Dhru Purohit Show - It’s Time to Take Back Control of Your Life from Overstimulation, Social Media and Addictive Foods with Dr. Anders Hansen

Episode Date: January 1, 2024

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth and Pique Life. As we head into the New Year, many of us may focus on improving our lifestyles, diet, and movement habits. No matter your goals for 2024, we know that having a deeper understanding of how our brain works and what we can do to optimize our ability to achieve those goals is critical.  Unfortunately, our modern lifestyles are full of distractions and we are often bombarded with information and access to choices, which often make us anxious and make it difficult to focus on what we truly need. How do we empower ourselves to focus on what truly matters, achieve our goals, and protect our brains from being hijacked in the process? Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with psychiatrist, speaker, and author Dr. Anders Hansen to discuss key lifestyle practices that can protect our brain and focus. Dr. Hansen shows us how our brain has not evolved to cope with the constant stimuli from our modern world and often reacts to these distractions through basic survival instincts even though our lives are not at risk. Dr. Hansen shares the importance of preventing information and access overload to prevent anxiety, depression, and operating in a constant state of comparison. He also shares practical tips we can implement to bring awareness to our defense mechanisms and thrive in our current world.  Dr. Anders Hansen is a psychiatrist, speaker, award-winning author, and TV host.  His books, The Attention Fix, The Happiness Cure, and The Mind-Body Method, have sold several million copies and topped bestseller lists worldwide.  In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Hansen dive into (audio version / Apple Subscriber version): How our modern world hijacks our brain and interferes with our longevity goals (2:57 / 2:57) The distractions that we love but don’t love us back (9:40 / 6:39 ) How we experience stress versus our ancestors and what can help you thrive (12:37 / 9:51) Protecting your focus and thriving (17:50 / 14:50)  The role of movement, the natural tendency to be lazy, and the defense mechanism against starvation (21:02 / 17:50) The overabundance of sugar in our diets  (26:11/ 23:11)  Misconceptions about our brain with our modern lifestyles (30:31 / 27:29) Inadequate sleep and how it impacts our brain and creativity (36:07 / 33:02) The impact of smartphones on our brain (40:51 / 37:45)  Dr. Hansen’s experience with a hunter-gatherer tribe in Kenya (42:37 / 39:37) Spending time with your community and the effect on our brain (55:26 / 52:20)  Why is connection so critical, and how loneliness impacts your health (1:03:00 / 1:00:49) Simple actions to help us step into true fulfillment and protect our brains (1:10:30 / 1:07:36) Also mentioned in this episode: The Happiness Cure The Attention Fix Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code DHRUP. For a limited time, Pique is offering my community up to 20% off of their Fasting Bundles PLUS an exclusive gift. Go to Piquelife.com/Dhru to redeem this exclusive offer today!  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There was a study that was done in 2005 in London where researchers had people doing IQ tests, and some of them were constantly interrupted by SMS and emails. And this was in 2005, so it was before the smartphone era, and it turned out that their IQ was 10 points lower because they were constantly distracted. And I think now, 18 years later, all of us are distracted all the time. So probably whole society, our brains are working on a much lower level than they should. because of these constant distractions. No matter what you want to give love and attention to in 2024,

I can tell you this. Learning how to protect your attention is one of the most important things that you can do. And that's what today's conversation is all about. Hi, everyone, Drew Prode here. This week's guest on the Drew Prod Show is Dr. Anders Hansen, and he's here to talk to us about protecting our focus and attention in a world that's increasing. trying to hijack it, much to our detriment. How do we do this? Well, the good news is Dr. Anders Hansen

on today's podcast, who by the way is a Swedish psychiatrist, speaker, award-winning author and TV host, he's going to show us how to do this in detail by first helping us understand how the brain works. When you understand how the brain works and how we're actually biologically prone, a little bit towards laziness, we're biologically prone, a little bit towards overeating, We're biologically prone to distraction. The more we understand this and how those things were important for our survival, the more we can understand how to unwind it in a world where social media, traditional media, processed foods are all fighting to hijack our attention.

And for a lot of people, they're very successful in doing it. And look what's going on around you. People are more unhealthy, more distracted, less successful in their goals and dreams than ever before. It doesn't have to be that way. Dr. Hansen is going to show us how to unwind all. that. Now, a little bit more about Dr. Henson. His books, The Attention Fix, the Happiness Cure, the Mind-Body Method have sold several million copies and top bestseller lists around the world. Dr. Hansen is also the winner of the Book of the Year Big Health Award in 2017 and 2019,

and Sweden's Men's Surprise in 2018. Stay tuned for a fantastic conversation with Dr. Anders Henson. Dr. Hansen, welcome to the podcast. You know, so many of my viewers and listeners have this goal. of wanting to live to 100, or at least what their genetic potential is, but maintain health along the way, right? Health span and lifespan. But, you know, sometimes our modern world and the way that it's designed, including all the distractions that come along with it, can get in the way. Can you talk about how our modern world and its ability to hijack our brains makes this goal of a long life and a healthy life more difficult? Well, that's a great question and something that I have thought a lot about.

And I have asked many of my colleagues and friends, what's the main goal of the brain? And I have heard all these different answers. Some people say it's to make you happy or to think or be creative or make tools or be smart or cooperate in large numbers and so on. But none of that is actually correct. The correct answer is that the main job of the brain is to keep you alive at all costs. The best brain is the brain that takes you to tomorrow alive. And the most important thing I never learned in med school is that the brain has not changed during the last 10 or even 20,000 years.

For almost our entire history, humans were hunters and gatherers. We lived on the savannah. We were constantly threatened by starvation. And that's, of course, not alive that we live anymore. But that is the life that the brain is still adapted for. And I think it's striking that half of all humans died before they became teenagers. And that was actually the case during 99.9% of our history. And we are, of course, the descendants of the ones who did not die.

We are the last generation in a long line of survivors. And what did these people have to survive from? Well, the most common causes of death for humans was starvation, bleeding, accidents, murder, and infections. And since we are the descendants of the survivors, we have in us, we have us in our brains defense mechanisms against all these things. And that means that the brain perceives the world as dangerous. Why? Well, because people died from accidents. and murder and so on.

