E532 Dr. Tara Swart

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Today's guest is a woman I've been intrigued with for a while. She is a neuroscientist.
She's an author, and she's an

advisor who focuses on how to get peak mental performance. She wrote a bestselling book called

The Source, which is all about things you can do to be your best self. She's a fascinating woman,

and I'm grateful for our chat. Today's guest is Dr.
Tara Swart. Just so you know, all this air conditioning and ice is really playing havoc with my throat.
Really? Yeah, because I'm not used to it. Yeah, they don't have it in the UK.
No. Yeah, sometimes, you know, I wonder.
You know, I find sometimes there will be, I'll go on vacation and I'll stay in a place that doesn't have air con, you know. And it's kind of cool because at first I'm like, this sucks.
But then like you feel a lot more connected to Nate, like just the, I don't know what it is. The environment at the minimum, yeah.
You feel way more connected to the environment when you don't have air conditioning, you don't have all these kind of little comforts, you know? Because you're always kind of trying to balance everything for the perfect amount of comfort. That's what I feel like I'm trying to do these days.
It's like, I'm always trying to, like, okay, the air conditioner, am I laying the right, like when I go to sleep specifically, it's like, am I laying the right way? do I it's like I'm always trying to aunt like okay the air conditioner am I laying the right like when I go to sleep specifically it's like am I laying the right way do I it's like I have to have so many little things kind of perfectly lined up or everything's not going to be okay you know but do you do that thing where you blast the air conditioning but you sleep under loads of blankets and yeah why I don't get that why not just have the bedding that's correct for the temperature that it

naturally is?

Yeah.

I think because people have just gone rogue.

People don't know how to just beat just people are just crazy like that.

Really?

They're really sleeper paths.

I call them because it's kind of crazy.

Yeah,

you're right.

Like I'm going to put it at 65 degrees and I'm going to bundle up like it's like I'm in Antarctica. Exactly.
Yeah. And then the craziest stuff is sometimes you'll see like some people have like a rainforest.
They have an eye mask on. It literally seems like they're being it's kind of the same thing as if you were being tortured in a country like in a, you know, it's like they've got eye masks.
There like water dripping in the back just you're like this is this is what they used to do to prisoners it seems like you know i knew i was going to laugh with you but i can't believe i've got the giggles like already do you really yeah oh well damn um i like it i like an eye mask personally because i i don't can't tolerate any light when i'm sleeping but when you said i have to be in the right position, do you actually know what the right position is according to a neuroscientist? Uh-uh, for sleeping? And I'm here with neuroscientist Tara Swart, and you're that brain babe. Yeah, you're the lady that knows about the brain.
I am. Yeah, and we're happy to hear about it today, and we're happy to have you.
Do I know the right position?

No, I don't.

I sleep.

Yeah, tell me how you sleep.

Well, I sleep on my side, I guess, and pillow between my legs, holding a pillow,

and just kind of hoping for the best usually.

What do you suggest?

So sleeping on your side is actually the best position so sleeping on your side is good yeah okay so left or right probably when so i like to connect everything back to evolution so when we slept in the cave we co-slept so we huddled together for warmth and we probably slept on our left side to protect our heart and have our dominant hand ready for an attack. Okay.
But now it doesn't matter which side, but a side is better than back or front. And the reason is that we're cleaning out our brain very actively overnight.
And if your neck is stretched like this, then it helps the waste products to get moved out through the the lymphatic and lymphatic systems and, you know, excreted from your body. Oh, nice.
So yeah, so I'm doing okay. No wonder you've got such a sharp wit.
Maybe, you know, it used to be better. I used to, I had so much stress over the past few years that a lot of my wit has started, has kind of dis, has eroded, to be honest with you.
you know i feel i just know it i used my brain used to have more fun and now it feels like it has more responsibility and so it doesn't have the ability to have as much fun i guess and some of that could be growing up some of that could be actually having more responsibility but i think there's just a lot of stress in the world it feels like like, especially here in the States. I feel like everybody's stressed out.

Do you notice, is that something that you're noticing in you guys' field or is that even something that you guys look at?

So I changed career actually around the time of the global financial crisis.

And I went from being a psychiatrist in the National Health Service in the UK to becoming a stress expert and advisor for very senior leadership people in financial services. At that time, we were seeing a lot of high profile suicides and heart attacks that were caused by stress, even if you weren't overweight or, you know, had high blood pressure or smoked or something like that.
So that was a time where a former psychiatrist kind of could really find a niche in a new career to help, you know, highly stressed people. Then things seemed to sort of calm down a bit.
But I think the new normal was just that we're kind of chronically stressed all the time. And then the pandemic happened happened yeah so unprecedented levels of stress health anxiety um actual illness um and you know potentially people dealing with death so just took things to the next level and meant that all of us we're more stressed than we should be all the time and the brain is constantly monitoring out like our stress levels there's a hormone called cortisol yeah when that's high all the time the body literally goes into survival mode and and i just feel like that's how so many of us if not all of us are at the moment yeah it feels like that it feels like everybody's in survival mode it feels like why are we like this right now what's going on is it really happening that people are more? Or is there just so much more awareness around it that we're also taking it on as like a

placebo type of thing? I really don't agree with the latter. Because remember,

I've been a psychiatrist for seven years before I even started coaching in this field.

So, you know, there were reasons for people to be stressed and us to know about it for a long time.

I think what's really changed at the start of the pandemic, I actually predicted this was going to be a mental health crisis. I also said it could be an opportunity for some kind of spiritual revolution.
And I think that's happening for some people, people who are deep into that are really kind of getting a lot out of it. But for most people, the pandemic happened, we came out of it and we thought, okay, everything will just go back to normal.
But actually, everyone's social circle shrank. We're more lost, lonely and disconnected than I think ever before in the history of humanity.
I think the genders have become very polarized in a way that's not good for either gender. And I think that people are really struggling with what to do about that and often doing exactly the opposite of what they should be doing.
So using your devices more when actually you should be connecting with people face to face more, for example. Kind of also because of devices and, you know, let's say dating apps, for example, just using people as pieces of

garbage that you can get through really quickly instead of forming actual, deep, meaningful relationships that could nurture both parties. Well, it makes sense.
I mean, say if you're looking on Amazon and you see different items, you're like, I don't want this one, not this one, maybe this one, let me read up on it. Nah, yes.
And then you are looking on the same thing and its people people It would make sense that you start to Treat them the same way in a way Without even realizing it maybe You know Especially because of that You know, some of that phone access What effects do we see When we're really stressed out That people may not notice I had an experience years ago Where I was extremely stressed Some people I couldn't't even talk to, some of my close friends, just because of the volume or the speed they communicated at. I just, I was like, it's too, I just couldn't handle it.
I was so burnt out. And I thought, though, that I just wasn't working hard enough.
That was my first thought. I was like, I got to do better.
I'm not doing well enough. And that just burnt me even more.
What's the best way to recognize when you're somebody that's at the brink, kind of, before you get there, I guess? I always said that one of the most cruel aspects of any kind of mental health issue is that the first symptom is loss of insight. So that means that the first thing that happens to you is you actually lose the clarity that something is going wrong.
So being aware is really important. And sometimes this will come from your friends and family saying, Theo, what's going on? Like you're working like a maniac and you don't really seem well.
Or it could come from if you've had previous experiences. So maybe if you ever got into that place again now, you might recognize it quicker because you've been through it before.
For sure. And something like journaling can really help with that as well for you to kind of have a tangible thing that you can read saying, I'm not sleeping well.
And that's usually a sign that I'm getting burnt out or, you know, I've withdrawn from my social circle. So yeah, some kind of reflection of yourself.
Yeah. Yeah.
Once you know what that is, I used to have in my journal, a list of things to do when I'm stressed, because I would find that when I get to the point of realizing that I'm stressed, I don't really have the higher mental functions of working my way out of it. But now I don't need to look at that list.
I kind of and it's very simple things. Talk to a friend, have a square of dark chocolate, take a nap, go for a walk you know nothing kind of too extreme um so once you've started doing those things a little bit then it's obviously also important to um address the the cause of your stress so if for you it was working excessive hours then trying to do whatever you can to you know minimize that in the near future Or if you possibly could like take a quick digital detox break over a long weekend or something, you might feel a lot better.
One of the things I learned is that if I just take two days of kind of, you know, drinking lemon water in the morning and just kind of, you know, slowing down and eating really clean, that it can make a big difference in just two days. If you say, you know, I can't take proper time off for two months, but I can do this two days, you might be able to reset yourself.
And I try to share a lot of information about resetting your nervous system. So there are two modes we can be in.
Fright, flight, fight, or rest. Is that three modes or no? Fright, flight, fight.
That's one of them. That's one of the mode.
Okay, that's one mode has three parts. Yeah, it's like, you know, you get a shark, you want to run away, or you have to attack a predator kind of thing.
And the other mode is rest and digest. And that's the nice feeling you get after you've had a nice meal, and you just feel a bit lazy and really calm.
And so we want to be in the rest and digest mode more of the time, but we tend to find that we're hypervigilant, like looking out for the next threat. And actually, if you're willing to share, I have some research to share about the way that you grew up in that kind of environment.
So there's a lot of breathing exercises that you can do to move yourself into the restful state. For me, things like going for a long walk in nature really helps me to get into that state.
So people have to identify what it is

that for you can reset your nervous system really quickly.

