Hello everyone, I'm Diane Gorsell, also known as Silver
Disobedience, and this is the Silver Disobedience Perception
Dynamics podcast. And today we're going to be
talking with an expert in a about a topic that I think's on
a lot of people's minds. I hear all the time now, and I
often think it myself, that my focus sometimes just doesn't
seem like what it once was. Is it because I'm older?
Well, I certainly am. Is it stress?
I don't feel it, but maybe you do.
I don't know. Is it the news?
Well, that's ever changing, but it's always been changing.
What's causing people to feel less focused than at other times
in their lives? My guest today is going to help
us unlock those secrets and the mysteries of our mind.
His name is Doctor Shrini Pillai.
He's a psychiatrist, a researcher.
He helps a lot of companies to understand their employees,
their interactions and how they can do business better.
And he's also a technician in the area of brain science and
how we and our operating systems, which is what we
explore a lot in this podcast. So please welcome Doctor Shrini
Pillai. Thank you.
Thanks so much for having me Dan, always lovely to talk to
you. I am so excited to talk to you.
Let's just get right into it. Do you think there is less focus
than at other times, or does it just feel like we're all less
focused than we once were? I definitely think that there's
less focus than at other times. I can think One concrete thing I
can say is that in the programs that I designed for
corporations, I've reduced the amount of content to probably a
25% of what I used to present. So I I know that the ability to
just stay focused on one thing is very difficult for a lot of
people. I also think there's been a
tremendous amount of research done showing that actually our
tensional parameters have actually closed in on us.
Why? What's happening to us?
I think there's, there's a lot of, so there are two sides to
this, you know, but my last book is about how we can leverage
unfocused. So I don't think unfocused is
all bad, but I do think that in terms of, you know, why a couple
of different things. So one of them is digital
distractions. You know, throughout the day,
you get up in the morning, you get a notification from your
phone, Alexa saying something, you have the TV on, you get a
message, you get a text. You know, if think about this,
before mobile devices were around, the brain had real
estate that it had and it had to use its real estate well to be
able to focus, to carry out tasks.
Now we've got to do pretty much the same thing while we're
attending to 40 messages that come in in one minute.
And we just take it for granted that that's OK.
But when you open up your e-mail box, it's a bit like Russian
roulette as well. You don't know what you're going
to find. No idea what you're going to
find. And as you're thinking about
this, you're like, well, you know, this e-mail is okay, this
is fine. So the brain is also on high
alert because it's not just that there's too much to process,
it's also that there's a lot of unknown and a lot of
uncertainty. So are you saying in a way we're
in a constant new, a new form of stress, a constant state of
stress? I think so.
And I think, you know, the world is changing so much that even at
the level of the collective, you know, every day, depending on
how you consume news, you, you are put in a position where you
might have to respond to wars, to financial calamities, to
political decisions. So I think a lot of people feel
like there's an onslaught that's coming their way and that their
brains are now getting taken over.
And so for most people, they're just trying to keep their lives
together. You know, if they're people with
families, for example, they're trying to make sure everything's
OK at home. They're trying to make sure that
they get the work that they need to get done on time, but the
work keeps pouring in. And then there's also new stuff.
If you think about AI and how AI has changed things.
If you're not someone who has jumped into technology, and I
have partly because I'm a technology entrepreneur, but
also because early on I felt this is not nothing.
This is going to change a lot of what's happening.
But if if, if you don't dedicate time, time to new things, you're
not going to learn about them. Now, some people are in the
privileged position of not having to learn about them.
So they don't care. They can read a paper, newspaper
and they can go for a walk and they can not care about changes
in technology. But right now, I used to feel
like I was just learning from my Instagram feed or learning about
the latest thing that was happening.
But now I feel like I have to set aside dedicated time to
catch up on the latest developments in AI that are
relevant to the work that I do and to my field.
So, so I think in summary, what I'm saying is there are a lot of
distractions, there are a lot of new things and there's, there's
a lot of uncertainty. And those three things are
putting our brains at risk. I mean, some people would also
say that that post COVID brain fog has increased for people
with long COVID. And then there are people with,
with syndromes like chronic fatigue syndrome, for example,
which also seems to be on the increase.
And, and one hard statistic is that ADHD is significantly
higher than it ever was. Now the question is, is it
really higher or are we just detecting it more or are we
overly detecting it? That that can be debated.
But I, I think if you're, if you're just looking strictly at
that diagnosis, that the wait list for diagnosis of ADHD in,
in the UK is in the order of years.
Well, do you think that's because they're on that
particular one? Could the wait list to get
diagnosed with a DADHD go up because you get testing
accommodations? And yes, you know, there's a bit
of a scam in that too, which I'm sure you've seen.
Yes, I've not only seen the scam in that I've seen it all over
medicine. Yeah.
