The Resilient Mind - The 2-Minute Habit That Rewires Your Brain (Backed by Science) - Dr. Therese Huston

Episode Date: January 7, 2026

Watch the full video interview on the new Resilient Mind YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RADtU4SAbfUIs your brain working against you? Do you struggle with focus in a world of endless distractions, feel the creeping effects of burnout, or worry about cognitive decline as you age? What if you could not only stop the decline but actively build a better, more resilient brain?In this fascinating episode of The Resilient Mind, neuroscientist Dr. Therese Huston reveals that your best brain days are NOT behind you. She translates cutting-edge neuroscience into simple, actionable strategies to enhance your mind's performance at any age.Connect with Dr. Therese HustonWebsite: https://www.theresehuston.com/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/therese-huston-06246295/ X: https://x.com/ThereseHuston Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drtheresehuston/Healthy Minds App: https://hminnovations.org/wellbeing-tools/#app----------Take action and strengthen your mind with The Resilient Mind Journal. Get your free digital copy today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bit.ly/Download_Journal Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Resilient Mind Podcast. In this episode, you'll be listening to The Two-Minute Habit That Rewirees Your Brain with Dr. Teresa Houston. This episode is also available in video. Watch it on YouTube by clicking the link in the show notes. Enjoy. After about age 40, we lose 5% of those two areas every decade. The good news is it's not inevitable. You've spent years translating neuroscience into practical tools that,

that we can all use. About 66% of US workers are experiencing reporting burnout. Right now, there's a lot of opportunities to feel stressed in our life. How does our brain response to stress us? People who multitask find it very hard to get out of that mode. They find it hard to go deep when they want to. We make on average about 47% more mistakes

than if we were single-tasking. And you talk about binaural beats and specific frequencies. If you put on headphones, you look up binaural beats, 40 hertz. You will find within five minutes, You will be so deeply focused. Taking dance lessons is one of the best ways to improve memory. We have to do things right.

We have to be hard on ourselves. People who have high and self-compassion are more productive. And I'm really curious about meditation because we hear it becomes something that is very popular. We can unpack all these mysteries of who people are by understanding the brain. I want to switch a little bit and talk about our phones. Welcome, Dr. Houston, to the resilient. Mind podcast, we are super excited to have you here as a guest. Thank you, Simbo. It is such a treat to be here. So let's start from the beginning. What got you into neuroscience? What excited you about neuroscience

that got you exactly to the point that you are today? Well, this is a cute story. And in my case, I think I first got excited about neuroscience when I was nine. And I didn't know the word neuroscience. No one in my family, I think, knew the word neuroscience. But I got a Christmas gift. So nine years old, fourth grade. And the Christmas gift was a book. It came from Santa Claus. I still believed in Santa Claus. And it was a book for adults, though. It wasn't a book for kids. And it was a book about the left side and the right side of the face. And basically what they did is they took pictures of very famous people at the time. So like Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe and JFK. And they would show the normal picture of the face. And they would show what would happen if you copied the left

side of the face and flipped it over so we just saw two to the left sides of the face back to, you know, mirror images, and then the right side of the face. And the person would look completely different demonstrating that the left and the right side of the face weren't symmetrical, right? So you can picture that. And then the book went into some science about how the left side of the face is actually much more expressive of our true emotions because the right side of the brain controls the left side of the face. And the neuroscience at the time was showing at the right side of the brain was where emotions were held. So the authors then jumped to a big conclusion that if you really wanted to understand someone, you should only look at the left side of their face. And they would say,

you know, things about Elvis Presley looking at the left side of his face and what this told us about his life history. And the same way, Marilyn Monroe, just looking at the left side of her face, how tormented she was. And things like, well, I was so excited. I just like, oh my goodness, we can, we can unpack all these mysteries of who people are. by understanding the brain. I was very excited by this. Well, to make a long story short, you know, there were certain things I was very wrong about. First of all, you know, spoiler alert, there is no Santa Claus. And I kind of got the hint that maybe this was a gift for my dad because he was so excited about this book. He kept talking about it with me. So I was pretty sure he had

seen it before Christmas morning. So that was one thing that I was wrong about. Secondly, the science, although the science was right about the fact that the right side of the brain control, the left side of the face and spontaneous emotion on the left side of the face will really reflect how a person's feeling. So if you're ever wondering how is a person really feeling, pay more attention to the left side of their face. But it's not the case that a lifetime of the left side of your face is going to change like the bone structure or anything based on your emotions, right? So that part it was wrong. But it really got me excited about understanding deeper behavior or who people really are by understanding the brain. So that was the early excitement for me. And I think it's, I think probably if we

were to ask more people about some of their early gifts as children, we'd find out, you know, more people are turned on to a possible career or life's work based on something that happened when they were young. Anyway, that's my initial foray into it. I didn't take a neuroscience course again until my 20s. So it took a long time before I actually studied it, you know, methodically and rigorously. But that was when the door first opened. Amazing. And I'm just thinking, like, as I'm hearing your story, I'm like, maybe I should be looking at the left side of the face more often than just the whole face for when I'm talking to people. It is. And what scientists have found is that when people are just shown the left side of someone's face, they are better at guessing what that person was feeling, particularly when it's spontaneous emotion. So if someone's doing a posed photo, right, which is so often the case when we're taking, you know, Instagram photos. or when we're taking, you know, a family photo, it's posed.

And so that's not going to reflect real emotion. But you get a spontaneous smile or you look around a room in a meeting where people aren't consciously controlling what their faces are doing. Left sides would better tell. I'll make a note of that. You've spent years translating neuroscience into practical tools that we can all use. what do you think is the one discovery that has fundamentally changed your approach to mental resilience? It's such a good question. And I think the one finding that I keep coming back to again and again, and it gets me to behave differently and talk with people differently about

their own behavior and about their brains is this really disturbing finding that too few of us know about. And that is that as we age, there are two key parts of our brain where we lose gray matter. And it's the prefrontal cortex, which is right here behind your forehead. And it's the hippocampus, which I can't point to because it's deep inside of your brain. But it's crucial for memory. And after about age 40, we lose 5% of those two areas every decade. So at age 50, you might not notice it. By 60, you might be like, oh, it's harder to remember some things than it used to be. Or it's harder to make decisions, and that would be, the memory would be the hippocampus, the decision making would be your prefrontal cortex. That's the bad news. The good news is it's not inevitable, right? So on the one hand, it would be like losing randomly a file on your computer every couple of years. And you're just like, wait, where did that file go? Right. Why can't I find that? I must have moved it somewhere, right? At first, we don't, we can compensate. We can still use our computers, right? We can still think if we lose this brain, tissue, but it begins to accumulate, right, if you lost lots of folders over many years. So the good

