Well with Arielle Lorre - 157: How to Train Your Brain with Dr. Rahul Jandial

Episode Date: February 23, 2022

In this episode, I'm talking to Dr. Rahul Jandial, a brain surgeon & neuroscientist at The City of Hope Cancer Center. We discuss our current climate of stress, resiliency, and constant stimulation; how that affects our brains, how to properly multi-task and unplug, and how to train your brain to cope. We also discuss brain health; what little things you can do each day to improve your brain's well-being and how to access the brain's natural Valium.   www.Athleticgreens.com/blondefiles for a free 1 year supply of vitamin D and 5 free travel packs with your first purchase. www.Arrae.com with code 'blondefiles' for 10% off one-time purchases or 25% off first month of subscription. www.Sakara.com/Blondefiles20 for 20% off your first order. www.Foriawellness.com/Blonde for 20% off your first order.   Produced by Dear MediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Go to your re-sadviseur or sunnycars. The following podcast is a dear media production. Hey, welcome to the Blond Files podcast. I'm your host, Ariel Lori, and I'm here to talk all things wellness. From how to achieve optimal health and well-being to the best beauty tips and everything in between, no topic is off limits.

I know there is so much information out there, so I'm here to help you navigate it all and live your best life. Thanks for listening. Let's get into it. Hi, everybody. Welcome to the show. I am very excited about today's episode. It's been a long time in the making. We've been trying to schedule this since last year, and it turned out just to be such an incredible conversation. So I'm talking to Dr. Raoul John Dahl. He's a brain surgeon and neuroscientist at the City of Hope Cancer Center. So I first became aware of him when I saw him on TV. I can't remember when or where. And I was like, wow, okay, this is like a real life McDreamy that we have here. Then I heard him.

him on another podcast and I realized he's more than just a pretty face and I'm joking. I'm sure he's so over this narrative. So if you're listening, Dr. John Diel, I'm sorry. Anyway, I proceeded to read his book Life Lessons from a Brain Surgeon, which I loved. And after I read that, I knew I had to get him on the show. I just find his perspective on life. It's so fascinating from treating people losing their life. He just has this really profound outlook and we get into all of that. on this episode. So a little background. Dr. John D'all is a dual-trained brain surgeon and neuroscientist at City of Hope in Los Angeles, a hospital for cancer treatment designated as a comprehensive cancer center by the National Cancer Institute. As a surgeon, Dr. John D'all provides complex

surgical treatment to patients with cancer and as a scientist, his lab investigates the biology of cancer spread to the brain. He's also authored 10 books and over 100 academic articles. on surgery, neuroscience, and cancer biology. So in this episode, we talk a lot about our current climate of stress and constant stimulation. We talk about how that affects our brains, how to properly multitask and unplug. We talk about how to train your brain to cope with all of this. And then we also talk about brain health, what little things you can do each day to improve your brain's well-being, how to access your brain's natural volume, and so, so much more so I hope you enjoy the episode.

All right. Welcome, Dr. John Deal. I'm so happy to have you here. My pleasure. We've been trying to book this for a long time. So there's so much that I want to talk to you about. And I know that my audience is really interested in the topics that we're going to be covering today. So before we get into all of that, can you just give us a little bit of a background on who you are, what you do and how you came to do it? Wow.

That's a big question. First, it's nice to be in person. There is a difference, you know. For sure. Right now, my career is I'm a brain surgeon and neuroscientist at City of Hope Cancer Center. How I got to that position, academically at least, was very unconventional. I went to Berkeley. I dropped out of college.

I was a security guard for a little bit. Fell in love. Went to medical school, went to residency. She had three babies. They're teenage boys now. And then I became a cancer surgeon at 35. I'm 49 this year. along the way I learned a lot from the cancer patients and as I got farther along my journey I started

doing some television did some Fox stuff did some Discovery UK and the best part of the journey has been the last four years where I've had books do well in London and that's I think how we got connected so I've got a wide range of experiences some expertise but I think really what I pride myself on is trying to synthesize the space between just being smart and just having experiences only. Out of everything that you do, what is your favorite thing? What's your favorite part about what you do? Favorite part would be new adventures in London with my sons. Five months ago, they had their first cigars there. I gave a talk at Oxford. It was sort of my life story. There in the audience, it was just a month that there was a pause in the pandemic.

and then we went to a club and dinner and just had fantastic adventures all night there. To me, that's the most wonderful part of my life. What's facilitated that is taking care of patients. You know, I think I could have gone in a lot of different directions in life, but I'm glad I chose to take care of the sick because in that interaction I can be myself. It's pure. I mean the best. They need the best.

and that sort of developed me as a person, it shaped me as a person, which I think helped me be the father I'm trying to be, you know, and have been the last few years, especially, through the pandemic. Do they think you're cool? Do they think that what you do? I'm trying. You know, yeah, that's a good question. I'm trying.

I'm young. You know, they go to the private schools in L.A. I see one of them. They got a lot of pops that are like 70. Yeah. And I was 48. I mean, my eldest is turning 20. 21 this year and I'll be 50.

You are young. Yeah. So my wife and I, we had kids. We were very early in training. So all my professional colleagues here, they got like five-year-olds. So I try to keep it cool. And part of that is travel. I travel all over the world with them.

Like my son was 14 when we went to Ukraine, I've been to Bolivia, different islands. Their mom is an extraordinary woman. And so I think, I don't think it's one thing or the other. is just sort of, again, all these pieces coming together in a wonderful time, my life. We talk a little bit about non-negotiables in this episode, and you guys know me pretty well by now. You probably know that I have a few non-negotiables in my kind of wellness routine. One of those, of course, is my daily green drink. So I love to take athletic greens in the morning on an empty stomach before I have my matcha, before I work out.

