I want to go into some of the other, I guess, chemicals that you hear associated with the brain, and have you explained to us what they are and why they're important for happiness, for brain health. Let's talk about serotonin. What is it, and why is it important?

Serotonin is hugely important for many different functions in the brain, but for happiness, for flexibility, and respect, and respect is the one that bulls people. But when your serotonin levels are low, you more easily feel disrespected. And if you have a social fight or you feel diminished in some way, your serotonin levels drop. And when serotonin levels go low, people tend to worry. They get stuck on negative thoughts, negative behaviors. They tend to be argumentative and oppositional. And if things don't go their way, they get upset. That, which on the surface can appear selfish, but it's really not selfish. It's rigid. And boosting serotonin with bright light therapy, which is why it's so important to get sunshine. And while as we go into the holidays, time change happens just at the wrong time, right? As we get less sunlight and it gets colder outside, We just then got a bomb dropped on us. Like, all of a sudden, you lose an hour a day of light. And light is so important.

Let me back us up a second. So does your brain create serotonin? Is that like, what is the function of serotonin in the brain?

So your gut makes about 90 % of the serotonin in your body, but it doesn't go directly into your brain. Your brain creates serotonin from the amino acid precursor called tryptophan. And that's why often eating tryptophan-rich foods- Like turkey. Can be helpful, but not in a ketogenic way. You have to eat tryptophan-rich foods with a carbohydrate because you need an insulin response to drive tryptofan into the brain. So turkey and sweet potatoes together is a great combination to boost your mood.

So when you have high levels of serotonin, how does that impact you?

We tend to be happy. You're a little bit less motivated. You don't care that much. I remember when Prozac first came on to the market, and I would give it to some of my depressed patients, and they would say they would be less depressed, but also less motivated because as tryptophan goes up, dopamine, another chemical we should talk about, goes down. They have this counterbalancing effect, which is why, and this is really interesting for anyone who grew up in an alcoholic home, I studied children and grandchildren of alcoholics. They often have low levels of both serotonin and dopamine. And so if I just raise one, I make them better in some ways, but worse in other ways. So a lot of people who take SSRIs, they go, Well, I'm happier, but I don't really care that much. I had one guy tell me he wasn't doing his taxes, and he's like, no, this is going to be a problem. So I had to rebalance his medication.

So is serotonin the happiness one, and dopamine is the motivation and drive one? Is that their relationship?

Well, they're both. You think of both of them involved in happiness, and dopamine is the molecule of more. When you get dopamine, you go, Oh, I like that. And the problem is, the more you get, the more you want, and then it turns into trouble. We are wearing out our dopamine centers in the brain and our society with our phones and social media and the nonstop video games and texting. We're being thrilled to death, which ultimately wears out the pleasure centers in the brain. So you have to be very careful. I often talk to people about drip dopamine, don't dump it.

What does that mean, drip dopamine, don't dump it?

So you want little tiny bursts of dopamine, not a big splash. So for example, cocaine, big splash of dopamine, and you go, whoa. But the problem is you have none left, and then you get depressed, which you then start using alcohol is the same way. Alcohol dumps dopamine. Nicotine vaping dumps dopamine. Scary movies, dump dopamine. Falling in love, dumps dopamine. You want to drip it, holding Tana's hand, getting eye contact, looking for what I call the micro moments of happiness, so much more important. And new love is totally dumping dopamine. So whenever you just fall in love, you need to like, well, this is really awesome. Let me ride this out before I make any big decisions.

So would an example of dripping dopamine include the two microhabits you talked about, one being waking up in the morning and saying, I'm going to make it a great day. How am I going to do that? And also at the end of the day, going on that treasure hunt for what went right?

Yes.

Excellent. How can you tell if you have low dopamine?

If you're tired, if you find that you're unmotivated, if you're sad, and you just don't have the motivation to get done what you want to get done. And I'm in Justin Bieber's docuseries Seasons, and I've been his doctor for a long time, and they just wore that boy's dopamine centers out. And then when you become famous like that, you have access to women, to drugs, to video games, and just completely almost killed that boy, and they dead And his pleasure centers. But the good news is even if you've been bad to your brain, by doing the right things, your brain, we call it neuroplastic, it can be batter even in a matter of months.

Wow. We've talked about supplements. We've talked about some microhabits. What are three simple ways to increase dopamine?

