The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Top 7 Belly Fat Burning Hacks For 2024 That Are PROVEN To Work!
Episode Date: December 26, 2023As a holiday wrap-up, we’ve listened to you and answered one of the most popular questions; What is your favourite EVER episode? But, we think the more important question is what is YOUR favourite e...pisode on the Diary of CEO of all time. Using our in-house data scientist and a group of analysts, we’ve found the most replayed and shared moments from 2023. This should be the most valuable episode you will ever listen to. 7th Most Replayed Moment, Dr. Giles Yeo. Dr Giles takes on some of the biggest myths about health, weight and obesity. His books, Why Calories Don’t Count and Gene Eating: https://amzn.to/3NFeUdE Twitter: https://bit.ly/3Y9IZF0 Instagram: https://bit.ly/3Rs5bIj 6th Most Replayed Moment, Dr. Mindy Pelz. In this clip we talk about intermittent fasting, the gut reset fast and the belly fat burning diet. Dr Mindy lays out how to eat and behave to improve our overall health. Instagram: https://bit.ly/461aBB0 Dr Mindy’s book, Fast Like A Girl: https://amzn.to/41y9Opr 5th Most Replayed Moment, Professor Matthew Walker. This is from my conversation with the Worlds Number One expert on sleep. He gives us a roadmap for how to sleep better, explaining the impact of our sleep on our overall health, happiness and everything in between. Instagram: https://bit.ly/3YsK1f6 Matt’s bestseller, Why We Sleep: https://amzn.to/3totIGS Twitter: https://bit.ly/3yI60V7 4th Most Replayed Moment, Dr. Daniel Amen. Taken from Dr. Daniel Amen’s second appearance on the show, we discuss how to grow a healthier, better brain. Daniel is the World’s Leading Neuroscientist who may have scanned and seen more brains than anyone else. The no.1 book on Brain health: https://amzn.to/3vbmXsh Instagram: https://bit.ly/3tHjm4r Twitter: https://bit.ly/3scQpgr 3rd Most Replayed Moment, Gary Brecka. Gary Brecka is one of the world’s most renowned human biologists. Our conversation covers the ultimate human wellbeing checklist. From Dana White’s transformation using the super human protocol to stripping fat, listen to transform your life. Instagram: http://bit.ly/3IVf6Dw Twitter: http://bit.ly/41w492P 2nd Most Replayed Moment, Dr. Tim Spector. A favourite guest on DOAC, here Tim busts myths about a frequently debated subject: diet vs exercise. Foor For Life, Tim’s book: https://amzn.to/3RTckDt Instagram: https://bit.ly/3CDRuQD Twitter: https://bit.ly/3VG0zil No.1 Most Replayed Moment: Dr Tara Swart. The most listened to moment ever this year is neuroscientist Dr. Tara explaining the brain and body’s connection. We dive into the influence the brain has on our health, relationships and well-being. Dr Tara’s book: https://amzn.to/47dokE0 Instagram: https://bit.ly/48hJ1k2 Twitter: https://bit.ly/46gqYZI Bonus Moment, Mo Gawdat: This is from episode 101 with Mo Gawdat, and it’s the most shared episode we’ve ever had of all time on WhatsApp. Mo explains to me his influential equation for happiness, and we discuss how to put it into practice. Mo’s book, Solve For Happy: https://amzn.to/489n5qJ Instagram: https://bit.ly/3qmYSMY Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo
Transcript
Discussion (0)
Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want
to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can
say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would
expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America,
thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack
and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United
States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard
in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And
thank you to all of you that listen to this show. Let's continue. Here's the most important question.
People ask me this question all the time. They say, Steve,
what is your favorite ever episode on the Diary of a CEO podcast? And I think the more important
question is actually, what is your favorite episode on the Diary of a CEO podcast of all
time? And so I went out to try and answer that question. What is your favorite episode? What is your favorite moment
on this podcast of all time? And using a data scientist and a big team of analysts, we've found
the most replayed moments of all the hundreds of episodes we've produced this year to show to you
today. These are the moments that you replayed and shared more than any other moment on this podcast. Theoretically,
this should be the most valuable Diary of a CEO episode you ever listened to, because it's a
compilation of the
biggest myths about health weight obesity and he answers the question do we have to get fatter as
we age is it genetic what are the easy ways to manage our weight?
After I read it in your book about us gaining more and more weight as we age, I googled it
and the Healthcare Research and Quality Agency said that we naturally tend to gain weight as
we age to the tune of one to two pounds per year according to their review. And that's from the
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality,
which I found quite startling.
But completely accurate.
So the numbers, so what the numbers that we have is,
yeah, I think that's right, actually.
So between 20 and 50 years old, those 30 years intervening,
the average person, average, will gain about 15 kilos in weight,
which is 32.
Yes, two pounds a year, one to two pounds a year. 15 kilos in weight, which is 32. Yes, two pounds a year,
one to two pounds a year. 15 kilos in weight is gained over 30 years on average. Some gain very
little, others gain a hell of a lot more. We look at ourselves in a mirror. I look at myself in a
mirror. But it's true. I don't want to be that guy. Mate, I don't know how much choice you have.
What can I do to try and stay? Because for me, it's not really about the weight thing
or how you look.
It's more about like, I don't know how to say this,
but there was this big set of stairs the other day,
really, really long set of stairs leading down to this lake.
I was in Indonesia a couple of months ago.
And I remember thinking about those stairs and thinking,
God, if I wasn't, you know, athletic and strong and
didn't have good knees and things like that, there's no way I'd be able to get down this long
winding hand carved set of Indonesian stairs so that I could go on this boat trip that I was going
to go on. And I just thought about how it was a weird thing. I know this is kind of a strange
story to tell, but it crossed my mind. I got to the bottom of the stairs and I turned to the person I was with and was literally like,
you know, that's why I've got to stay in shape for as long as I can, because I want to do these
boat trips and I want to go on this little rafting thing, but I won't even be able to access it
unless I can go down up and down those stairs, like 200 meters of stairs down this cliff.
So that's what I care about. I care about being active and strong and fit for as long as I
possibly can. And I, from what you said about gravity and weight, being overweight is going to inhibit my chances of being able to do
those stairs. So, so that I think there are two elements there. First of all, there is doing the
things that we want to do. Okay. Like that, because you're exactly right. These are the things which
I can still do that. I can still walk up a mountain or down a mountain because I'm still
fit enough to do that. And I want to stay as fit as long as I can to do that.
And weight will inhibit that undoubtedly. But then there's a second element to actually consider.
Now that's healthy. Look, none of us are going to live longer. We hopefully, and anyway, if we
lived longer, but was unhealthy, would you want to live longer? So you want to live longer but healthier for longer, okay? And undoubtedly, the thing that is closest related to health when you age is not
your total weight. There's a role to play there. The amount of muscle you have. It is your muscle
mass as you age, independent of how much fat you have, okay? That will determine how healthy you are as you age.
So now I'm talking about going into the 60s and into the 70s rather than when one is able to go
down a 200-meter set of steps, okay? So now, as you get older, the most crucial bit of information
is to maintain resistance training, not lifting, and that's not what I'm talking about. Sitting on
a wall, getting up and down a chair, because that, the amount of muscle mass you have really, really,
really marks the level of health that you're going to get. And then the science is startling.
It is so, so, so related, independent of weight, you know, from there. So muscle mass is the most
important for healthy aging the moment you get 60, 70 plus.
