Einstein's Disease (Aired 04-30-2025) Rewiring the Brain: Anxiety and Neuroplasticity

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to Einstein's Disease. Through real world insights and powerful conversations with industry leaders, we help you break. [00:00:07] Speaker B: Past limitations and rethink success. [00:00:10] Speaker A: Are you ready to push the boundaries of what's possible? [00:00:16] Speaker B: Hello, it's Greg Ellers from Einstein's Disease. I'm here today in Zion National park with Dr. Jill Wilkes. Jill, how are you doing today? It's great to see. [00:00:26] Speaker A: Doing very well. How about yourself? [00:00:28] Speaker B: How can I be happy in a place like this? Jill, it's a beautiful spot and I'm really fortunate to be able to have an afternoon here with you. Had a nice conversation before we started this and I'm looking forward to the show today. [00:00:43] Speaker A: Great. Me too. [00:00:44] Speaker B: So, Jill, I think that as we were talking about prior to taping, there's so many different ways we can go with respect to your area of knowledge. And I don't like the word expertise. I haven't met one. [00:01:00] Speaker A: Neuroplasticity. How about we call it. [00:01:02] Speaker B: How about that Brain works. Why don't you tell us a little bit about the lens that you look through when you help people or you observe the way that society is both a changing in a positive way and where you try and work with people, Jill, to make their opportunities or remapping some of their brain, if you will, to have a better experience. If you could just. We could start there, that'd be great. [00:01:32] Speaker A: Well, by giving them a toolbox for brainworks or for neuroplasticity, then they're the ones that start using it. We're coming off a period of industrialism where the authority figure was always the one telling people what to do. And people just followed orders according to middle management or who whomever the boss was. But now those things are going away and people are having to work on their own and guide and direct their own thinking, their own wellness, their own everything, while we enter into the technology or the brain age. [00:02:00] Speaker B: Why don't you for the audience. Because it's got a couple of vowels and consonants. Neuroplasticity. Why don't you kind of bring that. [00:02:09] Speaker A: Down to fancy $50 word. That just means neural is brain. And our nervous system, it's all connected. We can't separate it out. And plasticity simply means that it's malleable, it's changeable, it's changing all the time. When I was growing up, we were told we get a certain amount of brain and we don't get any more. And that's just not true. We grow brain constantly and through life. So it's a matter of learning how to guide and direct that brain growth. [00:02:35] Speaker B: For intentional outcomes and what you just touched on there. And I think it's important because we were talking about that before going from the industrial age to the techno technology age or whatever, this next dying, this period that we're going to have. Because technology, the industrial age lasted for 150 years. So. [00:02:58] Speaker A: And it's not going to go away completely. [00:02:59] Speaker C: Right. [00:03:00] Speaker A: But that's not. Robots and computers do those jobs now. People are going to have to think again. The industrial age emphasized obedience, sitting down, being quiet and doing what you're told. But those don't work anymore. Now you haven't worked. [00:03:12] Speaker B: They didn't work for a long time with my kids. Joe. I think this age might have started earlier. [00:03:17] Speaker A: Yes, it did. It's been going on for some time, really. But they have to learn to think again and speak again. And really, when you look at our classrooms or many areas, we hardly ever give them time to speak. [00:03:28] Speaker C: Right. [00:03:29] Speaker A: The teacher's always doing the speaking. And if we want to hear from them, we have to create environments that are their space that we can allow them that safe space to talk without having to feel like they have to be right or they're going to be corrected or they're going to say something wrong or they're just able to think. [00:03:46] Speaker B: So what you just touched on is a great tool, and it's a tool that I know that you utilize as a professor. Talk to us about how you engage and how people can engage. Jill. From the standpoint of not sit down and shut up and learn and listen, but engage and be a part of it. The audience is hearing and seeing this are their distrust in, you know, the old world and leadership or organizations, government, etc. And the uncertainty with respect to where things are going on. AI so to be able to express those feelings. There's a lot of people that don't have those tools. Jill. [00:04:32] Speaker A: Skills, Right? Only because they don't have brain in it