Through manifesting, you're about to teach us how to rewire our brain and train it toward abundance.

Things like manifestation, visualization, affirmations, these are all things that prime the brain more towards thriving than just surviving. Let me put it like this. If you and I both wanted to learn Spanish, and you wanted to learn it because you were planning a vacation to Mexico, but I wanted to learn it because I had a Spanish boyfriend, who do you think is likely to learn it more or better. You? Yeah. Our listeners' brains are actually going to be different at the end of this podcast than they are right now.

I am so fired up that you're here with me. This conversation is so exciting because by the time you're done listening and learning from our guests today, your brain is not going to be the same. You're going to learn today how to use science to rewire your brain so that it can help you get what you want. This is so freaking cool. And before I introduce you to today's is a remarkable expert, and we jump into the conversation, I have something really exciting that I want to share with you. As a thank you to you for helping make this podcast one of the most popular podcasts in the entire world. I created something incredible for you, and I cannot wait for you to get your hands on this thing that I've created. It's a free gift. You can access it in less than one minute. All you got to do is go to melrobbins. Com/makethappen. What is it? Oh, you're going to love it. It is a two-part video training. It's almost two hours long. It's brand new. It's backed by research. I created it and I teach it. And check this out, this two-part video training.

It comes with a free 25-page workbook. I'm holding this sucker right now. If you could see me on YouTube, you would see this gorgeous green workbook, 25 pages, based in science. The training is called Make It Happen, and you can access it at melrobinds. Com/makithappen. Now, this free two-part training teaches you how to take confident, consistent, and inspired action. And that's important because when you start taking confident, consistent, and inspired action, you tap into the power that is inside you to create a better life. And I know you learn a lot listening to this podcast every Monday and every Thursday. And I love that. And I love how it inspires and empowers you. And I want to remind you, though, I don't want you to just listen. I want you to apply what you're learning. I want you to act because nothing in your life is going to change unless you start doing something different. And it would be a real honor to spend almost two hours teaching you how to master execution. Just consider this zero cost training my thank you. Thank you for spending time with me. Thank you for spending time investing in yourself by listening to this podcast.

And thank you for supporting the work that I'm doing. Just go to melrobinds. Com/makethappen. Super easy to get your access to this, and it's going to help you go even deeper into everything that you're going to learn today on the podcast. So let's talk about the conversation we're going to have today, because world-renowned Dr. Tara Swart-Beaver is in the house. Dr. Tara is a medical doctor, neuroscientist, psychiatrist, and senior lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management, and she runs the Neuroscience for Business Online program for MIT. She's also a best-selling author of the book The The Source, and the host of the podcast, Reinvent Yourself with Dr. Tara. I love her because she's a scientist who used to be a skeptic when it comes to things like intuition and manifestation. But today, she's here to teach you that, yes, you can change your brain. You can become the person that you want to become. You can train your brain to help you spot opportunities. You can learn how to make your thinking more positive. You can learn how to lead a company. You can become more agile and happy and successful in life. Dr. Tara is here to give you the very tactical things that you can start doing immediately based on the best research in the world.

We're going to cover how to change your brain in three different ways. You'll learn the real science behind manifestation and the neuroscience that explains intuition. Are you ready? I know I am. Please help me welcome Dr. Tara Swart-Beaver to the Mel Robbins podcast.

Mel, it's so amazing to finally be here in person with you. I've been looking forward to this for so long.

Well, thank you so much for jumping on a plane and flying all the way from London and spending time with us in person. I am so excited I'm really excited. I guess I want to start by having you speak directly to the person who is listening to us right now. Could you share with them how their brain or their life might change based on what you are about to teach them today?

Yeah. So one of the things we're going to be speaking about is neuroplasticity, which is the fact that the brain can grow and change throughout life. Unlike the fact that we used to think that by the time you physically stop growing around the age of 18, that your brain is fixed, that your personality is fixed, your IQ is fixed. We now know that those things are very fluid depending on what you do. But I want to bring that down to the here and now just to make it feel really real, which is that by the end of our conversation, because the brain is being molded and shaped constantly by what you're listening to, who you're meeting, what you're recalling in your memory, the emotions that you're feeling, our listeners' brains are actually going to be different at the end of this podcast than they are right now.

How does that happen?

Well, so neuroplasticity means that the brain is taking in information through the five senses. So everything we see, hear, smell, taste, touch. And in real-time, I'm thinking, How do I need to be to survive in this world? It usually comes down to survival. And what I think I'd love to do today is help people move from the brain reacting for basic survival to, What else can you make your brain do to thrive in this world?

I know we're going to go deep on this, but can you just, at a high level, tick off a couple of things that you can train your brain to do that you might not know that you can train your brain to do?

Yeah. So things like manifestation, visualization, looking at vision boards, which I actually call action boards, but we'll come to that, affirmations. These are all things that prime the brain more towards thriving than just surviving, because if you leave your brain to its own device is, all it wants you to do is live long enough to reproduce. So what's it going to do to make that happen? Make sure you put food on the table. That means pretty much that you need to turn up to your job daily and not get fired. So you need to keep a good relationship with your boss. You need to keep a good relationship with the person that you'll potentially reproduce with. That's not enough for most people. We want more than that out of life. So if your brain is taking care of that anyway, what do you want to put front of mind to make your brain look out for opportunities for the things that you dream of that you really, really want with what I call magnetic desire.

Magnetic desire. How do you define magnetic desire?

Well, the way that neuroplasticity works in the brain is through repetition and emotional intensity. So let me take it back to the survival things we were just speaking about. If you think, I want to get married and have a family because that's what all my friends are doing, there may not be a huge emotional intensity behind that. That may be more to do with societal, parental, peer group expectation. If when you were a kid, you dreamt of being an actor, then if you actually try to start doing that, even if it's hard, that was your dream. That was what you feel you were put on this Earth to do. You will endure barriers and obstacles and refusals and difficulty and keep going. Whereas for other things, you might not. We know that idea of giving up just before you dig up the gold, right? If you've got magnetic desire, you won't give up. That's where the motivation piece comes in. And all of these are the science behind what contributes it beats to manifesting what you want.

Let's talk about manifesting. Have you always believed in manifesting?

Looking back, I actually think I did it as a kid naturally. It's so chicken and egg for me whether I got drawn to neuroscience and manifestation because that was innate in me from a child, or whether I now live my life in that way because I've done so much research on it. I honestly don't know the answer to that. The more I do the research, the more I consciously bring these things into my life, I look back and think, that's what I was like as a kid. That's what I was interested in as a kid. But I would say that once I studied the sciences in high school and then went to medical school, it worked slightly different recently in the UK, and did my PhD in neuroscience. Certainly, by the time I got my faculty position at MIT, I was a complete skeptic about manifestation. Those two things could not exist in the world as far as I was concerned. That's partly down to how I had to live my life as a child, because my parents were first-generation immigrants from India to the UK. I went to school in London, and I just wanted to be like all my friends and do the same things It was them.

But I would come home, my mother would be in a headstand, and there would be incense in the house. There was meditation and chanting and things like that. I thought, Okay, that happens at home, this happens at school. I learned very well to separate those things. Then I became a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry. You were diagnosing people with magical thinking and delusions and hallucinations, so you couldn't really say, Oh, but I believe in manifestation. Again, I had to keep those things really separate. It wasn't really until I started doing my research to write the source that I realized how together these things could be.

Was there a moment where you remember remember going, Oh, my gosh, this is real?