Interesting.
Okay, so I'll keep doing resistance training.
Correct.
Always keep resistance training.
And lifting weights as long as I can.
Lifting weights as long as you can.
At some point, you won't be able to lift weights.
Well, I don't know.
Don't write me off.
Don't write me off, Giles.
The hubris of youth.
Yeah, that's the naivety of youth yeah you just assume you'll always be able to do
what you can do now i i yeah it's something i think a lot about and i think a lot of people
will watch this podcast because probably especially this time of year we're in january
they'll probably be trying to find ways that they can cut fat they want to be a bit skinnier you
said you think you said half a stone you want to lose i'm in the same place i think most people
want to lose a half a stone or something what is the way that you would suggest to do that the simple way you
know not the like fucking complicated go buy this guy's course and do three million sit-ups whatever
the simple advice you would give someone that's hoping to create sort of sustainable weight loss
so the first is the amount of protein you eat. And you need to try
and focus on trying to keep to about 16% of the energy in your day, okay, from protein, 16%. And
there's a sweet spot. So if you eat too much and you're not lifting, you're stressing your kidneys
because your kidneys have to get rid of the nitrogen from the protein, okay? So 16% is a
sweet spot. And it doesn't mean steaks only. It can mean beans,
tofu, any kind of protein from anywhere, 16%. Second is fiber. We need to eat as much fiber
as physically possible, okay? 30 grams we want to aim for. Although we're looking at the moment
on average in this country, we're probably only eating 15 grams. We need to double the amount of
fiber we actually eat. Third, we need to limit the amount of added sugars
into our diet.
Added sugars, meaning sugars not tied up in fiber.
Powdered stuff, maple syrup, algarve, nectar,
all those are added sugars you put in.
Keep it to 5% or less of the energy content in your day.
And those are the three numbers
that I want you
to think about. So 16% of protein, 30 grams of fiber, 5% or less of added sugars. Apply that to
whatever you want, keto, whatever you want to do. Apply that. And I think that will be a sustainable,
healthy way to eat. The sixth most replayed moment is a conversation I had with Dr.
Mindy Pels, who talks about the belly fat burning diet. Nutrition is a huge thing at this time of
year. And so she lays out exactly how to eat and behave in order to reduce belly fat and to improve
your overall health. You told me about the first two styles of fasting. The first one was intermittent
fasting, which is 12 to 16 hours, which is good for weight loss, brain fog, that kind of thing. all health you told me about the first two styles of fasting the first one was intermittent fasting
which is 12 to 16 hours which is good for weight loss brain fog that kind of thing the second is
autography autophagy what did i say autography but i like it i said it works for me we can play
that back i definitely said and if i didn't we'll fix it with ai um autophagy fasting which is 17 to 72 hours good for balancing
sex hormones and preventing illness yeah yeah number three we haven't spoken about gut reset
fast yeah what's that yeah so that's based off a study that came out of mit that showed 24 hours
without food and your intestinal stem cells inside your gut actually start to reboot themselves.
Now, a stem cell is a cell that can go to anywhere in the body and repair itself.
But at 24 hours, you get a plethora of them in your gut. And in the gut, we've got a damaged
microbiome from everything that we've just been talking about. So what I discovered in this 24-hour fast is I could take women that have been on birth control pill for years, people that have
been on multiple rounds of antibiotics, people who had been eating horrible food, and I could
actually put them through a 24-hour fast once a week, once every couple of weeks. And these stem
cells would come in there and they would start to repair. And so now if I teach that person how to eat right,
their food is actually starting to build
a better microbiome in the gut.
So that 24 hour fast became this go-to in my clinic
where I could take all these gut challenges
and I could start to unwind them
just because I knew the body had this capability
of making these intestinal stem
cells. And it was crazy. Like we got people off supplements. We got people that weren't making
serotonin, which affects moods, comes from the gut, all of a sudden started to become happier.
People who hadn't had bowel movements in like three days, all of a sudden we started to put
in this gut reset. And it was like a miracle.
It was incredible.
Number four, fat burner fast.
So the fat burner fast is probably my favorite for those people who want to lose weight. The research was done that 36 hours without food, followed by 12 hours of eating, and then another 30.
They actually did it over a 30-day period, but we've been using it in our community, just dosing it in, that at 36 hours, what happens is that's enough time where the
blood sugars come down, where all of a sudden the body, it's so smart. It goes, okay,
blood sugar's not common. We've been in this fasted state. We've triggered autophagy. We've
brought inflammation down. We've made you ketones.
We're trying to go find food.
But this extra weight, it's not serving you.
Because remember, you got to go find food.
So it drops weight.
And it's the most beautiful way to get a person to unstick any kind of weight loss resistance.
But most importantly, you know where it dropped the most amount of weight
from where does everybody want to lose weight belly yep so it is the i probably should have
called it the fat burning belly fat burning the belly fat yeah that would have banged yeah but
yeah and so that's what they showed is that actually a 36 hour fast started to unstick
weight loss and it was started with weight around the belly.
Compelling.
Number five, the dopamine reset fast. Yeah. So number five, I found some research showing that when people go without food for 48 hours,
the whole dopamine system will be rebooted.
So what's important to know about the dopamine system is it is our molecule of happiness.
It is the thing that it's actually a motivation molecule.
And it's a neurotransmitter that allows thoughts, happy thoughts to go across from neuron to neuron.
And so what happens, and I'm sure you've talked about this on your podcast, that we're so dopamine saturated right now. But specifically people who are overeaters, they actually are finding the study I quote in the book is that
they found that people who had food addiction, people who had extra weight, like obese situations,
they were not getting as much happiness out of their food because their dopamine receptor sites were saturated. So they had to eat more
food to get more happiness. And, you know, food is a state changer. It does make us happy.
So what they found is if they put them into a 48-hour fast, that they actually rebooted the
whole dopamine system and new dopamine receptor sites appeared. So that when they brought food
back in to the equation, they actually got
more enjoyment out of food with less food. This kind of got me thinking about a conversation I
was having yesterday with some of my team here. We were talking about how it almost feels like
sometimes if I've eaten sugar, I can go into a bit of a sugar cycle. And what I mean by that is
I'll have some sugar and then like a couple of hours later, I'll have another craving for sugar.
And then a couple of hours later, I'll have another craving for sugar and then a couple of hours later I'll have another craving for sugar but then at other times specifically for example when I did keto I was I did the keto diet for about eight months uh eight
weeks bloody eight months I wish um eight weeks and throughout that period I didn't have any
cravings for sugar yep I would we had some chocolate come into the studio and I walked
over to the chocolate I smelled it yep And I didn't want any of it.
Yep.
It had gone.
Yeah.
But then when I'm in my, what I call like the sugar cycle, I'm eating sugar maybe, you know, once or twice a day and I'm getting like the craving for it, which I just can't
seem to resist.
Yep.
Well, dopamine is the molecule of more.
It's not the molecule of enough.
So what it does is when you get sugar, you get this dopamine rush and the brain goes,
whew, love that. Give me more of that. And so you can't, it's endless. You will never be
fully satisfied. It constantly wants you to come back for more and more and more.
So when you start to go off the ketogenic energy system, you're getting the same euphoria.
You probably felt the same high, the same mental clarity, but you've totally taken this molecule more out of the picture. In fact, dopamine will
actually, you know, you get those receptor sites that will be repaired, but you're not getting a
big dopamine buzz when you're in a ketogenic state. You're getting ketones. I was mulling
it with my team how long I had to stay away from sugar to kind of get out of that vicious give me more cycle.
