#990 - Dr Tara Swart - How to Use Your Intuition as a Superpower

What do you mean when you talk about trusting our instincts?

I think it's a return to something quite primal and physical.

So I think in this modern world,

we overthink everything, we try to rationalize everything,

we prize logic above anything else.

And I'm sort of talking about using intuition as well as logic.

Why do you think it is that we are

laying at the feet?

Why is it that we're dispensing with sort of the wisdom that comes from instinct?

If it's something that is sort of more ingrained, why is that being pushed to aside?

So I think it goes back to when the outer cortex of our brain grew from being a sliver around the limbic system, which is the size of your clenched fist.

And that's when we could articulate speech and we could like plan better for the future.

And

so

then we sort of prized those things more than the primal instincts that we had relied on before.

And then, if you fast forward to much more recently,

until about 30 years ago, we didn't have sophisticated scanning technology that could actually show us things like how emotions and intuition work in the brain.

So it just I think felt safer to rely on something like logic that makes more sense.

And then, if you also add in the rise of technology,

it feels like it's counterintuitive, but I actually think this is where intuition and emotion and creativity and vulnerability are going to become superpowers, whereas, you know, they've sort of been

put lower down than logic and rationality.

Why would you say superpowers?

Because I think they're things that technology and AI won't be able to emulate or, you know, actually use in the same way that we can.

Right.

Well,

I always think about this.

It's kind of interesting that we had the scientific revolution.

And, you know, I remember when it was early 2000s and I was starting to listen to Christopher Hitchens or Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris or whatever.

And it was very seductive to dispense with wishy-washy mythology and archetype.

And you wanted something that felt more rigorous and that you could prove.

And, you know, we had this amazing boon in loads of areas of psychology.

And

then 20 years later, the replication crisis has come along and decapitated tons of the studies that we all thought were part of the physics of the human system.

And now, how many people refer to themselves as an agnostic because they're terrified of calling themselves an atheist?

Because it feels sterile.

We kind of had this weird sense that we were going to be able to prove the world to us.

And,

you know, physics is kind of stalled for the last 60 years or so.

It hasn't really developed anything that's been that new.

And I think people have got this sense that even if stuff can be

literally unproven, it can be functionally useful in the same way as, huh?

Well, maybe my gut instinct, I can't give you on a spreadsheet, I can't fully dissect why I felt that thing.

But I've noticed that when I rely on that sense, the outcomes that I get, my decisions tend to be better, even though they're less explainable.

And I wonder whether we're going back to a focus on effectiveness

over rigor, if that makes sense.

You've put that so beautifully.

I mean, I think it's a real sort of modern dilemma.

And I almost feel like where you get to the

the top or the peak of feeling, you know, of what you can prove, of what you can can explain.

It's almost like you then do a 180 and you actually ask yourself, what feels good?

What feels right?

You know, how do things pan out when I ignore my gut instinct and I ignore those red flags and I go with what I think is the right thing to do, you know, as deemed by modern society?

And I think you're right.

A really big question is,

do the things that can have value to us, that can make us happier and more connected and more at peace, do they actually all have to be measurable improvement?

Like, I'm starting to, even as a scientist whose career has relied on rigor for so long, I'm starting to question that.

If you look at the rates of mental illness around the world now, if you look at

how lost and lonely and disconnected and unhappy and anxious people are,

something hasn't worked about what we, you know, have for so long

let's say, at least in your and mine adult life, thought was the right way to be.

It is a strange horseshoe to come back around to this.

I mean, what's the

longevity study?

Is it the Harvard longevity study, that longitudinal thing,

looking at

basically the number of friends that you have is the single most predictive,

way more predictive than smoking, going to the gym, obesity, body weight, everything.

And

it's almost strange that something that feels right, it feels like when we're connected, we feel good, had to go through an 80-year study to then come back out the other side to be, oh, now by the standards that we want to judge things in the modern world, you can justifiably say this is good to the thing that intuitively you kind of knew all along.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think that it's when times are really tough that you you actually realize things like having

a really supportive inner circle, having a large group of friends, how much that actually means,

what a difference it makes.

Is there a distinction between instinct and intuition and trusting your gut?

Are these the same thing?

Do they differ in a meaningful way?

I mean, I think the words are used really interchangeably, but I like to make a bit of a distinction.

So I think that intuition is wisdom and the ability to use your judgment that's based on patterns that you've picked up through life lessons.

And that these are stored deeply in the limbic system that I mentioned,

all the way down to the gut neurons.

But actually, new research now

with the serotonin hypothesis.

particularly which I'd love to tell you about shows that that wisdom can also be held in the tissues of the body, like the fascia and the muscles.

Instinct

is a good thing, too,

but sometimes your brain will take shortcuts to protect you, and it's acting in such a primal way that that's more related to survival, like when we you know, we lived in Paleolithic times than what actually helps us to thrive now.

So, I think some, you know, and that's why I always say you have to run it alongside your logic.

It's your brain, you know, has this loss avoidance gearing.

So it'll

work much harder to keep you safe from losing something than it will to allow you to take a healthy risk to get a reward.

So I think instinct can sometimes

actually not benefit you.

And that's when you've got to use your logic as well, or you've got to like, you know, run it by a friend and see what they think too.

So, you know, get that sort of perspective.

But intuition, if you learn how to hone it and really listen to it and access it and trust it and live your life guided by it, I think is

an amazing way to live.

What's the serotonin hypothesis?

What are we talking about when we talk about gut instinct and things being held in the body?

So, actually, up to 95% of serotonin is produced in the gut or at least outside of the central nervous system.

And that serotonin can't cross the blood-brain barrier.

So where people feel that serotonin is the mood hormone, mood is actually one of its very very less significant functions and the word serotonin itself comes from serum and tone.

So serum is to do with the liquids in the body, blood, plasma.

And tone is to do with the action of that hormone in constricting or dilating the vessels throughout the body that supply the oxygen and nutrients to the tissues.

and that's why,

you know, most people have heard of the book, The Body Keeps a Score, which speaks about how trauma is held in the body.

And you can understand that if you've been traumatized and it's made you like change your posture in certain ways, you know, to sort of brace yourself against the

source of the trauma, that that could become ingrained in patterns in your muscles.

But the serotonin hypothesis says that

when

stress causes constriction of your capillaries, it actually has an action on the tissues of the body, like the fascia, which is the connective tissue that connects up all the organs and muscles and things.

And that that's how trauma is stored in the tissues of the body.

And so it makes sense to me that

intuition or hidden wisdom because you can't remember everything that you've experienced in your life, but it it gets laid down as patterns that you use to make your judgments about things, that hidden wisdom could also be held in the body by the same way that trauma is held in the body through the serotonin mechanism.

So, I think where previously I've spoken about intuition as potentially a very strong mentor faculty, and that you can access it through journaling, through meditation,

through practice of

trusting it, there's a whole other element now of bringing in the physicality aspect to access your intuition even more so combining the mind and the body um

to

you know release or access this this wisdom and and and actually how that would show up would be for example in visceral reactions to things so like have you ever experienced something and had a shiver down your spine or goosebumps on your arms um

I mean, certainly in my friendship group,

if someone says something that really resonates emotionally or you feel like that, you know, intuitively that feels right, we will tend to say things like, oh, that gave me goosebumps, or that gave me chills.