Yeah, there are a few because I think these things build up, don't they? In 2017, I was the world's first neuroscientist in residence at a five-star hotel in London. So I was already doing quirky things with my career. And because it was unusual, there was a lot of press, and I was approached by Penguin Random House to write a book. And they said, We've had really amazing books, one on meditation, one on diet, one on sleep, one on exercise. We think as a neuroscientist, you could bring all of those together. Without thinking, I said, I could do that, but I've got an idea about the cognitive science behind manifestation and vision boards. And they just said yes straight away. I think their response made me think that could be a thing, but I wasn't convinced myself. So before I started writing, I went on a summer vacation with my laptop, which is unusual for me. I just started looking into the laws of attraction and trying to figure out, is there cognitive science that can explain these things?

And for somebody listening who does not know what the law of attraction or manifestation is, could you give us your definition?

They're basically all about the fact that if there's something that you really want in life, then if you think positively about it or you believe in certain vibrations of attractions of attraction in the universe, then you can bring that thing into your life. Manifestation is bringing into reality something that you want. But until I started looking into the cognitive science behind it, all the explanations so far had been to do with quantum physics. For me, as an empirical scientist, that wasn't enough for me to believe in those things. Equally, I felt very disimpowered empowered by the fact that it was happening because of something outside of me. I wanted to feel like it was happening because of my brainpower and that I had some autonomy over it.

Do you believe, based on the research that you've done, that you attract things into your life because of your brain power?

I believe it 100 %. When the book came out, people that I knew personally who were not scientists at all said, I've always been interested in this, but I've never actually acted upon it because I couldn't understand how it worked. But now that you've explained the science, I'm actually doing the steps that I've heard of before, actually, but that you've repeated in your book. So the writing process did bring it together for me quite a lot, but it was actually the response from other people. It started with people I knew, and then it started on social media, just being thousands of people that I will probably never meet in my life, saying, Because you've put the science to it, it's completely changed my view of these topics.

What are the steps to manifesting based on the research so you attract what you want in life?

It starts with abundance. Now, in the brain, we have the strongest gearing that we have in our brain is called loss aversion or loss avoidance. That was the survival mechanism from when we lived in the cave, which was that if you saw a juicy apple on a tree and you really wanted it, but you ignored the fact that there was a sabre-tooth tiger standing next to you, you would die. So we had to want to avoid loss more than we wanted to get reward.

So you've got to avoid the tiger more than wanting the apple. Exactly. And so we're wired toward, as you mentioned earlier, survival.

Absolutely.

And through manifesting, you're about to teach us how to rewire our brain and train it toward abundance and thriving.

I'm not going to completely wire it the other way because we still need to be safe. Yes. Even in the modern world where the threats aren't so much physical predators, there are psychological threats to our safety, like job loss, relationship loss, et cetera. But it doesn't serve us to be that strongly geared to loss avoidance. What we want to do is balance that out a bit more or in a safe situation, understand that we absolutely can take healthy risks and believe that there's enough for everyone and not live from that scarcity mindset. That's the first piece. The second piece is magnetic desire, which we've already somewhat discussed. But once you're feeling abundant, then if you can be really aligned in your head, your heart, and your gut about what it is that you want, then that desire, that motivation will keep you going and help you get the things that you want that you might have given up on. There is an element of patience required because this process of neuroplasticity involves neurons wiring together to form new strong pathways that are stronger than the pathways that you had before. That means that it feels like a lot of hard work is going on.

Psychological work is physical work going on in the pathways in your brain, but that nothing's changing in the real world. There's a real tipping point where there's enough neurons in a pathway that certain new habits and behaviors or being patient becomes easier. It It feels like nothing, nothing, nothing, and then suddenly, oh, things are happening, things are changing. I'm getting the things that I want. If you put those three behind manifestation, then that is about priming your brain to notice and grasp opportunities in the real world that can bring you closer to the things that you want. It's exactly the same process as if you buy a new car, you suddenly notice that car all over. It's the same. So it's a brain priming process.

Oh, well, that makes sense. It's why you suddenly see Jeeps everywhere when you are looking at buying a Jeep. Can you explain the neuroscientific... I don't even know what the right word is. What is the scientific explanation for why you see cars? When you're interested in buying a car or how the new neuropathways are changing your brain in real-time, what is actually happening when you tap into magnetic desire?

Basically, we're overloaded with information constantly, and the brain has a natural filtering mechanism called selective filtering. This relates back to what I was saying about if you leave your brain to its job of just making sure you survive, it will filter out all those other things that you actually really want, but they're not essential to your survival. That's why you have to make a list or make the vision board or remind yourself every day of what it is that you truly, magnetically desire to put that to the top of the for your brain. Because after selective filtering, it does selective attention, and that is noticing the red car or the Tesla or whatever it is that you're noticing. So once you've filtered out the things that you don't want to notice, then You narrow it down to the things that you do want to notice. And then the third part is called value tagging, which is the brain actually tags those things in order of importance. And it does that in two lists. So it does it in a logical list, and it does it in an emotional list, and that's where the magnetic desire is important.

That's where you say, No brain. I don't want it in that logical order. I want it in this order. This is what is really important to me. This is what makes me feel alive. This is what makes me understand that I have a purpose for my life. It's not just put food on the table, stay in your job, stay in your relationship. It's so much more than that. A classic example is, I really want to find a partner and settle down and get pregnant. Yes.

How could you go through the steps of manifestation to help you achieve that?

I would explain the process of manifestation that's underpinned by neuroplasticity, which is a four-step process. Raise your awareness, focus your attention, do your deliberate practice, and hold yourself accountable. It starts with raised awareness. I always say that's 50% of the battle because sometimes we don't really know why we're not doing the things we know we should be doing or why we're potentially with self-sabotaging those behaviors. But instead of taking the supplements that would set my body up for good fertility, I'm going out partying because that's the way I think I'll meet a new partner. The awareness piece comes very much from journaling or not so much speaking with friends sometimes, because if they're in the same place or everyone has an agenda for your single friends might want you to say that thing. But maybe talking to a therapist or a coach or doing some proper soul searching and trying to understand why you're not doing the things that you could be doing, why some of the things that you're doing really easily, why are they so easy, how do they fit into your lifestyle so well, and really what it is that you actually want.

Do you actually want to settle down and have a family? Or fine. If you actually want to be out partying, fine, just say that and to do it and be aligned and don't do the thing that you want, but pretend that you want something else.

It's all about that. So that's step one. So step one, and let's just stay with your example, somebody who is single, who really wants to meet a life partner and be in a committed relationship and start a family. That the first step is for you to take the time to get very clear with yourself about what you want and why.

A wonderful exercise for that is to place your hands on your forehead and ask yourself, Logically, is this what I really want and why? Then write that down. Then take five deep breaths and put your hands on your heart and ask yourself, Emotionally, why do I really want this? Then write down the answers. Another five deep breaths and then hands on your belly. Intuitively, do I really want this? Again, write the answers down. If they're all aligned, happy days. If they're not, we might have a little bit of rethinking I'm thinking to do. When I've done this with clients, one of the things that's come up is, I really, really want a baby, but actually, I don't really need a partner to get there. That could change the, I need to meet someone and be in a loving relationship and have a baby. Could just be, actually, what I've always really wanted as a child. I'm getting to a certain age where waiting to have a partner be part of that might mean that I don't end up with what I really want. Got it. That's the most important step.

Okay, so let's say you've gone through step one and your mind, your heart, and your gut, your soul, your intuition is all aligned. Yes, I want this.

