Change Your Brain: The Power Of Neuroplasticity And Braincare - Dr Tara Swart
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It's actually really related to what I understand about neuroplasticity now, because there's a period of time where you make new connections in your brain and you build up this new pathway. And it's almost like there's a tipping point where that pathway becomes the way that you think now and your old ways of thinking get overwritten. So one of the analogies that I could use is if you came up to a field that was knee high in grass, then the first time you walk across that field...

you're going to be pushing that grass down with your feet. But if you walk that same path every day for a week, you probably would have trodden a sort of pathway through the grass that you can walk through easily. If you then said, "Okay, I'm going to lay down some wooden slabs to make it even easier to walk along there,"

And then you built that further and you maybe like cemented them in. Then eventually you could make a path that's so easy to walk down that it takes no effort at all. And it's exactly the same in the brain when you learn something new. We're so bombarded with information in the modern day that we're not able to

What you would read in a newspaper in one day, today, is the amount of information that somebody would have received in their lifetime 100 years ago. The brain naturally filters out things that aren't vital to our survival. But if we do something like create a vision board or visualize something that we want, then we're

training the brain more to be aware of the things that we really want. So then when it does the selective filtering, it doesn't filter out that person that could introduce you to somebody about your business or that person that could introduce you to somebody for a date. That means noticing and then grasping opportunities that can move you closer to your goal.

Hey friends, welcome back to Deep Dive, the weekly podcast where every week it is my immense privilege and pleasure to sit down with academics and authors and entrepreneurs, creators and other inspiring people. We find out how they got to where they are and what we can learn from them to help apply to help live our own best lives. What you're about to hear is a discussion between me and Dr. Tara Swart. Tara has a PhD in neuropharmacology. She also trained and worked as a psychiatrist in the UK's National Health Service for about seven years.

before leaving medicine and becoming an executive advice coach type person and then her career morphed into doing talks and exploring the world of neuroplasticity and the world of brain care and the world of how we can learn from neuroscience and psychology and endocrinology and like immunology and microbiology and putting all these sciencey things together to help improve the ways that our brains function.

Oh, she's also chief science officer for Heights, which is a brain care supplement company, which I've also invested in. We had the founder of Heights on the podcast a couple of seasons ago. In the conversation, we talk about the somewhat circuitous path she took to get to the career that she is at now. And we spend most of the conversation talking about what are the practical things that we can learn from the world of neuroscience, from the field of neuroplasticity, that we can apply to our own lives to help reduce our stress, to help increase our brain's performance, to help make it easier to learn stuff. Super interesting conversation. I hope you'll enjoy it as much as I did.

All right, Tara, thank you so much for coming on. I would love to sort of just get into a little bit of the backstory. So you were or have been a sort of a psychiatrist, a neuropharmacologist, neuroscientist, PhD, you're now chief science officer at Heights. You have your own executive advice business where you kind of apply these insights and I guess coach other people. Where did all this start? How did we end up here?

Yeah, so that does sound quite messy when you put it like that. That's a lot of stuff, but it's pretty cool, yeah. If we put it in date order, then I like you, I guess. From school, I went to medical school in London, did two years of preclinical, did the intercalated BSC,

And then from then got offered to stay on and do a PhD in neuropharmacology, which I did for three years. And then it was time to get out of London. So I went to Oxford to complete medical school, the clinical part. Did my first surgical job there, returned to London and did my medical job and then started training in psychiatry at the Royal Free Hospital. And over the next, that sort of six years, I worked in the West London Mental Health Trust mostly. And I also worked abroad in Australia and Bermuda.

Then in 2007, I quit medicine, moved back from Bermuda to the UK, did a six-month coaching course, and then in 2008, and worked in an office, really going from sort of being quite an experienced psychiatrist at that point to being the absolute bottom of the pile, no business contacts, and

my PowerPoint skills apparently weren't up scratch for what they needed at that point. And then in 2008, started my own freelance practice as a coach and sort of two or three years later, made that into a company and did speaking and writing.

And then a little bit after that, a year or two after that, started teaching at MIT Sloan. So applying neuroscience to business and leadership. And then at some point, I'm not sure of the exact date, maybe four or five years ago, Dan and his co-founder Joel found me on social media. So great place to like headhunt people. And we're looking for a chief science officer for Heights, which is a brain care supplement. And

I think all of the, you know, PhD in neuroscience and medical doctor obviously were important. But the thing that really gelled us together was that when I was traveling and I was traveling a lot for business at that time, I was taking 10, sometimes up to 20 bottles of supplements with me for my travel. It was very stressful. I was enduring a lot of jet lag. I was going

going to very different places, having to switch mode between whether I was coaching or speaking. And I wanted to make sure that when I was traveling, I couldn't always eat as healthily as I did when I was at home. So I grow my own food and only eat organic and I cook from scratch every day. Yeah. So when I couldn't do that, I was even more aware of making sure that I got all the nutrients that I feel that I need for my brain and that get very depleted by stress and travel.

So when I heard about the idea of having one capsule, it's a double capsule that had pretty much everything that I would want to take in it.

I wanted to be part of that. And from the beginning, I was banging on about magnesium and probiotic. And now we are bringing those on as bolt-on products to the original brain care supplement. Okay. So many kind of interesting points along that journey. Can we zoom into 2007? Why did you leave medicine? What was going on? I'd been thinking about it for two years because it's a really big decision, both personally and professionally.

I loved psychiatry and I really cared about my patients. And I felt that for a lot of my colleagues, it was a lifestyle choice. So to leave, knowing that people who depended on me, who waited for months to see me, children, the elderly, you know, really vulnerable people, I had to feel that I was definitely going to have more impact on people by doing whatever I was going to do next.

But obviously the other side of the coin of that was that I'd done my PhD in neuroscience thinking I was going to become a neurologist. When I went to the clinical school, I felt like that interaction with people wasn't going to be enough for me with neurology and psychiatry, where I started to really delve into people hearing voices that weren't there.

that your brain could play a trick on you in such a way that you couldn't trust yourself. That felt like a really important thing to be part of and try to help with and care about and understand. But what I realized as I moved through the different specialties, so I did child psychiatry, I did forensic psychiatry, vulnerable females, the elderly, rehab, learning disabilities, and I traveled around the world with it too, was that...

If I remained in that job for the next 30 or 40 years, I wasn't going to get enough intellectual stimulation or challenge to keep me happy and at my best. And so I had that terrible dilemma of feeling like I could do this really well for the rest of my life, but...

I wouldn't be living my best life if I did that. And so when I finally made the decision to quit, and that was after I'd gone through a hundred options of other things that I could do instead of medicine, because when you go to medical school when you're 18 and then you're a doctor for six or seven years, and I was at medical school essentially for nine years, you don't think that you can do anything else. So it's a really big deal to leave. So I finally found executive coaching as the thing that was...

very much about goal orientation and focus and determination, but also quite zen. So that seemed to fit with my psychological skills. And when I went to the chief of psychiatry and said, as you'll know, you know, you have to have a form signed by all your bosses for the last two years to prove that you're not leaving because you've done something terrible. When I asked him to sign the form, he said to me, this is such a great loss to us because you could do this job in your sleep.

And I think that was the phrase that I needed to hear, which was, I didn't want to be asleep for the rest of my life. I wanted to be challenged and do new and different things. And at that stage, I thought I was just going to be a coach. Obviously, I've done like loads of different things since then. But yeah, I moved countries, came and did the coaching qualification, had to learn to listen in a way that was completely different to when you're just thinking about what diagnosis you're going to make. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's, does that answer your question? Yeah, it does. So it's, how, okay, how much of the decision to leave was lifestyle versus kind of intellectual stimulation? I guess I'm asking because I mean, I still know about half my friends are medics and the biggest gripe anyone ever has is the lifestyle, usually. Yeah.

Yeah, so that wasn't a thing for me because, as I mentioned, a lot of people go into psychiatry because of the lifestyle. So it's not, you know, the on-calls aren't as hard. And ever since I was at medical school, or not medical school, but in my first year before I got married and I still had my maiden name, which was Banerjee, people used to pray for a Banerjee night on-call because I literally never got woken up.

And I actually worried when I got married and I changed my surname that my luck might change, but it didn't. And when I had my sort of six monthly review with my consultant in psychiatry, he said, you know, what's going well, what are you concerned about? And I said, I'm concerned I'm not getting enough experience on call because I go around the wards, I check everything's okay. I go to sleep, I wake up the next morning. He said, I wouldn't complain about that. Um,

And then in Australia, I could do a lot of phone consultations overnight or it was a 15-minute drive. That wasn't an issue for me. The lifestyle suited me. I was able to travel. I didn't get too much sleep disruption. I'm obsessed with sleep. So that would have been a problem if I had sleep disruption. So for me, it was definitely... And in the end, when I felt like...

how, how would I really be able to feel good about the fact that I was leaving behind patients that I could have given so much care to? It came down to the fact that in NHS or, you know, government psychiatry, you're dealing with people in the lowest socioeconomic groups, whose families have abandoned them, who don't have jobs, whose children get taken away from them. And so your impact is really high on that one person, but it

doesn't go much further than that. And I felt that if I went into executive coaching and I worked with really senior people who impact their teams and accompany and have corporate social responsibility and are role models in society, that I would be able to touch more people by doing that than I would by staying as an individual doctor.

Just a quick note from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode. And very excitingly, this episode is brought to you by Heitz. Heitz is a brain care smart supplement that I've actually been taking for the last 12 months, ever since I became friends with Dan Moriserta, who was the founder of Heitz and who we had on the podcast in season one. And this season of the podcast, we're also featuring Dr. Tara Swart, who is a neuroscientist and psychiatrist. So what is Heitz? Well, it's a brain care smart supplement.

Basically, it is a supplement. You take two of them every morning like I do. It's like these two little capsules which have omega-3 oil in them and they've got a bunch of multivitamins as well. They have all of the details on the website. Every single ingredient that they've got is super high quality. And the great thing is that just by taking two of these capsules every morning like I do, you get all of the essential micronutrients that you need without having to deal with drinking sludge or anything fancy like that.

So the great thing about Heitz is that even if you don't have one of these absolutely perfect diets, at least you know you have your bases covered in terms of the micronutrients that you need. It's very easy to sign up. You just go to yourheitz.com and then you sign up to the thing and it's a mail order. They get to you every month or in three month packets. And if you use the coupon code Ali15, that's A-L-I-1-5 at checkout, then you'll get 15% off your first three months of subscription. I

I've been subscribed to this for the last 12 months. I also happen to be an investor in the company because I believe in the product and I love how they're fully evidence-based in absolutely everything they do. And if you're interested in the evidence base behind all like 20 different ingredients that they've got here, you can check them out on the website and that'll be linked in the video description and in the show notes. So thank you so much to Heights for sponsoring this episode. How did you land on executive coaching? Like as...

