You're Not Doomed By Your Genes
You’re not doomed by your parents – rewiring the brain to change your traits and health. So can you beat the genes that make getting-up in mornings hell? Deepak Chopra explains how we can our plastic brains can acquire new habits, become happier and more efficient.
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BBC voiceover:
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Tim Samuels (voiceover):
I'm having lunch with my dad Sefton and his double first cousin Ronnie. There's a reason its lunch, not breakfast.
Tim Samuels:
Ronnie, how'd you find mornings?
Ronnie:
Difficult to get up. I don't think I'm unusual in that respect.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Two octogenarians and me who feels at least their age most mornings.
Tim Samuels:
Who have been the worst morning risers?
Ronnie:
My cousin Sefton.
Tim Samuels:
My father?
Ronnie:
Your father.
Sefton:
Yes!
Tim Samuels:
How'd you find mornings?
Sefton:
Dreadful, to put it mildly, but cousin Rondo's forgotten uncle Nat.
Ronnie:
I don't remember him very much in the morning because we never saw him.
Sefton:
He was in bed!
Ronnie:
Yes, quite. I remember my Uncle Joe, who very rarely got up before lunchtime.
Tim Samuels:
And what was Joe's excuse for not getting up till lunchtime?
Ronnie:
Didn't see any reason for it. Some of my grandchildren are not very clever at getting up in the morning. So, you know, I think it goes right through the family.
Sefton:
I don't think you're too good at getting up, are you in the morning?
Tim Samuels:
No, I’m awful, awful.
Sefton:
Yeah, yeah. thought so, sorry about that. It’s a bad gene you've inherited.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Yep. I don't think I need my whole genome sequenced to see there's something about mornings and the men in my family. I'm long resigned to the early hours being a pit of doom, a low energy, low mood, over-ruminating fog where getting out of bed is the sort of expedition needing a couple of Sherpas as long as they promise not to make any conversation. At some points, you just know whether you're a morning or night person and that's that, but is that still that?
[Musical Introduction]
BBC voiceover:
From the BBC this is All Hail Kale, a discerning yet loving look at all things wellness with Tim Samuels.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
New understanding of how our brains are wired gives hope that the traits we think of as fixed might not be after all. That our genes are much more open to persuasion, our brains much more moldable, even rewirable. And we might not actually be doomed by our parents.
ARCHIVE CLIP:
Burning the midnight oil could mean you'll burn out for good, much sooner than early risers.
ARCHIVE CLIP:
A Northwestern University study found that those who stay up late but struggle to drag themselves out of bed in the morning are more at risk of dying over a six year period than those who turn in early and leap out of bed when the sun rises.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Is it any wonder we don't want to face the world first thing?
ARCHIVE CLIP:
When there's this misalignment there's an issue and that can have a bad effect on our biology and increase, maybe, systemic inflammation and pathways of inflammation that lead to cardiovascular risk and that sort of thing and also cancer has been identified.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
And of course, a whole host of rubbish mental ailments too which all seems entirely unfair. It's not that us night owls are lazy, it is a suspected genetic.
Professor Adrian Williams:
It’s the Period 3 gene and I was part of the group that identified that in 2005.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Adrian Williams, professor of sleep medicine at King's College London and the London Sleep Centre, concurs. It's not laziness. It even has a five syllable definition.
Professor Adrian Williams (voiceover):
The change in the Period 3 gene is not called an abnormality, it's called a polymorphism. That's to avoid the idea that it is you know, some disease-making change. Some people are short, some people tall, some people will sleep late and some people rise early.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
From his clinical experience, there are broadly two types of late risers.
Professor Adrian Williams:
Either the problem is truly genetic in the way that we describe the changes in the Period 3 gene.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
In which case it would have been there since childhood. Or it's something that develops later in our teens.
Professor Adrian Williams:
When there is a tendency to become more evening anyway and that that becomes a learned behaviour.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Surely it can't be learned, my owlism is seared into the DNA of my forefathers. So having said there'd be no need for extensive genetic testing, is this a test tube I see before me?