It really gives me this like buzz of energy, and I just feel like I am, covering so many bases before I even start my day. So one scoop of athletic greens has 75 high quality vitamins, minerals, whole food sourced superfoods, probiotics and adaptogens to help you start your day right. And this special blend of ingredients supports your gut health, your nervous system, your immune system, your energy, recovery, focus, aging, all of the things. I definitely have found that since I've been consistent with it since last year my digestion has been so much better and it just eliminates the need to take a million pills and supplements in the morning. So athletic greens is lifestyle friendly, whether you eat keto, paleo, vegan, dairy-free or gluten-free. It contains less than one gram of

sugar, no GMOs, no nasty chemicals or artificial anything. And it still tastes really good. And this is huge because so many green drinks that you can buy have so much sugar in them. And it's just very convenient. So like I said, I drink it first thing in the morning. I add a scoop to about eight ounces of water. I throw a couple ice cubes in there. And it's really something that I look forward to. You can also put it in a smoothie. So there are different ways that you can take it. So if you guys want to get in on this little micro habit that can have so many benefits, athletic greens is going to give you a free one-year supply of immune supporting vitamin D and five free travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit athletic greens.com slash blonde files. Again, that's athletic greens.com slash blonde files

to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance. Well, hello. I'm Gidie Maloney and you probably know me from a little show called Banner Bumber Rolls. I've been labeled all kinds of things. A bitch, a bully. And a mean girl, but there is so much more to a person than what you see on TV. Tune in every Friday as I talk to some of my friends and castmates, celebrities, comedians, medical professionals, and maybe some political figures. And by the time we're done, you're going to love me. So I reached out to you initially because I read your book, Life Lessons,

and I just was really kind of moved by it. We won't get too far into it. but just for the audience, you talk about lessons that you've learned from being in your position. Is there anything that you may have learned more recently, like over the past two years from the patients that you've worked with, especially in the climate that we're in now? Or you can just talk about one of the lessons from the book. Maybe that has been the most profound for you. Yeah, the last two years has been intense for everybody.

I mean, I think it's shown me the complexity of human experiences. So how can you frame? So when you take care of cancer patients, this ties into the book as well as the question about the last two years in particular. When you take care of cancer patients, people used to ask me, aren't you sad?

So, well, you know, I mean, quite the opposite. Seeing them battle, it's heroic. They don't come in asking for pity. I mean, they are, we can get into it later, but they are the accurate sense of resilient. They come in, they get dressed, They put up with surgery, testing, uncertainty. It's fantastic.

It's a positive environment, strangely, while they are often dying. So that was something of like, wow, that's not what I imagined. And I'm glad to have that life experience over the last 15 years. I think listeners and people on the outside might be surprised by that. But then you look at the last two years and it's been traumatic, but it's also been triumphant. And we expected suicides to go through the roof. They went up a touch, but not dramatically. And for all those people who've lost their lives, it's very sad.

But when you look at sort of the whole spectrum of what's gone on, it's been many things. It's been stifling, but also liberating. Maybe I don't have to do this. Maybe this isn't the way I'm going to do it once we get out of this. So that sort of complexity, the nuance in human interactions is the lesson from cancer patients and to me is the lesson from the last two years. I think it's so interesting that you say that because I know that there have been studies that have been done and I've heard people talk about how what we think is going to be the absolute worst thing that could possibly ever happen to us turns out to be completely different and often not that getting cancer is the best thing. But when you're faced with that experience, you grow and you evolve and a part of you is born that can then deal with that. But you can't imagine when you're just thinking of that scenario happening.

Yeah. I mean, you've hit it perfectly. I don't want a pandemic. I don't want cancer. I don't want my patients to suffer or to struggle. But it is quite revelatory to see that. their strength comes from the struggle. Their complexity, the biggest lesson is,

I wish I would have made quality of life a priority before my diagnosis, that the things that bothered me, the little things are now, they don't care, they're not encumbered by it. So to say that cancer is bad, yeah, I mean, like, man, I don't want cancer. I don't want my patients to have cancer, but people do. And then what happens afterwards, I think speaks to humanity. It's not a sad thing. It's, like I said, triumphant.

And the pandemic has been very difficult, but it's also been liberating to see people endure, people come together, people evolve, people take care of each other. All those stories are there, too. And that's a master class in humanity the last few years. So with my sons getting back to them, it's like, listen, man, we're going to learn a lot with the way people behave. So like my first book you're mentioning, there's a lot of brain in there, like, how do you live longer? How do you stave off dementia? How do you smart drugs? You know, how do you, you know, then my second book is more mind like trauma, belief, pressure, grief, you know, it's like, but, and what the last two years really is a master class on is behavior that smart people, technically smart people, or what you

want somebody would say they are intelligent, can make bad decisions. And sometimes uninformed people can have good instincts and make good decisions. So it's been a master class in behavior the last couple of years. And those are sort of the things I try to point out to my children because they're going to see it again. If they're 20, God willing, they make it to 80. There's going to be some more biological stuff coming. In the scientific world, which is, you know, I have a laboratory. It looks like CSI with petri dishes and we have viruses in my lab and viral vectors and different things,

all for the potential treatment of cancer. but there's no way that generation is not going to have another biological challenge in the next 50, 60 years. So hopefully they've become informed on how to handle it. So there's a lot of lessons. Well, another thing that I want to ask you about kind of tying into the challenges and circumstances that younger generations and we might experience in the future is kind of this world that we're living in today, where we're constantly getting bombarded with, stimulation and like, you know, between the smartphones and the Netflix and whatever and this like dopamine cycle, I would imagine, in our brain constantly. And just, it seems like we're just living in this really heightened time. And everybody is really fucking stressed, partially probably

because of that. And people don't have coping skills. And we're so distracted and it's hard to be in the present. How, if you can say, how is that changing our brains or how could it change the brains of younger generations. I get that question a lot because, I mean, it is a wild time. I'm always plugged in, you know, my car is talking to me, my phone's talking to me, my TV or laptops talking to me. We're constantly on the grid. And people are wondering, like, how will the brains change because of that? So there's two questions there. One is at a very specific level. I'll give you a very specific example. There's a certain part of the brain called the hippocampus. It's behind her temporal lobes. It's shaped like a seahorse. It's responsible for navigation and memory.

