Passion Struck with John R. Miles - THE POWER OF INTENTIONAL BEHAVIOR CHANGE - The Best Passion Struck Podcast Moments of 2022 EP 234

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Today’s special episode of the Passion Struck podcast highlights some of our best interviews from 2022, showcasing the power of intentional behavior change. There is growing interest in the intersection of neuroscience, behavior science, and alternative health. By studying these fields together, we can better understand the various factors influencing our behavior and well-being and develop more effective approaches to promoting health and reducing suffering.  The Power of Intentional Behavior Change Show Notes Today's episode unites a world-class interdisciplinary team of academic and healthcare experts to advance the science, research, and practice of intentional behavior change, including Katy Milkman, Don Moore, Cassie Holmes, Max Bazerman, Ayelet Fishbach, Jonah Berger, Sara Mednick David Vago, Jordyn Feingold, Scott Barry Kaufman, Kara Fitzgerald, Dominic D'Agostino, Cynthia Li, and Chris Palmer.  By integrating their insights from these fields, we may be able to develop more comprehensive and effective strategies for improving health and quality of life. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/the-power-of-intentional-behavior-change/  Brought to you by American Giant. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/LaMgOTvmwgE  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/   Episode 155 with Dr. Katy Milkman: https://passionstruck.com/katy-milkman-behavior-change-for-good/ Episode 123 with Dr. David Vago: https://passionstruck.com/dr-david-vago-on-self-transcendence/ Episode 185 with Dr. Cassie Holmes: https://passionstruck.com/cassie-holmes-happier-hour-time-management/ Episode 227 with Dr. Jonah Berger: https://passionstruck.com/jonah-berger-the-catalyst-remove-change-barriers/ Episode 176 with Dr. Ayelet Fishbach: https://passionstruck.com/ayelet-fishbach-get-it-done-find-the-fun-path/ Episode 194 with Dr. Max Bazerman and Dr. Don Moore: https://passionstruck.com/max-bazerman-don-moore-better-choices/ Episode 188 with Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman and Dr. Jordyn Feinbold: https://passionstruck.com/jordyn-feingold-scott-barry-kaufman-chose-growth/ Episode 161 with Dr. Sara Mednick: https://passionstruck.com/sara-mednick-recharge-your-brain-body/ Episode 182 with Dr. Dominic D'Agostino: https://passionstruck.com/dr-dominic-dagostino-on-metabolic-health/ Episode 174 with Dr. Kara Fitzgerald: https://passionstruck.com/dr-kara-fitzgerald-become-younger-you/ Episode 216 with Dr. Chris Plamer: https://passionstruck.com/dr-chris-palmer-brain-energy-mental-health/ Episode 228 with Dr. Cynthia Li: https://passionstruck.com/dr-cynthia-li-on-intuitive-healing-using-qigong/   ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struct Podcast. The answer is absolutely in line with your broader thesis around intentionality. When we pay attention to time as our critical resource, that leads us to be more thoughtful, more deliberate in how we spend it, spending in ways that are closer and more aligned with our values. So we become more deliberate with how we spend our time.

Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.

We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 234 of PassionStruck. And thank you to each and every one of you who comes back weekly to listen and learn,

how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you would just like to introduce this to a friend or family member, we now have episode starter packs, both on Spotify and on the PassionStruck website. And these are collections of our fans' favorite episodes

that we organize into convenient topics to give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything we do here on the show. Just go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash starter packs to get started. And I don't know about you, but 2022 has gone by in just a flash. And I can't believe that we are already at the end of the year. And earlier in the week, I did an episode that featured some of my favorite interviews

that I did with people like Daniel Pink, Rich and Ruben, Susan Cain, Admiral Stavridas, and many, many others. So go check that episode out, you haven't had an opportunity. And over the course of the year, we had a number of just amazing accolades that I wanted to share with you, including hitting number one on the iTunes chart for alternative health. Number eight on the iTunes chart for health and fitness. Interview Valet recognized us as the fourth best podcast for conversation, and the third best for mindset. And lastly, FeedSpot named us as one of the 50 most inspirational podcasts of the year.

Thank you all so much for the support that you have shown this show throughout the year, and for trusting me to bring you quality content every week that helps inspire you to lead an intentional life. There is growing interest in the intersection of neuroscience, behavioral science, and alternative health. By studying these fields together, we can better understand the various factors that influence our behavior and well-being and develop more effective approaches to promoting health and reducing suffering.

Today's episode unites a world-class interdisciplinary team of academic and healthcare experts to advance the science, research, and practice of intentional behavioral change, including Katie Milkman, Don Moore, Cassie Homes, Max Bezerman, Eilith Fishback, Jonah Berger, Sarah Medneck, David Vago, Jordan Fine Gold, Stopperikoffman, Tara Fitzgerald, Dominic D'Augustino, Cynthia Lee, and Chris Palmer. By integrating their insights from these fields, we may be able to develop more comprehensive and effective strategies from proven health and quality of life. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide

on creating an intentional life. Now, let that journey begin. Dr. Katie Melkman is a behavioral economist and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and she brought a unique perspective to the podcast this year by sharing her scientific principles and research on the subject of how people change. During our interview, I pointed out to Katie that her research indicates that regardless of your age, we are all capable of behavioral change.