It's only recently I even knew the term existed. How did you discover that that was a thing and that that's the career you wanted to go down? One of my best friends at school who studied psychology and philosophy at university and then also did a PhD in the neuroscience area, she went on to work for McKinsey and I went on to work for the NHS. That's where our lives, having been at school together, diverged quite significantly.

She encouraged me to look into the idea of coaching and sent me lots of articles to read about it. And during that two years that I was thinking about whether I would do something different, we spent a lot of time sitting in Green Park talking about business psychology. And so I really owe it to her to have introduced me to even the idea of that. And I was originally going to go and work as a coach for her. She was going to set up a business, but then that fell through.

And I literally heard these words come out of my mouth before I decided really. And I was like, well, I'm going to do it anyway. I think that's when I looked for the next opening for the coaching course. And I think it was either like quit now and we give you a three months notice and you could do it soon or you'd have to wait another six months. And I just quit. And I think...

It's actually really related to what I understand about neuroplasticity now because there's a period of time where you make new connections in your brain and you build up this new pathway and it's almost like there's a tipping point where that pathway becomes the way that you think now and your old ways of thinking get overwritten. So I feel like that two years of really thinking about should I leave? What could I do instead? How can I justify this to myself and feel good about it?

When something came along that was the right thing, I was just able to say, okay, I'm quitting my job. I'm moving countries. I'm starting this course on a thing that I've only read a few papers about, but I don't really know what it is. Yeah.

And yeah, I just did it.

And so it's like, and just earlier today, I was interviewing another friend, Simon, who's also a coach. And it's just like, weirdly, lots of interactions with people who have found coaching as like a career. And even though I feel like I was quite clued into the alternative career thingy, just like being a coach has never even vaguely occurred to me. But now I find that through YouTube and through the podcast, like a lot of people have emailed me like, hey, do you do one-on-one coaching? And I'm always like, no, but it's always like a question mark on the end of it.

Yeah. So, okay. So you left psychiatry and did you have like a backup? How were you planning to make money while doing the coaching thing? Were you thinking I can do a locum every now and then? What was the thought process? So interestingly about the locum,

And I'm not saying this is right for everyone at all. A lot of people have a side job or a part-time job when they're starting up a new business. I think the decision to leave medicine was so emotive for me that I had to burn my boats. I was like, there's no way back. I will never do a locum. I have to make this work.

And there were times that I couldn't pay my bills and people said, Tara, please just go and do one weekend. You'll earn enough money to pay your rent for six months and you won't have to worry about your bills. And I said, no, but

That probably says quite a lot about the kind of person I am. And that's why I qualified it by saying that's not for everyone. So I was married at the time that I made the decision. And we did have an agreement that he would support me for a period of time whilst I did the course. And once I knew I was going to quit, even though there wasn't much time, I started saving in a

Um, unfortunately we got divorced during that time. So that, um, but actually he was, you know, super supportive and still, um, helped me for as long as I needed and would have continued to help me for longer, but there was a point in time where I said, I don't need. Yeah. And so you built up your coaching business, I guess, from the ground up since then. And that's.

Kind of what you do now with along with the height stuff? No, it's really changed. So I was doing like all coaching at the beginning. And then and that was 2008, 9, 10, around 2010.

neuroscience became a buzz topic in business and leadership and people wanted speakers. And there weren't that many. I mean, as a former psychiatrist, I fell very much in the gap between psychologists that become coaches and business people that become coaches. And I didn't belong anywhere. But suddenly, where it was like, well, who can talk about neuroscience in business? I was like, well, I can. So I started doing a few talks thinking,

they would just lead to me getting coaching clients. And then I realized very quickly that that could be a revenue generator for my business. And it went like this, literally, like all my money was coming from coaching and none was coming from speaking. And then it went like that over time. Yeah. Very open-ended question. Like how do neuroscience and business go together? Well, basically, if you're in business, if you're a leader, if you're a senior executive, if you're a trader,

then you're being paid to use your brain. But if you haven't studied neuroscience, you probably don't know as much as you need to know to get the most out of that really important organ. So I can go in and do a general one hour talk that sort of tells people about how their brain works, how to get the best out of it.

You know, all the foundational factors that contribute to peak performance and brain optimization and good mental health and well-being. And then in coaching, I can either take that approach, which is here's the sort of general ideas for improving your well-being and therefore your brain performance. Or I can find out what somebody's issue is. And it could be stress. It could be travel. It could be...

doubting themselves when they're about to make a trading decision. And then I can go and look at the research and find something specific to help them overcome that particular brain issue that they might have. Okay. So I wonder if we can start general then. So like, let's say someone's listening to this or even me, because I actually don't know much about this. What are the things that we can do to improve our brain performance? So we talk about things like

rest, which is sleep and also sort of downtime. Nutrition is super important. So the brain is obviously a tiny proportion of your body weight and only weighs a few kilos, but it uses up to 30% of the breakdown products of what you eat. So when you're asleep, your brain is eating up 20% of what you ate that day.

When you're at work and focused on something, it's using up about a quarter of what you eat. And when you're stressed, it's using up to 30%. Oh, wow. Yeah. And so obviously people think, what should I eat if I want to be healthy generally, or I want to lose weight, or I want to build muscle mass. But the sorts of people that, you know, like you and the people that I work with,

aren't thinking enough about what should I be eating so I can make the best decisions today? What should I be eating so I can solve complex problems? What should I be eating so I can understand what's going on in terms of interpersonal communication with my team, for example? And then there's everything from hydration, exercise, breathing, mindfulness, curiosity. There's so many factors that contribute to brain health. And

They're probably not dissimilar to things as a doctor that you would know contribute to cardiovascular health or gastrointestinal health. But, you know, we at Heights feel that if you approach everything with a brain care first attitude, then you're kind of taking care of the rest of the stuff. Like if you eat and drink in a way that's good for your brain, your skin and your hair are going to look nicer. I mean, and that sounds like it's such a girly thing to say, but people make a lot of really important choices based on

what they look like. And that's fine. And that probably has like beneficial effects on our brains and our guts as well. But considering this organ is so energy hungry, and it's so important in terms of everything else that happens in your body, I feel like

We need to flip that narrative so that it's starting with, okay, what things can I do today that are going to be the best for my brain? Just a quick message from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode. And this episode is very kindly brought to you by Shortform. Shortform is the world's best service that summarizes books.

But it's way more than just book summaries. They almost have a whole study guide for every book that they've got on the platform where they've got a one-page summary. And then they also have chapter-by-chapter breakdowns. And it's not just chapter-by-chapter breakdowns. Also, in between the chapter breakdowns, they have interactive exercises where you can engage

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And that will give you a completely free five-day trial, and you can try out the service to your heart's content. That link will also be in the video description and in the show notes. And thank you so much, Shortform, for sponsoring this episode. I wonder if we can start with the nutrition thing then. And I guess, what should me and I guess listeners and viewers be thinking about when it comes to nutrition? Or is it all just the stuff that everyone kind of knows but doesn't implement? Or do you feel like there's actually a knowledge gap and an understanding gap?

Or if it's just actually implementing the things that we all know we probably should do? I like to think there's a bit of both. So I think there's a lot of things that are in the public domain that people are aware of that we all know we should be doing, but we're not necessarily always doing. Yeah.

But there are definitely fun neuroscience facts that I can throw in that I would guess maybe even you haven't heard of. So should we try? Yeah, perfect. Yeah. Okay. So I would say like level one is that

You eat three healthy meals a day and maybe you snack in between if you need to. And when I say healthy, mostly plant-based, maybe some fish and eggs, minimal amounts of other types of meat, foods that contain high amounts of water and good fats. So a bit of dairy.

Fatty fish, nuts and seeds, berries. I mean, I'm already going above level one, I would say, with some of those. But three healthy meals a day, that kind of food. Question on that front. Yeah. Intermittent fasting? Yeah, yeah. So level two. Oh, that's level two. Okay, fine. If you're not eating healthily generally, if you're not sleeping around...

seven to eight hours 15 a night drinking enough water making sure you're not sedentary don't bother with intermittent fasting you need to have those foundations correct if you're doing all that good stuff and maybe even meditating then you can take it to the next level which is um the first level would be time restricted eating so for example i only eat between 12 noon and 8 p.m

So I'm essentially doing a 16-hour fast overnight, which has all sorts of benefits on longevity and cancer risk reduction. And once you get used to it, it's also good for your mental performance.

And then the third level, which I'm considering doing again for the rest of this year, but I haven't quite got there yet, is what I think is proper intermittent fasting, which is that for two days of the week, you reduce your calorie intake to, for women, 500 calories and for men, 600 calories a day. And the other days of the week you eat normally. But in all three of those stages, you still have to be eating the kinds of foods that I mentioned. And so this is

Tell me whether you knew this or not, but in terms of brain optimization, eating dark-skinned foods is much better than just eating general, you know, the leafy greens or the salads. Dark-skinned? What do you mean dark-skinned? Blueberries rather than strawberries or raspberries. Okay. Purple sprouting broccoli rather than green broccoli. Black beans and black chickpeas rather than cannellini beans or normal chickpeas.

Why is that a thing? I had no idea. So the skin and things like eggplant as well. I think in the skin of darker foods, and actually you'll like this because it does include good quality coffee and dark chocolate that's over 80% cocoa. There are substances called anthocyanins that are really powerful antioxidants and they contribute to something called neurogenesis. So there's three ways of

growing your brain if you like and i and i use that in a as a metaphor um and the hardest one in adults is for embryonic nerve cells to actually grow into neurons and connect up with other neurons in your brain and so aerobic exercise and foods that contain high levels of anthocyanins can contribute to neurogenesis oh it's going for a run is good

Going for a run is good. If you're feeling guilty because you haven't been going for a run, then when you do regular aerobic exercise, the cell turnover is sort of 13, 14% of neurogenesis. If you haven't been doing exercise for some time and you start again, it can actually be up to 30%. So to me, that's the perfect excuse for every time I fall off my schedule of exercise and I start again, that I'm really boosting my neurogenesis. But

I'm never sedentary, but I'm not always doing full-on aerobic, more high-intensity exercise. Okay. Yeah. So one mechanism is neurogenesis, the one that makes our brain grow. What are the other two? So neurogenesis is the embryonic cells growing into new neurons.

The next one is synaptic connection, which is already existing neurons connecting up with each other to make stronger pathways. And the third one, which you'll be well aware of, is myelination, which is a fatty substance that coats some pathways in the brain and body. And that leads to faster conduction of electrical signals along those pathways. And there are reasons that we have some pathways that are myelinated and some that aren't. Like, for example, if you put your hand in a fire...

