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And we so too often talk on this show about understanding what you want, what motivates you, what are you driving towards, what's your purpose... Not so much just purpose, but what is your core motivation? "What are you optimizing for?" is what we say a lot. And I think that's what people miss - that awareness. |
\[12:19\] And what comes with that is understanding who you are, what you wanna be, and I suppose - to use back your words - who you can surround yourself with or the environment you can put yourself in to get there. And that's what that space is. Pinch and zoom. |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** I love that. I've never used that before, and that's why we're in conversation right now. Pinch and zoom. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So much comes from conversation. |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** That might be the title of my next book, Pinch and Zoom. People are like "What's that?!" I'll give you credit for it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I love it. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** But some of this way in which our brain can have flexibility, but structure... Because one thing that stood out to me was about stress, and how stress affects our response. So if I can't calm my brain down, I'm gonna see that really small square view, and I can't then zoom out to see the broad... |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** Yeah, what would happen -- so Adam mentioned the What, in some way, and the Who, almost. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah. |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** And I think an important thing -- and prior to us getting on here, Mireille, we talked about this idea of the Why... We have these thing that we know; everyone who's listening here sometimes knows what's needed in their life to be more balanced, to be more grounded, to walk their days with mo... |
But then the question is, if I'm gonna employ these things, these things of caring about myself more, of being more skillful, why am I doing it? And to ask ourselves that question, to pause long enough and say "You know what, I need to take some time to think about --" I always think about this in response to, by the w... |
But the question is Why? Why do I wanna employ these methods? Because otherwise, the brain is not gonna have a reason to actually do those things. If we're gonna talk about mindfulness and meditation, you saw for the past ten years all over every magazine - Time Magazine, Newsweek, all of these; it's been all over ever... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I think we accepted default. And the default is to autopilot. It's not to dig deep or to understand myself or self-care... We almost need permission for those things. And I think we need educated individuals like you and Mireille, which I'm so thankful. I am not educated, I don't have a Ph.D. after ... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[16:20\] It's interesting, Elisha, because I think about what you said and the default mode... So I'm gonna out my spouse here. My husband grew up sort of a car guy, and is so frustrated by all of the technology, with self-driving cars, and the less that people do to move and maneuver a vehic... |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** Oh, I grew up on them my whole life, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** A vehicle manual, yeah. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Right? And he talks about the different feel that cars have as based on how they shift and how you move them... And there's this sense of power, or agency around "I influence my outside world by what I'm doing or how I'm responding." And that seems like an important aspect of mitigating or man... |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** Yeah, you need to have the awareness... You know, he has the awareness - because he has to - with the manual model of his car. We have to have the awareness to do that, or else, as Adam is saying, we just go to that. And the interesting about the default mode, speaking of brain science, is th... |
Another example is if you're really, it's the most delicious meal on the planet and you're really tasting that food, it's like your favorite thing in the world, how often are you worrying at the same time? Not very much. So when one is up, the other is down. And there's a whole lot of science around that which shows th... |
Basically, all science does is it usually backs up the things we already know, but it's a window for us because we're a culture that believes in science, so it's like "Oh, yeah. Okay, good. That must be true, because that shows me things I already know. Yeah, I love that." |
That's important, because our default mode can get us in trouble... Because the default mode, just to kind of point this out - the default mode to stress is to start projecting, our mind starts projecting into the future to see about what are all the worst-case scenarios that might happen... Or it reaches back into the... |
So we either get caught feeling this negative thing from the past, or this anticipatory anxiety about the future... And what we really need to do noting the neuroscience is take a moment and very practically - now that we know this, we wanna lower the volume on the default network in that moment to help ourselves with ... |
So we wanna open those parts of our body, take a couple deep breaths, and then ask ourselves -- because now we're in that space between stimulus and response that we've been talking about; we're at that choice point... "What's most important for me to pay attention to right now? Is it this social media that I'm on righ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[20:23\] Yeah. It's interesting what should I be paying attention to, because that next moment you could be stressed out... And I've had this actually happen and I had a similar scenario, where it was like three o'clock in the afternoon and I'm like "I need to be productive, but I just can't right ... |
