Dr. Alan Watkins: Being Brilliant Every Single Day (Part 2) at TEDxPortsmouth (Transcript)

Or my personal favorite Family Fortune, if you’ve ever watched that show Family Fortunes, the two people sit at the front. We’ve asked 100 people in the street to name something you put in a jacket potato, jam. It’s hysterical, you know, when your frontal lobe is inhibited you say anything, and it’s really funny.

Anne Robinson, The Weakest Link, she throws you a simple question, then stares at you, and you blurt out any sort of rubbish. So when you’re up with your boss, he might be the nicest boss in the world. If you’re feeling a little under pressure you suddenly discover you’re talking rubbish. Sometimes you even have that awareness. You almost sort of see yourself coming out with the most ridiculous nonsense. You think, “Why is this happening?” And it’s because you’re built that way. The human system is built that way is that under pressure, physiological chaos, brain shutdown. You’re designed that way.

You think, “Well, why are we designed that way?” And the reason is, the only reason you have anything in your physiology is survival. There are survival advantages to having brain shut down. And it goes back 200,000 years, so when you were wondering across the prairie, and a big grizzly bear comes out from behind a rock and says, “Oh, human being, there’s my lunch”. You don’t need clever thinking, in fact, if you stood there trying to be clever, “Is that the brown bear, or a spotted grey bear?” He will eat you. So you need brain shut down, your thinking has to become very unsophisticated, in fact it has to become binary. So you either have fight-flight, or play dead. Two choices, you either just drop to the ground and faint, or you’re prepared to slug it out or run. It’s binary. Anything more sophisticated you don’t need, it will kill you.

So here we are, 200,000 years later, and we still have the same biological mechanism. We’ve basically got 200,000 year old software, and we’ve never had the upgrade. We don’t meet Bear today, we meet each other. But in meeting each other, the same phenomenon goes on. We showed you how that chaos can cause somebody who’s even good at math, like Neil is, “Two hundred, uh, uh, ah, uh, shut up you’re putting me off! Two hundred uh, eh,” it becomes impossible, a simple task like that. I can tell you, I did this in the office of the Chief Exec of one of the leading retailers in the UK. His first answer was 298. And he went, “Oh, no, no that’s wrong!” And, he was so embarrassed that he got the first one wrong, he couldn’t think of the second one. It literally sounded like, aahh, like he was in headlights. He just couldn’t come up with anything.

So as I said, you’re all at the mercy of that. The point being, until you’ve got control of this physiology anybody can make you look like an idiot. Right? And what’s worse? You’re doing it to yourself an awful lot of the time. Right? Your own anxiety about you own performance is actually causing the chaos. So you’re just lobotomizing yourself. A lot of people around you can trigger you into a lobotomy but most of the time you’re just lobotomizing yourself.

So until you’ve got control of that absolutely, fundamental basic, you might be brilliant one day, you might be poor, and who knows what’s going to show up that day. So right about fundamental, the cleverness of your thinking, or your ability to read the line on a golf putt, or your ability to come up with a great idea, or how to innovate that sales process, or any of that stuff. The quality of your thought, in fact, the very things that you think and how well you think them is hugely influenced by your biology. All right?

I’ll give you a couple of live examples and then we’ll show you. We’ll get Neal back out and we’ll show you how to control your physiology. If you haven’t yet clocked that your biology is controlling your brain function. If we house you and lock the doors and filled you up with coffee, what happens is your bladder gets bigger and bigger and bigger. It starts to send alarm messages to your brain and you’re getting one of these pees. “I got to pee. I got to pee. I got to pee.” Then if you’ve ever experienced where you can’t get out of the room but you bladder is going to alarm — and all of that. You haven’t got Pampers on. What you’ll discover is you go deaf. Right? You ever notice that? You can’t hear people. You’re so internally focused, “My bladder is going to burst. My bladder is going to burst.” You go deaf, you can see people’s mouths moving, but you can’t hear what they’re saying. Right? Then beads of sweat start to break out and you’re trying to pee urine out through your forehead. Literally, you conscientiousness is completely eradicated. All right? So that’s the biology disrupting your consciousness.

I was in a meeting recently with a woman who was 8 months pregnant. And we were chatting away and you saw the baby visibly ripple across. You could see this ripple go across her abdomen. She was chat, chat, chatting and then she went, “Oooh!” For about 20 seconds she was gone, completely left the room. Then she went, “Oh, hello…” back in the room again. It was like her consciousness disappeared for 20 seconds. These are live examples. You just think. But what do you think? And why do you think it?

I was talking to a Senior Exec, he was on a government think tank. I said, “Oh, a government think tank, that’s interesting. You probably sit around with loads of clever people debating the issues of the day and trying to come up with some clever answers?”

