Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - #76 How to Optimise Your Brain Health with Dr Rahul Jandial

Episode Date: October 2, 2019

We are undergoing a huge technological experiment. In our pockets we have tiny technological miracles through which we can communicate, instantly, with anyone on the planet. We are constantly bombarded with endless information. But what impact is all this having on our brain? Why is it important to allow our brains to drift into random thoughts and be creative? I discuss all this with neuroscientist and brain surgeon, Dr Rahul Jandial, who loves technology but believes that we need to structure some boundaries around its use – especially for children. We talk about the impact of music on the brain and what it means to be in flow state. Dr Jandial explains what happens in the brain when we engage in what he calls “meditative breathing” and why he is such a huge proponent of it. He explains how his knowledge of brain health has shaped the way he parents– from encouraging navigational skills in his children to exposing them to a diverse range of experiences. It seems where the brain is concerned – if you don’t use it, you lose it! Finally, he draws on his years of experience as a brain surgeon to share some practical tips that can help us all get the best out of our minds.  Show notes available at https://drchatterjee.com/brainsurgeon 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. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And then they went through like meditative breathing with these patients and these kids and these young people. And they're watching the electricity change and get closer to that alpha wave, get closer to the calmer electrical signals in their brain after just deep, slow, deliberate breathing. And that's accessible to us all without having to pay for it. It is a resource available to you that has been harnessed for millennia, and that now you have crazy brain surgeons providing you the electrical proof if you're a skeptical kind of person. To me, that's magic. Hi, my name is Rangan Chastji, GP, television presenter, and author of the best-selling books, The Stress Solution and The Four-Pillar Plan. I believe that all of us have the ability to feel better than we currently do, but getting healthy has become far too complicated. With this podcast, I aim to

simplify it. I'm going to be having conversations with some of the most interesting and exciting people both within as well as outside the health space to hopefully inspire you as well as empower you with simple tips that you can put into practice immediately to transform the way that you feel. I believe that when we are healthier, we are happier, because when we feel better, we live more. Hello and welcome back to episode 76 of my Feel Better Live More podcast. My name is Ron Ganchastji and I am your host. So I'm currently in Los Angeles recording this intro to the podcast. I've come over for a few days to help

promote my book, The Stress Solution, out here in America. It's been super busy so far, but really, really enjoyable. And I'm delighted to let you guys know that I've recorded a lot of new podcasts whilst out here. I think you're going to really enjoy these conversations. So do look out for enjoyable and I'm delighted to let you guys know that I've recorded a lot of new podcasts whilst out here. I think you're going to really enjoy these conversations so do look out for them in the coming weeks. Now, today's episode is all about brain health. We are undergoing a huge technological experiment. In our pockets, we have tiny technological miracles through which we can communicate instantly with anyone on the planet. We are constantly bombarded with endless information, but what impact is all of this

having on our brain? Why is it important to allow our brains to drift into random thoughts and be creative? I discuss all of this with neuroscientist and brain surgeon, Dr. Rahul Jandil, who loves technology, but believes that we need to structure some boundaries around its use, especially for children. We talk about the impacts of music on the brain and what it means to be in flow state. Dr. Jandil explains also what happens in the brain when we engage in what he calls meditative breathing and why he's such a huge proponent of it. He explains how his knowledge of brain health has shaped the way he parents, from encouraging navigational

skills in his children to exposing them to a diverse range of experiences. It seems where the brain is concerned, if you don't use it, you lose it. Finally, he draws on his years of experience as a brain surgeon to share some practical tips that can help all of us get the best out of our minds. I really think you're going to enjoy this conversation. Now, before we get started, as always, I do need to give a quick shout out to some of the sponsors of today's show who are absolutely essential in order for me to continue putting out weekly episodes like this one. I am absolutely delighted that Vivo Barefoot support my podcast. As you may already know, I'm a huge fan of minimalist shoes and have actually been wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes now for many, many years,

as have my wife and my children and my mother. I strongly believe that our feet are one of the most important parts of our body for our movement and our musculoskeletal health. Their function influences how we walk, run, and so much more. Not only have I used them for myself, I've also found them extremely beneficial for some of my patients. I have been recommending them to some of my patients for many years, and it is pretty consistent that they report back improvements in a variety of different complaints such as hip pain, knee pain and back pain. I'm also a huge fan of using barefoot shoes in the elderly. I think there is a bit of

research now coming to support their use in terms of balance and as I've said before you know my own mother improved her balance and her mobility and her stability since moving to Viva Barefoot shoes, because ultimately you are closer to the ground, which sort of intuitively makes a lot of sense. Now, minimalist shoes, which Viva Barefoot shoes are, are thin, wide, and flexible. And Viva Barefoot makes shoes for every occasion for both adults and kids. Now for listeners of the show they have come up with a great deal they are offering 20% off to all new customers in the UK, USA, Australia and selected EU countries. So if you have thought about giving them a go

this is a great incentive to start. They also offer a 100 day free trial for new customers so if you're not happy you can simply send them back for a full refund. I think it's a great offer. If you have been sitting on the fence about trying minimalist shoes, do consider taking advantage. You can get your 20% off for new customers by going to vivobarefoot.com forward slash livemore. That is vivobarefoot.com forward slash live more. Now, on to today's conversation. So Rahul, welcome to the Feel Better Live More podcast.

Thank you for inviting me. I'm happy to be here. So I thought, you know, your new book is full of practical tips and tools, as well as some great stories and anecdotes from your career as a neurosurgeon. But I thought a really nice place to start would be, you know, you're here in London, you're doing promotion for your book. How's the jet lag doing? Jet lag is terrible. Because I haven't done all the tips people might, you know, think that are valuable to break jet lag, drink a lot of water, don't have a glass of wine, try to get sleep. My son and I are here. We're going hard in London. We've been to Stonehenge. We've taken a bike tour. We went to Tate, Britain, South Van Gogh. So we're just enjoying it all.

And I think it's liberating to be able to see London both as a tourist and to get into these corners such as meeting you and being in this space so i'm having a great time and thank you again for including me hey rahul it's so refreshing to hear that that you've actually come to do your promo tour with your son how old your son he's 14 i have 3 13 14 and 17 i take them i take them all over the corners of the world and it's never for business it's always for pleasure yeah no that's fantastic and we're definitely going to explore children's health and brain health a little bit later um you said you're not doing the things that you should be doing for jet lag and i'm really interested we are currently speaking it's about 11 o'clock in

the morning um where do you live in america i live in los angeles okay so eight hours behind so your body clock is potentially thinking it's three in the morning yeah so we know that sleep is critical for brain health so what's going on in your brain at the moment given that you are trying to be alert trying to have a conversation with me about brain health when your body thinks it's 3 a.m yeah sleep deprivation is unhealthy on occasion it's okay but prolonged sleep deprivation is not good for you it gives you diseases for a short trip like this i'm familiar with sleep deprivation i not good for you. It gives you diseases. For a short trip like this, I'm familiar with sleep deprivation. I did surgical training in the States before they limited the

hours to 88. And I mean, we were doing 40-hour shifts. For me, when I'm sleep-deprived, I become disinhibited, more candid, a bit more jovial. I think that works for me during this trip. So I'm okay with it. But for most people, they should understand that we, as well as plants, grew on a planet that has a revolution. And so it's a diurnal basis of not just our sleep patterns, but the DNA in our tissue changes at night and during day. We're meant to cycle that way. And it's not from the pineal gland and melatonin that regulates it. It's actually from a suprachiasmatic nucleus, a fancy term for a structure hanging down beneath your brain that you can access through your nose. And it is based on a 24-hour clock and

