The Discomfort of Change Part 2

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Hello and welcome to humanising the podcast that allows you to understand how you've been programmed by both evolution and culture, so you can liberate any behaviour you choose and be who you would like to be. Today. I'm Ginny, I'm the map holder. I'd like to introduce Marhin. [00:00:22] Speaker B: Hello. [00:00:23] Speaker A: Marhin is the explorer, and together we will journey through this programming so you can understand through the questions you ask, and definitely the questions Mahin asks, how to liberate yourself and be the most amazing person that you choose to be. [00:00:49] Speaker B: I'd like to ask you about neuroplasticity. [00:00:51] Speaker A: What do you mean by that? [00:00:53] Speaker B: Well, what I understand it to be is a kind of programming that you can do to yourself where through repeated statements, sentences, possibly conscious programming, you. Heal is the word I'm using. Reprogram could be a more overarching word. I don't know if it's unconscious thoughts or conscious thoughts or negative thoughts, or just something that's going on that you want to be reprogrammed. So if you tell yourself you're something over and over again, and then you give yourself a reframe or a different phrase, and you sort of interject that thought with a different thought, and you keep sort of interjecting, you start to embed the new thought, and that new thought becomes the stronger thought eventually. And from a change perspective, from a personal change perspective, it can be an incredibly powerful tool if you are trying to, I don't know, undo trauma or, well, not undo trauma, but. [00:02:09] Speaker A: Okay, so neuroplasticity is the ability for the brain and the body to rewire a certain way of doing the thing is that takes absolutely zero account of how deep a program is, or whether it's actually something you've been taught or something that is part of being human said, you can't not be unconsciously biased. Doesn't matter how often you search yourself, right? So if you want to change or transform something again, it's. Where is it held? Is it a program? Is it an evolutionary program in my dna? Or is it something I've learnt in this lifetime? That's the first place you have to go. Then the other thing is that negates anything about the mind body connection. So a lot to do. That happened in your, we think it's in our heads, actually, in our bodies. So, for example, and this is, again, lots of stuff recently that's changed. So there is a significant amount of scientific evidence now that things that were serotonin antagonists for depression don't work. And that for ages, could you expand on that? They just proved not to work, because the latest research shows that most of the serotonin you need is made in your gut. So for most of the enlightenment period, from, say, the renaissance of our words, we have tried to divorce human beings from their environment and give them control over it. We've also tried to divorce your brain from your body. So you are a consciousness, right? No, you're not. You're interconnected system with this organic thing that you live within. [00:04:04] Speaker B: So the phrase you are what you. [00:04:06] Speaker A: Eat, oh, it's huge. And again, a lot of that's only becoming really scientific evidence recently. So the fact that your body is not designed to eat highly manufactured or highly processed food makes complete sense because. [00:04:23] Speaker B: It'S only just become available. Actually, we're meant to eat what nature provides. [00:04:27] Speaker A: Well, what's in. Yes. Or only processed in a limited way. So for example, canning or older before refrigeration, methods of storing food, whether that's things like pickling, like the kimchis or the sauerkrauts, which use natural bacterias. And again, Stuart, I'll be able to provide the data if we need this. But there was an experiment recently by this, most scientists would consider themselves what's called reductionist, as in you reduce it down to. It's called separate components, not system. Right? And this guy was, I think, approached by PepsiCo to do research into the fact that there's nothing wrong with highly processed foods because it actually contains the baseline constituents. So they set up two groups of people, properly managed, properly done for all their group things. So they were good to. And it's proper scientific study. And then they took two loads of food, one which would have been produced and homemade from actual baseline ingredients, and one which was highly processed, but they had exactly the same nutritional content. So from a reductionist perspective, your body should have handled those entire, both of those exactly the same. And results for the experiment were, no, he doesn't. And the guy who did the experiment was