The One You Feed - Debunking Brain Myths: What’s Really Holding You Back from Change with Sarah McKay

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

In this episode, Dr. Sarah McKay dives into debunking common brain myths and explores what’s really holding you back from change. She also discusses willpower and how it isn’t the magic bullet for behavior change. This conversation is all about separating fact from fiction when it comes to understanding your brain and how it works. Key Takeaways: [00:06:40] Neuromyths and neuroscience understanding. [00:09:31] Lizard brain myth debunked. [00:12:37] Constructed emotions vs. hardwired reactions. [00:16:24] Language and emotional understanding. [00:18:55] Change and brain plasticity. [00:24:41] Willpower and self-control dynamics. [00:30:36] Addiction vs. Habit Distinction [00:33:21] Aging versus dementia distinction. [00:38:24] Cognitive testing for memory concerns. [00:40:43] Alzheimer’s disease research trends. [00:44:47] Hearing loss as a risk factor. [00:49:24] Sleep’s impact on brain health. [00:51:20] Social connections and mental health. For full show notes, click here! If you enjoyed this episode with Sarah McKay, check out these other episodes: Understanding How the Brain Works with Lisa Feldman Barrett Eating for Brain Health with Lisa Mosconi How to Harness Brain Energy for Mental Health with Dr. Chris Palmer Connect with the show: Follow us on YouTube: @TheOneYouFeedPod Subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify Follow us on Instagram See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

All your brain is doing is kind of gathering a lot of information as it goes along through life and stores that information so that when you're in that situation next you can make that decision about what to do. And a lot of the time we will be making decisions based on did that feel really good last time or did that not feel so great? Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear.

We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. What if I told you that some of the most popular beliefs about your brain, like the idea that you only use 10% of it, are completely false? And worse, these

myths might actually be holding you back from real change. Today, I sit down with neuroscientist Dr. Sarah McKay to debunk the biggest neuromyths you probably still believe. We'll also explore why willpower isn't the magic bullet for behavior change and what actually is. And Sarah shares a deeply personal shift she's making at 50 that might just change how you think about your own life's pace. If you're ready to separate fact from fiction when it comes to your brain and maybe even rethink how you're living, stick around. I'm Eric Zimmer and this is The One You Feed.

Forty-five years ago, a Virginia soul band called The Edge of Daybreak recorded their debut album, Behind Bars. Record collectors consider it a masterpiece. The band's surviving members are long out of prison, but they say they have some unfinished business. The Edge of Daybreak, Eyes of Love, was supposed to have been followed up by another app. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Why would you do that to me? Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Blum was a professional con artist, so you didn't stand a chance.

But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. I'm Caroline DeMore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ever wonder what it would be like to be mentored by today's top business leaders? My podcast, This Is Working, can help with that. Here's some advice from Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan Chase on standing out from the leadership crowd. Develop your EQ. A lot of people have plenty of brains, but EQ is do you trust me? Do I communicate well? Develop the team, develop the people, create a system of trust, and

it works over time. I'm Dan Roth, LinkedIn's editor-in in chief. On my podcast, This Is Working, leaders share strategies for success. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the show. Thank you for inviting me. I am happy to have you on. I first came across your work, I think because my partner, Ginny, subscribes to your email list.

Oh, that's cool. The thing that sort of hooked me and that I wanted to talk about was that you often talk about neuromyths. And so we'll be getting into neuromyths, we'll be getting into your latest book, which is called Brain Health for Dummies, and all of that in a moment,

but first we'll start like we always do with the parable of the wolves. And in the parable, there's a grandparent who's talking with their grandchild and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops, think about it for a second, they look up at their grandparent and they say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that

parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Yeah, it means quite a lot right now. I was thinking about this last night because I'm one of those sort of seasons of life, let's say my mother loves to talk about seasons of life, where I think that kind of the balance and moments and places and people kind of working against each other. So I turned 50 at the very beginning of the year. Last year was a huge year. I wrote a couple of books. We had a lot going on.

I had lots of great, exciting, fun things happen, but we also had quite a lot of stress in our family. And I decided that this year turning 50, I was gonna take like a gap year. I think growing up, I was meant to call it a sabbatical, which is I don't want to be at my desk. I don't want to be writing. I don't want to be,

don't want to spend too much time thinking, to be honest. I'm going to do podcasts and speaking, but I want to travel and I want to connect. I'm trying to sort of shift a balance. I think my oldest son, it's his final year of high school and he'll probably go away to university next year. And I left academia many years ago when I had my boys because I wanted to be at home with them. And I feel like it's a really nice book end of his schooling to kind of be here. I mean, to be honest, he probably won't notice whether I'm here or not, but he will notice

the food and the baking just to kind of shift my focus and just sort of slow down and live a bit of a, a slower linear, like I like to say, less of a 360 life. So I feel sometimes I can be in a tug of war between striving and achieving and trying to do all of the things and parent with trust, not anxiety, try and give up control and be a mentor.

So I feel like I've purposefully decided this year. It's not the word slow down, but perhaps anchor myself a little bit more. You know, people have a word of the year. Last year I had this word equanimity and I think I'm going to reuse it again this year, cause I think that's about kind of being grounded and balanced. And when life is kind of rushing around, I'm going to try and be a little bit more like linear, choosing where to place my focus in a calmer way this year. I think I need that, my body needs that, I want to give that to my family again.

So that's what that parable kind of, it's about not fighting between different ideas, it's just about left-setting some aside and leaning into some others. Yeah, that idea of being away from your desk is one that sounds good. I've been working on my first book and it's due to the publisher in a month. Oh, congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. I spend a lot of time at my desk normally. You spend a lot of time sitting down alone.

