Something You Should Know - How to Make or Break Any Habit Successfully & How to Calm Your Brain to Make You More Intelligent

Episode Date: December 18, 2017

You can manipulate your brain to change your mood. How? Biofeedback. For example, when you are happy you smile. But it also works in reverse - if you smile, that makes you happy. And there are other ways I’ll discuss that you can improve your mood by doing very simple things. It’s fascinating. Then, have you ever wanted to create a new habit or break an old one? Charles Duhigg author of the book The Power of Habit (http://amzn.to/2yKznVb) joins me to discuss the science of habits. He offers some great techniques to start new habits and explains why you should never really try to “break” a habit. There is something else you should do instead.  Did you know you have more than five senses? For example, when you move your foot from the gas pedal to the brake pedal when you drive, you are using another sense that allows you to find those pedals without looking or using any other of your five senses. I’ll explain what it is and what it is called. There is real power in calming down. That’s according to Gyatri Devi, M.D., author of the book, A Calm Brain: How to Relax Into a Stress-Free, High-Powered Life (http://amzn.to/2on2EoX). Because our brains are always active – checking texts and emails and rushing around, we don’t have the d"own time" we need that allows the brain to perform at its best. Dr Devi has some ways to do that and she reveals the amazing benefits of a calm brain.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, how can smiling and wearing sunglasses improve your mood? I'll explain. Then, what's the best way to create a new habit or break an old one? One of the things that we know is that some habits seem to matter more than others. Some habits, when they start to change,

they seem to set off this chain reaction that makes it easier for other habits to change. Also, you have more than five senses. I'll tell you about one of them you use all the time. And if you could just calm down a little bit every day, great things can happen. When I talk about calm, I'm not really talking about someone who is sedated or mellow. I'm talking about a state where we are at our optimal,

cognitive, mental functioning. All this today on Something You Should Know. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hi and welcome you know i get a lot of emails great emails from all the world. And I got one the other day that was kind of fun. It was someone who said, you know, I love your podcast. I listen to it all the time. But what's going to happen when you run out of things people should know?

And fortunately, though, I've checked and we've got a long, long way to go. We start today with biofeedback. You've heard that term before. It's the idea that your brain is always sensing what's happening in your body, and it reviews that information to decide how it should feel about the world around you. You feel happy, your brain detects that, and then you smile. But it works both ways. If you smile, your brain detects that, and then you smile. But it works both ways. If you smile, your brain detects that, and it makes you happier.

This is according to Alex Korb, who is a researcher in neuroscience and author of the book called The Upward Spiral. So, if you want to boost your mood using biofeedback, here are some things you can do. Listen to music from your happiest time. If you were happiest in college, play music that you loved back then and it will transport you to that happy place and make you feel happier. Smile and wear sunglasses. When you smile,

you feel happier. In fact, research shows that smiling gives the brain as much pleasure as 2,000 bars of chocolate or $25,000. However, if you're in the sun and squinting, your brain thinks you're worried, and that lowers your mood. So when you wear sunglasses, you prevent the squinting, and you feel happier. When you're feeling stressed out or challenged, think about your long-term goals. It gives your brain a sense of control and releases dopamine, which will make you feel better and more motivated. And make sleep a priority.

This is important because depressed people don't sleep well, and people who don't sleep well get depressed, and it becomes a cycle that you don't want to fall into. And that is something you should know. We all have the ability to create a habit. And we can use that ability for good or evil. We can create a good habit or we can create a bad habit. But why are bad habits so easy to create while good ones seem

to take more effort? And what's the best way to break a bad habit? Charles Duhigg is an authority on this. His book, The Power of Habit, has become a hugely popular book on every bestseller list you can imagine. Welcome, Charles. Thanks for having me on. So what is a habit? How do you define it? So a habit is a decision that you made at some point that you stop making, but that your brain continues acting on. And there's been studies that have shown that 40 to 45% of what we do every single day