But I asked her why it is people get this mindset that they can't change, where that someone else in their life can't change. Well, first of all, I should say change is hard. It's not as though there's some magic wand we can wave and just instantly be a different person. And so I think there's a good reason that we have this, I'll call it a prejudice, towards thinking we're not going to be able to change, because it isn't easy. But I think the ways in which we can change are also different than often people recognize.

Those are a few things. One, there's wonderful research by Dan Gilbert, who's a psychologist at Harvard, showing that we think we will change far less than we do over any time span. Our forecast is like we will be more stable as humans than we are. And that's a misappreciation of the way

that our social circumstances evolve, our preferences evolve, you know, our taste in music changes over decade time periods. All of these things just happen naturally. I think that same bias may be part of what's making us think it won't be possible to change. Because we don't recognize that the world is constantly swirling around feeding us new inputs, new social experiences,

new beliefs, new understandings, and that it does take us on more of a journey than we appreciate. But second is, when we put our mind to it and say, I want to change, there are a set of tools we can use that will help us achieve those goals deliberately if we want to. Now, not everyone will want to. And you might think, oh, I met this person.

And could they be a long-term life partner? I don't know. Maybe they can ever change. Well, the answer is, if they don't want to change, and they aren't interested in being deliberate about using these tools, well, you can't force them to. It's more that we have the agency to change ourselves when we choose to, if we use the best to change ourselves when we choose to if we use

the best principles and it's going to be work and it's going to take time and it probably will have setbacks. But the evidence is that when we set the right kinds of goals, when we use the right strategies, there is an opportunity. Dr. David Vago is a neuroscientist and associate professor at the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. Dr. Vago's work focuses on understanding the neuro mechanisms underlying mindfulness and its effects on brain behavior. His research has also highlighted the potential benefits of mindfulness and meditation for various health conditions including depression, chronic pain, and addiction. He has explored the use of mindfulness-based intervention in clinical settings, such as in the treatment

of post-traumatic stress disorder. Overall, Dr. Vago's work has contributed to the growing body of evidence, supporting the use of mindfulness and meditation as effective tools for promoting mental and physical health. And during our interview, I asked him why his holiness, the Dalai Lama, has taken such a unique interest in his work and the personal challenge that the Dalai Lama gave him.

Thanks for going there. I feel very motivated by his holiness, the Dalai Lama, and his efforts to make people realize how important compassion is, compassion and bringing people into this non-dual state of awareness, which is we can dissolve the boundaries between ourselves and others. And you see this so often with human dynamics in the workplace or in a professional setting, people are always competitive with each other. It's just sort of naturally set up that way in society that we compete, especially in the academic world. There's always competition, you're always competing for grants and such.

But the goal here is that we're all going to work together to improve humanity. And how do we do that? He's always been an inspiration for me. And because as a meditation practitioner, of course, he's one of the great teachers of the Tibetan Vajrayana path. So I've had the opportunity to meet with him a bunch of times through my work with the Mind and Life Institute, but there was a specific time

where I got to present my work to him with a number of emerging leaders in the field of contemplative science and mindfulness research and meditation research. And he said basically that he looked at us and there was sort of a changing of the guard. There's some people who did some of this work in the 70s and they're sort of moving in towards the retirement phase maybe or just starting to look for legacy, leaving their legacy with newer generation of scientists who focus on meditation and mindsets and doing the rigorous

work that needs to be done for the future. And he says, now you and your generation, it was talking to six of us that were in his presence, you and your generation have the responsibility to build a happy, peaceful world. It's hard for me to even say that you're knowing that right now, Ukraine is being invaded at this point, and there's a possibility for people to die in the context of war, but millions of people want a peaceful world.

They're just lacking the knowledge of how to do so, right? There's just these structures embedded in our world and in our society to compete with each other. So, few individuals show interest in actually doing the work, and he was telling us, month by month, year by year, you will gain awareness about these things, how to bring more conviction to others' minds with evidence to convince others. And he said, he will watch us, whether we are really helping to build a happy peaceful world or not. And then he was joking, and he's a good joker. He said, I'll be, I'll watch from either hell or heaven. If from hell, there's not much I can do. But if you do the wrong things, I'll come as a demon

with horns and hunt you down. But he really was just being playful and saying it, you should constantly check your own motivation. So I have been continually motivated no matter which way I go, whether I stay in the academic path or work with others in the for-profit sector or in the context of this new society that we're building, I really am just trying to use my neuroscience skills and my own meditation practice to help inform people about the science, the rigor of in which we can say meditation can have a truly lasting impact and help humanity in a positive way. And that's really the gist of it.

It's really just a form of motivation for me. Dr. Cassie Holmes is a professor of marketing and behavioral decision making at the UCLA Anderson School of Management and author of the best-selling book, Happier Hour. In her work, Dr. Holmes provides, how to think about and spend time to live a more joyful life. And during our interview, we discuss that a healthy chunk of our happiness

is determined by our intentional thoughts and behaviors. What this means is that our happiness is significantly influenced by what we think and do. And I ask Cassie, why do those who place more intentional focus on their time, rather than money, report more positivity in their lives and more satisfaction in their lives? And the answer is absolutely in line

with your broader thesis around intentionality. When we pay attention to time as our critical resource, that leads us to be more thoughtful, more deliberate in how we spend it, spending in ways that are closer and more aligned with our values. So we become more deliberate with how we spend our time. Touching back to some of my very early research where I was looking at the effect of focusing on time versus money.