recent Nobel Prize was given to it. So the getting into a rhythm of day and night is extremely important for your health it is designed not in your not just in your brain but in the dna readouts in your liver and your muscle and your intestine so it's mind body regulation that the sun and the setting sun of the rising sun does sure and then as in the western world but actually all over the world now as um we move to 24-hour societies and shift work is common we know that that has a detrimental impact on our health but for you as a neurosurgeon you were talking about your early days as a trainee so you are there in layman's terms you're cutting open someone's skull

what are the effects of you doing that when you're sleep deprived? Because if you're working 88 hours plus a week, you must have operated at some point when sleep deprived. Yeah, I have operated sleep deprived for maybe a decade when I was in training. Back then, it was the way to staff hospitals. You couldn't hire five trainees to work 30, 40 hours each. Staff, hospitals, you couldn't hire five trainees to work 30, 40 hours each. Some people felt like that's the only way to get the necessary experience. And when they limited it, what we found in the States was when they limited the work hours, the complications and the errors didn't go down because that increase in handoffs also raised the risk for the patient. So it didn't solve all the problems, but it was a major problem. What is it like to feel, what is it like operating when you're sleep deprived?

I think we select for ourselves in medical school. I think there are certain personality traits and driven personalities that go into brain surgery or maybe cardiac surgery. And on occasion, we end up working in areas where you can't call another doctor the next day. In many of the smaller towns in the States, if you do a brain surgery and the next day you need to tinker with that patient's skull again, as you said, you can't call somebody else. So if you didn't sleep that night, you still have to perform. Me, when I was sleep deprived as a trainee, there was usually another professor alongside with you, so you were a team. But is performance affected by sleep deprivation?

Absolutely. Can you still perform a task in a capable manner? I like to think I did so. But truck drivers to cops to surgeons and definitely pilots, sleep deprivation is not only bad for your health, it's the best way to not perform well, if that's your goal. Yeah, and it's interesting that those professions now have limits, don't they? Drivers have limits, pilots have limits. I guess we as doctors in our profession, we've been pretty late to the game in terms of recognizing our fallibility, and that's actually being sleep deprived. I mean, I can, like, I started off as a physician doing nephrology. That was the specialty I'd chosen to go for and was doing before I switched.

And I can remember so clearly, I was a junior, what you guys would call an intern, I'm guessing. I was probably what we call a second year SHO here, senior house officer. And we were still doing the old fashioned on call shifts. So I got to work at 8am, worked all day. And then I was on call that night. And you know, I was working through to the following day to the evening. I remember getting there. And you know, it relied on the fact that you would usually grab a couple of hours or something at night, you would normally quieten down. So you could actually maybe put your head down for an hour or two and that would get you through.

But we just had a busy night. Lots of acutes came in. I remember I didn't get to the mess. I didn't get to my room. And I was thinking as a junior doctor at the time, I thought, hey, I'm sure when my senior gets in, they'll probably let me home early today. And it didn't happen. And then we said, oh, you prepped for the afternoon ward round. I was like, in my head, I'm thinking I'm exhausted. Anyway, when I did finish at about 4 or 5pm, so I'd been working for, and I know you've done this many, many times, but just my experience of that was, well, that was a good, what, 24 hours and another 10, at least 34, 35 hours of work. I remember I was in the car on the way home on the ring road from Manchester

and the traffic had stopped because it was busy, you know? And the next thing I know, there's horns going on around me. Because you're shut down. I've fallen asleep in the middle lane. That's scary. So all the other cars around me have gone

and everyone behind me is beeping me. And that scared the life out of me. Something that wakes you i mean that got me home no problem but but that is that is really scary and dangerous so i guess the question is you know we talk and we're going to go into what sort of proactive things we can do for our brain health but given that we're living in a sleep deprived society is arguably the most dangerous place to be in a motor vehicle because how many people around you are actually sleep-deprived and are operating a car, you know, without the ability to do so optimally? I like that question. I mean, I think the semi-autonomous features in cars now that the steering wheels vibrate if you go out of your

lane, those things will help. But we are in an extremely distracted society. So let me backtrack to the story you were telling just now about, you know, acutes came in. That must mean a lot of admissions or a lot of things were happening in the middle of the night. I found, and the surgical residents, I knew if we were just given the opportunity for one, one and a half hours of sleep, it was actually better that we pulled an all-nighter. There was something weird about just shutting your brain down for just a touch. You hit the pillow, you pop back up in a 40-hour shift for an hour and a half. It kind of threw off your energy and your focus even more than just enduring the night awake. So I used to, rather than get an hour of sleep, I'll just walk around the ICU talking to nurses and seeing what's going on. But that led, and that's a story I mentioned in the book, that led me to understand a little

bit about the dangers of disrupted sleep. And what I talk to my kids about is, it's, you know, they say you want seven, eight, nine hours of sleep. If you could get five hours of uninterrupted sleep, that might be better than eight hours where you got up once or twice to answer your phone or it pinged and the light went on. So, disrupted sleep is now almost an epidemic because all the devices and lights that are near us that are tripping up that circadian rhythm we talked about, the sunrise and sunset that led to our evolution of how these biological cycles work. I think the treatment for

that is more sophisticated devices. The devices aren't going anywhere. I don't want them to go anywhere. I like having a superpower computer in my left pocket. It's the first thing I look at, and sometimes it's the last thing I look at. But if we could regulate the glow, the access, the frequency for our kids, that's what I do with my teenage sons is let's just start turning it down around eight and just give me an hour without a phone in your face before you go to bed. I mean, they're teenagers and that's a big ask. And I said, why? I said, well, it would be great to just have your brain entertain itself for one damn hour rather than having a device pummeling content into you. I think the ability to drift

into random thoughts is very important to the brain, especially the moments before you drift into sleep. And so I have tried my best to, they all have phones, they do their thing. I don't really, I don't really, I talked about the digital diet. Just choose good content as well as all the indulgences on your phone, mix it up and just get it out of your face the last hour before you go to bed. Fridays and Saturdays, my wife and I will binge on Netflix and fall asleep sometimes with the laptop in the bed. There's nothing wrong with that. But for kids in particular, the ability to be creative and daydreamers is fundamental.