So for me, that day I was like "What do i need to pay attention to right now? Myself." And so too often do we not put that in the equation. Myself. Self-care. Take a shower. |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** Yeah, I think what's interesting - that ability to stop and slow to ask yourself the question is super-important. In some of Adam and my earlier conversations -- I think the children's movie is Over the Hedge... It makes me think of the scene where -- you know, when we're stressed, we might be... |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** Yeah, there's two things there. One is that we've been trained by our culture to think self-care is a waste of time and indulgent, because we have to be productive. You might have listeners from around the world, but the United States has certainly been brought up from the beginning of its in... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I said I didn't need the shower. I didn't need the shower. |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** I know, I know. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I'm just kidding. I feel you though, I understand. |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** But what that does is it balances our nervous system and brings blood flow to the front of our brain again, and allows us to then have more perspective and energy to focus on what matters; so we'll make less mistakes typically, we'll inevitably get more done... It seems so counter-intuitive, ... |
**Mireille Reece, PsyD:** \[24:13\] I think you spoke to this a little bit earlier, but talking about a little bit of the way in which we've been conditioned... So the way in which our biases show up, or we sort of go "Hey, this is stressful, let me go draw back from what has happened", or infer onto the future some so... |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** Yeah, but the number one way we try and avoid any situation is to think more about it. I'll get in front of a crowd of like a thousand people and I'll talk about "What's the number one way we try to avoid things in life?" People say "We sleep too much, we eat too much, we drink too much..." B... |
So its number one imperative is to help you survive, so it goes into the future and the past to do that, and it pulls us. That's why this idea of stepping into that space between stimulus and response - which by the way, is just like a muscle... Again, we were talking about that procedural memory earlier, and it's a pr... |
Another way of understanding this is our brain uses short-term memory also as a reference point to make decisions, and have perception... I mean, if you had a really hard moment and then you walked down the street and you saw someone walking towards you and you smile and wave, and they just looked at you and walked dow... |
So if you are working out, you're doing mental fitness let's say, you're taking time to connect with your body, take a deep breath, maybe do a short meditation to kind of just train your brain to be here, then that's putting those memories in your short-term memory. So what's happening is a difficult event happens, a s... |
So everybody who's listening to this right now, everyone can do this. Everyone can practice being more present and aware in their lives just in the little moments. You'll build up those short-term memories and you're way more likely to be aligned with the person you're wanting to see in this world, because you've just ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[28:09\] So we have this default then, you'd mentioned. It seems like we really have to fight for our prefrontal cortex to get the blood and do the work. It's a constant fight to not fall back into the default. But then we're also driven, I suppose, to some degree, towards negativity bias, because ... |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** You're comfortable in it. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I only know chaos. I can only really enjoy life in chaos, so I must thrive and drive towards chaos. |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** There's something interesting about that, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I don't understand it, but we have to fight for that prefrontal cortex -- it's like a wake-up call. |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** Well, there's some adrenaline in chaos. There's some adrenaline in seeing the twin towers get crashed into; that this many people have the infection rate in this place, or something like that. And there's something kind of scary and exciting about it at the same time to the nervous system. No... |
So that negativity bias that you're talking about, which I'm assuming your audience knows about because you mentioned it, is something that is also stimulating to our nervous systems, as much as we might have this kind of push-pull with it. So we're almost like addicted to it at this point, and that's why we're also so... |
I'll tell you, sitting down and paying attention to the breath for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes is not that stimulating. And maybe it's more what we need, because we've gotta really work with that stimulation factor. It could be quite boring maybe... So we have to create fitness in our brain. We have to do some m... |
And then what we did is refined the sugar and put it in everything that we could possibly see; we put it in everything, just to get people to wanna buy our foods. So now we're addicted to sugar. So it's the same thing, we're addicted to stimulation. And I'll tell you, the smartphone hasn't helped with that for a second... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Where does mind training begin then? It's easy to say that because you've studied this, but for those who haven't read your books yet - hopefully they might - or taken a course or a workshop, where do you begin to train your mind? Is it simply being present and aware, kind of connecting to the here ... |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** It's a good question. It's funny, just harkening back to the slowdown thing - because I think this is a really good initial thing to do... And I created this course called "21 days to ease anxiety naturally", and the very first lesson in that course is about slowing down. So slowing down migh... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Bake it in, yeah. |
**Elisha Goldstein, PhD:** \[31:57\] "I'm not gonna take any extra time. Save me time, save me money etc." So it's not gonna take any extra time. So all we're doing is we're saying "Slightly slow down in the things that you're doing." Everyone who's listening to this can practice this today. What happens is your body i... |
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