yet. [00:04:36] Speaker B: Right. [00:04:36] Speaker A: But we can grow brain. Nobody is not intelligent or nobody's stupid. They're just downright disadvantaged. [00:04:42] Speaker C: Right. [00:04:42] Speaker A: So when you teach them how to grow that brain consciously, according to their individual brain, because every brain is different, then they take off. [00:04:51] Speaker C: Right? [00:04:51] Speaker A: So when I would train faculty, I would say we got to get the work of learning out of our laps and back into their laps. [00:04:58] Speaker B: And how do you do that? Joe, what is a. Because the kids have to your students, I say kids, gray hair. They have to accept that you're transferring that responsibility to them. [00:05:12] Speaker A: Correct. [00:05:12] Speaker B: And yet they May, as you said, they haven't developed that part of their brain. So they're either atrophied or just never. [00:05:24] Speaker A: It's just never been there. [00:05:25] Speaker B: Right. [00:05:25] Speaker A: And so one thing would be, as I told the university that I retired from, they shouldn't be leaving here with the transcript, they should be leaving here with the resume. [00:05:34] Speaker C: Right. [00:05:34] Speaker A: And I don't care if the resume just comes from kinds of research that they did, undergraduate research, or I don't care where it comes from. We need to get off the focus of lecture, put that on your cd, send them home to listen to it, then they come back and practice something called deliberative democracy. [00:05:51] Speaker B: What does that mean? [00:05:52] Speaker A: That just means that we're going to talk, but it's not to win or debate or decide. It's just to hear how this information went through your head. Because we each have a different library. Have you ever played the game of telephone? [00:06:05] Speaker B: All the time. [00:06:06] Speaker A: Does it ever come out the same? [00:06:07] Speaker B: I do it with my employees all the time. [00:06:09] Speaker A: Right. Why not? Because it goes through your unique library and your unique creator ability and then it becomes what you say. So communication has to change from the way we've been teaching it as well. It's been about, oh, just learn these rhetorical patterns, just stand up and do public speaking. But no, it has to. We really want to teach one on one and interpersonal communication. [00:06:35] Speaker B: So what you're really talking about is a changed behavior, not only in the way that a student comes to get an education, they need to be getting this at a younger age. Don't. I mean you can't wait until they're. [00:06:48] Speaker A: No, no. When I was in a senior in high school, they implemented the same thing I'm teaching today and it was a complete disaster because you can't take a 12th grader and tell them here you're going to do the exact opposite and be successful. So it needs to start in kindergarten. So I ran a school for my daughter and they had to public speak once a week. It wasn't, oh, scary public speaking, it was just what you do, right. In the classroom. They worked in groups all of the time. They work to solve problems. So there were again, instead of memorizing and test, it was outcome based. [00:07:24] Speaker C: Right. [00:07:24] Speaker A: So in an outcome based school model, you can't cheat. [00:07:28] Speaker B: No, absolutely. And I think that's something you know. And we'll touch on this in the next segment. We're going to have to cut away here for a minute to let our advertisers help pay for the show. But What I really want to get on there is teaching people to be confident in what they actually have the capacity to do is the most powerful thing. And I know talking to you, and we'll touch on it in the next segment. When people react and have that opportunity, it's the most beautiful thing that exists. [00:08:07] Speaker A: Yes, it is. I still have people calling me from 50 years ago saying, you saved my life. I said, no, I didn't. I just gave you a toolbox. [00:08:13] Speaker B: That's right. [00:08:14] Speaker A: You had to use it. I can't do that. I'm busy enough of my own Life. It's a 247 job just to take care of this one. [00:08:21] Speaker B: No, I hear you. Well, listen, we're going to cut away to that commercial break. This is Greg Ellers from Einstein's Disease. I'm here with Dr. Joe Wilkes. Brain works, Mapping tools. [00:08:33] Speaker A: Toolbox for the mind. [00:08:35] Speaker B: Toolbox for the mind. And we will be back in after we pay for this show's ability to be on. Thanks, Jill. [00:08:43] Speaker A: You're welcome. Thank you, Greg. [00:08:59] Speaker B: This is Greg Ellers. I am the host of Einstein's Disease. And I'm back with Dr. Jill Wilkes here in Zion National Park. It's a beautiful day. Jill, thank you for joining me again in this segment. And as we move into this segment, I think it's really important to identify that we're trying to provide