Cold shower. Hours will do it. So I just took a shower before I did it, and I always finish with two minutes. I turned it all the way cold because cold therapy has been shown to increase both norepinephrine another neurotransmitter, and dopamine. Eating tyrosine-rich food. So we talked about tryptophan, the amino acid building block for serotonin. Tyrosine is the amino acid building block for dopamine. So things like apples, and eggs, and beans, and fish, and chicken, dark chocolate. But you don't want to do that with an insulin response or with a carbohydrate. And so this is where a higher protein, lower carbohydrate diet can be helpful. Exercise also does it, and certain supplements like tyrosine. So tyrosine is a supplement, and it's the amino acid building block for dopamine.

So is there any certain times of day where your dopamine is higher or lower just naturally?

In the morning.

And is the same true as serotonin?

In the evening.

Okay. So explain that to us, and then how we can use something natural to boost it.

So Everybody's circadian rhythm or the realm of their energy is different. There are morning larks and night owls, and you have to know what you are. A lot of my ADD patients are night owls, and society is biased against them because school starts early, work starts early for a lot of people. But you just have to know your rhythm. And if your dopamine is high in the morning, that's when you want to focus and get work done. If it tends to be higher later in the day, know your rhythm. Serotonin often helps people sleep. And in our supplement, Put Me to Sleep, we actually have 5HTP, which is the amino acid precursor, even closer to serotonin than I'm not a fan. For a lot of people, it helps decrease worry and promote sleep.

Wow. I'm slightly overwhelmed. I don't even know where to start in terms of how to boost my serotonin naturally, how to boost my dopamine naturally. So is there a way to simplify this? You just talked about your circadian rhythm and understanding if you're a night owl or you're a morning person. So if you're a morning person and you wake up and you're naturally more motivated, are there certain things you should do first thing in the morning to keep your dopamine levels high, to stay focused, to promote your brain health?

So one thing I really like, especially as we start into later fall and winter, is morning bright light. So people who have seasonal affective disorders, so winter blues, that morning bright light therapy, and you can actually get these therapy lamps. I make one called our Bright Minds Therapy Lamp. 10,000 lux. So it's bright. Don't look at it. Put it like an arm's length away from you while you're putting on your makeup or having breakfast, if you have breakfast for 20 or 30 minutes in the morning. Super simple, can significantly improve dopamine, your energy, mood, and cognitive function. Exercise. Whether you want to increase serotonin or dopamine, it does both walk like you're late. For 45 minutes, four or five times a week. Super simple, bright light exercise. Just incredibly helpful. And this is very important. I just turned 68 this year. And it's very clear to me that the stronger you are as you age, the less likely you are to get Alzheimer's disease. But it's really For older people, it's frailty that kills them almost more than anything else. So light, exercise, simple supplements. And now you can eat in certain ways to boost the neurotransmitters in your brain.

So when you say frailty and strength, are you also recommending, in addition to the 30 to 40 minutes of walking as if you're late three or four times a week that you also add in strength training?

You bet. I think it's absolutely critical for men and for women. Your muscles are your protein reserve. So one One of my young doctors went to Hawaii on vacation and got this terrible infection that almost killed him.

Oh, wow.

The reason he didn't die is he was strong when he went into that illness and had the protein reserve muscle on his body. And I remember the day when the hospital I expected I was going to get a call He died in the middle of the night because he just got this wicked infection from jumping into a natural pool in Hawaii. But he survived, and he's done great because it's the protein reserve or the brain reserve you bring into an illness or an accident that determines how you're going to do after it. I mean, you've probably seen One person gets into a car accident, and they come out of it just fine. Another one's permanently damaged. Same accident. Why? Because it's the level of brain health or brain reserve they brought into the accident that often determines the outcome. So every single day of your life, from my perspective, every single day of your life, you should be boosting your brain reserve.

And And that brings me to our very first question about happiness from a listener named Andrea. Hey, Mel. It's Andrea. Can you talk about happiness? I can't think of a time that I have felt true happiness. I'm just living, I guess. I feel that something is missing, and I believe it's happiness. Andrea, I love the way you frame that question. And for you listening, I'm going to put that I'll question right back to you. Can you think of a time that you felt true happiness? Or are you, like most people, that you feel like something is missing from your life and you can't quite put your finger on it? When I hear Andrea's question, I can totally relate to it because I know I felt the way that she's feeling. One of the mistakes that I was making when I felt like something was missing is I, of course, went on the search. I got to find happiness. Here's the first piece of research that I want to talk about. Research says that happiness or that feeling that we're seeking of happiness, it's often fleeting because we are searching for happiness in the wrong places.

