The Food Medic - S6 E7: Tara Swart on neuroscience, spirituality, and the law of attraction

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

Tara Swart is a neuroscientist, former medical doctor specialised in psychiatry, author of best seller ’The Source’ and Faculty at MIT Sloan.Tara is also executive coach to a small number of clients in hedge funds and investment banks; Trustee at the Lady Garden Foundation for gynaecological cancers; and an ambassador for brands in health, beauty, fashion, and manifestation.This episode covers:- Science and spirituality - The law of attraction- How to harness an abundance mindset- Manifestation and how to start - The power of visualization and action boards - Neuroplasticity and shaping the brain - Meditation and the brain - Reframing failureIf you loved this episode make sure to give it a review, rating (hopefully 5 stars) and share it with your friends and family. instagram/twitter/facebook: @thefoodmedicwww.thefoodmedic.co.ukThis podcast episode is sponsored by WHOOP. Right now, you can get your first month free when you checkout through join.whoop.com/thefoodmedic Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Grocer $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over-deliver. Hey team, and welcome back to another episode of the Food Medic Podcast. I'm your host as always,

Dr. Hazel. I hope you're doing well and enjoying this season of the podcast. Your feedback has been amazing and all of your reviews and ratings have really helped boost the podcast and the chart so I'm super grateful for that. This week we are discussing science and spirituality and the law of attraction. Now prior to having any guest on the, I always put out my feelers online and explore your ideas and questions regarding the topic that I will be discussing. So with regards to the law of attraction and manifestation, the majority of you were just really interested to hear more, but it also raised some questions and important points. Some people said it's just pseudoscience and we shouldn't buy into it. Others felt it was a toxic idea in that people don't ask for trauma

or illness in their lives and others felt it's only applicable to those of privilege. So I took all of that on board and I brought it into the conversation because as a medical doctor and a scientist myself I am evidence-based first and foremost but as quite a spiritual person I'm also very inquisitive and I like to think relatively open-minded when it comes to these things and I don't want to shy away from these conversations and I also do think we can harness some of the principles to help us achieve the goals that we want to achieve in life. So I'm inviting you into this podcast, into this space and asking you to have an open mind and just listen. You know, just listen. You might find this podcast is not useful for you. you might find it changes your life, you never know. So our guest today is Dr. Tara Swart. Tara is a neuroscientist,

former medical doctor specialised in psychiatry, author of the bestseller The Source and faculty at MIT Sloan. Tara is also executive coach to a small number of clients in hedge funds and investment banks, trustee at the Lady Garden Foundation for Gynecological Cancers and an ambassador for brands in health, beauty, fashion and manifestation. So sit back, enjoy and I can't wait to hear your feedback. Today's podcast is brought to you by our sponsor Whoop. Whoop is one of the most popular fitness wearables right now. It's a 24-7 digital fitness and health coach that provides actionable insights to help you recover faster, train smarter and sleep better. Whoop is unlike most other wearables

in the sense that it doesn't just tell you what you've done but it tells you what you really need to know. So I've been using my Whoop for a few months now and I am so impressed with the amount and level of insight it can provide you. So each morning when you wake up you get a recovery score from WHOOP based on your sleep and other recovery metrics such as heart rate variability and resting heart rate. That score helps to guide your day whether you should push yourself and go all out, pull it back a little or actually just take a rest day. The greatest feature for me is the built-in sleep coach which lets you know how much sleep you should be getting based on your expected activity for the following day. It also tracks all four stages of sleep so you can get a breakdown of how much REM and slow wave sleep you got. It's allowed me to figure

out ways which work for me to optimize my sleep. Whoop can help anyone perform better. Whether you're preparing for a 5k, training for an event or just looking to build healthier habits, Whoop can help you make smarter lifestyle decisions with data that is personalized to you. Right now you can get your first month free when you check out through join.whoop.com slash thefoodmedic. So Tara thank you for joining me today and like I mentioned prior to us recording I heard you on my friend's podcast Adrienne and I first of all love her podcast The Power Hour and I hadn't heard of your book before but I really resonated with so many things that you were saying and there was a lot of things that I felt like we had in common in that like your background is medicine

as well as mine but obviously you're a very spiritual person as as am I. And sometimes I think people assume that that can't go together, as in you're either one way or another, you're either scientific or you're spiritual, and they can't be combined, or they can't live in tandem together. And so I was thinking to myself, listening to the podcast, I really want to get Tara on and discuss this. And that's why we're here today. Yeah, well, I want to say to you, thank you so much for sharing that. Because I think I felt very much the same until I was writing my book. And when I was writing it, I really felt the integration of both those sides of my life for myself. And I wasn't worried about what people would think because

