Technology
Unlocking Self-Reinvention: Exploring the Power of Neurohacking
In this episode of the Emotions Mentor Podcast, host Rebecca Hincey delves into the transformative concept of neurohacking, exploring how deliberate modifications to brain function can enhance cogniti...
Unlocking Self-Reinvention: Exploring the Power of Neurohacking
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Hello, and welcome to the Emotions Mentor Podcast. I'm your host, Rebecca Hincey. We are full on in a month talking about neurohacking. If you're not familiar with neurohacking, it's a term that's often used to describe the deliberate modification of brain function. So if you're thinking about our human brain, it has neuroplasticity, and you may have heard that term before if you've listened to our podcast regularly. What that means is our brain has the ability to change. It holds a lot of ability for flexibility. When we look at the brain, we have neurons, and at the end of our neurons, and there's billions of them literally inside our brain, and at the end of them are axon potentials that shift and connect. Neural pathways are formed when there's flexibility between the connections between these neurons. The space in between the neurons is called the synaptic junction, and that synapses shifts and ebbs and flows. And so what that really means to you and to me is that we are not hardwired. We may feel like, oh, I have a family history of anxiety or depression, or I have trouble learning, or maybe in my early childhood, someone projected a role that I needed to play in my life or describe me as being emotional, or I learned that about myself and believed that based off of someone else's perception, or I just believed it about myself, and everyone picked that up for me and reinforced that perception. And therefore, the neurons in my brain are kind of responding to that. So there's a lot going on that defines who we are as humans. And certainly our brain plays a major role. So this idea that we can deliberately modify brain function, that we can make changes in the brain, whether we're looking to do it structurally because maybe we've had a stroke, maybe we are struggling with learning issues because that is a biological factor, or maybe it's an emotional factor. Maybe we feel we have depression or anxiety or a mental health diagnosis that has left regions of our brain struggling, all of it has the potential to shift. And that's the exciting part about neuroplasticity. So what are we going to talk about with neurohacking in this podcast? So I. I want to walk away from this podcast having gone over some very specific and neurohacks that you can apply in your life for specific reasons. I want to talk, though, before we jump into all of that, a bit about the different ways in which neurohacking can help you so think about cognitive enhancement. So neurohacking does offer you the potential to improve how your brain works as a whole. That's what cognition is. Cognition is your. Your memory, your focus, your creativity, just how your brain is actually working. And so neurohacking can help you with that. And in this podcast, I want to talk specifically about memory and focus. I also want to talk about emotional regulation. So neuro neurohacking methods can help you to manage your emotions and help you to reduce stress. And so we're going to talk a bit about that today, too. Behavioral modifications can also be impacted through neurohacking. That means you have a chance to show up differently. In fact, I love the idea that you don't have to be the person that you were yesterday. So if you don't like parts about yourself, if you don't like the way you're showing up, if you don't like the roles you're in, this happens. And it doesn't mean we. We don't like ourselves. We want to love who we are innately. So sometimes we don't show up as our best self. I mean, let's be honest, I sometimes don't show up in the way that I want to show up. So I'm sure you may feel the same way. There may be days or times when you're in a situation and you feel a little awkward and you think, oh, I shouldn't said it that way, or wish I hadn't done it that way. I want to invite you into the idea that you can love yourself and still ebb and tweak and change how you show up and be a better version of yourself each and every time. And neurohacking can help you with that type of behavior modification so you can be honest with yourself about how you're showing up and then think about how you want to refine that. Think of your life for a minute as a performance. If you were, let's say, an Olympic skater and you're trying to show up and do your very best performance here in life. I don't want you to feel like you have to be perfectionistic in any way, But I know there's so much joy that comes when we can just show up in a way that feels really good and natural to us. But sometimes we don't even know what we're capable of. We don't know who we are, we don't know what that looks like or how we want to show up. And neurohacking can help us to get into our brain and kind of unwire those old habits of showing up in the way that we didn't want to and shift into a new possibility. So I love that idea of behavior modification and personal growth is all a part of that. Just empowerment is part of neurohacking, the feeling of being empowered because I'm using these tools. So be sure after this podcast to apply the things that we're going to talk about today. And just remember that as you use these tools, you are applying this neuroplasticity tool and that helps you to capitalize overall on your brain's functionality. So if you're using these tools and you are seeing shifts and changes in your brain, and the more you use them, the more your brain realizes, oh, I can do more, I can stretch more, I can grow more, I can be my best brain. And it's possible it's going to be add to the overall health of your brain. So I really hope you'll take the conversation this month as we talk about neurohacking. I hope you'll take it seriously. Ultimately, what we're looking for is personal transformation. And as you're moving through this journey of living your best life, feeling your best emotionally and physically, working with your brain and helping your brain to process better, hopefully that's what you're experiencing and that's what