[Casey Neistat gently humming]
"Dude get off my back what the hell"
Just kidding, there's no vlog.
That counts for an April fool's joke right?
So this video is actually about willpower.
Specifically how just slowing down my breath has really helped me to do the hard thing
in several situations.
On March 3rd , I found myself in a quite ironic situation:
While listening to “The Willpower Instinct,” by Kelly McGonigal, I was lining up to buy
something that would end up undermining my willpower.
The problem was that the new Zelda game was way better than I anticipated.
I would set aside 30 minutes to play which would quickly turn into an hour then two hours
and so on.
So after investing way too much time into finishing the game and finally starting to
shift back into my creative and productive mode, I noticed I had less capacity for willpower
in general.
It wasn't so much that Zelda was preoccupying my mind, it was just more difficult to get
to work and stay focused in general, and a lot of times I would diffuse that uncomfortable
tension by zoning out on my smartphone or on social media websites.
So, in these uncomfortable moments of really not wanting to do the harder thing, I started
using this breathing technique I picked up from the Willpower Instinct.
Basically you just breathe in one breath for 10 seconds and breathe out that breath for
10 seconds.
Five to ten minutes of this was usually enough to dissolve that tension and give me the willpower
to focus on work.
This kind of breathing is significant because it improves something called heart rate variability.
When people talk about heart rate they are actually talking about the average heart rate
over one minute.
You know the kind of scene on House where they inject the dying patient with some unexpectedly
effective thing like snake venom and the heart monitor shows a pulse and you hear a ping
ping ping.
The ping is when the heart contracts, this generates a bit of electricity which the machine
can read.
So heart rate variability refers to variations in the time between these pings.
If there is precisely one ping every second, then your heart rate is 60 beats per minute
but you have virtually no heart rate variability.
If there’s .85 seconds between the first two pings and then 0.90 seconds between the
second two and then .95 seconds then .90 seconds again and so on, then you have some heart
rate variability.
This is a good thing.
Everybody’s heart rate changes throughout the day and even moment to moment.
Your heart speeds up a little bit when you inhale.
It slows down again when you exhale.
A smooth variation of heart rate is good and means that your heart is getting signals from
both branches of your autonomic nervous system: one is the sympathetic nervous system, which
speeds you up and is responsible for things like the fight or flight response, and the
other is the parasympathetic nervous system, which promotes relaxation and engages during
processes like digestion.
Studies show that people with higher HRV are better at ignoring distractions, delaying
gratification, dealing with stressful situations and are less likely to give up on difficult
tasks.
Because of this Heart Rate Variability has been called the body’s “reserve” of
willpower.
This is because Heart rate variability is the single best physiological measurement
of something called the "pause and plan response."
Pause and plan is essentially the opposite of the body's fight or flight response.
When your environment presents you with stressful situation, the brain switches on the fight
or flight response, and as much energy as possible is directed to the body to help you
run or fight.
This means energy is directed away from the brain.
The pause and plan response starts when the prefrontal cortex identifies that another
part of your brain is asking you to do something that may benefit you now but is not helpful
for long term goals.
It could be something like wanting to drink a beer at lunch or eating cake for breakfast.
To generate the self control to slow down and make the decision to not do these things,
energy needs to be transferred from the body to the brain.
To do this, your prefrontal cortex will communicate the need for self-control to lower brain regions
that regulate your heart rate, blood pressure, breathing and other automatic functions.
Then all these processes slow down and self control improves.
When people successfully exert self control, the parasympathetic nervous system steps in
to calm stress and control impulsive action.
Heart rate goes down, but heart rate variability goes up.
Suzanne Segerstrom, a psychologist at the University of Kentucky, observed this physiological
signature of self-control when she asked hungry students to not eat freshly baked cookies
in front of them.
As they sat there resisting the cookies, their heart rate variability went up.
Variability in other participants who were free to eat the cookies stayed the same.
Heart Rate Variability is such a good indicator of willpower that you can use it to predict
who will resist cravings.