news is, it's not inevitable. And if you're listening and you're in your 20s or 30s and you're thinking, oh, 40 is years and years away, you still want to be building up with what neuroscientists call brain reserves. You can be adding more neurons to those areas so that when you start losing them, you lose, you already have kind of padding, right? You've got a fluffy brain, so you've got, It's okay if you lose some. If you're in your 40s, 50s, 60s, there's still good news, and that is you can hold on to what you've got or you can add either new neurons or new dendrites. That's what's happening in the prefrontal cortex. You're basically like pruning the trees. So imagine a bushy tree or a tree that's really been pruned back and only has the branches and then the big branches, none of those little branches. That's what's happening in the prefrontal cortex over time. But the good news is you can stop it from happening. And so I've really become motivated to know, and learn what are those things that add more neurons to the hippocampus or add more branches to the prefrontal cortex, in part because of my age, I'm in my mid-50s, but just knowing that all of us, it's not inevitable, we can all improve our brains, give ourselves more mental real estate at any time. They've done research

when people in their 70s and they can gain back brain matter. So this is the good news. And I know a question that a lot of our listeners are probably thinking, if I'm in my 20s and 30s, how do I add that gray matter? If I'm in my 40s, 50s or 60s, how do I hold on to it? And then if I'm in my 80s, can I maybe hold on or kind of reverse that? So what are some of the specific tools or techniques that I can incorporate? Absolutely, right? This is this is the million dollar question. For at any age, you either want to be adding neurons so that you know, you've got plenty, like you said, in your 20s and 30s so you don't lose the dangerous bits later. Or if you're older, you want to either hold on, but you can actually still even in your 70s, you can be adding neurons

to the hippocampus. It seems to be, as far as we can tell, the only brain area where you can, you have what's called neurogenesis. You actually can add no neurons into late adulthood. So what can you do to either add more branches, because that's what you can do in the prefrontal cortex or add new neurons to the hippocampus. So for the hippocampus, the golden ticket seems to be aerobic exercise. What happens when you do aerobic? Aerobic exercise, one of the, and not just a single, it can't just be like, oh, I went and did that one spin class, that one time symbol. So check, I'm done. In terms of adding neurons to the hippocampus, it has to be a semi-regular practice. And so they've gotten to a point, there's so much research on this.

There's now kind of a specific protocol that I offer in my book. And that is, you want to do 40 minutes or more of aerobic exercise, and you want to do it at least twice, preferably three times a week. So it doesn't have to be every day, but it should be more than once a week. And that can be running, it can be dancing, it can be a spin class or swimming or Zumba, whatever is going to get you, you know, learn to play racquetball, whatever it might be that will pickleball. It's something, you know, that's the craze now. Something that will get your heart beating fast. or a good rule of thumb. Things that are good for the heart are also good for the brain, specifically the hippocampus.

And what happens when you do aerobic exercise, you produce something called brain-derived neurotropic factor. We don't need to go too deep into that. But that BDNF is like miracle grow for the brain. Like they've actually seen in the laboratory, you sprinkle BDNF on neurons and it will sprout new dendrites. So aerobic exercise adds to your hippocampus. So that's a beautiful thing you can adopt at any at any point in life. that would be for your hippocampus to get a fluffier hippocampus. And then in terms of your prefrontal cortex, which is important for executive function, decision making, you know, inhibiting yourself from doing

the wrong thing and doing the right thing instead. You're feeling motivated. Your prefrontal cortex is key to all of those things. What you want to do there, believe it or not, is meditation. So it's kind of the opposite of the aerobic exercise would be it doesn't have to be sitting still, although there's certainly a lot of really good mindfulness meditations that involve sitting still. But research shows that people who, again, this needs to be, can't just be a single meditation. There are definitely benefits of single meditations that we can talk about. But if you have a, what they find, the studies have usually been done for about eight weeks. So if you do mindfulness meditation for as little as 10 minutes a day, a couple days a week for eight weeks, you'll start to add more

branches in your prefrontal cortex. So this is a game changer for me. I now have a morning meditation practice, Simba. And I had been an occasional meditator before. Like I would be like, no, I should do it. When I have the time. And I'm like, no, you need to make the time. You want as much brain real estate as possible at any stage in life. And so I now have a daily meditation practice. So those would be the two key ones, aerobic exercise and mindfulness meditation. And I'm really curious about meditation because we hear it becomes something that is very popular. A lot of people talk, meditate, meditate, meditate. And I think some of us, sometimes we tried once or twice and then we're not consistent. For those people that believe that they can't meditate, or they've tried it once

and it didn't work, what would be your recommendation in terms of getting that started and making it into a little bit more of a consistent routine? It is really hard, right? And I think one of the tricky parts with meditation is it may not immediately make you feel great, right? So, you know, something like you can talk about dance, like you dance and you immediately feel good, right? Or, you know, as long as you don't feel embarrassed, you feel good. Or it's meditation. You meditate. You're like, huh, okay, that was interesting. Or maybe it made me feel calmer, but you don't necessarily feel smarter. You don't feel a big shift takes place. So I think that's part of the challenge for people with meditation. They don't feel a big change has happened. And the other problem can be time. People don't

feel like they have the time to take 10 minutes. So what I find is really, really helpful when it comes to meditation, there is an app that I'm now, you know, telling everyone about whenever the topic of meditation comes up. It's not the most popular app because they don't advertise it heavily. It's called Healthy Minds. And if you were to look it up in the app store, the little icon as an HM, it's out of, it's completely free, which I love. I have, I have subscriptions, paid subscriptions to several meditation apps. So I'm all, I'm all about the paid apps as well. But the fact that this is free, makes it accessible to anyone at any life stage, any income level. It's free. It's out of the University of Wisconsin. And the head of the project is a neuroscientist. So he's really incorporating

neuroscience practice into the meditations that they develop. And what I love about it, Symbol, is they have active meditations. They have sitting meditations where you sit still, which is what most of us think of when we think of mindfulness meditations. But they give you the option when you're picking your meditation for the day, you get to pick, do I want five minutes, ten minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes. And then you pick, is it going to be active or sitting? And so, for instance, a common thing for me to do now in the mornings is I'll go for a 10-minute walk

and I'll pick an active meditation. And it still incorporates a bunch of the principles and practices that a sitting meditation, would, except they also then have you pay attention to your movement to the interactions with the environment as opposed to just paying attention to your breathing. So you're still being mindful. You just now have other things that you can be mindful of. Anyway, it's wonderful. And it has, I still do sitting meditation some days, but I'd say about half the days I do these active meditations. And I think for a lot of people, it's a light bulb that goes off. Like, wait, I could, I could do a meditation while I pack my kids lunches. Or I could do a,

meditation while I walk from the bus to my office or from my bus to class, like, I can do that because I'm doing that walk anyhow. So I think it opens up new possibilities for people who, if you haven't been able to find the time, you don't need to find extra time. You can just use the time that you already have. Amazing. And I think that's nice because I'm just thinking in terms of expanding our even definition of what meditation looks like, knowing that there's an active meditation, it can look differently for us, especially if we struggle to sit down in that lotus pose for like 10 to 20 minutes. So I think this is a very exciting alternative to try as well. It is. It is. And I've taken meditation courses where we just sit. And what the instructors are