And those areas may become less efficient. They might become smaller. They might become less interconnected because we rely on our phone simply for navigation. So relying on something can have a brain-changing effect. So that's sort of like the concept. I don't think it's bad. I mean, I don't want to memorize. I mean, I'm loving learning London because the roads aren't straight. It's not a grid like Manhattan, so it's fascinating. But I don't want to memorize phone numbers. I like having my apps. But it does change the brain a little bit.

Now, let's go to a bigger way of thinking about the brain. There's something called attention slash vigilance. So like way back when in the military, they realized like you can't have people on full alert for a long time. And you have to sort of keep it graded, full alert for a little bit. and then you have to pause a little bit to allow yourself to be truly on full alert again. And that's something I think people can benefit from learning from that if you want to power for 90 minutes,

you wake up, you want to power. It's your laptop, one phone, too. I mean, I have two monitors at work. I love having five screens open. That by itself is not bad. But to think after that 90 minutes, maybe it touched longer if you've had some tea or coffee, like that you can do that through the whole day.

I think that's where the mistake is. So multitasking, powering with a lot of information, which is what we do in the operating room. There's monitors, there's instruments, there's things being handed to us. Multitasking is power. I just want people to realize you can't do it for 12 hours. And so when you multitask, do it for a while, get the most out of it, and then switch to a different frame of mind, if you will. Go exercise. Let there be more input that's just sort of creative, like watching that.

Netflix show, you know, last night I was watching, inventing Anna, just take in something different, something you usually don't do, then eat or don't eat or move or take a walk, then consider going back into that power mode. So the input that we're getting from all the technology, if we could compartmentalize it during the day, makes us superficient, makes us work at home, makes us come up with all kinds of creative things. It's just you can't sit there and just get slammed by it for 10 hours in a row. At some point, then you're numb and you're not really engaging what's coming in.

You become passive in the influence of the stimulation. I think for me, at least, like the hardest thing is to have the discipline to take those little breaks. Like take meditation, for example. I got super into meditation a few years ago. I do transcendental meditation. So I do two times a day, 20 minutes in silence. And it changed my life. And it really kind of like, I heard the analogy that it kind of does.

does the laundry on your brain. So twice a day you're kind of cleansing that accumulated stress and whatever from your brain from your body. But the hardest part is that if I have a crazy day and I get up at 530 or 6 or whatever and I want to work out and do all my things, I feel like I don't have the time to do that. And it's this paradox because if I do make the extra time to do it, then everything else benefits from it. But that's the hardest part. And I think so many of us feel like we're so connected and we have to be like available all the time and working 24-7. And it's hard to take those moments of unplugging. Yeah.

I mean, so we used to crank and grind and training. Yeah. And that's just what we had to do. If that's what you have to do to get things done, you got to get your kids dropped off or you got to get stuff done. Listen, man, you got to get stuff done. I'm not here to limit people's lives and approaches because I'm not in their shoes. We're all individuals. and I like to think we're also different versions of our former selves.

But if you're asking for conversation or if we're having a conversation about like, what's like the optimal rhythm if one could, if one had the time, the focus and all that. Like how would that approach be? That doesn't mean we're going to hit it every day. But at least we should know what the compass is. And what it isn't is cranking all day and night. So if we set the goal like me or you being the most productive, and we define whatever that is,

some people are surprised that by resting better or taking off periods, you might actually do better. But if you look at other disciplines, you see that. And for athletes, they don't want to train too far before the Olympics. I've got a good buddy in London and is Olympian. You actually don't want to train for nine months for the Olympics. There's a certain period. Then you do the Olympics.

and then there's an off period. Same thing with sports. An off period. I think the day should be organized with off periods. And you say, well, okay, day organized into compartments. So let me introduce a different concept. It's sort of in the book I'm thinking, dreaming about, really, is in 24 hours, we know there's an awake state of mind

and a sleeping, a sleep state of mind. And we've all come to accept that. When we sleep, there's REM and non-REM. We don't even know what that means. we throw those words out. But we get like even when you're sleeping, you're kind of switching between different mind energies, mind electricity, right?

My aura ring says I didn't get any REM sleep last night. So just throwing that out there. Right. Whatever that means. Yeah. That sleep isn't just knocked out for eight hours. Yeah. Well, the day can't be just power for 10 hours.

The day can't be just chill for 10 hours. And if we try to look at the day as you're going to have certain windows, mind frames, if you will, that will make you your best at different things. So in the morning, you naturally get into these alpha brainwaves that can be measured. This isn't just conjecture. Like, that's great for analysis. Take it all in, power, have your coffee.

But then switch to something else. So meditation, coming back to what you mentioned, how it changed your life and how it breaks up your day, is that pause that it's actually a different mind frame. You can measure it through breathing techniques and electrodes on the head. People say, hey, look, that's a different rhythm going on globally inside somebody's skull. So when you move through these different compartments of the day, it's not like that time it's wasted. That meditation allows you to take the 90 minutes or two hours of powering you were doing in the morning and make sense of it. Integrated. Come up with creative ideas.