is in fact a habit. So the first time you backed your car out of your driveway, you probably had to think pretty hard about how to do it. You know, look at all the mirrors and keep track of where the garbage cans are. But now when you do it, it just kind of happens automatically. You don't really have to think about it. Or when you in the morning tell your wife or your husband, hey, today I'm going to have a healthy salad for lunch. And you walk into the cafeteria and you just kind of unthinkingly get the same unhealthy sandwich that you get every single day, that's a habit. Nearly half of what we do is a habit and they kind of emerge almost without our permission. And some of them are good and some

of them are not so good. Well, and actually our ability to create habits is incredibly good. In fact, there's a part of our brain known as the basal ganglia that exists basically to help us create habits. And every animal has some variation on the basal ganglia, because if you can't create habits, you really can't succeed as a species. If you have to decide before, you know, every single time you see something on the ground, whether it's a piece of food or not, if you have to make choices about how to walk in the morning, that would be so incredibly cognitively overtaxing that you'd never get a chance to invent fire or aircraft carriers. And so habits are the things that allow us and every other species to succeed. But the thing is that it's such a great talent that it can pop up without our permission.

The habits can emerge without us kind of being conscious of them. And that's why I wrote The Power of Habit, is to help people understand how to take control of what's going on inside our brains, how to shape their habits so that they're the ones that they choose rather than the ones that just happen to them. So a habit is basically a decision you make over and over again so that it gets to the point where it kind of takes, it goes on autopilot. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. And what's interesting is that oftentimes you don't even have to make it that many times.

Oftentimes, as it kind of happens without you, you make the decision once and then it just happens again and again and again. And at the core of this is our understanding of how habits work. So there's, every habit has three components. There's a cue, which is like a trigger for an automatic behavior to begin. And then there's a routine, which is the behavior itself. And then finally, there's a reward. And that reward is how our brain learns to remember that chunk of behavior for the future. And it's interesting and important to realize that because

if you can diagnose the cues and the rewards in your own life, then you can figure out what your habits are and, more importantly, how to change them. Well, you said that habits are relatively easy to create, but why are they so difficult to uncreate? Why are they so difficult to get rid of? Well, usually because people think of them as getting rid of them, right? We have this expression, you want to break a bad habit. But what all the research and science tells us is that that's the wrong way of thinking about it. In fact, there's this thing known as the golden rule of habit change,

which says that if you want to get rid of a habit, don't try and extinguish it. Instead, try and change it. Because once that neural pathway is associated with that cue, routine, reward, it's going to live in your brain for years or decades. So instead of saying, like, I want to break this habit, I want to extinguish it, what we ought to say is I want to change this habit. I want to figure out what the cue and the reward is that's driving this behavior, and then find some new behavior that corresponds to the old cue, that delivers something similar to the old reward, and instead let that kind of flourish in my life. So give me an example of a habit and how you would change it.

So exercise is actually one of the habits that people most frequently say that they wish that they could establish in their life. There was actually a big experiment that was done by a German healthcare company a number of years ago, where they took a bunch of people into a room and they told them, you know, everyone should exercise more and kind of went on at length about why that was important. And then they took a small portion of the people in that room and they took them off into another room and they gave them an additional lecture. And they said, they explained how the habit loop works, this idea of cues and routines and rewards. And they said, here's what we want you to do. We want you to choose a cue, like put your running shoes next to your bed. So you see them when you wake up first thing in the morning, or, or, or maybe, um, you know,

always plan on meeting your friend Dave at the gym on Wednesday night. And, and when you're done exercising right away, give yourself a small piece of chocolate. Now this is kind of a counter intuitive because most of us, we, this is kind of counterintuitive because most of us, we'll go and we'll exercise and we wait like 45 minutes before we eat chocolate because we like to pretend like they're not related to each other. But what the German researchers figured was that if they could get people to choose a cue and give themselves a reward right away, that it would be easier for their brain to kind of latch on to that behavior, to that habit loop and make it more automatic. Nine months later, they find everyone in that room

and they find that the people who they had gotten that additional lecture, they're actually exercising at a much higher rate than everyone else. And the lesson there is that basically, you can go ahead and figure out how to build habits. You could start an exercise habit by identifying these cues and rewards, by giving those to yourself very, very explicitly. Because in doing so, that's how you end up building a habit. Our topic is habits, and I'm speaking with one of the true authorities on the subject, Charles Duhigg, who is author of the book, The Power of Habit. My wife and I just signed up for HelloFresh, and it has changed the way we eat in our house.