In fact, researchers at Rutgers and the University of Toronto found that people who pursue happiness, you're chasing it, you're looking for it outside yourself. You often feel like you don't have enough time in the day. And this, paradoxically, makes you feel unhappy. Because when you feel like you don't have enough time in the day because you're constantly chasing all these things outside of you, you start to feel like you're not in control of your life. And I think that's what Andrea is talking about, that we're all chasing down some version of happiness that we think we're supposed to be chasing, right? That society has marketed some version of life to us. And that's why you probably are familiar with that phrase, I'll be happy when. We all succumb to that thinking. I'll be happy when I lose the weight, I fall in love, I land that dream job, I pay off my bills, I get into my dream school, I find the perfect apartment. And there's multiple problems with thinking like this. First of all, if you think that you'll be happier when you achieve something, what always happens is when you achieve it, you're not as happy as you thought you would be.

And then all of a sudden, because you don't have this big goal in front of you anymore, your happiness plummets. And so the research is very, very clear that these big events that we're chasing, that we think are going to give us a boost of happiness, that happiness doesn't last. And there's a second reason why this thinking that you'll be happy at some point in the future, why this is really problematic. It's because you are anchoring your happiness on something that hasn't happened yet. That means your happiness is something you have to earn. Your happiness is something that's outside of you. And that's not what happiness is at all. Happiness is always within your control. Happiness is something that you want to cultivate in your life where you are right now. And the good news is, you don't have to wait to be happy when. You can learn to be happier now. So let me explain, based on the research, how happiness works when it comes to you individually. So there's this formula that's supported by the science that says, you have 100% capacity for happiness. That's what you got. Your cup can be full and runneth over.

100%, baby. Happiness is for you. 50% of that capacity is genetics. That's your default. So you might somebody that has 50% genetics that are preset to being very sunny and bubbly and happy. Or 50% of your genetics might be like, you're grumpy. That's okay, because you still have the other 50% to play with. 10% of the rest is based on the circumstances that you're facing right now, and 40% of happiness, period, in your life right now is completely under your control. And that's what we're to focus on, because that's awesome. No matter what family you were born into, no matter what you're facing right now in your life, 40 % of your capacity for happiness right now, completely in your control. And so before we go forward, I want to make sure that as we're talking, that we're in complete agreement about what the word happiness means. Because when you and I use the word happy or happiness, we might be saying totally different things. There's a huge spectrum when people use this word. Researchers even talk about the fact that happiness is all over the map. Some people, when they say happiness, they mean laughing and having a good time.

Other people mean fulfillment, or thriving, or kicking ass in life. And so you and I are going to have a conversation right now about what you mean when you say happiness. Where are you on this spectrum spectrum between laughter and having a great time to feeling completely fulfilled and thriving in life. And so in order for you and I to get on the same page, I'm going to bring a metaphor in. You know Mel Robbins. She loves her metaphors. She loves her visual explanations for these big heady concepts. And thankfully, I got a great one for happiness. So whenever you hear the word happiness, I want you to think about an ocean. There are waves in an ocean, and that's one spectrum of happiness. And waves come and they go. And having fun in the waves requires you to jump in the waves, to get into the ocean, to decide that you're going to go have fun. But then if you think about the ocean, there are days that there's no waves at all. It's perfectly still. And the ocean itself, and your ability to stand in that ocean, to float and to swim, that's a deeper form of happiness.

Or what about the days where the ocean is stormy and you wouldn't dare go in? But on those days that you're on the beach, aren't you so present to the wind, to the salt, to the waves crashing on the beach? That's what I want you to think about, that huge range of how an ocean shows up. And I love this metaphor of an ocean for happiness, the waves being fun and the Still Ocean being your ability to just experience happiness and you being present even on the stormiest days to the little details. I love this range because it ties right back to all of the research, but it gives us a visual. What I want to know is, what's been your most shocking discovery about walking?

I think it's the last chapter of the book that we underestimate the extent of which walking walking as a profoundly social activity. We think of walking as just a simple means from getting from A to B, and we underestimate dramatically how exquisitely attuned we are to each other when we walk. And we underestimate terribly how enjoyable walking together is. And if you think about it, humans made our journey out of Africa, 80 130,000 years ago. And we did it on foot. We didn't do it using mechanized transport because we hadn't invented it. That's only something we really invented in the last 50 or 100 years or whatever. So it's something we have to do together. We did it in groups, we did it in families, we did it in tribes, we did it in communities. And to do that successfully means that everybody has to be paying attention to everybody else. People have to keep an eye out for danger. If you're walking at the edge of the group and you see a sudden movement in a bush, you're going to have to quickly tell everybody that there's a tiger over there.

