Dhru Purohit Show - The Mind-Blowing Science of Manifestation with Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart

Episode Date: June 1, 2023

This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth, WHOOP, and BON CHARGE. Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru sits down with Dr. Tara Swart to talk about the power of manifestation and its impact on the brain. Dr. Tara Swart is a neuroscientist, former psychiatric doctor, and senior lecturer at MIT Sloan. She is visiting senior lecturer at Kings College, London, and an executive advisor to some of the world's most respected leaders in media and business. She is the lead author of the award-winning book Neuroscience for Leadership and was named the world's first Neuroscientist in Residence at Corinthia Hotel, London. In this episode, Dhru and Dr. Swart dive into: -Visualization and manifestation (2:19) -The role of gratitude in manifestation (4:16) -What fear-based media does to the brain (12:03) -Defining manifestation: what it is and is not (18:30) -How old stories shape the brain (27:53) -A mantra for overcoming self-doubt (42:17) -Cultivating awareness under pressure (47:32) -Merging meditation and mindfulness (59:25) -Creating an action board for manifestation (1:07:43) -Roadblocks that get in the way of taking action (1:19:31) -Lifestyle factors that contribute to manifestation and healthy aging (1:34:03) -Figuring out what you want to manifest (1:41:33) -How spiritual beliefs play into manifestation (1:48:03) -How to navigate grief and suffering (2:01:23) Also mentioned in this episode: -The Source: The Secrets of the Universe, the Science of the Brain -Dr. Tara Swart’s podcast, Reinvent Yourself -“When you want something, the whole universe conspires in order for you to achieve it.” — The Alchemist -Click here to sign up for my weekly Try This newsletter For more on Tara Swart, follow her on Instagram @drtaraswart, or through her website, taraswart.com.  Cozy Earth has the most comfortable, temperature-regulating, and nontoxic sheets on the market. Right now, get 40% off your Cozy Earth sheets. Just head over to cozyearth.com and use code DHRU. WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker and health coaching platform that monitors your physiology 24/7 and provides personalized recommendations based on your body needs. To get yours, go to join.whoop.com and get your first month free. BON CHARGE is a holistic wellness brand with a HUGE range of evidence-based products to optimize your life. Right now, my community can go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This comes from Buddhism as well as neuroplasticity, which is that to replace a thought that you don't desire with a thought that you do desire, or that's going to help you to move forward, or that's going to unblock what's not been happening up until now. What's important to know in the brain is that you can't undo a neural pathway in the brain. The only thing you can do is overwrite it, so to create a pathway that is more energy efficient than the one that's already there. So by continually interrupting the negative thought and replacing it with the positive one, you will eventually get to the point where that pathway is stronger than the original one. If you're curious about the intersection of manifestation and neuroscience and how you can use the latest science around both to achieve your goals in life, today's episode is absolutely for you. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast.

Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds and wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Tara Swart. Dr. Swart is a neuroscientist and former psychiatric doctor. She is a senior lecturer at MIT Sloan and a visiting senior lecturer at King's College, London. And on today's podcast with Tara, we're diving deep into the topic of how to use the brain's potential and power to actually manifest what we want in life. And by the way, if you think manifestation and neuroscience don't fit together, you might be presently surprised after listening to Tara, break it all down on today's episode. Now, a little bit more about Tara. She's an executive advisor to some of the world's most respected leaders in media and business.

She's also the lead author of the award-winning neuroscience for leadership. And in 2016, she was named the world's first neuroscientist in residence at Corinthia Hotel London. Dr. Tara's true mission in life is to teach others how to apply lessons from cognitive science to enhance their everyday lives and reduce human suffering. It's a fascinating conversation. Stay tuned. Dr. Tara, welcome to the podcast. A pleasure to have you here.

I want to jump right in. You know, your teachings are so much about the power of the brain and the brain's ability to visualize and create a completely different and magical future. So I'm going to ask you in our first question here, to do a little bit of a visualization exercise for our audience. If people listen to this interview and they get a chance to step into your world, what is possible for them when they understand the true power of neuroplasticity and they combine that with the power of source and manifestation?

So give us a little bit of an idea. What's possible after this conversation? Wow. Thank you for throwing me in at the deep hand, Drew. Let's actually start with gratitude, which is a really important part of visualization and manifestation, for me to be able to say thank you so much for having me. And I'm really excited because we've got so many friends in common and I've known of your podcast for years

and it's a dream to be here with you in L.A. now. So what I would say about visualization is that the way it works in the brain is if your brain has never seen or experienced something before, it would consider it as a threat. So when seeing or experiencing something for the first time, there would be some fear involved with that. And that would likely mean that your stress hormone levels would go up. That then changes the blood flow around the brain and makes you less likely to take risks because it wants to keep you safe. So if you have visualised something, whatever it is that you want, then to your brain, it's like it's experienced it before.

so it makes that first real event easier. So I advise people to either create actual images in a collage, like, you know, what we call a vision board or an action board, or to regularly visualize the outcome that they desire, to start to really tell your brain that it's already come true so that when it starts to happen, you notice all the things about what it sounds like, what it smells like, what it feels like,

and then to give gratitude for the fact that it's come true because gratitude is like the opposite of fear. When you're in a state of gratitude of love and trust and joy and excitement, you're releasing the bonding hormone oxytocin, which makes you feel warm and open and it lowers your guard and allows you to take healthy risks. I'm so glad that you start off with gratitude. And by the way, thank you so much for being here. I super appreciate it. I know you're highly in demand. I find that gratitude to add another layer to what you shared is that many people forget about how far they've come in life so far. So we tend to focus a lot about what do I want to manifest and bring in from the future.

And great, that's important and that's a big part of what today's conversation is going to be about. But we forget that five years ago, 10 years ago, there's things that we have in our life that we had been working on, that we would have, you know, shouted from the top of the roof if we knew that we would have achieved that thing or brought it into our life. So I think loving the life that you have, is that also part of training the brain and stepping into the power of manifestation? That's so true what you've said, and you put it really well, which is that, you know, I like the way you said like five years. Even one year ago, there might be things that you think

if that ever happened, it would be so amazing. But when it happens, we don't really tend to acknowledge it that much. We, you know, when something like that happens, we just think, okay, what's the next thing that I can try to manifest? So there's a serious lack of acknowledging and celebrating, you know, the things that we've already achieved. And the importance of that, apart from just enjoyment in life, is that the more evidence you can give yourself that you had a goal and you achieved it and the more understanding you have of how that worked in your brain, what the circumstances were that made that come about, it's obvious that that makes it more likely for you to achieve the next thing. I often find with high achievers especially, a lot of people

who are listening today are high achievers in their life. It feels like, okay, check, I'm ready to move on to the next thing. What does celebration look like for you in your life, right? You have gone on so many podcasts and you've talked about different examples. We'll share some of them today of manifesting. In fact, I might even ask you, what's something a year ago that you were putting attention on that has shown up in your life maybe today or in the recent, you know, a few weeks? And what was a way that you solidify that in your brain and body by having even a small little moment of celebration? So what does celebration look like? And what is something that a year ago, you want it to bring in. Such great questions. So in my journal, so journaling is an important way of,

of, you know, marking down a lot of these things that have happened. But I have a separate section, which is a list of accomplishments and achievements. So when I'm feeling like nothing's manifesting at the moment, you know, there's something I really want, but there just feels like there's an obstacle every time I try to make it happen, I go back and look at my list of achievements. Some of them, I've looked at frequently enough now that I can summon them to mind. But when you feel like things aren't working out, like I said, the blood flow and your brain changes and it can actually go against you because to keep you safe, it will say, well, don't take a risk. Don't try to get onto that podcast. Don't, you know, go to America and do, you know, whatever you've got planned.

Stay at home. It's safer. So then when you go and look at this list of achievements, you think of the times that you felt like that thing wasn't going to work out, but then it did. And so as you were saying a year ago, I can hardly believe that a year ago, I hadn't even launched my podcast. So I launched my podcast in September 22. It's huge. Yeah. And it was quite a sudden decision because I've, as you mentioned, you have been working on creating a TV show for quite a while.

Yeah. And then we came up with the brand of Reinvent Yourself with Dr. Tara. and TV shows don't happen overnight. So it was kind of like that excitement of wanting to get that out there, but knowing that it was going to take quite a long time. I always say it was writing the book. It's like you're pregnant for a year, but then you don't get a baby at the end of it

because you have to wait until the book gets published. Right, right. So launched the podcast in September 22, and my team, the studio in the USA, sent me this massive bouquet of pink flowers. Pink's my favorite color. and I love flowers. And I wasn't expecting it at all.

So, you know, even if it's something small like that. So occasionally I will buy myself something and say, this is because you launched the podcast or this is because your book came out. And then that object becomes more than just what it is. It's a constant reminder every time I see it, whether it's, you know, a pen or a piece of clothing, that that's related to a certain achievement. Yeah, it's a reminder of the power that's inside of you, that's inside of everybody who's listening today.

And we all need reminders because so much of the media that's so pervasive that's around us, even without even trying to, can pull us into a place where if you look at the subtext, it's reminding us that we are powerless, that we can't impact the world, that we're all victim to circumstances, and that there's a lot more bad in this world than there is good. So do you feel like people have to become resilient in sort of being able to push back against that onslaught that's there? Two things I would say about that is one that most of the neuroscientists that I know, all the ones I know personally and other ones that I've heard of, don't watch the news or read newspapers. That's powerful. And it's not because we don't want to be informed because obviously we do manage to stay informed in other ways of important events around the world.

but if you just look at the nature of news, the proportion of it that is bad news and the impact that that has on your brain is disproportionate. So the first thing is to curate your news feeds, your social media feeds so that you're not getting bombarded with so much bad news and you balance that out for yourself. Of course, life can be hard. So yes, you have to be resilient as well. but the first thing is to take charge of what you're actually feeding your brain. And that's everything from your diet to information. How is it that regularly exposing ourselves to negativity or sort of fear-based media? What does that do to the brain? And how is that actually happening?

So we've come onto the subject of neuroplasticity, which is essentially neurons that fire together, wire together. Now, every time you meet somebody, experience an emotion, recall a memory, watch the news, neurons are, you know, firing in response to what you're experiencing through all of your senses and, you know, the information that you're taking in. So neuroplasticity is an incredible thing, but what we need to not forget is that it can be as bad as it can be good. So if you repeatedly look at bad news, if you repeatedly obsess over a, you know, a bad relationship or a breakup that you had, you are going to be embedding that wiring more deeply in your brain. So it's a force for good, but it also can be reinforced. I don't want to say bad, but unproductively.

What are some of the habits and addictions that people, even maybe people listening today, that are dealing with certain behaviors that they don't want? what are some examples of those that their brain is kind of been hijacked by this pathway, but for quote unquote, bad, right? What would be some addictions, habits, behaviors that people are suffering from today that is an example of this? Yeah, so I like the way you framed that as not good or bad. We could say positive or negative or, you know, it's productive, nonproductive.

And so through my work, which is very varied. So, you know, I work with executives, mostly in financial services. I teach at MIT Sloan. I work with a very different demographic through my social media and through, you know, people that read my book and listen to my podcast. But I see the same issues surfacing across the board. And this is based on the dopaminergic pathways in the brain, which are related to motivation. So motivation is the neurological. mechanism that makes us seek something that's good for us. But motivation and addiction are on a

spectrum. So something that used to be good for us, if we overdo it or we're doing it and somehow it's starting to actually not have the same effect, so we have to do more of a certain action to get the same reward that can become destructive. And obviously drugs and alcohol are examples of that that everyone will understand. But I'm talking about things like being a workaholic, so working excessive hours, over-exercising, particularly in a really high-intensity way that actually creates more cortisol and stress in the body. So basically screen time.