always telling you is that the hope is, the ultimate goal is that you'll work meditation into your everyday life, that you'll integrate it into your activities. even though the way they're teaching it is separate from your activities. So what I love about the Healthy Minds app is you are practicing it while you're integrating it into your activities. And I find that for me, that leads me to be more likely to take a mindful approach. Because mindfulness is really about noticing your thoughts, noticing how you're reacting. And so if you're practicing, noticing how you're reacting, oh, I'm ruminating. Oh, I'm picturing that unpleasant conversation. I'm going to have when I return that piece of furniture, right? You become aware, like, oh, do I,

do I want to be anticipating that conversation? No, I don't, right? But you become mindful of it while you're doing something else, as opposed to saying, ah, here's my 10 minutes to meditate. And now I'm going to clear my mind. So it's nice because I think it gets you more quickly to the ultimate goal of meditation, which is to become mindful throughout your day, not just in that 10 minutes when you sit down. And right now there's a lot of opportunities to feel stressed in our life. whether it's in our personal life, looking at the news, maybe what's happening in the economy. So how does our brain response to stressors, particularly micro-stressers, and how can we reset or be able to manage them better?

I do think it's a hard time for so many of us, whether it's about the news and politics or you're in a return-to-office situation where you used to be able to work from home and now you're in the office three days a week or five days a week, right? Anyway, there's so many stressors that so many, inflation, cost of living going up, and salaries not matching that. So there's, and then AI, anyway, we don't have to list all the stressors, but there are plenty, right? The way the brain responds, there are ways that the brain responds that are adaptive initially, but if they continue, if it becomes a chronic stressor, then that becomes problematic. So one of the

things your brain and body does is something called the HPA axis, the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis, HPA, we'll just call it. Basically, the hypothalamus and your brain sends a signal to your adrenal glands on your kidneys to send out some cortisol. We need to act, right? We've got a stressful situation. What are we going to do? You hear something on the news.

I need to act. What do I need to do? Oh, wait, there's nothing I can do. Except maybe not watch the news before bed tomorrow night, right? Right? But there's that sense, I've got to do something. No wonder it's hard to go to sleep, right? Because there's an urgency. That's what cortisol is trying to get you to do, get up and act. And it's preparing you for a challenge. So that cortisol is great if you need to get up and give a presentation or you're about to walk into a stressful meeting with your manager, right? That cortisol will actually sharpen your thinking, sharpen your focus. It's equipping you to act, right? I love Lisa Feldman-Barris. She's a neuroscientist who likes to say, it gets your butterflies to fly in formation, right? So it's good. Cortisol, short-term good, long-term bad.

If you have cortisol elevated for long periods of time, it'll disrupt your sleep. It actually shrinks the hippocampus. It's one of the reasons your hippocampus shrinks as you age is extended levels of cortisol. So people who manage their stress better will have a larger hippocampus than people who can't. can't regulate their emotions and their stress levels. And if their cortisol's are elevated for extended periods of time, the hippocampus is one of the areas that suffers. So that's, that's, that's the bad news. And then I think we also add stress to the situation ourselves. I did it myself this morning. I had an 11 a.m. deadline. And I really wanted to get something done for work by 1045.

That would give me some safe padding, right? Okay, I started on the, I'd already started working on the task yesterday, 8.20 this morning I started working. And I know. I know the research on this. The research says what we need to do is take micro breaks, that the best way to get through a stressful task is to give yourself a break every 45 to 60 minutes, definitely by 90 minutes. You should take a two to 10 minute break. That will help your prefrontal cortex reset. You will be sharper. You will be clearer thinking and you will make fewer mistakes. So you need to stop working momentarily. to do the most effective work. I know this. Simba, was I wanting to take a break? No. I just power through. Power through. Come on, T, just power through. And really what you're doing is you're powering down, right? You're not

powering through. And I began to notice this around 1020. I'm like, I am not, I am not clear. I'm making mistakes. I've slowed down. And so at 1020, even though we were getting close to my deadline, I gave myself a five-minute break. I got up. I went downstairs, grabbed a quick cup of tea, a little silly dance. I won't demonstrate it for you, but I did a little silly dance. And when I sat back down at my computer at 1025, even though I now only had 20 minutes to finish, I was so much sharper than I was five minutes previous. And the research supports that are, there's areas in our prefrontal cortex that begin to power down. It's kind of like your phone going dim. So micro breaks. This is, and it's, and it's hard to do because it feels like you've got momentum. It feels like how could you do more if you

momentarily do less, right? It's really, we believe the only way to get more done is to just keep doing. But it's worth the experiment, just five minutes. And the research shows you make fewer mistakes, you'll feel less fatigue, you'll have new ideas, you'll be more creative. It's like you're starting the task from scratch, or at least close to it, but it certainly won't feel like where you were at the beginning of that five minutes. You'll be much fresher. So that's a key tip, I think, people need to know is give yourself micro-breaks. And talking about the HPA access and I'm assuming that sometimes we, if you're feeling stressed out, we don't want to take those breaks.

Yes. Is that the reason for burnout? Because I think you mentioned that it's about 66% of people report burnout. Is that kind of part of the reason? Yes, it is. So it's, yeah, there was a Forbes study in February. Well, actually the study was done by Moodle, but it made headlines in Forbes about about 66% of U.S. workers are experiencing reporting burnout, which is so high.

Because during COVID, peak COVID, physicians and nurses were at 50% burnout. So the fact that across different occupations that were higher now than we were at peak COVID, it's really concerning. Yeah. So the HPA axis is probably part of the story because one of the things that happens when you're experiencing burnout is the cortisol levels are high for so long that basically, because normally your cortisol levels fluctuate during the day. So they will tend to go up in the morning. It's one of the reasons if you feel well rested, you'll feel energized in the morning because your cortisol levels go up. That's if you're having a healthy cortisol response. If you've been maxed out on stress for so long that you're basically your cortisol levels aren't fluctuating, what will end up happening is cortisol will be high initially and then it will get depressed and it won't come up in the mornings. So one of the signs of burnout is in the mornings, you just like, Even if you got eight hours, nine hours, you don't feel good when you wake up in the morning.

You don't feel energized. You don't want to do a thing. And that's a sign that your cortisol levels have kind of bottomed out. They're not coming back up. And that would be a sign. It's hard to tell the difference between stress and burnout sometimes. But that would be one sign of burnout. So, yeah, the HPA axis is part of the story.