Either that, Shane, or I'm going to shove you in the direction of the tiger and run in the other direction. Exactly.

To survive a tiger, all you have to do is run a little bit faster than the slowest person, as the old joke goes.

It's true. Nobody that's listening to the podcast, but everybody on YouTube could see that I wore a orange and black striped sweater today. I look like a tiger.

Maybe that's what primed me to give that example.

It could be, but you're right. And I also think in modern life, the fact that so many people are stuck at home working hybrid roles, and you feel a sense of deep isolation, that you underestimate the difference that simply getting out even alone and walking in your neighborhood can have, and you feeling connected?

Yeah, no, that's for sure. And I think if you take What are those two different examples, you going for a walk by yourself, or you going for a walk with others? There are clearly benefits to you from the very fact of you going for a walk for yourself. It brings clarity of mind. It's certainly good for your health and all of those things. You may also happen to accidentally meet people when you're walking, and you can talk to them, which is an easy thing to do. It's not so easy when you're driving or cycling on a bike or whatever to do that. But the benefit from walking with others, of course, arises from the fact that humans are intensely and immensely social animals. We get this feeling that it's been given a variety of different names, but the one that I like is effrofescent assembly, which is the feeling of the dissolution between self and other, and people are walking together in a common cause. And we humans are the only species that do this. No chimpanzee has ever got an up and gone on a protest march against the Alpha because they're unhappy with an edict that the Alpha has handed down.

But you see right throughout, look at the history of the US over the last 50 or 100 years. You've got those amazing marches that happened in In Washington, you've had the astonishing civil rights marches. In the country next door, the UK, you had those huge marches against Brexit, which, sadly, were ineffectual. But nonetheless, a million people who didn't know each other gathered together and walked the streets of London to protest a policy that they disagreed with. And we've had similar marches here for all sorts of reasons. And humans are unique because we will do this together. As I said, chimpanzees won't do it. Tigres, and we've spoken a moment ago, won't do it. Fire ants won't do it. This is something unique to us as humans.

If you even take that point that you just made, and you distill it down to just something even more simple that's important to people's lives, I'm thinking about the fact that even when you join up with a group of friends, and you decide to go on a walk in the afternoon, you are joining in solidarity in your friendship. And one of the things that I know that has made a huge difference in my life, and it's one of the many reasons why I wanted to talk to you, is when I moved to this new area just a year or so ago, it was forming a walking group with other women that had moved to the area that made me feel suddenly more connected. It made me feel more optimistic. It made me feel a little bit more excited about being in some place new. I hadn't thought that much about the fact that walking is something that we've done our whole lives. It's something we do in political protest. It's something that we do to form friendships. And that that is one of the many, many profound reasons why it's an important part of everybody's life.

But your book has also dug into what I think is jaw-dropping science about a simple walk. So before we dig into all of it, can you talk a little bit about that 2018 study that tracked participants' activity levels and personality traits over 20 years, and how walking had impacted people over time?

One is one that looked at inactivity over time. This was a US study, a so-called Panel Study, Tracking Changes in Personality and Correlating Those with Activity or Inactivity. The bottom line is very, very simple. That people who spend increasing periods of time being sedentary as they move along in life. It's not a question of getting older. This can be a midlife. They tend to show changes in their personality, which are, for want of a better phrase, tending them towards being more asocial, being less open to experience, and probably experiencing more by way of negative emotion compared to people who get up and get out and get moving. The other study that I'm thinking of is one that was conducted just a couple of years ago in older people, people in their late '60s and early '70s. And that study, again, a beautiful US study conducted in the Chicago area, showed very clearly that if you are inactive, there are negative changes in the brain compared to people who are active. And the changes that are positive in the brain from activity arise from getting up and moving and getting out and going for a good walk.

So the intervention Intervention is a very simple intervention. It's to go for a walk three times a week for a couple of miles, along with a walking partner and a physiotherapist. And what you see in the group that are active is brain changes that are really remarkable. You get an increase in the volume of certain brain regions that are concerned with memory, and you also get changes in the effectiveness, for want of a better phrase, of the memory that supported by those brain regions. Whereas the people who are sitting at home not active, they're showing a greater decline than they need to do, or if they had have been active over that period of time. So the key point here to really to drag out is that being active positively supports good things about your personality, but it also reaches across to cognitive function. It supports positive things about memory function, and it helps resist the trajectory of decline that you would have if you just are sitting on your couch doing the Homer Simpson, eating a bag of potato chips and watching telly.