And I worry that these devices are tripping them up before they go to bed. Yeah, I think the point about downtime, I think it's really important. It's something I've written about in my last book, The Stress Solution, all about stress and its impacts on our health. And one of the things I see happening in society is that downtime is slowly being eroded from our lives. So the example I often give is, you know, you're here in London, right? If you were here 15 years ago in London, I'm going to guess that if you went into a local cafe to order a coffee, you would stand in line and you know what? You'd probably be daydreaming, people watching, looking around you. You might be looking at all the pastries and trying to think,

am I going to have one? Am I not going to have one? You might interact with a barista. If you go into anyone now, as I'm sure you have done since you've got here, and again, I'm not criticising because I do the same thing a lot of the time, we've all stuck in our phones, right? We're trying to catch up on that email, oh, I'll quickly check Instagram. Every little bit of downtime now, I think it's been eroded out, and I think that's having a consequence. So my question really is, what is that doing to your brain when we're constantly distracted, when we're not allowing ourselves to just be and allow our minds to wander? Yeah, I don't have an answer for that. And the reason is we don't have enough data for that. So the question is also asked about the devices maybe being beneficial for grandparents because they can

have access to children's videos and posts. So the effect of social media and constantly being on your phone, because my children, when they're looking at their phone, they're swiping Instagram. I'm checking emails and swiping Instagram. They're just swiping Instagram. And the visual content and they look, they seem to function well. I mean, they're multitasking well. But you're right. There seems to be – there is no empty space in the day where, again, they're not being pummeled by some visual stimuli from their phone. We don't know the effects they're having because it's been 10, 15 years. And as you know, you need data over longer periods of time, like when they figured out the mind diet or is over decades cardiac issues

over decades so i don't have an answer for is it changing the structure or function of children's brains but uh in you know undoubtedly it is i'm just curious to see which doctors and scientists are going to be able to figure that out yeah i'm not sure it's all for the worse hey i'm sure it is not all for the worse i think there are so many benefits to social media, but I'm sure there are some negatives as well. I'm sure we're probably having a huge global experiment at the moment. And I don't think it's necessarily the technology. It's how we're using it.

Same with booze, right? Same with anything, right? If you're drinking a bottle of wine every day, that's going to have a certain impact on you. Whereas if you're having a glass of wine every now and again with your friends as part of a lovely meal, that's going to have a different impact. Alcohol is the same drug, but it's having a different impact, right? Yeah. The phone thing is a very interesting conundrum. It is the way in which they engage the world, but it's also the way the world can actually lead them to the wrong path.

I mean, not just the phone. 13 Reasons Why came out, there's a little bit of a spike in suicides. I don't know what to make of that. I want them to know about it, but I didn't know what to make of that. We know with Facebook and politics that those rules weren't set right. So I love what you're saying about, listen, these devices aren't going anywhere. The television's not going anywhere. Rock and roll's not going anywhere. Drugs aren't going anywhere. But how do we structure some boundaries and constraints within those devices so people who

use them in a destructive manner have some triggers? For example, gamblers, they don't ingest a drug, yet they do all kinds of, they can have an addiction that's equally addictive and destructive as cocaine, and they never put a chemical inside their body. So casinos have certain things with gamblers and rules, there's gambling hotlines, you start to put things in. I think for some of the kids that cannot manage and choose a healthy digital diet, or actually even a food diet, there should be some boundaries. Maybe what we did with supersized at McDonald's also needs to apply within Facebook and Instagram. And, you know, YouTube is now making a kid's channel because maybe it's not good to have kids' channels and porn on the same thing. Yeah.

So, those those constraints without being too stifling because i tell my kids i want to be allowed to make bad decisions i don't want too many constraints i just want to know the truth about them and i think you've hit it perfectly what's the way to let them have it but set some boundaries up so they know when they're getting into dangerous terrain i mean you say you've hit it perfectly i i'm not i'm not convinced with my own children i am hitting it perfectly. I think, you know, I'm sure you're the same. You know, we're trying to figure it out, right? We're trying to learn the science. We're trying to learn from our own intuition and we're trying to do the best

that we can. How old are your kids? My kids, my son just turned nine. My daughter's six. Okay. So, you're right into it. Not quite yet, but almost with my son. No phone at nine? Not at the moment at the moment no so i don't know if culturally it's different here from the us or where i live i have no idea but at the moment it's not become an issue yet but i'm expecting it to um within weeks to months and so you know i'm sort of it's interesting to hear how other parents do it right 11 or 12 is when we are three teenagers back then there was that was the average age when somebody got a phone. And the parental blocks are key.

And just a heads up about those parental blocks, they're good at removing. So you sometimes have to supplement with another app or feature to make those... Even harder. Yeah. Because the reality is our kids are probably going to be more tech savvy than us. And therefore, they're going to know how to get around these things. Rahul, you mentioned rock and roll just now. And that got my attention.

As a music fan my entire life, someone who spent a lot of his teenage years and 20s and still now going to rock and roll concerts. Good for you. That's great. That sort of piqued my interest. So rock and roll, or let's expand out music. What impact does music have on our brains?

That we know. And there's actually somebody in San Francisco or somewhere else, he's putting musicians in fMRI scanners. And those scanners don't tell the whole story, but they do tell something new compared to just putting electrodes on somebody's head. And so these different technologies that, you know, we're an electric, our brain flesh is electric. I think of it as a jellyfish. It's the tentacles are spraying chemicals and electricity. We can detect

it from the surface of the brain and we can actually put people in machines and look at blood flow. And when you do that for musicians, it's really interesting because it's a physical performance. If you're learning to play music i think i want to pivot from listening to music to learning to play to me learning to play music that seems to be the thing that leads to the most left right right left connections and electrical currents passing through the corpus callosum your brain's like a walnut there's a bridge in the middle and music hearing it playing, thinking about it, using your fingers to control it, seems to pull from the most corners of our mind.

And I can't imagine that not being good for you because as you know with the brain, if you don't use it, you lose it. It will down-regulate. It will let wither certain corners of the brain if they're not actively engaged. So I think music, especially when you're a kid, learning to play music has to be good for the brain. Do we have data on that? No. But do we have instinctual feelings about it being beneficial? Yes. Yeah. And I think, as you say, instinctively, we think that, you know, our kids learning a new skill, whether it's a sport or a musical instrument, is likely to yield benefits um i think one of the

one of the reasons for me that might apply is because it often puts you into flow states very good um you know and i think for adults as well you know when when something's that you know it's not too difficult that it's unachievable it's a little bit a little bit harder that we have to concentrate you have to you access that flow state I find those people who get into the flow state, and I think some people have, you know, may not know what that means. And they may think that's kind of fluffy, but there is a measurement for that. So when you're awake and resting and focused, those are alpha waves. If you look at, for example, sharpshooters, just the moment before they hit a target,

If you look at, for example, sharpshooters, just the moment before they hit a target, likely athletes, a footballer scoring something, NFL quarterback, ballerina, the release from the constraints of thought that come from your frontal lobe and letting a well-trained behavior exert itself, the brain is actually less active. It lights up less brightly. It's more efficient in its pathways. And that flow state is an alpha wave that's detectable. Similarly with Buddhist monks, likely with deep divers before they do their dive. It's a state of being focused, awake, and calm. And I think our phones and the technology and everything we're doing is pushing us away from that. So if we can find skills and habits that let us harness that, channel it, know how

to get into it, that would be great. I think learning music, and like they say with music, learn it and then let it go. That's that alpha wave flow state that I think could be very beneficial for anybody to learn music. I guess what you're saying is essentially this whole idea that, you know, let's say a golfer, for example, who freezes and crumbles and the final back nine at a major tournament. And I'm super fascinated with this, this whole idea that when we learn a new skill, we are, you know, rationally, we're thinking about it, we're trying to learn all those movements that we need. But then when we need to perform, you know,ally we're thinking about it we're trying to learn all those movements that we need but then when we need to perform you know we just want to have absorbed that forget about you know rationally thinking about everything and just let it go what i think is happening with a

lot of those golfers and in any sport when you freeze is that you're starting to overthink again instead of just letting your innate ability that you've trained just come out you're then starting to think oh yeah okay make sure you get to this point in the backswing make that you've trained just come out, you're then starting to think, oh yeah, okay, make sure you get to this point in the backswing. You've stopped. I think it's what you said about letting go, right? Is that the key to allowing our brain to function at its peak? It's you learn and you then develop mastery and then you let it go so you just allow it to perform yeah and i think let's let's dig into that a little bit deeper i don't think when a surgeon is is moving swiftly and with minimal trauma to tissue or a footballer's making their moves and you're thinking what this seems

effortless they look relaxed they're moving in a way that is efficient. It's not strained. You can see it in their face. They're not trying and thinking. That's not a reflex. A reflex is you – I don't want people to think it's a – you've trained – 10,000 hours an hour, you know, I don't believe in the 10,000 hours. Yeah. I like to have conversations with teenage kids and I go to dive bars in Los Angeles when I'm off duty. My friends are just a bunch of

normal fellas. I just tell them, well, we know surgeons that have done 10,000 operations and they're still no good. So how can it be 10,000, right? So the 10,000 thing, and that limits the inclusion of talent into the equation. And when people say flow, saying it's a reflex, you do it so much, it's reflexive. It's actually a misconception. Reflex is, as you know, you tap on my knee and I reflexively will kick it. It doesn't even go to my brain. It just goes to my lower back and comes back and makes my leg move.