Yeah.
My experience has been it's about three days.
Three days.
That's what I thought.
Yeah.
I think I said four or five, but it's just from experience as well.
If I haven't had sugar for three or four days, I mean like a chocolate bar, something significant in terms of sugar.
Then after three or four days, the craving for it seems to vanish.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. It's not, if you think about that, it's not hard if you're trying to overcome a sugar addiction. Like just bear it for three days. And then that dopamine stops barking at you.
And then if you tack fasting onto it, now you're getting ketones. And so you're not needing that
as much. Ketones kill hunger and they make you so mentally clear. and so you're not needing that as much ketones kill hunger and
they make you so mentally mentally clear they give you this euphoric feeling so you don't have that
urge to go for the for the sugar and the ketones come from fasting yeah which is when your body
switches metabolic state good the last and final fasting style immune reset fast. Yeah. So immune reset was built off of Dr. Walter Longo's work. And he did a study on people who
had cancer and were going through chemotherapy. And one of the challenges we know about chemotherapy
is that it wipes out the whole immune system. And so he wanted to see, well, what if I put
somebody in a fasted state as they went through chemotherapy? Would there be a difference?
And what he found is after
three days of fasting, the white blood cells in our system actually reboot themselves. So what
they do is all old white blood cells are sloughed away and new white blood cells emerge. So people
were able to come out of that chemotherapy experience and have a stronger immune system
as opposed to what we were seeing
was that it was wiping the immune system out. So that launched the whole three-day water fast
sort of craze. At least here in America, we're seeing a lot of people that are just
going after three-day water fast to prime their immune system. But you also, also at three days,
get stem cells, full systemic stem cells. So all of a sudden
your body's got, surging with stem cells going to all parts of the body repairing it. The great
example I always use on this one was I had an Achilles tendon injury and nothing was helping
it. So I threw a five-day water fast at it. the fourth day I felt this buzz in my Achilles tendon
and I was like oh I wonder what that is and it stayed all the way through I went five full days
and about the fifth and sixth day so sixth day I was entering food back in all the pain completely
went away and it never came back i tried everything i tried everything and that
was the only thing that repaired it it does make again evolutionary sense that
if our body senses we're injured because we're not eating or you know some other signal that we are
on a course to not survive to put it nicely it does make sense that it might set about to repair whatever needs
to be repaired you're getting it you know because like if i was a wounded human back in
on the savannas of i don't know africa or wherever we came from um and i'm laid there and i'm not
eating my body should probably go okay steve might need something fixed so he can get back to hunting. So you're getting it.
So survival, that is the number one priority of the body.
So when you go without food, you amplify every resource it has to keep you alive.
And if repairing my Achilles means I can now go hunt for food, it's going to do that.
It's going to make me stronger.
And in the book, I stumbled, when I was writing the book, I stumbled upon a really cool hypothesis
that's called the thrifty gene hypothesis. And it said that, it's a theory, obviously,
it's a hypothesis. It's a theory that the people, the humans that evolved out of the primal days had a very specific genotype.
And this genotype allowed us to metabolically flex and be stronger in a fasted state because
we had to survive. And the people that didn't make it from that time period didn't have that gene.
But think about this for this moment. So they think we all have this gene inside of us
right now, this thrifty gene, where we can go long periods without food and we can survive.
So what happens when we're eating all day? What happens when we're ignoring and we're not
actually activating that genetic profile? So what they are now believing is that diabetes,
metabolic syndrome, all of that is largely
happening because we are going against the genetic profile that we are now seeing in humans we're like
on the opposite end of this spectrum we're overloading our bodies yeah which is meaning
that the survival genie reference there is not being activated to help us. That's right.
That's right.
Interesting.
The fifth most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with Matthew Walker,
who is the world's number one expert on the subject of sleep.
He explains the importance of sleep on our overall health,
on our weight and everything in between.
But most importantly of all, he gives us a roadmap for how to sleep better and i know so
many of you are struggling so i'm not surprised that this is one of the most replayed moments
of the diary of a ceo of 2023 had a lot of health experts on this podcast recently but none of them
have really talked to me about the role that sleep or sleep deprivation plays in weight. Is there a relationship? It's probably one of the most well-defined
relationships that we know in all of sleep science. And it is at least a three-part story.
So the first emerging evidence came in terms of hormones. So there are what we call appetite
regulating hormones. And the two principal ones
of concern here are something called leptin and ghrelin. Now leptin when it's released will signal
to your brain that you're satisfied with your food, you are satiated and you are no longer hungry.
Ghrelin does the opposite. When ghrelin is released, it says, no, you're not
satisfied with your food. You are not full. You still want to eat more. You are still hungry.
And some of the first studies, they started to just limit people, restrict people's sleep to
six hours or five hours or four hours. And what they found was that there was firstly that signal leptin that says,
no, you're satisfied with your food. You don't want to eat any more. You're full.
That signal of fullness, satiation was decreased by 18%. If that wasn't bad enough, ghrelin which is the hunger hormone that leapt up by 28 percent overall hunger levels rose by about
at 26 percent so firstly you are it's almost like double jeopardy that you are getting punished
twice for the same crime of not sleeping enough once Once by losing the signal of I'm full, I don't
want to eat anymore. And once again for the, no, I'm much more hungry and I'm just going to overeat,
which is ghrelin. So what that produces is a profile of increased eating. So on average,
underslept individuals started to eat in those studies about three to four hundred extra calories at each sitting by way of insufficient sleep.
Then what they discovered is that it's not just that you want to eat more, it's what it is that
you have a craving for when you are underslept. And this is the problem. What they
found is that when you are underslept, you eat more of everything, but you especially eat more
of these heavy hitting stodgy carbohydrates, bread, pasta, pizza. The next thing that you
started to eat, have a preference for was simple sugary foods, sweets and chocolate. And then finally you started to crave very salty
food and high sodium food intake will increase your blood pressure. So that was the first of the
three mechanisms. Then we did a study where we said, perhaps it's not just the circulating hormones
in the body. The brain is the ultimate arbiter of your food decisions. So what's going on in the body, the brain is the ultimate arbiter of your food decisions. So what's going on in the
brain? So we took a group of perfectly healthy individuals and we put them through the experiment
twice. Once when they'd had a full eight hours of sleep and once when we deprived them of sleep.
And then the next day we placed them inside an MRI scanner and we showed them images of lots of
different foods that range from being sort of, you know, very healthy to being
very unhealthy and sort of ice cream and, you know, chocolate and pizza and things to leafy
salads and nuts and greens and vegetables. And we asked them to rate how much they wanted that food
for each item. Now we did something a bit sort of dastardly to make it more ecologically correct so that they
weren't just saying, okay, they probably think I should probably say that's healthy. We said,
we're going to randomly select one of these images, these food images that you see.
And after you get out the brain scanner, we're going to give you that food and we're going to
politely ask you to eat it all. So it made it a bit more realistic. So the choices were more,
you know, as much as that we could. So what we found is that when they were sleep deprived, the deep hedonic centers, the emotional centers of the
brain, these desire centers, these reward centers, they ramped up in their activity in response to
these highly desirable, highly unhealthy foods. So these more basic sort of, you know, guttural parts of the brain, as it
were, these reward centers were lighting up much more strongly when you were sleep deprived. Worse
still, the impulse control regions in the front of the brain, what we call the prefrontal cortex,
they were shut down, they were taken offline. So as a consequence, you lost your impulse control.