There's other brain areas. If you're curious, I can tell you about, but the HPA axis is definitely part of it. And is it also, I'm just thinking like in addition to, again, being under constant stress, most of us are either working long hours, juggling multiple roles, either at work, at home. So is it like the culmination of all those things that might keep our HPA axis like active? And if so, how can we start shifting that so we can reset it in a manner of speaking? Well, I'll tell you what I do know, because I'm not sure of what the individual differences are for who has chronic HPA access activation. But I do know that there are

certain groups that are more susceptible to burnout. So I can talk about that. So groups that are more susceptible to burnout, people who are low in self-compassion. So these would be the people who believe that being hard on themselves is the best way to get a lot done. I know I was one of those kind of individuals for a very long time, that the belief that if you just had super high standards and pushed yourself all the time, that was, that was the reason I was so good is because I showed myself very little self-compassion. Can you relate? Yeah. I think, I think it's what's encouraged, right? Culturally. So low self-compassion, as opposed to someone in high self-compassion would be like, this is really hard. You need to take a break and you're not doing your best work and that's not

your fault, but you can be part of the solution, right? That would be a self-compassionate response. So people who are alone, self-compassion tend to experience more burnout. Women tend to experience more burnout than men, at least they report it more often. And part of the thought there is that they do more emotional labor. They're, you know, particularly women managers carrying kind of the emotional weight of everyone on their team, that they're feeling everyone's emotions fluctuate. And a third group that tends to experience burnout are people who don't have good emotion regulation. So those would be individuals who, you know, go from zero to 60 in irritation like that, right? We've known people like that. Or people who push down all their anger

or sadness, right? You know, they've got kind of the roll top desk approach to their emotions. rather than feeling their emotions, they like shove it in a cubby, right? Or they just blow up, right? So it could be either way. They either stuff it down or they blow up rather than being like, well, Simba, I'm kind of annoyed with you, right? I'm not. But like, you know, as opposed to talking through it, right?

And if we don't talk it out, we act it out. I love to think of things that way. So those would be three groups that tend to experience more burnout. And I'm not saying, you know, then there's certain professions like, you know, social work. There are certain professions that have more burnout than others, but those would be three kind of things to look out for if you're trying to figure out, am I someone who's susceptible to burnout? And there are great practices you can do if you're in one of those groups or you're feeling burnout. And I think sometimes it's hard to tell the difference between stress and burnout.

And a way that I often describe it to people is if you're feeling like I'm feeling stressed because I care so much, that's stress. If you're feeling like I need to do a great job on this presentation and it's stressing me out because this presentation matters so much to me. You know, I've worked so hard on it. I've got to do a good job. That's stress. Burnout would be I don't care anymore. I am stressed because I'm so detached, whatever, right? I've been stressed for so long.

I don't care. I'm going to do the presentation. It doesn't matter. I can't do a good job anyhow. That would be burnout. Can you tell the difference makes sense there? Absolutely. Yes.

Yeah. So I think that's a helpful distinction people can make to figure out if they're just in the stress space or in a burnout space. And one of the interesting thing you said about, especially one of those groups, the individuals that practice low self-compassion. Yes. Because I think there's this idea that we have to do things right. We have to be hard on ourselves. And some of it is cultural, right? And if you practice compassionate, being compassionate to yourself, it might actually be perceived as a sign of we can. but it's necessary for you to be resilient. Yes, yes. Yeah, let's get back to the resilient mind, right?

Les how do you have a resilient mind in this? And self-compassion is part of it. It's one of the things I talk about in the book because I think a big buzzword in a lot of circles right now is we need more empathy. And I'm not saying we don't need more empathy, but the research indicates that compassion, particularly self-compassion,

is even more powerful than empathy. because empathy can exhaust you, right? Because empathy is often about feeling someone else's feelings. So if you're having a really hard day symbol because you didn't get the promotion that you expected to get and you come in and you're angry and you're sad and you want to talk about it with me, if I feel all those emotions with you,

if I feel the rage and indignation, and then I feel the sadness and disappointment, I'm going to leave that exhausted, right? Whereas compassion, so that's empathy, is feeling with you, at least that's emotional empathy. If I can have compassion, compassion is more along the lines of, I see that you're hurting and I want to help you. How can I help you? As opposed to walk, you know, people talk about walking in someone else's shoes. Walking in someone else's shoes is empathy. Noticing that someone has crummy shoes and calling the cobbler, that's compassion.

Right? So compassion is, what's the action I can take to make this easier for? for you, right? And when people practice compassion or they get, and there's training, compassion's kind of hard to learn. It's a little trickier to learn than some things. But I can show you a quick demonstration of a nice compassion practice, self-compassion practice. I did, once I'd learn about this, I decided I would do some self-compassion training. And the Center for Mindful Self-compassion is a wonderful place where they offer lots of different courses on how to become more compassionate. it. So yeah, compassion is, we need to talk more about compassion. I think it sounds woo-woo. But the science is there. The science shows that people who have high and self-compassion are

more productive. They are more resilient when there are setbacks and failure. They, and they, they don't perform less than the people who are hard on themselves. They actually perform better because they're, you know, they know that a mistake isn't the end of the world. So they're willing to keep trying. They bounce back quickly as opposed to feeling. So can I show you a quick self-compassion technique that I love? Absolutely. Okay, great. So this is one I learned in the course, but I've since looked at the research on this.

I learned in a self-compassion course, but I've since looked at the research and it's found this is incredibly effective at reducing cortisol levels. They've actually tested this in the lab. So it's an affectionate self-compassion technique. And so the idea is you want to put both hands on your heart. So my necklace is odd. Okay, there you put both hands on your heart. And what you would do is you would just like make little circles with your hands for about 30 seconds. That's what they do in the lab.

Just little rubbing motions. And you might think to yourself like, okay, that feels warm. I feel my hands. I feel the pressure. That feels good. If that doesn't feel comforting to you in the lab, they ask people to figure out what's the most comforting gesture. So for some people, it's hands at the tops of the arms. for other people, it's putting both hands on your cheeks. That one doesn't work as much for me,

but you can picture putting your hands on your cheeks. So you figure out what is the gesture that feels warm and comforting. You do it for 30 seconds, and what they find is it lowers cortisol, and it helps people feel gentler to themselves. They now feel like, okay, this is hard, and I've got you, we're going to get through this, right? It just makes people feel like, okay, I can take a softer approach to this. And it's powerful. And I just love the, you know, I'll do this sometimes. You know, I was getting stressed out in a grocery store recently because the line wasn't moving. And I did the little hand gesture. I sat down my hand cart. I did the little gesture of the two hands on my heart. And I just immediately felt like, you can handle this. You can handle, you can handle a

slow moving line. It's okay. Right. So it's a nice one because you can do it in plenty of circumstances. And maybe you don't do it in meeting with your boss, right? That might be a little weird. But there's other circumstances where it works. Maybe we can ask our boss, let's do this self-compassion together so we can. I love it. I want to see that meeting. That's great.

Yes, please. More of that. That is amazing. And thank you for sharing that because I think that's an extra tool that we can add to be able to practice more self-compassion. I want to switch a little bit and talk about our phones. and task switching. Yes.