Even more, yeah. Just lately, the last few days, I've just had this feeling like I get off, I'm like, I just need to go for a walk, with no music, no audio books, no podcasts, I hate to say it. Listeners, I don't advise that. I think you should always have the one you feel on.

It's hard to walk without a podcast if you have a busy brain. I find it stops me thinking, as I say, I don't like this 360. My brain will just be going off in a million angles. I agree. And generally, I felt like no stimulation for just even 30 minutes where it's like, there's not something coming at me. So let's move into talking first about neuromyths. What does that mean to you and what are some of the most prevalent neuromyths out there? This is interesting because I haven't thought to be perfectly honest about neuromyths in quite some time. I feel like when I started, I sort of started the current phase of my career, which

was very much about my background as a PhD neuroscientist, a research when I left academia and I was at home with my boys for a few years and then I set up a practice sort of teaching, talking, writing about neuroscience. It was probably at a point in time when I don't know whether people, I don't know whether that's gone backwards, people were as scientific, literate as they are now, but then sometimes I wonder if that's, like I say, changed again. Neuroscience wasn't as popularized then as it is now, and I don't think people had as clear understanding. And so there were lots of ideas people had about the brain that were reasonably, whether they were widely shared or whether I just tuned into them. The, as a neuroscientist, I'd never heard of, because when you're in the

neuroscience research world, academia, you're doing your thing and you're surrounded by other like-minded people. And so then when I first stepped out, there were people saying things about the brain that I didn't necessarily think were correct or I'd never heard of before. So I thought I'm going to bust those myths, let me show them and tell them. saying things about the brain that I didn't necessarily think were correct or I'd never heard of before. So I thought, I'm going to bust those myths. Let me show them and tell them. And so I started talking about some of these ideas.

And honestly, it feels a little bit old fashioned for me now to talk about what some of them are maybe these ideas around we have a right creative brain and a left analytical brain and you're either right brained or you're left brained. Or learning styles, either a kinesthetic or an auditory or a visual learner. We only use 10% of our brain. I think these are some of the more popular ideas that are out there about the brain.

And initially I used to be, I'm going to bust the myths and I'm gonna tell them. And I have learned a lot in the last sort of 17 years I suppose of doing what I do that busting a myth isn't a way of Connecting with other people and educating them about neuroscience. No one wants to be told You know what you think is wrong Yeah, in fact that'll make them dig their heels in and that's why why I say, when you say, what do neuromyths mean to me,

this is what it means to me now. That's not how I now approach their work that I do. It's around taking ideas that are correct and are accurate and are based in the research, or at least our current understanding of where ideas about neuroscience are, and then sharing them in a way that will resonate with someone that will land with someone. And then if they come to me and ask, oh, what about this or what about that? Then I might say, hey, let's kind of take a look at what our latest understanding is.

And often it will be kind of different. I suppose some ideas that have persisted over the years and maybe not so much in neuromyths, but might be just inaccurate ways of phrasing discussions about the brain and perhaps the one that I still tend to rant on a little bit about would be the reptilian brain or the lizard brain. Yeah. And this gets thrown about as this kind of phrase that we've all got this kind of lizard brain inside of us, kind of waiting to be scared

to freeze or to flee or to fight, although lizards don't typically fight, and that kind of controls everything that could potentially go wrong. It controls our behavior. And we don't have a lizard brain because we're not lizards, we're humans. Our brains are far more complex. We're not born with this kind of fear hub inside us waiting for something to go wrong. So that is perhaps not a myth that I tell people is wrong, but I try and present different ideas instead, which I think are more contemporary ways of explaining how the brain works, that I think are more useful and give people a bit more agency

and a bit more to kind of move on with in a useful way. With the lizard brain, I mean, obviously, I think that you're right, we're not lizards. Secondly, I think one of the things that you talk about in your book, and I think if you dig into neuroscience a little bit, you start to realize is that there's a lot of connectivity among parts of the brain.

So to think that one part of your brain is doing all of something is misleading. But is it safe to say that we have a part of our brain that is more, I don't even know if this would be safe to say, limbically based, a part of our brain that is more reactionary, that is from older brain structures in creatures that we've evolved from and we've built on top of that or is even that a misunderstanding? The brain is complicated. It does a whole lot of things.

This idea that we evolved from lizards, first of all, is inaccurate because an evolutionary biologist will be able to tell you, you know, mammals didn't evolve from lizards. If you kind of look at a kind of an evolutionary tree, they branched off we branched off we kind of evolved along one kind of path and they they evolved on the other so this idea that we've retained some lizard part in us is inaccurate on top of that if we look at how the brain develops this idea that there's this kind of like layer by layer kind of development of the brain whereby these primitive lizardy parts develop first and then the other parts grow on top or develop on top.

Again, that's not necessarily how our brains develop either. So the idea that they evolve and then develop in the same way has been set aside. The idea was really popularized many, many years ago, kind of back in the 1960s. Let's just say we've learned a lot in the last five years, let alone a lot from the 1960s. When it was originally proposed, this idea of this kind of lizard brain or the limbic brain, it was proposed by this chap Paul McLean. And when he was first describing the different parts of the brain, he didn't even label the limbic brain, the

so-called limbic regions of the brain as the lizard brain. He in fact labeled them as the mammalian brain. The lizard part or the reptilian part of the brain was even kind of more sitting below them, was more parts of the brain that are involved with things like kind of respiration and heart rate and sleep and awake, et cetera. So if his description is accurate, people aren't using his description accurately today. And I think what's kind of funny, what I always encourage people to do is do a Google image search for lizard brain or reptilian brain and look to see the diagrams that people have drawn of this.