What I found was simply those who are chronically more focused on time versus money or value their time very highly are happier. And that is controlling for how much time they have which you can measure by age, you can measure by how many hours they work per week. It's also controlling for how much time they have, which you can measure by age, you can measure by how many hours they work per week. It's also controlling for how much money they have, which you can measure by income level. And what it's picking up on is that those who value time are happier because they are more deliberate in how they invest it. Now going to the quote that you read is like, okay, so we need to be deliberate.

Happiness is a choice. So yes, there are inputs into our happiness that we don't have control over. So our inherited disposition has a big effect actually on our happiness. So where are you born as sort of naturally have glass half full type person, or are you sort of more of a natural grime?

And this is the effects of our inherited disposition are quite large. And then there's those circumstances. So things that are in our life that we don't have control over, like income level, like a level of attractiveness, near-to-status, yes, you can decide to get married. But these are sort of circumstantial factors

that you don't have sort of daily influence over. Those are things that actually have a significantly smaller effect than people think. Because so many individuals think that if only I had a ton of money, if only I was super gorgeous, if only I had that huge fancy house, then I will be happier. The research shows that yes, sometimes those have an initial effect, but that effect is much smaller than we think. And I actually spend the first sort of two

classes in my course trying to sort of re making that point that these things that we think are those sort of secrets to happiness have less of an influence than we think. And then the part that I am really interested in is that part that we do have control over that sort of remaining variance. In our happiness and that is how we think and how we behave. And that's where the science comes in because yes, it's about intentionality, but even if I want to be intentional, there's still the question of like, okay, well then, what should I be doing? And there is work that can inform how will we be spending our time?

There's time tracking research that tracks individuals over the course of their day, whether they're doing and how do they feel while doing it. And so that we can look at on average, what are those activities that tend to be associated with higher levels of happiness, what are those activities that tend to be associated with the most negative emotion, you see that the activities that on average are associated with the sort of contribute to the greatest amount of happiness or social connection. So spending time with family and friends, those activities that tend to on average are associated with the least amount of happiness are commuting, work, and housework. So getting to work, getting home from work, work itself, you know, doing work when you go home. But notably, that research is based off of averages. And so an exercise that I have my students do and I walk through in great detail in happier hour is so helpful because it is basically having you tracking your own time. So over

the course of a couple of weeks, riding down every half hour, what are you doing? But most importantly, how happy are you on a skill 1 to 10, like overall positivity? So not just like is it sort of pleasurable and fun, but how how positive overall, how satisfying, how meaningful. So that you have your own personal data set and can identify, okay, whether those activities that are for me are the most happy, whether those activities that are the least happy. So you don't have to chunk all of work together because there's going to be some work activities that are more positive, some work activities that are more negative. There are going to be some social activities that are more positive, there are going to be some social activities that are more negative. And so you can pull out what are actually the features underlying those activities that can inform

given that our happiness is also a choice of how we spend our time is it can inform those activities that we spend our time on. Dr. Jonah Berger is a professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and a repeat New York Times best-selling author. He's known for his research on consumer behavior, award-of-mouth communication, and the psychological factors that drive social transmission. Dr. Berger's book, The Catalyst, How to Change Anyone's Mind, is based on his research on the science of persuasion.

And the factors that influence whether or not people are willing to change their beliefs and behaviors. The book explores the ways in which people are influenced by their social connections and the messages that they receive from others and offers practical strategies for effectively communicating with and persuading others. And in our interview, I asked Jonah, how do you get people to overcome the inertia to change their minds?

Yeah, I think it's even worth taking a step back of why I wrote this book in the first place. As you noted, I have written a couple books before and I'd been doing sort of speaking and consulting around contagious and around invisible influence. And I was using some tools with clients that found interesting and useful. And I started realizing that not all those tools were in the books that I had written so far. And I started knowing some commonalities between different things. And I wondered similarly, do you, could there be a better way to create change?

Think about it. Everyone at the core has something they want to change. Boys want to change their boss's mind, the marketers or sales people want to change that. Consumers mind, leaders may want to transform organizations, nonprofits and the folks that work in them want to change the world, startups want to change industries. Everyone, some people said, I just want to change organizations, nonprofits, and the folks that work in them want to change world. Startups want to change industries.

Everyone, some people say, I just want to change my spouse's mind. I just want to change my kids' behavior. Everyone at the core has something they want to change. But as you've noted, it often doesn't work. Right, often we push, we pressure, we cajole, and nothing happens. And so the question I started to ask myself is, could there be a better way?

Could there be a better way to change minds and drive action, not by pushing, but by doing something else? I found there's very much an interesting analogy to make in chemistry. So in chemistry, obviously, changes really hard. Think about diamond being squeezed together out of carbon over eons of time. Think about plant matter being turned into oil over millions and millions of years. Chemists obviously can't wait that long. So in the lab, they often add temperature and pressure. They heat things up, they squeeze them together.

