#788 - Mo Gawdat - How To Save Your Brain From The Dangers Of Stress & Anxiety

Chris Williamson
What's happening, people? Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Mo Gawadat. He's an entrepreneur, former chief business officer at Google, and an author. We often experience stress without knowing where it's coming from.

Although we feel overwhelmed, we struggle to pinpoint the source. So how should we actually go about assessing our lives and reducing our stress? Expect to learn why the modern world is so stressful for everyone. What Mo means when he says young people are comfortably numb? How to assess stress and where it's probably coming from, the things you're not aware of which cause your emotional discomfort.

The most important habits you should implement if you want to become peaceful and much more. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed, and that means that you will miss episodes when they go up. So if you want to support the show and if you want to make sure that you do not miss episodes when they go live, and if you want to make me happy, press the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever else you are listening. It is a huge help and I thank you very much. This episode is brought to you by element.

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Why is the modern world so stressful for so many people? Because we designed it that way. We designed it with a very simple statement that stress is an acceptable tax that we should pay for success in life. And yeah, I mean in a very interesting way, we tell people that stress is the result of the events that go on in our life, but that's not true at all. When I wrote unstressable, my attempt was to compare stress in humans just as a very elementary understanding of what stress is to stress in objects, as in physics, if you want.

Mo Gawdat
And elementary school understanding of physics is that an object is not stressed because of the force that's applied to it. We are not stressed because only of the challenges that we face. An object is stressed as the force divided by the square, you know, the square area of the cross section of the object. Similarly, in humans, we are stressed because of the challenges that we face, divided by our abilities and skills and resources that we have to deal with that stress. And if you really understand those two concepts, one, that you are not necessarily supposed to be stressed to succeed in the modern world, and two, that stress is not just the subject of the forces that are applied to you, but is also subject to the way you deal with the events of your life, then suddenly we don't have to be that stressed anymore.

We can continue to engage in the modern world, but we can choose to be unstressable. What would you say to someone who responds by mentioning, look, that sounds wonderful in an idyllic world, but stress is the price that you pay to do difficult things. Stress is not a bug. It's a feature of the modern world, and there is no way that we can get away from it. It's baked into reality.

Chris Williamson
And this sounds great, but in practice, it's impossible. The challenges are baked in reality. We have to absolutely accept that our life is challenging, and it comes with a lot of more and more challenges. Every day, the world is becoming a lot more complex, almost surpassing the intelligence of the civilization that created it. But that kind of statement almost reminds you of that person in a striped suit on harvard Business review and on the COVID saying, people only perform their best when they're stressed.

Mo Gawdat
And that statement always, always drove me mad, because how about those who are creative? How about those who are in flow? How about those who are in harmony with those who are there working with? How about amazing teams of innovators and creators? And, you know, stress is not the only way you can achieve.

As a matter of fact, stress is the only way to achieve when you're stressed as a. Almost as a cog in a machine, right? But if you want to allow yourself to do anything beyond just performing the same task over and over and over and being managed to get it done, then there are so many different ways to succeed as a result of that. Now, there are lots of studies that will tell you that we are way more productive when we're calm or contented, when we're focused on what we're doing in a way that doesn't take away cycles of stress. If you understand the deeper reason why we are stressed, we are stressed.

Normally, the biological machine stresses us to be able to respond to an actual immediate threat so that it reconfigures you into a superhuman, dilates your pupils, sends more glucose to your brain, know feeds your muscles so you can engage in a fight or flight response. But believe it or not, the infamous cortisol that rushes through your system to tell you to become superhuman will be completely flushed out of your system within 90 seconds. Within 90 seconds, you have a choice. You have a choice to look at the situation with your rational brain, with your hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, and say, yes, I have a reason to stay in the stressed mode and continue to fight for my life, if you want. Or I can actually choose to say, no, no, no, I recognize the situation differently, and I'm willing to actually do something different about it.

Now, the problem is, because we are not designed as a machine to be under stress all the time, we're never allowing our parasympathetic nervous system to engage or autonomous nervous system to engage in a parasympathetic state so that we can rest and digest and actually do vital functions. Digesting your food is a vital function. Replenishing your muscles is a vital function. Relaxing, you know, sleeping properly, resting, all of that is a vital function for survival, because we don't allow that. We are not taking the benefit of stress, which is a short burst of superhuman capabilities.

We are starting to take the. The downsides of stress, and stress is becoming a pandemic that's killing a lot of us. Yeah. So am I right in saying that a stressful event occurs? There is a 92nd window.

Chris Williamson
That is the cortisol being sent around the body, and in 90 seconds, it's flushed out. Therefore, if you are stressed for longer than 90 seconds, that is only because you yourself are perpetuating it by continuing to trigger another 90 seconds. 90 seconds? 90 seconds. Absolutely.

Mo Gawdat
Because you're a best selling author with a lot of trauma, with a lot of drama, that creates trauma. Right? So it's quite an interesting way of looking at life without an actual, immediate threat and yet responding as if there is a tiger in front of you. You see, the original design of stress for our biological machine was a tiger shows up an actual threat. Right.

That this was triggered in your amygdala. So literally, almost a reptilian response. Like a lizard. Right? You're not thinking at all.

The rational brain is supposed to be able to say, oh, no, no, no, this is not a tiger. It's just, you know, leaves moving because of the wind. And when you get that, you. You can actually get into that negative feedback loop and cancel out the stress. The problem is that in the modern world, most of our stressors are not triggered by an actual physical event.

You know, other than maybe you're crossing the street and a car is speeding in your direction. Right. Otherwise, how do we trigger our stress response? We trigger it with a thought. We trigger it with an emotion.

We simply go into stories that we've created within ourselves as a result of events that are not immediately stressful upon us. And because of that, when it comes back to that negative feedback loop we allow ourselves to, your brain will start with a story that, my partner doesn't love me anymore. Okay? And, of course, 90 seconds later. But by the way, we position that as a survival issue.

Like, you know, that even though breakups never really killed anyone, but we will position it as a survival issue, and then we will take that survival issue and then basically perpetuate it over and over and over. Because when you consult your rational brain that created the issue in the first place, it will reaffirm it. It will say, yeah, yeah, your partner still doesn't love you. There is no, you know, physical signal of anything that changed in the real world. So my original, original thought is true.

And as a result of that, you will break. Right? So. So, in unstressable, we write that even though a short burst of stress, superhuman capability, is good for you, we break under three conditions, right? You break either under a trauma, which is an intense stress in a very short period of time, that exceeds your ability to deal with it, right?

You break under burnout, which is repetitive stress. In physics, it's almost like fatigue. You know, when you hold a piece of plastic and you keep bending it over and over and over and over, you're not really applying a massive force to it, but just little force back and forth and back and forth basically breaks it eventually. That's burnout. Or because of anticipation of stress, okay?

Or anticipation of threats that will show up in your life, which is basically fear and all of its derivatives. So fear, worry, anxiety, and panic, right? Between those, if they show up in your life long enough. So, of course, trauma is outside our control. But believe it or not, 93% of the people that get exposed to a PTSD inducing, like, the highest level of trauma, 93% will recover within three months.

96.7% will recover in six months, and most of those will actually enjoy post traumatic growth. So trauma is not the reason for the epidemic of stress. Right? It's burnout and anticipation of threats that actually ends up breaking us. The interesting thing is, I think a lot of people have shame around stress about their response to stress.

Chris Williamson
So we have the event that occurs, small or large, consistent or acute, chronic or acute. Then we have the story that we tell ourselves about that, the rumination, the continuous revisiting of whatever that situation is. And then we have the story that we tell ourselves about the way that it's affected us. That, I think, leads to a lot of shame. And I certainly know that this does in my life where something affects me.