And the story that I hear with this is it's really important in my job to be responsive. I always reply to emails straight away and I get rewarded for that. and then that can at the other end of the spectrum be, I'm constantly scrolling social media, I'm working across time zones, I'm looking at my phone in the middle of the night. So you can see with all of those things how, you know, having a good work ethic is great,

but working excessive hours and damaging your health and your relationships isn't. Doing, you know, not being sedentary is good, but exercising to the point. And I see it with the most high achieving people, you know, the high flyers, the professional services, the lawyers. I met a lawyer at a lunch party and as soon as she said, she does this super intense high, you know, high, really like challenging exercise.

The first thing I said to her was you're exactly the kind of person that shouldn't be doing that. You should be doing yoga and walking and she sort of said, I know straight away, which means that you even, you know that it's bad for you, but you still keep doing it because that original driver is exercise must be good for you and I'm sweating out my stress by doing it. But it's just really good to step back every so often and check, is this still good for me? And the same with obviously using screens and social media. I'm going to jump around a little bit as we sort of stack and build a little bit of your background of the audience. We're of course going to come to your story, which is so fascinating.

I'm going to go back to a little bit of the beginning of the interview because I think, you know, my audience here, this podcast used to be the broken brain podcast. We've done a lot of episodes on brain health. What my audience is not used to hearing so much about is an Oxford, MIT train, doctor, professor talking about manifestation. That is new for them? And maybe even some people thinking, is manifestation real? Is it not real? So I'd love to start off here. Tell us what manifestation is and tell us what it isn't. Yeah, so it's definitely had a bad, you know, sort of rep. And I think that is just for all the different definitions and possible journeys to manifest, you know, the umbrella term of manifestation, you know, that one can have. But as a scientist, if I were to say to you that manifestation is not much more than you setting a goal and making that come true in real life, then the,

there shouldn't be any argument that it could be quite scientific. And when I wrote the source, which came out in 2019, so I was writing it in 2018, I was, I'd always personally been interested in spirituality and visualization and manifestation, but I felt like there was no overlap with my professional work at the time. I'd, you know, until recently being a psychiatrist. And I already had my PhD in neuroscience. So when I started looking into the science behind manifestation, for me personally, I had to be able to explain it based on cognitive science, which is psychology and neuroscience. Just for it to make sense to me, that wasn't necessarily even the book that I was going to write, but I had to feel like, okay, I really understand how this works.

And then what am I going to do with that? How am I going to share that with people? But the fact that explaining manifestation through cognitive science means that it's your brain that makes these things come true felt extremely empowering. If it had to be blind faith in something, you know, a higher power or the universe, or it had to be about quantum physics, which I certainly, you know, am not qualified to understand deeply, that's okay. but it made me feel like I'm not part of this story of creating success. And personally, it works better for me to feel like I am. And what I was really surprised by is how many people in my real life who aren't scientists at all said, I've always been interested in manifestation, but now that I understand how it works in the brain, I'm actually going to do the things like make the action board or, you know, set the goal and work towards it,

that I always read about but never actually acted on before. I think that's a beautiful phrase. You set a goal and you work towards it, but what you are clearly stating, if I got right and please feel able to correct me, is that if you're tapping into the power of manifestation, you are just tapping into what is the most effective way to go about that process. Is that correct? Yeah, that's correct. And it kind of marries up very nicely with the brain science, which is that the brain,

is a small organ if you look at, you know, it in proportion to your body size, but it's very energy hungry. So it uses up 20 to 30% of the breakdown products of what we eat each day. When we're asleep, it's using up 20% of what we've eaten that day. So it likes to always choose the path of least resistance. So it's very, it likes to be efficient. So therefore being, you know, efficient and effective in your real life in terms of what you do to achieve the things that you want makes sense to the brain. So that's already kind of started aligning quite nicely. And I was smiling internally when you said, oh, I'm going to jump around a bit because in the brain it's all about interconnection. So I hope this makes sense to the audience. And I'm sure

the podcast will get edited beautifully. But for me, jumping around completely makes sense because it's all connected. And I'm sure as we draw to a conclusion, all of those threads will come together. And hopefully people have, you know, really great insight, even if it sounded like we went from brain science to manifestation to, you know, like different topics. We're weaving threads like the brain is weaving neurons. Totally. Inside a neuropathways. Yeah. And there's a deep connection that's there that you explain beautifully with that and manifestation.

Now, one question about manifestation is it that everybody, even the people who don't realize it, they're still tapping into the power of. manifestation, they may not realize that they're actually manifesting things in their life that they say they don't want, but that their mind is completely preoccupied. Is that, how does that fit within your wheelhouse? Yeah. So like you said, it is a subject that has attracted skepticism in the past and, you know, still does to some extent. And what I'm always amazed by is the small number of people that I see that I consider to be the biggest negative manifesto, and that I've ever like come across in my life and I I always think and it's and we've all been guilty of it to a certain extent oh you know that will never happen for me oh that goal is a bit too

big for you know let's let's like take it down a notch kind of thing um or worse than that which is you know it's just my luck bad things always happen to me nothing ever works out for me as I said in neuroplasticity if you are continually saying and thinking those things it's more likely to come If you're so powerful at manifesting that, imagine what could happen if you decided to say, that will work out for me. That will work out better than I even dream that it could. And I just invite people to try that for a day or a weekend or a week. Or I have a very close friend who is also an executive coach, but not particularly into manifestation,

who one year said, I'm just going to say yes to everything that I would normally say, know to. You know, for me, sometimes learning to say no to things has been an important part of my journey. And I'll share something with you that I've never shared before, apart from with my close friends, which is just from the sort of upbringing and education that I had. So, you know, you'll understand the expectation of first generation immigrant Indian parents. And then I was very fortunate. I had a very privileged education, but it was very competitive. And, you know, I was absolutely expected to go to the best universities and be professional. And that does leave this little girl inside that always thinks she's never going to be good enough.

And so I remember when I was filming my online program for MIT Sloan, I said to one of my best friends that, you know, it was super hard work. I was in lockdown in the UK. So it was on a, you know, different time zone as well. And it was, you know, a sort of run of deadlines every few weeks to get it ready. And I remember saying to her, it's not perfect. It's not going to be good enough. I'm so stressed and there's just not enough time left to get it right. And she said to me, I have never seen you not knock the ball out of the park and beyond.

And I said to her, this is the one time that's not going to happen. I'm absolutely sure of it. And I think I made like my family's life quite miserable for a few weeks around that time. And then it came out, and I did, I can't remember all of the, like, statistics now, but I mean, it was literally the number two programs second only to the AI program at NYCC. Wow. It had a net promoter score of 98%. It had like over 200 people sign up for the first iteration. And for the first time in my life, I actually thought, you cannot at this age keep saying nothing's going to be good enough.

And then it turns out to be that good. Like, you've got to make a change here. And so the next big project I took on was my podcast. And I didn't have a lot of expectation around it, something that I just really wanted to do and I had a great team around me. But they also said, you know, it's brand new. So if we want to get kind of, you know, supporters on board, then it would be better if we can do that before it launches,

just because once it launches, people will ask for analytics and it's just new. And I wasn't offended by that. I thought, you know, it's going to take some time to grow. And quite quickly, but certainly by the end of season one, it had charted to number one in the UK and the US on life sciences on Apple Podcasts. And for the first time in my life, I didn't say, I can't believe that happened. I said, I'm not surprised that happened. And that was a huge neuroplasticity change for me.

So I still have to prove myself a bit by doing that again because I've only done that once in my life. but it's things like that, like more intangible things like difficulty saying no, you know, not prioritizing yourself because your level of self-worth and deservingness are pivotal to manifestation. If you don't believe that you deserve something, you immediately make it less likely to happen

because of every action that you portray in the outside world based on what you believe about yourself. That's so powerful. It really brings up this theme that I've heard you talk about, and you write a little bit about in the book, is that many people are not aware about how their early, either childhood insecurities or early belief systems, they didn't choose to believe. They kind of just inherited from their environment.

They don't realize how powerful these are and how these narratives shape what they pay attention to. How do some of those, from a neuroscientist perspective, how do you want to help our audience think about the power of these early moments and that even when we become adults, it's like you're an adult now, you know that you have a track record, you have receipts about it, you teach other people about the point of gratitude and yet still these early stories and ideas have a hold over you. What's going on in the brain that that's the case? well there's several mechanisms that we could discuss here so but probably from the neuroscience point of view the most fundamental one is that the longer that pathways have existed in your brain the deeper they're buried the more powerful effect they have on you and the less conscious you are of that so the earliest experiences and that will tend to be about the family that you grew up in.

And obviously there's concentric circles because then there's the community that you grew up in, the school that you went to, and the politics of the country that you grew up in and any major events that occurred sort of, you know, in your young childhood. But if we just take it down to the family, because obviously the adults in your family

and also teachers and community leaders are very, very important for children. children whose brains are so impressionable, you only really need one really striking role model in your life to have a huge impact on you, both either, you know, positively or negatively. And so your survival depends on the love of your caregivers. And so you learn at a young age what is okay to do and what you shouldn't do to keep that safety and security around you. And I'm talking about things like the values that your family hold, the boundaries that are, you know, acceptable or not acceptable in your family, the secrets

that are kept in your family, who you identify with. And that will have been put onto you as a child because you won't decide that by yourself, but it will be things like, oh, you're just like your mother or you're just like your uncle, you know, and that will have. Or you were mentioning in your family, like we're a high achieving family. We have to do it this way. Yeah. So, you know, there's a sort of a few things like that that have a very, very strong impact early in life.

And there's a whole other area that we could go into of epigenetics, which is a, you know, really quickly growing field. But we certainly know that what happens in the womb is, we know a lot more about that's not epigenetics. We know that that is also very critical to what happens to you. So just the most basic example, if a mother is stressed and she has high circulating levels of the stress hormone cortisol, that will of course affect the baby because they share the same blood supply. We know in animal experiments that pregnant mice that were given the smell of peppermint and given a mild electric shock at the same time, that when the baby mice were born, they were never given electric shock, but they would have a stress response to the smell of peppermint. So that's the part about being in utero. And then we also know that now we know more about the fact that what happened to your parents throughout their lifetime and your grandparents and possibly even beyond that also has an effect on your neural wiring. So the most, so one thing that I find really interesting is that you don't inherit the genes that your parents were born with.

You inherit the expression of their genes at the time of conception. And further back than that, we know from Dutch famine disease and the Holocaust that there are switching on and switching off of the expression of certain genes that, you know, will affect you in your life. And that can sometimes, it can be good, even if a bad thing happened. Like, if a stressful thing happened, it can make you more resilient or it can make you more prone to anxiety. So even there, there is a level of, I don't know if choice is the right word, but let's say maybe agency over how you use what you've been given to make the most of your, you know, the life that you've got now. And certainly, like you said, in adulthood, there are things that you can look back on and reframe. And, you know, in more popular psychology, these are known.