my personality is to take risk and go with my gut. But I was really overwhelmed by the positive response of bringing those things together and actually how much the science did mean to spiritual people and how validated the spiritual side felt by, you know, somebody from a medical and scientific background speaking about their own personal experience. later on a podcast actually someone did say to me didn't you think you were taking a risk you've got a position at MIT you're you know you tell people that you're a medical doctor and a scientist and suddenly to start writing about these things did you think that it might affect your credibility and that honestly hadn't crossed my mind. But of course, it possibly was a risk. But I have to say that the response was very different. And I had even thought, you know, maybe if you've shared a similar journey to me, like you,

if you've been a medical doctor, or like a lot of people who've been divorced, or people who come from, you know, a different cultural heritage, that I could understand it resonating with those sorts of people but honestly I can't tell you just how much it means to me when I see like somebody who's nothing like me he's got nothing in common with me basically kind of saying he couldn't put the book down for a whole weekend or whatever so I feel like I don't know if I would even describe myself as a very spiritual person I just think we all want to have a happy life. We all want to find meaning in our life. We're all on a journey. And if that means you're spiritual, then yes, I'm those things. And I think at points that you either need proof and then at other times you're willing to try something maybe that you never

would. And both of those things are part of the human journey yeah I completely agree with you um and I agree with the label of you know spirituality can also be maybe it can seem like an absolute label and maybe some people feel like they exist on a spectrum or that they don't assign to any form of label in that in that way and I think more and more we're realizing that obviously when it comes to science and as medics it's evidence-based and and that's kind of the process that we go through but when it comes to wanting a good life it's very different I guess I don't know where I'm going with this but well I think I can I think I can help you

out of it because I'm like itching to challenge you already so I think I think my challenge might help you to kind of complete the question which is that of course as medics, everything that we learn is based on evidence. But as you get more experienced, you definitely use your intuition in terms of judgment about patients, which is obviously based on that evidence. But then it's also based on your experience. And actually, I felt this from the start, but I had to be sure about it because I would never put someone's life at risk. But I'm sure that medicine is an art, not a science. I think science and medicine are different. And I think medicine is more like that, what you were going to say about the personal life journey, where maybe

you listen to your gut, maybe you have to think outside of the box. I can absolutely tell you without any hesitation that in my time as a clinician, I had to use my gut and I had to think out of the box and I had to look at, you know, interpersonal things rather than just facts. And if I hadn't done those things, I wouldn't have been as good a doctor as I was. Yeah, I agree. And I think, you know, more and more we're understanding that the mind-body connection is a very real thing and our thoughts and our feelings can really manifest in in our bodies physically as well and that is being recognized more and more in kind of conventional mainstream medicine but yeah I guess before we go

any further I'd love to talk a little bit more about your your background because you are a medically trained doctor who specialized in psychiatry and you're a neuroscientist and now you're doing a lot of coaching and speaking and obviously you're an author so how did you get here tell me your story so I was the first child of first generation immigrant Indian parents to the UK and it's such a cliche but I think like from the age of two, I was basically told that I was going to be a doctor. And luckily, I was good at maths and science. And looking back, I was good at languages, I was good at history and geography, I was good at English. So I perhaps could have had more choice. And perhaps, hopefully, as generations

go on, and we become parents, we understand that mandating what you think your child should do isn't probably as good as letting them become the person that they need to be to fulfill their purpose. But anyway, I loved medical school. And as soon as we could start choosing special topics, I was interested in the neuro topics of everything. And then I did my that extra year, the BSc, mostly in neuroanatomy and neurophysiology. And then I did a PhD in neuropharmacology, all this time thinking that I would become a neurologist. And when I returned to medical school to do the clinical years, I just found the psychiatry elements so fascinating how your mind can play tricks on you.

You can hear voices that aren't really there, how your mood can change so much because of chemicals and pathways in the brain. And it was more personable in that you really spoke to people. You weren't dealing with brain tumors or brain abscesses or things like that. So I did my year of medicine and surgery that I had to do. And then I decided to specialize in psychiatry and always kept holistic care of my patients. So I think more than some psychiatrists like to do, I would do the full, if I was referring to a medic or a surgeon, I would do the full examination and not just kind of pass it on. Unfortunately,

I eventually got to the point where I didn't feel like my career would change sufficiently in the next 40 years that it would keep me intellectually stimulated. And I also began to see this revolving door of patience. And it was very much working, psychiatry tends to be working at the lowest end of the socioeconomic scale, where people were often excluded by their family, had their children taken away from them, couldn't maintain relationships, couldn't hold down a job. And I thought I must be able to have more impact than working one-to-one with people like this. And so for about two years, because it's very hard to leave medicine, as you know,

