Speaker 1Hey, how's it going? Welcome back to the James Kennedy podcast. Thanks for tuning in. I hope you all had an awesome week and enjoyed the last episode with the great Robin Ford. And boy, do we have a good one for you guys today. I'm not going to waffle too long on this one because I want to get into this conversation as much as you do. So I'm just going to say one thing before we start. Why the hell have you not subscribed to the podcast? I know you haven't because I know how many people listen to this thing and I can see how many people have subscribed. So come on, man, do me a solid. Help your brother out, man. I'm giving you the good stuff here. Click that subscribe, click that follow, click that share if you're feeling crazy. And I, in return, will promise to keep these things coming. Also, I think a lot of people don't realize that this podcast is available on every platform, even YouTube. There's no video, but you can still listen to it on YouTube as well. And it's also available in all usual places, Spotify, Apple, and wherever else you get your podcasts. So just pick your evil giant tech company of choice and it'll be there. Right. Okay. Well, I said I wasn't going to waffle. So let's get down to the main event of the day because we are joined. Today. By the neuroscientist and author, Dr. Joseph Gibelli, whose latest book, The Brain at Rest, is a fascinating and important exploration of what happens to our brains, our health, and our lives when we simply stop. I think I probably need to hear this more than most. So I personally cannot wait to tuck into this one. And welcome onto the show, the brilliant Dr. Joseph Gibelli. How are you doing, man? Hi, James. I'm good. Good to be with you. Thanks so much for doing this, man. We really appreciate it. And as I said in the intro, I am somebody that definitely needs to be with you. I'm really pleased to hear what you've got to say today because I am a chronic nonstopper. But before we jump into the subject at hand today, could you give the listeners a brief overview of who you are, what you do, and the sort of things that you're involved in?
Speaker 2Yes. So I'm a neuroscientist by training. So I did my PhD in cell and molecular neuroscience at University College London. And then I worked as a postdoctoral researcher in America at University of Washington in Seattle. And again, it was very cell and molecular, looking at basically brain diseases and looking at like a bunch of different brain diseases like ataxia and Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis, lots of different things. And I've spent the last couple of years writing quite a lot about neuroscience. And so I wrote my first book about Alzheimer's disease and, you know, sort of humanity's kind of hunt for. And I wrote a book about brain evolution as well. And then I sort of became I started to become really interested in rest and the neuroscience of rest, basically for two reasons. So it was kind of personal and professional, really. So I realized that I was overworking myself, say, in the book that, you know, I was going through a phase where I was just I was going into the lab like six or seven. In the morning, I was, you know, working on experiments all day long, mentoring students, writing grants. And then I would leave the lab at like seven or eight o'clock at night and I would go straight to a coffee shop and I would work on my first book or a grant or something. And because I was basically in in this phase where you just think, you know, you know, the faster you run, the more you'll achieve like that. You know, the harder you work, if you just outwork other people, you'll get you'll get what you want. Right. And, you know, unsurprisingly. My health started to really take a hit. So my memory started suffering. I was less creative and I just started to get quite unwell. And so I decided to kind of step back a little bit and not work as hard, still work hard. I'm still like a hardworking, ambitious person. But just I just decided to stop overworking myself. And it was also because I'd seen what happened with overwork with my with my parents as well. So I talk a little bit about my my my dad and my mom, my dad in the book. Because they've both worked so hard and have basically worked to the point of of burnout. And my father now lives with major depressive disorder. As a result, my mom, her blood pressure is so high. The GP asks her for almost daily blood pressure recordings. She's technically in like a hypertensive emergency, like all the time because of her blood pressure. And so I I started to basically it was interesting because as soon as I started to step back a little bit, I noticed not just that my health returned. But things like my memory and my creativity and my problem solving. And I thought, oh, that's really interesting. What is it about rest that is having these really profound impacts on the brain? And that's when I started to look into what rest is for your brain, true rest and what it does. And that's when I just yeah, it's just it's just an absolutely extraordinary area of neuroscience, which I which I just explore in the book.
Speaker 1You've got me fascinated already. I mean, it's such a shame, isn't it? In our society these days, in our culture, the message is that of, you know, crushing it. And as you said, you know, outworking the competition and being a winner and all that sort of stuff. Like it's a trophy. You know, if you work in yourself to death, it's almost like a badge of honor. You know, it's such a strange place to have ended up. I'm sure we're going to get into all that and so much more because I've got so many things I want to ask you. So to open that up, what would you say is the central overarching message or main? Discovery of your book, The Brain at Rest.