And you can make it analogy to the social world, right? When we create change, we similarly, we put energy into the system, right? We think if we just push people a little harder, they'll change. That's good why we think that. If there's a chair, for example, in the middle of a room, and we wanna get it to move,

we're pushing is a great way to move that chair. So we apply the same intuition to people. We think if I give more facts, more figures, more reasons, more information, they'll change. But if we think about it last time, we try to change someone's mind or someone tried to change us, we're more than chairs. Force in a particular direction doesn't make us move, it often makes us resist. So what does create that change? And so going back to chemistry in the lab, chemists often add a special set of substances to make change happen faster and easier. These

substances don't heat things up, they don't increase the pressure, they allow change to happen less energy, not more. And these substances, as you can probably guess already, are called catalysts. And with most interesting about these is the way they create change. They don't squeeze things together, they don't heat them up, they don't add more energy to the system. They mitigate and remove the barriers to change. They identify ways to make change happen with less energy, not more, and I think the same analogy can be made to the social world. If you look at those great change agents, those catalysts and whatever organization

or business you may work for or know of, they often they don't just say, well, what could I do to get someone to change? Instead, they take a subtly, but importantly, different approach. They say, well, why hasn't that person changed already? What's stopping them? What are the barriers or obstacles that are getting in the way and how by removing those barriers can make change more likely? And it's a subtle shift, but a really important one. Often as change agents, we know a lot about the outcome we want to achieve, the thing we want to happen.

We often know a lot less about the people, organizations that we're trying to change. But the more we understand them, the more we understand the barriers that are preventing them from changing, the more effective we can be. Dr. Eilert Fishback is a professor of behavioral science

and marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. She's known for her research on motivation, self-regulation, as well as decision making. Professor Fishback's research has been widely cited and has contributed to a wide variety of fields, including psychology, marketing, and business. In our interview, we discussed her new book, Get It Done.

And I asked her, why is it so hard for us to choose our personal objectives? And what is the difference between do versus do not goals? Two questions there. One reason it's hard to choose our objectives is that we often plan for our future self. and we have this policy where we think that our future self is going to be much more for a superhuman than our present self, which means that when we plan for the future we are envision the person that doesn't get tired or hungry or frustrated or bored. And that person of course will get up at 6am and walk until midnight well not really and so it's often hard to add plan because our plans are suffer from what we refer to as the

empathy gap is lack of empathy for our future self. Your second question about do versus do not goals, well it's better to set do goals because they are more likely to be exciting, do goals are more likely to be intrinsically motivating, they are not sure, okay, do not goals, don't eat that, don't smoke that, don't talk to that person, don't engage in that activity. These are goals that seem less exciting, more like a chore. One problem with these goals is they tend to bring to mind exactly the thing that you are not allowed to do. So you think I should not talk to my ex and how do you know that you are not talking to your ex or you ask yourself am I, and by that you bring to mind. The thought that you were trying to get out of your mind

and ask yourself, have I eaten or whatever, read meat and you bring to mind the fact that you are tempted by that food. And another reason is that do not girls tend to elicit psychological reactions and they maybe will throw another concept in psychology here. What psychological reactions is when you become the rattle that you wear when you wear a kid. You want to do something exactly because your parents or teacher told you not to. You want to eat the thing that you told yourself that you should not eat exactly because your parents or teacher told you not to. You want to eat the thing

that you told yourself that you should not eat exactly because you told yourself that you should not eat that and that's not good for the goal and for your success. One advantage of avoidance goals is that they tend to seem urgent. If you think that you should not do something, you probably think that you should not do it right now, but the stamina is less, when it's not a good predictor, what you're going to do in the long run. Dr. Max Spaserman and Dr. Don Moore, were known for their work in the fields of decision-making,

behavioral economics and behavioral ethics. Professor Max Spaserman is the Jesse Isador Strauss, Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School, he is known for his research on decision-making, negotiation, and conflict resolution. Some of his key contributions include the concept of bounded ethicality, which highlights the ways that individuals' ethical judgment can be influenced by the contacts in which decisions are made. Professor Don Moore is the Lorraine Tyson Mitchell Chair

in Leadership and Communication at Berkeley Hoss and serves as Associate Dean for Academic Affairs. He is known for his research on judgment and decision-making, particularly in the areas of risk and uncertainty. During our interview, we discussed their brand new book, Decision Leadership, and I asked them why, as the way we work, changes drastically, will it have a profound change on how we make decisions in the role of organizations as decision factories? Yeah, so thanks for that, John. In the book, we talk about organizations as decision factories, and as more of the effortful labor gets delegated to automated systems, the effortful labor gets delegated to automated systems,

the decisions of the humans in the loop becomes more and more important. And an organization that's a decision factory where it's outcomes, it successes the welfare of the people inside and the people affected by the organization's operations, all of those depend on the effectiveness of the decisions of the people inside. And so our book focuses on what leaders can do to enhance the effectiveness of those decisions,

to empower people to behave in ways more consistent with their own ethical values, where they're considering the broader impacts of their choices and the choices of those around them, as far as the impacts beyond the the small set of insiders to the larger world, the natural environment, and future generations. What we get in life is driven first and foremost by the quality of our decisions and that holds true for especially for leaders who are in a position to influence the quality of the decisions of those around them. So I'm struck John by the fact that people listening to this podcast are doing so online,

almost by definition, and so much of what we do happens online. And anybody who creates a new organization that operates from early online creates a platform. And when they create a platform, whether they think about it or not, they're creating a decision architecture that's going to potentially influence all the people

who eventually end up on that platform. So they are creating the decision architecture. They are leading by what they do in terms of the structure of that, by the design of that platform. As you mentioned my work with Mike Luka and we wrote this book, The Power of Experiments, and Don and I certainly built off of that, were big fans of the use of experiments in our book decision leadership. But one story that really belongs to Mike Luka, even though it's in a book that has my name on it, and Don and I refer to it, is this story about Airbnb. And the founders of Airbnb created a platform that wanted to create more connectivity between guests and hosts.