And that's why you
start to then say, you know, when I'm sleep deprived at the food sort of buffet, I'm not
going to do salad. I'm just going to, that pizza looks awful good, or that pasta with the cream,
I'm just going to go into that, all go. So it's what we call a pattern in terms of brain activity in neuroscience of hedonic eating,
that your brain goes into this hedonic desire profile. So now we understood it's not just
hormones in the body, it's also changes in the brain. Then came the finding that there's another
chemical in the body that's responsible. And this comes on to cannabis. When people that you may know have smoked cannabis,
they'll often say, I get viciously hungry. I get the munchies. I get really hungry. That's no
coincidence because cannabis will stimulate appetite. Now we all have naturally occurring cannabis compounds
in our brain and our bodies. They are called endocannabinoids. Endo meaning comes from insiders,
whereas the cannabis that comes externally when you sort of smoke it or take edibles.
So endocannabinoids do many things for the brain and the body, but one of the things
that they do is control your appetite and your hunger. And what we found is that when you sleep
deprived individuals, these naturally occurring endocannabinoids rocketed up by over 20%,
cranking up people's appetite. And so these three ways lead you to start packing on, you know, when
insufficient sleep is occurring, when sleep gets short, your waistline typically starts to expand.
And we now understand the reasons. If that wasn't bad enough.
It is bad enough.
The final, yeah, you just stop, Matt. Honestly, I've really... The last thing that we discovered is that,
let's say that you're trying to be really careful
and you're trying to diet
and you're trying to lose weight.
If you're not getting sufficient sleep,
then 60% of all of the weight that you lose
will come from lean muscle mass and not fat.
Not the muscle. I know, know exactly so in other words when you
are dieting but you are underslept you lose what you want to keep which is muscle and you keep what
you want to lose which is fat so again it's i'm sold not an ideal situation. Sleep is important. I get it.
I'm sold.
How do I, my question is,
what are the things that in the modern society
are standing in the way of sleep?
We've touched on some of them loosely,
but some of the like big obvious things,
the things that you would suggest doing,
very actionable things we could do straight away
to improve our chances of having
that healthy um deep sleep that we need to be um optimal in every regard of our health and
performance there's probably i think five standard tips what we call sort of sleep hygiene that you
can do and then i'll come on to maybe just some unconventional tips that we've sort of touched on
and we've spoken about many of these the The first thing I would recommend people to do,
and this is why when some people say,
what about this new sleep supplement?
Or, you know, it's 40 quid for this bottle
of these new sleep natural medications.
I'm going to give it a try.
I would say, try these tried and true things first
before you spend your money on supplements.
The first thing is regularity.
Go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time, no matter whether it's the weekday
or the weekend. Your brain expects regularity. It thrives best under conditions of regularity.
When you give it regularity, you can improve the quantity and the quantity of your sleep.
The second thing is get some darkness at night. As I said, we don't get enough darkness
in the modern world. And so the trick I would offer, and I don't use it, I don't like the word
hack, but the sort of suggestion would be in the last hour before bed, try this experiment for
everyone listening for the next week, dim down half of the lights or switch off half of the lights
or even three quarters of the lights in your home
in the last hour before bed.
All of the lights in every room?
In all of the rooms, switch off almost all of the light.
Now, I'm not suggesting be unsafe
and walk around in the darkness in the last hour.
That's not what I'm saying.
Just dim down, switch off half of the lights.
You will be surprised at how sleepy that darkness will make you feel. And it's also an incredible
behavioral trigger to signal to your brain that it is time for sleep, that darkness is around me.
That's the second tip is darkness. The third tip is
temperature. Most people sleep in an ambient bedroom temperature that is too high. And you
need to aim for a bedroom temperature of about 18, 18 and a half degrees Celsius, around about
65 to 68 degrees Fahrenheit. If I'm probably butchering the mathematics there on that, but you need to get
cool. Now you can wear thick socks, you can have a hot water bottle, that's fine, but the ambient
needs to be cold because you need to drop your core body temperature and your brain temperature
by about one degree Celsius to fall asleep and stay asleep. And it's the reason that you will
always find it easier to fall asleep in a room that's too cold than too hot. So make your bedroom cold, make it dark like a cave. The fourth question
would be sort of what we've, or fourth suggestion would be walk it out. And we've spoken about this,
the 30 minute rule, you know, get up, do something different or meditate.
Don't lie in bed awake for too
long then the final two things we've spoken about well we've spoken about caffeine we haven't spoken
about alcohol but let me just say as the kind of headline of it alcohol is not a sleep aid many
people use it as a sleep aid it is not your friend alcohol again is a sedative so it knocks you out
the second is that it fragments your sleep so you
wake up your sleep is littered with all of these small awakenings most of them you don't remember
because they're too brief but it makes for miserable lousy quality sleep and the final
thing is that alcohol is very good at blocking your REM sleep or your dream sleep which we know
is critical for many other functions as well so alcohol's not your friend that's the sort of the final tip again you know just every if you're with friends have a glass of red wine just know
okay my sleep's not going to be great thank you matt yeah i'm joking you know i'm not yeah i'm
whatever it's just you know live life too of course i'm not saying that the fourth most replayed
moment is a moment from my conversation
with the world-leading neuroscientist,
the man who has scanned more brains than anybody else,
Dr. Daniel Amen,
who is a favorite on the Diary of a CEO.
And he tells us very, very clearly
how to grow a healthier brain.
I can change my brain.
It's the most exciting lesson that I've learned.
You're not stuck. I'm not stuck with the brain I had. You're not stuck with the brain you have. You can make it better. I can
prove it. In fact, every day what I've come to believe, you're making your brain better
or you're making it worse. Let's start there.
By what you're doing.
What things make the brain worse?
What are the common things that most of us do
without thinking that make the brain worse?
When my daughter Chloe was in second grade,
I went to her classroom and I wrote 20 things on the board.
And I went, separate them for me.
Good for your brain, bad for your brain.
Seven-year-olds.
They got 19 out of 20 right.
So most people, no.
The only thing they got wrong was orange juice.
They put it in the healthy category when, in fact,
when is it rational to unwrap fruit sugar from its fiber source because
it turns toxic in your body so i'm not a fan of fruit juice i'm a fan of fruit not fruit juice
what's bad about sugar for the pro-inflammatory which what does that makes you diabetic but i
mean as it relates to the brain why is like orange juice or the ice cream bad for my brain?
Because it's ultimately going to give you high blood sugar levels,
which erode your blood vessels,
and you're going to have lower blood flow to your brain.
That's a bad thing.
I mean, there's so many things about it.
So it's addictive. It's pro-inflammatory.
It makes it more likely you're going to have diabetes and obesity. So 72% of Americans are
overweight. 42% are obese. I've published three studies on 35,000 people. as your weight goes up, the actual physical size and function of your brain
goes down. That should scare the fat off anyone. I used to be chubby, but when I figured out that
connection, I'm like, oh no. It was that that gave me the motivation to drop about 25 pounds.
And so sugar is the gateway drug to diabetes and obesity.
And so not to mention inflammation,
which is the cause of depression and dementia.
So you want to avoid things that cause low blood flow,
caffeine, nicotine.
Caffeine?
Caffeine constricts blood flow to the brain.
And what does that do to my brain?
Well, it constricts blood flow.
So you're going to get less blood flow.