our listeners and viewers with the ability to either understand where they are or acknowledge the changes that are going on. And when they acknowledge those changes that are going on, how, what can they do? How can they become? How can they adapt? How can they change and get more productive in society? Because their anxiety is keeping them from having that ability. So what I want you to touch on here in this episode, in this segment is talk about a couple of the tools, Bill. Talk about a couple of the ways people can change what they do because they want to and what that outcome is going to give them. [00:10:12] Speaker A: First, we start with an understanding that we create everything that happens to us in our life. When I first learned that, I was quite upset because my father had just died. And I said, I did not create the cancer. And they said, no, but you created your response to it. So we right now have an idea that responsibility is some heavy burden of just surviving. No, it's your ability to respond, to get what you say you want, want. So anxiety is actually a conspiracy theory against yourself. Someone needs to tell these youngsters that instead of give them a pill for their anxiety, we are the pharmacist. So there's Only three tools. We are the library. And we grow that with our lifetime of experience. That becomes our filters and how we see the world, our paradigms, our working theories, with all. Every. Every discipline has a different name for the same phenomenon that we are existing from our reality. We don't see the world as it is. We see the world as we are. So we want to make them aware of what they put up there and what are called their neural pathways. And then we want them to know that they're the pharmacists. You're applying the meaning, right? Your ability to respond is saying, ooh, algebra causes anxiety. No, algebra is a conspiracy. I mean, anxiety and algebra is a conspiracy theory against yourself. And you probably have a belief system that says, I don't do math. [00:11:30] Speaker C: Right? [00:11:31] Speaker B: That could be put. [00:11:32] Speaker A: That could be put in very early. My daughter came home one day in third grade. I said, and she said, I hate math. I said, wait a minute. It was your favorite subject yesterday. What happened? She goes, I don't know. I just know I hate it. And I said, well, honey, sometimes teachers can hate it, and they don't even have to say a word. You will feel it. That's called a mirror neuron. You will feel it. She goes, well, I know our teacher hates it. She tells us every day, how irresponsible of a teacher to not realize you're putting that belief in these vulnerable minds, creating that constraint. We've had to retrain surgeons to not say, this guy's a goner, because when you're under anesthesia, everybody gives into that power over. Because we've been trained that way. But now we want to get to that power to achieve with each other. So the tools are grow that brain the way you want it. [00:12:22] Speaker B: How? [00:12:23] Speaker A: Through active involvement. And everybody's different, so it's hard to say. But let's say you want to get used to fears so you would go near the edge. I mean, get used to your fear of heights, so you would go near the edge. And every day, you're building one dendrite closer and you're breathing through it. So you're dosing your brain with the pharmaceutical of calm in a variety of ways. There's a million tools. So every. Every one of those three tools has a million tools in the toolbox. I call them specialty toolboxes. But you got to have this hammer, the saw, and the screwdriver. And then our voice that's inside our head talking to us all the time. Have you heard it when you're trying to go to sleep? At night. [00:13:06] Speaker B: Absolutely. And we're going to go down that rabbit hole right now. Voice, conspiracy of an anxiety and anxiety that's created by conspiracy of fear or not wanting to do something. We always, if you're a self help person or you listen to motivational speakers, they give you some tools. But the reality is most of society doesn't either address, learn or believe in those types of things. What they believe in is, as you said, you lay there at night and you hear a voice in your head and that afflicts almost any person that's alive. And if not, they're probably lying in a big way. Right? So talk about how you work with that voice. [00:14:02] Speaker A: How do you direct it? [00:14:03] Speaker B: How do you direct it? Because in the end I know that some days when I go to bed, I'm thinking a lot about challenges that I may have. And sometimes I have a real restful sleep and sometimes I wake up in four or five hours and I'm back right on that issue and I can't get it out and I can't get back to sleep. And that creates anxiety. Anxiety. But what it really does is it makes my next day less productive. As much as I was putting forth a lot of