You've added the dots. Now it lets you connect the dots. So it's not wasted time. It's not just, man, I need to do that so I can power again. that is actually part of making meaning and sense out of the information you captured when you were motoring and multitasking in the morning. And exercise in what you eat. So different compartments to the day will not only leave you more relaxed, less stressed out, but I argue will put you at your most productive self. That's the goal if we can get there.

Some days you just got to smash through and get a ton of things done though. Feeling your best starts with what you're putting in your body. and I know I feel my absolute best when I am eating really nourishing, nutritious food, which can be hard with a busy schedule and being on the go all the time. And when I start skipping meals or snacking on more processed things, I really start to struggle on all fronts, especially mentally. And that is where Sakara comes in. Sikara is a wellness company anchored in food as medicine

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Again, that's array.com, a-r-r-r-a-e.com, and the code is blonde files for 10% off a one-time purchase or 25% off a subscription. What are some non-negotiables in your routine? Like say that you have a long surgery coming up. What do you do? Good question. Nobody's asked me that. Like I was exhausted today.

So on the way here, I was listening to like ASAP FERG and like hardcore rap to get me in the zone. So do you have something like that? That's funny. My son and I were listening to 21 Savage Knife Talk. And it's a horrible thing to say. But Drake always sounds so fake on those. Because he did the Disney thing. And now he's just like, can't like, how do you quite the transformation?

But 21 Savage on a knife talk is interesting. It's a horrible line. And they're talking about. We're listening to it on the way home. Talking about brains hanging. It's just like, oh, this, I don't have to listen to music, but I do pull up, listen to certain music to help myself get into that flow. So music can help you transition from powering to meditation or from meditation to powering like in a pregame. But there isn't a non-negotiable for me.

The thing with surgery is if you need a method, if you need a process to get focused, then maybe you shouldn't be doing it. Because when we did it, it was 35, 40-hour shifts, just pop up from asleep. And then next to you know, you're shaving somebody's head and like pulling out a bullet from a skull or brain. And then you go back to sleep. I mean, so I'm not saying that's the way to do it, but it makes you ready to go at any time. So I don't have anything that's non-negotiable. But in the operation, if I start to lose control or something difficult is happening and I feel myself struggling, I'll definitely control my breathing.

If I can control my breathing, I'm more likely to come up with a solution. I'm more likely to be slick with my hands if I can control my breathing. That doesn't mean like if I'm panicking, I still can't pull up the maneuver. And it doesn't mean that if I get into what I call pace of breathing,

meditative breathing, that doesn't mean solutions will always arise, but I'm more likely to in those states. And I think that's where I want people to realize there is no on-off switch in the brain. You get yourself in a likely, you're more likely to be creative in that meditative state once you're putting together the stuff you've learned in that morning power stage that you did. So once you create those flows and greater sort of inclinations and proclivity for creativity or analysis, you make that a habit. And all of a sudden you see things that are, you know, you see yourself doing stuff that you didn't think you could.

Can you talk about that breathing for a minute? because I've heard you talk about it in another podcast or maybe a different interview. But I know that so many people, especially my audience, because they send in questions about this struggle with things like anxiety and panic and feeling like they're constantly in fight or flight, probably, you know, something that's attributed to what we were talking about, the constant stimuli. And just the state of the world right now.

Exactly. State of the world. So do you have tips for something that they can do in the moment or breathing? And my thing, you know, we can go through those. tips, but what I've learned from my patients is if you explain something to them, especially the old timers, take these pills. They're like, oh, sure, it's in the trash can on the way out, you know? That's how it was when I was in medical school. They're not listening. They have to believe that this will work and the way they believe is if they understand how. So this,

a bit of a deep dive into this question because it's important. Okay, first of all, if somebody says they're mindful or centered or present or meditating, I don't know. I mean, maybe they are, maybe they aren't. I don't know. I mean, there might be a storm going on in their mind. How can we really measure that? But we can measure the effects of pacing your breath on the electricity in your brain. That we can measure and we have done in hospitals and I'll take you down that path.

And we know that when the electricity after pace breathing cools off, it's similar to the effect. you have if you took value, which is an anxiolytic. So like that, that I like. But if you can imagine a mountaintop and it chills you out, great. I'm not throwing shade on that. I'm just saying, I can't measure that. And sometimes I find, like, people tell me, like, be this way. You're like, no, I just got a car accident.

And I'm not present right now. I'm freaked out. Like, sometimes advice is too easily given out, right? And what I want people to know is, like, they have their own ability. we are built with tricks and techniques that we can use as individuals to break anxiety based on what we're going through. You get a cancer diagnosis. You may not be successful at breaking your anxiety compared to like if you don't get

something you wanted from the store. So I don't like to compare because stress is a continuum. And so the thing I'm going to get into is useful for you whatever the origin and source. force of anxiety. So anxiety is part of vigilance. It's that powering, paying attention. It keeps us on our toes. Having it unnecessarily or having it pop up too easily wrecks our day. It keeps us from doing the things that we enjoy. And so what is breathing? And the first thing is the mind-body connection is not this theoretical thing. There's actually a thick nerve that comes out of our brain. It comes down the side of our throat, it's called the vagus nerve, and it throws a fine mesh over the

heart, lungs, and abdomen. And it goes to the brain. I've operated on it. It's a, so I'm a neurosurgeon talking about breathing, but I'm trying to give it to you so you can say, oh, wait a second. The mind-body connection is actually a physical, anatomical feature. So when you get Buddhist monks saying lower your heart rate, their brain is sending signals down that nerve, two of them, over the surface of the heart, and they lower their heart rate. That we know exists. When you get deep divers, they want to go down super deep. They do the same technique.

