Hey there, it's Dr. Susan Peirce Thompson, and welcome to the Weekly Vlog. All right, in this week's vlog, I'm going to be talking about a part of the brain that I've never told you about. It's going to sound really familiar to you, but it is a new part of the brain that I have not talked to you about before, and it's thanks to Cheryl Coza that I'm going to be bringing this to you. She said, we can use her full name.
She wrote in as follows, "You and the coaches have helped us understand that we shouldn't wait for motivation to kick in before taking action. I've been in Bright Line Eating® for almost four years, but I recently have had a drop in willpower, loss of interest in previous pursuits, and nothing seems interesting. It's sorrow. Fatigue. I've stopped doing things that previously were interesting to me. Even food seemed too boring to deal with. Serendipity connected me with an exercise coach who pointed out exactly what I needed to hear. He said, 'The part of the brain that connects willpower with doing the anterior mid cingulate cortex shrinks when you stop doing things. When the anterior mid cingulate cortex shrinks, you don't have the willpower to do things. The best way to beef up the anterior mid cingulate cortex is to do something anyway. You can't wait to want to do it.' I've heard parts of this from you, Dr. Joy, and the other coaches, but I'd love to hear more about the link between action and willpower and this part of the brain having the intellectual framework helps me get started, do it anyway and reactivate my brain. Can you speak more about this part of the brain and its impact on getting stuff done when you lose the will to do things at all, it could reinforce how to get started or Rezoom™ when a part of you wants to and the rest of you just doesn't care?"
Oh, Cheryl, well first of all, my dear, my heart goes out to you and your sorrow, and it does sound like some low-grade depression is sinking in. Just that loss of enjoyment in activities that used to light you up. And I'm just so sorry for your loss and your sorrow, and I hope you're doing better now. I think your topic is fabulous. For everyone out there who's heard me talk about a part of the brain that's in a very similar region, I talk a lot about the anterior cingulate cortex, which is not what we're going to talk about today.
The anterior cingulate cortex is the seat of the Willpower Gap™. This is the part of the brain that gets fatigued so easily and it gets taxed by regulating our emotions and resisting temptations and persisting on tasks. Then when that part of the brain is depleted, we just end up eating stuff that we know we shouldn't be eating, but we just end up eating it anyway. It's the part of the brain that is actually just in front of what we're going to be talking about right now.
The cingulate cortex is typically divided into several regions, including the anterior cingulate cortex, the mid singular cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, and today we're going to be talking about the mid singular cortex, but the anterior part of it. This is the front part of the mid singular cortex, not the front part of the whole thing. So, not the anterior cingulate cortex, but the anterior part of the mid cingulate cortex. Doesn't matter. Anyway, it is a distinct part of the brain from what I usually talk about. It's true what you say, Cheryl, that this anterior mid cingulate cortex has been discovered to be incredibly neuroplastic, meaning it's growing and shrinking on us all the time based on whether we take the easy way out when things get hard, or whether we are tenacious and tough it out and do the hard thing anyway. I'm not talking about doing something that would really hurt you. Like my husband, I was telling him about this vlog I'm about to shoot, and he is like, we're not talking about like, "Ooh, I don't want to cut off my toes, but I'm going to go cut off my toes." I'm like, no, no, no. We're not talking about doing stuff that would be hurtful to you. We're talking about the stuff that you know would be beneficial to you, but it feels really hard to do it. You may have heard that it's really good for you to take cold showers, but like many of us, you may have resisted taking cold showers because it frickin' doesn't feel good to take cold showers. It feels terrible usually, especially if you're not used to it, right? You'd rather take a warm shower or a hot shower. So, we're talking about, do you take the cold shower for a minute?
Now, interestingly, here's some interesting facts. Yes. When you do the hard thing that feels hard, this part of the brain grows in size and in connectivity. It grows in two ways - in density of connections and also in size. Then as soon as the activity becomes automatic, which of course we're always striving for in Bright Line Eating, the growth plateaus, it stalls out it. You have to...then once something is automatic, find a new way to make it aversive, hard, difficult, distasteful. Again, like let's say you want to go for a morning walk and you convince yourself to do it the first morning, it just feels hard. You'd rather stay in bed. You don't want to get up and lace up your sneakers and go outside. It's cold out okay, but you do it. Let's say you're in a rhythm now where you're going out for a 20 minute walk every morning and that now feels automatic. Well, you're not getting any growth in that region anymore. It's not going to shrink on you. If you start staying in bed entirely, it will actually shrink right back down to your prior baseline, but if you're going for a walk every day and it feels automatic, you'll plateau out. It grew initially when you were doing the hard thing, but once it stops feeling hard, once you're automatic, it plateaus out. The way to make it keep growing is to find a new way to make it hard again. Find a hill to walk up, pick up your pace a bit, maybe jog instead of walk. You get the idea.