And remember, I showed you that progression with age.
No, you don't want that. You want to do things that increase blood flow to your brain.
So exercise, ginkgo.
This is one of the supplements I'm going to give you.
Eat foods like beets, oregano, rosemary, cinnamon.
They increase blood flow.
While we're on blood flow, 40% of 40-year-olds have erectile dysfunction.
70% of 70-year-olds have erectile dysfunction. What that means, if you have blood flow problems
anywhere, it means they're everywhere. And so I'm like, no. And it means either you're too sedentary, you're overweight, you're smoking or having too much caffeine or using marijuana because marijuana lowers blood flow to the brain. And so just in that one of the 11,
it's exercise,
Genco,
and for you,
not for everybody,
but for you,
hyperbaric oxygen.
Those three things will make a big difference in blood flow.
Genco.
Genco.
What is that?
It's a supplement.
What does it do?
Increases blood flow.
To the brain? The prettiest brains I've ever seen take Genco.
There's actually a spec study.
They gave people 120 milligrams of Genco twice a day.
Significant improvement in blood flow to the brain.
And so one of the supplements I'm going to give you, we have Genco.
I've taken it every day for the last 20 years at least.
And then this is where the U.S. government got an F for the pandemic.
Loneliness accelerates dementia and brain problems.
And so when they isolated us, the whole significant increase in brain problems.
So get connected to other people.
The I in bright minds is inflammation.
So what increases inflammation?
Low omega-3 fatty acid levels.
And we are deficient.
93% of the population is deficient in omega-3 fatty acids, 93%.
So all of us should be either eating more fish or taking an omega-3 supplement like fish oil.
Gum disease, like who knew?
Like I wasn't really that good at taking care of my gums until I started reading the studies.
You have gum disease, you have inflammation, you're more likely to get depressed and have dementia.
The third most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with Gary Brekker,
where he lays out how you can become a superhuman, strip the fat off your body,
and get yourself healthy with free easy simple exercises that will
cost you nothing at all when i heard the story about dana white and i saw he had gone from
respectfully being a man that had a little bit of weight to having this these six-pack abs on
instagram of course the six-pack isn't the the outcome it's as you've said it's the stuff going
on inside right that's really the transformation but what can someone who's just heard that at home,
where do they start with getting extending their life by triple and getting the.
So, you know, he also started something called the superhuman protocol and superhuman protocol
is using magnetism, oxygen and light. Right. So the only things that we really get from mother
nature, the big benefit we get from mother nature, the big benefit
we get from mother nature is we get magnetism from the earth. We get oxygen from the air. We
get light from the sun. The truth is most of us are not contacting the surface of the earth
that much anymore. So he bought $150,000 worth of equipment, a PMF mat, an oxygen,
what's called a hypermax oxygen to do exercise with oxygen therapy,
and a red light therapy bed.
And I had him use that equipment every single day,
seven days a week.
But if your listeners want to do it for free,
you can take off your shoes
and contact the surface of the earth.
And I'm talking about bare feet on soil, dirt, grass, sand,
because earthing and grounding is a very real thing.
We actually discharge into real thing. We actually
discharge into the earth. We actually, human beings build up a charge. Do you know that pH,
the acid alkaline scale, pH stands for potential hydrogen. It's a charge. It's a complete fallacy
that you can get alkaline by drinking alkaline water. That's the biggest marketing myth ever sold
to the public. But you can get alkaline by contacting the surface of the earth.
So if you don't have 150 grand, which I don't expect anybody listening to this podcast to spend
150 grand, but he did. I said, you need a PMF mat so that you can be alkaline. You need to spend
10 minutes a day breathing 95% O2 under mild exercise, and you need to lay in a red light
therapy bed. So in the absence of the
superhuman protocol, you can become superhuman by contacting the earth and by learning to do
breathwork. Let's talk about breathwork. I spend eight minutes every day doing a very specific
series of breathwork. People do not realize the power of something that is so accessible,
so free and so easy to do, right? They want things to be more complicated, but it's
not. And when I said the presence of oxygen is the absence of disease, it's absolutely true.
Remember that every elevated emotional state that a human being can experience actually has in its
molecular structure, oxygen is a component of that emotion. So if you look at the difference
between passion, elation, joy, arousal,
libido, and anger, for example, it's usually only one neurotransmitter and the presence of oxygen.
The reason why no human being has ever woken up laughing is because you don't have the oxidative
state to experience laughter right out of deep sleep. But can you wake up angry? Yes, because
anger doesn't require oxygen. So every morning contact the surface of the earth
and then spend eight minutes doing, I do a Wim Hof style of breath work. I give credit where
credit's due. He's the father of breath work as far as I'm concerned. So I do three rounds of 30
deep breaths, like obnoxiously deep breaths. And I start by trying to take my belly button and pull
my belly button out towards the wall.
Imagine there's a string pulling your belly button towards the wall.
And then you fill from the lobes of the lung to the apex of the lung.
And then you exhale and just relax.
God knows what they think we're doing out there.
Right outside this podcast.
They're like a bunch of freaks.
I knew it was a cult.
I knew he was a cult leader.
So you do three rounds of 30 breaths.
On the 30th breath, you exhale and you hold.
Allow the carbohydrate receptor to reset.
When you don't feel you can hold anymore, you take a deep breath in.
You hold again.
And then you let it out breath in, you hold again,
and then you let it out slow, and you start again.
I would suggest that you start with three rounds of five breaths, then work to 10, 15,
20, 25, and 30.
If you get lightheaded, this is a good sign that the oxygen tension is changing in your brain.
If your fingers and toes get tingly, this is a good sign that you're changing the oxygen
tension.
If you feel some kind of heat, temperature change in your neck, these are all great signs.
You will get to the point where you can actually hold your breath for two or three minutes,
sometimes four minutes between rounds of breath work.
And then the last thing is to expose yourself to natural sunlight.
First thing in the morning, the first 45 minutes of the day, God gives us a very,
very special type of light. It's called first light. There's no UVA. There's no UVB rays in
this light. So that's not the damaging rays from the sun. It still generates vitamin D3. It has a
positive effect on cortisol, on vitamin D3. First light is the best way to reset your circadian
rhythm. So by contacting the surface of the earth, doing breath work and getting first light, you can get to the same place that Dana White did with 150 grand in equipment.
What about oxygen masks? Because I'll be honest, when I read about the Dana story,
I went on Amazon soon after and I was like, I'm just going to buy an oxygen canister.
Good idea, bad idea. So what you want to do is, you know, you get an oxygen concentrator,
which takes 21% oxygen from, which is the concentration at sea level.
It turns it into 95% O2 and it fills this bag.
And it can refill this bag over and over and over again.
Okay.
I use one called the Hypermax.
You can see it on my Instagram.
And you plug it in, you turn it on, it fills this bag.
And then you go in, you put an oxygen mask on and you exercise for 10 minutes, only 10 minutes. Cycle for three minutes, sprint for 30 seconds, cycle for three
minutes, sprint for 30 seconds, cycle three minutes, sprint 30 seconds, and you're done.
And what this does is it raises something called the partial pressure, the storage of oxygen in
your blood. The only two-time Nobel Laureate Prize winner in medicine, Dr. Otto Warburg,
won both of
his Nobel prizes for his work in exercise with oxygen therapy.
You want to be a superhuman, do mild exercise every day while breathing 95% O2.
It's important that you're exercising.
And then after that, you move into a red light therapy bed, photobiomodulation.