effort to try and for my team, for my family, for my company, whatever it might be to solve a problem. [00:14:41] Speaker A: Right. [00:14:42] Speaker B: So, so spend a little bit of time on how it's. It sounds. Some tools that would be, you know, being. Because being John Malkovich. How do I get up there? [00:14:52] Speaker A: Well, first you have to understand thoughts, want to live. So that's what a meme actually is. Richard Dawkins was a biologist in the early 70s who was studying genetics. [00:15:03] Speaker B: Selfish gene, one of my favorite. [00:15:05] Speaker A: And he said something else is at play in creation. And he coined the term memetics. And that is that our mind affects creation. So that's our voice, that's our dendrites and our neurochemicals and what we put out there, right? So one in a meme or memetics is just that dendrites or these things that grow in our brain, our pathways want to replicate. They want to replicate. That's why we like the familiarity so much, right? It can be in there and we can keep replicating quite easily instead of doing it with that first step of what they call disadvantage or cognitive, I mean disequilibrium or cognitive dissonance. So one is to know that. So before you go to bed, it's important to jot it down. The brain will go, okay, you remembered it's there. So get it out of your head. Because five things on paper can feel like 50 up here. [00:15:55] Speaker B: Amen. [00:15:56] Speaker A: So get it out. Acknowledge that that thought wants to live and you're going to come back to it and you're just telling your brain by writing that down, you're giving it that reassurance. But then there's a variety of thought stopping methods depending on how severe the anxiety or, you know, how severe the thought is versus how simple it is, right? So one of the most groundbreaking discoveries lately for thought stopping. Eat a piece of sour candy, get out of here. Because all we're trying to do is break that, break that pattern, break that hamster wheel, stop it and think of something else, right? So you'll often see me when I'm in class jumping outside of myself going, we just have to always jump out, look back and say, is this what I want to create? [00:16:39] Speaker C: Right? [00:16:39] Speaker A: More anxiety, more fear, more distress? What do I want? And after 150 of years of industrialism, sit down, shut up and do, do what you're told. People don't know what they want, right? They've been told what they want. So, so we. And the minute you let them have a little bit of that, they will want to take off. [00:16:59] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:17:00] Speaker A: You don't have to push dead weights up ladders. You just have to stand at the top and go, look at how cool this is. Come on up. [00:17:06] Speaker B: That's fantastic. So on this element of that voice, what is it if you really want to stay in this rabbit hole when you hear a voice that has anxiety? Is that providing more than just anxiety? Is there meaning there? Not necessarily. It's just, I mean, we don't know, right? [00:17:31] Speaker A: So what fires together, wires together. And in our first eight years, we're in the age of preconsciousness. So things that happen to us then could work on us later in life. Like we have something called medical intuitives now that western trained scientists call when there are mystery illnesses. One woman's name is Carolyn, Miss my s S. And she, when I saw her work, a woman stood up. And in America, we're trained to focus on the problem, not solutions, right? One of our addictions is problem focus. So she starts telling all of her symptoms what doesn't work, blah, blah, blah. And Carolyn says, just your name and date of birth. And she goes, yeah, you've got breast cancer. Get to a doctor immediately. And then the other woman stood up. And again, all the symptoms, what's wrong? Because we're so trained in our, in our neural thinking for that. And that Is, I'm not trying to put that down, by the way. [00:18:21] Speaker B: Right. [00:18:21] Speaker A: That's how we've solved all of our problems probably is forward blemish, throat problems throw us forward. That's not working so much anymore. We've got new kinds of problems. We don't need to just be more comfortable or more healthy. We need to be a more emotionally. [00:18:35] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:18:36] Speaker A: So I think I got off track because one thing I wanted to say is when I was growing up, we had the cartoons with the angel and the devil. Well, that's just religion's metaphor for are you choosing neurochemicals that are creators or are you choosing neurochemicals that are destroyers? Anxiety is clearly a destroyer. Now, if you feel anxiety, it doesn't mean it's a bad emotion or wrong. It just means pay attention like a stop sign, not dwell there. [00:19:02] Speaker C: Wow. [00:19:02] Speaker A: Because if you start