Re-Air: The Brain’s Motivation Center They Don’t Tell You About | Dr. Kyra Bobinet

Summary

Mayim Bialik's Breakdown

Episode: The Brain’s Motivation Center They Don’t Tell You About | Dr. Kyra Bobinet

Date: May 29, 2026
Guests: Dr. Kyra Bobinet
Host: Mayim Bialik & Jonathan Cohen

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the neuroscience of motivation, failure, behavior change, and performance with Dr. Kyra Bobinet, physician, behavior change designer, and author of Unstoppable Brain. The discussion centers on an underappreciated brain region—the habenula—which is crucial in motivation, feelings of failure, addiction, depression, and the trap of performative self-improvement. Framing habits, goals, and setbacks through the lens of modern brain science, Dr. Bobinet and the hosts break down how we can iterate our way through life, rather than get trapped in cycles of shame and motivation loss.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Motivation Crisis and Performative Culture

[03:44]

• Dr. Bobinet explains her impetus for writing Unstoppable Brain: nearly everyone struggles with “I know what I should do, I just don’t do it.”
• Main cultural problem: Overusing performance-based tools, being “performative” rather than authentic, and how this overloads our brains, fueling mental and physical health crises.
  • “Performing as ourselves instead of really being ourselves is kind of the cause for what you would describe as the disease of failure.” — Mayim Bialik [05:12]
• Performance-based approaches like New Year’s resolutions, social media, fitness trends, “SMART” goals, dieting routines, even to-do lists can become self-sabotaging when not framed mindfully.

2. Performing vs. Authenticity & Motivation

[06:58]

• Performing triggers neural networks that reinforce extrinsic motivation and set us up for disappointment ("failure field"), activating the habenula and depleting motivation.
  • “Those two neural networks do not cross over... Performing sets up a failure field.” — Dr. Bobinet [06:58]
• These performative strategies may work short-term but are harmful for long-term or complex change.

3. The Hidden Cost of Failure: Enter The Habenula

[16:24]

• The habenula acts as a “failure detector” and “motivation killer”—it is highly sensitive to perceived failure and is pivotal in depression, addiction, and loss of motivation.
  • “We need to manage the failure, not the success… this is the source of the brain causing that asymmetry of real pain and psychic pain.” — Dr. Bobinet [16:24]
• We are neurologically wired to be “twice as sensitive to loss as gain” (behavioral economics), thanks to the habenula [17:24].

4. Types of Failure and Their Mental Traps

[25:04]

• Dr. Bobinet identifies seven types of failure:
  • All-or-nothing thinking
  • Comparing
  • "I used to be able to…"
  • Pre-failing (performance anxiety/assuming you’ll fail)
  • “Nothing works for me” (hopelessness)
  • Imposter syndrome
  • Should-ing (“I should have…”)
• Each represents habitual ways our brains prepare for or process failure, deeply influencing behavior and emotional state.

5. To-Do Lists: Helpful or Hurtful?

[10:47]

• Reframe to-do lists as aids/tools, not sources of self-judgment—“how you hold it” determines whether it motivates or shames.

6. Smart Goals—Why They Often Backfire

[29:13]

• While clarity is essential, rigid goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Timely) often set up unrealistic standards and fuel the failure-habenula loop.
  • "If it doesn't work out exactly like this, that's normal... just iterate." — Dr. Bobinet [30:52]

7. The Iterative Mindset: The Anti-Failure Antidote

[37:05]

• Iteration means continuously experimenting, adjusting, and reframing setbacks as part of the journey—not endpoints.
  • Example: A woman addicted to Doritos gradually leaves more chips uneaten and, eventually, only licks the flavor off (iteration vs. cold turkey).
  • “Iterators never fail.” — Dr. Bobinet [39:40]
• The ITERATES Acronym (components of the iterative mindset):
  • Inspiration (positive self-talk/mantras)
  • Time (habit stacking, timing)
  • Environment (shaping cues/triggers)
  • Reduce (harm reduction)
  • Add (new positive behaviors)
  • Togetherness (social support)
  • Expectations (reframing goals/flexibility)
  • Swaps (healthy substitutes)
• “Make the good thing easy and the bad thing hard.” — Dr. Bobinet [81:26]

8. Depression, Addiction, and the Habenula

[49:12], [57:40]

• Depression as a function of unextinguished or chronic “failure fires” in the brain; success in one domain doesn’t buffer against feelings of failure elsewhere.
  • “The opposite of depression is not happiness… it’s getting rid of the failure.” — Dr. Bobinet [48:06]
• Addiction: Pursuing pleasure provides temporary relief (+1) but always brings greater pain (-2) due to habenula’s response.
  • “A habenula that’s on...has a stranglehold on our dopamine, it controls serotonin...so there’s a lot of operants in the habenula and addiction.” — Dr. Bobinet [57:40]

9. Dopamine Fasting & Motivation “Numbness”

[59:47], [62:48]

• Dopamine famine/fasting: Pausing pleasurable activities, allowing the brain to reset from chronic overstimulation, is crucial for recovering motivation and pleasure.
  • “If someone can get through that...painful period, then they can start getting some of their homeostasis back.” — Dr. Bobinet [61:16]
• Anhedonia and motivational numbness (“the fog”): Often the habenula is persistently on. Iteration—not just pleasure seeking—is the way out.

10. Practical Hacks: From Food to Fitness to Sex

[79:59], [82:47], [89:14]

• Eating: Strategies include splitting/throwing away food early, harm reduction, forgiving yourself for slips, mindful eating, and quick recovery after setbacks.
• Fitness: Iteration is key: adapt routines, be flexible, and see each “change” as part of ongoing iteration, not failure. “If you go into it, eyes wide open, you’ll keep going… where others get stuck in ‘I’m not doing Zumba anymore.’” — Dr. Bobinet [83:06]
• Sex: Explored as an inherently performative act but also a field for authentic expression. Faking orgasms, performance pressure, and hookup culture all tie back to habenula regulation and cycles of pleasure/pain, authenticity/performance, and shame [89:14–93:36].

11. Chronic Pain, Autoimmunity, Mind-Body Link

[98:27], [100:12]

• New studies indicate the habenula also mediates mood and physiological responses in conditions like rheumatoid arthritis, underscoring the tight linkage between chronic pain, depression, and brain circuitry.

12. Key Takeaways: Three Steps to an Unstoppable Brain

[103:06]

• 1. Stop overperforming: Use performance only where beneficial; stop when it becomes self-harming.
• 2. Turn off the habenula: Neutralize or let go of thoughts of failure.
• 3. Iterate everything: Continuous experimentation and reframing—not linear progress—is the hallmark of lasting change.
  • “Iterate the shit out of your life.” — Dr. Bobinet [103:16]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Every youth in America who is doom scrolling…is basically disempowering themselves, causing motivation loss in the evenings and the mornings.” — Dr. Bobinet [08:30]
• “You become addicted to trying to fix an addiction.” — Mayim Bialik [65:36]
• “My habenula’s always on.” — Mayim Bialik [70:36]
• “The habenula is like the ring in our nose…so outpowered and undersized, but overpowering everything.” — Dr. Bobinet [102:12]
• Sexual Authenticity Segment:
  • “Your habenula was faking orgasms? …You were protecting your partner’s habenula by acting not truthful.” — [90:02–91:15]
  • “There is so much inauthenticity in sexual relationships with people.” — Dr. Bobinet [93:41]

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Important Timestamps

• [06:58] - Performing vs. being yourself; the neural networks of motivation
• [16:24–17:24] - Discovery and significance of the habenula in failure and motivation
• [25:04] - Types of failure and psychological traps
• [37:05] - The iterative mindset and real-life examples
• [57:40] - Addiction, depression, and the habenula’s deep role
• [62:48] - Motivation loss and dopamine fasting
• [79:59] - Practical iterations for food and eating behaviors
• [82:47] - Fitness, iteration, and performativity
• [89:14–93:41] - Sex, authenticity, and performance through the habenula lens
• [100:12] - Chronic pain, mind-body link, and new habenula research
• [103:06] - Dr. Bobinet’s top three tips for an “unstoppable brain”

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Tone and Style Reflected

• The hosts blend warm curiosity and humor (“My habenula’s always on!”; “Did your habenula have an orgasm last night?”).
• Dr. Bobinet conveys empathy, practical optimism, and scientific rigor, often using vivid analogies (“sharp object,” “nose ring in a camel”).
• The show flows from neuroscience to relatable life scenarios, always coming back to “how can we do better?”

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For Listeners: Why This Episode Matters

• You’ll learn why your to-do list or rigid approach to goals might be sabotaging your motivation.
• Discover how to reframe “failure” as a normal and vital part of growth—biologically, psychologically, behaviorally.
• See how depression, addiction, and feelings of being “stuck” aren’t a weakness, but a function of brain circuitry that you can work with, not against.
• Leave with actionable steps to replace self-judgment with iteration, honesty, and flexible, science-driven self-compassion.

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Final Wisdom

“Iterate the shit out of your life. That’s what people do that succeed long-term.”
— Dr. Kyra Bobinet [103:16]

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For more, read Dr. Bobinet’s book ‘Unstoppable Brain,’ and subscribe to Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown for future explorations at the boundary of science, mental health, and spirituality.

Transcript

[Jonathan Cohen]

Mind Breakdown is supported by Helix Sleep.

[Maya Bialik]

Spring is in the air and so are all of the allergens that come with it. Spring allergens means you need more sleep, but there are a ton of factors that can prevent us from getting a good night's rest. Night sweats, back pain, feeling the person next to you when they roll over a million times. We were so excited to hear that Helix wanted to partner with us. I've had my Helix mattress for about five years now and I have been sleeping so much better. Jonathan and also our kids love their Helix mattresses and all of those issues. Night sweats, back pain, motion transfer. Those things are significantly better with a Helix mattress. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door which is so much fun. With free shipping in the US they have a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty plus their Happy With Helix guarantee. Rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. The Happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk free customer first experience designed to ensure that you're completely satisfied with your new Mattress. Go to helixsleep do slbreakdown for 27 off site wide that's helixsleep.com breakdown for 27 off site wide helixsleep.com breakdown. Hi, I'm Imbialik.

[Jonathan Cohen]

And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

[Maya Bialik]

And welcome to our breakdown. As we wrap up Mental Health Month, we've got a very special super helpful episode with motivation expert physician and behavior change designer Dr. Kyra Bob. She helped us discover the secret part of our brains that controls motivation. It's called the habenula. And if you don't know what the habenula is, you need to listen to this episode.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Dr. Bob actually reveals why your to do list, something most of us have, may actually be secretly hurting you and preventing you from getting things done. She also explains how how to succeed in relationships, improve our progress towards our health goals, and how to break free from imposter syndrome. One of the topics that I loved the most was the benefit of dopamine fasting. It's gotten so much more attention these days. If you've never heard about it, it's something that you really need to learn about.

[Maya Bialik]

She's also going to talk about how the habenula connects addiction, depression and failure, how to regulate your environment to set yourself up for success and the best sources of of motivation for short term goals and long term goals. We're also gonna talk about what's the difference between performing versus authentically being a wonderful topic for Mental Health Month. So please enjoy this episode with Dr. Kyra Bobinet and don't forget to join us on Substack, mayimbialik's Breakdown, where we have content you can't get anywhere else. Also, make sure you're subscribed. Check right now. It's free, it's easy, it helps our show. Check us out on Substack. Make sure you're subscribed everywhere. And now here's our episode with Dr. Kyra Bobnet. Break it down.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

So great to be here.