So if you don't have access to a hypermax oxygen machine, just do the breath work.
Get the breath in.
You know, exchange the oxygen tension in the tissues and expose yourself to first light.
What about cold water plunging?
So I'm a huge fan of cold water plunging, but probably not for the reasons why you think.
You know, I also sit on the board of the NFL Alumni Association Athletica as a health service director.
You know, there was a time when we used to think
that putting athletes in cold water after exercise was good because of its anti-inflammatory effects.
We know now that that's only about 15% of the benefit. The majority of the benefit comes from
something called a cold shock protein. If you really want to be fascinated, Google cold shock
proteins. These are reserve proteins that are in your liver. They're dumped into the bloodstream
in an effort to save your life when you put yourself in cold water.
They scour the body of free radical oxidation.
They increase the rate of protein synthesis, muscle repair.
They are free.
You get them when you put yourself in cold water.
I don't know what the Celsius conversion is, but I use 50 degrees for three minutes minimum, six minutes maximum.
Cold.
Yes.
It's actually not that cold. I mean, you know, I see people getting in 37, 38 minutes maximum. Cold. Yes. It's actually not that cold. I mean,
you know, I see people getting in 37, 38 degree water. There's no evidence that I've read that
shows that colder is better. You get a peripheral vasoconstriction, so it forces all the oxygen into
the core and up to the brain. And you get an activation of something called brown fat, right?
Thermogenesis comes from brown fat. And for the women that are listening, for some reason I seem to ensnare the women when
I say this.
Remember that the definition of a calorie is a measure of heat, right?
I mean, the definition of a calorie is the amount of energy it takes to raise one cubic
centimeter of water, one degree centigrade.
So if a calorie is a measure of heat, then this means that when heat's leaving your body,
calories are leaving your body. So if there is nothing, nothing,
no amount of exercise hits cardio,
no type of cardiovascular or weight training
that comes anywhere close
to immersing yourself in cold water
in terms of what will strip fat off your body fast.
If you want to strip fat off your body,
get in cold water three to six minutes a day.
That's fascinating. Because the oxygen rushes to my head, that's why it has a really profound
impact on mood. That's why it has a very profound impact on mood. Because if you think about it,
what's the reason why we need deep sleep? What happens in deep sleep that's so special?
There's a secondary oxygen transfer. We transfer oxygen from the periphery, from the extremities,
to the brain. Remember, the brain's a non-metabolic organ. So in other words,
it's unlike a muscle. If I pick up a weight and start to work out my muscle, my arm,
my body will send more blood, more amino acids, more oxygen to that muscle because it's working.
Well, if I'm sitting at my computer and I'm watching reruns of The Simpsons,
or I'm sitting in my computer and I'm solving the most complex joint venture agreement,
partnership agreement with all kinds of mathematical equations,
my brain gets the same amount of nutrients, same amount of blood flow, same amount of oxygen.
So it eats the same meal, whether or not it's in a dead sprint or whether or not it's just
chilling on the couch, except in deep sleep and when you're in cold water, because it's
forcing the oxygen up to the brain. The second most replayed moment is a moment from my conversation with Dr. Tim Spector,
a favorite on the Diary of a CEO. And here he talks about health more holistically
and some of the biggest myths that most of us believe that are currently standing in our way.
We've got a fitness group amongst some of my friends, there's about 10 of us in it. And we've been tracking how often we work out and how frequently we work out in the
workouts that we do. And one of the things I have to say is pretty much no one in the group has lost
any weight. We've been doing this for a year. And that kind of bucks what you would think. So the
only time that I lost weight was actually when I went on the keto diet. I went from 14 stone eight to 13 stone eight in roughly in several weeks.
But exercise and exercising for almost religiously for the last two and a half years doesn't really seem to impact my weight at all.
In a, you know, in the way that the fitness experts might tell me on Instagram.
What's your stance on the role that exercise plays in weight loss?
Has very little role in weight loss.
All the studies, such long-term studies show it doesn't help weight loss.
And it's been grossly exaggerated as an easy fix for our obesity problem.
Exercise doesn't help weight loss?
No. All the studies show that.
The only caveat to that is if you have changed your
diet improved your diet and you've lost some weight at maintaining some exercise does help
prevent it going back up again but as on its own if you don't change your diet it's of no use
and that's well known now by all the obesity experts and all the studies does sugar
make us fat is that the culprit is that one of the main things that's contributing to no again
that's that's reductionism you know we the but the reason the reason exercise doesn't work is
it's important to realize this is because we all know this that you know you go for
a walk build up hunger before a meal that's what your parents told you you know and everything
about exercise is after it your body slows down your metabolism slows down and it tries to regain
the energy that you've lost that's just what our evolution and so that's why it's a you're not
gonna it's great for your health i mean i exercise fantastic for your mood um it's great for your
heart anti-cancer all kinds of things we should all do it but absolutely not if your goal is
weight loss you have to do something about changing your diet. And I think that's, that's the big, a huge myth, particularly perpetuated by gyms and fitness apps and everything
else. And it is complete nonsense. I read that you, when you look to studies over 30 years,
and you looked at how many studies had been done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus
things like sugar and weight, was 12 more 12 times more studies
done on the relationship of exercise and weight versus sugar and weight and why why is that
why is there less research done on the latter um i think that's the influence of governments and
the food companies and the drink companies so a lot of the exercise research done in the last 20 years
was sponsored by large corporations
who wanted to make this link between exercise and weight loss
so that they could continue to sell sugary,
ultra-process processed foods and drinks and just say it's the childhood obesity is because we've we don't have playgrounds and we don't
encourage this and that's why the cokes and the pepsis are always there at the olympic
sponsoring olympic events and associating themselves with sport and they gave hundreds
of millions to various physiology departments sports departments nutrition departments to do
research in this area basically it was really hard to get anyone to do research into how sugary
drinks make you uh gain weight or cause problems because they the amount of money for nutrition
has been abysmally poor you know in from from governments and that's why you know we only the
first ever study of ultra processed food in a controlled trial was only about three years ago
and it's been around for you know 30 40 years so such is the power of that lobby that it it doesn't necessarily distort the
research in a sort of you know evil way but they point it to make sure that the researchers are
working in an area that they want uh people to work in and distracting them keeping away from
talking about sugars or even artificial sweeteners which in my view are nearly as bad because they're sort of hidden
and deflecting us from the idea that, yes,
giving kids sugary drinks or even artificial sweet drinks
is going to be bad for them and cause obesity.
Wait, so I cut out sugary drinks about a year ago.
I still have the same brands, but I have the no sugar version.
Oh, dear.
Oh, shit. What do you mean, oh, dear?
Well, the summary of the trials shows that if you take young adults and kids
and they would stay on two cans of full sugar sodas and you change them to
the diet version there's no real difference in in weight or metabolic changes in their blood
you will go to the dentist less so you don't get as many fillings but and yet you know you should be gaining 300 calories right if you were
doing two cans a day so it doesn't work out as it should do and that's because of the extra
these chemicals are not inert so the sweeteners in kids they change their their brains to give them
they want more sweetness in their food okay so it it could reflect your wish for your
your late night milk chocolate who knows um and it it makes it very difficult trained kids to
have more bitter foods or sour foods if they've got these artificial sweeteners in their diet
all the time but they've now shown that all these sweeteners actually affect your gut microbes. So even stevia, you know, these so-called healthy ones, have an effect on your gut microbes, and they're not inert.
