Speaker 1: 1:25

Welcome to the show everybody. This is the Next Level Human podcast. I am your host, dr Jade Tita, and today I have a very interesting guest. This is Dr Kyra Bobinette, who has a brand new book out, and that book is the reason why I wanted her on the show. It's called the Unstoppable Brain, and the subtitle is the New Neuroscience that Frees Us From Failure, eases Our Stress and Creates Lasting Change.

Speaker 1: 1:52

And so before I introduce you, kyra, I just want to give everyone a little bit of a background. You know, as a podcast host, one of the things that happens is you get people pitched to you all of the time, and so people come across and you kind of look at them and say, yeah, that's not for me, that's not for me. Well, most of you listeners know that I have been very much over the last 10 years, specifically the last five, really engaged in this question of why is it that we oftentimes know what to do, but we can't actually do it? What is going on there? Is it habits and behaviors, which we know? This is part of it. Is it identity and beliefs? I think this is part of it, but what is all the sort of story that's going on here, and so that's why I wanted you on Dr Kyra, because I want to unpack the different ways that people see this. You have been doing really amazing work.

Speaker 1: 2:50

Just so everyone knows, kyra is an MD and also has her master's in public health and has been involved with some of the research in behavior change and stumbled across sort of a new system that is very effective, that she is seeing for behavior change. So we're going to learn all about that. So what I would love for you to do, kyra, is tell us a little bit about how you got here being an MD. It's not typical for an MD to be focused on these kinds of things, but you are, and you have written a book on this, and it is very important from my perspective. We might know what to do, but if we can't do it, we're not going to make any change. So if you could just give us an update on sort of your background and the story that got you here, and then let's get into this amazing work that you're doing.

Speaker 2: 3:43

Absolutely so. By the way, you're a clinician after my own heart, so I'm really excited about this conversation. I guess how it started was just observations in patient care where you know somebody would say oh yeah, doc, like I'm going to, I promise I'm going to stop smoking, I'm going to, I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that, I'm going to eat better, I'm going to exercise, and then the next time they either ditch you and avoid you or they come in with their tail tucked and are like you know, like I feel so bad about myself. And one patient that was particularly poignant for this was a guy who came in. You know, I had 10 minutes with him.

Speaker 2: 4:20

He had a gouty toe, very generic kind of situation. I'm writing the prescription for the toe and I say, you know so how'd this happen? And he said well, doc, you know, I did. Three days ago I did meth, haven't been to sleep since.

Speaker 2: 4:35

And so, you know, meth, no sleep, dehydration, gout, and I remember thinking I'm on the wrong end of this animal and I didn't really know what I was attracted to in that moment. I thought, you know, should I go into addiction medicine? No, that doesn't really draw me. But, and there was no behavior change. You know specific degree that I knew of at that time, you know, and, and so I think I did, that's what kind of sparked my interest in hey, wait a minute. You know there's there's a lot of things upstream of what I'm doing that I'm super curious about.

Speaker 2: 5:09

So I started crawling up that stream. I started a program for incarcerated youth which was all about behavior change, coming back into the community, lowering recidivism with that group. So they kind of taught me, you know, what does and doesn't work. I also went into public health and, as you mentioned, you know, did population health studies on 33 million people where, you know, I'm testing everything from wearables to programs to, you know, texting programs, to any kind of education program, incentives, punishment and reward structures, all that kind of stuff, and so I just went deep on trying to change people's behavior for about two decades and then, as you mentioned, then had kind of a discovery that really changed my mind about the whole thing.

Speaker 1: 6:01

Okay, so we have the right person, because 20 years looking at behavior change from all these different things and this is why I really love you know, just for the listeners to understand, this is one of the things that I really love about being an MD and then being an MPH. Having a master's of public health it gives, I think, a really interesting perspective, because not only are you working clinically one-on-one with individuals and seeing those individual case studies, but you're also able to zoom out and see some of the issues that are affecting the population as a whole. And so I can imagine you're sort of looking at these individuals one on one in front of you and then kind of zooming out and being like what is everyone suffering from and what works for everyone? And you're running into constant roadblocks and understanding all these things, all these stuff that we have available to us. So I am interested in, of course, what was the thing?

Speaker 1: 6:55

Because over 20 years doing all this research, looking at all the things that are available to us, you obviously found things that did not do much, things that did some things but weren't able to last, and now you seem to believe right, when this is the thing that I think is really beautiful. You now believe you found a solution that I assume can work for the vast majority of people, and this is why you've done a book on it. So what is this solution? Is that where you want to start? Or do you want to start in terms of helping us understand how you came to the solution, Some of the things that were surprising findings. Maybe that led you here?