So I think that's the way to start.

What do you think is happening there?

I actually really tried to dig into the research on that for my book.

And we know that

all we can really prove scientifically is that when you experience a strong emotion,

there is an action of

the hair follicles making your hair stand up on end.

I tried to find research to say that it could be connected to a strong intuition.

We're not there yet, but I think those two things are kind of connected.

And again, you know, going back to how we started, it feels right that that could be the case.

You know, it definitely aligns for me with that feels right intuitively when I get goosebumps.

I guess the interesting thing is, what does it mean to say that we know something, but we don't know why we know it?

That's this sort of sense that people have, right?

That's right.

And if you were to say why, they go, I don't know.

It just feels right.

And that's what you mean, that

we have limited capacity in terms of being able to

explain our memories and explain sort of the sense that we have and the value judgment around things.

But we are shaped by all of the experiences that we have in more subtle ways.

I guess it's like an aggregate of all of our life experiences.

But yeah, what does it mean to say that we know something, but we don't know why we know it?

Well, that's the million dollar question, isn't it, Chris?

Well, I think that connects back to what we were saying about having friends and longevity, because your tribe provides you psychological safety.

A really good group of friends should absolutely challenge your thinking if they don't think that it's potentially serving you right.

But if, for example, I say,

you know, I can't explain why, but intuitively this feels like the right thing to do.

Most, most of my experience is that the people around me will validate that, will say, I trust your intuition.

When you go with your intuition, it usually works out right.

And that also, you know, that sort of that safety and that trust helps you to take healthy risks.

And what you need to do is gather data to show yourself that when you trust your intuition, the outcome is good.

Now, of course, you won't always know what would have happened if you'd made a different decision.

And I do think that there's an element of it, which is like, make your decision either way and then make it work.

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How can we tell the difference between an anxiety-driven thought and a genuine intuitive insight?

Because these two things, I have to assume, are going to cross over a lot.

People are nervous about change.

I knew that I shouldn't have done that decision.

That's not the way, that didn't feel right to me.

Well, yeah, but you've got to bias against change.

So, how do you know that it isn't just our cognitive processes stepping in, our normal sort of mental models biasing against or for lots of different things

and genuine intuition?

Yeah, it's a really good question.

And I actually get asked that question quite a lot on social media.

So I think this will resonate with a lot of people.

I think it's related to what I've just said about gut instinct or instinct versus intuition.

I think journaling could be a really good way of reflecting on that and working it out for yourself.

I mean, you said, you know, whether it's against or for a certain decision, I think anxiety is usually against.

So that's like just the simplest way of

starting to separate the two.

For me, my personal experience is when I feel nervous and excited,

even though the nervous part is kind of, you know, the brain, the hippocampus and the amygdala will get together.

So the memory part of the brain and the emotion part of the brain will get together and remind you of all the examples of the times that you took a risk and it went wrong to stop you from taking a risk.

But if you

have honed your intuition and you trust it, and maybe you run it by someone else that you trust, then you can override that.

So, you know, it is about working it out for the individual, but I'm hoping that maybe my personal experience of saying I'm nervous and excited at the same time,

that's been the case just before the biggest successes of, you know, everything in my life.

Are there certain categories of decisions you think that are more

that lend themselves to being gut

and instinct intuition driven and advised?

And are there others that you should be a little bit more, are there some that should be bottom up and some that should be more top down?

I think so.

I think the classic one really

is when,

so in a romantic relationship, when it's starting to unravel and it's clearly going to end and should end,

but because of the sort of sunk cost fallacy, people think, well, I've invested so much in it, you know, I don't want to be back on the market single again.

So I'll just try, you know, I'll keep flogging a dead horse and try to make this relationship work.

And that's when you ignore red flags.

I think everyone's been there.

You know, you look back and think, I stretched out that torture out for much longer than I needed to.

But, you know, if you can learn from that, if that's happened to you once or more than once before,

then

something that you can say to yourself and journal about and meditate on is, you know, the next time I feel that this relationship is on the rocks, I need to make a quicker and better decision about

whether there's a way of both people trying to start again and really make something right, or whether it's just better to, you know, move, move on and and kind of heal yourself and and give yourself a you know a different chance

you're saying that when you encounter situations like that trying to write out some

spreadsheet breakdown of the fors and against have you ever uh read the list that charles darwin wrote when he was trying to decide whether or not to get married no oh it's slightly niche i'm aware that that's a it might sound like a slightly niche thing but it is uh

it's it's phenomenal.

So Charles Darwin was unsure whether he should get married, so he made a list.

The document has two columns, one labeled marry, one labeled not marry, and above them circled are the words, this is the question.

On the pro-marriage side of it was children, if it please God, constant companion and friend in old age, who will be interested in one, object to be beloved and played with.

After a reflection of an unknown length, he modified the foregoing sentence with better than a dog anyhow.

He continued, home and someone to take care of house, charms of music and female chit-chat, these things good for one's health, but terrible loss of time.

Without warning, Darwin had from the pro-marriage column swerved uncontrollably into a major anti-marriage factor, so major that he underlined it.

The issue, the infringement of his marriage on his time, especially his work time, was addressed at the greater length in the appropriate not marry column.

Not marrying, he wrote, would preserve freedom of to go where one likes, choice of society and little of it, conversation of clever men at clubs, not forced to visit relatives and to bend in every trifle, to have the expense and anxiety of children, perhaps quarreling, loss of time, cannot read in the evening, fatness and idleness, anxiety and responsibility, less money for books, and, if many children, forced to gain one's bread.

Even experts in mating and evolution struggle with big decisions.

That's from Russ Roberts.

I'm just actually really laughing about the fact that I don't think much has changed in that time.

I would say that my male friends,

who are all big fans of you, by the way,

game recognizes game, Tara.

Yeah, would say some of those same things, would kind of say, I don't know if I can invest in a relationship because I'm so invested in building my business and it would distract me from that.

And, you know, I sort of

try to help them to understand what this is what I would say to Charles Darwin, like things like freedom to travel and go where you want.

If you're with the right person, you've got that freedom anyway.

And, you know, you can have the charming female chit-chat and also have the clever gentleman's chat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, so where romantic relationships are involved, there's obviously like hormones and emotions that really bias the decision-making.

So that's why I think when a relationship's going wrong, that's where it, you know, sometimes it doesn't work as well.

I think for things like, you know, career choices,

you know, big sort of things like where to live,

that it, you know, it can be a really valuable tool.

So, I think where there's a bit more ability to sort of

align logic, emotion, and intuition.

And in fact, it's just an interesting exercise to ask yourself

a question or a dilemma that you have.

And

I've sort of

outlined this exercise where you do quite a lot of like breathing to just like cleanse the thinking pattern between each one.

But you start by putting your hands on your head and ask

the logical part of you to answer the question.

