Hello, welcome to the final episode of 2025.

We have squeezed one more in for you on New Year's Eve.

Whatever year you've had, I hope that this podcast can help support you into 2026.

And I was thinking about what we would do today for Part 2.

And I really wanted to focus on something that I think is so important, especially going into next year, which is our mindset, our mental health, psychology, everything to do with our brain health.

And to do that, I've looked back at this year to see which ones you loved the most in this sector and which ones meant the most to me.

So we're going to kick off with thought leader Simon Sinek.

We're going to talk to neuroscientist Dr.

Sarah McKay.

Especially if you're a woman, you should listen to this episode and these reflections.

Then we speak to Professor Dan Nicoli, probably one of my favorite episodes of this year.

He's a neuropsychoemologist.

It's a lot.

He looks at the brain and the immune system.

We then speak to the godfather of psychedelics, Rick Doblin and we end with the master himself, Robin Shawarma.

This is episode hopefully is inspiring.

It will give you loads of amazing takeaways from neuroscience to personal growth.

All the things I am loving at the moment and hopefully this just gives you a little bit of support thinking about 2025 going into 2026.

Thank you once again for being part of this community this year and get ready for my first solo episode to come next week.

Happy new year everyone, wishing you the best end to 2025.

Hey guys, I am very bad at asking for this but I wanted to stop for just one minute and ask a huge favour.

If you want to hear more diverse conversations from female voices such as myself, I would love if you could hit subscribe.

We work so hard on this show to bring you some of the best guests in the world, and having a female voice sometimes gives a different perspective, and I really want to elevate more of that on this channel.

So please hit subscribe if that's important to you as it is to me.

People might have this perception of you where you, you know, when you said, I actually didn't realize I'd ever think I'd be doing this standing on stage so eloquently with such autonomy, inspiring so many people.

It just comes with complete ease.

You sitting here talking comes with complete ease.

This is what you're naturally good at, but people might be quite surprised to know that you're also quite introverted.

How have you navigated those qualities, though?

Isn't that something that many people talk about?

But I actually think it's something maybe really important to highlight.

They're completely different things.

So a friend of mine invited me to a Christmas party at her at her flat and I said no and I went to her Christmas party the year before and I hated it.

I think I stayed 15 minutes.

And then you left.

And I left, I, I, I hated every second of it.

And, and so she asked me to come the following year and I said, I, I, I, I love you, but I'm, I'm going to pass.

And she said why?

I said it's, it's the introvert of me.

I just, it's really uncomfortable.

I mean, I can force myself to do it, but if I don't have to do it, then I'll choose not to do it.

And I don't have to do this, right?

And she was very aggressive.

You know, she sort of said, you, I can't, I don't believe you, you, you, I don't believe you that it's your introversion that you don't want to come to the party.

She goes, I see what you do.

You stand on stage for a living.

How can you call yourself an introvert?

Because she thought I was lying to her.

And they're completely different things, right?

I don't know how to make small talk.

I don't know how to work a room.

I don't know how to do any of that right?

I'm very good one-on-one.

I'm great one-on-one.

I love an individual conversation.

I love the company of one or just a very few.

I don't even like the company of 10 people that I know.

You know, it's I'm usually very quiet.

It's like I love watching my friends sort of get to know each other.

That's the best.

I don't mind that I enjoy, but I just stay out of it.

And when I'm on stage, I'm having one conversation with one person because I look one person in the eye and I talk to them and I talk to one person and talk to them.

I'm having a lot of individual conversations, which is why I'm a good public speaker, because I'm not attempting to hold court.

I don't like holding court.

I don't want to hold court.

I don't pan and scan and look around the audience and think that I'm no, I'm talking to one person at a time, which is why I always request for the house lights to be up so I can see the people so I can have one conversation at a time.

So what makes me a very, very effective public speaker is that I am an introvert and people are very surprised because before or after the big event, I'm just sort of, you know, a little awkward or quiet.

Or sometimes I'm in a great mood and I'm jacked up on caffeine and I'm having a good time.

And then I have a bigger, larger than life personality.

It's not like I'm always, I think, and this is the other thing, I think people confuse social awkwardness and introversion.

You can be a socially awkward introvert and you can be a socially awkward extrovert.

Like there are extroverts who derive energy from from people, but you're like, dude, too much.

That's socially awkward extroversion, right?

I'm a socially functional introvert who is sometimes socially awkward, right?

But I can I my personality is big and people think I'm extroverted and all of that can come out, but it is exhausting when it happens.