And you could get an array of 20 of them, and I guarantee every single one of them will label a different part of the brain as lizard or reptilian. And the reason they can't label it is because it doesn't exist. It's not kind of a thing. What we understand now,

the current contemporary neuroscience perspective, and this may change, is that we don't have these kind of hard-wired neurobiological basic emotions that are widened from birth, whereby every human on the planet is going to respond in an identical way, in the same way that every lizard on the planet does. Like a lizard in Morocco and New York and in my backyard here in Sydney, you're all

going to behave the same way. We humans don't. Instead, we talk about this idea of constructed emotions and some of this has been popularized by various neuroscientists whereby like everything else in our brain like a thought or a memory or an expectation or a belief an emotion is also constructed from kind of multiple inputs or we could think about them as like ingredients. So some of these would be from our bottom-up kind of physiological body, the sensations we feel in our body. Some of us are more consciously aware of what

happens in our body than others. The situation we're in, the context we're in, the people we're with. I mean and there's a whole lot of data coming in these days from like your mobile phone. So a war happening on the other side of the world is now happening 30 centimeters away from your face. And that gets combined with our memories and our personal experiences, the language we've learned to describe these kinds of feelings. And so there's this kind of conglomeration of, or this kind of mix or construction of all of these different components that create

this kind of feeling that we would have, that we would give a particular word to. And we know that this is the case because people can learn to experience new emotions as they have different experiences as they're going through life. We gain a much broader kind of emotional vocabulary so to speak as we get older. We see this from small children to teenagers to adults in terms of the nuance and the kind of shades of grey that we learn to understand and feel and experience. And we also know from say therapy or cognitive behavioural therapy or other types of sort of learning or training that we can learn to respond in different ways to situations by understanding all of these

different inputs. If we had a lizard brain that controlled our emotions, we would be like the lizard in Morocco, New York or Sydney. There would be no variation and that's not the case in a human. Do you think the lizards are insulted by us constantly talking about them in this way? I don't really think that lizards, you know, have that many deeper thoughts. I do spend a lot of time, I've got a little lizard. Let's say I'm very familiar with lizards, I have little lizards sort of happening in my house.

There's lizards inside the house. Australia's a wild place to live, there's a lot of wildlife in and out. My dog just thinks that they're all meant to live in here with him. He hasn't learned that they don't belong. What I really try to teach and encourage people to do is to think about the words and the phrases they use to describe neuroscience and all the brain and all their behavior. Because it can be very limiting if we use certain phrases. It almost dials us in to think that that is the only option. So I don't even like using the word stress and that's kind of I suppose related to these ideas of lizard brains. When we say the word stress it's a useless

word in the English language because it could mean the thing that's happened out there, now whether it be a natural disaster or something that you've seen on your phone or it could be something that you've imagined, it could be a threat, it could be a challenge, it could be an opportunity. One event could be all those three different things depending on who you are. We've got various sort of physiological response systems which are deployed over different sort of time scales and response to those threats, challenges and opportunities. We've got sort of our stress response systems, but they're not only responding when something is scary or a threat, they're also responding.

You know, your heart rate rises as you stand up so you don't faint. That's controlled by your sympathetic nervous system. Some people like to call that your fight and flight system. Your heart rate isn't rising as you stand up because you were once chased by a saber-toothed tiger. It's just how your body is responding and engaging. And then we've got the feeling that we use. So we've got the threat, challenge, or opportunity, the response systems, and then we've got this word

that we would use to describe our physiological response in the context. And again, we like to use the word stress. So what I try and do with all of the neuroscience education I do is to give people a very clear biological understanding of what is happening and then some more sophisticated language to describe that. And that blows open opportunities for them to act in different ways instead of focusing in on we've got a lizard brain and there's fight or flight. Yep. So let's change directions just a little bit because I'd

like to get a neuroscience perspective on a couple of different things. So one of the things that this show is about and one of the things that I help people do in various different ways is to make changes in their lives of different types. But change is difficult. This may be me using a broad term like change, which is like using a broad term like stress that doesn't isn't helpful enough. But from a neurological perspective, is there a reason that change is so difficult for us? Yeah, I mean, as a neuroscientist, back that back and ask you to define change in a little bit more of a clear way. So if I was to reframe that question and think about change would be you're in place A and you want to get to place B. Now that might be you're wanting to learn something new. So maybe you're, you know, you're 15 years old and you're, this is a real example, you're in high school and you're studying Shakespeare and you've got to learn some quotes about, you know, an essay that you've got to write in class coming

up. That's change. That's, you've got to read Shakespeare, which you find a struggle and really difficult. And then you'll get to the point where you've learned those and you can understand and write about that. So that's change. Learning something new is change. Having perhaps a mood that, you know, you've got low mood and you've been struggling with that for some time and you want to have more upbeat moods. So perhaps you've been struggling with that for some time and you want to have more upbeat moods. So perhaps you've been diagnosed with depression or anxiety. Perhaps you've just got the blues and you want to not be like that anymore.

That's that's also changed. So we've got different types of scenarios or perhaps you're trying to learn a new skill. Like, you know, I'm in a musical theatre group. I'm very untalented at singing and dancing, but I do like knocking about in the back row with the other mums and the ensemble. We've got to learn a new dance for the show coming up and it's like we first get taught it and again that's change. I have to change something to be able to get from point A to point B and if you are you know five years old or ten years old and it's a context relevant type of learning that you're doing or change that you're trying to make it is a whole lot easier than it is when you're 50 years old. Anything is easier to learn

when you're young versus old and one of the principles around that is based on the degree of plasticity in which your brain kind of has or the degree to which it changes by experience. And we know that there are certain times through life, particularly during infancy, childhood, adolescence, and then interestingly, some context relevant plasticity takes place in pregnancy for women where the brain is incredibly kind of receptive and can be shaped very, very easy by the experiences it has and in fact it often fundamentally requires those experiences to guide its

development appropriately and we might call these sensitive periods of development and by and large these kind of phases of life open and then they close because you want to grow up and learn and adapt to the environment in the context in which you're in and be changed and moulded and shaped for it and then an adulthood function within that. And so what we see is that the capacity for plasticity dialing down, some types of different brain networks that are responsible for different types of behaviours we might perform will retain plasticity longer than others. So your hearing

centers in your brain are very very plastic when you're very very young in infancy and then they kind of close down so it's much harder to learn languages later in life than it is earlier in life and if you're born profoundly deaf and you never hear spoken language it's going to be very very hard for those brain centers to ever hear spoken language later in life if there's not an intervention straight away. However, we can still learn to solve a maths problem. We can still learn to play a new musical instrument. You can still learn new dance moves in your 50s, you know 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s.