The second step is focused attention. That is at least a month of just noticing what you're doing, what you're not doing in regards to moving in that direction.

What are you noticing?

Depending on what your goal is, it might be yourself, it might be your interaction with others, it might be feedback from others. But it's a data collection period, because what won't work very well in a manifestation underpinned by neuroplasticity is just jumping into doing without being first. Raising that awareness might have brought up things that you've never consciously known in the past. You can't suddenly then say, Okay, I'm on all the dating apps. You need to sit back and see, What is it? Are there patterns of behavior that I'm doing that are leading to a bad result? Is there something that's holding me back from taking the first step that I really need to take? So taking longer than a month, if you need, to get to the point where you feel like I have enough data about myself that when I act now, I'll be able to give myself really good feedback. The third part is deliberate practice, and that is doing the things that you know you need to do to bring the goal into your life. Whether that's taking certain supplements, whether that's going to sleep earlier than you do, whether it's being more socially active than you used to be, and then practicing.

That's an experimental phase. You might still make mistakes in that phase, but course-correcting as you go on, because at this third stage, this is where people could give up.

Yes.

The fourth part isn't really a stage. It's something like a theme or an umbrella over all of this, which is accountability. How are you going to hold yourself accountable that you will actually see this through? Now, the easiest way to do that is with an external party, like a coach or a therapist. But ways to do that yourself are by recording it in your journal and reading back over your journal and continually reinforcing why I did this, why I didn't do it, what happened when it went wrong. I use an app called Habit Share because what I learned for myself, and this won't be for everyone, but it's quite a good one for a lot of people, is that it's easier to build up microhabits than to start the year or your birthday or whatever it is with one big, this year, I'm going to meet the person that I'm going to get married to. I set out 12 microhabits at the beginning of the year, and I pick three to focus on for the first quarter of the year. I track them on this app until they become so habitual that I don't need them on the app anymore, and then I move to the next three.

When I've done that, instead of setting big goals at the start of the year, I've come to the end of the year and I found that I have 10 habits that I'm no longer even conscious of that I'm doing all the time that are leading me towards that bigger goal or those bigger goals that I really want.

Why are there only 10 if you start with 12?

Well, they don't all stick. I find that along the way, I just didn't actually make one or two of them into a habit. It's still a bit of a struggle. I either decide that I'm going to drop it or I'll carry it on into next year.

How would you recommend you make microhabits, or where would you start? Because I know we're going to get flooded with questions about this.

I'm going to talk really directly to you like I would as if you were my client. Great. Which is that the habit that you're working on is not the other person in the relationship, it's yourself. If the goal is a partnership with someone else, the habits are all around your self-worth, your deservingness, what you have to offer in a relationship, what boundaries you will have about somebody treating you in a certain way, and I'm sure a lot more, but those are the first ones that come to mind. For example, a lot of people cast a list of what they want in a partner, and there's two things around that. One is make a list of what you have to offer in a relationship, compare it to the list of what you want in a partner, and where all the gaps are, make those your microhabits.

Okay, we got to stop right here and highlight because Because we've all been in that situation where we have a friend, and we keep seeing this person that we love dating people that we do not believe are up to their level. Yeah. And You do make the list of what you want in somebody else. I've never made a list of what I have to offer.

No, neither had I until someone told me about that.

And it doesn't even occur to me that I would make a list about what I have you have to offer. How does just making the list of what you have to offer change the way you view yourself?

So there's two things. One is it might highlight gaps between what you think, what you want. But if you're not there, why would that person want you? So if you've got self-work to do, let's start with that. That's why I said, I will speak to you really directly like I would to a client, which is that we need to start here if you want to get there. The other one is that the focus It can be so outward and external that you actually are not always aware of how much you have to offer. And that's why when, unfortunately, in this day and age, the behaviors that I'm hearing about on the dating apps, you could succumb to those. But if you have a very strong idea of what you have to offer, you're more likely to say no to bad behavior, right?

Yes, it's true. I just think about this from my own life, that in periods of my life where I was in distress or disassociated or in peak toxic Mel mode in the past, college and law school come to mind. I had no clue what I had to offer. Which is why I kept finding myself engaged in toxic behavior patterns and with people that I was perpetuating them with. It makes a lot of sense that if you're not even aware of what your value is, how could you possibly attract something that's of a higher value?

Or equal value.

Or equal value.

One of the things you speak about, Mel, is the fact that we love our friends and family and children and pets more than we show that same care to ourselves. If a habit that you have with your partner is writing them a little post-it note of 10 Things I Love About You, well, obviously, if you're in partnership and they're doing that back to you, that's great. But if you're single, write down 10 things that you love about yourself or say to a friend, I'm going to send you a list of 10 things I love about you. Could you please send me a list so I can see how I'm viewed by another person that I know cares for me? Obviously, there are affirmations, but you can also bring your tribe into saying, Don't forget, this is what you have to offer. This is how lucky someone's going to be to get you. I don't think we do that enough either.

I'm just I'm having to think about this because it's sad that we don't do this. And how common is it that you're working with somebody in your practice and you ask them to make the list of 10 things and they can't do it?

I feel like we all have some angel inside us. If you start, you'll be surprised that things will come out, and that is such a good feeling. They can be really tiny things, and they can be physical attributes, or they can be your your kindness and your creativity, but they can also be your vulnerability or the fact that you maybe didn't used to be good at asking for help, but that's something that you've learned to do. There's so many There are so many things it can be. I would love to think that people would go and do it, and I would love to think that people would be pleasantly surprised. If not, then reach out to your tribe because I'm sure you'll get inundated with things that people could say about you.

So whether you're going to use manifesting to look for a job or look for a committed partnership, or to, I guess they shouldn't even say look for. Whether you're going to use manifesting to land a job Or to land funding. Love that. Or to fall in love and be in a committed partnership or to achieve a health goal. Step one is the self-awareness that comes from you doing doing the work to get very clear about what you want. And you gave us that beautiful meditation of going from your head to your heart to your gut and asking yourself if you really want this. And you say we should saturate ourselves in the self-awareness of it by journaling and talking to a therapist or a coach or a friend that you trust about it. And then the second one was noticing yourself. Are you acting consistently? What is happening? What's appearing around you? The third one is take actions that are consistent with somebody who is landing their dream job or who is attracting a committed relationship or becoming a parent. And then the fourth is patience. Did I get it?

The fourth is accountability. Accountability.

That's right. I don't want that one. That's why I forgot it. I wanted to just have it like magic. So accountability meaning what?

Accountability meaning that you don't give up, that you are still doing the consistent behaviors that you need to to bring the thing that you want into your life, and that either you find a way of doing that yourself with technology or your journaling or an external party, you know that they'll be asking you in a month's time, did you go on the number of dates that you said you would, or did you send your resume out to as many places as you said you would? In my work, I always say, if not, why not? If you didn't, there's a learning opportunity there. But if you did, great. What else can we do in the next month? Kind of thing.

I love this topic so much. Dr. Tara, I could just keep on going on and on and on, but I want to take a quick pause, hear a word from our sponsors. We have so much more to cover. Don't you dare go anywhere, because when we come back, we're digging deeper into manifestation. And of course, you're going to learn the mistake that you're making. It has to do with vision boards and using glue, all of that and so much more coming up when we return. Stay with us. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and I've been thinking, it's time that you and I take relationship to the next level, that we get off social media and do something a little bit more serious together. I have this gift that I've been wanting to get you, maybe a little forward, but whatever. I'm going to shoot my shot. I have created a brand new free two-part training called Make It Happen, just for you. It is a video training. It's got two different lectures in it. It is so freaking cool. I made this for you because I want you to stop wasting so much time on social media.