Speaker 2: 7:39

Well, you know, it's kind of a handshake and since it's organically coming up. Let's go with the solution, and then we can back our way into the brain science that fuels this solution or enhances it. So one thing that happened was in my pursuits of, you know, trying to change behavior.

Speaker 2: 7:58

I had gone to work in the behavior design laboratory at Stanford and the school of medicine as well at Stanford, and I had also started a behavior design consultancy for large companies looking at the population health view, still trying to figure out, like you know, because at heart I'm an interventionist, you know I want to change people and so I was looking for research that would give me clues on what would work, that kind of thing, and I did a behavioral study with Walmart, who hired us to really rethink what is it that causes people to be healthy versus not under the same circumstances? So these were people who were, you know, lower socioeconomic status all over the United States and they had every what's called social determinants of health. You know every barrier to being healthy that you could imagine. You know single parents, multiple jobs, you know taking care of senior parents, you know not having enough money or time and also living in food deserts, those kinds of things, and so what I found was super interesting is that you had these kind of unicorns scattered about you know, in different locations, who didn't know each other and, independently, what they did was they were different than their peers in one particular way, which is that they had a different mindset than everybody else, than everybody else, and this mindset was made of. Well, let me practice this, let me experiment with this, let me just see if this will work.

Speaker 2: 9:36

That kind of curiosity and experimentation kind of view, then kind of smart goals, and I'm going to re-regiment it and I'm going to do this and that, and instead of setting a goal, they would set up an experiment or an effort, you know, to see what they could do. The second thing that was part of this was that they would iterate instead of fail whenever they hit an impasse. And so inevitably, as I'm sure you've seen in every single patient you've ever had, somebody hits up against some unexpected disruptor, some unexpected trigger internally, some, you know, barrier externally. And what these people did differently and uniquely was that they iterated their way through that problem to something better, so that they would do either small tweaks to what they were trying or they would do a wholesale change. It just depended on what their inspiration or what their learning guided them and, as a result of them iterating and not failing, these people kept going and they were able to keep themselves in effort. I call it versus everybody else who tried something, failed it and then quit trying.

Speaker 1: 10:56

Yeah, this is going to be very familiar to my listeners and so you listeners know this, but this is the first time Dr Kyra and I have talked, so I'll clue her in a little bit and see what she thinks Like. One of the one of the key things that this group of individuals you're talking to understands is that to me, I oftentimes say there's only one rule in all this, and that is do what works for you. Right, it's like the one rule to rule them all. It's like you had to become a metabolic detective versus being a dieter, and it seems like you're saying something similar to this. If I'm right and I oftentimes use this Bruce Lee quote that you know with my individuals is that you know, if you think Bruce Lee, this is the martial artist, actor, philosopher Bruce Lee.

Speaker 1: 11:43

If you think about Bruce Lee, he says you know, discard what is useless, absorb what is useful and add what is uniquely your own. So this is this very iterative process, when you try certain things on, and in that process you gain some understanding that works for you. You gain some understanding about things that don't work for you and, of course, you came into the process knowing some things already that were powerful for you. And there's a final quote that I oftentimes like to use, which is you've arrived when arrival is no longer the goal. This idea seems to be compatible with what you're saying. Am I thinking about this right, or are there pieces I'm missing? How does that hit you when you hear that? Is this very similar? Is it exactly the same, or are there key differences here?

Speaker 2: 12:37

Yeah. So what I can say is you're spot on with the research that I did in terms of find what works for you, and I would just maybe point out a little specificity around in this moment, because where people can trip up on failure or perceived failure, is that they can say well, this always works for me, zumba always works for me, but what happens is that they don't see that there's a decay of their love of yoga or Zumba or weightlifting or whatever the case may be, and that is just a sign that there is another iteration that is coming up that they need because they're falling out of love with that particular food or that particular exercise or that kind of thing, and so I find that it's one thing to make sure that it matches you.

Speaker 2: 13:25

It's another thing to understand that it may not always be your one and only. It may not be the one thing that you do for the rest of your life. We don't know which things that we're trying, that were our lifetime, that are seasonal, that are momentary, and just having the right mindset of both finding out what works for you and honoring in this moment what can I get myself to do, instead of some fantasy of what I wish I would do. That seems to be the thing that closes the gap most often for people.