But it's up to you. It's up to us, right? It's like, I think sometimes we're all looking for

something to fix us or a certain medicine or a certain tea or a certain, you know, we're looking

for something to get the job done for us. But in the end, you really have to take control of it.
Yeah. I mean, you mentioned medication and I didn't even respond to that because to me, that's the absolute last resort.
But I think culturally the UK and the US are a little bit, you know, different. Oh yeah.
We're pretty pilled up over here. We're like our pills, you know? Yeah.
Yeah. And I did, I did actually bring you bring you a little tea.
That's a kind of like calming, nurturing one. So, you know, there's nothing wrong with that.
You brought me this nice gift actually. Very sweetie.
I saw this store. I was walking in London and I saw it.
It's called Fortnum and Mason. It was real fancy in there.
Oh yeah. They got some nice tea right here.
Rhapsody. Botanical infusion.
This looks nice, baby. This little canister.
Oh, it's a girl. Yeah, it looks nice.
This is very sweet of you. Thank you.
You're welcome. I'm going to remember to calm down and have me some of this.
Is this for calming down? Good. I need it.
It's hard. Yeah, it's hard to calm down.
It's hard to calm down when you feel like, well, there's also this feeling these days Like you have to fend for yourself I think that's a big feeling of a lot of stress Right now is like everybody kind of feels that In America, some of the fabric of our society Has started to kind of disappear It's like a lot of things that we felt like People used to feel a sense of purpose from our country And we're not feeling that now and so immediately that kind of like gets very scary you know because then you're like well what do I belong to and the closest thing you find is yourself or your family and so those are the things you really start to lock in on you know. Yeah I mean I there's two things I want to say here let's I'll start with myself and then come to you I have worked very hard to create a large community of people around me that I really trust that make me that make me feel safe although you know I agree that safety and peace and freedom have to come from yourself but you also create the narrative that you have about the world um through your experiences and your perception of the world ever since you were a child.
But there's a choice as an adult that you can make to change some of that. So I put things into place that I can see every day in my life that make me feel like the world is a safe place where I can take some risks and I can trust and that could make my life better.

But I can completely understand why if you haven't worked on that for decades, and maybe you don't know about things like neuroplasticity, which we can come on to, you know, how you can change the pathways in your brain, that it's very easy to default to the world is not a safe place. You know, I'm not safe.
I can't trust anyone. I have to be careful.
And this particularly came up for me when I was looking into some research and you shared with me that, well, I won't put words into your mouth. I asked you to identify the first age at which you experienced some kind of neglect or abuse or trauma in childhood.
Would you like to share what you said? Yeah, for sure. I talk about this sometimes on here, and I don't want to beat a dead horse, but this is an environment where it's like helpful to share about that kind of stuff.
Yeah, my mother had like a condition, I think, where she couldn't, she had like this kind of almost, I say like it's an emotional autism in a way, but she didn't know if there was something wrong with you. Yeah, my mother didn't really build like a connection with me when I was young.
She didn't really look at me. She didn't touch me very much.
And she couldn't tell if there was something wrong with me. So if I was sitting somewhere crying, she didn't understand there was something wrong, right? Or if I looked scared, she didn't understand there was something wrong.
Now, if I had a cut on my arm, she immediately could be like, oh, how can I, what's going on here? Because it was very, I don't know if it was obvious. It's tangible.
It's tangible, yeah. But anything that was intangible, like emotional, there was just no, there was nothing there, you know? And so I think, yeah, when I grew up, it was just like that a lot.
And so I was constantly in a fright or flight probably. Yeah.
And I, I know that you, you want to like heal and move on and not flog a dead horse, but I really feel like I can bring some new information to you that could really help you. No, it's good.
So there's a psychological sort of construct called psychosocial stages of childhood development now freud first described this and basically said you know if whether it's from zero to two or two to five or five to seven whenever you feel like the first you know separation from your parents or illness or something happened there's a rewiring of that child's brain um and Freud said, the outcome is always bad. So something goes wrong, you know, you suffered neglect or trauma, this is what's going to be wrong with you.
But Erickson came along later and said that it could be a vice or a virtue. So something could go wrong.
And obviously, a lot of people end up, you know, in with substance abuse or criminality and things like that. But if you're lucky, if you have, you know, one supportive adult in your life, or you as a child make some kind of amazing intuitive choice, then you can go down the other path.
Now for you having experienced this from zero to 18 months, which is the first stage, and then on, it's the vice and virtue are mistrust and trust. So if you go down the road of mistrust, it's having feeling unsafe in your environment and having fear of future events.
But it's also possible that you could have gone down the road of feeling safe in your environment and hopeful for future events. And the piece I really loved, which is connected to the gift.

So after you shared that with me before I flew,

I never ever take a gift to someone

if I'm going to do a podcast.

And I also think it's a little,

maybe a slightly strange thing to do,

but I just had this feeling in my heart,

like I really want to get him a gift.

And obviously that shop is like very English.

So that made sense.

But I walked around the entire store and I looked at every tea and it has like teas and jams and cookies and stuff. And I finally found that one and picked it.
And then I did further research into Ericsson. And he basically said that the way for you to heal is through nourishment and affection.
And that was exactly why I chose the gift that I chose for you. So obviously my neuroscience experience kind of brought me to an intuitive answer.
But it's also said that if you do the right work and you're still in the window of opportunity, it's sort of in your forties, you know, midlife is actually a big opportunity to rewire your brain in a really healthy way. Then what the outcome that you could have would be a really positive experience of interdependence and relatedness.
Well, thank you. It's very sweet of you.
And it's nice to have and we'll make sure to keep it in here so we can remember that too. And our listeners and viewers can look at it and remember that too, that, yeah, that there's a way to move forward, right that's the biggest thing because you at a certain point you kind of get tired there's part of you that gets tired of using the past as a crutch kind of there's a part of you that still is in some pain from it um and then there's a part of you that slowly comes along that, you know, that really wants

to move forward, you know, and that part starts to grow. I've noticed that part grow in me more, especially in the past year.
So I'm grateful for that. I never really thought that, that, that would kind of happen.
But, um, is there a way that people can choose the perspective that they want if they want to choose mistrust or trust now that they're an adult, you know? Yeah. So interestingly, Carl Jung, another psychologist also said that 42 to 44 is the sort of corridor of age where we go from not being our best selves to the ability to choose.
And I think you're in that. Yeah, I'm in there.
Yeah. Yeah.
And you said in the last year it happened. So unless people have some kind of crisis, like a divorce at the age of 35 or something, then people don't usually come to this point of like, do I choose trust or mistrust until naturally until about 42 to 44.
and so first of all obviously you have to know that that there are these options so

if people google ericsson's stages of psychosocial development yeah so basically trust versus

mistrust is the first one that was you a lot of my ceo clients are in the industry versus inferiority one um which is age five to seven usually and is that like uh the you always hear a lot about um you don't think you're good enough or whatever Yeah, imposter yeah yeah yeah you always hear about that imposter syndrome yeah yeah yeah yeah is pornography causing a problem in your life that's a good question it's a real question it has in mind it has at certain periods in my life uh watching porno and everything and watching porno was making me it was ruining my life it was ruining my life man made me feel just so much shame that's what it did well watching pornography has become commonplace today and oftentimes men will use porno to numb the pain of loneliness boredom anxiety and depression that's all i want to introduce you to my friend, Stephen Walt. Steve is the founder of Valor Recovery.
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How do we adjust our perspective? Is it that possible that we can adjust our perspective now? Yeah, so there's this amazing thing called neuroplasticity. When I was still at medical school, we didn't have sophisticated scanning techniques, you know, for brains or bodies.
So we had kind of like x-rays and... Oh yeah.
And just asking people guessing. Yeah, kind of, you know, and in neurology, a lot of guessing, because if someone had a brain tumor, but you knew where it was roughly, then you would say, oh, now we know which part of the brain you use for like writing or it was a lot of guesswork in neurology particularly once we could scan brains we could see how healthy brains are working so what's happening when you're experiencing an emotion or you're recalling a memory or you're making a decision or you know being really funny you know we can see what's going on in the brain, which parts of the brain are interacting with each other, you know, which systems are getting a lot of blood flow.
And so we also then found out that because we used to think that by the time you stopped physically growing, like age 18, that your brain became completely fixed, your personality, your IQ, etc. We now know that the brain actively grows and changes till we're about 25.
So if you think of a newborn baby, it can't do anything. And within 18 months...
It's ridiculous, really. If you look at me like, this is ridiculous, you know, like you would never draft one on your fantasy team or whatever, you know, they just it's bad.
But anyway, go on.

I mean, I like what God does, but some of that is the starting point is very far.

You know, it's you're off.

You're far off the line, it feels like.

But isn't it incredible what happens within 18 months?

Yeah.

So, you know, then they're like walking.

They can control their own bladder and bowels.

They can speak up to five languages if they've been exposed to, you know, different languages in the first few years of their life. So that's the biggest example of neuroplasticity.
That change is incredible, as you've just said. And then in teenage, there's quite a lot of change.
You know, the brain becomes a bit more sophisticated for adulthood. And then this process is going on really actively till we're about 25.
And then from 25 to sort of 70-ish, you have to put in more effort to get your brain to change, to get your brain to keep learning and growing. But it's absolutely possible.
And for some people, it's okay to plateau. You know, if you get a job that you love and you want to do that for the rest of your life

and you married your high school sweetheart and nothing really needs to change, that's

fine too.

But, you know, for a lot of us, this opportunity to think that you can really change your personality,

your career, your community, your resilience throughout your life is like a beacon of hope.

So yeah, 100%.

Yeah, because you start to think, oh, it's too late. But you're saying it's not.
No. Wonderful.
So once you know about, and also I'm doing that thing about saying so the whole time, which I want to start doing. Do people say it a lot? Yeah.
Who does? Americans? Well, an American producer told me that everybody does it. Says so? Yeah.
I don't know if we do. We might.
I don't know. I don't know that much, but anyway, I, yeah, I'm hopeful that you know what you're talking about.
Cause I don't, you know, um, if you know about neuroplasticity that, and that means, you know, that you have some options to change the way that you behave in the outside world or your thought patterns and your beliefs about yourself. Right.
So you're saying there's still a lot of hope. There's still a lot of hope for people from 20 to 75.
There's still a, it's yeah, it shouldn't be something, anything you feel hopeless about your brain, you can still, and that's the main thing you got to change. Yeah.
And you might be able to identify what that is for yourself, but I think this Erickson stages is a really helpful one because people can go and look up the age that they were when they first felt abandoned or neglected and then work out what their particular issue is and work on that. But if I was doing a proper session with you, you know, like I do with people, I would ask you, what is the repeated negative thought that you have about yourself? I don't know if it's a thought but it feels like a belief and it just feels like i have to do something to be worth something that's the biggest one i think that was always there like whatever i do isn't enough you know this isn't good enough you're not enough yeah that was like a deep one.
And it's, it's not even something I think it's just something that it's almost like a magnet that's inside of me, you know, and it, it brings my other thoughts down to it a lot of times. So you've kind of said the thought and the belief, which, which often what I have to do with people is dig under the thought to actually find out what the belief is that's driving that thought.
And then I help people to create an affirmation that's the opposite of that belief. Yeah, because sometimes it's like the thought will be, man, this isn't good enough.
And it goes back to the belief that, you know, I would always set my goals ridiculous. So always I felt like I was underachieving, always.