So, so I think it's, there are a lot of amazing things about the
medical system and a lot of ways in which the system serves us,
but a lot of messages that reach people are the messages that are
best marketed. I thought how you addressed ADHD
in your book Life Unlocked was phenomenal.
That was one of the most intriguing ways because you tied
it into fear. Yeah, because because a lot of
people don't realize that in the brain, the fear center, which
the amygdala is a big, plays a big role in, that is actually
directly connected to the thinking brain, which allows you
to focus and pay attention. And so when I used to run the
anxiety disorder service at MacLean Hospital, which was at
Harvard, I used to think to myself, what's going on here?
Like is the primary, the presenting problem would be I
just can't focus. But when you take a deeper
history, you realize this person's actually has this
chronic worry and a baseline anxiety.
And when you have these earthquakes going on in the
anxiety center of the brain, it spills over to the thinking
brain. And so you can't really attend.
And So what I would find is that in certain instances, by
treating the anxiety, the attention gets restored.
And so I think if you have a problem with attention, it could
be a problem with attention, or it could also be a problem with
your emotional system that's not cooperating and blasting through
your attention. And can we talk about that?
I mean, it's anxiety. You can't scroll through
Instagram without seeing the word anxiety.
And it's not something I follow. So it's clearly got to be there
a lot. I mean, I follow puppies and
babies. So like, I don't, I don't think
I've ever like hit on anxiety thing.
So clearly it's posted a lot. You see people talk about my
anxiety. You know, it's, it's almost like
people, it's become a identifier for people.
It's clearly up because it's a highly searchable term.
And I want to ask you about anxiety.
You talked about the dinging going off all the time, which
then we answer that the dopamine drain that could be going on.
I want to hear from a medical perspective, are we draining out
our dopamine at a rapid speed each time we respond to one of
those Dings? And is it elevating anxiety?
What's going on? Well, firstly, anxiety is the
commonest mental disorder, so it is.
So I don't think you're seeing those those things by chance.
It actually is. It is the most common.
OK, how do you define anxiety? What's the definition?
Well, so we could get into this in a number of different ways.
So there's there's the the the diagnostic institution.
Your stage. Well, anxiety is, is a response
to a presumed threat. And I think if you're anxious in
the presence of an actual threat, it's not pathological
because it's not disrupting your life, your life, it's helping
your life. However, if you're anxious and
there's no real reason that you're anxious and it starts to
disrupt your life, then you're responding to to a presumed
threat that probably doesn't exist.
And that's when anxiety starts to take over people's lives.
But I think in the current environment, there's a theory of
that's called the theory of constructed emotion by Lisa
Feldmann Barrett, which is, which is a new definition of of
any emotion. And what she says is emotions
are signals that come from the brain telling the body to
prepare for what's next expected.
So if so, it's basically a metabolic signal that is
supposed to be there to help your body say, OK, we need to
hold on to our our glucose stores.
We need to figure out whether we need to feed ourselves, you
know, prepare to flee. Now the, the issue with anxiety
is that it's fine if the signal is correct, but if it's a
malfunctioning signal, that's like, hey, hey, hey, be careful,
be careful, be careful, which is the message we get.
If you look at any news, that's the message that's coming
across. So the brain is getting trained
to actually create these inaccurate prediction signals.
That's making everybody feel extremely anxious.
And so I often say to people, you know, 1 short way to think
about managing this is a is a mnemonic that I came up with
called Circa, which is, you know, it's, I'll tell you what
each letter stands for. First C is for chunking, The I
is for ignore mental chatter. The R is reality check.
The second C is control check and the A is for attention
shift. And I'll tell you what each
thing means. So the chunking is essentially
reminding us that the brain goes into this anxious state when
you're flooding it with information, right?
You know, like you get up on a Monday morning, you open your
e-mail. Whoa, what just happened?
And if you actually tell yourself, let me just take a
minute and, and, and just chunk out this.
I'm going to check e-mail at this time.
I'm going to try to figure out what I can get done in the
morning, in the afternoon. It might sound silly, but
actually the brain starts to calm down once it knows that you
don't have to do everything at once, which ties into the second
form of chunking, which is basically ruthless prioritizing.
So say to yourself, I'm probably not going to get everything done
today, but what do I have to get to?
And then the the third piece of chunking is delegating.
We think we have to do everything ourselves, but
actually there are many things we could actually delegate.
So that's the chunking. The ignore mental chatter is
essentially mindfulness. So it's sitting back in a chair,
closing your eyes, paying attention to your breath and
then keeping your attention fixed like a flashlight.
And you just, you just observe yourself breathing in and out.
Now, that might sound ridiculous, but studies have
shown that the amygdala, one of the key parts of the brain
involved in anxiety, actually decreases its activation if you
If you engage in a regular practice like.
And I'm a big believer in that. Yeah, I've done that over almost
25 years. And I think it was a lifesaver
for me, actually, almost 40 years.
