Neuroscientist Dr. Tara Swart on stress contagion, neuroplasticity, and how to unlock brain potential
Stephen Bartlett interviews Dr. Tara Swart, neuroscientist, medical doctor, and author, on the Diary of a CEO podcast.
Summary
Stephen Bartlett speaks with Dr. Tara Swart, a neuroscientist, former psychiatrist, and executive advisor, about the science of stress, brain change, and human potential. Dr. Swart explains that cortisol — the primary stress hormone — physically leaks through sweat and is absorbed through the skin of those nearby, meaning a leader's stress has a measurable physiological impact on everyone around them, including driving abdominal fat that cannot be shifted through diet or exercise alone. She presents the case that the brain remains changeable throughout adult life via neuroplasticity, and that this can be deliberately harnessed to change habits, build confidence, and improve executive function through a four-step process: raised awareness of a pattern, focused attention on its triggers and consequences, deliberate practice of a new behaviour, and accountability. The conversation also covers the neuroscience of manifestation and vision boards, intuition stored in the gut, generational and epigenetic trauma, the psychological dimensions of aging, the neurological power of language and self-talk, and what Dr. Swart identifies as an ongoing post-pandemic mental and spiritual crisis rooted in disconnection and loneliness.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
The brain-body connection and stress in high-performance environments
Stephen Bartlett: Dr. Swart, what are the existing ideas and preconceptions about the brain and human potential that your work is confronting head on?
Dr. Tara Swart: The first thing I came up against — and this was around the time of the financial crisis — was the lack of understanding of the brain-body connection. These high-performing executives were acting like their body was just the vehicle moving their brain around from meeting to meeting. They were both disrespecting their physical health and not understanding that what they were actually being paid for was to use their brain — and they weren't creating the best conditions for that brain to operate in. I'm talking about really basic things: sleep, a good diet, hydration, not being sedentary, managing stress. This tiny organ, if it's not in an environment that gives it the best chance of doing its job, it's not going to perform, and a crack is going to appear somewhere.
The first time I really had a big confrontation with a bank was when people were dropping dead on the trading floor of heart attacks. 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. They just could not get that.
Stephen: What did you want to do with those people in a specific and practical sense? If you could have been in charge of preventing them from dropping on the trading floor, where would you have started?
Dr. Swart: With the understanding that stress — everything you're experiencing mentally and emotionally that's challenging, plus things like a lot of travel which is physically challenging — raises levels of the hormone cortisol, which comes from your adrenal glands. 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. In a 24-hour cycle, depending on your age and gender, there's a normal range for cortisol — it can go up and down. Something challenging happens, we need to adapt and rise to meet it. But when that level is above the top of the range all the time, the receptors in your brain essentially think there's an imminent threat to your survival. There's a whole cascade of hormones, and cortisol causes inflammation in the body — inflammation of your vascular system, inflammation around your heart. Particularly at that time, we were seeing a lot of heart attacks caused by stress, in the absence of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, or smoking. It was all stress.
Stephen: I read a study and watched a TED Talk that seemed to make the case that stress is somewhat subjective — it's an interpretation of events. You can put two people in the same situation and one feels stressed, the other doesn't. There's also a fairly famous TED Talk arguing that stress only has physiological consequences — the disease, inflammation, heart attacks you're describing — if we believe that stress is going to have that effect on us. If we believe stress is bad, it's bad. Is that true?
Dr. Swart: I would define stress as when the load that you perceive on you — physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually — is too much for you to bear. So yes, it is subjective. When I moved into business and leadership, people would use the terms "good stress" and "bad stress," and I found that really difficult having been a psychiatrist and seen people actually break down — to think there's any such thing as good stress. The way I've adapted that over the last ten or fifteen years is that there's an adaptive response, which is a healthy response to a challenge. We have that for a reason; we need it, and it can be a good thing. But it should be a spike — it should go up and come back down again. If it stays high all the time, that's not good.
How stress leaks through the skin and becomes contagious
Stephen: My second question is about the contagion of stress. I once Googled "is stress contagious" and it came up that it was. Is it contagious? In what circumstances? And how and why does that contagion work?
Dr. Swart: I'll tell you the answer to that, but I'm going to ask you a question first. Have you ever walked into a room with someone and by the time you've left that meeting with them you just feel completely drained?
Stephen: Of course, yeah.
Dr. Swart: So you know the feeling. I'll tell you how it works physiologically, but I'm going to build up to it. Did you know that women who live together or work closely together will synchronize their menstrual periods within two or three months?
Stephen: I found this out many years ago and it completely changed my perception on so many things. I have to be honest — I'm very logical, I need science and evidence, and I always thought about physical things. If I can't see it, it doesn't exist. That was my framework. When I heard about this, I checked, it was true, and it broke the frame in which I think. Because if invisible forces between me and you are interacting with our bodies, what else is possible?
Dr. Swart: Exactly. And I'm already using a certain form of eye contact with you to create emotional resonance.
Stephen: What? What eye contact are you using with me?
Dr. Swart: We'll go back to the hormone thing — we'll park that. It's related. When a baby is born, one of the ways it learns what emotion the mother is experiencing, and how it understands its own emotions — everything that grows over childhood and teenage years into pro-social behavior — starts off mostly with eye contact with the mother. At first they can hardly see anything, just two blobs, and then they start to understand micro facial expression changes. But eye contact with the mother is hugely important.
Most people are right-handed, so they hold their baby in their left arm so they can still use their dominant hand. That means when you gaze at your baby, your right eye is looking into their left eye, and that interaction from the optic nerve goes around the brain, impacts the amygdala where emotions come from, and creates this emotional resonance loop that's part of how mother and baby bond. So right-eye-to-left-eye contact has the most bonding effect you can have with someone.
You could say your mum was left-handed, or you could be left-handed, but if I'm taking a chance on building that bond with someone, that's the statistically most likely one to create good resonance. So I waited until we sat down, I gave you a hug — those little things start to create higher levels of the bonding hormone oxytocin, so you're more likely to lower your guard, trust the person, take a healthy risk.
Stephen: So the reason that works is because there's an association in our brains — if someone is looking into your left eye it triggers a bonding response that is quite innate in us. What else can I do if I'm trying to bond with someone?
Dr. Swart: Physical interaction. Depending on the appropriateness — minimum a handshake, maybe a hug, maybe a kiss on the cheek. Many years ago I read an article that if when you shake someone's hand you put your other hand over the top of it, it creates a sense of warmth and trust. I've been doing that for ten years now. You see this in a lot of older cultures — there's more of a two-handed handshake rather than what we do, which is just one hand, quite brief.
