HealthyGamerGG - The Neuroscience Of Living Without Regret

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

Today, we embark on an intriguing exploration into the neuroscience of living a life without regret, gaining insights from a unique and compelling source: individuals who have experienced near-death or clinically died. Join us for an eye-opening journey as we glean profound lessons from these experiences, delving into the neuroscience behind leading a fulfilling life without regret. Through the narratives of those who have glimpsed beyond life's edge, we uncover invaluable wisdom on living purposefully and without remorse. Check out HG coaching: https://bit.ly/47dF7rF Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, we're going to learn about the neuroscience of how to live life without regrets. And we're going to learn this from a very interesting source, people who have died. When I was working as a psychiatrist, I noticed that a lot of my patients struggled with regret. They may have whatever diagnosis, but when I actually talked to them, what I noticed is that they were filled with regret. And this looked like a lot of different things. So for some of y'all, this will look like actual regret about the past, where you're kind of thinking about your past and you're saying, man, I really screwed up. I let that relationship get away from me. That was the best relationship. Breaking up with that person was the biggest mistake I made. Or I can't believe that I didn't study

harder in school. And so your mind is kind of occupied in the past and you're filled with regret. And then what happens is your mind is so occupied in the past about the mistakes that you made that you can't even think about fixing them or improving your future. For some of y'all, this actually looks like inaction in the present. And how does that relate to regret? Well, you're sort of thinking, well, I don't know what to major in. Should I major in this or should I study this? Should I take this job? Should I not take this job?

And so sometimes the fear of regret looks like paralysis in the present because you're so worried about making the wrong choice. If I date the wrong person or heaven forbid I marry the wrong person, then it'll ruin my life and I will be filled with regret. So we're paralyzed to act in the present because we don't know what to do. The third way that this looks, and this is the most unusual, is maybe you're someone who's very, very efficiency oriented. And anything that you do has to be perfect. And even when you do a good job, there's a part of your mind that doesn't even let you enjoy it. And it's kind of beating you up

and saying, hey, you could have done this better. You could have done this better. You could have done this better. And if you really tunnel down into that, that's regret too. And so people who are so interested in optimizing every corner of their life, why does your life need to be optimized? What are you looking for? You're looking to wake up tomorrow and not regret the actions of today. So it's a lot. So it's really bizarre, but the fear of regret and trying to avoid regret can keep you stuck in the past, keep you paralyzed in the present, and even keep you beating yourself up as you chase a particular future. And so let's understand what is the fear of regret and where does it really come from? And so the key thing about regret is that it relates to time. So if you sort of think about,

okay, what should I major in? What should I study in college? If you had an infinite number of years, then you could pick one thing, and then if that didn't work out, you could put, pick something else. So if you don't have to worry about this dimension of time, then you don't have to worry about picking the wrong thing. If you have an infinite number of possibilities for relationships, if any particular relationship gets away from you, it doesn't really matter, right? Because you're going to have infinite opportunities in the future. And so if we sort of think about it, what is it that forces us to regret? It's the limitation of time. And if we think, take it one step further, why is our time limited on this earth? Because we die. So there's this fantastic text,

called the Tibetan book of living and dying, where this group of Tibetan monks sort of figured this out. They figured out that the fundamental problem with attachment of life and regret is the fear of death. Because since we're going to die one day, our time is limited. Obvious, right? If our time is limited, we have to use time efficiently. We can't afford to make mistakes. And if we screw up, that time is never coming back. So regret has to do with limited time.

Limited time has to do with the fear of death. How do we tackle this problem and start to learn how to live life without regrets? This is where we're going to turn to neuroscience. And this is where there's a fascinating case that I want to share with y'all. Generally speaking, when we look at what happens to the brain when we die, we're not actually watching the brain. Someone has died and then we'll do an autopsy, or we can sort of do a brain scan or something like that.

We can measure the anatomical structures. And we can see what happens to the brain after death. But we don't actually see what happens to the brain when we die. And so there's a really awesome case report that had an EEG, which is an electroencephalogram, which is something that's measuring the electrical activity of the brain. And we've had a couple of cases now in science where we've literally watched the brain die. And what we've learned is incredibly fascinating. The first thing to understand is that when people die, there is a synchronicity of all parts of our brain,

and that if you sort of look at what happens is this midline cortical structure, There's this one kind of area of the brain that seems to be affected by the process of death. And what we sort of know is that we've seen a bunch of electrical activity, but then we'll have people who go into brain death. We'll see this change in midline cortical activity. We'll see this synchronicity across all the brain. And then if we bring that person back to life, we can actually ask them what was being dead? What did it feel like?

