No.1 Neuroscientist: Why You Should Always Look Into Someone’s Left Eye! & How Stress Leaks Through Skin, Is Contagious & Gives You Belly Fat! Dr. Tara Swart

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Tara Swart** (0:16)
Did you know, there's a really fascinating experiment done on weight lifters. They lifted no weights for two weeks. They just sat there and they visualized themselves lifting weights.
They had a 13% increase in muscle mass. People should realize how much potential they have in their brains.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:31)
Dr. Tara Swart.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:33)
She's a neuroscientist, medical doctor, executive advisor and bestselling author.

**Tara Swart** (0:38)
She's here to teach us on how to build mental resilience to overcome our biggest challenges.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:43)
Is stress contagious?

**Tara Swart** (0:45)
So cortisol is the main stress hormone and it will leak out of our sweat about this far around us, go into the skin of everybody else and it's going to impact them. And as a survival mechanism, it will help you to store fat around your abdomen.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:01)
So stress causes belly fat?

**Tara Swart** (1:02)
Belly fat that's really hard to shift. There's another rabbit hole you could go down about social contagion. So there are statistics that show that you meet people who are at a similar psychological level to you. For example, if someone gets divorced, you're more likely to get divorced in the next year. Your own brain can play tricks on you.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:19)
So what can I do about that?

**Tara Swart** (1:20)
The brain is actively growing and changing till we're about 25
But from 25 to 65, if you do things that are intense enough to force your brain to change, you will actually improve the highest functions of the brain. Things like regulate your emotions better, solve complex problems, think flexibly, override any unconscious biases that you may have.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:42)
It begs the question then, where do I start? I don't.
Dr. Tara Swart, what are the sort of existing ideas that your work and what you speak about is confronting? The like unhelpful existing preconceptions about the brain human potential that your work is confronting head on.

**Tara Swart** (2:14)
So the first thing I came up against, because this was around the time of the financial crisis, was the lack of understanding of the brain body connection.
So these high performing executives were kind of acting like their body was just the vehicle that was moving their brain around from meeting to meeting. And both disrespecting their physical health, but also not understanding that what they were actually really being paid for was to use their brain. And they weren't creating the best conditions for that brain to operate in. And I'm talking about really basic things like sleep and a good diet and hydration and not being sedentary, managing your stress, et cetera. So, you know, this tiny organ, if it's not in an environment that is giving it the best chance of doing its job, it's not going to and a crack's going to appear somewhere. And the first time I really kind of had a big confrontation with the bank was when people were dropping dead on the trading floor of heart attacks.
And they asked me to work more in my capacity as a former medical doctor to help with physical stuff. And I said, I can't do that if we don't address the mental and emotional piece because that's what's causing this. And they just could not get that.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:37)
What did you want to do with those people in a specific and practical sense? If you could have, you know, been in charge of preventing them from dropping dead on the trading floor, where would you have started?

**Tara Swart** (3:49)
The understanding that stress, so everything that you're experiencing mentally and emotionally that's challenging and things like a lot of travel, which is challenging of your body, that that raises levels of the hormone cortisol, which comes from your adrenal glands.
And that cortisol courses around your blood through your entire body and brain.
And the brain has receptors for understanding what's going on in terms of threat to your survival. So in a 24-hour cycle, depending on your age and your gender, there's a normal range for cortisol. So it can go up and down like this. You know, if something challenging happens, we need to adapt and rise to meet that challenge. But when that level is above the top range all the time, these receptors in your brain basically think that there's an imminent threat to your survival. So there's this whole cascade of hormones and they basically cortisol causes inflammation in the body. So inflammation of your vascular system, inflammation around your heart and everything else, gut and other things. But particularly around that time, we were seeing a lot of heart attacks caused by stress. This was in the absence of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, smoking. It was all stress.