Your reflex to snatch your hand out of the fire is a fast myelinated pathway, but your pain pathways are non-myelinated because if you were incapacitated by the pain of burning your hand, you wouldn't be able to move or escape from the threat kind of thing. But in terms of what we're talking about, which is brain performance, basically repetition

can lead to more myelination, which means that that pathway becomes a faster conducting pathway for you. So something like resisting the urge to eat.

junk food. Like those crisps, some crisps over there. And last night I made the bad choice to eat the crisps and Gordon kind of looked at me and like sighed because I was like, whoa, there's 200 calories in these. And today I didn't. I decided to eat the chips as they were. Well, that could be to do with time of day because your willpower also reduces during the day. Yeah, maybe. But I mean, for me, it's mostly about stimulus control, which is that I don't keep those things. Yeah. It's a lot easier to reduce

resist the chocolate cake if it's not there. Okay. So we've got neurogenesis from embryonic cells. We've got the synaptic connections and we've got myelination. Such a pleasure talking to you because most people are like, what were those things again? How do we tangibly impact those things? So we talked about repetition equals more myelination. And I guess this is where sort of repetition when it comes to learning stuff as well, like spaced repetition over time equals more myelination, presumably. What other things can we do to

grow the brain? So I think in real life, we don't necessarily need to know which underlying physiological mechanism we're affecting, but we need to know, we need to see the real life result if I'm trying to learn something or do something differently and it's working or it's not working. I think the easiest way to just think about those three is that

The myelination is like something that you're already good at, that it would be really easy for it to become your superpower, basically. So for instance, and this sounds, and I don't mean this in a boastful way, but I've got a friend who's a professor of neuroscience who plays in a band and I really admire him for being so good at an instrument, but it really irks him that I can just learn a new language so easily. So that's like one of my superpowers. And

So I have learned five languages in my lifetime. I'm not fluent in all of them at the moment. But if someone said to me, you know, do you want to learn a new language? I'd say, yeah, because I'll probably be quite good at that. But there are lots of other things that would be much harder for me to become good at. So...

For me, that would be like my A grade subject. And I take that unwillingly because I probably find it not too difficult and I'd probably be quite good at it. So think about what that might be for you. And then synaptic connection is more like your B plus, which is something that you're not bad at at all, but you don't love and it doesn't come really easy and naturally. But if you worked really hard, you could make that into an A grade.

And then neurogenesis in adulthood, although there are embryonic cells around the hippocampus, which is where we lay down memories and learning, it's way less than in children. So that would be like, well, I did this. That would be like me taking up golf. I was really bad at it. It took me ages to improve. I would have had to give up my day job to become, you know, any level of decent at it. So...

It's not wise really in adulthood to take on a learning that's so difficult that it's going to detract from your day-to-day brain performance. And in that middle category, for me, I'd probably put something like

Learned the tango quite well, not amazingly. Improved at tennis. Taught myself keyboard, you know, but I'm never going to be like performing or anything. So that's the easiest way to think about those in your mind, like which of those mechanism might I be working on? Because it's really to do with the level of how difficult it would be for you.

So would it be fair to say then that like, let's say when you're at university, the things you found yourself naturally good at are probably the things that you will find it easier to remain good at or be good at when it comes to adulthood? Like for you, presumably that was languages, but not golf. So you mean when I was at university? Well, interestingly, did you know that in the first, in the preclinical part of medical school,

You learn more new words than a language student does in their whole degree. Really? Yeah. Because there's so many Greek and Latin based words. And so I would say probably we're both really good at languages. Yeah. So I want to be a bit careful about saying when you're at university, because by then you've already narrowed down what you're doing quite a lot. So it might even be when you're at school. Yeah. And it might even just be what you're interested in outside of academia. Yeah. So...

I do believe in identifying what your passions are usually aligns with what your strengths are. Maybe not always, but thinking about it that way is a really good way to think about it and not kind of trying to be good at everything. Play to your strengths. The neuroscience really supports that. Okay. And so to what extent is this relevant when you're like coaching people in the sort of executive advice space? That's such a good question because actually I often get dragged in because people say,

This person is really, really, really good at what they do, but they've got no emotional intelligence. And unless you can help them change, we're going to have to get rid of them. It's that bad. I mean, not so much recently, but more when I was coaching, like around the time of the financial crisis and the consequences of that, there were still people that would shout, go red in the face, make people cry, like make people not want to quit their team and stuff like that. So

That was almost me having to do like neurogenesis with them. But I would definitely help them to see what they're really good at and play to that because those are quick wins. And in coaching, I would want people to get quick wins because then they'll believe that they can change things and that I can help them.

And a lot of coaching is about building up that relationship of trust so that it's okay for them to try something and fail because they know that you'll just still be there encouraging and helping them learn from it. It's really, it's a very like privileged, like special kind of relationships. It's intense. It's one-on-one. It can be very emotional.

But the main thing I found that helped these senior guys who are pretty much at the top of their career ladder, don't really have to worry about finances, why would they put in that effort that it's going to take for them to now change their behavior? And a lot of them said,

It's too hard. I don't understand what I need to do. I don't understand what people mean when they say you need to be more caring or understanding or emotionally intelligent. And I don't know if I can do it. And so I explained neuroplasticity to them like building a brick wall or building a pathway. And so one of the analogies that I could use is if you came up to a field that was like knee high in grass and

then the first time you walk across that field, you're going to be pushing that grass down with your feet and maybe some of it would bounce back up. But if you walk that same path every day for a week, you probably would have trodden a sort of, you know, just a pathway through the grass that you can walk through easily. If you then said, okay, I'm going to lay down some wooden slabs to make it even easier to walk along there,

And then you built that further and you maybe like cemented them in or whatever. Then eventually you could make a path that's so easy to walk down that it takes no effort at all. And it's exactly the same in the brain when you learn something new. And so what I would get these guys to do is I'd say, go home tonight and listen to your child for five minutes without interrupting them and not having your phone on your person.

And that alone was so eye-opening for people because they were never doing it. They were always asking, how did, how, you know, how was school today? Did you do your homework? Did you do this? Did you get 10 out of 10 on your spelling test? And they'd probably be scrolling on their phone half the time and the child would feel that they weren't really listening. And this happened with men, women, all different ages. And then I'd say, okay, now try this with a friend.

Try to like have a conversation where you really listen to them and you don't interrupt them. And then they do that. And then the next stage would be with a colleague, but somebody they've got a good relationship with. And then by the time they started feeling like, yeah, I can do this, I can really listen. I don't have to like sort of.

answer back all the time, we'd get them to the point where they'd have a conversation like that with somebody that they haven't been getting on with at work. And that pathway was sort of built in the brain by then. So yeah. What sort of time period are we talking for this to happen? It really depends how attention intense the task is. So if it's something like, I want to start going to the gym three times a week, or I want to try intermittent fasting, it takes...

two to three weeks to get that, you know, to not feel like it's really difficult. When we're talking about things like emotional intelligence or intuition or creativity, we're talking more like six to 12 months. But I have this new theory, which I haven't really shared before, which is that if you really focus on doing this in a nine month period, which is the gestation period of a baby, so from fertilization to a newborn baby being born,

you can essentially create a rebirth in your brain by rewiring your neural pathways. Oh, that's good. That's a good theory. I like it. That's very sticky. It makes sense. It's like, okay, nine months.

Just a quick note from one of our sponsors and we'll get right back to the episode. And this episode is very kindly brought to you by Skillshare. If you haven't heard by now, Skillshare is one of the world's leading platforms for online classes for online education. They've got thousands and thousands of classes on all sorts of topics from business, entrepreneurship, lifestyle design, cooking, interior design, loads of stuff. And very excitingly, I've actually been teaching on Skillshare since 2019 and I've got 13 classes on Skillshare. Yes, 13 classes.

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productivity and video editing and YouTubing and even cooking. So head over to Skillshare.com forward slash deep dive. And thank you so much Skillshare for sponsoring this episode. Any other tips for developing emotional intelligence? Asking for a friend.

Oh, I love that. Well, so emotional intelligence is two things, which is one that you actually understand and are able to regulate your own emotions. And then the second part is that you understand what's going on emotionally for somebody else. And you can respond to that in an appropriate manner, compassionate, but not getting sucked in. So in terms of the yourself part, just like naming how you're feeling. So finding a word for how you're feeling and, you know,

And I say this from a position of really caring, but it's harder for men to do that than women because of the way that we're still brought up in society, which is big boys don't cry and don't be sad or sort of. So having a wider vocabulary for your emotions. And you can start off by either just, you can check in with yourself every hour and say, how am I feeling emotionally? You can do it one to four times a day. You could journal.

And then in terms of other people, just spent listening. That's why that listening exercise is so important and listening without interrupting and looking at people's facial expression and stuff like that. And

So I would say to you, and this obviously isn't going to apply to everybody else, but just in the exact same way that you learn to do a physical examination on a patient, you kind of go through that checklist of like, okay, these are the things like, what am I seeing here? Is this person smiling at me? Are their eyes welling up with tears? Are they starting to raise their voice? Is their voice quivering? Just really paying attention to those things. Okay.

So these high-flying executives are coming to you for help with a thing. It sounds like emotional intelligence was like a big part. It was a big one. So resilience to stress and emotional intelligence, as a former psychiatrist, those were my bread and butter after the financial crisis. Resilience to stress. How does one train that? Back to those basics. And I'll always keep coming back to those basics. Sleep, diet, hydration, exercise, and mindfulness. Okay.

And then, yeah, that's the five like really easy ways to think about it. But we have at Heights, we have some like more pillars around that, like curiosity and curiosity.

And then I would use heart rate variability technology to see what was actually and show them what was actually going on in terms of stress, like how well you're sleeping, how stressed you are during the day. If there are any periods of time, hopefully whilst you're sleeping, but also during the day that you find a way to recharge and like rejuvenate your nervous system. What does that mean?

Okay, so firstly, what's the deal with heart rate variability? I've heard a few tech bros talk about, oh, HVR with sleep and stuff, but I've never really known anything about it. And then what do you mean by rejuvenate your nervous system? Okay, so these days you can get all sorts of gadgets from the Oura Ring to the Woot Bracelet to the Apple Watch to the Fitbit that can monitor your heart rate variability. But I'm talking quite a decade or so ago. I was using...

a heart rate variability monitor that people would wear with like a gel sticker on their chest for three days and three nights. And it's just color-coded data, which shows it's like turquoise when your body's in the parasympathetic state, which is like rest and digest.

and it's red when you're in the sympathetic state, which is stress, and then it's light blue or dark blue depending on whether you're doing moderate or high-intensity physical exercise. Okay. So if you're doing a high-intensity exercise, you would expect it to be in sympathetic, and then that's legit? No, no, no, no, because it compares heart rate and heart rate variability. Oh, okay. If your heart rate is elevated and therefore you're physically exercising, it's going to be dark blue. But if your heart rate isn't elevated...

then depending on how your heart rate variability changes, it shows up more the psychological side, which is whether you're in sympathetic or parasympathetic. And so is it overly simple to say parasympathetic good, sympathetic bad? Yeah.