Speaker 1: 14:00

Yeah, I love that distinction. I love that distinction and yeah, so I lost you there for a bit, but I love that distinction because I think some of the things that I see with this is that certainly we can talk about the metabolism sort of changing, and you're speaking to the psychology changing, and I often tell people you have to account for that A menopausal woman is not the same as a younger woman who has her hormones working for her, not to mention an 18 year old who's passionate about dance and nightclubs is not going to be the same as a 40-year-old who's dealing with teenage children and trying to get them to school and the passions around that. So I love this idea. So, I guess, walk us through. How does someone begin this iterative process? Because what are the? Because you alluded to this, it's almost like it's a personality trait, or is it a learned trait? You know, cause that's going to be the first thing that people ask Is this something that I can learn?

Speaker 2: 14:58

Yeah, and so in our research, about 20% of any population are iterators. They have really high scores on iterative mindset and we've done a research validation series of studies to develop a tool to measure iterative mindset. So iterative mindset is you practice or experiment instead of setting a hard, fixed goal, and you iterate whenever you reach an impasse. An impasse could be you're bored, you need variety. An impasse could be you're bored, you need variety. An impasse could be it's too challenging. An impasse could be you killed it and now you want to level up right. So that's where people start to iterate and this tool, the iterative mindset inventory, has been validated and we're about to publish on this and in the population that is 20% already there. They don't need any more iterative mindset for that domain.

Speaker 2: 15:54

But we also find that people are like patchwork quilts In some areas of their life they'll be very iterative and in other areas of their life they'll be very performative, which is the opposite of iterative. So in people's careers, for example, there's performance-based goals at work, those kinds of things. In school, there's performance-based grades and grading and ranking and those kinds of things, and in those areas they forget their natural faculties to be iterative and they start to suffer and there's a lot of mental health problems that occur when you stop iterating and you start performing for other people, because that means that the other person is now controlling you and your experience. So we can get to that in a second. But to your question about whether it's trainable, it's absolutely trainable.

Speaker 2: 16:45

We've done preliminary studies on this and you know, to me, the mindset that you're running, the software that you're running on your hardware of your brain and your nervous system, is the main determinant of your outcomes. And so checking for the level of this mindset, which is more powerful than any mindset that we tested, so we tested it against growth mindset, learning mindsets, performance mindsets, self-efficacy, grit, resilience, learned helplessness, all of these sort of and optimism and over and above any of those qualities and strategies that we might use in our life, iterative mindset was, was stronger at habit formation, mental health, well-being outcomes, performance outcomes at work, productivity at work, healthcare, risks and costs, and I think one else, yeah, health outcomes. So it is to me the most significant factor and it probably has a lot of allegories or synonyms for itself kind of your work and how aligned that is with this, but it's the most powerful thing that I've ever seen in terms of our ability to change our behavior and sustain it.

Speaker 1: 18:11

More importantly, yeah, you know what, kyra, I love this so much, but partly selfishly, because I'm seeing a tool that I did not have that I'm realizing is a huge piece of the work that I've been doing. You know, it's really interesting, right? Because you talk about all these things that we know have a great evidence base Angela Duckworth's work and others on grit and stuff and this iterative mindset. It makes sense that it's taking into account a lot of these things resilience and all these other things learning a growth mindset, a resilience mindset, all of this. Actually, for you, the listener, just before you and I jumped on, kyra, I didn't tell you this, but I went on your website and I actually took the quiz. There's actually a quiz there.

Speaker 1: 18:56

So if you guys you all who are listening go to drkyrabobinettecom slash iterative-mindset-quiz, you actually can take a quiz, and I'm assuming this is a part of the. Is this the actual assessment or is this a shortened version of it? I'm curious. I ended up getting the seeker. I just got a report sent to me that tells me a little bit about being the seeker. So it sounds like this actually is a place where we can go and get a sense of where we are on this iterative scale.

Speaker 2: 19:36

That's right. And also you can track over time. You know, as you evolve and practice iteration and practice iterative mindset you can. Your profile might change and so that's something just to know about yourself and give some evidence-based you know from this research some evidence-based direction, guidance on what might be helpful for you at this time based on yeah, I love it so much.

Speaker 1: 19:56

I love tools like that are so important.

Speaker 2: 19:58

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 19:59

Yeah. So let me, let me ask I'm just plugging in my computer because I'm getting ready to run out of gas, but all right, so. So we're all good now. So let me, let me ask you then. So you said this can absolutely be changed. I'm build this iterative mindset skill and you are educating us on that. This absolutely is a skill. It is absolutely determinative of success, more so than other things that are very well established, at least based on the preliminary research that you have done and that you're going to be publishing. How do we begin this process? Is there a set of things that you have found work for the vast majority of people? That here's step one to being more iterative in your mindset. Here's step two. Here's step three. I'm curious on if there is any simple, stepwise process to get people started.