Because I didn't even know what my goals were,

but I just knew that I needed to get my mother's attention.

I needed to get some feeling.

I needed to get some response, right?

And I would try everything.

And nothing worked.

And so I think it created this thing inside of me

where you always have to keep trying. There's never a piece.
You have to keep trying, and it's always never going to work. Yeah, everything you do will never be enough.
Yes. Just to even get that minimal piece of attention from your primary caregiver.
Yeah. Yeah, everything I do will never be enough.
And so it started as that kind of went through my life, I guess. So have you heard of a part of the brain called the amygdala? Yeah.
So this is where all our basic emotions come from. Like caveman stuff, huh? Yeah.
Yeah. And there's that movie, I think it's called Free Solo about the guy who climbs like a crazy vertical cliff face in Yosemite.
Oh, yeah. That guy's really interesting.
Have you seen his brain scan? No. Okay.
So they found out that basically he doesn't really have an amygdala or any activity in his amygdala. So he can't feel fear.
And that's why he'll do things that you and I would be like, I'm not going to do that because I'm going to die if I do that. Yeah.
Yeah. So my buddy Jeff was like that.
He would always, yeah, he would just burn a lot of shit in his house and stuff and like and he he was just he was an idiot but um oh wow this is that guy's brain scan this is so cool that you do this by the way yeah it's neat to be able to see things you know wow so he doesn't have a fear so some people have less fear than other people so fear is actually our most basic this movie, in this documentary, they showed that the reason he could do these crazy things was because he wasn't experiencing fear. But in similar research, we see that female primates who have damage, physical damage to their amygdala will neglect or even physically abuse their babies.
So what's becoming interesting now is that this psychological stuff, like you say, I think my mom had some form of emotional autism, it's becoming much more aligned to physiological stuff. So kind of now we say anything biological probably has a psychological element and anything psychological, you know, may be underpinned by some kind of neurological issue.
So, you know, it's perhaps too late to investigate that, but it just makes the point that there are so many reasons she could have been like that and none of them are actually to do with you. Right.
Yeah. Because as a youth, you think it's your, yeah.
When you're, of course, when you're a baby or a kid, you, everything, the world revolves around you. So if the world isn't giving you any, a lot of stuff back, then you think it's your fault, you know? And so that's where you create ideas like, oh, I'm not enough.
Nothing I ever do will be enough, you know? And how do you think this has played out in your relationships with women throughout your life? It's been tough, I think. You know, it's been tough.
I remember I would be like, I didn't know how long to look at a girl when you when you looked at them you know i didn't i would get super nervous i remember like in my 20s if there was like intimacy or something you know i got super it made me super nervous i always felt nervous um it gave me like yeah sexual problems because just the mistrust like I think just not knowing how to be around somebody those types of things for sure and then I think fear like I put women on a pedestal a lot of times you know it was like if they were always kind of unattainable in a way inside of me you know it's like oh um i'm not going to get a girl that i want i'm just going to get a girl that you know i'll hope the best that a girl will want me right so that So that was kind of maybe some thought patterns.

Those aren't all the things that I have today.

Some of that is certainly eroded,

and I've learned a lot over the years and stuff.

But those are some of the things I think,

if that's what you're asking about.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it makes sense

because it's basically a mirror of,

no matter what I did,

I couldn't get my mom's attention, so women must be so far away, I won't be able to get their attention. Yeah.
And then if one did, I would like kind of, I would be overbearing kind of sometimes, you know, I just, you learn all that kind of stuff the hard way. Then you're like, you know, if a girl looks at you one time or even like, you know, even if she's just taking her garbage out or whatever, and you're hiding in the bushes or whatever.
But even if she looks over, you're like, damn, this might be something real. you know even if she's just taking her garbage out or whatever and you're hiding in the bushes or whatever but even if she looks over you're like damn this might be something real you know i would fantasize like before i'd even i would adjust kind of my plans like i'm gonna go out of town but then i'd seen this girl's like maybe i'll stay in town a few extra days maybe i'll see this girl again just like very um you know kind of but i kind of based a lot of my life around the hope that I that there would be some connection you know so that kind of stuff I think wasn't very healthy and then when I did get a connection with a woman I couldn't if I couldn't do it was too much yeah it was very hard to uh to lock in on a relationship I'd always find myself cheating, that sort of thing.
Have you heard about this hormone called oxytocin? Yeah. Yeah.
So actually, the way that we build the emotional architecture in our brains is through eye contact with our mom. So you didn't have that.
And you also didn't get physical affection, which your mother holding you or kind of you or kind of, you know, cuddling you would induce oxytocin and that would help to build healthy neural architecture in your emotional system. So you didn't, you didn't have that.
So. No, the architecture was very limited.
It was luckily, it was a damn, you know, it was more of a Hardee's. I felt like that somebody had built her a Tim Hortons inside of It was very, yeah, it was just a, you know, it was just like more of a hardy's i felt like that somebody had built a tim hortons inside of me it was very yeah it was just a you know it was just like more of a kebab shack you know then it was like a real fixture of love it felt like you know i was going to say i don't know what tim hortons is so i couldn't like a drive-through establishment okay you know it wasn't a real place of like uh you know there wasn't a ton of value like in the architecture, I don't think.
And in your life now, whether it's through friends, family, pets, you know, sometimes even things like bathing or getting a massage, how much physical affection do you get? Well, it's weird because I kind of created a life that's kind of isolating sometimes.

Because I think that's maybe what I was used to.

And then, but now it's gotten better.

I go do get more massages.

I find myself, I am able to lock in a little bit more communication with women.

I feel more confident.

You know, I've been like done therapy for a long time.

I did some ayahuasca seminars, things like that. So plant medicine.
So there's been things that I think have helped me, you know? Okay. So for people who are lonely, because I think this is a, you know, an issue as well at the moment, bathing instead of showering actually gives you oxytocin because you're enveloped in warmth.
It's kind of like a hug. So that's one thing that people can do.
Oh yeah. When you get out of a warm bath, you're just like, oh man, you know? Yeah.
You almost feel like a baby kind of. Do you think this is the reason that you sleep with the air conditioning on so high and so that you're wrapped up in lots of blankets? It could be.
Oh, I noticed if I don't tuck the blanket under my feet, then it's very hard for me to sleep. So I'm still, yeah, I'm

definitely a very tall baby, I think, you know? Yeah, I think so. So that's okay.
I have to

remember that sometimes, you know? Yeah, I mean, I'm in like recovery programs and they're always

like, we're all babies. We're just retarded or not.
Or I don't know if people say like,

but that we're like, not doing, we're just babies that are having a tough time, you know? Like If you saw a baby smoking or drinking a coffee, you'd be like, God, this baby. Isn't a bad way.
He isn't doing well. Yeah, or the baby was taking Propecia or something.
God, this baby needs some help. Needs some help.
So yeah, I'm one of those babies, but I'm getting better. I feel like I'm kind of a, now I'm like a camp counselor of the babies.
you know? I'm not as much, you know. I'm still kind of a baby, but I'm evolving out of it pretty quick, I hope.
So another tip for you. I'm pleased to hear that you're having massages and therapy.
Yeah. But I find that there's a place that talking therapy can't go beyond.
And that is trauma that is stored in the body that you're not even consciously aware of. Have you heard of that book, The Body Keeps the Score? So it was written in the 70s, but it's back in the bestseller list, which is making me feel hopeful that more people are realizing that since the pandemic that we've got trauma stored in our bodies.
So I've actually recently been doing some somatic therapy called body realignment. And it seemed to be, for me, surfacing emotions that I perhaps don't allow myself to in talking therapy or in regular life.
I think there are some emotions, for example, anger, that it's quite still socially unacceptable for women to express. That's a good point.
Yeah, women aren't allowed to get super angry, I guess. When I did boxing, I actually felt like I released a lot of anger as well.

I can only do that physically, whether it's through a sport or this kind of body thing.

And I think for men, it might be things more like sadness that it's not socially acceptable to express as much.

Yeah, probably so.

I think a little bit, even though it's more now, I think people are kind of, now everything's a little bit more free. What type of trauma really can get held in our bodies? Oh, all sorts.
So that phrase psychosomatic is that all the various emotions that we can feel can end up showing up as physical symptoms in our body. And that can be actual illness, but also it can just be aches and pains.
For me, it's like tense shoulders and just aches and pains. But when I actually had the body realignment therapy, there were parts of my body that I wouldn't even think like kind of like the size of my ribs and things that was so painful.
And the therapists, they know which parts of your body can, you know, certain emotions get stored in. So I think for that one, you really have to find someone that can guide you through that.
But the point, another point that I really wanted to make is we talk a lot about trauma. And like, you know, like you set such a great example to people of don't just keep focusing on the trauma and be a victim.

I actually think we have as much access to generational healing as we do to generational trauma. So, you know, horrific things have happened in the past, like the Holocaust, apartheid, slavery, the treatment of the first Americans.

Yeah, France won in the World Cup as well.