No, I mean, that's true. It's true. But there's a reason that we have an adaptive response to stress, which is that sometimes you need to get away from something that's bad for you. So we do need that ability to get into the... If you think about, we say these words without ever really thinking of them, but...

It's fright, flight, fight. And a fright is a threat. So you need to be able to get away from a threat. And that's the response is that either flight, you run away, or fight, you respond to that threat in a sort of equal manner. And then parasympathetic, which as medics we would say is rest and digest. I prefer to say rest and recharge because you're not always digesting. Right.

is when you recover from whatever stress response you've had to go through during the day. So if we're thinking kind of ideal workday, would you always sort of be in parasympathetic chill mode? Or like in sort of laptop work, is it ever useful to have a sympathetic response to a thing? I mean, I think we have. It's very different for different people. So interestingly,

A study showed that a nurse who was giving cancer-related news to patients and families all day was actually in a flow state because that was her purpose. Even if it was bad news, she was there for the people. The kind of people that I work with

They're in sympathetic all day. Really? Yeah. And sometimes even at night. No way. Yeah. That sounds terrifying. That's why I work with them. That's why they want to work with me, I guess. Because I guess in like super high flying careers, we're making like massive trading decisions where there's billions on the line when their job is at risk. Like that's a high stress environment. And they're multitasking all the time and they may be traveling a lot and they may be jet lagged and they're entertaining every evening. And funnily enough, one of the patterns I saw, which

I laughed with the person the first time I saw it, but then I saw it quite a lot was that

They may be moderately stressed and at some points maybe have flow states, but it was rare during the day at work. But they'd always be more stressed when they got home and they had to see their kids. So that was interesting. These executives were stressed during the day, but it was kind of something that they could control. But then when it was like home and young kids or screaming kids or just being pulled in two different directions, they found that really stressful. Oh, wow.

Okay. So what do you think I can look at my heart rate variability and it will give me an idea of how stressed I am throughout the day? It's really important to look at trends rather than a momentary. But we, yeah, I mean, we could look at that. Okay. Rejuvenate your nervous system. What does that mean?

Well, we should assume that we're quite stressed during the day. So there are loads of statistics that support that 70, 75% of people in the Western world are way more stressed than they should be all the time, that they're like chronically depleted of magnesium, which is a micronutrient that gets leached up by the body when we're stressed, which is why right from the beginning of working with heights, I was like, we need a magnesium supplement. Excellent.

So we actively need to do things to help to push our body into a state where it can recover. Now, you might ask, and people do ask me, well, when we lived in the cave, we didn't have to like do mindfulness. But actually, when we lived in the cave, yes, we hunted and we had to avoid predators and we had to avoid like extremes of cold and hot and things like that. But

We spent all our time in nature. We walked barefoot in nature. We sat around the campfire every night. We looked at the stars in the sky every night. There were natural ways of recouping our resilience. And life was a lot more like a short-term acute threat. And then the rest of the time, a lot of recouping of resilience. These days, we're bombarded with information 24-7. We can be online across time zones all the time, you know, all day if we want to.

And so unless we specifically do things to try to reduce that stress that our brain and our body are under, that, you know, we basically essentially lead to burnout. Okay. So what are the, beyond sleep, hydration, exercise, rest, the basic stuff that we've kind of talked about, and it would be good to explore those more in more detail. What are some easy, I guess, easy, actionable things that people can do to reduce stress levels? Mm-hmm.

Before I answer that, I can't go on without repeating the importance of sleep because there are still a lot of people that say, well, I can get by on four or five hours sleep or I don't need to sleep that much or I'll sleep when I die. I mean, these phrases are still around, right? But actually getting enough sleep is probably the single most important foundation to being able to recoup your resilience during the day.

The second one I would say, we've talked a lot about nutrition. So I'll go on to oxygenation of the brain. And that is either through formal exercise. But what I find with stress is that people start to breathe in a shallow manner or they hold their breath. So a lot of people when they're scrolling on social media are actually holding their breath and they don't really realize that. And now that I've said this to you,

probably when people hear it, they will start realizing that they might be doing that. And you're already smiling. So I'm wondering if you're thinking that you do it. So just remembering to breathe deeply is if you are at a desk, you know, on the laptop a lot of the time, then each hour when you check in on, okay, how am I feeling emotionally? Also just check in on like how deeply you're breathing and maybe just do 10 deep breaths for the sake of it anyway. Why does deep breathing help?

Because it really does. Like anytime I have, like even earlier when I was having the conversation with Simon, who's also a coach, and this morning interviewing Jim, we were talking about compassion and stuff. Breathing came into it somehow. And I found myself being like, and realizing, oh, I actually have some...

I actually don't breathe deeply very much. I tend to take very shallow breaths. My singing teacher even pointed this out. He was like, "Massive problem with your singing, you don't breathe anywhere near deep enough. When you're in the shower in the morning, you need to take 10 deep breaths." It's just something that I just don't do. There's something about it that feels really good. What's going on there? Well, it's good that you're doing singing because at least you're paying attention to breathing, which a lot of people wouldn't.

It's one of these things we're not very conscious of all day because obviously it's happening 17, 18 times a minute. We can't be paying attention to that all the time. Stress is definitely the biggest contributor to shallow breathing and breath holding. So if we weren't stressed, we probably would, well, not probably, we would naturally be breathing more deeply. And even if we're breathing normally,

it's still good to take 10 deep breaths because it does give that boost of oxygen to the brain. That's why it feels so good because the brain's resources are glucose and oxygen, right? I mean, you know that from basic physiology. So as long as you've eaten enough and supplied the glucose that the brain can take up within two or three hours of eating, then the second thing that you can supply your brain with is oxygen. If you're tired, but you don't have time for a nap,

Do you have time to go for a walk? If you don't have time to go for a walk, take 10 deep breaths at your desk. It makes a difference. You mentioned nature and looking at the stars and stuff. What's inherently good about nature?

Yeah, so this has really come up as a big one in the last few years. And I don't, I'm not sure if it's coincidental with the pandemic and having been locked up or locked up, but also had more opportunity to maybe commune with nature than we did in our hectic lifestyles before. But the brain benefits of time spent in nature are massive. And

Whenever I'm asked a question that I don't necessarily factually know the answer to straight away, always take it back to evolution. There's a reason that our brains were wired in a certain way. And when we first became homo sapiens,

We walked on the savannah. We walked in the land. We ate what we could hunt, fish or harvest. And so our relationship with nature was, you know, we were dependent on it, but it was also a huge threat to us. Floods, storms, you know, fires, whatever.

It's the symbiotic relationship. And what we've done through agriculture and construction is just move ourselves further and further away from that. And even if you just think of one like super scientific example of that is that the quality and diversity of our gut flora has diminished so much since we lived in the cave. It's like reduced by, I don't wanna get the number wrong, but it's a shocking factor, like hundreds.

And agriculture has contributed to that. Antibiotics have contributed to that. Like, obviously, antibiotics save lives. And, you know, it's been an amazing advance for us as humans. But the fact that we eat food that's not as diverse as it used to be, that we...

don't necessarily eat those natural things, the prebiotic and probiotic foods and supplements that allow our gut bacteria to flourish. And we eat so much processed food and that stress, alcohol and antibiotics will damage our gut microbiome. That's one of the huge consequences of having moved away from nature.

And people ask all sorts of questions that we don't know all the answers to yet about why do we have more diseases like ME, like MS, like autism, like ADD. And some of the answers lie in that disconnection from nature and how that's shaped our bodies and our brains and how we live as a result of that.

Damn. Cool. So, okay. I mean, I'm just about to move to Marleybone, which is fairly close to Hyde Park. So I like the idea of... I've been dabbling with taking up running and just running across along Regent's Canal at the moment. But I really like the idea of kind of running around Hyde Park. There's something about that that feels nice. So we'll give it a go and try and maintain the habit. Do another little thing for me when you do that, which is...

Just take one minute to look at a leaf or a petal or a squirrel or something that's close up right in front of you in great detail. And then take one minute to look at a really large tree or building or a cloud in the distance and just see how that resets your nervous system. So there's a couple of... That's basically taking yourself away from sharp focus to...

a wide vista, which is part of like living in nature and on the savannah is that we love having an uninterrupted view of the horizon. It's really restful for the brain. Oh, yeah. And then as well as like 10 deep breaths, you can just do like, you can take, you can do a sharp intake of breath and just do like a really long sigh as well. That's a nice little way to reset your nervous system. And then I did this

real on Instagram that is called the half salamander and it's a way to reset your nervous system and I had no idea it would get like 1.7 million views yeah so it's a bit difficult to explain now but you look at that too so those are three things the sort of looking in detail to looking in the distance and

Sharp intake of breath and a big sigh and then this helps up. They're three really easy things that you can do. Yeah, this is something I came across on the Huberman Lab podcast recently. Most of us spend most of our time looking at near things and we almost never actually look at something in the distance. And apparently there's something super legit about that. Is that partly why, speculating, it feels so good to have an ocean view?

where it's like you can see the horizon there's something about that it's just like stupidly relaxing maybe there's something there okay so we've talked about stress so okay so when you say reset the nervous system by that do you mean that most of us tend to be in sympathetic mode in our work days and just taking that moment to pause kind of the Apple watch breath breathe thing it's just like okay we can chill it's all good tiger's not coming like it's all good like body can relax and

switching into parasympathetic mode into rest and recharge mode naturally helps us kind of reduce our cortisol level, reduce our blood pressure, it makes us feel great and also has all these positive health benefits. It's all of that stuff that you said and for me the additional benefit of it is knowing that I can control that and that it's not completely dependent on outside factors. So

To be honest, sitting here with you and chatting with you, even though obviously I'm thinking, feels really nice and relaxing and we're resonating. We're both former doctors and there's something that's very warm about that. But if you were a different kind of person and I felt maybe that you were really quizzing me with challenging questions on purpose to try to trip me up, then I could have a fright, flight, fight response to that.

Or, because I've trained myself in these ways to reset my nervous system and longer-term ways to build my resilience, I could find a way to not let you push me into that state. And knowing that I have the choice to do that, that's really, really empowering. Yeah. What are some longer-term ways to build resilience?