They get their heart rate lower, to get their metabolism lower. So you can think down things like your heart. When you get nervous, you say, I have butterflies in my stomach. Well, you're actually nervous in your brain, but it's sort of triggering the nerves that it also sends down your stomach. The big question is, if we breathe, can we send calming signals upward? We know we can think down the heart rate, but can we breathe down the brain's anxiety, right?

That is the true question. And there was an answer. We believe that, you know, slowing down the pace of breathing works that's happened over, you know, millennia. But how? And can we prove it? So at different hospitals and people have seizures, sometimes we'll do this, do a surgery, peel down their scalp, lift off the skull, put a little grid on there. And then skull back and the stitch up the scalp.

have these, it looks like braids, but they're coming from the surface of the brain. And it looks like a monitor, like you're watching the stock market or a heart rate. So you have live electrophysiologic monitoring of the brain, not stickers on the forehead, like on the surface. What we're looking for is if a seizure pops up, look where it happened, because then we would know where to sing it or to deal with it. But when those patients are in the hospital, sometimes for weeks, they're bored. And so grad students and cognitive neuroscientists.

They're like, hey, can we talk to? And patients were like, yeah, man, we're bored. And so they started going through different thinking exercises and breathing exercises. And it was published that if you slow down the cadence of your breathing, doesn't matter in and out from nose or mouth. They all connect them, you know, in the back of your throat. But if you just slow it down, one in, two, and three, in whatever your pace is, and you do that for five to ten minutes, they saw the electrical.

activity cool off. And that was exactly what we see when we give volume a pill to break anxiety. It cools the electrical activity of the brain. So there's proof now that you have your built-in volume. It's pacing your pace of breath. Like this ain't London, that's cadence of breath. That that's with you, that you don't have to ask permission to. That you could do that before surgery.

You could do that before a fight after a fight, before a stressful moment, to get in that mind frame when you come home. home, that's there for you. To me, that's really empowering because you don't have to buy anything. And it's something you're doing internally, you don't even have to tell people that you're in that mode. That's amazing news because I used to be addicted to Benzos. I've been sober for eight years.

I'm very open about it. But that was my thing because I just kind of like, I think I'm just kind of sensitive. I tend to run a little more anxious. That's why meditation was so helpful to me because I actually say I feel like it's nature Xanax. So that's meditation for me. probably something else for somebody else.

But to know that you have that tool within yourself. You're addicted to meditation, but just not in the healthy way. You know, there's the same things that go off when we fall in love as we do cocaine, but falling in love is good. And, you know, cocaine is bad for the most part. And then, you know, these addiction meditation. For the most part. Yeah.

What we use in the hospital. cocaine will shrink the nasal linings and stuff like that. And when they were learning to do surgery like, you know, hundreds of years ago, I think like in Peru where I've been, they'd operate and they'd like chew coca leaves and or they'd put cocaine in the wound and numb it up. The reason I say that is not because I'm for or against cocaine or for or against volume. Do you mind if we talk about this? No, no, no. Like I just don't want there to be any judgment. No, you know, because if I had a family.

family, the child died at Children's Hospital of San Diego. The mom and dad were not doing well. There's no judgment. I don't know how it would respond to that stress. Enormous stress coping mechanisms, they may not be great. I'm not judging that person. What's interesting is that the same people get hooked on coke or hooked on benzos and will get into, do you mind if I get into this?

Not at all. So I had this conversation with my kids, my elder boy in Amsterdam. You know, opiates are narcotics that come from poppy. They're analgesic. They're like, they make pain go away. Like, cut the arm, you want poppy. Coca-leave and cocaine are stimulants very different. Benzodiazepines are a third class of drugs.

Like opiates, they can make you stop breathing. So they're sedatives in that way. but benzos lean break anxiety oxycontin opiates lean break pain and a little bit anxiety so it's interesting and so benzodiazepines are an amazing medicine for those kids that have seizures ones we did those great experiments on because they'll they'll break their seizure so they have they have a tremendous clinical use. And the chemical wear that makes benzos cool you off, it's called GABA. Everything else is a stimulant like, you know, serotonin, dopamine, these other things.

And the person who discovered it was at City of Hope and I worked with him and he met my son. So it's kind of a strange connection. But what I learned from there is that the addiction to benzodiazepines is for people who are dealing with just tremendous anxiety and putting up a good face and pushing through life. Whereas these are just generalizations in my experiences. I'm not, you know, I'm not an addiction, quote, expert, but I've taken care of a lot of patients. The opioids, you know, are sometimes those people after surgery

and their pain doesn't get better. They're just, they're taking it to break pain. And so you start to see these patterns on what people arrived with that led them to have a certain type of addiction. And meditation, as well as benzos, which would be Valium Xanax and Ativan, they break anxiety. They cool the electricity of your brain. But hey, you can turn to pills if it's a difficult situation and your doctor prescribes it. But the thing that the pill does, you can do for yourself by pacing your breath, practicing it all the time, not when you're stressed.

So it's there for you as like something in your quiver, an arrow you can pull out. crisis and even when you're not in crisis, just as part of your day. It's powerful that way. Yeah, I won't go too off into a tangent about this, but for me it was, I was addicted to alcohol and then cocaine. So it was alcohol, cocaine, then Adderall. So then I needed something to like level me out, but it got to the point where I was having seizures constantly because, like, I would stop drinking, stop taking the benzo.

And I think like the GABA glutamate imbalance, right? Is that what happens with alcohol seizures and benzos? Those are the neurotransmitters people never talk about. It's always dopamine, dopamine, as if it's like the happy chemical, even though it can make you a gambler if we give you too much. But yeah, the GABA and glutamate are the under-recognized, infrequently mentioned, cool the electricity, cool the vibe in your brain chemicals. Yeah, I'm always like, what can I do to increase my GABA here? I mean, do GABA supplements do anything? No.