to dwell there, you get the mind. That's the pattern, that's the habit. [00:19:07] Speaker B: Absolutely. And I think that's a good place to leave this segment. Jill. We'll be back shortly. This is Greg Ellers from Einstein's disease and with Dr. Jill Wilkes. Thank you, Jill. This is Greg Ellers, Einstein's Disease. Again, I'm fortunate to be up at Zion National park with Dr. Jill Wilkes. And we are. We're talking about humanity. We're talking about the brain. We're having an interesting conversation. And in the last segment, Jill, you were sharing a situation where a professor was asking different questions and the first was the lady that had breast cancer. But we didn't get to hear about the second lady. So kind of reset that up and share that. And then we're going to move on. Because for our audience, this is a powerful point of anxiety, a powerful point of stopping to learn and accepting something and not letting your brain be in charge. Be in charge. [00:20:26] Speaker A: We're in charge. I used to ask students if we're. If we have to tell the brain what to do, where does the original idea come from? [00:20:33] Speaker B: Right. [00:20:34] Speaker A: You know, I think humanity's been talking about these kind of things since the beginning of time. But yes, thank you for bringing me back to the second woman. I got off on a tangent there. Sorry, the second woman. Again, all of her symptoms calm her down. She's in the age and name. And Carolyn, Miss, the medical intuitive that western trained doctors are calling from all over the world, she said, yeah, I don't know what happened, but at age 7, you decided you'd never be happy again. And the woman burst into tears and said, my twin died. And I stood by that coffin and told them I'd never be happy again. So there's the power of the word, or let's take an ancient Hebrew word, abracadabra. Do you know what it means? [00:21:16] Speaker B: I only know that it means reveal or change. [00:21:21] Speaker A: It means as I speak. So I create an ancient Hebrew word, knew that as I speak. So this is ancient knowledge. [00:21:30] Speaker B: Absolutely. And thanks for sharing that. And I think it's important that the audience realize the power of the brain. [00:21:39] Speaker A: Power of the brain. [00:21:40] Speaker B: And it's your brain. It's not something that belongs to somebody else. It's yours. So you have the ability to continue to have the brain grow. It doesn't stop growing, never stops. And because it never stops, that means that you've got the opportunity to do just about anything. To do anything. So people that feel they have reach their station in life, but they have more aspiration or they have more interest, they sh. They need to realize I can actually go and do that. And that is just so powerful. So, but to do that, and we were talking about this before the show, people have to be able to learn how to express their feelings. And we're using technology today, sitting out here, we're using a phone and these microphones, and we can have a conversation in a beautiful place and experience not only the nature around us, but be able to have a great conversation. We 15 years or 20 years ago, we'd have big cameras or we wouldn't even come here, we'd done something else. So there's great things that technology's done, but there's other things that it's done. Jill, in terms of brain atrophy or inspiration through being a person in the seats versus being a participant. And when you're a participant, you don't really have feelings. You have an emotion of, oh, that's great, or oh, that's too bad. But you don't have the emotions of failure. You don't have the emotions of success, the emotions of love, the emotions of just involved being involved in something where you and I, now we spent the morning together, we have a different connection than when we had when you first came here. I gave you a hug, you sat down. But our connection is different because we're very engaged, because we're sharing brains. We're sharing brains. So it's a long winded rhetorical question, but talk to us about how you're teaching people to learn to share those emotions. Because if you don't share them, you have to share them more than when you talk to Yourself, you have to have somebody and a plan. And we're humans, we don't. We're not singular. That's, that doesn't work that way. [00:24:02] Speaker A: Well, I think in the industrial age we only allowed happy, sad, glad, mad. Well, Today we know 80% of all doctor visits are emotionally based illnesses. We got to pay attention, folks. We got to figure this out. In the past, the threats were physical. We had to protect ourselves from physical threats. But now it's emotional. Now it's all emotional and people are. Don't have a very big toolbox. So first you need the vocabulary for all of the emotions or as many as we can think of or. An interesting thing came up in class the other day. I said, we