I want you to stop thinking about what you want to do, and I want to support you in taking action and making something amazing happen. The next six months of your life could be extraordinary, but it's not going to happen by accident. It'll happen because you decide to make it happen. And because I want to take our relationship to the next level, I thought I'd invite you to jump in this training. Just go to Mel Robbins. Com/makethappend to get this free gift from me. And let's take our relationship and your life to the next level. Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins. I'm thrilled that you're here today. We're learning all about the science of manifestation and intuition and how to wire your brain to thrive and be more successful with neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart-Beaver. So what are the three ways that this changes your brain, or you can change your brain?

So the three mechanisms for neuroplasticity are myelination, synaptic connection, and neurogenesis. Now, myelination, people who do repeated weight training will be quite familiar with that. It's myelination Pain is a fatty substance that coats some neural pathways, making them fast conducting pathways. There's a reason that we have fast conducting pathways and slow conducting pathways. For instance, if there was a fire on the table here between us and you put your hand into the fire, your reflex to physically snatch your hand out of the fire is a fast pathway for obvious reasons, so you don't burn. But your pain pathways are slow pathways because if you became so incapac capacitated by the pain of the fire that you couldn't move, you wouldn't survive. That works for many different types of pathways as well. But to make a pathway more efficient, we want it to be myelinated. If we're working on a manifestation, Obviously, we want the pathways for the behavior that will lead us to that goal to be more efficient. Just basically repetitive practice leads to more myelination of pathways. That's relatively easy to do. The middle one in terms of difficulty is synaptic connection. That's where neurons that we already have in our brain, but that aren't necessarily connected to each other, at the end of every neuron, there's a bulb called a synapse.

Neurons communicate with each other because chemicals flow in the gap between those bulbs and form new pathways. Making new synaptic connections is a step up in terms of difficulty. My favorite analogy for this is learning a language. I think when we talk about manifestation or other psychological behaviors, it feels very intangible. But the process is exactly the same as learning a language. You go from not being able to speak this language at all, to picking up the basics, to becoming semi-fluent, to potentially becoming completely fluent in a language. Everything that we have spoken about so far, it's exactly the same process in the brain. The myelination is when you start listening and you pick up the alphabet or a very basic vocabulary like my name is. Then the synaptic connection is when you can say some sentences that's maybe enough for you to travel to that country on vacation and at least make an effort. Then the hardest one in the adult brain is neurogenesis. That's because genesis means growth. This is growth of baby nerve cells into fully formed nerve cells cells that then have to make synaptic connection with other nerve cells, and potentially those pathways get myelinated.

So you can see how it's a building up process. Yes.

And you had said magnetic energy.

Magnetic desire.

Magnetic desire is one of the fastest ways to change the brain, or it's a required way. Talk to me about how that stimulates one of these processes happening. Yeah.

Okay, let me put it like this. If you and I both wanted to learn Spanish, and you wanted to learn it because you were planning a vacation to Mexico, but I wanted to learn it because I had a Spanish boyfriend, who do you think is likely to learn it more or better?

You. Yeah.

Magnetic desire. A real deep reason for wanting to be able to speak that language.

What I love about this example is that I now understand why manifestation works.

Good.

So magnetic desire, which you are helping us tap into by asking ourselves, by putting our hands on our head and our heart and our gut, what do I really want? You're tapping into the deep sea created magnetic desire behind any change that you want. With that, you are fueling the change in your brain to help you both see more opportunities around you and also to help you stay motivated to do the actions. So it's like training for your brain to be doing the work to make something happen in the future and to help you do it.

All of that, and I would just add, even when you feel like giving up, even when it feels like it's not going to happen. That's the difference between someone that will manifest and someone that will continually take it this far but never actually manifest.

Is there a trick that you Can you teach people that are very negative or resigned or have a difficult background where they just have a very hard time believing things are going to work out? Is there something that added that you would suggest to somebody who's like, Well, that's never going to work for me. I've tried that. That your resignation stands in your way of the patience?

Yeah. I actually always struggled with that because I felt like it was such a privilege and a luxury to be manifesting in your life. The first time I was challenged on that, it was when I had my friend Shanne Haynes on season one of my podcast. She played Tina Turner in London's West End. I asked her the same question, and she said, Manifestation isn't a luxury. It's an essential. She came from parts of New Orleans that people would be scared to go to. She built herself up through manifestation to having the career that she had and being the oldest person that ever played Tina Turner in London. I think finding success stories like that, there's another piece of science that says, if you are trying to achieve something that you've never achieved before, find an example of a person that you resonate with, who's achieved the thing that you're trying to achieve. Anything from playing Tina Turner in the West End all the way down to where you were saying somebody who's got a lot of adversity, who's had difficulty in their life, breaking out of that. There are examples of that in the world.

Of course. And interestingly, because you've already mentioned this, the third part of that is changing your negative self-talk.

How do you do that when that is part of the wiring in your brain?

You cannot undo wiring that's already in the brain. Before we understood about neuroplasticity, say that once your brain was in adulthood and certain pathways were set up as they were, like things about low self-esteem or things never working out for you, it was impossible to change it because It's impossible to change your height once you've stopped growing, right? But we know that's not true in the brain anymore. We know that there's an opportunity for rewiring, but it's not through undoing wiring that's already in the brain, it's through overwriting it, which means repeating a new thought or behavior so many times with such emotional intensity that it becomes a more energy-efficient pathway for your brain than the one that you've had Until now.

How do you do that?

So one of the ways of doing it is through positive affirmations. So it can't just be a random one that you make up. So the way that I help people to find their affirmation is if you have a recurring negative thought, it's not your thought that is wired into your neural pathways. It's the belief that underlies that thought.

Can you give us an example?

That's never going to happen for me. That's a classic one. Things like that don't happen to people people like me. The answer to this will be different for different people. It could be different for you and I and anyone who's listening. But you need to, either through therapy or by sitting down and really meditating on it, say, what is the evidence that things like this do not happen to people like me? Keep asking yourself that question until you come up with the answer. If the answer is because I'm a woman or because I come from a low associated socioeconomic background, or because I'm a person of color, or because it's never happened to anyone in my family before. Let's say going to college. No one in my family has ever been to college before, so what are the chances that I'm going to go? Once you've understood that it's because it's never happened to anyone in my family, then what you need to do is create a mantra or an affirmation that that says, I could be the first. That's just one that came into my mind, but into my heart, actually, I really felt it there.

But it'll be very different for different people. That emotional intensity is important, and that's why I can't give the answer to you because it has to be your answer.

When you said could, I deeply felt that because for me, it allowed the possibility that it might not, but there is something about the possibility of I could be the first to that opens the door to then wanting to try.

Or try, yeah. Yeah. Wanting to try and then trying.

And then if you keep saying something that has that magnetic desire, That's how you start to, what did you call it? Reprogram?

Rewire or just overwrite. Overwrite. The wiring. Yeah.

I love this affirmation, I could be the first because it makes me believe that it's possible, because of course it's possible. Of course it's possible. And I'll just share quickly. I delayed starting this podcast for so long because I just felt like there were already so many out there. If I had had this affirmation, but I could be the first or I could be successful, even though there's already all these podcasts. If I had had that, I probably would have started this sooner. So what do you do once you create this affirmation for yourself? And let's just run with this one. I could be, and then fill in the blank. What's the step?

