Neuroplasticity rocks - a podcast by Rich Lister

This week I'd like to talk to you about neuroplasticity. It is a real word. It's actually a thing, it's not something I've made up. And this neuroplasticity term, this concept is one that is relatively new. It's your brain's way to reorganize itself through the environment, behaviour, thinking, emotions, all of that stuff stored in your brains, and how it reorganizes itself to optimize your mind and body for processing whatever's going on around you. And this happens throughout your entire life. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes completely passively, but all through your life you're growing this neuroplasticity, sometimes in certain ways, sometimes in really narrow ways.

It used to be thought that your brain, once your brain was formed it was a done deal. This is what your brain did. This is how you function. This is how you did. Can't teach old dogs new tricks is based on this thought that your brain is static. We now know, thanks to this guy called Norman Dodge who was from the University of Toronto, he did loads of research into the therapeutic potential of neuroplasticity. And because of him, we know that the brain is in fact plastic. Plastic means that it can be changed and adapted and moulded into what it needs to. It's really useful to know that, especially if you're dealing with things with a medical head on. So we know that our brains can adapt to things like strokes, Parkinson's, autism, and adapt around those limits to create an experience that is as unaffected as possible by these conditions that can have interesting effects on our world.

Knowing that your brains are plastic and can evolve and adapt is really useful to know, because that means you're not stuck in one behavioural style. You're not stuck in one way of reacting, processing, or doing anything about anything with your brain. So you're not stuck in just doing the same thing all the time. You're not just going to sit behind a computer all day and press keys in Excel spreadsheets. You can do anything you want.

To rewire your brain, the only thing you need to do is change your behaviour. That's how you reprogram your brain. In a computer you type lines of code into it, with a dog, with yourself, it's rewiring your brain by your behaviour. Doing lots of micro actions to break your bad habits and to reinforce the ones that you want to be successful in. This all happens in two parts of your brain, the hippocampus, which isn't actually hippo, it's a little bit at the bottom of your brain, and that's all to do with long-term memory and spatial memory. And the cerebellum, which is all the coordination and muscle memory. So, if you put your hands in your fire and you burn your fingers, and you jerk your hand back, that's muscle memory.

When you play sport for a long time, you see it lots in sports people, that if you throw a football at them, they will instantly respond to it, how they've been trained to do it. Whether it's holding it, stuck it under their arm if you're American footballers. If you're a soccer player, they let it bounce off their chest, down to their feet without even thinking about it. Basketball players as well, soon as they get the ball thrown at them, they [inaudible 00:03:58] it, and straight away their brain's going to look around, see where the ball going, see where the threats are. Really, really powerful way to have training behaviors is by doing this muscle memory, but we do it a lot with sports and things like that.

So these four parts of the brain are responsible for your memory. The hippocampus and the cerebellum being the two regions with the highest amount of neurogenesis that goes on there. This is where the nerves are created, neurogenesis. Another good word, only worth 11 points in Scrabble, but still pretty good. And that'd be 13 points. The reason these regions of your brain are so important for your neuroplasticity is because they have loads of these things called granule cell neurons, which are what creates the massive amount of neurogenesis, means there's potential there to grow really well. It's like having a grow bag for your tomatoes, one full of sand, one's full of specially formulated soil for tomatoes. You know where your tomatoes are going to grow best in the tomato soil, where your brain cells going to grow best in your brain full of these granule cell neurons.

So this is really interesting to see because you've got lots of these granule cell neurons available, then you can have lots of neuroplasticity available to you and you can make new neurons easily. How do you make these granule cells, well you need to practice having the need for them, because your body doesn't do anything without a need. If it needs something, it'll make something. That's how it works.

So there's a study done on London cabbies and guys who drove the big red buses, you've seen them all, the black cabs go everywhere, all the big red buses that you see all over London. Buses tend to run the same route day in, day out. Cabbies go all over the place. So cab drivers when studied, showed that their brains have bigger hippocampus then the bus drivers, because the cabbies spend more time having to use their spatial memory to get around and work out where they're going. So they've got higher neuroplasticity because they're having to adapt constantly to everything around them. Bus drivers also have a relatively large hippocampus because they're having to look out for the people that walk out in front of them and drive past them at silly angles and stuff and cabbies have slightly bigger, which is really interesting to see.

So to help you grow your hippocampus and cerebellum, to make sure that you're having really good neurogenesis, so can be really good with your neuroplasticity. The first place is start by having lots of new experiences. By sticking to the same routine day in, day out, you don't have to grow any new cells. You can literally function like a robot and you're more than a robot, you're a human being, unless you are a robot. But anyway, if you're a human being, you are looking for new experiences and they don't have to be massive ground-breaking ones. They can be taking a different route to work. They can be going out somewhere different for lunch. They can be taking up a new hobby or lifting a different set of weights at the gym. Doing something slightly different day in, day out, that changes constantly, is what will build a more responsive and more resilient brain.