What was it like to actually be dead? And we can actually get answers to what is going on in the brain. So when this goes on in the brain, what is this person? and subjective experience. And what we tend to find, and now we've got tons of cases of this kind of stuff, is that when people die, their sense of self kind of dissolves. So they sort of feel this like loss of the barrier of self. So I'm not me anymore. I'm just kind of this formless presence. And I feel really connected to everyone. For some people, life flashes before their eyes in every moment of your life kind of like runs through your mind. And that could be that synchronous, synchronicity across all the

brain, so you get this hyperactivation of the brain right before you die. But the subjective experience is that I lose my sense of self. I feel like the personhood within me has died. And so the interesting thing is if you ask people like, what was it like to be dead? They actually say it's really great. So there are lots of cases where people really enjoy being dead. I know it's kind of weird, but that's literally what they say, that when I sort of lose my sense of self, I feel very peaceful, I feel very connected. It feels amazing. It feels like I'm in a womb. I'm not advocating that you'll go kill yourselves, please don't do that. We're going to teach you how to get all the benefits of that without actually dying. What it comes down to and what people have sort of called this is ego death.

So scientists have studied this and even psychologists have studied this. They've concluded that patients go through this experience of ego death when they die. In addition to bodily functions, there's a subjective experience that the sense of self dissolves. And so then the question kind of becomes, okay, if the sense of self dissolves when we die, which makes sense, right? then, and that makes us feel happy and blissful, then the opposite should be true as well, right? As the sense of self increases, does that increase our pain and suffering of life?

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I'm not talking about narcissism. Literally what happens in schizophrenia is the part of our brain, that associates ourselves with external stimuli is hyperactive. So I'll give you all a really simple example because I know that sounds confusing. So if I'm walking down the street and I walk past someone who's sitting on a park bench, the part of my brain that sort of governs self doesn't connect those two things. So I don't think that the person sitting on the park bench is in any way connected to me. The events that happen, like other people are living their own lives,

there's random events going on in the world. it doesn't all tie back to me. I'm over here and there's random crap going on out there. But when you take someone who has something like paranoid schizophrenia, literally what we know from brain scans and tons of scientific studies is that the part of their brain that governs self ties themselves to all kinds of stimuli in the environment. So suddenly two people sitting on a park bench are monitoring me.

There's a car that drove past and then I saw it reverse and park. Holy crap. That person parked because of me. So all of these stimuli all around us suddenly get tied into our sense of self. And this is something that is incredibly, incredibly, I don't know how to, it's like terrible to live through. These people suffer every day because all of these benign stimuli that have nothing to do with me get associated with me. And so we even have evidence that ego death leads to peace and that hyperactivation of the ego leads to suffering. We also see this in cases of depression.

So this is what's really cool is we can look at studies on psychedelics. And if we look at studies on psychedelics, we know that psychedelics can have a profound positive effect for people who are depressed. And if we look at the mechanism, how does a psychedelic affect and help a person with depression? It turns out that the more ego death they experience during their psychedelic experience determines how much their depression improves. And there are even studies that have looked at the therapeutic value. of psychedelics, and they've looked at people who haven't benefited. And then they've asked them, what was your psychedelic experience like? And it turns out that the people who had more of an ego death experience, their depression improves. And people who have a psychedelic experience

without ego death, their depression actually stays relatively the same. And this is another reason why I don't recommend people go out and just do psychedelics, because it's not that the psychedelic itself magically transforms and gets rid of depression. There seems to be some way to kind of activate that ego death, and that's really what we're looking for. Subjectively, what this feels like is people will say, I feel connected to everyone else, the barriers of self kind of break down, and I'm connected to my other human beings, and this sort of leads to a sense of compassion and stuff like that. And even on the neuroscience standpoint, we kind of know this. We know that when people are depressed, there's a part of their brain that's hyperactive,

which is called the default mode network. And the default mode network is the part of our brain that governs our sense of self. And we know that psychedelics disable this ketamine, which is a dissociative agent, disables this. And the third thing that's really interesting is meditation disables the default mode network. So now we've reached a point where we kind of have talked to people who have died. We've studied their electrical activity. And we kind of know that as people die, they sort of feel really peaceful. There's this sense of ego death. And the opposite of ego death leads to suffering. So how does the neuroscience of ego death tie into living a life without regrets. And this is where we kind of come back to that Tibetan book of living and dying,

where they sort of figured out that what is the cause of the fear of death? How do we as monks conquer the fear of death? And what they concluded is that misidentification with our ego is where the fear of death actually comes from. And this is kind of fascinating, right? Because this is exactly what the neuroscience showed us. When we disidentify from our ego through ego death, then we enter a blist out state. And the Tibetan monks figured this out thousands of years ago. And so what they sort of figured out is that if you want to live a life of joy and bliss and without regrets, and you want to conquer that fear of death, the way that you do it is by de-identifying with the ego. The Sanskrit term for this is Ahamgar, and we're going to dive into this a little bit more.