Like I'll have fun and I beat big personality and I go home and I'm done.

I sit in the back of the car and I'm like, I need sugar, You know, I'm exhausted.

How do you navigate that with your career though?

Because half of your career is is being on stage, is surrounded by a lot of people.

How do you navigate that?

I don't go out for dinner afterwards.

Like I always get invited to come out with the team for dinner.

No, no, that's just more work.

I went from working to doing more work.

For other people, that's the time they get to relax and let their hair down.

For me that's more work.

So how do you relax?

I'm a homebody.

I love staying at home.

I love puttering around the house.

I love little silly projects, fixing things, making things, building things.

I do Lego like it's going out of style.

I mean, I mean, I'm, I putter.

I, I love, I love companionship.

I love the company of a person, you know, I love sitting next to somebody watching TVI love it, you know, and it's not, and and it's it's not antisocial, it's unsocial.

I'm not antisocial.

I'm very, very social.

I'm just unsocial.

Meaning I like the company of a few a lot and going out is great.

I love, I'm a foodie.

I love going to restaurants like I'm a it's, but it is, it is always exhausting and that's OK.

I know this about myself and sometimes I have the energy and sometimes I don't, and I'm gotten better about saying I don't have the energy.

At communicating this yeah, like.

Going out for dinner?

Are we going to go out for dinner tonight?

I will, but if you really don't, if you don't mind, I'd rather stay home.

If you want to go, I'm in because it's all there's.

Also, I'm also not the only person in the world and I like to make sure that others are taken care of and I can rally if I if I need to, but I'm just better at vocalizing it.

Again, practice, practice.

That's all it is.

And compromises, you know, practices and compromises is all it is.

How do you, I mean, I feel like you've gone through a lot of kind of self growth or how easy you are to keep kind of start communicating your needs outwardly.

Some some don't like it.

Maybe that's more about.

That keep it to myself.

It's not always a blessing.

Yeah, but I think it's actually worse if you can't.

I mean, because you rattle people up the wrong way and they can't understand you.

It's circumstantial.

Yeah, I think.

Nothing, nothing is.

It's like what I said before, everything comes at a cost.

Everything comes at a cost.

And you have to weigh the costs always.

And sometimes the costs are worth and sometimes they're not right.

So I mean, we have to get away from this.

Right, wrong, good, bad.

There's no such thing as right and wrong.

There's no such thing as good and bad.

Everything is about cost.

What's the cost of the thing that you want?

That's it, right?

There's the right way to build your career.

There's the right way to do this.

There's the right way to No, there isn't.

They're just different cost structures.

And for some people, this cost is worth it.

And for some people, this cost is not worth it, right?

I mean, take a silly example.

You know, some people devote themselves so intensely to their career.

Some of them may not have a relationship with their kids and in the in the moment they may think it's worth the cost.

Later on they might re evaluate them be like shit, not worth it, you know?

But the point is there's costs.

And I think what I've gotten good at over the years is not believing I've completely limited to the concept of right, wrong, good, bad, right, in in in in myself as well.

There's no such thing as strengths and weaknesses.

I fundamentally don't believe we have strengths and weaknesses.

We have attributes and characteristics.

And in some circumstances those those attributes and characteristics will manifest as a strength and in some circumstances they will manifest as weaknesses, but they're not in themselves strengths or weaknesses.

It's just the way you are.

So let's talk about my forwardness and bluntness about some things.

In some circumstances with some people, it's a boon.

In other circumstances, not so much, right?

And so I have to learn to modulate those things or modulate where I am.

I'll give you a really funny one.

I'm very disorganized.

People don't know that, but they don't expect it.

But I'm very disorganized, right?

Is that a strength or a weakness?

Is that a strength or a weakness?

Now most people would be like, oh, it's a weakness.

Is it though?

I don't know, maybe it's circumstantial, right?

So if I have a lot to get done and I'm not good at keeping it all organized, something's absolutely full.

The crack fall through the cracks.

I am notorious with being like, I have to do that and literally a minute later forgetting to do it.

Like literally people like I just told you, I'm like, I know I forgot.

They're like, how can you forget?

It was literally one minute ago.

I'm like, I know I forgot.

ADHDII mean I it's not an excuse.

It's it.

I didn't write it down.

I forgot and like, you know, so being disorganized, bad, bad.

OK, now I'll take another, another example.

I went to this networking event when I was young in my career, met this guy.

He's like, your stuff's amazing.

I would love to work with you.