I mean, they may not hurt. it might hurt your wall. I mean, that's another thing. Like, I don't want to smash on people's, like, thoughts about the things they're taking or helping them and stuff like that. What I do want to empower them with is you can calm the electricity of your brain. You can break anxiety by doing meditated breathing that releases the GABA that is already in the pharmacy of your brain. And often overlooked part of wellness is sex and sexual pleasure for whatever reason. It's still not really talked about. I think it's considered a little bit taboo, although it is getting a little bit more widely accepted as it should because having good sex has so many mental and physical health

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That's F-O-R-I-A wellness.com slash blonde, B-L-O-N-D-E. for 20% off your first order. I definitely recommend starting with their awake and arousal oil and the sex oil. You will thank me later. Well, I have a wellness podcast, and so I always say that I'm wellness without the BS, though. I try to have experts like yourself on

and kind of like sift through a lot of the snake oil and the fluff that's out there. Are there any trends or anything that you've seen out there about brain health or neuro fitness or anything like that that is complete. BS. Oh, you want to talk about the bullshit first. I was like, okay, I've got a few good things.

Most of it is bullshit. Look, if people want to spend their money on stuff that doesn't hurt them, it's fine. I sometimes worry that people who don't have resources may look at somebody and say, they can buy those supplements, I can't afford and they have an advantage or there's something that money is allowing them to get an extra edge. No. there isn't stuff that's expensive and pitched. I haven't found any magic solution.

You know what I mean? I haven't seen that. What I will say is that the baloney comes from misunderstanding how the brain works. And the way to think about every product that's pitched to you is you got to think about the brain in multiple ways. You got to think about it as flesh. You got to think about as chemicals that are being sprayed everywhere. and then you've got to think about it as electricity. So electricity and chemicals overlap a little bit.

We did dig into that a bit with the GABA. But let's just talk about the flesh. There are withered brains that people are sharp as a fiddle. And there are people whose brains are perfectly juicy and full, and they're not great. So it doesn't tell everything. But let's say you want to keep the brain's flesh healthy. That makes sense.

Okay. Well, first of all, people should be able to understand, well, flesh, you've got to irrigate it. The arteries have to stay open. So keeping, you know, taking your cholesterol meds and all that kind of stuff, keeping your heart arteries open, also keeps your brain arteries open. So the flesh remains irrigated. And that's a simple thing. The other thing the flesh needs is avoidance of injury. So we heard with Bob Sagitt, you know, when I first started television, it was Liam Nilsen's wife, who unfortunately tragically passed away.

So avoiding head injury for kids like tackle football. Look, if you want to play, play. But just know that that's dangerous. The repeated hits and concussions are now showing that it damages the flesh. So at the very like elemental level knowing about brain flesh that helps us, chemistry is interesting now, right? Because then we get into dopamine and serotonin and this will boost my serotonin. No, actually, you can't take something by mouth and think it's going to go to your brain

and have more because the brain has something called the blood brain barrier. A lot of it really filters what comes through. And just because it lands there doesn't mean it's going to release and make you feel good. The release comes from thought and emotion. And so chemistry is something that I want people to understand. The best example is Prozac or any other SSRI. So that doesn't keep the brain arteries open, right? That's your Mediterranean diet and your cholesterol pills and exercise.

size. That's going to keep the flesh juicy. But what about at the super microscopic level where the 100 billion neurons are spraying chemicals at each other? So one of those is serotonin. And in some types of depression, it's low. So what Prozac does is when two out of those 100 billion-ish neurons, no neurons actually touch. There's a small pause there, like almost a kiss that never happened. and those chemicals are released from one side waiting to land and dock on the other side. But in depression, sometimes that release of serotonin can be low. So what an SSRI does, it's a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor, it just messes with and breaks the vacuum in that space. So even though less is being released, it's not sucked out of there too quickly.

So you have overall greater serotonin. even if you ate serotonin all the way, you're not going to release more from the deploy deck to the landing deck. It's not that you have a shortage of serotonin, it's that those neurons have somehow decided to not release as much.

And that's where people need to understand that just because you eat it doesn't mean it goes straight to your brain. And that is, in chemistry, that's the most manipulated. And then for the electricity, we've talked about that a bit. There's some gizmos coming out

where you wear them on your head and stuff like that. A lot of that is BS, but not for long because we're learning a lot more about electricity. So when you want to conclude on that thought, you're trying to figure out, is this real or not? Ask yourself, like, where is this working at the flesh level, at the chemistry level, or at the electricity level? That'll help you sort of focus it. So to that point, a lot of people asked about maintaining, you know, brain health and memory and all of that mental acuity, I guess. What about like brain games and these things on our phone and are there things that we can do to kind of stay sharp?

Yeah. I'm trying to think of your three things if it applies to that. But yes? Yeah. Okay. So practicing memory. This is an interesting concept. Like there's a lot of different types of memory.

People with Alzheimer's don't forget how to tie their shoelaces. You know? So there's different types of memory. Right. The question is if you play word games and play memory games. games will it help all types of memory. Like if you do push-ups, will it help you open the door? Will it translate to other things? And likely we're thinking, yes. And that it's really important for people to understand. It's not the actual playing of the memory game. It's not the, it's actually

just being one step beyond where you're comfortable. And so video game designers are really picked up on this. If they make the game too hard, people just disheeled it. They don't want to play. But if it's just past your level ability and leaves you thinking, I think I could have, I think I can get it. I think I can get it that creates an ambition and an effort and it trains you right at the next level of your skill level. And so if you want to play games, that's fine. But if you want to challenge yourself and go to work in a different way, you want to challenge yourself and cook in a different way. You want to challenge yourself and use the phone in your left hand. Just make yourself a little bit uncomfortable and give yourself little challenges during the day.

that is brain training. If you don't want to do, because if we just do easy, if you do easy memory games all day long, that's not brain training. If you do rigorous academic stuff, you can still get Alzheimer's. But at the individual level,

getting out of your comfort zone is brain training. So that's the most important thing. You take a different road home from London or L.A. You try to memorize the path home on your map and then see if you can do that. you watch something different, you read something different, you learn some vocabulary. But just keeping going with the acquisition of new skills is brain training. You don't have to learn the next language.