And actually there's a, there's a, there's a technique called
cyclic sighing that's recently been studied at Stanford that
was actually shown to be superior to mindfulness.
And so if you're someone that says I can't sit in a chair and
focus on my breath, then try this.
Try breathing in to 3/4 and then and then, and then you go right
to the top and then you breathe out through your mouth slowly.
You do that for 5 minutes and it actually helps to reset what's
going on in that amygdala. Also, this, this practice that
you're talking about is, is actually something that can
protect genes. At the end of our genes, we have
telomeres which get shorter and shorter as we get older and when
we get illnesses and then we die.
But Elizabeth Blackburn, who got the Nobel Prize in medicine in
her preliminary studies found that you might actually be able
to protect those telomeres. So ignore mental chatter has a
lot of benefits. Then reality check is simply
self talk, which is this too shall pass.
You know, those days, there's no silver lining.
There's nothing. You just can't see the good in
the disaster that just unfolded in front of you.
But what we often forget, and the brain forgets this, is that
this will pass. Yes, think about any adversity
you've experienced in your life. When you're experiencing it,
it's like it's going to last forever.
But if you remind your brain, you know what?
This actually is going to pass. We were talking about the ocean
earlier. I was trying to think of it as,
you know, it might feel like it's coming in like a tsunami,
but it goes out. Right.
Absolutely. Yeah.
And then and then there's control check, which is
basically the Serenity prayer. What can I control?
What can I not control? Do I know the difference?
Lady Gaga is a great example of someone who actually used this,
you know, on her own. She was talking to students at
Yale and she said I reached a point in my career where I was
just totally burnt out and I didn't want to sing anymore.
People were like, what do you mean?
Like, you're like such an amazing singer and we got such a
huge fan base. So I just realized that I didn't
want to do what I was expected to do.
I didn't want to take selfies. I had more to offer the world.
I didn't want to sell perfumes. I don't even like perfumes.
And so eventually I'd go home and I'd look at myself in the
mirror because I would say no to some things.
And I would say you, I can sleep with any day because you have
integrity. You're standing for what you
believe in. And it was, it's kind of an
amazing wake up call to what can I control?
What can I say no to? And and if I'm not going to
control something, why do I want to fill my brain with all kinds
of nonsense that has nothing to do with you know who I am?
And then the last A is a tension shift, which is we get stuck in
the problems, but but we rarely shift early enough into
solutions. So how do we take the brain's
attentional system? You know, people will go on
about, oh, this just happened politically or this just happens
like, well, OK, so you, we've identified it's a problem for
you. What's your solution?
Because if we spend more time, even if we don't know the
answer, if we spend more time, and that's where the unfocused
mind can help actually trying to figure it out, the answers often
arrive. The answers are not always
sought after by the brain and caught.
Sometimes there's an intelligence in waiting.
And so my so basically just to round off that idea, there is a
lot of anxiety, there's a lot of uncertainty.
And by using a technique like circa, you can use that every
Monday whenever you're in a high pressure situation.
At the beginning of each day, you can use some of the steps.
Not all of the steps, but you can know that if you use any of
those steps, you will change your brain for the better if
you're feeling anxious. I would totally believe that
because it gives someone a sense of control.
And if we, you know, often that anxiety is triggered because
someone's feeling everything's out of their control.
So if you can immediately say, well, I can chunk my day, I can
look at, you know, divided into what I can do and what I can't
do. Look at those priorities.
You know, I know I drive everyone in my house nuts
because they'll say, you know, mom, what's happening, You know,
they'll talk about something three weeks from now.
And I always think I'm on an ad as need to think about it basis,
you know, there's enough I'm thinking about now when I need
to think about it. I never miss anything, right?
But I'm not going to spend much time thinking about it until I
have to. Yeah.
No, absolutely. If you fill your brain with all
the stuff that you have to do, you probably will just go to
sleep and not want to get up. Yeah, it's a yeah.
But to this point about the unfocused, the reason I wrote
Tinker, Dabble, Doodle Try was because I wanted people to
recognize that there is a focus brain that can be helped when
you address emotions using techniques like circa.
But there's a part of your brain that only turns on when you
unfocus. It's called the default mode
network. We used to think of it as a do
mostly nothing network, the DMN, because like people would be
like, yeah, this network only, only lights up when somebody's
not focusing. And they were like, well, what
could possibly be the use of not focusing?
Well, it turns out that this is one of the most intelligent
circuits in our brains. And a lot of people live their
days with focus, focus, focus fatigue and then they're out for
the count, but they don't spend time strategically unfocusing
and. Oh, my gosh, Trini, you just
have resolved something that has fascinated me.
I recently was unloading, you know, just kind of clear stuff
out of our house, and I found all these notebooks from our son
from calculus his junior year of high school.
And I'm looking at these and I'm seeing all these formulas that
are making me break into a sweat because I don't remember
calculus at all. I'm not even sure I took it.