It's just a whole lot harder than it was then. So again, it's going to very much depend on what is this change that you are wanting to make. Yep. And what is the process by which you're going to go through that change? If it's learning a new motor skill, if it's changing a thought process, often those are kind of two different things because learning something new is often easier than trying to unlearn something old. Because typically, say you have this thought that you're always having, perhaps you're

berating yourself for being a useless mother. I used to do that. Now I think I'm a brilliant mother. Back in the day when my boys were young, I used to think I was terrible. It was completely fine. I was just going through early toddlerhood years. It was very hard to unlearn that, to stop that thought process. In fact, I had to figure out

what triggered that thought process. This is what we would do if we were talking about habit change. What is triggering or causing that particular thought? And what can I think or do instead when I encounter that trigger? Instead of trying to unwind a thought, I had to learn a new thought in its place.

So it's very important when we're talking about change to say, am I just trying to learn something new? Do I need the skill development that someone could teach me? Am I having to learn something new, but I really don't want to, like learning Shakespeare quotes. And so the problem isn't the teaching and the skill development, the problem is like the kind of the motivation

and the grit and the kind of emotional regulation required to perform the task even in the absence of wanting to, or is there some particular habit or learned skill that you don't want to do anymore, so you need to kind of unpack the trigger for that and learn a new process in its place. And those are three different kind of brain networks and processes that would be involved for change. The

September 1979 Virginia's top prison band Edge of of Daybreak, is about to record their debut album, Behind Bars, in just five hours. Okay, we're rolling. One, two, three, four. I'm Jamie Petrus, music and culture writer. For the past five years, I've been talking to the band's three surviving members. They're out of prison now and in their 70s.

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podcasts. I'm Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's Chief Product Officer. If you're just as curious as I am about the way things are built, the insights behind what it takes to create a world-renowned product, then tune in to my podcast, Building One. There's so much to learn, like how Patagonia innovates with its supply chain. We had to go out to farmers and convince them it was really damn hard. Or the way Adobe thinks about the first interaction somebody has with Photoshop. I was always so fascinated by how people navigate

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is redesigning seeds for flavor, and how Pixar is nurturing a creative culture. Listen to Building One on the iHeartRadio app, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dr. Joy here. You may know me from Therapy for Black Girls, where we're celebrating 400 episodes of the podcast. That's a whole lot of girl me too moments. For years, we've had deep, thoughtful, and inspiring conversations

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Before we dive back into the conversation, let me ask you something. What's one thing that has been holding you back lately? You know that it's there. You've tried to push past it, but somehow it keeps getting in the way. You're not alone in this, and I've identified six major saboteurs of self-control, things like autopilot behavior, self-doubt, emotional escapism, that quietly derail our best intentions. But here's the good news, you can outsmart them. And I've put together a free guide to help you spot these hidden obstacles and give you simple,

actionable strategies that you can use to regain control. Download the free guide now at OneUFeed.net slash ebook and take the first step towards getting back on track. In psychology studies, there is discussions about the idea of willpower or self-control. And in general, the behavior change lens on this is that you want to rely on these things as little as possible, right? You want to set up your environment, you want to get all the support that you can get, et cetera, et cetera.

But neurologically, do we know where this idea of willpower or self-control comes from, which I guess I'm just gonna define it as, I'm in a moment where I need to make a choice, and I've got the two wolves going, right? And one wolf is the one that I've decided I want to follow, and the other is the other wolf. Do we know what's happening neurologically

when somebody is sort of in a moment of wrestling with these questions and then making the right choice? Is it solely an executive function? Do we know? It probably depends how sophisticated your self-awareness and executive functions are, and whether you're able to kind of stand back

and look at those choices from a distance and then consciously choose which one or the other to choose or whether you know perhaps you're very emotionally dysregulated and you know you'll be driven to the right or the wrong decision you're listening to your emotions instead of being able to thoughtfully engage in that task. What I always try to explain to people is pretty much that one of the main things that the brain does is it draws from our past experiences and predicts what we should do next. So whether that be, you know, the construction of emotion last time I was in

this situation and my body was feeling this way surrounded by these people, then this is what I felt. So I'll feel that again or the last time I was in this situation I made choice A and that felt really good so I'm going to do choice A again or last time I was in this situation I chose B and it did not work. I was very disappointed or it was really scary or I really didn't enjoy it so I'm going to do A instead of B. So all your brain is doing is kind of gathering a lot of information as it goes along for life and stores that information so that when you're in that situation

next, you can make that decision about what to do. And a lot of the time we will be making decisions based on, did that feel really good last time or did that not feel so great last time? And part of that learning process, the signaling process for that one component of that, there's a whole lot going on, is what we would call like kind of our dopamine system. People think that dopamine is released just when something feels great,

but actually it's a learning cue. It's been constantly kind of dribbled out, this kind of like really sort of slow rate and the reason the brain often sort of has these kind of baseline rates it's not going from zero to on it's got a baseline rate that means it can dial up the release and it can dial down the release so you've got far more kind of you know scope there for dopamine to act as a teaching signal so if something was really horrible last time you did it dopamine dropped off if it was really good last time you did it, dopamine dropped off. If it was really good last time, dopamine went up.