You don't have to learn the next language. You don't have to ever get there. You don't have to learn and get good at playing a musical instrument. But just the effort of trying to learn, that's brain training. Do you play golf? I've got a good swing, but I don't have time. to play golf. I'm just thinking, like, I have played a little bit, but everybody that I know is so obsessed with it because you can't perfect it. Yeah, exactly. It's a good point, very good point.

So in the pandemic, we got a, we got a sailboat in Marina D'Rae. And bringing that boat in, it's, look, I pride myself being on an excellent driver. I'm, you know, my patients and my colleagues think I'm a capable surgeon. But it's been tricky to learn how to dock that. boat between those other big boats and there's no traction and you got to kind of sling it in there softly with the wind. You can never really get it perfect. And I've been my sons are like, Dad, when you drive, I haven't got any car accidents. I'm never, dad, they're like, Dad, you were so just looking around at the world. I was like, yeah, I got this. They're like, this is funny, dad. It's the first time we saw you pay attention is trying to reverse this boat in with the dog on the

boat because it's just, it cannot be mastered, so it keeps you engaged. But you can get it sometimes, so you feel good. It's not kind of like an inconsistent positive reinforcement where you never really know what you're going to get. So yeah, golf and docking boats. Those would be, those are the tips. I think, you know, I mean, it's an interesting conversation. I never thought about that. People ask me, like, the surgery that I have perfected no longer interest me. I mean, it's good for the patients. But a lot of us who have gone into complex surgery is because we know you can never get the risk to zero. And it keeps us engaged, you know. It's excellent.

Great point. Why don't you just tell us about the book a little bit? The story of the book is actually pretty cool too. It just shows you like, I think a lot of times people are like, well, I guess that ties back into it, just taking chances, you know. I had to take in college, they had me in remedial English, like writing a book, it was not in my,

it wasn't even just in my imagination. When I did get a chance to sign with a talent agency, they had a literary branch in New York, WME, and I went over there and the agent and said, you know, brains are kind of popular, and you just came off a show with,

on Fox and primetime called Superhuman, and you were talking about the brain. And I said, yeah, I've take my notes. I'll write a proposal. And so he's just like that. And he's like, okay. And so I worked on that for a little bit. And it got picked up. This is just, you know, dream come true. And they bought the penguin, bought the same book. They're like, yeah, we like this, but we're going to call this. We're going to call life lessons. And we're going to totally redo the cover. So the same book became a best seller in London and did, you know, was so, so here in New York. And that's just fascinating to me that how many, think about how many talented people have never had a chance to showcase their abilities because the opportunity never sort of unfolded. Right. And so much luck behind. I was like, this is just complete luck.

I mean, you know, to the point where I was in London doing this tour with my middle boy. And I was like, look, man, we're just going to enjoy ourselves because this already by itself is fantastic. And when I landed, they sent me an email, you are now and forever. or a Sunday time's bestselling author. I was like, this is just the best. And so that just further, like, liberated me. It's like, hey, it's okay. Your sons are men.

Explore. Take chances. Don't look at your phone. Like, I was sort of born again in my quest to explore the world and not just through surgery, medicine, and science, or fatherhood. and that led to me giving some talks over there and the conversations went more into like soul and meaning

and how do you deal with stress and what is belief? Is there a part of our brain that leans us towards faith? What's the meaning of life? And I was like, this is just gotten to be so great, you know? And the publisher gave me a chance. Just so many people have given me so many chances in particular of my extraordinary wife, Danielle, that I feel grateful. And so they say, okay, now here comes responsibility.

What are you going to say about trauma that hasn't been already said by the guy who wrote the book, the body keeps score, which is just something. And like, there's like philosophers writing about trauma. I was like, what are you going to do? And so I had 20 pages. So each chapter, I try to bring in my personal story, a patient. story and some little bit of information. And so for trauma, what I would say is traumatic memories are not permanent.

Because of the electricity, because trauma doesn't really reshape your brain that much, it really throws off your electricity, as we were talking about earlier, that those memories are moldable, that they can be revisited in the emotional context can be removed from them or dampen from a traumatic memory and attack or a car accident. And there's a process that happens. and proteins are built that lead to different electricity. And they're like, okay, that's fresh. I give us nine more.

I just feel so good about that. And I put some of my own stuff in there. And another thing about trauma, a young scientist, she figured out, like, what we do immediately after trauma, maybe it's not better to talk. Maybe it's better to do some audiovisual task because that leads to less consolidation or cementing of traumatic memories.

I'm not saying I have the answers. You're saying it's fascinating. that there's so much still to learn about just how we all process trauma. And clearly, the last couple of years are showing us, we've all been traumatized in some way. So I did that for nine other chapters and, you know, dedicated to my sons. And the first book is dedicated to the love of my life. And it's just been a wild ride to be able to put together all the stuff I've been going through and seeing in a way that's shared and out there for my friends, family, and my patients and

people like yourself, it's just, it's more of a life than I ever imagined for myself. I just feel so thankful to even have that platform. And that's what the second book is about. It's intense. It's raw. But, you know, I think for some people it'll change your life. I feel like we're going to have to do a part two all about trauma because I got so many. questions about that.