It looks like Greek to me. But on every other page there
are these elaborate graffiti drawings and like drawings on
every page in between the calculus formulas and everything
else. And I'm like, how did this kid
ever do so well in calculus? And now you're pointing out that
maybe it was because he was doodling.
Well, doodling can actually improve memory by 29%.
Really so? What?
Why is that? Well, part is, your brain is
metaphorically speaking, if you're all tense and you're
focused, your brain is like a stiff sponge.
It's not going to absorb information.
But if you relax into something enough it, you begin to absorb
information. But so, so doodling, I mean,
doodling, the studies have been initially that it improves
memory by 29%. Then people said, well, actually
you should be doodling about about something that's relevant
to the material. So for any fact I state, there's
always a counterfact. I think it it depends on the
individual and it depends on whether that works for you.
But doodling is a form of unfocused that I talk about in
Tinker Dabble, Doodle Tri. And what I explain is that the
circuit, the default mode circuit in the, in the brain,
the, the, the default mode network is actually a network
that is responsible for abstraction, for processing
complexity. So when you've got 10,000 things
you have to figure out how to bring together and you don't
know how to do that, your focus network is not the network to
turn to. It's the reason you have some of
your best ideas in the shower is because that's when you're
unfocusing. And so, and, and, and it's also
called the crystal ball of the human brain because it's the
part of your brain that's responsible for prediction.
And I have so many thoughts about this because I I just did
a. Let's hear some because it's
fascinating, the part of our brain that's the crystal ball.
I think everyone would like to hear more about that.
Yeah. Well, if you think about it, I
mean, if you're a fund manager or you're trying to someone
who's trying to predict things in stocks, if you focus all day
but you don't have these periods of unfocused, you're not
activating the crystal ball of your human brain.
And so you're not actually allowing your brain to go into
prediction mode. And it's those people who've
learned how to focus, unfocus, what I call cognitive rhythm,
focus unfocused, focus unfocused.
Those are the people who learn how to use their brains best.
You know, Albert Einstein said that his discovery was a musical
perception. It wasn't a logical perception.
He found it in a musical way and then he was able to derive the
logic. So what I say to people is if
you're one of those people that says I've got to focus to get
stuff done, well, it turns out we spent close.
We actually spent close to 50% of our days with our minds
wandering. Our minds need to wander to
figure out who we are. You know, if you are just, if
you were your LinkedIn profile, then focus would be fine.
But everybody knows whatever your LinkedIn profile is doesn't
describe who you are and it doesn't describe what it feels
like to be with you. So what what we know about focus
is that it can drain energy from the brain.
So there was a study done that looked at people who were
focusing on a video and people who were just watching it as
usual. And at the end of that of of
that time, they asked, they gave them a dilemma.
Who would you save in this particular situation?
The people who were focusing couldn't care less.
They were like, let them all die.
Like I can't, I don't have the energy.
And then when they fed them glucose, they started to care
again. So when your brain is drained,
you, you can't even care about anything.
And so focus is problematic in that way.
It's also problematic when you don't pay attention to what's
going on around you. You know, like Anne Wang, who
discovered the word processor so focused on on version #2 he
didn't notice that the PC was making an entrance into the
market. And so he was focused but not
paying attention to what was around him.
And it's the same thing with not being able to.
If you're focused with your nose to the grindstone, you're not
paying attention to upcoming trends.
All of a sudden, you're sideswiped.
Your job is gone. You're like, what?
What happened? Well, you were not paying
attention to what was around you.
Also, when you want to innovate, you usually have to join one or
two points. And so if your focus is just one
point and it turns out that you do have a self, a kind of self,
which is the embodied self, which is served by the focus
network, which is like, you know, when you're in the zone or
when you watch a tennis player, just sort of like, they're like,
perfectly tense and relaxed. You're like, yeah, that's an
amazing thing. But the unfocused circuit is the
part of your brain that is responsible for getting together
the puzzle pieces to be like, this is who I am.
And, you know, we evolve all the time and, and we are constantly
changing who we are. And in fact, I think it's to our
advantage if we can change the the arrangement of these puzzle
pieces. But something has to put it
together. And if you're focused all the
time, the pieces are just going to be scattered in your brains.
Like, I don't know what happened.
You know, I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've seen
over the course of my life who are brilliant, highly
accomplished, the whole world admires them.
Kinds of people who are like, I don't know what happened in the
last 20 years. I honestly don't know.
I feel like I was so focused in solving this world problem that
I never picked my head up. And now I'm thinking what
happened in my life. And, you know, some people have
have been in extreme distress about that.
So I always like to remind people that unfocused is helpful
to your brain and, and there are ways you can do this.
You can do this, you know, either by taking a booster
break. So instead of working the whole
day 15 minutes, go on a brisk walk or.
