The Wellness Scoop - How Our Brains Control Our Happiness

Episode Date: March 12, 2019

Ella and Matt take a deep dive into the world of the brain with Dr Mithu Storoni looking at how our brains record events as we perceive them, not as they actually happen, how our emotional and rational sides of the brain control the way we see the world and how we can therefore train ourselves to shift from a negative to a positive bias. Stress can both help and harm us and Mithu helps us understand the ways in which we can use this to achieve peak performance and improve our mental and physical health, as well as how small tweaks in our lifestyles can make us feel completely different, why challenge and reward cycles can be game changing, and how our perceptions of colour, sounds, taste and time alter under stress.   See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelp, H-E-L-P.com. Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Delicious Yellow podcast with me, Matthew Mills, and my wife and partner, Ella Mills. Hi, everyone, and welcome back. So the most popular episode we've ever had on our podcast actually was our episode on stress with Rangan Chatterjee a few weeks ago. And it really resonated with us as it seemed to resonate with a lot of you guys. And as you know, we've talked a lot about happiness, and kind of cultivating happiness in many different capacities

and all kinds of different episodes. And most recently in the episode we did with Ferg Cotton. And it's really interesting to see how so many of us, in fact, probably all of us are looking at the sense of happiness and well-being within our lives, but how we sometimes really struggle to get there. And then a book landed on my desk a couple of weeks ago, all about the brain and the connection between our brains and our stress, our brains and the way we process emotions and what's going on around us, and how that has such a fundamental impact on our well-being.

And I thought this is going to introduce our guest for the day Dr. Meetu Storoni and Meetu is a neuro-ophthalmologist who lives in Hong Kong now and who studied at Cambridge and who is as far as I'm aware pretty fascinated with the brain and its impact so welcome Meetu and thank you for coming. Thank you so much Ella and Matthew for having me. It's a huge honour to be here. Oh well thank you for coming. So can we start off with the basics. First of all what is stress but then second of all what's going on in our brain basically. Okay so to really understand this question which I've thought about a lot is you have to imagine your brain is essentially an organ that's suspended in complete darkness. Okay. And we have lots of sense organs and we have

lots of intelligence sitting inside our brains, but our brains are trying to create a picture of reality with all the cues it's receiving from the environment. And it's building this picture of reality so that it can predict what's about to happen next, it can minimize uncertainty, and it can somehow control the environment that we are in. So in a sense, your brain is always operating on guesswork. And every time its predictions are correct, it feels great. Every time it receives confirmation that the model it's created of reality is correct, it feels really happy and secure and safe. Now we jump back to our realities and we jump to stress. Now, stress is, in a very broad sense, stress is the result of the brain perceiving some kind of threat to your existence, okay? And that threat doesn't just have to be a physical

threat. It doesn't just have to be, when I say physical, it can be, you know, it can be pain, it can mean an injury, it can be an environmental threat, it can also be an emotional threat. And in fact, today's stressors, since our lives have moved on from living amongst wild animals, today, the wild animals that we live amongst are our neighbours, the people we commute with, our colleagues at work. So the lions of yesterday have become the people of today. So we navigate this social jungle, we navigate these people. And so the biggest, the most potent source of stress today comes from psychosocial stress, which is the threat that comes from social threats of feeling threatened by other people. In summary, very brief, in a very

loose way, stress is really your brain's perception that you are under attack. So it kicks certain processes into play. But these processes helped us survive so that we're here today. So we wouldn't actually exist today if it weren't for stress. And those processes, just to elaborate, they start in the brain and you have two phases. One is a nerve network phase, which is really immediate. And the second phase is a hormonal phase. And so when we're talking about stress, we talk about cortisol. That's the hormonal phase we refer to. And that's what we classically call the stress response. And that saves us because that pumps blood to our extremities so we can run faster. It raises our blood pressure. So if we're losing blood, our brain still keeps staying supplied. Okay. And that allows us to kind of be alert and respond to things.