Do some breath work, put your hands on your heart, ask the emotional part of you to answer the same question,

and then some more breathing, put your hands on your belly and ask your intuition to answer the same question.

Now, of course, if they're all aligned, that's great.

If they're not, then you've got a little bit more

complex thinking to do to work out what the right answer might be.

But with practice and over time,

and I think you know and I want to acknowledge that probably it's been maybe a bit easier for me than some people because I've been naturally quite intuitive at least since my 20s but I've definitely worked on on building that up so if I have a dichotomy between those I will go with my intuition and trust that I'll I'll make that you know work out in the end I wonder how many people are struggling or how much pain and tension exists in people's lives because those three things are in conflict with each other.

They have a sense of something logically, they have a sense of something emotionally, and they have a sense of something else intuitively.

And that trying to navigate that friction and that tension is

a source of probably like decades of, for some people,

weird purgatory.

Yeah, I think a lot of people, and I think sometimes, so what I've seen sort of psychologically, whether with patients or coaching clients, is that

if your intuition, your creativity, your motivation was ridiculed as a child, that's when you have a, you know, a bigger fear of trusting intuition.

You know, or if you had that sort of expectation of being perfect, of getting 10 out of 10, then you would

value

logic and you know what

is deemed the right thing to do rather than necessarily what feels right to you more.

So you'll find it harder to access that.

And something that's been really effective with my clients is where you hear the voice of your intuition,

but there's a critical voice that comes in that doesn't encourage you to go with that, it's helpful to identify that as not your own voice.

Sometimes people specifically will say, you know, my mother was very critical.

So I

remind myself that that's actually my mother speaking to me, not me.

But you don't have to necessarily identify the person.

If you just can separate yourself from that voice, then you can ask yourself a question like, okay, Chris, what would you advise your brother or your best friend if they came to you with this?

And if you're able to take that one step away from being so like in a situation yourself, that can be really helpful.

But equally, going to your brother or your best friend could be, you know, helpful to chat that through.

When it comes to the sort of archetypes of people that you've seen who struggle with intuition or trusting their intuition, hearing it,

what are the common

avatars?

What's the type of person who struggles with that sort of a thing?

And what are the impediments that they've done, the sort of things that they value in life, the way that they show up, the way that they

prioritize certain modes of thinking or decision-making over others.

Is there a trend that you've noticed?

I mean, these are sort of quite general and a bit stereotypical, but I'm going to go with them anyway, because I think it makes sense.

I think

because intuition is intangible,

So people who are in certain industries that are either very logical or technical

tend to think that things like creativity and intuition that are intangible don't exist.

Or

there's a strong belief in certain types of people, like let's say engineers, scientists,

lawyers, that they're not creative.

But it depends how you define creativity.

So if creativity is about painting or acting or dancing or music or something, then it may be that you haven't excelled at those activities.

But if you see creativity as joining the dots in a way that not everybody else is capable of, seeing patterns where they're not obvious to other people, a lot of people in these industries, and particularly people that I teach at MIT, the leaders, will say, if that's the definition, then yeah, I am creative because I can definitely do that.

And I think there's a little bit of an overlap with that and then trusting your intuition.

And what I've definitely seen is people, as they get older and wiser, are much more likely to be okay with saying that they would make a really big, important decision based on intuition.

Oh, that's interesting.

Is there any data on that that you've looked at?

Older people are more prepared to make decisions that they can't reverse engineer and write on a spreadsheet?

I've definitely seen that with my business coaching clients and the sort of age range of people that I'll teach in a class at MIT.

So, I mean, you know, let's say 10 years ago, when I started teaching about intuition, people

genuinely said, I'm obviously not going to make a high-stakes decision like higher or fire based on intuition.

And actually, it was absolutely the older guys that then chimed in and said, that's the exact way that we would make that decision.

And that's because, you know, you've you because you've had 20 extra years of seeing patterns.

And on the odd occasion that I've coached someone really young, which I don't do a lot, what I found is that where you help someone to

understand a way forward through patterns that they've experienced in their life before, there just isn't enough data of someone's 18 or 20 for them to really, you know, rely on that.

So

wisdom is what it is because it takes time.

Well, I suppose in some ways you might say,

look at these older people, they have decided that the best course of action is actually to trust your intuition.

But when you remember that intuition is this sort of weird aggregate of all of your experiences, if you're 18, maybe it's not such a good idea to trust your intuition because your intuition probably sucks and is actually maybe going to be more at the mercy of anxiety-induced thinking and confirmation bias and anchoring bias and social consistency and a desire to be seen as someone that's getting things right, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So it's like, do you see almost you would perhaps advise people to be

less

logically driven as they get a little bit older.

Yeah.

And if you think about the fact that, so, and hormones, by the way, so that, you know, hormones are having a massive impact around that sort of teenage and early, early 20s.

And what we understand now about how the brain matures is that it's actively growing and changing and therefore more liable to irrationality until we're about 25.

So we used to think, you know, 18, you're an an adult, you stop growing, your brain has, you know, kind of reached what it's going to be for you as an adult.

We know that's not true now.

And actually, it's very accurately reflected in society where more and more children are still financially reliant on their parents into their early 20s.

And that actually kind of makes sense.

If you think about where somebody would have been sort of given a briefcase at 18 and sent out into the world,

that doesn't match up to what we see about how the brain matures.

Okay.

When it comes to the role of inflammation and brain function, have you looked at how this can potentially step into our ability to make good decisions?

Yeah, so brain fog, which is basically where you can't make good decisions, you can't access your intuition.

The stem of that, basically the root of everything that goes wrong is inflammation.

The root of most physical ailments and clouded access to your mental faculties.

So, when we are,

you know, even if it's low-level chronic stress or acutely stressed or anxious, we have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol.

And cortisol has a basically, it causes widespread inflammation in the body, and this also causes dehydration in the brain-body system.

And just, you know, a small percentage of dehydration can negatively affect your decision-making skills.

By the time you realize you're thirsty, you're way too dehydrated to be operating at peak, you know, sort of brain power.

And, you know, what we really want to be doing is having the blood flowing around the brain with all that oxygen and nutrients going to the

centers for our highest functions, like cognitive flexibility, emotional regulation,

creative thinking,

being able to override biases.

But if we've got high levels of cortisol, then the brain actually stops sending blood flow to those higher functions and keeps it for survival mode.

So I kind of call it low power mode.

So absolutely,

intuition is not going to be working well if

you're under chronic stress or anxiety.

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What is it beyond the cortisol?

What else is happening?

Let's say that someone is in a period of stress and they have been for a long time.

What else is flooding through their body and what systems are turned on and turned off?

I guess potentially, you know, adrenaline as well, although that's more of an acute thing.

It's kind of more the effects of that

chronic stress, meaning that there are higher levels of cortisol kind of generally.

And cortisol and oxytocin, the bonding hormone, the one that helps us to, you know, trust and seek joy and excitement, they're kind of on a seesaw.

So, if the cortisol levels are high, the oxytocin levels are low.