Stephen: What else increases that bonding chemical — oxytocin — in our brains?
Dr. Swart: Eye contact and touch are the main ones. Laughing together is another. Not to do with another person, but if you take a bath rather than a shower you'll release more oxytocin — you're immersed in warm water so it feels like a hug. Massage helps as well.
Stephen: What about vulnerability? I've heard shared struggle is one of the things that releases oxytocin.
Dr. Swart: Yes. Going through something highly emotional — not necessarily traumatic — is very bonding as well. We see this a lot on reality shows where people say "we're going to be friends for life." If you do something like a skydive or a bungee jump in a group you do feel more bonded to those people. But they're not as practical as the little things you can do every day.
Cortisol, leadership hierarchies, and belly fat
Dr. Swart: So let's go back to stress contagion. I started by setting the scene with women synchronizing their menstrual cycles. Whenever I want to explain something complex I take it back to what happened in ancient times. When we were living in a cave, the men hunted and gathered and sometimes went away for months. In those days the most fundamentally important thing for the survival of the species was that the alpha male must pass on his genes. He needed at least five women to be impregnated at the same time — if there was a food shortage or a stillbirth or miscarriage, at least one out of five would survive. To be able to do that they had to be fertile at the same time. That's why that mechanism exists. We don't need it now but it's still wired into the way we operate.
Those sex steroid hormones — estrogen and progesterone — leak out of our sweat about this far around us, and particles of hormone from sweat go through the skin of another woman if she's within that proximity. In a small office with six women, the menstrual synchronization will happen. And interestingly, it's led by the alpha female. The alpha is determined by testosterone levels. She was probably the person the alpha male was going to impregnate first, so everyone falls in line.
Cortisol works in the same way — it doesn't matter if you're male or female, but it does matter where you are in the hierarchy of the organization. Usually, in the scenario where you walk into a room and feel completely drained, the person who comes out feeling drained is less senior than the person who had that effect on them.
This is why it's so crucial to leadership. Your stress levels as a leader, as a CEO, are going to have more impact on everybody else than the rest of the people put together. Managing your stress is obviously important for you, but it's also important in terms of what happens to other people. The first issue I came up against was CEOs and CFOs who said, "Well, I won't show them I'm stressed, I won't display emotions in front of them." And I said: they're still going to know physiologically, and it's going to impact them. So you really have to actually do something about it.
The other thing about cortisol — one of the side effects — is that as a survival mechanism it will help you store fat around your abdomen. In the cave, if you were potentially not going to find food for a month, extra fat around the abdomen meant you could digest that and survive until you found food. With my clients in financial services, it got to a point where as soon as I walked in, they'd just lift their t-shirt and say "now you know how I've been this month."
I had a really funny incident when I was speaking at a bank. The CEO's PA was in the audience, and I was explaining that leadership stress leaks down and can lead to abdominal fat you can't shift. She shouted out, "So he's the reason I'm fat?" — meaning the CEO. And no one laughed. That's when I knew he was obviously really stressing everyone out — it wasn't funny, it was true.
Stephen: So stress causes belly fat that's really hard to shift. What would you see with those people?
Dr. Swart: They would say "I've put on a bit of weight around the middle, I've started eating less, I've started exercising more and I still can't shift it." That's when I would explain this is the impact of cortisol. As long as you're still leaking excess cortisol, nothing's going to change. Even exercising more or eating differently wouldn't shift that fat — you had to get to the root cause and reduce the cortisol.
It also made me think about when you consider promoting someone in your organization — you have to be very careful that if you put a particularly stressed, cortisol-leaking individual high in the organization, there's going to be a significant impact for everyone below them.
Stephen: That's accurate?
Dr. Swart: That's a really good way of putting it. I always think of the phrase "what got you here won't get you there," which is more about the fact that people get promoted because they're good at what they do but don't really get taught the best management and leadership skills. But that's a really pertinent point — if a person is particularly stressed, and especially if they suppress that stress, it would have an impact down the organization.
What to do if you're a "cortisol leaker"
Stephen: So if someone's listening and thinks, "I'm a leaky cortisol person — I'm highly stressed and it's probably getting to people around me," what can they do about it?
Dr. Swart: First, if someone is saying that, half the battle is won. The problem is when people are not aware of it. The signs and symptoms of high cortisol include sleep disruption — because cortisol is part of the 24-hour clock; melatonin helps us fall asleep, cortisol helps us wake up. You may have noticed the belly fat. Because of the strong connection between the brain and the gut, any reflux or indigestion symptoms are often signs of high cortisol. And of course things like irritability and mood changes.
What I mostly hear people say is "I can just about keep it together at work, but when I get home and my kids are annoying or my partner's asking for too much, I just snap." That means you're one step away from snapping at work if somebody pushes you too far. Cortisol is pro-inflammatory — it's also very drying of the system. You might notice your skin is really dry or you've got skin problems. Your skin isn't just the physical border of your body; it's the psychological boundary of your body too. Stress often shows up in the skin.
There are two main things you can do. One is physical aerobic exercise, because you can literally sweat cortisol out of your body. The other is journaling — writing out what's on your mind rather than letting it keep going round and round. Or if you've got a therapist or trusted friend, speaking it out loud. It's all about getting cortisol and the negative thoughts associated with your stress out of your brain-body system.
Sleep, the glymphatic system, and brain cleaning
Stephen: I've had a revelation in my life over the last six months about sleep. I don't have any meetings scheduled before 11AM and I sleep with my eye mask on and just wake up when I wake up. The importance of sleep — you're a neuroscientist. There are a lot of people who have dysfunctional sleep. How important is that for the brain and for containing stress levels?
Dr. Swart: It's so important. I do understand that for some people it's not a choice — they don't sleep well, or their sleep gets interrupted because they have young kids or they do shift work. I've done shift work as a junior doctor in the NHS and I travel a lot, so I'm jet-lagged half the time. But I try to do everything I can to make sleep as good as possible.
We've always known that when you sleep you lay down memories and new learning, you process emotions, and cells in the body regenerate. But that's never really been enough for very driven CEO-level people to want to give up eight hours a night. If they feel they can get by on four or five, they'd rather do that because they've got so much to do. The ideal is eight hours and fifteen minutes in population norm studies. Sleeping more than that can actually be depressogenic — it can start to lower your mood — so you don't want to be sleeping for nine-plus hours, but you ideally need to be in bed for nine hours to get that amount of sleep.