I started thinking about what else I could possibly do. And coaching came up as something with transferable skills and appealed to me in terms of being very results focused, but also having a very Zen element to it and obviously psychological skills. And once I established myself, which was around the time of the global financial crisis. So as a former psychiatrist with and with lots of people, you know, feeling very, very stressed, that was a really fortunate time for me to make such a big career transition. And I did a lot of work with financial services. And I, I really felt that I was helping people with really good brains to be even better and, you know, have a cascade effect on their teams

and their organizations and through corporate social responsibility on society. So it kind of fulfilled all the things that I needed for myself and were sort of, you know, what I felt was my purpose. Then, actually, then a few years in after that, neuroscience became quite a buzz topic in business and leadership. So the speaking opportunities came up, it wasn't something that I was intending to do. But having done a PhD, I'd done so much conference speaking that I didn't have any fear of it. So that was quite lucky as well. Writing was probably the part after having done a PhD that I, you know, I'll go as far as to use this word, you know, not disrespecting people who've who've actually suffered trauma, but I had some sort of post-traumatic response to writing after having completed my PhD, which

was the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. And the only thing in my life where I said, I actually want to give up and don't want to finish this. I did finish, but sort of under duress and after like a very, very long time, like the longest you could stretch it for. So I sort of fell into writing my first two books with co-authors I really liked. But every time I finished, I said, I'm never going to write again. And then this is the thing about the source, it kind of, it made me write it. It was, you know, I wasn't looking to write another book. I was, I'd just become the world's first ever neuroscientist in residence at a five-star hotel. And that got a lot of press. So then Penguin approached me. And they said,

we've got a series in our health section where we've got books on, you know, a book on sleep, a book on exercise, a book on mindfulness. And we think that you could write one as a neuroscientist that brings all of those together. So I said, I could do that. But I have this other idea about visualization and vision boards. And they just absolutely loved that idea. So that's how the source came about. Wow. And did you find like when you were writing the source that it wasn't? Well, not I'm using the word easy loosely, but it came to you very naturally. Yeah, I know. I know what you're getting at. So basically, the first summer before I started writing properly, I looked up the laws of attraction to see how easily I could explain them with cognitive science rather than quantum science.

And there's not really agreement over what 12 exactly they are, but from the research that I did, sort of 10 out of 12, I could explain absolutely with cognitive science straight away with even without having to do that much research, because I had the sort of papers in my mind because of the sort of work that I was doing on neuroplasticity for my executives. And then the couple that, you know, aren't really evidence based as you and I would like them to be, I sort of basically said, if people don't want to do this, because I can't find a scientific explanation for it, then it's fine not to do them. But if you kind of think, well, if 10 out of 12 makes sense, then maybe I should just give the other two a chance. They're not going to harm me. As you know,

with medicine, it always comes down to do no harm. So if believing in a universal connection doesn't have scientific proof, but it's not going to harm you, then you could choose to do no harm so if believing in a universal connection doesn't have scientific proof but it's not going to harm you then you know you could choose to to do that I think yeah and then no it still wasn't easy Hazel but of course of course that I meant compared to you writing your PhD did you feel like this was your calling this was yeah almost like what you were supposed to write about and it's yeah kind of came full circle definitely that's of course writing a book is never an easy feat um I know this first as well but it is a great book so you touched on the law of attraction and I guess that's kind of like a huge basis of your book the source and kind of things like manifestation, and you mentioned vision boards

and things like that. And I did mention online that we were going to be discussing this on the podcast. And there is so much interest in this, you know, people wanting to know more about it, how can I do it? How can I incorporate it in my life? But there's also a lot of people who were calling for evidence, where is the proof? And some other people who felt like this isn't a helpful concept in that if we flip it on its head, if the law of attraction is attracting good things into your life, ultimately, it could be attracting bad things into your life. And people were saying, you know, no one asks for trauma or illness in their lives, and it just happens. And so I know I just said a lot of things there, but I'd love to pick that apart with you. I mean, you said a lot of things, but they're definitely things I've heard before. So I think that I can agree with you about the level of interest in it for, you know, because the way that I put it in the source is, at the end of the day, it's your brain that is the organ that you use to make the best of your life, your health, your wealth, your relationships, your

career. So in terms of the neuroplasticity, which is the ability of the brain to grow and change that underlies things like the laws of attraction, then believing that you can take agency over your life rather than sort of live on autopilot and feel like a bit of a victim of life, then believing that you can take agency over your life rather than sort of live on autopilot and feel like a bit of a victim of life, I think is something that people like to hear from the science. And then the evidence. So the way that I split it up, because, you know, in the new age thinking, there wasn't complete agreement about what the 12 principles were. And, you know, I don't even call them laws, because I feel like that's too strong a word to use. I split them into sort of six themes. And the first one is abundant thinking or an abundant mindset. The evidence there is because from a primal survival mechanism, one of the strongest