Speaker 2So basically, the book is about the fact that we have our understanding of work and rest completely upside down. So we think that when we rest, that our brain is kind of like a muscle and that it's powering down and we're not really doing anything. And that taking time off work and resting too much is kind of lazy. It's indulgent. It's unprincipled. It's even maybe a bit reckless. But the precise opposite is true. So basically, when you rest, your brain activates a network that we call the default network. And we now know that when you activate your default network with rest, you improve your intelligence, your creativity, your memory, your problem solving abilities. It even lowers your chances of developing things like depression and dementia. And so it's such an exciting area of neuroscience because it's only really been discovered in the past few years. Like the default network. The default network itself was discovered in 2001. But only in the past few years have we really begun to understand that actually people are succeeding in life, not despite their inactivity, but because of their inactivity. Right. Because the default network, it occupies 20% of your brain. Right. Whereas your working brain network, what we call the executive network, that actually only occupies about 5% of the brain. So, you know, there are so many cognitive benefits to be had. And that's what I'm trying to get across in the book. And true rest for the brain is not like looking at your phone or binging on Netflix. Those things feel restful because mostly because they're just a distraction from what you were just doing. Like, you know, you're in the office, you're doing your work and you look at your phone and it feels restful because you're not looking at your work anymore. But it's a trick. It's masquerading as rest. That's not true rest for the brain. So true rest for the brain is things like staring out of the window and letting your mind wander. It's things like. Going for a walk, especially in green space. Green space has like a whole bunch of really profound benefits on the brain that we can discuss. It's things like taking a 30 minute nap, which we now which we now know actually enlarges your brain and enlarges your brain by 15 cubic centimeters, which to put into context is the volume of a small plum. So it's really big, you know, and it's things like taking more breaks throughout the day. It's things like, you know, engaging in more play, you know. Just embracing things like silence, which we know stimulates things like BDNF, a protein that really helps sprout new neurons and helps defend you against things like Alzheimer's. So, you know, so these are these are true, truly restful things to the brain. And they activate this default network. And it's this default network that I really want to encourage people to activate more. There's a reason why, you know, you're you're working on a problem and you can't get it and you get exhausted and burnt out. And then you think, sod it. I'm just going to go for a walk. And then five, 10 minutes on your walk, the solution just pops into your head. That's your default network working, busily working on the problem without you even thinking about it. So the book is basically, you know, about what what rest is for the brain and why it's so beneficial. And that actually, you know, it's, you know, rest is the secret to sustained productivity, not work. It's rest that is driving not just your best thinking abilities, but your best long term.
Speaker 1Productivity and your best work. Oh, that's fascinating stuff, man. And like the fact that it's actual tangible physical evidence that you can look at on a screen must be pretty mind blowing, you know, no pun intended. But what about something that's just occurred to me whilst I was listening to you then? What about rumination, though? Because all that happens to me when I start, you know, daydreaming or looking out of a window is I start ranting with somebody in my head, start arguing, start going over old things. And getting anxious about future things that haven't happened yet. It's very unrelaxing. So I think that's why I personally tend to keep myself so busy all of the time is to sort of block out that internal asshole, you know. Is that a separate conversation or does that tie in somehow with what we're talking about here? No, that's a really good question.