[Maya Bialik]

It's really exciting to have you here. I feel very motivated and I don't want to fail. So I really enjoyed Unstoppable Brain. I'd like to think that I have an unstoppable brain, but one of the things that was really interesting is I saw a lot of my faulty or perhaps misplaced thought patterns really throughout the book. You, you really kind of hone in on places that we either stop ourselves or we don't let ourselves kind of fully be ourselves. So before we kind of get into that, I want to start with a super basic question. Who did you write this book for? Like, what was the impetus for saying this is a book that needs to be out there?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, so I, I've tried to change the behavior of millions of people in my career and created interventions of all kinds of complexity or simplicity, trying to get at this problem of, you know, I know what I should do, I just don't do it. And I wrote it for people who have that problem, which is almost everybody in every way.

[Maya Bialik]

I'm trying to think, is there anyone that doesn't have something? Right, right. Probably not. There's always got to be something.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Absolutely.

[Maya Bialik]

Like if it's not weight, it's fitness. If it's not fitness, it's work. If it's not work, it's relationships. Do you feel that there's sort of one general problem that society or even our culture is collectively experiencing that sort of also needs this wisdom?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, I think right now we've kind of run aground in overusing performance based tools and performing, performing, performing and being performative. And that in particular in this time in history is lighting up the brain in massive amounts of mental health problems and physical health problems and that kind of thing. So I think that this is a right hand turn. I like to say that there was a time in medicine before we knew about bacteria and we used leeches and we used weird things and we had Typhoid Mary and things like that. And so after we knew about bacteria, then we had antibiotics and this whole new era was ushered in of like how to treat that.

[Maya Bialik]

Let's go right into this performative notion, because this really hadn't occurred to me. And you lay it out really, really clearly. You say that performing as ourselves instead of really understanding and then being ourselves is kind of the, the cause for what you would describe as the disease of failure. Meaning that we're all. Not that we're all failures, but, but this notion that we will fail or that we get stopped because of a fear of failure, you know that the, the cause of that is this performative aspect. So can you, can you tell us what does that look like? Because when I saw the list, I was actually. Or, well, I made it into a list. Cause I make everything into lists. When, when I looked at the things that literally can be performative, I'm just gonna list them.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yes, please.

[Maya Bialik]

The list is New Year's resolutions. And so for that one, I was like, okay, well, I usually get annoyed with New Year's resolutions. And I'm like, I don't really make them. So maybe I was onto something. Social media, competitive sports, fitness trends. And now I'm like, oh, smart goals. Which is an acronym which we can talk about in a bit. Dieting habit routines. And now I'm thinking like, okay, Kyra's off her rocker. What do you mean habit routines? Then she went for the guttural to do lists. Like my favorite thing.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah.

[Maya Bialik]

And then it expands out. Lying career goals, relationship goals. And I literally wrote in my document, can I strive for anything? So all of the, all of these are what you would describe as falling under this performative category. So what does it look like if I'm performing instead of being.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, so performing basically uses a neural network that terminates in the area of disempowerment and extrinsic motivation. And so I'm doing it for you or my mental model. And myself is. I'm doing it for myself. Right. So we're already there. And those two neural networks do not cross over. They are completely separate and independent of each other. And the reason why that's important is that when I'm doing it for somebody else, not myself, first of all, it's a disconnected state. But also it sets up my brain to be triggered by any non expected result. So that becomes a failure. I become disappointed, frustrated, whatever the case may be, if I don't have that perfect expectation happen, which is most of the time. And so the performing basically sets up a failure field. The failure field triggers the brain in this new area of the brain that we're going to Talk about the habenula. And then that's a setup so you can use performing. The literature shows that you can use performing kind of tools short term for short term goals or for single simple tasks, but nothing complex, dynamic, reversible, those kinds of things.

[Maya Bialik]

And also I just want to note because of course I'm sure that people like the first thing I thought of and maybe other people are thinking this, like. But it works. It works, right? Or like I lost 50 pounds or whatever it is. But I, but I think what you're talking about is there's a price. There's both a neurological price and kind of a neuropsychological price.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, yeah. And I think you can use it, you know, like you can use it if you know about the habenula. Because then when you have a disappointment or a discrepancy between what you thought was gonna happen and what actually happened, then you know what to do. Right now in this history, we don't know what to do when things don't work out perfectly and then we're lost and then we get demotivated. And that's this kind of like pervasive motivation loss. Even doom scrolling has been shown to trigger the habenula result in motivation loss. So basically every youth in America and around the world who is doom scrolling at night and also in the morning, like my kids are basically disempowering themselves causing motivation loss in the evenings and the mornings. And so then you get this kind of self blame that sits on top of that and depression, anxiety, all that kind of stuff ensues if that's what

[Maya Bialik]

it looks like to perform. Right. And the notion also is, of course you would say like I'm getting fit for myself. But in a lot of cases it is about a metric. Right. Or it's about if I get to look like this, I'll have access to this person, this job, this opportunity. Right. So that's the, the, the performative aspect. So the, the, the converse is being yourself. So in, in brief, what does that look like? Because for me it looks like to do lists and you know, like all the things that I do. Having goals and like forming habits, like that's the old way of thinking. What is this newer way?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Do, do you mind if I explore the to dos list? Do it.

[Maya Bialik]

Jonathan loves when people ask you questions.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, so, so how do you psychologically respond when you don't get to all your to do list things? What is that like for you?

[Maya Bialik]

Well, I mean, it doesn't feel great. I mean literally before we started recording. I told you that I made a to do list for my son because I had a list of chores that I actually needed him to do before he left the house. Yeah. There's usually, I mean, there's shame. You know, there's a feeling of why did I try in the first place? I mean, I've also read the book, so, like, I'm, you know, I'm sort of like piecing it together. But the practical question I have for you is if I have a list of things that I need to get done, what is the better way to do them? What would it to be myself if I have a list of things I have to get done?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. It's about letting go of the performance and just saying, this is an aid. This is a tool. So reframing tends to be the sort of wise thing that people who do this Right. Do. And so if you approached it as, you know, this is a potential list that we will get to or that my son might do. Right. Because he can't control another human being, especially a teenager, then the way you hold it seems to be the key. But the fact that you're having it,

[Maya Bialik]

I angled it like this. I went like here.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

And the fact that you're experiencing shame means that you're holding it in a way that it becomes a sharp object.

[Maya Bialik]

Got it.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

So then knowing where that sharp object happens, anything can be helpful as a tool in performance. You can set a goal, you can say, I want to run a faster mile. You can do all these things. But if it becomes a sharp object at the end of the day, then you're harming yourself.

[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Maya Bialik]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

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[Jonathan Cohen]

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This is a limited time offer and while supplies last, you can't get it on Amazon, you can't get it in stores. This offer exists in one place. Our link, our code. That's it. So maybe you were already thinking about it. This is the sign. Go to buyoptimizers.com,/breaker, use the code breaker. Grab it before it's gone. Make 2026 the year you finally start sleeping again. So, okay, so that makes sense. We now have performative. Performative me versus just me trying to be me. And there's some more reframing to that. But I do want to talk about before we get into the Habenula, in particular, when you talk about that we're constantly failing and you talk about that, our. Our disease, or I like to call it dis ease. You know, our dis. Ease is. Is failure. What does that mean? Because, like, obviously I think of like, oh, are we failing as a country? Like, are we failing? You know, cause we're not being nice to our neighbors. What does this, like, feel when you talk about it that way?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Long time ago, when I wrote my first book, I had run across this paper when I was writing the motivation chapter. That failure lit up this new area that I'd never heard of called the Habenula. And it was discovered in like the late 1800s, but, you know, in the last 20 years, it's exploding. And in that paper it showed that. And then a different paper, it showed that when we think we fail or when the Bendula turns on, we lose motivation to keep trying something. So I was like, ah, Reese's peanut butter and you know, and chocolate. Kind of like it came together. And so then from that point forward, it was like, oh, we need to manage the failure, not the success. There's a paradox there. Because if you look at even behavioral economics, you know, we're twice as sensitive to loss as gain. Like this is the source of the brain that is causing that sort of asymmetry of real pain and psychic pain. When the habenula goes on, it's your worst situation. And then we just try to reach for anything to shut it up.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I want to touch on something that that was just said. We're twice as sensitive to loss as we are to gain. I don't think people really understand the impact of that. So I want to like actually go back to the beginning of what you were just talking about in terms of failure. What I hear is that people are setting themselves up for failure. If, if, if they make a goal and they say I need to do this because it's a part of my self worth. I'm going to be able to lose weight and then I'm going to feel good. I'm going to be able to get into this relationship because that means something. There's these, all these unconscious motivators or values that they're associating with the goal that they're putting up. And if they don't get that, then that's the setback. I would. Can you frame a little bit about maybe the very challenging and dangerous situation that people are unknowingly putting themselves in without realizing it?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

That's a really good way to put that. So they're playing with fire. I like to call it failure fires. You know, if you had a fire in your house, you would put it out immediately. And myself as a clinician, a researcher for many years did underappreciated how toxic failure or the thoughts of failure are. Now I see it as, oh, that's the most important thing, not the setting of the goal. And again, just like the to do list, it's how you hold it. You know, if you hold a smart goal, even, you know, in a way that's flexible or reframing any failure along the way, then it doesn't become a sharp object. But most the way that we're doing these things is very linear and very, you know, win, lose and very all or nothing. And so that's the way it's being held currently. And I think that we can now that this is information is coming out to the public, then the public can do something more creative and more protective of themselves so they don't keep getting cut by this. And I really, I mean failure is like a bad word, you know, in our, in our society. And so I like many others trying to help people never Wanted to mention it or never wanted to go there. You know, nothing's more of a bummer than when you're all excited, you know, to change your world and then somebody saying, well, let's talk about failure. Let's talk about what you're gonna do when this doesn't work out. Like you think.

[Maya Bialik]

I wanna talk in particular about this magic habenula because you describe it as a failure detector, meaning it detects failure, for lack of a better word. It lights up, you know, if you're talking about scans. But it's a failure detector and it's a motivator killer. So. And it's this very, very tiny, tiny region. I only knew about the habenula because it was kind of a landmark in neuroanatomy, meaning when you're dissecting the brain, it's like, where's the habenula? Oh, it's right there. Like, it was question, like 12F, you know, on, like, my midterm exam in neuroanatomy. So it's this tiny little region. Why don't you orient us a little bit? Because most people who've. Who've, you know, watched or listened to our podcast know some things about the limbic brain. We talk about the amygdala, we talk about the thalamus as like a processing center. You know, my thesis was about the hypothalamic pituitary axis. So, like, we. These are words that people have heard orient us as to where this special little part of the brain is.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, so it's epithalamic. It's above the thalamus.

[Maya Bialik]

And epi's the fancy term that just means above.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Above half a centimeter large. There's two of them, one on either side, but central in your brain.

[Maya Bialik]

And.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

And, yeah, it's connected to everything. It's connected to your prefrontal cortex, your reward pathway, your limbic system. You know, it, basically. And it's also in front of, interestingly, the pineal gland.

[Maya Bialik]

That's a big important.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

So.

[Maya Bialik]

Right.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Because the pineal glands, like, go. And the habenula is like, stop.