These things are known by phrases like reparenting or inner child work or mirror work, where you basically, obviously accept what's happened to you in the past, but see if you can reframe some of the emotions around it or just, so either reframe emotions or manage that memory in a way that allows you to move forward in a different way to how you have up until now. Yeah, I appreciate you going into that because I brought it up from the context of sometimes people feel like, well, I'm trying to manifest.

I'm trying to put attention on the things that I want to create in my life, the things that I want to attract, the things that I want to bring in. And they don't often know if they're not paying attention to it, that there might be still some background thoughts that you have to push up against, which, by the way, everybody has. Of course, there's degrees of trauma that people have went through, but everybody has gone through some version of an imprinting, and your parents were just doing the best that they could.

They have their own imprinting. And a lot of times it wasn't even that they sat down and said, it's, you know, they didn't tell you to your face like, you're not good enough, right? They would say certain things and we would infer from those situations. Some people did, and my heart goes out to them, have a parent that, you know, just to straight up say, you're not good enough. So you go around constantly in your life, even when you're trying to achieve, even when you're trying to manifest, all you can see is that I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. Yeah. So I think that when we start to become aware that these thoughts are there, as we begin to put some of our resources,

into action boarding, vision boarding, manifestation, really take advantage of the power of the brain, we can say, okay, great, that's not my, it's funny when people believe everything that they think. Some of your thoughts are like popcorn. That's like your old high school coach or that's your elementary teacher who said you don't have good handwriting or you're not creative. In fact, I think at one point in time, one of your beliefs as an example was, I'm not creative. Yeah. What were some of the earliest experiences that you had that left that impression for you, just as an example for our audience?

So I'd like to just say something before I go on to that, which has just come into my mind. Please, please. Jump into it. Really important. So if you think about a pendulum swing of the formative experiences that you might have had as a child, and, you know, one side is extremely good, which may be, you know, parents or teachers that have said, you can do anything you set your mind to. On the other extreme, there may be not something as obvious as you're not good enough,

but it may just be something like that's not the kind of job that you could end up in. That's not going to work out for you. It's better for you to do something else. So those two things are very obvious. We often remember those things consciously. And even the bad things like that will never happen for you. Some of those things have spurred me on to achieve those things more. because somebody told me that I couldn't do them.

I think the most potentially dangerous but also area with highest potential is the very middle of that pendulum swing where there are small, what we would call perhaps like, you know, micro-experiences that you may not even remember consciously that really affect what you still do in adulthood. So that's why it's really worth doing in a work

like journaling or therapy or meditation to try to find out what it is that you're not conscious of that might be driving a lot of your behaviours. So, yeah, mine is a very classic example. I found out once I started sharing it, and that's something I'm a big fan of, you know, that there are lots of things that we hold secretly because there might be some shame around them. And when we share them, we tend to find out that a lot of people have, you know, had similar We think we're the only person.

Exactly. And then we start sharing and then other people raise their hand. Well, so my one, which was that it's not like traumatic or anything, but my art teacher at high school said that because I wasn't good at drawing that that meant I wasn't creative. So I think I was about 15. I fully 100% believed that until I was at least 35. And that was okay because I did my science A levels. I went to medical school.

I became a doctor. It wasn't that relevant to my life, but it was certainly a lingering thought. It was only actually when I was giving a lecture at Stanford at the D school, which is a really interesting concept where they have... It's a design school, right? Yeah, it's a design school. But they take people from all the different faculties like medicine and engineering and the arts. And they get them to sort of brainstorm and come up with ideas that you wouldn't come up with if you just stayed in your own. And I mentioned this to the guy that was running the D school at the time.

And he said, well, that happened to me as well. And in fact, around our age group, there's a generation of people that believed they weren't creative. Because at that time, being creative meant that you could paint or sing. And it wasn't kind of a more expanded view of creativity that we have now. But even then, and that then for me went hand in hand with the fact that my English teacher said to me, you're so talented at acting that you should read English at Oxford and go to Rada and become an actress. And when I told my father, he literally said, over my dead body.

He said, go to medical school first and then you can do whatever you like. But obviously, once you've gone to medical school, it's quite tough to give that. Yeah, Indian parents love to say that, but it's like interesting of how to make that pivot. Exactly. Especially here in America, at least you guys have a little bit better of sort of a higher education program. You're not ending up with hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, which is very common here. Yeah.

Yeah, that's interesting advice for sure. Yeah. And, you know, at that time, you really didn't see many Asian people on even the small screen. And it's been so fascinating for me to see that change in the last 10, 15 years. And so another thing that's really important in terms of manifestation and us overcoming some of these beliefs. that we might hold about ourselves is giving ourselves examples of people that we identify with for whatever reason it doesn't have to be actual skin color or anything like that but that is somebody that feels like they're like you that's achieved something that you want to achieve i mean your own

past successes are a great things to you know write down as i've said as well so that when you're moving on to the next thing you can say here was something i didn't think i would achieve but i did so i know i can do it. If you really don't have an example of the specific thing that you're trying to achieve, then, you know, I could have looked at you or Rangan or Rupi and said, well, you know, they launched a really successful podcast. So, you know, that should help me to believe that I can as well. It's possible for me. Yeah, exactly. And then, so in that, in that area, there's four things that are important. So focusing on your own past successes, find a, The kids these days call them receipts.

Are you aware of that? No, I heard you use that word. I didn't know. Yeah. So they call it receipts. It's basically, you know, here's proof that you went through this, right? It's your record just like you'd get a receipt for buying something. It's like, show me your receipts, which basically means like, hey, are you putting in the work?

That's so cute. I love that. I'm going to take that lingo on. So if you don't have a receipt yourself, then looking for, you know, example of somebody like you that's achieved that. keeping your brain and body in good condition. So the usual basics that I speak about like sleep and diet and exercise. And then the last one, which is, you know, coming full circle to the question that you first posed is,

is dealing with that voice in your head that tells you that you can't do it. And wherever that's coming from, whether it's your parents, your teachers, you know, the past. And for that, I suggest people create their own personalised affirmation, mantra. So underneath every thought that we hold about ourselves is a belief that we're often not fully conscious of. So you need to do the work through self-reflection of digging under the thought, the recurring thought that you may have about something specific, finding out what it is that you believe about yourself that's driving that thought, and then create a statement that is the opposite of that belief. And just one clarification, these are recurrent thoughts.

So like a negative recurrent thought or sort of like a weighty, like it's kind of like it doesn't have a positive aspect to it. It's sort of negative or maybe even slightly leaning neutral negative. Something that's holding you back. Something that's holding you back. Yeah. Okay, got it. A neuroplasticity really is boosted by repetition and emotional intensity. So either a recurring thought or like you said, a weighty thought.

And so this comes from. from Buddhism as well as neuroplasticity, which is that to replace a thought that you don't desire with a thought that you do desire, or that's going to help you to move forward, or that's going to unblock, you know, what's not been happening up until now. So, you know, if it's something like, I'll just use a really, really common one, which is, you know, I'm not good enough, then you would change that to something quite bold. So not, you know, I'm not a fan, really, of that phrase, I'm enough, because I think everybody is enough and needs to be like more, you know, feel that they're more than that.

So it'd be something like, this is perfect for me. I'm exactly right for this. I'm more than good enough for that. You know, and you just, every time the doubt creeps in, you replace it with that thought. And so from a neuroscientist perspective, that works, right? There's research behind it. Like, you know, you've heard people anecdotally. I remember people kind of talking to that when I first got into the world of sort of positivity culture,

reading about Tony Robbins or this person or that person when I was early in college. But you're saying that that is backed up through the research, that it actually is useful for the brain to have something else to latch onto that creates a different future. Yeah, and I'll tell you why. Remember what I said about how energy efficient the brain is? So basically, if a thought has been recurring or holds a strong emotional intensity, then it's probably a lot it's aligned with a neural pathway that's probably made up of lots of neurons that have connected up together and when a pathway in the brain is thicker it's easier for the chemical

and electrical signals to pass down that pathway so by and and what's important to know in the brain is that you can't undo a neural pathway in the brain the only thing you can do is overwrite it so to create a pathway that is more energy efficient than the one that's already there so by continually interrupting the negative thought and replacing it with the positive one, you will eventually get to the point where that pathway is stronger than the original one. I think I just had an aha moment. And it might be misguided, but you're going to correct me, right? That's why you're the expert and I'm the interviewer here. The aha moment that I had is that so many times I see people wanting to focus on the negative aspect of why they are the way they are,

right which which I'm sure there can be benefits obviously you need to initially look at something but it could be they want to use their thought power to say you know and it's a reoccurring thought like oh my gosh I'm so stupid like why do I keep on doing things this right right why do I keep on doing the same pattern and that feels like you're just riding down that pathway again and again and again when you're using that phrase instead of a little bit of gentleness that's there which is tough it takes practice but going to something else, like going to another thought that's positive versus people. I think this might even go back to the dopamine connection

is that some people are addicted to beating themselves up. Do you ever see that out there? That people want to beat themselves up and say, oh my gosh, I'm so stupid. I always do that. I do that again. I just like there's an addiction to wanting to do a little bit of self-harm. Is that a dopamine thing?

So first of all, all of that language, I'm so stupid. Why do I keep doing that is, you know, things that we all need to work on. So from what I've just shared with you, I would immediately try to change that to I can be smarter than this. I don't always do that. Or I can change myself to not always doing that. So that's the start. Or I'm showing up the best that I can and I'm working on even being better, some version. Like whatever feels true to you, but it's still.

Towards the positive. Yeah, but you still have to have awareness to be able to do that in the first place. It's, you know, like you said, some people are in the loop of I'm so stupid. This always keeps happening to me. And so it will be, that will be a very complex mechanism in the brain made up of the whole array of neurotransmitters. Everything, believes, everything, all kind of intersecting together. Which are all, you know, they're all underpinned by different neurotransmitters. But the way that it works is, so you're, you're.

amygdala is an almond-shaped object deep in the limbic system, which is the seat of your most basic primal emotions. Some people call it the first brain sometimes. Do you think of it that way? Like our earliest brain? We've got to move beyond that. Yeah, yeah, we've kind of moved beyond that. It used to be called the reptilian brain. But, and there are kind of, it's easy to think of the brain in like sort of three sections that have grown around each other. But our understanding of the brain is much more sophisticated now. So we like to think of it as systems that interact with each other that are underpinned by these different neurotransmitters. And, you know, brain is just a lot more complex than that, which we believed for a very long time. And it was only when we got scanning

technologies that we've understood it a bit differently. So, yeah, the amygdala is part of the limbic system. And it's to do with, that's where our emotions arise from in the first place. And then there's a whole kind of cascade system of biofeedback loops and stuff that affect how they, you know, pan out in the brain and the body. And then the hippocampus, also part of the limbic system, is where our memories are formed and stored. So those two parts of the brain interact with each other a lot, because obviously we lay down memories that are associated with emotions. And when, again, going back to what I said about, when we're under stress, not feeling good about ourselves, that we have higher levels of cortisol, the stress hormone.

When the brain detects that levels of cortisol are higher than they should be and they're staying high, one of the things it will do to keep you safe is that the amygdala and the hippocampus will get together and dredge up every bad memory of you having failed at something, telling you why you shouldn't take a risk and, you know, go out there and try to make it better, telling you that you're stupid, that this will always happen to you, that you can't change it. because if in that mode, let's say I was feeling like that this morning and then I came here to record the podcast with you, probably wouldn't be, you know, I wouldn't give my best performance. You'd be cautious, you'd be worried about saying stuff, you'd be second guessing yourself.