A Think of how I I've read a lot of Thomas Edison biographies and
he would work, said he really never slept any extended
periods, but he would work for three to five hours and take a 5
to 20 minute nap and then work and and he often said sometimes
he wasn't even sure he was napping.
He was just not thinking is how he described it, which is I
guess, you know, today we would call it meditating or getting
into that zone. Right, or strategic unfocused,
you know, strategic unfocused, activating the default mode
network in your brain, you know, cause 'cause.
So things like booster brakes can help.
There's a type of daydreaming that actually helps.
It's called positive constructive daydreaming and it
was first started by Jerome Singer in the 1950s.
And what he found was that it doesn't help to sit at your desk
and just Daydream. And it doesn't help to remember
the prior night's indiscretions. Like, Oh my God, what did I say
at the party? I shouldn't have had that much
to drink. I'm not sure how why did I
handle it that way. But what does help is positive
constructive daydreaming. And to do this just three steps.
Number one, you have to be doing something low key.
Like if knitting is your thing, then knitting or gardening or
going for a walk, but not stationary.
You have to, your body has to be moving.
And then what you do is you take your mind.
We spend our whole days perceiving, right?
Everything is looking outward. We don't spend time going
inwards. And that's what imagination is
about. So in that time, whether it's,
you can start with 5 minutes and build up to 20 minutes, if you
can just then turn that attentional apparatus inward and
you imagine something wishful or joyful like lying on a yacht or
lying on the beach or running through the woods with your
dogs. You, you actually activate
circuits in your brain that enhance creativity and you're
basically relaxing the focus part of the brain.
You know, you were asking earlier, like, why are we not
focused? Well, because we're focusing too
much. Why don't we actually take this
time to allow, to, to activate our full intelligence so that we
can get to a place where we're, we're harnessing everything that
we have. I I think one of the biggest
tragedies that I see in human psychology is that is that
people do not listen to themselves.
They listen to everything else. They listen to the news, they
listen to someone else's opinion.
But when they have a hunch telling them, I don't know why
I'm having that hunch, but hunches are there for a reason.
And if you took a little of that unfocused time and you didn't
think about anything but you just tried to think about about
that, yeah, I guess I, I am learning about.
If I, if I think back of any thing I might call have called a
mistake in my life, I had some kind of gut instinct that I
ignored. There was something that made me
question it, but I rationalized it.
My rational brain just came in and said no, or my forceful
personality said I'm going to handle this.
But there was something there was some instinct.
I'm such a believer in listen to that instinct and we've also
talked about hypnosis. When you talk about visualizing
something, it's why love, you know the concept of hypnosis,
because you're giving, you know, that visual that you can give
someone that maybe can't get to it themselves.
Yeah. And, and a lot of times, you
know, what people don't realize about the power of visualization
from a biological standpoint is there there's a condition where
people can't imagine. It's called a Fantasia.
Yeah. So they just cannot imagine.
But if you look in their brains, the visual parts of their brains
are working. So people are like, well, why?
What's happening? Well, what's what's what's
happening is that the other senses are not joining.
So the vision doesn't have any life.
So if, for example, you wanted to visualize living in a bigger
house and you were thinking to yourself, OK, I want to
visualize. It's not.
People would say, well, that's that's ridiculous.
Like what do you think you're just going to manifest it?
It's like, no, you're creating a blueprint for your brain.
You're helping your brain out. You're basically saying to your
brain, this is what I want. And then your brain doesn't have
to say, well, you know, he or she doesn't know what they
actually want. But then it's important to allow
the feelings to come in of like, what would it feel like when I'm
sitting in that movie theater in my house?
Like, it would be so cool. What would it feel like having
popcorn with my friends over? What would it feel like?
This is knowing that I don't have to get up one more day and
worry about how to make ends meet.
What would it feel like? You know, it's like you.
Have to put their feeling there, power in that I can't imagine
not being able to imagine because years ago I bought.
I said to myself, if I could make it through my first two
years in a business I started and I was saving every dime.
I mean, if I made it, I saved it.
I just, I was turning orange from eating too many carrots.
But I said, if I make it through, I had pictures of these
mansions. Don't ask me why I wanted a
mansion. Probably because I was living in
a a studio apartment about the size of the table we're sitting
at. But I wanted a mansion with
property and it had to be a mansion.
And I had pictures of my mother even used to send me pictures of
mansions and say, Diane, if anyone's going to get this,
we're going to figure out a way. Well, I ended up buying Alice
Cooper's mansion at one point. That's incredible.
Up in upstate New York, didn't keep it long because I found out
that mansions come with huge gas bills, electric bills and lawn
maintenance bills. But I got that mansion.
But it was that visualizing aspect.
What? What is it that triggers in our
brain when we use our imagination like that?
Well, when you're using your imagination, you're actually
starting to create a blueprint, but you're also when, if it's
real for you, you're involving yourself in that goal, right?