Some people would say. That was bad.
It was pretty... Yeah, well, it will affect people for generations into the future.
I think some people it will. Yeah, totally.
Some people it will. But what were you going to say? So I was going to say that we can also get access to ancestral or ancient wisdom.
And if we put that together with the somatic stuff, think about what our ancestors did when they didn't really have resources spare to have fun, right? But they danced, they drummed, they chanted, they hummed, they sang, they painted. These physical activities are actually really good for us and can help us to release some of that stored trauma.
So I'd love people to go away with that message that yes, you might have stored trauma that talking therapy hasn't completely got rid of, but there are things that you can do at home. You don't have to pay for a massage.
You can, you can do self massage. You can take a bath, you can dance around your living room and all of these things could also help you to release that kind of trauma.
Yeah. Yeah.
I've noticed how there'll be times where I've done yoga and a certain thing, and then I'll lay down after it, and tears will come out of my face. Really? And it's just pain, something being released.
Sometimes a memory or something might be with it or a feeling. But it's, yeah, it's pretty amazing that that kind of thing can happen.
In yoga, hip opening particularly releases a lot of emotions. So again, people can Google some of the like hip opening poses and you're supposed to stay in them for longer, like five minutes.
And if it produces tears, then it's definitely helping release trauma. Yeah.
I feel like we've kind of been all over the place right now. I want to talk.
So let's go through a couple of things. So I want to know, like, does stress affect men and women the same? This is a really interesting one.
So there are different forms of stress. One is called adaptive stress, and it's actually a very healthy response to a short-term stressor, like a deadline or a podcast interview or something.
And then there's the chronic stress, which is bad for us because it starts to erode our immunity. It causes a lot of inflammation throughout the body.
But the differences between men and women aren't with regard to those. It's with regard to how we respond to being in either of those situations.
So men, and all of this is based on population norm studies, so it's most men and most women, but not all. Men good at reacting to a crisis and you know releasing all of that cortisol and adrenaline and fighting off the monster or whatever it is but they have to rest afterwards women can actually find ways to recoup resilience during long periods of stress so they'll still be dealing with the stressful thing but at times find, you know, whether it's speaking with a girlfriend or taking a bath or, you know, going for a walk in nature, they find ways to keep their resources topped up.
So they don't have that crash that like more men tend to have. I wonder sometimes if a lot of like, because we have so many, everybody feels so stressed out and it seems like it's such a thing, you know? I wonder if sometimes I think like it used to be, we had to literally like be weary of like a lying attack in us, you know, it was like really fight or flight.
Like it was, but now that's not the case. Right.
But I wonder, I wonder if that, that thing that was worried about everything out here just started to go inside of us because there wasn't anything else out here to fight, really. Yeah, absolutely.
The biggest threats to our safety now are psychological threats. So things like your partner leaving you, you losing your job, your friend's not liking you anymore.
Yeah, the fear started to become internal as opposed to external. And I wonder if we're partially just in a phase of that, you know, like we're evolved, you know, it's almost like an evolution because yeah, the lions now are the fears inside of us.
Like you're saying our partner leaving us or us losing our ability to feed our families or a goal that we have not working out or something, losing a job. Yeah.
Yeah. The things that you need to kind of keep your basic life on the road that it's on, you know, and not lose the things that make you feel psychologically safe.
Are you less stressful if you're in a relationship? Does relationships or like love, having somebody, a family, does that affect stress at all? It depends what kind of relationship, right? So yeah, if it's an interdependent trusting relationship where, you know, both parties are in it for the long term, then that inevitably will reduce your stress levels. But I mean, what I'm seeing a lot of at the moment actually is as women, we tend to be having the same conversations that, you know, whether you're in your twenties 30s 40s whatever um of kind of you know want to find a nice man and settle down um but just feeling like that desire for commitment isn't the same as it was you know basically since there have been apps and stuff like that um but I've actually got some really close male friends and they've been confiding in me recently that A, they don't really talk to each other about deep things like they do with me and that some of them have no one to confide in.
Wow. And, you know, lovely guys who I think would make, you know, nice husbands for some of my friends, but have been so broken by toxic relationships that they've been in, that they now just want non-committal casual relationships.
And this is where the problem starts is where a guy says, let's say it was you and I, and you say, Tara, look, I've had all these issues. I've just told you about my upbringing, mummy issues, et cetera.
I can't commit to you, but you know, we can hang out. But if I'm thinking, well, you know, I'd like to marry you.
So I'm going to hang out with you in the hope that you'll get to know me and like me and change your mind. That happens so much.
And then it leads to issues, obviously, for both parties when it doesn't work out. So that's an incredibly stressful place to be in, no matter what gender you are.
And the outcome only reinforces for both that you're not worthy of love. Yeah, how does it reinforce that? So for the woman, particularly if they're actually being intimate, she will be experiencing a lot of oxytocin.
Basically, that happens through cuddling and physical intimacy, but like off the scale when you orgasm. So she'll be getting more and more bonded to the guy.
If the guy has no intentions of this becoming a committed relationship, then he'll be experiencing a lot of reward, like the dopamine, the reward chemical, lots of testosterone. And there's also this hormone called vasopressin, which in both genders is to do with our blood volume and our blood salt.
But for men, it's also to do with bonding, social bonding and aggression, but aggression in terms of protecting and being possessive of your partner. And so if men don't get to have sex straight away, that hormone will build and build and build, and then they'll become bonded to the woman.
And then they'll also start releasing oxytocin when they orgasm. So there's better value in creating a relationship if you don't have sex immediately.
It will work better for the woman in terms of chances of the man bonding with her. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like, I feel like it, sometimes I romanticize the past and it feels like that used to be

more of the thing, you know, like people would wait till marriage for sex.

And so it creates, you know, that had a lot more value to it.

Like, yeah, I think sex and animacy is kind of like, was, I don't know, for a lot of guys,

it got replaced by pornography too. I really damaged it especially for me um you know once i once i found pornography there was a like a way to have a feeling a connection with a woman that was safe enough for me to be in i knew it wasn't i wasn't going to be hurt yeah um there was some sexual reward to it it.
I could start it and stop it as I wish. It was the only kind of relationship I could even really handle.
I was in other relationships but none of them were as long as my relationship with pornography to be honest. Right now I'm I think I'm 77 days off of pornography and 70 days off of masturbation so i've had um sexual activities but i haven't um been you know uh touching my wiener whatever people just say different stuff but you know i'm saying like i don't know what they say in your country you know topping off the wanking yeah okay.
Yeah. Yeah.
Thinking of the queen or whatever they say, you know, I don't know what they say. Queen takes rook or whatever.
That's like a chess move, but yeah. So that's been kind of different, you know, for me, that's been different, but that was a, that was a huge thing.
How is it different? Well, for one, I quit thinking about it. It's like, don't think about pornography.
I don't think about masturbation. I don't have that weird feeling where I'll masturbate and then I'll just be laying there like I'm still right where I was, but I've kind of ejaculated or whatever.
Because sometimes like semen or some people call it, I don't know what people call it or whatever, like party sauce or whatever. I don't even know what people call it on the street or whatever.
But I feel like the more I keep it in my body, the more masculine I feel, right? And the more of myself I feel, as opposed to just having a leak of it constantly. It was kind of like almost had a leak of my masculinity.
And I would cause the but the leak would happen and it was just like a dripping pipe it was like you look at a dripping pipe you're like uh you know but you look at a pipe that's not dripping you're like hey this is some pretty good construction i like that i love that phrase leak of my masculinity yeah that's kind of what it felt like you know now that i really think about it and then um i start to look at women a little bit i don't think of it just so much and in i've always thought of women in more than just a sexual sense but the sexual part isn't as strong it's not like let me just think about sex it's giving me a little bit more space in myself to be like well let me think about who this person is and do i really want to engage with them? It starts to give a little bit more value to sex for me. And by that happening, intimacy is kind of created because for one, I have a little more intimacy with myself, right? It's like I respect my intimacy a little bit more.
I'm not just masturbating. I'm not just tossing my intimacy off to some person through a screen or something that doesn't really mean anything to me.

And so I think those are some feelings in my head that start to happen. And I start to feel a little bit more, I don't know if it's integrity, but it is a little bit more sense of intimacy with myself.
That's lovely. So one of the reasons that people resort to things like that, particularly after a breakup, is that the brain circuitry that is to do with unrequited love is relieved by certain activities because they cause the same kind of chemical cocktail.
And those activities are things like alcohol, cocaine, pornography. Yeah.
Yeah, sorry. Yeah.
Yeah, well, it makes sense, right? This is why people can indulge in those. Yeah.
And obviously they're addictive. So then it becomes something that you need to do more of to get the same reward.
Right, and that becomes your relationship. Yeah.
Yeah, and so then it's like, well, yeah, of course, other relationships are going to be different because I don't even realize the relationships that I put in front of. And the other thing is that pornography creates such an unrealistic, idealized version of what a woman should look like and what she should be prepared to do in an intimate relationship or, or even not in an intimate relationship, you know, like in a one night stand or very early in dating,

that that's very damaging to male and female relationships as well. That, you know, the expectation that you will naturally have if you've been looking at that every day.

Yeah. Oh yeah.
And to not have it in my brain and it starts to, my imagination starts to start up

again. Like that's one thing that's disappeared over the years, I feel like is our imagination,

because we have access at anything you want to see. You want to see two gay guys attack a

Thank you. start up again like that's one thing that's disappeared over the years i feel like is our imagination because we have access at anything you want to see you want to see two gay guys attack a squirrel or whatever in a marina or whatever you can but you can google it right now and it'll you'll find it like anything you want to find out there you can it's like we don't need our imagination we used to have to imagine yeah yeah yeah um and so that, now my imagination starts to start up again, you know, because, yeah, I'm not attaching porn to women I meet now, you know.
And there, right there, squirrel attacks, twink, right there, that is. Yeah, and I don't know.
And that might have been the rebuttal. Who knows where the first attack started, but, but yeah, so that's something that's been really neat just on this recently that I've been doing and really seeing some reward from it.
And you know, what's so crazy for years, I tried like different like blockers on computers and stuff. And I got started with this kind of recovery coach and he just just said, why don't you text me at night? And he said, tell me something that felt good during your day.
Tell me something you felt like maybe you could have done a little bit differently. And then tell me how long you've been off of porn and how long you've been off of masturbation.
For some reason, that's all it took. And it's just been so easy.
Well, accountability maybe that's it it's like accountability with somebody that i trust or yeah that i trust and and that you respect because you will feel like you've let them down if you can't keep you know send those messages that's a good point yeah it's funny i didn't feel that as much but i did i just felt i was shocked at how easy it started to help me you know um so that's been that's one thing that's really that's been really nice um do couples what is the chemistry that happens in the brain if you're in a like if you've created a you're in a comfortable relationship or you're you mentioned earlier that like families have better chemistry if they sleep together. Did you say something like that? Or sleeping under one roof, you know? Like a lot of my Mexican friends are always so happy and most of their families live together.
Intergenerational. Yeah.
Oh, they sleep on each other's backs sometimes. They just, you know, they're really close knit.
Yeah. What is it? Is there there is there scientific evidence to back any of that up yeah lots and the research was done on um prairie voles prairie like little animals yeah oh yeah yeah yeah bring up one prairie dog vole not dog prairie vole they call them y'all make everything fancy we know what they are it's not a dog it's like a little mouse thing oh it is well let's see who's right see oh prairie vole, they call them.
Y'all make everything fancy. We know what they are.
It's not a dog. It's like a little mouse thing.