And first off, I feel, like, agitated that things affected me, and then I feel ashamed that I felt agitated about the thing affecting me. And you think, oh, God, not only has this thing occurred, but then my response to it has caused me to become my own executioner, my own torturer in this way. And I'm telling myself this, should you not be more resilient than this? How can it be that something so small, oh, God, how unresilient, how pathetic are you that you couldn't have gotten over this more quickly? And then I think I've certainly noticed in times where that's ended up being chronic because I've been either unable or unprepared to change whatever the thing is that's stressing me or confront whatever it is that ends up with me becoming numb to the emotion.

And I start to switch myself off to that. And I think the comfortably numb phase is something that a lot of people are in that they probably don't realize 100%. One of my favorite songs of all time, comfortably numb by Pink Floyd. Right. So the idea is that we tell ourselves scripts, or we are the product of scripts that we accept as the reality, and then we play them over and over.

Mo Gawdat
In your case, that cycle of why did I allow myself to feel that I'm not good enough to do that? And so on? Believe it or not, the other extreme of this is those who wear stress as a badge. It's like, look at me. I am stressed because I'm busy.

I'm busy because I'm needed in the world right now. The interesting side of all of this is it's a script. And it's a script that is. My wonderful wife is an incredible therapist, and she teaches me a lot about psychology. You know, normally.

Normally, those scripts are in response to events that are not in your life right now and that are exaggerated because of their size compared to your size when they happened. Right. So you see, the interesting side of those who develop their abilities. The square area, as I say, in terms of dealing with stress is that things that stressed me when I was 20 freaked me out when I was 20. I dealt with them with a reasonable amount of stress when I was 30.

I dealt with them with ease when I was 40, and I laugh about them when I'm 50. Right. And that is true for all of us. You grow in your resources and skills and abilities, and then they become easier. The only challenge that prevents you from doing that is sort of a fixed mindset of saying, but I don't want to grow, okay?

I want to actually look at my script and reapply that script over and over. Okay. And a script of shame or a script of ego or a script of, you know, the most famous script of stress is good for me. The, you know, the script of it's unavoidable. The world applies it to me, and I have no choice but to accept it.

All of those scripts, I think, are the biggest reason why we're unable to become unstressable. You know, when people ask me, what is the very first thing that I need to do to become unstressable, I would say, make a choice. Right. The first thing you need to do is to choose to become unstressable, to choose to prioritize your calm and peace over your script, over your ego, over your shame, over your. Whatever it is that is telling you, no, I need to stay in that space.

Chris Williamson
Talk to me about the difference between prioritizing becoming unstressable with words like calm and peace and triaging of yourself over other stuff, compared with a more aggressive, lean in, sort of gripping tightly, spit and sawdust, nothing can hurt me type approach. You understand what I mean? Because both of those could be responses that people would have. Yeah, it's actually quite interesting. So, I mean, you may, of course, know a bit about my background, Chris.

Mo Gawdat
So I was chief business officer of Google X. I ran half of Google before that for around seven years and started more than 103 languages, more than 50% of Google's business worldwide. That's a very stressful job. Right. But you don't have to be stressed to achieve.

See, the challenge we have in our world is that we, from school, from our parents, we are taught to be motivated by the negative. It's almost as if we need that whip. Okay, or that fear or, you know, to achieve in life. The truth is, anyone who's ever achieved in life will know that you've achieved because of the actions you've taken. Right?

And that if you've taken the right actions, whether you were stressed or not, the exact same actions will lead to the same exact results. Now, the interesting side of it is that you can do better with your actions if you're not stressed. Why? Because you're not wasting cycles on handling your stress. You're not bursting in the face of some of your colleagues.

You're not, you know, and so on, right? So, so here's the interesting thing. If I gave you 18 hours of work a day, let's say you're one of those people who will absolutely smash it, right? And I gave you the entire 18 hours. When you're calm and contented and focused and you're really on it, would that be better for you?

Or if 4 hours of those are wasted on your stress? Now, this is the interesting bit. The interesting bit is stress is a choice. And as a matter of fact, sometimes, especially for those of us who are so motivated and so driven to achieve, we even create synthetic stress because we believe that we need it to continue to achieve. Now, interestingly, if you really reflect on this a little bit, you would realize that you can be similarly motivated by the positive, right?

So you can tell yourself, I want to be motivated by squeezing every possible success and efficiency out of my day, okay? And I will hate myself if I waste half an hour. Okay? Or you can. You can also say, I'm motivated to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of my day, and I will feel very proud if I didn't waste half an hour.

It's the. It's two sides of the same coin. One of them pressures yourself like they did to you in school. Okay? And the other motivates you and encourages you and excites you, which is really the way you should deal with anyone that you love, hopefully including yourself.

Okay? And that's my. That's been a mega change in my approach to life, that do I want to stress myself as the only means of achievement, or can I actually achieve by motivating myself more? Interestingly, by the way, and I say that, and I know a lot of people will not like me for it, is that 80% of what you do in your day is useless. Right?

That 20% of what you do is normally what gets you 90% of the way to your objective. And perhaps it's wiser to give up on the 10% extra, which you will never achieve, by the way. Okay? You may achieve two or three percentage points of those ten. You may want to give up on that extra two to 3% to gain 80% of your day.

So as a senior leader in a very large organization, my teams would normally come to me with, and when I worked at Google X, that the deal size was massive, billions of dollars. So they'd come with eleven deals. And I'm like, who wants eleven deals? Like, why are you doing this to yourself? If we get two deals that prove the concept and have enough revenue in them for all of us to succeed, why would we want to chase eleven?

Oh, just because maybe we will lose a few of them. It's a portfolio approach. Let's kill ourselves so that we close all of them. And I'm like, why? If you choose three that are likely to happen, where the customer is committed, where everything's working well, you're more likely to close those than you are if you focus on eleven, right?

So there is always that choice of why do we go the extra 80%? I really never understood that. Why don't you wisely look at pushing yourself as far as you need to get most of the way and you don't, and give up on that extra bit, win the time and space so that you can become more creative, that you can become more liked among your colleagues because you're not as stressed as, and hopefully so that you live a little longer to enjoy the fruits of what you have achieved. I think a lot of the time we are more concerned with how our inputs look than what our outcomes are. And people prioritize looking busy over getting work done.

Chris Williamson
And in knowledge economy, where I don't have a bucket of widgets that are to be done and a bucket of widgets that are done, I can't see how much work you are doing, but I can see how quickly you reply in slack, or I can see how fast you respond to an email or how long the email is or whatever, there's a quote from Andy Groves that says there are so many people working so hard and achieving so little, and it makes me think about what you mentioned. There's also a concept from Oliver Berkman called productivity debt. And he kind of describes the way that he wakes up every morning as if he's overdrawn in some sort of bank account. And if he nails every single moment of the day perfectly, he can maybe get himself back to zero, he can get himself back to black as opposed to being in the red. But as you say, there's no rule that says upon waking every morning you are indebted to the universe.

And the only way that you can fix this is to flagellate yourself, whipping yourself through your workload and your to do list, and then by the end of the day, think, oh, thank God I didn't waste that much of it, as opposed to look at all of the time that I used, which was productive. And it's a simple reframe. But I do wonder how much of that comes from school and comes from the way that we're sort of disciplined into it. So when it comes to the machinery of stress, can you explain what stress is, what's happening in our mind, in our body, in the human system? Yeah.

Mo Gawdat
So just to comment very quickly on what you just said. So the idea there is that I always say you wake up every morning and you have a limited number of heartbeats and you can use those heartbeats, which is so stupid, which is what most people do. You can use those heartbeats to collect coins that you keep so that you can enjoy future heartbeats, right? Or you can use those heartbeats to collect enough coins and then enjoy the rest of the heartbeats, live the rest of the heartbeats. And I, and I think most people don't recognize that that future moment where you're going to spend the coins never comes.