And to perceive the world as dangerous, that's what we call anxiety today. Since our brain wants to help us avoid starvation, it tells us to eat everything that we could find because people could not find enough food. And today we find ourselves in a world where there's plenty of food, where there's no limit to the amount of food we can get. And of course, the consequence of that is that two billion people are suffering from are obese or overweight. And half of humanity will be obese or overweight in the next decade, according to the World Health Organization.

So I think realizing that the brain is wired or the brain evolved for survival in a world where people died from things that we don't die today. And the brain is not, that means that the instinct that we have in us is instinct that helped us to survive in such a world, but those instincts doesn't make us happy in a world of overabundance. And sort of really understanding this has given me so much insights into human psychology, into my patient's psychology, and certainly to my own psychology. It has made me realize why many people suffer from anxiety. It has made me realize why so many people suffer from obesity and it has made me realize why so many people are addicted to their to their smartphones.

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That's Peak, P-I-Q-U-E-L-I-F-E-F-E. e.com slash dhr u that's me to redeem this exclusive offer today you know piggybacking off of that you have this idea that the most dangerous distractions in our modern world are the ones that you love but that don't love you back so can you expand on those a little bit more because our brain was not wired and it's not changed in the last 20,000 years but our environment has, what are some of the most dangerous of those distractions that we have fallen, in a sense, victim to? Well, one of them is that the brain is evolved to be easily distracted. Distraction is the default state for the brain. And why is that? Because people constantly had to scan their

surroundings. Is there something there, there, there, there? Is it something I have to, you know, pay attention to? Is it's the line creeping up on me? So focus, which we value so much in our modern society, is something that is very precious for us and that is very fragile, that can be easily eroded. And of course, focus is something, our attention is something that the number of companies has been incredibly good at hijacking. And I'm talking about social media companies. So it's a shame that something that is so valuable for us, attention, is being eroded to such a large degree in our modern society. Another thing that is interesting from this perspective is that anxiety, as I said,

that's seeing the world as dangerous. That's a defense mechanism that helped humans survive in our past. To see the world as dangerous, well, that made the increase your chances of passing your genes on. And since half of the tendency to become anxious comes from your genes, It's set in you when you're born. It's not strange that people have anxiety. What is strange is that there are people who don't have anxiety. And maybe they should be diagnosed.

And when I say that to my patients, that a strong pair of arms, they can lift heavy things and a strong pair of legs, they could run fast. But a strong brain is not a brain that goes through periods of stress being unaffected. It's a brain that wants to keep you alive at all cost. Remember, the brain is a survival machine, and even if that means that the brain creates negative feelings. So by having said all of that, I'm not downplaying how horrible anxiety can be, but just to understand that it's a defense mechanism that shows that you are functioning normally from a survival standpoint, it makes some people realize that, ah, I'm not damaged. I am not broken goods.

And that is very important, how you continue. textualize your feelings and your experiences makes a lot of difference for how you experience them, so to speak. So, you know, a core part of your work is like anxiety is a tool. It's baked into us to keep us alive. And is it also fair to say that our current things in our modern day environments that are putting that anxiety into overdrive comparatively to, let's say, our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Yes, definitely. We are bombarded with information from our TVs and of course our computers and our phones, news from all over the world. And that means that we experience stress and negative news in a way that our ancestors could never dream about. Of course, they were threatened

constantly, but they did not get the threats from all the whole world into their screens all the times. So I saw this very, very, I saw a lot of this during COVID. Patients became very anxious from seeing the news on the TV with all. And of course, that that was important in one way because it made them feel cautious, but some got almost paralyzed by their anxiety. And I told them that we never evolved to experience this bombardment of negative news. So my advice to them was to check the news in the morning and the evening. And that's it. So that's certainly one example. And another example is the fact that we evolved to live in small groups, bands and tribes of perhaps 100 or 150 individuals.

And you saw those individuals again and again. So anonymity was probably very rare for almost all previous generations of humans. And we had to be in that group, you know, to be isolated, to be by yourself. that was death. To be pushed outside the group was as dangerous as not having food. So we have this constant strive to belong to a group. And that, especially when we are teenagers, of course, then we desperately want to belong to a group. And I think what we're doing is we are always comparing ourselves to people around us.

And our ancestors compare themselves to perhaps 50 or 150. individuals and of those, perhaps 20 or 30, was around your age. And they were in some ways competitors to you. And today we compare ourselves to the whole planet. And there's always going to be someone who is smarter and better looking and richer and more successful than yourself. And the brain computes deep down that that means that you are not good enough to be part of the group.

It feels that you are being pushed out of the group. and being pushed out of the group, well, that was death for our ancestors. And that's why it hurts so much, I think, to be exposed to this constant bombardment on social media where you don't see your friends' perfect pictures. You have a whole army of Instagrammers who send you this message that is being computed by your brain that you're not good enough. And you're especially, of course, vulnerable to that during when you're a teenager. And some argue, of course, that we have had film stars and models and stuff like that for several generations.

So there's nothing new about that. And that's true, of course. But the big difference this time is that we are receiving this five, six hours every day from our screen. And we are basically being told that we're not sufficient. We don't. We're not good enough. And that takes a toll on our mental life. And as you probably know, teenage anxiety and depressions among teenagers have risen sharply during the last decades.

And we now know for sure that social media is partly responsible for that. And I always say that to my patients, especially young patients, that the companies, Facebook and Instagram and so on, they don't give a damn about how you feel. They just want your money. They just want your attention because every second you spend on them is money for them. And so, and if they bombard you with stuff that makes you feel inferior, that makes you feel diminished, they couldn't care about that. But your brain cares about it. It registers that as lethal danger.

And some of them, I'm not saying everyone, but some of them realize that I'm not going to let these companies jeopardize my mental health. I'm going to take charge of this. And, of course, that's very difficult to use your screens less. But I think we need to be aware of the price that we are paying. with our mental health in our digital life. It's an important reminder because many people are allowing the priorities of others, whether that's the mainstream news, whether that's social media. They're allowing their attention to get hijacked by the priorities of other people.

And that's why now through the work of individuals like yourself, I'm really getting clear that understanding how to protect your focus through habits and lifestyle is actually a superpower. So much of our evolution as a species was about survival. But now it's not just about survival. It's about thriving. And if you want to thrive, you have to understand how to protect your focus. Do you think that's accurate?

