Rewire Your Brain for Bliss with Dawson Church

When we get together with friends for coffee or tea, we commonly talk about what's wrong in our lives. We talk about how hard everything is and how miserable we are. Think about this for a moment. How strange would it be to have coffee with a friend who raves the entire time about how amazing her life is right now? Or what if we watched TV shows where everyone is happy and the story arc is about how to spread the happiness around? We're in love with the apocalypse.

We're oddly obsessed with doom and disasters. We are constantly preparing for the end of the world and the next big cataclysmic event. Why are we so focused on what's wrong instead of enjoying what's right? In today's conversation, we're going to be talking to researcher, author, and teacher Dawson Church about how the world is actually thriving and why we, and the media, are so resistant to it.

Dawson Church is a bestselling science writer, researcher, and the author of three award winning books. The Genie in Your Genes, his first book, broke new ground by showing that gene expression is influenced by emotions. His second book, Mind to Matter, is based on hundreds of studies showing that our brains play a key role in constructing the reality around us. In Bliss Brain, his third book, he demonstrates that as we cultivate peak states, our brains rapidly rewire themselves for happiness.

He is the founder of the Veterans Solution, which has offered free PTSD treatments to over 22, 000 veterans, and also the founder of the National Institute for Integrative Healthcare.

And of course the purpose of quantum revolution podcast has always been about giving people hope. And when I said, let's give people some hope, you said, we're actually really thriving, tell us a little bit about how much are we actually thriving?

So in all my books, I usually have the last chapter, right? I've combed through often hundreds of studies and find a few that really tell the story. And those are all big data stories of unprecedented human thriving, that people are thriving today In a way in which they never had before things like, for example, um, wealth, the average human being, the average global citizen is three times as wealthy as he or she was in 1980. So in only 40 plus years, uh, global wealth has tripled.

Um, people are living twice as long today as they were a century ago, near the start of the 20th century. So lifespan has improved. Health span has improved. Female literacy. Has shot up dramatically in the last century, infant mortality has dropped dramatically, maternal mortality, you just go through all the statistics, number of people educated in the world, number of people living, uh, some kind of, of, of productive life has gone up dramatically.

Remarkably, diseases like, you know, cholera, typhoid, polio, all these things have been eliminated. So, we live today in a world that's dramatically better than that of our ancestors. But at the same time, there's a trend that sociologists track, which is how News is reported and they take, for example, all stories in the New York Times from 1940, because there's a database of them, to the present day.

And they find that during that, that, that almost a century, that the number of positive words in the news, hopeful, beautiful, Kind, compassionate, good. All those words have been going down in there and in global media and words like disaster, catastrophe, you know, death, doom and destruction. All of those words have been going up. So we're getting this really skewed view from our media, but in fact, human beings are thriving today as never before.

I knew that that that web URL was not directing to the right page and I began to worry about this and I lay there in bed I thought let's I'll go check on it in the morning, but I tried to get back to sleep I couldn't get back to sleep kept on worrying about that web page and that web url And so over and over and over and over again. I kept on having this negative thought worrying and keeping me awake. So that is what we call the brain's negativity bias.

And it's been observed in psychology for a century. But we now know it's not the mind, it's the brain. And our brains are honed by millions of years of evolution to look around us. Because if your ancestor missed that snake, like my wife and I were taking some of our grandkids out for a walk, And there was a snake in the path and they all just walked right over the snake. They just walked, they literally stepped over the snake, didn't even see the snake.

I saw the snake, pointed it out to them and we all looked at it for a while. But if you did that and it was a poisonous snake a hundred thousand years ago, a million years ago, you were dead. So our brains are hardwired to look for any possible threat in our environment. And they're also completely oblivious. To the beauty like if our ancestors missed the fact that the roses were blooming or the children were singing or there was a beautiful sunset Nothing bad happened.

They survived but if they missed the snake one time then they died So our brains are not just our minds have a negativity bias. Our brains are honed in To seek out threats, and that's why we're so focused on threats and was so, it's so difficult to focus on the good stuff. It's just a feature of the way our brains work.

Why, why are we communicating in a way now that is more negative when things are actually better?

And that is the set of regions to which our brain defaults when we aren't doing a task. So we have two sets of networks, and one is the task positive network. When we're focused on a task, and it has to do with the lateral parts of our brains, we have the default mode network in the center of our brain. And anytime we aren't actively doing stuff, our brain defaults to using that network. And that network focuses on two things.