And that's a teaching signal that didn't work, that did work. And so the next time you encounter that, in advance of you making the decision to act, you'll be going, oh, that felt really great, or that didn't feel really great, and that'll be part of the desire to do it again, or the kind of, oh gosh, the feeling of not wanting to do it again or the kind of, oh gosh, the feeling of not wanting to do

it again. Often the problem lies therein when last time you think you didn't really enjoy it, but it's kind of the smart choice. And then you're trying to override that feeling of aversion or disappointment or, you know, just, I don't want to do that. But that's the thing that you've got to do and that's really tough. Yeah. And that's all around dopamine acting as a teaching signal so our brain can predict what to do next. Well you've got the other example also which I think addiction is the extreme version of. 100 percent. You know I've heard addiction framed as a learning disorder. I'm a recovering person. When I heard that, it

made a certain sense to me because in the beginning it was all good. It's obvious to me why I did it and why I kept doing it because it felt freaking great and I loved it and it made my life better. That's kind of the unspoken thing about it, especially like say drugs of addiction, where it feels really good. That's why you keep doing it. But over time, the adverse effects start to really add up. And it almost seems as if the brain is not getting the new learning information on a deep enough level, right? It almost just seems like that reward learning loop somehow has just been broken. Yeah. But I think we can say this even on a much lesser level. Let's say people who have a mild issue with eating more than

they want to in the evening. And when they do it now, what they end up with is shame and remorse, which seems that if reward learning was driving the whole show, your brain would be like, oh, the last three times I did that, maybe it felt good for a minute, but I just then felt terrible for an hour. And yet we continue. Particularly when we're talking about drugs of addiction, they have a psychoactive component. Part of the problem there is that acting on the exact same neural pathways and synapses as that reward learning process. So that kind of makes it twice as hard because they've interfered with that process. Others,

you know, it's more like the act of doing them, the psychological processes, acted on those pathways. So I don't know enough about addiction neuroscience to know how much we can sort of differentiate and tweak between those two. But I suppose one of the definitions, and there's many definitions of addiction, is that you are compelled to keep on doing this behavior or activity despite the negative consequences. Even if you're not getting the high or the pleasure from it anymore. And that's the difference between what we would call a habit or an automated behavior and an addiction, because a habit, you can always intervene. You can consciously intervene, whereas an addiction, you're often compelled.

Even if you don't want to do it, you still appear to be compelled to do it despite the negative consequences. And that makes that very, very hard. And I mean, that's why we have these, you know, support programs of people with problems, again these circumstances change is so incredibly difficult. Yep and so a habit has aspects of that nature to it though right I'm basically probing at an unanswered and probably unanswerable question right which is where does something verge from being a bad

habit into an addiction? I don't think we have to answer that. But there is something happening, even with a bad habit, you sort of feel it, right? You might technically, yes, you can intervene, but I like to think of it as like the habit energy, which is just the pushing forward. Yeah, yeah. It feels so strong. Yeah. And often, I mean, if it was a, as I like to call them a true habit from a neuroscience perspective, which was very, very similar to an automated behavior, riding a bike, for example, is some motor process that has learned you have to be very conscious and aware about it, engage

a lot of cortical networks to learn that process. And then eventually your brain goes, well, I know how to do that. I'm going to store that down in the striatum where I would just roll that motor program out when someone gets on a bike, you know, roll the motor program out when you're not on a bike. So there's a specific trigger or contextual situation in which that behavior is performed and it doesn't require typically motivation. You don't really need to think about how to do it. It's a little bit like the analogy of brushing your teeth.

I like to say, well, it's a lot brushing your teeth, but actually it's not just going and brushing your teeth. It's the way that you move your hand around your mouth. You move the brush around your mouth. You probably do that the same every time, but you never really think about that. So again, that's a stored behavior, but you can get on a bike and go,

well, I'm just gonna not pedal. I'm gonna stand here and not do that. So you can intervene consciously. Got it, yep. The addiction would be not being able to stop yourself from doing that despite not wanting to. So that's how we would differentiate a habit from an addiction, addictions that

compulsion despite the negative consequence. Let's talk a little bit about some of the things in your brain health for dummies book and the things that you talk about in that book are cognitive diseases, Alzheimer's, dementia being some of the most common ones. I think there's a section that's called Knowing What's Normal, Aging Versus Dementia. So talk to me about this because those of us like you and me, who've hit 50, right? We have to start to wonder about this stuff a little bit, like, okay, what's normal here and what's early mild cognitive impairment? And my dad died of Alzheimer's, Jenny's mom died of Alzheimer's, so we're on the lookout to a certain degree. So how

do we know what is normal aging and what is a problem? Yeah, we do get to a certain point in life when you have those sort of like tip of the tongue moments or you used to be really, really quick and sharp. And I'm like that. I used to be like really, really quick and sharp and now I've got like quick, sharp teenage sons and it drives me crazy because they think I'm kind of a bit dopey and slow.

And I'm like, excuse me, I'm very well qualified. I may be your mother, but that doesn't mean I'm not capable. And so we do get to these points in life when these things happen, or they can happen throughout life. It just may depend what we want to attribute them to. And to use the example of teenage boys

who are very sharp and quick, they, I reckon at least two or three days a week now, still they'll come to me because they can't find their school tie or they can't find their shoes or one of them left their PE bag at school. Now if I was doing that much forgetting of my personal belongings, I would be probably at the GP asking for some kind of cognitive test, but we're not assuming that there's anything wrong with them.

