The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett: Moment 111- The Unexpected Health Benefits Of Travel Everyone Should Know: Max Lugavere

One of the things that really did catch me off guard was it was in your book,

The Genius Life, where you talk about this study with the mice and you make the

case that travel has positive relationships with health, like it has

health benefits. Not something I've ever heard anybody say before that travel is

good for our health. Yeah. Wow. I'm glad you brought that up because 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, so the study that I talk 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 suffer. They

suffer in terms of their bodies and their brains and then they let that mouse

or they let, you know, intervention mice go and explore what they call enriched

environments and they see something like fourfold, you know, like they see like

an up regulation 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,

this is something that I struggle with in my own life because I am a creature

of habit. And I would routinely get the sense, 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 Groundhog Day syndrome

is actually a thing. And essentially what it is, is, you know, our brains are,

and this ties back to the mouse study, our brains are 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, right? 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 rate, despite accounting for only 2% to 3% 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? It's like a human universal. People report that time just accelerates,

right? Like where did the last decade of my life go? It's not 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 definitely the case,

but they 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?

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. Our routines

become so cemented. And what we fail to realize, and hopefully this, me saying this,

shakes people out of their comfort zones and inspires people to shake things up a little bit,

this Groundhog Day Syndrome, it causes our brains to just shear away for the sake of efficiency.

I mean, it's got good intentions, right? But it shears away like all the joy. So you just

become like this rote automaton and the joy, the excitement, it's 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 so that I think is really important. 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 a while, 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 and the maize. 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 monitor

the rat's brain and there's a ton of cognitive activity, right? You see the rat

observationally scratching around, sniffing around. Eventually it finds the chocolate against the

reward. When they put the rat back into the maze for the second time, cognitive activity is gone

because a habit has been formed. So as I looked at the brain scans of those rats,

it was just completely flat because they were on autopilot. Again, the brain is

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 our lives become. When we get out of bed in the

morning, our route from the bed to the kitchen is not one that requires me to have any sort of

cognitive activation. Therefore, also, I don't remember the journey. I just fly down there.

Yeah, you're on autopilot. Yeah. And our lives become autopilot. And it's interesting. I'm

trying to figure out as you were talking there, you said shearing away the happiness.

Why does being on autopilot cost me happiness? Did you say it made my brain smaller?

Not smaller. Okay, thank you. Well, if that mouse study holds true in humans,

it probably doesn't support neuroplasticity. Yeah, there's no need for my brain to...

Yeah. I mean, it's an efficiency machine after all.

The happiness point. Now, why is living a life on autopilot have an impact on my happiness?

Well, there are definitely benefits to routine. Some of the benefits to

routine can be that you have your, for example, your diet dialed in, or you have great connections

in your community. So I'm not telling everybody to throw their lives into upheaval. But it's

when we start to do the same things every day, the scientific term is habituation.

Yeah, failure.

We habituate. It becomes habit. And we feel this way. 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, that level of excitement that we

once felt towards that car, or maybe sometimes it's the person that we're sharing our beds with.

This is just an 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 significant

other or break the routine with your significant other, or invest in things that have emotional

value for you, for example. So I mean, the car might have not been the best example because

some people do have emotional connections with cars. I bought a guitar recently that I love,

and I have an emotional connection to it because it was played by one of my favorite artists.

So you're talking about that really, it's the decline of meaning that is associated with habituation.

And that makes us unhappy because creatures of meaning, we do need things to remain meaningful

in our lives. Yeah, it's these rote routine behaviors that are not all that productive or

meaningful. It's like driving the same route to work every day, shopping in the same supermarket

every day, eating the same foods every day. Challenge your preferences. There are foods

today that I enjoy that I didn't like 15 years ago. And I'm always willing to challenge 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 was reading about regarding music and how

there's almost an optimal point with a song that we love where it can be repeated over and over

again. So say if we're listening to a hit 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 and it's become habituated that we love

it at an optimal level. And then it declines when we've heard it too much because it loses that

sense of meaning. And I just remember reflecting on that, how the record industry want to put

things in our lives that have a certain level of familiarity, but not too much familiarity,

because then we'll dislike 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, which habituation obviously kills. Habituation and novelness are inversely correct.

Yeah. No, it's true. There's this quote that I love. I'm a huge James Bond fan. We're talking

a little bit about before we started rolling, but in the latest film, there's this wonderful

Jack London quote at the end of the film that they use 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 good,

it's so emblematic for I think the life that we all deserve, that we all ought to be living.

I think occasionally in this conversation about how do we live longer? That's a nuance that gets

lost. It's not just about living longer. It's about living more fully. And so yeah, I think

that that's part of it. It's like breaking the routine and getting back some of that joy and

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Link in the description.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.