So here we're talking more like the things I said would take like nine months or more to build up. So that's having a really long-term journaling practice, long-term gratitude practice, practicing meditation, yoga, regularly spending time in nature, curating the sort of news and social media information that you allow into your brain.

being very careful about the kind of people that you hang around with. I made a video recently where I experimented with journaling for 90 days and it was great. It was so great. Now I've continued journaling, started bullet journaling as well. I have this little smart typewriter thing on my desk at home, which is literally a keyboard. All it has is one of those e-ink Kindle screens and

and all it does is that you write on it and it just connects to wi-fi and syncs it up with whatever so you can't physically can't get distracted doing anything other than just the writing and so i've been using that to journal each night along with the bullet journal there's something so nice about journaling um what does the neuroscience or evidence say around why journaling is legit yeah so um

At the very minimum, it's like a download of your emotions. And so with your, you know, any emotions, negative thoughts, unfinished tasks, if you keep them in your brain body system by just thinking about them in your mind, then you actually increase your cortisol levels and cortisol correlates with stress. So it's like, it's like a pressure cooker building up. If you speak it out loud,

write it out into a journal or do physical exercise and literally sweat out some of that cortisol, then you're releasing those negative emotions, negative thought patterns, anxieties, you know, worries about the future from your brain body system.

But I have, and I'd love to know if you've done this or not. I had an insight which I just stumbled across by myself, but it really makes sense, obviously, from the neuroplasticity point of view, is that if you go back and read over your journal, you see your thought process laid out in front of you. You see your patterns of behavior. You see like your decision-making tools, whether it's more logical or more intuitive. You see what you've written about your relationships with people. And

Seeing that in your own handwriting or even if it's been synced up and typed out for you, just knowing that it's your words and what you've thought and what you've said, you can't run away from that. So it can be so insightful and enlightening. And I've had that definitely with all of that stuff like emotions and thought patterns and intuition. But I also had it when I used to go to Boston twice a year to teach at MIT. And

I remember with the travel and the jet lag, just feeling that I was having these small muscular twitches and it was noticeable in bed at night. And I decided to read back over, not for that reason, but just anyway, I decided to read back over my journal from six months earlier when I was last in Boston. And I'd written in my journal, I'm getting these little muscular twitches. And so I worked out that I'd become magnesium deficient by flying. And so I basically

hence why I was carrying so many bottles of things with me when I was traveling, really upped my dose of magnesium for the trips and it never happened again. Oh, wow. And if I hadn't read back, I would never put two and two together. I would have thought it was just happening now and it hadn't happened before. What is the deal with magnesium? So, I mean, there are a lot of essential micronutrients, but magnesium is one that underlies...

lots of different physiological mechanisms in the body. So everything from sleep to mood to neuromuscular junctions to our joints, our skin. And it's very, very easily depleted by stress. That's the thing. So it's an important mineral, but there are quite, you know, there's also zinc and calcium and other important minerals, potassium. But

It's one that's very easily depleted by stress. And that is a big, you know, impact on our brains in modern and Western society, or really just in the modern world. So when we're stressed, and the stats show that 70% of us are sufficiently stressed to be magnesium deficient, you cannot eat enough leafy greens and nuts and seeds to replenish that you have to supplement. And

Supplementation by powder or capsule or tablet is fine, but it's best taken transdermally. Studies show that taking magnesium transdermally... Through the skin? Yeah. Like magnesium patches? Not so much patches, but gels, lotions. I bathe in magnesium flakes every day. No way. Yeah. Wow. Okay. Sorry, I interrupted you. Studies have shown that. There was a study that showed that it was equivalent to taking IV.

No way? Yeah. Bloody hell. That's cool. Yeah. How much ROI is there on this? Like, should I start beating in magnesium flakes for the...

minor benefit? It's not a minor benefit. I can physically tell the difference if I haven't. And if I choose to shower for a couple of days in a row instead of have a bath, then I put three handfuls of magnesium in instead of two. If I'm doing it five days a week, let's say, I'll do two handfuls. What difference does it make? What have you found? It helps with your sleep.

One of the biggest signs that you're magnesium deficient is that when you get one twitchy eyelid. Do you ever get that? Maybe I do, but I don't remember. But a lot of people say they do get it. So I never get that if I'm regularly bathing in magnesium. But I can get that, especially around the time of a lot of travel involving jet lag. Other little musculoskeletal twitches as well. Mood.

And just emotional regulation, your response to stress. You know, it's like some people say, I can just about hold it together when I'm at work. But when I get home, if, you know, if my partner's too demanding or my children are playing up, I just snap. So it's like, how much does it take you to snap? If I...

um you know if people are severely deficient in magnesium then it's just it's harder work to do the things that you need to do to regulate your emotions if you haven't put in the ingredients that you're required to be able to do that yeah and i guess like you know if someone has a seizure or something like magnesium is is often on the list of things to just whack in iv or something yeah and if you know like the biggest thing that i saw in medical school that was just like

such a shocker, like so easy to correct was when I did care of the elderly and people got UTIs and just how disorientated and confused and

how, how, how bad, how awful it looked like the state that they were in. And you could just like put in a bag of saline and it would make a massive difference, you know? And, and obviously then we, you would check electrolytes and. Yeah, that's a good point. So I, I, I'm not sure if it's just me, but like, I feel like there's a lot of skepticism around the idea of supplements, the idea that I, oh, I'm fine. Oh, like diet supplement companies equals scam, all of this kind of stuff.

A lot of medics I know are also very skeptical about supplements because, well, there's a normal range. Most people are in the normal range, etc., etc. But just intuitively, if someone's electrolytes are a little bit off, it can make a massive difference to them and you'd obviously whack in the electrolytes. If someone's fluid deplete, then it makes a huge difference to how unwell they look and how unwell they feel. You just give them saline and it's all good. And yet...

especially medics, even medics, like drinking water. Like, you know, most people I knew, including myself, were more dehydrated than our patients were when we were working because it's just like you wouldn't take the time to have some water and you'd, you know, have a wee once a day and it would be super concentrated and you'd be like, oh, it's fine. But you'd measure someone else's urine output and you'd be like, oh, hello.

That doesn't look very good. Let's whack in two litres of saline in you. And apparently nurses get more kidney stones than like most other professions because they have the same thing. They don't have time to go to the loo or drink water. Yeah, that's a really nice way of putting. And I would also say that for a start, most people are not in the normal range for vitamin D, for example, especially us with like darker skin, but pretty much, you know, in our English weather, a lot of people, regardless of skin colour, are vitamin D deficient. And that has a really...

important correlation with future cancer risk as well. So, you know, it's an important one to supplement if you are deficient. And I would go back and say that I agree, ideally, we would all get all of our nutrition from our really nutrition dense, high quality, organic, you know, biodynamic food. But the reality is that most people are not eating in that way. And

I do try to eat in that way as much as possible. And, but naturally I'm vitamin D deficient. I can't eat enough food to correct that. I have to supplement in the winter months. Um, so, and magnesium, I know that I have to, and a probiotic I know makes a massive difference to like my, my, my gut health, my gut brain connection, my immunity. Um,

So I do think it's really important to know yourself really well, but not everybody's a medic and medics, like you said, are often the worst at neglecting themselves. I feel like since I've left medicine, I've had more personal benefit from the knowledge that I have as a doctor because I'm now in health and well-being. Yeah.

You know, I'm one of those people that can tell like two days before I'm coming down with a cold or a flu and I can sometimes even like, well, I haven't had a cold or flu for years as long as I can remember. And then at the other end of the spectrum, there are people who like the day that they go on holiday, they get sick because they've kind of been saving up all that stress and just trying to get through the deadline kind of thing.

So I think knowing yourself and then understanding strategically which areas you may need to supplement. And that can be from a blood test or it can be from just understanding that if you're really busy and stressed and you're feeling fatigued, that probably a vitamin B complex could make a difference to that. Try it. If it doesn't make a difference, you don't have to take it again. If it does, then keep taking it. What sort of time period would you expect a noticeable change?

I would say one to three months, depending on the level of depletion. Okay. And is this the sort of thing that you have to actively monitor your own response to it in terms of how am I feeling today and sample that? Or is it like, oh, damn, I feel so much better than I did three months ago. Like what sort of response do people have? I would say the latter is more realistic. Really? Or just like a, oh, wow, I've noticed myself. I mean, okay. Let's say you're going to invest in taking something like heights, which...

isn't cheap because it doesn't have any fillers in it or caking agents and it's got all high quality ingredients and everything, then

Even then, I mean, let's be realistic. You tell me, would you write down how fatigued you're feeling every day? I mean, like I've been taking a hike for a while, but I wouldn't be able to even, like, I can't tell the difference in my focus levels when I'm dehydrated versus when I'm not because of just like, I feel like I'm just like this, but I'm clearly not like, and so there's this level of self-awareness of our own levels of focus and our own levels of stress in a way.

And if I were to poll myself at almost any day, it's like, how's my contentment level? I'd be like, honestly, it's like 10 out of 10. I can't imagine being any happier. And so I find it hard to imagine a noticeable effect of any kind of dietary supplement, if that makes sense. So I'm actually the same as you. So I obviously look at all the studies and the surveys that we do for heights.

And so I have seen the percentage increase that people have reported in things like sleep quality and memory and concentration.

It doesn't make a noticeable difference for me because of the way that I live and eat and the supplements that I was already taking. But I'm pretty sure that if I stopped taking it and didn't eat quite as well as I do, I would notice a deterioration. So I think it's like the delta. It's like, how much difference is it making? Apart from vitamin D and probably magnesium, I'm not

as far as I know, deficient in anything else. But I'm assuming that the way that I'm eating is enough to kind of keep me head above water. But if I supplement, then I'm not risking going below that threshold. Yeah. I mean, that's why I subscribe to Heitzler because I'm just like, "You know what? I don't want to even run the risk of a deficiency on any of these things. It's a fairly small price to pay in the grand scheme of things, so why not?" And

good studies, good quality ingredients. I'm never going to eat 45 blueberries a day, so why not? You know, all that kind of stuff. And getting the omega oils in a palatable way is quite difficult as well. And with omega oils, you do actually have to like take them consistently. And I found that the Height's capsule is the easiest way to do that. So, you know, I'll have a spoonful of fish oil. I don't care about the taste, but

It's harder to make that into a habit, put it that way. Yeah. I did a blood test with the stuff. It was a couple of months ago now. I had a high omega six to three ratio.

which apparently means I eat too much red meat and not enough fish. So I'm now making more of an effort to eat more fish and eat less red meat. That's good. Yeah. Okay. So we've talked a lot about stress. You threw out the term gut health and probiotics and gut-brain axis. What is going on there? I feel like this is such a thing that some people talk about

Six years of med school, not once did anyone mention the phrase gut-brain axis, except maybe in a postscript in a physiology lecture in first year. And we had maybe two lectures on nutrition, which were awful in first year. And beyond that, no one cared anymore. Like what is going on with gut-brain axis, gut health? Like what is gut health? How does it affect our lives?