It's not like like, you know, there are all kinds of.
Yeah, I knew I had to work for it.
Right, but right but so a lot of people stay in a state of
desire. But what desire does,
paradoxically, is it separates you from your goal.
You're always wanting. Can you repeat that?
That's a good point. Desire often separates people
from their goals. Like I want a mansion and people
stay in this hope state, which is different from I want a
mansion. And then the mansion becomes
part of your intrinsic brain architecture.
It's, it's, it's literally, it's a, it's a, it's a figure that's
been, that's a blueprint in your brain.
And then you start to own it. And when you start to own it,
you are no longer separate from what The thing is.
So how do you define desire? Because you tied desire in
there, so I'm curious what desire means.
Well, I was thinking about it in that particular context from the
perspective of of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali and and.
OK. And also from the perspective of
a discussion I had the other day with Thomas Hubel, who is an
amazing human being who's, we were talking about time and,
and, and the future and, and, and he was saying, well, you
know what? So I I'm very much a believer in
the block theory of time, which is that the past, present and
future don't actually exist. I believe that.
Too Einstein. I don't know why I believe it,
but I feel it every day. That that actually they're
continuous and the brain has to figure out how to make stuff
work. So we divide everything into
past, present, future, and we make it exist, but it's not an
intrinsic property of the universe.
Well, one of the things that I loved about what Thomas said was
he said, well, what people think is that the future is somewhere
else. Like the house you want is
somewhere else, and if it's somewhere else, it's going to be
somewhere else. He said.
What they don't realize is that they've got to dial into a
higher state of consciousness to bring the future into the here
and now. And so dialing into that
consciousness means when you're visualizing that you're, you're
getting into a state of belief, you know, you're increasing your
dopamine, you're decreasing your stress hormones, you're actually
activating reward centers that give you the motivation to
pursue what you need in order to get there.
There was a really cool study done that looked at the impact
that some people would say, well, what's all this hope?
Well, it sounds ridiculous. Well, consider this experiment.
There was a neutral paste that they gave people, but they put
it into three different tubes and they labeled them
differently. Paste paste, just like a paste
that you put in your skin. OK, one was one was one they
labeled lidocaine, but it wasn't lidocaine.
The other they labeled capsaicin, the active ingredient
in Chile. And the third, they just said
neutral. So when people expected
lidocaine, they put it in. They were like, wow, this is
kind of relieving. And you looked in their brains
and the reward center was activated by the belief that
this was lidocaine because it was not lidocaine.
You know, if you then look at the people who had the
capsaicin, the active ingredient in Chile, they were like, oh,
this stings a little. Like, what is this?
And the pain centers were activated and nothing happened
in the brains of the people who had the neutral pace which
indicated that in life you can change your brain based on what
you expect. You know, I have seen the for
over almost 30 years now I analyze, I've analyzed clinical
trial results for biotechnology companies to come up with the
messaging based on the results. And as you as a medical
researcher and Dr. could say, even more so probably than what
I've seen, even though I've probably like, no exaggeration,
probably looked at 2000 clinical trials.
The placebo effect is the most wild thing that can happen in a
clinical trial where all the people who didn't get that
cancer medication are all of a sudden feeling a heck of a lot
better than the ones who did. And it's mind blowing.
No, it is. And it's sort of, it's such a,
it's such a controversial area in medicine because the, I
really believe in the placebo effect, but I also believe in
the nocebo effect, yes, which is.
Explain that for everyone because it's so important.
If you expect something negative to happen, it's probably going
to happen. Yeah.
You know, there's another good example of this placebo type
effect, which is ghrelin, which is the hunger hormone with, they
gave people milkshakes and they told one group you're getting a
600 calorie milkshake and they told the other group the truth,
which is that they were getting a 300 calorie milkshake.
Well, the 600 calorie people got full really quickly and, and you
look at the hunger hormones and it dropped because they expected
to get full. And so they changed their own
biology. So I I'm a huge believer in
being attentive to the energy that we're carrying around us.
And I think what you're telling me about the visualization, and
it wasn't just any mansion, it was Alice Cooper's mansion.
It was a really cool mansion, like built in 1917 by Buster
Brown. You might not remember, but it
was. It was the biggest shoe company.
When I was little, everyone wanted a pair of Buster Brown
shoes. Well, it makes sense to me
because I think you embody some of what Alice Cooper is.
In my dreams. In the daring.
Yeah, I'm 18 and I don't know what I want.
I'm sort of like that all the time.
I'm completely in denial. It's.
One of the things I love about you I.
Refuse to think about it. I mean, people are like what I
think. No, I'm proud of it.
You go ahead and be proud of whatever you want to be proud
of. I do not want to fall into
conditioned ways of thinking. Yes.
And you know, studies have shown that if you fall into these
conditioned ways of thinking and you're like, no, well, you know,
I'm 70, you know, I'm 80. You have to go slow down.