And that for most of us who succeeded in life, you, you know, as soon as you achieve a goal, the goal posts will move, and you keep going and you keep going and you keep going and you stress yourself and you wonder why you're doing it, because it's really not getting you anywhere that you want to be, interestingly, because you don't know where you want to be. It's just that constant quest for more, right? And I think stopping somewhere to reflect and say, how much of this do I need? How much of this do I that makes me a better person? And how much of this should I live?

I think that's really, really important. You asked me about the stress machinery. So, as I said, stress starts with, to understand stress properly, you have to understand it in context. And in context, stress is a response that triggers fight or flight. Truly and honestly, in its biological form, it was the survival machinery that was making us either fight or run away, right?

Now, when you really think about that, you realize that most of the tuning of stress is actually very physical. It, you know, it, it sends more sugar to your brain so that you're able to focus. It dilates your pupils so pupils so that you're aware of danger. It really feeds your muscles more so you can run away and so on and so forth. Fantastic, right?

You can use that same machinery to focus on a presentation on Thursday, a little bit of a, you know, of cortisol and adrenaline before the presentation. You're focused, you're, you know, you're pushing yourself harder to practice and to rehearse and you nail it. Great.

Robert Sapolsky, you know, wrote that incredible book, why zebras don't have ulcers, which was entirely about what happens post stress. So you take that response and you're supposed to be within it for as long as the threat is there. If you're eaten by the tiger, well done. You don't need to be stressed anymore. If you're not eaten by the tiger, well done.

Chill. Right. The problem is we keep re triggering that, as I said, post the 90 seconds rule. But we also keep layering that, right? So it's never one stressor.

So one of my dear friends is not a nature photographer, Jimmy Nelson. He basically goes to indigenous tribes that have really rarely ever had any interaction with humanity and would go and photograph them in their environment. Right. He was telling me about that one night where, you know, he, first of all, he spends months and weeks with them to get to know them. And then he takes them to the place that represents them the most, and they're in their best gear, and they're supposed to get to that waterfall, that tribe, so that he takes that one photograph on film.

That's its entire focus. One photo on film. And how stressful is that? And then by the time they get there, the light is not perfect. So he says, we can't take the photo now.

We have to take it tomorrow. So they sleep behind the waterfall. Right. It's incredibly noisy, it's extremely wet, and it's very cold. He says, best night of sleep in my life.

And I was like, how? And the idea is that when we're in our habitat as humans, the original design, believe it or not, somehow we end up not feeling as stressed as we are in the concrete jungle. Okay. You know, in the concrete jungle, everything is stressed. Being late to a meeting is stressful.

You know, the train is late, you're stressed. You know, the commute is a little congested. You're stressed. Every little thing becomes a stressful trigger. And we layer them.

We layer them and we never resolve them. So you get one of them that basically says, my commute is killing me. And by the time you arrive, that topic is over. You're going to deal with it only on the way back. Okay?

And you keep doing this day after day after day after day after day, and you never really stop to tell yourself, can I limit this? Right? And so when, when we, when we looked at, we, my co author Alice Law and myself, when we looked at stress and unstressable, we wanted to go down and say, how can you stop doing this? And we came up with this model that we call the three l's, you know, to limit, learn and listen. So the idea is, before you even start to say, I'm stressed by the modern world.

The modern world is killing me. Stop the layering. Stop the layering. Meaning take a Sunday morning, take a piece of paper, sit down and write down everything that stressed you last week. It's not a difficult exercise.

Just tell your brain what was stressful last week and your brain will go mad. Yeah, let me tell you. And you'll write as many items on the list as you want and then ask yourself openly how many of those are necessary, right? How many of those can you do without starting from the simplest things, like, you know, the alarm that wakes you up in the morning, does it really have to be that annoying and jolt you out of bed as if you know the world is about to end? Can you make it a little quieter, maybe calmer, maybe start a little quieter and then become, you know, more audible after a while?

Can you. By the way, which a lot of people hate me, again, when I say this, I rarely ever wake up to an alarm. If I need to wake up at 09:00 a.m. i'll sleep before 01:00 a.m. i mean, how difficult is that?

8 hours of sleep? And I rarely ever need to wake up. If I need to wake up at 07:00 a.m. i'll sleep at 11:00 p.m. at 8 hours of sleep.

Most of the time I'll wake up before my alarm, right? A tiny shift in your, in your life, you know, that friend that annoys you, do you really need them in their, in your life? Can you limit all of that and remove it? And if you start to take charge so that, that stress machinery is not engaged all the time, the problem becomes that because stress is for fight or, or flight responses, it's engaging that part of your system that's using those resources all the time, but it's ignoring your kidneys, it's ignoring your digestive system, it's ignoring your liver, it's ignoring every other part that is parasympathetic, which, by the way, is also a survival mechanism, right? You cannot survive when you're, you know, completely not directing blood to your kidneys and starting to struggle as a result of that.

So. So the trick is, how much of that stress should I accept and when do I stop? When do I tell myself, no, no, no, this is the price for this is too high. I need to remove those things from my life? The assumption we have about stress being baked into the fabric of existence continues to come up.

Chris Williamson
I think so many people just believe, well, no, that's the price you paid. That's how it's supposed to be. Or it's supposed to be hard. It's supposed to be stressful. And trying to come up with a different way, I think, upends a degree of attachment that people have, even people like me.

I like being able to work hard. I like being able to overcome difficult things. But there's a difference between something being difficult and unnecessary suffering. So I think trying to bifurcate those two is pretty important. Let's take a simple example.

Mo Gawdat
Commute. Most of us will have to struggle with a commute, you know, several times a week, some of us several times a day. Right.

First question is, can I limit that? Can I, you know, work from home twice a week so that I don't have to go to the, you know, to the office and suffer the commute? Not all of us have that ability. Can I maybe consider in the next year or so to move closer to the office? Right.

Maybe not all of us have that ability. Can I choose to make the commute more enjoyable? Can I align with a friend so that we go together? Or can I listen to an amazing modern wisdom podcast on the way? Can I take a cup of coffee with me and sip it slowly?

I always remember the story when I worked at Google X, we had a project with the New York office. So I went and spent a little bit of time in the New York office. And if you've ever been in Manhattan, it's mayhem. It's just unbelievably fast for my abilities to deal with the world. And I don't know if that's true, but it felt that there was this green wave of crossings.

So the pedestrian lights, so if you walked like a maniac, you would catch all of them green. But if you are less than a maniac, you would be stopped in a red traffic crossing, you know, pedestrian crossing. And so from where I stayed to the Google office, because I love to walk, took me a 40 minutes walk. When I walked like a maniac, I came to the office completely breathless. Right then one morning I asked myself, and I said, what if I missed a few of them, like, what would happen?

So I somehow allowed myself to leave 15 minutes early, bought myself a coffee and walked slower. So every third light I would miss and stop in this, in the red pedestrian light. And I would have to tell you, I enjoyed that stop very much because I looked at the New Yorkers running around like headless chicken, honestly. Right? And it was funny because I was standing there sipping my coffee slowly, and everyone is like, mad.

I arrived seven minutes late. So instead of 40, it was 47 minutes. And you have to ask yourself, are those seven minutes really going to make the difference? Okay? Or are we really overdoing it?

Are we serving a script in our heads that basically says that life has to squeeze out those seven minutes? Now, of course someone will tell me, oh, but hold on. You know, I have the school run and I have to do this and I have to do that. Yeah. Wake up seven minutes early.

Wake up 17 minutes early. Seriously. Okay? And ask yourself, are those extra, you know, minutes or less minutes in sleep? Are they good for your stress?

Can you have them at the end of the night, not in, you know, early in the morning? And that's my point. My point is the stressors of life are endless. Okay? They will keep coming at you.

