Stress and Anxiety are Energy Killers — Here’s How To Eliminate Stress, Fix The Problem, and Get Your Energy Back
Anxiety and stress are energy killers. And you probably already know that because you’ve experienced it. Severe stress or anxiety can literally crush your energy levels within hours.
And day in, day out chronic stress and anxiety for weeks or months? It will seriously wreck your energy and cause long-term health problems.
What if you had access to one of the world’s leading neuroscience experts who could show you the most powerful science-based methods you can crush your anxiety and stress in a matter of seconds?
Sound too good to be true? Listen to this interview and find the truth.
Taking control of your anxiety and stress is a critical piece of the puzzle when it comes to getting your energy back.
Want 21 Science-Based Tips For More Happiness, Better Brain Performance, and Eliminate Stress and Anxiety? Get Mark’s 21 NeuroTips eBook for FREE here!
Before you go any further, I want to mention that Mark is giving away his “21 Neurotips for Success and Happiness” ebook. It’s short and packed with powerful, science-based tips to re-wire your brain for more happiness, less stress, and more success in life. Click the image below to get that eBook for FREE.
About Mark Waldman
Mark is an internationally recognized business and personal development NeuroCoach. He has authored 14 books including the national bestseller, How God changes your brain, which Oprah selected as one of the nine must read books for 2012. He is considered one of the world’s leading experts on consciousness, communication, spirituality, and the brain, and he is on the Executive MBA faculty at Loyola Marymount University and teaches at Holmes Institute.
His research has been published in journals throughout the world and his work has been featured in Time magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Oprah Magazine. He has appeared on hundreds of radio and television programs including PBS and NPR, and his TED talk has been viewed by more than a hundred thousand people.
He received the distinguished speaker award from the Mind Science Foundation.
His latest book is NeuroWisdom: The New Brain Science of Money, Happiness, and Success.
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How to eliminate stress and anxiety, show notes
What the word energy means when it comes to brain science (6:14)
How much activity that actually is going on in your brain (7:00)
How stress is a form of too much mental activity going on (8:14)
How yawning can make you score higher in tests and have a better performance (10:40)
[Exercise] Use mindful yawns to remove anxiety (13:30)
The results of doing the yawning exercise (15:50)
What anxiety is from a neurological perspective (17:08)
The benefits of yawning (17:36)
How to incorporate mindfulness into your busy workday (19:00)
Why the 60-second mindfulness breaks are more effective than the 20-40 minutes meditation (19:54)
How to remove physical stress (23:12)
Why the general stretching advice is causing more harm than good when you have pain (22:02)
[Exercise] Stretching to eliminate pain (26:00)
How slow stretching will lower stress (27:30)
How spending too much time in a deeply mindful state will cause your mind to tap into problem-solving mode (30:12)
Why you should use your intuition when it comes to stretching (32:06)
One a day is enough to start with (35:19)
[Exercise] How to stop anxiety when it emerges (38:00)
How to communicate effectively (40:26)
The internal chatter of your left and right prefrontal cortex (42:12)
How realistic negative thinking can cause anxiety (43:24)
How to interrupt negative thinking and anxiety (43:48)
How believing our negative thoughts can cause anxiety (49:34)
[Exercise] The fastest way to eliminate negativity (51:52)
Why the C.R.A.P. board is so powerful (53:51)
Why the cognitive function is not as clear as we think it is (57:12)
What the experiential exercises and workshops are about (58:16)
How to tackle the real problems on your C.R.A.P. board (1:02:56)
How reflecting on your successes at the end of the day can improve self-esteem (1:03:42)
Want 21 Science-Based Tips For More Happiness, Better Brain Performance, and Less Stress and Anxiety?
Mark is giving away his “21 Neurotips for Success and Happiness” ebook. It’s short and packed with powerful, science-based tips to re-wire your brain for more happiness, less stress, and more success in life. You can get that for FREE here.