Because one of the things that I think all of us are experiencing is that we are getting more and more glued to our phone devices. Absolutely. And we tend to be multitasking, mental ping-ponging. And it's almost harder to focus now. One of the things I even realized was actually a difficult time watching a movie. Because I'm like, everything seemed so slow. Yeah.

But I connected it back to maybe social media use. So how is kind of the shift and the use of our phones impacting how our brains might be processing and how can we regain that control? So it's early days on the science on that in terms of not on multitasking, which there's lots of research on that. But in terms of the impact of social media on our brains, it's early days. I think there's going to be a lot of research just coming out in the next year or two. But right now the things that people are pointing at is it's especially, detrimental on developing brains. So prior to the age of, you know, 24, lots of social media use leads to increased anxiety. If people are finding it, you know, youth teens and people in their

early 20s are feeling more depressed, especially if they started using social media younger, right? Before they had learned, like, no, people are posting just their best days. This isn't everyone's day every day. You know that now, right? But maybe you didn't realize that if you got on social media when you were 12 or 13, you didn't appreciate that. Instead, it seemed like everyone lived an amazing life that you were missing out on. And so depression and anxiety tend to be higher on youth that get on, if you get on social media earlier. So we know that that's a real problem. But in terms of the impact on the brain, those are early studies are just being published now. We do know that multitasking, though, is really bad for the brain.

We tend to think of ourselves as we're getting more done. Or, Tereyce, the reality is I have to multitask. I can't single task. But if I can show you a demonstration of how disruptive multitasking is, because most of us don't realize how hard it is, how much harder it is than single tasking. So would you mind if I demonstrate? It's not going to be fun. Is that okay?

It's a nice test. If you're thinking you're good at multitasking, this is a nice test of how good. you actually are. Okay, so people can play along. All right. So what I'm going to ask you to do, Simba, is out loud as fast as possible. Count from number one to ten, go. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Excellent. Now I want you to do the same thing with the alphabet from the letter A through the letter J. See the alphabet as fast as you can. Go. A, B, C, D, E, F, J. J. There you go. Good, good. And you stopped. J. Often people just keep going. You get on a roll. Okay, nicely done. So here's that with single task.

Now I'm going to ask you to multitask. What I want you to do is I want you to say a number and then a letter. So it would be like 1A go. 1A, 2, B, 3C, 4D, 5E, 6J, 7. It gets really hard. Write at about 6 or 7. It starts to get hard, right? Yes. All right. So what just happened is, you know, you still. down. We all do. Most people slow down. I think the fastest I've ever seen anybody slow down is they get twice as slow. For me, I get about four times as slow when I've actually timed it on my phone to get slower. You can get faster with practice, but you won't get ever as fast as doing the single tasking, right? So we get slower. We make more mistakes. The research indicates we make not just on that, but on any kind of multitasking. We make on average about 47 percent more. So almost 50% more mistakes than if we were single tasking. And if it's something important, like you're writing an email to your team, that's, you know, but you're also trying to talk to someone in your kitchen because you're doing it at night and, you know, your partner or your roommate or your kid is talking to you. You don't want to be making 47% more mistakes on that email to your team or to your manager, right? So definitely say, hey, wait, wait, I'm just going to, I need 10 minutes to write this email and then I'm all yours, right?

So just single task. The biggest one is exactly what you were saying. For me, the biggest concern is that if we multitask a lot, research out of Stanford shows that we find it harder to go deep later. So I know so many people who say, yeah, yeah, yeah, I am distracted and distracted. But in the afternoon, I've got this block of time on my calendar from two to four where I can really focus. And if you multitask all day and then at 2 o'clock, you think you're going to turn on the deep focus, chances are you will find it very hard to do because people who multitask find it very hard to get out of that mode, that they find it hard to go deep when they want to.

Even when they give themselves the time, even when they shut the door, turn off their device, only have one app open that they're working on, one screen, no matter what things you put on your computer to make it hard for you to get distracted, you will find it hard to go deep. That for me is probably the biggest reason that you want to try to single task. So the way I do it, because it's hard practically, right, is I will set a timer on my phone and just say I'm going to single task for 20 minutes. And I often find 20 minutes in, I'm, you know, I'm deep into it. And when the timer goes off, I just like turn it off and I just keep going. So that can effectively get you into a space where you're single tasking more often. Or at the end of the 20 minutes, if I know I need to check my email, I'll check my email, but then I go back to single tasking. So I'm single tasking on email and then I'm single tasking on the main task. I'm giving myself permission, knowing that I'm

going to do a better job on both things. And I've noticed personally in my life that when I single task, if, let's say I'm going to do like a task without any distractions for an hour, I tend to be like significantly more productive on that task than when I'm trying to multitask. And typically, I know I've also seen that certain music or beats have also helped in terms of that focus. And you talk about binaural beats and specific frequencies, how does that also play a role in it? Yes, I love binaural beats. This has become, you know, for me, there are a number of changes I've made to my life and work rhythm and flow because of doing the research for this book. And binaural beats were something I didn't know about until I started researching this book.

So binaural beats, B-I-N-A-U-R-A-L for people who are like, I've never heard of that. So binoral beats means kind of two ears, so binoral, two sounds. And the idea is that neuroscientists are still trying to understand. We can talk about what neuroscientists think is going on. But what the finding is, is that if you put on headphones or AirPods, whatever your listening device of choices, you need to put something on both ears and you go to YouTube, or you can find this on, I believe Spotify has it. Pandora doesn't yet that at last I looked, but Spotify has, You look up binaural beats, and you want to look up some 40 hertz. That part's important for concentration.

There are other binaural beats at like 8 hertz and 12 hertz. That would be more for relaxation. But if you need peak focus, like you said, it's that hour where you really need to focus up. And you turn on 40 hertz binaural beats. If you're doing this on YouTube, it's just going to sound like a tone. It's going to say, mm. But there's actually two different sounds going to. in each ear. So if you were to like remove the headphones, you'd hear a slightly different sound

in each year. But your brain does a subtraction so it doesn't sound like a cacophony. It's just going to sound like one steady hum. And what neuroscientists believe, and what will happen, just your experience of this will be at first. You'd be like, I don't, I don't get the big deal, trees. Keep that recording going and then get back to your main task. And you will find within five minutes, you'll be so deeply focused. It is so wonderful. It, on days when, you're, you're I am having trouble getting focused and we're shopping for a house. And I find that I'm like spending too much time on Zillow or I'm, you know, texting my husband different like, what about this house? What about this house? If I put on binaural beats, I'm like, you have to get to work, Therese.

The binaural beats will do it. I suddenly can ignore Zillow. I can ignore the text from my husband. I just get right into the task at hand. So binaural beats are beautiful at 40 hertz because what scientists think is happening is that that the brain begins to fire. at a rhythm of 40 hertz. So not every single neuron, but basically if you can imagine most of the neurons firing, would be 40 times per second. If lots of them are firing at that rate, that is a peak concentration frequency for the brain. It's called gamma frequency.