gobsmacked, right? Because if you're a reductionist, a protein is a protein, as a protein, no matter if it appears as in a tofu or chicken leg, or if it's a highly processed chicken nugget, it's protein. Apparently not. The way your body looks at it. [00:06:18] Speaker B: That makes sense to me. [00:06:19] Speaker A: What was really interesting is the group who had exactly the same nutritional content, exactly the same everything but highly processed, felt more hungry and put on more weight in the two week period than the other group. And then they swapped them and the reverse happened. So if they went, they lost weight on the unhighly processed, and the group who'd been on the unprocessed went on to the processed one and put on weight. [00:06:48] Speaker B: So we've got food as a phenomenally important source. We've talked previously about protein being incredibly vital for our brain. [00:06:55] Speaker A: But you asked about repeating words. [00:06:59] Speaker B: Yes. Neuroplasticity was sort of my. Well, I mean, I suppose it kind of sits in the place of how can we change our behaviors? How can we change our thoughts? [00:07:10] Speaker A: You have to understand what thought you're changing. And are you changing a thought that is dependent on a set of chemicals that have been released? Something it's a bit like. So for years and years and years, middle aged women were considered hysterical. So anyone who's going through perimenopause or menopause was considered hysterical and depression. All of those. You were put on huge amounts of antidepressants. In fact, some people were. Some poor women were sectioned and given electrotherapy. And those same women today have now been given hormone replacement and are fine. Right. So you might be trying to change a thought that has absolutely sod all to do with what you think. It can have a completely different basis. So, so. And we have been taught that, number one, everything I think is my fault. It's not. Could have a hormonal basis. Right. It could have a food basis gain. You're not eating the right foods. Your body doesn't produce enough serotonin. Who knew? So for me, it doesn't matter how hard you try to think yourself positive, you're never going to. [00:08:23] Speaker B: But this is such an important piece of knowledge, isn't it? [00:08:28] Speaker A: It is, because it's not all about you. It's not all your fault. It's not the fact that you don't try hard enough and it's actually giving. [00:08:37] Speaker B: Power to something that is. So that is a micro adjustment, if I could call it that, to look at your diet and your age, especially, this is with a heavy, heavy dose and your age. [00:08:51] Speaker A: Right? [00:08:52] Speaker B: Yeah. And look at your diet and consider whether what you are putting into your machine is going to yield the results that you want it to yield. Are you putting diesel into an unleaded engine in the most basic breakdown? [00:09:09] Speaker A: Totally. And that's really important because the first place you should look for where thoughts come from. Well, there are things you've been taught to think about yourself totally. But there are also, if you're perimenopausal, menopausal or even a man at that particular age whose testosterone is dropping off, you will feel more negative, have higher anxiety, and have a tendency to be depressed because basically over 90% of the things that happen in your brain depend on oestrogen and testosterone. So it has an impact on absolutely everything that happens. [00:09:45] Speaker B: Right. [00:09:45] Speaker A: That's not to say that how I think, as she says, looking down at her chest, that no one can see. The fact that I believe my boss is too big because I don't conform to a certain model of what I've been told. That's not depression. That thought about how I see myself is received. Someone then told, right. So they're very, very different. Some of the pure emotional disorders. You should start with how old you are and what you are eating. Again, my particular experience with anxiety, at one stage, I was so unbelievably anxious, I couldn't get in the car and drive. Someone gave me testosterone. It disappeared in 24 hours. Literally 24 hours. [00:10:32] Speaker B: It's amazing, isn't it? [00:10:34] Speaker A: It's not in my head. Again, as women and what's it. We've all been told it's in your head. [00:10:41] Speaker B: It's so frustrating. You can say to somebody, I don't feel okay, and they will write you a prescription for a thing versus ask you about your diet, your exercise, your sleep routine, your hydration levels. They won't go there. They won't maybe ask you about your home. [00:11:03] Speaker A: I don't think they've been taught. They've not been taught that medical model of medicine basically says, treat symptoms, not causes. [00:11:15] Speaker B: Right? And then you have what people would call holistic