we want for you at the Emotions Mentor Center. So let's get into some practical tools for neurohacking. So some of these I want to give credit to Dr. Lynn Dowski, who is an award winning neuroscientist who I've learned from. She's the director of the Australian Society for Medical Research. And so some of her research is fabulous and actually I would say all of her research is fabulous and, and I love what I've learned from her and some of the tools that she has taught we're going to share in this podcast today. We're also going to share some other professional tips and tools too. So let's dive in. We all nowadays probably are looking to to increase the ability to focus. I know that's a common conversation and with the introduction of social media and the distraction brings into our life, strengthening the regions of the brain where we need to focus is an important conversation to have. Our human brain is changing over time. I'm not talking about mine personally, I'm talking about all of our brain. So research is showing that our human brain is changing as humans and we are seeing less of an ability to focus. So one of the neurohacks I want to talk about first is the neural hack of taking a few minutes a day to increase the regions of the brain at that strength and focus and attention so that you can pay better attention to what you want to pay attention to in your life. So whether you're trying to learn, you're trying to improve cognition, as we've talked about, you're trying to just get through the day and focus on the tasks that you have at hand. These tools will work. So let's, let's let me tell you what you can do. So if you use your phone for more than an hour, you're likely to experience attention deficit. So I'm just going to say that again because I think we're all guilty of this. If you use your phone for more than an hour, you're likely to experience attention deficit. So this is directly from Dr. Lendowski and all of her research team and other research that's out there. So this is a scientific thing. And I'm gonna say it again. If you use your phone for more than an hour, you'll experience attention deficit. So you can see why the human brain is shrinking. What you can do to, to change that is that you can exercise. And we talk a lot about exercise on this podcast. It does so many things. But when we're talking about exercise here, we're not you to do crazy workouts. We're just saying 20 minutes. So 20 minutes has been shown to shift the brain back into being able to focus. And there's a neurochemical reason for that. There's lots of reasons that we could talk about why. But the, the what you need to know, the hack, the neurohack is to exercise. So if you are trying to get something done and you cannot seem to focus to save your life, then what you can do is stop and do 20 minutes of exercise. And that could be just a running, a light jog up and down the stairs in your office building. It could be going for a very brisk walk outside. You could go for a run, you could hop on your, on your bike, if you have a bike at home that you could ride some kind, you can put a YouTube video on of an exercise dance routine that you can run, which would even give some other benefits to regions of the brain because of the coordination factor. But 20 minutes of exercise will shift that. So great neurohack for getting Back into focus and attention. Another great neural hack. You can use the WIM HOF method of breathing, so you can Google that. The WIM HOF method. W I M H O f. There is a breathing method that I can describe to you here, and it's. It's very simple to use. If you go on YouTube, you'll be able to find it and you can practice it. But you breathe in through your nose and then out through your mouth, and you repeat it 30 times in a pretty rapid fashion. Not so rapid you can't breathe, but rapid enough that you start to stimulate regions of the brain that work for focus. So it sounds like something like this. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth, in through your nose, out through your mouth, and it's 30 times that you do this. Now at the very end, you hold your breath and count to 30, I believe, and then you breathe. Take a deep breath in, hold your breath for 15 seconds and repeat. So three rounds of 30. Now, this gets your brain to make all kinds of fun changes, and it doesn't take very long to do this. So if you don't have time for 20 minutes of exercise, you can try the WIM HOF method of breathing. And this can help you to focus. So remember, we're not just trying to focus so that we can get things done in the day. That is one of the things that you want to do it for. I know. Or maybe you can't. You've got to finish a paper, whatever it is. But remember, you're also working to increase attention in general, because paying attention to something is what strengthens the brain overall. So if you're into your brain health and you just want to have a healthy brain, practicing these regular exercises and limiting the amount of time you are on your phone doing your 20 minutes of exercise, doing a breathing exercise like the WIM HOF method, all of that can strengthen your brain's ability to pay attention, which overall increases your cognition and supports brain health. So I love that. Okay, let's talk about alertness for just a moment because it ties back to attention. And the neurohacks that we talked about for attention also work. So your exercising can help with alertness, and your WIM HOF breathing method can help with alertness. You may have noticed that if you are in fight or flight because you have some stress going on, you are going to have some more adrenaline flowing, and that is going to increase your level of alertness. But if you're using stress to keep you alert, you might find yourself with chronic stress and that causes brain damage that can cause problems with learning and memory. So that's not going to help you. A little bit of short term stress is fine, but long term stress is not. So pay attention to that. If you are finding yourself in long term stress, you want to reduce the amount of stress. And don't rely on that adrenaline to keep you alert because eventually the bottom is going to fall out of that, of the hat, as they say, and that's not going to work for you anymore. A lot of people use caffeine to help with