#2052 Brain Literacy - Harps (PT2)

those things, how it works. I think it's a good idea that we all have one, so we should probably try and understand how it works and how we can manage it rather than it manage us all of the time. It's a little bit of a two way kind of an interaction. But so we did. Let me just I've got my notes here, I'm trying to remember, just a quick recap. If you haven't heard part one, have a listen,

Have a listen. It's probably you know what. It doesn't It doesn't matter so much that you listen to it chronologically. But we've spoken about five concepts. Number one, the role of the brain. Number two, whether or not we can manage our brain or it manages us. Number three, the idea of keeping our brain working optimally, keeping our brain in a healthy state, which is, believe it or not, something that is really important that very few people think about.

How do I optimize my brain from a physiological point of view, from a health point of view, from a hydration, from a sleep, from a nutrition. We think when we think about health, we think about, you know, our heart, our cardiovascular system, and our lungs and all of our organs, and we talk about our energy, and we talk about our body composition. But we don't often think directly about how do I make my brain work better? How do

I make my brain healthier? What are the things that I can do for my brain and to my brain and with my brain that are going to make my brain perform better. Remembering that how well your body can perform, how well your mind can perform, Yes, it's different to your brain. How well you can perform in life, at work, in relationships, in navigating the day to day bullshit, that is largely dependent on how your brain is working. So

that was the first three. The fourth one was a little story I told about an analogy between the brain, our brain, and an old house. It's kind of a story that I told to help people who have no

idea of what the bits of the brain do. Let's say that to help them understand different roles and functions of you know, like the prefrontal cortex, the bit of the brain that does the thinking and or the conscious thinking and the critical thinking and the decision making, and the amygdala which is the center of the brain, and all of those bits and pieces. So I kind of like that. The fifth section we did was how our brain can sometimes conspire against us and get in get

in the road of what we want. Keeping in mind that our brain is not actually built for happiness or fulfillment or personal growth, which is not say it can't do those things, but it's actually built for survival, you know. The factory setting. The come out of the factory setting of your brain is to keep you safe, is to make sure that you're not putting yourself in harm's way. All right, that's the first five. So how many more have I got left? I think I've got It would

make sense that I did ten. Let me just check. I should probably have prepared this earlier. Oh, I seem to eleven. All right, Well, let's dive into number six anyway, unless I feel free not to edit any of this. Let's just keep the organic mess that is me all intact. So question six is how much of my thinking am I in control of? And how much am I not? So, in other words, how much of my thinking is automatic? It just happens. It's an unconscious kind of process and

a conscious process. How much is one unconscious? How much two is conscious? I always say that, like in simple terms, this is what I say. Thinking happens because of you conscious thought and despite you automatic thought. Most people like to believe that they're walking around making conscious, logical, deliberate decisions all day, but that's not actually true. So we're mostly being run by our subconscious we're mostly being run

by automatic program. So about ninety to ninety five percent of our thoughts, reactions, interpretations, impulses, and decisions come from our automatic system, the fast, emotional, instinctive, predictive part of our brain, the part that fires before we realize anything's

really happening. And this isn't laziness, it's efficiency. So if your brain had to consciously think all day, every day, every second, every minute, through every decision, if you had to consciously decide everything in real time, all day, every day, one you'd never make it out of bed, and if you did, you'd be fucking exhausted perpetually. So because your brain understands this and is very smart, it creates shortcuts, habits, patterns, assumptions, interpretations,

and emotional reflexes. And these these shortcuts a kind of like the autopilot that drive most of your day, your automatic operating system. And that's why you and me can drive home from somewhere and not even really remember the drive home. I I'm always surprised that I can. You know, I've been riding. I'm sixty two as I record this.

I've been riding. Got on my first motorbike when I was five years old, six years old, grew up in the country, and I've been riding motorbikes on the road, in traffic in Mayhem, a million different kinds of motorbikes in a million different situations, for forty four years on the road. And as you would know if you're a motorcyclist or even not, you know you have a clutch that you pull in with your left hand. You have a front brake that you pull with your right hand.