So they featured people's photos because people like to know who the person they're interacting with is in a photo is what means of doing it. But what the leaders didn't think about is how people might use that information in unfortunate ways. And sort of years after the platforms created a group of Harvard researchers, including Microka and Ben Adelman and Dan Sversky, come along and they find out that a small but significant portion of hosts are pretty racist and don't take black guess.

And all of a sudden, the leaders of Airbnb become aware of the fact that sort of a choice that they made for perfectly well-intentioned reasons had the perverse effect of allowing hosts to be racist. And this is something that they could have avoided with very, very different decisions. And what we want all leaders to do, whether they're thinking about how to set up the cafeteria to lead people to healthier choices, or whether they want to sort of be more responsive on the DEI front, how we set up our organizations, including platforms, is going to have a dramatic effect

on the decisions of others. And we want people thinking about the decisions of others as they go about making those design decisions. The every platform designer worries about this in some form or other. You can set up your website to make it easy for customers to find what they're looking for and to buy your products. Or you can, through bad design, make

that very difficult for customers, where they're confused, uncertain how to proceed with the transaction and they'll just wind up drifting away and leaving your website without actually successfully consummating the transaction. That's a trivial example, but it has analogies to many more consequential decisions including those that Max highlights. And I love trivial decisions because I think that we want leaders to think about the millions of trivial decisions that they're affecting, because cumulatively, they matter a great deal. Dr. Scott Berry-Koffman is a cognitive psychologist, author and host of the

psychology podcast. Scott is a professor at Columbia University and director for the center of human potential. He is interested in using his research to help all kinds of minds live a creative, fulfilling, and self-actualized life. Dr. Jordan Feingold is a physician, researcher, author, teacher, and well-being expert who applied positive psychology in understanding how to implement empirical science of well-being into how you prevent, and treat burnout and mental illness. Jordan and Scott co-authored the book, Choose Growth,

a workbook for transcending trauma, fear, and self-doubt. And during our interview, I asked them, why do we need to constantly choose growth instead of living a life that's on autopilot? This idea of choice is so critical, and it's so critical that it is the title of our book, Choose Growth. and this comes from a quote by Abraham Maslow, I'm just gonna read it, so I don't misquote it.

But it's, one can choose to go back towards safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again. Fear must be overcome again and again. And that is where the title of the book comes from. In my own psychiatry training and my training director, one of them, Oshersign, and always tells me we always have a choice. Human beings always have a choice.

Everything we do. There are many things that we cannot choose. For example, our genetic makeup, we had no choice. We didn't choose to be alive. We didn't choose the family as we were born into. We didn't choose to be alive. We didn't choose the family as we were born into. We didn't choose the conditions of our birds. There are so many things that we have no control over yet that can't build an illusion that we are not in control of anything. And one of the goals of this book is to help people understand we often have more choices than we actually think we do.

And if we fall subject to a victim mentality or think the world is just happening to us and I know this idea of being a victim is something Scott is incredibly excited about thinking through and I'll leave that to him. If we choose to see ourselves in that way versus choosing to see ourselves as a gentick being, to have a lot more control than we think, we can actually build our autonomy, we can start to bolster our self-esteem, we can move in the directions of life that we want to go. Of course, with some limitations and these choices are not necessarily equitable across society, and we have to recognize

the real structural barriers to making choices that are in line with our goals, and how we may have to overcome different barriers to do so, but we always have a choice. And this book is really about helping people identify like what is in our control and what is not, and how do we really optimize that locus of control and live the life that is

authentic to us and in line with our values. Wonderful. Tell Jordan, there's so much nuance there. We have with our environments and how can affect how some choices can be harder to choose the growth option versus others. We're trying to think this through. Sometimes a really big part of the choosing the growth

option actually is choosing to change your environment. The most simplest example is if you have lots of, if you wanna lose weight, don't keep lots of staff all around your apartment. If I have like starbursts everywhere, you know, it's gonna be harder for me to choose the growth option when I'm really craving sugar. This idea of choosing growth,

it's, we're not trying to say it's just always easy, right? To just choose the growth option, but there are things we can do in our lives to make that option easier for us to choose. Dr. Sarah Medneck is a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of California, Irvine. She's known for her research on sleep memory as well as the brain.