Links
www.markrobertwaldman.com
www.neurowisdom.com
Transcript
Click the link below to show the transcript for this episode:
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How to Eliminate Stress and Anxiety with Mark Waldman – Transcript
Ari Whitten: Hey friends, this is Ari, and in this module, I am really excited about what I have for you in store today. I am here with my good friend and brain expert, neuroscience expert Mr. Mark Waldman.
So, Mark, I am going to read you his bio here real quick to tell you a little bit about him:
Mark is an internationally recognized business and personal development neuro coach. He has authored 14 books including the national bestseller, How God changes your brain, which Oprah selected as one of the nine must read books for 2012. He is considered one of the world’s leading experts on consciousness, communication, spirituality, and the brain, and he is on the Executive MBA faculty at Loyola Marymount University and teaches at Holmes Institute.
His research has been published in journals throughout the world and his work has been featured in Time magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times, Forbes, Entrepreneur, and Oprah Magazine. He has appeared on hundreds of radio and television programs including PBS and NPR, and his TED talk has been viewed by more than a hundred thousand people.
He received the distinguished speaker award from the Mind Science Foundation.
His new book co-authored with Andy Newberg is called, How Enlightenment Changes Your Brain – great book, by the way, I am almost finished reading it right now, and it is awesome I am loving it – and his brain training program Neurowisdom 101 is now used in schools and businesses throughout the world to help people build mindfulness, communication, and positivity skills.
So Mark, how are you today?
Mark Waldman: I am doing great. Thank you so much for having me on this program.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, thank you for being here. I am really excited about this. So, a little personal note here, Mark is actually a friend of mine and we have had a lot of discussions over many years now and I just love this guy, I am a student of his work, I follow it myself, I implement it, and it has dramatically improved my own life. So this is really an opportunity for me to share, you know, someone that I really admire and learn from myself in my own life with all of you.
And you know, I did not want to try and teach this stuff myself. I wanted you guys to get it all straight from the source. A man who really knows what he is talking about.
So with that said. Basically, Mark, his expertise ranges from, in the in the realm of neuroscience, from spirituality to interpersonal communication, to business success, to lowering your stress levels and your anxiety levels. And really for our purposes here, I wanted to focus more on, you know, addressing emotional management, anxiety management, stress management, and how that relates to energy management. Because it is such a critical component of maintaining optimal vitality and energy levels, is to learn how to control your stress levels and your emotional state and to optimize your brain health.
So with that said, Mark do you have any thoughts on that or should we get straight into the questions here?
What the word energy means when it comes to brain science
Mark Waldman: Well the one thing I want to clarify is the use of the word energy, and as you know, each different field of science has a different definition of energy. And a lot of people think about energy. Really, they do not, they are not aware of it, they are not thinking about it as a scientific term, they are thinking about it as a metaphysical term.
Ari Whitten: Right.
Mark Waldman: We are all energy, the energy of the universe, whatever else or I really feel energized, I am really jazzed up, I am psyched up, but what does that actually mean when it comes to studying the brain? And this is where it becomes really difficult because the word energy only has one specific meaning as far as brain science is concerned, which is metabolic energy.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
How much activity that actually is going on in your brain
Mark Waldman: How much activity is going on in your brain? And you realize, that you have something like 80 some odd billion neurons and they are not just pieces of machinery or wires, each one is a living organism could send out tentacles from the end of the neuron – the axons – they can have 10,000 receptors at the other end. And you can actually watch these neurons in vitro they actually move to connect, they connect with each other as we form new thoughts, they sometimes disconnect when we do not need that particular information, and a tremendous amount of energy is involved with that, how that neuron collects information, how it stores information, and most of this is speculative – almost on a level of science fiction – but we are beginning to get some pretty cool ideas and we can actually see pictures of how these neurons connect as we form different thoughts, how positive memories are formed, how negative memories are formed.
And in this particular sense of energy, I look at energy as being how much metabolic blood flow do you need in order to focus properly on achieving a particular goal or task. And what happens? Can you burn out your energy circuits? Can you become stressed out?