practitioners, which is, to me, just sounds like a human having a conversation with a human. And it's the same tick box. There just might be a few questions earlier. [00:11:30] Speaker A: It's. And the body stores. I mean, Dr. Garfield is better on this one than I am, but the body stores trauma in very different ways. It's not just what you say to yourself. It's where things appear and why they appear in those places. A friend of mine who had really, really chronic back condition, in fact, he often says this is the reason he ended up working for me, because during our conversations, it became apparent that this might not be a spiral issue or what's it, but attached to grief. And now he's worked really hard on emotional. In fact, he's a practitioner in that field, but that emotion causes pain in your body, and he can now run a marathon. Such an advocate. [00:12:28] Speaker B: So I've been doing some emotional freedom technique work for about two years. As somebody who's I work with someone to do it because I think it's really interesting how you can talk about something and then it sits somewhere in your body and you recognize that, like sometimes it's in your chest or sometimes it's somewhere else. And there's a physical response to recalling something good or bad doesn't always have to necessarily be negative. You could be telling a happy story and you can feel it bubling up somewhere. And that's just as important as everything else. And how, if it is something negative, the release of that kind of frees you a little bit from. Yes. [00:13:17] Speaker A: And there's also to give people different access to this sort of thing. You don't actually have to talk about it. Right. So there are practices such as Wim Hof breathing technique, which have been used with child soldiers very effectively. It's allowing the body to release stuff because it's actually held in the body as much as the mind. Right. Thoughts in the mind, usually. But it's this thing that you are a system. Let's go back to that again. We are a programmed, organic, carbon based. Organic is carbon, carbon system. Right. We just are. The more we realize we are a system and not a set of individual parts. Not just as an individual, but as a group of people. Things just happen better? [00:14:09] Speaker B: Well, everywhere we look, we are a bunch of parts. So whether it's the individual human, the groups that you're a part of, it's. [00:14:17] Speaker A: For me, this is system and system dynamics. So the system itself is programmed to behave in a specific way, which is all about competitive advantage. Your body is programmed in a specific way to behave and hold things or release things. And for me, we have lost so much of what we knew because we've been insistent in the past three or 400 years and then 5000, it's either a metaphorical being's fault or it's in your brain. [00:14:52] Speaker B: So in this episode, we are talking about the discomfort of change. And I think something I would like to explore for a few minutes is the physical discomfort of change. [00:15:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Well, and this is really interesting because if your body. Physical discomfort usually manifests as an emotion, right. Your body will feel something and you'll feel pain, and pain will make you upset and want to do something about it. Right. All this is, in the end, is this amazing system going problem here. I need to let your. Sometimes it doesn't let your consciousness know. Right? Because why should it? Sometimes it does. And that then is you feel something emotionally. You then have a thought and then do an action. But it's the fact that your body is an entire system, not a list of separate parts. [00:16:00] Speaker B: So if you get the shakes, that's usually adrenaline. Yeah, that would be described as discomfort. [00:16:09] Speaker A: Totally. But then you have to remember the shakes are also really positive. If you're really happy. Adrenaline is something that's released regardless if you're happy or sad, because your body is. It's the same thing. The way you think about it is you've been taught to think about it is different. [00:16:29] Speaker B: Okay? So whichever way it goes, you take a few deep breaths and you come down again. [00:16:35] Speaker A: But sometimes you might want that adjust. Who said that it was negative, right? You might want that feeling. We live in a complicated system. I mean, for heaven's sake, we don't even know why we sleep. We have very little knowledge of the mechanisms of falling asleep. We've no idea, really how the brain processes emotion. We don't know. [00:16:59] Speaker B: And if it processes it, sometimes it feels like emotion is body. [00:17:02] Speaker A: Exactly. [00:17:03] Speaker B: I cry. I need a hug or I cry, or I put my arms in the air, or I jump around, or I'm nervous and fidgety. That's all happening in my