One of the things that really did catch me off guard was it was in your your book, The Genius life, where you talk about this study with the mice and you make the case that travel is, a has positive relationships with health, has health benefits. Not something I've ever heard anybody say before that? Travel is good for our
health. Yeah. Well I'm glad you brought that up because this, that also kind of parlays into another concept that I've been
lately thinking about a lot for the first time. Well, first of all that. So the study that I talked about in the second book, The Genius life is the fact that they, you know, just how important novel experiences are for the brain they will take mice and keep them confined to you know like a very limited area and they see that they're they suffer. They suffer in terms of their bodies and their brains and then they let that mouse or they let you know intervention my
Go and explore what they call enriched environments. And they see something like fourfold, you know, like they see, like, an upregulation in various indicators of neurogenesis, which is really important. It's like the creation of new brain cells. So all that is to say, like, you know, it's important to do novel things. And as I say this, you know, there's something that I struggle with my, in my, in my own life because I am a creature of habit, and I would routinely get the
Since this gnawing sense that I'm living Groundhog Day over and over and over again where I wake up and I do a few things like work-related I work out but ultimately like I've got like this routine that I love and I tend to do that on script every day but I started to get this feeling like I'm just like waking up doing a few things, going back to bed, waking up, doing a few things, going back to bed. Like before I know it like my head is just like on My Pillow again and it started to get like really frustrating to me until I discovered that.
Hugged A syndrome is actually thing and essentially what it is is you know, our brains are and this ties back to the mouse study, our brains, our efficiency machines, right? It's conservation of energy. Our brains and bodies don't want to do any more work than they absolutely have to write. Because I mean now we know that food is like ever-present always at Arm's Reach but for the longest time that wasn't the case and our brains are massive energy, consumers our brains speak for 25% of our basal metabolic.
Pollock rate despite accounting for only two to three percent of our body's Mass. So anything that the brain can do to make its functioning more efficient, it'll do. So when you do the same things every single day what does your brain do? It prunes away excitement. Joy happiness, like the dopamine response is just completely blunted and that's why as you get older people, universally right? Is like a human Universal. People report that time Justice.
Accelerates. Right? Like where do the last decade of my life, go? It's all that time accelerated. Right? It's just that your life has become so routine. It's interesting. You say that because there's also the other stereotype that you get grumpy. Yeah. The word. Yeah. It's quite typical in The Stereotype that people will get older and a little bit more grumpy.
Yeah, well they get grumpy. They get stuck in their ways, they get. I mean, yeah, that's that's definitely the case but there probably are getting grumpy because their lives lack the joy and excitement that they once felt right time is just like accelerating that moving walkway that we are all on towards the inevitable decrepitude of old age, right? Like it seems to go faster and faster and faster. The older we get but it's not because time actually is moving any faster. It's because we get so stuck in our ways like we get so our routines
It's so cemented and what we fail to realize and hopefully this, you know, me saying this like shakes people out of their out of their comfort zones, you know, and and, and inspires people, to shake things up a little bit. This Groundhog Day syndrome, it causes our brains to just like sheer away for the sake of efficiency. I mean, it's got, its got good intentions, right? But it's Shearer's away like all the joy. So, you just become like this wrote automatized on and and the joy, the excitement, it just, you know, it's something that like
You cease to experience, you know, you cease to experience it. Whereas when you look back at, like, your youth, for example, it's not that like time actually moved slower. It's that every day was different and and so that I think is really important and, and yeah, we should challenge ourselves whether it's to travel. I mean, travel is like, to me the epitome of exposing oneself to an enriched environment because everything is new. But if you can't travel, you know, like
Go to a different gym every once in awhile, look, you know, try shopping in news in different supermarkets or change up your wardrobe or take on a new creative project, like start a new hobby. There are all kinds of things that you can do to shake yourself out of this like, Perpetual routine that I think has a real cognitive and health cost.
So I was looking at a study, they did on rats and habits, you probably know the study with the rats, the chocolate in the Maze. I think so where they
Get the rats to run through a maze to a piece of chocolate. But the first time, the rat runs through the maze to the chocolate. They wanted to the rat's brain and there's a ton of cognitive cognitive activity, right? You see the rap observationally scratching around sniffing around, eventually finds the chocolate against the reward when they put the rack back into the maze. For the second time, cognitive activities gone because a habit has been formed. So they as they as I looked at the brain scans of those rats, it was just
Lie flat because they were on autopilot. Again, the brain is yeah, conserve a conserving, its need to function so that it can focus on other things. Other threats, it can conserve energy as you say and that's what I lives become like. We don't when we get out of bed in the morning, I'll route from the bed to the kitchen is not one that requires me to have any sort of cognitive activation. I fly in there for also, I don't remember the journey. Yeah, I just I just fly down there. Yeah, you're on autopilot. Yeah. And our lives become autopilot and it's interesting.