Here's my card.

Be in touch.

I'm like great, fantastic.

Of course, I lost the business card almost immediately.

So if I was organized, I'd be, you know, texting from the taxi on the way home or emailing the next day to, to, to make contact.

Not me.

I lost the business card, lost the opportunity, gone.

2 weeks later I found the business card happened to be at the bottom of a bag somewhere.

So I emailed the guy.

I'm like, I don't know if you Remember Me.

Two weeks ago we met, wanted to see if he was to want to work together.

He wanted to work with me even more because he thought I was busy.

So is being disorganized as strength or a weakness?

Depends.

It depends.

So I know that I have these attributes and these characteristics and I work very hard to figure out where those things will show up as strengths and then make sure to put myself in those situations more than the other situations.

I started MAPS because I felt like it was through science and basically it's to go where the suffering is, that people will listen when they're suffering.

Other times they might not listen.

So that if we can go to try and make MDMA into a medicine to cure certain kinds of suffering.

And then the other big issue was, well, it was a strategic sense of all their psychedelics, which would I pick?

It was MDMA.

And then what should it be for?

And at the time, we needed sympathetic patients.

So the main, there was a lot of people from Vietnam who had PTSD.

This is now quite a while 86 now, but there were still a lot of people from Vietnam that had PTSD that had not been treated.

So we needed sympathetic patients.

We needed a disease that was potentially causing suicide.

That would be very expensive.

That would lead, as you're saying, with the stress to lead to all sorts of physical illnesses.

That was expensive.

And I had worked with a woman in 1984 who had PTSD and saw it helped.

So MDMA for PTSD became the vehicle to go through the FDA.

I think that's something where I've become really aware of that there is no treatment legally.

I'll put that in for PTSD and I think people now still go to the doctors with PTSD and they're prescribed SSRIs, which doesn't work.

Yeah, there there was an incredible image of.

This was a image of a soldier who was like wading through a river and carrying his gun so it wouldn't get wet but the river was filled with pills he was wading through.

SSR is because that's all the VA was giving and it wasn't really helping.

No, yeah.

How does MDMA work with the brain and PTSD?

OK, this is an easy one.

All right, so the first step is what does, How does PTSD change your brain?

So PTSD is this post traumatic stress disorder.

People are fearful very much of whatever happened before is not really in the past as it's going to happen again.

And so your amygdala, the part of your brain that is more processing fear is hyperactive.

There's more activity in the in the amygdala for people that have PTSD than than average normal people.

The other thing about PTSD is that it's hard to separate out what's real threat, what's a not, if, you know, people are always triggered by different things.

So there's less activity in the prefrontal cortex where we think logically.

So you're sort of short circuited by your emotions.

So you see somebody that looks like somebody that assaulted you and now you feel like you're about to be assaulted again.

If you had a moment to think about it, it's a whole different person.

It's all different context.

It's not that.

And then these traumatic memories are never really put into the past.

And so the hippocampus, which is the part of our brain that stores memories into long term storage, there's lower activity in the hippocampus and less connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus when you have PTSD, right?

So that's kind of how your brain changes and you've got these real circuits that are activating all the time.

So MDMA works great for PTSD, but we found later that or not we other people found it.

We felt that if we focus on the healing, other people will do the neuroscience.

So what we know is that MDMA reduces activity in the amygdala so that when you are remembering A traumatic memory, it's not as fearful.

MDMA increases activity in the prefrontal cortex, so you're able to sort of think logically more so.

And then MDMA increases connectivity between the hippocampus and the amygdala so that you're able to process memories and put them into long term storage.

Then the other big part of what it does is oxytocin, so the hormone of love and connection of self, compassion of self love.

Yeah, my favorite one.

Yeah, so MDMA releases oxytocin.

And there's a woman, Gul Dolan, a neuroscientist, who has done studies that show that in mice that the oxytocin is released by MDMA, and that's what promotes neuroplasticity.

And that's what we really need with PTSD is that we need to create more of these neural highways and kind of shunt them off from the trauma loop and create new neural highways.

So we're having new processing methods.

Right, yeah, you definitely can have one session where you rewire your brain and then if you do the therapy.

Now I I should add though, that for example, this woman that I worked with in in 1984 who had PTSDMDMA, by reducing this fear response to traumatic memories can be destabilizing as well as healing.

So she initially did it with a friend of hers and memories of past sexual abuse came up and it's so destabilized her.