learning, thinking that that's going to help with alertness. It actually does, so I'll throw that out there. However, it does come with some complications. So caffeine can wear and tear on the body and can cause jitteryness and can cause can cause other health problems. So you don't maybe always want to rely on caffeine for alertness. So what else can you do? You can do cold showers. So cold showers will also bring alertness. Obviously you can exercise and do your breathing exercises that we talked about, but you can notice when you are having natural stress during the day that is not chronic stress because we all experience a little bit of that. When you do have some stress happening, take note and then go try to learn something. Because anytime you have adrenaline from stress and you are trying to learn something or improve in a certain skill, that high amount of journal and can help you to learn and to remember things better. And that helps to increase your cognition as well. So it kind of all starts to flow together. And let me just kind of recap. With your first narrow hack, you're trying to increase focus and attention. You're wanting to look at exercising and the WIM HOF breathing exercises. You also want to get rid of distractions. I think I failed to mention that. But just get rid of distractions in general and just try to focus, do your best and then apply these neurohacks. And then when it comes to alertness, notice your natural flow of stress and then utilize the time right after stress when that natural adrenaline is moving to learn and strengthen cognition after. Right after an experience with stress. So just take, you know, awareness is more than half of the battle. You know what's going on in your body and you act upon that. And then remember, just exercise the WIM HOF breathing method. Those are so great for alertness as well. Sleep is such an important thing for your brain. It does reset our immune system and our metabolism. And when we sleep at night, we get rid of waste in the brain. It's critical for memory consolidation. So if we're trying to take short term memories and move them to long term memories, that happens in the night, there's memories that have that are built in the hippocampal region of our brain that's like a diary. And during the night when we sleep, that information gets transferred into different regions, but mainly the frontal cortex, where you can begin to start to use that information. If you're not having sleep happening, then you're not learning and your brain isn't going to be working well for you. So sleep becomes a neurohack in and of itself. Because when you prioritize, prioritize sleep, you're going to be able to have your brain working better overall. So if you're feeling a bit of a mess and you're listening to this podcast and you're thinking, oh, I've got to get myself together, let's just, just list down to some very basic things. You're getting rid of distractions, you're exercising for 20 minutes, you're noticing your stress and doing your studying or learning after stressful experiences. You're staying away from chronic stress, you're prioritizing sleep. What else can you do? So basically a neurohack for repetition is to repeat whatever it is that you're trying to do as much as you can. And the trick is to do it over a few days right after you learn it. So don't have too many breaks between learning. If you're practicing something, then keep working on that for the next few days. Don't think it's a one and done deal. We don't really remember and hang on to our learning if it's a one and done thing. So we don't generally study something or try to improve if we just practice at one time. That's why habits are key in just developing. Repetition is how we change ourselves over time. There's an exception to that, and that's when we have what's called one trial learning, which is where we have a mistake that we made or something that has a strong emotion around it. So if it was a scary experience or something that triggered fear or sadness or terror or whatever emotion around that and it was a learning experience, we lock those and we call them one trial learning, where you learn something immediately and it sticks and it happens that way because emotion is connected to that. So if you think for from an evolutionary perspective, humans were trying to survive, so obviously our brain was locking in anything that triggered emotion because anything that processes emotionally is the stronger part of what our brain will remember. That all has to do with the history of our fight or flight response and in our human nervous system. So neural hack for changing something about ourselves. Repetition, practice makes perfect. So maybe right now think of something that you want to practice that will be what you want to change inside yourself or the way you respond. Or I mean it can be anything. Maybe you're trying to learn the piano, you're learning a new language, maybe you're just learning a new response to the way you handle a situation with your child or with your partner or with a co worker. So think of what, whatever it is for you, whether it's something more physical or emotional, or whether it relates to relationships, whatever it is, think of practicing it. See yourself practicing a new response and do that for a few days until you start to lock in the learning. Now here's something interesting. Breaks are important. So where I'm talking about repetition, you need to be consistent with that. But breaks give our brain a chance to replay sequence of events. And so if you spend about 10 to 20 minutes of a quiet break without cell phones, obviously after practicing something, that newly encoded information can start to stabilize itself. And so when you're trying to learn something new or practice something new, it's good to learn over a period of about 90 minutes and then take a 10 to 20 minute break. But the key is to not get on your phone, to not do things, utilize the brain in that 10, 20 minutes. It has to truly be a break for the brain. Maybe you want exercise in that 10 to 20 minutes, something that's just going to give your brain just a minute. So it would be a light exercise or light movement. So practicing something new, taking breaks, all of this can be very helpful and then reinforcing over a period of, of three to