You have gears that are down by your left foot, you have a rear brake that you use with your right foot. Rear tire break, front break is right hand, clutch is left hand. Then you've got, you know, indicators that you use with your left thumb, turn left, turn right, and then push it into cancel. Then you've got a horn that in most instances is down by your right thumb. And you've got this myriad of things intersecting and happening

in real time. And while I'm doing all of that, riding home from a gig in the city, you know, there's all of these things happening with my fingers and my hands and my feet and changing gears and breaking I'm actually looking ahead and taking in the scenery and the road and the potential threats and where I should go and where I should sit in the lane and who I should avoid, and up all of this myriad of variables that I'm looking at ahead of me and

anticipating and deciding about in real time while doing all of this other shit with my feet and my hands that I'm not thinking about. And it's so funny that I can get home and I've done I don't know, maybe a thousand different things in the last thirty minute ride home with my hands and my feet and my fingers and my thumbs. I've done all of these things that I didn't make a conscious decision about. I've done

a thousand. Now imagine imagine the complexity and the impossibility of me having to ride this motorbike with all of these literally moving variables that I have to navigate and decide on in real time and read the road in front of me and assess all the potential dangers and issues. And this capacity that we have to auto pilot our lives it allows us to or it sometimes means we're going to check our phone a hundred times without actually making a decision. Like it's just there, we just pick

it up. It's not like I go, all right, my phone's over there, I could pick it up, I could look at it. Will I pick it up? And no, none of that happens. It's just in my hand and I'm just looking. It's why we can I've spoken about this many times. It's why we can keep having the same arguments with the same people. We can have the same version of the same conversation that didn't work the

last hundred times. It creates more problems and solutions, but it's kind of it's a hard wired sociological pattern, and we just do it. We keep saying the same dumb shit that didn't work the last thousand times because we're not really thinking critically. We're just being hijacked on an unconscious or an automatic kind of level. It's why we reach for food when we're stressed. It's why we overact

or over react perhaps before we think. And it's why you and I fall into for your patterns and behaviors that we said that we wouldn't do. And that's all autopilot stuff. That's our brain on autopilot. Let's call that system one. And then there's the smaller, slower, more energy demanding bit and that's conscious thought. That's called that system too. So this is where reasoning, reflection, long term planning, and intentional behavior arises from. This part of your brain is

kind of brilliant, it's kind of clever. It's where the real thinking happens. But it's also lazy and easily overwhelmed, and stressful situations will turn it off. Emotion will turn it off, Fatigue will turn it off, overwhelm will shut

it down. Like one of the questions that I often ask people is not how skilled or talented are you, or not how well can you perform, but rather how well can you perform in the middle of chaos, Because when we're in the middle of chaos, quite often skill, intelligence, intellect, common sense, effective decision making, all of that shit takes off. So the important bit is for you to know is that you're not a bad person because you act on impulse.

You're not weak because you repeat old patterns, and you're not broken because you react before you think. We all do that. We all do that to an extent. We want to turn the volume down on that. We want to be more aware of that. We can't change the thing we're not aware of. And you and me, we're

just humans running human wiring, doing and shit. But the good news is that awareness gives us the option to create different outcomes, to choose differently, to process data differently, to go into things with that level of awareness and understanding and insight. This is why understanding our brain and understanding how our brain works in different situations and this is weird, but building that relationship with our brain where

we understand each other. Because once you recognize the difference between me and my autopilot well, then you can kind of insert a gap, a pause, a moment where you can step out of the reflex you know, the automaticness or the autonomousness of it, and choose a response reflex and into unconscious reflex I guess and into conscious response. So autopilot is the default. Conscious control is the upgrade.

And so every time you slow down, every time you notice a pattern, question an assumption, take a breath instead of reacting, you're strengthening the part of your brain that gives you options and not just reactions. So question seven is why do I keep repeating the same patterns? Why do I keep doing the same dumb shit? So one of the most frustrating human experiences is knowing better and

still doing stupid stuff repeatedly. We've all been there, repeating behaviors that we don't like, reacting in ways that we regret, falling into habits that we said we would break, doing shit we said we wouldn't do, living in that groundhog day of frustration and repetition and pointlessness and exacerbation. So why does this happen? Well, because your brain is designed to prioritize the familiar over the functional. So every time you think a thought, or rehearse a behavior, respond in

a certain way, or make a choice. Your brain wires that in. It builds a neural pathway and strengthens it with repetition, and eventually that becomes an automation. It becomes an automatic response, which is energy saving, and the brain wants to save energy, So good or bad, good or bad, you're going to hardwire habits and behaviors that are going to become automatic responses, whether or not they serve you