gearings of our brain is to avoid loss more than to seek a reward. And you can completely understand how that keeps us safe. And, you know, even the last 15 months or so, we've had to focus on staying safe, keeping out of danger and giving up things that we would want, you know, to keep ourselves alive. So apart from in something like a global pandemic, that can really hold you back from achieving your full potential. So, you know, rewiring your brain to think more about opportunity and go to grasp opportunities and take healthy risk is usually a very good thing to do. And then secondly, I wrote about manifestation. And the brain processes that are behind that are selective attention, selective filtering and value tagging. So because we're bombarded

with so much information through all of our five senses, but also other senses that as medics, we're aware of, like temperature sense, pain sense, joint position sense, and interoception, which is the sense of the physiological state of the inside of your body. So you're constantly dealing with all this data. And your brain naturally has to filter out some of that data, it can't possibly attend to all of it. I mean, we, we would read in a week's worth of newspapers in the modern day, what somebody in Shakespeare's time, the amount of data they would experience in their entire lifetime. You know, and it was bad enough then, but it's much worse now. So this is the reason that you are not aware of your clothing on your body all day because your brain filters that out.

So your brain has this natural filtering mechanism. And then what is filtered in, it pays attention to. And then what it pays attention to, it tags in order of importance. And there's a logical tagging system, which is literally to do with your survival. And then there's a more emotional tagging system, which has to do with your sense of belonging, your sense of identity, your sense of purpose. And so if you are more mindful about telling your brain what you want to be filtered in, what you want to pay attention to, and what you want to be, you know, seen as important, then you're so much more likely to notice and to and what you want to be, you know, seen as important, then you're so much more likely to notice and grasp opportunities that are likely to take you closer to your goals

and your dreams. So, you know, that's the sort of difference between letting life happen to you and you taking a bit more agency of it. And then I go into magnetic desire, which is a very, very strong motivation and a really, you know, core aligned emotional reason that you want the things that you want. So it can't be, you know, I'd love a big house because that's what everyone wants, or I just want to be rich, or I want to get married and have a family because now all my friends are doing it. It has to be things that really come from your core purpose. And then the last three are about harmony, patience, and universal connection. And I'll just pick up mostly on patience because the other two had a bit less evidence to them.

Patience is about neuroplasticity. So when you decide, I'm going to be more confident, I'm going to change career, I'm going to find somebody that's actually worthy of me now, that doesn't happen overnight. You don't wake up one morning and go from being low self-esteem to high self-esteem or single or to married or in a job you hate to running a business that you love. So as you start to change psychologically, and we'll go through the process, it takes time just like it would to build a brick wall or build a road for you to actually like embed this new neural pathway in your brain. That's your new way of thinking and being. And it feels like you're

trying so hard and working so hard for a long time and not getting any results. And then it's like, there's a tipping point where this pathway has become stronger than your old way of thinking, which maybe was that will never happen for me. I've seen a few people leave medicine and I think it's great but I could never do it you know and that was that was a thought that I'd had so um it takes time to get to that point but once you start thinking if I put my mind to it I can make this work then a lot of things you know fall into place and change and then finally to the really pertinent point about if the laws of attraction mean that if you think positively or think about good things that you

want, then you attract those into your life. And if you ever have a down day or worry about your health, that you might be attracting negativity or illness into your life. I'm not really sure if this started around the time that The Secret came out, but I know that The Secret was criticized for that kind of concept. But I also don't know if it's just that some people kind of worked out for themselves, if the laws of attraction mean that you can bring good things into a life by thinking good thoughts, that the opposite must also be true. I don't ascribe to that way of thinking. And the reason is that I don't even call vision boards, vision boards, I call them action boards. Because about all the good things that we want, I always say you can't make this fantasy collage of what you want in your life and then sit at home and wait for it to come true.

That's never going to happen. You've got to do something every day to move yourself closer to that goal. You've got to go networking, you've got to go dating. You know, your dream man isn't going to turn up in your life just because you've put a picture of a couple on your vision board. And so equally, let's say you've got a family history of some disease and you do spend quite a lot of time worrying that it's going to happen to you. That is not going to make you get a disease. However, as we know with, you know, whether it's genetics, whether it's lifestyle, that there are risk factors, there are physical actions that you can take that make it more likely that you're going to get a certain disease. So whether that's smoking or being sedentary or

eating badly or drinking too much, those things can actually lead to, you know, risk factors for cardiac disease and other diseases. So it's both a case of not giving too much importance to just what you think about, but also trying as much as you can to take the actions in life that are likely to move you closer to the things you want and away from, you know, any familial tendencies that you might have for a certain type of disease. Yeah. And I think what you mentioned earlier, the whole tagging of thoughts that you're focused on and really drives you in the direction of a particular goal. And I see that as my process of when I'm trying to focus on manifesting things it's more so really dialing in on what I want and I do really resonate with what you said in that it has to be aligned with your values and