physical body, which is great. [00:17:17] Speaker A: But it's this bit that I go back to the difference of what we've been taught versus what we think or feel sometimes. And you know this because I wrote about this. It's the fact that we've been locked in an amphitheater in our own mind by the system that has told me that I am my own competition. Right. Yeah. Which is so not human. [00:17:42] Speaker B: Do you think people who are open to change are brave people? [00:17:48] Speaker A: Well, that means you have to take the pre context that change is scary. And that goes back to. That's what we've been taught. I'm being circular now, aren't I? But it's that. [00:18:00] Speaker B: No, I think it's important. I think it's important because there are definitely times in my life when I've probably avoided change because I have been frightened. [00:18:09] Speaker A: Yeah. You see, I will always. Interesting. Yeah. I would have said I've been remote change, but sometimes I've had change thrushed upon me and I didn't choose it, and it wasn't that bad after all. [00:18:25] Speaker B: Absolutely. Yeah. [00:18:28] Speaker A: So let's just get on with it. There are some things that can affect my way of acting and being in the world and how I earn money, which I found incredibly scary. But then you still do them. But we discussed this, I think has lots to do with people's internal ability to risk. There are people you would meet who? Well, I look at my parents, my grandparents. If my grandma hadn't been prepared to get off her ass and leave Czechoslovakia when she did, I wouldn't be here. [00:19:07] Speaker B: Right. [00:19:08] Speaker A: As huge risk, literally. She left or she was going to end up in a concentration camp. So she ran away. [00:19:16] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:19:17] Speaker A: And she actually said to me, you're genetically selected to survive. Get on with it. [00:19:24] Speaker B: Wow. [00:19:25] Speaker A: I love that. I did you cab and all right. She did say on another day, she said, you might have trail behind you on a toboggan, a truckload of shit, but you're still here. [00:19:42] Speaker B: Brilliant, isn't it? [00:19:43] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:19:44] Speaker B: But to go back to my earlier point or question, I can't remember what it was, but I would put that down to resilience and self trust. [00:19:52] Speaker A: Resilience is one of those words that bug me because it's a bit like psychological safety. People have suddenly seen. They've just bloody invented it. No. [00:20:02] Speaker B: How about self trust, then? How does that sit with you? No matter what comes at you, obviously, we're not talking about resilience always sounds. [00:20:12] Speaker A: I always think it's a very negative word. I'd say I was a highly resilient person, but I just am. [00:20:21] Speaker B: That's had nothing to do with how you've been raised. Not the story you've just told. [00:20:26] Speaker A: No, because my parents were absolutely, positively dreadful and my grandma had very little to do with that. That could be genetic. I suppose I get annoyed because it's one of these things that we seem to have just decided we've developed. So it's a bit like, let's have psychological safety and that's trust. Psychological to someone feels safe to something. They have to trust you or they have to trust the environment is not going to undermine them. Resilience is. But you could still be resilient and not be very happy. You could still be resilient just by, let's say, my grandma did and just get on with life. I don't know, I suppose I get pissed off with all of these suddenly new psychological. Pop psychology. This is pop psychology in my book. And I'm like, what do you really mean? What are you talking about? And are you just here to make money out of it? [00:21:23] Speaker B: And that's fine. I think everything is worth interrogating to ensure that there is. [00:21:28] Speaker A: I wouldn't interrogate it, would I? Here, I'm still asking why. Okay, what you're doing, why are you doing it? Are you just telling me that so you can make me feel shit and therefore make money out of me? And is resilience individual? Or is it held by the group? Because in the end, evolution only cares about group survival, not individual human beings, not you. [00:21:56] Speaker B: So maybe it's, maybe the discomfort of change is what could it be? [00:22:07] Speaker A: Feels uncomfortable. [00:22:12] Speaker B: But if you know that no matter what happens, ultimately you'll be okay. [00:22:18] Speaker A: That'S interesting because it depends what okay is. I mean, there are sometimes in my life I've not even known what okay was. I just moved a step forward. Exactly. Not dead yet. It's just good enough. [00:22:31] Speaker B: Right. [00:22:32] Speaker A: And the thing is, I also think it's a reasonable choice to