[Maya Bialik]

The pineal gland is actually, in yogic and eastern practice, is kind of what is related to the third eye center. So when you meditate in Kundalini Yoga in particular, and you look. They say to close your eyes and look upward and towards your third eye. It's actually pineal gland activation is what, you know, sort of the. The notion is. So I really like this idea of the pineal and the habenula as sort of, you know, in in opposition, as it were. And the research that you talk about in your book, you know, has links for the habenula to depression, to anxiety, to addiction, to hunger, to sleep. I mean, a lot of the things that the hypothalamus also does, these are all kind of homeostatic mechanisms, also connections to ACEs, which are adverse childhood experiences. And this is a term we've talked about a little bit here, but I think is really important to mention. You know, it kind of seems like the habenula is like this holy grail of mental wellness. Is that how you see it?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

As far as I know, because, you know, I was a dorsolateral prefrontal cortex gal before this. I had created, I created, you know, mindfulness programs at work and things like that because I was like, oh, it's the pfc, you know, it's the rumination, that's what's causing the depression. And it really looks like this is the one, this is the locus. And there's an explosion of literature that is reproducing this in both rat, animals and humans. And so, you know, it really opens up the world. You know, again I say like there's a world before bacteria and now after we're in that post bacteria world where we can treat depression differently. You know, even some of the trans magnetic stuff that's going on, I think that can be helpful. Deep brain stimulation. I mean, ketamine is also a really big. Since I published the book, there's been more evidence to support the ketamine absorbs into the habenula and cures the symptoms of depression. So treatment resistant depression. And so it's really becoming this big revelation and groundbreaking information in science and medicine.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I mean, I'm still stuck at the beginning. I really am. I'm just thinking about, you know, making it tangible, how people are unknowingly setting themselves up for triggering this system of their brain to help them not succeed.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

That's right. And you know, we're careless right now because we don't know how consequential failure or its friends can be. And there's a lot of failure types. I started a list in the book and I'm really interested in seeing what the public has to say about that and saying, oh, I fail this way. But there's kind of like, you know, your brain has favorite ways to fail. And we did some research recently in our company on failure types across different segments. And some people who struggle the most with behavior change have a very strong signal around shoulding. And then People who are successful long term and iterative, which we can get into, have more like I used to be type of failure type. So there's really kind of these groups of strategies and also the way that you neutralize failure and what you're dealing with around failure that are very specific to different populations and different people.

[Maya Bialik]

So I have the list of types of failure. I'm happy to go there. So what you describe is that the ways that people. It's more like the ways that people feel that they're failing. Right. There's certain categories that people fall into and one of them is all or nothing thinking. One of them is comparing. There's the. I used to be able to. There's what you describe as pre failing. Nothing works for me. Been there, done that. Imposter syndrome as a type of failure and then shoulding. And you know, I've heard people say that we, we can't should all over people. Yeah, you know, these, these are going to show up differently depending on what, what determines the kind of failure that you foresee for yourself, I guess is the question.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I don't know what, what I would imagine, hypothetically is that, you know, the brain is very habitual. And so what. Wherever you got that, you know, in my family system, you know, you're. It was all or nothing was a big signal and so I had to overcome that. And there's a lot of ways in which I lose power around things that I'm scared of and that I pre fail too. And so, you know, I think that maybe the, the audience can tell us, you know, which of those are most prominent in kind of their, their brain habits of how they like to fail. You know, what, what, what gets your goat?

[Maya Bialik]

Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, just speaking for myself, I was actually, I was very interested in pre failing. Can you talk a little bit about that one?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, yeah. I think this is kind of the class of performance anxiety. Things where you already have failed, forecast that it's not gonna work out for you. And so the Habenula is always looking around the corner and saying, is this gonna be safe or not? Is this gonna be okay or not? Is this gonna work out for me or not? And so if we train ourselves to always listen to that voice, I can imagine that it becomes habitual to pause and to not approach whatever it is we're supposed to be approaching. And for me, that creates procrastination. You know, when I'm afraid to fail, I just dally and I do all kinds of weird things. I clean you know, I do weird things. And so I think that that is something that once you know explicitly that you're doing that and you're not just procrastinating, which is more of like a self blame type of way of experiencing that, then you can say, oh, you know, like my habenula is telling me something that is not helpful, that is not, you know, I need to push through that, I need to try something else. I need to reframe the inevitable failure into like, well, maybe not

[Maya Bialik]

talk about imposter syndrome a little bit. You know, this is one of these terms that's kind of thrown around a lot. And I was actually, I was, I was pleased to see it in this context because, you know, we tend to think of it as like, I don't belong here. But it's actually a lot more complicated than that.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, yeah. So it's basically, you know, you have a performing self, you know, that is at the fore, that kind of triggers the feeling of imposter. Because if we were fully ourselves all the time and showing up that way there would be no problem. But you know, more higher performing people tend to be susceptible to imposter syndrome in the sense that they step into an environment and they feel like, well, I shouldn't be here, I shouldn't, you know, shouldn't be me, that kind of thing. And that's a form of failure trigger to the habenula and then losing your motivation to keep trying. So there's that kind of anxiety that's produced by the habenula of like, this isn't working out for me. They're all just going to find out. It's kind of similar to pre failing in that way that you're kind of future facing and you're saying, you know, they're going to find out, they're going to kick me out, they're going to, you know, expose me, that kind of thing.

[Maya Bialik]

I want to talk about a little bit more about some of these performative tools that fail. Can you talk about what smart goals are and what that acronym stands for?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. So smart goals is specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, time bound.

[Maya Bialik]

That's literally all the most important things in life. Jonathan, would you agree?

[Jonathan Cohen]

100%.

[Maya Bialik]

So what is wrong with having specific, measurable, achievable.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

What's the R Realistic or something?

[Maya Bialik]

Realistic, time bound. What's wrong with having goals like that?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, it seems counterintuitive, doesn't it? Because it seems like, oh, that's clarity. Right, right. But the way that the clarity gets operated at over time is that you have this smart goal and if it doesn't happen exactly like that, which is most of the time, eventually, eventually it will fail. Eventually you'll need something different then. And the probability that your past self predicts perfectly what your future self is going to do and how it's going to work out for that person is very, very minuscule. So everything leads to failure. Everything, you know, that ideal sets an ideal and everything else the brain is noticing, well, that's not exactly specific, that's not exactly measurable. Like it has a criteria against which to fail. And so again, it's how you hold it. If you had smart goals, but you had some additional instruction of hey, you know, if it doesn't work out exactly like this, that's normal, don't freak out, it's okay, just iterate. And that in my research has been the holy grail solution to the habenula, to everything that we're currently using. Becoming a sharp object for people.

[Maya Bialik]

And I want to get to this notion of the iterative mindset, but I think one of the areas that you talk about a lot is one of the biggest moneymakers in our culture, which is health and fitness, you know, and specifically weight loss.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah.

[Maya Bialik]

And you, you talk about, you know, kind of the trajectory of what it's like not only to try and lose weight, but to keep weight off. What, what are people doing without even knowing that they're self sabotaging that is causing this kind of cycle.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. So I, I like to think, you know, you can use anything to lose weight. You know, performative tools, strict diets, you know, a personal trainer, all that kind of stuff. But the key is, does it last and do you know what to do after the party's over? And so I started doing research on long term weight loss and figuring out what's different about the people who achieve that long term state. And to a person, the only thing they had in common is that they were iterating their way through. So even if they did a boot camp, even if they did a yoga retreat, even if they did all these things, each one of those was almost like a tile in their iterations of what inspired them at that period of time to keep going or to really get into something, and their space in between those tiles was very, very small versus other people who are like, oh, I used to do yoga and now I don't do it anymore. And then failure, failure, failure, habenula, loss, no motivation, then blaming self for motivation, loss, all that stuff starts to be triggered off.

[Maya Bialik]

So the notion is not there's anything wrong with goals. Right. The notion is not that there's anything wrong with wanting to get fit. Right. The idea is that the way we frame it and the way we execute it is actually the difference in getting your habenula to help you or to hinder you.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Right. Or the marketing, the current marketing of lose this in 60 days or whatever the case may be, really hurts us because it sets that expectation that that's going to happen and that it's going to be permanent. And all that stuff just sets up the habenula to be like, uh huh. Yeah. Right.

[Maya Bialik]

All right, so I'm going to ask a controversial question. A lot of people are taking drugs to lose weight. And Ozempic and what's the other one? Well, we don't need to name it Manjaro, I don't remember. It sounds like a mountain. I don't know. So what's happening? And you know, I live in Los Angeles, so this stuff is like, it's big news and it's kind of everywhere

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

at the gas station.

[Maya Bialik]

Right. And. And what's happening is that it gets an immediate response. Right. Meaning it's such a performative.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah.

[Maya Bialik]

Thing.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah.

[Maya Bialik]

Are people who are using these methods, like are they trying to hack the habenula? Is the habenula being bypassed? Is there a component of this where you might say that's performatively positive, but what's the long term implications? What's going on?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, nobody's done that study yet, but I hope they do after hearing this interview. Because my hypothesis is that it's got to touch the habenula. Habenula controls hedonic eating, it controls satiety. So if you have satiety as part of the main activation of this GLP1, which by the way, GLP1s are a daughter molecule of oxytocin. And to me, from a public health perspective, that means that we don't have enough oxytocin in our social systems, in our society to help people feel good. And they feel lonely and scared and they feel like the only worth that they have is as a performer of some kind, whether it's in business or entertainment or those kinds of things, online influencers. And so, yeah, it is a performative tool if held that way. But I also know for people who have really traumatic childhoods or things like that, where food is the only thing that can shut up their psychic pain from their habenula, having compassion for that situation, this could be kind of a way to provide a safety net in an otherwise frustrating situation where they've blown through so many diets and they've really wrecked their metabolism, set points and things like that. It really helps them to kind of have some hope. But I don't think that it's a long term solution for most people for a lot of reasons. There's really questionable and I think Peter Attia like opened my eyes to this, which is like muscle wasting, you know, like that's the number one thing for frailty and longevity. And so we're playing with fire in that way. So I do think that for people who are just stuck in a whirlpool then can't get out, this is a good way to kind of fish them out of that despair. And it also, because it also has some side effects on lowering depression. I also think it's activating on the habenula.

[Maya Bialik]

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[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

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[Maya Bialik]

VRBO terms apply. See vrbo.com trust for details. What is the iterative mindset?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

So what I did is I had a large project for the largest retailer in the US and their employees health was the subject of the behavioral research and upon looking at deep dive into their stories nationwide, there was this subset of people that changed their health, you know, got off their medications, lost weight, got fit, that kind of thing. And in the face of the world's worst, you know, social and economic pressures and time pressures and they didn't know each other and to a person the only thing they had in common was was that they had this iterative mindset. And the way that I pulled it out of the research is that they would iterate instead of fail.

[Maya Bialik]

What does that mean for people who are like. What is iterate?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Iterate? Yeah. Iteration is like versioning on your phone. You know, like version 15, 16, 17. It's a constant state of improvement through versioning through something.

[Maya Bialik]

It's like leveling up.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Leveling up is a.

[Maya Bialik]

Is that performative?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

It might be a performative, but it is a natural point of, like, if you get tired of something and you want variety and you want to kind of, like, see if you can challenge yourself, that's a really good thing to do. But in this case, what they would do is. For example, there was a woman who was addicted to Doritos, and she just couldn't get off of them. And what she did was that she would eat the whole bag every day at baseline. And then when she started changing her behavior iteratively, she would eat the whole bag except one chip, and then two chips and three chips until she was leaving every chip in the bag, taking one chip and licking off the flavoring and then throwing the chip away. Because she had realized iteratively that she was addicted to the chemicals of the cheese. And so that became her path. Of course, if you post that online, people might try that. It may not work for them.

[Maya Bialik]

I would just lick all the cheese flavoring off all the chips every day.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I would remember doing that as a teenager. So everybody had their own path, and they got there through iteration. Like, does this work? Experimenting, tweaking things, tinkering with it, adapting it. If they changed shifts, then they couldn't go to their normal gym. They moved, they got divorced. All those things, they iterated their way through so that they found their next thing, and that's what made them superpowered.