He said, “Yes, that’s pretty much what we do.”

I said, “Have you ever thought about why those answers and not the other answers? Have you ever thought about your own thinking?”

He said, “Oh, I never thought about that.”

So I said, “You’re a think tank and you never thought about thinking. What’s that about?”

So we just think, but we don’t realize that what we think and how well we think it, is actually influenced by something else. Thought is really an emergent property within your system. The very things that you think, you will think different things if you’re happy, then if you’re depressed. And how well you think them will depend a lot on the biology.

So if you want to step-change thinking, if you want to really double or triple the quality of your thinking, you can’t do it by thinking about it. Wouldn’t that be nice to say, “Look I’ve spotted the problem for you in your life, you’re not thinking smart enough? So I want you to go away over the weekend and come back 25% smarter on Monday morning. All right.” That would be nice wouldn’t it if you could – “Oh, you know I have a thought to do that. I’ll go away and I’ll think about my thinking over the weekend, 25%. And on Monday, here I am!” It doesn’t work that way. That’s what Einstein said, you can’t solve problems with the same level of thinking that created the problem? You need a new level of thinking. But the problem is how do you get a new level of thinking? You don’t get a new level of thinking just by thinking about it. You’ve got to change the context in which thoughts emerge.

It’s the context, in human terms it’s the biology. What is the biological context from which thought emerges? What is the emotional state from which thought emerges? You change that context, the biological and the emotional context, and you can change the quality of the thought and the actual thought itself. That is the source.

Okay? So let’s get Chris back up and I’ll show you how Chris can learn, with no training before, how to control his physiology. You do not need to be a — sorry, Neil… a yoga master.

[Neil: What happens to short term memory?]

Here we go. Which ear are we on, this one? All right, if you just hold that. In fact, change the chair around a little bit if you like. Just turn your chair around a bit so you can see the screen more easily.

So exactly as before. Is he still alive? Yeah. So we’ll start recording. So again, just picking up each heartbeat. And so, again, the software’s measuring the distance between each heart beat and calculating his heart rate. Now, because he’s just come out of the audience and walked up the stage he’s going about 90 miles an hour. Just the excitement about being at the front here.

So if you want to control your physiology, this isn’t years and years and months and months of practice. You don’t have to be a yoga master to control your physiology. You just have to know exactly what to do. All right? So we’re now going to show Chris exactly…sorry, Neil, exactly what to do. Mental block.

So over here is a breath pacer. So when that goes up, I want you to breathe in. When that goes down, I want you to breathe out. And at the bottom there’s hold, so wait for it. Don’t go too soon. Ready? And a long, slow… Okay, wait for it. A long, slow… And you can follow this in the room, if you want. Just breathe in this rhythmic fashion. So nice, rhythmic breathing. So a long breath in, and a long, slow breath out. Okay. So I’ll leave Neil to do that and I’ll carry on talking to you guys.

So of all the things that you can do to get your physiology under control, there are many, many things. But the start point is to do something that you can get conscious control over. And you can get conscious control over your breathing. Now there are 12 different aspects of your breath that you can regulate. 12 different aspects. So when you go to classes, whether it’s singing, sports, fighter pilots, all sorts of things. They all taught you that breathing and breath practice. Yoga… But what are they teaching you? So for example, there’s a yoga practice where they teach you ultimate nostril breathing. And that’s kind of interesting, but in my view that’s number nine on the list of priorities, of the 12. The single most important thing is rhythm, which is what this is training.

So, we’ve seen that this measures the level of coherence in Neil’s system. So when he’s in complete chaos, he’s down here in the red. And just with a bit of guidance, in less than or about a minute, he’s up and into the coherent green. He is the yoga master. Neil brackets Yoda. Okay. So you can see the physiology has changed from erratic to this coherent wave form, in less than a minute, when you know what to do. So of all the things in your breathing that you can do, if you start to control the rhythm of the breath that will start to change the physiology just as you’ve seen. And you’ll start to become more coherent. So his frontal lobes will work better now than at the beginning of this trace when his physiology was erratic. Do you all see the difference?

And even though the average heart rate is about the same during that period and during this period. The heart rate is the same but the pattern is different. So when you change that pattern, you’re basically sending better quality fuel from the heart to the brain, the brain’s going to work better. And when the brain works better you’re more perceptive, you’re more insightful, you’re more clear-thinking, you can understand how to problem-solve. So I saw one of the speakers say to figure out when things go wrong, what am I going to do about this? Well if your brain’s inhibited, you probably won’t come up with the idea or the right answer. But if you’ve got your brain switched on, you’ve got a much better chance. Does that all make sense?