There was award-winning research around 2012 to 2014 when we began to understand how important the cleaning of the brain is overnight. This was an entirely new system that we didn't know existed, called the glymphatic system — named after glial cells, similar to the lymphatic system in the body. We used to think the fluid around the brain passively dripped through overnight. We did not expect to see jets of fluid flushing out toxins from the brain. The exact things we see in the pathology of dementing diseases — Alzheimer's, Parkinson's — tau proteins, amyloid plaques, neurofibrillary tangles — are being flushed out of the brain very actively overnight. And that process takes seven to eight hours to complete.
One thing I say to people who don't sleep well: if you find yourself awake at night and you're not lying on your side, turn yourself onto your side. That's the best position for this cleansing process. I have a special memory foam pillow by Tempur UK that keeps me on my side. Left or right doesn't matter, but it's a better position in terms of the veins in your neck than sleeping on your back or front.
Stephen: Do you know how our ancestors would have slept?
Dr. Swart: Co-sleeping is definitely how we evolved — sleeping in groups. You needed to huddle together for physical warmth, but the proximity and interaction also gave you more of the bonding hormone oxytocin, so you experienced the warmth of being part of a tribe. I think they slept on their side because they would have had to be ready for an attack from a predator, keeping their dominant arm ready. And most likely they slept on their left because they'd be protecting their most vital organs — the heart.
Co-sleeping, oxytocin, and HRV-measured resilience
Stephen: A lot of couples — including me sometimes — sleep in the spare room because of work commitments. When you talk about bonding and oxytocin being released in close proximity, especially at night when we're literally touching each other, is it conceivable that by separating rooms we're eroding our bonding?
Dr. Swart: I would never do it. Unless there's a young baby and one person has to go to work — that I understand, and that's temporary. But co-sleeping is fundamental to our survival. Physically when we were in the cave, and now emotionally and spiritually.
Stephen: Why would you never do it?
Dr. Swart: Because it's so good for you — the bonding, the physical warmth, the skin-to-skin contact, the love, the trust. I'll even put up with someone waking up early. I've worn HRV monitors and shown that even when my husband woke up at five and gave me a kiss goodbye, even though I wouldn't normally wake up before eight, I got a spike of resilience at that exact time.
Stephen: How do you measure resilience on an HRV monitor?
Dr. Swart: I was using Firstbeat technology, where you wear the HRV monitor with a gel pad on your chest. It's color-coded — light exercise, heavy exercise, stressed, or recouping resilience. Mostly people recoup resilience overnight. You could clearly see with people who had young children when they were woken up overnight, because it would go into distress. Some people recoup resilience during the day if they're with a partner or sibling and it's super relaxed, or if they love their job.
It's not just physical resilience — it measures both, because it compares your heart rate variability to your heart rate. The turquoise zone is actually about recouping psychological resilience. So because I was asleep, my heart rate was low, and I literally saw the highest spike of turquoise at that exact moment when he kissed me goodbye.
Stephen: That's amazing. My girlfriend — a couple of months ago I left the house quite early, maybe around 6am, and I came up to her and kissed all around her face and gave her a big hug. She told me the same day or the day after: "I don't know what happened there, but it unlocked something in me." And she'd had some challenges with her menstrual cycle and she came on her period.
Dr. Swart: Some of these things can't necessarily be immediately explained by science, but if you use your intuition you have to ask yourself — and I feel like you are coming around to thinking that could be true.
Stephen: When I'm given a reason I accept things. Even a sliver of science and I come around to ideas. Do you think men and women are different in their intuition and their ability to understand these forces?
Dr. Swart: If you had a hundred people in a room, fifty men and fifty women, and asked them to line up in order of height, not all the men would be taller than all the women — in the middle there'd be a mixture. It's like that with the brain and intuition. I think most people would agree it feels like more women are in touch with their intuition than men, but it's absolutely not all women versus all men.
Stephen: Do you believe women are more in touch with their intuition?
Dr. Swart: I think they're more open to accepting that it's a thing. And I believe that more men need the science to explain how intuition works.
Stephen: You know, I remember teaching at MIT about seven years ago — I was teaching the science of intuition, senior leaders in Executive Education. Someone stood up and said, "Well, I'm not going to make a really important decision like hire or fire based on my gut feeling, am I?" He was quite young, and quite a few of the older guys turned around and said, "That's absolutely how I would make my most important decisions." But at that time it was still not universally accepted. I think people are beginning to understand more that with age and experience and wisdom, intuition is actually your strongest — it should be your strongest decision-making modality.
The neuroscience of intuition and embodied wisdom
Stephen: What is intuition?
Dr. Swart: You can't remember everything that you've experienced in your whole life, but somewhere in the neural architecture — and in the gut neurons as well — that information is stored because you experienced it. Intuition is the lessons you've picked up along the way that you're not conscious of, but they're still stored in your nervous system. The less conscious you are of them, the deeper they're pushed into the nervous system.
There's a process called Hebbian learning, named after the neuroscientist Donald Hebb — neurons that fire together wire together. The things you've learned today are very front of mind, in little pathways that are just connecting up with each other. But stuff you learned when you were five — like when you put your hand in a fire and it burnt you and you never ever want to do that again — that's deep down. You're not really conscious of it, but you know.
We believe that wisdom gets pushed from the outer cortex into the limbic system — the emotional system of the brain — into the brain stem, into the spinal cord, and into the gut neurons. That's why they sometimes call it gut instinct: it's that feeling of knowing something but not knowing why you know it. It's actually to do with the fact that you have wisdom and experience that is embodied in you, but you're not necessarily conscious of it.
Stephen: It's quite surprising to hear that memories and wisdom can be in the gut. I always thought my cognition and memories and intelligence existed just in my brain.
Dr. Swart: Your memories, cognition, and IQ are in your brain. But your intuition is in your brain and your gut. Every single part of your body has nerve cells or nerve pathways in it. That's the connection that brings us back to the brain-body connection — they're intimately connected, it's bidirectional, they can't exist without each other. The more you understand that there's constant feedback going back and forth, the more you can know days before you're going to get sick. I bet your girlfriend knows days before she's going to get a cold.
Stephen: Yes, all the time. And my clients — as soon as they go on holiday they're sick the whole week.
Dr. Swart: Because they suppress it to be able to do their job. As soon as the body gets a break, that's when it succumbs. The immune system is being run down by cortisol, and as soon as it gets a rest, it gives in. After the financial crisis I had people saying "I've had this cold for four weeks, six weeks, but everybody's got it." And I'd say: do you actually think it's normal to have a cold for more than a week?
The post-pandemic mental and spiritual crisis
Stephen: A moment ago you mentioned a looming crisis. What is that?
