, and a lot of times, you know, what people don't realize about the power of visualization from a biological standpoint is there there's a condition where people can't imagine.

It's called a Fantasia.

Yeah.

So they just cannot imagine.

But if you look in their brains, the visual parts of their brains are working.

So people are like, well, why?

What's happening?

Well, what's what's what's happening is that the other senses are not joining.

So the vision doesn't have any life.

So if, for example, you wanted to visualize living in a bigger house and you were thinking to yourself, OK, I want to visualize.

It's not.

People would say, well, that's that's ridiculous.

Like what do you think you're just going to manifest it?

It's like, no, you're creating a blueprint for your brain.

You're helping your brain out.

You're basically saying to your brain, this is what I want.

And then your brain doesn't have to say, well, you know, he or she doesn't know what they actually want.

But then it's important to allow the feelings to come in of like, what would it feel like when I'm sitting in that movie theater in my house?

Like, it would be so cool.

What would it feel like having popcorn with my friends over?

What would it feel like?

This is knowing that I don't have to get up one more day and worry about how to make ends meet.

What would it feel like?

You know, it's like you.

Have to put their feeling there, power in that I can't imagine not being able to imagine because years ago I bought.

I said to myself, if I could make it through my first two years in a business I started and I was saving every dime.

I mean, if I made it, I saved it.

I just, I was turning orange from eating too many carrots.

But I said, if I make it through, I had pictures of these mansions.

Don't ask me why I wanted a mansion.

Probably because I was living in a a studio apartment about the size of the table we're sitting at.

But I wanted a mansion with property and it had to be a mansion.

And I had pictures of my mother even used to send me pictures of mansions and say, Diane, if anyone's going to get this, we're going to figure out a way.

Well, I ended up buying Alice Cooper's mansion at one point.

That's incredible.

Up in upstate New York, didn't keep it long because I found out that mansions come with huge gas bills, electric bills and lawn maintenance bills.

But I got that mansion.

But it was that visualizing aspect.

What?

What is it that triggers in our brain when we use our imagination like that?

Well, when you're using your imagination, you're actually starting to create a blueprint, but you're also when, if it's real for you, you're involving yourself in that goal, right?

It's not like like, you know, there are all kinds of.

Yeah, I knew I had to work for it.

Right, but right but so a lot of people stay in a state of desire.

But what desire does, paradoxically, is it separates you from your goal.

You're always wanting.

Can you repeat that?

That's a good point.

Desire often separates people from their goals.

Like I want a mansion and people stay in this hope state, which is different from I want a mansion.

And then the mansion becomes part of your intrinsic brain architecture.

It's, it's, it's literally, it's a, it's a, it's a figure that's been, that's a blueprint in your brain.

And then you start to own it.

And when you start to own it, you are no longer separate from what The thing is.

So how do you define desire?

Because you tied desire in there, so I'm curious what desire means.

Well, I was thinking about it in that particular context from the perspective of of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and and.

OK.

And also from the perspective of a discussion I had the other day with Thomas Hubel, who is an amazing human being who's, we were talking about time and, and, and the future and, and, and he was saying, well, you know what?

So I I'm very much a believer in the block theory of time, which is that the past, present and future don't actually exist.

I believe that.

Too Einstein.

I don't know why I believe it, but I feel it every day.

That that actually they're continuous and the brain has to figure out how to make stuff work.

So we divide everything into past, present, future, and we make it exist, but it's not an intrinsic property of the universe.

Well, one of the things that I loved about what Thomas said was he said, well, what people think is that the future is somewhere else.

Like the house you want is somewhere else, and if it's somewhere else, it's going to be somewhere else.

He said.

What they don't realize is that they've got to dial into a higher state of consciousness to bring the future into the here and now.

And so dialing into that consciousness means when you're visualizing that you're, you're getting into a state of belief, you know, you're increasing your dopamine, you're decreasing your stress hormones, you're actually activating reward centers that give you the motivation to pursue what you need in order to get there.

There was a really cool study done that looked at the impact that some people would say, well, what's all this hope?

Well, it sounds ridiculous.

Well, consider this experiment.