[Maya Bialik]

And so the iterative mindset. You're continuously improving. Here's the goal I have to reach.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I'll say, you're continuously trying. You're figuring it. You're puzzling. You might be in the valley. You might be like, I don't know what to do, but I'm gonna do this. You know, I'm gonna try this little thing. But the attitude, which is why it's a mindset, is that this is gonna work out for me because I'm gonna iterate my way through it. Iterators never fail, is what I've noticed. And then the other thing that they do really well is that they. Through iteration or even some self talk, they neutralize the effects of failure. So these people were naturally, kind of intuitively figuring out, hey, failure's not where it is. I'm gonna unblock myself. Tomorrow's a new day. Whatever little mantra that they would tell themselves, or try it with a friend, try it with my mom. All those kinds of things were a way of getting past the failure.

[Maya Bialik]

So you have a clever acronym. I like acronyms. And it's for iterates. Right. And it kind of goes through the iterative mindset and talks about all these different components. The components are inspiration, time, environment, reduce, add, togetherness, expectations, and swaps. So these are all different components of the iterative mindset? Correct.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

These are different. These are different sort of like creature innovations that I found in research that kind of group together into categories. So not everybody iterated with one variable or three variables or whatever. But in composite, this seems to be a pretty comprehensive palette of the ways in which humans are inventive.

[Maya Bialik]

So give me an example of inspiration, the mantras.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

So, you know, a mantra that neutralizes failure, such as, tomorrow's a new day, or it didn't take me one day to get here. It's not gonna take me one day to get out. Those kinds of things where they set their mind away from the failure.

[Maya Bialik]

Give me an example of time where time comes into the iterative mindset.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. And this gets into, like, current thinking around habit design, where you stack habits. You know, before I brush my teeth, I'm gonna do this. Or at bedtime, I'm gonna do that.

[Maya Bialik]

Oh, you're supposed to meditate after you brush your teeth. Yeah.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

You can't. Yeah, exactly. And you can move that meditation around because it might not go for you in the morning, it might go for you at night. Like, those kinds of things. So moving that variable time. Time can be time of day. It could be before or after something. Like the habit stacking example, it could be frequency. You know, it could be intensity of the time. So those kinds of things.

[Maya Bialik]

And when. When we talk about environment, you know, this is a place where I start thinking of kind of differences in, you know, how culture distributes resources. Like, there's so many components here, I think, especially that are important in conversations we're having about equity and about equality. Where does environment come into this?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, I mean, it's powerful. Right. If you. If you go to, you know, in Buddhism, there's this idea of Sangha, you know, and that's like a mini environment. It's kind of. And people who go to religious ceremonies or religious activities, even neighborhood. There's a social norming that goes whenever there's people around. But there's also the things on your desk, there's where you place things in your fridge. And you know, I think there's some real legitimacy to, you know, kind of out of sight, out of mind, you know, for things that are tempting and those kinds of things. And even for me, I have a sugar addiction. And so if I have a relapse, like let's say we go and we get ice cream at night and I just put it in the freezer and I forget about it or I throw it away if my lower self kind of did something. So I kind of regulate my environment that way.

[Maya Bialik]

What about reducing and adding? This was actually really interesting to me because for me when I think about wanting to expand or wanting to improve or try, it seems like it would always be adding. But reducing can be just as important.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, we find that. So there's something in the brain called heuristics. Right. Which is the way that you like to take shortcuts, your fast brain. Cause we can't cogitate on everything. So in reducing that has to do with the people who. I'm at a six can soda, you know, pace and I'm going to go to five, I'm going to go to four. So just being able to kind of harm reduce called in psychology is kind of the variable of reducing things.

[Maya Bialik]

Okay. And then adding makes more sense to me. Talk a little bit about the importance of togetherness.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, nobody changes alone. In my research it shows that like, you know, nobody changes alone. They always have a buddy or they have a group or they have coworker. Usually spouse is number one and then followed by another family member or friend.

[Maya Bialik]

And what is it about that togetherness that kind of helps with iterative mindset?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

It's kind of a micro environment for social accountability and social support. I would say that accountability is very perform. It can be very performative. So we gotta be careful with that. But it is somebody else who's doing, you know, people like me do things like this. You know, per Seth Godin's definition of tribe, it's it. We're just so wired for social that it would be neglectful and it's not successful if you don't have it.

[Maya Bialik]

Tell me about the expectations component of this mindset.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, so that's where we were getting into smart goals earlier where if you expect something to happen, it doesn't happen. You've got to do something about that. So reframing is the number one way that people neutralize failure that is kind of live in their system. You know, when Something didn't work out the way they thought, they tend to change what they expected. Well, maybe it'll take a little longer or maybe I didn't try that hard or that kind of thing to make it okay. Because if you leave that live like that, then it becomes a failure, a sharp object. And your habenula is on.

[Maya Bialik]

And the final of this acronym. What about swaps? Give me an example of a couple good swaps that you can do.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, these are clever people. You know, I mean, I mean we have zoodles for noodles these days. And you know, people who hack their sugar drink with stevia like those honey, like those kinds of things are, you know, neuro, similar, sensory similar. Crunchy for crunchy, you know, salty for salty, sugar for sugar, you know, sweet for sweet. That kind of thing is what people do. Even if you are, you know, struggling with alcohol addiction. You go to a party and you have a non alcoholic beer, but the whole sensory experience is otherwise the same, you know, like those are swaps that kind of trick the brain into thinking like, okay, we're all right, you know, it's familiar.

[Maya Bialik]

On page 133 of your book, this is a very, very sexy heading. It says the biggest mistake people make about habits. What is the biggest mistake that people make about habits?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

That. Well, two things. One is that it is permanent and that it is going to happen in 21 days. And so really understanding that habits is not a marketing term. It is a neuroplastic change that happens at about a year firmly and that it takes a year to construct that automatic way of being.

[Maya Bialik]

I don't want to hear that.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I know, I know. It's. It's super sad. It's super sad.

[Maya Bialik]

Well, it's super sad. But it also, you know, what it does is it, it highlights a much larger concept that you are trying to communicate to people, which is that there is no quick fix. There are changes that can happen quickly. Yeah, right. Yeah. Like if you stop using the drug that you are addicted to. Right. You'll see some changes pretty quickly. You'll feel all the things that you were trying to unfeel when you were taking the drug. But the notion of having a different mindset, that is something that is a life commitment.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. And mindset moves faster than habits. So the good news is that if you work on your mindset, it's going to be very rewarding. It's going to be, you know, the opposite of depression is not happiness.

[Maya Bialik]

Right.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

It's getting rid of the failure. And you know, when people get Mired down in depression, they cannot get out of. It's because they have an active set of failure fires, wildfires that are going on in their being, and they can't figure out how to extinguish them.

[Maya Bialik]

What is depression in the framework of failure?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Depression is. Is fed by failure. So if you don't have an idea or notion of failure anymore, whether it's because you, you know, some people meditate and they kind of go to this, you know, metacognitive state, and they no longer. They can observe the brain. And other people do compassion practice, other people do service leadership, other people at workout, like whatever works for them. But there's a way to counteract the idea of failure in whatever area that you're failing. And we talked about at the beginning, there's different domains of life, right. So I might be succeeding at work, but I might be failing as a parent. And so we're just underappreciating how the parenting failing can cause depression.

[Maya Bialik]

And this is also a place where a lot of people misunderstand when someone is depressed, because what they'll say is, you, you have a beautiful house, you've got a great job, you have a husband that loves you or whatever, you have kids. And this is a place where, you know, the kind of old thinking was, what do you have to be depressed about?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Right.

[Maya Bialik]

And for people who understand major depressive disorder, which is a distinction from I feel depressed.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Right.

[Maya Bialik]

Or it's a distinction from I, God forbid, you know, lost a parent, and I'm having appropriate reactions, which are called a depression depressive episode. But when you talk about major depressive disorder, and this is sort of, you know, I love to point out when people are using nomenclature in psychiatry, that's inappropriate. If you have, quote, no reason to be depressed from an outside perspective, and you are still depressed, chances are you probably need a lot of support because you likely have major depressive disorder. Right, right, right. I mean, that's like a sort of a. An armchair, you know, analysis.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah.

[Maya Bialik]

Is that there's a. There's an abstract notion of what should, you know, allow people to feel depressed, which is completely arbitrary and inappropriate. But what you're talking about is if someone's personal meter for failure. Right. Is so out of whack, I mean, if their habenula is, you know, exhausted, depleted, you know, wrung out, no amount of external success will feel good.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

No. And we're kind of at that place in psychiatry where we're not. I mean, we honor the content, but we realize that the content can be secondary, and the chemical. Even the neurochemical environment can be secondary. It can be just a neural network issue, electrical problem. And so this was no more illustrated than that case study that I cited in the book where there's this German woman, and she has recalcitrant major depressive disorder. She's very suicidal, and her husband's really worried about losing her. And then they did a deep brain stimulation of her habenula, and boom, the husband's like, this is the woman I married. Like, she's back, you know, so we didn't have to do therapy. We didn't have to, like, make her happy. We didn't have to talk her out of her misery. We didn't have to do any of those things.

[Maya Bialik]

She had an electrical signaling problem.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

She had an electrical problem.

[Maya Bialik]

Chemical problem also.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Exactly.

[Maya Bialik]

So deep brain stimulation. Do you want to explain to the good folks what that is? It's, you know, there's. There's a few. There's a few categories that we use dbs deep brain stimulation for. But can you describe what. What deep brain stimulation would look like for the habenula?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, I mean, for me, it's NASA. That's just one point. But they're doing it more in animal models right now in terms of, like, being able to turn off certain areas of the brain. So a probe. You can do it other ways. Again, trans magnetic is. Is really where you kind of do the same thing. You're sending, like, surge of magnetic energy and electrical energy to this particular area to change its activation level. And so if you're trying to turn off the habenula, you basically overwhelm it. Yeah, yeah. And we don't know, again, lateral medial, you know, both sides. You know, we don't really know what's gonna work. And I don't know the protocol that they used for that particular woman.

[Maya Bialik]

Yeah, I'm picturing. I mean, for deep brain stimulation. We first started hearing about it when I was in grad school, you know, in the 1700. They were doing it for basal ganglia stimulation for Parkinson's. And they were able to see, you know, people with active tremors and, you know, that sort of parkinsonian mask. And it literally was like, it would. It would.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

You would.

[Maya Bialik]

It would light up. I mean, it was. Yeah. I think of it like a long acupuncture needle. Valerie was like, are there side effects? Yes. It's like a probe in your brain, so you have to be extremely precise. Like, it's a whole mapping thing, which is why, you know, they're not doing it a ton. Yes, it is invasive, but really fascinating. So when we think about dieting, when we think about fitness, you know, in some ways, I feel like when you look at the list of the performative tools, you know, that are bound to fail, my to do lists went in the garbage. You know, our experience on social media, New Year's resolutions, you know, places in relationships where we have goals. I guess the question is, is there anything that we can strive for in a healthy way? And is that where the iterative mindset comes in?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. So, you know, in my research on thousands of people, tens of thousands of people, the key around the Habenila, or to keep it quiet because you don't want to poke the bear, is iteration. And this is something I first saw at Stanford. We had a panel of expert patients who were leaders in their disease area, whether it was liver cancer or heart disease or diabetes. And to a person, they were all kind of iterating through their disease to really inspire other people who were having trouble. Where we go wrong on social media is that you follow an influencer and you take verbatim their workout routine or what I eat in a day or whatever for models or whatever that is, and that becomes performative, as opposed to understanding the pattern that, hey, that person is iterating on, how they're using smoothies or how they're getting their heart rate up or whatever, and being able to say, what would it be for me to iterate my way through that? And that's an empowered state as opposed to a disempowered somebody else. I'm trying to be somebody else. I'm trying to be this influencer, or I'm trying to not be myself. And so that seems to be the key to keeping somebody safe from their habenula and keeping the habenula happy and quiet.