So let's understand how the Ahamgar leads to suffering. So when I sort of think about, so now, like I was born Alok, right? But at some point, I became Dr. K. And the interesting thing is that once I become Dr. K, I open myself up to all kinds of joy and suffering. So now that I am Dr. K, I'm a big guy. And that pumps up my ego, right? And I sort of feel like I'm a somebody. But the interesting that happens is the moment I start pumping up my ego, all these other thoughts kind of come in. Well, what happens if there's going to be a doctor one day who's better than I am, who's more handsome and more beautiful. than I am. Oh my God, I'm now 40 years old. I'm getting older. Dr. K is going to be older. There's going to be someone sexier and more beautiful and more knowledgeable and knows more than I do. Oh my God, Dr. K is not going to be so great in the future or someone will start shit talking me on the internet, right? And now suddenly like Dr. K, like that hurts me because I identify with Dr. K. So the moment that I put on the mantle of this ego identification, I actually open myself up to a lot of pride.

But pride doesn't really feel good, right? Even if it feels good for a little while, like anytime you feel prideful, that's not going to last forever. And pride and insecurity go hand in hand. And so I open myself up to a lot of different hurt. And so this is what's kind of weird. The yogis kind of figured out that what I think I am is not really what I am. And you may have experienced this if you sort of thought, oh my God, my life is falling apart. I am screwed.

But if you sort of think about I am screwed, the only way you can be screwed is if you were identify with that I. And maybe it's a breakup or maybe it's failing a single class and then you think your life is over, but you're unable to take a step back. And at some point, as you grow older, you learn how to take a step back, right? You start to learn, oh, the world doesn't revolve around me. Even though everything with my ego-based life, I thought this was everything in my life, falls apart, it doesn't mean that my life is actually over. So even everyone sort of learns some degree of that distance of identification with the self. And if you really want to conquer this, we're going to teach you a technique that will sort of train you in the process of disidentifying

with yourself. And that is something that I call the MEC pilot meditation. So when we sort of sit down and think about ourselves, I think of this as part of me. So if you do studies on people and you ask them, if you lost both of your hands, what would you do? And a lot of people would say things like, okay, if I lost both of my hands, I wouldn't even want to be alive. I would kill myself. I would rather be dead than lose both of my lives. This is the way that people think because they think I am mean, oh my God, without my hands, I wouldn't be able to live. The interesting thing is when you actually have accidents with people who lose limbs, ahead of time, they think that they don't want to live, but afterwards, basically everyone adapts. Like 95, I don't have specific statistics, but I want to say

95 to 99% of people actually adapt to losing a limb and are actually totally fine with it. So it's that idea of who they are in the life that they can live that sort of gets changed and human beings learn to adapt. So that's not really who you are. And the sense of self changes, right? Your thoughts change, your identity changes. Today I'm a doctor, but I wasn't born a doctor, but I'm still me. I was me when I'm born and I'm me now. But doctor isn't necessarily a part of it, Because if doctor is a core part of my identity, then it had to be there when I was born. So there's kind of this weird thing that the yogis kind of figured out, which is that there's a transcendent sense of self. Your emotions change on a day-to-day basis.

What you identify changes on a day-to-day basis. Hell, even your gender, for some people, changes over the course of their life. So there's a lot of stuff about our ego that we think we are where we're really none of those things. And the yogis actually figured out a way to teach you who you truly are. And that's the MEC pilot meditation. And so is it possible to achieve dissolution of the ego or separation from the ego without dying or using psychedelics? And the answer is absolutely. Thankfully, these Tibetan monks and people in ancient India actually figured this out.

So I'm going to teach you all something called the MEC pilot meditation. That's not the original Sanskrit. That's just sort of my adaptation. So we have to start by understanding a little bit about what the ego is from a yogic perspective. and what the true self is from the yogic perspective. So what the yogis and monks in ancient India, China, Tibet, basically figured out is that there's one part of us that is constant. And that is really what we really truly are.