So we know that saccharin and sucralose also cause spikes in your blood sugar.
When I did it, you know, I have a trace.
They're not supposed to, but they actually do things they're not supposed to.
So we know very little about these products.
And my view is that they are harmful, probably not as bad as having the sugar,
but they are absolutely not a health drink.
And we should be encouraging people to have you know teas and kombuchas and uh more bitter
tasting interesting flavors and foods than just this ultra sweet uh chemical concoctions it's
this sugar conglomerate that have been funding much of the research that points towards um some
of the things you're talking about there there that's also the conglomerate that wants us to believe the calories in calories out approach because if i just view every all foods as kind of equal and on this sort
of calorie number then i can drink some of the sugary fizzy fizzy drinks and some of the processed
foods as long as i keep it within that sort of calorie deficit i'll be fine and so are they is
that sugar conglomerate is the processed food conglomerate for the calorie
model absolutely they need that right they absolutely it's vital you know zero calories
or one calorie you know on the can that's what you see and you know you're fooling people into
thinking this is a healthy drink and oh you know if i used to have full coke or pepsi and now having the diet version
i'm getting 300 calories less a day i should lose weight it's exactly what they've been doing and
they're also desperate to show that artificial sweeteners are really healthy and they come down
on anyone who tries to say that they're you know could be in any way dangerous and yet they're not
obliged to test them so none of it none of the chemicals added really go through rigorous testing
on how they affect our gut microbes and this is this you know their testing mechanisms haven't
changed in 50 years and here is the single most replayed moment as it relates to health
on the diary of a CEO of 2023.
So the first thing I came up against, because this was around the time of the financial crisis,
was the lack of understanding of the brain-body connection.
So these high-performing executives were kind of acting like
their body was just the vehicle that was moving their brain around from meeting to meeting.
And both disrespecting their physical health, but also not understanding that what they were
actually really being paid for was to use their brain. And they weren't creating the best
conditions for that brain to operate in. And I'm talking about really basic things like sleep and a good diet and hydration
and not being sedentary, managing your stress, etc. So, you know, this tiny organ,
if it's not in an environment that is giving it the best chance of doing its job,
it's not going to and a crack's going to appear somewhere. And the first time I really kind of had a big confrontation with
a bank was when people were dropping dead on the trading floor of heart attacks. And
they asked me to work more in my capacity as a former medical doctor to help with the
physical stuff. And I said, I can't do that if we don't address the mental and emotional piece, because that's what's causing this. And they just could not get that.
What did you want to do with those people in a specific and practical sense? If you could have, you know, been in charge of preventing them from dropping dead on the trading floor, where would you have started? The understanding that stress, so everything that you're experiencing mentally
and emotionally that's challenging, and things like a lot of travel, which is challenging for
your body, that that raises levels of the hormone cortisol, which comes from your adrenal glands.
And that cortisol courses around your blood through your entire body and brain. And the
brain has receptors for understanding
what's going on in terms of threat to your survival. So in a 24 hour cycle, depending on
your age and your gender, there's a normal range for cortisol. So it can go up and down like this,
you know, if something challenging happens, we need to adapt and rise to meet that challenge.
But when that level is above the top range,
all the time, these receptors in your brain, basically think that there's an imminent threat
to your survival. So there's this whole cascade of hormones. And they basically cortisol causes
inflammation in the body. So inflammation of your vascular system, inflammation around your heart and everything else, gut and other things.
But particularly around that time, we were seeing a lot of heart attacks caused by stress.
This was in the absence of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking.
It was all stress.
Once upon a time I googled, because I had a thesis, I googled, is stress contagious?
And it came up and it said it was contagious is it contagious in what circumstances do we need to be aware of that contagion
and more importantly how and why is it contagious okay I will tell you the answer to that but I'm
going to ask you a question first have you ever walked into a room with someone and by the time you've left that meeting with them, you just feel so drained?
Of course, yeah.
So you know the feeling. So I'll tell you how it works physiologically.
I'm going to start with something else to build you up to this story.
So did you know that women who live together or work closely together will synchronize their menstrual periods within two or three months. So whenever I want to explain something that's complex or I don't actually
know the current neuroscience, I always take it back to what happened in ancient times.
So when we were living in the cave, the men hunted and gathered and lived quite nomadically.
So sometimes they would go away for months at a time. And in those days, the most fundamental important thing for the survival of
the human species was that the alpha male must pass on his genes. So if he was going to be away
for months, and he couldn't, you know, that there weren't men there to defend the women from
predators, maybe there was going to be a spell of the ice age and they would all freeze to death or they wouldn't have food. He needed to
make sure that at least five women were impregnated with his sperm at the same time. So that if there
was a food shortage or there was like stillbirth or miscarriage or whatever, at least one out of
five would survive. So to be able to do that, they had to be fertile at the same time. So that's why that mechanism
exists. Now, we don't need that mechanism now, but it's still wired into the way that we operate.
So those sex steroid hormones like estrogen and progesterone, they leak out of our sweat about this far around
us and that's why if you're living with another woman or if you know you're sitting across the
desk every day then particles of hormone from my sweat would go into the through the skin of the
other woman if she's within what distance i mean it's not you wouldn't have to be sitting next to
each other if you live together then that means you're interacting enough that it would happen.
Okay.
So particles.
But not if you work together.
If you work together and you sit right next to each other every day, then it does happen too.
So, you know, in a small office that's got like six girls in it, the menstrual synchronization will happen.
Interestingly, it's led by the alpha female.
So, yeah.
So you can work out if you don't know already who the alpha female is well if you know basically let's say my cycles don't change
and everyone says oh i got my period early or i haven't had my period yet but now it's started
then that would mean that probably i was the alpha female how does the body know who the alpha female
is that will be to do with levels of testosterone
why why did the body why does that matter who the alpha female is why does it matter that they sync
up with her i i don't i don't know if it really matters i think it's just a case of physiology
so it's a little bit like in the um troops of gorillas the stress levels of the silverback
gorilla affect the other gorillas more than gorillas
who are peers to each other so there is we have a natural hierarchy and it must be related to
survival as well so she was probably the person who the alpha male was going to impregnate first
probably so everyone needs to kind of fall in line because when she starts
having sex they need to be ready yeah okay and also it'll probably be to do with things like
you know survival genes so it'll be the people with the hardiest genes because that's what you
want to pass on as well okay makes sense most resilient okay okay so where were we stressing
contagion we've done all the hormones in the menstrual cycle so basically cortisol is a
hormone that works in that same way so cortisol is the main stress hormone and this one doesn't
matter if you're male or female but it does matter where you are in the hierarchy of the organization
as i just mentioned so usually in that conversation i mentioned to you where you go into a room and
you just feel completely drained afterwards,
usually the person that comes out feeling drained is less senior than the person that's had that effect on them. And that's why this is so crucial to leadership.
Because your stress levels as a leader, as a CEO, are going to have more impact on everybody else than the rest of the people put together, basically.
So managing your stress is obviously important for you but it's important in terms of what happens to other people and the first
issue I came up against was CEOs and CFOs that said well I won't show them that I'm stressed
I won't I won't tell them what's happening with the numbers. I won't display
emotions in front of them. And I said, they're still going to know physiologically, it's going
to impact them. So now you really have to do something about it. And the other thing about
cortisol, which is quite funny, well, one of the side effects is quite funny, is that as a survival mechanism, it will help you to store fat around your abdomen.