One of those is a replay of the problems of the past, and a projection of those past problems into the future. The snake that almost bit me yesterday, the snake that might bite me tomorrow. That's the region of our brain that kicks in when we aren't actively doing stuff. And in one giant study, done by two Harvard psychologists. They found when people were doing nothing, actually they were the least happy because their brains was ruminating on, on all this bad stuff.

And so that's just the way our brains work. That's why we need to learn skills and tools learn. And use meditation daily. Meditation is one of the few things that can start to shift us there. Energy therapies can do this. Exercise can do this. And so you just start to develop practice of countering the brain's negativity bias. And after a while, You develop more resources. The amazing thing about the brain is that it's growing and the parts of it that you use are growing the most.

And so if you're just thinking those negative thoughts, then that those parts of the brain grow. There's a chunk of tissue called the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which will not be on the test after this podcast ventromedial prefrontal

And so it's not able to effectively regulate emotion, negative emotion. The other thing that happens is that, in these poor, unfortunate people with major depressive disorder, the signals start to travel the wrong way from the emotional brain. To the executive center. Now you feel upset about something and your emotional brain tells your executive center and uses it to conjure up reasons why you should be upset and I can say, well, I'm upset because of the pandemic.

I'm set because of the corporations. Well, I'm upset because of the pandemic. Climate change, I'm upset because of blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So now our emotional brain, which is, again, looking for threats all the time, is on a hair trigger to be upset and react, is actually controlling our executive centers. And those people, again, have major depressive disorder. They're miserable. They have a lot more disease.

They have much shorter lives and it has huge effects on their entire health span and lifespan. So that's why I'm so passionate about teaching these tools that can get us out of that predicament.

She literally looked at me when we were reading about carbon cycles a couple of weeks ago and, and with tears in her eyes said, mom, what if I don't even live as long as you, what if I die? What if we all die because we've messed up the planet? And I think, okay, that's, that's a, that's a very terrifying thought. And, and I think about these are the kinds of messages that these kids are hearing in school.

And, uh, we're, we're pretty restricted in our family about exposure to social media, but I know a lot of these kids are exposed to social media. What's going on with our kids that I suspect that emotional regulation and executive function are probably not functioning optimally. Would you agree?

That teens that self identify as spiritual, describe themselves as having a spiritual practice or a spiritual sensitivity, have lower levels of depression and anxiety. And even when they hit, say for example, phases of social anxiety or puberty or, Life changes like changing schools or going to a different level of education. What happens is that meditation is, and this is a word drawn from epidemiology, is it inoculates them from those stresses.

So when they do have episodes that challenge them, they bounce back even higher. And this is a phenomenon I write about in my books. Very little, little is written about this, but it's so important. It's post traumatic stress. And that's what happens to those teens. So, um, yeah, there are things that are going to trigger anxiety in the outside environment. I mean, climate change is real and human made climate change is real.

And if we don't act in many different ways to ameliorate that, it's going to really have dramatic effects. I mean, the third of the world's population is in low lying areas that are Subject to flooding, for example, so yeah, when we as human beings, there's racial inequality, there's gender inequality, there's age inequality, there's economic inequality, there are all these issues you have to deal with, and those can produce anxiety.

But again, the anxious brain is not very good at dealing with them. So you need the resources of that.

Smart executive center to do it if your emotions are taking over what happens is is really interesting to watch what happens in in in tissues when Neurochemicals like cortisol and adrenaline are released by the body and they're released by the body not just when you have a Difficult experience traumatic experience, but when you think about it afterwards, so you have this experience Maybe you have a fight with somebody and your level of

cortisol and adrenaline rises But then when you don't tell your friend about having had that fight A week later, your cortisol and adrenaline rises too. So now those levels of neurochemicals are rising. You're stressed when the thing isn't actually happening. And that's what traps people in these cycles of stress. And it's so important to learn to reduce that because those, those cycles of stress and those rises in Those neurochemicals produce all kinds of adverse changes in the body over time.