That's a reflex. Thought and anxiety and controlling your movements, we know what that is. That's frontal lobe. That's too much CEO involved in the game. What is that flow state? What is somebody performing at a high level is, one, somebody who's mastered something. Just like a creative thought has to come on top of lots of knowledge. Yeah.

A flow state has to come on top of lots of practice. And then it's about harnessing the subcortical structures in my, this is the way I understand it. So the brain's like a canopy, the CEO's on top and, you know, the cortical canopy is doing the thinking. But below that, on the way down to our spinal cords, there are these subcortical structures that fine tune the movements. They're the structures where you see a snake and you jump, but then you realize it's plastic and the next time you don't fall for it. So there's all this subtle intuitive movement and instinctive responses going on. And the challenge of a flow state is once you've mastered it and you're golfing, you're in that back nine, like you said, the anxiety is making those subcortical structures say, freak out, freak out.

Ask the CEO for help and it's going to start interfering with it. And the mastery underneath is saying, just let it go. Most people will have a flow state when they're not under pressure and the lights aren't on. The challenging thing for athletes is how to deliver that under the stress of a game-winning situation. And clutch performance to me, that flow state is not performing better than what you would do in practice, but just doing what you would normally do under these extremely anxiety-provoking, stressful conditions. So, for people listening to this who are not high-performing athletes, I think there's a lot of take-home there for them. So,

I submit that we all want peak performance in our lives. Whatever our life entails, whatever we need to do, whether it's be a father, whether it's to be a good office worker, be a neurosurgeon, whatever it is, we are all, I think, on some level wanting to perform at our peak. So what can somebody listening to this or watching this on the video learn from what you've just said that athletes can do? How can they use that to help them in their daily lives yeah thank you for that transition because the lessons we learn from athletes and ballerinas and other people apply to everybody and so when we speak about what people can do when they're stressed out on an la freeway when they're about to go into a meeting with a boss and you're anticipating something not going well, when you're coming home and your relationship hasn't been good. The time-tested method and the one that we now know, see, I don't want to just

tell you things without telling you how I know and why I have the privilege to be even asked that question, to me is meditative breathing. It's a very powerful way to quell that anxiety storm that those instinctive structures have done. I'm going to see my boss and those subcortical structures are firing and they're unhappy, much like you'd see a snake or you're at the edge of a cliff. There's certain things that should be released in your body, but those have been repurposed in a negative, destructive way where we feel that at work, we feel that at home, we feel that when we look at certain social media. How do we tamp that down? Just like we would slowly walk away from a fear of heights, how do we walk away from just the general anxiety that's filled our life during the day? And I

deeply believe, and particularly now because there's hardcore data, I'll go into this a little bit, is meditative breathing. I don't know what mindfulness is. I don't know what your mind is thinking or my mind is thinking or your mind is thinking. But I know that the brain is connected to the lungs and the heart through this thing called a wandering nerve. It comes down. And that the brain can send signals down to your heart and Buddhist monks can slow down their heartbeat. I know when I put a little coil on there for people with epilepsy, kids with epilepsy, a vagal nerve stimulator, and we send electricity, the electricity can actually go upward into your brain and quell epilepsy. Epilepsy seizure is an aberrant electrical

activity of your brain. Think of it as an arrhythmia of your heart is epilepsy of the brain. It's called a vagal nerve stimulator. It's been around for a while. This is something you can look up right now. We put an electrical coil on this nerve, and it calms electricity. It's not even in the brain. But meditative breathing, deep breathing, in a count of four to go in, a count of three or two, one to hold, and a slow release, if you do that just a little bit before you engage in that next stress-provoking task, it too works like a vagal

nerve stimulator without us having to do a little surgery to calm the electricity in your brain. And you're saying, well, okay, that sounds, where did you get that? Well, we know meditation has been going on for a long time. We've seen Buddhist monks do certain things and others. Deep divers are a great example of that. But we know this now because a study came out last year. And children and young adults, and actually all people, if they have epilepsy, an aberrant electrical activity of the brain, arrhythmia of the brain, if usually treats with medicine, sometimes they find a little nodule we cut out. It's usually not cancers, but sometimes we don't know where it begins. And it's hard to know what to do

without understanding the origin of it. So they come in and they have brain surgery. We make a big incision. We remove the skull and we put a grid on the surface of the brain. It's not deep brain surgery. It's surface brain surgery. There is a difference. And then the wires come out of their head. They have to stay in the hospital for a week. And that's recording them 24-7 waiting to catch that firefly, that origin of the seizure. Where is it? Because then with radiation, you can zap it and you can cure them of it.

So it's meant to be therapeutic. But what are they doing for that week when they're just kicking back, getting bored? So in come all the neuroscientists from San Diego, the highest per capita is actually on the ocean, so San Diego. They come in and say, hey, can we hang out with you? And the recording's going on. Wow. And they actually asked them, let's do certain tasks. And then they went through like meditative breathing with these patients and these kids and these young people.

And they're watching the electricity change and get closer to that alpha wave, get closer to the calmer electrical signals in their brain after just deep, slow, deliberate breathing. And that's accessible to us all without having to pay for it. So that's a great thing. It's free, right? Oh, yeah. The book is meant to be all the magical things that are right there. I mean, when you pull into work before a big operation, I'll take a few minutes and just slowly breathe. And you can find an app and it's a count of four in, hold for a couple,

count of four out. And then what happens is you don't have to count as much. It becomes a habit. It becomes a part of your routine. It's free. You don't have to do it for 30 minutes. You're not going to be walking on coals and all the exaggerated things people think about. It is a resource available to you that has been harnessed for millennia. And then now you have crazy brain surgeons providing you the electrical proof if you're a skeptical kind of person. To me, that's magic. i think you know it brings a lot of weight to this to this term just breathe i mean it's it's deceptively simple but it really works and i know this year i'll be giving a lot of um talks to companies about wellness and how they can improve productivity and what's really

interesting is that a breath that i sort of use with my patients something i've written about a lot is the three four4-5 breath. When you breathe in for three, you hold for four, and you breathe out for five. And when I'm talking to people, a group, I'll often, we'll collectively do just one of those breaths together, which takes about 10 or 12 seconds. And I ask people straight away, how do you feel? Can you feel a difference just on one breath? And about 80% of people put their hand up. And that's just one breath. You do that a few times, as I say to them, five of those three for five breaths takes one minute. You will put your body in a different state because breathing is like information for your body and it's responding. So it's interesting that, you know, you as a neurosurgeon before a big operation will use breathing. Yeah. Thank you for that.