Oh, it is?

Well.

Let's see who's right.

See?

Oh, prairie vole.

I've never seen that.

Oh, dang.

That's rodentia.

Yeah.

Wow.

Is that a, oh, that almost looks like a little bit of a hamster or something or a little gerbil.

Gerbil?

Yeah, you don't have them.

You got them?

Gerbil.

Oh, it's pronounced, I guess that maybe the j is silent or whatever it's not a j that gerbil baby look at them those are a couple i'll make slippers out of them bad boys i'll make a newborn a set of slippers with them little warm them little chunks of warmth make your slippers out of the marsh voles because they are promiscuous these ones ones are monogamous. They mate for life.
Oh, they do? Oh, that's beautiful. And so they studied them and they found out that these are healthier animals? Is that what you're going to tell me? That's a little bit oversimplified.
Okay. I would say that the research, so basically that they're the same kind of vole, but some of them live in the prairie and some of them live in the marsh.
Okay.

And in the marsh, there's plenty of food and shelter.

So, you know, why not have sex with lots of other she-voles?

Because you can.

It's partying.

It's like being in the city.

Yeah.

In the prairie, to make sure that your young would survive, it's more advantageous for you to settle down with one Mrs. Vole and the children, protect the territory and share the job of finding food for them.
So what happens in the prairie voles compared to the marsh voles is that certain receptors, so for some of the hormones we discussed like oxytocin and vasopressin and dopamine. So if we were prairie voles rather than marsh voles, then you would get a dopamine hit every time you saw me.
You would choose me over a different vole. It's like a new strange vole.
You'd say, no, I'd rather stay with my vole. And you'd have higher levels of vasopressin and oxytocin.
And we'd both have more receptors in the reward centers of the brain for those hormones. So we would just feel so good every time we see each other.
If we saw the other one in distress, we would want to comfort them. Why did they create more receptors? We don't know.
We don't know why. It's not just that you have more of the hormone, but you have more of the receptors in certain parts of the brain.
It's just, it's part of the bonding kind of like increases the bonding. The fact that you've got more of the hormone and more of the receptors in certain parts of the brain.
It's just, it's part of the bonding, kind of like increases the bonding, the fact that you've got more of the hormone and more of the receptors and it's in the reward part of the brain. But actually it's not just like if we just hung out together and looked after the babies and fed them and saw each other frequently, that would happen.
But sexual activity actually intensifies the wiring. So it's kind of like the genetics and the receptors load the gun, but actually having sex pulls the trigger.
Interesting. Wow.
So, so that's why you see if it's a, if it's a healthy family, then that's why, um, people want to be in a healthy family because it feels good. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
And the co-sleeping is a different thing. That's oxytocin.
Co-sleeping? Yeah, which is like sleeping together like you two and the kids. Are those people healthier? Or even just the couple sleeping together because some people don't sleep together because they snore or whatever.
Oh, yeah. I know you're talking about people in New Jersey.
I know it. I've been over there.
The women snore too. Dang.
Yeah, you're like, gosh, is this my wife or is this a refinery I'm laying next to? A lot of puffle puffing. Anyway, with no other issues like that, it is more healthy for you to sleep together because you increase both of your levels of oxytocin.
So you feel better. Your brain feels better sleeping with someone that it cares about or just anyone? You would get some benefits of sleeping with just anyone, but it's much more if it's somebody that you care about and that you love.
And if a family's closer together, do you guys, there's a, uh, that's even more. Yeah.
Well, Indian families like Mexican families sleep together. Um, or at least one of the children, let's say there's a widowed grandparent, one of the children, grandchildren would sleep with them.
So no one sleeps alone. Wow.
That's pretty cool. Are there animals that do that as well that we, do you think that we learned that from? All animals do that.
They do? Well, some, obviously some animals like snow leopards, they're completely independent. They don't even stay with their children after a certain age.
I know it's really sad. Um, but most animals will, will sleep together.
And so there's a few things that go on on there one is that you actually share your gut microbiome so we have an oral microbiome a skin microbiome and a gut microbiome which are the good bacteria that help us not just to digest and help our mental health but also contribute to our immunity so if we ate together kissed slept together then I'm guessing I've got a better gut microbiome than you. I would actually donate healthy cells to you as part of a relationship.
Really? Yeah. And improve your immunity.
Wow. So there's a lot of value in being close to someone and there's a lot of neuroscientific value.
Oh, that's cool. Yeah, I guess it makes sense, you know.
It certainly makes sense. Well, we had to be part of a tribe to survive when we lived in the cave, right? For sure.
And if you've ever seen like a group of puppies or whatever, somebody has like a box of dogs or whatever, you know, they always look like it. So if you see them all right there by the mom, it looks like the funnest thing in the world.
Even just looking at a puppy with big eyes would make you release oxytocin. God, then I need to start dating animals then.
You know, I don't know what you guys' laws are, but might have to come over there to do it. But here's some of the world's most solitary animals right here.
Platypus. Yeah I could see that Kind of maybe polar bear That's sad man That's sad

Because it's so cold and they're just up there and polar bears every video you see a polar bear it's like the polar bears looking for food it's just like god like and the ice cubes amount ice yeah it's always ice cubes yeah it's floating on like a little it's floating on like you know four grams of ice or whatever and it's just like it's god it just seems like a horrible life snow leopard a sandpiper hawaiian monk seal the chuckwalla lizard snow leopards are beautiful i think i feel like i would want to be one but i wouldn't want to be on my own. You'd have to be, though.
I'll just be a regular leopard then. That's fair.
Okay, you're allowed, Miss. First of all, I'd like to say thank you to Dan Morgan and everyone over at Morgan & Morgan.
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What is it about love today that makes it seem like you think it's harder to find?

Or am I just romanticizing it?

I think that one of the reasons is that we're living so much longer.

So to be honest, in cave times where all we had to do was survive to reproduce our genes,

you and I, it wouldn't be worth us being alive anymore at the ages that we're at now. So now that we're living much longer and the divorce rates are like 50%, people are looking for that, you know, second long relationship or even third long relationship that they might have in their life.
So I think it's just very hard. Obviously, people did stay together for like, you know, 50 plus years or whatever.
I just think society has changed. It's all about, you know, sort of instant gratification and short termism.
And our attention spans have changed because of the internet and smartphones and apps and things like that. And it's just become more socially acceptable as well.
So in many cultures, they still, you know, still won't divorce, but the cultures that we exist in, like it's kind of quite normal now. It's a swap meet.
Yeah. It's very much a swap meet.
It feels like. Yeah.
I know you talked about like maybe coming out of the pandemic that people would sense a return maybe to faith. Is there any proof that having like faith and higher power has a positive effect on your brain? Yeah.
So having a moderate amount of faith or some sort of spiritual belief is beneficial for the brain, but having none or too much like fundamentalism is actually not good for your brain. Hmm.
Really? Like how, like what, how does, how does having too much affect your brain negatively? Um, well, it might become associated with certain levels of paranoia or mistrust or sort of survival emotions like anger or hatred or fear, because it kind of often means that you have to be against someone. Right so when you get to the point where you're against somebody um or where you're so for just one thing yeah that you're then inherently against other things yeah it can get uh it's not as healthy for you um you advise like in your work you advise like a lot of very like powerful people you know because I know that you have worked with like a lot of like, you advise like a lot of very like powerful people, you know,

because I know that you have worked with like a lot of like, you know, a lot of the,

a lot of the powers in the world will come to you to help them. What are problems that powerful people have and successful people have like that maybe would surprise us? Do you think if you can,

you don't have to get specific, but if you want to share anything. Well, the first thing I will say is that the problems are pretty much exactly the same, whether it was a patient I saw in the National Health Service as a doctor or as it is now as an executive advisor to very senior people.
And because I'm a stress expert, I do tend to see people who are managing really high levels of stress and complexity. And they're also traveling a lot.
So their sleep might be really disrupted. They often don't really believe in sleeping that much anyway.
So it's all those sort of habits, like people who don't get enough sleep, who, I mean, they would tend to eat well because they can afford to, but they might not be eating in what I call like a brain first approach. So they might be eating because they want to run a marathon or because they can afford expensive things, but that's not necessarily what's best for your brain.
So I can help them with that. Um, really is eating certain ways better for your brain? Cause yeah, I find most of the time I eat eat just because i have to like if i didn't have to eat i would a lot of times i would just keep working or doing something you know and i don't eat like a lot of variety of stuff yeah i don't i'm not a foodie i guess you know i maybe would be once i get married or something if my wife wants to get something or order something then i would try something something like, like more new or something.
But I just like, I'll just usually make a quesadilla

or have a smoothie because it's easy. Wow.
So you wait till you're hungry and then just eat

something because you have to. Yeah.
That's kind of how I am. It's a little bit, it's kind of sad

really, but it's okay. Maybe it's because you don't know that even though your brain is such

a small percentage of your body weight, it uses up 20 to 30 percent of everything that you eat. Really? Yeah.
Your brain does? Yeah. Wow.
So when you're asleep, your brain's using up 20 percent of what you ate that day. What a peeve, huh? It's just energy hungry.
That's what we would call it. And so when you're really focused on, really focused on something like this, you're probably using up about 25%.
But if you're under a lot of stress, your brain will take up 30% of what you're eating. Wow.
What happens to our brain while we're sleeping? So the brain- Do you know? We know quite a lot more about it now than we did, let's say, 20, 30 years ago. But we probably don't know everything.
We actually don't. Well, we've only recently understood why we need to sleep for eight to nine hours.
And that's because that cleaning process I mentioned. Oh, it's nine now? Well, eight hours and 15 minutes is the ideal in the sort of population norm studies.
Let's round it up. I'll take nine if we're willing to do it.
Nine in bed so that you get at least seven to eight hours of sleep. Yeah.
Because that cleansing process takes seven to eight hours. And that process is flushing out toxins that are exactly the same pathologies that we see in dementia and Alzheimer's and things like that.
And they build up due to the daily wear and tear of life, stress and alcohol and processed food and all that kind of thing. I know there's a big debate in this country at the moment about ultra-processed food, but from a brain point of view, don't eat it.
Really? Yeah. It's really bad for you? Really bad.
What are some of the effects that processed foods have on your brain? Well, everything comes down to inflammation. So these ultra processed foods for your body to break them down is going to cause a lot of like cell activity.
And then it's also leaving the waste products from that food in for your body to get rid of. And this is going to cause some of the cells to become inflamed.
And when your body's under stress, and that's the only nutrition that it's getting, then basically your cortisol levels go up and that crosses the blood brain barrier. So it supplies blood to the whole brain and body, and it will just cause inflammation in your gut.
Your gut talks to your brain all the time. Your brain talks to your gut.
Gossiping. You know, but that's good.
It's actually a three-way gossip because your gut microbiome is also signals to the gut and the brain separately. Wow.
So your brain is super busy, huh? If it can have such an effect and what are things you recommend that you would eat? I mean, obviously some of it seems kind of obvious

or things you would or wouldn't.