Speaker 2: 21:09

Yeah, in the book I have a acronym, because I was a doctor and we deal with all kinds of acronyms, as you know, in our education called Iterates, and that's really just a brainstorm framework where you know if you're stuck on something or you're not sure what to do. You know being able to brainstorm by each of these categories each of those letters represents something, might help to jar loose your own intelligence and your own creativity around what you could, what your options are, you know. And then the most important thing about iterative mindset is that it prevents and protects against the idea of failure or discouragement, and it turns out that the new neuroscience that I cover in the book is so key for that, because this mindset is the most protective factor I've ever seen, and again, I articulated it, but it exists in nature. There are people 20% of people are naturally going to do this in any particular domain of their life, and the rest of us have to learn how to do it.

Speaker 2: 22:20

So what I would say is number one to assess things so that you neutralize failure. The first step is to neutralize any past failure or pre-failure, because some people are really creative and they have all kinds of stories about how they will already fail. Right, and you've probably seen that in many people. The second thing is to pick a practice, to your point, your wisdom of what's going to work for you right now. Right, and just try. It's just a try, it's like let me just see if this works, you know.

Speaker 2: 22:54

And then the third thing is to iterate. When you reach any sort of impasse, you're bored, you're stuck, it's too difficult, you want to level up, you want to challenge yourself, and that's where that iterates model can help with brainstorming, because iteration is new to all of us, you know it's. It's something that we're not used to thinking in iterations, but those areas of our lives that we naturally do, that we actually tinker or tweak with things, that's where we're iterating, and so we just have to expand that goodness to the areas of our lives that are not getting that kind of treatment.

Speaker 1: 23:33

Yeah, you know what it reminds me of? It reminds me of Marcus Aurelius. I'm like, I'm into stoic philosophy and he has a saying that the obstacle is the way. And I've oftentimes seen this idea. It's like, if you can get beyond and I talk to my clients and patients about this all the time the idea that it's a failure to me. There's always a lesson there, right? So this is this sort of growth-based mindset, but you're adding something uniquely onto that, because you're not just saying, hey, there's a lesson in here. It sounds like you're almost saying, not only is there a lesson in here, but actually this is the path to get beyond the obstacle, right here, but actually this is the path to get beyond the obstacle, right? So it's just. It's basically like this iterative mindset is essentially saying, yes, there's lessons and yes, you need to be resilient, but it almost has taken it one step further and saying, and this is a process, rather than a protocol, rather than a recipe, it's sort of a process by which you will escape any obstacle, right? So it's a really interesting.

Speaker 1: 24:31

I see some parallels here with this and just so you, the listener, and I'll let Dr Kyra hear this as well but to me, I've always thought part of our problem is protocol-based practices, right, where it's sort of like oh, jade gets one thing, kyra gets another thing and you get another thing. That's kind of the way it should be, but in practice that's not the way it is. It's basically like Jade, kyra and you all bake the cake exactly this way, turn the oven to 465, put in this amount of sugar, drop in this amount of chocolate. It's a very recipe-based thing. I am convinced that in medicine and pretty much everything we do, this is a big piece why things fail.

Speaker 1: 25:13

It seems like what you're doing here is you're actually teaching people a process rather than giving them a protocol or a recipe.

Speaker 1: 25:21

That's essentially saying hey look, here's the general way that you can approach baking a cake, but your cake is going to come out in an infinite number of different ways based on what you like. Maybe it's coconut cake, maybe it's chocolate cake, maybe it's you know something else with sprinkles, but you'll end up in a place where you get your unique thing, like maybe I'm going to end up doing donuts and Kyra's going to end up doing you know, now I'm getting hungry, by the way, but everyone's, everyone's going to be a little bit different, but is this, is this partly what it comes down to? So do you? Is there this idea in this process where we have to release the idea that if I look at my next door neighbor and see what they're doing, if I look at someone on social media and see what they're doing, that I have to essentially maybe use that as a starting point, perhaps, but quickly iterate away from it, based on what is working for me?

Speaker 2: 26:14

Yeah, I think working for me should be your top level filter for everything. So when you look at Instagram or you look at your neighbor or whatever, those are ideas of suggestions. If you will, and if you feel really attracted or drawn to one, yeah, give it a go. But where people get into trouble is that they become sharp, pointy objects. You know that they that cut them. You know when they think of it as, oh, if I'm not doing it the way he's doing it, or I'm not getting the results that he's getting, then I'm bad that we turn on ourselves and we cut ourselves on these, these ideas, because it's so rigid it's. And again, if I had the mindset that I'm just trying this as a practice to see, like I would try on a shirt at a store, you know, just to see if it looks good. If it doesn't, I'm not going to blame myself for a particular color not looking good on me. I'm just going to go find the colors that work for my skin, my style, whatever the case may be.