or fuck you up. To your brain, familiar equals safe, even if the familiar thing is miserable or unhealthy, or unhelpful or self destructive. And that is why people stay in relationships that they've outgrown. And it's why we keep having the same arguments. It's why we eat, drink and scroll to our own detriment. It's why we sabotage opportunities, and it's why we fall back into the identity that we've always carried. And it's why change feels harder than

staying stuck. And like, even when we're stuck in something that's not particularly healthy or productive, it's familiar, right, and we like familiar. We know it, And while we want to be different, or do different or live differently, produce different outcomes. That means that means stepping into the unknown

somewhat and doing different things. And while we don't like where we are metaphorically or literally, sometimes the idea is stepping into that known is going to be the thing or the fear around that, I guess is a thing that's going to keep us stuck in that two out of ten default pattern. And truthfully, you're not really choosing the pattern, The pattern's choosing you. And I guess you know dopamine. We've spoken about that many times. It plays

a role. The brain rewards predictability and routine and behaviors that reduce uncertainty. And even I guess even shitty habits, even bad habits, have a payoff, you know, relief, escape, pleasure, numbness, familiarity. That's why instant gratification sells like a motherfucker, and your brain will tag them as successful strategies even when logically you know they're no good for you. But I guess

the good thing is that we can change that. Not easy, not quick, not fun, not painless necessarily, but patterns are not personality traits. They're learned circuits and anything that can be learned can be unlearned. But here's the important bit. You don't change a pattern by fighting it. You change it by replacing it. So neural pathways don't disappear per se, they get out competed. So when you practice a new behavior over and over, the brain gradually shifts its loyalty

from the old circuit to the new one. And that thing that was weird, that was strange, that was unfamiliar, over time it moves from those things to being your new normal. And that's why consistency beats intensity. Think about think about how many people start stuff that they don't finish. I would say, I mean I've done it. I would say everybody does it. But when you think about you know, the obvious of like New Year's resolutions, how many people

do that? How many people say they're going to do it, how many people say they're going to be consistent, how many people say they're going to follow through? How many people say this is the time I've done it before, but this is you know, I'm in, And then they don't do it. And this is no judgment, this is no criticism. This is merely a reflection of what actually fucking happens. And so that is why consistency beats intensity. That's why small daily steps outperform big emotional promises, and

that's why identity change. I'm becoming someone who beats willpower. I hope I stop doing this, so that kind of I'm that kind of language of oh, I'm not on a diet. It's like, no, I don't eat that way anymore. Or I'm giving up booze for a while and seeing what happens. No, I don't drink alcohol. I don't drink alcohol, and I'm not on a program and I'm not operating on willpower. I've actually just changed my default setting. Or

I'm changing my default setting. I'm rewiring my brain. As long as we do something, let's say we change your behavior on a subconscious level. Our story is I'm just seeing how this works out. Well, we've got the wrong story, and we're always going to end up back in that place we don't want to be because nothing in our nothing in our story about that is reflects any kind of permanence, any kind of deep seated change. But I

guess the good news is your patterns aren't failures. They're just old wiring trying to be helpful, and you're not stuck with them. You're just at the beginning of the rewiring process. Right question eight. So what happens in my brain when I'm stressed or anxious? Could question Grasshopper. So when you or I are stressed or anxiou our brain shifts into a completely different operating mode. It's not subtle. It's a full system takeover. And the first thing that happens.

Remember we spoke about the imigla, the emotional epicenter of the brain, blah blah blah. The first thing that happens is you're amigdala. The brain's alarm center. It fires up. It's scanning for danger twenty four to seven. It doesn't care whether the threat is physical, emotional, social, or something else. A difficult conversation, a harsh email, financial pressure, embarrassment, uncertainty, rejection. You're amig Deala reacts to all of it like something

bad is happening or is about to happen. And when the alarm goes off, it sends an urgent message to your body, which is essentially get ready. Something bad is happening, something's wrong, something is up. We are in danger. There's an imminent threat and so on, and our heart rate goes up and our breathing gets shallow. And I've told

you before about all those physiological responses. Muscle get tense, muscles get tense, digestion slows down, stress hormones happen, nervous system goes nuts, and all of this is designed for survival, not for modern life. But here's the kicker with all of this stuff. Once the alarm sounds, your prefrontal cortex, the logical, rational, calm, strategic bit of your brain, it

starts to go offline. And this is where this ability, this skill, this development of us being able to stay online in the middle of the chaos, that's the challenge. But typically in the middle of that amygdala kind of emotional disaster, alarm bells ringing, the prefrontal cortex, the thinking, the critical thinking, the decision making part of the brain starts to shut down, and just thinking clearly, just making