Alisa Lehman:
There are 450 places scattered all over your DNA that are related to this trait, that we actually look at all of them and take them all into account only given this tendency to be more of a morning person or evening person.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Alisa Lehman is a Senior Product scientist at 23andMe which runs personalised genetics reports. She sent me a spit kit, I send them some saliva and their lab will analyse.
Alisa Lehman:
Hundreds of thousands of places all across all of your DNA and then after that gets analysed, it'll be packaged up into different reports on different topics, including sleep.
Tim Samuels:
So I mean, when you when you process my DNA, will you be able to tell me whether I, as I suspect I do, have this genetic tendency to being a late person?
Alisa Lehman:
Yes, we will. That report will actually give you the average time that people genetically like you tend to wake up. So it'll say, you know, you may be likely to wake up at 8.45 in the morning. We also have a very interesting calculator tool, where you could pretend to be a different person who had more morning genetics and see what would you be like if you had different genetics.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
But even if I do have a polymorphism on my Period 3 gene, am I saddled with never willingly seeing a sunrise, to praying that I don't bump into anyone I know on the tube in the mornings? And away from sleep, does having a genetic tendency for a personality trait, a body shape, even a disease mean that's how you're going to turn out? Oh, it's in my genes, it's in the family. These are big questions requiring a big, multi-disciplinary brain to answer. Dr. Deepak Chopra is an internationally renowned wellness guru, a leading practitioner of alternative medicine, an author on the potential of the brain who foolishly gave me his number after we appeared on a National Geographic show together. So when it comes to our genes, what do we know today?
Dr. Deepak Chopra:
So here's what we know today. When we are conceived, we acquire 25,000 genes approximately, that's what creates the human body. But then when you're born, you acquire another 2 million extra genes which are not human. They are bacteria. They come in your food, they come in contact with your parents, you know, the mother breastfeeds you, touches you, cools, cuddles, strokes you, you're exchanging these bacterial genes and there are 2 million of them instead of 25,000 of human genes. Technically speaking, you're a few human genes hanging on to a bacterial colony, evolutionarily speaking. This bacterial colony is called the microbiome, the second genome, and it’s totally dependent on your lifestyle, totally. It depends on what you eat, how you think, how you breed, how you exercise, how you move, how you relate to the world. So guess what's more important, those two million or the 25,000 human genes? Now of the 25,000 human genes that we have, there are some genes that come with what are called genetic mutations. Think of a mutation for breast cancer like the BRCA gene that Angelina Jolie has, that gene that predicts breast cancer, period. No matter what you do with your lifestyle, if you have that gene, she will get breast cancer. Only 5% of the genetic errors or genetic mistakes can be prevented. All chronicles, Alzheimer's, heart disease, stroke, etc. Those 5% for that in the near future, within the next five years, there will be gene editing or crisper type technology. So, just like you can take an email and you can cut and paste it, you'll take a barcode and read the barcode with gene, then you'll be able to delete the harmful gene and paste the right gene. But even that will not affect more than 5%. The remaining 95% will still be based on lifestyle.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
The gut, home to everyone's new favourite organ. The microbiome from the previous episode just gets bigger and bigger. It's almost even worth the hassle of brewing your own kombucha. That 95% of illnesses and traits are in our own hands isn't just down to the gut. There are two other crucial and interconnected emerging fields at play, epigenetics and neuroplasticity. Epigenetics being the idea that genes can be switched on and off by how you live, it’s nurture over nature. Neuroplasticity, contends the brain is much more moldable than previously thought, and can actually be rewired, both of which are probably best explained by Deepak.
Dr Deepak Chopra:
The neural networks in our brain are constantly shifting according to our experience. Fundamentally our brains are neuroplastic. Now in order to layer neural network, a new wiring, I need to activate proteins which means I need to activate genes. Epigenes are sheets of proteins that are above the genes that are shaped by experience. Just like light bulbs, I can switch on a light bulb, I can switch it off. I can dim it, I can increase the volume. That's what epigenetics is. How your choices, not only mental choices, emotional choices, but also your food, your sleep patterns, your exercise, your movement, your breathing, and ultimately, even your connection with nature. All this influences epigenetics.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Through the miracles of epigenetics and neuroplasticity, a new dawn awaits. Dawn, switching off that night owl tendency to rise where no male ancestor has risen before, to mould my brain into becoming a morning person able to form words, not just grunts before 10am, to maybe even become one of those aliens who go to the gym before work. Hello mornings!