Dr. Medneck is the author of Take a Nap, Change Your Life, which explores the science of napping and its potential benefits for cognitive function and overall well-being. And she is also the author of the new book, The Power of the Downstate. Dr. Mednex research has been widely cited and has contributed to our understanding

of the relationship between sleep and brain function. I asked Dr. Mednex to explain, what is the power of the downstate and why is it so essential to our well-being. The downstate is a concept that I developed in my lab, based on my own research or my lab's research and a lot of other people's research that really encapsulates all of the restorative processes

that we can engage in on a daily basis, both in the daytime and the nighttime, to restore and replenish our resources. And it comes with this idea that we are rhythmic animals and plant bacteria, all animals on the planet are rhythmic, meaning that we have periods of upstates where we're super active and downstates where we need to replenish those resources

that get used in the upstate. The downstate comes from a sleep concept that I can also talk about, but it really is sort of a umbrella concept of all of the different restorative processes that we need to engage in. Well, I find this whole concept of the upstate and the downstate truly fascinating and one of the things I wanted to ask is why are we only as good in our upstates as we are in our downstates and I think this has a corollary to Newton's third law of action and reaction yes exactly when you consider a rhythm every rhythm has an upstate and downstate, meaning that if you think about a wave, the wave crashing on the beach is a system that first does an internal drawing in of its resources and drawing in of all the energy and pulling into itself back into

the ocean before it crashes and has this outward activation. And this is the same as any rhythm, right, that you have this inward drawing in and an outward expression of activity. This is what a rhythm is, is that there's an upstate where the wave is crashing and a downstate where it draws in. And it goes up and down and up and down and up and down.

We have this same system of ups and downs in every cell in our body. We have these little clocks that are basically looking for a time where it should be active and at time where it should be dormant. And these cells grouped together. They form processes in organs where a cardiovascular system has an upstate and a downstate. Our metabolism has an upstate where it's at its prime. The resources are primed and ready for eating and a downstate where we should stop eating and give it some time to restore itself and replenish its resources. Our brains also have this upstate and downstate where our frontal cortex, which is the part of the brain that does all this executive function and attention and big thinking,

that brain area actually has a period where it's at its most powerful and then it starts to recede and it goes into the downstate where it can replenish itself. So at every level of analysis, you can actually see that these systems have the same kind of idea of activity and repose. And not considering your down state, not considering these rhythms is a good example of what we do all the time, right? What society is doing, which is emphasizing time in the upstate and not prioritizing time in the downstate. Dr. Dominic Dogostino is a University of South Florida scientist

and researcher who has made significant contributions in the fields of nutrition and health. His work is focused on the ketogenic diet, including its effects on various biomarkers or measurable indicators of health. For example, he has studied the impact of the ketogenic diet, including its effects on various biomarkers, or measurable indicators of health. For example, he studied the impact of the ketogenic diet on blood sugar levels, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels, and has found that it can lead to improvements in these biomarkers in people who have certain conditions such as type 2 diabetes and metabolic syndrome. In our interview, I asked him, how can you hack these biomarkers as a therapeutic tool for a range of medical conditions? Great question. I would preface this by saying that if you want to start on a ketogenic diet to really do your research,

not all ketogenic diets are constructed the same way. There's healthy ways to do it and non-healthy ways to do it. And you want to make sure that your kidney function is good, your liver function, things like that. So it is initially a stress to your body because it forces your body to go from burning carbohydrates for fuel to burning fat and ketones for fuel. And this changes our physiologies in ways that are sometimes unpredictable, but the majority of changes that happen rapidly and a very significant majority of changes that happen. Long-term are very positive, so there's very, very positive changes in cardiometabolic biomarkers that are responsible for our long-term health. And probably most importantly, ketogenic diets can cause rapid weight loss. That's usually a good thing, but a people tend to do a yo-yo diet. They go on ketogenic diets and then it go completely off.

For the large majority of people just wanting to use the ketogenic diet for weight loss, it is highly effective for that, but more importantly, it's very effective for weight loss maintenance. So a lot of diets will allow you to lose weight. It's harder to sustain that weight loss. So you could potentially use a ketogenic diet to get down to your ideal weight and then gradually add some carbohydrates back in, ideally not in the form of sugar or processed carbohydrates or even starch, but add carbohydrates back in the form of vegetables and maybe a small amount of fruit.

And then you can gradually tweak the diet to maintain that weight loss and to preserve the benefits that are associated with that weight loss. There's different ways to implement the diet and there's healthy ways and there's not healthy ways. So what I would advise to do more of the Mediterranean style modified ketogenic diet,

which is essentially a ketogenic diet that's rich in fish, poultry, eggs, red meat, limited red meat to some extent, but has a lot of salad greens and what we'd call fibrous vegetables. So vegetables that are mostly non-starchy. So above the ground vegetables, not potatoes, not sweet potatoes or white potatoes, or things like that, but basically vegetables that grow above the ground, no grains.

And what you'll find is that a host of metabolic parameters will increase and improve over time. And this will typically allow weight loss and sustain the weight loss without having to count calories for the large majority of people. And that's pretty important because the whole basis for diets and weight loss has been to count calories. And a low carbohydrate diet that doesn't even need to be ketogenic diet, which doesn't even need to be severely carbohydrate restricted,

typically changes our appetite regulation in a way that allows us to be more satiated with the food that we're eating. And by virtue of regulating glucose, blood glucose control, we call this glycemic variability, and that can be measured with a continuous glucose monitor. Without the wild fluctuations in your blood glucose, people realize that they don't have cravings like they do, eating carbohydrate-based diet, and that has significant effects for long-term weight management. Dr. Kira Fitzgerald is a natural pathic physician, author, and expert in functional medicine, reverse biologian, and authored the new book, Younger You.