So I would suggest, this is ideal, ideal.

Okay, this is what I do,

but it's taken me years to get to this point.

I eat 30 different plant products per week.

Now that can include coffee, dark chocolate, spices.

So especially like if you eat a lot of Mexican food,

it's actually not as hard as you think to do that, but you do need to vary the sort of vegetables that you're using. In South America, they actually call squash, beans, and corn, the three sisters, and attribute that to the blue zones of longevity in parts of South America.
Then you do need to eat some good quality protein. So lean proteins like eggs, yogurt, tofu.
Fish. Can we do fish? Fish.
Can we have it? Yeah. Oh, good.
Fish. Yeah, I like fish.
I like having fish. Yeah, even like.
And it looks cool if you see it in the water. Because that's the only thing I don't like.
You have a thing about fish. You think? Yeah.
Maybe I do. But cows, you look at them, you're like, this thing is dumb as fuck.
I'm not eating this thing. That's how I feel a lot of times, you know.
Especially the one with the bell on his neck or whatever. You're like, this one's dumb, but at least he's trying to party.
But it's like cows. I know people are like, meat eaters, you got to eat them.
But sometimes I look at a cow and I'm like, dang, man, I don't want to be eating. This thing just seems kind of dumb, you know.
No offense to cows either. But you know what I'm saying? Kind of just like, they're just standing there, you know.
They could easily be victims of crime or whatever. But a fish, you know, it just looks like that's how i would like to be you know okay so if you'd be an animal you'd be a fish yeah or just something more exciting you know i'd have yeah so i start sometimes i think like oh i should eat things that are like things that i want to be like maybe that would be cool that's actually cool because i try to eat things that look like a brain like a cauliflower or a walnut oh really that, dude.
Wow, that's cool. It kind of makes sense that it would help it.
A walnut looks just like a brain, huh? That's crazy. Yeah.
And if you cut a cauliflower in half, it looks exactly like a brain too. Yeah.
Wow. And then the good fats, we can't forget the good fats for the brain.
So that is your oily fish, avocado, eggs, nuts, seeds, olive oil, all that kind of thing. And then dark skinned foods are better for your brain than regular colored foods.
So purple sprouting broccoli instead of green broccoli, blueberries instead of raspberries, because that purple color has antioxidants in the skin of the food called anthocyanins, which really help with neuroplasticity. You know, that process we talked about of changing your brain.
So, you know, I try to eat kind of, I try to take the purple version of everything, but basically quite just like saying dark skinned stuff is better for you.

Well, I mean, yeah, I think I've heard, yeah.

I mean, I got BLM.

I mean, people like different things, you know, you got to, you know,

everybody likes somebody, somebody, yeah.

My friend only dates brothers, honestly.

And yes, and there's a lot of value in that.

So yeah, I could certainly see that. So yeah, explain it.
Actually, can I share a story that is a really, really kind of important one that had a massive impact on me? And I would like to share it because I think it could really help people. Yeah, I would love to hear it.
So I was street outside my house waiting for a taxi and a young blonde woman walked past me, but then I could see out of the corner of my eye that she stopped and turned around and came up to me. And she said, are you Tara Swart? And I said, yes.
And she said, you saved my life. And I was a bit taken aback.
So I said, you know, what was it that I I said that resonated with you because I feel like I can speak so broadly that I don't always know what it is yeah and she said I struggled with a really serious eating disorder for years and I heard you say that you choose what you eat because it impacts your brain and it immediately changed my relationship with food and I have heard I mean when I was a psychiatrist the eating disorders ward was like a hopeless case there was there was really not much we could do and I've heard that recently the latest way of dealing with eating disorders is tying people to their beds and forcing them to eat and I can't believe that's helpful for anyone but just hearing this person say that one thing I said changed her life so dramatically it was kind of just made me feel like everything i've done has brought me to the right place oh that's wonderful that's thank you for sharing that yeah it's so it's so powerful if somebody comes up and you can tell they're being real or genuine you know and they share something with you and um you must get that i meet a lot of people and sometimes you know it's like and sometimes there's moments you're like oh this is really cool you know and it's like you can share and sometimes you'll be having a bad day and they'll tell you something that they heard you say that helped them and you're like well shit tell it back to me right now i know same well look thank you for coming back and telling me because it's like the exact thing i needed to hear right now Sometimes people, my friends, send me a page, a photo of a page from my book and they're like, you wrote this, like why are you being like this now? I know it's so hard to help ourselves a lot of times, but that's why we need each other You know, my friend James Beshara, he always says that we're the keys to each other's locks, actually Oh, I love that I think you might have done, you do podcast in venice one day you ever do one in venice maybe with sahara rose it hasn't come out yet no this is with a man senj oh drew perahit no he's an indian man yeah he's he's indian he is yeah yeah maybe it was him yeah was it in venice do you think it was in la it was in la. It looked like my friend James' studio.
I saw someone, I was like, oh, that kind of looked like James' studio. Oh.
Because I have no idea if it was or not. It looked a little similar.
Okay, let me ask you a question. Okay.
Did you know that we actually have a second nose that's not connected to the brain? Uh-uh. We have a second nose more than the one on our face? Yeah.
Okay. It's called the vomeronasal organ and it detects the smells of things that when you eat them, they give off a vapor, like a spicy food.
And it actually connects to your heart and makes your heart rate go up, but it doesn't connect directly to your brain. And dogs have them.
It's got a special name in dogs, which I can't remember, but that's why they can smell pheromones. And also I got this research from my colleague at MIT who, who creates artificial noses and he's created an artificial nose that can detect prostate cancer before any of our current diagnostic tests can.
And get this, This might cause some trouble for some people that you know. It can detect pregnancy earlier than any test at the moment, and it can tell who the father is.
Nuh-uh. Oh, my God.
So it's going to be like Snorri Povich or whatever. What are they going to put the nose on i don't know how do they do it they just hold it up to something yeah and what's it made out of i think titanium but it's it's connected to a machine obviously okay yeah wow so it's a robotic nose that can tell if you have cancer and can it can tell if you're pregnant and tell who the father is what oh i wonder how expensive it is hopefully you can just put a dollar in the back of it and find out nano nose here you go earlier this year mershin and his yeah mershin he's my friend they had created a nano nose a robotic nose powered by ai that could identify cases of prostate cancer from urine samples with 70 accuracy wow so really like a real piss sommelier or something they would call it, a urine sommelier.
Wow, the nano nose. What else can it do? Early detection of lung cancer.
They'll start going across the cancers. So cats and dogs in old people's homes, they go and sit outside the door of the person that's dying.
And that's because cell death starts to happen before you actually die. And it happens in a certain order and they can smell when that's happening.
That's crazy. Andreas Mershin also told me something, but I can't remember why.
So I'm going to say it on this podcast so I can send him the link and then ask him to explain. Okay, fair.
Which is that if you inject rabbits with urine from pregnant women, they get their period. No.
Wow. If you inject them with urine from pregnant women, they get their period.

Man.

So next time a pregnant woman's like, I'm not a problem, I'll be like, yeah, but you obviously are into some, you got sorcery running through your body right now. Because that's crazy.

Yeah.

That's crazy to think that.

I never seen anything like that.

I wouldn't even do it to anybody.

And early, go back to that nanonose. I want to see what wouldn't even do it to anybody and early go back

to that nano nose i want to see what it's what else that can do that's fascinating to me and do

they have do they show any use of that nano nose yeah for detecting cancer and pregnancy but i'm

just wondering do they is it do they do they have how it's actually used okay how it's used yeah

he also told me that um way more women are super smellers than men. Really? Yeah.
I could bet that because also women are, I think, over life, they're like the chefs and they do more of like the, they have to smell if the kid's okay or whatever probably. Do you think that's why? Yeah, I think so.
It makes sense. Okay.
Electric nose accurately sniffs out hard to detect cancers. An odor-based test that sniffs out vapors emanating from blood samples was able to distinguish between benign and pancreatic and ovarian cancer with up to 95% accuracy.
That's crazy. But Theo wants to see a picture of how they use it, like what it looks like when they're actually sniffing patients and there's a one in five chance for a preventive medical check-up the late detection of prostate cancer often means the removal of a part or the whole organ there's hope at the park scientific Victor Barcelona.
Wow, that's incredible. Where does our intuition and our gut instincts come from? That's one of my favorite questions.
Is it really? Yeah, I love intuition. It's like my superpower.
Oh, yeah? Yeah. So basically...
Because it's so cool. It's kind of this, it's like this ghost that's in us a little bit.
Yeah, kind of. Yeah.
The ghost of wisdom or something. I mean, Andreas Mershin also said to me that things like extrasensory perception, they're not woo-woo.
He was actually comparing that to the fact that most people don't know we have the second nose. He was like, there's science about it.
We just haven't discovered it all yet. So intuition was a bit like that.
People didn't, because they couldn't see it, it wasn't tangible, they didn't really take it that seriously. I've been teaching at MIT for over 10 years now, and 10 years ago, senior leaders would say, that's not a sense I would use at work, I'm not going to use that for hire or fire.
But then actually the older, wiser guys would say, that's exactly the one I use for hire or fire, because I've learned over time to trust it yeah um so I honed my intuition by journaling and reading over my journal and writing down every decision that I made if like logic told me one thing and intuition told me another and I decided to trust my intuition more and more you really mapped it out yeah um I think I was naturally quite intuitive but sometimes I was afraid to trust it when I felt like something else was the right thing to do, logically. So what we need to live our normal life is called our working memory, and it's stored in the outer cortex of the brain.
And then our sort of beliefs and thought patterns, sort of what we were discussing earlier on, that's in systems in the limbic part of the brain which is the shape and size of your clenched fist so obviously yours is bigger than mine and the cortex is around it and then through a process called Hebbian learning which is named after the neuroscientist Donald Hebb because you can't remember everything that you've experienced in your life but you have experienced it so that information like neurons that fire together wire together get stored deeper in your spinal cord and your gut neurons and that's why intuition is sometimes called gut instinct oh so that's why you kind of feel it right there you kind of go there in your brain like what is my gut telling me to do yeah like butterflies in your stomach tells you that you're nervous, right? Yeah. But the sense of like, this is the right thing for me to do, or this is the right person for me to date, you might not feel it viscerally, but you'll just get that sense.
Yeah, because like over time, it's like, yeah, you have to believe that your intuition gets honed as well because of you've had experiences. Yeah, but it can also, actually a really important point is that neuroplasticity can be a bad thing.
If you repeatedly go for people that it ends up being a toxic relationship and you have a breakup that drags out and damages you and then you don't really heal and you just go back into a similar type of relationship, you're going to kind of, that's your intuition telling you the wrong thing, right? Right. But you're following it.
Yeah. So you could actually, you could mold your intuition negatively as well.
Yeah. Oh, wow.
Like obsessing over a breakup. That's neuroplasticity.
Yeah.