[Maya Bialik]

Well, also, I can't help but point out that, you know, almost all of those things that you just mentioned are a predominant feature of being a teenager.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Absolutely.

[Maya Bialik]

You know, being a young person. Absolutely. You know, and I would also argue, like, we have a little bit of an extended adolescence. I think, you know, my son tells me every generation thinks that about the next generation, but I really think it about this one. There just seems to be a little bit of an extended, you know, kind of period of uncertainty and, you know, kind of trying to find your way and being very, very impressionable. So how do we navigate, you know, either having kids or, you know, ourselves feeling like we're impressionable? Like, how do you navigate that when that is also a feature of development.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

You know, I did one thing right as a mother, which is that I taught my children, you know, the number one rule of life is change, and the number one thing you can do is figure it out. And I didn't even realize my own future self would find iterative mindset, and that this was actually a thing. So I think that the safest safety wrap, safety vest, whatever you want to say for teenagers and for all of us is to teach them to iterate. Carol Dweck's early work divided the world into performance mindsets and learning mindsets. And then she went down the rabbit hole of growth mindset from there. And growth mindset is essential, but it's not sufficient to undo the barrage of what's coming at our young people. And so I would say, I would argue that iterative mindset is, at least in my 30 years of researching all this stuff, the most protective factor that you could give a young person or an older person to navigate this world of failure triggers that we're immersed in.

[Maya Bialik]

I wonder if you can talk a little bit about addiction. You touch on it here and there in the book, but I wonder if you can kind of lean into it a little bit more, because this is one of those things, you know, I'm thinking about people who are chronic relapsers, right? Which is a very special category. Okay. So, yeah, so, you know, there are chronic relapsers, and obviously sugar can have significant consequences. But I also think about people who, you know, see their lives crash, you know, lose their homes, lose their money, lose their spouses, their job, their kids, lose their entire way of being, get clean, and still will relapse. Right. And the notion is you think like, oh, once someone's hit bottom, right? You want to believe that's the bottom. But I wonder if you can speak to sort of what might be going on in the habenula and what are some of the, you know, kind of deeper ways that we can understand the addictive process in this framework?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. So before people started looking at the habenula, there was this addiction medicine 2.0 kind of idea where if you have a number line and you have the person try to get pleasure through their addictive substance, they'll go one point to the positive for the moment. And then again, loss is twice as powerful as gain. You get 2 marks negative on the number line. So now you're at negative one. Then you try to get back to homeostasis at zero, and then you get punished. Negative two so now what's coming out is that the habenula is the source of that negative two for every one step towards something pleasurable. And that's why doctors are recommending or playing with dopamine fasting, because there's no other way. You can't get there through happiness. You have to get there through managing the failure, through managing the negativity. And a habenula that's on. All I can say is it's such a psychically itchy stuff state that there is a natural proclivity for us to numb out, to distract, to do anything to get that. Because it's got a stranglehold on our dopamine. It controls serotonin. It has the most nicotinic receptors of anywhere. So there's a lot of operants in the habenula and addiction. And there was one study where they had young men who unfortunately lost their lives to overdose of heroin. And they found that their habenula was shrunken down. So you could imagine like that repeated awash of the addictive substance, kind of suppressing the habenula and the habenula stopping you from doing something maybe wrong for you or threatening to you. Just their brakes went out in their car and they drove over the cliff because they didn't have habenula brakes anymore. And so it's very consequential, I think, that two areas I predict are going to explode. One is in depression, anxiety, the kind of like mood disorder area around habenula and treatments for that. And then the second one is gonna be for addiction because we've now found the culprit of something that we've observed in people's lives.

[Maya Bialik]

You know, I want you to talk a little bit more about this notion of dopamine. You know, this is a very hot chemical, and we obviously it comes up here a lot. But you said something about, you know, kind of why dopamine fasts are recommended. I wonder if. Can you explain a little bit more that pleasure is not kind of what will get you there. It's being able to modulate kind of the distribution of pleasure.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. If anybody's known somebody who really struggles with addiction, what they'll say is, I'm not trying to get high. I'm trying to feel normal. So they're trying to get back to that zero point on the number line, that equilibrium, and they can't, because they're slipping further and further to your point around, like hitting rock bottom. That's when you've tried so many times to get back to the zero on the number line and slipped further and further away from it because of this plus one minus two equation. And so in terms of the habenula and what it's doing to you, you're trying to shut it up with the addictive substance. The addictive substance at one point I think just gets rid of your habenular activity whatsoever because you won, right. But then you're pursuing, you're a fiend for that dopamine and you're not able to feel that high. And so the current thinking is that if you just stop pursuing the pleasure, it's called withdrawal. And the habenula is the cause of withdrawal symptoms.

[Maya Bialik]

It's nasty.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

It's a nasty little half centimeter thing. Yeah, Like I went to Fez once and there was camels with like little rings in their nose. So there's this giant animal and is led around by this ring in their nose. So I'm almost thinking that the habenula is kind of like the ring in our nose that we can be led around by, you know, whether it's by other people or addictive substances. And so, you know, this psychic pain is just like itchy and it's whatever and like, you know, shut it up, shut it up. And so if somebody can get through that, I think a month long, real painful period, then they can start getting some of their homeostasis back. They can get some of their like normal dopamine and normal normalcy.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Can we talk a little bit about how it can influence people who just feel generally stuck? There are so many more people out there these days that just kind of feel numb. You know, they have this malaise about themselves and about the world around them and they're just stop really enjoying things. They kind of are going through life in a bit of a fog. And maybe it's endless scrolling, maybe it's just feeling overwhelmed by the news. But more and more people are, you know, not excited by things that either used to bring them excitement or that, you know, decades ago, before we were endlessly connected, people would go outside and play. And, you know, there used to be more of a sense of, oh, I'm just going to enjoy, quote, unquote, the simple things.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

So whenever somebody is in a state of anhedonia, you know, that sort of state below or above depression, you know, before depression sets in, that is by definition a habenula on state. Now that we know the habenula is the cause of that. And so when that's on again, it's an itchy experience. And Then there is a natural proclivity towards reaching for something to numb or something to entertain or something to distract. And so that's basically the loop that you're describing. And so the answer off the merry go round is to iterate your way out of that. Dopamine fasting is an iteration. I don't think it is important in all cases. There's weird people who can, like, cold turkey themselves when they kind of wake up to, oh, that's not working out for me. I'm just gonna cold turkey, you know?

[Maya Bialik]

Is that the dopamine fast that you say? Like, I'm not gonna get a dopamine hit.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Those people, I don't even know. They're freaks of nature. It's a permanent dopamine fast for that. And maybe their addictive mind goes to another domain. Nobody's, I think, really articulated that that I know of, but I would assume that's what's happening. But, yeah, they just quit smoking one day because something clicked and they're like, it's not gonna do this anymore. And those kinds of kind of miracles of behavior change. But for everybody else, being able to do harm reduction, dopamine fasting, that kind of stuff, even the GLP1s is kind of like inducing that, where you're not able to get the pleasure out of the food. And all that yummy, all that kind of stuff is not going on because it's kind of stopping you and it's giving you that pleasure in a way, or that need for pleasure downstream of oxytocin, that satisfaction, that satiety, and then also dampening your anhedonia, your depression at the same time. So it's replacing something that's been lost by your own spinning in the way that you're living your life.

[Maya Bialik]

So the question I have, because if we're looking at the habenula sort of overseeing a variety of different aspects of motivation and of notions of failure, does that put a different lens on, let's say, fitness goals and weight loss? Do we get to look at it in the framework of not just the addiction to food that might be driving you to, let's say, be a compulsive overeater? But the notion is that we become addicted to this process. Right. We're basically. Our habenula is so depleted, deprived, compromised. Right. That we have created an addiction of trying to fix an addiction.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

That's right. Yeah. You're kind of adding insult to injury, you know, when you're reaching for the wrong thing. So it's the wrong view you know, when we have habenial activity and this is something I'm, I'm, I'm, this is my edge right now is when I see myself not motivated to do the thing that I should do for myself. What is different about me because I have a jump on this information is I start looking for where did I think I failed and then dealing with that because it's not gonna come through distraction or numbing or pursuing pleasure or aversion of any kind.

[Maya Bialik]

But this takes a long time and people don't want that. I mean they want the fast.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

That is fast though. I think it's equally as fast to really spend your energy being like oh this isn't working out for me really reframing that. It's just that we don't have the right instruction right now.

[Maya Bialik]

I was just gonna say I didn't mean to say that people don't want it. But in our fast paced culture where you know, we're kind of like scrolling all day and like looking at the puppies blowing bubbles, you know, like that's a lot of where a lot of our energy goes or we're trying to escape from the realities of politics and the world and just everything is crazy. This is hard for people.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Also we're not taught to think about hey, where did I think I've failed? And finding that psychological trap that we may have set for ourselves. What we're taught is I'm going to focus on all my strengths and if I just focus enough on my strengths that's what's going to help me get over the next hump. But actually going backwards and auditing that is a really powerful practice to say where have I tricked myself into thinking or set up an expectation for myself that I haven't met?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, in my research I saw two groups of people. One is that they would go and look at the why you know, why did this happen? That tends to be me. You know, maybe over educated people do that more often. But then the other there was another group of people that just okay, that's broken. I'm just going to iterate, not going to think about it. Generally men, you know, and so there's

[Maya Bialik]

a couple ways say more.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

They just start solving that. They go into problem solving mode and they iterate, you know, whenever they are not getting what they.

[Maya Bialik]

My husband did this. He's very successful at certain things because he's just like I'm just going to figure it out and I'm going to do it.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, exactly. So if I see myself watching Too many puppies with blowing bubbles. Then I iterate. I just iterate on what is going to cause me to, you know, right size that in my life. And I.

[Maya Bialik]

So you have to recognize the problem, right?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I see that there's something I don't want and there's something I do want. And then, you know, certain people are just like, I'm just gonna start puzzling over here. I don't have to like, analyze why this other thing is happening. I don't have to get all caught up in that.

[Maya Bialik]

I had been off news. Like, I had been. I. I had to do a news fast. It was specifically really bad for, you know, call me whatever you want. I'm a highly sensitive person. Like, all the things. Like, yeah, so I had gone on a fast. And then, you know, things happen and then you come off the fast. But I realized I was having reactions that were pervading my day, midday and night. Like, what specifically? If I would wake up and the first thing I would go to was to check the news, I would feel my heart start racing and I would feel like I'm putting all these chemicals of, you know, and legitimate chemicals, meaning I'm outraged, I'm scared, I'm sad, like, whatever those feelings are, but I'm putting them in my brain first thing in the morning and then expecting to not feel grumpy or out of sorts. Right. And also I would then like, you know, send things to Valerie or Jonathan. Like, look what I saw in the new joy.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I'm sharing.

[Maya Bialik]

Sharing the trauma, right? I'm making everyone else feel trauma with me. And one of the things that I did, which, you know, I'm already judging it, like, I'm not entirely pleased with the solution, but I started playing word games instead. Meaning I really love, like, crossword puzzles. And I. I got into wordle, like 10 years after everyone else did. Um, and I started like doing easy Sudoku because I knew that my brain wanted to. It wanted to. It wanted to chew on something, but I gave it something that wasn't as, I don't know, hurtful.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

That's a swap.