That allows us to survive to our best when we're running away from things that really threaten ourselves. At moments of acute stress, I talk about the seven processes that take place. So very quickly, for instance, we know that the moment you become stressed and even emotional stress has this effect, you become inflamed. We now know that know that for instance if you're at work and you suffer from something called subordination stress which is someone at work is making you feel inferior say you're at the bottom of the ladder yeah just being in that state of mind makes you more susceptible to a cold and makes you causes you to take longer to recover from a cold that's how emotional stress acts through your inflammatory pathways isn't that extraordinary it is absolutely extraordinary

because i think so often in the world we live in today it's kind of like i'll just get on with it you know and actually when you start to understand what's actually happening in your body you kind of can rethink whether get on with it is the right approach. That's always been the philosophy that I was used to following until you really look at the data and you realize that actually, there are all these little subtle things in the environment and little habits that we have. And if we change those habits ever so slightly, the impact on our lives is so enormous. So, for instance, the moment you become stressed, you become insulin resistant to the blood sugar. Your blood sugar rises.

And the reason your blood sugar rises is so that there's more there for your brain. Because in the past, this rise in blood sugar would keep your brain thinking and planning how best to escape. I quote a study in my book that shows you that when you take two mice and one mouse doesn't quite warm to the other mouse and you put them in a cage together, just being in that situation makes the unhappy mouse develop insulin resistance. And, you know, extending that even further, there are studies now that show that there's something called effort reward imbalance, which means that at work, you might for some reason feel you're not being rewarded for your output. Okay, so either you know, you're not getting the bonus, or you're not getting the reward you should be or the recognition you should

be getting. So that is a form of psychosocial stress. And there are studies that show that link that, that simple metric of effort, reward, imbalance to metabolic syndrome and insulin resistance. And there are large scale observational studies on this. It's absolutely kind of mind blowing when you start to break it down like that. And so in your book, which I've been absolutely loving, you talk about how we have the two sides of the brain, the rational side of the brain and the emotional side of the brain and what power that, but actually the brain is not divided into these two roots. But essentially what I'm trying to say is that when everything is good and the brain knows exactly what's out there and it can predict the future and it knows you're going to be safe in the next 30 seconds or so, at least, or ideally longer, then it operates in something called a

goal-directed mode. okay? So you have an intention and you're following that intention through. And when you're in that situation, you have a little bit of the brain that sits at the front. It's within a region called your prefrontal cortex. But essentially, the way to think about it is it's your CEO of your brain, okay? So your brain is like this big multinational organization. And it's your CEO that sits at the top. And this CEO coordinates your entire brain like this beautiful orchestra. So everything happens in synchrony, so that you can achieve the goal that your attention or your intention has set itself to. When you're in that state, you plan, your emotional reactivity is low, so you don't respond to things that are irrelevant in your environment.

And if you go very deeply into that state, for instance, we know that your perception of things like colour and sound are actually modulated. Now, when you are under threat, your brain thinks, okay, I'm not going to plan for the future. I just need to survive the next 30 seconds. So when it enters into that state, it suddenly flips mode. You start or your brain starts responding and reacting to its immediate environment, to cues in the environment. And a really fantastic analogy of this is if you read some accounts of soldiers who are actually stationed in active combat, the whole world, the perception of the world becomes distorted. So things move slower, colours appear brighter, sounds, certain frequencies of sounds, are sharper.

Time moves at a different pace. So if you're a combat soldier in the middle of combat and you have that state, that will allow you to see a threat that you would otherwise have not paid attention to. It will allow you to hear a soft sound that you would otherwise have ignored. And those soft sounds and that movement, detecting those will save your life. So that's a good thing.

So at this state can be positive when used, I guess, as traditionally intended to use when you're running away from a lion or you're in a situation of kind of genuine danger rather than the kind of quote unquote danger of sitting in your office. Yes, and that's exactly right. So when you are in this state, so instead of being goal directed, you just respond to your environment. One of the things that happens is you become emotionally reactive. And so when we're in the stimulus responsive state, in this non-rational state, we become emotionally hyper reactive. And when that happens, we all develop a negativity bias. So we interpret things in a different way.