your personal what you want and not just kind of a random I want a you know Ferrari or whatever it might be yeah but I think the kind think the whole concept of manifestation for some people can seem a little bit woo, maybe a little bit awkward when they're first trying it out. And I know I felt like it was a little bit forced, even like, you know, like little things like wanting to make some changes in my life and things like that. Is it normal to feel like that and and how can people best get started yeah I think like with anything and I always use the analogy of learning a language so even though I haven't thought this through I'm going to use it now to see if I can make sense of it so let's say you grew up speaking English you learned French at school and now you either want to go and work abroad or you've got a

partner that's from a different culture and you want to learn a new language sort of in your mid-20s or mid-30s you might think it's going to be really hard it's going to be much harder than it would have been when I was younger I don't know if I can do it I don't have time you know we make all these sorts of excuses but if you got the Duolingo app and you were as self-motivated as you possibly could be, you would at least pick up a few words and be able to go on holiday to that country. If you got a teacher and you had a lesson every week and you had homework and you had an exam at the end of six months, you'd probably be as close to fluent as you're going to get in adulthood for a language. So manifestation is like that. Of course, you do have to believe in it. I mean, I think we all need to see to believe, whether it's factual evidence or just stories of people

who've done these things. There is an element of that. And then the process that I use, which is the process of neuroplasticity is raised awareness. So, you know, real clarity about what you want and why and that it's right for you. Focused attention, which is looking out for opportunities in your life to make that thing happen. And if that's not happening, then noticing why it's not happening for you. Is it because you're not putting yourself out there or is it because it's a bad time to be looking at that thing? And then deliberate practice, which is the actual action, you know, the networking, the dating, depending on what you're trying to achieve.

And then accountability. So and that's very similar to the language thing, because with the best will in the world, none of us push ourselves as hard at the gym as if we've got a personal trainer. And it's kind of like that. So it can be a friend, or, you know, some sort of proper, like coach or therapist, or you can use a form of technology to hold yourself accountable. But there does have to be and that's why I really love vision boards, because I sort of usually do them annually. And it's just a great way of very tangibly seeing at the end of a year, how many of the things that I put on this board did I achieve. And I've really learned about the patience piece, because sometimes some things, you know, they trickle into the next year,

and you've got to be okay with that as well. Yeah. And so kind of just on a practical level, when you're talking about action boards or visualization are you making a physical board yeah so the best practice from the start if people haven't tried this before is to make a physical board because the fact that you use your hands that it's you know it's it's in color you can move things around and also just that when you look through magazines you don't just go with your logical instinct for, okay, I know that I want this thing. So I'll find an image of that. You also go with images that you're drawn to or more metaphorical images. And so you start to bring in your emotions and your

intuition as well, which I think is really important. I've been doing it for 13 years now. And there have been years where I've used Pinterest instead of done a an actual board or both but this year you know after the year that we've had in 2020 where it was very hard to see how you could really exert much influence over achieving the things that you wanted to I have made a tangible board again because it's I feel a bit like it's sort of starting again you know and really having to kind of go from nothing to to manifesting the things that you really want despite the difficult situation yeah I agree I do love the idea of using Pinterest because I use it for so many things whenever I'm mapping out projects and there's just so many images that you can tap into as well but I also am a very handsy person and like to get it like a big a3 page and just scribble away and you mentioned kind of abundance mentality is this kind of similar to the

growth mindset yeah very similar actually and so obviously the growth mindset research comes from Professor Carol Dweck at Stanford so very evidence evidence-based. And she did research on a lot of children and later adults. I guess I've adapted it a bit more in two ways. One is that when, because I know Carol, that when the research first came out, it was very much you're either growth or you're fixed. And because my research is in neuroplasticity, I had to hold onto that strong belief that you could change along that spectrum, which Carol then did the research to show was correct. And also, her research doesn't talk about things like positive affirmations and mantras, but my work does because I've merged the wisdom traditions with the science. So just a slightly different

take on absolutely that research. Yeah. And so if someone wants to harness that abundant mentality, is it through processes of action boards and manifestation? No. So this is one of the things I believe has to come before manifestation, because if you're not manifesting from your most abundant self, you're going to continue to play small in life. So the first part of the work is really believing that you deserve the things that you really want, because that's often a big issue. We haven't really covered that yet. But deserving is a big issue that underlies why people don't achieve things like, you know, New Year's resolutions or lists that they write