Speaker 2So basically, all of the research into mind wandering and daydreaming, it explores. the positive aspects, but there is this side to it, as you said, about rumination and i get this too right like so you know i'll stare out the window for a couple of minutes and let my mind wander and but sometimes if i'm doing it for a bit too long or if it's just not the right time of day or if something else is bothering me maybe in the day like i'll stop i start i'll start ruminating and overthinking and so what i would say about that is if you find that your mind wandering and you start ruminating just just just stop doing it and go and do something else right like because it's not you know i don't want people to avoid the benefits of mind wandering the cognitive benefits of daydreaming out of fear of go you know out of fear of rumination happening if rumination does start to happen and you start overthinking you start getting anxious then you know just just go and do something else right and just come back to it at another time like i find that um i mean so if i'm having a bath for instance i find that i mind wander in like quite a positive and productive way and i'm like oh i'm going to do something else right and i'm like oh i'm going to do something else right and i'm like oh i'm going to do something else right and i'm like oh i'm going way i think so it's i think it's just about finding you know finding the conditions that you yourself but you know i find enjoyable to have a sort of positive daydreaming experience
Speaker 1right love it yeah well i totally agree with you about walking as well because for some reason if i go out walking in nature i'm lucky i live in south wales there's lots of it around uh and as a creative person as well exactly like i said i can go out for a walk in 10 minutes later the thing that i'm not actively thinking about anymore the solution will just come so i i totally get that on the flip side of that i also do experience what you described as well with the burnout now i'm someone that pushes myself very very hard i really never get a day off or any time off ever really i won't let myself i'm always juggling and doing something i'm self-employed so there's always that pressure to you know never take your eye off the ball for a second and every now and then every few weeks i hit a point where i'm just completely and utterly burnt out my memory starts going i'm struggling to find the right words i start getting really gnarky and nasty and you know depressed i start hating myself hating the world it's pretty grim and whether i want to or not a self-imposed kind of lockdown almost happens against my will you know i'm just so exhausted that i end up just hiding away for a day or two just kind of doing nothing and i'm starting to learn now the pattern that after a day or two of just doing nothing the fog suddenly starts to lift i catch up on my sleep you know i just watch mindless crap on the telly and i sit and stare and i daydream and it's not intentional but i do know now from habit that after two days of doing that i'll start to feel so much better my optimism comes back my faith in humanity comes back my sense of possibility comes back is all of that the good and the bad stuff because of what
Speaker 2you're describing yeah absolutely so yeah so there's there's lots of really interesting things there so so the thing about doing nothing is it's not really so it's not like meditation so meditation is all about you know a focused um very much focused on on the present right focused on your focusing on things like your breathing and it's a it's a very focused and engaged exercise it this is far more effortless than that right doing nothing and so you know i think the the way to think about this is when you actually look at the neuroscience of work as well as the neuroscience of rest so we know so the reason you feel so bad when you've when you're when you're overworking is because overwork does do loads of really bad things to the brain so one of the things it does is that it actually thins your frontal cortex in the same way that aging does so it literally makes your brain older than it is it also uh shrinks the hippocampus the brain region really important for memory which is why you struggle with things like short-term memory and working memory it enlarges a region called the amygdala which is really important for our fight or flight response and it's really important for our brain to be able to do things that's why you know overworked people are often very much on edge very anxious very tense and interestingly so psychologically overwork is basically broken down into these three stages it starts off with um just dissatisfaction so you know you're not happy with your work but that's kind of a manageable feeling so you just you just get on with it but if you ignore that signal it then moves on to cynicism and that's where you basically just you just don't care about your job anymore it's just something you've been doing for a long time and you're you've got to do and i think a lot of people are at that stage and if you ignore that without taking much more rest it then moves into the phase of dehumanization and that's the phase that's very much a kind of emotional hardening a complete detachment from your colleagues from your friends and family it's where you just feel really angry really grouchy you have feelings of dread and anxiety depression and incompetence as well and you sort of walk around and it kind of it's almost like you wear those feelings like like skin like they've just always been there and if you ignore that what what you know that then basically leads to all of the neurobiological damage associated with with overwork and it's really interesting they've done these fascinating longitudinal studies in scandinavia and they've shown that once the symptoms of overwork set in it can actually take your brain up to three years to recover so three years for your brain to return to its baseline ability to solve um cognitive problems cognitive tasks so you know i would argue that we're all somewhere along that three-year uh spectrum of overwork and so you know when you're when you say okay enough's enough and you take time out and you go and sit in the park not only are you preventing all of that damage from happening um and reversing much of it but you're engaging your your resting brain your default network and so that's restoring and replenishing your your memory and your problem solving abilities so like it being in like being and take being in green space as an example we know that when you spend time in nature and green spaces like just a park your creativity and problem solving ability goes up by 50 percent wow your memory recall goes up by 20 percent and a part of part of that