And like I said, the blood flow around the brain will be

changed because of the high levels of stress.

And also, the cortisol, because it's in the blood system and it's going around the whole body, it has a sort of corrosive effect on our immunity.

So that can start with just more colds and flus, but it, you know, at the extreme end, it has led to heart attacks and cancers in people with really chronic stress.

So, you know, imagine that you're just that bit more run down all the time.

Maybe you're getting like colds more of the time.

Maybe you're having to take antibiotics and that's wiping out your gut microbiome.

Because intuition,

this whole complicated system complex system is between the brain, the gut and the gut microbiome, which is the trillions of good bacteria that contribute to

not just our digestion, but also that the butt, the sort of connection between the brain and the gut.

one round of antibiotics will really negatively impact that.

So

the best way to access,

you can't access your brain directly, as it were.

So a good way to try to optimize your brain is through your gut, and that's through what you eat, how much water you drink, whether you take pre- and probiotics, fiber, etc.

But if you're stressed, then you're more likely to comfort eat, you're more likely to crave sugar and caffeine.

It gets harder to drink enough water to actually keep your system in optimal hydration.

So magnesium, a really important mineral that actually helps us to deal with stress, is ironically actually leached out of the system by stress to the point that you can't actually eat enough leafy greens and nuts and seeds to replenish that.

So then you need to start supplementing.

And you know, the best way to,

I think, work out if you're magnesium deficient, apart from you can get a blood test, is if you have a twitchy eyelid or like just little, you know, micromuscular twitches, that's often a good sign.

No way.

Yeah.

That's interesting.

I used to get that when I was club promoting.

So I would run nightclubs and stay up till super late and drive back from Manchester to Newcastle and get in at 5 a.m.

and then go and work again the next night and stuff.

And if I had during Fresh's week, so Newcastle had its week and then there was a week off and and then Northumbria had its week.

So it was a three-week period where I basically didn't sleep.

And reliably, after about 10 days, everybody would come into the office, and everyone looked like a pirate because everyone

had one eye or both eyes if you were really pushing it hard.

Just on the point around optimizing gut for brain health, or optimizing gut for sort of systemic health, there.

I'm always a little confused.

And even the best guys on the planet seem to sort of need to hedge a lot of their conversations around around this.

When I talk about, you know, should we be taking lactobaxilius and probiotics and prebiotics?

And it, how much can you generalize and how much is

each person's individual microbiome such a fingerprint that you kind of need to go and get a very personalized approach to this?

And obviously that makes it way less accessible, which kind of sucks.

Are there general rules?

How do you come to think about this when you're giving out advice?

Yeah, so there are companies in the UK and the US where you can send in a stool sample and they can personalize which probiotics you should take or which strains of bacteria should be in the probiotic that you take.

There are a few

probiotics that are backed by a lot of

clinical studies.

I don't know if I'm allowed to mention any of that.

You can mention whatever you'd like.

So seed

is one that's backed by a lot of clinical trials.

And so unless you've got a particular,

particularly poor immune system or ill health or something, that one's probably

going to be good for like somebody who's quite healthy.

So when I travel, I take that one because the one I use at home is a liquid.

I can't take that with me.

I personally have tried several different probiotics and

because I rely on my intuition very heavily, I can feel which one is right for me.

And I understand that not everyone can necessarily do that.

You've got to use your intuition to work out whether you're strengthening your intuition.

Yeah, that can be a bit of a challenge.

So, like I said,

I do rely on my intuition quite heavily, but I also, and I eat really healthily, like a wide variety of plant products every week, fermented foods.

But I also take a probiotic all the time.

So, I think,

like you say, people want to hedge, but I think the best truth you can say is what you do.

I'm not saying that everyone should do that, but that definitely works for me.

How about the role of the people that are around us in influencing our ability to tap into our intuition?

It seems

every week there's some new study coming out about how the sort of people that we spend our time around somehow influence us in ways that we maybe wouldn't have realized previously, but certainly it's a big impact.

What is there to say when it comes to gut instinct and intuition and the people that you spend your time around?

Okay, I want to start with something else and then get make my way back to that.

So, the person that you live with and sleep with and

share bodily fluids with, and

okay, yeah, go on.

And even share like crockery and cutthroat and stuff.

Your immune systems sort of

impact each other.

So the person with the stronger immune system is actually going to donate

immune cells to the person that's got a poorer immune system.

No way.

Yeah.

Tim Spector told me that.

And

also, when you are

selecting your partner,

the way that they smell is a reflection of their immune system through something called the major histocompatibility complex.

And this isn't a predictor of relationship success, but children benefit from having what's called a bilingual immune system.

So two immune systems that are really different to each other.

And you're likely to non-consciously pick a partner.

who you like the smell of because that's actually indicating to you that they've got a different immune system.

Isn't this the argument for why humans kiss so much?

Um,

well, when you're kissing, you're obviously sharing your oral microbiome, but this is to do with smell.

And I guess, obviously, if you get close enough to kiss, then you are smelling the person as well.

Yeah, at least I thought that that major uh compatibility index, I thought that that was at least from some of my EP coded friends, my evolutionary friends.

That's you know, you ask the question, why is it that humans do this?

Other animals don't in the same sort of a way, And it releases a ton of neurochemicals that make us feel good.

So there has to be a reason that we should be doing it.

So, okay,

if the proximate reason is it feels good, what's the ultimate reason?

What's it doing on the back end?

Why does it feel good?

I'm open to other, yeah, sharing microbiome stuff.

I certainly know that this can go badly.

I certainly know that if you've got something like

H.

pylori, that you can actually share that too, because that does get held.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, this is a really interesting study that I found from Dr.

Gabrielle Lyons' team that if one partner treats their H.

pylori,

the other partner also needs to be treated at the same time, or else you're just going to fix one and then get reinfected, then fix the other, then reinfect.

You need to kind of,

I guess, like do a quarantine overall for everything at the same time, kill it entirely, and then I guess make sure that neither of you kiss somebody that's got H.

pylori again.

That's hilarious.

Yeah, so there's that.

And then, in terms of intuition,

I think it comes back to the psychological safety that's provided by your tribe, which is, you know,

when you discuss something and you can't logically explain it, do people validate you or do they criticize you?

Yeah, that's so good.

I love that.

I mean, you know,

if I could gift something to the UK

as a culture, certainly one of the things would be encouragement for people following their gut.

Because I think a lot of the time there is a bit of a tall poppy syndrome thing that goes on, or a you shouldn't stray too far from the beaten path, mate.

I have a friend that did that, and it didn't go too well for him.

The blue sky, I know that America has got its problems, and everybody thinks it's a oppressive, patriarchal, cis-heteronormative superstructure trying to keep everybody down.

But at least they've still got a bit of a blue sky vision.

So that's pretty cool, which is why they've got the same number of universities in the top 10.

I think it's two or three as the UK does, but they produce five times as many entrepreneurs out of those universities, five times as many startup entrepreneurs, because I think that there's just more of an encouragement.

So, you, I mean, you even see this on a population level.

You even see this in the sort of communication, the big, broad cultural conversations that people have in comedy.