But it sounds like what you're saying is that we're maybe more resilient than we think. Yeah. And so that's under stress. Do you mind if I wrap on that for a little bit? So I think that word, how do I connect that? It's a little bit like how my cancer patients, they're starting to resent like, oh, beat cancer. I'm like, no, man. No, some cancer is just not beatable, man.

You know, I mean, that's not, you don't want that, you don't want that pep rally for this type of cancer. It's, you know, meaning in life. What are you learning from cancer? How are you living with cancer? Not beat cancer. So resilience and resiliency has become a sort of, in my opinion, overused word that what if I don't cope with being alone for a year of my apartment? Well, am I not resilient or somebody else? is more resilient because they did.

I think that's a bit of a trap. It's not a trait that you have like tall or short. It's a psychological evolution and capacity. So when I looked into it and there's a couple paragraphs about it in this, in the second book, which is called Life on a Knife's Edge. And I mean, just come on. I'm in London. You know, I used to be a college dropout.

And they're like, yeah, they have this meeting and it's just, it's London publishing. I mean, my friends are like, isn't that? I'm like, didn't they invent English? They're Shakespeare. You know, they're just teasing me. And I'm like, and I'm sitting there and they're like, yeah, we like this. There's so much in here.

Why don't we call the subtitle where your reflections on life, loss, and survival. It's a bit of a mic drop moment for me. Yeah. I could actually just be a kid again because that's my body of work. Right. Resilience, like when you look at a crane in buildings, it's like the wind hits it, it bends, but it comes back. That's the engineering definitions. The psychological definition is it's a bit different.

So there's processive resilience and systemic resilience. So systemic resilience, that's the fight you have in you. You could have been born with it or you could have been nurturing it over the last 20, 30 years. It's what you bring to the fight. systemic resilience. But then no matter how you do in that fight, you have processive resilience. This might be the event that rocked you,

but is also strengthening you. This trauma is leading to growth to build systemic resilience for the next event. And I just thought that was so fascinating. So wherever people are, either you're at your best and you should pat yourself on your back, but if you're flamed, and you're struggling, this pain will make you, can make you stronger for the next struggle

you face. So either way, there's meaning there. You shouldn't feel bad if you're, quote, not resilient compared to the next person. It's a constant bringing something to the fight and also what the fight is bringing out in you. That's the way I think of resilience. Have you found that people respond better to more major, quote, quote, stressors than kind of the more mundane day-to-day monotonous stressors that we face in life?

It's a good question. I don't have the answer for that. I don't, as a surgeon, I never get to know them long term, especially as a cancer surgeon. So I think the doctors that do sort of the prescription medicine and fall you through life might have a better insight on that. But doesn't matter what trips you up, big or small. Once you're tripped up, the same electricity and chemicals are getting in your way. So the honk in the parking lot, what happens in your skull, my school, is not different than the first shot in a firefight. Like, it's similar pathways, chemicals, and electricity that happen. So again, if we don't put judgment on, why are she stressed out? Why is he stressed out? They got it all. That's not a big deal. So what? That wasn't there. So what's a flat tire.

No, it has to do with what's been unleashed in that individual skull. I would never judge it. It's like I wouldn't judge somebody whose kid was hurt at a children's hospital. What I would say is I would love to inform them. Then we talked about already, like, hey, you come, if you don't want to feel this way, the same thing the Navy SEAL does, who I did a podcast in San Diego where my sons were born, same thing the Navy SEALs teach their team is the same thing you can employ in the parking lot. And that's powerful to me. So we can take all the, should they be stressed, why are they

stressed? Why don't they deal with stress better and just equip people with the techniques of dealing with stress, regardless of how you felt it and how hard it went off inside your mind? Well, I like to always ask my guests at the end. One thing we should stop doing today or could stop doing and one thing to start doing today for our brains, for our minds, whichever. Well, it's at a more personal level is, you know, stop being angry and start being forgiving. I'm telling myself as much as anybody else. The garden of our brains, I just want to leave people with this thought, right? Because we talked about flesh and electricity and chemicals.

I hope that helps them. But in neuroscience, we don't talk about the brain as wires and stuff like that. use terms like cortical canopy. The ridges are a canopy like a tree. We use words like dendrites, the neurons when they approach each other, they branch. When you cultivate that part of your brain or that emotion or that thought, there's arborization, there's branching, there's pruning. So if you think of your, the flesh of your brain is more of a garden. And if you come to see that deeper inside you have this visceral brain, where the emotion is fire.

And then right behind your forehead is this sort of cognitive brain, brings in reason and judgment and restraint, that those two are not like two balls separate from each other. They're like two trees whose canopies grew into one canopy. And it's lush. The luscious life is one where you can modulate emotion, but not completely constrain it. It's too much as being said about only,

being smart and emotions are bad. Now emotions. Emotions are what make us human, but we have this extra capacity to think down our emotions, to let our emotions earn a right to be in our lives. And when you know that, then it makes biological sense that we can be less angry, agitated, and we can be more forgiving and understanding. Well, no offense to my other podcast guest, but that was the best answer. I've forgotten. And thank you so much for coming on. Such a fascinating conversation.

And everybody definitely go check out your books. And we'll link all of that. Where can everybody find more information about you? Just Google. I do a bunch of random stuff, you know. But at my core, I'm a dad. And I'm a cancer surgeon at City of Hope. Thank you.

Thank you. I hope you enjoyed that episode. If you liked it, And if you like the show in general, please take a second to rate, review, and subscribe. It goes a long way, and it's actually the best way to support the show. Also, if you want to see more about each episode, you can head over to The Blonde Files podcast on Instagram. I'm always posting about each episode there or over on my personal page at Ariel Laurie.