Absolutely. Absolutely. And by understanding, not just why, how, sorry, by understanding that your focus is fragile, because it's supposed to be fragile, you're supposed to be easily distracted because that helped us survive. When you understand that, really, that, you know, what you value so much is something that can go up in smoke just in a second. then you will protect it. There was a study that was done in 2005 in London where researchers had people doing IQ tests, and some of them were constantly interrupted by SMS and emails. And this was in 2005, so it was before the smartphone era, and it turned out that their IQ was 10 points lower

because they were constantly distracted. And I think now 18 years later, all of us are distracted all the time. So probably whole society is our brains are working on a much lower level than they should because of these constant distractions. And as you also know, we spend a lot of times on our screens today, adults around four hours, a teenager's five to six hours. It's actually difficult to say because it increases so fast. But what I've realized as a psychiatrist is that there's another price that we pay, and that is what we're, we don't do when we are online.

When we are spending so much time on our phones, we don't meet in real life, we don't sleep as much as we used to, and we don't exercise as much as we used to. And in Sweden, for instance, the number of teenagers seeking help for sleeping problems has increased by 1,000% during the last 20 years. That's astonishing.

That's a factor of 10 during 20 years. And all of these things, sleep, exercise, and the most important meeting in real life, they are protecting us against depressions and against anxiety. And those protective factors are being eroded. So it's not just what we do when we are online. It's what we don't do when we are online. Powerful. Well, we're going to get into some of those tips in detail here and you have a bunch of them inside of your book, I want to pivot to another area, a kind of key pillar that you help people talk about. A lot of people, as you mentioned, think that because they have anxiety, they're broken.

And you're reminding them that they're not broken. Our brain was programmed. You are also reminding people who feel that they are fundamentally lazy and think that they're broken, that there's actually more to the story, that they're not broken. Can you talk about laziness for a moment. Yeah. So, I mean, exercise is that is very important for the body, of course, and it's also very important for the brain. It protects us against anxiety, protects us against depressions, and it increases all of our cognitive functions. We increase our attention, we increase our creativity, and we even seem to get a bit smarter. Exercise actually seemed to affect intelligence somewhat. Now, this is very strange if you compare it to the fact that we are lazy. If exercise is so good

for the brain, why doesn't it want to exercise? Why does it prefer to stay in the couch? And the reason is that the brain, as I said, is a survival machine and one of the biggest threats against human survival was starvation. And that means that we should, if our ancestors came across something that contained a lot of calories, such as sweet fruits or honey or something, they should feel an urge to eat all of it. Take all of the berries that you could find because tomorrow another group of humans or some chimpanzees have taken these. So it made a lot of sense to take everything. Now when you take that crave for calories into our world where calorie rich food are basically free, well then you get problems. And that's exactly what we see in terms of overweight and

type 2 diabetes. But the amount of energy that you have in your body is not just dependent on how much food you eat, but it's also dependent on how much energy you use. And it costs energy to move. That's why the brain wants you to stay in the couch. It wants to save energy. And some of you who hear this might think that, well, obviously we aren't threatened by starvation anymore. that's very strange then that the brain wants to keep it still, and that's a good point, of course,

but the brain never evolved for overweight or obesity. There hasn't been any problems in our evolutionary history of obesity, but there were huge problems of threatening starvation, and that means that the brains have several defense mechanisms against starvation, and one of them is that when we lose weight, our hunger increases. The basic metabolism, the amount of energy, that your body uses actually drops when you lose weight. And that's your body protecting you against starvation.

And that occurs even if you are overweight. That's the strange thing. So I think that if we could tell our ancestors that we go for a run and then we come back to the same place and then we lift heavy things into the air and then we put them down without achieving anything, which is going to the gym and go for a jog, they would say that you are crazy.

To do something as stupid as that must have been as crazy as throwing food into the ocean. So the whole concept of exercise must be crazy for almost all previous generations of humans. And so the fact that we are lazy doesn't mean that we are broken. It certainly doesn't mean that we are morally bad. It means that we have a strong defense mechanism against starvation. However, it is a defense mechanism that we have. to try to work our way around if we want to feel as good as possible and certainly if we want to live as long as possible because exercise has as you all know is very important for our health

and longevity. So it's an instinct then that we have to fight and how should one do that? Well I think the main job, the main point here is that try to build exercise into your lives. make it a habit of walking to work or taking your bike to work or walking in stairs instead of taking the elevator. Stuff like that that becomes a natural part of your life so that you don't have to negotiate with the quote unquote lazy part of yourself. Because that part of yourself is powerful and it should be powerful. Not because you're a bad person, because you're a human, because you are a survivor. powerful you know I want to just like you gave that action item of building it into your life I want to sprinkle a few more action items here or ask you to as we continue to build the foundation of your work

and I find that when we do that at the beginning of the interview people feel excited they feel that okay there's hope there's things that we could do so around this time of year people are thinking about what priorities they have and so if one of those ways to maintain a healthy body composition is, of course, you know, having frequent and regular exercise baked into our lives. Do you have any thoughts and suggestions around the dietary aspect of people's life? When it comes to either eating, you know, too much ultra-processed foods or eating just too much overall calories, if we took your methodology for the people that are listening today and said, how do we bake it into our life to make this almost a habit and automatic?

What tips and suggestions would you have for people on diet? So I don't know enough about diet to give in a specific advice on that, but I think that a way to look at this is there was studies done in the 40s by a biologist called Nicholas Tinberg, who got the Nobel Prize. And he took seagulls, the bird seagulls, and they have a red dot on their beak. And the younglings pick on the parents' red dot, and then the parent feed the younglings. What Tinberg did was to paint a red dot on a pencil, and then he put the pencil into the nest. And the younglings started to picking on the pencil, even though the children, the younglings were hungry,

and even though the parents was in the net, and even though, of course, the pen couldn't give them any food, they picked on the pen because it was a bigger red dot. And Tinbergin called this red dot a superstimuli. It's something that is so powerful that it overrides the stimuli that nature has created. And I realized that candy is a super stimuli. Candy is basically super fruits. There is nothing that contains so much calories in nature as candy. When we are standing at the candy section in the store,

the brain is basically registering that we have run upon the best fruit tree on the savannah. And it's screaming to us, eat everything, got this whole thing down because then you will survive. Then you won't be threatened by starvation. And of course, from that we know that we can't have candy around all the time. I certainly can't. If I have candy in my apartment, I will eat it immediately. So I think to look at food, some food, certainly some processed foods candy in that way, makes you realize that you have to create a distance to it.