Like, look at the comedies that we do in the UK.

You fail in the US for being overconfident.

You fail in the UK for being too cringe.

Like, the difference between the US office and the UK office

actually in sort of very different kind of way, even though it's the same thing, which is a tone-deaf boss that's kind of a little the way that that shows up, I think, happens very differently, which is maybe indicative of what's happening in the culture.

But yeah,

I love that idea that your friends should yes and, as it's said, from improv as opposed to no, but.

Exactly.

And I have this

thing which I seriously need to grow out of.

And I thought I had mastered it and then I just failed again, like dramatically recently, which is that because I was that kind of

had to be perfect 10 out of 10 high school girl,

when I've got a big project, coming to fruition, I always think it's not going to be good enough.

And

it was when this happened about five years ago, one of my American friends said to me, I have never seen you not knock the ball out of the park and beyond.

And I was like, but it's not going to happen this time, because this time it's really not gone very well.

And then it went really well.

And that's when I was like, okay, I need to stop this.

This is ridiculous.

So then a couple of years later, I had an example of where I was like, yeah, of course that worked out well.

You know, I've learned this.

I've nailed it.

I'm going to be like normal from now on.

And then recently, I just did the same thing again.

I was like, I'm so, you know, I'm so nervous because I know this thing has gone really badly, and then it's gone really well.

So, you know, I guess

we have to keep learning.

And if you do sort of like fall down at one,

you know, stumble, then you have to, you know, get up again.

And I, I, for me, definitely, it's the people around me that are a huge part of,

you know, keeping me grounded, but also, like, you know, massively encouraging me to take healthy risks, to think bigger,

really believe in my intuition.

What are the areas of life that people who don't rely on intuition will fall

will struggle with the most?

I would imagine that risk-taking

has to be one of those things.

Do you think about broad areas of life that people are going to struggle with if they are too heady, too top-down with this stuff?

I guess if you think about

being entrepreneurial or creative or spontaneous and a risk-taker, then you're much less likely to do those things.

I think you'd be more likely to,

I don't know if I should use the word settle because it may be fine and right, but you're more likely to want something that's safe and predictable

and stable

than something that potentially could be better, not for everyone necessarily, because

it's too much of a risk.

And what that boils down to is that you don't actually trust yourself.

I remember one of my

sort of colleagues or peers

said that, and I can't remember what came before this, but I really strongly remember him saying, whatever happens, I know that I can roll my sleeves up and deal with it.

And I heard that and I was like, I want to be like that.

And I trained myself to be like that by changing my gratitude practice from what it naturally was always kind of external things.

I think that's pretty normal.

It was my ability to travel, my friends, my family,

my career.

And then I changed it to things like my resilience, my vulnerability, my creativity.

And as I

repeated those internal resources, resources, that helped me to get to that place of no matter what life throws at me, I will find a way to,

you know, come out of it sort of like stronger.

That's cool.

What is a good

and bad journaling practice, in your opinion?

What are the areas that people mess up on and get it wrong?

And what are the things where you think, hey, these are the principles of really making it work?

I don't really, I don't have an idea in my head of what's a bad journaling practice.

I guess the only bad one is like not doing it.

And that's really because there's so many things that happen that we forget, you know, and these can both be like triumphs and sort of obstacles.

And you just don't learn from it if you just move forward to the next thing and you forget that it happened.

So my biggest like game-changing tip for journaling is not actually to do with the journaling, it's to do with reading back over it.

Because that's when you see the repeated patterns.

And, you know, if it's in your own handwriting and you see, I've done this same thing again, that it can be really game-changing in

making whatever adjustments you need to to stop repeating patterns of behavior that aren't helping you.

Yeah,

what I was going to mention,

at least for me, I think I filled up 10 daily gratitude journals over the space of about six years.

And what I realized was I was treating it an awful lot like homework.

I was not going below the neck, so to speak.

So, yeah, I'd know that by the end of the day, I'd have to think of three things that went well or whatever, three things that I'm happy happened.

And then in the morning, what are the things I'm grateful for?

You know, whatever, it was lovely.

But I wasn't really connecting with it that much emotionally.

And I was very much taking a logician's

approach to something that was supposed to be trying to actually feel embodied.

So

I would say, at least in my experience, yeah, it's good that you've got a record of things that happened.

And if you go back and read it, that can be a source of gratitude, right?

Oh, wow, I remember when that thing happened and how grateful I am for that.

But it seems to me like you're making two tasks out of one.

You're having to go back and revisit the thing in order to feel the thing, as opposed to actually just sitting with it for a little bit longer.

And this is Rick Hansen's idea from Hardwiring Happiness, which I just think is much better.

It's spending a minute, just allowing it to sink from your head down into your chest a little bit.

And it's so funny, isn't it?

You've mentioned it a couple of times: this sort of sense that you put your hands on your head, you put your hands on your heart, and you put your hands on your gut.

And

despite the fact that your heart doesn't think, right?

Like there's no neurons that are available in your heart for thinking about stuff, but there is something about that visualizing process that allows us to tap into a different

way of thinking, a different sort of mode of being.

And yeah, it gets perilously close to,

I don't know, to something that doesn't seem very rooted in science.

And yet, as we said at the very start, it's something that most people find pretty effective.

So you don't really need to sort of scrutinize it that much.

If you go, you know,

when I think about opening my heart up to people, I feel more empathic.

It's like, hey, guess what?

Your heart doesn't have front doors on it and it didn't open up in that way.

And yet you felt like it had done.

So I don't know whether we actually need to like scrutinize it too much.

No, and I think you know that is to people like you and I, that's an analogy.

But at an event I did this week, someone asked me to look into the Heart Math Institute and you know they would disagree with what you've just said.

So, you know, and I'm going to look because I think it's interesting.

But what I really liked about what you said was the embodiment aspect because a lot of the research around PTSD

shows that trauma shuts down the broca's area of the brain, which is the part that articulates speech.

And what that means is that there is a limit to the

effectiveness of talking therapy.

So journaling and talking therapy are, you know, they're both thinking,

writing and talking.

Whereas the research shows that things like yoga and dance or craniosacral therapy or certain types of massage can actually help to release trauma that's held in the body and not in the PTSD circuits of the brain.

So, so again, you know, even in the absence of trauma, getting the body involved in this kind of therapeutic work like gratitude and

journaling is really important.

And that's why my gratitude practice has now changed to what I call the art of noticing beauty.

So, very much informed by this field of research called neuroaesthetics, which is about how the arts and beauty, particularly in nature and creativity, benefit our mental health, our physical health, and our longevity.

And so by choosing to notice beautiful things,

I started, the first thing that I noticed after I was doing this practice was how many times a day I was saying, oh, that's so pretty.

Oh, look at that.

Or like, you know, smelling roses and just kind of, you know, walking down in the park and

getting the smell and just being like oh my god that's so beautiful and i just you know realize that

multiple times a day i'm talking about

beauty and something that's pretty and something that's like smells nice or

and pointing it out to other people and it just it totally changes the way that you live it's um It's so easy to just get habituated and walk past an amazing tree or an amazing building and not notice it.