Let me tell you what happened when we got started. This box got delivered to my front door with all the ingredients for several meals. All I did was pick a meal and get started. I picked sizzling southwestern chicken with bell peppers and feta crumble. Now that may sound daunting but the recipe card was easy to follow. I chopped some beautiful fresh produce, roasted the chicken, chopped the herbs, put it all together and 30 minutes later I had a delicious restaurant-quality meal everyone loved, all for about $10 a meal.

And here's something you should know. HelloFresh makes everything simple and convenient. You choose the delivery date, all the ingredients come pre-measured, and there are three plans to choose from, the classic, vegetarian, or family plan. These are really high-quality, nutritious meals that taste amazing. You have got to try HelloFresh. It'll change the way you eat, and you get $30 off your first week. Just go to HelloFresh.com and use the promo code SOMETHING30.

That's HelloFresh.com, promo code SOMETHING30 for $30 off your first week. So, Charles, it's one thing, as you were talking about a moment ago, it's one thing to create a habit, to start doing something you've never done before and make it a habit. But it's entirely different, I think, to get rid of or alter or change a habit that you have that you don't like. If you're overweight because you eat too much or you smoke cigarettes, to stop doing something is different. And you said at the beginning that you don't want to eliminate a habit, you want to change it. Well, in that case, if you want to change a habit, you have to figure out what are the cues and the rewards that already exist? And how do I take advantage of those to come up with something new? So for instance, I had this habit when I started writing this book

that I would get up every afternoon and like go eat a cookie in the cafeteria, right? And like, I actually put like a little note on my computer monitor that said, no more cookies. And somehow every afternoon, I'd managed to ignore that note and go up to the cafeteria and get a cookie. And so when I was talking to these researchers, I would ask them, how do I change this habit? How do I break this habit? And they would say, well, the key isn't to break the habit. The key is to change the habit. And they said, what's the cue? And all cues fall into usually one of five categories. It's usually a What time of day is it? Who's around me?

And I figured out pretty quickly. It was always between like 3.15 and 3.45 that this urge hit to go eat a cookie. So it's clearly like a time of day. That's the cue. Then I had to figure out what the reward is. And when I talked to the researchers and I said, well, what's the reward for the cookie? I would say, well, the cookies, right? Because they're pretty tasty.

And they would say, no, no, no, no, no. Rewards are much more complicated than that. A cookie is like a little bundle of like 12 or 15 rewards all in one tasty little package. You got to figure out, like, for instance, is it that you're hungry, in which case the reward is satisfying that hunger, in which case having an apple should work just as well as a cookie. Or is it that you need something to, the reward is relief from boredom, that you need something to kind of break up the day, in which case just getting up and taking like a walk around the block should do the trick. Or is it that the cookie, the sugar in the cookie is providing you with a burst of energy, in which case getting a coffee should be just as effective. And so for

about a week, I experimented, right? Like one day I'd take a walk around the block. One day I'd go get a cup of coffee. And what I figured out pretty quickly was that the reason why I was getting that cookie is because whenever I went up to the cafeteria to get the cookie, I would see some friends and I'd usually sit down and like chat with them for, you know, 15 or 20 minutes. And that's what was driving the habit. That's the reward is that it was offering me a social reward. And so's what was driving the habit. That's the reward, is that it was offering me a social reward. And so once I figured that out,

once I knew what the cue was and I knew what the reward was, I could change the habit. So now every day at about 3.30, I stand up from my desk and I look around for someone to go gossip with and I walk over to their desk and we gossip for 15 or 20 minutes.