And yes, absolutely, they are. The price that you pay for engaging in the modern world. The way you deal with them is a choice. The way you deal with, with the stressors that come into your life is always a choice. And it's always a choice that if you prioritize stress, you would make differently.

If you prioritize being unstressable, you would make those different, right? So, you know, I'll give you an example. We, when we talk about the. Listen, part of unstressable, we say that a human is made up of four elements. You're made up of your mind, your heart, your body and your spirit.

Your spirit here, not in a religious form, but sort of your, your purpose, your non physical existence, if you want, on mental stress. You know, by the way, every one of those speaks to you in a different language. And you have to understand the language and you have to respond in that language if you were to be not mentally stressed or not physically stressed. Okay, when it comes to mental stress, you know how it is. You go to the gym and, you know, basically you tear your muscles and exercise, and then you feed your muscles and rest and you'll become stronger.

The way that happens inside our heads, in our logical machine that's called the brain, is through neuroplasticity. So with neuroplasticity, you sort of almost exactly the same way. You use your brain to do a task that is a little difficult for it. It builds the neural pathways to make that task easier and easier over time. So what you use grows and what you don't use, shrinks, right.

Most of us, especially the ones that love to stress themselves, will go to the gym five times a week at least, right. And, you know, four to five times a week, you're really focused on your physical health, physical fitness, if you want, you know, in unstressable, we write about the mental fitness, right. So we, we write something that we call the mind gym. And gym is g g y six. Ms, right.

Which are exercises that you can do regularly. It's not going to show on your six pack and your shoulder muscles, right. But it's going to make you much more mentally fit to deal with stress. Right. First of all, of course, gratitude is the g.

We know that for a fact. To recognize the actual reality of your life rather than be critical all the time of what's wrong in your life, is a massive, massive machine that requires practice. If you're trained by the modern world to excel, you're training your brain to always look for that missing bit or the bit that's wrong so that you can fix it, right? But then by training your brain to do that so that you succeed in the modern world, you forgot. You forget to be grateful.

And if you be, if you, if you forget to be grateful, everything becomes stressful because life has no flavor in it. What is your favorite framework for a gratitude practice? So I actually did. So, of course, let's say that the absolute commonly discussed one of writing down what you're grateful for before you go to bed is useful, as a matter of fact, to find moments in your day. So think about it this way.

You can do it at the end of the day. You can also do it at the beginning of the day because that sets your day, okay? But you can also do it several times a day. So the idea of stopping, I used to have what I called motime in my very busy Google schedule. And if you've ever been to the Google X building, all of the offices were made of glass, right?

So I would have a 15 minutes more time where I'm sitting in one of those glass offices, but I have no video conferences in front of me, I have no computer in front of me, I have no phone in my hand. I'm just sitting there. And people would go like, is he mad? Either meditating or reflecting or finding what I'm grateful for or simply taking a breath. Believe it or not, that 15 minutes, I did that twice a day.

Just twice a day. Flipped my day upside down. So, a gratitude practice that reminds you three times a day to stop and say, what happened? Don't call it gratitude. Anything you enjoyed in the last couple of hours.

Simple question. I went the other way. I actually. So, you know, in my first book, so for happy, I attempted to statistically try to show for you and I, I mean, people who are not in a war zone or who are in extreme poverty and so on, for the typical person that has a device to listen to this wonderful podcast and, you know, is busy, engaged, trying to make himself better for that typical person. If you count the norm of life, Chris, the norm of life is good, right?

The reason why we recognize when we're sick is because the norm, the baseline is we're normally healthy, right? Most people would, you know, think that an earthquake is a mega disaster because they've seen it on tv, but they've never actually experienced one. I mean, if you live in California, you may have experienced a few, but if you live in, you know, in Norway, you may have never experienced one, right? And most of your life, even for those who experienced a few, most of life, you're on solid ground. The truth is, most of life is good.

Most of life is okay. And the reason, you know, if you want proof for that, the proof is if you have the brain bandwidth and cycles to be able to contemplate something in the future or, you know, reflect on something in the past, then that, by definition, means now is okay, right? If. If there was a tiger in front of you right now, you wouldn't be thinking about the meeting tomorrow, right? You wouldn't be thinking about that bully that, you know, hurt you in school.

You wouldn't be able to look at past and future, right? So the reality is that if you take every moment of your life, most of the moments, there is no tiger out there. So, using that, I started a very unusual gratitude practice. I basically started to recognize the negative thoughts in my head, okay? And when my brain gave me a negative thought, I made a simple assumption that if 50% of life is okay, then there must be a positive thought associated with it.

So every time my brain told me something negative, I'd say so, but what's good about it, right? And when you get good at this, you can push it to a Jedi master level, honestly, which is to say, but 90% of life is okay, right? So next time your brain gives you a negative thought, ask for nine positive ones. Do that often enough, and your brain will shut the f up, will stop complaining, and will actually start to learn because you're building those neural networks that are training to look for the positive. So those neural networks will simply say, when your brain starts to look for something negative, it will also, by definition, because it knows you're going to ask it for positive ones, it will remember the positive ones, too.

And they are plenty. There are plenty. Like, you know, today, it's now 11:45 p.m. in Dubai. Okay?

And I could complain and say, why am I staying up late and I'm supposed to be unstressable? Or I am. I could tell myself, oh, my God, I'm talking to Chris, someone that I know the work of and appreciate and respect so much. Such a wonderful opportunity. And hopefully, together we're going to make five people unstressable, or maybe 50,000 people unstressable.

Amazing, right? It's the same exact coin. You just need to turn it, and you need to tell your brain, because your brain, as a survival mechanism, is not interested in telling you what's good. You know, what's good doesn't, doesn't represent a threat to you. It's very, very interested in telling you what's wrong.

So you have to shortcut that machine and say, hold on, hold on. I heard you, okay? I heard you complaining. I heard you alerting me to a, b, and c. I heard you.

What is good about this? And if you make that your gratitude practice, you'll become grateful. A lot more of. Okay, that's g. What about, why are.

We going to go through all of them? Why is the yield. And yielding is a very, very difficult skill, especially in the modern world of fast paced success. Right? Yielding is to recognize when the world has.

When life has forced your hand. Okay. And I always try to tell people to try and differentiate between two sensations. Of course, there are so many incredible pieces of work. Grit, for example, is an incredible book about the idea of, no, don't ever give up.

Keep going, keep going, keep going. And I try to say, differentiate between two sensations. One sensation is you're walking on a flat surface, and then it ramps up. Okay? That's when you need grit, when life becomes harder.

Yeah, try, keep trying. But picture yourself, which is what I call the nudge. Picture yourself driving into a roundabout. I know in America you don't have many of those, right? But driving into a roundabout, and as you drive in, exit to where you were where you wanted to go out is closed.

Three is closed, four is closed, and five is open. Right. You can go around that roundabout with grit for the rest of your life. You can go about around it for the rest of your life with grit, but you're never going to get anywhere. And the smarter ones of all of us will yield, will say, okay, you know what?

Where I want to go, the exit is closed. I'm going to go out of five and figure out my way out of there. Right. There is a big difference between ramping up. It's.

It requires more effort, so stay the course, or it's. It's really changing you. And when life forces you to change, it's one of. For one of two reasons. Only one of two reasons.

One is to change direction, or the other is to learn and heal. Okay? And so once life forces your hand, ask yourself, which one of those. Which one of those does want? Does life want to direct my attention to?

Is there something I can learn here? Is there something that's within me that I need to change and heal? Is there something that I need to change direction and maybe go another way because I'm needed in another place? Because, by the way, the story of life is not just you. You're one in a massive form of being that's called all of us.

And your presence in a different place might actually lead you to a different place or might lead someone else to a different place. I met my wife and the love of my life simply because I had to be a little late. So I miss a train, and then, you know, I arrive, you know, in the later train around the corner. We literally bump into each other. I could stand entirely on that old train journey complaining about life.