Dr. Swart: It's not looming anymore — we are in crisis. All of the health anxiety, uncertainty, fear, and loss we experienced during the pandemic was bad enough. It caused a level of stress that no one alive today has experienced before. But we've come out of it and we have not paid any attention to the consequences of what happened to us. I mean everyone: babies born during that time who never saw anyone but their immediate family, teenagers — interestingly boys did better than girls because they play video games online so they stayed connected — older people who were isolated, people who lost loved ones. We haven't really acknowledged what happened and what we went through. Most people aren't really understanding what's changed for them as a result of that, and we certainly haven't made any plan for the future.
One of the things I've learned about the first Americans is that when they make a big decision for their community, they imagine the impact of that decision seven generations into the future. We don't even think about one generation ahead. We just think about what's going on right now.
I remember in March of 2020 thinking this is going to be a mental health crisis — whatever happens physically. And as time went on I thought more so. Then I started thinking, what else could it be? I had time to indulge in other areas of interest that I couldn't when I was traveling and working non-stop. I started reading more about spirituality in ancient cultures and I thought: this could be a spiritual revolution.
Stephen: When you say spiritual revolution — it's a very broad term. What do you mean?
Dr. Swart: If I look back at my journey since I changed career: it started with the physical piece where I was working, with the heart attacks from stress. Then I spent many years working on mental resilience with people. Emotional regulation was part of that, and it became important again during the pandemic. What I've seen as some of the good things that came out of the pandemic is that we definitely appreciated again the importance of time in nature. There were no planes and no traffic, we could see the stars again, we saw amazing sunsets, people began to appreciate birdsong. Studies now show that time in nature has a genuinely positive impact on physical health, mental health, and longevity.
The other thing of interest that's come out is that having a purpose that transcends yourself is really important to your mental health. You could say, "I do my podcast and I love it and I share knowledge with others" — a lot of that is still to do with self-satisfaction. Having something that doesn't necessarily do anything for you but gives you purpose in life is really important. That could be volunteering, it could be giving free information, it could be asking your elderly neighbor if you can do their groceries. Something that makes you feel like life is worth living but doesn't necessarily earn you money or directly improve your life.
Stephen: I've spoken to a lot of therapists who talk about the fact that two of the things we never want to feel are that we're "different" and that we're "not enough." In the context of a tribe — if I was different, there was a risk of being kicked off the tribe; if I wasn't enough, I risked being kicked out because I wasn't valuable. Is serving others a prehistoric desire to add value to the tribe?
Dr. Swart: I love what you've done there — which is exactly what I do, which is go back to evolution when I'm not sure of the answer. I hadn't thought of it exactly like that before, but I think it's true. A tribe sadly could not afford to carry dead weight. If you were injured, immobile, elderly, not contributing, you might get left behind.
There's also a really interesting new area of research called neuro-aesthetics, or neuro-arts — about having some kind of creative activity in your regular schedule. Research shows that if you're not doing something creative at least once a week — and that could be dance, music, painting, drawing, going to the theater, reading a novel, or time in nature — the impact on your mental health, physical health, and longevity is significant.
Even just small moments of aesthetic experience matter. This morning I had zested a lemon last night, and when I went to get the milk out of the fridge I smelled it and thought, that is so beautiful. If you've put flowers on your bedside table, if you've got objects of beauty in your house, if you listen to birdsong in the morning — that's all neuro-aesthetics. It's living a life that is aesthetically pleasing to your brain, and that's good for your health.
Stephen: Why?
Dr. Swart: I think it's to do with safety. If you were able to spare your mental resources to appreciate beauty, that must mean you're safe — you're not just trying to survive. And through the frame of the idea that pathways that fire together wire together, every time you've seen a tree you've been safe. So there's now a neurological association: if I put myself in nature again, it will signal to my body that I'm safe. That's neuroplasticity — repeating that and giving yourself the message that every time I'm around trees I'm safe.
The conclusion I've come to with this whole spiritual crisis and potential revolution is that all the things we need to go through that revolution have always been in the world as long as we've existed. We don't have to invent crazy new things — we can just go back to doing the things we did when we were at peace.
Stephen: But that's not easy in the world we live in. We've built a society where people live in white-walled cities alone. We're more lonely than ever. We order food using glass screens, use pornography as a replacement for intimacy, social networks instead of socializing.
Dr. Swart: You can start with yourself. I actively try to spend as much time in nature as I can. I have lots of plants and flowers in and around my house. I am very careful about who's in my tribe — positive, meaningful, deep, spiritual relationships. I don't use pornography or dating apps.
Stephen: What do you think of pornography and the brain?
Dr. Swart: The two most basic drives in the brain are sex and food, so the potential impact is huge. I agree with you that increasingly it has created a big disconnect between men and women in real life, which is really sad. It changes the way men view women. The impact on women in terms of what you have to look like, how much plastic surgery you have to have, what you're expected to do in — or even outside of — an intimate relationship. The biggest issue I would have is what you're expected to do when you're not even in an intimate relationship, when it becomes more of a transaction.
Going back to having really respectful relationships, having empathy for other people, looking out for the people in your life who might be lonelier than you — these matter.
There are studies that show the amount of time you spend communicating with friends online versus face-to-face has all sorts of impacts in terms of how socially comfortable you are, how empathic you are. It can even have a really big impact on teenagers in terms of body dysmorphia. It's fine to spend quite a lot of time online as long as you are also spending a lot of time with people face to face.
Social contagion and the importance of who's in your tribe
Stephen: You said earlier that you're very careful about who's in your tribe. Why is that important from a neurological perspective — in terms of our health, outlooks, outcomes, and neuroplasticity?
Dr. Swart: Let's link this back to the question about stress being contagious. There's another rabbit hole you could go down about social contagion. There are statistics that show that if someone in your social group gets divorced, you're more likely to get divorced in the next year. If someone in your social group is obese, you're more likely to become obese. I'm absolutely not saying don't be friends with someone because they got divorced or put on weight. I'm talking more about the attitudinal stuff — how you treat other people, how kind you are, how generous you are, how open you are to conversations about intuition or spirituality. You meet people who are at a similar psychological level to you. If you are working on yourself, you want to be with people who are growing too — who are open to challenge, who are learning, who are interested in exploring spirituality, who care about their mental health and other people's mental health. It's about having a circle of trust and knowing you've got support, but also that if you do something that's really not okay, somebody's going to tell you.
Neuroplasticity: what it is and how to use it
Stephen: You mentioned neuroplasticity. What is it, why does it matter, and I think there was an epiphany in your career when you realized its importance and possibilities.