Nothing. I'm trying to figure out. If she were talking there, like you said, sharing away, the like the happiness, what wide? Why does being on autopilot, cost me happiness? And why does it make my? Did you save me in my brain smaller? Not
smaller. Okay, thank you. Well, it probably, I mean you know if that Mouse study holds true in humans it probably doesn't. It doesn't support neuroplasticity. Yeah, you need for my brain to? Yeah, yeah, I mean it's an efficiency machine after also,
the happiness.
The why? Why does that? Why is living a life on autopilot have an impact on my my happiness?
Well, there are probably I mean there there are definitely benefits to routine, right? Like there are not two like some of the benefits to routine is like our can be that you you know you have your for example, your diet dialed in or you have a, you know, you have great connections in your community, you know. So I'm not telling everybody to like throw their lives into into upheaval but but
No. It's just like when we start to do the same things every day we it's the scientific term is habituation. Yeah. Fuck yeah. We habituate right? It becomes habit right? And we feel this way. Like we see this with that car that we've pined for and suddenly it's sitting in our driveway and yeah it's exciting for the first month or two months, or three months. But after a certain point you know that that level of excitement of excitement that we once felt towards that car or maybe even if it's maybe sometimes it's the person that we're
Her beds with, you know, like this is just an inevitability unfortunate, inevitability of The Human Condition. And so I think there are ways to hack it. I think there are ways to travel with your Sig, with your significant other or break, the routine with your significant other. Or, you know, invest in things that have emotional value for you. For example. So, I mean, the car might have not been the best example because like some people do have emotional connections with cars like I bought
Guitar, you know, recently that I love and I have an emotional connection to it because it was played by one of my favorite artists, you know?
So you talking about that really. It's the decline of meaning that is associated with habituation. Yeah. So and that makes us unhappy because, as you know, creatures of meaning, we do need things to remain meaningful in our
lives. Yeah.
It's, it's like, it's the, it's
these, like, wrote routine behaviors that are not all that productive or meaningful.
All those are, you know, it's like driving. The same route to work every day shopping in the same Supermarket everyday eating the same Foods everyday, like challenge your preferences, you know, like their Foods today that I enjoy that, I didn't like 15 years ago. And I'm always willing to challenge, like my own preferences about things, but it's like, when you do the same things every day, you tend to start to overlook them. It's difficult if not impossible to maintain an appreciative.
Relationship with something that's always there.
It's funny, it reminded me of a study. I am I was reading about regarding music and how that is almost an optimal point with a song that we love where it can be repeated over and over again. So safe, we're listening to it on the radio. It's repeated say we listen to it 50 times. There's a point where we've heard it so many times. It's become habituated that we love it, adopt More Level and then it declines, when we've heard it too much, because at least is that sense of me?
I just remember reflecting on that. How the record industry one to put things in our lives that have a certain level of familiarity, but not too much familiarity, because then we'll just like it. This is why they do remixes because there's a level of familiarity there. So we like it but it has that novel nature which we also really value to make us interested. Yeah. Which habituation obviously kills like habituation and novel. NE so inversely correctly, you know? Yeah,
no, it's true. It's on. There's this quote that I love. I'm a huge.
James Bond fan were talking a little bit about like, you know, before before we started rolling. But like, in the latest film, this is wonderful. Jack London, quote, at the end of the film that they that they use to, to kind of commemorate Bond. And the quote is something like I shall not waste my days, trying to prolong them, I shall use my time and I love that line so much and I think it's such a it's such a good.
You know, like it's so emblematic for I think the life that we all deserve, you know that we all ought to be living. I think like is occasionally in this conversation about how do we live longer, like that's a Nuance that gets lost, you know, it's not just about living longer, it's about living more fully and and so yeah. I think that that's like that's part of it, you know. It's like breaking the routine and and like getting back some of that joy and excitement that we have about life. You
know I have some breaking news.
Shoes.
And this is an emergency, I've spent the last two years writing a book and I've written 33 laws for business, marketing and life that I derived, from all of these conversations I've had here, I traveled the world to write this book. I interviewed some of the most incredible people. I did six months of extensive research on scientific studies, and principles to corroborate everything that I wrote into these 33 laws and ladies and gentlemen, that book called
all the Diary of a CEO. The 33 laws for business, marketing, and life is now available for pre-order and there are 5,000 only 5000 signed copies.
And its first come first, serve. The link is in the bio right now if you want that book. Honestly, it's the best book I've ever written. Is the book. I always should have written. It's the book. I also wish someone had written for me when I was starting out in my career.
I'm really proud of it. I'm really really proud of it really, really proud of it. And I can't wait for all of you to get to read it. It's out in August. I couldn't be more excited about this as you can probably tell. I don't know what to set to say other than the words, I've said to emphasize my excitement, because I think it's important and I think it's really valuable Link in the description.