Exactly. And, you know, I wouldn't want to share as much personal information because I would think that that could lead to me being criticized or ridiculed or humiliated. So it basically makes you hold back on, in a way. way, I feel like in that mode, the brain, when you need it the most, doesn't give you the things that can really help you. So, for example, let's say I'd had a bad day today. And I thought, well, I don't, I've never met Drew before. So I'm obviously not going to tell him like what's happened this morning because then he'll just think I'm a bad podcast guest. You know, that's the way the brain

will start, you know, like. Justifying. Yeah. But if that had happened and I came here and I said, Look, Drew, you've heard me on podcast before. You know what I'm capable of. I've just had this, you know, really unexpected bad morning. How can we work together to make sure that this interview comes out the best that it possibly can with you knowing that that's what's happened in the background? That would, you know, completely change it. Yeah. So it's things, it's understanding that sometimes when we feel really under pressure, our brain isn't necessarily helping us.

And the more work that we have done when things are, you know, good or all right, the more we can have access to that awareness, which is so important in the moment to be able to override this potential safety mechanism of the brain that's telling you for actually survival reasons that's telling you that you're stupid, that you shouldn't take a risk, that things will go wrong. Do you think that that's the brain's version of, you know, also for some people it's fight and flight, but for other people, it's maybe, is it the, is it the brain's version of pulling into the stress response of freeze? Like, do you think that sometimes comes in? You know, we have fight or flight, but then we also have freeze that some people just play dead when they feel like maybe they're not literally playing dead like the way that an animal, animals play dead, right? When they're being hunted and other things. And that's some ways there's a ton of videos on this on YouTube and Instagram about animal plays dead for a little while. the predator that was chasing it, kind of gets distracted for a second because it thinks that it made the kill, and then the animal is able to dart off, right? The rabbit or whatever. Do is, is part of us sort of tensing up in a moment? Is that also tapping into that freeze response? Yeah. So basically, fright is the thing that triggers us. In response to fright, we can either take flight, which is literally run away, or we can fight. Let's use a workplace scenario that would kind of be. mean that you might yell at your boss or actually physically assault them, which you can't really do.

So that's why in the modern day, we're more likely to freeze. And I love this example of animals playing dead. It's a really great kind of analogy for it. But we wouldn't obviously physically do that, but we would try to go under the radar. Let's hope that my boss doesn't notice me and picks on my team member instead because I'm not getting anything done at the moment, kind of, you know, scenario. Or let's shut down and not bring up the things that could be actually helpful for people to work through. It's like, I don't want to get beaten up. So let me just shut down. Yeah. Yeah. And like I said, the blood flow in your brain is literally shutting down. It's going down to the survival centers so that you are able to get up in the morning, get dressed, look smart enough, go to work and sit at your

desk, but you're not able to be productive, collaborative, creative, have healthy conflict. All of those things actually can, you know, make things much, much better. So if I'm connecting the dots for myself correctly, what I'm hearing from you is that it's what we do when times are good, the training that we do, having the affirmation, diet, which you've mentioned previously, breathing, which is also a way to, you know, continuously keep the blood flow high to the brain. And all the other things you talk about, we'll tease some of those out in a minute. It's the things that we do when times are good and having the intent and the practice, I don't want to use the word willpower, but making it a

priority when times are good that supports us in these moments when times are bad. Is that accurate? I have never been formally taught that in medicine or neuroscience, but I have certainly found that to be true in my real life several times. I will. quote a piece of research from Amishi Jha that balances that view out a little bit. So when she was working with the US Marines on mindfulness-based resilience training, they had a group that was supposed to be practicing mindfulness before going to the battle zone and a control group that weren't practicing. But in the group who were supposed to be doing X minutes of meditation a day,

there were some skeptics and they just didn't do it. And so they went with their group to the battle zone and very quickly noticed that the colleagues who had been meditating could sleep at night even though there was gunfire going on all night that the colleagues who'd done meditation weren't sweating or getting palpitations like they were. So they went to the researchers and said, okay, I didn't do what I said I've been doing for the last month

but I want to start now, please, can you like help me? And they said, of course, we can help you to like start this meditation program, but we cannot promise that it's suddenly going to help you now that you're in the battle zone. And what was really surprising was that it had a very, very quick effect, a positive effect on people. So even the people who hadn't done meditation in preparation for battle got benefits like in a matter of days. So I don't want people to feel like, oh, well, I haven't been meditating for years. and, you know, journaling and I don't always eat super healthy, so I'm doomed. I always say the best time to plant an acorn was 200 years ago, but the second best time is now.

Off of that theme, what are a few things? You know, I can imagine somewhere in the title of this episode, whenever we come over the title, people are so curious about the topic of manifestation. How do we get our body and brain prepared to be better at the end of the day if we use your definition manifestation is simply about setting a goal and then achieving that goal. How do we get the brain and body better? And let's tease out each one of the top few items that you have to really walk people through like what that looks like in reality, in creating it, right?

What would be one of the first ones that you would say if we want to get better at this aspect of creating things in our life and achieving our goals? So 100%, the first and top one I would say, is sleep. So when we're asleep, we are processing our memories, our emotions, and we're also starting to mentally prepare ourselves for the next day and the next kind of chapter. And I'm going to put that together with something that's directly related to manifestation. So all of the benefits of sleep alone, adequate quality and length, that's basic science.

If we add that together with the fact that if you visualize or look at your action board last thing at night, then you are priming your brain to tag in order of importance the items that are on your board or that you visualised just before you go to sleep. So in the state between being awake and falling asleep, also in the state between being asleep and waking up, those are two very powerful times to impact your subconscious. And if you can prime your subconscious to rate what's on your vision board or action board as more important than some of your, like, basic daily tasks. Obviously, you know, we all have to go to work and do our job and tend to our family and put food on the table. But those things are kind of automated. What we want to do is rise up the automation of noticing the things that we want to manifest. Because if you've done that whilst you're falling asleep and then overnight, then the next day, you're just more likely

to notice things that you could actually grasp an opportunity, you could meet a person, you could, you know, go to a different place or read something that you wouldn't read, all things that basically make up a patchwork that at some point you haven't realised it, but it's become a quilt. It's a bit like, to be honest, I'll say that about mindfulness as well. I no longer sit down and meditate formally. I did for years, but I got to the point where, it started like a patchwork, like I was making, you know, just putting little patches, like not even together, but I would cook mindfully, I would eat mindfully, I would do some mindful walking, I would take digital detoxes, I would make sure that I gave my loved ones my absolute full attention, like not even thinking about, you know, what's on an email or a phone or whatever for, you know, certain periods of time. And then those things just started to knit together more and become, you know,

know, loosely, a quilt that's kind of going on 24 hours a day. Yeah. I love that you said that because I think especially in our space, meditation is so hip that the folks that had done it at some point in time, and I'm right in your same boat, I was a diligent meditator taking on different traditions and backgrounds and things in my early 20s and did that for years and then inherently just didn't feel that call for that formal version of it. I got a little bit introduced to this work of this gentleman named Adashanti, and it's called

spontaneous meditation, which is very similar to what you're talking about here. And then this component of, and of course I know people will say, hey, meditation is different than mindfulness, but it being incorporated in my daily life through different versions of it. And maybe at some point in time it'll shift and I'll go back to having a more formalized meditation structure. But it's not always cool to say that, hey, listen, I'm not meditating anymore, but that was something that was there. but I'm still weaving it in because at the end of the day, meditation is a vehicle that's taking you to, you know, everybody has a different definition of it, but hopefully the present moment to be in in the now.

Yeah. And it's interesting because I shared that with a friend who is a big fan of my book, you know, super intelligent and successful in a very different field. And two or three times she said to me, I couldn't, I just couldn't manage if I don't meditate. And I felt like I was, Maybe I was doing something wrong. And again, being the scientist, it took for me to hear from some people who actually research in that area in New York to say that that is actually an evolution on your spiritual path. Because if you think about it, even if you meditate for an hour a day, which I don't believe that most people do, that means that for one hour out of 24, you're being mindful. And for the other 23, you're living your normal life. But if you can merge those things so that all day is somehow, not every single hour, but more of your whole day is somehow incorporating mindfulness or a form of meditation, whether it's walking meditation or tasting meditation, then that's both more integrated, but it's also more time that you're spending in that mode. For sure. And everybody is going to have a different version of getting to that destination. but it's good that people speak up and say, hey, this is how my journey has evolved because I think

a lot of people, just like when you said, I was like, actually, I'm in that same boat over here. I've had to tell people who were huge fans of it. They're like, oh, yeah, you're obviously a meditator, right? You're like so calm and chill and other stuff. And I'm like, I used to a lot. And I'm not scared to admit that I'm not as much of right now, but that was a conscious choice that was there. And I'm sure it might change in the future.

You know, another thought that I had is that this idea of looking at going back to the last question I asked you, your idea of the action board. And we're going to get into like why you call it an action board. This idea of looking at that right before bedtime because you're prioritizing sleep as one of those important things to tap into to really supercharge your ability to step into manifestation and the power of manifestation in the brain. People know that this is inherently true. I mean, how often is it that you watch either for some people it could be a scary movie or it could be a really intense film, or could even be a subject that you are even looking forward to. And then that night, what ends up happening? You have dreams all about that all evening. And the next day, it's still

kind of on your mind. It was occupying space all the night before just from watching something so intense the night before, which makes me feel so much for people who are literally watching news right until they sleep, CNN, Fox, MSNBC, all this stuff. You know, it's funny. there's a gentleman here in in Los Angeles. I don't know if you've come across him before. Reverend Michael Beckwith. Yes. Okay.

He's the founder of the Agape Center. He's very close with Oprah and did a bunch of her Super Soul Sundays. He has a great phrase. He says, you know, the news is simply a collection of the lowest common denominator of human society. Yeah. So basically, if you want to find out everything that's wrong. Yeah. And increasingly, you're starting to see that social media is kind of becoming that same sort

away because even if you try to curate who you follow, I don't know if you've noticed this now, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter even, they show you things that they know are going to excite you even if you don't follow them. Have you seen this a little bit? So you get shown all this information. You're like, I'm not following that while all of a sudden am I getting connected to it. Anyways, I digress. But my heart goes out to people who right up until that very vulnerable space of, you know, in Buddhism they call it like ego death, right? Like going to sleep, there's a little bit of baby ego death that happens when you go to sleep each night. You're very vulnerable and you're getting exposed to all this negative imagery. No wonder that people

wake up the next day and they're in a bad mood. They feel that there's no support for them. They feel that nothing works out. They feel that the world might be out to get to them or they feel like they're not enough for all their creative ideas, visions, and goals they want to bring to their life to better themselves and the people that around them. We have to, and I love that you said it. I'm going to probably clip it for social media. You know, that neuroscientist that you know are not watching the news, at least on like that regularity of a basis.

I feel like that's one big hack that could help so many people, even with people addicted to their phones right before bed at nighttime. We're so impressionable and I don't think a lot of people understand how it's impacting us. No, and I'd like to add something to that, which is that, And I'll also share that, I mean, I love a scary movie. Yeah, yeah. I'm all about like people watching to watch whatever they want to. It was just an example of how impressionable we are in these moments.