And life actually feels different when you choose to notice those things.

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Let's say that there's someone who's listening for whom being too heady, struggling to tap into their intuition is, it feels like home to them.

How do you advise those people to get started with

first off

hearing intuition?

And then secondly, the thing that was really important, you said right at the start, is trusting the fact that if they follow it, that things might go well.

Because it seems like

the first step is there's a little voice, there's a fleeting thought that appears.

And wow, that voice, maybe I should actually listen to it and pay attention to it a little bit.

But there is a massive difference between that and I am going to use that voice to help me make a decision.

And

there is a certain type of pain of not being aware of it, but there's an extra special type of pain of being aware of it and not being

not feeling compelled to be able to commit to it.

Yeah.

Um, well, I genuinely think that conversations like this, um, you know, podcasts are so powerful now, and I think they help and change people in a really positive way.

To answer that question scientifically, I would have to say that you, you, you should start by looking at the state of your gut and your gut microbiome, because if that physical foundation isn't there, it's going to be harder to

take that,

you know, that leap sort of mentally.

So making sure that you you are eating a healthy and diverse diet with some fermented products in it, and maybe taking a probiotic for a while.

Once you feel like, and actually, changing your diet can change your gut microbiome in a matter of days.

So, it's really actually one of those things that we can do that will have a positive effect very quickly.

And a tip, a pro tip there is to eat in a way that acknowledges your genetic

ancestry.

So, for example, it's very likely likely that my gut microbiome would benefit from eating coconut-based products, less likely that yours would.

You're coming from the north and looking pretty Viking to me.

So, I would think about

what people.

So, for instance,

in the Nordics, a high number of people are lactose intolerant.

So, it may be that, you know, that's something that you want to avoid too much of.

And, you know, obviously different for different people depending on where you come from.

Just on that, just before we move on, just to get real specific on that,

if someone has the time, is there a particular type of gut health test that you think is accessible in most places?

Or can most people just get started with a broad spectrum probiotic and eating some fermented foods?

How important is it to be able to do the gut health test?

And then what,

shy of me looking in the mirror and going, I reckon I've got some Scottish ancestry.

Look at those rosy cheeks.

Like, I should drink beer and haggis or whatever.

Is there a little bit more of a rigorous way for people to get to this gut health thing?

So, in the US, there's something called Thrive, and in the UK, there's the Zoe project.

And both of them can give you

a breakdown of which strains of bacteria would be beneficial for your gut microbiome.

In the absence of

paying to do that, I think what you said about

eating healthily, including some fermented products and taking a good quality probiotic is fine for most people.

And then,

yeah, I mean, I think hopefully most people would be able to find out maybe just through asking their parents or grandparents, like where the ancestry comes from.

And

but you know, if not, then I think that sort of

like a Mediterranean diet is probably like a good one for most people.

And that means, you know, a lot of different coloured plant products, olive oil you know basically the good fats the hydrating foods

dark dark skinned foods are really good for us because they've got polyphenols in the skin so what's examples of those um like purple sprouting broccoli instead of green broccoli um black beans cocoa products coffee products um

blueberries instead of strawberries kind of thing.

The more that I learn about dietary fiber,

you know, everybody subs.

I come from a bodybuilding, bro lifting, degenerate background for a long time.

And fiber was just this thing that wasn't protein, carbs, or fat.

And it just got in the way of gains, basically.

And the more that I learn about it, the more that I think I should have been having beans with every meal for like the last 15 years.

Yeah, because in the gut lining, there are these

tiny folds called microvilli,

and

toxic residue can stay stuck in those tiny folds and fibre helps to clear that out so you know once once that stuff stays stuck there

it starts to cause inflammation and so it affects your entire gut lining and that will you know also contribute to brain fog and not having you know your physicality in the optimal condition to think about things like intuition.

So, um,

and you know, that can also lead to bowel cancer.

So, so fiber is very important to like just keep that whole gut lining really cleaned out.

So, let's say we've you know made some tweaks to improve our gut health, um,

then I still think journaling is a good way to start because just to remind you of the times that you've you've had a dilemma, had to make a decision, what you did.

Um, at first I would just do like the noticing and the recording and the raising awareness of when you have or haven't used intuition in the past.

Then I would encourage people to take a low-risk decision

and where intuition and logic don't align and go with your intuition and see what happens and record that.

And then to slowly

build up the

significance of the decision and you know whether you use intuition to go with it or not.

And just

building that trust in your intuition.

I wonder whether a journaling practice would be good for that.

I wonder whether noticing those fleeting thoughts and then thinking about this thing came to me and I didn't do it because

I felt scared, because I was worried of looking silly, because a friend told me that they did something similar and it didn't go well for them.

Yeah, it's it's really fascinating.

This

people who listen to podcasts like mine and probably consume books like yours are

maybe the least likely to be the ones who are already tapping into their intuition, spending a lot of time in their heads,

trying to be rational about things.

They want to make good decisions.

They want to maximize their time on this planet.

And they really want to, you know, they don't want to make mistakes.

They're probably a little bit introspective and reflective.

And

yeah, I mean, if the answer, if you're right, and the answer to most of our problems is I should have just gone with my intuition.

And actually, the more that I do it, the more it strengthens it.

Lots of people will have created very impressive mental architectures when they could have just like gone with what felt right after age 35 or something,

which would have been kind of poetically ironic.

But I wonder if you need to go through that whole process to come out the other side again.

Well, can I ask you a question?

How much do you rely on your intuition?

Very limited, I would say.

Oh, really?

Yeah, very much much so.

I'm a pretty good role model for someone who moves very slowly with decisions,

very, very risk averse.

Basically, all of the businesses that I've ever started, none of them have failed, which suggests that I'm probably not moving quickly enough or breaking sufficient things because I'm evidently leaving at least some amount of growth on the table.

in that I've only done things that are basically surefire wins.

I've waited for a very long time.

I waited for a long time before moving to the US.

I've waited for long times before leaving relationships that I should have left.

I've waited for long times before making decisions and changes in careers that were almost obvious.

Like my, my

certainty level has to be so absurdly high.

You know, it's like a 99.9% conviction ratio before I'm prepared to do it.

And in retrospect, things are obvious.

And you go, oh, you could have made that decision six months earlier or two years earlier or whatever.

Or at the very least, you just didn't need to go through all of this time vacillating about whether this decision was the right one to make or not you just sort of knew so it's not just the cost in terms of time it's the cost in terms of mental cycles that you've wasted going through going through this so you know it's of personal interest to me to try and work out how to tap into intuition uh a lot more That's so interesting.

Thank you for sharing that.

But I also want to disagree with something that you said, which is that the kind of people that would read my book, I don't think they are people that struggle with their intuition.

I think the people that, like my work, are really into

using their intuition.

I literally live and die by my intuition.

And I met my first husband when I was 25, and we were the same age, did the same job, sipped very similar levels of intelligence.

But he totally trusted my intuition.

We made huge decisions, like moving to Australia, because I just said, I believe that's our destiny.