Speaker 2: 27:17

And so that is a better attitude that people could have around health and fitness and behavior change type of things. So that again, the number one starting place is to neutralize all ideas of failure. You cannot fail at being yourself, you cannot fail at learning, you cannot fail at this life that you're trying to live. You're just figuring it out.

Speaker 1: 27:41

Yeah, you've alluded to this several times now, so I want to unpack the science here, if we can a little bit, just so the listener can get a sense of this here. If we can a little bit, just so the listener can get a sense of this. You've alluded to this idea of beating yourself up or making yourself feel bad, or shaming or guilting yourself. It's like, well, I'm going to try this and if it doesn't work the way it works for Jade, then I'm somehow a failure and a bad person. Can you just briefly tell us why this idea? Because you see this all the time.

Speaker 1: 28:09

There's this, I think, prominent thing in our culture where it's like I need to berate myself into success. Right, it's this idea that I'm going to whip myself, you know, into shape, and it is so pervasive and you're alluding to the fact that this does not work. Can you help us understand why it does not work? What is going wrong there? Because it seems, unless I'm missing something, that what you stumbled across is that this is a pervasive, underlying problem in being able to achieve an iterative mindset if you have this constant beating yourself up mentality.

Speaker 2: 28:51

Right, and so I have come to realize and believe, based on the neuroscience, that the most important thing for us as humans to deal with and to manage is any notion or story of how we failed and how we're the worst person on the planet. And the reason why that is job one is because there is a newly discovered area called the habenula, which is like half a centimeter in the center of your brain, and it basically acts as the brakes for your behavior, and it is turned on. The brakes are put on when we think we failed, and so that leads to all kinds of observations that we see all the time as clinicians and also as people living in bodies is you know, I know what I want to do, but I can't get myself to do it. I procrastinate, I feel stuck, and then, when I feel that way, then I turn on myself inside my own head.

Speaker 2: 29:56

You know, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is a main area of, like rumination, negative emotions. You know, all these things start to churn, and this brake pedal is the cause of all that bad feeling, and so that to me was like a huge breakthrough that, you know, the more people know about this fact, they're going to stop wasting their energy on just forcing success and deal with the side effect of failure, failure thinking, failure, thoughts, failure, self indictments, all that kind of stuff so that they can actually succeed. And it's paradoxical because we think that success is doing something that we intend to do, but it's actually unblocking our failure to try to do something which is more important and twice as powerful as the dopamine, as the success, as the gas, as the gas pedal, as I say.

Speaker 1: 30:56

Yeah, and if we're listening closely, it's so interesting, right? Because in a sense, what you're doing and correct me if I'm wrong here, because I may have this slightly off but what it sounds like is you're creating a game where failure doesn't exist in the game, the game is being played for the sake of the game, which takes this idea of beating ourselves up kind of off the table right. It's just kind of like you're just playing a game, just trying things on, and that's part of the process. And it's trying, it's not failing, it's iterating, it's not failing, it's discovering, it's not failing. So all of a sudden we're taking this idea away that we can fail, which is kind of this psychological sleight of hand that makes us get into sort of this cross between a therapist and a coach. And one of the things that we lean very heavily on is compassion-focused therapy, which reminds me a bit of what you're doing here, because it essentially removes this idea that you are bad in any way and gets you focusing on compassionate thought.

Speaker 1: 32:07

There's sort of two rules here. One is the human rule and the other is the empathy rule that we teach clients to use on themselves. The human rule is to essentially say you know what Jade, you know what Kyra, you know what. You're only human, you know humans, you know, are learning creatures and we're just here to learn. And that's the first part. You're only human. We all suffer and we're all just here to learn, and that releases something in people's minds. And the next part is you know what? Yeah, I know it's hard, and that's the point. There's lessons in the hard right. So there's this idea in my program, which is easy, is earned kind of thing, right when it's just like. This is the way it's supposed to be You're just here discovering, you're just here learning, and it seems to fall in alignment with sort of this iterative thing. And so you're doing this really beautiful psychological sleight of hand that sort of takes the idea of failure off the table. Is this kind of how you're seeing it as well?

Speaker 2: 33:01

Yeah, I've come to see that anything that works is neutralizing failure in some way or the other. You know, I used to call it like the Dumbo feather. You know, dumbo was an elephant and he had a feather from crows and he believed that he could fly because of his big ears. And it's kind of like whatever you can do to somebody or they can do to themselves, to have that feather of being able to believe that they're not going to fail or that they haven't failed, it renders them, it turns off their habenula and it renders them motivated and persistent. They have the ability, because you might have the idea of grit before that, like I'm going to be gritty or I'm going to be, but you're just being, like you know, quixotic. You're just going up again, you're doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results, and you're just banging your head against a wall with brute force, right.