I have one for you that just really came up in my mind that you could have had, which was I could create a unique niche. Because even though there were so many out there, I think your affirmation would have been, I could create something that's not out there yet. I think For a woman, you're just such an icon in this space. Anyway, regardless of what it is.

I love that because I also do think my husband right now is finishing a master's and working on his first book. What he battles every day is this has already been written, this has already been written. And so many of you listening have something that you want to do, and you're like, But there's already a bakery. But there's so many real estate agents. But there's YouTube, there's this. That if you start to take this one, I could do something unique. I could fill a gap. I could do something different. I love this. So what do we do once we have something that feels like, Oh, yeah, that's it. I could be.

So remember, we based this on an underlying belief to do with lack of deservingness. Every time you have the thought that that belief underlies, so I shouldn't bother applying for that job, or that's not going to happen for me, or that's already been done. Every time you have a thought that, you replace it with your affirmation.

And you just say it to yourself?

You can say it in your head, you can say it out loud, you can write it out and have it on your bathroom mirror. The one time I remember it got quite... I was glad I'd been practicing it, was Someone openly, verbally challenged me. And I actually burst into tears. But then I said, I think I can.

Wow. That makes a lot of sense. And I want that for everybody. I want you listening to us to believe that you could be the first whatever or that you could do whatever. I think it is really important that you tap into and find the right sentence that has that door open for you when you say it.

For season 2 of my podcast, Reinvent Yourself with Dr. Tara, I've actually focused on the new science of ancient wisdom. Yes. What's interesting to me about this one is that Buddhist have known forever, replace every negative thought with a positive thought. That is part of Buddhist Awesome. Now, fast forward tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, neuroscience says, you can overwrite a negative thought or belief with a positive affirmation. I mean, hello.

As long as you have magnetic desire attached to it. And I think that's the piece that is really important here, that there is this charge in the feeling around it that is really important for you to do the work to figure out for yourself. You just have this way of explaining very dense things in a really inspiring and accessible way. I just love that about you, Dr. Tara. I want to take a quick pause, hear a word from our sponsors who are bringing you this information at zero cost. Stay with us. Hey, it's your friend Mel, and I'm so excited because I can finally tell you about a free gift that I've been working on just for you. It is a two-part video training called Make It Happen with Mel Robbins. It teaches you how you go from thinking about what you want to actually doing it and making it happen. I'm doing this because I want to thank you. Thank you for being here with me on social media. Thank you for being a fan of the Mel Robbins podcast. You made us the fifth most followed podcast in the world last year. Wow.

So I poured my heart and soul into this free two-part video training just for you as a thank you. I want to teach you how to apply everything that you're learning to make real results happen in your life. How do you jump in? Great question. Go to melrobbins. Com Melrobbins. Com/makethappen. Last year when I did a training, more than half a million of you took advantage of it. This year's training is even better. Again, go to melrobbins. Com/makethappen. Welcome back. I am so glad that you're still here with us. I'm Mel Robbins. We're learning all about the science of intuition with the amazing neuroscientist and senior lecturer at MIT, Dr. Tara Swart-Beaver. So as a PhD MD, what's the first thing you do when you wake up?

So I literally do live my life in the way of everything that we've been discussing, so I'm just going to tell you the truth. Please. As soon as I am aware that I'm awake, I snuggle my face against my silk pillowcase and I say, I love my silk pillowcase. And then I say, And I love my side sleeping pillow. And I love my wall mattress toffer. I've created a bit of a haven in my bedroom.

I love this. I'm right there with you. What else do you love?

Let's keep going. I'm so grateful for my silk duvet. I'm grateful for my mattress. I'm grateful for my bedding. Usually, that's the minimum. I might do the temperature in the room or how quiet it is.

Do you say it out loud or do you just say it to yourself?

I say it in my mind. Then I just do some deep breathing in every direction of my chest, like it's a barrel, and just have a feel for if there's any areas of tension. Then to actually When I get out of bed, I start thinking about how much I'm going to save on my cup of tea. Then I go downstairs and I take my probiotic because I have to wait 10 minutes until I have my cup of tea. I do my oil pulling, and then I make my cup of English breakfast tea or matcha a complete ritual and sit and really savor it and enjoy it. Then I pick up my phone and look at my messages.

How does this help you?

How does this help your I think the thing about this gratitude practice that's to do with the tangible things that around me is that it stops what usually happens to people is that you start thinking, What do I have to do today? What time is it? What am I going to wear today? Because obviously, I don't keep my phone in my bedroom, I can't reach for that and start getting bombarded by the outside world before I've had a chance to set myself up how I want to. There's a lot of scientific evidence for the benefits on your mental health and your health and your longevity of gratitude. Basically, I'm not letting my brain kick in. I'm going straight to the gratitude, so I can't even think about anything else. Of course, then that makes me feel good already.

What are other key habits that you have as a neuroscientist throughout the day that continue to help your brain to thrive like this?

I'm going to be really honest with you and say I'd prefer to start by going to the end of the day because those are the real key anchors for me. I just want to keep it really real and say that there are days where I don't do anything else consciously in the rest of the day. I just live, just do my day. But I will come back to... There are some things, so I will come back to them. But I would say second in importance is the fact that I have my vision board next to my bed, so it's the last thing I look at at night.

Let's talk about the vision board because you called it an action board. Yeah. Why does a vision board work?

I've been doing them for 15 years, and I've manifested a lot of things through my vision board.

What? What have you manifested through a vision board? I'm saying- Dr. Tara.

I started when I quit my job as a medical doctor, and I started my coaching practice. I literally had no money, no clients, got to the point where I wouldn't be able to pay my rent and my bills. At that stage, I did include an actual amount of money that I I needed to earn. For the first three years of running my business, I doubled that figure each year. Then after that, I just put symbols of abundance because I didn't need it to be a specific amount. I've manifested a lot of travel, but sometimes spooky. I saw a picture of a tanned girl snorkeling, and I love snorkeling. I put her on my vision just to have a vacation that was that vacation. At this point, I was single, and I used to go on Christmas vacation holidays with my best friend who lived in Australia. We would often choose where to go because I would see how many air miles I had and say, Oh, I can get a flight to this place. The year that we decided we would meet in Rio, to De Janeiro, was because that was the only flight that I could get with my points.

And I suddenly had this inkling that I hadn't been aware of. And I went and looked at my vision board, and in tiny writing under the Snorkeling Girl, it said Rio de Janeiro. I have so many more examples of things like that as well.

What I also love about this is that you take it a step further and you don't say, What a cool accident. You say, I manifested that. And how does a vision board, which you call an action board, program your brain for thriving?

It is a vision board in the sense that most people will know what a vision board is. But the difference is, like I said, about quantum physics before I wrote it through cognitive science, did give an idea that you should create this vision, either in your mind or on a board. Often it was quite fantastical compared to what the person's life was actually like, and I do believe it's got to be somewhat realistic. Then sit at home on the couch and wait for it to come true, wait for the check to come in the post, wait for the dream partner to bang your door down. I just don't believe that that's possible. I believe that you have to be out there doing things to move yourself towards those goals so that the board is simply a reminder to do the selective filtering, selective attention, and value tagging to your brain to keep those things at the front of your mind and not let life get in the way because it's so easy to just get busy with kids and work and forget. Not every day, remember what are the things that you want. But if you're seeing the board every day, then it does just help to bring it back to the front of your mind.

