Mo Gawdat: Moment 95 - A Simple Hack To Achieve Maximum Happiness: Mo Gowdat

00:02this concept that we can retrain our brain physiologically seems like nonsense you know i can't change my arm so when someone you know asserts that you can actually change your brain you can't change your arm i can change my arm of course what tattoo no you work out that's true when you work out you're building muscles in your arms and that same exact process is exactly what happens inside our brains and it's called neuroplasticity. The only difference is that you don't see it. You don't see it visibly. You can see your muscles growing because that's the function that they need, you know, they need to grow to perform. But in your brain, what actually happens again, like computers, it's almost as if you loaded a new piece of software, a new piece of operating system on your brain, literally for every one of us listening, everyone listening to us to right now, at the end of this conversation, their brain will be wired differently than when it started. Every single instance of anything that you do literally rewires the hardware itself, the neurons that fire together, wire together. Okay. So imagine the old days of the switchboard.

01:15Okay. And, um, you know, Steve wants to call his mom. So you, you know, crank your phone and the operator says, you know, hi, how can I help you? And you say, can you please connect me to that number? And she would literally take a wire and patch you and your mom's phones together. Okay. After a while, the operator constantly, every time you call, you want to, you ask for your mom. So the operator goes like, why am I even wasting my time on this? Let me just patch that wire to his mom all the time. Okay. So that's exactly what happens in our brains. If you, if you perform a certain function, your brain starts to build networks that make that function easier to perform in the future. If you do it one time, it becomes a little easier. If you do it 20 times, it becomes permanent. And there are tons of studies. If you take a simple task like tapping your finger on the table and you're requested to do that, say, 20 times every hour, after a few days, you'll find that you're so much better at tapping your finger on the table and you can do it much faster and you can do it consistently and you can do it in the background. Gamers know that for cert. Okay. The problem with neuroplasticity is if you tell your brain to wire for tapping

02:27your finger, it will. If you tell it to wire for solving complex mathematical equations, it may take a little longer, but it will. If you tell it to wire for hating people, it will become very good at hating. If you tell it to wire for fearing the end of the world because of what the media is telling you, it's going to become very good at fearing the world. I know some of those people. No, absolutely. And you don't want them in your life. The challenge of our modern world is that we think that this brain is supposed to be there to make us successful.

02:57Yeah. Okay. First of all, it's not the primary function of the brain. The primary function of the brain is to make you safe. Okay. And then the secondary function that we push as humans to, that brain to do is to invent iPhones and create podcasts and have amazing things. Right. That's a secondary function. But believe it or not, before that secondary function, your brain is supposed to make you happy because happy is the ultimate form for you to perform in life.

03:24If you're not happy, you're not as effective as you could be at achieving survival. Think about it. If you're grumpy all the time at work, people don't like you. You're not focused. No one wants to help you. You're wasting most of your time, your brain cycles, you know, thinking about the negative. and so you're not innovative or creative and so on and so forth, it degrades your performance. Happy is a better place for you to be at work because it will make your customers want to do business with you.

03:54It will make your colleagues want to, you know, to help you out. It will make your boss welcome you in their team and so on and so forth. We are social animals by definition. And we want to have that in our life. And the easiest way to connect and to open up and to discover the world is to be in a happy place. that's a primary function of your brain it's hard for some people you know because we can all think of someone in our lives who has um certain wiring very stubborn wiring that almost seems impossible to unwire and i think we all have that ourselves as well certain wiring in our brains where something happens and our reaction to that thing might be uh you know to catastrophize it's the end of the world that's like a certain feels like it's a certain set of wiring where trigger and then the brain goes through the circuitry and it goes catastrophe panic yeah and and the answer to that i found was to actually guide that person or yourself if that's yourself to the opposite of your wiring so if my if my wiring is to look at everything and see what's wrong with it i should deliberately force my brain to look for what's right with it so uh you know i uh when i was when when I was coming here, it was very busy in the morning. And so I came late, if you remember.

05:09And my brain's immediate reaction is, oh, what's going to happen? I'm going to be late for Steve. Right? That's the immediate reaction of the brain because something is wrong. So it looks for what's wrong. I could also say, and what is good about that? What is good about being a little late? You know, he's been recording for the last few days. So it may give him a little bit of extra time do you want to know the truth i was so happy you were late because i was late right so i was doing upstairs reading that i was reading the book and i was thinking i just hope he's like 15 minutes late and then i'm looking at my phone i'm like i really are they're like he's not coming at perfect so i carried on going and carried on going and carried on going and i just finished as you arrived yeah so it's perfect time you see that that is the truth that's the truth that your brain tries to deny you from seeing and interestingly you can train your brain so so basically what you can do is for every thought, for every negative thought that your brain gives you, task it with the task of giving you a positive one.

06:07Or two positive ones. Nine, I say. Nine. Yeah, because in reality, if you look at life around you, more than 90% of life is okay. For your brain to contribute more than that as negative is not fair. Right? So if literally, if your brain says, hey, by the way, this studio is a little warm, what else is about this studio? My friend Steve is there. The lighting is perfect. The crew is amazing. You know, the coffee is not that bad. You guys got me honey.