There was a neutral paste that they gave people, but they put it into three different tubes and they labeled them differently.

Paste paste, just like a paste that you put in your skin.

OK, one was one was one they labeled lidocaine, but it wasn't lidocaine.

The other they labeled capsaicin, the active ingredient in Chile.

And the third, they just said neutral.

So when people expected lidocaine, they put it in.

They were like, wow, this is kind of relieving.

And you looked in their brains and the reward center was activated by the belief that this was lidocaine because it was not lidocaine.

You know, if you then look at the people who had the capsaicin, the active ingredient in Chile, they were like, oh, this stings a little.

Like, what is this?

And the pain centers were activated and nothing happened in the brains of the people who had the neutral pace which indicated that in life you can change your brain based on what you expect.

You know, I have seen the for over almost 30 years now I analyze, I've analyzed clinical trial results for biotechnology companies to come up with the messaging based on the results.

And as you as a medical researcher and Dr.

could say, even more so probably than what I've seen, even though I've probably like, no exaggeration, probably looked at 2000 clinical trials.

The placebo effect is the most wild thing that can happen in a clinical trial where all the people who didn't get that cancer medication are all of a sudden feeling a heck of a lot better than the ones who did.

And it's mind blowing.

No, it is.

And it's sort of, it's such a, it's such a controversial area in medicine because the, I really believe in the placebo effect, but I also believe in the nocebo effect, yes, which is.

Explain that for everyone because it's so important.

If you expect something negative to happen, it's probably going to happen.

Yeah.

You know, there's another good example of this placebo type effect, which is ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone with, they gave people milkshakes and they told one group you're getting a 600 calorie milkshake and they told the other group the truth, which is that they were getting a 300 calorie milkshake.

Well, the 600 calorie people got full really quickly and, and you look at the hunger hormones and it dropped because they expected to get full.

And so they changed their own biology.

So I I'm a huge believer in being attentive to the energy that we're carrying around us.

And I think what you're telling me about the visualization, and it wasn't just any mansion, it was Alice Cooper's mansion.

It was a really cool mansion, like built in 1917 by Buster Brown.

You might not remember, but it was.

It was the biggest shoe company.

When I was little, everyone wanted a pair of Buster Brown shoes.

Well, it makes sense to me because I think you embody some of what Alice Cooper is.

In my dreams.

In the daring.

Yeah, I'm 18 and I don't know what I want.

I'm sort of like that all the time.

I'm completely in denial.

It's.

One of the things I love about you I.

Refuse to think about it.

I mean, people are like what I think.

No, I'm proud of it.

You go ahead and be proud of whatever you want to be proud of.

I do not want to fall into conditioned ways of thinking.

Yes.

And you know, studies have shown that if you fall into these conditioned ways of thinking and you're like, no, well, you know, I'm 70, you know, I'm 80.

You have to go slow down.

Now those people slow down more than people of the same age who are not thinking that.

So, you know, it's one thing to say I'm reality testing and I know what my age is is obviously value to that.

But I think we don't need to fall into patterns of behavior that society forces us to think about.

It's so funny you say that because I I'll talk to people and they'll say, yeah, I'm in my 60s.

Of course things are starting to fall apart and I'm like, I'm in my 60s and I feel like I'm just getting started.

I needed all that energy to start to build up to get me to this point.

I have no idea if I'm going to combust tomorrow, but I never knew that when I was 30 either so.

You know who's that have said youth is wasted in the Yeah and.

I think they were right.

Another thing you said that I thought was so funny.

A few years ago one of my kids said, mom could you stop telling me this is healthy and good for me?

He goes, I just like it.

But when you say that, I almost don't want to eat it.

I'm similar.

I actually, I have like I because I, if you actually, if you go deep down into studies, you know, you've looked at clinical trials.

So you know, as well as I do that there's, there's so much more complexity to what things actually are than than people talk about.

You know, I think I've mentioned two once before when I look at the studies of good cholesterol, and I find medicine really funny because medicine in a sense is a representation of science, which historically has been separated from the ethos of religion, but the terminology has made its way right into medicine.