Also, some people can't do visualization. Especially for them, actually having the visual images ready to look at allows you to get into that next step, which is visualize it being true. Close your eyes after looking at the board and immerse yourself in the feeling of those things actually being true. Like, you're in Rio de Janeiro, you're with your loving partner, you're doing really well at work. Feel that through your five senses and then give gratitude for the fact, for that feeling of like, wow, with my eyes closed, I can feel that I'm holding my partner's hand and our feet are in the sand in Rio, and we could afford this vacation because we're both doing really well at work.

Because what you're really summoning is that magnetic energy that you talked about. Like, what's actually happening in your body and in your mind when you go through this process of creating a vision board and then visualizing it and allowing the wave of gratitude associated with that happening to fill your body? What happens in your brain?

So when you visualize something really strongly and you integrate your senses, your brain can hardly tell the difference between that being true you and that being a created feeling by you. Because anything new is the biggest threat to the brain, uncertainty and novelty are the biggest threats to the brain, the more you visualize and embody the thing that you want, the more likely you are to take healthy risks to get it when it appears around you in the real world. When you're feeling fear or shame or sadness, your blood is circulating a lot more of the stress hormone, cortisol. When you're feeling love and trust and gratitude, you're circulating a lot more of the bonding hormone, oxytocin. Those hormones are on a seesaw. If you're giving gratitude, then you're improving the release of oxytocin, and that's relatively reducing the stress hormone. Basically, love or gratitude, trust, those sorts of things, can't coexist with fear and shame and sadness. The The more you push your brain into those emotions which correlate with that hormone, the less you're living in that state of fright, flight, and scarcity.

So simply visualizing and feeling that wave of emotion that comes from being grateful for the visualization of something that hasn't happened yet coming true changes the chemical balance in your body.

When you are immersed in that feeling, and think of a couple of the things that you'd like to happen right now and how good it would feel if they were true, you'll release dopamine, the reward chemical. So that has a really strong impact on your body. Then when you move it into, and now I'm given gratitude for that, then you're also releasing oxytocin. So you've got this cocktail of really feel-good hormones.

What is one mistake that people make when they are making a vision board?

I have now learned to leave a lot of space on my board because I don't I don't believe that my brain is capable of knowing how much I could manifest in this world. So I love to leave a bit of room for magic. In the book where I do the chapter on actually how to make the board, I say, get the board, lay the images onto it, really ask yourself, do I want everything that's an image on there? And if there's something that you thought you wanted, but it doesn't resonate, remove it. Have another flick through the magazines. And if there's an image that isn't That's something that you thought you wanted, but it really speaks to you, try fitting that in. Leave it overnight, and I specifically said in a windproof, childproof, pet proof place, and then come back the next day after having slept on it. If you're sure that it's correct, then glue it into place. Then I start speaking to people who say to me, Yeah, I've done all that, but I just haven't glued it yet. I said, Oh, did you do it yesterday? No, months ago. I just can't bring myself to glue it down.

I don't understand why. Having been an experienced coach now for 15 years, I just had the answer to that just came into my mind through my gut. It was, You don't want to glue it down because you don't really believe that you deserve it. And the tears just came, and it was the truth. So it was, these are the things that I want, but if I glue them down, I'm saying that I actually think I should get them. And deep down, I don't believe that, and that's why I haven't glued them down. So you might be listening now and think, Oh, yeah, I've done I did that, too, but I didn't really know why. So hopefully it will help.

What does the act of gluing signal to your brain in terms about what you want? And would you do that gratitude wash as you're doing it as a way to tap into magnetic energy? Because that's probably very thick old wiring. I actually said that to somebody recently where I was like, I don't even want to tell you that because I feel scared to say I want that thing.

Yeah. I feel like if you're gluing it down, you really mean it, right? And so if there's hesitation, that could be hard. I have never thought of this before, but your idea is brilliant. If you do it whilst giving gratitude, it'll probably make it feel much easier. It's a bit more like, I'll just be so grateful if this comes true, and I'm happy to partially put it out there and partially make the effort to do it. When I had my first one, when I was really broke, I was living in a studio apartment, and it was in the bathroom bathroom, which meant that anyone that came to my studio would see it, and it had a specific amount of money on it. It's very un-british to talk about money.

How much money was on it?

£35,000, so really not very much. I thought, Okay, this is a bit embarrassing. But then I thought, Well, anyone that I actually invite into my apartment who then uses my bathroom has got to be a close friend. That just has to be okay. I got so much positive feedback from people saying, Oh, yeah, I looked at your vision board, and I can help you with that thing that I saw. It was so sweet.

I can hear everybody now moving their vision boards from their bedside table to the bathroom. Okay, we're going to put this right in the bathroom. What are some of the other habits that you have every day that keep you resilient, that keep your brain wired for thriving?

Okay, so I would say my next one, which is like a ritual, too, but also very good for your stress levels, is that I bathe in magnesium flakes.

Why is that good for stress?

Because when you're stressed, your body leaches itself with magnesium. So magnesium helps you deal with stress, but it also gets used up in stress. And the best way to take magnesium is through your skin rather than through a capsule or a tablet. Oh, really? And so I find the easiest way with English weather is to bathe. There are also gels and sprays and lotions that you can use, but I like the ritual of bathing. A little bit like when you're training for a marathon and you would eat more protein, when you're stressed, you need more magnesium. The best way to check if you need more magnesium is if you ever get that twitchy eyelid.

Yes, I've had that. Yeah.

Well, some people get tiny twitches in their fingers or their toes as well, but the eyelid is quite a good sign that you probably need to top up with magnesium.

Because it's a sign that you're stressed.

Well, the twitching is an actual sign of magnesium deficiency, but the reason you would be deficient is probably stress. Wow.

Nobody's ever told me that before. And it happens quite a lot.

Try the... You can do a foot bath if you don't like a bath.

Oh, I take a bath every night. Okay. I love a bath, but I've never done the magnesium Flakes. I am doing it. So you take a bath with magnesium. What's something else that you do?

So by this time, it's getting close to the time that I would eat because I do time-restricted eating. I only eat between 12:00, noon, and 08:00 PM. I would obviously deal with any work admin or home admin that I have to, but then I would cook.

While we're on the topic of food, what are the four foods that you eat for better brain health?

The first thing I would say is that I make all of my dietary choices based on brain health. If you think about it, people choose what they might eat based on it's delicious, or I'm trying to lose weight, or I'm trying build muscle. But I feel quite strongly that if you make your choices based on brain health, then it's actually good for your skin, your hair, your gut, the rest of your body. On that, I would say the dark skinned foods I've already mentioned, hydrating foods, because you actually keep in more hydration from food than you do from drinking water. So your leafy greens and your salads thing, and maybe Fruits like melon. Then the good fats, this is probably the largest part of my dietary intake. So oily fish, eggs, avocado, nuts, seeds. The fourth category is fermented foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, kefir, and kombucha.

What I love is that at the very beginning of our conversation, you talked about the fact that our brain really was wired for survival and mating, and that you are teaching us strategies based based on cognitive science, based on neuroscience, based on all of this research about how to program your mind for thriving, for longevity, for happiness. Every one of these examples, whether you're talking about the ways in which you can use this magnetic energy and these deliberate practices to wire your mind for thriving and attracting and spotting what you want, or whether you're now talking about the deliberate things you say to yourself and the deliberate practices and actions that you are creating in the morning. You are showing us exactly what you're doing to make your brain function in a way that helps you thrive. I would love to talk to you about intuition. I mean, you teach a course at MIT called The Science of Intuition. What do we need to know about intuition?