So I don't know when you were at medical school, but a lot of research has been done quite recently on the gut-brain axis. So we've always known it existed, like you said. I think it was mentioned once in preclinical. But now, and this is a really exciting, I'm really excited about this area of research. So the gut-brain connection is now agreed to be bidirectional. So we used to think

that the quality of the gut microbiome had an impact on your mental state and your brain power. But now we know that it goes both ways and that it is through certain nerves, but actually it's through a much wider network of nerves than we ever knew before.

It's through cytokine messaging, which is chemical messages that get sent in the blood and again are bidirectional. It's also through hormones.

So, basically, it's a complex dynamic bi-directional system. That sounds like I'm saying like everything and nothing in one phrase. And interestingly, all the factors that contribute to gut, the health of your gut microbiome, so the good bacteria that live in your gut are the same things that we've talked about already. Sleep,

Because when you are jet lagged, your gut bacteria get jet lagged too. That's why you go to the loo at the wrong time of the day and you're hungry at the wrong time of the day. Okay. And obviously nutrition and hydration would affect your gut. And we...

Don't really understand why, but doing exercise improves the quality and diversity of your gut bacteria as well. And then the psychological aspect. So some psychological therapies like CBT, cognitive behavioral therapy, and mindfulness practices. We know more about the effects that they have on certain receptors in the brain, but they also have direct effects on the gut bacteria.

Do we know how or is that an active area of research? I mean, I think we know that when we're stressed, the gut can become leaky and it can leak hormones into the bloodstream that then has an inflammatory effect on the rest of the body. So I think at the minimum, we know that it's reducing the pro-inflammatory effect. Okay. How do I know if my gut health is good or not good? Is it the quality of my poo?

It is. And actually, you can have your stool samples sent off to a lab and they can actually give you the breakdown. I am going to do this with Sophie from Heights in the next couple of weeks. Yeah. Yeah, I think she loves poo, apparently. So as a doctor, again, of course, you could examine it, but most people aren't going to do that and they wouldn't know really anything.

necessarily what it meant by the colour or the consistency and the frequency and that kind of thing. What does it mean? What is gold standard when it comes to poo? I haven't been a doctor for way longer than you. You should be answering that. No, you've got the whole stool chart thing, but they're like, oh, broadly, if it's not like a five or six on a stool chart, it's probably okay. But beyond that... Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, regular, and that's anything from...

one or a few times a day to like a few times a week. It's just very individual. So you need to know what's right for you. Like the color, I would say either looks like what you know you've eaten. So for example, don't have a heart attack that you've got blood in your stool if you ate beetroot the night before. And, you know, the consistency is basically...

If it's too hard, you're constipated. If it's too runny, it's diarrhea and anything in between is fine. And then things like blood and mucus, they're also things to look out for, obviously. But mostly, if people do a food diary and they want to connect that to their bowel movements and their mood, then it's...

Yeah, it's sort of like once or twice a day if you go daily. I would say probably looking out for any change is the most important thing. And that's with your urine and your stools. But if you really want to know about your actual gut microbiome, you do have to send a sample off. So what does that tell you?

I think it actually tells you the names of the different types of bacteria that you have. I haven't done this myself, but I've been offered to have my poo sent to America, but I declined. Because I eat so healthily and I take probiotics, I don't feel there's no issue in that department. I don't particularly feel a need to go that extra step with that testing. Okay.

What are probiotics and should everyone be taking probiotics? So I'm going to go with the second part of that question first because I don't like a one-size-fits-all solution. I mean, I think it's a general advice to take probiotics if you're traveling a lot, if you've taken antibiotics, if you are feeling stressed, if you do eat a lot of processed food, then

It's not going to harm people, you know, and like with everything with medicine and looking after the health of my loved ones, often I do come back to this, do no harm. So I think a good quality probiotic that's out there, if you took it for six, eight, 12 weeks, it's not going to harm you and it's probably going to benefit you. I take one all the time and I was doing the after travel,

or a 12-week course once a year just to like give myself a boost but from the beginning of the pandemic I started taking one every single day. What does it do? What benefit do you see? So it does help you to go to the loo regularly and it basically it

it replenishes the good bacteria that are already in your gut. And then the prebiotic foods like onion, garlic, asparagus, artichoke, they actually feed the bacteria that are then multiplying in your gut, the good bacteria. And so, for example, when you take antibiotics, because that's killing bad bacteria in your body, wherever it is, it also kills all the good bacteria in your gut. And then you can have an imbalance with things like

um, fun fungus. And so it's basically keeping your gut in good balance so that it can digest your food, not leak bad things into your blood system, not cause you to get bloated or irregular and, and send good signals to the brain. And, and there is a connection between, um, the bone marrow cells that are responsible for our immunity and the quality of our gut microbiome as well. So

these kind of longer connected fields, like when we connect up endocrinology, which is the hormones, with immunology, which is our immune system, and psychology and neurology, there's such a thing as immunopsychoendocrinology, which is the connection between our mental state, our hormones, and our immune system. And so...

All of our systems, I think, are connected in a much more complex and dynamic way than we understand. But that gut microbiome does seem to be almost like stem cells for a lot of other important systems in the body. And when it comes to food choices that are good slash bad for your gut,

Is that like an individual thing? Like some people's guts respond really well to red meat and others don't? Or are there some general principles around what sorts of foods are good for your gut? Yeah, so there are general principles like plant-based and hydrating foods. Sorry, hydrating foods? Like cucumber and melon. So foods that obviously have a lot of water in them. Because you actually retain more water from plants

food that is high in hydration than just drinking water because that tends to run through. Foods that are high in antioxidants, the good fats, pretty much everything that we were saying earlier. So like, you know, that healthy diet, bit of fish and seafood, not too much meat. The real no-no's are processed food, smoked food, too much alcohol, antibiotics.

And the real kind of yeses for the gut microbiome are the fermented foods. That's sauerkraut, kimchi, kefir, kombucha. I try to have one of those things almost every day.

And then there are some more genetic things to think about. So for example, for a while, coconut oil was a big craze, particularly for the medium chain triglycerides, the MCT oils. But if you genetically come from a country where coconut trees grew,

you're more likely to be able to tolerate coconut oil in your gut and for it to not affect your lipid profile too much than if you start taking a lot of MCT oil in your coffee, but genetically you weren't really made to metabolize coconuts that well. And so the meat thing is probably also along those lines. So depending on where your genetic heritage came from, um,

whether a lot of meat was eaten or not. Having read your book, it strikes me that you are somewhat into Eastern spirituality practices like yoga, meditation, manifestation, affirmation-y type stuff. And I first read The Secret a couple of years ago and I was like, there's no way anyone can take this seriously. And then I saw how successful it was. I was like, oh wow, people are taking this seriously.

And I read your book recently. I think it was like last month or two months ago. Oh, really recently? Yeah, very recently. And I was like, oh, you know, maybe there is something to this manifestation-y type stuff.

But then around the same time, I've started to dabble with books around spirituality, and basically 100% of them talk about meditation, and like 90% of them talk about yoga. And so clearly, there's something going on here, which benefits us, and which science seems to have sort of scratched the surface of, but not really. What is your take on all this stuff? How should a normal rational thinking person approach the realm of

spirituality broadly. Well, I've probably been on a similar journey to you in that it was very difficult for me to accept something that wasn't evidence-based. I partly started the research for my book to convince myself that there was an evidence base for the laws of attraction. That's where it started. I spent one summer holiday researching what the laws of attraction were

finding out that there wasn't even necessarily agreement about exactly what they were, but kind of whittling it down to the most commonly agreed 10 or 12, and then just trying to apply the cognitive science to it. Because I'd heard about all the quantum science and the vibrations and things, but I felt like, well, if it's to do with the power of your thinking, surely it should be explained by cognitive science. So let me see if I can do that. And it was surprisingly easy to explain most of the laws of attraction through cognitive science. And

The one or two that maybe I couldn't find evidence for, I sort of came to that point of where what I said to you earlier, which was, I don't think it's going to harm you. So if you're happy to do it without the evidence, do it. And if you don't want to do it without the evidence, then don't. And then...

Through that, I became much more interested in visualization. But I had personally been doing vision boards really successfully for over a decade by the time I wrote my book. And so understanding more about the neuroscience of vision

the selective filtering that your brain does and the selective attention that you can choose to pay to certain things and the way that your brain tags what's important in value to it in your brain. That was all like, okay, wow. And what was really gratifying is that people who weren't scientists at all said that understanding that the science, that there was science and what it was, made them actually do something like a vision board or visualization where they'd heard of it before but never actually bothered to do it.

And then being a senior lecturer at MIT and my previous book being Neuroscience for Leadership and working with the kind of people that I do in financial services, I suppose it was a bit of a risk to go out there with a book that's about science and spirituality and suddenly start being more open about the fact that I do yoga and I grew up with meditation. But the response to my book was,

that actually had a huge impact on me. So by doing the research, I was like, yeah, this is legit. And now I understand even better how it works. And that contributes to me being able to do visualization and manifestation better. But just seeing the amazing impact it had on people, just seeing the numbers go up of the international translations. I mean, on the day that my book came out in the UK,

I'd already signed 24 international translation contracts. And now I think we're up to 38. And that means it's having global appeal that people of all different races and cultures and religions and belief systems, it's got that appeal. And, you know, I absolutely love neuroscience and psychology and neuroplasticity. And so that tells me that

Personally, that journey for me was that it's okay to go out there and talk about stuff that you believe in in private and not keep it completely separate to your professional life. And so, yeah, I grew up with yoga and meditation in the household, but I just wanted to fit in and be like my friends in London who didn't grow up with those things.

And those things circled back to me later in life. And now it's cool to be into those things anyway. But both yoga and meditation are forms of mindfulness. So I use that as an umbrella term like sport. And then under sport, there's all sorts of different sports. And under mindfulness, there's meditation, there's yoga, there's spending time in nature, there's barefoot walking, there's eating mindfully, there's paying attention. What's mindfulness good for you?

I'd love to put that back onto you and say, how could it be good to be mindless? You know, thoughtless, not paying attention. Okay. So the specific scenario I have in mind is, um, so I walk, I walk here every morning, a nice half an hour walk by the canal. It's all very nice. Um,

This morning, like most mornings, I have an audiobook on at like 3.5 times speed. And I was listening to The Bomb by some author, which is about the history of the nuclear arsenal and how that evolved from the 1960s up to the present day. So I was just like, I want to learn more about the topic. It's kind of cool. And so I've got this like... If someone were to...

see that they would be like this is the archetypal example of toxic productivity this guy is a psychopath and a sociopath he's off his rocker like what why the fuck is he listening to a book at 3.5 times speed can't even understand what's going on about bringing like nuclear arms proliferation i quite liked it i was like you know i was walking by the canal listening to this book i've got like three podcast interviews today where i can have cool conversations with people like life is good

But part of me is like, yeah, but what if I took the AirPods out? What if I just kind of enjoyed the walk and walked mindfully and stuff? And I've tried that a few times and I haven't noticed a...