She'd previously attempted suicide, she'd been medicated, she'd been hospitalized from this trauma and under MDMA, even in a safe place, relatively with a lover, these memories came up and she felt that they were overwhelming.

So she checked herself into a hospital not to kill herself.

And while she was there, they stabilized her, but they gave her the same accessorize stuff that she'd had before, whatever medicine, she didn't think it would work.

So she was more so subtle when she got out.

So I, I, I don't want people to think you take MDMA and now all of your problems you can deal with.

If you're not in a safe therapeutic setting, you, you can trigger traumatic memories and then they can be overwhelming.

So it's the context more than the drug that is what produces the healing.

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What is the one that like, really stands out to you the most, that you really hold dear to you of all the lessons that you wrote on the 8 healthy habits?

On the 8 forms of wealth, I would say maybe the chapter about going ghost for a year, so many people have have commented on that and the idea is basically if you look at the most creative, productive people, they all have a retreat, whether it's the stacks in a Public Library or whether it's a seaside cottage like Goldeneye, which was where Ian Fleming who created the James Bond books, he would just go to get away from the world.

But I think it's really important to go ghost on a regular basis.

Ideally, if you can go ghost for a year, go to Bali or go to Columbia or take your family on a sailing adventure.

If you can't go ghost for a year, go ghost for a month.

And if you can't go ghost for a month, then do it even for a weekend.

But I think it's really important to get away from the noise so you can hear the signal.

I think our greatest insights and there's a lot of entrepreneurs who watch your show when I work with my clients.

One of the things I helped them do is on their schedule, institutionalized strategic refueling, because so many people work hard because if they think it's going to make them more productive, that comes from the factory era, where if we're at a factory and we produced more, we would be more productive.

We're now in the cognitive era.

And so if we are depleted and if we are exhausted and if we have lost our inspiration because pretty much all we do is work, we're not going to get the billion dollar ideas that help a billion people.

So spending more time going ghost, I think is a very powerful idea that connects a lot to.

Your rest comment that you mentioned in the five questions, right, is getting the rest and the recovery.

But if someone's looking at their diary and whether it's somebody who is like an extremely busy mom or an entrepreneur running a very high scale company, how can that person actually like know that prioritizing that is going to increase to a better outcome, better productivity, being a better mum, whatever it is.

Because I do think it's so hard that sometimes when you feel like life is toppling on top of you to make these decisions.

So well, actually, I'm just not going to go to that meeting or I'm actually just not going to turn up to that thing.

It's so hard to actually inject that into your life and be aware of it, but also enforce it.

How can we do that, to actually say no to the things that we felt we should be saying yes to?

Well, a few.

Ways I would answer that.

First of all, there are a lot of workaholics in the world right now.

And there's a lot.

Of people whose self worth is tied to their self identity in the world.

Absolutely.

And so if your identity is attached to.

I'm a business builder.

Then if you're not building your business, you don't have any self identity, so you're going to be a work addict.

If.

You don't like yourself very much or you're full of wounding and undeserve it, undeserve ability issues.

Then you're not going to prioritize self-care and Wellness and fitness and stillness and meditation because your identity is tied to you working.

A lot of people, you know this, they use overwork as a badge of honor.

So that'd be the first thing I'd say Second thing is just look at the science.

Look at the science, the work of the energy project.

Look at what's the what's the energy?

Project the energy.

Project has found, for example, that the most productive people are much more like sprinters versus like marathoners.

And the the most productive people work in bursts of intense activity and then they pull back and recover.

And then if you study the great lives, many of the great lives, once we're here in London, Winston Churchill, I mean, he had a very full plate, to put it mildly, especially in World War 2.

But almost every weekend he would have one car in front of him with his security person with a revolver as his protection.

And into the night they would race out to checkers, his country retreat.

And he'd spend the whole weekend smoking cigars in the Rose Garden, taking long walks, staying up till 2 after midnight, drinking and eating for recovery.

Now, I'm not saying you have to drink and eat.

What I'm saying is he had a retreat and if you look at a lot of the great creative people, they had places they would go to to rest and to recover.

I'm interrupting.

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Thank you.

When we're thinking about what you're looking at, for instance, what is it that you're looking to find through well through hypothesis that you that you're exploring?

Thank you for the question.

So pretty simple actually almost something you could explain to.

Well I think I could probably explain to my 4 year old.

So if you if hypothesis one, social media use in some contexts at some levels causes inflammation.

Causes in the sense that of course you have other things that are causing inflammation and other things that are reducing inflammation like antioxidants.