And the same logic goes to the digital devices. There is nothing that is as rewarding in real life as your phone. There is nothing that creates so much stimuli. So the phone is super stimuli. And from that, you realize that you can't just rely on willpower. You have to make distance to it. In the same way that you can't have candy around all the time, because you will eat it, you can't have your phone around all the time because you will check it.

And that's a very important message, I think, not to blame yourself too hard when it comes to these things. Just because you don't want to run, just because you want to eat everything you could find, it doesn't make you a bad person, it doesn't make you lazy. It makes you, as I said, as a survivor. And of course, it's not either or. have power to change these things, but I think we have to be aware of how tempting they are, and that willpower is a resource that we don't have an infinite amount of. And that's why we need to create distance to some of these things.

I like that you said that the word power, because you have this beautiful quote, and the quote says, the more we learn about the brain, the more we become freer from the brain. So the knowledge about how the brain works is the power that allows us to take control back into our life and have agency on working with the brain that we have, but in our modern day world. You know, you've already shared some key misconceptions that people have of the brain. Like the brain, oh, don't worry, the brain has evolved with all the stuff that we're dealing with, with our modern day world. are there any other misconceptions that you see out there that people are still maintaining today that gets in the way of them truly understanding how the brain works? Yeah, there are so many of them.

I always, anxiety is a very important part of this, I think. So many people seek help for anxiety. And when people say that they are feeling bad, it's almost always anxiety that they're having and many of them contextualize themselves, they look at themselves as broken, as damaged. And I think we are, humans are always trying to understand ourselves through a story. And sometimes this story of oneself being anxious becomes the way, you know, that you view yourself. You see yourself as this victim, as this person who are broken. And I always say to my patients that, you know, if this is an example that has been given by a psychiatrist called, his name's Randolph Nessie, he gave the example that if you are on the savannah and there's a rustle in the trees behind you, then you could make you decision.

Then you could think that, oh, that's probably just the wind. Or you could think, oh, that's a lion. and then you run away as fast as you can. If you think, well, that's probably a lion and then you run away as fast as you can, what will that cost you? Well, that cost you about 200 calories. That is what your body uses when it runs away.

If you think that's probably just a wind, then it turns out to be a lion. What does that cost you? Well, that costs you 200,000 calories. That's what the lion will get when he eats you. Now, from this pure calorie perspective, which of course is a bit absurd, but from this you realize that the brain should be calibrated in such a way that it accepts 1,000 false alarms to not miss the one time when your life depended on it. So the brain should see danger 1,000 times for every time there is danger. And that means that to have a panic attack is basically a false alarm that shows that you are functioning normally.

And I told this story to a patient, and he said after a couple of times that now I get it. I'm not damaged. A false panic attack is okay. It just shows that I'm functioning normally and just realizing that made these attacks came less often and they became less threatening to him. And by that, I don't mean that you shouldn't treat panic attacks. Of course you should. But the way that you sort of contextualize, as I said before, your experience is so important. And then you could use the brain as a way to sort of see yourself from a distance.

And there's a movie that came out in the 30s that's called Wizard of Oz. And in this movie, the protagonist is afraid of a wizard. And the whole movie, she has this idea of this powerful wizard, this evil wizard. And then in the end scene, the wizard is revealed because he's standing behind a curtain and the curtain is withdrawn by a dog. And it turns out that this wizard is just a phony. It's just a guy that's pulling levers and pushing buttons. And then she's not afraid of him anymore.

And I think the same logic can be applied to anxiety. When you understand what it is, when you realize that it's just your brain wants you to be afraid because that has saved our lives, then it became less threatening. And you could also use your brain to sort of see yourself from a distance. If you go to psychotherapy, a big part of that will be to try to understand why you do certain things and why you behave certain ways and why you feel certain things. and to see yourself from a distance is very difficult, but you could use your brain to sort of see yourself on the stage and say, it's just my brain who wants me to be afraid, or it's just my brain who wants me to be in the couch, etc, etc, etc.

So in this way, I think you can become a bit smarter than your brain. And that's what I mean when I say that the more we learn about the brain, the more we learn about our biology, the less dictated, we become from it, the more the freer we become from it, actually. Yeah, part of that learning is the understanding of how our brain is designed to work. And then understanding how our environment has changed so much so that we can work on both aspects. We're having compassion for the anxiety, you know, and your work is also, hey, where do we need to modify our lifestyle, our habits, our surrounding to actually promote us not being anxious,

not having as much shrinkage of the brain. And one of the key areas, you're so incredible about helping people double down on the basics. You know, sometimes people are like, what's the best supplement? What's the best this? What's the best that? And you've shared a few basics. You've already talked about one, which will come back to a little bit more exercise. I'd like to go into the next one, which is sleep.

Tell us how not getting adequate amounts of sleep actually can move our brain in the wrong direction. Yeah, and sleep is by itself very interesting because if sleep did not fulfill an important function, it would be evolution's biggest mistake if you think about it. Why should we spend seven or eight hours every night in an unconscious state where we are preoccupied by psychotic experiences, dreams? I mean, if that didn't fulfill a function, it would be very strange. And it does feel a function. The brain is not resting when we're sleeping.

it's doing different things than what it's doing during the daytime. And one of the things that it's doing is that it's trying to integrate, it's deciding what of the stuff that happened during the day, what of those should be kept, what of the short-term memories should be transformed into long-term memory. That seems to happen when we sleep, especially deep sleep. And the brain also seems to make connections between things, that are not obvious to us.

And it tries to figure out what the stuff that happened during the day really mean. How does that connect to what I've known before? And this is probably why we dream, because elements from our day is sort of pushed into this bizarre, these bizarre experiences that turns into dreams. And we know that when we are, also when we're dreaming, the amygdala of the brain is active. and amygdala is a part of the brain which is important for threat detection.

It's important for stress and anxiety. And that is very active. But at the same time, the level of a neurotransmitter in the brain called noradrenaline is low. And noradrenaline is more about being vigilant than alert. And that shows that the brain seems to be processing difficult things. The amygdala is active in a state where it's calm. and to process difficult things in a state when you're calm, that's basically therapy. So it's no coincidence that sleep has been called nightly therapy.