For example, recovering alcoholics whose HRV goes up when they see a drink are more likely
to stay sober.
Recovering alcoholics whose heart rate variability drops when they see a drink - have a greater
risk of relapse.
In fact, your body, brain and mental willpower are so well connected that people with strong
self control can actually stay a bit more sober on the same amount of alcohol when they
need to.
A report from the University of Kentucky compared alcohol metabolism in a group of men with
similar body compositions.
The men went through an evaluation process to assess their ability for self control,
then they drank the same amount of alcohol and their blood alcohol content was measured
afterwards.
They found that the men who ranked higher in self control were actually less drunk.
The study gives an example where two men with different levels of self control each have
two drinks “Then, their supervisor from work arrives unexpectedly, and they spend
the next 30 min regulating their behavior so as to appear sober.
All else being equal, the present results suggest that the man with high trait self-control
will likely have a BAC around .026, and the man with low self-control will have a BAC
around .032 – approximately 20% higher."
So why do some people just have better heart rate variability and better self control than
other people?
Many factors influence your capacity for self control- things like anxiety, anger, depression,
poor sleep, loneliness and even poor air quality are all associated with worse heart rate variability.
Things like regular exercise and proper diet can improve HRV.
Practicing meditation or the controlled breathing technique I mentioned earlier also increases
heart rate variability.
One study found that a daily twenty-minute practice of slowed breathing improved HRV
and reduced cravings and depression among adults recovering from substance abuse and
PTSD.
But whether you’ve been practicing this or not, at any time you can take a moment
to slow your breathing down to manually improve your heart rate variability and self-control
in the moment.
In this presentation, Dr. Alan Watkins actually demonstrates how breathing like this can quickly
improve your HRV.
A volunteer is hooked up to a device that measures the change in his heart rate and
as you can see when he first walks up on stage his heart rate is quite erratic, but after
he begins to breathe in a slow rhythmic fashion, you start to see nice smooth waveform.
The thing that’s happening when you breathe like this is: you’re simply destressing
yourself and creating the physiology of calmness.
As mentioned earlier, the stressful fight or flight response diverts energy from the
brain to the body.
When this happens activity in the prefrontal cortex decreases.
This is good in some situations, you don’t want to have to slowly decide to run from
a bear, but some situations you really don’t want your prefrontal cortex shutting down.
It lowers your willpower and you become more impulsive, but other forms of self control
suffer.
With less prefrontal cortex activity, you may yell at your spouse, forget how to use
words during a job interview, and you might find yourself saying “Hi there, my name
is come here often.”
to an attractive woman at the bar.
This slow and controlled breathing engages the pause and plan response and directs more
energy to the prefrontal cortex giving you better control over yourself.
This brings me to my favorite point in Dr. Watkin’s talk:
There is something even more fundamental, down here in the basement of the human system
is your physiology.
If you want to be brilliant every single day you've got to get a grip of every single level.
At the root of behavior is physiology.
If you want to improve your behavior, you need to change how you think- and if you’re
in a negative emotional state it’s quite hard to change your thoughts.
And Most emotional states are determined by feedback between the brain and the body- your
physiology influences emotion.
This is why you feel jittery or anxious when you drink too much coffee, you don’t just
calmly observe your heart rate rising.
The hard thing about having a powerful imaginative human brain is that we can turn anything into
a source of stress.
An offhand comment from your boss or simply the absence of a text message from a person
you’re attracted to can be interpreted by your brain as a threat to survival.
This causes your body to express the physiology of stress which affects your emotional state
which affects your thoughts which affects your behavior.
If you want to better control your behavior, one thing you can do is invest a couple minutes
into controlling your breathing and changing your physiology which is the root of your
behavior.
Quick thanks to SeraNova for the drone, if you're in Japan make sure and check them out.
They're a drone rental service.
Also, thank y'all for being patient on the part 2 to the video about the internet's effect
on your brain.
I'll have that one out soon.