But causes in the sense that if you get rid of it, your inflammation will get better.

And if you bring it back, your inflammation will get worse again and you're going to look at.

That through CRP level there is some.

Evidence.

Yes, CRP is a is a course marker of inflammation.

As you know to your biochemist.

There is some evidence now yes that that I can talk about that that the more social media you you you self report that you use, the more of course inflammatory markets are up six weeks down the line.

Hypothesis 1 Hypothesis 2.

Specific content causes it.

Socially stressful content like violence, like shouting, like hate speech, bad things.

I use the word bad very loosely, but I think you know what I mean.

And I think everybody does know what I mean by bad.

Yeah, They're not looking at.

Puppies they're not looking at.

Butterfly like mating cycles.

Yeah, that's hypothesis 2, that specific socially stressful content causes these changes.

And not just all content.

Like, not if you're looking at, you know, videos of sunsets or whatever.

Hypothesis 3, independent of social media.

People who do content moderation, people whose job it is to filter out bad things so that we don't see them, we'll have higher inflammatory markers than match controls.

People who are very similar to them but just don't do content moderation for a job.

We know that those people who do content moderation for a job have terrible health outcomes.

Many of them commit suicide.

Many more attempt suicide.

They have depression, they have anxiety, they have all sorts of problems.

And indeed, why would you expect anything different?

If your job is to like watch horrible, you know, violent or sexual assault videos of no one else does, of course you're going to be affected.

So I think it's very difficult to imagine that last hypothesis not turning out to be correct.

Nonetheless, we do need to do the work.

As always in science, I wrote this down the.

Science.

I didn't forget.

I'm thinking about my nephew who loves gaming.

It can be quite aggressive.

I mean, they go, I mean, obviously it's not like people, but you're literally going around with guns, right?

Killing people, would that cause inflammation?

Is that the type of like negative kind of usage that we would also kind of put that under?

Because I think in gaming is huge now.

Two things that have been well studied previously are gaming and pornography, and they have been studied very well respectively in South Korea and Australia.

And the research there is, is, is, is, is good, is good.

The evidence base is very thorough and in both cases there is basic at inappropriate levels.

They they both cause all sorts of problems, including mental health, but also inflammatory states.

Social media has not been studied, which is sort of surprising.

And when it has been studied, people have looked at screen time.

There is no obvious reason and they've concluded that there's very little evidence.

But there's no reason to think, there's no sensible reason to think that simply screen time itself would give you problems.

It depends what you're watching.

I would think virtually everybody would agree with with that statement.

So it's likely that the content is doing things to you, if anything, right.

So people have studied screen time and they conclude, well, there isn't that much of a link between screen time and bad outcomes.

But a little, you know, screen doom scrolling at night or like, you know, a 16 year old watching

like pornography at 2:00 in the morning.

That's not the same as you're watching, as you said, David Attenborough or, or something about, you know, I don't know, volcanoes or something.

I mean, it's interesting.

Because the brain of the brain.

The word in the Oxford Dictionary this year was brain rot.

And so that was the new word, which is basically that it's like social media is rushing your brain by doom scrolling too much.

And I think we're all at mercy, not yourself because you don't have it, but, you know, ending up going down a black rabbit hole of content and not quite sure how we got to this part of this content because the algorithm had kind of fed us this, this kind of this weird route to get there.

Just thinking about kind of practicality, people that are listening to this.

So obviously it's like a little bit worrying.

Is there anything that you're kind of seeing immediately that or some thoughts that you might be having that maybe if children or young people maybe have some chronic conditions, whether it's something that's like asthma to, I don't know, hay fever or an allergy, that these also increase by poor social media use because it's got the inflammation markers are higher.

Yeah, well.

There is some some good evidence that if you're feeling unwell for any reason, like if you have a a cold or an asthma attack or something, you will seek out social media, which is the opposite direction I think to what you're asking.

But nonetheless it's a very interesting hint.

It presumably is also the case that the more of the doom scrolling that you seek, the worse that you will feel.

To the extent to which inappropriate use of digital technologies generally is very likely to cause higher inflammation and higher inflammation itself.

Is more likely to cause triggering of allergies, whether neuro immune wise or peripherally.

More likely to cause asthma attacks or worsen them.

More likely to 'cause you know, other crises like rheumatism, other things to the extent to which that, but we've never found anything other than a bidirectional communication.

I think it's extremely likely to be the case that inappropriate use of digital technologies generally of which social media are, are obviously an important case, but not the only case.