[Maya Bialik]

I did a swap.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

You did a swap?

[Maya Bialik]

I did a swap.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yes, you did. I wanna do all of them. Yeah. So you noticed the thing that was kind of causing you more and more suffering and by the way, exposing your brain to the news, which is, I think it should be called the bad news. Cause it's a misnomer. It sets up expectations that there's something positive or helpful and then you're awash and your Habenula's on, and it's not.

[Maya Bialik]

My Habenula's always on.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

It's not the problem of, like, taking in information for which you have a compassionate response. That's not the problem. The problem is that you have no way to do anything about it.

[Maya Bialik]

Well, and there may be some people for whom they don't have that specific response. Like, my dad used to read the New York Times every single day. Every day of my hub. Every day of my life. My dad would sit down and, like, you didn't interrupt him. Or like, I learned to, like, read the newspaper with him, which is like, my hands would get all, you know, the print on them. But, like, that was the thing. And sometimes he'd get upset about things, but, like, mostly he just seemed to, like, read the paper. But I don't know if it's that the news has changed. I think it all changed with, like, the political situation where, like, everybody, like, where it was on Twitter and, like, I have to know what the president is tweeting while he's sitting on the toilet. Like, things like that. That it just became so, so much a part of our constant culture.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Well, news used to be more boring because it wasn't monetized. And so once it became monetized and also competitive with outrage, with things like social media and stuff like that, then it did become super. Supercharged. Right? It's supercharged. The language. If you. I'm sure if you pulled archives, the language was a lot more straightforward and bland in terms of what your dad's brain was drinking in every day.

[Jonathan Cohen]

What I'm hearing about mime's experience is it's less important and maybe even counterproductive for her to go through a whole evaluative process of why am I being drawn to the news? And what in my past is making me want to chew on something right now. And more important, to really quickly iterate on a solution to get her chewing on something that is less activated.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

That's right. And my. My own with New York Times, specifically my own iteration was to delete the app because I put friction in the way. This is one of those ads ad friction. I put friction in the way of between me and having to type it into my browser to get the fix. And I also do a lot of solitaire game, just non open to social. Just me, myself and I doing solitaire. It's a soothing exercise. So I think that there's productive ways to redirect that energy when you're feeling, especially for sensitive people like myself, yourself There's a lot of iteration that needs to happen.

[Maya Bialik]

I wanted to talk about. And I guess this falls a little bit under inspiration from the iterative mindset. You mentioned something. And there's a couple points in this book that get very transcendental. You know, you have indigenous lineage, and so there's some really beautiful kind of stories that you weave through and traditions and. And in some cases, some ritual aspects that you weave through. You also do talk about the use of psychedelics. You talk about a particular, you know, really kind of therapeutic journey that you took. But there was one section of the book that just. It stuck out to me not because it didn't belong. You talked about I am, which is soham in Sanskrit, and this is a mantra that is used. And there's actually one of my favorite in. In Kundalini Yoga, there's a lot of songs that we listen to and there's a lot of, like. There's bands that just sing, like Kundalini music. And one of my favorite pieces is just the words I am. And it's a beautiful piece. And it's like over and over, I am, I am. And you know, we're all singing and we're swaying. But you. You talk about the significance of owning this notion of I am as part of shifting out of this failure mindset into the iterative mindset. Can you talk about I am?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. So, you know, our ruminative brain, we have a narrative self within that. And so that's something, you know, I'm telling myself right now that I'm on this podcast. You know, you're telling yourself that you're mind biologic. It's. There's a. There's a subconscious aspect of that that's going on at all times in terms of how we locate ourselves. And of course, with psychedelics, that's all scrambled. When the person is in a journey, the I am is kind of disorganized. It gives you a break. Because what if your I am is I am the worst person on the planet? You know, and so how'd you know what mine was? Sometimes. Sometimes not. Not having an I am is good. But the main thing is that we do need to, with failure, kick out any notions of I am a failure in some way transform those into I am learning, I am iterating whatever it is that I am focused on, that I'm telling myself that I am to re identify with things that maybe other humans programmed us to think negatively about ourselves or the world programmed us to think negatively about ourselves. And so that's something that is, unless we deal with that sort of chamber of the bank of I am and the narrative self, we're going to be kind of spinning.

[Maya Bialik]

Is this notion of I am like, is this positive thinking, for lack of a better phrase?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I think optimists, you know, if you look at the literature, optimism is a very protective factor. But just like growth, mindset, like, I'm not a failure, it's not over for me. That is very essential, but it's not sufficient. And so I find that the iteration on top of that is really the operant part of getting out of any destructive negative aspects of notion of self.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I mean, I just want to hear more stories about people who, like the Dorito addict had had ways of successfully changing their behavior is fascinating.

[Maya Bialik]

Maybe. Maybe we could throw out a couple. Would you mind if I threw out a couple scenarios?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah.

[Maya Bialik]

Okay. Jonathan, why don't we throw out a couple scenarios?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Yeah. One that hit me was the procrastinator or the person that assumes they're going to fail. How does that show up in relationships?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. So, you know, in animal behavioral science, there's this kind of shortcut of approach avoid. Right. And so the habenula we've established is the avoid part of that equation. And so if I am wanting to be in love or I'm wanting to approach my partner with something that's really vulnerable for me or that kind of thing, then I may have a pre failing notion of like, well, this didn't work out before. Before I was never received. I was never listened to that kind of thing. I might hesitate. And my habenula is already pre failing me into not connecting.

[Maya Bialik]

That's avoidant attachment.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yes.

[Maya Bialik]

You just defined avoidant attachment.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I feel like this is like the answer to everything. Like you talked about Holy Grail. It's like, oh, everything goes back to the Bendula. Right. Because it is everywhere all at once and all of our behavior. And so then if I don't do that, then I don't form a bond with my partner, then the relationship ends. So there's a lot of consequences in me not being able to wrestle with my habenula and get it to quiet down.

[Maya Bialik]

So that. And again, I don't mean to throw avoidant attachment out there, but if you have this notion that I'm afraid to approach and attempt are never going to be complete because there's always going to be that, you know, habenula pulling you back. Right. This then becomes a loop that's very difficult to break out of because you've just had reinforced that you will fail.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

That's right. That's right.

[Maya Bialik]

So how do you hack that? How do you. If you are an avoidant attachment person, let's say because of your habenula, you can't just say like, sorry, it's my habenula. How do you hack that?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I hope people start saying things like that. I really do.

[Maya Bialik]

It's not me. I want you.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I want this to like, enter the zeitgeist. Um, so, yeah, I think that iteration is the, the golden ticket to everything. You know, I iterate. I. I might try like a little bit of a, you know, maybe being more vulnerable in this moment. I might go to a support group for that. I might, you know, read a book on that. Like, those kinds of things are iterations and everything is going to be different. You know, each person will be unlocked by a particular resource in a different way. And so, you know, it's just about finding again, it's like finding what it is that's going to turn off your habenula.

[Maya Bialik]

In particular, I want to give an example about eating and food. You know, you talk about it quite a bit in the book. You know, in the category of overeating, I have decided, let's say, let's say I make the decision. I'm only going to have one helping, right? Like, this is like a thing. I mean, the standard American diet is usually the portions are super large, but then like, I always also, like, will be like, well, I want seconds. So my, my notion, and it's part of its pleasure principle, if something's good, more of it is better. That's not always true, especially if you're trying to control your caloric intake. How do I hack that?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

So the iterations for overeating that I've seen work for people is to again, throw away the food as soon as possible to split it and save it for later to cancel their order if they ordered it in a moment of weakness to reducing the number of bites. And some people can kind of. And then if you also just blow past all of those gates of safety and you're just ravenous and the inner monster has taken over, then as soon as possible get off the, you know, get out of the relapse. You know, the people who succeed long

[Maya Bialik]

term, right, don't keep diving in and being like, I messed it up, I might as well keep going.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

It's slippery, you know, like, you can just go all the way to the bottom of that. But people who are more experienced with themselves start to get More better and better at pulling out of that tailspin faster and faster. And that tends to be built on iteration. But also their mindset is they have right view, as they say in Buddhism. You know, like they're seeing it clearly that, oh, I'm in a relapse and now I'm gonna, you know, dream my way out of this into, or I'm just gonna forgive myself.

[Maya Bialik]

Here's another one. Some people, when they wake up in the middle of the night, go to the fridge.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

What?

[Maya Bialik]

Not naming any names. What is that? How do you hack that?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

So there may be a disempowered state of the habenila before bed. There may be a habit around going to the fridge. And so it's comfort, it's familiar. And so again, iterations for a late night fridge is to have something as healthy as possible at the fore of that fridge and hide everything that the monster might go after. That would be counteractive for oneself. And just say, like, this is satisfying. And also, even people do mindful eating. So if somebody has a presence of mind, not usually in a groggy, sleepy state, but again, making the good thing easy and the hard thing hard or the bad thing hard is kind of an adage that we have in behavioral design.

[Maya Bialik]

Okay, so we did a relationship example, we did some eating examples. Jonathan, do you want to. Jonathan is very into like fitness and things like that. Why don't you give us a fitness challenge? Like, you know, something that's challenging in the fitness world, that, that we could try and figure out a hack for?

[Jonathan Cohen]

Well, there's more fitness influencers on Instagram and elsewhere than I think maybe anything else. So if someone is trying to develop a new fitness routine, if they're trying to get over a hump or set a goal, what's the best way to be successful?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

So iterations in fitness, as you mentioned, are there's a plethora of information. The main thing is that in trying those out, that they don't become sharp objects because fitness can become so easily performative. But if you look at people, professional

[Maya Bialik]

athletes, when is it not performative?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I think when you're seeing the performance as the iteration, there's a meta there that I think that some super smart people are doing and I hope other people copy that, not their workout. And so if I see a great, inspiring workout, there's kind of this notion of, let's see, in the self talk world, let's see if I can get myself to do this. Let's see what percent of this. Let's See how long I can get myself to do this for. But the expectation from the get go on every workout should be at one point. This will fail me, bore me, and I will need to iterate. So if I go in into it, eyes wide open that way, then I will keep going where other people get called caught up in. I'm not doing Zumba anymore, huh?

[Maya Bialik]

Yeah. That's interesting because I've noticed that Jonathan, who, who does look at Instagram and things like that, he'll sometimes get an idea for something and he'll be super into it. And I'm like, okay, this is his thing now. Yeah. But then it will run its course and he'll find another thing. And I find that very confusing. Cause I'm a little bit binary about it, you know, like, what's your thing? Right. Well, it's like, you know, I started doing taekwondo and I worked my way up to a black belt. Now I have a black belt. Like, that's my thing. And now I work for my second degree black belt, you know, Whereas Jonathan is like, I hang from the ceiling on these things and then, like, I'll play pickleball and then I want to pull a sled. He really wants to pull a sled through the backyard because he keeps seeing people pulling sled. Then he keeps showing me this guy who runs on all fours, and I'm like, is this my life? Now he's gonna start running on all fours. His limbs are. But like, that's kind of how it goes. And I think, you know, for me, like, I. I am very performative, you know, I mean, that's just. I think I was born that way even before I started being an actor. But I kind of feel like I've put my performative needs on him. Like, is he doing it to the degree that he wants? And then why is he stopping? Did he fail? Like, I'm all up in his performative Habenula business.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I think after this conversation, you're going to see the world differently.