Totally. And it's not like you're watching a scary movie every single night right before bed. No. But even though I don't look at news and obviously mostly bad news just before bed, I have this practice that I do in the morning because when you first wake up, you don't really know what you're suddenly going to think of. there might be something on your mind that you have to do that day or something that you're worried about. And I'm not saying that you don't come to those things and deal with them

at some point in the morning. But before I even have time to think, the first thing that I do when I become aware that I'm awake and I'm still lying in bed is I say, I love my pillow. I love my pillowcase. I've got the best mattress in the world. I love my mattress toffer. I love my silk duvet and all of my bedding so that before I even have a chance to think, the first thing I've done is like talked about love and gratitude. You're setting the stage. You're priming, your space and your brain. I love it. That's beautiful. You know, going back to that, you had mentioned looking at your action board, right? Or at least some positive imagery that reminds you of the life that you want to create. Or even, as we mentioned at the beginning of the podcast,

the beautiful things that you already have, family, friends, other things like that, things that a lot of us take advantage of and you'll forget like it's natural. The brain adapts and it gets used to it. Take for granted. Take for granted. Sorry, not advantage. What is, before we go through a few of things that might be supercharging our ability to set goals and achieve them in our life, we're calling that manifestation here,

what is an action board and why did you give it that name? whereas most people identify it as a vision board. Yeah. Tangibly it's the same thing as a vision board in that it's a collage made up of images that represent either literally or metaphorically the things that you want in your life or how you want your life to look or feel. And that can actually be physically by hand with like paper and card or it can be digitally these days people do them a lot more. Do you have a preference over one or the other? I would say a little bit like how we've described our

meditation journeys that if you're starting the practice, I would recommend doing it by hand. But if you've been doing it for years, then it's probably okay to do it digitally. Although, so my current one is digital. It's on my phone. But the one next to my bed is my like most precious, successful, important one because I use that more to remind myself of what I'm capable of. So, and some of the things are themes that, you know, I would still want recurring. in my life. So it's not like it's old things that I don't want anymore.

When you say your most successful one, meaning that when you were making this shift from being identified as, you know, just to use loose terms, like, I'm just a psychiatrist, I have to be in medicine, I'm in neuroscience, you know, I'm not creative. This was the board that got you shifted in a different direction? This was a bit later than that. So this one, I was already in my, in the business that I'm in now. Okay, great. It was my, it was my, more personal. Got it. It has a special meaning for you.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But whether it's personal or business, it represents the biggest change that I made in the 15 or so years that I've been doing action boards. Yeah. I love that. Yeah.

So where were we? So you were sharing. What did I call them action boards? Yeah. Okay. So the board itself is very similar to what people would recognize as a vision board. I do like the fact that it can be metaphor. not just literal representation.

So, for example, if you looked at mine now, you might not understand exactly what the images mean to me, but I know exactly what they mean to me. Some of them are literal, but some of them aren't. So it's about the feeling that it creates for you as well as what you're seeing. The reason that I call them action boards instead of vision boards comes right back to what you were asking about at the start of the interview, which is, you know, why people might be skeptical about manifestation at all

and certainly about a scientist speaking about it. It's because I feel that prior to me using that different terminology, there was definitely a sense that you can create these images or create a fantasy in your mind and do nothing but sit at home and wait for it to come true. And it's all going to come to me. Yeah. And I don't believe that at all. I would go as far as to say that if you create a vision board and you don't do anything to try to make it come true

through your own hard work, it will never come true. It might even create a negative reinforcement because you feel like, well, this is all bullshit. But you have to take the visioning and combine it with the action and actually take a step forward, which takes courage sometimes.

Which is why we were trying to prime the brain because the brain is reminding you like, hey, you've done this in the past or somebody else has done this in the past, past. Yes, you're stretching or yes, you have to take a little bit of a leap, but it's possible because you're seeing that imagery every single day. There's two things. So there's that. You're absolutely right. The priming is the key between the visioning and the outcome manifesting in the real world. But it's exactly what you said, plus the fact that, which I've already

explained, which is that we're automated to do certain things that we need to do to survive, like go to work, eat, you know, look after our families, have shelter. But we're not automated to get all the things on our vision board necessarily. So the priming is also to bring it to the front of your mind so that it doesn't just get ignored in a busy day. We're also busy. You know, a lot of people will say, I don't have time to manifest. Or there are other things that are more important in the short term that I need to do.

And that's why my manifestations always just, you know, are in the background and never quite get the priority that they need. But if you prime your brain, then the first step is that you'll be more aware of these are the things I'm looking for. Oh, you know, that's a book that's relevant to something that I want to manifest, so I should read it. And then the second step is what you've said, that you then have the courage and you go out and you do some things that you might not have done that are likely to bring you closer to that outcome. There's a quote I heard a few years ago. I can't remember where I got it from. So I'll have to look at the end of the episode and we'll put in the show notes, but I'd love to hear your take on it. And the quote, I'll paraphrase it, is

the universe, which can mean a lot of different things. People, source, we could be talking about. Your book is titled Source. You could replace it with God if that's your belief system. But the universe is constantly conspiring for your greater good. The only question is if you're noticing. Does that fit within the idea of taking the different worlds that you're bringing together, manifestation, neuroplasticity, and a little bit of your own spiritual tradition? Yeah. So, I mean, if I'm being the scientist, then I would say we can't currently prove that that's an actual fact.

That maybe goes more into the quantum physics, which is not a conversation we're having right now. No. But I'm not against it because what I feel like it's really saying is that we're not starting from, you know, like you said, if people watch bad news till late at night, to me, the message that they're really giving to themselves is the world is not a safe place. That is the most basic belief that you are carrying around if you're constantly bombarded with news of violence and death and unfairness and poverty.

So if you hear this beautiful phrase, the universe is constantly working to help you get the things that you want, then what that's really saying to you is the world is a safe place. So now you go and do what you can to make your life better. Because it's taking away the view that, well, I can't risk going to do those things because look at all the bad things that are happening in the world. And if I, you know, if I put myself out there, then something bad could happen. It's taking that away.

And I think that's really important. And I, you know, I, of course, I'm an advocate of the, you know, comfort that spirituality can get you, I'm just also saying as a scientist that you have to do something. You know, you can't just rely on that. Yeah. And the thing that I think of that lines perfectly with action is the question, the second part of that, you know, first part is the universe is constantly conspiring to your greater good, right? Again, that's not a scientific statement, right?

Could be a spiritual statement for some people. The second part being, the only question is, are you willing to notice it? And the noticing goes right into the action that you're looking at your action board at night and you want to build a business. You want to write a book. You want to do something. And then you're having a conversation with a friend and a coffee shop. And they go up to go to the bathroom and you see somebody in the corner and they're reading a book.

That's like right on the topic that's there. And it's like you could strike up a conversation. It's like, what's that book? What does it meant for you? What is this? So many beautiful things in my life have come from just these little tiny happenstances. that have been the magical serendipity or intersection, but I had to still take action towards it and say hi to somebody

or pick up this book or order this thing or whatever it might be. And that took me down a whole rabbit hole that led to momentum, more action and eventually some outward version of success on that particular project. Yeah, and it might not even be that you see someone reading that book so you go and have a conversation with them. I definitely believe in signs. But for me, if I see, if I notice signs, it's because my brain is primed for something that I know I want. And then it's like,

okay, what is it that you keep noticing and why are you noticing that? And what does it mean that you actually want to manifest? So then it could mean that I go and have a different conversation with somebody else. But it's the fact that I've noticed that book title for some particular reason. Yeah. And would you have noticed it if you didn't have that priming the night before the action steps? I want to ask you a little bit more about any other best practices around action boarding. If somebody wanted to create one action board for, let's say, you know, one area of their life, or this one's for business, this one's for love, this one's for that. Are there any best practices?

You know, people have a lot of things that they want to attract, a lot of things that they want to create in their life. Are there any do's and don'ts best practices that you have when it comes to this general topic? Yeah. So I don't do it like that, but I do know people who've done. done separate action boards and had great success. So like you said, it's what's right for different people. Because I think because I'm a neuroscientist, but also because I'm a real people person, I'm all about interconnection. So for me, I like to have everything on one board. And I even like to think about, I do have sections. So it's not completely random. It is in

sections like work and, you know, family and health and stuff like that. But sometimes I might make sure that they touch each other because to me there's a connection between the pattern recognition between them as you were saying earlier and even like the order that they are like arranged in next to each other and where they are on the board so again it doesn't have to make sense to to anyone else particularly but like for me like top left is usually about love because your heart's on your left hand side and and to me like love is the most important thing in the world, so I'm always going to put it on the top. Central is usually obviously an important place. And then it sounds like, oh no, well, whatever you're putting on the bottom obviously isn't very

important. But I always think of that as foundational. So to me, that's usually about home. But, you know, that's like one year I did it like that. In other years, I might change it around. But it will always make sense to me. So it's not everything on it makes sense to me. That's really important. And then I used to, and I said, well, I didn't ever like crowd my board up too much, but it used to be fairly full. But I see people really, really crowding their boards up. And I often say, I always say if I see that, is that what you want your life to look like? Because to me, that's really hectic. Like I would like to have some space in my life. So I usually leave some space just because when I look at my board, I want to feel calm. I want to exhale. I don't want to look at it and think,

oh my God, there's so many things on there. I feel like it's just like overwhelming. So that's a feeling, but equally, what I've come to realize over the years is that I don't know everything. And there might be things that could happen to me that I haven't imagined yet, and I want to be open to those things as well. So one of the reasons I now justify leaving space is that I'm allowing room for magic to happen that I can't even envisage yet.

I love that. Yeah. That's beautiful. What are some of the things that you see that get in the way of people actually taking action on creating an action board, right? I think one that I'll just acknowledge that we talked about before is that people feel, which is why you're on this podcast today, that it's like, this is kind of bogus. It's not going to make a difference.

I think another one that I'll toss in before I pass it over you that I've definitely felt early on when I first heard of this work early on in my sort of personal development journey is some version of feeling kind of vulnerable wanting to put out there the things that you want to ask for in your life. Right? Yeah. It can be very vulnerable. And I know there's different schools of thoughts.

Some people are like, hey, I want to show people my vision board, action board. And some people are like, no, I want to be more protective. I definitely in the early journey of mine was more like, hey, this is kind of for me. So I'm just kind of holding space for it. But part of that was I didn't think. feel at that time ready to be able to say like, well, why is that thing on there? And what does that mean? I didn't want a lot of questions, especially from people who I was kind of the first in my friend group and family to really go down this, you know, path of personal development, spirituality,

visioning, you know, all that sort of world. So I would have been more, I would have felt more vulnerable. Yeah. You know, and I would, I would wanted to protect my goals and visions in life. I didn't want people saying like, oh, that's crazy. Why do you? think that you could achieve that, right? Which I think is a real thing. Totally. You don't want that negative sort of thing. No, I'm laughing with you because I know that that happens. And I'm imagining that, you know, for the amount of time that you've been in this area, that it was probably harder as a guy to be open about things like that. I think, you know, when I started being open about it and I started being open about it when I started,

and I maybe kind of went the other way a bit in that, like, as time's gone on, I'm a bit more private about my boards. But I think that, you know, along with the skepticism that comes with it is that, that, you know, it is a thing more that women do than men, for example, maybe. More that it's a feminine sort of thing that people have. It's quite, it's seen as quite feminine. It's certainly seen as more spiritual than scientific. Like, I guess there's many ways that it's seen.