And thank you for allowing people to find things about themselves that can help themselves. Because that in itself is power also. And I'm from the States and I'm from Los Angeles. And it has become a bit commercialized that people think it's actually breathing. The meditative component is, I like to call it meditative breathing because it lets people know it's going to help them meditate, whereas a lot of people say, I don't know how to meditate. What do you mean? Just think about Mount Everest or do I have to buy yoga pants and be in Malibu and drink

green juice? They just become so distracted from the essence of it, which is deliberate breathing, just breathing. And what happens is, for people who are thinking, gosh, that can't work, is, well, you got nothing to lose. You're equipped with it. And I think many people, I'm not saying 100%, they'll find that that's a wonderful habit to add to their life, to turn down the anxiety. Even if it just creates a pause before you go into an anxiety-provoking situation and lets you get your thoughts in order as well as get your instincts under control

so you don't go in there and say something outlandish or over the top, it's a great break in the day. It's a few minutes, and I like to do it before I go to bed. I like to do it before a big case. I like definitely do it before a meeting or a conversation. And sometimes, like when I came here, I didn't want to do it. I don't want people to think I'm some yogi master with all that. I don't have any of it. I am breaking the rules and going hard in London. I am not doing meditative breathing before this because I want to just be loose

and I want to be disinhibited. But if I were anxious, and this doesn't provoke anxiety. And I hope I'm not stress-inducing you being on this show. I love it. I mean, this is, you know, you're offering me a creative avenue.

That's the bucket in my mind that this interaction right now between you and me is. But for those people on the freeways or on the tube, stressed out, there's a resource available to you. And if you're listening to your earbuds with your phone, there's so many free apps that'll help you set the cadence. It's such an easy way and a smart way to get close to the flow state, turn down the anxiety. And I'll give you one last example. You're saying, okay, I believe him. I don't believe him. Okay, take're saying, okay, I believe him. I don't

believe him. Okay. Take you to a gnarly story again. There's this rare, you know, the perturbation of the system is what sometimes reveals the mechanics, you know. So there's a disease called Moya Moya. Japanese people get it more than the rest of the world. Nobody knows why. I had a patient, a kid, and basically you have these four arteries popping off your heart going into your brain. And sometimes right when they pop through the skull, rather than breaking into this beautiful tree of small blood vessels, they get clogged at a young age. And these kids develop this fine blood vessels, this vasculature that's very sensitive to breathing. And when we have surgery that needs to be done on those patients, we have to tell the anesthesiologist at the end,

don't let this kid cry. Because if they cry and hyperventilate and breathe too fast, the signals will be sent to the fine blood vessels to shrink hyperventilation skittish breathing is a squeezer of blood vessels that can clot off the work of our surgery and kids this is a proof this has been 20 years don't let kids cry after moya moya repair at a children's hospital all neurosurgeons can talk about it so there's biology to slow breathing, working through the vagus nerve. And then there's also biology to rapid breathing and hyperventilating being not good for the brain in certain conditions. So there is basis to breath controlling mind. Yeah, incredible.

Just taking a quick break in the conversation to give a shout out to the sponsors of today's show. Athletic Greens continue their support of my podcast. Now, to be really clear, I absolutely prefer that people get all of their nutrition from their food, but for some of us, this is not always possible. Athletic Greens is one of the most nutrient-dense whole food supplements that I have come across and contains vitamins, minerals, prebiotics and digestive enzymes. So if you're looking to take something each morning as an insurance policy to make sure that you are meeting your nutritional needs, I can highly recommend it. For listeners of this podcast, if you go to athleticgreens.com forward slash live more, you will be able to

access a special offer where you get a free travel pack box containing 20 servings of Athletic Greens, which is worth around £70 with your first order. You can check it out at athleticgreens.com forward slash live more. I'm going to move to practical tips for us, what we can do in our lives as adults to help improve our brain health. but before we go there you when kids are coming up a lot yes that that example you just gave i've had the pleasure of meeting your 14 year old son who's just he's he's lovely really you know it's just incredible to say hi and and for me actually it's really nice to see you traveling with him on a pr tour

and it makes me think it's something i've thought about for years i'd love to take my kids with me but often we think as you know it's better for me just to go and do my work and then come back. But actually just seeing and hearing you say how rewarding that experience is for you and your son, it makes me think about re-evaluating how I do these things. Thank you for that. But I want to go deep into kids here so you in the start of your book i think it was interesting to me how your knowledge as a neurosurgeon has in some ways shaped what you do with your children and it's really to do with that attitude to risk some of the things that we might perceive as risky you allow them to to do. I think it was

climbing in trees, for example. But some of the other things that others might allow them to do, like crossing a road, you're pretty strict on. I wonder if you could elaborate. So, first of all, my wife unexpectedly got pregnant. Now, I say unexpectedly because she was an OBGYN in training and I was a neurosurgeon in training. And she's like, I'm pregnant. I said, well, that was 100% your jurisdiction. I thought you had that under control. So we had kids when we were in training back when those hours were 40-hour shifts. So it was nuts back then, right?

And my siblings and her siblings were not the oldest, but we had kids first. And there was like a generation gap where I hadn't seen kids being raised for a while. And so she and I just kind of made up our own stuff. So we brought in a lot of what I call diversity of interactions, partly by necessity, partly by choice. We put them in a lot of different schools. We put them in a lot of different faith-based schools, secular schools. We took them to a lot of different places. They ate a lot of different food, a lot of different faith-based schools, secular schools. We took them to a lot of different places. They ate a lot of different food, a lot of different music, grandparents, nannies, we did all those things. And part of what motivated me is when I had my kids, when I was also in the children's hospital, and I remember reading the study and people were suggesting,

and I think later on, an orphanage in Belarus proved it. Such a sad case, but an illustrative one. So I always like to tell you my story, and it can be sometimes too intense and maybe even a bit macabre, but that lets you know, like, why would we ask this guy about kids? First, I got three teenage kids. I do children's brain surgery around the world, usually in Eastern Europe and South America. usually in Eastern Europe and South America. But the kids in an orphanage that were left alone and not tended to, the beautiful undulating pattern of that brain, which is like a – the reason it's like that is like imagine taking a giant pizza

and squeezing it like an accordion to put it into a box. It gives you more canopy square footage or square kilometers, if you will. And what happened was they started losing the ridge because they needed less parts of their brain. The brain is an energy hog. If you don't use it, it's three pounds and it uses 20% of the blood flow. 20% goes to that thing in our skulls. So, it's not advantageous to feed parts of the brain that you're not actually using. It'll start to wither. Hence, you'll use it or lose it.