Good cholesterol, bad cholesterol, Let's judge the cholesterol, you know, high blood pressure, low blood pressure, let's use ranking systems for your for your blood pressure.

When in fact, if you actually look at what we call good cholesterol and bad cholesterol, the effects are more complex.

There have been lots of studies that show that that bad cholesterol could be bad, but there are also a large number of meta analysis that show that if you lower bad cholesterol, you may die sooner.

Except, I mean, I never understood the cholesterol thing, and I've worked with many companies that have done it just plain on the fact of every cell in your body needs cholesterol to make, why do you want to reduce what makes cells right?

And it's essential to the structure of a cell.

Yeah.

So, so that's just, is there some way that we can understand?

Differently.

Yeah, like I think the next era of my life, I'm very interested in figuring out how to present complexity to the public so that you don't just go on a podcast and be like, Oh my God, you're right.

I should be eating fewer, more antioxidants, so let me eat more broccoli.

Well, I like broccoli.

I think it's great, but but there are studies that show that antioxidants can also accelerate cancer cell development if they're already in use.

So it's not nothing is just have more and you'll get better.

You know, everything is judging, intuiting, being in tune with your body, looking at medical research.

And I love medical research because I think it's it's better than witchcraft.

So I think I like the idea of looking at data, but I don't think that that what you see is what you get when you look at data.

I agree.

I think data, I always think of Trident chewing gum that always said four out of five dentists recommend Trident chewing gum.

And I'm thinking, OK, so you're, you started Trident chewing gum.

You could have four sons or daughters or sons and daughters that are all dentists.

And are they going to go against your chewing gum?

No, but maybe that fifth person you asked thought no chewing gum is bad for your.

So always I, I often say that, you know, they always talk with conflicts of interest in studies.

That's a whole other story.

I would.

We could really get into that one, Srini.

Well, I would love it if all the studies that say that that vegetables are all you should eat.

I would love to know what the study investigators are eating.

And the same thing for meat is all you can eat.

I want to know what the study investigators are saying because I can tell you I would not conduct a study that showed that you should not eat steak because I like it.

Exactly.

It's your bias.

Enter with a a form of a bias or a prejudice to the end result.

Right.

And so I think it's good for the for the public.

I don't think it's good to be paranoid about it or to be afraid of it.

But I think to give yourself permission to ask questions and and to and to explore things for yourself and turn on that default mode network and go for that walk so you can say.

You know, when I put two and two together, I think I want to do this, that or that.

You know, someone once said to me, if you had to give me some like your greatest piece of sage advice, what would that be?

I would say life is short.

Make it worth it for yourself.

You know, too many people realize this with their with their last breaths, and they don't realize that they've been spending their whole lives worrying about something that was pointless.

You know, I, I, I talk about death a lot and it's such an important subject to me because it's so intimately related to life.

And when people get to be 50, they so often say, oh, I'm at the 5th, I'm at my halfway mark.

Well, how many 100 year olds do you know and 100 year olds that you'd want to be or I think you know, I live my life by.

You never know when the second-half began.

Absolutely.

Yeah, you know.

Yeah.

And, and, and you know, what's interesting about about worry, if you look at the leading theory of like why people worry, it's kind of disappointing because it's a little bit boring, but it's also interesting.

It's sort of, it's called the contrast avoidance theory.

And what people have found was that in life, you have peak experiences, you know, having a child, getting a great job, having a great meal, and then you have these traffic experiences, which is like losing important people in your life or losing a job.

Worry.

People keep themselves in the miserable middle.

They have to keep themselves in the miserable middle because they're afraid of the contrast between I just had a great meal yesterday and someone died tomorrow.

They don't want to have that swing.

But if they're mildly miserable, when they get the bad news, they're prepared for it.

And so I always say to people, make a point of deliberately adding some high level event to a week so that you know that you're not spending yourself spending your time in this miserable middle trying to just stay there because you're afraid of that contrast.

You know, from an anxiety perspective, one of my favorite quotes is that of Kierkegaard, who said anxiety is the dizziness of freedom humans say that they that they want.

That, and that's a good one.

Anxiety is.