So we see someone, I mentioned an example of Botox. So you see someone with a neutral facial expression. And just because we don't see a smile, we assume it's not a neutral facial expression. We assume it's a hostile person. So we misinterpret cues. We misinterpret things. We always look at things without the benefit of doubt. We always assume the worst. And what this does is, if we go back to the image of the person in active combat, your reality, if time changes, if colour changes, if sounds change, your entire reality is different when you're in this other state. And where does peak performance exist within that? If you're a musician or you're an artist

or you're a performer or you're just doing a piece of work and you get in that zone where suddenly you feel like you're performing at your absolute best where does that exist between the two i love your question for the following reason for the following reason so if we just come zoom into the brain a little bit i talk about this a little bit in the book as well there is one part of the brain we'll call it the lc it's called the locus coeruleus anyway that part of the brain is responsible for the brain's um and i'm talking about this very loosely just so we can conceptualize it it's responsible for the brain's adrenaline response because it it's the hub of noradrenaline release in the brain. That is your centre for alertness. We call it physiological

arousal. The higher the activity in this particular region, this LC region, the more alert you become. When you talk about peak performance, it makes sense that the more alert you are, the better your performance is, because the more perceptually sharp you are to information. So in peak performance, what you want to do is you want to increase the alertness, you want to increase activity within this region. But you don't want this region's activity to keep rising to the point where it triggers the rest of the stress response. And can you actually control that and train that? So have you heard of flow? So I talk about flow in my book.

In the state of flow, you actually achieve exactly this. You have peak alertness. So you have peak activity in this locus coeruleus region, but it doesn't reach the kind of the speed bump beyond which it triggers the stress response. So it keeps it there. And when it is kept there, your emotional reactivity, the scans show your emotional reactivity stays very quiet. And for those listening, will you give us just a quick definition of flow state?

Yes. So flow state is a state where, so the first thing is you need to be doing something. You can't achieve flow by not doing anything. And when you're doing something, you need two components. You need the activity to be interesting and challenging enough so you pay attention, so it grabs your attention. And it needs to be at the threshold of the level of difficulty so that it's challenging enough to really grab you. But it's not so hard that you lose interest and you become bored. Okay, so it

has to be at your edge. But the thing with peak performance is ideally, it should also give you feedback and a little bit of dopamine, a little bit of a reward signal. So you solve a challenge and you feel good about it. And that propels you forward. And a great bit of a reward signal. So you solve a challenge, and you feel good about it. And that propels you forward. And a great example of this is I've been talking about this quite a lot with regard to the book is Tetris, the game Tetris. I love Tetris. So if you think of Tetris, you're fitting in blocks into spaces. So if you operate at your own, you know, level of difficulty, with me, it's very low i i like it playing it at a very basic level but when you're when you're playing it at that level of difficulty that's

just right for you the moment you fit the cubes you feel good and that propels you forward to seek the next challenge but the challenge is within your reach so your challenge has to be if you imagine a carrot on a stick your stick has to be really short so you think you can actually reach for the carrot so as soon as you get into this challenge reward cycle you keep going at it everything else dies away you lose attention to everything else you see it a lot in sports i used to play professional golf and unfortunately didn't get in in the zone or flow frequently enough but you see it with people and they play beyond where they've ever been before and you see it across multiple sports you see it in musicians you see it in people doing brilliant

works or whatever it is and it's it's extraordinary they just it's like a glaze comes over them and they just suddenly have a different sense of calmness and so we've learned for peak performance that you have to get to the right to the top of the level of arousal or awareness before your mind tips into stress is where peak performance exists. How do we train our minds to do that? So this is a very fascinating question because if we all learn to do this, we can stay in that phase indefinitely. Now, what's very interesting is that, as we know, it's like an inverted bell curve. So the more alert or the more sympathetically aroused you become, the sharper your mind becomes. So your alertness improves and you perform sharper. Now, as you perform sharper, ideally,

you just want to stay focused in the zone in which you're performing. You don't want your alertness to extend to your emotions so that you don't want to become emotionally more alert to what's around you. You simply want to be alert to what you're focusing on. So in order to be able to push the brakes on your brain before you slide from this state of high alertness where simply your attention is extremely alert to alertness where your brain is overall is alert overall to everything in your environment and the stress response is really by training your self-control, your self-regulatory skills, so that you can catch the harness, you can hold the harness of