Speaker 2: 36:37

And so this is the key to not getting in that kind of Sisyphus, rolling the thing up the hill and having it roll back down hellscape, where you actually are free. You free your mind, you free your self, your habenula, because when the habenula is on, it is incredibly painful. It is what drives addiction. It is what drives when people have withdrawal from addictive substances. This area of the brain is what's causing it to be so uncomfortable and so like maddening, you know, and so people will do anything in that state to numb out or distract themselves. And that and that's what we have to understand is like there is this mechanism in the brain that is working against us Whenever we try to change ourselves, whenever we try to change our behavior. So whenever we try, to change ourselves.

Speaker 1: 37:34

Whenever we try to change our behavior, this is our greatest obstacle. Yeah, ok, so let me. I want to. This is going to get into some hypothetical stuff and I'm just curious your, your sort of understanding of this and if you have anything to say about this. This is so. I think. All the rest was for the listener and this one's for me. So let's see if we can, if maybe you can help me with this. So here's my hypothesis, and I want to see what you think about this.

Speaker 1: 37:57

My hypothesis is that this mechanism that is going on with the Hebenula is sort of a mechanism of narratives and stories, right? So it's this idea that I failed this many times and I'm just convinced that I'm a failure or I'll fail. This even can bleed over into other things. So I failed so much in with finance, and now I'm failing in health and fitness. And it's like this, this you know, as children and as adolescents and even as adults, when we encounter difficult, challenging things that make us feel perhaps less than and I call these misguided, unconscious decisions mud, right? So they're misguided because they happen during times where we don't have the skills, the wisdom, the knowledge, the know-how, the maturity to deal with them. They're unconscious because they follow us around like a shadow. And they're decisions, because, whether we're aware of them or not, we did make a decision or choice to see the world in a particular way. And so this mud in my mind. It's kind of like thinking of the Habanula sitting in mud and not able to escape, and so then I go.

Speaker 1: 39:10

Well, the work that needs to be done is one rewriting these stories, trying to get people into this more unconscious state where they can see change their perception around the idea of failure in the first place, and then sort of rewire the nervous system around this or the emotional response to this, and then, of course, the nervous system around this or the emotional response to this, and then, of course, at the end, retrain the brain, which is where habits and behaviors come in. So to me, I'm wondering what you think about this idea of let's call it a habitual, a habitual, habitual response Mud. It's stuck because you've seen things as failure so long and then needing to go down in there and restructuring these stories through some of this unconscious work. Is there anything in your research or in your ways of seeing this that this idea would make sense when we look at things like PTSD or adverse childhood events, or just traumas and difficulties or repeated failures in any domain, finance relationships and or, you know, health and fitness.

Speaker 2: 40:18

Yeah, as you may suspect, what they've shown in the literature is that when somebody has and this was shown in animals, because you can't traumatize humans and then show pre and post effect, but you know when they would mess with the instability and the trauma for baby mice that their habanula was incredibly trigger happy and so it hypersensitizes the habanula, going off to any notion of failure, and that lines up with PTSD symptoms. Right when you've got this hypervigilance and you've got this pessimism, you know that nothing's going to work for me or this is everything's dangerous, everything's scary. You know that that gets really programmed in the brain so PTSD can happen through, you know, massive adrenaline rush. That kind of super glues all of these neural networks together, rewires your brain like in an instant. Or you can have the childhood experiences that you're talking about where, for example, my father even though I love him, I love him dearly, he's now passed he would tell me that I was going to be an effing failure and that I was a loser. And I think in his mind he was doing that to counter, motivate me, like paradoxically, motivate me to strive and to achieve. And hey, you know, it kind of works. But, as you said, a lot of mud was instilled in that moment.

Speaker 2: 44:52

And so my habanula, because I have so much trauma and different things from my past that I've had to heal from, and that kind of thing can be quite, you know, tenuous or pessimistic and about things, and then that becomes drawing from my narrative self, my frontal cortex, my prefrontal cortex, those two things match up and I can become depressed or I could become anxious or I could become pessimistic as a result.

Speaker 2: 45:21

And so what's different about me is that I know I have a habenula. And because I know I have a habenula, whenever I see any hint of a gap between what I should be doing or what I want to be doing and what I'm actually doing, I'm like, oh, my habenula is on, it's diagnostic, and if my habenula is on, then I feel like shit, I feel terrible about myself and about the world or wherever. And so I know whereas other people, if they don't know about this part of our brain, I know better than to wallow in those stories that you're talking about in the mud and I can immediately have the right action to neutralize the failure to either talk myself out of it or get myself out of it Journaling, talking to somebody you know whatever somatic you know, running whatever, whatever the case would be, to kind of get yourself out of that gear is what people like me who know about this will do, whereas everybody else might just take too long lingering in the.