And during our interview, I asked her about her insights and recommendations on how individuals can reverse their biological age and achieve optimal health and vitality. One of the main themes of Dr. Fitzgerald's work is addressing the root causes of aging, such as inflammation, hormonal imbalances, as well as stress. And in our interview, I asked her about the importance of incorporating lifestyle practices, such as regular exercise,

stress management, and healthy nutrition into one's daily routine in order to promote healthy aging and reverse the effects of aging on the body. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the reality is in this country and we should dissect what you're talking about because it's extremely, extremely important. Education is a piece of it and I think that we can inspire people, at least I hope that we can inspire people by getting them the facts. I mean, in the facts are in our country, the majority of us will have two significant chronic diseases by the time we're in our early 60s. We will be on multiple medications. Make no mistake that you will, if you're choosing the standard American lifestyle, end up

in this position. Your hard earned dollars, your lifetime commitment to your work, your kids inheritance will go to this journey. You will spend it. I mean, Big Pharma will get your money, skilled nursing facilities, hospitals. They will inherit what should rightfully go to your kids and be yours in your golden years.

That is the trajectory in this country. I mean, it's just the bitter truth. It's ugly. It's so ugly. I don't think we get that. We don't take it in. We spent 16 years of our lives, our final years, really sick and compromised. For me, that raises my, I feel such indignation,

such offense at that trajectory, that it is motivating. It's motivating because it really pisses me off frankly. No way do I want to end up in that arena. I do not want to live the standard American life and it's very motivating for me to do right by my body and to make those daily micro choices. So I think education really kind of understanding that the standard American life will put you in a skilled nursing facility propped up and taking many medications and that is where your heart earned dollars will go and if we can get enough people on board with that information and really pull the branch down to how you can live a quality life, it need to be that difficult. So here's the truth. The truth is not pretty in this country.

And here's the alternative. It was an extraordinary finding that we were able to show that a simple diet and lifestyle program doesn't need to be out of the reach of any of us was able to reverse biological age. This is broadly adoptable. On one of the peer reviewers at the journal we submitted to the journal aging said just that, that this is important information because we can all do it. It's not out of reach pluripotent stem cells therapy, $50,000 or $60,000. This is something that you can choose in your local regular grocery store and getting outside perhaps for a walk or whatever form of movement you want to do. It's not rocket science and it's not prohibitive. It needs to be prohibitively expensive to adopt some of these.

But yes, we do need to get people engaged. I will add one more thing and then I want to hear your thoughts. Certainly, the community environment helps. So this is what I have two thoughts on that. So in our study, I believe the reasons that it did so well were one, our participants were excited about engaging in a study that looked at gene expression, that was an epigenetic kind,

it was the first of its kind study. So they were jazzed up about the content, but they also worked with our nutrition team. We've got a like an elite ninja nutrition team here in our practice. And actually it's a virtual nutrition team. We work got a like an elite ninja nutrition team here in our in our practice and actually it's a virtual nutrition team. We work with people around the world who are so well-trained in the science and just getting people rolling in however they need to eat. So these nutritionists met with our study participants once a week and I think that touch point was an essential

piece to our success. Our current state on our participants is just very, very impressive. Most nutrition studies are kind of lousy and they get criticized for either poor adherence or just using dietary recall forms that people fill out every few months or even longer. So nutrition studies are notoriously flawed. And I think that we changed that by having our nutritionists stay in contact. So that's a little bit of maybe a community, but then once we launched the book, we started a Facebook group for the book that has become a massive,

really active, lovely, fun community where they post photos of their amazing meals and talk about issues they might be having that they need some brainstorming on. But so I think the community piece and I think regular consistent support are very essential. Dr. Chris Palmer is a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School. In his brand new book titled Brain Energy, he presents the first comprehensive theory of what causes mental illness, integrating decades of clinical neuroscience and metabolic research into a unifying theory that mental disorders are metabolic disorders of the brain. The theory integrates biological,

psychological, and social factors and helps us understand the connections between mental health and physical health. And during our interview, I asked Dr. Palmer about why so many psychiatric medicines are causing more harm than good. It's a really important question. And the overarching premise of my book is that mental disorders are actually metabolic disorders of the brain. I do a bit of a deep dive into the science of what that means and how that works at the cellular level. But one of the things that we know about many psychiatric medications is that they actually impair metabolism in that they cause weight gain.

They can cause type 2 diabetes. They can cause cardiovascular disease. And at least in the elderly, the FDA recognizes that they can cause premature mortality. So some of our treatments are actually impairing metabolism. And I do a bit of a deep dive into why those medicines might reduce symptoms in the short run, but I raised serious red flags about what those medicines might be doing to people over the long run, that they might actually be keeping people ill or worse yet, they might actually end up causing symptoms

or causing new symptoms or causing new disorders. And we know this with a lot of the medications, we usually call them side effects, with antipsychotic medications, for example. Sometimes they can actually cause OCD, a brand new disorder, like out of the blue, is though the person didn't have enough problems already. Now we're giving them a treatment and it's causing another disorder

on top of their already existing disorders. And then it can cause neurological problems and metabolic problems and all sorts of problems. And in the book, I raise serious concerns about these treatments. It's not that these treatments should never be used. And I want to say for the record, if you're taking any of these medications, please don't stop them on your own. Please don't just go cold turkey from all these meds because if that's a disaster and a nightmare, I've seen it a million times, don't do it. But I do want people to seriously think