But let me address your first question, which is that it's bogus. well, okay, maybe it is bogus, but try it once. Because if it doesn't work, it's not going to harm you. If somebody's going to give it a real shot, how long should they try the process for? And I even say that with if you go in thinking like, okay, let's see if this thing works and your hands are crossed for those people who can't see me on YouTube, you're already coming in with a little bit of negativity, you know, to that component. But if somebody's like, no, I want to do this. I want to pay attention. I want to kind of follow the methodology that's there in the book.

link of the show notes for anybody who wants to check it out, the source. What is a good amount, what is some time? You're saying try it. What is an appropriate amount of time to give this a shot? Well, I do my boards, and I recommend that people do an annual one, because it's not too short term. These things do need time. And the only reason they need time is that manifestation is based on neuroplasticity. And that means that you have to change a neural pathway in your brain, and that takes time.

It depends what it is. So usually I say that if there are some what look like quick wins on your board, do everything that you can to make them come true because then you're giving yourself evidence that it works. And it's a cumulative. You're stacking up the receipts. Yeah, you're stacking up the receipts. It's cumulative. And some things will naturally take longer. But if you're still staring at this board and there's absolutely nothing on it that's happening, then that can be quite demotivating and it's really important to stay motivated.

But I do want to say as well that although I'm a huge advocate of action boards, it isn't the only way that you can manifest. And there are some ways that may be more appealing to people with more masculine energy or who are less spiritual. And so an obvious one is a list. So a list of things that you want. You know, that I think seems less bogus, right? And there will be a lot of people who will say, well, I'm not going to do a vision board,

but they might already have a list and they don't talk about it. Yeah. Or they have a list and they don't. do talk about it. And then there are actually, there's a small group of people who neurologically cannot visualize. So for them, I've suggested creating a soundtrack of success. So you can basically choose song titles or music that make you feel that same way, like that you've achieved something that you want. You can even create a smell of success. So you can have a particular essential oil or combination that represents to you that you've achieved, you know, whatever it is that

might be on your manifestation list or board. So there are other ways of doing it. And the amount of time really does depend what it is. Like it's, to me, it's similar to that question, how long does it take to form a habit? It really depends what it is. You know, if it's, I'd like to be doing some form of exercise three times a week, then you could probably, you know, get that going in a few weeks. But if it's, I need to, like, completely change how emotionally intelligent I am, that's going to take nine, ten, twelve months. But both are achievable.

The simplest analogy for me is, how long would it take you to learn a language? And basically, what languages do you speak? I speak Gujarati and English. Okay. So you're bilingual. So let's say you want to, so. you probably would find it easier than somebody that's not to learn another language. Let's say you decide to learn Spanish, okay?

So you could either use deolingo and be self-motivated with no particular end goal, and you can imagine, like, how well that might go. Or you could go to a Spanish class every week, and you could book a vacation to Mexico in six months time, and it's likely that you would be much better at Spanish if you did that than if you did the first way. So it's like that with a habit and with your manifestations, which is that it depends how difficult the thing is. And it also depends how much effort you put in to make it come true. And I would say, I think this is kind of what you were asking before as well,

is there's also an element of self-sabotaging behaviours. And the first thing I see is not so much people who don't do action boards because they wouldn't really be talking to me. So people who talk to me want to do an action board. But I've seen quite a few people who find the images but do not glue them down. Oh, interesting. Yeah. What do you think is going on there?

And actually, we have a friend in common who's done that. I'm not going to say who it is on the podcast, but I'll tell you on. You don't want to put them on blast. I was actually on her podcast when she shared that, though, but it was years ago. And I said to her on the podcast, from my experience, there's only one reason that you are not gluing them down and that's because you don't believe that you deserve them. Wow. Wow.

And that really resonated for her. So I think there's the desire to do it and the knowledge of what it is that you might want but then there's that the deservingness. You know, I mentioned that at the start. It's really important. If you don't believe that you deserve those things, you're not, you know, not gluing them down is really

what's going on inside is I don't really think that's going to happen. So if I put it there, it's going to lead to failure. Similar with sharing, I mean, I think people are different levels of private, right? So I'm not saying that everybody has to share their vision board at all. But if you feel confident enough about it, like when I, my first one, I had a, I had a small apartment with like one bathroom and it was on the wall in the bathroom. So if anybody came to my apartment and used the bathroom, they would see it. But obviously, see the only people that were coming to my apartment and using the bathroom were like close friends. So that was okay. And what I experienced from that was that it was very inspiring for people.

And they were genuinely interested. And not only was it inspiring in terms of they might do something similar, but because it was my closest friends, I would literally get text messages and phone calls saying, oh, you know that thing on your vision board? Well, I know somebody who's doing blah, blah, blah. And I can introduce you. Yeah, exactly. That's beautiful. I love that. And I I think that I think it's all about who is that, because this is an extension of your action board is who are the people you're surrounding yourself. Right? I can imagine in certain situations, things, depending on the age that people are at,

especially if people are feeling like they're doing this, living in their parents' home, immigrant parents, other things like that is like, what? You want to be a writer, dancer, creative person, whatever. But as you get older, you are able to curate your friend group. You know, I have a weekly men's group that has met for the last seven years. Los Angeles. It's an incredible group of highly evolved, caring, thoughtful men who all just happen to have a business as well too, so they're very driven in that side. And we get together every week, you know, rain or shine, you know, pretty much out of like 52 weeks in a year, it's like 30 weeks

we get together. As long as there's like three people that are in town that get together. And with that group, I do regularly share all sorts of different things. In fact, one of the questions that we prompt the group that meets on a weekly basis when we don't have a question of the day that's really designed to sort of open up conversation. And we do this walking, by the way, which is like a whole big part of, I don't know if you know any of the research around EMDR and that sort of space. But a question that we often ask as a default is, tell me what you're celebrating today, right? Because men in particular are not really good at celebrating. Like, what did you achieve recently? Even if it was tiny, that might have been you hadn't called your

parents in a while and you called them and that made them feel really happy. It could be something as basic as that. And then also like, what are you navigating? What's something that's important to you in your life that's, that's, that's, you're something you're trying to make progress on. Maybe a new workout routine. Maybe there's a few authors in the group. So you're trying to write a particular section in your next book, but it's a little

sticky, you know, and get it off your chest, right? Not that we're here to complain about anything and nothing wrong with that either. Just here's an open place to be able to share whatever's on your mind, right? I can imagine with that group being like, hey, like, here's my action board. Here's what this means. Here's what that means. You know, because you feel that even if people have questions, it's going to be brought up in a way that's going to be supportive for you and design for your greater good.

So I think this idea of an action board is also a reflection of people thinking about that sort of old adage. You know, you're the average of the five people that you surround yourself with. So there might be some people you go more in depth with and there might be other people that you can be a little bit protective on until. you know, things change. Totally. And can I just say and really like congratulate and celebrate?

I think that is amazing what you do. I wish more people, but you know, particularly men would do that. It's such a healthy, positive, productive, like lovely thing. I feel like thank you for having me on your podcast, but actually that's the one thing that everyone should take away from this episode. Well, it can stack along with everything else that you're saying because, the thing that I feel is that, you know, the bigger your goals and dreams, the more you need supportive people in your life to make it happen.

Like I look at all these worlds that intersect, right? And shout out to my mother-in-law who's here also listening, who is the first person to tell me about your work, Neelu, thank you so much. And, you know, all the people that we know in common and all the people that are also have been supportive of you. Hey, you should talk to this person on their podcast. Oh, check this out. or check out this speaking event, or have you thought about this?

Or this could be a good idea for, you know, the new TV show, whatever it might be. Totally. It's our friends. It's our community. It's the people that we surround ourselves with that are there to encourage us, especially when times get tough, right? Have you seen your friend group evolve over the years that has changed according to kind of what's important to you?

So I am extremely fortunate in that regard. but probably not non-consciously, if you know what I mean. So probably consciously. I mean... You worked on it and you crafted and created a really positive group. Yeah. And like my... My...

I don't want to say best, actually. I have to say now, like my core or like oldest group of friends are people that I've known for like 30, 35 years since we were children. So I think that is just... I'm so lucky to have those people, you know, still in my life. And then when I changed career, that was definitely... an opportunity for me to choose some new people that could come into my life. And it's just interesting, I think, what kind of friends you make at, you know, in adulthood

that's different to the ones that you make in childhood. But the ones in childhood have very similar values and you have lots of memories with them, but they may be doing like very, very different things to you. And the ones that you meet later, especially after a significant career change, might have just more in common with the person that you are now, But for me, it's really, really important that they are, you know, that we're all people that support each other that absolutely want the best for each other that, like, would do anything for each other and that I could tell anything too. Another reminder, your friends and your core group is a reminder that the world is safe, you know? Kind of goes back to that Albert Einstein quote, which I'll paraphrase here.

But I think he said that the most important question that a human being can ask himself is that is the world, the universe, a force for good, right? Or is it a force for evil? Yeah. Yeah. Now, I think not only do I personally think that is so important, but when we look at, you know, you're asking me what are the factors that contribute to manifestation, let's just, because they're similar, but in a way kind of more vital are the factors that contribute to successful aging and longevity.

Mm. And like in a healthy, you know, the best possible way. and those are sleep like I mentioned already and I'm going to say hydration quite sort of higher up than I normally were just because for the chemical and electrical signals to pass along the neural pathways you've got to be adequately hydrated so it's just such a basic one and then obviously exercise because oxygenation of the brain so these are factors that contribute to manifestation but also successful ageing

and then diet. And for diet, like, let's just assume that people know the basics that you eat a healthy, diverse, mostly plant-based diet. Above that, you need to focus on eating as many dark foods as you can. So the dark-skinned foods, and that includes coffee for your mother-in-law, who I know is. But just not at the wrong times. So, you know, dark berries, dark chocolate, purple-sprouting broccoli,

eggplant, the polyphenols in that skin contributes to neurogenesis, which is the growth of new nerve cells, so not just the connection of existing ones. And then the factor that is up there for people staying healthy in old age is positive, meaningful social relationships. And so that must not be underestimated. And you've just reminded me through this conversation how vital that is to manifestation because if everywhere that I looked or spoke people said don't be silly Tara that's not going to work why are you doing that and a lot of people live in that reality then you know I might stop doing it I might be ashamed to talk about it I might not want to share my accomplishments I think it's really important to be humble but you know part of the joy of life

yourself is to be able to give that inspiration to other people of like look I said this is what I was going to do and it's happened and I'm so grateful. I think one important point because I would tell you that that core aspect of loneliness that the world is suffering from right now, there's an increasing number every year of people who feel that even if they have a lot of friends or people that they know, a lot of family, there's people that feel I don't have people in my life that truly understand and get who I am, right? That number's kind of seen, at least from the data that I've been seeing, kind of ticked up. and has been ticking up. And I think that for those people in that category, just one thing I'd like to

add is that if you've ever had somebody in your life, even when you were younger, or maybe it was in university, or maybe, you know, just somebody. It might take a little bit of work, depending on what age that you met them in, but see if you can get back in touch with that person. And even on the topic of manifestation, can you set up, I literally call it with friends, I'll say, you know what, I missed you, right? And by the way, how good does it feel when somebody tells you, like I missed you, especially if they haven't talked to in a little while. And by the way, guys who are listening, guys can say that to other guys, right? You'd have to be worried about that.