And he was like, usually you're right.

So we'll go with that one.

So obviously that was very validating for my intuition as well.

And I recently shared something with him that's a story in my new book that involves him.

And I wanted to let him know about that before it came out and check that he was okay with it.

And it was about a

Now, I have to admit, a prophetic dream that I had.

And I said to him, but I don't think I'm psychic or anything.

and he messaged me later and he said I actually think you are

so um and I really still don't think I am but I think I'm very very intuitive um

well I mean a question on that what is the difference between being

psychic like being able to see things that other people can't see and just having such a difference in access to your own intuition

that is the same thing let's say that most people are walking around at 20 intuition access and they're able to aggregate this amount and you're able to aggregate way more.

That functionally is the same as you being able to see the future or tap into things that other people can't tap into.

You don't need an astral realm to be able to bring that to life, right?

Yeah, true.

But I think like something like that dream, for example, didn't feel like it was within my control.

It felt like it happened to me.

Whereas in terms of my intuition, I feel like it comes from my inner wisdom it comes from my interpretation of things around me um

but i think you're right i think they're on a spectrum so there's something you know and i kind of want to try to stay quite rigorous here for you because i know that you'll prefer that but there are things called um

claire cognizance and clair sentience which are

I think in between being intuitive and being psychic, maybe, or, you know, maybe they're up there with being psychic, I'm not really sure, but they're

so clear audience is like that you hear something and it's not coming from your own brain.

And

oh, I don't know, I was just going to say it's like an intuitive thing, but um,

clair cognizance is just knowing something in your mind and knowing it's true, but not knowing why.

Claire sentience, I think, is feeling it in your body.

Um,

so there are people that, you know, that's their form of intuition, or or like potentially, I think some of them think they're psychic.

So,

yeah, they had a fascinating conversation last night about how, and apparently there's a movie about a mathematician that had a dream that worked out like a

really complex situation or something.

So, you know, I think.

I also

yesterday went in a driverless car for the first time.

Oh, you're in the great state of California.

Yeah, you've been driven around by a robot.

Yeah.

And and that's, you know, I was a kid that grew off on science fiction, so this was like science fiction becoming real life for me.

Um, and you know, there are so many things that were science fiction when we were kids are real life now, and I think there's going to be leaps like that in the future.

Um,

obviously, as a neuroscientist, where that's to do with altered states of consciousness or expanding your consciousness, that's very exciting for me to just witness and be part of.

What is something

that you believe but can't prove to be true using your scientific method?

What is something that you kind of accept as a

ground reality as part of the physics of your existence?

But if I get you to point to it on a map or write it out in an equation or show me the area of the brain or whatever,

it doesn't work in that language.

Yeah.

Well, this is basically the topic of my new book, which is about receiving signs from what I call beyond.

And

I mean, I think the closest we can get scientifically to that is Carl Jung's description of the collective consciousness.

But where the science, you know, isn't backing that further at the moment is whether it's the source or the universe or God or like some sort of, you know, cosmic force.

And I think you know, where I've talked about intuition going from just a mental capacity to being very much embodied, and you know, that's taken me to a next level with intuition.

Adding in the art of noticing beauty has taken my gratitude practice to the next level.

Um, by cultivating that art of noticing,

I've also then started noticing things that appear

randomly, coincidentally,

things that have symbolic meaning to me that I interpret using my intuition.

I have looked into the science of things like near-death experiences and terminal lucidity and dark retreats to examine the nature of consciousness and look at things like dualism and materialism to try to explain some of these things.

But I think I've really come full circle to where we started off, which is

there are some things in life that I don't actually feel the need to explain.

And, you know, as long as it's not harming anyone else.

And,

but this sort of

what I've been experiencing in the last couple of years has totally changed the nature of the conversations that I have in my friendship group.

People will send me photos of signs that they've seen or ones that they think might be for me.

And

yeah, it's been so interesting.

It's become completely normal in like my circle.

And now that I've started speaking about it, I have been inundated with messages from people.

I had no idea it was going to be like this widespread.

I'm actually gobsmacked.

But it's a nice feeling.

And, you know, of course, I'm sure I'll get criticized as well, but I'm actually okay with that.

I have a bunch of friends who I think give me a similar energy to the one that you do.

One of my friends, Austin,

who drives a very nice Porsche, which is kind of rare in the city of Austin, Texas.

We went to to my birthday party a couple of years ago, and I remember we were walking to his car after we'd finished up, and he walked up to it, and I was waiting for him to

unlock it using the remote key, and it wasn't locked.

I was like, You know, you left your car unlocked.

And he's like, I don't lock my car.

I was like, What?

He's like, Yeah, I don't lock my car.

The universe has just got my back.

That's just something that I don't do.

What?

And he is one of the most tapped in guys that I know.

Every time that I'm around him, I feel very regulated.

And he's done a metric fuck ton of self-work and all the rest of these things.

And there's part of me that goes, dude, like, are you really telling me that some

quantum energy is going to protect you from a guy that tries the handles of nice cars and does this thing?

And, you know, maybe one day he'll sort of live to regret that specific decision.

But at least from my experience, People like you and people like him that kind of embody this sort of an energy, you live in a manner where even if you end up losing in the specific, you gain so much in the general that it doesn't really matter.

It really doesn't.

And there's a famous Bill Burbet where he's on some talk show and this person's

explaining about why he's a little bit more of an optimist than people might expect, given that he's kind of like a shouty, angry ginger man.

And he says, things are going to be fine.

And even if things aren't going to be fine, isn't it better off believing that everything's going to be fine because if it's not fine you'll just deal with it when it happens yeah and

this is uh

certainly an energy in the simplest form of this a vibe uh that

i would say the people who have it in my friend group and that i've met reliably seem to be more at peace happier and more successful than the ones that don't I'm like, okay, which

what do I think happened first?

That they became successful and then reverse this luxury belief, or that this sort of, I guess you could kind of call it an abundance mindset and a trust in themselves happened.

And off the back of that, they just started to see the good in things and they weren't as stressed.

So they didn't get as sick, so that they did make decisions based on this aggregation of all of their life's experiences.

So they didn't overthink things, so they didn't stop themselves from not taking risks when they should have done.

So that they didn't stay and all of this stuff together.

It's just interesting.

And,

you know, I mean, you mentioned before

you've probably correctly judged me as somebody that would be more on the side of rigor and materialism.

And can I prove it?

But, you know, Rupert Sheldrake has been on the show, and I found him unbelievably compelling.

I thought that his whole world, for the people that didn't, everyone should go back and listen to that episode after this one, actually.

I think that would be a lovely second one to listen to.

This is studies of dogs going to the window 10 minutes before their owners go home, of

birds learning to be able to break into bottles of glass milk that only previous generations of birds had seen because they stopped putting milk out during the war.

This is mice learning to go through mazes in LA and then mice in New York being able to get through the same maze more quickly because of some weird.

What is it he calls it?

What's that thing?

Not synchronicity.

What is it he's got?

What's the name of that thing, the energy that goes across it all?