So when you hear people say to you, “Oh yeah, before that big presentation, take a few deep breaths.” I’d say, don’t bother. Because a few deep breaths isn’t actually going to alter your brain function that much. And by the way, when they say deep, what they actually mean is large. They mean large volume breaths. Because depth is really where the air in the lungs is going. And what they mean is a few big breaths.

But even volume is only about number five or six on the batting order. The number one priority is rhythm. Take a few rhythmic breaths. That will start to change your physiology. So you can put this to the test. Next time before you might have to make a difficult phone call, rather than taking a few deep breaths or even a few large breaths, take a few rhythmic breaths. And rhythm really means a fixed ratio of in to out. And it doesn’t matter what that ratio is, so long as it’s fixed. So this is four seconds in, six seconds out. Four, six. Four, six. Four, six. You could do five-five-five-five-five-five-five-five, so long as it’s fixed. What you don’t want four-six-five-five-eight-three-three-seven-two-five. That’s erratic breathing, okay. You want a fixed ratio.

And then once you’ve got a rhythmic breath going. The second most important thing is smoothness. Because you can breathe rhythmically but staccato. So you could go [air-breathing sound]. That’s entirely rhythmic, but, it’s staccato, but what you want is smooth. So [inhale-exhale sound] which is a fixed volume per second round the entire cycle. So just as we probably boat row, my boat is rowing, that’s what they teach you. So how are the rowers going to win us all the gold medals in the Olympics in 147 days? They teach you, whenever you learn to row, blades in the water, and blades out the water. In-out, in-out, rhythm right. And then once you’ve learned that rhythm as a novice oarsmen, the next thing is once the blades are in the water even smooth pressure through the water. All the way through the stroke. What you don’t want to do is put blades in the water, pull really hard and let it drift a bit. And pull really hard at the end, because the boat will go, like that. In, even pressure, and the same with Chris Hoy on the bicycle. If you look at the metrics that are done around Chris Hoy, I don’t know if you realize this. Novice cyclists think it’s just about the kick down, but then it’s the drag, it’s the lift. And actually it’s a circle. So if you look at the metrics on that. They’ve got to go circular and get as much pressure evenly applied around the whole cycle. So you’ll see the Olympic cyclist will have a smooth and even force all the way around the loop, and those are the guys that win the gold metal.

So it’s smoothness through it. So exactly as we’ve got here, is if we can [breathing sounds], and then go [breathing sounds]. So you might have rhythm but have you got smoothness. As you get smoothness better it becomes more and more coherent. So rhythm and smoothness exactly as you would cycle, exactly as you would row, gives you the most powerful effect. Does that all make sense?

So one other thing, if you’ve got time. We probably have, I’m just yapping because we don’t have lunch till 1:00, so I might as well tell you something.

The third most important thing is the location of your attention while you’re breathing. So what we say, is, people teach you is you have to have abdominal breathing. Breathe through the belly and all of that. Breathe through the center of your chest, through the heart area if you will. Three reasons why we say breathe through here, not breathe through there. Or don’t imagine you’re sucking the air up through the soles of your feet. It’s coming in through the crown chakra or whatever. You could do any of that stuff. The worry is where the attention is when you’re breathing. Put your attention on the center of your chest.

Three reasons why you put the attention on the center of your chest is number one, the heart generates more electrical power than any other part of your system. So even though there are billions of nerve cells up here, and only a couple of hundred thousand down here, the power output of your heart is 3.5 watts, which is way greater than the power output of your brain. Because what happens in your brain, the electrical charges are going all different directions, it all cancels. But here you’ve got something called auto-coherence. The heart has to synchronize in order for it to pump.

So electrically speaking the heart generates 50 times more electrical output than the brain. If you want to record somebody’s brain waves, you have to put a clip on their ear just as Neil’s got here. And pick up the heartbeat, and then you have to mathematically remove the heartbeat. Because the heartbeat is this big, and the brain beat is, or brain wave is only that big. The heart’s way more powerful electrically. Electromagnetically the heart generates 5000 times more energy than the brain. So it starts to, forgive the pun, turn on its head, on what’s controlling what here. We’ve got to start to look a bit more broadly in terms of the human system as a system. We’re so brain dominant — brain centric. So if you put your attention in the heart. You’re putting your attention where the primary source of power is, here. So that’s the first reason.

The second reason, if you drop your attention and breathe through here, it gets you out of the noise in your head which is where we’re usually confused. Just to drop into the body and breathe through the center of your chest.