It's likely to to bidirectionally drive those things.

It also gives you a hint at the solutions, right?

Because we have pro inflammatory processes and we have anti-inflammatory processes.

So if we do more, it's almost like try to say it, right?

It's almost like a tautology.

But if you do less pro inflammatory stuff and more anti-inflammatory stuff like sleep better, drink some tea and you know, have some friend, but loads of things that people like sleep better, more sex, you know, things that just make you happy, make you better.

Yeah.

And less things that make you not better, then everything will be better.

But it's hard because.

It's also quite addictive.

And so it's, I think what I find the kind of the irony of this situation is that we actually know that social media is bad for us and we know that screen time is bad for us, but we are.

So the dopamine hit is so large that we feel so attracted to it.

Again, we know that ultra processed food is bad for us and we know that Whole Foods and grains and fruits and vegetables are good for us.

But it's so addictive from the dopamine hits that we get that we kind of seek these things out.

And so, you know, we're all intelligent human beings and we all kind of know the right from the wrong, but we seek out these more negative kind of self sabotaging behaviours.

But then if the irony, if you flip on all of its head about, you know, what we're talking about today about living well-being well, the longevity sector is going up more than ever before.

The wireless industry is predicted to be $9 trillion by 2027.

Yet the kind of the things that are going to increase that longevity from what I'm hearing from you is literally like turning off our phones, going back to basics, which isn't kind of what's being I guess spoken about in the kind of longevity, longevity to fear as much ultra processed foods is about eating a very like nutritious diet.

But this seems to be such an overriding part of that, to the extent to which.

Inflammation is the arrow of time.

Anything that reduces inflammation is going to like lengthen the size of that, that arrow.

The reason we do these, you use the word bad, I think, but the reason that we seek out these things is because we were designed to operate in a world in which like sugar was really good because you weren't sure when you want to get the next sugar hit.

So dopamine spikes are to be sought out like pleasure is to be sought out in the Savannah 100,000 years ago, not now and then, but then about the fact that they're addictive.

I know people.

I mean, everybody says that, including me.

Of course.

That's like, that's clear as a society.

I mean, I'm a, I'm a scientist, you know, I'm an expert on scientific things, not not on societal things.

But as a society, we have a choice.

Like we have a choice.

So opium is addictive, but we have decided as a society that we're going to ban it.

Like smoking is addictive, but we don't let kids smoke.

Alcohol is addictive, but we don't let kids drink.

We have a choice.

We can say if social media of some types of some content at some levels is so addictive that as a society it's harming us because we can't control it because of these dopamine circuits we have from like a squillion years ago that had to do with, like, getting sugar, we we can legislate.

We can say attention is a human right.

We can say kids shouldn't be using social media.

We have a choice, Yeah.

Australia have done that, Australia have done that.

Yeah.

My native.

My native country, so you know.

I forgot a question.

And this might, this was going to, this is going to connect.

So I don't want to leave us on a cliffhanger where people go, well, what do we do?

I mean, I guess the number one instance is that we do is that we we try and reduce our time on social media, try to put a time frame on using it, you know, try to create as much friction between US and social media as possible.

And I think for parents, it's a harder conversation to have.

And.

That's one that I think is that very hard one to navigate because none of us have grown up people that are apparent, say in a world of social media.

So it's a new way that we're we're kind of going through.

But this is something that was really stark that you said to me when we're talking about the immune system and you're thinking about social media and we're thinking about all of these kind of the rises of autoimmune conditions.

You said something to me that once we have this like big baseline crash or the big crash of what hits US, whether it's a virus or burnout or we get a disease or whatever it is, we never return back to the baseline.

Our information, you know, our immune system never like fully goes back.

And that was something that really hit me because I think so many of us might think, you know, if I damage my liver, it regrows and I can replenish it.

And, you know, if I, if I get sick, I'll recover pretty quickly and I'll be fine.

But actually hearing you say that was quite a stark kind of moment where I don't think many of us are aware of that.

So can you just explain, you know, the way that I said it in a very kind of confusing way, what that means, that actually our immune system was always on after we have quite a dramatic event.

Yeah, you've you've said.

It so eloquently, I'm not sure I have much to add.

So the immune system is always on because it needs to protect us from all sorts of things, including from ourselves.

So it's always on.

A lot of people working in this area and we don't really understand inflammation and we certainly don't understand the immune system.

But but there is there is there is compelling evidence that basically once you have certain shocks, which can include things like burnout, just to pick up on that example, something non inflammatory, non infective, that your immune system is sort of shocked into a state from which it will always be on alert.