we think is because when you're in a green space your brain waves essentially shift from these very busy and anxious beta waves to much more daydreaming calming and reflective alpha waves and even meditative theta waves so and another another part of the reason that we think that's true as well is because nature abounds with what psychologists call soft fascinations so these are things that just hold your attention in an effortless way there's a reason why when you sit on a park bench and just watch the rustling of the leaves or you're at the beach and you look at the lapping of the waves those things hold your attention in a very effortless way and when you contrast that to what psychologists call hard fascinations these are things like your phone led billboards train announcements bosses deadlines all of those things just lead to cognitive fatigue and overwork for your brain so so yeah like exactly when you know when you say i've had enough and i'm taking a day off to relax in the park that's exactly what you're doing you're activating your your resting brain and you're getting all of the cognitive benefits and all of the health benefits of that as well so it's not you know so many people say to me that you know they feel guilty you know and i just say well that's that's productivity guilt that's the guilt that has come from our society telling you that you should equate your value and worth as a human being with your economic output right yeah and it's you know that that's a hard thing to let go of but you have to let go of it because it's you know it's killing you like it literally is killing you you know 745 000 people a year now are dying of overwork in japan they even have a work word for it they call it karoshi yeah um and so you have to let go of that guilt and and actually understand that it's not just your body that's resting your brain is resting and by resting it's not powering down it's powering up
Speaker 1and it's doing loads of really important things yeah it isn't almost like a very interesting irony there then isn't there it's like if you want to crush it and be super productive and all that stuff then actually you need to be resting more yeah absolutely that's and that's
Speaker 2like one of the key things that i want to get across to people as well because um i think you know it's you know it's i think it's easy to it can be easy to misunderstand the message like you know when you when you're doing nothing your brain's doing a lot of something and that we know from like a mountain of research now that having more rest taking your work-life balance a lot more seriously it massively improves your long-term productivity right and because we're in this hustle overwork overwork um culture we're just we all we're doing is prioritizing short-term productivity at the end of the day and we're not doing that we're not doing that we're doing it at the expense of long-term productivity and so if you want true sustainable long-term
Speaker 1productivity you have to rest your brain a lot more amen to that yeah beautifully put um is there a ratio then is there it obviously is does it depend on the person does it depend on the circumstances or is there have you have you found something in the studies that prove that there is some kind of ratio between active the brain engagement to this soft focus of stuff that sort of rest that you're talking about is it half an hour in the day is it much more than that is there a ratio does it depend so i mean it depends basically because
Speaker 2there are so many different ways to rest your brain and they all have slightly different benefits they all seem to activate the default network the interesting thing about the default network is it's kind of an all or nothing phenomenon once one part of the default network is active the rest of it will will often activate as well which is great because it means that you can do something restful like going for a walk and it'll activate your default network but you can also mind wander and it will activate your default network but you know each individual type of rest also seems to have slightly different benefits for the brain and some of this is still obviously being fleshed out by neuroscientists But we know like a 30 minute nap in the day, as I said, grows your brain by the volume of a small plum. You know, we know that people who take breaks throughout the day. So if you try, for instance, the Pomodoro technique where it's 25 minutes of work and then a five minutes, five minutes of rest, that your cognitive abilities improve and your long term productivity improves. We know that there seems to be people who have lots of micro breaks throughout the day, like five, 10 minutes every hour, for instance, instead of just, you know, one slightly longer break in the day. That will actually have more cognitive benefits and it will be better for your resting brain than ignoring those micro breaks and just having, you know, a half an hour to an hour break in the day. So I suppose it's more about there isn't an exact ratio. I think that it's more about just. Understanding that we we are massively overworking, we're massively overusing our executive network, our brains work working network, and we're massively underusing the default network, the resting brain network. And so we need to basically like completely restore that balance. And so we just need to take rest a lot more seriously. We need a lot more of it. I mean, if I had a magic wand, I would put us all on the four day work week straight away because, you know, we've like so many studies have been. Done on this now that show a huge trial in Iceland. Like it shows that, you know, at worst productivity stays the same. At best, it massively improves. And it's like when you think about it, it totally makes sense. I mean, you know, one of my favorite studies where they looked at consultants, for instance, and they, you know, they showed that they couldn't tell the difference between people who like worked 80 hours a week and people who just pretended to work. Like so much, so much of our time is spent, you know, just just presenteeism. You just you're there. Because it looks good, but you're not actually doing anybody productive work. Yeah. And so, you know, I used to work, you know, I don't know what, like eight, 10, 12 hours sometimes a day. And, you know, it's just I wasn't actually getting that much done. So now, for instance, you know, I'll work I'll work really hard for like five to six hours a day, for instance. But I'll get a lot more done than I did when I was just grinding out ridiculous hours. Right. And so I think it's more about it's more about just taking. On board, all of the different types of things that are really restful to your brain and taking a lot more time off as well.