06:36I can go on for hours, right? And the idea is by training your brain to look for that, what are you actually doing? You're firing the neurons together. Gratitude. And exactly, your book basically says it is the answer. The answer is when you find gratitude, that gratitude journal that you kept for years every day, what was it telling you? It was training your brain to look for what's right. Your brain every night that you did it was like, okay, it seems he's going to be asking to call his mom a lot more often. It seems he's going to be asking for good things a lot more often. I might as well observe them. I might as well find them. And so, yes, you said some people are impossible to rewire.

07:20They're impossible to rewire if they've been practicing a certain wiring for 21 years. it's not going to take 21 seconds to rewire anyone including me and you it will take 21 days let's say for your brain to recognize i need different wiring and it will take maybe 21 months for your brain to say and i don't need the old wiring anymore okay and the game here is can you actually keep doing that can you keep tapping your finger in a way that trains your brain that this is the wiring that you need like can i keep going to the gym and working on my absolute guns yeah believe it or not the research will tell you that a big part of being athletic is wiring of your brain not your muscles for your brain to be able to say i will go even if i feel a little tired i will go even if i feel a little uh busy i will go and i will do the right exercises even if the last push is a little painful a lot of people will hear that and go but what's the evidence for this what's the evidence for neuroplasticity is there science oh there is a ton of science behind neuroplasticity any anything from between neuroplasticity and neurogenesis is when you know neuroplasticity is to rewire the connections between the neurons and neurogenesis

08:35is to actually create new neurons when if you're hit with a ball for example and part of your brain is damaged how we can recreate that right if you have a stroke and how you recreate that and ample evidence one of the very famous stories is matthew ricard when we spoke about him in the beginning matthew's brain looks different than the average human brain his insula is much bigger in relative comparison his prefrontal cortex is is bigger and and it what it fires more often it's simply because of the constant neuroplasticity of i need you to meditate i need you to stay quiet i need I mean, some of Matthew's journeys would last four years in isolation.

09:20He would meditate for four years. Be in isolation in a hermitage for four years, right? And so at that level, your brain starts to do very different things. And by the way, that's not unusual. Many farmers around the world live in isolation for a very long time. Believe it or not, you and I, when we spend a long time on airplanes, I chose a long time ago to not watch a lot of stuff on, you know, I maybe watch one movie, but not the entire trip. The other bits of silence, that's actually a form of meditation. I, you know, my absolute wonderful friend, Jamie Nelson, the photographer, if you know him, he photographs indigenous tribes.

10:01And the way he does it is he would go and spend a few months outside their premises, you know, their village, if you want, in silence, you know, camping out there. He doesn't speak their language. He's just sitting there waiting for them to accept him. And then he would start to, you know, communicate to them in sign language because he doesn't speak their language. And he's one of the wisest people I know. And I said, how did you become this wise?

10:28He never studied any of those things. and the reality is it's because he's in constant reflection and meditation. He's sitting out there and he's spending hours and days in reflection and meditation, right? Because you're sitting alone. All of those things are our habits and all of us have the chance to do it. So you could be on the tube for a commute of 40 minutes a day and you could be in that commute cursing life and that's a very good 40 minute exercise to work and another 40 minute going back or you could be spending the 40 minutes in gratitude.

11:02You could be spending the 40 minutes listening to music. Could be doing whatever. What you will do for 40 minutes a day will rewire your brain. It really is like a paradigm shifting thought that our brains are in this constant growth and evolution. But when we look at, as you said, my muscles are. My muscles are changing state, size, growing more fibers to achieve their objective in a different way. And of course my brain is as well. And when you think about that, it's really liberating because you realize that you're not stuck with who you are.

11:32Absolutely not. My friend Ro, she's got a podcast as well. She, one of the smartest people I've ever met. And she worked at my company for many years and she got a brain tumor. And she showed me the scan of her brain. They found this golf ball in the middle of her brain and they removed it. And she showed me those brain scans. And then just months later, the hole is gone. Yeah. and her brain has regrown that part and there's no longer a hole in her brain and that was one of those moments when i go oh my god the brain like like everything around us is a living organism that is shaping and evolving based on the inputs and what's happening to it so let's choose what's which parts of it are we going to grow i think that's the whole point and we grow it with our actions and our thoughts repetitive actions thoughts and memories believe it or not one of the interesting things is if you take a memory in the past and you think about it over and over and over, it's as if it's happening over and over and you're growing the neurons that are needed, you're growing the connections between the neurons that are needed to trigger that memory.

12:40Think happy memories. If you sit next to your partner and focus on one thing that they do and go like, they say, do this, they do this, they do this, they do this, and forget that they do a hundred other things that you you love and appreciate your neuroplasticity is making you completely obsessed about that one thing and you can only see that one thing and eventually you know some of my friends after a breakup i go like so what happened then they'll say one thing it's like just you could they obsess about it over and over because your brain is growing to say he needs to think about this right i'm gonna make it easier to think about this i'm gonna make it faster more accessible and you'll see it more often like the red cars you know the old thing about when you if you buy like a red car if you buy like a green car then every car you see will appear to be green if you buy a range over every car you see is a range over