After that, it will always expect like if you've had an episode of, you know, very dramatic burnout that puts you in the hospital, the immune system in the brain are rational in assuming that's going to happen to you again because things that have happened once are likely to happen again.

And that after events like that or a crisis of psychosis, for example, after that, the immune system is essentially, I don't want to use the word forever lightly, but it's permanently on alert.

And that you as a result move into a new pro inflammatory state, which will kind of always be there.

Now, that doesn't mean, of course, if you, if you do anti-inflammatory things like, you know, antioxidants and sleep better, eat better and exercise, if you do all those things, it will come down.

But once you've had a shock, I think that's what you're asking, Once you've had a, a substantial immune shock, whether it's sort of classically immune like a certain virus or obviously after a virus, you do return to a normal baseline inflammatory level, right.

So there are situations where the immune system does return.

You know, the, the troops go home, as it were, but not always.

Sometimes they don't go home.

Sometimes the riot police just stay on the streets forever.

And yeah, so, you know, that leads to the question, what can we do?

Avoid crises, like avoid burnout?

I, you know, it's just one of these things, easy to say, hard to do, right?

It's easy to say hard.

To do, but I think the awareness of it is important, you know, the awareness of, you know, we are living in a culture of work harder, perform better, quicker, more than ever before.

We're more on than ever before.

And I think I'm just even like the simple reminders of actually, you know, once you get really hit, you're never going to go back.

I mean, I don't think.

People really resonate with that as much as maybe they should, as one should.

I didn't and knowing that our system will forever be impacted.

I think it's just a really important message to to bring home to people because if you know, I think we can go through life so many times without realizing the importance of our health.

And it's not until your health has gone, but you go, well, I could have gone to the gym today and now I can't.

I could have walked down that road and now I can't.

Like, you know, it's not until something is literally physically taking away from us that we realized the power of it.

It's an ancient.

Proverb it's in.

It's in every ancient text.

It's in the it's in the Bible, it's in Buddhist texts.

We abuse our immune system and we also abuse our brain.

We abuse our immune system at our peril.

It's actually amazing what it does for us.

You don't think about it because you're just, we're here sort of talking on this podcast and during this whole time, our immune system is making sure that our microbiome is balanced.

It's involved in blood pressure regulation.

It's involved in brain regulation.

It's involved in like skin, you know, it's working around the clock.

It's 10 times bigger than the brain and it's as a computational device, it's probably more powerful.

Everybody says that the brain is the most complex system in the universe.

I disagree.

I think the immune system makes makes a mockery of its computational power and it's it's working for us all the time on, you know, unsung as a hero.

And not only we don't appreciate what it's doing for us and for all those around us, we abuse it as well all the time.

And then marvel that you suddenly are, you know, not going to be the same because you've you've had this like this shock and it's it's doing its best.

But like, just because it's doing its best doesn't mean you get to abuse it.

Because it's doing it's best means you should be grateful and try to help it out.

At least not actively like hurt it.

It's efforts to protect you.

I think PMS is interesting because emotions are quite subjective and when I first set out to go how many women have PMS and feel emotionally unstable, angry or cranky or irritable leading up to their periods?

What's the percentage like?

It can't be all of us.

It can't be none of us.

It must be somewhere in between.

And I found this fascinating meta analysis that was pulled together rates of PMS, self reported PMS.

So This is why I'm saying, yes, I have this before their periods.

And it looked at all different countries in the world.

And so the lowest reported rate of PMS in the world was in France and it was 12%.

So 12% of them put their hands up and go, yes, that is me jump over the border to Spain.

It was about 33%.

Global average was around 50%, but it was all the way up in the sort of 90% and Iran and lots of other countries fell in between.

And I was like, how can this be?

How can it be?

A purely biological phenomenon that's objective, that's measurable.

If rates vary from 12% to 90% globally, there must be a very subjective cultural storytelling expectation component to it.

And that's not to dismiss it, but it's to say it there appears to be enormous cultural variation when whether women have this experience or not.

And there's a, there's another study I always like to discuss that actually come out of New Zealand where I grew up.

And there's been a few different sort of studies of this type.

Whereby?

Where women?

Have, you know, gone the, the studies have gone and looked at, you know, sort of cycle day.

Some of them will measure women's blood to check that it is precisely the cycle day that they say it is because women aren't, we're not necess.

We might know.

My period started two weeks ago on a Wednesday.