So you know what? I really missed talking with you. We had some really incredible times. How do you feel about putting a monthly check-in on the calendar? And we can just check in on each other's goals and dreams and what we're working on in life. If you've ever had one person, but you don't feel like you have that person now, reach out to that old person and see if a monthly check-in or something can be a way to at least keep some of that energy in your life. And then before you know, you'll probably add on a second,

third, fourth person and now you're surrounded by people who are rooting for your success. Yeah, I think that's a really good idea. And funnily enough, some like people from way back have come back into my life recently. And when I look at the messages, it's just, it's interesting because you don't know how much people have changed over that time. But the messages are just all like, I'm so happy you're back in my life. I love you so much. I've thought of you over the years. And of course I'll pass the message on to that friend that I'm still in touch with. And it's just like, you know, it's oxytocin boosting. And I just would like to add to this as a human, not just a neuroscientist,

that you don't have to check in on your monthly goals. You can just check in and like laugh about something silly, you know. Yeah. No, thank you for adding that in. That's very important. It could just be an opportunity to say hi, hello. Tell me what's going on in your life, right? Give me the latest.

Or tell me like something really embarrassing. that you did so I can just laugh at you. Anything, anything. Whatever way you guys connect. Yeah. Whatever where you guys connect. You know, I want to go back to this idea of, I think a lot of people would be surprised that from a manifestation standpoint, that you were listing a lot of things that were

about taking better care of the body, right? I often like to ask the opposite version of that question just to really drive that point home, what happens when we don't take care of our body? How does that impact manifestation? So you already went into a little bit of a deep dive on sleep. But if we are not taking care of our diet and getting, you know, adequate levels of protein in our diet, adequate levels of diversity of the rainbow and fiber that comes from eating a lot of fruits and vegetables, you know, how does that affect our ability to manifest and create our goals and dreams in life?

Yeah. It's a very simple answer. So manifestation is a higher function. It's not a survival function. It's a, you know, I have actually been challenged on it by people saying, isn't that a luxury for people that have, you know, the basics that they need in life? So, um. And to that you would say yes?

So, no. What I've said there is being very respectful of the fact that some people have much harder lives than others. I still hope and believe that everybody could make their life a little bit better if there was a little room for manifestation on top of. of the basics. And I've always tried to be very diplomatic about that because I realize, you know, there's a whole spectrum of lives that people have. I had a guest on my podcast who, when I said that to her,

actually it was like paused for dramatic effect and said, manifestation is not a luxury, it's a necessity. And that changed for me, you know. So that was great to have someone be so bold about that. But so given that it is a higher function, what I would say is that if you're compromised in any way, tired, hungry, dehydrated, inflamed, stress, sedentary, anything like that, then that's the priority for your brain and your body to heal that. It's not going to be manifesting if it's got all that to deal with.

So if the gap is, is there any compromise in your body? If there's compromise in your brain or your body, that's what your body is going to focus on. once you're just at least neutral, then you can do manifestation. That's a powerful answer. Thank you for driving that home. I really think that connects the dots for a lot of people. I want to ask you a question that I hear often that comes up in the topic of manifestation. And it's a question that people say, well, what if I don't know what I want?

I'm sure you've heard this before. For somebody who's listening today who's like, I believe in this, I think it's amazing. my challenge is not coming up with an action board. My challenge is not sort of doing the work. I want to put in the work. I want to take care of my body and I'm doing good at that. I just don't know what I want in life. In fact, I feel confused and maybe even a little bit conflicted as to what I should be going for.

How do you help that person navigate? I do get that question on DM sometimes, not too often, but enough that I've had to think about it. So what I usually say at first to the person is maybe tackle it. by thinking, how would I like my life to feel? And then what I add in that's more specific than that is two kinds of things. In the book, I actually start it by saying, has your life panned out exactly how you always dreamed it would? And if not, then manifestation is, you know, a potential channel for you. The other thing is, at what stages in your life did you know what you wanted?

or what were the things that you wanted when there were times of more certainty? And then if that's not enough to kind of start the thought process going, then just journaling in general is the way to start untangling that confusion and conflict and lack of knowing. Could it also be that people can just get started with what they have right now? And they can always add to it later on. I'll give you an example in my life, is that when I got clear, a big driver for me in my life has been, okay, how do I figure out to create a situation that I can work with my family and friends? That was a big motivator for you. Right. And then I found

out that, okay, if you get a traditional job, you can't necessarily be hiring your family and friends. And in fact, let's look down upon, especially if you're a manager, you've got to pursue the path of entrepreneurship. And I said, okay, well, I have no idea about business. I have no idea what I want to do. I've been studying computer science over here, you know, following that sort of Indian path of, you know, a secure job and profession. I said, okay, I don't know what I want to do, but I know the feeling that I want. I want to be with my family and friends working on interesting projects. Okay, what is the feeling? Literally my first vision board was like this.

Okay, we're traveling together. We're a small team that's working on interesting projects. What projects? I don't know yet, right? I don't know what we're going to be doing, right? we are having interesting conversation, but our world is a little bit of a blend of profession, but also personal. So if we want to, you know, take off in the middle of the day because we're going to go

celebrate somebody's birthday or, you know, talk about some big win in our lives or whatever, I saw that blending in. And I would have different imagery. Sometimes I would write on different words onto my vision board of what I would want. But I still didn't know what I wanted to do. But I think the unique thing was I didn't put too much praise. pressure on myself of needing to know what I wanted to do. Yeah. I'm really glad you said that because it kind of validates what I've been saying

to people about how would you want your life to feel because I don't always get to know the end result of those stories of, you know, people that DM me. So the fact that you went with a feeling and that's been really positive is great for me to hear. And I'll also share that, you know, I do an action board annually, but I have always really struggled to do like a five-year plan or a 10-year plan. I've never done that. that. And I always used to think I just, I can't for some reason. But at some point, I realize that if you, and I, you know, I am a planner. I'm not that spontaneous. I'd like everything to be in order. I don't think you make your way to MIT and, and, and make it through some of these other

schools and lecturing at Stanford. If there's not a little bit of planning that's in the mix. Honestly, that happened really randomly. Okay, okay. Yeah. Yeah. That's interesting. And I can tell you the story of that, but I think it's bit, it's a bit over, like, not necessary for this particular episode of the podcast, but it was actually a complete mistake that I ended up where I did and got found by those people. Wow. So, where was, you completely put me off. Sorry, I threw you off target.

So you were saying that, uh, oh yeah, yeah. Having not been able to do that and kind of thought, is there like something wrong with me that I can't envisage like that five year planned, yep. what I kind of learned, you know, with maturity was that things can come from left field. Like life can throw things at you that you had no idea that were coming. And so I actually now prefer the fact that I don't have such a fixed plan. So I'm able to be a bit more flexible to what happens. And yes, you've got to be resilient because sometimes like bad things happen.

But it also means that when an opportunity, like becoming a senior lecturer at MIT comes up, that I had never planned, I could take it. I mean, I basically, so I will share a very, like, summary of how that happened. There was a conference called Unicon where all the heads of business schools around the world meet. And my co-author from my second book was invited to speak at that. And he's like, you know, like an older male mad professor type. And he had moved to Asia so he couldn't do it. So he recommended me.

I promise you when they saw me, I would. was not their idea of like a professor that they wanted to speak at this conference. And so, and, you know, it was like, it was far out of London and it was a really small honorarium. And I was like, it's going to cost me more to go there than I'm going to get paid. And but my friend said, look, like, you should do it. It'll be good for you. And you'll be doing me a favor too, because obviously I can't do it. Um, so I went and did it. And I was literally, I remember just having all these people standing towering over me. saying, do you ever come to Boston? Do you ever come to California? Do you come here?

I just put my hand out and got this stack of business cards. They all wanted a piece of you. I flew to Stanford three weeks later. And I just thought, no, I remember saying to my friend, I'm so bad with jet lag, I don't want to go. And he was like, are you stupid? You have to go. So I did. So, yeah, that would have been quite a hard relationship for me to have regularly because, you know, coming to LA from London or San Francisco from London is a lot of jet lag and I'm not good at jet lag.

So then a while later I went out to Cambridge, Massachusetts for a week and I attended some classes and I met some professors. And then, you know, what happened happened of it, I promise you there was no plan to go back into academia. Yeah, yeah. That's a little bit of the magic that you talk about. Yeah. Yeah. How do your spiritual beliefs, if you feel comfortable getting into it? it. So, you know, we all wear different hats. You're a neuroscientist, you're a psychiatrist, you know, these are all different labels that we have. Talking to you as the person, not even saying that this has to be backed up by any particular science that's out there, how do your spiritual beliefs layer on top of the message that you share with the world? So I was brought up in a Hindu

household. So I, you know, have that cultural heritage in my background. So things like yoga and meditation and spirituality have been a part of my life since I can remember. There was a time as a teenager and perhaps into my 20s that I rejected a lot of that stuff because I just wanted to be like my friends. And funnily enough, it was yoga that kind of brought me back into the fold because it, you know, became very popular with my peers. And I was just such a natural at it. It was kind of like, oh, wow, okay, there is something to this, which is,

that my heritage is obviously having like an impact here and it's and it's also like a popular thing and then about five years after that I got divorced from my first marriage and in trying to heal from that journey I got really interested in Carl Jung's psychology and some Buddhist teachings so that was the first time and I wasn't conscious of it at the time that sort of cognitive science and spirituality came and helped me together. And it could not have just been one or the other. Then I would say the next time was when I was writing the source and I was doing the research into the cognitive science

and visualization and manifestation, that was quite a risk for me at the time. I don't think I was aware of how much of a risk it was for an MIT professor. and my business was really like consulting to hedge funds to write a book on manifestation. It was a bold first book to put out by itself. Yeah, exactly. But I just didn't, I think I just did it because I didn't really think of that as a potential, potentially an issue. It was good. You didn't overthink it.

Yeah. You just put it out there. Yeah. That's quite a theme for me. Sometimes I've just got away with things because I just haven't thought about it too heavily. And, you know, for me, it was definitely a journey of bridging. those things closer, science and spirituality. But actually it was the response to it when it came out was quite life-changing for me.

So how much it was not just accepted, but like, you know, how successful it was. It's now translated into 38 languages. Incredible. Yeah. Congratulations. Thank you. And I love travel and languages and, you know, understanding different cultures. And I speak quite a few languages.

but my friend Alyssa who's in L.A., who I've got another story about her to share, she said to me, it's like you're now speaking to people in 38 languages. And that was just like a wow moment for me. And then, you know, I guess through social media, people know a lot more about you than they ever would have, you know, before. That was a thing. and I've always been very private and considered my social media to be, you know, a professional channel. But I had dinner with my friend Alyssa in L.A. last night.

And she said, you know, I look at your Instagram and I think, has she got an MD or a PhD? She might even have both. I mean, my friends, they don't care about my qualifications or anything at all. And she said, but now I look at your Instagram and I see restorative yoga and, you know, you're like you've got beauty endorsements, you're getting sent clothes to wear to show people. And you're like really like bringing out your spiritual side. And she said it's just wonderful to see.

And I said, it's for the first time in my life. I'm really like showing all aspects of me that I've never really shared before. And that massively includes spirituality. And, you know, I'd even go as far as to say, it doesn't always have to be backed up by science.

So I remember, remember when I was on Dave Asprey's podcast and I said that, he was like, wow, you're going to lose your position at MIT. He was saying not everything has to be backed up by science. But it's been a really, really great journey for me. And, you know, having had a lot of parental and societal and educational expectation on me that I felt like, you know, under the weight of as a young person, I feel like very free to express kind of all facets of me now.