Yeah, but in a way that's an active process at the structural physical level. Parenting in a way that would preserve the flesh inside my children's skulls was important to me. And then at a microscopic level, I was getting my PhD then, and we were seeing this thing called synaptic pruning. So in some ways, the biology of the brain is very landscape architecture. We use words like pruning and dendrites. And you are born with more brain cells, all of us, than you're intended to keep. with more brain cells, all of us, than you're intended to keep. And the ones you keep as a toddler, when you're young, are the ones that were tickled, that were engaged. And we know that again, because if somebody is born with an eye that doesn't work, that part of the brain starts with

brain cells. But if it's not using it, it'll let those things wither. So my parental approach, I don't know if it's working or not. It's not even about the outcome. I took the best approach I could. I just took them to all different stretches of experiences. I had them doing free running for one summer. They dabbled with some music. We've traveled all over the world for pleasure, languages, food, constant interaction. the world for pleasure, languages, food, constant interaction. And for example, what better thing for my 14-year-old son to come here and find himself having the confidence and the ability

to navigate London coming from Los Angeles. That's my gift to him as a father. I'll let school do the algebra and the geometry and the grammar. I actually don't do homework with them. It's kind of a weird thing. I'd rather just chat with them like we're talking. I'll take a interesting article and I'll be like, let's talk about this. I just want to hear how you think. Just keep up with me and talk to me, teach me. It's interesting. Loads of new ideas there. What about the orphanage you mentioned? What was going on there? So why were their brains adapting in the way that they were? Was it a lack of touch? Was it, you know? The 40 hours when I was doing those shifts,

I missed my kids. It was for a few years. And they were telling us not to have the kids in their bed. And I'm not trying to come up with policy or give medical advice on the show. I just, my wife and I, two medics at that time, two surgeons in training, we put the kid between us because of touch.

I wanted to have them near me. I wanted them to hear me breathe. I wanted those things. And the lack of touch will shut down certain parts of your brain. The lack of sight, visual stimulation will shut down parts of your brain. And here is the thing that just really broke my heart. The introduction of a stressful environment will change the brain forever, right? If you have to fend off assault, if you have to worry about getting home safely, that's too much to put on that brain. Because now what you're doing is you're messing with the emotional thermostat, that subcortical structure.

You're going to make it harder for that kid to find that flow state in their life as they mature because you've primed them to always be under threat. And that survival instinct that lets them survive also gets in the way of happiness and tranquility. And I think I'm not a policy person, but that's why you need to put a lot of resources into kids. Because if you don't set that thermostat right, they're not going to be healthy adults.

And you're going to be paying on the back end for people who are thinking about it from a financial point of view. Yeah, and that's super fascinating. And I think, you know, those early years are critically important. We know that as a note of optimism for people listening who might be thinking as many parents do you know maybe the first few years were very stressful and there were certain situations out of their control often you can feel very bad as a parent because you think guilty what can i do now but but we're gonna we are gonna come to these tips and there's things that we can always do to improve our brain function yeah um and i do want to make sure

we cover those you mentioned well two things about your about your children about your son in particular really um first one is why were you so cautious this is what i got from reading your book about letting your children cross the roads yet you're happy them jumping off trees okay first question and the second question is you said that your son here in london what a great gift that he can now start to navigate his way around london and i was thinking about navigation i was thinking about gps smartphones um is there a an unexpected consequence to our brains by outsourcing its ability to think you know many us, we don't know where we're driving anymore. Our GPS takes us. And if the GPS breaks down, we don't know where we are. We don't know how to get back.

So quite a few questions there. I wonder if you could tease your way through them. No, I worked at a children's hospital and I saw how kids die. So apologies to the audience. This is just who I am. I always learn from things and I have intense experiences, but we saw kids choked. They fell out of second story windows. They were burned and they got hit by cars, all these ridiculous SUVs, giant vehicles and fast roads. And so when they were younger, I wanted them to be safe because pediatric mortality, frankly, is, you know, that's the first thing you want to avoid. So that's why I didn't mind if they fell out of a tree. And they've taken some scrapes.

The one that's here now has got a scar from his forehead. He rode his bike into a garage. Because, again, I saw from Children's Hospital, that's stuff they heal from. And so that's why I didn't, at that time, want them to be crossing streets and stuff like that in the neighborhood. Because you're looking at death. Yeah. Not an injury you're healing from. First, you've got to get them to live.

You've got to feed them and get them to live and then you can do all those things we talked about by diversifying and what are we robbing our kids from by letting them push the navigation up so that's interesting it's okay in my opinion I don't want them to be memorizers. It's okay for them to have all the capitals of American states that we used to have to memorize in their pocket. I'm like, I don't care. You get a good grade on that. That's not really what I'm, I'm not trying to grow robots. So that kind of memory and loss of capacity, I'm kind of okay with.

But there's another type of memory called working memory where they can juggle a lot of things i gotta get to school i got this text multitasking that's really a skill that's what that's what we all want to do better in a calm fashion right although some neuroscientists will say that it's impossible to multitask i've read that from many neuroscientists there's a book i don't know if it's the organized mind where it says it but i you know and i just completely disagree you know the highly functional people i know my kids they can do a lot of different things not necessarily eight projects on the kitchen table at the same time but I mean multitask eight different things that need to get done during the day without dropping the ball and connecting them in a seamless fashion I think that's that's called working memory I think that's

important the particular thing we're talking about different things yeah so exactly so connecting them in a seamless fashion. I think that's called working memory. I think that's important. The particular thing- So it could be we're talking about different things. Yeah, so exactly. So just raw memorization of phone books, I don't mind if they leave that, lose that. Able to get through the day and not drop the ball and know what comes first, what comes second, priorities.

As you know, when the acutes came in, you had to take care of the triaging is working memory. And then, but the navigation one I have, I'm particularly opinionated about. you know when the acutes came in you had to take care of the triaging is working memory and then but the navigation one i have i'm particularly opinionated about i don't like them to press the route app and you say well where does that come from is he just is he making that stuff up or where does he get that the temporal lobe actually has uh-D. Neuroscientists have found that there are cells and particular clusters of tissue in the temporal lobe that help you with spatial navigation. And so what I tell my kids is, come on, you got to be good at this because this spatial navigation is that cognitive reserve

that you build now is what people lose in dementia when people have Alzheimer's. They can't find their way home. It's in that same space. So building up spatial navigation is good for you now. It's good for when you're older. It's good when you're a surgeon. It's good if you're driving. And those grid cells are important to cultivate. So what we do, and many people do it their own way, but for my sons, if we're going somewhere in Los Angeles or even around the world, let's just look at the map. You can press route if you want, but then you got to put it away. 101 South, 10 East, exit this, make a left. So I want them to think about the sequence of navigating an environment. And if you think about it, it was

probably useful thousands of years ago in the savannah, like which cave, which rock, that's a very important skill to have and it's deeply rooted in neuroscience and biology in our brain i love it it reminds me a little bit and i i've got to be honest my tendency is to go a bit extreme on things sometimes when i apply them to myself i'm really kind and compassionate i hope to my patients and a lot more relaxed with myself i can be quite tough sometimes and um when i used to do a lot of house visits or house calls, I think you guys call them from general practice. I remember my car did not have a sat-nav at that time, still doesn't actually. And I was quite resistant to using them. So what I would do

is when I knew I've got to go and visit these three patients, I'd write down their address. I'd look on Google Maps as to roughly where they were in relation to the surgery that where I was working and I sort of hold on to that I'd lock it into my head and then I'd go to my car and sort of try and picturize it and go let me see if I can figure it out and get there and I guess what I didn't realize I was doing uh is that I was working out these grid cells which I feel pretty good about myself now that I was doing it. But no, it's interesting, isn't it? All my suggestions, I want there to be a scientific base. Yeah.