out, or, you know, vision board or visualization that they do. So basically, there's an ancient Buddhist sort of philosophy that says replace every negative thought with a positive thought. And the way that neuroplasticity works, again, if we use the language metaphor is that you can't unlearn a language that you've learned. But you can make the pathway for a different language stronger than the previous one. So, you know, I was brought up bilingual in an Indian language and English, but since I was 18, or maybe even before, I don't really use the Indian language, which I used at home a lot. And I use English all the time. So now, even though I was equally good at both of them in

my childhood, definitely my English is much better than my Bengali now. So like that, you have to cultivate a mindset of positivity. It's natural for us because of that survival gearing to dwell on what went wrong. And that's great for learning from. But if you don't also dwell on what went right, and we don't at all, we spend way more time thinking about what went wrong than what went right, then your whole view of the world starts to become things go wrong, things don't work out, I shouldn't take risks, the world isn't a safe place. So it's really important. And you know, when I said at the beginning, I don't know if I would call myself a very spiritual person, I want to be a very spiritual person. But I feel like

every time you get to one next level of that, you realize that you've got so much further to go than you ever thought. And so you know, something I've been working on during the lockdowns is cultivating positivity and happiness and noticing when good things happen much more. And it's really shocking to me how much we don't do that. Yeah, no, it's so true. And I guess that kind of is one way that we can reframe failure, which is another thing that you talk about in the book. And I think when I reflect on my own life, and I'm only 30 years of age, so it's not like it's a very long life but I feel like there's been a lot of obstacles and I guess failures I'm using in air quotes along the way and people love asking me on podcasts about this you know like what was your biggest failure and

blah blah blah and I don't really see them as failures because I just think like it just nudged me into onto this path that I'm currently on that I know is right for me. And I guess my question to you is, when people do feel like they're coming up against failures, or have experienced big failures, and are identifying themselves as a failure, how can we reframe that? I mean, one of the reasons I wrote the book was because I wanted to offer people tools to sort of readjust their life or take more control over their life before they faced some of the things that at the time I considered to be failures. So, you know, I considered my marriage of over a decade ending

as a failure. But it was also the biggest push for me to make big changes in my life. And I don't personally think this, but if you think back to the story that I told you about my parents wanting me to be a doctor, it doesn't matter how successful I become doing something else. In their eyes, I haven't achieved the career that I should have. So I don't feel that that's a failure. I feel that leaving medicine was absolutely the right thing for me. But I know that if I had that conversation with them, they would say, we wish that you'd stay being a doctor for the rest of your life. So that's other people's perceptions as well as your own. I really think that usually it takes the passage of time to look back and think

how well your life turned out or as a result of what you considered to be a failure of course that's not always the case for people but I think the only way that you can always reframe something to not be a failure is through your personal development so the biggest thing that I learned after I got divorced when you know at points I was literally and metaphorically flat on the floor, was that I had the resources and the resilience and the determination in me to pick myself up and make my life work. And the great thing about that was that next time, it might not be a divorce, it might be something completely different. But those innate resources, they apply to everything yeah it's a process of growth and I guess that's also neuroplasticity is it you know creating those new connections and rewiring your

brain as you grow through life absolutely yeah I mean for me those things are so parallel you know if I talk about personal development or becoming more spiritual, I can hardly distinguish between those two phrases and neuroplasticity. And it's a bit like, it's so funny because it's now, you know, because of this conversation, I'm thinking about how when I was a teenager, my mom would speak to me in Bengali and I would answer in English. But in my brain, I couldn't really tell the difference between those two languages because I understood them both perfectly. And I could, you know, mix them up up I could answer in one listen in another and to me neuroplasticity is as intertwined with changing your life personal development becoming more spiritual and I you know that's probably just because of my sort of academic background so I'm sure for other people maybe for a linguist they'll well, it's just like learning a language, maybe for a coder, they'll say it's just like, you know, an algorithm. So I

love that. I think, you know, everybody's got their own version of it. Yeah, 100%. And I think, you know, the concept of neuroplasticity is a term that's used quite a lot recently, and people are becoming more au fait with what it means and you know there's ways that you can kind of harness it and I think meditation and mindfulness often come up as as ways we can change our brain like physically change our brain I'd love to know more about this kind of like what's happening on a physiological level when we do practice things like meditation or mindfulness meditation and being more present? Lovely question. So yes, mindfulness and mindfulness activities, which include meditation, yoga, mindful eating, mindful walking, basically

paying attention are one very powerful way of changing your brain in a certain way that but any intense learning can change your brain so learning a language learning a musical instrument you know the famous case of the London taxi drivers that do the knowledge for example that changes cell volume in the part of the brain that's to do with navigation and memory that makes complete sense right so when you do meditation, it does quite a few things. So just in the moment that you're doing a mindfulness activity, your brain's more likely to be in a gamma wave state and maybe with some alpha waves, but you do get alpha waves when you're asleep, but you don't get gamma when you're asleep or completely like task focused and switched on. And there's an interesting research study that