Lower frequencies, like if you're in deep sleep, would be about one to four cycles per second. So that's really slow. And there are binaural beats at the, low frequency. So if you're trying to fall asleep, that's a nice one because it'll help your brain get nice and slow. But for peak concentration, 40 seems to be the magic number. 35 works as well, but kind of the higher frequency, the more focused you'll be. So it's a great trick. And like I said, neuroscientists are still trying to figure out exactly what's happening there. But it's one of the techniques that when I teach it to people, this is the thing that they email me right away and say,

oh my gosh, that works. I was coaching a swim coach, actually. I was coaching a swim coach, actually, I was working with him on how to get better focus. And he said he now does this whenever they're driving home from a swim meet. And he's on the bus with, you know, 20 college students, men, and they're all making lots of noise. And he just puts on his binaural beats. And he can suddenly get into his work and the emails he needs to send. And it's like the rest of the bus has disappeared. So anyway, it's one of those practices that's very convincing once you try it.

Fascinating. Have you tried it? Have you tried it? Have you tried the binaural beads? I tried it but years back. I haven't tried them recently, so I need to probably incorporate them back into my toolbox so that I can be more focused. Yeah, yeah. And like I said, I don't use them every day, but on a day when what I try to tell myself, like if you've sat at your computer for 20 minutes and you still haven't started on your main task, it's a binaural beats day. And I've got my I got my AirPods right behind my laptop. Is that right here just for that purpose? So anyway, you'll have to tell me if it works for you. Absolutely. Some of the things you are currently researching is why people avoid meditation and yoga, even though they know that it's helpful. What are the biggest psychological blocks you are seen? So it's interesting, there's some overlap between the reasons that people don't do meditation and yoga. And one of the reasons I wanted to study this is a thing I'll often do when an organization hires me to give a talk is often when we start talking about the benefits of meditation. Like I was saying earlier, it benefits your prefrontal cortex. I'll ask, how many of you know that meditation is good for you? And symbol like, you know, 75% of the people in the room will raise their hand. And then I'll say, great. So keep your hand up if you have a regular. meditation practice. And like almost all the hands go down. So it became really interesting to me.

You know, it's like, we know it's good for us. Is it just like other forms of exercise where we know exercise is good for us, but like blah, blah, blah, right? Why don't people meditate? So here's what my research is in the early stages, but here's what we're learning so far. So for meditation and yoga, there are a couple of things, barriers that are in common for both of those, that reasons that people want to or keep up meditation or even try meditation or yoga. So for yoga, one of the number one reasons is just, I don't have time, right? And that's the number one reason that women give. I think it's about 47% of women will give that reason that it's because they don't have time. Same for meditation. It's not quite as high in number, but one of the number one of the number one

reasons for meditation is people don't have time. That's why I love the healthy Minds app because you don't need to set aside time instead of you can work it into the things that you're already doing as long as they you know like I said there are things that don't take a lot of thought like doing the dishes or going for a walk or you know climbing the stairs of your building you can do a healthy minds active meditation so number one is is the amount of time that you have the second most common one for both yoga and meditation at least for men and this is where there's an interesting gender difference on yoga for women the number one reason seems to be time For men, the number one reason seems to be that she's not interested in yoga.

And it's kind of funny, I think, about my brother-in-law, my brother-in-law is single. And he would often joke about how, you know, the only reason he would go to a yoga class would be to meet women. So it's really interesting. That was his, you know, if he was going to find an interest, that would be the interest. It wasn't for the yoga itself. Again, it's right around 47, 48% of men say that the reason they don't do yoga is it's just like it's not, they're not, They're not motivated. And so it's one of the things I try to do in my book is give you science-based reasons to be interested in doing yoga.

But that's also a key reason in meditation. So for meditation, we've got time that it takes, but also I'm just not interested in it and not motivated to do it. So those would be top two reasons. And then for yoga, some of the other reasons are cost, you know, accessibility. You know, the classes aren't near me. Although now there's so many online classes. and yoga with Adrian is free on YouTube. You know, there are free classes.

So I think, I'm hoping that concern goes down, but more people just need to know about it. And then with meditation, kind of the third most common one. So for yoga, it's time, interest, and then kind of accessibility and cost for meditation, it's time, interest. And then another one is misconceptions, right? So if people try it and they think, I need to clear my mind, but I keep, getting distracted. I'm not doing it right. I'm bad at this. Or I need, you know, there's just so many misconceptions where it doesn't feel like it's working. And so I think that's a common problem,

because what a good meditation teacher will teach you is that like, no, if you get distracted, you're doing it right because that's the practice. The whole practice is going from like, I'm focused, now I'm distracted, and I come back to focus. So you need to be reassured. No, that's, that's the juicy part. That's the part that you want to always be learning. is to come back to like, oh, I got distracted and I'm noticing that I'm distracted and now I'm coming back to focusing on my breath or focusing on my feet on the ground as I walk if you're doing an active meditation. So those are the top reasons. And that's, I find helpful to know because then we can start to help people get over those hurdles of time, interest or, you know,

misconceptions or how do we make it accessible. And for each of those reasons, is there like a specific piece of information you share to help them get over their hurdle, or is there like a kind of like a mindset shift statement that you let them know so that they can switch their mind? Yeah. Well, I definitely tell people about things like Healthy Minds app and the facts you can do it actively and then it can be as little as five minutes. Most of the research finds that the benefits come at about 10 minutes or more, but I don't I don't find many researchers that study five-minute meditations, right? So it could still be

effective, but I think most researchers are like, if I'm going to put all this work into this, I'm going to make sure it works. And I know 10 minutes will work. And so I think that's the reason we don't see people studying five-minute meditation. So maybe just as effective, but 10 minutes is the sure shot based on the science. So I'll tell people about the Healthy Minds app or I'll tell people, you can find plenty of free yoga videos online. And there are plenty of yoga instructors, in fact, where they will have a sliding scale. They'll say, you know, pay what you want. Like Eddie Stern, who's a famous, internationally famous yoga instructor if you look up Eddie Stern online. I have no, again, no affiliation with any of these things. But Eddie Stern just like says, you know,

pay for what you can. If you can't pay for the class, I'm still glad to have you here. Like, what? That's fabulous. I can take a class with a world-renowned yoga instructor. And he's like, I'm just glad you're here. It's amazing. So hopefully Eddie's still offering that. But when I took a class with him a month ago. That was his policy. So it's fabulous. So that's, I try to tell people about the free if the cost or the time issue is at least time with meditation and the cost with yoga. I also try to let people know when it comes to the misconceptions. I try to let people know that, yes, the even deeply practiced meditation practitioners are going to, their minds are going to wander. and that's the practice.

That's the practice part is you have to keep practicing. That's why we call it a practice. You have to keep coming back to, oh, I just noticed that I was planning dinner. Okay, I'm going to come back to paying attention to my breathing. Oh, here I got distracted. I'm planning that conversation or I'm remembering that conversation. And that is the practice. So I try to dispel some of those myths that you're not doing it wrong.