Professor Michael Striker:
I would doubt it.
Tim Samuels:
Professor Michael Striker from the University of California, San Francisco, is an eminent neuroscientist and party pooper.
Professor Michael Striker:
The genes that are known to affect sleeping habits have pretty strong effects. I mean, in part because it's only the ones that have strong effects that are easy to analyse through several generations when you're relying on historical records and so on.
Tim Samuels:
Is it possible to rewire yourself to be a morning person?
Professor Michael Striker:
I doubt it.
Tim Samuels:
Deepak in the case of sleep, I fear that I have the gene which makes me an owl not a morning, mornings are a terrifying prospect for me and I've always assumed it runs in their family and there's nothing I can do. How could I rewire my brain to become a morning person?
Dr Deepak Chopra:
Maybe you don't need to, if that's what your genetic propensity is, then you hang out with other owls and you know, you create your own owl colony or social network but here's something that you could try, okay, if you want to change it. Walk barefoot on the ground, or on the beach, or touch a tree for 20 minutes, or walk barefoot on grass.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Tree-touching, barefoot grass-walking? I’m from Manchester, not Malibu, mate. And with late rising seemingly about as healthy as smoking an asbestos joint with a trans-fat chaser, I can't just take this lying down.
ARCHIVE CLIP:
Well, now the inside of my brain is much cleaner. It's clearer. I feel like I'm able to handle uncomfortable situations in a way where I can actually respond without my heart racing and me panicking. I'm not as anxious, near as anxious and I actually have unexplainable peace, especially the last probably a month and a half. And that's after starting the neurofeedback.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Whilst lying down on the couch, I came across the practice of neurofeedback, something to do with rewiring your brain, harnessing its plasticity. I called a clinic in London, Brainworks, which offers neurofeedback and spoke to James Roy.
James Roy:
We get stuck in certain habits. I'm sure you know this yourself if you have a stressful time, over a week or so, well, it might take you an evening or a day to calm down and return to normal. If you're in a six week period of having a highly stressful time, a habit starts to set in and you start to lose the sense as to where non-stressed is. You lose that memory. And what we're doing with neurofeedback is we're just showing you back into where that neutral spot is. And once you see it again, you know, of course, this is much more comfortable. I haven't felt like this in 20 years.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
The promise of teaching the brain to self-regulate, to be less stuck and more efficient, something that's being used by athletes and in business, as well as people with PTSD, autism and ADHD.
James Roy:
Really it’s learning to alter your brain activity, learning to alter your emotional state, the way you function. It's a therapy rather than a treatment. Much like learning to control your heart rate, or learning to control your skin temperature, or any of these functions that are normally considered autonomic but with practice, one can learn to control.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
It's still a little on the conceptual side. So I popped into Brainworks for a more tangible explanation and a brain scan.
Christina Lavelle:
And we have a nice graph underneath, you can see this with nice colours.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
They duly popped on a cap with multiple sensors to map my brain’s electrical activity at different frequencies using something called QEEG which allows them to compare my brainwaves with those of a well-functioning brain.
Christina Lavelle:
And we can see that in 19, 20 hertz, it starts getting a little bit busy across here, especially more on the left hand side, around the temporal area, kind of here [indicates on graph].
Tim Samuels:
A bit of orange going on.
Christina Lavelle:
A bit of orange going on, and we can see that it carries through and especially, we're looking at 26, 27 up to 30 hertz that is… it starts to increase more and more…it gets a bit red.
Tim Samuels:
And that 30 which is the last of our little heads…
Christina Lavelle:
Yes...
Tim Samuels:
I mean, that's quite a big pool of red. That's quite a big red island that's developed on the left.
Christina Lavelle:
Yes, exactly. It's interesting. So it's right across the sensory motor strip but it is very much towards the temporal area. This temporal area is where we hold our past memories and things for past events. Maybe you've had a negative experience in the past and it reminds you of it and so you hear that that past negative event might pop up and cause a little bit of anxiety.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Guess I won't be the poster boy for the well-functioning brain. Cross-sections of my head reveal expanses of green, splodges of yellow and orange and the odd island of red, all indicating over-activity, the brain not running as smoothly as it could, especially around that area apparently associated with memory.