And the third reason which we’re going to get onto is actually, we’re ultimately going to go from controlling that physiology up to the emotional state and show you actually how do you turn on the passion. How do you turn on a positive emotional state? We know an awful lot about positive emotions are experienced in the center of our chest. Hence I love my son with all my heart. Why do you even say that? Because that’s actually where I feel it. The awareness might be in our mind, but where do we feel the sensation of love, in the center of the chest. So where do you clutch the baby. You clutch them to your heart. You don’t clutch the baby to your knee. I love my son with all my knee. We don’t say that because we don’t feel it in our knee. We feel it in the center of our chest.

So the very fact that you put your attention on the center of your chest, or in the heart area starts to drift you into a slightly more positive state. Does that make sense? So this last thing I want to– just while Neil’s impressing you, give you this other bit so it might be a big myth of performance, I think is that it’s something to do with the adrenaline. You know, you will see this in business or in sport. You know, if you’re not a bit pumped, you won’t perform. That means you’ve got to be a bit psyched. No, no, no, you’ve got to be relaxed under pressure.

Now you’ve got to be psyched, you’ve got to be relaxed, you’ve got to be psyched, and you’ve got to be relaxed. You get both types of advice, neither is true. It’s not about sympathetic activation, or even parasympathetic activation, it’s not about how hot the system is, or how cold the system is. There is another part of your system which really determines your output, which is really if you’re in a negative emotional state. So, if this is adrenaline, and this is a chemical called Acetylcholine, ACH, negative emotion, right, underpinned by the hormone Cortisol, or positive emotion, underpinned by the anabolic hormones like DHEA, Dehydroepiandrosterone, banned substance in the Olympics, you get caught taking those tablets you’re out because they are performance enhancers. In the States this is known as the elixir of youth, the vitality hormone. You can get them on the internet. Right, DHEA tablets, point is, you don’t need them.

So, when you heat somebody’s system up, you can heat it up negatively, anxiety, anger, and frustration. Or you can heat it up positively, passion, determination, and focus. The heart rate over here is 120, but erratic. The heart rate is 120 over here but coherent. Both of them have the same heart rate, both of them have the same amount of adrenaline. That will impair your performance, that will enhance your performance. And, passion, as we have heard, is the number one predictor of performance across every aspect of life, including health. If you’re passionate about something, you will do it better. It predicts all types of performance.

Similarly, when you cool the system down, relaxation is not necessarily valuable. In fact, I’ve given lectures to some of our medical colleagues entitled, relaxation can kill you. Right, so you know. Sometimes lecture titles, you know, can pull the crowd in. Relaxation, and it can, because you can be relaxed and negative. Apathy, boredom, detachment, indifference, all those kind of things, heart rate is erratic, averaging 50.

Now you can be relaxed, and it can be positive, so things like contentment, curiosity, equanimity, and those kinds of things. Heart rate coherent and 50. So it doesn’t really matter whether the heart rate is 50, or 120. What matters is am I on the left, or am I on the right?

And so, the secret really, if you map most organizations is you’ll see a right-ward skew. But people who are rightward skewed over here. If you don’t believe me, you can say it’s the coffee machine and you will hear the negative hum. Do you know what so and so said to me yesterday? He didn’t! That’s outrageous! Right? And then you bump into somebody else over here filled with the joys of spring. What’s up with you? How dare you be that cheerful? You don’t realize it’s shit. Right? I’m not trying to drag you back over here, back to reality. Right?

So as a leader, you really, and a large part of the work that we do with folks is getting them over here and you live your life over here, so somebody referenced Csikszentmihalyi in the zone or the state of flow is about being over here. You know, and how controllable is that emotional performance, we’ve got Chris’ point, can we live our life over here. Now as you’ve seen most people haven’t got control of their behavior, let alone their thinking, let alone their feeling, let alone their emotional physiology.

So how do you live your life over here? That’s where the training comes in, and we’ve shown in Neil that when we have taught him how to regulate his physiology, right, that’s the start point. The regulation of the physiology would at least get you to the mid-point. You at least get to the mid-point with regulating you physiology. So you will get to this point just through breathing.

So if you learn to breathe properly you’ll at least get the mid-point. How do you get over here, is you’ve got to learn to regulate what emotional state you’re in. Now most people have got no control over that. Their emotional state is dependent on everything outside of them, not what is going on inside. So you’ve got to learn how to train yourself to stay over this side of the thing. But if you take nothing away, at least you get yourself to the mid-point by learning how to breathe properly.

So to help you remember that think of BREATH as an acronym. B stands for breathe. R stands for rhythmically. E stands for evenly. And through the heart every day. So if you breathe rhythmically, evenly, and through the heart every day you will at least get to the mid-point. Okay?

Thank you.

 

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