I don't feel as if I'm suddenly way more stressed if I'm listening to an audiobook at three times speed compared to if I'm not. But I wonder if I'm missing something. That's kind of why I ask. Okay. So am I your third person of today? You are, yeah. Okay. And I'm using that to assess you because I know that three in a day is the maximum that I can do. And with that third one, I start...

feeling a bit like, did I ask that question to Tara or did I ask that person, you know, that question to the person I was with earlier? Because it all starts to like merge into one a little bit. So you feel so alert and engaged. I think you're like definitely in your happy place and good at this and like nothing's detracted from your mental performance.

And, you know, you're also at that stage in your life, like your age and where you are with your business that you want to be absorbing all this information and doing like as much as you can. But maybe it's about just understanding that there is something good in terms of cortisol levels and about spending some time where you're not always doing. Okay, yeah. And...

I'm guessing, and we'd have to keep in touch to prove that this is true, that as you get older, that that might change. So I think, I don't know how old you are, but I appreciate it. I'm 28. Okay, so I'm a lot older than you are. So yeah, when I was 28, I could, you know, I mean, because of how long I was at university, I was probably a junior doctor when I was 28. I think, how old was I? Around that time, 27, 28. Yeah, 27.

So, yeah, you know, I did like weeks of nights on call on a vascular surgery ward and like got up and went on holiday the next day and like still socialized. And yeah, OK, now that I know how young you are, yes, it's your age. You're able to do all those things. OK, so if I so is it is the idea and I guess for people listening to this, that if if someone does notice a deterioration in their mental performance and like, oh, I find myself unable to concentrate, I'm

At that point, you're like, okay, let's assess and figure out what you're doing across all these different domains. So I would say that, you know, you're so young and obviously you said that you're very happy. So I'm assuming that like nothing has like seriously affected your health or your mental health or whatever. But I wouldn't say wait till that starts to deteriorate because one of the things that I really, really felt for myself during the pandemic was

was how much better off I was because I had been proactive about building up my mental resilience and my mindfulness. So for example, I have always, as far as, as long as I can remember, since I was a child, I was taught it as a child, but as an adult, it was such an ingrained habit to eat mindfully. So I always pause before I take my first mouthful. I always give gratitude. I try to not speak when I'm eating.

I don't mind if other people do, but I try and I never ever watch television or have it on in the background or have my phone anywhere near me when I'm eating. And so what I found in lockdown, where obviously we were forced to be in a way that wasn't natural for us, that we didn't necessarily want, we were also in terrible fear of what could happen to us if we didn't adhere to these restrictions, that

I didn't really have to think about being mindful because I had those three meals a day where that was a mindfulness practice for me. I was very fortunate. I was able to spend time in nature. And just the way that I chose to interact with people, because suddenly when you're working from home,

I started off sitting at the kitchen table and that meant that anyone that walked past me thought I wasn't working. So they would just talk to me. And my first response was to feel like I'm trying, I'm in the middle of an email, like that's a bit annoying. And then I thought, what's more important, this email that I can finish in five minutes time or that a member of my family wants to talk to me? And so then I would turn and give my full attention and say, yes, I'm really interested in what you have to say. And then

You know, within a few weeks, I'd moved myself out of the kitchen. So there were times that I thought this is such, it's not life or death. It's not important. But I became so depressed at one point that we couldn't go on holiday. And I just had, you know, a really down day where I felt really sorry for myself. And I allow myself that from time to time. But...

I did think if I hadn't done all of the gratitude and journaling and that kind of stuff before, there were quite a few things that could have dragged me downwards much more than they did. Yeah. So when it comes to yoga, for example, and yoga and meditation, it seems like, at least from the stuff I've read and the way people describe it, there is something more than just mindfulness going on.

But where people describe kind of these out-of-body experiences and kind of the death of the ego and like connecting with the world and feeling energy and all of that stuff.

Have you had experience of that? How do you think about that as a scientist and a doctor? Yes, a scientist and a doctor, I wouldn't use that terminology. Yoga actually, in Sanskrit, means union, and it's the union of the mind and the body. Mindfulness and meditation are that connection between the mind and the body, so understanding that the

The mind is embodied. It's not just in your brain. It's everywhere. And being one, so union in that way. So I would say that those things are mindfulness, that when you practice them regularly, your cortisol levels are lower than people age matched, people of the same gender that don't.

I can't speak to those individual experiences, but that's not phraseology that I... Awesome. Yeah, I'm 16 days through the Sam Harris Waking Up Meditation course.

I was reading some stuff around non-duality, non-dual meditation and sort of this, how people who unlock the ability to experience that and feel like it's really life-changing. And so I was like, I mean, that sounds pretty cool. So I'll give it a go. See what happens. Well, let me know how you go at the end of the 30 days. Yeah, we'll do. We'll do. Like there's some studies have been done on that app that found that I think like,

uh the stat i read was like 10 of users who complete the 30-day course say that they it taught them non-dual meditation and of those half of them said it was like the most life-changing thing they've ever done okay those are sufficiently good odds that yeah high expected value why not but i i would really really like trust and respect your opinion on your experience at the end of it you would oh yeah yeah i'll report back when it comes to mindfulness and this genre of stuff um

Again, what are some actionable things that someone listening to this could do that are fairly non-odious that would have a big... potentially help them level up in terms of kind of stress reduction, spirituality, this sort of thing? I mean, some of the things that we've discussed already. So like paying attention to your breath. That's a really minimal one. Mindful eating...

is a favorite one of mine. How do you do that? What is mindful eating? Well, the way that it started for me in lockdown was that because I had no boundary between work and home, I sort of had, I could either do a time like six o'clock because that's, I can do all my US work in that time and still not be too late. And then my like chopping of my vegetables in the kitchen and preparing dinner, that was

That was like a mindfulness activity for me. So I'd be like very, very focused on that. Didn't want any distractions around. So you're not listening to a podcast or an audio? My goodness. Okay. Occasionally I might, but really, really occasionally, like not more than once every two weeks. So then you're just fully focused on like chopping the thing? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Peeling, chopping, and because I compost, so then knowing that it's going back into nature. Thinking about things like...

the bite size that it's going to be for the person that I'm going to present it to, like really like thinking all the way through. And then mindful eating is just that you sit down, you're mostly you're quiet,

that you give gratitude for your food and then you just you you just eat your food you don't do anything else you know and you don't rush it like my goodness yeah what a radical thought and you appreciate the flavors and stuff like that without watching tv without like doing other stuff yeah because i find that if i'm like i'm often so mindless while eating i've just eaten a whole plate of stuff i don't even know if i was full like haven't really enjoyed the food but i've just been like

watching a YouTube video at double speed or something while doing so. Oh my goodness. And then my girlfriend is big into mindful eating so occasionally she'll be like, you know, we should try eating mindfully. And I'm like, that's a good idea, you know, let's try that. Oh, that's good. You've got that influence. And look, I'm not one of these neuroscientists that doesn't watch TV. I love TV. I watch so much TV, including trash. So it's not a comment on that at all. It's just about...

If I'm picking that as one of my mindfulness activities, then I've got to be focused on that at the time. And, you know, I also do a lot of barefoot walking. What's the deal with that? Like, why is that just because it feels like a connection with nature? Yeah, it's like it's a grounding practice. So it just connects you to nature. Yeah.

Some people believe that it has an effect on the electromagnetic field, but it's more just being in nature and being primal like we were when we lived in the cave. And yeah, that exercise of staring into the distance, I really love that one. But I think probably the most important one in life is paying attention to people that you love. Because you can be half paying attention whilst you're watching a YouTube video on 2.5 times speed and that's not really love, is it? So I think...

Having that time with people where you're like together, you're giving each other that eye contact. You're like genuinely listening to that person. You're sharing things that they know are special, that you're sharing it with them. And just sharing experiences, but also kind of doing it mindfully. I think reading can be mindfulness. For me, swimming is like my most mindful activity. So I do like running. I do like my exercise bike.

But swimming is the most mindful one for me. Amazing. We talked a little bit about vision boards. What is a vision board? How do I get started with making a vision board if I want to do the thing? Okay. So a vision board is essentially a collage made by hand where you actually have magazines and you cut images out and stick them down. You can do it digitally. But I actually prefer to call them action boards because...

A little bit like what you were saying earlier about the secret is that, and I'm not saying this is said in the secret, but there is this idea that you can create this fantasy of the life that you want and sit at home and wait for it to come true and do nothing about it. And the science, but also just my way of going about life is that, yeah, create that dream, that ideal and do the collage and have it somewhere in your house that you look at it all the time.

and visualize it becoming true. But also you have to go out there and do things to make it come true. You know, if you say, oh, I really want to get married and have a baby. Well, then start looking after your health and meeting suitable people rather than going out partying all the time. You know, if you think, oh, I really...

like, hate my job, but it pays the bills, but I'd love to go off and be a freelance, whatever, then ask yourself what you can actually do about that. Who can you ask your network to introduce you to that might help to move you closer to that? So everything from really, really little steps all the way up to perhaps bigger things that you could do that maybe you have to build yourself up to a little bit. So I really say, yeah, I make a board once a year. I keep it somewhere visible.

And it's fine to keep it visible only to you and not necessarily visible to others. But I keep mine visible to others. So I'm like, I have no reservations about talking about these things that I want. I'm not ashamed of them. I believe that I deserve them. So anyone can look at them. And when I started up my business, that included the amount of money that I wanted to earn each year. So, you know, the kind of thing that not everybody tells everybody about. But for me, it's like it's out there.

And then looking at it at least, well, looking at it, I say at least daily, I keep mine by my bed so I can look at it twice daily. Or I naturally look at it twice daily without even thinking. Visualizing it becoming true and having the absolute belief that it will. And one I've added in more lately is like giving gratitude that this is coming true, like it's unfolding now, even if you can't see all of it yet.

And then going out there and doing something, however small, to move yourself towards those things. And what's the science behind how this stuff works? So it is back to something I briefly mentioned earlier, which is selective attention, selective filtering and value tagging. And that is that...