Finding clarity is a really powerful tool for sorting out your brain and making sure it's got really good neuroplasticity, is making sure you're calm. And finding clarity isn't just in the moment. I like working in the moment because that's where a lot of my training is and I work like working with the ABC method. Your airway good? Can you breathe? Is your breathing good? So can you breathe in and out through your nose? Nice long, four seconds in, four seconds out. That means your unconscious mind and your programming knows you can be alive for another three minutes without any more oxygen. We know that three minutes without oxygen kills you, three days without water kills you, three weeks, three months without food kills you. And by making sure those three needs are met, your unconscious mind straight away, "Okay, now I can work out what else is going on."

So finding clarity through the need to maybe make yourself calm by making sure your breathing is nice and clear. Slightly harder in Australia and that's why there'd be quite lot of stress out there in the next few months because there's so much smoke and yuck in the air. Making sure you can breathe clearly, making sure you've got water. So having a water bottle around is really useful, not just to make sure you're hydrated, hydration rocks, but also to sure your unconscious mind realizes that there's water nearby. And make sure you eat every day as well. Skipping days of meals is never good and making sure that you are eating in a coherent fashion that's not going to mess with your body. Those are three really powerful tools to make sure your body starts to be calm and your mind starts to be calm and then you can start looking at clarity and how you build clarity into your future.

Looking at where your passions are, looking at what your challenges are, where your strengths are, what you're most proud of, things you value most in the world, what goals you want to achieve and how you want to achieve them, when you want to achieve them. What your values and where do they sit, those and you around you, what things define you and all these different things that ... I'll put a worksheet up, it would be very useful, honest, for all this sort of stuff. And then once you've got these ideas of what is important to you and how you can find clarity through them, then you know how you're going to angle your life and you can work towards a goal. Goals are super important because without a goal we just exist. We're designed to have a goal, be that goal surviving to the end of the day because the saber tooth tiger is going to eat me, or is that goal hunting and killing the Brontosaurus so we've got something to eat.

This all works on a very deep neurological layer that's oldest old, so we need to make sure we have a goal. Yes, there's not a lot of Tyrannosaurus Rex's to go out hunting at the moment, but we can look at goals on, okay, I want to make sure that I'm earning X amount of money by 2022 or I want to be making sure that I'm living in LA by 2023. Buy a new house or I've got a meaningful relationship or I've proposed to my partner or whatever it is that your goal in life is, make sure that you have it in a clear, concise way that you can achieve it, not just pie in the sky, oh yeah, yeah, I'm going to earn $10 million next year. No, how are you going to achieve this $10 million? But if you know how to do it, then you can action on it.

If you can see a path from A to B then that's it. Brilliant. If you can't see a path, if the path is nebulous and not formed, then your unconscious mind is not going to be able we to grasp hold of it. It's like trying to find a Unicorn. You're never going to be able to hunt a unicorn, even less likely than you are going to be able to hunt a Tyrannosaurs, if you don't know how to hunt, Tyrannosaurs Rex or the Unicorn. So having a clear path on where you're going to get your goal is really, really powerful.

So, I've talked about how to set a goal and get clarity with your breath and your food and your water, putting yourself into positions where you can grow new neural pathways is cool because when you grow new neural pathways, your body starts to get excited and when I say body, I mean all of your anatomy and we'll dump the good hormones onto you, the ones you want to get. The dopamines, the oxytocin, the endorphins, the serotonin, they get produced more and taken up in the right ways so you can actually start to feel good about yourself. So some really good ways to increase your neurogenesis and therefore increasing these good releasing of hormones is by making sure you're in a community.

Whatever your community is for you, it could be a World of Warcraft guild. It could be hanging out with your mates in the pub. It can be your family, it can be paintballing at the weekend with strangers. Whatever your community is, make sure it's important to you and it works for you. Because we are wired to be social creatures. We're not wired to be sitting in a small dark room watching Netflix all the time. We need to go outside and we need to meet other people. Whatever it is for you that feels safe for you, go and do that, but do it with other people. By trusting people, by being around people, our minds grow new neurons. Our brains grow new neurons so we can process more information so we can be more responsive to different situations. And by doing that, dopamine gets released, serotonin is released, newer epinephrine gets taken in, so we don't have as much of that stress hormone going on. So all of this stuff is really good by being social and around people.

The next thing, doing things that challenge you, that encourage your growth, be it volunteering, be it rock climbing, something that pushes you out of your normal routine that's a challenge, is really good. Be it whatever it is that is a challenge to you. If you don't like getting on a bus, try getting on a bus. If you don't do any exercise and actually walking for five minutes every day is a challenge for you, get up, do that five minute walk and by the end of the week you'll be doing eight minutes and then you'll know there's an improvement and your body will improve, your mind will improve, your energy will improve. And those hormones that make you feel good will be dispensed by your brain because that's what it's programmed to do. And looking at, oh sorry, I covered the next one in the previous one.