Okay. Or I could tell myself the nudge is taking me to a place where I should be. The line between I'm giving up because I'm not trying fully hard or I am letting go of something because this isn't right for me. Or I'm pushing to the point of break or injury is a delicate one. And I think that there's an art form to learning how to do that.

Chris Williamson
And it's one that I've struggled with for an awfully long time. I don't want to feel like things are out of my control, but I also don't want to push myself so hard that I snap. Yeah, I'd encourage you. So, I mean, let's be fair. I lived a very long portion of my life killing myself.

Mo Gawdat
Right? I remember vividly Karena, my assistant, in Google X, Stanford MBA, incredibly intelligent woman. You know, she comes to, joins my team. The first thing I say is, okay, look, here are my travel guidelines. You know, when I go from here to here, I want this.

I don't want the red eye on those trips. I want that. And she smiles and looks at me and says, yeah, sure, no problem. Yeah, sure, no problem. Right?

Comes back to me a week later with a PowerPoint presentation that with the title of the presentation is, you're killing yourself. Okay? So I said, okay, that's quite interesting. And she flips through, slide by slide of my history of travel, okay, showing me how many hours I actually were in the air, how many hours I actually were in transit, and how other paths, how our other ways of doing those trips could have actually worked differently. And she came up with two very simple rules.

She said, 1 hour of one, one night of sleep for every hour of time zone difference, okay? Which doesn't really work very well when you're from California to New York, if you want, but works really well when you go to Singapore, right? And then suddenly she started to say, and by the way, we're just going to tell people upfront that you're going to be in Asia for seven days or nine days or whatever, and so they can line up your meeting things. My God, my life flipped upside down. Like, truly and honestly, she showed me a trip where I went from California to Taiwan, from Taiwan to China, from China to Russia to the UK, back to California in five working days.

Tell me, tell me that we're not maniacs, okay? That is absolutely, absolutely wrong. And when you really start to think about it, where is the line? Where is the line where you can actually start to do things with joy? By the way, I achieve so much more now by simply telling myself, no, I'm not going to treat myself that way anymore.

It's really quite interesting. And what ends up happening is that 90%, the only reason you're talking to me, Chris, by the way, is that I managed to give myself enough breaks in life to sit down and write. Because you know what? I can whip myself to write, and it's not going to happen. I need to have inspiration.

I need to have organized thoughts. I need to have my notes, you know, written down when I'm sitting, sipping a coffee somewhere slowly, right? And I need to have my structure of what I want to write about, how I want to write about it. It doesn't happen with stress. Yes, proper authors will sit down and write for two to 3 hours a day, but I can't push myself and say, and by the way, you can write eight pages a day.

So if you write seven and a half, you failed. Today doesn't work that way. We've spoken about the issues that you encounter. The line for me, between mental and emotional problems are very difficult. Are very difficult to split apart, because our emotions manifest in the body.

Chris Williamson
They make us feel a particular way. But then we start to tell ourselves a story, correct, about what that means to us. So talk to me about the things that people might be feeling that they're not aware of, which can cause them to be emotionally stressed. But big, big, big lie in the modern world that is driven in my. No scientific proof for what I'm about to say, but I believe it started with the industrial revolution, right, that we were told we can't handle your unpredictability and irrationality and emotions.

Mo Gawdat
Emotions are just too fluffy to deal with, right? So you don't bring your. Your emotions to school, don't bring them to work. You know, when you're here, don't cry, right? And.

And what a disaster. What a disaster for two reasons. One is we still feel them or they're still within us. Sometimes we numb them, okay? But they're still within us.

And two is you've never felt alive without emotions, okay? So even negative emotions are really the memory thread of your life is made of emotional moments, not of facts. You know, nobody remembers. Remembers the algebra equation that they solved when they were in third grade. Okay?

They remember that they solved a difficult equation, and their, you know, teacher was proud of them. The emotion. Okay? Here's the trick. The trick is all of those layers, mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual, interact with each other.

So, you know, you can feel an emotion that triggers a thought, or you can have a thought that triggers an emotion, okay? And then the emotion will trigger more thought, that will trigger more emotions that will reflect in your body, which will make you feel, you know, stressed and aches and pains that will make you think. A negative thought that will trigger an emotion, and so on, right? So take fear. We spoke about fear and all of its derivative.

Fear is quite algorithmic. As irrationalism as it may appear to be, fear is a moment in the future is less safe than this moment, okay? So fear basically is related to, you know, your amount of safety at t zero minus your amount of safety at t one. And it's an algorithmic response, but it gets highly exaggerated and it gets blended, and then it gets suppressed. So let me explain that.

Fear, in itself, as an emotion, is a very exaggerated emotion. You know, the heart of a mother would tell her husband, your son's been sick all winter because the child had the flu. Three days. And then six weeks later, another three days, right? But to the.

To the heart of a mother, this is way too much not to act upon it. So you exaggerate. Fear exaggerates the situation so that you actually start to act. Number two is we are taught to suppress our emotions. We are.

They're very subtle and blended. So if I asked you, how do you feel right now? It's impossible to tell me like a laser sharp. I feel jealous. That doesn't work that way.

You can feel jealous and a little bit of envy and a bit of anger and the constipation and whatever, right? A million things come together to create that blend, that wheel of emotions of how you feel, right? So it actually takes a lot of attention to understand how you feel. And in the unstressable, we try to explain that the way to do that is to look for the physical signatures of every emotion. Okay?

So, you know, anxiety, for example, is felt in your stomach, in your digestive system. The third is, after all of that, they tell us and don't feel it, don't they? They are saying, don't show it. And as a result, we tell ourselves, I cannot not show it. If I feel it, it just takes me over.

It's irrational. I am afraid of it. So I'm not going to feel it. I'm not going to acknowledge it to myself. And what ends up happening is that those emotions will.

Will stay. The body keeps the score. Remember the book, right? So basically, they will stay within you and they will build and build and build until, you know. You know, eventually they'll either burn, burst out.

So, you know, basically you'll find yourself crying for no reason or you'll. They'll kill you. They'll eat you out from the inside. Now, how do you deal with this? We said that each of the four modalities, you know, mental, emotional, physical and spiritual, has a language.

It speaks to you in a different language. Your emotions are trying to get your attention, believe it or not, for a positive reason. Even then, the uncomfortable emotions. I don't want to call them negative and positive, right, the uncomfortable emotions. Fear is uncomfortable, but it's trying to alert you that something might not be safe.

Envy is uncomfortable, but it's trying to alert you that there is something in the world that you want but don't have. Right? And you can go on, you know, boredom, the biggest emotion of the modern world. Why we're swiping all the time, okay, is uncomfortable, but it's originally designed because if you're underwhelmed with. With the world, you would try to make it better.

So when you were born bored in the cave, you were chipping stones, and chipping stones was helping all of us. Now, when you're bored, you go to Instagram or TikTok. Right? And so, interestingly, the first step to acknowledging your emotions is to acknowledge the value of emotions, that they're a very. In computer science, I call them batch processing.

So, if I gave you clear information and data to analyze and come back with an answer, this is what we do mentally, our emotional and spiritual engagements, connecting to the non physical side of you so that you can actually listen to your intuition. Those are crunching a massive amount of information that you cannot scrunch in your brain, including the body language of the person, including what you felt about this, including this. Including a million little things. And telling you, I don't feel comfortable, or I feel worried, or I feel, that's incredible intelligence if you allow yourself to listen to it. So, step number one is acknowledge that they come for a reason, and that even if they're uncomfortable, that reason is.

Is a good reason for you. And two, celebrate them, because I hosted, on my podcast, I hosted Arun Gandhi. Arun is the grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, and he wrote a book called the gift of Anger. And so, first question I asked him, I was like, arun, how can anger be a gift? Like, seriously?