We're so bombarded with information in the modern day that what you would read in a newspaper in one day today is the amount of information that somebody would have received in their lifetime 100 years ago. And even 100 years ago, people were overly bombarded with information. So it's gone exponential. And so for similar reasons to how we're not aware of our clothes on our body all day, the brain naturally filters out things that aren't vital to our survival. And

If we are not mindful, then that's being chosen subconsciously without us having any impact on that. But if we do something like create a vision board or visualize something that we want, then we're training the brain more to be aware of the things that we really want. So then when it does the selective filtering, it doesn't filter out

that person that could introduce you to somebody about your business or that person that could introduce you to somebody for a date. Because you might think, well, that's not really important for me today. I need to put food on the table or I need to get this document done. But those sort of more long-term important things, the brain will just not filter them out. And then you're more likely to pay attention. And basically that means noticing and then grasping opportunities that can move you closer to your goal.

And the value tagging is a system that literally tags in order of importance the things that you want in life. But it's partly logical and partly emotional. So logical will be the very basic fundamental, these are the things I need to survive. And then the emotional will be more like your wishes and your desires.

like the innermost things, the longer term things and often logical trumps emotional. So you have to like move that balance and keep reminding yourself, these are the things that I really want. And then your brain adapts to you rather than you just being kind of not the kind of driver of the journey. Okay, yeah. So...

I remember this was one of the things that most struck me when I was listening to the audiobook of your book while doing those canal walks, actually, where I was thinking, okay, I'm going to make a vision board. And then I found some online whiteboard-y software thingy and posted a photo of Zac Efron with six-pack abs on it. I was like, cool, that's cool.

Body goals. And then I just never looked at it because it was never a thing that I would look at. But since I've started bullet journaling recently, this is now a thing that I look at every day where I've got my goals and things that I was, oh yeah, I did have try and do a standup comedy thing on my list of goals.

And so yesterday I was interviewing someone who's done stand-up comedy and I remembered, oh yes. I was like, hey, do you want to do a YouTube collab where you help me do a stand-up comedy set? And he was like, yeah, sure. And I think I wrote that goal like two months ago and had I not looked at it, I would have forgotten that that was even a thing that I wanted to do because I was so focused on like, you know, let's make this podcast good. That's like every other thing that got in the way. So I love the idea of having like a physical board where I can like stick stuff on it and actually just shove it on my bedside so I can look at it twice a day. And I feel like that would almost certainly have better...

benefits. How do you do it? Do you divide life into eight different areas and do it like that? What's your actual process for this? You can do it like that. You can have it like travel, work, home, love, health, whatever. You don't have to, but I do tend to group things.

And I like to leave some space because I am not arrogant enough to think that I can think of all of the most amazing things that could ever happen for me. So I like to leave a bit of space for magic. I do choose which sections touch each other and which sections don't. So things like home and life, they have to be in balance. But, you know, some things like my own personal like fitness goals don't necessarily have to be completely connected to those two things. Yeah.

And I think positioning is important. So things like, and it's just what it means to you, you know, things that are at the top could be like that's top priority, things at the bottom could be that's foundational, you know, it just kind of depends. But I think it's good to be intentional about that. How big a canvas do you use? I don't use a massive one. I use a...

Half the size of that. Oh, okay. Yeah. And then do you get print off images? I've had a bigger one than that as well. In lockdown, I did a really big one. Nice. Yeah. And do you print things off or do you buy some magazines and cut things out? So the reason I wanted to come back to this, because you said you did a whiteboardy thing, is the reason I do magazines is that if you print stuff off, that means you are limiting yourself to what you can think of. Because you've got to go and search for it. When you look through magazines, you'll find images that you're drawn to and you need to work out why.

Or I try not to use words that much, but sometimes there's a phrase that really just captures what you want. And so it's good maybe if you're very sure about some things, sure, look them up and print them off. But do go through some magazines because then you might see something that you didn't expect. Oh, that sounds great. I'm just imagining like this would actually make for an interesting video as well. Like starting, you know, I tried a vision board for 30 days, you know, starting with the science of manifesting and how that works and then being like, all right.

You might have to try it for longer than 30 days. I do them annually. Yeah, no, I'm just thinking if I want to do it like this year rather than in January. Yeah. Well, you need to do it before January. So it's like fully set up for January. Oh, nice. That's a good shot actually. And it doesn't even have to be January. September's like back to school. Yeah, that kind of vibe. Okay, cool. I'm sold. When's your birthday? May. Okay, so that's another time you can do it. Yeah, that's a great shot. Okay, I'm sold. Vision boarding, here we come.

buy some magazines, cut some things out. I've really started to like the analogness of stuff since starting the bullet journal thing and getting like a Polaroid camera. And there's something nice about, you know, flexing that like old secondary school muscle, just like highlighting things and making stuff look pretty. And the tactile nature of it in an otherwise very like

sort of online digital type life. Well, that's actually part of my process as well, which is that when you do a vision board, it's color, it's tactile. It's not just, you know, it's different to writing a list. So it is stimulating your other senses. What sort of stuff have you had on the vision board in the past that's kind of come true? Come true. Sounds weird to say, but yeah. So I've had a lot of things. One of them was in the first year of my business, I

thinking about how much money I wanted to earn and working out how much I needed to live. And then a friend challenging me and saying, well, that's not really very vision board, like you should double it. And I said, but that's absolutely not realistic for this first year. But I did, I found the number that was double and I liked it and I put it on there. And sure enough, so I was like, okay, well, I could double this again.

And so I did doubling for quite a few years and then eventually it plateaued because I can't live. I'd have no more hours in the day. And when I was buying my first flat after I got divorced, I found a picture of a kitchen and a bathroom that I liked and they were on my vision board. And I liked the kitchen, but it had one orange wall and I didn't like the orange wall, but I liked everything else about the kitchen. And

The bathroom, I liked everything about it, but it had a wooden loo seat, which I didn't like either, but I liked everything else. And the first flat that I bought, the kitchen had an orange wall, which my ex-husband then painted white for me. And it had a wooden seat, which I also changed. And then, you know, lots of specific travel places I wanted to go to, lots of business goals, writing the book, you know, had like an old fashioned typewriter on my vision board one year.

And then in 2015, I realized, you know, I've been divorced for quite a long time. I was working like a maniac and I just realized that I was kind of running away from opening up my heart again. So for the year of 2014, it was all travel and business and I put a tiny heart on it and like nothing happened. So at the end of 2015, I thought, okay, if I really believe in this vision board stuff,

I should open myself up to doing it for love as well as like work and travel. And I found a picture of like a prominent engagement ring in a newspaper. And I put that on the top left because left is like left hand and heart and everything. And then I found this phrase and I don't, like I said, I don't normally use phrases, but it said joy comes out of the blue and it just really, really spoke to me. I can't tell you why. And I put that top center and then I had some housey stuff and

And I had a rhino and a tiger because I was interested in conservation. Trying to think what else was on it. Those are the main things. And so I made that in December 2015. On February 2016, so like a month and a bit later, I met the person that I was going to marry on a plane. So that's joy comes out of the blue because we met in the sky. And three months later, we were together. Six months after that, we were engaged.

A year later, we got married and we didn't ask for gifts. We chose charities and I chose a conservation charity. And the housey stuff that I'd put on there looked exactly like the house that we then renovated. I mean, that vision board stays by my bed because it's a reminder that that's how specific you can be and like how things can come true. And it's really incredible. And since then, it's been more back to like work stuff and travel. Yeah. That's really cool.

So someone a bit skeptical listening to this might be like, okay, come on, you've been vision boarding for 10 years. Let's say you've got 20 items in a vision board. That's 200 items worth of stuff. Like almost by chance, some of them are bound to come true. And then you're going to tell yourself a story that, oh, these things came true and therefore dot, dot, dot. And I think it's similar to the skeptic attitude towards like, oh, I was thinking about this person and they rang. It's like, well, you probably think about 20 people a day and they don't ring, but the one that works is the one that you remember. Yeah.

How do you think about that kind of response to vision-boarding manifest-y type stuff, which I've come across on the internet? Yeah. So, I mean, there is such a thing as confirmation bias, which is obviously that when something gets proven right, that we take that as evidence that we were right. And when something doesn't get proven right, we forget about it. There is that. I'm not going to deny that. But

I personally, and I have so many messages from people who've read my book and listened to me on podcasts, have been so specific about the things that I've asked for. And if I look at the ratio of the things that I put on my board that have come true, some of them have taken longer, some of them haven't come true yet. It's an impressive statistic. If it was going to be random, it's way more than random. And it really comes back to

the fact that it must be true that if you know what you want and you put your mind to it and you take steps towards achieving it, it's more likely to happen. And so with these sort of ideas that, well, it could be just that you're noticing it because of confirmation bias, or it could be that you were lucky,

or it could be that you've got more opportunities in life or whatever. All of those things could be true, but you could also make your life better and get more things in your life that you want if you were just open to these things. Absolutely. I love it. Um, final thing I'd like to ask you about if you're open to it and we can absolutely cut this if you're not. Um, so, and I'm, I'm asking for selfish reasons. Um,

Any lessons like that you're taking away from marriage number one that you're applying to marriage number two that could abstract to other like relationship advice for other people? Yeah, that's I don't know. I mean, in general, I would say that my journey between marriages was when I, you know, I got divorced when I changed career.

So all of that stuff like reading Jungian psychology, looking into Buddhism, looking into like the laws of attraction, soul searching for myself and starting really on the path of more mindfulness and gratitude and journaling and resilience training. All of those helped me to

become the person that I was by the time I got married again. And it was nine years between marriages, so quite a long time. And obviously my career had completely changed. And look, like a normal human, I carried some of the issues that I had from the first marriage into the beginning of the relationship. But I'd have to say, obviously I was more mature and I knew more, but really I

One of the biggest thing I learned was that even though I'm a doctor and I've got a PhD in neuroscience and I've done a lot of personal development, I just met someone that was so lovely and amazing and kind and generous and tolerant of all my little bad habits and stuff. It was just easy. I was lucky. Yeah. Yeah.

It may not have worked out like that. People often say that marriages are hard and it's the effort you put into it and stuff. And then some people are like, well, if you find the right person, it doesn't feel like effort. Yeah. It sounds like you're more in the second camp. Well, I think, I mean, I'm probably not giving myself enough credit for all the personal development that I did, but I also met somebody very compatible. So...

Yeah, it didn't take that much effort. And also my first husband is still an incredible person as well. So we were just young. Yeah. Lovely. Well, Tara, thank you so much. This has been wonderful. Any final asks that you have for the audience who might be watching or listening to this? Well, it would be lovely if they follow me on Instagram at DrTaraSwart. And if they were interested in reading my book, definitely.

but they can also listen to me on podcasts. And I actually have my own podcast launching called Reinvent Yourself with Dr. Tara, which is about neuroplasticity and its stories of people's life changes. So if they'd like to listen to that too, that would be amazing. Fantastic. And we'll put links to all of those things in the show notes and the video description. And of course, a link to Heights, which is a supplement that you work with, I'm an investor in, and both of us take on the daily. So Tara, thank you so much. Thank you.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching.

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