Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #180 BITESIZE | Train Your Brain to Create the Life You Want to Live | Tara Swart

Episode Date: May 6, 2021

It’s easy to go through the motions every day and let life happen to us, but if we want to get the most out of life, we need a strategy. Feel Better Live More Bitesize is my weekly podcast for your mind, body, and heart. Each week I’ll be featuring inspirational stories and practical tips from some of my former guests. Today’s clip is from episode 58 of the podcast with Dr. Tara Swart – neuroscientist, executive coach, and author of the best-selling book ‘The Source’. In this clip, she explains how we can take back control of our lives by training our brains to create the life we want to live. Show notes and the full podcast are available at drchatterjee.com/58 Thanks to our sponsor http://www.athleticgreens.com/livemore Follow me on instagram.com/drchatterjee Follow me on facebook.com/DrChatterjee Follow me on twitter.com/drchatterjeeuk DISCLAIMER: The content in the podcast and on this webpage is not intended to constitute or be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your doctor or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition. Never disregard professional medical advice or delay in seeking it because of something you have heard on the podcast or on my website.

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10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More. Bite size your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 58 of the podcast with Dr. Tara Swart, a neuroscientist, executive coach, and author of the best-selling book, The Source. In this clip, she explains how we can take back control of our lives by training our brains to create the life we want to live. you talk a lot about how important our thoughts are how important our mind is and i don't feel that that gets enough air time when we talk about health and well-being why is it that our thoughts are so important so i actually think that the pillars that you talk about, like sleep, diet,

exercise, mindfulness, they're important to improve the quality of our thoughts. Because if you actually think about it, why are you doing those things? You're not just doing it so that your body is in good shape. You're doing it so that you can think more clearly, you can do your job better, you can have better relationships. And all of that really boils down to how you think. So all the physical factors put your brain in good condition and then it's what you do with it that really counts. Yeah, I guess it works both ways, doesn't it? Because I guess paying attention to these physical factors helps your brain function, helps you think more clearly.

But at the same time, I guess, if you change your mindset and you work on your thoughts, it can make it easier to actually do a lot of these physical things we're talking about. Absolutely. I mean, one of the chapters in the book is about that brain-body connection. So I think because psychology was around for a long time before we could scan brains and bodies, it left us with this sort of idea that there's a cut off at the neck and that what you think and feel isn't connected to what goes on in your body and vice versa. But absolutely, if you're cold or hungry or tired, it affects the quality of thinking. And if you're confident or anxious, it affects the nerves and hormones in your body. You have brought some of these ideas that have been there before to life, but you've got some scientific grounding in them now. And

one of your, you know, I guess one of your core concepts is how do we create the life that we want? How do we be in charge of what happens to, you know, what happens to our life rather than let life sort of happen to us. Let's say you and I want to go on a journey. Would you rather be sitting in the passenger seat and I choose where we go and the route that we take, or would you rather be driving and choosing the destination? It's kind of like that in life. It's very easy to go through the motions every day and let life happen to you. But if you think about it, if we stop and step back, we have a lot more choice in what we tolerate and what happens to us and the choices that we make than we necessarily think. It's easy to just sort of go on autopilot. And I think that's something that really does

happen these days, doesn't it? Many people are living life on a treadmill day to day, week to week before you know another year's gone by. And I think one of the issues is that people don't have time. They don't feel that they can actually separate off some time where they reflect internally. You talk about how many of us actually use fear as a way of making decisions. And that can be problematic. Can you explain what you mean by that? That's actually a natural default. So you have to make a lot of effort to override that because to help us to survive, fear is actually our strongest emotion. So we're hardwired for that.

Yeah. Right. And you can see why, because when we lived in the cave, you had to be afraid of saber-toothed tigers and run away from them, otherwise you you die so basically these sort of negative emotions like fear anger disgust shame and sadness they have a much more powerful effect on our brain than positive emotions like love and trust and joy and excitement um and you know there's a survival advantage to that but if you once you know that you've raised it in your awareness, you can take steps to say,

I choose to make my decisions from abundance, which is the phrase that I use a lot in the book. So of course, we don't want bad things to happen to us. We don't want to lose our jobs. We don't want to end our relationships. We don't want to lose friends. We don't want to be in debt. Everybody will be saying, yes, of course,

I don't want those things. But instead of making your life decisions based on avoiding those bad things, just choose to make your life decisions based on things like, you know, building up a little nest egg in the bank, having your relationship evolve and improve more than, you know, it even is at the moment, making new new friends so those things all seem to involve a bit of risk but you can make a real effort to understand the psyche of your partner more and improve your relationship you can try to go out and meet new and different people that will broaden your horizons and actually meeting new people having new experiences you know reading books on topics that are really different to what you normally do. They're all activities that make your brain more open and flexible.

And once you learn to try new things and you get a positive benefit from that, then if something bad happens, you will just feel that little bit more able to deal with a change because you've been willingly bringing changes into your life, which seems like a risk at times, but it's actually a really good thing to do. So I guess in many ways, the inspiring take home for me is that, look, we are programmed to look at the negative. So we absolutely, if we want to get the most out of our life, we need a strategy. If we leave it up to the default, if we leave it up to, oh, if we leave it up to, oh, if I feel like it, I'll do it, it ain't going to happen because we're hardwired to think this way. And I think many people are starting to realize this. That's why I think so many people

in the health and wellbeing sector are talking about gratitude now because yes, there's science behind gratitude, but it's great to have so many people talking about it and saying, hey, it's okay to say that I'm grateful for things and have a daily practice. I kind of feel that a lot of religions have had for years these sort of practices instilled within them. And often I think that religion's actual role really was to help create some sort of good living rules for society, wherever those societies were. And as we're getting more secular as a society now, I think we're losing some of those good practice rules. And I think a lot of them really aren't to do with religion. They're just good practices for how to feel well. So if we talk about gratitude, and gratitude is something you talk about, your own practice of gratitude has evolved somewhat over the years, hasn't it?