Not the collective consciousness.

No, it's a specific.

Ah, it's beaten me.

It was a long time ago, that episode.

Anyway, his stuff's fascinating.

And

there is a bit of me, there is a latent bit of me that is built for this.

My mum's a Reiki master and

has done it for 20 years.

Yes,

you would not maybe guess that given who her son ended up becoming.

But she's a photo of the full moon every time there's a full moon, angels, horoscopes, Reiki, distance healing, full works.

And

there's

the most sort of angelic temptation on my shoulder a lot of the time to kind of turn toward this a little bit more.

And especially living in Austin, Texas.

It's kind of like the woo psychedelic capital of America,

at least right now.

So yeah, it's cool.

It's cool.

And I think the more,

the more time that I spend around people who use that energy, the better I feel.

And again, I don't need to explain why.

I don't need to explain why that's the case.

I just like being around my friend Austin.

I like being around the guys that

talk in those sorts of terms, that have a bit more of abundance mindset, that don't second guess

something that they kind of feel to be right.

And yeah.

I've got a few thoughts.

There's one thing that I was not going to say, but I'm going to say it now that you've mentioned your mom and said angels.

So, people will see in my book that my angel numbers are 11 and 44 and any combination of ones and fours.

And when you,

the moment you started speaking about your friend that doesn't knock his car, we were on one hour and 14 minutes.

Okay, so to get us back into the realm of materialism just for a second, not to poop on the party, but at least to sort of bring it back down to worth.

You're a scientist.

Can't all of these phenomena just be better explained by psychology?

Wish fulfillment, memory biases, cultural conditioning, reticular activating system.

You just bought that car and now, oh my God, that car's everywhere.

Well, how do you know that it wasn't that you're just looking out for it more?

Because you've said yourself, you are looking for them more, so you see them more.

So there is not just this sense that signs are being given to you, but that your effort toward it allows you to notice more.

So how do you think about, yeah, could this not just be explained by psychology rather than metaphysics?

I think it could all, you know, it can all be explained by psychology, but I think

just in the same way that I said that science fiction is now like a lot of it's now real.

I think in the next decade and decades, a lot of what we're talking about now, which is on the fringe of

psychology and spirituality,

is going to have further explanation.

Let's put it that way.

And I've, you know, I've delved into the potential explanations in my book.

And I love Rupert Sheldrake's work too, but also Professor Donald Hoffman, David Eagleman.

You know, there's just a lot of stuff that we accept at the moment that can't actually be proven.

You know, Donald Hoffman says that

the accepted

sort of

formula, I guess, for want of a better word, that space-time is the construct of the universe can neither be proven nor disproven.

And he suggests that consciousness could be the way that the universe works.

David Eagleman says this idea that the brain is like a radio and it receives signals from outside can't be proven, but it categorically cannot be disproven.

So I just think, you know, it's interesting.

It's interesting as a human, like just living this existence, and obviously as a scientist as well, to be curious about these things.

And I think there's a level of simplicity to what you described about your friend and me, just simplicity in the way that we live life that's useful and easy.

Personally, my step changes in

the way that I approach life and build my resilience has come from extreme hardship.

And that's not going going to be the case for most people, but extreme hardship can either push you to be bitter and negative about life for the rest of your life, or it can push you to be more grateful and more trusting than ever before.

So

that's the choice that I've made.

Is that something you think that people should try to rely on a little bit more in times of hardship?

That this could be the catalyst, the beginning of the alchemy that takes them from where they are now to some higher plane of existence?

Again, if you've given yourself evidence of that, then yes.

So, very hard to do in the moment, obviously.

And, you know, even I'm not saying that I've thought that at the times of going through hardship, but definitely looking back, I can say, you know, two significant

periods of my life have definitely led me to

becoming a better version of myself.

What do you think, if you were to just put a couple of bets on the roulette wheel of science over the next

decade to a few decades,

what do you think we might

find out?

What do you think we might be able to explain materially using that formulaic approach that we said previously that right now most people would be very skeptical of or would be mocked by sort of the current scientific community?

Are there any uh top front runners for that?

Yeah,

reggae on, come on,

it's not time to be shy now.

We're an hour and a half in.

Okay, um, well, I think areas that I'm particularly interested in the research around at the moment are longevity and psychedelics.

But the one that I'm going to say is the frontier that

I think we're starting to be open to look into is about what happens after we die.

So,

yeah, I don't know how many decades that one's going to take, but

I think we are at the start of something where conversations like that are going to happen more than they've happened for a very long time.

Who's the guy?

Sebastian Junger?

He did, I swear that Sebastian Junger had a near-death experience.

Sebastian Junger had a near an N

D E,

didn't he?

This is, we said this before we started.

How did we survive before?

Yes, Sebastian Junger did have a near-death experience, and he writes about it candidly in his 2024 memoir, In My Time of Dying, How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife.

In June 2020, while in his home, he was struck by sudden severe abdominal pain.

He had a ruptured pancreatic artery, life-threatening, lost loads of blood.

Previously, an atheist, he remains so.

However, this experience led him to question whether we really understand or fail to understand about consciousness, death, and reality.

You, you know, who Sebastian Junger is?

He wrote the book Tribe, Tribes.

Phenomenal author.

He's been on the show, and you, you and him.

Have a look, and I'll do an intro if you want to speak to him, although I'm sure that you can get him to.

I think that would be super interesting.

Okay, so

what

are you?

It feels like a little bit of a full circle moment because you kind of laid the seeds of this with your first piece of work.

This has now come into land a little bit more.

What's next?

Well, truly, at the moment,

I'm kind of like

at a fork in the road where I need to make some decisions about what's next because

I've been so focused on the book coming out and unsure of what the response to it would be,

and it being so overwhelmingly positive might actually change what I do next.

So it's really hard for me to answer that question.

But as usual, I'm going to go with my gut.

I mean,

I was sort of

no, not I was.

So what I want to say is that, you know, leaving medicine was a huge, huge risk for me.

I had a stable job.

I would have had a job for life i would have known exactly how my career was going to progress and

i left that and started from nothing um and i'm really glad i did now

um

and i i kind of feel like i'm at another

kind of position like that now where i have to think about you know what the the future is going to look like but it's it's exciting

Well, as you said before, whatever it is that life throws at me, I will be okay.

That's the wonderful resilience.

Dr.

Tara Swatt, ladies and gentlemen, Tara, you're great.

I think you're a wonderful energy and, you know, a much-needed redress to maybe a too sterile

and

highly scrutinous approach to a lot of this stuff.

And I think

if nothing else, my mum is going to absolutely adore the fact that she got a shout-out on this episode and she'll do all of your work too.

So where should people go?

You You got a fantastic new book, you got all of your stuff.

Where should people go to check it out?

I'm most active on Instagram at Dr.

Tara Swart, and my website is tara swart.com.

And the new book, which is also going to be available on Audible with My Voice, is called The Signs: The New Science of How to Trust Your Instincts.

Heck yeah, Tara, I appreciate you.

Thank you.

Me too.

Thank you so much.