about what impact their treatments are having on their metabolism and looking at the long-term trajectory and trying to assess whether these might be playing a role and actually you being chronically ill. And then I would want you to work with a professional to try to come up with better treatments and or maybe try to get off these medications in a safe and effective way. Dr. Cynthia Lee is a medical doctor and researcher who is known for her work in the field of autoimmune diseases. She is an advocate for integrative and functional medicine in how we approach

treatment, the role of environmental and lifestyle factors, and the development and management of autoimmune diseases. The use of functional medicine approaches, including nutrition and lifestyle interventions, to support immune health and manage autoimmune conditions, and how the practice of Chigong can promote physical and emotional well-being. I asked Dr. Lee about her practice of Chee Gong and how it has helped her to improve her own health and why she advocates for its use. Yeah, so just really going back to basics, like Chi is what basically just think of it as life energy.

So as I was talking earlier about our bodies being 99.99% subtle energy and actually what we call form, what we call solid and matter, is actually that same subtle energy, but really condensed. This is what these wisdom teachers in the Chigong lineage have been teaching and living and knowing through direct experience in their bodies for millennia. But modern science is now being able to sort of explain and corroborate that,

but also, and I don't mean that in a in a small way, in a big way, it's a way that anybody, you don't have to be a special student or disciple or a wisdom teacher or a healer, like it's accessible to anybody because we have the language and the technology to, right, to be able to relate to that in our daily lives. Chi is just that energy. We can call it life force, we can call it vitality, whatever you want to call that. Then Gong means work or effort. Chi Gong is a very interesting practice because it is effort, but the effort goes into connecting to yourself as your true nature of being an energy body and a conscious energy body as opposed to effort in doing things. In fact, one of the foundational

principles of Qi Gong is actually based on Taoist teachings of which is effortless action. A lot of people know that through Ikea, you don't use your energy, you use your opponents energy, you turn that energy back towards that person. So, Wu Wei is really, how do we move at the flow of life? How do we move at the flow of life? Now, one of the things in healing is that often, we think, at least I did, and when I work with patients, they have very similar ideas, concepts, is that we think of healing as climbing this mountain. And it is, but what we want to do is we want to stay in flow, right? So if we're just climbing, this is a flat line. So flat line in medicine, right? Flat line, if you're a heart rate, if you're a heart rhythm, flat lines, you have no life. So what we want to do is actually we want to bring coherence. So we have to actually go down in order to go up.

Even if the overall trajectory if you think of it as up. So oftentimes we don't want to go down. Now what's interesting about passion struck is right, we think of passion as we're passionate about something that we love. The passion, the root of it in Latin is suffering, right? It's to suffer something. So we actually, we go down and just like our bodies, we have to detox if we're always eating, but we're not eliminating, we're not pooping and peeing, we just because there's one big loaded being,

we're not healthy. So we have eliminating is letting go. And so, with healing, we have to actually also let go. We have to go into the places that we might associate with suffering, right? The parts that scare us, the shadows, the traumas in our lives. But because we're gradually building our resilience, we can go stepwise. If you're really at a low to go into areas or to work with traumas can be really traumatic. You know, we don't have that reserve. So that as we continue to build resilience,

then we have more capacity to go down. We go up when we go down, we go up when we go down. A lot of what the Qi Gong practice for me has allowed me to do is in my body to understand what it feels like to not be attached. So don't be attached, this is that's the whole paradox of healing. Don't be attached to the outcome of health or no pain or balance. You just connect to yourself and the more you do that, the less we're attached to the outcome, the more inflow things happen. And so if we're really in a state of flow, which is basically chivalm, is that healing happens really quickly.

So that's where the radical remission for me happened. That second health crisis not only did I heal within a few months, but I had a freedom in my body that I had not experienced the first time around. The first time around was still really highly managed. And yeah, but I couldn't get there just by concept. I had to actually experience that in my body. And so for me, she gave me that framework actually experience that in my body. And so for me, she gave me that framework, and it's just a practice of the methods. I hope you enjoyed today's episode, which unites a world-class interdisciplinary team

of academic and healthcare experts to advance the science, research, and practice of intentional behavior change. Links to today's episode will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the guests that we feature are here on the show. It helps to support the show and keep it free for our listeners. Videos are on YouTube at John R. Miles and we have a new clips channel at Passionstruck Clips.

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Go out there and build yours before you need it. You're about to hear a preview with a passion strike podcast interview I did with Dr. Benjamin Hardy, who is an organizational psychologist and is the world's leading expert on the psychology of entrepreneurial leadership and exponential growth. And we discuss his latest books, Be Your Future Self Now and the Gap and the Gain.

And so we're actually being driven by our goals. And so then it forces you to ask yourself, what are the things that I've either consciously or unconsciously committed myself to? And what would happen if I changed my perspective and my commitment to the future so that now my whole life is being driven by something else. It's very interesting. And obviously our view of our past can dictate which goals we set. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends or family members when you find something that's useful or interesting. If you know anyone who could use any of the advice that we gave

here on the show today, please share this episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give this show is to share it with those that you care about. In the meantime, do your best, but why will you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen? And until next time, live life, action struck. you