Yeah, I love the way you put that question, because in the book, I have drawn on lots of ancient practices, and then backed them up by science. So you're right, gratitude is, I'm sure it features in many religions, but famously, research has been done on the practice of gratitude in the Buddhist religion. And so what I found with my own practice was that it started off as, you know, I'm grateful for the things in my life, like my family, my friends, my ability to travel. And over time, it evolved into more intrinsic qualities and resources that I felt that I had, like, I'm grateful that I'm creative. qualities and resources that I felt that I had. Like, I'm grateful that I'm creative. I'm grateful that I'm resilient. And as my gratitude list started to become about things like that, it made me feel like if something unexpected or bad happens to me in future, I have the tools

within me to deal with that. And that was a breakthrough for me. That was really, really empowering. But I've also introduced an idea of accomplishments or achievement lists. So sometimes instead of doing 10 things I'm grateful for, I do 10 things I'm really proud of that I've achieved. Because again, I think being Brits, we don't really acknowledge that and we don't talk about it enough. So, you know, I'll just write down some things that I've done academically or in my career. But again, this evolved into things like, you know, I'll just write down some things that I've done academically or in my career. But again, this evolved into things like, you know, how important it's been for me to become a stepmom and that that's a real achievement. It's, you know, it's an easy thing to say, well, you know, well, you are one.

But actually, I've made a real effort at it. My stepson's made a real effort and we built this amazing relationship that I didn't expect. And so I consider that a big achievement, not just the medical degree or the neuroscience PhD. And so that, again, builds up your image of yourself as a person. I'm someone that learned to play a role that I hadn't expected to play. Yeah, that's a great example, because society would probably applaud you for your medical degree, for your neuroscience qualifications for the fact that you are a teacher at such a esteemed business school mit and you know sometimes that

societal view of us doesn't really it doesn't really match what we're feeling about ourselves and that sort of mismatch is is is often at the root and heart of so much discontentment. And so I think that's really powerful that how you've actually had to create, I mean, in some ways it's unfair to say create a story, but in many ways, yeah, you've had to create that narrative in your own head that, you know, I'm a really good stepmom and I've worked really hard at it. And I think that'll be very helpful for people to think about things like that. I just want to touch on journaling. I'm aware that you know journaling, I know what journaling is, but some people listening to this may have heard that term, but may not really understand what is

it? How do I journal? So you literally get a blank sort of diary and you can start by just saying what happened to you today. So, you know, I could literally say I woke up earlier than usual, feeling a bit grumpy, went to, you know, meet Rangan and do this podcast, immediately cheered up. And even just in that little snippet, what you've realized is maybe if I don't get enough sleep that it affects my mood. Maybe if I'm with somebody who I really respect and have fun with, that improves my mood. You've learned something already just by recording that. Over time, you can get down to talking about things like emotions and intuition. You're basically talking to yourself. You're recording it to look at later. So you might say, you know, I had an argument with this person and this is how it left me feeling. I wish I hadn't said X. If something like this happened again, this is what I'd choose to do in

future. So you basically use the journal as a way to sort out your thoughts, to get them out of your head and sort of be able to look at them more objectively and create a narrative that you can look back at and make certain different decisions about your future. I do journal from time to time. I haven't made it a constant daily practice, but I go through periods of time in my life where for a few days, a few weeks, I will journal. And I personally like doing it first thing in the morning as part of my morning routine. And I wonder if you know about this as a neuroscientist, but sometimes I feel you've been in a deep sleep, you've w woken up there's so much going around

in your subconscious and when you just start writing first thing in the morning I sort of feel that what I'm doing is I'm just helping to process my subconscious mind and get it out onto paper so as you say it's getting out of my head and onto paper and one of the big problems I see these days is that people are living in their heads they've got all kinds of anxieties fears insecurities rushing around their brain but the simple act of writing it out in some way, quite literally takes it from your brain and out, you know, onto paper. Well, I fully believe that just like doing aerobic exercise can help you to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol, that speaking out loud or writing down

these thoughts that are racing round and round in your head instead of suppressing them or just letting them build up you know till it feels like your head's going to explode is a way of reducing stress so actually if you've got anxieties or negative thoughts and you write them down or you have somebody that you trust that you can talk to, it gets it out of your brain body system. Just exactly like exercising can release stress hormones from your brain body system. Yeah, very, very powerful isn't it journaling? What are the things that you think you have changed in your life that have had the most impact on your well-being? Great question. It's better to change 10 things by 1% than try to change one thing by 10%. So work on micro tweaks to your routine, like go to bed half an

hour earlier, do a digital detox over one weekend, drink a bit more water than you normally do, try to increase your steps by 1,000 to 2,000 per day for a week and see what happens so for small things like that build up because you start to feel better your brain becomes more powerful and then you're able to do you know some of the bigger goals that you may have been saving up man i love that i absolutely love that that whole idea that you know i've never heard it put like that before try and change 10 things by one% rather than one thing by 10%. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Please do spread the love by sharing this episode with your friends and family. And if you want more, why not go back and listen to the full conversation with my guest.

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