I think that most of us underestimate what's actually happening in our bodies and in our minds when we're walking. And so let's break it down. What happens in the brain when you go for a walk?

Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things to think about here, and it really depends on the level of analysis that you want to start at. So let's make it very simple. So I'm sitting here at home and I want to go to the shop. So the first thing that you have to do is form the intention that you're going to go and get up and do something. That could be because somebody has bleeped you or phoned you or whatever to say to come and meet them at the shop, or you realize you need to go and pick up a pint of milk or whatever it happens to be. So what does that do? The first thing is you have to stand up, you have to get up, you have to engage in preparatory movement in order to walk. That's a challenge for your brain. Sitting or lying down in a chair or being recumbant in a chair is not a challenge. Standing up, maintaining balance, and then having directed coherent motion in the direction you want to go is also a challenge to your brain. So the key point here is that movement, and the movement in this case we're talking about, of course, is walking, acts as a positive spur to the brain.

And rhythms that would be quiescent in the brain are suddenly alive. They become very apparent. So in order to get to the shop, you have to orient your body in the correct direction. You have to create a cognitive map of the environment that you're in. These are all subtle small challenges, but the brain benefits from these. And then let's say you are actually going to the shop and it happens to be up a hill for the sake of this point. Well, then there are other challenges happening as well. So you have to calibrate your walking speed so that you're at a speed that's comfortable for you. That means you have to step up your heart rate a little, you have to increase your breathing a little, your musculature has to respond to all of those things. So you've got a whole lot of top-down signals from the brain acting as a challenge to the body to get it moving. And then you get to the shop, you do what you got to do, and then you walk home again. You might have to carry something. So that's actually a good challenge for you as well.

So even at those kinds of simple levels, you can see changes across a whole range of things from, as I said, from the top down commands that are coming from the brain all the way down to your foot hitting the ground and you levering yourself off and moving off.

Well, I certainly don't think about any of those things when I need to get... Or should you? Well, but what is that? You said that the act of pushing pushing yourself off the couch, standing up, triggering your mind to activate from the top down the mechanical patterns that allow you to walk, the cognitive patterns of surveying where you are and how you're going to get to a certain place, that all these things benefit the brain. How do they benefit the brain?

They benefit the brain because probably the best way to think about this is that movement is medicine, is the lovely that's going around at the moment. So think of an example. Let's imagine you own a bicycle and you get this lovely new bike from the shop and you put it in your garage and you leave it there for a year and you don't do anything with it. What condition is it going to be in? The chain is going to be all silted up. The tires are probably deflated. The brakes aren't going to be especially responsive. All of those kinds of things will have gone wrong with it. And the same is true for your body. Your body needs to work optimally. Repeated challenge. Your brain needs this as well. This is why, for example, if you're walking for the sake of your heart, you need to step it up so that speaking is hard for you, so that there's a sufficient challenge being being presented to you. Your body is obviously designed to do two things. One is to conserve energy, but the other is to source energy. And we always have this fight going on within us.

Am I going I'm going to get up? If I'm going to get up, am I going to take the car? Those kinds of choices we make. And it makes sense, again, when you think about the conditions that humans lived under for thousands of years, we didn't have the easy availability of calories that we have now. We didn't have chairs with backs. We sat on tree stumps. We sat down on our hunkers. But we didn't have all of these wonderful comforts that our big brains have allowed us to invent over the past 100 years and to spread around among us all. Even this fantastic conversation we're able to have. When I said, you don't need to be thinking about these things, this is the joy and the wonder of the body that we have. You don't need to be thinking, well, I have to maintain a certain line of balance. I have to invoke my cognitive map. I have to put one foot in front of the other. All of these things are done at a level below consciousness, and you should only be thinking about them if something goes wrong. Like, for example, you slip because it's a patch of ice or the shop is closed and you have to think about another shop you have to go to.

And one of the points that I make repeatedly in the book is that We've designed movement out of our environment. And again, this is perfectly understandable. We're trying to conserve energy. But if we want to get people moving again, what we really need to do is design the environment so that it's easy for people to walk. So I'll give you a simple example. My local suburban town, which I live very close to, had quite narrow foot paths. It's a very old town. It's there since, I guess, the 1100s or something. And the foot paths are all three foot wide. And priority was given foolishly to traffic, even though it's an old medieval town. The pandemic came and people were eating outside. That meant the traffic had to lose its position of primacy. The restaurants were allowed to put tables outside. That meant the foot paths had to be expanded. And suddenly the default is people are walking rather than driving. And that's a really, really nice thing. But to give you a contrary example, in the building I work in, if you want to come and visit me in my office, you come in the door and I'm up on the third floor.