So if you sort of think about your body and mind, the observation that they made is that the body and mind changes over time. And so, for example, who I am can't be my body because I'm always me, but my body is different. So when I'm first born, I, you know, I'm very small, like I'm maybe like a foot tall. And then as I go on throughout my life, my body will change, but I'm always me. And they sort of tunnel down even further and realize that even these things in the mind, which we normally identify with, even if we don't identify with the body, because

even if you lose a limb, like let's say something happens and I lose a hand or I lose a foot, I'm still me. And so the next thing that they kind of looked at is, okay, is me or does me come from the mind? And they sort of concluded that similarly, me does not come from the mind. So the ego comes from the mind, but who you truly are is outside of the mind as well. And the way that they kind of observe this is that they notice that once again, the mind fluctuates. So all the activities of the mind are never permanent. All of our emotions, all of our thoughts, even our sense of ego or identity will change over time. I used to be a winner and now I'm a loser. Therefore, that's not really constant. What they tunnel down into and what they discovered is the one thing that is constant

is your capacity to experience, observe, or witness. So I know this sounds kind of weird, but if you think about any experience that you've had in life, whether it's good or bad, whether it's painful or pleasurable, the one common element, the one thing that ties together every part of your life is the fact that you experienced it.

And even Descartes kind of tunneled down into this or discovered this with Cogito ergo sum, which means I think, therefore I am. And what Descartes sort of looked at is he said, that, okay, I can't trust my mind. Maybe my mind has hallucinations. Sometimes people think wrong things, so even sensory perceptions can be wrong. But the one thing that is Descartes' foundation as well is, no matter whether I'm hallucinating or not, there is at least something that is experiencing the hallucinations. And the yogis discovered the exact same thing. So if we

want to disidentify from the ego, and the ego is going to be sort of the way that we attach ourselves to our body and our mind, the way to do that is the MEC pilot meditation. And this meditation is very, very simple, but it's actually quite difficult, and you have to do it for a long period of time to really see results. So all you have to do for the MEC pilot meditation, just close your eyes. And all of the parts of you that you think are you, imagine that you are a pilot controlling a MEC. And so if I tell my arm, so this is my arm, right? So I think that this is part of me. But if I kind of just wave it through the air with my eyes closed, which you'll kind of notice, is that you can send a command from somewhere up here and that the body will hopefully listen.

You can also send a command from somewhere up here and the mind will hopefully listen. And you all may have sort of realize this that sometimes you get your, you try to get your mind to do stuff, but the mind doesn't actually listen. And so then the question becomes, okay, if I'm trying to force my mind to focus, which part of me is forcing the mind to focus? because it's clearly not like I'm trying to force my mind, right? So in that moment, my mind is outside of me. It's something that I'm trying to exert control over.

So the yogis basically figured out, and this is what I encourage y'all to do in the Mek Pilot meditation, is notice that the things that you normally think are you are actually objects for you to act on. So whether it's flexing my hand, right, or it's directing my mind to do something. And then something interesting happens. As you all sort of notice that these things, are outside of you, you can also ground yourself kind of in this awareness. And it's kind of hard to describe, but if you close your eyes and you sort of notice, where do you witness things? Where do you

sort of feel that interpretation of body signals? Like, where is that center where all of the sensory information comes from? It actually comes from like somewhere up here. So what I want y'all to do in the Pek Pilot meditation is, first of all, just observe that all of the things that are you are actually things that you can look down on as a MEC pilot. The second step to the meditation is to actually start to sit in that place when you feel identified with the body or the mind. So I recently did this. I got food poisoning recently, and this was one of the challenges that I used to have, where even with food poisoning, I feel like I'm suffering. But the more that I sit inside the MEC pilot, the more tolerable the suffering becomes. And my original research when I was doing this work

at Harvard Medical School was actually on patients with chronic pain, and I would teach them to meditate. And then I would kind of ask them, hey, what is your pain score when you learn how to meditate? And the interesting thing about this study was that they found that the pain scores did not actually improve. So if you teach someone to meditate who's got metastatic cancer, their pain doesn't actually get better. But as I talked to them, I said, but you are feeling better. Why is that? And they said, well, it feels like there's a window between me and the pain. The pain hasn't actually gotten better. it's just it affects me less. So this principle is actually tied into this idea of the MEC pilot meditation.

And the more that you can take distance from yourself and sort of just sit and notice the experience, notice the witness. The more that you can take a step back from your life, the more chill your life will become. And as you get stronger in this technique, as you learn how to witness and just sit with your experience, what you'll start to discover is that your life will have to be a lot of have fewer and fewer regrets.