[Maya Bialik]

I think so.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

And I. I think you're gonna see Jonathan differently. And I think you're gonna see he's

[Maya Bialik]

a Bendula waiting to fail.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I think you're gonna see the sled as an iteration. I think you're gonna see the animal flow as an iteration. I think you're gonna see it differently and then be supportive in a way that you probably can't even predict right now.

[Maya Bialik]

I haven't been supportive of my friend Jonathan because my habenula's been compromised. I'm gonna blame the habenula for everything.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

You're in the middle of a lifelong relationship with taekwondo.

[Maya Bialik]

I thought you were gonna say with my habenula.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, well, also that. But the Taekwondo, at some point will failure, right? It may be, you know, in the last couple months of your life as an old, frail woman, who knows? You know, But. But everything expires.

[Maya Bialik]

Got it.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jonathan Cohen]

One thing I do with some of these exercises, I find also is that I will not do them exactly because I have a hip replacement. I'm always just sort of inching into things, seeing how much they impact me. Can I recover fast enough? And then I'm like, oh, so for me, it's research. I don't have a personal trainer. It's a lot of like, can I gather the information? Can I remember it? I get bored easily, and then I try to implement it. And then the other thing that I'm, you know, hearing here and I get stuck in a lot is like, oh, if I miss a week, if I miss two weeks, do I not get upset about the time that I lost and just say, okay, I can come back and reinforce the positivity of starting again that day and trying to build the next momentum that's gonna carry me forward versus sitting in, the momentum of not having done it to prevent me from actually getting back in?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

That's right. And, you know, that's where it could become a pointy object, is in the week or two you get sick, you're traveling, whatever the case may be, all kinds of life happens, right? And if you wallow or you interpret that as failure, watch out, because your habanula is on. And then you won't feel like doing it more, and then you're in this big, long relapse period, you know? And so it's just about like, get back up, get back up, get back out there, you know, do anything.

[Jonathan Cohen]

And I've seen that. I've seen myself say, like, I made this commitment. I was going to have all this progress in this next month, but I missed two and a half weeks. Look at all the pro. And so I've lost this progress, and I'm sort of hard on myself for not having gotten there, because I'm like, oh, I go play pickleball or I go do something. And I'm like, oh, I'm a little sore. Imagine how much less sore. If I had just done those two and a half weeks, I would have had all these gains. And so it's interesting that I'm. I'm hearing and I'm Seeing myself grieving the loss that we spoke about. And I also see that if I can put that away, if I can actually just focus on, well, I'm. I'm. Today I just did it. Let me feel how good that feels. And if I can focus on that, it will lead me more to be able to do it the next day versus the other.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

You're sounding very iterative as your main fuel that you're fueling, which is why you're able to keep going. But then there's these little catches of where you think you have to be performative. And so what I would say is that if you held the performative aspect, which does. It's exciting. It's like jet fuel performative stuff. It's like, ooh, there's a high at the end of it. If you do what you say you do and you get the results, you win the race or that kind of thing. But then know that there's a lull after the concert's over, after the rock star and there's that big high or the awards show or whatever, that's when people underestimate. The habenula is gonna come on and do a negative two on you. And you gotta be ready for that.

[Maya Bialik]

I think I have extra habenulas.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

You do? You got extra?

[Maya Bialik]

I do. This is a question you don't mention at all in your book. I want an entire book on it. I want you to talk about sex because this is an act that is, by definition. Yes. Performative.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yes.

[Maya Bialik]

And also can be, can be, and also should be ultimately, and ideally a true expression of you being yourself. And I'm thinking about, especially with hookup culture. Right. What is the habenula doing when you're having casual sex versus committed, connected sex?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

So this is great. This is all very hypothetical, so I'll just say that up front.

[Maya Bialik]

But, you know, it's my favorite kind of science.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

When I was 30 with my first husband, I don't think I'm revealing anything. I outed myself that I had been faking orgasms. Your habenula was faking orgasms? Yes. Your habenula was. Well, you were performing. And then your habenula's like, this is not working out.

[Maya Bialik]

Oh, my gosh.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

And so I was tired of failing at orgasms, and I told him. And that just opened up a whole new world of, like.

[Maya Bialik]

I mean, whose failure is it when you don't have an orgasm? Dr.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I know, but then you're protecting the man's habenula. If you're heterosexual and so you're protecting your partner's habenula by acting not truthful. You know, you're performing as a sexual being. And of course, with so much pervasive porn, which is an addiction, which is dopamine seeking. And then, you know, habenula is gonna come right after that. So right after the masturbation, that's the. For men especially, that is the biggest surge of oxytocin that they get is post ejaculation. And so then you've got this, like, dopamine seeking thing. You've got, you know, the habenula punishing you in the negative direction. You know, look, you're lonely, nobody loves you. Like, you know, they're calling you afterwards. Like, all that kind of stuff comes into play. And so in hookup culture, you may be enjoying the dopamine in the moment, but the next morning, the reason why you feel so horrible is because the habenula is punishing you in that negative two thing that it's doing. And then you want more. Then you want to go into more,

[Maya Bialik]

or you push it aside. Because I know a lot of people are like, I don't feel horrible. I feel amazing. There's a notion also of pushing that aside, because if you look deeply at. And again, there may be people who like to hook up with people. It's not for me to say, but I'm thinking about in this scenario of if there's a loneliness behind it, if there's an emptiness, if there's a desperation, if there's getting involved in situations that are dangerous and you know it, and you're putting yourself at risk. Right. Like, that's where your habenula is. Like, I'm at the party.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. And most people don't realize when they say, I'm fine, they're just remembering how good it felt to feel connected in that moment. Because they have this surge of oxytocin, which is stronger and more pervasive in terms of receptor sites than dopamine.

[Maya Bialik]

Is that always true of I'm fine? You're thinking back to when you were fine.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. Like, yeah, maybe, maybe. But it's a story. It's not really how you're really feeling. Cause I know this because I've talked to so many people in depth about their lives. It's kind of a whack a mole. Like, if you're denying that about how you're feeling in this one domain of sex, then guess what? You're gonna eat or you're gonna drink alcohol, or you're gonna Numb out in some other way, you know, or you're gonna look for the next hit. You're gonna look for the next. Love her.

[Maya Bialik]

Okay, let's get back to you and your first husband, because that's very interesting. I want to know.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

I consent him for this conversation. No, but we're good friends.

[Maya Bialik]

No, but my. My question is, once you've made that admission. Right. Is that then a place that you get to say, I want to step into my authentic self, and I'm either not going to have an orgasm or it's going to become a priority for me and my habenula.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Oh, my gosh. It just. It just throws a gauntlet down, doesn't it, between you? Because then they have all kinds of habaneal activity around, like, well, this whole time, I haven't been as good of a lover as I thought. So I'm failing as a lover. Wow.

[Maya Bialik]

Right.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

And as a sexual partner. And then, you know, men especially, you know, with erections things, they're really sensitive around that. And so how do you then, you know, I don't know what role it played in our divorce, but, you know, two years later, we got divorced. I mean, he had trouble with intimacy in general, you know, So I think that there's just a whole other level of sex health that has not been accessed in any way because we are so busy performing, either as porn stars or as people not telling our truth.

[Maya Bialik]

Right. I mean, that's what it is. Right.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

There's so much inauthenticity in the sexual relationships with people.

[Maya Bialik]

It's really funny because I'm just gonna. Go ahead. Never thought this episode would go here.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Me neither.

[Maya Bialik]

I have never. I've never in my life faked an orgasm ever, ever, ever, ever, ever. For you and. Well, thank you. But I remember that when I would hear that women would do this, and, you know, you learn about it in magazines or something, you know, and I was a late bloomer. For those of you playing bingo at home, I was a late bloomer. But I remember that when I heard that, that people did that, I was like, why would you make someone think something about themselves that. That they could do? That just isn't true. Wow. Meaning it just. It. It boggled my mind. And. And that's not to say that, you know, I absolutely have the best sex life of any human on the planet, but I'm just saying that, like, it never made sense to me. But it's interesting because in so many other aspects of my life, some might argue all the other aspects of My life there is a very strong sense of, how's the other person? And what do they need? And am I making them happy? And, like, my job as an actor is to make other people say, yes, you got the job. Exactly. So this was like the one arena. It's the. The island of. The island of orgasm. Isolation.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Good for you. Good for you. I mean, you're. You're.

[Maya Bialik]

You know, I've also never had an orgasm. No, I.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Just kidding. But, you know, you're in the minority, I guess.

[Maya Bialik]

But like I said, it never made sense to me. And, you know, I was like a young, empowered feminist. Like, yeah, why would you make someone think that they successful, succeeded in pleasing you if they didn't? Because then you're missing an opportunity to teach them what actually makes you feel good.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Now you're making me interested in polling feminists versus non feminists and finding, you know, where that breaks.

[Maya Bialik]

Do you have a feminist habenula or not? That's the title of this episode.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Exactly.

[Maya Bialik]

Did your habenula have an orgasm last night?

[Jonathan Cohen]

What is the percentage of people who have faked orgasm? It sounds like you've done a little research in this space for women.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

It's the majority, and I don't remember that. It's been years since I've seen the actual numbers, and it's not coming to me.

[Jonathan Cohen]

Let's touch on pornography for a moment and the impact that you see it having on people's feelings of authenticity versus feelings of shame.

[Maya Bialik]

When you think about performative versus authentic expression, there's a larger question to be had about pornography in terms of what impact it has on our ability to then either mimic in a performative sense, or is it a neutral way to get in touch with a variety of things that we're learning about. Is pornography impeding my ability to be my authentic self?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

The very nature of seeing other people in a pornographic sense is not in itself harmful. I think that kind of like we were talking about with the news. If I could make a weird analogy there, the porn industry is fueled by outrage that they're competing with each other for race to the bottom of the brainstem, as Tristan Harris calls it. And so it's an attention economy, and it's set up to be an addiction economy.

[Maya Bialik]

I was just gonna say one of the components of sex addiction in this arena is the need to keep upping the stakes, which is, I think, also what that sort of proliferation in outrageous porn, you know, is sort of getting harmful, abusive. Correct. But there's a notion of needing to sort of up the stakes, which addicts themselves don't always enjoy. Meaning it's a compulsive machine.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

That's right. And so you know that. That hyper stimulation is always, you know, kind of a. A reach for when your habenula is on and you don't know it's on. You know, I mean, I think it just cannot be overstated that the habenula is doing this in a silent, quiet way. There's no, like, ouch, my habenula's on. Like, it's just. It's very secret. You know, it just stealthy. And so in a person who's using porn as their drug to quiet their habenula, they're on that number line. One step towards dopamine. Pleasure. Two steps, pain. One step, pleasure. Two steps, pain. So they're falling down into a hole where they've got to do more and more drug, the more and more rough drug and harsh drug and things like that in order to get to. Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, it's the same result. Iterate your way out of that, you know, dopamine, fast. Whatever can get you out of that terrible, terrible state of helplessness and powerlessness against your addiction.