How do you get to me? If you want to walk to me, you have to walk through four fire doors to get to the stairs. But if you want to take the lift or the elevator, as you call it, it's just there. So my building has a walking designed out of it, and that building would be, I guess, there for 100 years. So people will be not using the stairs in that building for 100 years. And this is an issue that, generally, we've created environments where the default is to conserve energy and not move. But we've got a food surplus, a caloric surplus. Actually, what we should be doing is creating environments that make it easy for people to move around under their own steam.

You know, one of my missions in wanting to talk to you is to have the person listening to us right now have an epiphany about the profound power and impact that incorporating a simple walk into your daily routine can have on you. And I know it wasn't until we started digging into your research that I honestly had no idea that a simple walk could have the chemical and structural and creative impact. And it made me wonder, why doesn't everybody take a walk every day if it's free and it does all this? I asked our online audience and our listeners of this podcast, what are you struggling with? 95% of people said, distraction, memory loss, information overload, the anxiety about all the things I need to do, my inability to remember things. And so what do we need to do? Can you walk us through simple things that we need to do that you teach people in your institute to tap into the capacity of our brains?

Yeah. So for me, it's three things.

Okay.

Framework, and then We could go into the tactics and tools.

Let's do it.

It's three Ms. It's your mindset. I define mindset as a set of assumptions or attitudes you have about something. Okay. Your attitudes, assumptions about money, your attitudes, assumptions about relationships, maybe about yourself even. Okay. So the mindset for me at events where I do these demonstrations, people are like, Oh, I'm so glad you're here. I have a horrible memory. I'm not smart enough. And I would say, Stop. Because all behavior is belief-driven.

You say stop when somebody says, I have a horrible memory, because when somebody says, I have a horrible memory, that is a mindset. And that mindset, I have a horrible memory, or I'm not smart, or I've never been able to learn a language, or I'm a slow reader, all of those statements is the mindset that is limiting the capacity of your brain. So step one is to identify what your mindset is when it comes to your brain.

So the first one is your mindset. If people say they feel like they're not smart enough or they're too old, I say stop, because if you fight for those limitations, you get to keep them. Meaning your brain is like this incredible supercomputer, and you're on your self-taught is a program it will run. So if you tell yourself, I'm not good at remembering names, you won't remember the name of the next person you meet because you program your supercomputer not to.

That makes sense.

Your mind is always eavesdropping on yourself. Talk. Audit yourself. I don't have a great memory yet. It just opens up the possibility, and it just feels different.

I like to just stop and put a highlighter on what Jim is telling you. I have a story that I'm dyslexic, and I took six years of French in high school, and I went to college and took an exam to to place into the French requirement. Dude, I placed into French 101 for people who have never taken it. And yet, I have this calling and this desire to be able to speak conversational Spanish. Jim's point here is that if I'm not willing to stop telling myself that foreign languages are hard for me, I will never, ever, ever utilize the methods effectively because I will always be arguing against them. And so that's step one. And then let's move on to the second one.

Motivation. When we talk about motivation, I ask myself this question 10 times a day, verbatim. What is the tiniest action I could take right now that will give me progress towards this goal where I can't fail?

That's a big question. Now, see, here's part of my problem, Jim. I can't remember the question.

Okay, here we go. We can write this down. What is the tiniest action I could take right now? Operative word now. Okay. Little things add up to big things because consistency compounds. Little by little, a little becomes a lot. Yeah.

So talk to us about the methods.

I'm going to teach everyone a memory technique that I train Hollywood actors and Ted speakers to be able to memorize a speech. If you have to give a toast at a wedding. Right? And so what we're going to memorize are 10 keys for a limitless brain. There are 10 levers for a better brain that will make a marked difference in your focus, your memory, your overall brain energy and health. I'm going to share them, and then I'll teach you how to memorize these 10 things, forwards and backwards. Oh, my God.

I love this. Okay, let's go.