Speaker 1: 46:24

I love this so much. It's not always the case that I mean it often is the case when you're interested in someone's work. You're partly interested because it dovetails into some of your work. But it doesn't surprise me that. Surprise me that there's a lot of now crossover that I'm seeing. I have one more line of I want to be respectful of your time, but I have one more line of questioning that I want to go down that I think will be useful, just for the listener to sort of understand.

Speaker 1: 46:51

To me there are many different tools that we can use to. You know, to use my vernacular, you know, get us out of the mud, to use your vernacular to really free the hubbenula from this gap you know of. You know the thing that we want to do, that we see that we're not doing and we know we're kind of in this, you know, hubbenula sort of cemented in a particular degree. Some of those, from my perspective, would be things like we use breath work combined with journaling, a form of written exposure therapy, a form of holotropic breath work, very shortened, and a form of compassion therapy and cognitive behavioral therapy, or what we might call exposure therapies. I'm wondering what you have found to be the most potent, if any. Obviously, you've done and thank you so much for this work and sort of what you're bringing forth with this idea of this iterative mindset. What I'm wondering is how much have you got into which practices work the best, if any?

Speaker 1: 47:55

Obviously, the definition of being right it's you know, we can think, feel, choose, act Habits and behaviors. Think, you know, focus on the choosing and the acting. Some of the, you know, therapies, talk therapies, you know, go to thinking. Not very many things get into the feeling state and of course, before you can think, feel, choose and act, you have to see the world differently.

Speaker 1: 48:15

So I've always thought that perception altering treatments are one of the first ones I like to do. But then I like to kind of go up the chain of like. First I need to get you seeing yourself in the world differently, then we can get thinking and feeling in line, then we can get choosing and acting in line. But of course it goes in the other direction as well. But I'm more interested in the full length of sort of you just looking and saying, hey, jake, here are the things perhaps that we have seen in the world of therapy, in the world of somatic work in the world of meditation, in the world perhaps psychedelics, you know, and all these that can make a difference here. What would you say are the top, top ones?

Speaker 2: 48:55

So you're asking me what are the top iterations that work for most people?

Speaker 1: 49:01

Yeah, and tools. You know tools that seem to get, you know, fix this habanula let's call it the habanula hijack, maybe like just fix this, you know issue. Are there tools that seem to deal with this? Of course, you know, once you get into the behavior change, it's an iterative, choosing and acting process and maybe that's all there is to it. I'm wondering if there are any tools that get to the thinking and feeling and seeing differently to help this iterative process along, because the way I'm conceptualizing this is that what you're doing is you're taking the system of habit change, you know, which is choosing and acting, seeing that it's not, it's either incomplete or that this is a better model, a better way of doing it, this iterative process, and we're using this iterative, you know sort of style, maybe in coaching or in thinking, and you know acting and choosing. I'm wondering is there anything else that you've seen that can come before that helps this process along, to get people to be more iterative in their mindset, or is it just simply practice?

Speaker 2: 50:08

The main thing for progress, or the main thing that works, that unifies everything that works, is their ability to turn off the hebenula. That's my hypothesis, because everything I've seen that turns off the habenula frees up the motivation and the forward motion in an animal, no matter what if it's a human, if it's a mouse, whatever the case may be and you talk about psychedelics. It's been shown that ketamine is specifically acting on the lateral habenula, an outside part of the habenula, and that it stays embedded in those neurons for up to three months, which, by the way, maps completely exactly to the symptoms, relief that patients say that a ketamine therapy treatment helps them. But once you disrupt that habenula, being time you turn it off, kind of overwhelm it. Then you've got three months to build new habits, new ways of being, all these things you kind of. You can't put a cast on something and then have no healing of the bone underneath, you know. So habits and habit practices, whatever those are those iterations you know, does this work for me or that work for me? It gives you a bit of a breather. And so do SSRIs to some extent, because they're working on serotonin, which is also released by and affecting the habanula.

Speaker 2: 51:38

Hebenula controls dopamine, it controls serotonin, it controls everything. It is the main reason why we are able to do or not do anything that we do or don't do. And so now that we know about this hub, you know, and we know what turns it on and what turns it off, then we can see everything as an iteration on and what turns it off. Then we can see everything as an iteration Breath work. You know, there's an ibogaine derivative that has been shown to affect the nicotinic receptors in the habanero, which are higher and different than all the other receptors in the brain for nicotine. And so that particular ibogaine derivative particularly works on the nicotinic receptors, blocks them, and then that is what causes the disruption of very intense drugs, of abuse. That's the mechanism of action for ibogaine. And so what I find is that everything kind of converges on this science. If something is alleviating depression, if it's alleviating anxiety, it's absolutely doing it in part or whole through habanula.