[Maya Bialik]

I can't help but think about things like chronic pain and things like, you know, for. For those of us with autoimmune conditions, right, where there's, for lack of a better word, iterative, you know, iterative aches, pains, you know, things. I. You know, I'm a person who, like, my back will go out, you know, twice a year, and it's always the same thing. And it's the psoas muscle, and, like, it's the muscle of change. Whatever. I'm, like, done changing. But I was thinking about the role of the habenula, because if we're talking about addiction, you know, the brain is very redundant. It doesn't have as many communication pathways as there are pathways. So it is a redundant system. It uses a discrete amount of chemicals. It uses a discrete amount of receptors and channels and things that open and electrophysiological changes. So it's a very redundant system. But, you know, I'm kind of buying into this, like, holy grail component because obviously, there's never one thing in the brain that we can say. For some people, the habenula may be a really, really important hot point. And for someone else, it might be hypothalamic. It could be amygdala. Like, it could be a lot of things. But when I think about addiction and I think about patterns and I think about, you know, these. These grooves that our brain will go into. I can't help but think about things like chronic pain and things that we used to call psychosomatic illness. I mean, people used to be told, it's all in your head. Then we shifted to psychosomatic, and now we're shifting into more of the Dr. Sarno conception of, like, the mind body syndrome. Right. So where does mind body syndrome and sort of the intersection of your thoughts and your physiology, where does that play into the sort of patterns that the habenula is going to try and tap into as well?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. And this is a very recent study, like a week ago kind of thing, you know, with rheumatoid arthritis and depression. And what they found is that habenula mediates the depression of rheumatoid arthritis and mediates the rheumatoid arthritis. So there's something really intriguing about that.

[Maya Bialik]

What comes first, Right.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. Yeah. We don't have that all worked out. So that's the area where I think science is gonna explode, is figuring out chicken or eggs on those kinds of things or even how the cycle gets started and then also how to undo it.

[Maya Bialik]

Yeah. And Jonathan and I did a talk at south by Southwest on the intersection of science and spirituality. But a huge component of this was, you know, it's very hard to know what comes first. Right. Are people who are depressed, you know. Well, we know. And Gabor Mate has done, you know, all this work, and Bessel Van der Kolk, we know that people who have, let's say, adverse childhood experiences, children who witness trauma, children who experience trauma themselves. Right. This is all setting the stage for, I would say, a habenula that is struggling, a limbic system that is on fire. Right. An amygdala that doesn't know real from imagined. Right. So then you have this. This notion of those people are susceptible to autoimmune disorders. Right. We talk about the personalities associated with multiple sclerosis, you know, with epilepsy, that there's a personality that often, even with cancer, you know, these are some of the hardest statistics. But it's really interesting because. And this is, you know, for better or worse, you know, this is where animal studies come in to try and figure out what is the mechanism. Is it the depression that is opening up to a range of autoimmune dysfunction? Is it the habenula that is compromised or that is, you know, lacking appropriate connections, let's say, to other places? But especially I'd be fascinated to see if, for things like chronic pain or things like these autoimmune conditions. I'm so curious where more research will lead in terms of the habenula's role.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Me too. And again, it just. It gives me that image of, you know, the. The camel with the little nose ring. You know, the. The habenula is that little nose ring. It's so out. Outpowered and out, you know, undersized, but it is overpowering everything. It's honestly the most powerful behavioral control I've ever seen in my career.

[Maya Bialik]

Unbelievable.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah.

[Maya Bialik]

The title of your book is Unstoppable Brain. And I want to have an unstoppable brain, and I think a lot of people do. And I know it's hard to ask you to sort of, like, sum up your book in top three things, but if I were to say to you, I feel stuck. I feel whatever it is, depressed, unmotivated, I can't move forward. Whether it's work, weight, fitness, relationships. What are the three things you would suggest that I do to go from a stuck brain to an unstoppable brain?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah. So stop overperforming everything. Right? Size, performance, where it is beneficial. And then don't go. When it becomes a sharp object, stop.

[Maya Bialik]

Wow.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

The second is turn off the habenula by talking yourself out of or letting go of, or doing anything you can to neutralize failure or prevent failure, failure thinking. And then the third one is iterate the shit out of your life. That's what people do that succeed long term. If you look at any successful person in any domain, what's hiding in plain sight is the amount of iteration that person is using to do that superhuman thing.

[Maya Bialik]

I have kind of a rudimentary question, and I know that there's a lot of research and a lot more research coming out about the habenula. What happens if you just section out the habenula? What does behavior look like?

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, I have no idea. So there's a medial and a. We didn't get into this detail, but this is. Okay. Medial and a lateral. And the lateral seems to be most operant when it's active in causing depression, et cetera, all the kind of psychic pain. The medial may be mitigating that, but it's like a giant jigsaw puzzle, and we've only got a few pieces on the board, so there's no way to tell exactly how those are parsed out yet. But I'll say that there's even a more recent study that came out last week where they took mice, mother mice, and they cut off their lateral habenula activity. And what they found is that they stopped mothering their pups. And so it's just so consequential that the different things that people are trying to see, you know, how each of these parts of the penula activate.

[Maya Bialik]

Dr. Kaira Bobenet the book is unstoppable. The new neuroscience that frees us from failure eases our stress and creates lasting change. It's really been so great to talk to you. We covered so many things in the book. Not in the book, but I highly recommend people get the book. It's a wonderful reference to have. There's so many sections that you can pull up when you're in a particular situation. It's really a wonderful book to have on your shelf in your mental health and neuroscience category. So it's really been such a pleasure talking to you. Thank you.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

Yeah, thanks.

[Maya Bialik]

So, Jonathan, Dr. Bobinat predicted that we would look at the world totally differently now that we've spoken to her and learned about the habenula.

[Jonathan Cohen]

You now want to push my sled too?

[Maya Bialik]

I want to push your sled too also.

[Jonathan Cohen]

We can pull it. It's, it's a dual direction sled.

[Maya Bialik]

I think what, what I found interesting about sort of her statement around that is that we can sometimes even in, I'm imagining, even in work relationships and in personal relationships and I mean especially with our children, we can have performative expectations for other people. It's not just for ourselves. I was thinking about, I mean, parenting is like a whole other aspect. Like I want her to write a book about the habenula and porn. Habenula and parenting. Like all the things I was thinking about how much of what we want for our kids is often what we think looks good. Right? And so much of, I think our culture lends itself to, you know, almost adults acting like adolescents in terms of like, I want it to look good, I want it to look good for him. I want him to have the car he wants, I want her to have the shoes that she wants. Or you know, we, we're gonna go into debt so that I can give them this trip that we can't afford. You know, how much of our lives is this conflict between my performative self and what I think I should do so that I'll look a certain way versus my authentic self?

[Jonathan Cohen]

I think people have mostly been programmed not to even know what their authentic self is. How do we get to that in a modern day society where we're overrun with images of what other people are doing? What we think will make us happy. I mean, I see my son who is 16 now and he's really into training for tennis, training for pickleball. But on YouTube Reels, he sees a lot of bodybuilders and I see him comparing himself to these, these bodybuilders and, and looking at his, his traps and being like, do I have big traps? Am I broad? My friend has this muscle over here. How do I get that muscle? And in some way tell him to

[Maya Bialik]

look at his father. He's going to have the same exact body.

[Jonathan Cohen]

And in some ways that information is available. When I wanted to lift weights, I had to like go read Arnold's body book, bodybuilding manual and flip through the pages. And now he has access to all of these different exercises at the tip of his fingers. But on the same regard, I'm like, how much of this is driven by his need to look good to versus have his body perform well in the activities that he's passionate about that motivate him? That's a slippery slope.

[Maya Bialik]

When we listed the performative tools that fail. So I just want to go over them real quick. New Year's resolutions, social media, sports goals, fitness trends, dieting habit, routines to do, lists, lying was one of them. Career and relationship goals and then those smart goals, those like, you know, specific kind of metrics goals. Jonathan, what's your, what is your most reliable performative tool that you might want to change?

[Jonathan Cohen]

I've really been working on being consistent with working out and it's, I'm trying really not to base that on any sort of metrics for visual appeal or building a type of muscle versus functional performance. Meaning I know that to be healthy to increase lifespan, as Peter Attia talks about that building and maintaining muscle is super important. So instead of doing it of I want to get Jack to look great in for summer, I'm doing it much more so with the mindset to not have it be a sharp object if I do not execute five days a week or six days a week or lift this number of plates, but really iterating so that I know what exercises I can do that I can recover from, that I can stay consistent with. And if I do miss a day or if I'm not hitting it, that I'm not beating myself up for that.

[Maya Bialik]

I really like that. And I think that notion that it's not bad to have a habit, it's not bad to have a to do list, it's not bad to have a career goal or a relationship goal, but it's all Kind of about the framing. I'm also curious, Jonathan, if any of the types of failure, like the types of ways that you. That we tend to sort of think about failure, if any of those were relatable to you. So the choices are all or nothing. Thinking. That's kind of my specialty. Comparing. I used to be able to pre failing, imposter syndrome. Nothing works for me. Been there, done that, or shoulding. Like, I should have done this, he should have done that.

[Jonathan Cohen]

I can relate to shoulding for sure. Oh, I should do this, and then I will have gotten that result. I mean, imposter syndrome. You know, when we first started this podcast, I didn't think I was gonna have a microphone. Sometimes you ask me questions. I'm like, there should be a doctor or someone to speak to this who might say any of this. So I struggle with that for sure. Pre failing, I have definitely thought about, like, oh, is this worth it? You know, is. Should I go down this path of, like, learning something or exploring an avenue, how much time effort is that going to take? And trying to do mental gymnastics to try to think about the cost benefit ratio.

[Maya Bialik]

I've had a handful of friends in my life where I can recall them dating someone who was really smart and charismatic and fun and seemed to be really ambitious, but had what they described as a fear of success as opposed to a fear of failure. But when I was looking at this list, the been there, done that is actually kind of. It's a way of being afraid of success because it's like, oh, I've already done that, or I don't need that. And I just thought it was kind of interesting because it's a component of this larger notion of a fear of failure. And, you know, I think everyone can relate to one of these, if not more than one, right? But for me, the all or nothing thinking, or I used to be able to, right? Like, I used to be more fit. Or especially, like, as our bodies get older and especially as women, like, I used to be able to do this. Why would I even try? You know, I have friends who started running triathlons in, you know, their late 30s, and they were able to push past that. You know, like, nothing works for me. I know people who get in that ruminative depressive, like, why should I try?

[Jonathan Cohen]

You know, actually, black and white thinking is a big one. I used to think things were much more binary. I can do this thing or I could do that thing, but they can't always fit together. Even when one of those two things that I would juxtapose. Neither of them felt right. And what I've seen more and more is that often the solution is some combination. There's actually a joke. When I'm presented two creative options, my answer is always, can we take a little bit of each of them? And there's a strategy amongst creatives where they'll give you two or three polar. They'll give you the Goldilocks scenario. You take this option, you take the middle option, or you take the extreme option. And almost always I'm trying to blend things to create the ideal.

[Maya Bialik]

Well, I think that that's really the iterative mindset, you know, And I thought that was interesting that she mentioned that there may be some gender differences in how people organize around the iterative mindset. But, yeah, that's you kind of adding. Right? It's. It's you adding. That was one of the aspects. Right. Inspiration, time, environment, reduce, add togetherness, expectations, and swap. I really do appreciate this new perspective. I don't know if it's gonna make my brain unstoppable, but I definitely am gonna try and incorporate more of this iterative mindset to be constantly trying. That's how I'm continuously trying. That's how I kind of feel like I'm gonna take on the day.

[Jonathan Cohen]

If by unstoppable, she means an unstoppable jukebox with songs in your head, then you're already unstoppable.

[Maya Bialik]

Unstoppable today Unstoppable I'm unstoppable today It's a Sia song Stoppable today

[Jonathan Cohen]

Skip.

[Maya Bialik]

Oh, you want to skip? No, I'm not playing that game. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time.

[Jonathan Cohen]

It's Maya Bialix.

[Maya Bialik]

Breakdown.

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

She's gonna break it down for you she's got a neuroscience PhD or 2:1 fiction was a good down she's going

[Maya Bialik]

to break down It's a breakdown she's

[Dr. Kyra Bobinet]

going to break it down.