Yeah. Okay. So the first one is a good brain diet. What you eat matters, especially for your gray matter. A whole area of science we research and talk about in the book called neuronutrition, that your brain is part of your body, but it requires different nutrients, some different nutrients than the rest of your body. Well, actually, let's go to some of my favorite foods. Avocados, the monounsutry of fat, it's good. Blueberries, I like to call them brainberries. Broccoli is good for the brain. Vitamin E. Olive oil, Mediterranean diet, it's good for your brain. If your diet allows eggs, the choline in eggs is a precursor to acetylcholine, a neurotransmitter. It's really important for cognitive health. Greenleafy vegetables, if you could stomach that, is a kale, spinach. Fattie fishes, because your brain is mostly fat. It's the omega-3, specifically the DHA. Salmon, sardines. It's good for your brain. Turmeric. It has the curcumin, which helps to lower inflammation stemically. Walnuts and almond. Even walnuts look like a brain. High in vitamin E, which is neuroprotective. Probably my favorite is dark chocolate. Everyone can remember that very well. These are some of my favorite brain foods. Number two, the second key for a limitless brain, killing ants.

Ants stands for automatic negative thoughts. Let's talk about number three is exercise. As your body moves, your brain grooves. As your body It moves, your brain grooves. Number 4, brain nutrients. If you're not getting the fish, then omega fatty acids, supplementing with DHAs. But then there's all kinds of neutropics like Elthianine, Bacopa, Rodiola, creatine, which is often associated with exercise. Huge benefit for mitochondria energy for your brain. Number 5, positive peer group. Who you spend time with is who you become. If you spend time with nine broke people, you're going to be number 10. We have these mirror neurons. And mirror neurons help to drive our empathy and imitate people around us. We imitate their words. Whether somebody smokes has less to do with their biological networks or their neurological networks has more to do with their social networks. Because if your friend smoke, you're more likely to take that action. We start modeling the integrity, the moral fabric of the people we spend time with, of what's acceptable. Imitating the habits of the people around us. So if you spend time with people who are working out all the time, you're probably more likely to work Look out.

If you haven't found that person yet, be that person. We could love our family and friends, but they'd be our peer group. That's five. Six, clean environment. Cleaning your desk or making your bed, but then you feel just a clarity of thought. You know why? Because you're not using mental energy to keep track of everything. Your external world is often a reflection of your internal world. Then number seven, big one, sleep. Hello. Number eight, protect your brain. Brain protection. Wear a helmet, protect your brain. It's very resilient and it's very fragile. Number nine, new learnings. New learnings, meaning there's a study done with nuns on longevity. They loved 80, 90 above. Because it's a set community, similar diet and day play, They found that half of it was because of their faith and their emotional gratitude. The other half, key factor for the longevity, they were lifelong learners. They're reading every day. They're having spirited debates, conversations. Because of it, it had a year to their life and life to their years. My favorite learning, reading. Reading as to your mind would exercise your body. Then finally, number 10, stress management. Chronic stress has been shown to shrink the human brain.

It also puts you in fight or flight. You're held hostage in your survival brain. I'm going to walk you through a 2,500-year-old memory technique that will blow your mind. I want everyone to do this and be able to remember all 10. All right. I want you to imagine you're coming to my office. It's in the suburbs. You can actually just breathe. If you can, close your eyes just to help you to focus if it's safe to do so as you're listening. There are trees everywhere around our... It's a glass building. Let's say you're coming to take a speed reading class with us. I'm going to name 10 places along this journey to get to that classroom. And what we're going to do is take the 10 keys for a limitless brain, and we're going to imagine each of those keys in each of those places in order. I'm going to ask everyone to say out loud as you're listening this. The first place that you get out of is the parking lot. So what's the first place? Say it out loud.

Parking lot.

Parking lot. And that's their verbal memory. I want you to see it, and then we're going to feel it and get it in our body. So the parking lot, when you When you get out of the parking lot, you're going to be reminded you need a good brain diet. And how you do that, pretend you're eight years old and use your imagination. If you can't imagine it, imagine you can imagine it. And imagine there's a big buffet of your favorite brainfoods. And so you see the strawberries, the avocados, the dark chocolate. And even if you can't imagine, again, imagine you can imagine it, see it, feel it, taste it. All right. So from there, there's a waterfall. It creates a moat around the building. And so you have to cross a bridge. So the second place is the bridge. So what's the second place?

Bridge.

Bridge. That's your verbal memory. You go across the bridge and you're killing ants. To remind you the second tip, quick tip for a limitless brain, You need to kill automatic negative thoughts. So you're stepping on those ants. It takes more time to say it than actually do to see it. And as you're stepping on that, you would never do that, but it's just you can't forget it. You go into the building, the third place, you get into the elevator. What's the third place?

Elevator.