And he said, what do you mean, moa? I mean, anger is an energy, like any other energy. You can use it to punch someone in the face, or you can use it to stand up and make a speech that changes the world. Anger itself is positive in its amplitude, but has no polarity. You can use it whichever way you want.

And that's step number two of familiarizing yourself with your emotions. So, is to tell yourself, by the way, no emotion is bad. If I use the energy the right way, it will be good for me. Now you got yourself logically. Believe it or not, Alice, by the way, my co author would talk about this very differently.

I'm the, you know, the brainiac, right? So. So now that you got yourself to accept that, one, you will always feel. Two, that your emotions are for a good reason. Three, that they have no polarity.

You can use them in your favor, then sit down and identify them. Sit down and identify them. Like, literally sit with yourself and say, how am I feeling today? How am I feeling? And and you know what shocks me, Chris, is that if you get a tiny bit of a sore throat, you will stop immediately.

You'll go like something's wrong. I need to do something about this. A bit more vitamin maybe I rest. Soup. I don't know if you feel almost at the verge of burnout.

Some of us will not stop again. Going back to that assumption we discussed at the beginning, that it's the price I have to pay. That's absolutely wrong. Now start by acknowledging them. Write them down.

I feel jealous. I feel inadequate. I feel. I feel. I think it was Brene Brown that wrote, you know, 87 different emotions.

Read them, okay, and just tell yourself, yes, I feel this. Yes, I feel this. Yes. When Jenny shows up, I feel that when, you know, and so on. And then take the ones that are the most significant.

Not the most painful, not the most joyful, but the most significant. What does significant mean? Significant is they are contributing to a big part of where you are in life. They're contributing to a lot of your brain cycles and incessant thinking. They're contributing to sort of slowing down, slowing you down, and, you know, preventing you from engaging fully.

So, you know, I'll tell you from my work, sadly, sadly, because of school inadequacy, I'm not good enough. Okay. Is an enormously epidemic emotion in our world today. Loneliness is an epidemic emotion in our world today. And somehow, if you're lonely, by the way, that is literally constant stress.

Because, remember, humanity didn't survive because of how smart we are. We survived because we were part of the tribe. The tribe could work together. If you're with seven people in the jungle, you feel a lot safer than if you're alone in the streets of London. And I think the reality is that when you're lonely, this is literally one of the top signals of a stress response.

I can't be safe. I cannot relax because I don't know if everything is safe. Now. Those emotions are very significant in terms of how they impact you in life, how they impact your engagement with the world, how they impact your work, and so on and so forth. Pick those.

Pick one. Pick one and talk to it almost like a maniac, say, like, loneliness. Why are you showing up? Why do I feel lonely? The answer will be very interesting.

The answer will be because you would be better if you're with others. I'm encouraging you to feel uncomfortable about sitting alone, swiping so that you become motivated to go outside and meet someone. Okay. And believe it or not, if you understand that emotion, so when I talk about digital detoxing, for example, the number one step is to understand psychological discomfort is to understand that boredom is telling you. The emotion is telling you, I am underwhelmed with life, okay?

This life doesn't excite me. The response is not Netflix. The response is, how can I make my life more exciting? Right? And once you get that answer, you can now sit logically and say, okay, boredom, I get it.

I'm going to find a few things that will actually make my life more exciting, not numb my brain so that I don't feel the underwhelmed life. What else haven't we said about ways that people can heal? Emotional stress tactics, habits, connection. Human connection. Okay?

So, you know, Bhutan measures this gross domestic happiness. Interesting idea. I don't know how effectively they do it, but what blew me away was a study. I don't remember the name again. I hosted the professor on my podcast.

I don't remember his name, but he did a study in Bhutan to find the happiest people in Bhutan. Okay? And then he measured. He basically tried to find what was common across all of them. The happiest people in a place that is so, you know, placing so much importance on happiness were those who had a support network of five people or more that they felt they can call on if they were in need, okay?

And so basically, that connection, if you're emotionally overwhelmed, if you feel that there are people in your life that you can connect to, that you can rely on, that there will be. That will be there for you. Okay? You know, you'll feel a lot less overwhelmed. The most interesting part of that study is that he took the names of the five people that were in that network and went to them, okay?

And they each had five people that they felt were part of their inner circle that they can count on, okay? And it's quite interesting. So, you know, we believe, because of the way the world has set us up, that we are now supposed to sit alone in our rooms looking at screens, okay? And we believe that this is how it is. Like, we believe that stress is the tax we pay, okay?

That we believe that we now should be lonely. Interestingly, if we all agree that this is shit, okay, then there are enough people out there that actually don't want to be lonely. And believe it or not, I, you know, I'm an ultimate introvert. So I believe, you know, even though my work requires me to stand in front of tens of thousands of people and, you know, spend days and days and days hugging and talking to people, and so on. If you let.

If you leave me alone, I'll spend the rest of my life at all. I re energize when I'm alone, when I'm reflecting, when I'm thinking, when I'm learning, and so on. When, when I started to try and become extroverted and actually make friends and get to know people, I traveled so much in my life, so I needed to make friends very frequently. Okay. I started with a book that was by Larry King, if you remember Larry King, about how to speak to anyone.

And not, not a great book, but he had one tip that really flipped my life, which was, start with low stake conversations. Okay? And basically that means, you know, talk to the. To. To the, you know, person in front of you in the, in the, you know, line in front of the barista, or talk to the person in, you know, opening the door in the building, the security person and so on.

And why are they low stake? You know, if. If you're a man like me, you know, you don't go and talk to the most gorgeous woman in the room. That's very pressuring, very stressful. Okay.

But if in front of you, there is a lovely old lady in the supermarket line, you can definitely learn to practice that idea of not being lonely by talking to them. And you'll be amazed how silly, like, in the coffee line, you can simply say something like, oh, my God, so many choices. What are you having today? Just a silly conversation. Right?

You know, in the, in the, in. When you get to the top of the line, just speak to the barista. I do that every time, you know, especially in New York City. They get shocked. It's like the barista will mechanically look at me and say, so what can I get for you today?

And I'm like, hi, how are you? Are you okay? She says, sorry, I didn't get your order. And I'm like, no, that wasn't an order. I just was saying, how are you today?

Are you okay? Okay. And most of them would stop for a second and feel very awkward and then smile like, oh, my God, someone noticed me. And it was for them as much as it was for me to be able to teach myself to go out and talk to people. I would probably feel that for the younger generations of our world today, loneliness is one of the top reasons for stress.

Okay? It's probably one of the top reasons for suicide. And I would tend to believe that if we can force ourselves to have physical, like, face to face connections to humans and just start with silly conversations, a lot of that would go away. I think one of the problems people face when it comes to admitting loneliness plays a role in how they feel is that they know they can't fix it, just themselves. It's not something it requires you to be in relation with somebody else.

Chris Williamson
And there is a. Especially among guys, there is a desire to not be reliant on anybody or anything except for yourself. It's a protectionist strategy. The world out there is unsafe, untrustworthy. I don't know if I can put my faith in it.

So I'm just going to go monk mode. It's me and a barbell and some books and some breath work and screw the world. And I think that the most difficult paths are probably the ones that are going to yield the greatest return to you. And for a lot of people, it involves facing up to. Maybe I need to actually work with someone else here as opposed to just on my own.

Mo Gawdat
Yeah. The most uncomfortable bit is normally the highest tiered. Right. We know that from the gym. Anyway, talk to me about the role of physical stress.

Chris Williamson
How does that play physical stress? So, in unstressable, we attempted to help people understand where they stand by having a quiz actually called the unstressable quiz. So it's available for free anyone who wants to take it. Unstressable.com quiz. And when we tested it, Alice and I, my co author and I, I scored horribly on physical stress.

Mo Gawdat
Horribly. Like. And. And the way we wrote the book together, Alice and I are literally yin and yang, right? So.