shows that women who do yoga three times a week have lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol than age matched controls who don't. So women of the same age that don't. And so that's another mindfulness activity that actually causes your entire normal range for the stress hormone cortisol to, you know, to stay lower than it does for somebody who's experiencing the same life events as you. And then with two to three months of regular practice, and this is a minimum of 12 minutes, most days of the week, preferably every day, but, and that's if you do formal practice, like sit down with your eyes closed. And so the actual, the time that you've

got your eyes closed, and you're focusing on your breath or your thoughts, or, you know, a mantra or a sound, then we do actually see physical changes in the brain, we see denser folding of the outer layer of the brain, the cortex. And because the cortex regulates the amygdala, which is in the limbic system, which is the emotional part of the brain, the limbic system, and the amygdala is where the emotions originate from, then you see the effect of that kind of having more of a pause button. So that if somebody shouts at you, you don't just respond without thinking about it. You're able to think, okay, what would be the best way to deal with this person right now? Yeah. So those are sort of the three

main things. And then an amazing study in the US Marines done by Professor Amishi Jha, who's become a friend of mine, and she's so incredible, showed that Marines who did eight weeks of mindfulness meditation, 12 minutes a day, before being deployed into battle, had increased resilience once they got into the battle zone compared to the control group that didn't do any. But what she also found later, which was just literally mind blowing, is that in the group of people that were selected for daily meditation, of course, you know, like you've said, and in your followers and my followers, there's a variety of people, there were some skeptics. So they either didn't do it at all, or they did it, but you know know not most days of the week and when they got to the battle zone they could see that their friends who did the meditation could sleep at night that

they weren't sweating with anxiety all day so they phoned up the neuroscientists and said you know I'm definitely seeing the difference between my friends who did it the fact that we didn't can we please have these meditation tools now oh wow they said, yeah. But the scientist said, of course, we'll give them to you. But these guys trained for eight weeks and you're in the battle zone now. We're really sorry, but we can't guarantee that it's actually going to help you. But what they found was that in a very short period of time, it improved insomnia, anxiety, sweating, and stress levels. And I think that's such an important finding for the modern day and particularly the global crisis that we're in at the moment that even if you've never done meditation

before, if you started today and you did just five or 10 minutes and built yourself up to 12 minutes and try to do that most days of the week. I used to do mine on the London underground when I was still, you know, regularly traveling in London. That actually reduces your stress levels, helps you sleep better, helps you regulate your emotions better. So I think that's like such a gift, you know. And the other thing I found recently is I actually discovered this during the pandemic because I went for my annual blood tests. And it was sort of, I guess, like six or nine months after lockdown one and I said to my GP I'm completely prepared for the fact that all those sorts of factors that are subject to the stress hormone level like

my cholesterol they're probably going to be worse and I'm I'm okay with that and she said don't give too much emphasis to the effects of stress like think about the good things that you do as well. And so the results came back and they were not only not worse than the year before, but they were actually better for the first time in quite a few years. So I spoke to my ex-husband, who's still a doctor, and, you know, went through all the details of everything with him. By the end of it, because like when, you know, he knew what my cholesterol levels were like when

we were still married to each other um he said are you doing a lot more mindfulness than you did before and I said I'm actually not doing any formal meditation but I just live a mindful life I always do mindful eating you know when I do a walk it's mindful when I drink my cup of tea in the morning it's mindful and what I've learned is that the way that you first do meditation is it's separate from your life and then once you've done it enough or you find ways to incorporate it they actually become the same thing yeah so yeah it doesn't you don't have to set aside time to do it I didn't I didn't do that because I knew that I've actually learned that recently

but it makes a lot of sense to me yeah no it does make sense I think meditation can sound like a very like elusive and like you know very difficult thing to do but when you have done it in a structured manner for a period of time you do learn how to just incorporate it in different ways and I think I'm I'm similar to you in that I used to have a very structured practice for maybe two or three years and I found it really difficult during the pandemic to have a structured practice yeah and I was also working in the hospital over here so I was kind of sitting with my thoughts didn't feel like something I really wanted to do um but then instead I swapped it for going out for a walk every single day after work and using that as my kind of way of closing the stress cycle and

just yeah being mindful that way and it was so funny because I was speaking to a friend recently and I said you know I've never really paid so much attention to the weather and the seasons than I have this year like I don't think I've constantly been aware of the seasonal changes in the UK because that's all we really had that was like our entertainment was outdoors which isn't a bad thing no like you know it you become more conscious and more aware of the little things that bring you joy in life as opposed to constantly focusing on big milestones or big events and things like that I love the way that that was so intuitive for you actually got goosebumps when you said that was my way of closing the stress cycle because you know