So, you know, again, in the cave, if you were potentially going to like not find food for a month, then if you had extra fat around your abdomen, you could digest that and survive till you could find food. so with my clients in financial services it got to a point where as soon as I walked into the room
they just lift their t-shirt up and say now you know how I've been in the last month
so stress causes belly fat belly fat that's really hard to shift so again what I would see with people
is that they would say oh I've put on a bit of weight around the middle you know had to loosen
the belt a bit so I've started eating less I've started like exercising more and I still can't
shift it and again that's when I would explain this is the impact of cortisol as long
as you're still leaking out extra cortisol nothing's going to change so and like I said
even exercising more or eating better less or differently whatever it is wouldn't shift that
fat you had to get to the root cause you had had to reduce the cortisol. For any of you that are still here, I have a bonus moment for
you. I often get asked what is my favourite episode of the Diary of a CEO of all time.
And I often try and avoid that question because I don't want to pick one particular episode. It's
kind of like picking your children. However, because you've gotten here, I'm going to reveal
it to you and I'm going to play you a moment from that conversation.
My favorite ever episode on the Diary of a CEO of all time is episode 101.
And it just so happens to be the most shared episode we've ever had of all time on WhatsApp. And I know that sounds a little bit obscure,
but the interesting thing about WhatsApp is it's one-to-one typically. So it's typically one friend
sending it to a family member or to a friend or something like that. And for it to be the most
transferred between one person and another, I think is telling about the value of that
conversation. Here is one of the most important moments
from my favorite episode on the Diary of a CEO of all time.
To understand what happiness is,
you have to understand the cause of it.
Yes.
And you write about that extensively in Solve for Happy.
So what is the cause of unhappiness as you see it,
especially if you're building
sort of machine learning applications
that are going to, you know, solve, you know, make people arrive at contentment or happiness in a personalized way,
we must be able to know what's causing this lack of happiness.
Allow me a bit of time to explain it because it's simple when we get it,
but it's not simple to get to it. So happiness is very predictable. Okay. If you look back at
any point in your life where you ever felt happy there is one
commonality across all of those moments that can actually be documented in a mathematical equation
okay you've never felt happy because of a specific event in your life okay take for example rain
rain doesn't make you happy or unhappy there is no inherent value of happiness in rain
okay rain makes you happy when you want to water your plants
and it makes you unhappy when you want to sunbathe.
And so it's not just the event rain,
it's the comparison between the event
and an expectation in your mind of how life should be.
If you're worried about your plants,
then life should be generous to me and get me rain
so I can water the plants. And if life does that, then life meets your expectations and you're
happy. Okay. And so happiness in that sense becomes equal to or greater than, so it's really
mathematics that your perception of the events of your life minus your expectations of how life
should be. Okay. And apply that to anything, apply that to anything.
So, you know, my favorite example is nature.
We're all happy in nature.
Why are we all happy in nature?
I mean, you go out there and there are ants
and there are flies and, you know, trees are crooked
and there are, you know, shrubs everywhere and bushes
and it's just really not that hedged and organized,
but that's what we expect. So,
you know, nature's chaos is what we expect nature to be. And so we feel happy. You know,
nobody's ever sits in front of the ocean and says, I like the view, but please mute the sound.
Okay. You just take it, you know, it's, it's the monotonous sound and the view and the wind and the sun and the whole experience, right? And because of that, happiness becomes very different than what was defined to us.
Okay. What was defined to us is that happiness is found in a gathering at the pub or a party or a,
you know, an activity or some kind of pleasure or fun or elation or
whatever that is. That's not at all true. I call these the state of escape. Happiness as per the
definition of the happiness equation is events equal to or beating expectations, life going my
way. And so basically happiness is that calm and peacefulness you feel when you're okay
with life as it is. It doesn't really matter what life is. Okay. What matters is that you can be okay
with it. Right. So, so you take, you know, any example, if your boss is annoying and your
expectation is, yeah, bosses are annoying. This is what life is about. They become bosses because they're
annoying. Right. And, and so if, if that's your expectation, you're going to look at it and go
like, yeah, I need to learn the skill of managing annoying bosses. Okay. And if that's the case,
then you're not going to be upset about it. Similarly, anything else, if you look at it,
then it's not just the event. It's your perception of
the event. So you have something to influence. It's not just the event. Your partner might say
something hurtful on Friday at 4 p.m. That's the event. My partner said something hurtful.
At Sunday morning, you tell yourself he or she doesn't love me anymore. Okay. That's your
perception of the event. That's your perception of the
event. That's not actually the event. The event is something hurtful was said, but your perception
of the event is your work. It's your brain adding color to it. And then you compare that to your
expectations, right? You compared my boss is annoying to my boss shouldn't be annoying. Where
did you get that from? Right? So we blur the happiness equation. We break the happiness equation because of what I call the six and seven. Okay. Six grand illusions
and seven blind spots, which are the six grand illusions are basically call them pathways
that the modern world teaches us to navigate the modern world, that our illusions are not true.
Okay. Take, for example, control. Everyone knows that to succeed in the modern world,
you have to learn to control certain events, right? So you start to believe that the way to
succeed in life is to control everything. But the truth is, even if you go down to the basics of
physics, that we never are in control. That the absolute
design of nature itself, of the universe itself, is entropy and chaos, right? That's the actual
design. And so if you try to control it, you're bound to be disappointed. A lot of events are
going to miss your expectations, okay? And yes, I'm not saying don't control anything at all,
but start to understand that you're going to be selective because you have a finite amount of effort and by the way
even if you're selective and you you try to control everything sometimes things will fall
out of control okay and that should be your expectation once you get that right that was one
that was my biggest illusion okay I am a mathematician. I'm a software developer. I am a physicist. I am an engineer. And I'm a senior executive. It doesn't get worse than that. I'm like give her a spreadsheet that would tell her when to wash the colors and when
to wash the whites based on our average consumption as a family to save the environment. And poor
Nibel would actually smile at me and say, sure, baby, I will use this. Of course, and ignores the
hell out of me because that's how crazy you can be when it comes to control. Now, these are the
illusions. If you live your life
through the illusion of control, good luck finding happiness. So six grand illusions,
the illusion of thought, the illusion of self, the illusion of knowledge, the illusion of time,
control, and fear. Okay. Now that's one side and that disrupts your entire view of what to expect from life
because you're expecting life to behave
through a lens of an illusion.
The other side of it is what I call seven blind spots, okay?
And the seven blind spots
are not really defects in your brain.
As a matter of fact,
they are the very design of your brain, okay?
Your brain is designed to tell you what's wrong. Okay. It's not designed
to, you know, if a tiger shows up right here now, my brain has no use whatsoever in telling me,
oh my God, look how majestic that animal is. Right. Yeah. It's a beautiful animal, but my brain will
say we're going to die. Okay. And we're going to die is the idea that basically makes our brain constantly look for what's wrong, blur the events of life.
You ask a mother and she will say, oh, my daughter's been sick all winter.
She just had two episodes of flu, three days each.
But to the caring heart of a mother, that needs to be exaggerated too.
The exaggeration is one of the blind spots.
Your brain is trying to get you to take action, so it pushes you.
It pushes you by exaggerating the event a little bit so that you jump in and take action.
And accordingly, the event you're comparing to, you're comparing the wrong event to the
wrong expectation, and the happiness equation falls apart.
Do you need a podcast to listen to next? to the wrong expectation, and the happiness equation falls apart.