want to stay away from blame and shame because it gets us nowhere. And a woman asked, she said, well, isn't it okay if I felt shame if I did something wrong to somebody? I said, sure it is. But then what do you want to move to? You don't want to dwell in the shame if you've done something wrong. What emotion do we want to feel? Can you guess any? If I've done, if I've harmed someone, what emotion past the shame, how do I move out of it? What do we do? [00:24:58] Speaker B: You have to show compassion, you have. [00:25:00] Speaker A: Compat, you have the show, you have a neurochemical of contrition, compassion, apologetic, bravery. It takes a lot of courage to admit when we're wrong. So there's a lot of people we might be stuck on shame, but it's really those other five emotions we need to move this situation forward. Word. [00:25:20] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:25:21] Speaker B: So let's leave it there for a second. And I'm 35 years old, I'm listening or watching the show, maybe doing something in the house. And I'm. I know I'm stuck. I'm stuck. Be it either my relationship, my job, where I am with my family and my children, being able to be the breadwinner or the father or the mentor I'm supposed to be. How do I go about. What's a process to start sharing those emotions, Jill? How do you go about it? Because if you just throw everything against the wall, anybody that you're going to be communicating with may not have those either because it's just not in their behavior. So how do you start that conversation with somebody that you don't want the anxiety, you want to get things out and. But at the same time, I've known you for, I've been married to you for 20 years or whatever. I know where we are in life. How do, how do you start that conversation? How do you start. How does, how does that begin? [00:26:36] Speaker A: I think any change starts here. You have to change your own wiring first. So again, under the three tools of neural pathways, neurochemicals and our voice are subset tools. So under voice would be five ways to say I frame it. So you're only using the word I. [00:26:54] Speaker C: Right. [00:26:54] Speaker A: So first would be observe what is. Then what are your feelings, then what are your intentions and thoughts? And you learn to. So that's assertive communication. Assertive communications. Win, win. [00:27:05] Speaker C: Right. [00:27:06] Speaker A: So you're able to say what your truth is, but not having to have the power over the other person as you say it. [00:27:11] Speaker C: Right. [00:27:11] Speaker A: So we have to learn about the power over. The power to. There are so many elements that our neurochemicals are directing. Because we're coming again off of industrialism where you had an authority figure. Doctors have had to be retrained to not say this guy's a goner in surgery because that's an authority figure. And if you're under anesthesia, you're more vulnerable. You're more vulnerable. You can't jump outside of yourself and go, not true. [00:27:36] Speaker C: You're right. [00:27:37] Speaker A: I'm fighting this. [00:27:37] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:27:38] Speaker A: So it was interesting just to add to that, they recently did a study that women that survived metastatic breast cancer. When they went back and talked to the doctors, the doctors in their notes had considered them hostile. Hostile and aggressive. And when they went back and looked deeper is because the woman asked a question. [00:28:01] Speaker C: Right. [00:28:01] Speaker A: Was part of her healing. And that's what we recommend in this age. It's not the doctor over you. We're a team. [00:28:08] Speaker C: Right. [00:28:08] Speaker A: Everything's about. So we have the five ways to say I. Getting clear about what it is you want. I think people want to do things for us, but we're often so confused in how we act. Our words aren't coming out very clearly. They're coming out kind of jumbled. And that can then add confusion there. [00:28:27] Speaker B: No, for sure. And when you have a conversation or you're trying to work from the standpoint of using I to be able to communicate and be assertive but not be over somebody and the people that you're being, you're communicating with or you're opening up about your feelings and your emotions and trying to change things, have a more self centered. I mean my mindset. But you don't have anybody else to go to. So how is it that that communication process. Because you don't want to just say it fails. You want to find a way to. [00:29:08] Speaker A: Make it work, you need a better receiver. [00:29:10] Speaker B: Right. And so how do you can't push. [00:29:12] Speaker A: Dead weights up ladders. So how do you get them to anybody else? [00:29:15] Speaker B: So, and there, there is the. [00:29:17] Speaker A: That's why the five ways to say aye so you're clear about your feelings