decisions becomes a real struggle. And that's why stress makes you overreact and catastrophize and lose perspective and forget things and snap at people and make crazy impulsive decisions and overreact like a weirdo and feel overwhelmed by simple tasks. But you're not losing it. Your survival wiring is just overpowering your thinking brain. And this happens in nature, it happens in animals and humans. And it also explains why

someone telling you to calm down. I always talk about that piece of advice don't worry to people who are worried. But it doesn't work. It never works. They literally don't have access to the part of the brain that could calm them down in that moment, That part of the brain that could calm them down in that panic state, in that stress state, in that overwhelm of anxiety, That part of the brain that does the calming down has gone offline. But the good news is that this system

is incredibly responsive to regulation. So we can actually change our physiology consciously even when we're feeling this kind of stress and anxiety. Slow breathing, grounding, gentle movement, postural changes, simplifying tasks. We can do things even in a over a sixty second period, and all of these kind of physiological shifts or behaviors or actions that we take signal back up to the amigdala, hey champ, It's okay, stand down,

stand down, it's all all right, We're safe. And once you can quieten the amygdala through consciously, you know, deep breathing, box breathing, stretching, putting your feet in some dirt, huggin and tree, whatever the fuck it is for you. You Once the amigdala quietens, the prefrontal cortex comes back online and we can think clearly. So it's not about we're not trying to totally eliminate stress or anxiety or overthinking all these responses from our life, but we're we're trying

to learn how to regulate ourselves when they happen. So once the imigdala quietens, we can think again. The prefrontal cortex now works, We can make decisions, we can think clearly, We feel more grounded, the confusion evaporates, and we can see the options again. Stress isn't a flaw, Anxiety is not a weakness. It's just our brain switching into an ancient operating mode that sometimes misfires in a modern world. And the goal is not to eliminate stress, as I've said,

that's impossible. The goals to learn how to switch your thinking brain back on. And this is one of my favorite areas of discussion and exploration and research. I don't know why, it just I'm personally fascinated with the eye idea of reality. So question ten is how does my brain create my reality? And so this is maybe one of the most mind blowing truths about being human, and that is you don't experience the world directly. You experience

it through a filtered version that your brain creates. So your eyes is and senses take in raw data, but they don't send you a full, accurate transcript of reality. They send you fragments, clues, bits and pieces, and your brain then fills in the gaps using memories and beliefs and expectations and past experiences and biases and culture and conditioning and fears, and it predicts what it thinks is happening,

and then it presents that to you as reality. Which is why five people who are in the same room going through what seems to be the same experience are in fact not having the same experience because their reality is not created by the situation or the circumstance or the external stimuli. Their reality as they experience it is created by all of that stuff that I just said. So what you perceive is not the objective truth, but

rather your brain's best guess. We see it all the time where people live through the same event but go away within different interpretations. And your brain never starts with the world. It starts with you and then builds the world around that. It's also why you can misread tone of voice, assume the worst, overthink, or take things personally that weren't actually personal. Your brain is constantly trying to match new information to old patterns, even when that match

is wrong. It's what we do. We may not even know the meaning of something, but we give it meaning, and quite often that assumption or that perspective is completely wrong. So we don't respond to what's happening as much as we respond to our story or what our brain thinks is happening. But I guess here's the empowering part. If the brain can create a distorted reality, it can also

create a clearer one too. And so this is largely about awareness and being aware, Like here's something that's a bit of a mind fuck, being aware that you're not fully aware, and being mindful of your conditioning and your programming and navigating every situation, every conversation, every person, every relationship, every social dynamic navigating that knowing that you are just creating your own story and your own subjective experience and

reality in real time. But the good news is that awareness can change the picture, that new experiences can reshape interpretation and challenging old beliefs and not being addicted to our beliefs. We're so addicted to being right, we're so addicted to thinking that we know, we're so addicted to that stuff that we've been programmed with. But challenging old beliefs can rewire perception. Better emotional regulation makes the world

look less threatening. Curiosity widens your lens, and self awareness upgrades the entire operating system. The world that you see doesn't need to be fixed, It doesn't need to be set in the stone. Even when you've looked at a certain thing for a very long time, that can still be updated. Things that I thought that I believed, that I one hundred percent considered to be absolute, unequivocal truth, that I now realize was not unequivocal truth. It was

just what I thought was truth. So we can change, we can adapt, we can be cognitively flexible, we can create new neural pathways, We can be updated. When you realize that your thoughts, assumptions, and reactions are interpretations, not facts. You become far harder to trigger and far easier to teach, grow and evolve. You can't change reality, but you can absolutely change the way that your brain builds it. So you can change your reality. All right? Me? Last question,