What's probably going on there is attention. And when we think about memory and we think about what we remember, a big part of the information that we take in and what we filter out is around attention. And that's one of our most kind of precious resources that we can kind of learn how to control that. We're kind of halfway there. So sometimes when we are forgetting things that we're leaving things in places it's really just coming down to what are we choosing to pay attention to and what are we not. We know through pregnancy and early motherhood lots of women, many many women, four out of five women will say oh I'm

really I forgetful I can't remember everything like my brain's not working the way it used to. And part of that is around attention and just still trying to do it all, as well as trying to look after a whole new human. So again, a lot of that is around attention. But other times in life, it may not be, you know, just that there's a lot going on

and we're trying to remember things. You may genuinely feel that there is some kind of cognitive impairment with your brain, or you might just feel that there is some kind of cognitive impairment with your brain, or you might just be noticing that things are sort of starting to slow down or change. And as we go through life, we know that one thing that does change is kind of the processing speed at which we're kind of able to sort of sort through all of the information that we have with our brain and retrieve it.

You know, part of that is not that the information is not there and it's inaccessible we might just be a bit slower at retrieving it. However at the same time we've learned we've gained a whole lot of experience and a whole lot of wisdom so you know we've also got this kind of treasure trove of content and information and learning that the young swift thinkers don't necessarily have at hand. Forgetting where you've left things is probably an attention issue and is pretty common and normal. Forgetting how to drive a car or getting lost when you're driving, that's when we need to sort of start checking things out. So then you would head off to your general practitioner or your

family doctor or wherever you are in the world. I tried to write this book so everyone in the world could read it because there this book so everyone in the world could read it because there's different healthcare systems in different places so people are going to have access to different resources. But essentially then you would go and you might say to your, I would go down to my local GP and I'd say, Ruzika I'm forgetting things and then she would just look at me because she's this very tall Eastern European lady and she'd be like tell me a little bit more. I mean she would be slightly skeptical knowing me, but then there's various types of cognitive testing that can be done that would

act as a good screening tool to help her decide we need to send Sarah off to say a memory clinic to get this looked at in much more detail, or we can reassure Sarah that this is completely normal. And this standard tests that are used in a lot of places in the world, where say a perfect score might be 30, and they test all different aspects of your memory and your reasoning and your being able to name objects

and remember numbers. There's a lot of kind of quick type executive skills that are tested in these and say a perfect scores 30. If you got below sort of 24, 25, then that might be kind of cause for concern. And perhaps we'll go away and do a bit more of an investigation to see are these cognitive symptoms, the sign of something to be concerned about something neurological. If you get above that, it might just be, you need to kind of look at, you know, what's your sleep like, what's your mood like, are you doing enough exercise, all the kind of typical health and wellbeing things just to kind of get you back on track. Because it might not be neurological, it might

be just lack of wellbeing. So if you draw a clock and it looks like a Salvador Dali picture, that's a good sign that maybe things are going wrong. Yeah. So there's lots of different kinds of tests in there, like here copy this or remember this, you know, we're named 10 animals, you know, be able to kind of perform those. And I guarantee that a teenager will be able to do that quite quickly. Someone in their 50s will be doing that slower, you probably get there, but you might not be quick, quick, quick, quick. But then, as I talk about in the book, there are lots of different types of mental abilities.

And if I was going to go and have brain surgery, because say I had a benign tumor that I needed removed, for example, I would much rather have a 55-year-old skilled surgeon who maybe sometimes was a bit slow at remembering names versus the 22-year-old trainee who's who maybe sometimes is a bit slow at remembering names versus the 22 year old trainee who's super, super, super quick because obviously there's a skill set involved there. So there's a whole lot of different ways to think about mental capacity as we age.

And there's this lovely idea whereby, you know, perhaps we do need to be kind of quick and fast and we're building and we're kind of creating and we're kind of as we're younger, we're needing all of the quick fire. And then as those skills kind of listen, as we get older, that's okay because we need to be kind of still and we need to be slow and we need to be able to gather the information and mull over it and impart wisdom. So maybe becoming like, if you're a female, a matriarch, isn't about having that quick fire memory

and remembering every single little item. It's about the kind of the slower imparting of wisdom in a more thoughtful way. September, 1979. Virginia's top prison band, Edge of Daybreak, is about to record their debut album Behind Bars in just five hours. I'm Jamie Petrus, music and culture writer. For the past five years, I've been talking to the band's three surviving members. They're out of prison now and in their 70s.

Their past behind them. But they also have some unfinished business. The end of daybreak, eyes of love, was supposed to have been followed up by another album. It's a story about the liberating power of music, the American justice system, and ultimately, second chances. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Dr. Joy here. You may know me from Therapy for Black Girls, where we're celebrating 400 episodes of the podcast. That's a whole lot of girl me too moments. For years, we've had deep, thoughtful, and inspiring conversations about black women's mental health.

And now we're celebrating this milestone in a big way. In this special episode, Peloton yogi Chelsea Jackson Roberts shares how yoga has taught her to stay grounded and present while balancing motherhood and self-care. I can't control my partner. I can't control my child. I can't control anyone outside the way that I govern myself in this world. And the celebration doesn't stop there. We'll continue this milestone with Dr. Lauren Mims, who joins me to discuss the powerful,

yet sometimes challenging transition from girlhood to womanhood for Black Mims. Together, we explore how we navigate this transformative journey with strength and grace. Black girlhood is giggling, it's sisterhood, but it is also I think focusing on learning how to cope with really difficult things that are happening. With insights like these, this 400th episode celebration is one for the books. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Tomer Coyne, LinkedIn's Chief Product Officer. If you're just as curious as I am about the way things are built, the insights behind what it takes to create a world renowned product, then tune into my podcast, Building One. There's so much to learn, like how Patagonia innovates with its supply chain. We had to go out to farmers and convince them it was really damn hard.