The dizziness of freedom that everybody says they want to be free, but the moment you contemplate that, you're like, no, I can't be free.

I would go crazy, I'd go wild, I'd lose everything that I had.

And so people choose balls and chains to look to, had to add to their lives because they're afraid of that freedom.

And So what I say is, of course, you don't want a wildlife that completely disrupts your life, but you can, you can navigate toward a place of building degrees of freedom into your life.

And the more you can embrace that and the more you can realize that anxiety is a signal knocking on the door saying, hey, watch out.

You sure you want to be free?

And then you're like, no, no, no, I think I'd rather just be anxious.

I'll just be anxious so that I can never be free.

You know, it's a it's a, it's a contrast that Freud actually commented on this and said, people come to me complaining about their worry and their anxiety, and you try to take their worry away from them.

It's like taking a cub away from a lioness.

They're like, I want that worry.

Yeah, I want my worry.

And it's like it's.

Like people identify with it, it becomes their identity.

And what I it's, I was talking to someone the other day and Oh my gosh, I don't want this discussion to end, but we're getting close.

But I'd love your last thoughts on this because I said to her, the person I'll leave them the person I said, who would you?

I often ask people, who would you be if you stopped telling that story?

Absolutely yes and and and the self is is much more malleable changeable than we realize that there's a phenomenon that I that I also called psychological Halloween ISM.

Oh my gosh, we probably should have started with that.

That's an episode into itself.

But it was a.

Psychological Halloween.

Which is based on a study that showed that if I give you a creative problem to solve, and if you take on the identity of a rigid librarian, you are statistically significantly less likely to solve it than if you take on the identity of an eccentric poet.

And what that tells us is that our inability to solve problems is not because we don't have the mental capacity, but because we're stuck in a version of ourselves that cannot solve that problem.

And so you want to put yourself into a different identity, to give your brain permission to think in different ways.

I mean, This is why why people have said that psychedelics are helpful.

They, they put the brain on pause.

They disrupt the neural patterns that describe your identity so that you have this complete rearrangement of neurons.

And of course, there are lots of caveats.

The trials need to show that they're effective.

They they need to there's.

That's a whole other shell.

Story right, but I do think that that's that we are frequently limit up, we limit our lives because we are committed to our frozen identities.

And I think if we can recognize that you don't need to wait for a certain age to change something, you know, you're curious about something, try it.

You know, it can be as simple as the reason I feel like my life was transformed because I'd been denying how much I love jump rope.

And I was like, I saw someone on Instagram like using this with music and dance.

And I was like, wait a minute, This is like, why, why have I not had this in my life for like however many years I've wanted back in my life and I want.

And it's such a silly example, but there's so many things like that where you realize that if you can just, I think we've talked about this before, like I'm constantly falling in love and it's ridiculous.

It's ridiculous.

Like it's sort of at some point you're like, what is this feeling?

And Thomas had.

Wonderful.

He had some wisdom about this, actually.

Thomas, when I was talking to him, said I I think you would be less concerned about this if you just made a distinction between merger, which creates torture, and transcendence, which frees you.

And if you recognize that you're falling in loveness is about realizing that you are not alone, that you are fundamentally connected to all humans.

It will open the door to a transcendent gateway of your actual identity, which is not solitary.

Oh my gosh, I don't want to end this, but that's a really good note to end on.

And we did talk about falling in love.

And I told you about the painting that I have that says I fall in love at least twice a day because I think it's a wonderful thing and I do think of it as transcending.

But Oh my gosh, Doctor Srini Pillai, this just went too fast.

But boy, I appreciated your time today because I know you're busy and everyone this I, this has been a great episode.

So I know you're going to want to share it with your friends.

You're going to want to hit subscribe.

We have been recording in Manhattan Center.

My guest has been Doctor Shrini Pillai.

Thanks.

So much for having me in to you as well.

And you can find out all about him in the links below.

I highly suggest you check out his website.

Look up any of his books, every single one is an eye opener and you're going to learn a lot.

So thank you.

Thanks for joining me.

Hit subscribe, share this with your friends and thank you Doctor Pillai.

Thanks so much for having me there.