Team question eleven. I don't know why I did eleven, It's just what I did. Can I rewire my brain? And if so, how long does it take? Thanks for asking? So the short answer is yeah, app yep, sure you can. Not easy, but absolutely you can. So your brain is rewiring itself all the time. The question isn't can you rewire it? It's what are you rewiring it? Toward? Every thought you think, every behavior you repeat, every reaction you default to, every emotional pattern that you reinforce and practice

is literally reshaping neural circuits. Your brain is plastic, not like tupperware plastic, but in the adaptable remodelable Is that a word remodelable, constantly changing sense? And here's the important bit. Neural rewiring isn't a movie moment transformation. It's ongoing construction work. Your brain's always asking two questions, what do you want? Me to do more of what do you want me to stop wasting energy on? And it answers those questions

through repetition, not intention. When you practice a new behavior, setting boundaries, pausing before reacting, exercising, learning, replacing a habit, challenging a thought, your brain starts building a pathway for that behavior. Of course, it's weak at first and awkward and requires effort and energy, like walking through long grass or mud, but repeated enough and it becomes a track and then a path, and then a road and then eventually a highway. That's rewiring. That's what rewiring is. So

how long does it take? This is a million dollar question. So for small behavioral tweaks, it takes days to weeks. I'm just going to say before I share these numbers and these thoughts, this the research around this is pretty comprehensive, but it's not absolute. And also, remember when we say how long does it take to change this habit or that habit, the question would be well for who, because it's not going to be the same for Craig as it is for you the listener, or for your brother,

or for your money. It's not like, oh, this habit takes twenty seven days with everybody. Well, it doesn't. And also you know it's like I need to give up sugar. Cool? How much sugar are you having a day? Well, thirty teaspoons versus I was having five. So it's a bit of a different sugar addiction or sugar problem. But so I'm about to generalize. So how long does it take for small behaviors, small behavioral tweaks? Generally days, two weeks. For habit level rewiring, ah, six to ten weeks, maybe

twenty weeks, depending on the habit. We're trying to change the individual and so on. But that kind of inside out level change, I mean that real identity level change. I don't do that anymore. I'm different now. That can be years, months to years. But the good thing with this, when we consciously start down this road is that the early winds show up fast. Our brain loves new grooves. And the good bit is, I guess the important bit is you don't raise old pathways, you outcompete them. I

feel like I said that before, but that's okay. The old road stays there, but the new one gets more traffic over time, and the old one grows over And as I said before, consistency beats enthusiasm, and that's why small daily actions outperform. I'm going to change my life tomorrow, promises why identity upgrades on becoming someone who works better than I. Hope I can stop doing this. Your brain isn't stubborn or broken. It's normal. You're human. We all

deal with this shit. The good news is it's programmable, but only through what you do, only through your action, through your behavior, not what you say you're going to do, not what you talk about, not what you intend. So in other words, this kind of change is not a character issue. It's a wiring issue, and wiring can be changed. All right, groovers, I guess that's about it. Even I'm

a bit confused. That'll do us for today. Hopefully this conversation has given you a bit of clarity, made things a little bit simpler, more easy to digest and process, and giving you something of an understanding of the thing that drives your entire life, your brain, not the textbook version, not the lab coat version, but the real world. This actually helps me live a better life version. What would my takeaway be, I guess it's My big takeaway would

be that you're not broken. This is normal. You're just wired a certain way, and wiring can be understood and trained and calmed and challenged and upgraded and rewired. That your reactions aren't random, your patterns aren't personality flaws. Your stress responses aren't weakness. Your habits aren't destiny. That's good to know. They're all just the predictable outputs of a system that's doing its best with the software that it has.

And the moment that you get that you step out of the shame and into agency, stop fighting yourself and start working with yourself. You begin to manage the system instead of being managed by it. I think it's just important to understand that our is the most powerful tool we have, and for us to learn how it works matters, and to treat it well, and to keep reminding ourselves that growth isn't magic, it's mechanics by team. Thanks for hanging out out with me. Look after your brain, look

after your body. See you next time for something spectacular. Let's hope