That that's what's teaching your brain to. notice, right? And you're stopping the rumination cycle in your prefrontal cortex and you're learning to regulate your emotions, which engages your prefrontal cortex in a different way. So anyway, so I try to dispel some of the myths, give people

resources that are out there. Yeah, and don't picture, I think all too often we just we picture meditators or yogis as people who have to like commit their whole lives to a lifestyle. And then I'm always delighted to tell them, like, you know, it helps me to find out when a top person in an organization meditates or does yoga. So then I can say to them, P.S. The, you know, the VP of your organization meditates. And they'd be like, you're kidding. That guy in a suit, he meditates, right? So it can help. I think that's really a helpful thing that leaders can do is let people know that they do yoga and meditation so that it's. It breaks the stereotype that we have of, you know, it's got to be a woman in long, flowy clothing or something.

And just as you're saying that, I'm reminded of one of the successful people that I follow, Ray Dalio. Oh, yes. Who runs like one of the, like I think 160 billion hedge fund company. And he talks a lot about meditating. He's like meditate, meditate, meditate, meditate. Does he? And just, yes, yes. So seeing on social media, sometimes.

sometimes the story is just like meditate. And I'm like, if you are that successful and influential and just saying meditate, I think I could do it a little bit more concerned. Going to your point that when they see someone who's successful, it makes it more accessible as opposed to something that's isolated. Yes. And I'm always grateful when people in positions of power will let you in on their unconventional secrets, right? These unconventional or, you know, these practices that go against type, right? So I didn't know Radaliao proselytized about the benefits of meditation, but I'm so glad to hear that.

Oh, absolutely, yes. That's amazing. So if we're to paint a picture, let's say someone is like, I'm going to meditate consistently. Yes. And they do it for a set amount of time. What are some of the things they might expect from having that? So I love thinking about the different layers of benefits of meditation.

So when you meditate even once, even if you only meditate a single time, there are immediate benefits. And one of the biggest benefits is you will have sharper memory. Researchers find that as little as a 10-minute mindfulness meditation improves your ability to recall what you just learned by 75%. That's huge. There aren't many things that can immediately improve your memory by 75%. But mindfulness meditation is one of them. And I think part of it is that as opposed to feeling distracted, you just like zoom and you can concentrate better. They think that's part of what's happening as well as some changes in the brain where basically certain areas are becoming more active.

Other areas are becoming less active. And as a result, particularly the hippocampus becoming more active and the prefrontal cortex becoming more active. So that's fabulous. I sometimes advise people if they're going to go into a meeting where they need to remember a bunch of names. one of the best things they can do before walking into that meeting is, you know, do a 10-minute mindfulness meditation. You'll retain a lot more from that meeting, names, information that was discussed, whatever it might be. So that would be one of the immediate benefits. One time will be enough to do it. However, there are bigger benefits. Another layer after layer would be if you meditate on a regular basis,

you add more branches to the dendrites in your prefrontal cortex. You basically get a fluffier prefrontal cortex. And that's one of the areas that we talked about loses gray matter as we age, particularly after age 40. So that's one of the big benefits. And that comes with about eight weeks of meditation. You don't have to meditate every day. I think what they find in those studies, they have people meditate five days a week, 10 minutes at a time. So that's nice. You can take the weekends off.

Or if you know Friday nights, you're just not going to ever do it on Fridays, you know, whatever your realistic constraints might be. And then there are other benefits people find their sleep tends to improve stress levels go down. There are rates of depression, anxiety also tend to go down. So there can be a number of really nice benefits of meditation. So single experience, you're going to have improved focus and improved memory. Long term, you're going to get better sleep, less anxiety, less depression, as well as at more dendurites. basically add more connections within your prefrontal cortex. So that's going to help you with decision making, planning, motion regulation, just a whole bunch of benefits. So those would be kind of

the range. So you can do you use it once. You can use it lots of times and you'll get benefits wherever you lie on that spectrum. And one of the things I've noticed is that a lot of meditations ask to focus on your breath or to focus on something. But breathing seems to be an important element of that, is there like a way to breathe so that we can also kind of gain benefits from it? Yes, yes. And so if you don't mind. Besides what? I'm saying besides staying alive like breathing.

Oh, yes, right. Getting oxygen to your tissue. Exactly. We all want that. There is. And there's a great breathing activity I often do at the beginning of a talk to help people in a good state, move them from whatever, whatever, how they rushed to that meeting, how they, you know, had to find parking or they just had an email that was discouraging and now they need to be

present. There's a great breathing activity that I can teach you and people can follow along and do right now. We can talk about the physiological benefits, but let's just experience it first and then you can decide for yourself if you like this activity. Okay, so I'm going to describe it first, Simba, and then we'll do it. So what I'm going to ask you. you to do in a moment, I'm going to ask you to exhale all of your air, and then I'm going to ask you to inhale for a count of five, which is a very slow inhale. So just, you know, take, don't, don't do a big gas, do a slow, slow, small breath, inhale. I'm going to ask you to hold for a count of two. Then I'm going to ask you to exhale for a count of seven, which is also a slow, slow count.

And the hardest, and then we'll do it twice. We'll go through that cycle twice. I usually find that the inhale is the hardest part the first time. So if you get, if I get to three and you find like, oh, Teresa, I can't inhale anymore. Just start holding your breath early. That's fine. Four seconds of holding your breath should be just fine. The most important part physiologically is the really long, slow seven count exhale. Are you ready to try?

I'm ready. All right. Let's do it. All right. So exhale all of your air. And inhale, two, three, four, five. Hold two. Exhale.

Two, three, four. five, six, seven. Again, inhale, two, three, four, five. Hold two. Exhale, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Okay, so how do you feel? I feel more relaxed, almost like, yeah, a little bit more quiet in terms of like my mind and my body. Like, I feel like my body slightly more relaxed. I'm a little bit more focused right now. Oh, nice. And I think my voice might have changed even a little bit. A little bit? Oh, isn't that nice? Yeah. I like how mindful and thoughtful you were.

I do this with lots of people and they aren't as thoughtful as your response was. So I just love your attention to your interception and your ability to tune in. So I'll tell you what the science would say. The science would say that a couple of things happened. It's basically this important nerve called the vagus nerve that runs from your brain. down the back of your throat, into your lungs, your heart, and your gut. So the vagus is vagabond. Same root. It's a wandering nerve. It goes lots of places. But it runs, send signals in both directions. And so what's beautiful about the fact that it sends signals back up to your brain is that

by controlling your breathing, because we can't really control our gut, it's kind of hard to control our heart, but we can control our breathing. We can send a signal to the brain like, hey, everything's okay. Like the fact that you're breathing long, slow exhales would only be something you'd normally do if everything were very peaceful. So even in a highly stressful situation, you can send, you can basically hijack your brain a little bit and say, we're relaxed, really, no matter what you're thinking. The rest of the body is relaxed. And so the brain gets a signal. And basically two areas really change their activity. The amygdala activity goes down so you feel less threat. And the prefrontal cortex actually gets a boost of blood flow and shows more activity. And so that's going to improve your

reasoning and decision making. And so what they find in the lab is, first of all, it helps people relax, like you said, right? You just feel like a little more centered, a little more focused, a little more calm. But also, if we were to do two minutes of that, we did about 30 seconds, 25 seconds. If we did two minutes of it in the lab, they find that's enough to objectively improve decision making. Like you actually will make better decisions if you do that for two minutes, which would be eight cycles. We did two. If you did eight cycles of that, if so if you're having trouble making a decision, do that little activity for, you know, just set a timer on your watch, do it for two minutes and then come back to the decision. And it may not make it, you may not be happy with the clarity that you get.