How stress is a form of too much mental activity going on
So stress is a form of too much mental activity going on – too much mental energy going on – that causes neurological fatigue, psychological fatigue, and if you do not manage that stress in the right way, you will actually fry these neurons. They actually will drop dead. Yes, you have 80 billion of them, but sometimes a little tiny area of brain death is enough to give you the whole symptom of a stroke and you just lose something incredibly important.
So I would love to share with you some of the simplest ways that we have discovered, to both raise your energy levels, lower your energy levels, manage your stress levels, create more productivity and because I teach these strategies in the Executive MBA program, which are a lot of corporate executives running multi-million dollar companies, I cannot ask them to say sit there and do a meditation for 20 or 40 minutes until you feel that sense of bliss. You are lucky if they are going to give me two minutes.
Over the last six years, we have developed about 50 or 60 mindfulness-based strategies and brain-based exercises. We can tell a person do this for 20 seconds each time you feel a little tired, little burnt out, a little exhausted, take one minute at the end of the hour and do A, B, C and D. Your stress levels will go down, your work productivity will go up.
So where would you, how would you like to guide me through this educational experience?
Ari Whitten: Yeah. Well, that was an awesome introduction and I love how you explain the link between stress and fatigue. And you know, just a little side note from my own personal life. You know, I have, I am pretty dialed in when it comes to most lifestyle habits nutrition, exercise, sleep, circadian rhythm, and all every aspect of lifestyle.
But one thing that is a killer for me and for my energy levels, is stress. If I am under a ton of stress it can almost sabotage everything else. Even if you are doing everything right in every other aspect of your lifestyle, if you are under a ton of stress, it kind of just kills everything, you know, and so it is such a big factor in this and, you know.
So with that said, you know, based on your neuroscience research and your brain scan studies, what do you think is the fastest way to eliminate mental stress?
How yawning can make you score higher in tests and have a better performance
Mark Waldman: The fastest way to eliminate mental stress made us notorious when we came out with our book, How God changes your brain. I remember I was invited onto the Tavis Smiley television program and he look at me he said, ”Mark, all I needed to do was to yawn a bunch of times and I would have aced all of my all of my studies in class.” And the answer is ”Yes.”
We actually set up an experiment at Pierce College out here in Southern California. We had a bunch of students do three minutes of yawning before taking a test, because many people have test anxiety, and a bunch of people just sat there and did nothing. We found out that if you do nothing for three minutes, or you do yawning for three minutes, these students went from a C to a B, and a B to an A. And if they did not take that break to just be quiet for a moment or to do active yawning their grades would not change. So we could, we went back and forth doing it was really an amazing study so we now have about 42 documented studies showing that yawning is the fastest way to eliminate neurological stress.
So, here we are looking at stress as there is so much energy, so much metabolic energy going on, you are doing so much thinking which is just taking place up here in your frontal lobes.
Let’s say I was going to take this object here and I was going to try to balance it on my hand. The amount of focus and mental concentration that I need and how I have to learn how to get feedback from my motor cortex, to my frontal lobes, to my visual cortex to get this to balance, any of you who have done a particular performance activity like this will know, that if you are a beginner, in the beginning, in five or ten minutes you can just feel exhausted and then when you feel exhausted you start getting cranky, irritable, anxiety, you start, you cannot focus as well.
So here is what we found out, and we found it out because it is something that every mammal and many other living organisms do, and birds will do as well when they are under mental stress. They simply yawn. So what I want you to do, because as you know Ari, most of the people who follow me know, I will always answer a question with a question and then give you an experience so that you have a sense of what I am talking about.
I do not want you to come away from this brief webinar with a bunch of more intellectual information. That is just more mental stress.
[Exercise] Use mindful yawns to remove anxiety
So here is what I like you to do Ari and everyone who is watching this to do it with me. I want you to yawn just three times. But I do not want you just to do a regular yawn which does not involve much consciousness, I want you to do a mindful yawn. Meaning, I want you to pay close attention to what happens when you yawn. Now, if you do not feel like yawning you can fake one by just taking a breath in and then going (lets out a deep sigh) as you exhale. And because yawning is contagious, and since Ari and I are going to be yawning together, you are going to find that this is going to neurologically trigger a yawn.