Tim Samuels:
I mean I have a terrible tendency to go back and overthink the past, to relitigate the past, to go back to past decisions. Think could I have done something differently, go back through past events, ruminate, regret, thinking I should have done that, I shouldn't have done that. And that’s the sort of thing which might have turned what should be a lovely white or green oasis into a turgid, churning sea of red on the left temple.
Christina Lavelle:
Yeah, yeah. And yeah, so it's absolutely busy over there so it can be an over analytical state that you get stuck in.
Tim Samuels:
Tell me about it, yeah.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Yeah, so maybe I'm waking up tired as I've been overthinking whilst asleep. If so, then potentially, the circuitry can be rewired to ruminate less. I get the theory and with the island of red flashing like a warning light, I sign up for a neurofeedback course, an hour a day for twenty days over the next month, which I can do at home using the equipment they've given me. Once I closed the blinds in my lounge.
Tim Samuels:
If a neighbour walks past they'll see me wearing a blue polka dot EEG cap with electrodes hanging down and clips attached to my ears. I kind of look like a World War Two fighter pilot who's joined the circus and then been taken off to an asylum.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
The training is pretty simple. I sit and watch a TV show on the laptop.
Ingrid Valentin:
Do you know what you would like to watch for today?
Tim Samuels:
Yeah, I think... I enjoy these nature documentaries.
Ingrid Valentin:
Sure, I'll bring up the list and you can pick one.
Tim Samuels:
And somehow, just through the power of my thoughts, I have to stop the picture from fading out. If I lose concentration, the picture starts to disappear. So I plug myself and try to keep the wildlife up there whilst Ingrid in Brussels monitors my brainwaves.
ARCHIVE CLIP:
The cocks arrive in early April but all hens are mounted within two weeks around the beginning of May. The hens will…
[Knocking at the door]
Tim Samuels:
There’s someone at the door...
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
The brain is being rewarded with the TV show when its operating in its well-functioning state. It's getting used to being in its ideal place and in doing so laying down new neural pathways, new track for thoughts to travel on, rather than going around in the existing circles, stopping at the same old stations. That's the theory.
Ingrid Valentin:
Okay, we're going to stop here.
Tim Samuels:
Okay.
Ingrid Valentin:
How was that?
Tim Samuels:
I don't know whether I've rewired my brain to be my adolescent self, but the postman knocked when we were... when they were talking about alpha cocks and then the picture disappeared when we were talking about beavers so I think I may be back in my 13 year old brain now.
Tim Samuels:
Which is not a bad thing.
Ingrid Valentin:
No, no, why not?
Tim Samuels:
How did it look for you?
Ingrid Valentin:
It looked very good. I mean, there were moments where I was able to make it more difficult than all the previous sessions. And then there were a little more difficult moments where you noticed it as well that you know that you had trouble making the picture come back but you know, that's why we're here as well to fight with that a little bit. So a good session, a good session. I mean, we're pushing you a bit further every day.
Tim Samuels:
Okay. Good. Hopefully you're laying down some new neural pathways.
Ingrid Valentin:
I think so, I do think so.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Once seen as a more marginal therapy, neurofeedback is now available on the health services of several European countries, including Germany and Holland. And the US Veterans Affairs Department is currently funding research into neurofeedback for PTSD, including what it calls fear extinction, as well as traumatic brain injuries. It seems like we're still in the exciting foothills when it comes to seeing how the brain we once thought of as fixed can be rewired, rewired to make us less anxious or even better in business. Walking barefoot through the foothills, maybe touching a few trees on the way, I encouragingly find Deepak Chopra again.