So we're almost opposite in our approach in everything, even though we're aligned on the target. She's very feminine, very, you know, spiritual, very reiki type and so on. And I'm very like, you can see I'm a brainiac. Algorithms, equations, and so on. So when we decided to write, we'd align on the structure, and then we would write each a chapter and review each other's works and complement it and so on.

So she wrote physical stress, and I read it to edit it on my silent retreat right before my silent retreat in 2022. And I texted her and I said, Alice, every single symptom, every single practice that you mentioned in that book is within me. Like, that chapter is describing me. It's like, are you teasing me here? Okay.

So she said, yeah, I mean, I told you many times. So I said, what do I do? And she said, inflammation. Oh, my God. Chris flipped my life upside down.

So I was entering into my 40 days silent retreat, okay? Which normally is in nature, and so you de stress a lot. But I, on walking in, I went online and I ordered a food plan, an anti inflammatory food plan, and stuck to it for 40 days. All aches, all pains, all headaches, all digestive issues, all. Everything on day eight started to go away, and then it started to.

I mean, it never came back, to be honest. I mean, I still, of course, overdo it with travel and so on, so I would feel tired and exhausted and so on. But so much has been reversed just by working on inflammation. Now, the thing is this. Your body will speak to you in a language that is simply written in aches, pains, and discomforts, okay?

It is basically trying to tell you, you're about to kill me. Can you please stop? Okay? And for most of us, especially the athletic ones, we will end up saying, shut up. Let me push you a little harder.

Right? I can see you laughing, right? So this is exactly how we get our. So there are some times, by the way, of course, going to the gym is incredibly valuable. Sometimes.

A HIIT exercise is really, really valuable for you. Movement, by the way, is the natural response that cortisol wants from you. So if you're stressed, your body wants to fight or flight, so it actually wants movement sometimes just to burn out your cortisol. A good hit exercise, and it's done. But if the stress is physical and you keep pressuring your body to go through more and more and more physical stress, you're getting inflammation and you're getting chronic issues.

You're getting chronic issues. Like, you know, if your muscles are fatigued, you can recover. But if your joints are starting to become rough and not as good as they used to be because you're treating them like crap, that's not very recoverable, not as easily recoverable, and sometimes it's not recoverable at all. And so here's the trick. The trick is, I tell people, and I know it sounds really, really simple, I tell people, give yourself one weekend where you're gonna intermittent fast, you're gonna eat very healthy.

You're gonna hydrate incredibly well. You're gonna rest, rest, rest. Okay? You're gonna sleep well. You're gonna be in the sun if you can, and so on and so forth.

And then by the end of that Sunday, take a marker, tell yourself, this is how a rested, relaxed, healthy body feels like, okay? And just like that source wrote, anytime you deviate from that, it's a signal, okay? Anytime you deviate from that, because your neck and your back are hurting, you know, and your shoulders are hurting, it's. It means you've been overworking on your computer, okay? Anytime you get fatigue in your wrists and your, you know, your palms and so on, it's because you've been swiping too much on your phone and so on and so forth.

Right. Now, the trick is physical stress is not like emotional stress at all. It's not blended, it's not subtle. It is in your face. Yeah.

Right in your face. All you need to do is to make a decision. Tell yourself, when I get a sore, a sore throat, I stop. When I get a physical pain or ache or, you know, most of the time, you don't even need to go to a doctor. You really know what's going on.

Constant headaches, you know, ib's, back pains, neck pains. They're clearly stress symptoms. Clearly stress symptoms most of the time. You know, of course, if you feel that you need a physician to look at it, just tell them the truth about how stressed you are so that they don't just diagnose your, you know, your physical symptoms, but also your. What could be the reason behind those physical symptoms and.

And basically take a stand. How difficult is it? Eat healthy anti inflammatory. Right? Not, you know, you want.

We can complicate it, but the least is take all intolerances out of your body, even if you like them, okay? You know, attempt to reduce or stop sugar, at least all processed sugar. We don't need a massive study anymore to tell us how inflammatory that is. Okay? Gluten and lactose.

For most of us, maybe not any one individual listener, but for most of us, they're not the most comfortable things for us to eat. So tests so that, you know. Right. Otherwise, eat healthy, that's number one. Rest, that's number two.

Okay. And rest is a ritual. So sleep is a ritual that starts at 10:00 a.m. every morning. So for you to sleep well, your last caffeinated drink should not be later than 10:11 a.m.

right. And your sort of day is winding down. So your day needs to have that slope to it much earlier than we think. You can't get to bed at ten and expect to switch everything off and sleep at 10:10 right. You need to gradually slope back into less light, less engagement, less space, less everything until you're in that rested state.

So eat healthy, rest, and listen to the signals that your body tells you. It's really not that complicated. If you're in pain, something's wrong, it needs your attention. Yeah, speaking of the pushing yourself too hard we did breath work at a birthday in Miami over the weekend, and I managed to even push doing breath work too hard, something which isn't a competition. And I managed to make myself pass out doing breath holds during.

Chris Williamson
No way. Yes. Yeah. It was very impressive. It's the second time that I've done it.

It's just like the classic jimbro type a approach. If doing it for two minutes is good, doing it for four minutes is twice as good. And, yeah, I very, very impressively came back. I was having a wonderful dream about being on a gondola. So I'm maybe going through Venice, I think, or something like that.

And then I come back to. And the breath work practitioner lady has got a hand on my neck, looking slightly concerned. Yeah, look, I'm true to form on that. So the fourth type of stress that you have is spiritual stress? Yes.

I'm not even sure I understand what spiritual stress is like. What does that mean? Are you a spiritual person? To start. So, you know, I think the most important thing not to alienate anyone is that spirituality is very different than religion.

Mo Gawdat
So I am a very scientific person. The scientific method is responsible to help us understand everything that's physical. Right. So the scientific method will tell you if I cannot physically observe it and measure it repeatedly, it's not a concern of science. Okay, what is it a concern of, then?

So, you know, things like love. Love cannot be measured physically, cannot be observed repeatedly. It's really not part of the scientific method, things like your non physical being. So some of us can relate very clearly that I'm not just made of my physical self. There is a non physical side to me.

Call it consciousness if you want, or if you're a religious person, call it a spirit if you want. Right. But how do we study that? And the two disciplines for that are spirituality and philosophy. Right.

Now, in that case, spirituality becomes relating to the non physical side of you. Okay. And the non physical side of you, if. Call it consciousness, for the ease of the conversation. Sees the universe very differently.

Sees the universe very differently because it's not physical. So it's not subject to the physical limitations of the physical world, such as space and time. Okay. So it sees the world differently. It is a lot less stressed by the physical world, but it is very much more stressed by its purpose.

So basically, if you're engaged in the physical existence, ignoring the purpose for which you're here, your spirit will attempt. Your consciousness will attempt to talk to you, not through your brain, but through your intuition. So you'll basically be able to feel that this is not right. You don't know why you feel that way because your analytical brain is not catching up yet. Okay?

But somehow your intuition will tell you, no, maybe I shouldn't invest in that deal. Maybe I should ask about this. Maybe this is not the right partner for me. Maybe this, maybe that. Right.

And when it speaks to you in the form of intuition, that language, believe it or not, is not subtle, but is completely shut down by most of us. Why? Because the logical, you know, the, the high productivity world that we live in demands that we provide data and evidence for everything that we speak about, even. Even things that we speak about to ourselves. So I normally do what I call the arbitrage test.

I basically take any of the four, four modalities, take any three of the four modalities and see if they align. Right? So if you take your intuition, your emotion, and your logic, okay, or you take your logic, your emotions and your actions, for example, and they don't align, then you're not balanced around your purpose. You're not balanced for why you're here or. Or the best, optimum way for you to be here.