make if people don't want to do that or don't want to move or decide to get off. What I hate is the fact that someone else tells someone what to do, what to think or how to behave, and they've done it so often that those people or that person doesn't know that. [00:22:54] Speaker B: What if you're telling yourself not to do it? What if you're the fear that's usually. [00:22:59] Speaker A: Learnt human beings as we've gone, don't fear learning, don't fear change, don't fear sub small children. You can take a small child and both its parents can die, right? It's bloody resilient wherever you put that child, in what environment it will survive, right? That's resilience. Unresilient behavior is learnt. Dependence on the state, dependence on the system is learnt. [00:23:25] Speaker B: Dependence on people. [00:23:29] Speaker A: No, we are dependent on people as human beings because we work in groups. But the fact that you don't feel responsible for your own health, you think the NHS is just there to make you better. No matter how awful you've been to your body, means that you believe that the state is here to make you better. [00:23:50] Speaker B: The discomfort of change is actually a. [00:23:53] Speaker A: Really big, oh, we could have a whole number of podcasts on this, literally a whole thing, because in the end, what we're talking about across this entire thing is a change in transformation, or evolution, and at the seat of that is being human. And the humans are the most resilient organism, as in lots of us. Together we've done evolution and change and transformation forever. In fact, the fact that homo sapiens became the most or the dominant species and then outlasted everything else of the hominoids is down to the fact that we're bloody brilliant at this stuff. Absolutely, yeah. Neanderthals, homofluorensis, none of them exist anymore. [00:24:45] Speaker B: Maybe this is going to be a series of episodes, maybe we are going to pull this apart a little bit. [00:24:49] Speaker A: And I'm more than happy going on this one, because this whole thing about why homo sapiens are not neanderthals is really recent, and it's a way of particularly looking at the fossil record, and it looks like the fact that neanderthals were far more creative than Homo sapiens, but. And individually, so. So every single arrowhead or thing they developed, you can see, looks slightly different from. It looks quite different from any other. And yet the homo sapien fossil record shows that they played around with something till they got it to the best it was and then kept that. Which is all about group. It's all about data, information being powered to everyone. It's all about knowledge sharing. It's all about we are everything we are together, which is what I consistently talk about and believe in, versus your individual knowledge is power to me, and you're my competition. It actually looks like now, right deep down in the fossil record, the reason homo sapiens became the most dominant species and then wiped out everyone else is because of that group behavior. And if it continues on that vein, then culture has to be an algorithm. [00:26:17] Speaker B: Ah, yeah, that makes sense. [00:26:21] Speaker A: Yeah. In fact, it's a french guy who did most of the research, and he's just published. His book's just been translated into English, and it's over there. It's sitting on the shelf there. It's a bloody dreadful, dreadful translation. But what he says is very interesting, and he's the foremost neanderthal scholar we have at the moment. But again, that's taking its stuff and looking at in a different way. So literally everything we look at is about change and transformation. How you think about yourself, why you don't want to do certain things, why you're challenged with certain stuff. Yeah. Anyway, I'm going circular. Sorry. [00:27:02] Speaker B: No, it's great, because I think this is, as we've just said, it's a big topic, and we might have a couple of episodes in this, because 40 minutes. [00:27:11] Speaker A: I think digging into this is really important because this is the art and the sounds of being human. Well, there's the thing. [00:27:19] Speaker B: Art. Yeah. [00:27:21] Speaker A: In the rationalist, reductionist era we've lived in, art has been dismissed as, I don't know, not serious. Got nothing to with it. Has, hasn't it? Right. It's like we don't even teach arts. Education is the first thing to go. They'd rather you learn. [00:27:46] Speaker B: Horribly underfunded, really. [00:27:48] Speaker A: There's enough art in math, but again, we had art and we had music and we had dance before we had language. So they're fundamentally more human things. I love that there's a whole thing. And one of the things I've seen about art, and maybe it's the way I look at things, or a lot of the cave art and stuff you can see, is actually. It's telling not only