Dr Deepak Chopra:
In the next couple of years, you'll have devices about the size of a coin. It will be a neural feedback, measuring your brain and registering it on your iPhone, with every experience you have, with every experience you have. So if you go to an art museum, and you see a Mona Lisa or something Michelangelo that moves you emotionally, this little thing will tell you which part of the brain is being activated. And not only which part of the brain is being activated, what's happening to your immune system, what's happening to your genetics, what's happening to your hormones because it's all connected.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Portable device, training your brain in real time to be in a better state, make better decisions. And until that comes along, in terms of a spot of neural DIY, Deepak offers some daily affirmations.
Dr Deepak Chopra:
What I do every day, I introduce four intentions for the day. The first is I'm going to have a joyful energetic body, okay then I check it right now. Checking is my body joyful and energetic? Because you can only check in in the moment, every... right now is the snapshot of everything that's happening in your life so I check in, is my body joyful and energetic? If it's not, what am I doing wrong? And I know I may not have slept well, may not have... may have skipped a meal, or may have eaten too much or whatever. Second, am I enjoying a loving, compassionate heart? Do I feel connected or am I you know, pissed off? So that's the emotional check-in. The third check-in is with the mind, is my mind restless or is it quiet and alert? And the fifth check-in is with my spirit, am I free, am I not bamboozled by people's expectations of what I should be doing or what I shouldn't be doing. Do I have lightness of being? And if I don't, then I know what's wrong. That's all you have to do to rewire your brain. You don't have to think positive thoughts because if you force yourself to think positive thoughts you'll get stressed and you'll become exasperatingly positive as well.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
What a relief not having to conjure up positive thinking, always was a particularly depressing part of yoga classes. A relief too, that our brains can be moulded to better shapes, new tracks laid when you get stuck in a rut, meaning that addiction, for example, feels more surmountable, less mysterious. Gabe Dean had a problem with porn.
Gabe Deem:
At the age of 23, I got to a point where I could no longer get an erection with a real partner, even a partner I considered extremely attractive. And that just completely caught me off guard. I had no idea what was wrong with me and it wasn't you know until doing some research myself and trying like, desperately seeking answers for why I was a 23 healthy young guy but I had a low libido and I could not function sexually at all, what was wrong with me. And then I eventually found the neuroscience behind how porn can impact the arousal circuit in the brain and how it can recondition us and rewire us to a point where we need pixels on a screen just to function and we can't function with real people.
Tim Samuels:
And so how did you set out rewiring yourself?
Gabe Deem:
So the first thing I did was I decided to quit. I didn't want to continue to reinforce the neurological pathways of arousing myself to clicking from tab to tab and watching compilation videos. I wanted to stop that so I didn't strengthen that anymore. And then I spent as much time as possible with my girlfriend and I replaced the addiction. One thing that's wise to do when given up any addiction is to find replacement activities that are healthier. So I, you know, increased my time exercising, I spent more time reading books and trying to stay off the internet as much as possible unless I was, you know, going through educational material.
Tim Samuels:
It sounds like you kind of found displacement activities, you stopped watching but is that actually kind of rewiring your brain or just kind of giving it up?
Gabe Deem:
Well, I would say it's rebalancing your brain and rewiring it. So there's a lot of neurological things that happen when you give up an addiction. You know, the addiction-related brain changes that happened in the first place would be sensitization, which is a Pavlovian-type conditioning. If you know Pavlov's dog, you know, he trained his dog to salivate when he heard the sound of a bell. In a way we're doing that when we train ourselves and condition ourselves to become aroused by clicking through tab to tab on the internet and watching video after video, clicking and searching for that perfect scene to ejaculate to. So if you stop doing that, that sensitised pathway, the neurons that you know, grow dendrites and create more synapses to communicate a stronger message, those neurological pathways actually can wither away and weaken over time. So that would be the unwiring. But that's just one of the brain changes. There's also desensitisation, which is a numbed pleasure response or a dialling down of the reward circuit. And this is seen you know, with a reduction in grey matter in the brain, there's... there's less communication of neuro chemicals, leading to motivation and excitement. A receptor called a D2 receptor, a dopamine receptor, actually decreases in number whenever you develop habituation or become desensitised and that, that can actually increase a number once you give up an addiction and you regain sensitivity. So there's actually measurable neurological changes in the brain.
Tim Samuels:
Does it feel to you like you have in some way rewired your grey matter?