So it's so interesting interesting because I've been teaching at MIT Sloan for 10 years now. And 10 years ago, people would stand up in the class and say, Okay, this is really interesting, but I'm obviously not going to make an important decision like fire or higher based on intuition. And what I did see was that the older people would say, Well, actually, that's exactly how I would make that decision. And I've seen that change over time, which is so nice, which is now that more people get it. And it's just because I've just explained the simple, simple science. So There's a process in the brain called Hebbian learning. It's named after the neuroscientist, Donald Hebb, and it's basically neurons that fire together, wire together. The things that we need, what we call our working memory, to live every day are held at the top of our mind. The things that have become habits and behavior patterns, they've been pushed deeper into the limbic system of the brain, which is the size of your fist, and it's in the center, it's surrounded by the cortex. But also, apart from formal learning, you pick up life lessons.

You've picked them up throughout your whole life, right? Wisdom. But you can't remember everything that you've experienced in your whole life. But that learning has been pushed deeper into your brainstem, your spinal cord, and your gut neurons. There is a massive connection between your gut neurons and your limbic system, which is where your intuition and your wisdom arises from in the brain. And so that's basically how intuition works.

So you're tapping into your lifetime of wisdom and knowledge that has been pushed down from your conscious mind all the way through your brain, down through the neurons to connect the brain and the gut into your gut. So it's basically like tapping the iCloud of your body and your history. How does somebody learn how to Who trusts their gut?

For me, journaling was the absolute key to that. So journaling and reading back over your entries. Every time you make a decision, whether you made it by logic or intuition, whether they aligned or not, recording that, but then also seeing the patterns over the last three months, the last six months. So that's how I honed my intuition. But I think people will remember this more. When you're stressed, when you're bloated, when you've got digestion symptoms. Isn't it true that you find it harder to access your intuition? That's how connected the brain and the gut are.

Can you talk about how high levels of stress impact the functioning of your body and your brain?

Cortisol is known as the stress hormone, and it absolutely correlates with emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, shame, and sadness. Cortisol isn't all bad. We need it to wake up in the morning. We need it to have an adaptive stress response to a car driving too fast on the street that we're trying to cross. As long as it stays within that range, that's fine. But when something super stressful happens, like the sabre-tooth tiger that we spoke about earlier, the cortisol level will spike, and that enables us to run away, to warn our tribe, and it should go back to normal levels quite quickly. In the modern day, as I mentioned earlier, we're so overwhelmed with information. There are so many these psychological threats to our safety that it's... Most people, unfortunately, the levels are high, and they're either at the higher end or higher, and that's pretty constant, whereas they should be undulating between that range. When that happens, because cortisol is carried in the blood supply around the body and it crosses the blood-brain barrier, there are receptors in the brain that monitor the levels of cortisol in a to sense threat in our environment.

When those levels are high, most of the time or all the time, or higher than the higher end of the threshold, the brain immediately thinks, I'm about to die. What is the biggest threat to my survival? In some ways, because it's from so long ago, we're wired in such a cave person way, the first threat that the brain will consider is starvation. Even though that's for most For most of us, thank goodness, not the biggest to our survival, in fact, quite the opposite. To try to protect us from dying of starvation, one of the things that cortisol does is lay down extra fat in the abdominal fat cells so that if we are unable to hunt or gather for some time, we can digest that fat and stay alive until a food source becomes available.

Wait, so are you saying that stress is causing belly fat? Yeah.

It's not just causing fat, it's specifically causing belly fat. You may not have changed your shape in the rest of your body, but if you're noticing that your belt has become tighter, that's a sign that you could have chronic cortisol. The other thing is that it's fat that's particularly stubborn. If you do notice that the belt is tighter and you think, Okay, I definitely need to move a bit more or eat a bit less, and you actually start doing one or both of those things, but the belly fat doesn't change because the cortisol is driving the fat there, regardless of your behavior in the physical world.

And that's all initiated in the brain because the brain is picking up on higher levels of cortisol? Yeah. How does high levels of stress impact the functioning of your brain?

So I'm going to do brain and body, if that's okay. Yeah. Think of this cortisol as a corrosive agent that's literally flowing through your entire brain and body. So in the body, it starts erode your immunity. You might notice more colds and flues more often or ones that last for weeks and weeks. I certainly remember during the financial crisis when I worked with a lot of banks and hedge funds, people saying, I've had this cold for four, six, eight weeks, but everybody has it. I had to say to them, Do you hear what you're saying? That it's not normal to have a cold for six weeks, and this is cortisol. At the extreme end of that, people were dropping dead of heart attacks on trading floors. So lowering your immunity and corroding your body that much can cause everything from colds and flues to heart attacks and cancers. In the brain, what happens is what I call in low power mode, like on your phone. So once those receptors know there's an imminent threat to our survival, think of the highest functions of the brain. Thinking creatively, thinking flexibly, solving complex problems, overriding our biases, are regulating our emotions.

How are those going to serve us now that we're just just trying to survive physically? We don't need those things. Don't send any blood supply to those higher functions. Bring it right down to get up in the morning, go and sit at your desk, look like you're doing your job, even if you actually can't really do it. This is the reason that presenteism costs businesses more than double what absenteeism does. In that low power mode, it'd be better to stay at home for two days and recover and then come back to work and actually function and work with your team.

Because stress impairs the higher functioning of the brain.

It just moves the blood supply away from it because you're not going to give up your precious resources for functions like that. Just to put that into context for you, Mel, the brain is a tiny organ. It's a tiny percentage of your whole body, maybe 2 or 3%, but it uses up 20% to 30% of the breakdown products of what you eat.

Wow. Yeah. That's how hard it's working.

It's using up 20% of what you ate that day when you're asleep. It's using up 25% of what you eat when you're working, managing, leading, running your family, just thinking. Right now, we're probably both using 25%, but if you're stressed, it's using 30%.

What, Dr. Tara, is stress contagion?

Let's take this back to a couple of evolutionary mechanisms. Okay. When we lived in the cave, We lived in tribes, and we were either really quite nomadic, or at least the men would go off to hunt for a few days and then return to the cave. But at the more extreme end of being nomadic, if the men went off hunting and they went so far that they came to another cave of the same tribe, they would actually just stay there and never return to the original cave. So think back to what I mentioned about survival and reproduction. In those days, that was it. That was the only important... They were the only important things. So before leaving a cave, the alpha male had to make sure that his genes would survive in that cave in case he never came back. And in In those days, with predators and hypothermia and obviously miscarriage and stillbirth and stuff like that, he really had to impregnate five women to make sure that at least one of the babies would survive. To be able to make sure that five women would get pregnant at the same time, they had to be fertile at the same time.

That's why we had menstrual synchronization. Obviously, we don't need that.

There's an evolutionary reason for sinking up your menstrual cycle? Yeah.

Wow. Let's just start Start with how we synchronize first. That is because steroid hormones, such as the sex steroid hormones, estrogen and progesterone, leak out of your skin through your sweat.

Wait, what? Estrogen leaks out of your skin through your sweat? Yeah.

The way that it works is through physical proximity. So obviously in the cave, we slept in a huddle. So if you live with your daughters or you work in an office with a lot of other women and you're in close proximity with each other, then because your sweat leaks out around you about this far around your body, then-Well, hold on a second.

For people on YouTube, they saw about a foot. Sweat leaks out a foot from your body?

Okay, try not wearing antiperspirant and smelling how far you can smell your sweat.

Oh, I guess that's right, because I'm not thinking about the fact that the odor is actually you emitting something. Yeah. Oh, does that happen with stress, too? Okay, so yeah. Wait, let's say cycle sinking. I'm sorry. I'm so fascinated by this.