So the brain does all of these incredible important things when we sleep. However, as I said, it's a survival machine. It should be easily distracted. And therefore, it will prioritize being awake if you're stressed. So sleep is important, but fragile. And if you look at the pattern of sleep during a night, you see that we go through four or five sleep cycles. They're about 90 minutes each. In the beginning of the night, there's mostly deep sleep in each cycle and just a little dream sleep.

The longer as the night pauses, it becomes more and more dream sleep during each sleep cycle. And during the last hours before the morning, it's a lot of dreaming. And that means that if you only sleep for five hours, you get the deep sleep, but you don't get the dream sleep. And that means that you lose the stuff that you get from dream sleep, such as creativity and emotional stabilization. So you need to sleep for seven or eight hours, which everyone knows, but it's not dangerous. before you go below five or 5.5 hours. And that's very important to know. Loss of sleep has been connected to Alzheimer's, for instance,

but you need to go low. You need to go below 5.5 hours. So sleep is not just the necessity. I would say it's a treasure. It's one of nature's biggest gifts to us in terms of creativity and emotional stabilization. And as I said, sleep should be, it should be as attention. It should be fragile.

You should. So if you wake up in the middle of the night, there's nothing wrong with you. The brain is doing exactly what it should. It wants to make sure that you're safe, that there's nothing dangerous here. And of course, there's nothing dangerous here for us, but the brain still thinks that we are on the Savannah. Talk about the relationship of the smartphone today and its impact on sleep and how it is natural to want to wake up. It's natural to, you know, be alert at different moments. But is there something that the smartphone is doing that is interrupting our sleep to a greater degree than prior to us having it?

Well, the smartphone is a super stimuli. So it provides us with so much, so much reward. that it's very difficult for the brain to sort of ignore it. And there has been studies done where you have teenagers who leave their phones outside their bedroom. And even if they don't check their phone, it turns out that they sleep seven minutes longer if they have the phone outside the bedroom.

And that means that some of them don't sleep longer. That doesn't affect them. But some of them really sleep longer for 30 or perhaps 60 minutes longer. And as I said, the amount of teenagers that are seeking help for sleeping disorders has exploded. And I saw a poll that showed that a third of all teenagers have the phone in their bed, not just in the bedroom, but in their bed. And to have a casino, to have all your friends, to have all the world's news with all the great stuff and terrible things that happens in the world, to have that accessible next to you in bed, well, you're not going to sleep, of course. So to the ones to seek help for sleeping disorders, my main advice is always to buy an old-fashioned alarm clock.

Sleep is very, very fragile and very precious and it is definitely, it will be eroded if we use digital media too late, which is, as I said, it's a super stimuli. You know, you've shared before in your work that you spent some time with, you know, a modern-day nomadic tribe. Can you tell us a little bit about that and what some of the lessons were that and reflections that you got from them? Yeah, I was fortunate enough to go to Kenya for a Swedish television program. And I spent some times with a group of hunters and gatherers. and they lived, they had no running waters, they had no electricity, they were constantly moving, they were staying in one place for a couple of months and then they were going on to the next place.

They were constantly threatened by lions. They were there just a couple of hours before I came. And it was just incredible experience. I had read a lot about these tribes and how they lived, but to see it in real life, that was just astonishing. And I asked them how many of you have sleeping problems? And they said that, well, we did not sleep good last night because there was lions here. And then I said, well, okay, if there was lion in my house in Stockholm, the whole of Stockholm would be awake. So that doesn't count.

But apart from that, how many of you have sleeping problems? And they didn't understand the question. They were like, well, if you don't have any lions, you sleep. And what is interesting with this group of hunters and gatherers also that they don't seem to have any type 2 diabetes at all. And this has been studied in many hunter-gatherers groups. Cardiovascular disease, the main killer, or one of the main killers for Westerners, is very, very rare. Depression seems to be rare. It's hard to measure, but it seems to be rare.

And you should remember that these are people who live, they don't have any, access to any medicine at all. They don't have any primary care physicians who prescribe them blood pressure lowering drugs or lipids or antidepressant medication. They don't have any therapist or anything like that. And it was suspected that maybe they have something in their genes. Maybe it's something about their genetics and that they are unique in some way. But researchers at the Karolinska studied a group of these hunters and gatherers who moved into into Nairobi, the capital of Kenya. And it turned out that they got Western disease

exactly the same way that we do. So it comes from the lifestyle. They seem to be protected against these problems that we experience because of the lifestyle. And what is it in that lifestyle? Well, first of all, they seem to take about 15 to 18,000 steps per day. So they are incredibly physically active compared to us. They never exercise.

They would never dream of. that. I asked them, do you ever go for a run? And they said, well, we run if there's a predator who's after us. But otherwise, why would we? They did not really understand the concept of exercise. So they don't do that. And they live very closely to one another. Few of them live lonely, are by themselves. And I think these two things, exercise and being closely to one another. And they don't overeat. Their body mass index was around 18 to 20. So that's low. And they did not have any special diet. They ate whatever they could find because they were threatened by starvation. But I think all these three things, not eating too much, being constantly physically active,

not necessarily exercising, but walking stuff like that and living closely to one another. these are also the factors that we have seen in what's called the blue zones. And the blue zones are parts of the world where people live until they become 100, a large portion of people live until they become 100 years old, and very few suffer from dementia. There are a couple of those places. One is in Okinawa, and one is in Sardinia, and one is actually in southern Sweden.

And these places are a bit legendary. I think there was a documentary on Netflix about them. But one of the common things in all these blue zones is the fact that they all seem to exercise by daily exercise and not running. And they don't eat too much and they live closely to one another. And that's exactly what I saw with this tribe in Kenya. You know, one of the things that the individuals in the tribe told you when you had shared that there are so many people in my society, you know, you were talking about yourself, that they have everything, but yet they're struggling with depression, they're struggling with loneliness, they're struggling

with all that. And one of the ideas, I can't remember if it was you that said that or if they said that to you, but it's maybe because we have everything at our disposal and we don't have to work in the way that we do. We don't have to rely on each other the way that these nomadic communities do, maybe that's one of the reasons why we have let our brains be hijacked. We have everything. We have everything. We have the casino on our social media, on our phone. We have all that. And that might be one of the reasons why we are unhappy as we are. Yeah, exactly. I asked them that. How many of you have experienced sadness, longer periods of that? And they were like, it seems to be very few. And I said that in my country, one in eight adults are being prescribed medication

because they are sad or anxious. And they said, but you have everything. And then I said, yes, and maybe that's exactly why. And when I got there, I had this feeling that, you know, they live in such a primitive way. They don't have schools. They don't have universities or hospitals. I felt I'm going to feel sorry for them. I could not shake that feeling. And when I left, I had completely changed that. I thought that I don't feel sorry for them. I feel sorry for us.