Giving back, volunteering, giving value to those in your community, whatever your community is, that really, really helps. Again, build that community. Part of your nervous system and those neuro pathways will be generated and neurogenesis will happen and because there's more nerve cells, there's more processing power. Your neuro plasticity is more available to you when you need it.

Last one is health. Health, your diet, your exercise, as well as your mental and emotional health is really important for making sure your neurons are firing correctly. If you want to make sure you're growing neurons, eating extra spinach always helps, that magnesium and folate is really what neurons are grown with. It's not the stuff but spinach is easy and it's got a Popeye metaphor that I was trying to work in somewhere. I haven't quite worked out how to do that yet.

Exercise by moving your body. If it's lifting weights in the gym, if it's running a marathon or five K or whatever it is that you do for exercise, your body generates more of the good hormones, more growth hormone, more of the hormones that you need. Be it testosterone, estrogen, progesterone, whatever. Which means your body is more relaxed, even though it's stressed acutely, it's stressed acutely in ways it's designed to be stressed. So you get the release of the hormones that increases your mood, increases your focus, and makes you feel better about human beings in the world in general and yourself. So the better you eat, the more exercise you do, it will also improve your mental and emotional health because those things, your bodies are programmed to do stuff. And as you hit those growth markers, your goals, your community, whatever it is you've chosen to involve yourself with, then you start to feel better in the world.

And this is all not to be done in one big fell swoop was because it's new year, new you January, sod that, it's taking in tiny, tiny, tiny micro steps. I don't expect you to suddenly sign up to ballroom dancing, go and hang in a room with 50 other people, I expect maybe reach out, send an email, give him a text, whatever, so you start moving towards that and make sure you action those things to reach your goals, to build the community that you want, to build the experience you want for your body and mind. So take these little steps and because you're taking little steps, you'll be having little actions, micro actions, and you'll be having micro victories and micro victories are where the wins are.

But you're not going to be all of a sudden doing all the things straight away, that's not how the life works. But you will find that incrementally, you're having tiny, tiny little micro victories and these micro victories will build these neurons or have this neurogenesis happening around them. So you're more likely to have these victories happen again because you're programming yourself by being successful in tiny ways, to be successful in big ways. Because the more you look after the little things in your world, the more easy the big things to look after because all the big things are, are lots of little things.

The more successful you are with your micro victories, the more successful you will be with your macro victories and the macro victories won't necessarily be a macro victory, there'll be a micro victory that just happens after another thousand micro victories and you will be succeeding in where you need to be because you've taken the time to train your brain in the ways it needs to be trained to build the neurons, to have the neurogenesis going on, to have the neuroplasticity to adapt to the situations you are in so you can find your micro victories within those situations.

By making sure you are living in as much now as possible is really important for your brain to be having positive neurogenesis. Because if we started to worry about, oh my God, last week I went to gym five times and followed the routine and this week he's got me swimming and running and on the cross trainer and I haven't lifted a dead lift this week and blah, blah, blah, blah or worrying about not hitting got your bicep growth goals or whatever it is you're worried about, then your brain isn't focusing its attention on what it can actually change right now. If you're getting anxiety about not following the routine to get the goals you want from the gym, follow the routine to get the goals you want from the gym and change something else in your life. Because if you're having anxiety about it, you're moving yourself away from the present so you're starting to worry about stuff you don't really have influence over because you can't change the future. You can only change the right now.

So if you're worried that you're not hitting your goals in the gym because you're not doing the workout, because I've told you something different, go and hit the goals in the gym so you get the goals met you want, that's a really good goal. Go and do that. And that way you take the anxiety off yourself and you can focus on actually doing a good lift opposed to worrying about that, but I'm not doing the lift. So focus on the things you can control in the right now and learn from the things in the past that have wound you up or you think you could do better, so you know not to do them again if you do them. If you do do them again, do them badly again differently, so you learn something else.

It's all about learning, that's what mistakes are made for. So you learn how not to do them again and that's how everything works. Mistakes happen. This is how humanity learns. We make mistakes, we learn from mistakes. The foolish thing comes that if you exhibit foolish behavior by not learning from a mistake, then they're going to keep happening and you're still going to have the same problem. So learn from any mistakes you've made, any miss spoken words, anything that you feel cringy about, see where the fault was with yourself. It must be a fault with you that you're feeling cringy about it. See where you learn not to do that and accept that you won't do that again. Forgive yourself for it. Move on. Easier said than done. Practice it. It's all practice. The more you practice it, the more you grow those cells, grow those neurons, that neurogenesis grows in your brain and you become a more and more powerful practitioner of you.

 

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