Gabe Deem:
Yes, absolutely. Um, my... my libido, my drive, is for my girlfriend now and it's been that way ever since, you know, a year after quitting.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
In these foothills I’m discovering what the brain is really capable of. Jan Scheuermann’s story points to the quite remarkable.
Jan Scheuermann:
I'm a quadriplegic, I can't move from the neck down.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
A degenerative condition left Jan only being able to move her head and neck. She volunteered for an experiment to push the boundaries of neuroscience. Electrodes were implanted on the motor cortex parts of her brain. She was then hooked up via a brain computer interface to a robotic arm and hands.
Jan Scheuermann:
Day one in the lab. They have these brain rays up to their computer and the rays pick up the electrical signals for my brain, transfer them to the computer which transmitted the electronic impulses, I guess, the commands to the robotic arm but it all happened in nanoseconds. So it was in real time. I thought move right and it moved right and it was slow going at first, the first day I just managed to move side to side, had not been down and that was difficult but by the next day, I could do much more easily. By the third day, I could also do forward and back. By the end of the second week, I was also using the fingers to go from a flat hand to a fist. And that was four different ways of moving the arm and we had hoped to get to that point by the end of a week of a month. And we had done in two weeks. There were things I struggled with. But a lot came amazingly easily. And it was so thrilling, you could wipe the grin off my face, everyone in the lab was cheering It was one of the most satisfying, exciting things I've ever done.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Having quickly mastered the basics, you know the basics of controlling a robotic arm, using only the power of thought, Jan was given a harder challenge. Piloting a flight simulator.
Jan Scheuermann:
The same command I would use to raise my wrist up and down, I did the same thing with my brain to move the nose of the plane up and down. Then the same way I moved my hand, left and right, I used the same signal to fly the plane left or right. I first flew a single engine Mooney, I was able to do that control quite easily, after three minutes I was doing barrel rolls. I gotta tell you the first time they started this, then the plane was up in the clouds. I was out of my chair. I was out of my broken body. I was up there and I was flying. And when I think back, I still get chills because it was so incredible to feel like I was physically up there and now when I think about it I feel high again. Then we found out that this plane could take off from any airport in the world. So I went to France and I flew through the Eiffel Tower, through the Arc de Triomphe, through the Louvre, and then I took off from Alexandria, and I flew through the pyramids, then buzzed the Sphinx, places I've never been to in person but I visited them now.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
Virtually soaring through Paris and Alexandria today, maybe hopefully a future where the brain can control a prosthetic limb. If Jan can soar through the Arc de Triomphe and Gabe unwire his addiction, I do feel especially useless not being able to drag my ass out of bed in the morning. An ass which belongs to a body whose DNA results have finally come back. It's no great surprise that I do indeed have the genetic marks of being a night owl. More surprising was having the muscle composition common in elite athletes. So would twenty intensive neurofeedback sessions be able to land a punch on the nocturnal neurons?
Ingrid Valentin:
You see there is a very tiny spot of slow frequency still but it's very tiny, it's very close to the norm.
Tim Samuels:
So before, has kind of these islands of red and orange and more green around it.
Ingrid Valentin:
Mm hmm.
Tim Samuels:
Quite pronounced over sort of large parts of the head and now there's just a tiny island of... a tiny dot of red and a little bit of orange and green around it towards the front. Right. So a lot of the activity has gone away.
Ingrid Valentin:
That's right. Well, gone away, I mean, the deviation has gone away. There’s still activity. White is normal and comfortable activity.
Tim Samuels:
I mean gosh, so, there was tonnes more green, red, yellow, and now they're just tiny, tiny spots. it's almost like you've wrapped up my neurosis.
Ingrid Valentin:
I’m trying!
Tim Samuels:
Thank you.
Ingrid Valentin:
Yeah, there was maybe a little more also at the back here, agitation or stress or a bit of maybe hypersensitivities, if it's the parietal lobe, which is now probably much calmer.
Tim Samuels:
And at its basic, this is measuring brain activity. And so the bits of the brain which have been overactive, which might be in a negative way, like overthinking, they've been calmed down now.
Ingrid Valentin:
Yes, that's right.