Interestingly, this part of the brain is unusually plastic. It's growing and shrinking on us all the time based on whether we are being tenacious, doing the hard thing, gritting our teeth and doing it anyway. Some researchers say you want to find the micro suck every day. Just a small sucky would be beneficial thing, but feels sucky to do thing to do every day. Just have the hard conversation that you don't want to have. Resist the urge. You can actually make this part of the brain grow by resisting things that you want. Also, resist the urge to change up your food when you wrote down your food the night before. Stick with it. Make yourself actually eat only in exactly that. That will help that part of the brain grow. And I think the avenue of hormetic stressors offers a huge pathway for finding ways to strengthen this part of the brain. So, heat exposure, cold exposure, oxygen deprivation, right? Doing those breathing exercises where you're doing fire breath and exhausting your lungs and your brain of breath. Just go to YouTube and find ways to do intense breathing exercises like Wim Hof type breathing. You probably don't want to do it anyway. That's what will make this part of the brain grow so many ways to just get that extra little growth.
Some interesting findings in the research literature on this...One is there's a category of people called super agers. These are older adults who have the cognitive capacity of adults, decades younger. They seem to be impervious to dementia. They stay super sharp and lo and behold, they have ginormi anterior, mid cingulate, cortexes. Some other aspects of this part of the brain that are interesting are that it's actually smaller in people who have a more flaccid lifestyle in general. People who they have a heavier weight. They have type 2 diabetes, they have diabetes. People who are athletes in contrast, on average, have larger anterior mid cingulate cortices. So, there's an overall lifestyle correlation.
Finally, it seems like this part of the brain is doing this sort of nonstop cost benefit analysis. This is the part of the brain that whenever we have a task that's in front of us that feels kind of like we don't want to do it, it's the part of the brain that's weighing up, is it really worth it? The entire quick pros and cons list that happens in the brain, this is where it's being calculated to decide, am I really up for it? So, if you can just force yourself to grit it out, there are huge long-term benefits, and it's just interesting that this part of the brain grows and grows and grows as we keep making the harder choice.
What I find really interesting is that Bright Line Eating is a playground for this. There's always an opportunity to stretch yourself in your morning habit, stack in your evening habit, stack in your food plan, in the beverages that you drink in. Are you still relying on some gum or some mints or fruit that's the size of a baby's head? Are there ways that you can grit your teeth, choose the small apple, and make that part of the brain grow? It's kind of a fun game if you think about it that way. All these little ways that you feel just like you're, oh, you just don't want to. You just don't want to. But then you think about, oh, but this is exactly that moment where I can make my anterior mid cingulate cortex grow just a little bit. And interestingly, I believe that with that goal in mind, you'll get a little dopamine release by consciously making that choice and then knowing that you're getting ever closer to the robust brain that you actually really want for yourself.
I actually have an offer for you now because I'm offering a webinar, but it's not for everybody. It might not be for you. I'm sorry about that if it's not for you. Let me tell you who's invited. You're invited if you're a Bright Lifer™, if you've ever done the Boot Camp, if you've ever done Bright Line Eating fully, whether with the book or with the All Access membership that we used to have, or you were ever a Bright Lifer in the past. This webinar is for people who have really done Bright Line Eating now or at some point in the past. So, if that's for you, I have a webinar that I'm giving. I'm giving it three times over the next week or so, and it's going to be live each time, and there will be no recording. You have to find the time that works for you and show up live. It's called Reset, Recommit, Renew: The Bright Way Forward. If you want to explore Rezooming your Bright Line Eating program, dialing it in, resetting it, refreshing it, and exploring ways to get your anterior mid cingulate cortex growing and growing and growing, this is the webinar for you. We're going to be offering a course called The Bright Reset. We offered it last fall. It was the most popular course we've ever offered in Bright Line Eating history. We had like 2,370 people or something like that, sign up for this course. It was wildly successful. We collected data on people's results before and after, and it was just remarkably effective at getting people Bright and flourishing and happy and just on their Bright path.
It's a three week course. It's targeted, and this webinar is going to go into the science, the whys and the wherefores of it. It's really going to be just a playground for the anterior mid cingulate cortex essentially. If you want more information about that webinar, click below and you can go ahead and sign up. It's going to take you to a webinar registration page, and you're going to need to tell us which category you belong to, whether you're a former Boot Camper, or Bright Lifer, or you've done Bright Line Eating thoroughly, but with the book, or you were in the All Access membership, whatever category you belong to, those are the people who are invited. Again, if you're a newbie to Bright Line Eating, this isn't for you, but what I recommend is that you do our Masterclass. Just go to brightlineeating.com, and I have a Masterclass right there that's ready for you. That's what you're invited to.
For everyone else who's just here to learn cool stuff, I was so delighted to tell you about the anterior mid cingulate cortex today. Thank you, Cheryl, for your question. We're all sending you our love. Just we have all gone through those seasons of life where we're grieving and things just aren't as interesting or as Bright as they used to be. I hope you get your mojo back, and I hope that the science in today's vlog helps with that. That's it for this week, everyone. I'll see you next week.