And then I go back to my desk and the cookie urge is totally gone. But the only reason I was able to do that was because I actually tried to figure out what was the cue and the reward that was driving this. Can I find a new behavior that corresponds to the old cue and the old reward? So, Charles, how long do you have to do the new behavior, the new thing? How many times do you have to do it before it becomes automatic and kind of takes over? Well, it differs from person to person and behavior to behavior.

So like if you want to start an exercise habit, it might take a little while. If you want to start a habit involving like eating chocolate ice cream, probably would happen pretty quickly. But the point is that once you figure it out, it's going to get easier and easier each time, right? And you might not notice at first that it's getting easier. It might sort of feel like you've got to push yourself to get out in the morning and put on those running shoes that are next to your bed and go for a run and give yourself a piece of chocolate. But at some point, your brain is going to kind of take over, and you're just going to be out running and realize, oh, that wasn't hard at all. And that's kind of how habits work.

They just kind of emerge on their own. Is getting up at the same time every morning a habit? And I don't mean with an alarm clock. I mean, I wake up every morning about 6.45. I always do. I always do. And is that a habit I've created or is that something else? I mean, probably it's a habit. We would have to figure out kind of what the reward is there and

what the cue is. You probably have like an internal clock that's relatively accurate. There might also be certain things in your environment that consistently help trigger waking up. And the reward would be, well, do you feel like, do you feel well rested? Do you feel like to be up early, does that give you a sense of kind of accomplishment later in the day? Those are all sort of important questions to ask to figure out what is the thing that's driving that behavior. Does deliberately creating good habits in your life make it easier to create other ones, or is each one its own individual task to accomplish? There's a thing known as keystone habits. So one of the things that we know is that some habits seem to matter more than others.

Some habits, when they start to change, they seem to set off this chain reaction that makes it easier for other habits to change. So exercise is a good example. For many people, when they start exercising habitually, it changes their eating habits, right? On the day that they go for a run, it's easier for them to eat a salad in the cafeteria rather than a sandwich. But what's interesting is that these two researchers named Oten and Chang in Australia, who looked at other changes that happen when we start exercising habitually, they found that people who start exercising habitually, they tend to procrastinate less at their job. They do their dishes earlier in the day. They use their credit cards less frequently. And that's because for many people, exercise is this keystone habit that sets off this chain reaction that makes other habits more pliable or more flexible.

And so identifying and focusing on those, that sort of has these outsized dividends. Yeah. I've heard things like when people get rid of the junk in their house and shed all their junk, they also tend to lose weight. Is that kind of what you're talking about? Yeah, I think that that could definitely be part of it. It's that once we start this chain reaction going, that it tends to change our self-perception somehow. There's an interesting thing known as revealed preferences. We tend to figure out who we are and how we ought to behave by looking at what we've done in the past. Not only what we believe about ourselves, but actually looking for evidence.

Like, am I the type of person who goes for a run in the morning? And the more that we do something positive, the more it almost subconsciously convinces us that we're the kind of person to continue doing positive things. That's why once you get on like a healthy habit kick, it's so much easier to improve other parts of your life as well. But isn't it tougher if you decide, okay, I'm going to exercise more, and I'm going to eat healthy, and I'm going to quit smoking? When you take all of that on, doesn't that become much too hard of a burden to handle? Well, yeah. So one of the things that all the research tells us is that you should focus on

one thing at a time, right? That what the right thing to do is to say, not I'm going to do all three of those, but to choose one of them and to choose the one that you think is going to influence your self-image to yourself. So of the things you just mentioned, if you say like, look, I'm going to start, I'm going to start exercising. Now for people like me who, you know, there was a number of years, I didn't play any sports in high school. So for people like me, if I say I'm going to start exercising, that actually like can have a huge impact on my self-image. Like, like it's kind of, you know, it seems irrationally scary to start exercising at first. You don't know, like, where to go jogging or what to wear. But once you decide, okay, I'm just going to go out and I'm going to go around the block once.