You know, if you. If you tell yourself, I need to work harder, okay, and, you know, and you're actually working harder, that's your. Your mind and your body, but your heart is telling you, I can't take this anymore, or your intuition is telling you, no, there is some different place that I need to be, okay? That arbitrage broke. So something is not right.

And what I normally tell to people is, if you feel that, refer to your intuition or your emotions. They're more honest than your thoughts and your body. Your body is driven to just execute. Your thoughts are highly, highly programmed with scripts, okay? So refer to your heart and and or your intuition and, and try to find out what they're telling you.

And try to ask yourself, is there a way to include their perception within my actions and my thoughts? Okay. Spiritual stress is simply a purposeless life. Okay? You know, your.

Your spirit is not stressed. It is stressed that you're not catching up for to where you need to be. And. And it's stressed that you're. That you're unable to listen to all of the messages that it keeps telling you.

And most of the time, it will nudge you. Most of the time, if you keep straying away from that purpose, eventually life itself will give you a shoulder and say, you know what, I told you many times nicely, and you're not taking that. Like in my situation, in my story, I wrote soul for happy, my first book. I wrote the notes for solve for happy 2011. Okay?

You know, I'd been. My story very quickly is I was very successful since my late twenties. Multimillionaire, every. And I come from a very simple upbringing, okay? And.

And then miserable. So I had everything that you can think of, and I was miserable. And I started then to work on happiness with my very unusual engineering approach, with the help of my wonderful son, who was truly the heart, the wisdom of my life, okay? And eventually we ended up with something that works. I was, you know, calm all the time.

You could not dent my happiness. And I wrote the notes. I said, this is something that really needs to be shared with the world. 2011. Did nothing about it.

Nothing about it. My intuition was saying, write it, release it. It's a good book. Did nothing about it, right? Was busy closing more billion dollar deals.

Was busy excited about technology, my work at Google X, and so on and so forth, until I lost Ali. Okay? So 2014, my son leaves the world. I believe he's in a good place. But his departure completely shook me to the core, to the point where I suddenly realized that, you know, a couple of weeks before he died, he had a dream, and he told his sister he was everywhere and part of everyone.

So shocking, because when you really understand spiritual teachings like Sufism and so on, this means to die everywhere and every part of everyone is to. Is to sort of relieve the limitations of the physical world, right? So anyway, when his sister told me that dream, I found myself saying, oh, my God, I can do this for you, Habibi. I'm a very senior executive at Google. I know how to reach billions of people.

I'm gonna write your essence, what you taught me in a book, and try to get it to reach 10 million people who will then tell others. And through 70 years and six degrees of separation, you'll be a part of his essence, will be everywhere and part of everyone. And that's what happened.

My intuition kept telling me, right, right. And I kept delaying, delaying, delaying, delaying. So the world nudges you, right? And once the world nudges you, and you go back on track, believe it or not, I lost the one person in life that I loved the most, Ali and a and my daughters. My daughter is what I love the most in life.

I lost one of them. And yet I've never been happier. I have never been more positive. I've never been more aligned with my purpose. I've never more felt more right.

Even though he's no longer in my life. So the thing that I beg everyone when I speak about this is to say, don't wait until life nudges you. Don't wait. When you get that nagging intuition, just follow. Just give it a try.

Just take a short week off and try to see if you can write it or if you can do whatever it is that you get that intuition to do. I think this truly is the most stressful for anyone who's trying to make a difference to the world or to himself or to someone that he loves or she loves, is to not listen to our intuition. It's not to follow our spiritual purpose. What would you say to someone who's heard everything you've said today and goes, mo, that sounds fantastic, but it's just not really for me. I don't think that I can change.

Chris Williamson
I feel like stress is just baked into my life. And I'm worried. I'm scared that this is going to kind of just be me from now until the grave. What would you say to that person? I'd say, you know, of course, if they're interested in feeling better or living a better life, because living stressed is not living really.

Mo Gawdat
I'd say take one tiny thing. Just change one tiny thing. Take the easiest on the path or take the most significant on the path. Okay? Don't even eliminate your commute.

Just make your commute a little more enjoyable. Don't even, you know, remove 80% of your work. Just remove 1%, 2%. Don't, you know, free up your time from stress. Just take that one friend that is really annoying.

Like, really annoying, and tell them, no, just don't go out for coffee with them again. Okay? And I think one thing, you know, you see, one of my major concepts of life, and in the book is something I call committed acceptance. And committed acceptance is not to accept life as it is and then die. You know, lay down and die.

And that's it. I, this is my life forever. But to accept life as it is and commit to make life a tiny bit better, just that. So that tomorrow is a tiny bit better than today, and after tomorrow is a tiny bit better than tomorrow. And I think most of us fail because we don't have that consistency of vision.

Okay? It's so easy. I love, for example, nature, so I love gardening, and I love fish, aquariums and so on. And, you know how it is. You start those things and they always mess up when, you know, when I move to my new apartment, it's so difficult to start because the environment is different and so on tomorrow, I'll just make it a tiny bit better.

And the day after, I'll make a tiny bit better, right? Until they stabilize and everything works. And that's all I tell people. I tell people that, you know, when I graduated from university a long time ago, I'm an old man now. I noticed that I was regularly going to the gym four to five times a week, investing in my body, okay?

And then I woke up one morning and I said, okay, that's it. University is over. Does that mean I'm not investing in my mind anymore? More. Okay.

So I decided to add an hour a day, literally, just like I go to the gym. I added an hour a day at the time to read the book, to watch a documentary, you know, now, to watch a YouTube video, to listen to your podcast, and so on and so forth, right? An hour a day. Now, here's the interesting thing. If you're aware of Malcolm Gladwell's work of, you know, outliers, 10,000 hours is what you need to make a massive difference to yourself, okay?

An hour a day. Over the. As many years as I've lived since I made that decision, massive change. Massive change. A comparison between me and my friends who spent an hour a day watching football, okay?

I'm in a very, very different place. I then told myself, and maybe an hour a day in my spiritual reflection and seeking, okay, it's just to understand things that are not scientific for my brain. And again, I mean, nobody's ever further than anyone else in spiritual seeking. But interestingly, I have so much to consider and to reflect on and to maybe feel a little more lost in, because that's the beauty of a spiritual seeking, is to feel lost. And if you've studied.

I've studied Sufism, and then I studied Islam, and then I studied Christianity, and then I studied Judaism, and I studied Hinduism and Buddhism, so on. And I started atheism, okay? And I love every single one of them. Every single one of them enriches you. It's that whole idea of, what can I dedicate an hour of my day to?

So that tomorrow becomes a tiny bit better than today. That's all I ask people to do, is to not accept where you are today, even if it's good. Just make tomorrow a little better than today. Mo Gadda, ladies and gentlemen. Mo, I really appreciate your work.

Chris Williamson
I think that's this reframing of stress is something that people don't realize is annihilating their enjoyment of life. And I think that digging into it in the way that you have is something that probably everybody should benefit from. Where should people go? They want to keep up to date with all of the stuff that you're doing. Unstressable.com is definitely the place for stress, and Mogad.com is the place for everything else.

Mo Gawdat
I try to answer every social media message that I get, believe it or not, which is impossible. Impossible. I try to, so I don't promise to, but if people want to send me feedback and create a human connection even though it's digital, that would be wonderful as well. And, yeah, I ask people to just recognize that it's not the stress, it's not the events of their life that stress them. That's it's the way they deal with it.

And so perhaps if people make it a priority, they we can become a little more unstressed. Hell yeah. Mo, I appreciate you. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Chris Williamson
Thank you so much.

Mo Gawdat
Thank you so much.

#788 - Mo Gawdat - How To Save Your Brain From The Dangers Of Stress & Anxiety

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1: Introduction to Stress

2: Biological Mechanisms

3: Strategies to Become Unstressable

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