Not that other suggestions aren't great. No. But I'm not here to give you suggestions that I can't back up with hardcore science or clinical stories. And grid cells do exist. They're in hardcore neuroscience journals. Yeah. And it explains why preserving navigation

and thinking about that. So people want to do puzzles. People should be thirsty for challenge. I think holding on as navigation in a three-dimensional environment is very important. I want to move now to practical tips because this podcast is called Feel Better, Live More. The reason it is, it's quite self-explanatory,

but I believe that when we feel better in ourselves, when we're functioning better, we get more out of our lives. We've got more energy to do the things we want to do. We've got more cognitive capacity to do the things that we like to do in our spare time and even at work. And there's plenty of tips in the book.

I want to sort of, I wouldn't say quick fire, but just go through them systematically. I was really struck by a paragraph I read that, I think it was in your book, about how even at 60 or 70 years old, a few simple lifestyle changes with patients or with the public has been shown to increase their performance on cognitive tests. And I think that's really empowering for people when they think oh well i didn't do this i've had a stressful life wait a minute there are still things you can do so let's go through what are some of the things that people can do whether it's their diet whether

it's you know whatever you you go through some of the tips you think are useful and i thought about how to explain that so it's not too much of a listicle for people. Let's do a 24-hour day about, I'm just thinking about this now. I'm just going to take you through things you can do if you have the luxury. So first of all, food. I mean, people are starving in this world and food scarcity and bad food. I'm respectful of that. That said, if you wake up, consider skipping breakfast a couple of times a week. In neuroscience journals, and from what we know about the biology of it, that intermittent fasting going 16 hours a couple of times a week without eating glucose, your liver will run out of its glucose reserves. It will burn fat into these things called ketones. The brain is a hybrid vehicle. It's not all gas. It's not all electric. It likes both. And so if you have dinner at eight and it's Monday evening, consider having your next meal be midday the next day. That's an easy way to get to 16 hours. It doesn't mean you're fasting for days and days. There is

neuroscientific literature that intermittent fasting is good for attention and focus. Okay, now it's lunchtime and you're thinking about what to eat. Before that, I would consider taking five minutes to just breathe deeply like you're doing now. Just make deep breaths a couple of times a day, three times a day for three minutes. Make it easy. See how that works for you. Just the pause might be helpful. Now it's time to eat.

The food you choose is important. And there's delicious food to eat that's actually good for your brain. And how do I know that? Well, we don't have a pill for Alzheimer's, but we do have the MIND diet, which is essentially Mediterranean food that if you look at a group of thousands of people over a long period of time, they had less dementia. So now that you've figured out the cadence of eating, which is intermittent fasting,

skipping breakfast a couple of days a week. Now that you've brought in pre-lunch three minutes of just deep breathing, that's meditative breathing, choose plants, choose nuts, choose occasional fatty fish. The fatty fish has omega-3s, which is an essential component of your brain. It's the wrapping around all those connections that keeps those electrical signals firing faster. And on that point, given the growing tendency to follow a vegan diet, in your opinion, can that be problematic? I don't think so.

This is a good question. I was asked this at Stella McCartney's yesterday, and there are good nutritional sources for B vitamins as well as omega-3s. I don't have the names of those jars. at Stella McCartney's yesterday. And there are good nutritional sources for B vitamins as well as omega-3s. I don't have the names of those jars. So they can supplement. If they're choosing to go vegan,

you would recommend they supplement with something containing omega-3. Well, B vitamins. But if they supplement with omega-3s from fish oil, then they're not vegan anymore. But there are other supplements. And what I also say is the benefits of being vegan, if you can pull it off, are so great that a little bit less omega-3s because you're not eating fish i think

it far out you know far exceeds is that are you saying that relative to the standard of course you live in america so the standard american or the standard western diet relative to that are you suggesting an increasing plant foods is generally a good thing? Absolutely. Not only is it good for the animals that you're not killing, it's good for the planet, but it's actually what your body prefers. It's healthier for you. And if you want to eat meat, consider the Mediterranean diet where it's fatty fish and poultry. Pass on the beef, pass on the fried food, pass on the processed food.

Now, if you do have a burger, you're not going to undo what you did. Just make those things an indulgence rather than a habit. So now you're at lunchtime, you've chosen the Mediterranean diet, more plants, less meat, the right kind of meat. And your day goes on. And then the question is, what's next to improve your health? A bit of exercise is great. The brain likes exercise because it is flesh. Don't clog the plumbing to your garden because swaths of your garden will wither. So people have strokes and injuries.

It's because blood flow is not getting into their brain. That's the way to hurt the structure of your brain. So what's good for the heart is good for the brain. Then the other thing it does is it bathes itself in these neurotrophic factors. That's what my science is on, BDNF, brain drive. And so that's what my grants are on. When the brain exercises, it showers itself. It's not like thigh muscles release healthy brain chemicals

that swim up there. It's got its own pharmacy. You give it the right behavior and interaction, it'll reward itself. So, exercise keeps the plumbing open to the flesh of the brain, as well as releases molecules that serve as miracle growth for the brain. A couple of times a week is a good place to start. Do we know what specific exercise is good for the brain a couple times a week is a good place to start do we know what specific exercise is good for the brain and good for bdnf levels or is it a mix we don't well some people are starting to suggest uh some strength training is an essential component so if you're just running a marathon you might want to throw in some light weights but more a little bit more exercise than you're currently doing is a good thing is is what the brain's gonna say hey i like this direction i'm gonna shower myself with bdNF. Yeah, exactly. And I think we can, look, strength training, I'm a huge fan of strength

training. I do think we undervalue muscle mass in society and in health. But generally speaking, for most of us, if we just increase how much we move. Get vertical even. Yeah. Get out of the chair. That's going to help help just the postural elements of standing yeah is the first step next thing you know you're walking make sure you know you're taking the stairs uh so these are simple things these are free things and um so exercise and then the day the day moves on and you're getting to the evening uh if you can, I like to read something completely unfamiliar. I've got a stack of old magazines. I just flip through, just new content for your mind.

And I think since it's thinking flesh, and of course, it likes blood. It likes to be irrigated. Of course, it likes a certain kind of diet because of the components it needs. But it also wants to think. If you ask Usain Bolt, I mean, how do you get your thigh muscles stronger? It's to take some stairs. Well, how do you get your brain to be healthier? Think. And everybody's next level of thought and challenge is individual. We don't all have to do the same puzzles. We don't all have to have the same career, but get out of your comfort zone, if you will, just with

the thoughts. So, flip through something different on your phone, read something different on your phone, develop a new habit. I think that's important. And then for those of us who have creativity as an ambition, and I have the luxury of having creativity as an ambition, because cutting out a cancer from somebody's brain is a three-dimensional thing. Trying to guess how Mother Nature is working in science is a creative thing. I'm not a technician. I'm not an intellectual, frankly, in the end. I'm an instinctive person who wants to harness his creativity. So, people are microdosing, people are doing different things, but that requires pharmacological intervention. I don't support that.

What I would say is we're all wildly creative in our dreams. And people are finding that when you, on the transition from awake to asleep and from sleep to waking up, it's called hypnagogic and hypnopompic. There's actually those same alpha ways that we've been talking about just for 10, 20 minutes as you drift into sleep and your tasks are done. And Salvador Dali mentioned that. He uses sleep as a psychedelic tool for creativity to solve problems. It's not going to happen every time, but I like to look at my riddles at the end of the night and I have a notes app. I write a few things and I wake up and I write a few things that transition is like sort of a strange portal to your subconscious and again based on science if you put some electrodes on a brain at that time you have those alpha waves that we talked about

awake but focused and calm and you also have these other waves these delta waves that waves that are light sleeping early dreaming it's the only time where you have both awake and asleep waves. And I've heard in one of your articles, sorry, I've read one of your articles that you say, leave a pen next to your bed so that you can actually take advantage when those creative thoughts come

just before bed or just when you wake up, you can actually just jot them down. And yeah, that's incredible. You said learn new things. How important can learning a new language be? Oh, it's an essential thing. And whether you get it right is actually secondary. It's the process of trying to learn.