a story. Remember, we've got no language, hand on data and information. How do we keep it going? So there was some work last year which proved. And there was an amateur. Right. Even the word amateur annoys me. Okay, so he didn't have millions of, what's it? Qualifications, but he'd looked and looked and looked and looked and looked at cave art across the world for a very, very long time. And he'd sat there one day and he thought, because there are lots of dots and half dots and things on cave art, and he was like, I know what this is. They're trying to tell you in the seasons when these animals give birth and how long they just stayed for. Yeah. He tried to get listened to for about 20 years and no one would listen to him. Two years ago, someone said, oh, yeah, I think he's right. But it had to be an academic professor again, because supposedly they know, and they didn't want to know, that someone who's not in their tribe had come up with something brilliant. But they've decided now, and it looks very consistent, that not only he's right, they're now looking for other things in those pictures. But isn't that a brilliant way to hand on what you know and to hold it for, pass knowledge on to other people? [00:29:46] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:29:47] Speaker A: And it's fascinating. Some of the underground shifts and cave structures we still not caves. Man made structures we still have are really amazing echo chambers. I forget what they're all called, but they're a whole lap over in the north of Scotland, that if you sing at certain notes, it rings, it echoes. [00:30:14] Speaker B: Wow. [00:30:15] Speaker A: Yeah. So. And I think a couple of years ago in South Africa. Well, I think I know. I just can't remember exactly who did it. They found a non homo sapien species ceremonially burying their dead. [00:30:37] Speaker B: Oh, wow. [00:30:37] Speaker A: So I'm not happy with some of the ways they looked at what that really meant, because they then came piling in with. They must have had theory of God and transition. And I'm like, how much are you still using your own perceptions to look at something? The fact that from the way the cave structure had worked, because it was a large cave and then a smaller cave and then a very narrow tunnel going into a very large cave for me, this is female genocelia of giving birth. Right. And they wanted to re put back the dead person into the womb like structure, instead of going, oh, this is about transition, this is about God. If you're doing all of these things, you must live in afterlife. And I'm thinking, no, they're just putting it back where it came from. [00:31:23] Speaker B: Right. [00:31:26] Speaker A: There were only men who were on this thing, obviously, but it was this journey back, which obviously, for me, was very similar to those things. But this is like 300 and 5400 thousand years ago. We've been human for a very long. [00:31:41] Speaker B: Time, a really long time. And we've been changing all of that time. [00:31:46] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:31:47] Speaker B: And so when we talk about the discomfort of change, it might be uncomfortable, but we keep doing it. [00:31:52] Speaker A: Yes. And it will be uncomfortable, but. [00:31:58] Speaker B: That'S. [00:31:59] Speaker A: Part of being human. [00:32:01] Speaker B: Right. And that's great. It's something that actually unifies us. [00:32:09] Speaker A: I mean, that's a lovely way of looking at. Everyone feels the same. Anyone who tells you they're not made uncomfortable by change is lying. It's like laughter. Which is one of the baseline human things. Change, transformation, how your brain. Exactly the same. It is absolutely fundamentally human. Yeah, it does. [00:32:33] Speaker B: And it's okay to own that. It's a bit scary. [00:32:35] Speaker A: Yes. And it's going to be. And actually expecting change not to be scary is a bit stupid. Could that be denying everything what it is that your brain's been designed to do? Thank you for listening. [00:32:52] Speaker B: Thank you for coming on the journey with me, with us. [00:32:56] Speaker A: Well, you're the explorer Maheen. [00:32:59] Speaker B: I'm off. I'm bashing into the undergrowth of our. [00:33:03] Speaker A: Brains and into all that programme prodding around, gallivanting within that programming. What we want to do, as we've always done with this, is help you understand why you feel the thoughts that you do and then the behavior behind that. So you have a choice of how you behave and who profits by it. And if it's not you and it's not humankind, then stop and think and go. Who's controlling who's behind my steering wheel? So I want to invite you back, whether you're on a walk, going for the train, on that commute, taking a bath, even cooking, driving a car, wherever you find yourself, come and find us. We will be waiting.