What are we doing to ourselves? I mean, we have everything. And I don't mean that we should go back to the Savannah. We wouldn't want to because for these people, about half of them die before they become teenagers as well. The child mortality is just astonishingly high, and almost all the adults had lost children. So we don't want to go back, but there are certainly important things, conclusions that we could draw from their lifestyles when it comes to not just our physical, but mental health. And I couldn't help of thinking of a guy called Thomas Insel.

He's a psychiatrist, and he led an organization called, I think National Institute of Mental Health. And they distribute money for psychiatric and neurological research. And during his period as a boss there, they distributed, if I remember correctly, $17 billion to psychiatric research during a 10-year period or so. And he was asked a couple of years ago, what did that do? What was the effects? What did you get from that money? And he said that, well, I think we got a lot of cool articles. written by a lot of cool researchers, but I don't think we move the needle one bit when it came to reducing hospital admissions, when it comes to reducing suicide, when it comes to making people feel better.

And by that, I don't want to say that all research is bad. I want to say that we should not just focus on advanced molecules, but we should also look at our past, look at our brains, and by all of the research. and how it evolved and try to learn things from that, because there's so much wisdom in that, I think. That's beautifully said. You know, I was actually born in Nairobi. I was born in Nairobi, and I went back a few years ago to go spend some time with one of these modern day. They're the cousins of the Maasai.

They're called the Samburu tribe. And it was such a powerful experience to spend time with them. And also, it was a very challenging experience, because as modern foods, especially white sugar, started to come into the societies, you saw a stark difference between some of the younger people. You know, the older people that were there, you look at their teeth and you look at their jaw structure and they have perfect teeth and their jaw structure is square. It's, you know, it's beautiful.

You know, similar to the work of Weston Price and a dentist who went to Africa to study a lot of, you know, why don't people in Africa in particular and these tribes, why do they have perfect teeth and they don't have any access to toothpaste and dental care and other things, but some of the younger individuals in their teens and early 20s who had been given this sugar and for the first time and it started coming in, you know, as naturally modernity starts to come into all these areas. One of the individuals who was our caretaker, he said, we said, do you want some coffee in the morning? He said, yeah, yeah, we'll have some coffee. You know, so we were pouring coffee. We're getting coffee to everybody. And then he went over to the sugar and he put in 14, I counted it, 14 tablespoons of sugar inside a very small cup.

And it was a moment that I had where I said, you know, it's not that these groups, which you've talked about in your work, it's not that we had more willpower in the past. It's just that these things didn't even exist. If our ancestors had exposure to the same candy, the same sugar, same other things, they would fall victim to the same things that many Americans and Europeans are falling into, which is our brains are being hijacked by these ultra-processed technologies, foods, and stimulus that we're around. Yeah, exactly. And then we go and then we feel bad about it because we feel that we don't have enough willpower. and that's not just that that's not the way to frame it as someone said that you know to protect yourself against the smog of Beijing you can't just say to people wear masks that's it well that's it's part of the solution maybe but you should also have regulation of course everyone realizes that and I think that we will we will look back at this period in history and think it was very naive to

use these digital technologies to spread them without any regulation. And I'm one of the ones who believe in taxing sugar. I think that we should do that and that we need to tilt people's behavior in a way to eat more healthy and sugar tax seems to work. It did in Norway at least. So nature's greatest hoax is to make us believe that if we just follow our instincts, we will be happy. No, our instincts are not.

there to make us happy. They're there to help us survive in a world of scarcity and we don't live in that world anymore. We follow these instincts and we build exercise of our lives. We have cookies and stuff that are just, you know, there's nothing like that in nature. And of course, it's tempting. And as a consequence, when we can't deal with it, we feel bad. We feel morally broken. And that's just so sad. You know, you mentioned about sugar. There's often this quote that people say that you hear thrown around on social media, and it's this idea that sugar is more addictive than cocaine. And a lot of that was based on, for my research into this, mouse and mouse studies that were there, where they basically had the option of sugar and cocaine,

and you had these mice that were in isolation. There were some follow-up studies that got talked about much less, and we'll link to them in the show notes, which are when you take that same mice and you put them in what's called a mice playground where there are other mice that are there. There's other stimulus. They can interact with other mice and they can have community. Now all of a sudden sugar did not have as strong of a whole. And I think that this, if I would extrapolate from it, even though mice are not human beings, but we can look at other studies on human beings, we can see that being with people, as, you know, as you mentioned earlier in the podcast, and spending time in community, specifically face to face,

is one of these protective habits that helps us maintain a healthy lifestyle. Do you want to chat about that a little bit more? Yeah, I mean, I agree. And what I think is you should remember about the reward system in the brain. There's a chemical called dopamine, and it's 600 million years old. And dopamine is basically one of the oldest molecules that's been around. All brains have dopamine, not just humans, but animals, even insects have dopamine. And what dopamine tells you is to get more stuff.

It tells us what you should focus on. And dopamine basically there's no end to how much your brain wants. And that made a lot of sense in a world where we were constantly threatened by starvation. But the dopamine system is sort of, it's constantly active. in our brains, and it's active within rather limited parameters. And what was the best thing that could happen to our ancestors? Well, that was probably sex, or if you found a beehive full of honey, you smoked out the honey, and then you could have that.

That's wonderful. And then dopamine rose a bit, and then it went back to normal. Now, if you put amphetamines or cocaine into this system, dopamine levels rise way beyond anything natural. There's nothing in nature that makes dopamine rise so much as amphetamines, for instance. And what that means that this drug is hijacking your brain, is telling you that focus on me. That's what is doing. And the brain also wants to remain in balance.