Speaker 1: 52:49

Yeah, I love that idea and you know what I'm looking at, this idea of. Well, I don't know if you've seen some of the stuff on GLP-1s and its addiction, its addictive capacity. Yeah, of the stuff on glp-1s and its addiction.

Speaker 2: 53:01

You know it's addictive capacity, yep and um, and I think, I think and I'm actually looking it up as we talk, uh, that glp-1 is acting on the benula as well it has like that, that there's just if it's like first principles right, if, if depression, anxiety are controlled by hebenula that's the latest thinking and if GLP-1 lowers depression and anxiety, it has to be going through Hebenula, at least in part. But my guess is that it's major because it's a daughter molecule to oxytocin.

Speaker 1: 53:33

Yeah, it's really interesting, right. Yeah, it's really interesting right when you think most people are going to be taking GLP-1s because they want to reduce their hunger, but it's having an impact on these sort of core places that are driving soothing behavior in the first place, partly because of this action, and so you know, I work a lot with the GLP-1s as well because of the weight loss world. So, yeah, it's really interesting that you bring this up and it's important. You and I have like minds right Once you find these. You don't always find this, by the way, but sometimes in medicine you find a new mechanism where you go, oh, this unlocks a lot not everything, but it unlocks a lot. And this habenula mechanism that you're describing really opens up an area that I think has blinded us to effective treatments.

Speaker 1: 54:25

What I love about what you're doing is that you know you're essentially educating people on this mechanism and then the behavioral responses, this iterative sort of way of behaving. That is core. But I love this idea that you're talking about, about using some of these compounds, perhaps, and certain techniques that can open up this window of time where this iterative process can be downloaded better, let's say, than previously. And certainly this is what I see when I run certain of my events. You'll see that people will come to the event. They'll be sort of in this heightened state World has changed. But unless they get into this different style, a lot of them won't opt for sort of the follow-up, integration and coaching, and those individuals miss out on this window. I've just never put it that way. I absolutely love that.

Speaker 1: 55:17

So I want to just say thank you so much, dr Kyra, for your time. First of all, thank you for your work. It's my belief that it's individuals like you, practitioners like you, that are able to translate the science for the public, and I think this is you, being an MD and a master's in public health, that puts you in a unique position to take this complex science and teach it to all of us. So I just want to say thank you so much for your work and taking the time.

Speaker 1: 55:45

I know doing a book, you know, is not an easy thing. I've done eight of them now and it's never easy and they don't make you rich. People think that that's what's going to happen, but it's usually just to help people with these sort of new insights. But it's usually just to help people with these sort of new insights. So deep respect and deep gratitude for you, my friend, for this work. Is there anything that you want? Final thoughts that you want to give us before we go? And then I want to make sure people know where to get the book and know where to find out more about you.

Speaker 2: 56:17

Yeah, I think that you know. To me, this is the most significant finding in my career, in all of behavior change. Pursuing this for so long, it's the Holy Grail to me, and what it means is that failure and mitigating and neutralizing failure becomes our top priority for being able to restore our faculties, and I believe that people can change themselves if they know about this and stop tripping over it 100%.

Speaker 1: 56:48

I agree. The book for everybody is the Unstoppable Brain. It's subtitled the New Neuroscience that frees us from failure, eases our stress and creates lasting change. You all just got a little bit of a snippet right here. You can learn more about Dr Kyra at drkyrababanettecom and you can also get that quiz there as well. And I know you said you are on social media as well. What's your handle on social media if people want to go there and check you out?

Speaker 2: 57:18

I think it's at Dr Kyra Bobinette on.

Speaker 1: 57:21

Instagram? Yeah, I believe it is too. I just followed you. Dr Kyra and I were talking before we all came on with you and we both kind of love and don't necessarily always love social media. That's a whole other thing about what that's doing to our habanula, but that's a whole other discussion.

Speaker 2: 57:41

There's studies on that.

Speaker 1: 57:43

Yeah, there's studies on that, so maybe we have to have you back on, but I just again my gratitude. Thank you for your work. I'm looking forward to reading the study or studies when they come out. I've gotten your book on Audible, which I'm going to be listening to, and I so appreciate you. Just do me a favor, kyra, stay on the line. I just want to make sure this uploads. But for all of you, thank you so much for being here and I hope you learned something. We'll see you at the next show.