Or the way Adobe thinks about the first interaction somebody has with Photoshop. I was always so fascinated by how people navigate and find their way. Ever wanted to know how Nike builds emotion into the Jordan brand? You have to be obsessed with the current state of the human condition. And it doesn't stop there. What about how Gleam reinvented knowledge search with AI?

You can learn about how a Michelin star chef is redesigning seeds for flavor and how Pixar is nurturing a creative culture. Listen to Building One on the iHeart Radio app, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. Is there much happening in the neuroscience world that you're aware of that seems exciting on this dementia front? There's things that are happening and then the things that I'm excited about. So I think that people are desperate to try and find a cure. If you've been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease or frontotemporal dementia or one

of the dementias, what kind of medicine can we give that person and make them better straight away? And there's lots of different people working on that problem and it's incredibly complex because I think it's pretty complex because, you know, I think it's pretty safe to say that Alzheimer's disease is a disease of unhealthy brain degeneration, typically seen as you're older, but it's kind of an accumulation of years, if not decades of, you know, unhealthy brain aging.

And so it's not like if you've broken a leg where you can kind of fix it. So it's a very complicated problem in there. What I'm more interested in, which I think is more kind of population data science, I think is taking a look like a really big, like kind of zooming out from the whole globe, looking at rates of dementia around the world and looking at different kind of cohorts of ages of people going through because we've got a lot of throwaway statistics about dementia, like two out of three

cases of dementia are women. Why is it women? Is it something to do with female biology? Let's look at menopause and that must be the answer. Give women HRT, we've solved Alzheimer's disease. No one's kind of going back to that original statistic and trying to interpret and understand that. And it's interesting if you look at the difference between prevalence, which is the number of people with a diagnosed disorder at any kind of moment in time versus incidence, which is kind of always the right in which you're adding new cases in we've also got, it's like a pool of water.

You've got incidents as the inflow, but you've also got people dying as they flowing out the bottom. And if we look at healthy wealthy countries around the world, sometimes the U S is included in that. Sometimes it's not Australia and the, you know, say the Nordic countries in some European countries, let's just say to be more safe. We actually seeing the incidents of Alzheimer's disease and other dementias declining slightly. We're seeing more prevalence because that's as less outflow because people are living longer, but actually the inflow is slowing a bit.

So we're starting to see that incidence coming down and that gives us some clues to the cause. And we know partly the incidence is coming down because we're getting much better at treating some of the diseases that predispose people to Alzheimer's, like heart disease and metabolic disorders, diabetes, et cetera. So that's slowing the incidence down in the healthy wealthy countries, but we're not seeing that in parts of the world

that are less wealthy and more unhealthy where there's much lower socioeconomic support, where people are poorer, but want a better language. So that's interesting, because I think if we take that perspective, it gives us clues into where we could be intervening as well. The two out of three cases of dementia, we need to have a look at Alzheimer's disease, and again, prevalence versus incidence. And what we see in terms of Alzheimer's disease that males and females, when we're looking at women in their sort of 60s, 70s and 80s, we're looking at people in their 60s, 70s and 80s, there's more females in there because they're living longer.

But are the incidence rates, the kind of the rates of inflow the same? It would be very easy to think, oh, it's the rate of inflow of females is much greater. But actually, you don't see a greater rate of inflow until you're looking at people in their 90s. The men just kind of die off soon as they're coming out of the pool. So the overall prevalence is higher. And so we've got to start to be a little bit more sophisticated with thinking about the stats. Instead of assuming the statistic that you heard is correct, and then trying to look at the causes from there. I'm interested in taking this bigger picture perspective because we must do that or else we will jump to trying to solve a problem that may not necessarily be the right problem

to solve. Midlife, the greatest risk factor, which no one talks about because it's very unsexy and it doesn't make for good social media content is hearing loss. So untreated hearing loss and then later in life, untreated vision loss. And no one wants to talk about them because they're very, very boring and very unsexy. But what does that mean? And if you can't hear and you can't see, your brain is not like interacting with the world. It's not receiving input from the world.

It's almost shutting off one of the signals coming up from your body. It's completely shutting off those senses to the world and that's how we kind of taken a mate. Meaning of the world and navigate away around and use our brain for what it evolved to do so there's lots of kind of points in which we can intervene and I think unless we take this big picture perspective, that's what I'm interested in, we're gonna be intervening in the wrong places. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, honestly, a lot of the things that you do to be more preventative of Alzheimer's, all fall into the not very sexy category.

I mean, it's the basic stuff like eat better, exercise, get better sleep. Yeah, all of those things. Yeah. And most health and well being advice is boring. It's, you know, I like to call them the tech bros. I call them ice bath boys. They like to dial it on that top 1% and like tweet that is because they think that's going to matter. But the vast majority of the population isn't doing the 99%. So the top 1% isn't going to make any difference.

They just popularize it. Yes. We need to get all of those basics right. And some of those basics are beyond the control of an individual. Air pollution, education in childhood, a lot of those, or head injury. I mean, you can try and prevent getting a concussion,

but you might just get knocked over by your dog and hit your head, you know. You know, we've got lots of contributing factors either that are risk factors, individual risk factors, but the individual can't necessarily do things about. And then that overall metabolic health, heart health, metabolic health that we talk about, which is the diet and the exercise and keeping, you know, your blood pressure under control and your cholesterol down and all of the boring things most people aren't doing. And a lot of people just don't have the education or the capacity or the kind of resources to be able to manage that well. And particularly in parts of the world, you know, the low and middle income countries, it's just even harder

to do that. And that's where we're seeing the cases of dementia rising. Yeah, I mean, I do think you make a really good point in the book, and you just made it there, which is that there's a bunch of risk factors. There are some that are modifiable, and then even within the modifiable ones, right, there are some that are going to be easier given there are some that are going to be easier given your geographic socioeconomic type status. Yeah, health is this enormous kind of social factor embedded in it that people don't realize. I live in the northern beaches of Sydney, one of the healthiest, wealthiest kind of, you know, places to live in Australia, if not the planet. And it's very easy to be healthy when you are resourced and when everyone around you is fit and healthy.