You know, I'm going to just wear these, you know, workout clothes I got. Once you start doing that, you start thinking of yourself as the type of person who exercises. And that actually makes it easier and easier and easier to continue doing so. Well, I remember hearing something about, you know, it takes, what, 30 repetitions to create a habit or something like that. Is that kind of a random number that sounds like that? Yeah, there's no science behind it. It's usually 21 days or something like that. Unfortunately, if you want to create a habit that involves like eating chocolate ice cream, you can probably do that pretty quickly. If you want to create a habit that involves like eating chocolate ice cream, you can probably do that pretty quickly. If you want to create a habit that involves exercise, it might take a little bit longer. But as long as you have these very stable cues,

routines, and rewards, the more and more you do something, the easier and easier it's going to get. So what is the difference between a habit and an addiction? Are they basically two sides of the same coin? So the American Academy of Addiction Professionals, they actually consider addiction to be a habit dysfunction, right? There's some kinds of addictions that have a neurochemical or a biochemical aspect. Take smoking, for instance. So nicotine is addictive, but about 100 hours after your last cigarette, once the nicotine is out, but about 100 hours after your last cigarette, once the nicotine is out of your blood system, you're not actually addicted to nicotine anymore. But we know people who, everyone knows someone who craves a cigarette a year or two years or

a decade after they quit. If you crave a cigarette a decade after you give them up, that's not because it's a physical addiction. That's because it's a habit dysfunction, right? You still have that cigarette habit. But habits and addictions, they live in the same part of our brain. And so as a result, it can feel very, very similar. It does seem that in some ways our habits can control parts of our lives. So it's good to know that we have some control over them and that in fact we can change them. Charles Duhigg has been my guest. He's the author of the book, The Power of Habit, a big, big bestseller. And there's a link to his book on Amazon in the show notes.

You know, life is just not as calm as it used to be. You know what I mean? You just don't have a lot of time to calm your mind and sit and be quiet because you're always checking your phone or your email and you've got a million things to do and you've got to rush over here and go over there. And all that lack of calm is taking a toll on you. And it took a toll on a woman named Gayatri Devi. She is a medical doctor and she is author of a book called A Calm Brain, How to Relax into a Stress-Free, High-Powered Life. Hi, doctor. Welcome.

And it sounds as if you took on this project and wrote this book really for yourself, that this was to help solve a problem that you were experiencing. I've always been a frenetic person and my goal has been to be calm. And my background in neuroscience really helped me understand that the approach that we have these days, which is to take pills or to overschedule, is not the answer. And so I've found another method to get to calm. And do you suspect that people are not calm because it's kind of inherent that they're just, like you said, frenetic and that's their personality? Or are they frenetic because they just schedule too many things to do? I think that people have inherent temperaments. Some people are just,

quote, hyper, if you will, and some people are more mellow. But I think environment definitely has something to do with it. And I feel that modern climes with all the demands that are required and all the choices that we have to make just makes it that much harder to get to a place where we're not prone to a tremendous amount of anxiety. Is that the problem? In other words, it's not necessarily the doing too many things or rushing around here and there. It's the byproduct of the anxiety that's the problem, or is rushing around in and of itself a problem? I think that rushing around, there is a time and a place to rush around. We are wired to be able to do that. However, I think it's the incessant rushing around.

It's the incessant overscheduling. Then it becomes an issue because our body then becomes habituated and we're no longer able to turn off the switch so that we can relax. And the effects on our health have been devastating. I think there's an epidemic increase in the amount of hypertension, heart disease, depression, and anxiety, even in small children, even in 12-year-olds. So I think there is something about our society now where we're just required to do so much more. And what I'm trying to say is you can be successful, you can be efficient,

and you can still be in a place of much less stress by just incorporating small things into your daily life that will enhance your inbuilt relaxation system. And those would be things like what? Things, very simple things like turning off your cell phone for an hour, spending a weekend without any schedule and without a clock, hugging someone, smiling at someone, being forgiving. All of those things actually enhance the activity of the parasympathetic system, which is the system that combats the effects of the flight and fright stress system, which is the adrenaline-driven system that we all know so much about.