And the same thing happens with packs of wild animals. One animal yawn, the other animals will begin to yawn in unison and this is actually a way where all of the brains in the community are beginning to align themselves with each other. And they are aligning themselves because they are turning off all the noisy thinking, a stressful activity that is going on in your mind right now.
Let us begin and let us yawn, and then stop for a moment and just pay attention, just notice if you notice any change in your mental clarity or awareness, if your mood has changed at all. If you do not notice anything, that is fine, because now I want you to do a second mindful yawn.
Ready? Again – and keep yawning – let us do about five or six of these. All I am asking you to do is after you yawn your attention to pay attention to what is changing in your awareness, in your mind and your emotions.
All right.
The results of doing the yawning exercise
Now, just be still for a moment and just observe, without judgment, paying attention Ari how would you describe your change in consciousness or mood?
Ari Whitten: Uh, like a, you know, there is always this sort of baseline level of anxiety that I have and then you know you get in front of the camera you are recording live, and so you have, you know, an extra layer of anxiety on top of it. And for me, it is like hitting the reset button. You know, you hit the reset button and then you just kind of go back down to the low level of anxiety, and all these little layers that get built up kind of disappear, and you kind of just reset back to a calmer, lower stress state.
Mark Waldman: So, those are all vague words. Let me make it more materialistic, more specific. Were you having more or less thoughts?
Ari Whitten: Less.
Mark Waldman: Okay, and so everyone who is watching this, take a moment too. Now, you may find that you cannot stop yawning because one of the things yawning does is that it actually makes you aware of how much mental and physical stress you are walking around with. So any time during this presentation, if you feel the desire to yawn, keep doing so, because this is your brain’s way of telling you have been really overstressed.
And some people cannot stop yawning for about 20 minutes.
What anxiety is from a neurological perspective
Anxiety from a neurological perspective, is racing thoughts, endless thoughts, ”What if this?” ”I need to get that done.” ”What is going to happen if I do not get this done?” ”I do not have everything organized.” ”Oh, I am running out of time.” ”Oh, I am really excited.” It does not matter what the thoughts are, but the more they start speeding, that is what is the experience of mental anxiety. Too many thoughts going.
The benefits of yawning
So what yawning does is that it lowers the blood flow metabolism, it is lowering the energy in your brain, particularly in your frontal lobes. Your brain is becoming less active. Less active, less thoughts. Less thoughts, less anxiety.
The other thing that it will do if you want to take another yawn. Notice that it brings you into the present moment. Now that you do not have all these busy thoughts that you are paying attention to. If you yawn and you are just still, I am hearing my dog snoring here in the background over here, that is my phone chirping over here, and as long as you do not turn back on your thinking mechanisms you can begin to take all of these sounds: the fan, the background noises it becomes like a symphony. And this is called mindfulness, this is called being mindfully aware of being in the present moment.
How to incorporate mindfulness into your busy workday
Just taking 60 seconds to yawn, and to be in the present moment, and to notice that your thoughts have quieted down and that your mood may have become a little more calmer. That is all you have to do. Once or twice an hour to eliminate anxiety for the next 20 30 40 minutes of work.
So we asked all of our students, all of our managers, when I go into corporate environments and we do these training programs, to download the mindfulness clock onto your computer or your cell phone. Set it to go off three times an hour.
First 20 minutes, and you hear that bell sound, like this, just take six seconds and do one yawn.
Next time, when you hear that bell sound, do another yawn or maybe a very slow stretch.
Then, at the top of the hour when you hear that third bell, take a moment and just take a break from your work. Do something pleasurable do a meditation, run around the block for 60 seconds, feel the feeling of going washing your hands with cold water, and just absorb yourself into all of these sensations.
Why the 60-second mindfulness breaks are more effective than the 20-40 minutes meditation
These 60-second mindfulness breaks once an hour if you do that throughout the entire day, it will have a greater effect than if you were an experienced meditator doing 20 minutes in the morning, and 20 minutes in the evening. Because you have just learned how to integrate a calm relaxed focus neutral framework into your busy workday.