you've got the huge privilege of actually being able to listen to your body and understanding that you need to act on that and that's something I'm really passionate about more people kind of engaging with and connecting to and you also mentioned completely just by chance two things that are new pieces of research that came out during the year of this last 15 months, where all the things that you know, you and I usually talk about, like sleep and good diet and hydration and exercise and everything. As long as you've got those basics in place, two things that have a bigger impact on your mental health and your brain performance are connecting with nature on a daily basis, which you were

clearly doing, and having a purpose that transcends yourself. So I would say, you know, for someone like you that's still working at the hospital, of course, it's your job, but you are literally putting your life in danger to protect other people. And I hope that you, you know, feel that huge sense of the massive thing that you've done that so many people are grateful for, like more people than you'll ever know, probably. Oh, I really love this conversation. And I know that there's going to be so many people who love it too, and will want to hear more from you. So I guess, obviously, they've got access to your book, The Source, which I'm sure is available online and all good booksellers.

Where else can they hear more about you and the work that you do? Well, I do love doing podcasts because I feel like that's a really great way of reaching a lot of people. So I have done a lot of podcasts. There's a podcast page on my website, taraswart.com, or if you look on Apple or Spotify, just put my name in, then there's a lot there. I'm the most personally interactive on Instagram, Dr. Tara Swart. Yeah. And maybe just one more thing to say about the book, just maybe to end with a little kind of inspiration about vision boards and visualization is that I hadn't had any foreign translations of my previous books. And I didn't really know like what was a good number or anything like that. But obviously, I was with Penguin and it was kind of,

you know, all it was there an absolute class act. And so they have an international rights division. And I knew who the head was, and I knew who the people were for different regions and stuff. And I think I'm pretty sure I was the biggest pest that they had to put up with that year. But this is the action part of a vision board. You know, I was like, because basically, these translations started coming in. So every so often, I'd get an email saying like, the source, the Korean offer, the source, the Russian offer, the source, the Spanish offer, and it was exciting. So I was like, I read down an email chain and someone like the PR lady had said to someone she's already got 15 translation isn't that incredible she hasn't even finished writing the book yet by the time the book came out I had 24 translations and you know yeah I mean I've got

36 now that is incredible thank you I think I'm still not really aware of how, like, you know, what to compare it to. But the head of international rights at Penguin had a source branded vision board on her door that had names of countries on it that would get ticked off every time that her team had secured another offer. And people from all over the building were coming to like marvel at this thing and recently I was on an Instagram live with a very dear friend from LA and I was saying that when I was teaching at MIT we were talking about languages and the technology that's going to help us to understand you know different people whose languages we don't speak and I said I wish I could speak every language and I could

like communicate with everyone that I come across in the world and understand them as well and they understand me and my friend suddenly said well your book's out in 36 languages isn't it so you have essentially spoken to people in 36 language territories and I didn't quite like burst into tears at the time but I was sort of like that thing I've always wanted about connecting with people in like really random places. I guess I'd achieved that in a way by having this book translated in so many languages. And I had never thought about it till it was just a few months ago that she said that. But I did, you know, want to add in the point that I was regularly phoning up this rights team saying, what have you done about America? What have you about this like is there any progress and I think just to like stop me phoning they probably like did more stuff just

to be able to say yes yes we've done it I got it so you know don't hold back from asking for the things that you want I think and what you deserve as well yeah exactly and believe that you deserve it yeah and playing big no No, I love that. I'm after this, I'm going away. I'm doing my vision board, especially after this conversation. I'm so happy. I've absolutely loved speaking to you.

I love what you do. Thank you. And yeah, let's keep in touch. Okay, team, that was Tara. I hope you enjoyed the episode. It was slightly different to the topics that we normally talk about, but I hope you have come away from this podcast feeling inspired. And yeah, I definitely have. It made me feel really validated. It was quite therapeutic for me I think at the time of recording this I was going through a difficult time and so just having this conversation helped me walk away from certain things that I knew weren't helping me and bring my attention

towards the things that I really want to work towards and so I think that is really my takeaway from this podcast it's not about giving everything up to the universe and hoping that it will all work out I think Tara makes some really important points that really highlight that we can't just sit back and visualize our best selves. It's about taking action and really focusing on what we want from life. So yeah, I really, really enjoyed this podcast and I went away and made my own action board. So if you also love this episode, make sure to give it a review, a rating, hopefully five stars and do share it with someone who you think will enjoy it

I would love to hear your feedback so you can catch me on Instagram as normal Twitter Facebook wherever you go online and my handle is the food medic we'll see you again next week for another episode of the food medic podcast