So basically, by forcing yourself to calm down for a while, it helps to calm down the whole thing. Exactly. And, you know, what you want to do is to schedule little mini vacations into your daily life. And people often say to me, well, you know, when I go on vacation, then I can calm down. Well, what people are finding more and more is that when they do go on vacation, they're unable to relax. And then they worry about what they have to do when they get back. So we have to make calm a habit. And making it a habit is just as important to our health as eating right is, as exercises. And it has just as many rewards in terms of our overall well-being. To which some people would say, well, you know, I go on vacation and I worry

because I really have things to worry about, so I've got to be checking email and all that. And to which you would reply what? I would say that absolutely, all of us have a lot to worry about and all of us have more to worry about as time goes on and particularly with this economy. But we have to realize that unless we keep our bodies and our mind in a state of optimal health, we're not going to be able to respond to these exigencies of life. So unless we learn to turn off that cell phone for a few hours, we are not going to be able to keep our mind in a state of good functioning. When I talk about calm, I'm not really talking about someone who is sedated or mellow. I'm talking about a state where we are at our optimal cognitive mental functioning,

a place where we can be the best we can be, and a place from which we can win far better than in a place where we'd be anxious. I can imagine people saying, if I turned my phone off for an hour, I would spend the entire hour thinking my child's school is calling because something went wrong and I wasn't there to answer the phone. That is absolutely right. I think that you're correct in that we have this fear now and we are tethered to this electronic leash from which it's harder and harder to separate ourselves. And what I say to people like that is just take baby steps.

Spend 10 minutes away from the phone. Spend 15 minutes away from the phone. And you'll find it's going to be easier to do that. And the fact is, we have amazing systems in place to take care of things. And it's really also an issue of control, the ability to say, well, someone else is going to be able to take care of this as well as I can if they cannot reach me. And it's also the sense of being dispensable. else is going to be able to take care of this as well as I can if they cannot reach me.

And it's also the sense of being dispensable. All of us are dispensable. All of us will die. That's 100% guaranteed. However, how do we live our life in the interim? Do we have, if we are going to be checking our phone all the time, are we going to be able to enjoy the time we have with our loved ones? Are we going to be able to take care of ourselves? You know, I remember, it wasn't all that long ago, that, you know, when you left the house, you couldn't bring your phone. It was stuck to the wall. And, you know, there were no cell phones. When you were in the car, you were alone in the car. And people somehow managed to survive. Kids didn't die at school, and life went on. But today, if you leave without your phone, you think the world's coming to an end. Right, and that's what our new brain, our cortical brain, tells us.

It creates a situation where there is a sense of urgency where there should not be a sense of urgency. So we suddenly have now alarmed ourselves and taught ourselves that if we leave our phone behind, that is a crisis situation. So we live in a state of constant alert, and that's no good for us. And I think it's important to realize before phones, people survived. But explain, though, if I turn my phone off for 15 minutes today, or if I'm able to quiet down for 15 minutes and go for a walk without my phone or something, that helps for the 15 minutes, but how does that help for the rest of the day? Because the repercussions last throughout the day. You know, when you go away for that 15 minutes, even as you maybe are a little bit anxious about leaving the phone behind, but I'm hoping that over time you're able to actually disconnect

for a few minutes at a time, what that does is it slows your heart down, it slows your breathing down, it resets a little bit your core brain. It amps up the activity in the relaxation system in your body. And that allows the sympathetic nervous system, which is kind of in runaway mode right now for most of us, to take a back seat. And that's very important because it's a process of checks and balances in our body, and we just are ignoring a lot of the balance. Besides just taking a 15-minute break from your phone, what else can you do?