regardless of what the other person does. Because it isn't so much getting a resolution all the time as it is getting it out of our system to. [00:29:29] Speaker B: Be able to get that clean. You want to cleanse your. What's your neurochemicals. [00:29:36] Speaker A: So back to the shame. I keep going back each class and saying, now I want to add more. One more thing. Well, religions all have confession because they know the damage of that shame. [00:29:47] Speaker C: Right. [00:29:48] Speaker A: Or forgiveness is not a good neurochemical to carry. I mean, not forgiving. Stanford started a whole forgiveness clinic because it causes cholesterol, it causes anxiety issues. So we know the power of these neurochemicals and we now know that we're in charge of dispensing them. [00:30:06] Speaker B: Wow. The dispensing of those neurochemicals. And we are going to talk about that when we come back after we take this short commercial break. This is Greg Ellers from Einstein's Disease. I'm here with Dr. Jill Wilkes and look forward to this next segment. Thank you, Jill. [00:30:23] Speaker A: Thank you. [00:30:37] Speaker B: This is Greg Ehlers from Einstein's Disease. Again, I'm here with Dr. Joe Wilkes and we are talking about the tools to help people go from an industrial age to a technology age. And to have a life that has much gives the person the ability to grow their brain, to be able to have a more fulfilling life, to create meaning. Create meaning. And while we were on a commercial break, you really touched on a couple of things I think that are important for us to kind of finish out this segment and finish out this show. First, I want to really thank you for being here today. Thank you for having me. I know you've invited me up to Zion for a while and I'm really glad that I was able to make it up here. This is a beautiful place and it's fun to be able to spend some time with you. So thank you very much. [00:31:31] Speaker A: Good. Thank you. And you're welcome. [00:31:33] Speaker B: So when we think about that whole element of depression that you were talking about, when you watch tv, that's depression. Not necessarily always, but when you're saying that give, give, give the audience a mindset of being able to check themselves emotionally. [00:31:54] Speaker A: Right. [00:31:54] Speaker B: They're laying in bed, their mind, as we talked about in the first two segments doesn't stop. And that's an anxiety. And they can't get over it. And they don't have any of those sour candies. So it stuck with them for a while. They're expressing or they're having elements of depression. Talk to us a little bit about that human depression. That's from people being over you to giving you that ability and that anxiety you have. What is depression? It makes people spectators versus participants. [00:32:30] Speaker A: In some sense it depresses them. [00:32:32] Speaker C: Right. [00:32:32] Speaker A: And we're meant to be creative, spirited beings. [00:32:35] Speaker C: Right. [00:32:36] Speaker A: That's when we're at our happiest, healthiest place, is when we are contributing and participating. [00:32:42] Speaker C: Right. [00:32:42] Speaker A: Doesn't mean we define that anyway specifically, but it is important. So you know the saying, it's more important or it's better to give than receive. We can measure that. When you give, you get a 70% neurochemical high. When you receive, it's only a 30% neurochemical high. So getting out there, we are social animals and participating is important. Let me back up and say it's not watching TV that is the depressing. It's that when that is your main goal, when you're seeing that as a sign of success, that I can be in my lounger and I can watch my tv. No, we are meant to be engaged, we're meant to be active. So I'm not against tv, but if that's what your main entertainment is, I encourage more diverse methods and notice the word inside. Encourage. What have I just given to you? Courage. I encourage you to take the step out because it's not the journey that's the problem, it's the first step. [00:33:39] Speaker B: And I think one of the things that our viewers need to realize is the journey of learning. The journey of the brain continuing to grow is something you can do all the way through light. [00:33:56] Speaker A: You can do it all the way and you can turn it off and on wherever you want to. [00:34:00] Speaker B: Right. [00:34:00] Speaker A: And that's what we want. So we're in the middle of anxiety. Instead of naming it as anxiety. What am I going to learn here? Something's coming, knocking and asking me to learn something. What is it I need to learn? We just have to reframe it every time we have to turn it around. Because anxiety doesn't feel good. [00:34:16] Speaker B: No. [00:34:16] Speaker A: And it's hard on the body. [00:34:18] Speaker C: Yeah, it really is. [00:34:19] Speaker B: And it takes different tolls, from weight gain to