You may have to be like, oh, I really wanted the other decision, but it should give you some clarity you didn't have before. And I like this activity. Yeah, it's nice. It's worth, it's worth trying. I really like this activity because you can do it surreptitiously, right? You can be in a meeting and you can do this breathing activity just twice like we did and you should be thinking clear, you should be more relaxed. If you're getting feedback that you don't like or you know you're going to be getting feedback you don't like

or you have to give a presentation and you're nervous, you can do this and no one knows you're doing it. Right. And it helps your nervous system reset, you know, instead of feeling threatened, it will lower your heart rate. It will just do a wonder for your body in terms of saying, we're okay, you've got this. And anyway, so I like it. I like it as a technique. Love it. And I think I love this specificity of it because typically the way I'd learned was that four breaths in, hold for four, and then breathe out for four.

But it sounds like this variation is that Excel is very important as well. And there's a timeline to be like, okay, do it for two minutes, as opposed to just three times. Which makes it more specific. It's more specific. And just doing it twice like we did usually helps people feel relaxed. But if what you want is even sharper thinking, clearer decision making, better emotion regulation, then you want to do it for a full two minutes because that's where we really see changes in the prefrontal cortex. Prefrontal cortex is so complex.

It needs a little bit more of a on-ramp to change. The amygdala, we can just 30 seconds. of it is enough to help calm down the amygdala because it spikes and it's highly reactive. It can get agitated very quickly and it can also calm down quickly, whereas the prefrontal cortex is complex enough. It takes a little bit longer for you to make changes there. So anyway, that's two minutes. Two minutes will get you to the clearer mind, the more resilient mind. Amazing. One of the questions I've been dying to ask you because I'm actually a salsa and Bacchata dance instructor was around the effects of dance on the brain.

and on memory. Like what does science say about the benefits of dance? I love that you're sharing this, that you're a dance instructor. Oh, my goodness. I need to get to know you better. All right. So this was, you know, a finding that hasn't changed my life yet, but it's going to change how I spend my retirement. So one of the findings that I don't know why people aren't talking about this, but it's been replicated again and again in many countries with many different forms of dance. The finding is that taking dance lessons is one of the best ways to improve memory, not just for the dance steps, but improving memory across the board. And it's also one of the best ways to get that neurogenesis, adding new neurons to the hippocampus.

There was one study comparing people over the age of 60, and they looked at 11, different things that would be a workout. So they compared things that people like to do over age 60, like golf and tennis and cycling and swimming. And of all those, they found that the one that had the biggest benefits for hippocampus and memory was dance. And so why? Like, what is it about dance that is so special, right? And neuroscientists hypothesize it's kind of the trifecta, the sweet trifecta of three things. First of all, there's a memory component, right, which is that we, you have to remember the steps. You're learning them as well as trying to remember, oh, wait, I do this now or wait, do I do this now, given that rhythm, given this part of the dance, like

if it's a dance that has a sequence of steps. So there's a memory component. There's a movement component and aerobic activity, like we said earlier, releases BDNF, this miracle growth of the brain. so it's going to help sprout new neurons. But there's also a social component, right? With dance, unlike, you know, tennis maybe, you're chatting before and after the match. But with dance, you're interacting with a partner or you're trying not to bump into people. There's so many components that are social in dance or you're embarrassed and you're trying not to be embarrassed, right? But there's the social element of dance. And what's very clear is that when you activate, all three of those simultaneously, you're most likely to get change in the brain. And so,

so like, you know, now when I'm a few years away, I'm not going to retire immediately, but I'm a few years away from retirement. People have begun to ask, what do you want to do when you retire? And I'm starting to say, I'm going to take dance classes. And they'll ask, oh, with your husband? I'm like, I don't know. But I'm going to take them. Because the brain benefits are so clear. You're basically, you know, you're adding brain reserve. Now, can you start dance classes? earlier? Absolutely. Again, you'll be adding neurons to your hippocampus and you'll have more so that if you do start to lose them later, you're just going to get back to baseline as opposed to moving into a deficit. I know at the very least, the community that I'm a part of are going to say,

this is why we dance a lot and for hours a day. We just, that's what it will take to our brain. It's good for health, right? It is. It is. You know, what's funny, people often ask me, you know, what are the myths about the brain that you wish you could change. And I'll often mention the innocuous myth that we only use 10% of our brain. Lots of people believe that. That's pretty innocuous. It doesn't hurt if you believe that. But one of the damaging myths that I think is out there is people assume that we do physical activity if we want to be physically fit and we do mental activity if we want to be mentally fit. And it's true. Mental activity will keep you mentally fit. If you do crossword puzzles or if you have a job where you have to solve hard problems, that will keep you mentally fit. But if

you're physically fit, that also helps you stay mentally fit. If you're doing physical activity, you have huge benefits. So just, and this is one of the things I just met with someone from Menta yesterday. And this was a big takeaway. When she read my book, she was just saying that she's someone who's always been like, I don't need to exercise. I'm, I'm as thin as I want to be. She was thinking of exercise as just a way to get thin because she's naturally thin. She didn't need to exercise, but reading the book made her realize, wait, if I want to hold on to this incredible intelligence that I have, I'd better start exercising because it's one of the best ways to, and dance being one of the more fun ways to hold on to the brain you've got, if not

build a better brain. Dr. Houston, for those that want to learn more about your work, reach out and connect with you, also to learn more and maybe buy your book, where can they find you? So I have a great website, teresehustin.com. You can put that in the show notes. You can also find me on LinkedIn, and I've just started an Instagram account. So I'm early in my videos there, but I've started that. And you can also, on my website, you can find my email address. Feel free to reach out to me. And my book is available wherever you like to my books online or I just had someone pick up three copies at Barnes & Noble the other day. So more, you know, the brick and mortar bookstores have it as well. Anyway, I'm excited to help people. I think we all need to be reassured. Our best brain days are not behind us. And that's my message. And you read my mind because I was going to ask you what is the one message you want people to live with.

And he just said it. Exactly. Yeah. Your best brain days can still be ahead of you. Whatever age you are or however capable you are right now, there's still more. You still have more potential. Beautiful. Thank you for listening.

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