Now those people slow down more than people of the same age who
are not thinking that. So, you know, it's one thing to
say I'm reality testing and I know what my age is is obviously
value to that. But I think we don't need to
fall into patterns of behavior that society forces us to think
about. It's so funny you say that
because I I'll talk to people and they'll say, yeah, I'm in my
60s. Of course things are starting to
fall apart and I'm like, I'm in my 60s and I feel like I'm just
getting started. I needed all that energy to
start to build up to get me to this point.
I have no idea if I'm going to combust tomorrow, but I never
knew that when I was 30 either so.
You know who's that have said youth is wasted in the Yeah and.
I think they were right. Another thing you said that I
thought was so funny. A few years ago one of my kids
said, mom could you stop telling me this is healthy and good for
me? He goes, I just like it.
But when you say that, I almost don't want to eat it.
I'm similar. I actually, I have like I
because I, if you actually, if you go deep down into studies,
you know, you've looked at clinical trials.
So you know, as well as I do that there's, there's so much
more complexity to what things actually are than than people
talk about. You know, I think I've mentioned
two once before when I look at the studies of good cholesterol,
and I find medicine really funny because medicine in a sense is a
representation of science, which historically has been separated
from the ethos of religion, but the terminology has made its way
right into medicine. Good cholesterol, bad
cholesterol, Let's judge the cholesterol, you know, high
blood pressure, low blood pressure, let's use ranking
systems for your for your blood pressure.
When in fact, if you actually look at what we call good
cholesterol and bad cholesterol, the effects are more complex.
There have been lots of studies that show that that bad
cholesterol could be bad, but there are also a large number of
meta analysis that show that if you lower bad cholesterol, you
may die sooner. Except, I mean, I never
understood the cholesterol thing, and I've worked with many
companies that have done it just plain on the fact of every cell
in your body needs cholesterol to make, why do you want to
reduce what makes cells right? And it's essential to the
structure of a cell. Yeah.
So, so that's just, is there some way that we can understand?
Differently. Yeah, like I think the next era
of my life, I'm very interested in figuring out how to present
complexity to the public so that you don't just go on a podcast
and be like, Oh my God, you're right.
I should be eating fewer, more antioxidants, so let me eat more
broccoli. Well, I like broccoli.
I think it's great, but but there are studies that show that
antioxidants can also accelerate cancer cell development if
they're already in use. So it's not nothing is just have
more and you'll get better. You know, everything is judging,
intuiting, being in tune with your body, looking at medical
research. And I love medical research
because I think it's it's better than witchcraft.
So I think I like the idea of looking at data, but I don't
think that that what you see is what you get when you look at
data. I agree.
I think data, I always think of Trident chewing gum that always
said four out of five dentists recommend Trident chewing gum.
And I'm thinking, OK, so you're, you started Trident chewing gum.
You could have four sons or daughters or sons and daughters
that are all dentists. And are they going to go against
your chewing gum? No, but maybe that fifth person
you asked thought no chewing gum is bad for your.
So always I, I often say that, you know, they always talk with
conflicts of interest in studies.
That's a whole other story. I would.
We could really get into that one, Srini.
Well, I would love it if all the studies that say that that
vegetables are all you should eat.
I would love to know what the study investigators are eating.
And the same thing for meat is all you can eat.
I want to know what the study investigators are saying because
I can tell you I would not conduct a study that showed that
you should not eat steak because I like it.
Exactly. It's your bias.
Enter with a a form of a bias or a prejudice to the end result.
Right. And so I think it's good for the
for the public. I don't think it's good to be
paranoid about it or to be afraid of it.
But I think to give yourself permission to ask questions and
and to and to explore things for yourself and turn on that
default mode network and go for that walk so you can say.
You know, when I put two and two together, I think I want to do
this, that or that. You know, someone once said to
me, if you had to give me some like your greatest piece of sage
advice, what would that be? I would say life is short.
Make it worth it for yourself. You know, too many people
realize this with their with their last breaths, and they
don't realize that they've been spending their whole lives
worrying about something that was pointless.
You know, I, I, I talk about death a lot and it's such an
important subject to me because it's so intimately related to
life. And when people get to be 50,
they so often say, oh, I'm at the 5th, I'm at my halfway mark.
Well, how many 100 year olds do you know and 100 year olds that
you'd want to be or I think you know, I live my life by.
You never know when the second-half began.
Absolutely. Yeah, you know.
Yeah. And, and, and you know, what's
interesting about about worry, if you look at the leading
theory of like why people worry, it's kind of disappointing
because it's a little bit boring, but it's also
interesting. It's sort of, it's called the
contrast avoidance theory. And what people have found was
that in life, you have peak experiences, you know, having a
child, getting a great job, having a great meal, and then
you have these traffic experiences, which is like
losing important people in your life or losing a job.