drinking to drugs or going to a doctor who just starts loading you up with medicines to make you feel better. But at the end of the day you're not addressing what's really going on, masking it. [00:34:36] Speaker A: Right. So when I retired from university to go out and teach leaders in this. But then I got run into a wall at 75 miles an hour and spent 13 years overcoming a traumatic brain injury. I had to use this all the way. It's a simple cycle of notice. What is? Okay, I couldn't stand up. I had vertigo so bad. To direct for what you want. Well, today I'm gonna do one minute of standing up. Tomorrow I'll do two. And the brain rewires. So I don't know if you've heard of the main saying out of Alcoholics Anonymous. It's fake it till you make it. Because while you're faking it, you're growing brain and what you want. I wanted to be able to stand up again. And then I had about a million things to go through over 13 years to overcome that and rewire my brain. Essentially, what was happening is my eyes were processing at different speeds, so I knew everything, but I had to relearn it because this side had to catch up and learn it at that different time. [00:35:29] Speaker C: Right. [00:35:30] Speaker A: And as the neurosurgeon told me, because the only reason you're doing as well as you are is because you know how the brain works. [00:35:35] Speaker B: Right. And hence brain works. [00:35:38] Speaker A: Correct. [00:35:39] Speaker B: So, you know, as we close out this. This segment and this in this episode, tell us a little bit about Brainworks. Tell us what you're. As lifelong learners. Aspirational. To always be working is a bad term, but it really is, in a sense. [00:35:59] Speaker A: You want to be growth mindset instead of fixed mindset. [00:36:02] Speaker B: Correct. So tell us what you're doing with brainworks right now, Jill. Tell us what you're. What you're. You'd like to do over the next, you know, three to five, seven years with this. [00:36:13] Speaker A: Well, I love giving people the toolbox. And when I was. They made this required at the university where I taught, because students were so successful, one name they give this. I asked participants afterward, what would you call this? And somebody called the Anatomy of a Miracle. And they said, well, yeah, when. When students come to us with a 1.0 GPA and go on to get their graduate degrees and become doctors and lawyers, they call that a miracle. All it was was brain growth. All it was was that student directing themselves because we can't push dead weights up ladders. [00:36:44] Speaker C: Right? [00:36:44] Speaker A: So right now I'm teaching a course with older people because the. The number one indicator for slowing and reversing aging is growing. Brain. [00:36:54] Speaker B: Absolutely. [00:36:55] Speaker A: Cleaning up any emotional damage from our history. The firing and wiring that is ineffective for our brain. And I'm enjoying that. And I'm doing it because I love seeing the outcome and what people do with it. So back to the faculty. [00:37:08] Speaker B: There's. [00:37:09] Speaker A: How can you stand to say this over and over again to 2,000 students? Because I said it's not what I say. It's what people do with it. [00:37:16] Speaker C: Right. [00:37:17] Speaker A: And that's. It untethers the soul. And I'm not talking religion in the soul. I'm talking our life force. So whichever direction you want to go, that's not my business. [00:37:25] Speaker B: No. [00:37:26] Speaker A: But go, because expression is so much better than depression. [00:37:32] Speaker B: 100. So how can people find you, Jill? Whether. Do you have a website? [00:37:36] Speaker A: Huh? Brainworks. Zion.com? oh, no, no. Yes. Brainworks. No. Brainwork. Zion. Gmail.com. and I only have a Facebook page. [00:37:45] Speaker B: Okay. [00:37:45] Speaker A: I had a website for a while, but it was a lot to maintain. And. And I think I was still coming from my academic side, you know, with research references, and I just made it much simpler. So any workshop that I do is interactive. It's shaped for the group. So this particular group, their emphasis is how to improve memory and how to slow and reverse aging. So we focus everything on that. It depends every approach to it. There's the same basic tools, but when we plug it in to whatever people want. [00:38:18] Speaker C: Right. [00:38:18] Speaker B: Reverse aging. I'm at that age, Jill. I need to reverse aging a little bit. [00:38:24] Speaker A: We all do, I'm afraid. [00:38:27] Speaker B: Listen, thank you very much for being a guest on our show today. This is Greg Ellers from Einstein's Disease, and we look forward to having you back in our living room, letting us back in your living room next week. And with that, I will say goodbye. Thanks, Jill. [00:38:41] Speaker A: Thank you. [00:38:44] Speaker C: This has been a NOW Media Network's feature presentation. All rights reserved.