So language, music, the act of learning makes your brain say, I got to pull from different pathways. I got to get to different corners of my mind. It's actually an energy consuming activity. And that's what engages the greatest corners and recesses of your mind is to learn new things, particularly music, particularly languages, social interactions. We know these things. And now I'm just trying to give you a biological basis. Brain's efficient if it wants to fall into its rut. And breaking the rut in a constructive way is going to be good for your brain globally

as your mind, thoughts and emotions, as well as the flesh. That's one strong way to stave off dementia. Yeah, and that's very powerful. You know, keeping your brain active, trying new things. And I think what you said was super empowering. it's not about whether you can actually master that language it's not about whether you master playing the piano just the process of trying to yeah

that's going to do all the groundwork and all the sort of heavy lifting in the brain which which is super empowering um doing things with your non-dominant hands i'm asking a because i'm interested but b it's something that i often do with my son like i we've been playing uh table tennis you call the table tennis in america or ping pong um both we we've you know we've been playing that in the back garden and um sometimes we'll try and play with our left hands we're both right-handed and and daddy says to him hey you know this is really good for your brain this you know try and do with your left hands what's going on there and is it good for your brain yeah it is i'm a two-handed surgeon neurosurgery requires the use of left and right so to facilitate that i had a mentor when i was younger say you know put your right

arm in a sling for a little bit just just just to be crazy just to be just to see how that goes and over a few weeks, it's awkward, but your left hand, if it's your non-dominant hand, it can catch up quite a bit. And that effort to learn how to use parts of your body that you weren't relying upon is what I learned about from my patients. When they have injuries, when they come in with stroke, or they've had a brain tumor moved, sometimes they have weakness in their arms and legs and their ability to speak. They have these central nervous system issues and they have to rely on what's left. And that is a very powerful thing because when they come back to clinic three weeks later, or you see them three months later, they're quite facile. And that is brain plasticity. That is brain rehab. Relying on

extremities, relying on thought, relying on communication that you wouldn't originally had. So when I use my mouse with my left hand and force myself to do that or chopsticks, and I encourage my kids to do that, what it's doing is the left hand, for me, that's non-dominant, is controlled by the right side of the brain. That part of the brain, if you don't engage it, will also start to wither a little bit. And so, before you get into those habits, and again, nobody's saying if you're going to throw the football for a championship game to use your non-dominant hand. But the recruitment of brain cells in your right hemisphere by using your left hand and your left arm to bring in habits, I think is a powerful and effective way. Not only does it bring those brain cells in, just think about at the musculoskeletal level if using your

phone your whole life with your right hand you're going to stave off arthritis by bringing in the other hand as well so it's good for your brain it's good for your joints it's a way to be a more balanced person physically and music again it's a two-handed sport uh brings that in nicely yeah incredible rahul look just to finish this off then i know we've gone through tips but if i'm going to push you a little bit here sure um i always like to lead the listener with some really actionable practical tips that they can apply in their own lives immediately to improve the way that they feel or improve the way that their brain functions so what are your top four tips sure for people listening to this that they can or improve the way that their brain functions so what are your top four

tips sure for people listening to this that they can think about applying into their own life um one would be uh get vertical that's the most essential thing when i see our patients who can come out of a bed and stand they they grow you can see a withering flower come back to life if they can get vertical being standing and moving is very important for me. Wherever you're at, just do a little bit more. Two, make subtle but important changes in your diet. Get rid of the red meat and fried food. Add in some more of the Mediterranean diet.

You're still going to enjoy what you're eating. You can have a glass of wine, salmon, red wine, yogurt, fruit. It's not a tough thing. It's just changing the direction of what you're eating. The other things that I would do is I would consider getting some of these apps. Now, it's an interesting place to start. I don't know which ones I'm recommending, but there are brain training apps. Brain training works. Certain governmental agencies are using it. We use brain training as brain rehab in our patients. Find some puzzles,

find some content, read a book, do something unusual. That will also be good. And the fourth one I would say is, you know, try to find happiness. It's the most elusive thing. But we also know that people who have mental health issues or people who are depressed, their brains start to change. They are brain injured from the way they are thinking. So, if it's within your power to be happier, to pursue relationships and crafts that make you happy, that will probably be the best thing for your brain. Rahul, great tips. I hope, well, I know that will have inspired people. You say to read more, I would recommend that you get Rahul's new book life lessons from a brain

surgeon the new science and stories of the brain it's a it's a really fascinating reads everything that rahul and i spoke about will be on the show notes page for this episode of the podcast dr chastity.com forward slash brain surgeon so do check them out i'll try and get links to those studies that rahul mentioned in the conversation so you can check them out if you are so inclined. Enjoy the rest of your stay in London and I hope we get to do this at some point in the future. Thank you for including me. That concludes today's episode of the Feel Better Live More podcast. I really enjoyed having that conversation. What did you think? As always, I would really encourage you to think about what was discussed today and try and pick one thing that you can start introducing

into your own life immediately. I personally love the tips to do something novel and unusual, but also the one about looking for hobbies and passions that make us happy, whatever it is you decide to do, please do let Rahul and I know on social media. If you can, especially on Twitter, please do use the hashtag FBLM so that I can easily find your comments. If you want to continue your learning experience now that the podcast is over, please do head over to the show notes page for this episode.

It is drchastity.com forward slash brain surgeon. You will find interesting articles there, links to the study of the Belarus orphans and so much more. That page is drchastity.com forward slash brain surgeon. One thing I really enjoyed about the conversation today was the wide variety of topics that we covered. So many things that we can all do to improve our brain health. I actually wrote about a lot of these themes in my latest book, The Stress Solution. The importance of downtime, the importance of passion, the importance of sleep. If you have not yet read the book and you are interested in these topics, I really would encourage you to pick up a copy. It is available in paperback, ebook, and as an audio book, which I am narrating. We also touched on night shift workers in the podcast today, but unfortunately did not get

around to giving specific tips in this area. I do have a section on shift work in the stress solution. So if you feel you may benefit from some advice on this area, or if you know somebody who works shifts and could do with some advice, please do let them know about the book. If you'd like to understand and read more about my overarching philosophy on health and how we actively can create health in our own lives,

please do consider getting a copy of my first book, The Four Pillar Plan, which is also available in the USA and Canada with a different title, How to Make Disease Disappear. As always, if you enjoy my weekly shows, please do consider supporting them. It really does make a huge, huge difference. You can leave a review on Apple Podcasts, whichever platform you listen to podcasts on. You can also help me spread the word by taking a screenshot right now and sharing with your friends and family on your social media

channels, or you can simply tell your friends and family about the show. I really honestly do appreciate your support. A big thank you to Richard Hughes for editing and Vedanta Chatterjee for producing this week's podcast. That is it for today. I hope you have a fabulous week. Make sure you have pressed subscribe and I will be back in one week's time with my latest episode. Remember, you are the architects of your own health. Making lifestyle changes is always worth it because when you feel better, you live more. I'll see you next time.