What are some of the other techniques that work? I try to leave, like I say, human contact. Choose human contact over something electronic all the time. If you have a choice between going out with a friend versus staying at home and Skyping with a relative in Siberia, choose going out with a friend. It's more real. It connects more with your core brain. Your brain responds better to it.

It's better for your health. Exercise. Forgive. Forgiveness is a quality that's biblically touted, but it's also excellent for a core brain, and it's also very important for calm. Because when you don't, what happens is you kind of set yourself up in the state of anger,

and anger revs up the sympathetic system. Anger revs up adrenaline, and that makes it harder for you to calm down. You said in the beginning that everything you write about and talk about applies to you, that you're one of the people who needs to do this. So what was your epiphany? What was the moment that you said, wait a minute? Well, I just realized that it was not an efficient way for functioning. I thought, you know, there are so many things I'd like to do, and I want to do them well. And how do I do them well? I do them well by having a brain that's at an optimal state. And I can't be at that optimal state if I'm constantly anxious, if I'm constantly stressed.

And one of the other very important things in terms of keeping us calm is daily sleeping. Sleep has to be a habit, just like eating right, just like exercising. And we've got to sleep a good amount every day to reset our brain. That's another thing that's important for calm. So I think that for me it was a smart thing to do. every day to reset our brain. That's another thing that's important for calm. So I think that for me, it was a smart thing to do. It didn't have to do, you know, my life wasn't falling apart.

You know, things were very good. But I thought to myself, over time, this is not the way to run my body. It's going to run it down. I need to find a way to be efficient, to be able to succeed in the things that I wish to do well in, but at the same time, not to be at this level of stress. And very simple things can help you do that. But is this something that works for you, or is there some research that says that this will work for everybody? This is, this has nothing, This is not peculiar to me. You have the mechanisms for being calm in your body.

Everything I've said reduces the level of adrenaline and increases the level of vagal tone in all of our bodies. That's why meditation is such a wonderful thing because it actually raises the level of calm in so many of us. However, most of us are unable to practice meditation, either because of time constraints, or because we just have brains that run away from us. So this is not something that's just specific to one person. It's actually common to the entire human race.

And it makes all the sense in the world. I mean, who hasn't been in that relaxed state, whether it's, you know, in the shower or walking in the country or whatever, where, you know, ideas come to you, you think clearer, you're able to see things better. So we all know this intuitively. It's just a matter of doing it consciously when we're in the moment. My guest has been Gayatri Devi. She is a medical doctor and author of the book, A Calm Brain, How to Relax into a Stress-Free, High-Powered Life. There's a link to her book in the show notes. Close your eyes and then try touching your nose with your finger.

Did you do it? Well, of course you did it. But how? You didn't use any of your five senses to do that. So what makes it so easy to do? It's an ability called proprioception. Proprioception. It's defined as the sense of your body part's position. It's the reason you can switch from the gas pedal to the brake without looking at your feet or bringing popcorn to your mouth

without taking your eyes off the movie screen. Often considered a sixth sense, proprioception is much less understood than the other senses, but science is beginning to understand it better. Researchers from Scripps, Columbia University, and San Jose State University have identified a key molecule that governs proprioception, and it's found in the membranes of nerve cells in our muscles and tendons called proprioceptors. They are one class of a very large array of molecules that help

us detect things like temperature and blood pressure. There's a lot more to learn about proprioception, but clearly it indicates that there are more than the five senses that we all know. And that is something you should know. If you like this program,

I invite you to leave us a rating and review on iTunes. It always helps. And check us out on Facebook and Twitter. We publish information there that doesn't make it into the show, but I think it's just as interesting. In fact, I've even taken some of the things that we published on

social media because it got so much response that I then put it in the show. But like us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter, and you'll get all that information delivered to you. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community.

Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family.

But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first

is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl

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