If I lived in a completely different part of the world, I'd be surrounded by a completely different social and resource environment, which would make it that much harder. And it perhaps wouldn't occur to me because everyone I know wouldn't be behaving in a certain way. So I think we need to be very, very careful.

And I know that there's a bit of a shift without like trying to police language. It's not about that. But if we're talking about lifestyle choices, there's a bit of shame in there. And it's not always taking into account why people make a lifestyle choice. It may not just because they lack willpower. It's usually very, very complicated. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this. It may not just because they lack willpower. It's usually very, very complicated. Before we wrap up, I want you to think about this.

Have you ever ended the day feeling like your choices didn't quite match the person you wanted to be? Maybe it was autopilot mode or self-doubt that made it harder to stick to your goals. And that's exactly why I created the six saboteurs of self-control. It's a free guide to help you recognize the hidden patterns that hold you back and give you simple, effective strategies to break through them.

If you're ready to take back control and start making lasting changes, download your copy now at oneufeed.net slash ebook. Let's make those shifts happen starting today. When you feed.net slash ebook. Changing behavior can be so very challenging because there are so many different factors. What are a couple of other things besides the things we just talked about around diet, exercise, sleep that are risk factors that are modifiable. Let me even broaden it out a little bit because I think that what

we're talking about is a healthy brain here at any age, right? And so we may choose to engage with these things more because we're like, oh, I don't want to get Alzheimer's. We may just choose to engage with them because we just want to have a healthier brain overall. What are a couple other strategies people could kind of walk out of here that they should be thinking about if they want a healthier brain? Yeah, I think if I had to kind of choose a couple, and I would like to try and choose those which are most important, one would be sleep. Lots of people have problems with getting a good night's sleep.

And there's lots of resources out there now to teach us about sleep hygiene and how to kind of manage sleep. And again, that's kind of a bit boring, but it's super important because that's sort of the foundation on which everything else can be built. If you miss one night's sleep, you feel not great. Weeks, months. And it increases mortality.

And it increases poor brain health. And then lots of those kinds of first signs and symptoms people might start to query about is my brain working maybe around an adequate sleep or you're sleeping, but it's not good, deep, healthy sleep. So if you can, you know, do all of the things to get your sleep sorted, that would be great. But again, we don't need to belabor that point. Yeah. get your sleep sorted, that would be great. But again, we don't need to belabor that point. The thing that I think perhaps always, always shows up in all of the research I do and the teaching I do

is around, it's another S, it's that social, the sort of the social relationships and people that we have around us. And they can be the source of the greatest kind of neurological architecture and support that we need for a healthy brain, but they can also perhaps be one of the greatest sources of stress. Tremor and stress.

Yeah. And I think if we look at the phases of life we go through when there's probably these inflection points whereby our brains are most vulnerable, say, to develop mental health problems or later in life, neurological, you know, problems or diseases of unhealthy brain aging. So we look at puberty and adolescence, young people are a bit more vulnerable to mental health disorders, but a large component of that is the social brain is going through this massive phase of reorganisation from the focus towards family, towards friends, and the greatest vulnerabilities

there are kids who are lonely or socially isolated or perhaps are being bullied or picked on. It's the social component there that the greatest risk or the greatest kind of benefit. We see that all throughout life that the social architecture that we have around us is one of the strongest. And in some studies, it comes up almost top as the strongest kind of protection for good health. The biggest brain reorganization that we're seeing

taking place is in the social networks of the brain because we're, you know, we're tribe animals. It's fundamental to our health and wellbeing to have good, strong, healthy social connections. You know, like go out and make lots of friends. Sounds like a little bit of a trite piece of advice, but you might think about this. I actively chose to do this after I wrote my first book. Cause I spent like a year sitting down in my office alone with my dog writing. And I got to the end of a year and I had this book, but I felt terrible because

I'd been doing all of the opposite things that I should be doing to feel healthy. So I needed to get up out in the world, move, connect, communicate, interact with other people. Then you're kind of using your brain for what it evolved to do. Didn't evolve to sort of sit in a little room all alone staring at a screen.

It evolved to be moving and navigating around the world with other people by your side. Excellent. Well, I think that is a great place for us to wrap up. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been a real pleasure to talk with you. You're very welcome. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought-provoking, I'd love for you to share it with a friend. Sharing from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don't have a big budget, and I'm certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better, and that's you.

Just hit the share button on your podcast app or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the One You Feed community. 45 years ago, a Virginia soul band called The Edge of Daybreak recorded their debut album, Behind Bars. Record collectors consider it a masterpiece.

The band's surviving members are long out of prison, but they say they have some unfinished business. The end of daybreak, eyes of love, were supposed to have been following up by another app. Listen to Soul Incarcerated on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey sis, it's Dr. Joy from Therapy for Black Girls. We've had 400 episodes of conversations, growth, and healing.

So we're celebrating. Join us for a special episode with internationally recognized yogi, Chelsea Jackson Roberts, as she shares wisdom on mindfulness, movement, and motherhood. I waited later to have children and I still have exactly what I knew that I wanted. You don't want to miss this special episode. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Why would you do that to me?

Los Angeles, 2021. A friendly neighbor appears out of nowhere and promises to make all my dreams come true. Let's not forget that David Blume was a professional con artist, so you didn't stand a chance. But my dreams soon turned into a nightmare. I'm Caroline DeMore. Listen as I take down my scammer on Once Upon a Con on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.