Dr. Swart: When I was at medical school and doing my PhD in Neuroscience, we did not know about neuroplasticity. We absolutely believed that when you physically stopped growing, everything in your brain was set for the rest of your life. You couldn't change your intelligence, you couldn't learn to manage your emotions differently, it would be much harder to learn new things.
What we know now is that the brain is actively growing and changing until we're about 25. From 25 to 65 — and I would say even beyond now — if you don't do anything to change your brain it will tend to plateau. If you're in a job where you do the same thing every day and you're pretty good at it, you could stay like that for the rest of your life. But if you do things that are intense enough to force your brain to change, you can learn lots of new things and also get what we call global benefits in your brain.
Let's say you decided to learn a new language.
Stephen: You've just said something that is uncanny — I have a deal with my girlfriend this year that I'd learn Portuguese by the end of the year. It's September now and I know six words.
Dr. Swart: If you do that, your brain will not only get the benefits of being able to speak Portuguese — you will actually improve your executive functions. These are the highest functions of the brain: being able to regulate your emotions better, solve complex problems, think flexibly and creatively, override any conscious or unconscious biases. These are great benefits to get from just doing something like learning a language or a musical instrument. It can also be smaller things like travel, interacting with people who've had a different life to you, cooking something new, taking a different route to work, reading a newspaper that's very different to what you normally read.
Stephen: Does doing this podcast every day induce neuroplasticity in my brain?
Dr. Swart: In terms of the facts you're learning, yes. But your actual process — finding a person, doing a bit of research, meeting them, having a conversation, asking questions — that's a very natural pathway for you. You're getting better and better at it, but it's not a new big change in your brain.
Stephen: So what is it that people typically want from neuroplasticity?
Dr. Swart: They want to stop being a negative thinker, an overthinker, a procrastinator. They want new habits and new ways of thinking. So the process — underpinned by the physiology of what happens in the brain — starts with raised awareness. Let's say you've had a relationship break up again for similar reasons and you've recognized a pattern. Spotting the pattern is fifty percent of the battle. Once you know "this is a thing I think, believe, or do that comes out with a result I don't want," that is half the battle.
Once you've done that, you don't try to change anything straight away. The next stage is called focused attention — you look around in your life at work, in your personal life, in sports, with different types of people, and through your past. Where are the times I've done that? What triggers me?
Let me give you an example. Say I have a friend who repeatedly dates people who are married or in relationships.
Stephen: Step one would be becoming aware of this pattern. What I'd want to dig into with her is what she believes about herself that makes her think that's okay. There must be a level of self-worth that has struggled — maybe something in her childhood caused that. You'd only do that if you didn't believe you deserved someone of your own.
Dr. Swart: Exactly. I'd ask: what goes through your mind when you decide to do that again? She'd say something she's conscious of thinking. I'd want to dig below that and ask what she believes about herself. So that's an important part of raised awareness: getting below the thought into the belief.
The next stage is focused attention — journaling, acknowledging, writing down what happened at the point of that decision-making, what the consequence was. One of the things I say is: you are basically the sum of every decision that you've made in your life. That's who you are.
Once there's more understanding around what causes that pattern and how it happens, the next stage is deliberate practice. She may not yet be able to say no the first time. She may have to make another mistake — but she'll make it armed with all the knowledge she has now. And she'll see it for what it is. Then deliberate practice is where you say: "I used to behave like this. This is the new me — someone who says no to every man who's married."
At first it's hard because you have a pathway that may have been set since childhood that is used to doing a certain thing. The brain is a very energy-hungry organ, always trying to use the path of least resistance. But let's say this time I manage to silence that old voice fifty percent of the time. Then next week seventy-five percent. Eventually the new pathway becomes stronger than the old one, and that's the new me.
Stephen: So the three steps: first, becoming aware of the pattern. Second, becoming really cognizant of the pain or consequences of that pattern. Third, setting an intention for who we want to become and practicing it. And there's a fourth factor?
Dr. Swart: Accountability. Most people left to their own devices will give up when it feels too hard. It could be a friend, a professional, a language teacher. One of the reasons I'm a big fan of action boards is that there's a very tangible thing in front of you — images of what you said you wanted to achieve this year — that you and your friends and family can clearly see at the end of the year whether you did or didn't achieve.
Trauma, soft-wiring, and whether old patterns can truly change
Stephen: I was thinking about trauma. When we've had really traumatic early experiences — when we've learned we're not deserving, not worthy, not enough — that might be a really well-established pathway. Doesn't that suggest some behavior patterns are practically immovable?
Dr. Swart: I don't want to say yes to that. We've moved away from using the term "hardwired" — which implies it's there forever — and we talk about "soft-wiring" now, because of neuroplasticity. I know people who have been through incredible amounts of trauma who have done so much work on themselves that they're in a truly beautiful place, helping other people deal with that trauma. There's a lot that everybody can do. You may not be able to deal with every single thing you've experienced or the full extent of it, but I do believe there's a great deal that's possible.
Stephen: Earlier you talked about generational trauma and epigenetics. The first time I heard about generational trauma I thought it sounded like wishful thinking — a nice way to blame your ancestors for the way you are. Can it possibly be true?
Dr. Swart: I'm going to separate this into a few things. Generational trauma is related to specific acts placed onto particular marginalized groups — first Americans, slavery, certain groups in Asia. The impact is that when something happened to one generation, there's a psychological spillover — you always feel isolated, always feel at the margin, always feel left out, because a whole generation retreated in a certain way.
Intergenerational epigenetic trauma is about how some external event actually changes the expression of your genes. We have a genotype and a phenotype. The genotype is your DNA — it doesn't change. But the phenotype is which bits get switched on and off. The most famous examples are the Holocaust and the Dutch Famine. We are now sufficient generations away from those events to have seen three or more generations of changes in stress responses. It's not always bad — sometimes people are more resilient because their grandparents or great-grandparents went through something terrible. Sometimes people are more anxious. It's hard to know why it goes one way or another.
I always say to people: you aren't born with the genes your parents had when they were born. You're born with the expression of the genes your parents had around the time of conception — and then your mother's stress levels through the trimesters of pregnancy. This isn't meant to blame anyone. It's meant to raise awareness that if you have something in your family's history, or you did have a particularly stressful pregnancy, you can use neuroplasticity to improve the chances of your baby expressing genes that will be more helpful to them.
Stephen: If a woman was really under stress when eight months pregnant, how does that impact the baby?