I think we've done that. We've said that we recognize it as a phenomenon. I've given you the evolutionary reason. We've talked about the physiological mechanism of it. So what I want to do now is bring that same physiological mechanism to regardless of gender, cortisol is also a steroid hormone. There's no gender issue here, but there is a hierarchical issue. The silverback gorillas stress levels affect the other guerrillas more than guerrillas of the same status. And so it happens in business, and so it happens in the home. The leader, in quote marks, of the entity, their stress levels will impact other people more than the other way around or people of equal status. So the highly stressed boss is an example, the highly stressed parent.

Interesting. Yeah. Well, it makes sense because if If you think about it, whether it's in the example of the Silverback or you take a family system, or you take a work system, that if the person in charge of your paycheck is stressed out, that their stress is a direct threat to your financial survival. And that's why it triggers you like that. And so that makes a lot of sense that stress would be contagious and affect everybody around you. So if stress is contagious, how do you protect yourself from other people stuff?

Well, I think the answer to that is both how do you reduce your own stress if you're the stressed person, and how do you protect yourself from other people's stress? It's mostly through mindfulness activities. So activities that connect the brain and the body, because Like I said, the glands in the brain are talking to the adrenal glands and creating this stress situation. So the way to decrease their activity is through activities like meditation, yoga, time in nature, journaling, gratitude, all of those things that reduce levels of cortisol, move your autonomic nervous system, which is a nervous system in your body rather than your brain, from sympathetic, which is fight, flight, fight, to parasympathetic, which is rest and recover, and lower your heartbeat, lower your blood pressure.

So simply lowering your own stress insulates you from other people's stress.

Yes, but with both versions of it, whether it's your own or others, addressing the root cause is important because what you don't want to be doing is just continually shielding yourself from something that's not changing.

And the reason why this is important, if we bring it back to the brain and your ability to keep your brain in a mode for thriving and helping you attract what you want, is because when stress levels are crazy high, It impairs your brain's ability to do the higher functioning because the blood goes somewhere else. Yeah. So interesting. What impact do your friends have on your brain?

So have you heard that phrase, You're the sum of the five people you spend most time with?

Yes.

So we do believe from a neuroscience perspective that you have a tribe that influences your behaviors. For instance, if your immediate friend group is overweight, then you're more likely to be overweight. This is not because it's contagious in the sense of what we've discussed before, but because of what becomes socially acceptable. Again, if most of your friends are really into exercise and healthy eating, then it's more likely that you're going to be like that as well. But there are some stats on social contagion. That, for example, things like if someone in your social circle gets divorced, you're more likely to get divorced. Now, again, it's not because it's contagious, but it's Because if your relationship was already struggling, but everybody else in your group was married and it felt shameful to be the one to break that, then if someone else does, it's almost like you then have a choice of either staying in a relationship that's not working or deciding that actually it's okay to end it.

Does it work in the positive? Yeah, absolutely. Because I tend to hear the examples of the negative, right? That if you are around smokers, you'll smoke. If you're on drinkers, you drink. But it works in the positive ways, too. As a neuroscientist, MD, PhD, is there anything that we can do to motivate or change other people? Is absolutely anyone capable of changing?

Yes. Any age, any stage, any mindset. I get a lot of questions from people who are neurodivergent, and neuroplasticity literally is hope for people.

What is the biggest barrier to somebody changing?

Not wanting to.

So when people are like... When people come to you with excuses and time and self-doubt and past stuff and neurodegenerative, like every excuse in the book, right? For you as a neuroscientist, it still comes down to not wanting to?

Well, and that sounded very negative. So I'll give you like a- I actually don't think it did because I believe you're saying something extremely profound and way deeper than a desire to change at the surface level.

Because you have very clearly stated, Dr. Tara, that from a neuroscience standpoint, Absolutely any human being can change. Your brain structure can change in three different ways. That your brain can be rewired to align with the person that you want to become, the behaviors you want to exhibit, the mindset that you want to have. It is scientifically proven. It is possible. We have the evidence. There's no debate here. When you say the word whether or not somebody wants to, can we go about seven layers deeper? Can you explain what you're talking about.

That was very much the answer to the biggest barrier. So there are obviously other things as well. But it's easy to say not wanting to, but it's that there's a reason that deep down they believe that they shouldn't be doing this thing. The cuteest reason I can think of is when I was working with a dad who was a banker, and he had become quite overweight as well, and he wanted to get back to his running, which was three a week, half an hour. He said to me, But you know, Tara, I got married late in life and we had a child later in life, and I feel terribly guilty about not spending all my spare time with my child. I work long hours already. And so I said, You know what? I completely get it. You would have to think that taking one and a half hours a week away from your son is going to make you a better dad. Otherwise, you're never going to do it. I'm not even going to try and help to do that if that's what you believe. And he just suddenly said, Of course, it's going to make me a better dad because it's going to make me live longer.

Because right now, in my state of health, I don't know if I'm even going to see him turn 18. It was just like that. I'm not saying I make that change with my clients all the time, but I just knew there was no point trying anything else. If he thought it was going to make him a worse dad, he just was not going to do it. But when he had that insight himself, Yeah, he started running and kept it up for a long time and lost all that weight. It was really lovely.

What you're basically talking about is Having it tied to your deepest value in life. And that's a super clear example. What final words do you have for the person listening?

I really want people to realize how amazing their brains are and how much potential they still have in their brain, regardless of the age they're at or the job they're in. I think for me, the thing I'm most passionate about is helping people get unstuck. And so a new way that I've got people to ask themselves the question that gets them unstuck is, when was the last time you were really seen for being who you want to be? And what's the first small step that you can take to get back to that?

Beautiful. Well, Dr. Tara, thank you so much for being here, for giving us such specific, actionable strategies that we can use in our life, starting right now, tonight, tomorrow. I'm grabbing my glue gun. I'm making another fishing board. It is time. But I just want to thank you with all of my heart. It was just absolutely fantastic to finally meet you in person and to learn from you and to be in your spirit and in your presence. And I just love everything we learned today. So thank you.

You're an amazing interviewer. And it's like I said to you offline, I admire you so much, and I'm so grateful that I got to be interviewed by you.

Oh, well, we're the beneficiary of that. And I want to be sure that you know as you're listening to us, in case nobody else tells you, I wanted to tell you that I love you. I believe in you. And I believe in your ability to take everything that you learn today and get serious about training and wiring your mind for abundance, for thriving, for success, for happiness. You now have the strategies, the tools, the things you need to eat to do that. So go do it, and I'll talk to you in a few days.

I would like you to teach Mel about menstrual synchronization.

I It's about to happen. We better buy some tampons, right? And some diva cups.

Okay. Oh, Mel.

Awesome. Well, we'll have to do more together. Yeah, that's for sure. That's for sure. That's for sure. We love meeting you. We love being with you.

We're so proud of what you're all achieving in a man's world. It is really special.

Thank you. Thank you. And for you, here with me on YouTube, in case nobody else tells you, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you, I believe in you, and I believe in your ability to create a better life. I know that everything that you learn today from the amazing Dr. Tara is going to help you do that. If you haven't subscribed to our channel yet, do not make me manifest this. Just do it. I am asking you for what you can do to support me. So please, please, please, because your support helps me bring amazing people like Dr. Tara to you at zero cost. And if you love this conversation with Dr. Tara, just go right here to Dr. Daniel Amen, one of the leading experts on the on the planet, and five simple ways to improve your brain health.