your stress response before it arises. I think there's a sense of magic in there. And I think what's really interesting is the sense that we can actually train our brain in some capacity. There was a line, there was a quote in your book that I absolutely loved which I just would love to read which is your brain records things as you perceive them not as they actually happen so if you launch a colossal stress reaction every time someone nudges you on the train or you read an annoying news headline or you discover you've run out of milk your brain will record your days having been inordinately stressful when in reality it was quite ordinary over time and an overactive emotional brain has trouble bouncing back

and that was the bit I thought was so interesting because all the examples that you give there are like completely normal run-of-the-mill how we live our lives kind of stresses and I guess what you're coming to there is that if we continue to let those control our brain and get into that kind of emotional response, then over time, that's what genuinely impacts on our happiness. That's absolutely right. And actually, when it comes to stress, little bouts of stress are perfectly fine. They're good for us. If we don't recover from them or if they become too intense or that the interval between them is too short so we really don't have a chance to recover that's when the brain stays in the second mode and it starts the things that are supposed to help us start causing harm and with regard to what you just said um imagine you're at work in a you know in an office somewhere and you enter an office and while you're in that office you get shouted at by your boss for exactly two minutes.

OK, it's really traumatic. You don't like no one likes being shouted at. At the end of the two minutes, you open the door and you leave the office. Now, you know, you've left the office. Your boss knows you've left the office. But does your brain know you've left the office, but does your brain know you've left the office? Because the moment you leave the office, if you do nothing and just go and flop on a sofa and make yourself a cup of tea, then your brain is, your mind is empty. It will go back and it will start replaying what just happened to make sense out of it. Now, the problem is because the memory is so fresh and because your emotions are already reactive and have a strong negative emotional bias at that moment, every time you replay the scene, you have a deluge of all the stress hormones that were triggered by your

actual experience. And can I ask a question there? Do you even know you're replaying the scene? This is a very good question, because if you speak to people who really suffer from rumination, many of them will not be aware that it's happening. Yeah. I mean, you will know that you're replaying it, but you won't notice it until you really think about it. Yeah. And the reason why that's really important is because if you keep doing that, you keep your emotions reactive. So your emotions react to your memory. And again, they stimulate all the pathways that keep your hormones flowing, your stress hormones active. Then your brain thinks, in effect, that it's still reliving the experience. So a two minute experience has

suddenly turned into an hour long stressful experience, if you really think about it. So what is the best response you can have in that situation? So if you imagine five such episodes during your day, okay, at the end of your day, you'll have 10 minutes of stress. That's not bad. But if you have five episodes, and you ruminate for five for an hour after each one, at the end of your day, you will have five hours of stress. Okay. So the best thing after that, counterintuitive as it may seem, is the moment a stressful

experience is over, never do nothing. Always do something even more intense. Never flop on a sofa. Engage your mind and force yourself to do something that's so heavy, that's so intense, that your entire attention is grabbed. Because as soon as your attention is grabbed, your mind won't have a chance to wonder. The study that I quote in my book that showed this effect actually used mental tests, so like little simple mental arithmetic tests. But it has to be something that you enjoy okay that grabs you yeah so like a sudoku yeah but it has to be it has to be so you know so grabbing so tetris is a great example and i'm sorry to keep coming back

to tetris no i love tetris so i'm really happy to hear all this enthusiasm for it well no tetris is great because this challenge i mean if you can get into a flow state that's perfect because this challenge reward cycle really grabs at your attention and then your mind really can't wander. And then after you've recovered, after you've detached from that phase, when you've cooled down, you can revisit the scene and it's less likely to spark the same reactions because your emotional reactivity has gone down. That's amazing. So to keep your emotions under control is by improving something called self-regulatory skills or very loosely speaking self-control. Okay so one way is self-control training and one way of doing this is I describe something called focused attention meditation. And that's different to