Dr. Swart: Imagine the mother's a heroin addict — that affects the baby because they share the same blood supply. If the mother is stressed and has high levels of cortisol, that cortisol goes through the placenta into the baby's blood supply. Being stressed from in utero could switch on genes for not being resilient to stress, or for being more liable to anxiety or mood disorder, and inflammation is already starting in a tiny baby that hasn't even been born yet.
I really don't want this to come across as saying all mothers have to be completely Zen — that's just not reality. But everything you can do to manage stress during pregnancy is helpful. And then if your child starts to show signs of anxiety or inability to manage emotions after an age when they should be able to, you can introduce them to meditation, sit with them and talk about their emotions. There are great books and videos to educate children about that. Knowledge is power.
Grief, heartbreak, and processing deep emotion
Stephen: Thinking about grief — so many people including close friends of mine are recently grieving, whether that's a lost relationship or the death of someone. It seems to be an all-consuming force that's resistant to advice. Through your work, what have you learned about grief in the brain?
Dr. Swart: There are so many versions of grief we've seen in the last few years: loss of sense of self, loss of someone through a relationship breakdown, and loss of someone through actual death. I strongly believe that to ever heal from grief you have to go to the bottom of the hole. However you do that is not something anyone else can comment on. I think if you are throwing yourself back into work or partying too much to avoid it, that's not right. But if somebody has to go somewhere emotionally to deal with grief, they've got to be supported and allowed to do that — and then maybe at times gently nudged: how are you doing? Are you feeling any sort of healing, resolution, understanding, acceptance?
With grief, if we haven't been through something ourselves, it's really hard to imagine how bad it is.
Stephen: What makes you think you have to go to the bottom of the hole?
Dr. Swart: I think we are very avoidant emotionally, and that's part of the greater issue of being lost and disconnected. I remember when my first marriage broke up and I was changing careers — I thought, if I hadn't been a psychiatrist and didn't know what I know, I can see how you could end up on a psychiatric ward going through that. I'm not saying you have to feel terrible. I'm saying you have to process all the emotions and surrender to it a bit. Because if you try to gloss over it, it will come back and bite you later. I've seen many stories of that — people who did really great things like write a book about it, or showered all their care and love onto others, and then eventually found they hadn't actually dealt with their own emotions.
When I say go to the bottom of it, I mean process all of the emotions fully. Then you can actually heal and at some stage move forward. It doesn't mean you forget the person or what happened. But if you try to gloss over it — it's such a deep emotion, such a facing of your own mortality — it's dangerous.
The three mechanisms of neuroplasticity
Stephen: In your book you talk about the mechanisms of neuroplasticity. What are they and what are the three factors with the biggest impact on changes in the brain?
Dr. Swart: The first one is myelination. Myelin is a fatty substance that coats some neural pathways, making them fast pathways. There's a reason from evolution why we have some fast pathways and some slow pathways. If you put your hand in the fire, your reflex to snatch your hand out is a fast pathway, but your pain reflex is a slow pathway — because if you were incapacitated by pain the minute you put your hand in the fire, you wouldn't be able to get away from it. One mechanism of neuroplasticity is becoming even better at something you're already really good at, through myelination.
The most common mechanism — for something you're quite good at but could become really great at with effort — happens through synaptic connections. Neurons that already exist in the brain connect with each other and form new pathways. That can feel like hard work, but if you put in the effort, you can change your brain.
The third mechanism doesn't happen much in the adult brain but does happen around the hippocampus. It happens a lot in children's brains. It's called neurogenesis — embryonic nerve cells that float around in the brain actually becoming fully formed neurons. There's a growth factor involved, called BDNF — brain-derived neurotrophic factor. The things that contribute most to that are aerobic exercise and eating dark-skinned foods.
Stephen: Tell me about the exercise one first.
Dr. Swart: If you're regularly doing aerobic exercise, the rate of those embryonic cells becoming full-grown is about thirteen to fourteen percent. If you haven't been doing exercise for a while and then you start, the rate increases to about thirty percent. So it accelerates after a period of inactivity with new aerobic exercise.
Stephen: So if I'm trying to learn a language, by doing aerobic exercise I accelerate my ability to retain memories and make new neural connections?
Dr. Swart: Yes. In simple terms, aerobic exercise accelerates neuroplasticity. Weight training doesn't relate to neurogenesis as much.
Visualization and muscle growth — mind over matter
Stephen: This isn't about language, but it's another example of mind over matter. There was an experiment done on weight lifters.
Dr. Swart: Two groups of weight lifters. One group lifted finger or elbow weights in a two-week study and showed about a forty percent increase in muscle mass of the targeted muscle group. Their counterparts only imagined lifting weights for two weeks — they lifted no weights, just sat there and visualized themselves lifting weights. They had a thirteen percent increase in muscle mass.
Stephen: So we can tell our brain to grow muscle? That speaks to the power of our thoughts. If our thoughts can tell our brain to grow muscles, and thinking about positive things in line with our goals matters — what's the harm in imagining yourself more muscular or more youthful, alongside eating the dark foods and getting enough sleep? It's part of the package.
Dr. Swart: Exactly. And think about the number of athletes who use visualization as part of their training. Of course they also do the exercise and practice, but visualization is hugely used in sports.
Dark-skinned foods and BDNF
Stephen: What should I eat for neurogenesis? What are these dark-skinned foods?
Dr. Swart: At a basic level, where you can choose a darker version of a food, the pigment in the skin of that food has higher levels of antioxidants called anthocyanins, and they contribute to neurogenesis. It's things like: black beans instead of white beans, blueberries instead of strawberries, dark chocolate instead of milk chocolate, purple sprouting broccoli instead of green broccoli. And good quality coffee counts as well. I try to vary what I eat but always choose the darker option if I can.
Practical conditions for optimal brain change
Stephen: Is there anything else I need to know about the process of neuroplasticity?
Dr. Swart: The accountability piece, but also creating the conditions in your body for your brain to be able to do all of that. Sleeping roughly eight hours a night, having regular sleep and wake times — there seems to be an additional benefit to that, within about an hour. Go to sleep between ten and eleven, wake up when you need to. Not being sedentary. In terms of neuroplasticity you don't want to do too much high-intensity exercise because it spikes your cortisol levels — gentler exercise is better. Eating thirty different plant products a week and varying the color as much as possible. Managing stress — whether through meditation or removing the causes. And being hydrated.
If you're doing all of those things and want to play at level two, you could start doing time-restricted eating — only eating between noon and eight PM, or eight AM to eight PM. That kind of fasting is beneficial for your brain. But only if you've got the foundations right. Someone who's stressed, eats badly, or doesn't sleep enough will not benefit from intermittent fasting, because it is a form of stress on your body — one your body can take and use to build resilience, but only if the baseline is good.