It constantly, if it realizes that it gets dopamine from its surroundings, it stops producing its own. And then since dopamine drives behavior, the engine that drives your behavior shuts off. So this is, it's take a step back, you realize that this reward system that help our ancestors survive in this world that wants to also to remain in balance,

it gets completely knocked out in our modern society by drugs, of course, but I think also by processed food and digital media and so on. Something that Anna Lemke at Stanford has written a lot about in dopamine nation, which I recommend everyone to read. So my point here is that all these instincts that we have in us are being hijacked by super stimuli. And these super stimuli override the good things.

As you said, human connection is being overridden by these powerful stimuli. We spend less, we meet less and less. And as I said, humans evolved to survive and to be part of a group was incredibly important for survival. So when we feel lonely, we feel that we are in immortal danger and we feel bad for that. Have you ever come across the term Rosetto effect in the town Rosetto in Pennsylvania? Have you heard about this? No, I haven't, no. So this is something that Malcolm Gladwell and a few other researchers have written about.

this was a small town in Pennsylvania that during the 1950s and 60s, you had primarily Italian immigrants living in this town and they were living in these intergenerational households. You often had three to four generations all living in one household, taking care of each other the same way that they would when they were in these small towns in Italy. And there was a doctor that was servicing that local town. and he was at a medical conference and he went to the bar to grab a drink. And he had told this other, you know, bigger researcher that, you know, it's crazy. I'm the doctor for this small town.

Not one person in this town that I'm, you know, in charge of the doctor for has died of cardiovascular disease under the age of like 65, I think the number was. And the researchers got curious and said, well, what the heck is going on in this town when at that point in time in America, in particular, cardiovascular disease was on the rise. And over the course of 50 years of watching this town and also seeing how this town that was very close knit and these intergenerational households were living together, solely these Italian immigrants were no longer living in the way that they were. And by the 80s, their average rate of heart disease was the same as the rest of America.

And this term was coined as the Rosetto effect. And it's this idea that how we live, with one another and close-knit communities, in particular, experienced a reduced risk of heart disease, even if their diets and water they were drinking and everything else was the same as everybody. So that's the protective effect of community influence on our longevity and in particular cardiovascular disease. That's very interesting.

It makes, there's been lots of studies done into loneliness, as you perhaps know. And we know now that loneliness is not just increased, doesn't mean increased risk of depression and anxiety, but it actually means worse prognosis for all forms of cardiovascular disease. And long-term loneliness is also connected to increased risk for some forms of cancer. And by loneliness, it's very important to understand that our social needs differ. So you can't measure loneliness in any objective way. If you feel lonely, you are lonely.

If you don't feel lonely, you're lonely. not lonely. It's as simple as that. And to have shorter periods of loneliness, that's not dangerous, that everyone has that. But long-term loneliness is dangerous. And that's a bit strange. I mean, why is that? And again, I think you get an understanding from an evolutionary perspective. Our ancestors did not survive by themselves. In a group, they were safe and by themselves, they were dead, basically. So to be part of a group was as important. important as having food. And that means that you, when you are isolated, you are in a state where no one can help you. And then your stress system is amped up, is increased. So you are in a state of low level stress constantly when you are lonely.

And that's because you see the world, you start to see the world as more dangerous. Because you have to see the world as more dangerous. No one can help you. And we know now, for instance, that people who are lonely, They sleep more super, sorry, if you sleep by isolated, if you sleep by yourself and you haven't chosen it, then you sleep more shallow. You're easily, more easily awoken. And that's also strange. I mean, why should you wake up more if you're sleep by yourself? You don't have anyone who is tossing and turning around in your bed. And the answer is probably that if you slept by yourself historically, you had no one there to warn you for danger.

And then you have to sleep more, your sleep should be easier to interrupt. We also know that people who are experiencing a lot of loneliness, they start to view others as more hostile. Neutral faces becomes slightly aggressive if you are in a lonely state. And slightly aggressive faces become very aggressive if you are lonely. That's the way you perceive them. And that's probably because your brain is starting to interpret your surroundings as more dangerous. Because again, there's no one there to help you. So you are not damaged if you see the world that way, if you are lonely.

And it's very important to spread that information to people who are lonely that you will see others as more threatening. But they are not more threatening. And that's not because you are broken, because that's because you're functioning. And if you have someone who is lonely in your surroundings and they are a bit standoffish, that's not necessarily because they don't like you. It could be a symptom of loneliness. So as you say, human connection, of course, is important. And I think the really interesting question is, why is it that way?

Why is it so important for health and longevity and mental health? Well, that's because we would not survive by ourselves. And that means that we are constantly stressed if we are too isolated. There was a study done. There was during COVID, which was pretty interesting. And there was individuals who experienced a lot of loneliness. They were between 25 to 100 years of age. So there was all walks of lives.

And they had to fill out a questionnaire. And the loneliness score was calculated. After this, they were called three times a week, 10 minutes every time. And someone just chatted to them. them, basically about whatever they wanted to talk about. And after a couple of weeks, this loneliness score had been dropped by 20%. Now, then you might say that who were these callers? They must have been super psychologists who could give, you know, the best advice ever,

the perfect one-liners. And it turned out that there was just high school students. They had been trained for, for like an hour. And the advice they were given was that listen to the one you're talking to, let the person you're talking to decide the topic and be interested in what he or she is saying. And I think that's a beautiful example of how small things can make a lot of difference in terms of our perceived loneliness. And when you give your mom or dad or grandpa or whatever is a call or someone else who is lonely, you're basically sending a signal to them that you belong to the group.

You are one of us. Someone has your back. And deep down in the brain, that will be registered as you are not in such a danger anymore. And then the stress system gears down. And you don't just give them a happier life. You even give them a longer life. You know, loneliness was something that was, as you mentioned, a punishment for a lot of our ancestors. And really, no human beings could really survive.

without having a baked-in family, tribe group. Now, today, we have to go out of our way to seek community because of the way that the world is often designed in our Western world. We have to be intentional about it. I've shared with my listeners that one of the ways that I've done this in my own life is that I took a group of my friends that all moved to Los Angeles. That's where I'm recording right now, around the same time. And we weren't friends prior.