And I love being a neuroscientist. As you can probably tell, I can talk about neuroscience for hours. But yeah, I think I've always treated my patients and my clients holistically. And I feel like I'm able to be like that more now as well. And that's, it's really nice. You can pass on the next question, but just curious, as somebody who also comes from a similar background. Yeah. In the Hindu tradition, I come from the Hindu tradition of my dad's side, my mom's side, culturally Hindu, but it's the Jain tradition.

Okay. Yeah. And the belief in reincarnation is something that both sides feel. And people would ask me when I was younger and said, okay, you know, Hindus believe that, you know, the soul has never created nor destroyed and that there are, you know, different life experiences on a soul in different aspects. That could be in this dimension, another dimension, whatever, people have different visions of it.

When I was younger, I would say, yeah, you know, I believe in reincarnation just because I was toting the line of the things that were there. Interestingly enough, as I get older, as I got older, And I had some pretty profound experiences with psychedelics, which I've talked about previously on this podcast in an assisted, you know, setting, as well as just like deeply profound meditative experiences or oneness experiences, being in nature and kind of looking up at the stars and just having a feeling, I more felt it than I believed it. So I don't walk around with the belief of, hey, you know, the reason you got to be good is

because karma is going to come and bite you in the butt in a next lifetime, and that's why you should be good to everybody. No, you should just be good because it's the golden rule. Yeah. How would you want to be treated? But I do feel like there's some sense of energy is neither created nor destroyed. And so people would ask me today, I would say, they say, do you believe in reincarnation? I say, I don't know if I believe in it, but I feel it, right? I'm not saying that's right or that's wrong. I've had some interesting guests on the podcast who are actually researchers at the University of Virginia who actually kind of study that whole world. It's interesting. It's called validated past life experiences.

if you're ever interested in connecting with them. But yeah, I'm curious for you. How do you think about that? Yeah. So very similarly to you, when, you know, as far back as I can remember, I was told by my parents that reincarnation is absolutely true. And I obviously as a child didn't question that. And I didn't really think of it in terms of, you know,

karma's going to come back and bite you. I thought of it in terms of it was comforting to me when I lost my grandparents, for example. example. And my grandfather, I was very, very close to my grandfather and he always told me that we'd known each other in a past life. And actually my father always said that I was his mother reincarnated. And I remember as a little girl saying, but how do you know? And he would say to me, just like I know you've got big brown eyes and, you know, everything I know about you, I know. And if that's what your father tells you, you believe it, you know. So, so I believed it like with a kind of,

not without question, but I believed it. You grew up in it. Yeah. And then obviously, when you study Western medicine and neuroscience, it's, it's kind of hard to put those two things together. But like I said, I find it very comforting. So I kind of like chose to keep that belief. You know, recently as you get older and then, and with COVID and everything, I, have experienced a lot of grief. Like I've lost more than 10 people in the last few years. Yeah. So sorry.

So I've started reading about it more out of this sort of feeling of like I have to know. And so I read Dr. Brian Weiss's work. I've read Only Love Is Real, but I know he's written other books as well. And I've just like, you know, researched it on the internet. And so he's an MD and a, you know, a therapist. So that's kind of convincing to the scientific side of me that he's, you know, has all these case studies. But I would say like, you know, again, similarly to you, what I've felt it with the people that I love, that it's not a random coincidence that they've come into my life. So I feel like it from that point of view.

Yeah. Thank you for answering that. That wasn't on my list of questions. It just felt like something inherently I wanted to ask you about. And I appreciate you sharing. Probably, let's say, a couple or a few years ago, I wouldn't have been comfortable answering that question. Yeah, I can feel from somebody who's been taking in your content, you know, since having connected and discovered you through my friends and my mother-in-law again, I really feel grateful that you feel comfortable to put your whole self out there. Thank you.

All the different components. You had a post of the day that I really liked about five books that have been massively. powerful in your life. Yeah. And I just, I loved it, you know, I loved to just see what you were reading and doing. And I think that that's the evolution of the world. You know, people are realizing that human beings, even neuroscientists, are multifaceted. And actually, there's this deep push in the world of science.

And I think that podcasts are a big part of it, whether that's Andrew Heerman or Lex Friedman, who's from MIT as well, there's a lot of scientists, medical doctors, is that those individuals realize that this paper that they spent, you know, two to four years working on, maybe 800 people, if they're lucky, read this one, you know, in kind of the space. But actually, how can we take the message from that paper, some of the findings, some of the realization, some of the studies that were covered, and how do we get it to the people? Because the people are suffering. The people are suffering and they're looking for answers or the people are doing okay in certain areas, but they want to do better. And the more that we can take this knowledge to the people, the more it's a justification

of the whole reason that you got into this field in the first place. Completely. I mean, I just got goosebumps when you said that because that is literally the reason that I do everything that I do is because I am very attuned to human suffering and I just want to do everything that I can, you know, to try to make it better. And actually, You heard it first here, everyone. People have been asking about season two of my podcast, and I've just been saying we're strategizing about it and we, you know, not quite sure yet.

But I think we're very close to confirming that the theme is going to be me getting to speak to some incredible people from various indigenous cultures and, you know, spiritual wisdoms and applying that to modern mental health struggles. That's exciting. Yeah, I think it's going to be really exciting. Wow.

Yeah, you know, people are really, really suffering at the moment. I thought that would happen as soon as the first lockdown happened. But I just don't think we're aware of the consequences on people's mental health. Yeah, absolutely. You know, I think it's going to like pan out for a long time. There will be books written about it, documentaries are we made. But at least in the meantime, as much as people can be helped, that's really the mission and the goal. And that's what you're doing with your work.

You know, for my last question here, as we wind down and then we share with followers how they can keep in touch with you, I want to talk a little bit about grief and suffering, right? We were just chatting about that recently. And you mentioned, which, again, I'm so sorry about having lost some people in your life. And even if you have an incredible life, everybody will experience some form of loss, some constriction in their life, even to people who, love each other and care about each other might realize that they're not a fit and they don't want to continue building a life together and that they're better off going in different directions.

That's something that happens, of course. I think that sometimes when people think of the world of manifestation, there can be the sense of like, it's all rosy glasses. It's going to be fantastic and everything's going to happen. But you have been so transparent to share with people is that there can be bumps along the way and that doesn't have to be something that takes away from the stuff that you want to create. So could you talk a little bit more about that on the topic of grief and the intersection of how that is still a part of our journey and life, even in the power of manifestation? Yeah, so I'd like to reiterate a point that I made about something slightly different, which is about all the work that you do when life is good and how that serves you when life is tough. So we were talking, we were speaking about mindfulness, but I, you know, that includes,

resilience building includes mindfulness, but there's a lot of other things you can do to build your mental resilience. And I, I believe that it's helpful to have done that. You know, there's a theory that throughout life we experience lots of micro-stressers, like on a daily basis or a regular basis. And then at some points in our lives, we experience stresses that are so great that they could break you. And if you have built up your resilience, then you've just got a larger bucket to draw from, you know, when that happens. And then I think how I would relate that to manifestation is that at any one point in time, it looks like your life is going to go in a straight line. And then suddenly there's just going to be a right or left

turn or a crossroads that you hadn't figured you know factored in um so of all the things that i've done to try to prove to myself that i'm creative the one i think that's like the cherry on the icing on the cake is that i co-wrote a song with a rock star last year i heard about this um and there's um a line in it where it says like i'm standing at a crossroads and i don't know which way to go um And that song, you know, in some ways was about grief, but it's not necessarily like the death of a loved one. It can be like the loss of oneself. It could be the loss of something.

Could just be like a change in your way of life. Like that's happened a lot for people since the pandemic. So, you know, grief in its many forms is both about how you deal with it, given your resilience, but it's also an opportunity to change course. And of course, part of that, the default can just be that you go downhill and, you know, you never recover.

But given everything that we've spoken about, mental resilience, manifestation, friends, support, community, the fact that you can evolve and grow your brain and change, the best way to look at it is an opportunity to grow and maybe do things that you wouldn't have done if you stayed on the path and nothing had changed. I think there's also an element too that even if something's happened in your past, it's like we're all human.

We all have had something that's happened, maybe even something that we're not proud of, how we treated somebody or some area where we were rightly maybe wronged or not cared for in the right way. and a level of forgiveness for ourselves that we were doing the best that we knew how. I think that's a big part of manifestation in my own life, if I could just speak about myself, is that under the circumstances, under the situation, and the consciousness that I had the time, I did the best that I could. And sure, with, you know, we call it in America, we call it armchair quarterbacking, right?

It's related to football. Okay. So it's basically like, it's easy to say how the game should have went on Tuesday after the big Monday night football game. Yeah, yeah. Everybody can look back at their past and say, I should have done this or why did I do that or why did I get in this relationship or why, you know, I should have this thing or that thing, whatever. But a sense of gratitude that also the things that didn't go right in your life also are part of the things that make you who you are today and your potential. Right. There's that quote, which is everything I'm not made me everything I am.

And I think that when we step into that power, we can truly tap into, again, this is just me speaking for my own experience, we double down on what we're best at and we don't hyper, too much hyper focus. I'm not, I want people to get better at anything they want to get better at. But I truly feel we'll get farther in life if we double and triple down on what we're best at and meant to do versus on the small few things that didn't go well or how we should have focused on it. Oh, the neuroscience completely back set up.

So that whole idea of like play to your strengths. And it's not that you don't at all work on your development areas, but in terms of the efficiency of the brain, playing to your strengths is absolutely the best way to move forward. This has been a fantastic podcast. Thank you so much. I'm glad that our friend, Dr. Rupi, connected us. And we got a chance to have this conversation.

And just thank you for having the courage to go down the creative path. Thank you. If it wasn't for that, which for people who look on the outside and think, what are you talking about? You're a physician and you're a researcher. You could have done anything you wanted, but they may not know if they haven't grown up in those family structures and systems that just like anything, you're taking a bold leap when you start to dabble and go direct to the audience.

And that takes a lot of courage. So thank you for having the courage to put out your message. The world has benefited. I feel like there's a lot of really interesting projects that are coming in the future. I've heard about a TV show that maybe is going to be there, so I can't wait until you're ready one day to share about that. But in the meantime, on projects that you are willing to share about, season two is coming up with the podcast. Can you remind our audience what the podcast is called? The podcast is called Reinvent Yourself with Dr. Tara.

There is going to be a bit of a break before season two comes out because I'm absolutely determined that if it's called Reinvent Yourself, it can't just be a rerun of season one. Yes. There's going to be a twist. Amazing. Yeah, we're still kind of, you know, working on exactly how that's going to look. And while they wait for season two, of course, they can follow you on social media. And they can also get a chance to pick up a copy of your book, which is now in, you said, 38 languages. Yeah.

So pick your choice, whatever it is, and get a chance to dive into it. Anywhere else you want to send our audience? I'm most active on Instagram. So that's where I tend to, like, reply the most people I'm at Dr. Tara Swart and Twitter, Tara Swart. And yeah, the book's available on Amazon and all bookstores. Beautiful. All the links in the show notes, everyone. Dr. Tara, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for making my mother-in-law's day and getting a chance to meet you. You know we got to grab a selfie together with her too after the podcast. And again, thank you for being here. I truly appreciate it. Well, thank you so much for having me. I'm really pleased that we did it. 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 down a

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 hr u p u r o hit dot com and click on the tab that says try this