So there is all this stuff that could, can stress us out and we can have these high levels of anxiety and depression. But if we take care of ourselves, if we find ways to calm ourselves, soothe ourselves, I mean, a really simple one that I teach in my classes is breath. Simply, Be present with your breath. Take 10 mindful breaths. Benjamin Franklin said, 200 years ago, he said, If you're upset, take 10 breaths. Take 10 deep breaths.

If you're already upset, take 100. After hundreds of years, That's still really good advice. Breathing puts you in touch with your your body. When a famous psychiatrist called Joseph Walby was working with World War II veterans who had shell shock and were just totally dysregulated physiologically after the D Day invasion of Normandy, all these events they've seen, he simply found that if they breathed, if they Took deep breaths while they remember the horrors of war.

They were able to start entering that phase of post traumatic growth. If they didn't, they spiral down into post traumatic stress disorder. So, as simple a method as mindful breathing can help extricate us from that kind of conditioning and that, that high cortisol. That stress response, our cortisol then drops, we start to feel better. And then we can think more clearly.

When you have that flood of cortisol going through your brain, your capillaries in your brain, in your thinking brain, shut down. They, they, they go from being large to being small. They can, they can get about 80 percent smaller, constricting blood supply. So I'm stressed now, the blood supply to my brain is shut down. I can't think. I can't reason I can't act. So you absolutely have to control stress.

At that point, your capital is expand, you can think again, when you're when you're in a stress situation, when you're thinking yourself into a panic, you can't mental images. Memories are flooding in that raise your level of cortisol and adrenaline and those capillaries contract You can't come up with creative solutions, but take those hundred deep breaths. Go for a walk.

Give someone a hug There are all kinds of ways you can break the cycle and snap back into your regular self You become more creative and those are the people that find solutions to problems. They aren't stuck in that trauma loop

It's like when I. Looping that night on that website and the negative thought just kept on popping in for an hour. I was trying to push it away. Kept popping back in. Um, you get into these, these mental loops and they engage all of these. Processes in your brain. And so you want to be able to exercise your capacity of mind to shift which brain regions are active. And eventually I was able to do that. I began to chant.

I just began to do some meditative chanting and that gave my mind something to do, but but importantly, it shifted activity from that central area of the default mode network, which is on this looping memory of something bad to the task positive network, which is on the sides of your brain. And so just getting my brain that my mind getting my my brain that little task of chanting. Was able to take my mind off that material level problem.

And so we can use our minds to shape which brain regions are active and which ones are inactive. Now, what starts to happen after a while, this is just a stunning statistic. Um, our brains start to change within one month. I did one clinical trial.

With people who were doing a special meditation that we're going to give people this meditation free at the end of the podcast and people doing that meditation for a month in this really high, high scale, high level randomized control trial, we compared people using that meditation to people just doing mindful breathing. So the control was mindful breathing. That meditation was the active condition in this study. And we found that in one month.

Their brain hardware changed and that default mode network that keeps us miserable and ruminating calmed way down. And the compassion network, which also mediates emotions like gratitude, awe, joy, kindness, all of these positive emotions. That part of the brain became highly active. So the part of the brain that keeps us miserable shut down. The part of the brain that has.

Floods us with positive emotions lit up and it only took one month of doing that to produce brain change in another study I talked about in in Bliss Brain. There was a Man who had a TV show he was host of a TV show and He did a brain workup before beginning a meditation program and in this period Uh, lab he went into they measured every single part of his brain and how it worked and the volume of it. We can measure the volume of each part of your brain down to a neuron with modern scanners.

Then began to meditate. After 8 weeks he went back into the lab and they measured his brain volume again. And the part of his brain that regulates negative emotion grew by 22. 8%. in eight weeks, in two months, it was a fifth bigger, okay. So that's how quickly our brain starts to change the the stress parts of our brain begin to shrink and get smaller. And the emotion regulation parts of our brain, the compassion parts of our brain start to get bigger.

We now don't just have a better mood, we have more neural hardware. And that makes us resilient. So when you have bad things happen in your life, you have much more brain tissue, In those compassion circuits and those emotion regulation circuits to handle them. So by using the mind, we're literally shaping the brain. If we use the mind to run that trauma loop, the opposite effect happens. And all kinds of things happen in our brain that are not good for our long term well being.

So we, we're literally shaping our physical brain with every thought, every emotion, every belief that goes through our mind.

And what I'm hearing you say is meditate, breathe consistently, and you can already start to rewire all of that programming, all of that, that physical function of the brain.