Yeah, I used to do that, man. That was the worst.
God, I would be so heartbroken. The most heartbroken freaking weirdo ever, dude.
Smoking or whatever, just walking around the neighborhood. What else? How do we change our perspective? How do we use, is our perspective our brain? So this is called the hard problem of neuroscience.
And that is the question of whether our brain is our mind or our mind is our brain. And basically, if we're being very scientific, then our consciousness, which is everything that we think and feel, arises from neurons and chemicals that are physically part of our brain.
There's a big move more recently, and this has happened in the past. In ancient times, we believed in seers and shamans and mystics and things like clairvoyance and claircognizance and things like that.
We we've moved away from that in modern times. Yeah, we believe in like a lot more astrology, the moon, that sort of thing as well.
Yeah. But science is now starting to look at some of this ancient wisdom in a way that we may have actually forgotten things that we knew before that are crucial to our mental health in the modern world.
So I mentioned some of those things already like drumming and chanting but what we believe now is that our brain might actually be filtering our consciousness down so that we can survive in this material world but actually our minds are capable of a lot more than what we you know think now. So in terms of perspective that is all the filters that your childhood and your upbringing have put on how you see the world.
And you can absolutely challenge your perspective. It's not your brain.
It's a version of reality that your brain's creating. And I have some really favorite exercises that I have that people can do at home.
So one is if I have a dilemma, or particularly if I'm really struggling and just feeling like things aren't going to work out, I describe myself sitting here, what I'm wearing at my age. And I ask the question, like, what should I do? Or, you know, what's going to happen to me? Like, you know, when you're really kind of a bit desperate and then I get up and I walk seven steps and I turn around and i say i'm tara seven years older than you and i've seen what happens in your life and in the next seven years and i i answer the question i give advice so that's kind of like that's pretty cool thanks because you're kind of putting yourself in a place and then you're you're using your same self and my intuition and your intuition and who even knows what what powers the world grants you if you say okay now i'm going to put myself seven years ahead and speak back to myself yeah there's i it often feels like there's so many hidden abilities that we have that we just don't know about yet.
Like even with like five senses, it's like, I bet there's 30 senses. We just don't even know some of what they are yet.
There's up to 33. Is there really? They told us there's five.
Did they tell you that, dude? Well, not at medical school. At medical school, I obviously knew there's more than five, but I didn't know there's like 22 to 33.
They don't trust us with them, dude. I think, yeah, you got it.
I guess if you go to school, you get more senses. You don't get more.
You've got them as well. You've got chronoception.
You understand the passing of time. You've got.
I got five, but they give you five senses yeah right touch feel touch and feel

are the same

okay

sorry

my bad doc

touch

taste

taste

smell

sight

hearing

and hearing

yeah

sorry

but there's more than that

way more

unreal

wow

that'd be cool to go through all of them one day

whenever I come to your country

we'll have to go through all of them

okay

I'm sorry. unreal wow that'd be cool to go through all of them one day whenever i come to your country we'll have to go through all of them what country do you live in live in london yeah it's not okay london's not a country it isn't oh yeah told you guys huh enough with the attitude all right yeah manchester's the real england i'm joking.
Well, people think different things. Wow.

So your perspective.

You can do that exercise or you can ask yourself,

what advice would I give my brother?

Because it's just about taking yourself one step out of the situation that you're in

because then you can't see the wood for the trees, you know?

Yeah, you're stuck in yourself.

But yeah, what advice would I give my brother?

That's a great idea.

What advice would I give my sister? Because it is crazy. You'll give them the best advice, then you'll get off the phone and do the worst thing.
Yeah. Yeah.
Totally. That's so fascinating.
I mean, because some of my advice is like pinned on social media, me and my girlfriend were laughing so much about some of the things that I say. And then in my real life, I'm like, why is this happening to me? I know.
It's so funny. I think we all take turns being something that someone needs to hear, you know, even in the sense that somebody came up to me in the airport and was telling me something like, oh man, where'd you hear that? And like, you said that.
I'm like, oh Jesus, well, I needed to hear that right now. It's like we all kind of take turns, even throughout the day, throughout the moment,

throughout the years, being each other's champions at certain little moments, you know.

I think that that's pretty remarkable.

That's kind of a gift.

You've talked a lot about like manifesting and stuff.

Do you really believe in it?

A hundred percent, yeah.

I've been actively doing it myself kind of personally for 15 or 16 years.

And then in 2019, my book, The Source came out where I shared that more professionally. And the response to that was actually quite phenomenal in making me believe in it even more.
Wow. It's a bestseller.
Yeah. Yeah.
Congratulations. Thank you.
So cool. Thanks.
So cool to write a book and like, and have people want to absorb it. Yeah.
Tell me a little bit about that manifesting because we forget about it. We forget sometimes that we're the captain of this ship.
Sometimes we just feel like the stream owns everything, you know? Yeah. And I think some versions of manifestation can still make people feel like that because it's about the universe and vibrations.
I wanted to explain manifestation through psychology and neuroscience in a way to say, look, it's your brain that's doing it. It's not some outside force.
And I think that's way more empowering. And that's what people really liked about it, that I write a lot about vision boards, but I call them action boards because I say you can't just create a fantasy and then sit at home and wait for it to come true.
Like, look at how hard you've worked to get to where you are. It's very easy for people to say, oh, I'd love to have Theo Bond's life, but you've really struggled and worked really hard to get here.
So I absolutely say that that has to be part of it. It can't just be expecting like things to fall out of the sky and come into your life.
But if, you know, manifestation is basically setting goals and desires, knowing what you want, finding images of them to put on a board that you can see at least twice a day. And if it's only once a day, then seeing it just before you go to sleep because it imprints on your subconscious.
And it can be very literal or it can be metaphorical, like something that, you know, you could have a horse on there and it could mean one thing to you and something else to me, for example. And basically, I ask people to make this board, look at it daily, visualize these things being true, because your brain doesn't actually know the difference between something happening in real life and a strong visualization.
And then, yeah. And you won't be afraid of it if you've already visualized it.
You won't kind of meet that dream girl and say, oh, maybe I'm not ready. You'll have told your brain that you're ready to take a healthy risk.
Wow, so your brain doesn't really know the difference between, say that again? Between something that happened in real life or something that you strongly visualize. Wow, it's the same reason why when we watch a movie or something, we're able to get lost in it.
We're able to believe in it because it, wow, so you could create enough of a visualization for yourself if you really were to powerfully start to focus on it and do that and build that ability to visualize something that your brain at point, would have to think it's so true that the world would meet you and put it into your life. I love the way you put that.
Wow. Dude, that's crazy.
And that's what feels like another sense. That, to me, feels like another sense that, like, 200 years from now, they're going to be like,

people are just going to be manifest.

It's just everything, you know, everything is going to be so over-manifested.

But you know what it is?

That's one thing that I feel like there's like some elite people in the world and they

really learned that.

Sometimes when I see some people who are operating at a very elite level or the deep

state or whatever, I start thinking, oh, that's what they're using to the best of their ability. Wow.
Yeah, your brain and then the world is like, oh, well, it has to have happened because they put it in there so much. That's crazy.
And what kind of things can you manifest? Because people write to me all the time saying what they manifested. So it could be a certain kind of home, a relationship, a family pregnancy, their own career.
A lot of it's like quitting their job and actually starting up the business that they've always wanted to do. Travel is quite a big one.
Yeah. Yeah.
What are some side effects of the pandemic that we never treated as a society? Because that's fascinating to me. It's so, we kind of went through it.
And like you said earlier, we're just, now we're just here. And we never looked at, I mean, even in recovery rooms, like the shutdown of all of the 12-step rooms and people couldn't go to those meetings killed there's no way it's in kill 100 000 people you know oh yeah at least just in those yeah um i think there were mental health issues during the pandemic but there were slightly different ones since and we nobody's really talking about that which is so scary um i think they involve three sorts of loss so a loss of your sense of self and your purpose like who am i what direction should i be going in a breakdown of relationships whether that's marriages other romantic relationships working relationships friendships people are more like disconnected and lonely when some people lost a loved one and had to go to it over zoom and never even got to grieve it or have the family be there together when they lost their grandmother.
Yeah. There are people that were hoping in the next couple of years, they would find a loved relationship.
And then suddenly there's three years where they can't even date. Yeah.
And what was the third one? Sorry to interrupt you. Well, the third one was going to be loss of actual loved ones, you know, and grief.
And I think one of the things I'm seeing, it may have been creeping up before the pandemic, but it feels very evident now, is the world feels like a really difficult place for young men. The idea of what it means to be a man now doesn't feel clear.
And, you know, I've sort of had male friends say to me that, yeah, we're equal, but we're still different. And men, you know, they want to love and protect someone, but it feels like women are saying, I can do everything by myself now.
I don't need you. So that feels really sad.
And that's, I think, happening more in the younger generations than it did when we were that age. Yeah, I think.
And some people start to view themselves as men and women. I think some of the gender lines and stuff are getting blurred.
And some of that, I think, is probably good because you want everybody to believe they can do anything.