Elevator, great. Then third brain tip, exercise. Your personal trainer is there, and whatever your personal exercise is, Pilates, CrossFit, whatever, yoga, you're doing it in the elevator. See and feel yourself doing that. You get out of the elevator, and the fourth place is the hallway. So what's the fourth place? Hallway. Hallway. And these are brain nutrients, all the neutropics. So I want you to imagine you're tripping and falling on bottles of gink of creatine, of curcumin, of lion's mane, mushroom. And you're just tripping on it. You're like, donkey Kong or Laura Croft. You're jumping over these, maybe make the bottles really big. And there are vitamins everywhere. You open the door to my office, immediately to the left is the fifth place, which is the closet. Closet. So what's the fifth place? Closet. Closet. And inside, you want to remember your positive peer group. So all of your happy friends are in the closet. They're celebrating, they're cheering, big surprise party, happy friends, positive peer group. Maybe we're doing a mastermind. You get out, and it's the sixth place is the receptionist. Receptionist. What's the sixth place?

Receptionist.

And what the receptionist is doing is the sixth brain tip, which is clean environment. The receptionist is cleaning the environment. Waxing, vacuuming, dusting, everything is clean. Behind the receptionist is the seventh place, which is the Fish Tank. What's the seventh place? Fish Tank. Fish Tank. Everyone say fish tank, and then the seventh tip, sleep. Imagine Nemo, Dory in their pajamas, and they're in their bunk beds. One of them is snoring, right? And you're sleeping with the fishes. So that's what's going on in the fish. And you just see it, you won't ever forget it. You don't have to repeat it 100 times like old school. You see it once, you can't forget it. All right, we're almost there. You go to the classroom, but the door is locked for the speed reading class. And the classroom door is the eighth place. What's the eighth place?

Classroom door.

Perfect. And there's a helmet on a hook there. So you put the helmet on and you headbutt the door open. It splinters everywhere, right? But the helmet reminds you of the brain tip, brain protection. Protection. Protect your brain. Great. And we're almost done. The front of the room is the ninth place, and it's a whiteboard with markers, right? Whiteboards. What's the ninth place?

Whiteboard.

Great. I'm there as your instructor, and I'm writing two words on the whiteboard in your favorite color. Mel, what's your favorite color?

Red.

Red. In red, I'm writing new learnings. New learnings. See those two words, new learnings? To remind you about always be learning. And then finally, on the side of this particular classroom are these Japanese plants, these bonsai trees. What's the 10th place? Bonsai trees. And you want to remember stress management. So whatever relaxes you, do it on the bonsai trees. Take a moment. You're doing meditation there. You're getting a massage there. You're having your relaxing drink, but you're doing it on the bonsai trees.

Got it.

Perfect. Now, you are on stage, and you need to be able to share these 10 things. You go to the first place is the parking lot, and that reminds you of what? Everybody.

Blueberries and brain food.

Yes, your brain food. It's perfect. And then you cross the bridge, and what are you stepping on? Ants. Yes. Kill those automatic negative thoughts. You get into the building, you get into the elevator.

Exercise.

Exercise. And then once you get out of the elevator, you see the hallway, and it's covered in- Oh, bottles.

Bottles like ginko and stuff that I'm... Lion's Mane and- Yes, the Lion's Mane, all the brain nutrients.

You open up the door to the classroom, and immediately to the left is a closet.

Our friends are in there.

Yeah. All the happy friends, your positive peer group. Then you go to the receptionist, and what's the activity What are the things that they're doing?

The receptionist is cleaning.

Cleaning. Clean your environment. And behind the receptionist is a fish tank. And they're sleeping. What are the fish doing?

They're sleeping, Jim.

They are sleeping. Oh, my God.

I could tell you what they are. We're going to put on a helmet and bust through the door and on the whiteboard is going to be the words new learning. And then there's a bonsai tree where I'm relaxing.

Perfect. And you got a 10 out of 10. And you can even probably do it backwards, Mel. If you can probably go from- From the bonsai tree relaxing to the new learning, to the helmet, to the cleaning, to the closet where my friends are, to the bottles that I tripped over, to the elevator where there was some exercise to do, to the ants that we stepped on, to the blue. That is amazing. My message to everybody is, when you understand how your brain works, you could work your brain. When you understand how your memory works, you could work your memory. It starts to change your mindset about what's possible, because when you do something you never thought you could do, then you say, you get curious, right? What else? Maybe I could read. I really can read two or three times faster and enjoy it. I get more out of it, or I can learn Spanish.

Hey, it's Mel. Thank you so much for checking this video out. If you like this one, I have a feeling you're going to like this one, too. I'll see you there.