And for neuroplasticity to happen you need to be taking on big cognitive challenges — things that break existing pathways. Learning to DJ, for example, would absolutely establish a new pathway in your brain.
Building confidence and self-esteem through neuroplasticity
Stephen: Someone looking to build their self-esteem and confidence — what does the brain tell us about that process?
Dr. Swart: There's a little jump start that's particularly helpful for confidence and self-esteem. Usually there's a particular recurring negative thought associated with feelings of lack of confidence. If you can identify what that is and create a positive affirmation that counteracts it, that's a great way to get started. My phrase used to be "it has to be perfect." Now I'd say "it is going to be amazing." But to get myself there I could have said "it doesn't have to be perfect but it's going to be great." A question I ask myself is: what's the best possible outcome that could happen here?
It's about changing your language in your mind, reversing that narrative quite strongly — even if it doesn't feel totally true — and just repeating it so much that you start to wear down the other pathway.
Stephen: Does language really matter — the language we say to ourselves?
Dr. Swart: It really does matter. It's neuroplasticity. If you're repeating something in your mind or out loud, if that's being repeated more than another statement, it's the one your brain is going to believe. We can effectively reshape our brain by saying something else to ourselves repeatedly.
There's a whole movement in the personal development community where you look in the mirror and say "I'm beautiful, I'm attractive, everyone's going to love me, I'm going to be rich." I've found it hard to get on board with that.
Stephen: Yeah, because I know I'm bullshitting myself. If I said those things, my subconscious knows.
Dr. Swart: I think there's an element of reality to it. Those particular statements are very shallow — they're not the things people really need to be saying to themselves. What I find helpful is — and I picked this up from a conversation with Lewis Howes — sometimes you just say to yourself "I'm safe, I'm okay." Just sometimes saying "I'm safe" is what I need to hear. Not "I'm beautiful and I'm amazing" — that doesn't address the underlying issue. And "I'm going to be rich" is the worst one, because you actually have to do things to make that happen.
Finding the things you need to say to yourself that aren't to do with social expectation or parental expectation — what you really want to know for yourself — that's going to set you up to go out into the real world and do the things you need to do.
Manifestation through the lens of neuroscience
Stephen: When people hear the word "manifestation" it's highly associated with just thinking or saying things — not with actually going out and doing them. I had something that wasn't quite an argument but a disagreement that resulted in the person I was speaking to getting out of a taxi in the middle of New York and walking off. She was saying you can just manifest anything in your life — you can think about it and the universe will attract it. Do you believe in manifestation and if so what form, and how is that supported by neuroscience?
Dr. Swart: I believe in manifestation based on your brain — your thoughts, your beliefs, your actions. In my book The Source I say your brain is the source of being able to attract everything that you want into your life. I sat down one summer and researched the laws of attraction and looked at whether I could explain them through cognitive science — psychology and neuroscience. I could. And the first stage for me was understanding that it is absolutely to do with the way you think — but it's not magically attracting something from the atmosphere. It's to do with the changes you make based on your thought process.
I do believe in vision boards, but I call them action boards because I see them as a representation of what I want — but I still have to go out there and make those things happen. I think it's also much more empowering to believe that it's your brain making that stuff happen, not some external force you're not really sure about.
Stephen: How would I manifest a great relationship into my life using the brain as the source?
Dr. Swart: With that one, the preferred method is to create a list of the attributes you want in that person — but then you have to make sure that you are everything on that list.
Stephen: I've never heard anyone say that, but it's so important. I know so many people who would write a list they couldn't meet themselves.
Dr. Swart: Psychologically, you meet people at the level of psychological evolution that you're at — but equally you meet people at the level of your psychological wound. To be in a balanced relationship with someone really great, you've got to be bringing something to the party. You know, drugs want amazing people — that's the problem.
Stephen: Right! When I was at optimal drag in my life, I attracted drag people. But I wanted amazing people and I could never get them.
Dr. Swart: And that was part of your journey of knowing you could become an amazing person. You got an amazing person once you did the work.
So make sure you are the things on that list — you'll rise to the level of your values and fall to the level of your wounds. What you have to offer in a relationship is just as important as what you want out of it, and as a society we don't really seem to think about it like that.
Stephen: I have a note in my diary: "People who focus on what they want don't typically get what they want. People who focus on what they have to offer typically get what they want." In business, the people who ask for pay rises don't typically get them. The people who focus on what they have to offer — those are the ones you promote.
Dr. Swart: And if I'm thinking "I want that man" — that's got to be a cortisol-inducing state. But if instead I'm thinking "what can I offer, I have so much love to give" — that's going to be oxytocin. And who is someone going to be more attracted to?
Neurodiversity, ADHD, and autism
Stephen: Neurodiversity has been a big topic. What is it, what's causing it, and what might address it?
Dr. Swart: This comes more from my experience as a psychiatrist, including some work with children. Neurodiversity is basically anything that doesn't fall into the category of a typical brain — the way most of the population think and how their brain works. That includes dyslexia, dyscalculia, ADD, ADHD, autism and Asperger's spectrum, and other things.
I think a lot of it is to do with better diagnosis. I'm not saying these things haven't risen, but we're also much better at diagnosing them. For example, when I worked with mostly little boys with ADHD, when I saw them for the first time and took the full family history, there was quite often an absent father who'd been in several different relationships and couldn't hold down a job — and you'd think he probably had it but was undiagnosed.
I do think some of it is an adaptation to a world that's changing at such a rapid pace — always switched on, so much technology. Some people would say that autism is even a form of evolution in a way, to help us keep up with the changing pace of the world.
I also wonder about things like dyslexia — whether humans have always had an element of it, but it's more of a challenge in the world we live in now. Think about the schooling system: writing and formal education are fairly new constructs.
And this isn't to do with neurodivergence, but to do with things like gender identity and sexual orientation — what I found in my research with indigenous wisdom is that those things were understood long ago. There was a place for people, and sometimes even an elevated role. So it's really interesting that we're grappling with things like gender identity now, when apparently these ancient cultures were dealing with all of this, quite comfortably, all the time.
Insights from indigenous wisdom
Stephen: Your second podcast series is going to focus on some of this ancient wisdom. What are a few things from that research that would have the most significant impact on people's lives?
Dr. Swart: One theme that's come through quite strongly is related to creativity — that things like humming and chanting are really beneficial. They've obviously been around forever, and we don't really know why people did them in the first place. But in terms of expressing creativity and calming down the nervous system, that's one thing that seems to have come through from Ayurveda and also from the first Americans — it's good for your health and immune system. There's humming through the nose, humming at the back of your throat, humming between your lips. Really basic stuff. I think it has something to do with regulating your parasympathetic nervous system.