four days when you're practicing something new. So let's, let's give a, an example for that. Let's say I want to practice the way I'm responding to someone I'm frustrated with. So maybe I sit and I think about how I have responded and how I don't like the way I've responded and how I might respond differently. That would feel more authentic to who I really am. And I see myself hear myself practice that response. Maybe I do it in my room, I role play. Maybe I am driving in the car and I take that time in the car to just practice how I'm going to respond in a way that works for me. And that practicing of reminding the brain what we're going to be doing and how we're going to respond and how we're going to see these situations, that repetition, that role playing that we do. I can keep working that within myself and I may do it for a little bit and then I take a 10, 20 minute break. I'm not going to continue to do that all the time. I'm going to take a break and then I'm going to come back to it. But I'm not going to do it just once. I'm going to do it over three, four days. I'm going to come back to it. And that is what is going to help to reinforce a new neural pathway, a new way to respond. Now, the same is going to be true if we're doing something physical. So let's say I'm learning a new song on the piano. I'm going to do my 90 minutes of practicing, take a 10 to 20 minute break and come back to it. And I'm going to practice it over the period, over a period of three or four days. That would be more effective than if I practice it once. I don't take a break, I'll go right onto my phone and I don't, don't come back to the piano for two weeks. That isn't going to have the impact on my brain and helping me to develop new neural pathways and grow and become better at what I'm doing and learn and become a better pianist. These are again, little neurohacks that will support you. I want to circle back to talking for a minute about mistakes, because mistakes are so important, that mistakes help us to learn so quickly, like I said, especially if emotion is attached to them. You can use your mistakes, though, to work for your good. So here's a really cool thing that Dr. Lynn Dowski teaches, and that is you can purposely make a mistake when you're trying to learn something. So let's say you're out on the soccer field and you are practicing kicking for a goal. And you want to get really good at kicking that goal, that ball into the goal. And you know that you're not really good at a certain type of a kick. So you do that kick on purpose. And you know you probably won't get it in because that's a new way. You're going to try this kick. But right after you make the mistake, when you kick, you go after the ball in a way that you know you can kick it right into the goal. And that is a strategic move for you because when you make the mistake, your brain kind of gets a little bit anxious. Think about how we feel when we make mistakes. We get a little bit of norepinephrine. We see that our. Our brain starts to release neuromodulators that improve, that improve, actually improve attention overall. Because mistakes, when we make them, our brain is trying to figure out, like, wait, wait, wait. It's all these alarms going off saying, we shouldn't have done that. And there are neurochemicals that trigger the. The focus regions of our brain when we do that. So when you correct and you do something where you know you're really good at it and you get it right, your brain does something else. It releases high levels of dopamine, which interact with the reward circuits in the brain. And that makes you feel good when you get it right. So if you do those two things back to back, you let the mistake happen, but you follow it up with something you do right that does something really interesting inside of our brain. It helps us to lock in or to hold experiences and strengthen neural connections overall. So embrace your mistakes, because you can do them in a way that would work for you. So that would be like back into practicing the piano. Let's say I'm playing a song that I know very well, and then I play a song I know I can't play very well. So there's going to be lots of mistakes. So the minute I experience that, I'm going to start feeling stress and the anxiety that those feelings that are going to come up that I got not getting this right. And then I replace those feelings immediately thereafter with playing something I play really well and I nail it. And I get it right. That flow of chemicals in the brain is strengthening brain function and helping me to lock in learning and memory as I play the piano. It's a neurohack. It's a neurohack. All these are neural hacks. It's hack. It's just like we think of hackers that get into our computer and change things. These are hacks that we do that change our brain. So I love it. I love that we can do this. I love that modern science is showing us that we can do this. And these are all things that you can apply. And these, like I said, are neurohogs that are listed as some in some of the best research in neuroscience. So enjoy these. Let me just recap. We want to exercise 20 minutes. We want to do that strategically, though. So when we're trying to learn, we're going to throw that exercise in there when we're trying to focus. We are going to look at the Wim Hof breathing exercises, we're going to prioritize sleep, we're going to repeat things and we're going to stay in that first few day range where we aren't going to just do it one and done. We're going to repeat it over two or three days until we kind of lock it in. Meanwhile, we're taking breaks of 10 to 20 minutes in our learning and we're being super strategic with our mistakes and warming up to it. And I guess the most important thing of this whole conversation circles back to you and what you do with this. You get to see yourself in your best light. Remember, you're out skating that Olympic award winning skating performance of the lifetime that makes you feel so good. That's the life you're in. And you can hack your way into experiencing the very best life for you. And that's why we're here at the Emotions Mentor Podcast to help you along your way. So join us next week for more on neurohacking. I'm Rebecca Hincey and we'll see you next time on the Emotions Mentor Podcast. Take care. Bye. Bye.