mindfulness meditation. It's a different type of meditation, because in focused attention meditation, you're bringing your attention back to one thing. And you're training yourself to do that time and time again. And I also mentioned self control training in my book. So I talk about the fact that, you know, during the day, we are in certain situations where we have the easy option, or we have the difficult option. I talk about, you know, lifting weights in a gym, for instance, if you go into the gym, and you think you're going to do 20 reps, okay. And after 15, you think, Oh, I've had enough, I really want to drink afterwards, force yourself to do those five more, because that, in a way trains your self-control

so getting control over yourself is a very good way of making sure you stay in control of yourself during a challenging situation and you're you stay in control of your emotions as well and so I guess the kind of point is why does it? Do you know what I mean? So how is it that these like small kind of episodes or like a day's worth of episodes, what happens in the long term? Why is it that it is genuinely beneficial for us to not be stressed? Yeah, exactly. To not let this run away from us, basically. Okay, so we are going through a very interesting transition as a civilization. We have technology today. We have all these amazing new ways of living our lives. As human beings, we have always evolved with our surroundings. And at the moment,

our surroundings are changing faster than we are able to keep up with them. The reason why stress is a problem is something we need to think about is because the stress response that our brain instigates are there to help in small doses. If these responses exist in longer or higher doses, and they exist for longer than they should, so if we're not recovering from stress responses or we're taking longer to recover, then the damage they're inflicting has wide-ranging consequences. We know, for instance, that flare-ups of diseases like multiple sclerosis and other things are associated with stress. We are now discovering that the global burden of high blood pressure and diabetes are tightly correlated with stress. We have these changes in ourselves where if we look at the world with a constant negativity bias and we fail to read signals or we read signals in a wrong way, the world suddenly

loses its colour. It increases our risk of mental illness and mental illness, as we know, is on the rise. So there is a huge spectrum in between these two. So we also know that there is a possible link between stress and cognitive decline and dementia. So the spectrum of this shows that stress is helpful. But if we don't control it, so if it doesn't happen as we have evolved to allow it to happen, then stress is ending up harming us rather than helping us. And this harm changes the way we feel the world, we see the world, it changes relationships, it changes our ambition, it changes how we perform mentally at work, it changes our achievements, it changes relationships it changes our ambition it changes how we perform mentally at work it changes our achievements it changes creativity moving a block from that it changes the way we

interact with other people and it also changes the way society works and do you think this is a question we've we've had on you know lots of different topics like food waste so really really different to this but one thing that we've talked about a lot is whether or not and i and really interested to hear your thoughts on this whether or not you feel that kind of in the modern day world and our kind of conversations around what's going on right now that a we're not kind of taking this issue seriously enough given the consequences that it can potentially have and and you know the fact that mental and physical health seems to be on the decline as a general rule especially in the west but also that we're kind of not framing this in the right way possibly because I think the conversation around stress and things like that can be almost a bit kind of derogatory and

like you're not strong enough and you know what I mean and I've seen it in myself I've seen it in lots of friends that almost you feel like if you kind of can't keep up with it you're failing and you're not doing a good enough job actually I think from what you're saying but it does feel like there's a breaking point on that now where where people are actually realizing that being stressed isn't cool no exactly it's really going to do you do your arms totally and we kind of almost compete with it you know what I mean it's like how are you I you? I'm so busy. Oh my goodness. I am so busy. I have been so stressed. I'm not sleeping because I'm so stressed. And it's kind of like, you hear it back and you're like, this is insanity. And

as you start to understand the like genuinely really negative consequences on it, you're like, okay, it's not something to be proud of. You talked about, you brought up peak performance earlier. If you gain control of your stress reactivity, then you can, for instance, stay in the peak performance zone for longer, and you can boost your performance on a day-to-day world. So instead of seeing stress as a negative thing that you're complaining about, if you see it as something that if you erase it or minimize it from your life, your entire performance, your happiness and your ability to thrive massively increases. And I think that the

transition to that took a little while because we for a long time, there was a big abyss between being healthy and being ill. And there's a big gray area in between. And the reason the grey area partly existed is because we didn't have a way of measuring certain factors that relate to stress. Now that we're getting the means to measure these things, we're beginning to identify this missing link that separates, in some cases, of course, not all, wellness from illness. And as soon as you identify this missing link, by identifying these ways of measuring it, you suddenly realize all these threads which were hanging, which were loose ends, suddenly are all tied together. And at that point, you start realizing, okay, this is a modifiable factor in our lives. So by doing,