The psychology of aging and the limits we impose on ourselves
Stephen: You talk in your book about psychological priming and the effect that our mindset about aging has on our physical body — that our thoughts about aging affect our actual physical abilities.
Dr. Swart: There's a really fascinating study that's one of my favorites. Three groups of octogenarians — people in their eighties. One group was the control, living normally for a week. One group had to reminisce about being in their sixties whenever they had an opportunity. And one group was actually driven to retrofitted versions of their homes that looked like their house from twenty years ago — given newspapers dated from twenty years ago, photos of themselves at that time. And from the minute they got there, they were told: you're sixty now, you carry your own suitcase. These elderly ladies and gentlemen had to carry their cases upstairs.
After one week, the people in that group were taller because their posture improved. They had better musculoskeletal coordination than they had before. In before-and-after photos shown to people who didn't know them, they were rated as younger in the one-week-after photos. The reminiscing group also had some improvements, but not as much. That really goes to show the impact of what we think about ourselves and all the physiological consequences of that.
Stephen: You were talking about your eyes. Your optician told you that you'd probably need reading glasses.
Dr. Swart: He's the same age as me, and he said, "I think you're probably going to need reading glasses next year." I said, "No, I do not want reading glasses." He said, "Yeah, your eyes are going to age just like anybody else's." I left. I came back a year later and he said, "How's it going with the reading?" Fine. He did my eye test, spun around on his chair halfway through, and said, "Your eyes haven't got worse — they haven't even stayed the same, they've got better." I said, "I know." He said, "What have you been doing?" I said, "Well, I just said no to you." When reading feels like it would be a bit easier if I moved the phone further away — I just don't.
Stephen: What's that doing in the brain?
Dr. Swart: I think it's essentially what you see from the third group in that experiment — they had to change their behavior to live without any help and in a way that they had to when they were younger. That removed the limitations that we impose on ourselves. If I'm a certain age, I must need reading glasses, or a walking stick, or whatever. Not accepting the limitation and not changing my behavior.
There's a kind of opposite experiment done with young medical students in Florida. They had to walk between five rooms, and on each table were five pieces of paper with a word on them, and they had to string a sentence from the words. That wasn't the real experiment. The real experiment was that in one of the rooms, the words on the table were "Florida," "beach," "sunshine," "walk," and "bungalow" — all associated with retirement. Every student walked more slowly out of that room than any of the others. Because those words are associated with retirement, it made them slow down. That's how important language is to our brain — just seeing words can change our behavior.
Stephen: I've been thinking a lot about the casual language I use. I caught myself on my vlog saying "I really need a coffee this morning" and stopped myself. There's something about the casual use of the word "need" throughout our lives that is disempowering — making me a slave to the coffee. So I'll say instead, "I'm going to treat myself to a coffee." That was my decision, I was powerful there.
Dr. Swart: That's a choice you made. And there's an overarching point here about personal responsibility. When people say "I can't exercise, I don't have any time" — that's a really disempowering frame. Versus "I've got other priorities" — which feels empowering. Your child or your mortgage-paying job can be your priority. But I think it's important to acknowledge that you made the choice, rather than saying some force didn't give you the time.
Stephen: And constantly telling myself that I'm unorganized — how that's probably making me the messy person. The language we use shapes us.
Dr. Swart: Exactly.
A closing reflection on brain potential and first steps
Stephen: Is there anything we've talked about broadly, or from the ancient wisdom, that we should make sure to mention? What would be the most important thing?
Dr. Swart: My intention with every sentence I've said to you is that people should realize how much potential they have in their brains — how capable they are of having an even more amazing life than they have already.
Stephen: I accept that now more than ever after this conversation. I'm not this fully formed, rigid lump of cells — I can change fundamentally. And I think if people have gotten to this point in the conversation, they'll accept that too. What is the first step someone should take, moving forward from here toward the person they want to become?
Dr. Swart: I keep thinking about the taxi driver on the way here who told me a little about his world. He drives the cab every day and he has dreams of starting his own business one day. They're going to be so hard-wired into their patterns and routines, and it's very hard to make that jump. So if I could give people one takeaway that's really simple — even if there's a lot of hard work at the other end — it would be this: be very clear on what it is that you want. Spend five minutes sitting down and visualizing those things being true. Then give gratitude for that.
Spend five minutes — longer if you can — seeing yourself as a great partner, in a tidy home, with a successful podcast, whatever it is. See it, feel it in your body, taste it in your mouth, hear it in your ears. Completely immerse yourself in it. And then be so grateful for all of that. What you're essentially doing is moving your brain from a fear state to a trust state, and that is the gateway to making these changes.
Stephen: Thank you so much. You've given me so much food for thought and changed my mind on a lot of things. I have a better understanding of neuroplasticity, and I understand — most importantly — the part of manifestation that is understandable through the lens of science.
Closing question and the path to creative identity
Dr. Swart: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. This question is: what could you choose to change and choose to feel great about?
Stephen: The same thing — I love that. What could I choose to change and feel great about? I think I could finally realize my dream of feeling like I am truly a creative person. I'm not exactly sure yet what that would look like, but I'm on the path to it. Getting clearer on that, and actually doing it, would feel great.
Dr. Swart: You're already a creative person, though.
Stephen: Thank you for saying that. I feel like I have one more step to go before I really feel I've done it — because it was such a deep-seated thing for me. My English teacher said to me, "You are so good at drama, you should read English at Oxford." I came home and told my parents, and my dad said, "Over my dead body — you'll go to medical school, and then after that you can do whatever you want." There is a frustration in me that's been there for a long time. These days you can't imagine anything better than a teacher picking out your child as exceptional, but at that time there were no brown people on TV, so it was seen as an even bigger risk.
I have to say, every time I see someone who looks like me who's made it as an actress or a creative, it makes me so happy.
Stephen: Why did your father say that?
Dr. Swart: Indian parents think stability is the key to happiness for their children — a stable career, a regular salary. I don't come from a family of entrepreneurs, which is why it was so crazy when I gave up my job and started a business. No one could understand it. I was afraid of not having a regular paycheck. And then at some point I realized: I could earn zero in any one month, but there's also no limit to what I could earn. That realization came when I invoiced in one month what I was earning in a year as a doctor.
And there was also the sense that my grandmother grew up in a village in India and didn't have access to education — that was a big regret of hers. So I was given the best education money could buy and got an MD and a PhD. It's like overcompensation. And it wasn't really necessarily what I ever wanted.