Speaker 1Love it. Love it. Well, man, just listening to this is making my shoulders relaxed. The idea that it's OK for me to, you know, switch off for five minutes. What do you do? Do you have a something that works for you or does it depend on how busy you are?
Speaker 2Yeah. So I, I mean, I take a lot of breaks throughout the day, like definitely a lot more than I used to. So, like, you know, I'll. I'll work quite hard for like half an hour to 45 minutes, but then I will just like chill out for five or 10 minutes. And I never used to really do that. I'm a big fan of going for walks, I have to say. So I will just go for a walk in my neighborhood. I'm quite lucky because I'm I'm in I'm in Islington, which doesn't isn't actually known for having that much green space. But we do have. There is a small park nearby and there's also like a really small woodland like behind us. And it's like. Protected. It's quite small, but so so I have a little place I can go forest bathing, you know, I can take my son and we can just spend some time in nature. So I'll try and get sort of 20 minutes of green space in a park or in in a forest each day. So I do now also try and do the 30 minute nap, even though I'm not I was never a napper. Right. So it's interesting because before, if you said to me, I'll take a 30 minute nap of the day, I'd be like, there's no way I can. Do that. I got time for that. Yeah, right. So and that's because like you're you know, you do have a genetic predisposition to that. So that study was looking at it was looking at loads of a lot of data from the UK Biobank and it was looking at genetic data. It's really interesting as well as brain size data. But it was it was interesting because they basically found that people are either genetic nappers or genetic non nappers. But even if you're a genetic non napper, so genetically, you're just not predisposed to particularly want a 30 minute nap in the day. So even then, you're still you're still reap the same cognitive and neurobiological benefits of the nap. So I don't know if I'm a genetic napper or non napper, but but but I still I still try and get that 30 minute nap in like I can't always get it in, but I will try and get it in. And I do feel better as a result of that. And I think I think one of the bigger things that I do as well is like, again, so I mean, I've always been a bit of a daydreamer, like I will just like randomly stare at like a mark on the wall and just spend a few minutes just thinking about nothing. But now I know now I know actually it's it's doing it's doing my brain a lot of good. So what else do I do? I take a lot more baths now as well than showers. So like baths are really good for your brain, really good for default network activity, for daydreaming. Also, just really good for like your blood pressure and your and your stress levels. And like also really good for like your parasympathetic nervous system. There's all these really strong benefits of that. A bit of having a bath. And if you have a bath, actually, just before you go to bed, there's so much there are so many studies showing that you have much better sleep, much deeper, more restorative sleep, more restorative sleep. So I'll basically. Yeah, I sort of try and I mean, what else? I suppose I also try and get more. I mean, I've always been a bit like this anyway, like micro moments of play throughout your day seem to be really good for your brain. So because when you think about play, the neuroscience of play is really interesting because what is play? Play is it's it's imaginative. It's open ended. It's unstructured. It's task off, crucially. And so all of these things are default network functions. They're the things that your resting brain absolutely loves. So, you know, I try and spend more time throughout my day being more playful, which now that I've got a baby boy is a lot easier to do. So that's great. But also just not feeling that guilty about about taking rest. I mean, I used to I really used to suffer with a lot of productivity guilt. And I think that was just part of my. My upbringing as well. My parents were really hard workers. My parents, they're quite old fashioned, hard workers. I'm still, you know, to this day, I'm still trying to convince my mom about the neuroscience of rest. So, you know, I was sort of I basically was like raised to think of rest as like a luxury. Right. So, yeah, I'll try. And yeah, so there's lots of like tools and techniques that I talk about. I discuss in the book. I will be. I try to do every day myself.