in my book, you know, I show you that you don't need to take pills, and you don't need to do something major to change your life and go and live on an island. You can stay exactly as you are. But you just have to modify these little tiny behaviors that you're doing and these cues in your environment that are telling your brain that you're under threat. And it takes so little, and yet the impact is enormous. And so now that we are learning to recognize it, it's incredibly empowering. So not only does it change your own perception of your own life, your own experience of your own life of your achievement your you know your ability to thrive but it also protects you from kind of going down a rabbit hole before it's too late i also love how

you said that you don't have to go live on an island because i think there is a sense of people being like oh i'm so stressed i can't handle my life i need to kind of quit my life the only way i won't be stressed is if i don't work and i don't just get out of here yeah yeah and it's super unrealistic and so it's actually like how how do we manage it given the reality totally and so i guess that's my kind of closing question to you for people listening to this and thinking yeah she's she's right i've got to do something about this what are the kind of five things that people can do to really try and train that rational side of their brain so that it's the rational side of our brain that we're kind of really using and engaging rather than the kind

of more emotional side this is difficult because there are so many and i think i should i should i should also say do you don't have to be capped at five? I should say that one thing that's really important is that every one of us has a completely different universe in our heads. So the three of us are sitting here, your universes are more similar than they are to mine. But every one of us has a completely different universe. And the reason why our picture of reality is different is because we attend to completely different cues. What does that mean? It means that the things that stress you, Ella, are different to the things that stress

me and the things that stress you, Matthew. Yeah. Okay. And what that means is there is not going to be one single solution that applies to everyone. So every individual, depending on your job, your hours, your personality, your relationship, your situation, you will be able to find an area in your life where you be able to identify the biggest source of stress coming from. So you need to find out your own niche and then address whatever's missing in that niche.

And then your own personal prescription will be satisfied. So in the book, I have lots and lots of examples of things. Not all of these will apply to everyone. You have to pick and choose what applies to you. I think it's such an important point to kind of close with us because it's the same with absolutely everything. There is no one size fits all. so we all need to address our stress but as you said what we're all addressing is going to be different but also it's going to be different today as it will be maybe tomorrow especially next month next year you know it's it's kind of ever evolving so we can't say okay this is the one thing that's going to solve everything forever

because that doesn't exist and we're all always kind of, this is the one thing that's going to solve everything forever because that doesn't exist. And we're always kind of secretly looking for the magic bullet. And it's really refreshing, actually, for you to say that doesn't exist. So, Mitu, that was absolutely fascinating. I absolutely loved listening to you. And I hope everyone else will have learned lots, too. In every episode, we finish up by asking our guest what a daily routine, ritual, something that they live by every day is.

I think I'd say my favorite thing that I try to do wherever I go, and it is especially relevant when I travel between Hong Kong and London, is I try to wake up and watch the sunrise. And there are two reasons for this. The first is that getting light in the morning is very good for producing melatonin the following night. And also dawn light seems to have a very beneficial effect on your cognitive performance. And what I love do um is i've stopped drinking coffee i've started drinking hot chocolate instead so i have my mug of chocolate i have my chocolate and sunset capsule that i take every morning when i rise regardless of where in the world i am and it sets me up for the day nice god that sounds like something we all need to do hot chocolate

and sunrise every day that sounds dreamy absolutely incredible thank you so much me too's book is called stress proof it's fascinating absolutely fascinating but i really really hope you enjoyed this we only have one episode left of season two of the podcast which will be next tuesday and we're going to be talking to a really really special friend of ours about turning negatives into positives. So hopefully we'll see you back here next Tuesday. And as always, please do share it, rate it, review it if you thought it was helpful and have a lovely, heard only in Canada. Reach great Canadian listeners like yourself with podcast advertising from Libsyn Ads. Choose from hundreds of top podcasts offering host endorsements or run a pre-produced ad like this one across thousands of shows to reach your target audience with Libsyn Ads.

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