They start playing with the veins on the back of your hand and they smile and laugh 300 times a day. Toddlers laugh. Adults laugh on average 20 times a day. We shut down 90 plus percent of all laughter between the ages of like three and four and the ages of 25. And so we want to learn to have the joy and the excitement about life. And you and I were talking before the show, we laughed like 10 times in a few minutes. Life is that good. And we reclaim our joy. We find our joy.

You find things to be amused about even in a challenging world. So it's so worth doing this.

It's when we when we activate a state of coherence and that highly creative, enthusiastic, joyful state, joy is contagious. And we think sometimes that, oh, well, what is my happiness matter? Well, your happiness can be the portal of joy for your whole community. And we need people that can come together and, and um, Be laughing and singing and remembering that joy because you, you might be the one person in your community that brings that spark of passion to everyone around you.

And we need that, especially, especially, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

But her neighbor, who you don't even know, is is about 15 percent more likely to be happy. And his neighbor, who you definitely don't know, is about 6 percent more likely to be happy. You as a happy person, as a radiant person, are able to affect people around you.

We also find that meditators, after a while, initially you reach these states of what the yoga sutras call Samadhi, which is this ecstatic state, and it's wonderful to meditate and find yourself drawn up in these elevated states of consciousness where you're one with the universe, one with all it is, and you feel this immense, Well being and Sanskrit is called Ananda pure bliss. But what we find in our long term research is that that bliss initially is inside of you.

You feel this exquisite indescribable bliss of Ananda. And this molecule called Anandamide floods your brain. Your brain's meditators are filled with all of these pleasure neurochemicals like Anandamide. But what starts to happen later on, after a while, is that radiance escapes you. Into the world around you and the Yoga Sutras and other Eastern scriptures tell us that eventually you become a radiant being.

They say the fruits of extensive meditation and working on yourself are that you become radiant being and not only that you start to attract other radiant beings to you. So now you are a radiant being and you're radiating all around you. There's a sense of joy and love and peace and hope and people can feel it when they walk into the room with you. And then you're affecting them, they're affecting people around them, and the whole world starts to shift.

So, it's powerful to do this, not just for you, and have that inner radiance, that, that Ananda, that ecstasy, inside of your own body and brain, but it starts to shine all around you, and then the world in that way, Starts to change person by person and the ripple effect spreads out there. You attract other people to you, you come together in communities of consciousness, communities of change.

And in Margaret Mead's famous dictum, Don't believe that a small group of people cannot change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has changed the world. So that's what we're all about.

There, you can get all kinds of EFT tapping for stress reduction, videos, and instructions. As well as meditations. And of course your books are available, including Bliss Brain and Mind to Matter, uh, on any major retail bookseller and for sure on Amazon. Um, thank you again so much for joining us. I feel like I have way more hope this today than I had before we started. So, um, And, uh, I, I, I appreciate you reminding us that we are thriving, we are thriving.

And the more we thrive, the more we can reach out and lift others who are not thriving up and bring us whole up to this, this new level of sufficiency and sustainability, equitability, justice, and peace in the world. So thank you for being here.

If we're going to create a better world, it has to start first with regaining sovereignty over the function of our brains. This is the true challenge of growth and evolution and, much like we have to train our bodies to become strong and resilient, we have to do the same with our brains. More and more research is emerging that shows us that this process of reclaiming sovereignty over the brain is actually simple.

One that can be accomplished with ease and a short amount of practice and repetition. Changing your brain is the first step. This process of taking back control of your brain also demands that you establish a new identity. You can no longer define yourself by your past, call yourself a survivor, because you're no longer tied to old stories of victimhood and limitation.

You are forced to step into a void where, ultimately, not only do you retrain your brain, but you have to consciously construct a new identity. A new personal narrative of your own choosing. Ultimately, you get to decide who you are and how you are. And remember that not only are you worthy of liberating yourself from the constraints of your ancestral brain, you are also worthy of creating a personal narrative that truly reflects the once in a cosmic lifetime event that is you.

To learn more about Dawson Church and his work, please visit DawsonGift.com. If you want to learn more about the true story of the person you were born to be, get your free Quantum Human Design chart at freehumandesignchart.com. I'm Dr. Karen Curry Parker. Thank you for joining the Quantum Revolution.