Speaker 1That's amazing. Well, I'm going to make it completely. Uneducated assumption here that we used to do a lot of those things, perhaps before the digital age, before lifestyle moving at warp speed, when there were fewer options for things to do. You know, you might work without an app during the day, but then once your work was finished at five o'clock, whatever, that was kind of it for the day, you know. But now we've got these damn things, these these phones that, you know, with us, we're checking them every two seconds is constant stimulation to the brain 24 seven. Am I right in that assumption? Is this a problem that's getting worse because of the times we live in and is likely to keep getting worse? Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker 2Yeah. No, you're spot on. And that is exactly right. And it is getting worse. So, I mean, we basically have this always on mentality now. So you finish your day. But because of your smartphone, you're still checking your emails. Right. You're seeing work emails. You're thinking, oh, well, even though it's the end of the day, this, you know, I need to reply to that. So often you reply to it. You know. You still often get emailed by your boss on the weekend. Something which I think I think is actually illegal in the EU, but not here for some ridiculous reason. And so, you know, we have this always on mentality because of our phones. But we've also lost the kind of this kind of heritage of rest because. You know, I I mean, I do remember a time when I mean, because I was sort of I mean, I remember when I was a kid. When I was in my when I was in my teens and I think even a little bit early 20s, smartphones weren't really that big a thing. So it was still the days of like the Nokia 3210. So you just had text messaging and snake. I really miss those days. You know, you have to actually sit down at your computer and, you know, to, you know, to see the news, for instance. Yeah. I mean, now I will I'll read the news in the morning, but then I won't read it for the rest of the day because it's just so bad for your brain. And it's just, you know, we've so as well as the smartphones, we but we've we've lost this this, you know, people used to be able to just I would say just, you know, sit down on a park bench, sit down on a park bench. Just look at look at the look at the trees, look at the grass, sit in your garden and just, you know, just just let your mind wander. I think, you know, I think we've sort of lost that. And I definitely be taking a picture of stuff from the park.
Speaker 1Yeah. Instagram.
Speaker 2Yeah, exactly. Right. Exactly. And it's really sad. I think it's really sad, especially when it comes to children. Like, I do remember a time when you would see children just like in the park. They'd be on the bench. They'd be running around. Yeah. And it's like now. Now. But now it's the tablets. It's the phones. It's just it's so there's a heritage of rest that we've lost as well as as well as it's always on culture. And, you know, I think I think it's not just about like digitally digitally decluttering. It's not just about because we all we all now basically know. That, you know, phones are, you know, we're spending way too much time on them. It's not good for a whole bunch of reasons. It's really bad for our attention span and all of this stuff. But what we don't what we don't know enough about. about is just all of the cognitive gains that come from rest that come from true rest for your brain because when you stare at your phone you know you're training your brain's distraction rather than its reflection you're not allowing the brain to to have true to generate true like self-generated inner inner thoughts essentially and so you know your
Speaker 1you know self-generated thoughts receiving content rather than creating it so so even though it feels like you're relaxing because you're just doom scrolling you're switched off you're not really thinking about anything but your brain isn't like a child running around a park with free abandon it doing exactly it's still receiving is that is that what you're saying yeah
Speaker 2yeah yeah no that that's like the perfect way to put it it's it's not there's no you know i i would argue that self-generated thought is becoming essentially an endangered species because we're just we're just always on our phones and that's another thing that comes from just allowing your brain true rest from just you know sitting down and admiring nature and letting your mind wander and going for a walk in the forest that's that's when your best ideas are going to come to you that's when your default network is is going to is going to do its thing and give you the most creative insights right into whatever it is that you that you want to do you know we have to you know our brains have evolved you know for the default network to come up with the solutions to really complex problems by by letting our brain rest not just by being locked into work emails and on our phones and just constantly focusing on tasks and i don't know i mean it's kind of strange that it's that we we just think of like tasks on things so work as as the thing that's really productive and that something that's task off is is not productive like i've been thinking more and more about it and the more you think about it the more you think well like why do we why why do we feel of it think of it as as something that's lazy and indulgent and i i keep coming back to okay it's the lack of scientific understanding and it's the cultural and it's the culture that we've been programmed by and i mean i think those are the main reasons but it's sort of i i feel the more i think about it the more sinister i feel that the influence has been because it really it's it's quite hard to to break out of that and to start to realize that actually your brain is doing a heck of a lot when you rest oh man it's such