I mean, I'm at day whatever doesn't necessarily mean you're pre or post ovulation.

What we need to do is like very careful blood testing to make sure we're looking at precisely the right type of day and then ask women to to self report their emotional state.

But be very careful when we're getting self-reports of emotions that we're giving women positive emotions, neutral emotions and negative emotions and an equal distribution of each of those to choose from.

So we're not giving them like 18 negative emotions to choose from, 1 neutral and 1 positive, because it's always going to skew the data.

So we need to be very careful how we're gathering that data.

And in the careful studies that have been done where women are not necessarily told we're doing a study on PMS, we're just looking at emotion in daily life.

The rate of clear emotional variation is very low.

It's much more like women in France, interestingly.

Yeah.

Versus the sort of 90% rate of women in Iran, for example, some, somewhere in between.

And lots of people find this quite confronting.

And I'm just sort of sharing the data here.

And I talked about this at length with one of the research.

Well, a couple of the researchers that have worked in the space and one of them said we saw a much more clear variation in emotions, not based on menstrual cycle day, but based on an overall sense of well-being.

Like, what's your kind of health and well-being like today?

What's your physical health like today?

How stressed are you feeling today?

And how socially supported and connected are you feeling today?

And emotions varied far more with those metrics than with the metric of purely cycle day.

But there's a story that we tell here.

And I and I and.

I'm not saying this is all in.

Women's heads and I spoke to one of the researchers, Sarah Romans, about this and said, are you saying that PMS is made-up?

And a woman said she said, no, no, no, she said.

But I think what we need to do is we need to look very carefully at what is causing emotions to vary.

What stories are we telling ourselves?

And how can we look at the data that we each have available to see what is driving an emotion?

Because it's not always a hormone in everyone.

And we know that there are some women who have hormone sensitivity and emotions do ride that kind of wave of hormone fluctuations and variations.

But there's also many women who don't who perhaps have kind of landed on this idea that maybe I should get PMS, and therefore I experience that.

Your expectations are an enormous part of the experiences that you have, Doctor Lisa Feldman Barrett spoke about.

This on the projection of your emotions and past memories and experiences on this show, which is really interesting.

100% and her idea.

Is that our emotions are constructed from the signals from our body, the context on which we're in, and the experiences we have in the words we use to describe them.

And that's not to say that they aren't real experiences, but sometimes we can.

Like, you know, there's a few more.

Data points in there.

Which might sort of change that, that shift.

And it's and, and I think I just want to be very clear that PMS is real and the more severe form of PMDD is real.

That's horrific.

But this isn't an an experience in all women all of the time.

There are some women who have hormone sensitivity, but there are many women who don't.

And I sometimes wonder if we were telling ourselves different stories, we might have different experiences.

Maybe it's a different cultural narrative in France versus Iran.

There is a long standing feminist narrative around this.

And the sort of feminist literature is not really my expertise, but I've I've looked into it sort of lightly that says that women kind of self silence or kind of, you know, hold their emotions in.

And then there's this one week a month when they can kind of let it all out because they're kind of allowed to.

And that may kind of inform some woman's experiences more so than others.

But I think it's important to realize that the hormones are not the only data point which are constructing an emotion as as as Lease Feldman Barrett would say, the stories are part of that.

The cultural narratives.

We've got the.

Expectations we've.

Got.

I think it's a much more like.

Nuanced discussion.

Isn't it?

I think the importance of women feeling recognized who haven't for so long in this area where, where where we were is related to hormones 100% is really important.

But as you said, I think you said something that which was really interesting.

And I'm thinking about the women in Iran versus the women in France and the amount of stress that that the women in Iran may have compared to the women in France culturally.

And and maybe French woman can just be pissed.

Off any day of the month they feel like it.

Yeah, you know, maybe.

And that's a massive cultural stereotype we've just as we've just used there.

But maybe that's maybe.

Rights, you know, it's very different in Iran 100% maybe this is something in there and that's that's an.

Extreme example, but that was that meta analysis and and research has kind of followed along behind that is looking at that this cut these experiences that we have, you know, we've looked at, you know, the emergence of mood disorders perhaps.

During puberty and the.

Emotional experiences girls have and boys have going through puberty.

And I mean, we can dig into that a little bit more if you like, but again, we tend to zone in on the hormones as if they're kind of the only data point or the only kind of they're driving the car and, and we don't have any agency over anything else that matters.

Some women definitely have hormone sensitivity, but we have to be very, very careful that we don't make everyone's story the the same.