Worry. People keep themselves in the
miserable middle. They have to keep themselves in
the miserable middle because they're afraid of the contrast
between I just had a great meal yesterday and someone died
tomorrow. They don't want to have that
swing. But if they're mildly miserable,
when they get the bad news, they're prepared for it.
And so I always say to people, make a point of deliberately
adding some high level event to a week so that you know that
you're not spending yourself spending your time in this
miserable middle trying to just stay there because you're afraid
of that contrast. You know, from an anxiety
perspective, one of my favorite quotes is that of Kierkegaard,
who said anxiety is the dizziness of freedom humans say
that they that they want. That, and that's a good one.
Anxiety is. The dizziness of freedom that
everybody says they want to be free, but the moment you
contemplate that, you're like, no, I can't be free.
I would go crazy, I'd go wild, I'd lose everything that I had.
And so people choose balls and chains to look to, had to add to
their lives because they're afraid of that freedom.
And So what I say is, of course, you don't want a wildlife that
completely disrupts your life, but you can, you can navigate
toward a place of building degrees of freedom into your
life. And the more you can embrace
that and the more you can realize that anxiety is a signal
knocking on the door saying, hey, watch out.
You sure you want to be free? And then you're like, no, no,
no, I think I'd rather just be anxious.
I'll just be anxious so that I can never be free.
You know, it's a it's a, it's a contrast that Freud actually
commented on this and said, people come to me complaining
about their worry and their anxiety, and you try to take
their worry away from them. It's like taking a cub away from
a lioness. They're like, I want that worry.
Yeah, I want my worry. And it's like it's.
Like people identify with it, it becomes their identity.
And what I it's, I was talking to someone the other day and Oh
my gosh, I don't want this discussion to end, but we're
getting close. But I'd love your last thoughts
on this because I said to her, the person I'll leave them the
person I said, who would you? I often ask people, who would
you be if you stopped telling that story?
Absolutely yes and and and the self is is much more malleable
changeable than we realize that there's a phenomenon that I that
I also called psychological Halloween ISM.
Oh my gosh, we probably should have started with that.
That's an episode into itself. But it was a.
Psychological Halloween. Which is based on a study that
showed that if I give you a creative problem to solve, and
if you take on the identity of a rigid librarian, you are
statistically significantly less likely to solve it than if you
take on the identity of an eccentric poet.
And what that tells us is that our inability to solve problems
is not because we don't have the mental capacity, but because
we're stuck in a version of ourselves that cannot solve that
problem. And so you want to put yourself
into a different identity, to give your brain permission to
think in different ways. I mean, This is why why people
have said that psychedelics are helpful.
They, they put the brain on pause.
They disrupt the neural patterns that describe your identity so
that you have this complete rearrangement of neurons.
And of course, there are lots of caveats.
The trials need to show that they're effective.
They they need to there's. That's a whole other shell.
Story right, but I do think that that's that we are frequently
limit up, we limit our lives because we are committed to our
frozen identities. And I think if we can recognize
that you don't need to wait for a certain age to change
something, you know, you're curious about something, try it.
You know, it can be as simple as the reason I feel like my life
was transformed because I'd been denying how much I love jump
rope. And I was like, I saw someone on
Instagram like using this with music and dance.
And I was like, wait a minute, This is like, why, why have I
not had this in my life for like however many years I've wanted
back in my life and I want. And it's such a silly example,
but there's so many things like that where you realize that if
you can just, I think we've talked about this before, like
I'm constantly falling in love and it's ridiculous.
It's ridiculous. Like it's sort of at some point
you're like, what is this feeling?
And Thomas had. Wonderful.
He had some wisdom about this, actually.
Thomas, when I was talking to him, said I I think you would be
less concerned about this if you just made a distinction between
merger, which creates torture, and transcendence, which frees
you. And if you recognize that you're
falling in loveness is about realizing that you are not
alone, that you are fundamentally connected to all
humans. It will open the door to a
transcendent gateway of your actual identity, which is not
solitary. Oh my gosh, I don't want to end
this, but that's a really good note to end on.
And we did talk about falling in love.
And I told you about the painting that I have that says I
fall in love at least twice a day because I think it's a
wonderful thing and I do think of it as transcending.
But Oh my gosh, Doctor Srini Pillai, this just went too fast.
But boy, I appreciated your time today because I know you're busy
and everyone this I, this has been a great episode.
So I know you're going to want to share it with your friends.
You're going to want to hit subscribe.
We have been recording in Manhattan Center.
My guest has been Doctor Shrini Pillai.
Thanks. So much for having me in to you
as well. And you can find out all about
him in the links below. I highly suggest you check out
his website. Look up any of his books, every
single one is an eye opener and you're going to learn a lot.
So thank you. Thanks for joining me.
Hit subscribe, share this with your friends and thank you
Doctor Pillai. Thanks so much for having me
there.