Speaker 1powerful information and so simple as well i mean surely the easiest thing to do is to do nothing right and it says a lot about our culture right now that doing nothing is so difficult i'm going to sort of take a curveball on this um i don't want to get political or anything like that but i blame everything on capitalism and it seems to me that this is just another toxic effect of the needs of capitalism for all of us to just be on all the time working at maximum capacity yeah and when you're not doing that you're consuming the content you're buying the
Speaker 2goods i think it's i think it's i think the main thing is it's unregulated capitalism it's like it's it's capitalism this just doesn't have enough guardrails it just doesn't have enough regulations like so much of this could be solved with just smarter regulations like you know the four-day work week allowing your workers to have met more breaks throughout the day like understanding that if they're going to daydream you know they're actually going to be more creative and more productive um you know understanding that when they're taking time off that it's going to be better for your for your for your for your bottom line yeah there's not a log ahead not a log aheads with profits um so i feel like this is why it's sort of um it's kind of interesting some people have said to me like oh you know isn't the corporate world going to be angry with you because you're telling people to take more time off and it's like well if they read the book they'll understand that actually actually i'm actually helping them yeah yeah yeah they're actually they're actually going to make more money if they just let their workers like you know be more human and not die in the process yeah exactly exactly um so yeah i'm still waiting i'm still waiting for for some any any phone calls from the the corporate world i think
Speaker 1that'll be a while yeah you're not gonna be invited into the inner sanctum anytime soon but the people will have your back man oh joseph i better let you go on the very note of rest it is a sunday and i you know i know you've you've got a a young son you probably want to go and hang out with and daydream and play with so i'm gonna let you go and do that thank you so so much for squeezing us in i really appreciate it thank you james we're gonna give a quick plug for the book um which i encourage everybody which i know that they're going to have to listen to this conversation to rush out and grab immediately the brain at rest by dr joseph gibelli is out now it is available everywhere you get your books joseph can also be found online at dr joseph gibelli.com joseph thanks again man i really appreciate it and best wishes with everything and thanks for everything you're doing to make all of our lives a little bit better as well thanks so much james not at all brother we appreciate you man keep doing your thing we'll speak to you again soon thank you man you too take care bye man bye dr joseph gibelli ladies and gentlemen stand in ovation or what man did i enjoy that conversation you know what i would love to work in the sciences what a fascinating life that must be but instead i chose rock and roll dude that was a great chat i love that stuff and i've learned so much in that half an hour there that i'm still kind of processing you know what i mean i'm gonna have to go back and listen through through it all again and take some notes and apply it to my life because that guy was dropping some knowledge man it's just so many aspects to what he was talking about there you know like the social and the cultural stuff that we're dealing with with overwork and constant content saturation and that that's one whole area in and of itself but the stuff you were saying about the effects that just stopping and just staring at the window or going for a walk and just being still for five minutes can have on your physical brain size and ability to process things and come up with new ideas and to function healthily and to not develop all sorts of ailments and premature aging i mean dude come on it's right there you know i mean that this is proven in studies it's not a theory it's a fact so man we've all got to find ways to get some more rest in our bodies and we've all got to find ways to get some more rest in our lives and he's not even talking about long amounts of time either you know a half an hour nap or just you know five or ten minutes here and there to just close your eyes and switch off for five minutes or get out the house or the office for five minutes i don't think that's a big ask so an immediate takeaway for me i guess is something that i'm guilty of as well is that when i do have five minutes and first thing i do is i start just say i'll go and check my facebook i'll see what's going on in the world and i think that if we just stop doing that and resist the urge to go and pick up your phone and just stare at the window and see what's happening in your mind do its own thing for five minutes i think that could be a massive massive thing that we could all do that is so easy right away but hey i'm just spitballing right now because i'm just reeling from the conversation which i thoroughly enjoyed and i really hope that you guys enjoyed it too and i hope that you're going to get some benefit from that and i really hope that you're all now going to rush out and buy the brain at rest by dr joseph gibelli there are also tons of other interviews with a man himself on youtube and across all the other podcast platforms and he's done a bunch of other books as well so go and check it all out and in keeping with the theme of today's conversation i'm now going to clock off and let you guys clock off as well and go and steal a few minutes of nothingness time do it and once you've done it get your ass back here and click that goddamn subscribe button or i'm coming after you i'll be back next week with another fascinating chat with another awesome human and in the meantime as i always say take care of yourself take care of each other love you loads ciao for now
PodcastTranscript AI