#93 Creating An Upward Spiral With Dr. Alex Korb

Welcome, today I'm joined by Dr. Alex Korb. A professor at UCLA that helps people use neuroscience to live better lives. He's a three times winner of USA Ultimate Coach of the Year as well as the Author of Upward Spiral, helping fight depression one small step at a time. Max Out Insights: • We create depression and happiness in our lives through constant repetition of thoughts and behaviors. With little life changes you can start to impact the activity and chemistry of your circuits, being positive and exercising gratitude are two examples of what anyone can do to reduce their stress, increase their resilience and improve their overall happiness. • Every day we can go up or down. With small steps and changes, we decide the direction our feelings head into. If you exercise more, it will improve your sleep quality and when your sleep gets better than your brain is more rested and gives you more focus and that's how small changes eventually upward spiral us into a happy state. • The happiness overdrive we expect of our lives is misaligned with the real journey. It's impossible to be happy all the time. It's the full complement of emotions that make us complete and whole. • Any step towards the right direction is effective in changing your mental state, no matter how small it is. If you are stuck, taking any positive decision is better than having no action and doing nothing to improve your state. • The more you focus on things out of your control, the more out of control you feel together with anxiety and stress. While the same applies to focusing on things you can control, but with opposite effects increasing your calmness and lowering stress. Max Out Quotes: • "Happiness is not the absence of negative emotions. It's just learning to accept, sometimes you feel better and sometimes you feel worse." • "When you realize certain things you can't control, then you can redirect your attention to things that you can control." • "What makes us stuck is trying to find the best decision, but any of them would be better than doing nothing." • “Focus on specific things you can control and that helps calm you down.”