Because there has to be some value in being a man.

Just like there has to be some value in being a woman.

We want there to be.

I don't want to be with some woman and it's a man.

I would like her to be a woman most of the time. And so it like, that's a thing.
Can I put that slightly differently? Yeah. I think it's about having masculine and feminine energies, which we can both be capable of.
So I think for a man, you know, men are obviously physically stronger. And so there are things that men can do for women that could be helpful in terms of the fact that they've got more physical strength.
But equally, men are capable of emotional intelligence and intuition. And it would be nice if that could be more balanced in both the genders.
Yeah, because I think in the end, I think it probably goes back to some of our nature too. It's like I think we want to have someone.
sometimes it's like if you don't have somebody you'll start turning into the thing you want too which is kind of weird what do you mean i feel like sometimes if you're a maybe you're a gal and you're having maybe trouble getting a guy or you're not having success in that world you might start kind of like maybe doing more masculine stuff, maybe doing like you'll create what you need. Yeah.
I guess you have to, if you have to get on in life, you might have to do things that you didn't do if you were in partnership. Yeah.
That doesn't make any sense really. I didn't know where you were going with that.
I didn't know either. I was trying to like think of an idea and I thought you were going to say something really outrageous.
no i don't i don't know what i was going to say but i i just whatever i said didn't really make any sense yeah it is tough i think it is interesting for young men you know i think it's interesting a lot for just men these days you know but then also there was women like when women didn't have access to a lot of money or they didn't have money they were taken advantage of and so it's like maybe this is just the the eddy of the river the the path of it that we have to get to get to a place where um you know women have more finances and ability to make choices for their own and then once they feel comfortable in that space, then they can let themselves just be women again. Does that make any sense? I think it's a bit more complex.
Somebody's going to get upset about that. Yeah, I think it's a bit more complex than that.
I think we could say that both as men and women, and particularly as parents of the younger generations that are coming up now into adulthood, that we have a responsibility to not emasculate men to the point that they are taking their lives. Because women have changed a lot.
If you think since cave times, or even just since the 1950s, women have had financial independence, women have been able to use contraception, women have been able to use hair hair dye it's completely changed how particularly older women can survive in society and be valued in society but men haven't really changed that much let's say since the 1950s so there's obviously some sort of evolution or adaptation that needs to happen because things were so unfair before but i just think we've got to do it in a way that isn't unfair now, if you know what I mean? Like navigate it together in a way that men and women can be in harmony. Um, cause when the me too sort of conversations first came out, obviously there were a lot of women that were saying, you know, all the bad things about men that they could.
And I just kept repeating the same thing. We have to remember most men are good.
There's no value in us suddenly hating men because this Me Too movement has come up. That's not going to help any gender.
Yeah, and that was a huge thing. Every man, men were scared to look at women.
Men were scared to pat a woman on the back even. It was definitely getting real risque out there.
I think even things like, should I hold the door open for a woman or not is a confusing decision for men these days. Oh, I agree.
I'll be on an airplane and a woman will maybe be about to lift her bag and put it up. And it's like, I don't know.
Am I going to get the lady who's like, I can do it myself. Or am I just going to get the lady who was like, thank you.
Or just lets me feel good because I can do it and I'm able to help out. Not that she can't do it.
For a lot of guys, it wasn't that you can't do it. It was like, we want to do it.
Yeah. We want to be of service.
We want to be able to show off a little bit. Give us something we can do.
Yeah. Yeah.
And I love it. You know, I think it Yeah.
I used to have this joke. This is a long time.
I forgot about this. It was like, um, I was talking about women want to be men.
Now, like you see women that are like dead lifting weights. And I'll be like, if you put down the barbells and you look lost for a minute, then a guy will show right up, you know, like there's something about the thing that you just you know you want

to be able to be a guy and i think when it gets confusing as to what does that even mean where are you allowed to be what are you allowed to do um yeah you start and then also like all the sex toys came out and you're like well we can't even what are we doing you know what i'm saying like you know like

my nuts are powered by

battery powered by the lord or whatever like i can't compete with these you know uh ingenuity or whatever it's not the same as having an intimate relationship no but it's also threatening you know when it's like you know you know you hear some of the other room and it just sounds like it should have a fan bell on it. It's like some of these, it's just, I don't know.
I think that's kind of, you know, I don't know what I'm talking about. I don't think we should end on this note, Theo.
I'm pretty lonely as well. What's something you feel like before you leave that you would like to share with us or something else we can think about? Well, the main thing I would really love people to know, which is an umbrella over everything that we've talked about today.
And like you've said, there's so much more we could talk about is that you have so much potential in your brain. Your brain is amazing.
And if you know how to use it properly, you can make your life so much better than you ever dreamed it could be. Really? Yes.
Wow. How does somebody who doesn't believe that start to believe it? I would make a set of tweaks in some very basic fundamental areas, and I would make them micro tweaks.
So where I talk about sleep, diet, hydration, exercise and stress management, I always say change 10 things by 1%, not one thing by 10%. So if you went to bed half an hour earlier, or you drank an extra glass of water every day, or you ate some more vegetables, and you, you know, walked 1000 steps more than you usually do, and spent some time in nature.
And we haven't even talked about neuro aesthetics, which is a whole other topic. Yeah.
Then if you do a few things like that every day, they're physical things that are building the foundation for your brain to be in a good environment where it can be better. You will, I guarantee you, you feel so much better within a matter of weeks that you'll think, okay, what else can I do? And then you can build it up to a point where physically you're in really good condition.
And then you could do a vision board or, you know, whatever your goal is, maybe for part two, we could ask people to write in and say, this is what I'd like to achieve. How could I do it? Yeah, that'd be cool.

Yeah, you know what?

One thing you said it is,

it's so easy to create a pattern.

It feels hard.

The first day is a little tough.

The second day is a little bit tougher.

But then that third day,

you're like, holy shit, this is a pattern.

And it feels different and it feels cool. And then you get excited about it.

And there's nothing bigger I've learned in my lifetime

than realizing if you do this and then you do that and then you're like, oh, now the landscape looks different. Now what else could I do? What else could I do? Yeah, you're a classic example of that.
I just can't. Sometimes I'm like, what else can I do? What else? Holy shit.
The world's like, I could do some, what else could I do? I don't know. But man, it really is.
Especially, yeah, there were times when I just didn't feel like I could do, you know. And yeah.
But also for you, there are millions of people that some of them you might know about, some of you will never know about the influence that you've had on them.

And that's another thing that you're doing passively by doing everything that you do, which is huge.

Yeah.

Yeah, we don't know the effects

that we're going to have on other people

and stuff like that.

It's pretty magical.

That's why we need each other, you know?

We need each other to build our oxytocin up, huh?

Yeah.

Dude, we got to get more oxytocin going, huh?

Well, laughter creates it.

So you're spreading oxytocin like crazy. And is it, do we have synthetic oxytocin or they don't have that? I don't know if I even want to get you to Google this, but you can actually purchase it over the internet.
You obviously do not know what you are getting. So please be careful.
In lab experiments, they used a nasal spray of oxytocin and they showed guys pictures of women that they had to rate them on attractiveness before and after taking the spray they rated them all as more attractive after taking the spray wow yeah yeah dude i looked up oxytocin and nose spray was the top search so there's an oxytocin nose spray don't get crazy guys but maybe i'll take a hit of it next time we do the uh next time we record what you and i i'll take at least a hit yeah i don't think you need to that's quite insulting to me oh sorry i'll let you take a hit you're gonna need it i'll tell you dude yeah if you look at you're going to need some oxytocin, man.

Or we can give a little to a pup or something.

Yeah.

And see what he, you know.

Yeah, we could do that experiment.

Give some to a puppy and see what happens.

Oh, hell yeah, dude.

Is that legal?

I don't know.

I'm sure some people write in the comments if it is or not.

Tara Swart, thank you so much.

Your book, The Source.

I haven't read it, but I would like to. Okay.
You know, so I'm going to keep it on my list of stuff to read at some point. Thank you.
Yeah, thank you for just being somebody that wants to help share, like, the information that you have and are learning. Like, you're really on the forefront of things that are possible for the future.
You know, neuroscience is crazy, you know, because we just don't know what our brain is capable of. What percentage of information about our brains do you think we currently know? Oh, that's a really good question.
It's hard to put a percentage on it. But if I think about how much has changed since I was at medical school, and if I align that with the fact that what we used to watch as science fiction as kids, like a lot of it's true now, I just don't think we know how much potential there is.
I think it's big, you know, all I can say is it's bigger than what we think. We're not capable of knowing that yet.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's crazy. Cause we're not even capable of knowing it yet.
That's the wildest thing, man, is we're not even capable. Like again, you got to get there.
Sometimes you got to get that next place to see what else is even possible. Yeah.
And now with AI and everything it's, you know, it's just changed it's just changed the whole who knows yeah i mean we could both be yeah who even knows we could be living in an orphanage right now or something or who knows ai can do so many things you know so um dr tara swart thank you so much for coming thank you yeah i look forward to catching up with you too when i'm in your country i'd love that that. Yep.
And your book, The Source. Are you still teaching at MIT? Yeah.
Wow. That's crazy, dude.
That's like really MIT, dude. I know.
Oh, yeah. That was something I manifested that I never thought.
Really? Yeah. And that's crazy.
Because I don't even know where it is. You hear about it a lot.
You're like, oh, yeah, they're doing something illegal, it feels like,

but probably pretty good.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for coming.

Thank you, Theo.

And thank you for my wonderful gift as well.

Very sweet of you, love.

I'm going to have a little bit of this when I'm feeling a bit down, mom.

Good on you, miss.

You're welcome.

Now I'm just floating on the breeze,

and I feel I'm falling like these leaves

I must be cornerstone

Oh, but when I reach that ground

I'll share this peace of mind I found

I can feel it in my bones

But it's gonna take a little bit