Tim Samuels:
And that means, what, that there are new neural pathways that have been laid down new, new roads for thoughts to travel on sort of going around in the same.
Ingrid Valentin:
Yeah, that would be it or that you learned to find a bit of the balance between what's going too slow and what's going too fast and being able to travel the road in the middle there and find this balance walking on the line. We try to work a little bit on the sleep but I think that many of the sleep indicators are better so maybe it's also feeling a bit calmer with these things but that maybe we've reached your limit or your threshold for now, for you know... what is going on now.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
One or two swallows don’t make a summer, or the end of owls but strangely, I have found myself getting out of bed this week without too much hardship, and even doing some press ups one day. It's how us elite athletes roll. It does feel like something has shifted in the brain. It's hard to pinpoint precisely what, perhaps the best term is a heightened sense of focus and a resolution not to say, well, that's just the way I am but to recognise that your traits and behaviours can be knocked into shape, your genes overridden, your wires relayed. And having woken up again at the time when other people seem to, I was able to road-test those new neurons and try something I've not done more than twenty years. Speak to my dad before nine in the morning.
Sefton:
Hello?
Tim Samuels:
Morning.
Sefton:
Well, it is early.
Tim Samuels:
Have you had breakfast?
Sefton
Yeah, just just finished, well, just going to have a coffee.
Tim Samuels:
Yeah, are you off to the doctors today?
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
And having been told to meditate more to keep the red islands at bay, there was no way I was going to let Deepak go without giving us all a little guided meditation.
Dr Deepak Chopra:
Okay, so then you don't have to close your eyes just sit comfortably wherever you are and have what we call soft eyes. Soft eyes means you're not focusing on anything. In fact, you're just aware of the space in front of you. That's it. So when you focus on something that's focused concentration, I’m saying defocus. Just be aware of the space you’re in, that's it, with your eyes open and now become aware of your breathing. Notice that the breathing has a sensation, it's experienced as a sensation and then it dissolves. And before it arises again, this is all experiences this arising of a sensation, knowing the sensation and then the dissolving of sensation before it arises again, the sensation of colour, of sound, of taste, of smell, a thought, a feeling, emotion, it's all of the same nature. It arises its experience, it dissolves before the next one arises. So we can’t hold on to the experience, just like if you hold onto your breath, you will suffocate. Principle one. Now if you have understood this, then bring your awareness to your heart here in the middle of your chest, keep your eyes same way. Just ask yourself, who am I? Don't even look for an answer. Just ask the question. See what comes up. A sensation, a feeling, a thought, an image, see what happens. Let's do it for a few seconds. Who am I? Just reflect on that. Now reflect on another question. What do I want? What is my deepest desire? Again, don't go looking for an answer just see what comes up, wonderful things will come up, a sensation, an image, a feeling or thought, observe it, let it go. So for a few seconds, what is my deepest desire? You can keep your awareness and your heart and your eyes unfocused. What is my deepest desire? Third reflection. What is my purpose? Why do I do what I do? And once again allow any sensation, images, feelings or thoughts to spontaneously arise, be experienced and dissolve. What is my purpose? Final reflection. What am I grateful for? Just asking that question opens the door to abundance consciousness, takes away all the hostility. What am I grateful for? Allowing any sensations, images, feelings and thoughts to spontaneously arise, be known and let them go. Now feel your body. Enjoy your day and don't even think about this. You've ceded your consciousness with important questions and that's all that counts. When you ask the right questions, life moves you into the answers.
Tim Samuels (voiceover):
On a far less spiritual note, on the next installment of All Hail Kale, I cut through the marketing hype and crazy claims of the beauty business to definitively find out what we should all be slapping on our faces to stave off ageing, or at least, not cause harm and see how the beauty industry turned itself into a pseudo-science that’s worth an eye watering hundred and thirty billion dollars. That’s the beautiful builders episode.
Thanks to Deepak Chopra and our production team Sera Baker, Nick Minter, Roser Jorba Soler, Barney Roundtree from Reduced Listening, Ali Rezakhani and Gloria Abramoff. Original music by Xavior Roide. All Hail Kale is made by Tonic Productions for BBC Sounds. From me, Tim Samuels, sleep well.