These are just nice people that I met, you know, inspiring people, other entrepreneurs said, you know what, let's do like a weekly walk. And this was seven, eight years ago. And we'll just meet together. We'll grab coffee. We'll just go on a walk together. We'll talk about what's going on in our lives. As I mentioned, for seven, eight years, we've kept this up because it happens to be a group of men. We call it man morning. And we meet every Thursday. And it's on the calendar. And if you can show up, you show up. And if you can't, that's okay. You go do your thing. Maybe you're traveling. You're busy with the family. You got to drop the kids off of school. We get together. We grab a coffee. We're lucky in L.A. The weather's night.

and we just, you know, we formalized it a little bit over the years, but we simply ask one main question that I stole from my friends at the group summit series. We say, tell me one thing you're celebrating this week and tell me one thing you're navigating, something sticky, maybe something tough that you're going through. And it's so simple. We're walking, we're meeting at a regular time, and we're listening to one another on a couple simple questions. I can't tell you the difference that having this in my life on a weekly and a regular basis has made in terms of my overall happiness. And I think that we need more examples of that. This is why I like to talk about this because it can be something so simple as you mentioned.

Do you have things like this? It doesn't have to be that structured. What do you have in your life to seek out community on a regular basis in this world that wants to increasingly drive us more towards isolation? Yeah, those are very important questions. I have friends who I've hung out with for 30 years, and I still meet them every week, several times a week. And we just, I guess we do what you do. We walk and chat about whatever.

But I have really come to realize how incredibly important this is for my well-being and, again, how fragile it is and how my instincts are being overtaking. by the screen because it's a super stimuli. It wants to push me away from the stuff that we need, that I need to feel good at least. And of course, you could say that couldn't we do all this stuff on the screen? Couldn't you meet your pals every morning, every Thursday morning on the screen? Well, it's not the same. And why is that?

Well, because our social needs evolved during millions of years when we met face-to-face. And we just don't, we don't just register each other's face. on a screen, we register its touch and smell and feel and body posture and all the rest of it. And if we don't get that, the brain will interpret that as you are isolated. And if you think that sounds a bit speculative, just go back to COVID. We all experienced what it was like to live in front of our screens. And even though they were lifeline during that period, I think many of us, I did at least, felt very lonely. We thought that something was missing. And I think that shows how big this physical part

of meeting is that cannot be translated to digital devices. And going back to digital devices, they could have been designed in a way that they could have, you know, they say connecting people. That's what they claim to be doing. And I don't think they're connecting people. If they did that, they should make connections and then they should push us into meeting in real lives, perhaps by down regulating some of the most addictive aspects of these products after a while so that they push you to meet in real life. Because it could never be replaced. You know, in both of your books, and by the way, for the audience that's listening, we have the links in the show notes below. Please check them out. The happiness, cure, the tension fix.

In both your books, you have at the end of each book some fantastic summaries of simple things that we can all do to both step into true contentment and fulfillment and not sort of chasing the happiness side of it. And also to protect our brain from all the social stimulus that's out there, social media, regular news. and so we can maintain our focus for our thriving. I think these are important because when we describe the world, there's nothing in the immediate short term that makes us feel that the world is going to dramatically be changing. In fact, it seems like it's heading more in the direction of being hyper-stimulating for all of our senses and even at a younger age for the kids that are growing up in it.

But there are simple action items that we can all be doing. Let's start first on the attention side. You've mentioned a few here, but just in summary, and especially during this time of year, when this episode is coming out, it's January, people are thinking about their goals. They're thinking about their intentions for the year. If there was one, two, three things that they could be doing that could supercharge anything that they're working on when it comes to attention. What would you suggest to them?

My main advice for attention is both to create distance to social media, to your digital devices, because as I said, it's not just about willpower. You have to create distance to them if you want to function as optimal as possibly. I always empathize exercise because it's incredibly important, not just for mood, but also for cognition. You get more focused after exercise, you get more creative after exercise, and you even seem to get smarter. And I would like, my main advice, if I have to say one thing, is to learn more about the brain. I mean, you know as well as I do that you should prioritize sleep and exercise and make sure to prioritize your meeting people in real life. But when you learn how these things affect the brain and not just how, but why they do that, why the neurobiological machinery behind our mental health evolved the way it did, then you will be more motivated to do them. And I think also that you will become kinder to yourself. That's important, not to blame yourself too much.

That's certainly been the way for me when I've learned about this. And this is something that I have tried to convey to both patients and readers. It's so true. So often we make the problem worse by beating ourselves up for dealing with it in the first place, not recognizing that we're simply human beings that are trying to survive in a modern day environment that's making it more difficult to do so. Yeah, and that we are facing problems of overabundance that our ancestors never had to face. So when we think that, you know, we have it all, we just have all our calories. Everything is solved. No, it's not that simple because we never had an end of our wishes to get more. So then we will over it eat.

We never had, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. These biological defense mechanisms has turned into Achilles heels for us. Powerful. How can our audience keep in touch with you and your work? if you could, just remind us about your books. We're going to put the show notes, the links to both of them in the show notes below. Yeah, I have an Instagram. I don't use it that much, but I try to update it sometimes. It's Anders E. Hansen, that's one word. And I have one book called the Happiness Cure, and one is called The Attention Fix. And there's another one coming out that's called

the Mind, Body Methods. These books have come out during the last eight years in Sweden. So there's three of them and they're being published in the UK and US right now. And it's, I have learned so much from from learning about this. I've understood so much about myself. And I know that this has been rewarding for many of my patients as well. So, so I hope that you, that you, that you, that you, that you will enjoy it. And as I said, again, learn more about the biology of your, of your, of the brain. learn more about why you function the way you do, and that will make a lot of difference for you.

Well, thank you for helping us do that on today's episode. And thank you again for being on the podcast. Thank you. Hi, everyone, Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast. If you haven't already, subscribe, just hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast app. And by the way, if you love this episode, it would mean the world to me.

And it's the number one thing that you can do to support this podcast is share it with a friend. share with a friend who would benefit from listening. Number two, before I go, I just had to tell you about something that I've been working on that I'm super excited about. It's my weekly newsletter, and it's called Try This. Every Friday, yes, every Friday, 52 weeks a year, I send out an easy-to-digest protocol of simple steps that you or anyone you love can follow to optimize your own health.

We cover everything from nutrition to mindset, to metabolic health, sleep, community, longevity, and so much more. If you want to get on this email list, which is, by the way, free and get my weekly step-by-step protocols for whole body health and optimization, click the link in the show notes that's called Try This or just go to Drew Perot.com. That's D-H-R-U-P-U-R-O-H-I-T dot com and click on the tab that says, try this.