Ari Whitten: Say that again, because it is so important that I want that to sink in with people. Do the comparison again with the experienced meditator. I just want this to sink in, say it one more time.
Mark Waldman: Many people have been taught to do 20 minutes or 40 minutes of meditation and so you sit there for 20 minutes. Maybe you are going ohm, ohm, ohm, ohm, ohm maybe you are just watching your breathing it is very annoying, it takes a long time, and like I said if you have a busy day there is always going to be something going on in the back.
So we have found that it is actually faster to teach somebody how to become an advanced meditator if we only ask you to do one mindful breath a day. That is a commitment that was created by one of the leaders of Google who wrote a book called, Search inside of yourself, just make a commitment to do one mindful breath today. It takes about six seconds to just breathe in, notice the sensations through your nose, and breathe out.
Just that little tiny pause brings you back into the present moment, stress levels can be measured, we can see that the metabolic flow and energy has gone down, less mental stress. Less mental stress, you are now capable when you throw yourself back into a doing a task or doing a goal, you will have more energy, you will have more focus, you will be able to concentrate better. Stress levels go down, work performance goes up.
But, in 10 or 15 or 20 minutes you are going to get stressed out again up here, that is why we are saying so you can use a mindfulness talk to just train yourself two or three times an hour, something that is relaxing, something that is centering, something that eliminates mental stress, to eliminate physical stress, do anything that is pleasurable for one minute each hour.
Stress levels go down, work productivity goes up.
We have been doing this experiment and this exercise with our Executive MBA students for eight years now. We simply have them do these simple 60-second strategies and we ask then ”Do that affect your work day?” 80 to 95% every year says, ”stress levels went down, work productivity goes up. Thank you, I am going to use this for the rest of my life because I am making more money.”
Ari Whitten: Awesome, I love it. So that is mental stress, right?
Mark Waldman: Yes.
Ari Whitten: So there is a distinction between mental stress…
Mark Waldman: We have taken care of this part.
Ari Whitten: Okay so mental stress versus physical stress. So the mind-body basically.
Mark Waldman: Right.
Ari Whitten: Mental stress. Yawning. Single most powerful, single fastest way to eliminate mental stress.
Mark Waldman: That is what we have found so far from the research.
How to remove physical stress
Ari Whitten: Cool so what about physical stress? Is there a difference between them? And is there a more powerful way or a faster way to eliminate physical stress?
Mark Waldman: Well I am going to ask you a question. You know what my answer is about to be, but before you knew what my answer was going to be since you are one of the world’s leading experts in physical conditioning and everything else. What would you have in the past recommended? What is the fastest way to eliminate a physical tension, and muscle aches and pains?
Ari Whitten: Well, I make a distinction between two kinds of movement.
So, there is movement that is like intense exercise movement designed to generate, you know, sort of a metabolic stress and generate, you know, adaptations. And then, there is something called, that I call gentle rejuvenating movement or regenerative movement, and you know that that includes things like walking, things like stretching, things like yoga, especially movement that incorporates mindfulness or breathing into it.
Why the general stretching advice is causing more harm than good when you have pain
Mark Waldman: So I am gonna play devil’s advocate with you right now because I have had chronic back pain and neck pain for about 10 or 15 years. So even if I do treadmill or walk that is longer than 15 minutes I can be in a lot of pain…
Ari Whitten: Okay.
Mark Waldman: …uh in my body for the rest of the day and I have been practicing mindfulness for 35 years, so that hasn’t worked for me for that one.
Ari Whitten: Okay.
Mark Waldman: So, it caused me a lot of pain. So let us just say, ”Well, alright I have got a lot I have got a lot of neck stress and tension right now Ari, what is the fastest way for me to get rid of that?
Ari Whitten: That is, that is a good question. So, I mean the way I would explain it, I want to, do not want to digress too much here, but the way I would explain it is, everyone a different threshold where movement becomes a stressor or becomes regenerative. So, you know, some people may have to go even more gentle, even shorter, even less intense, in terms of the type of physical activity to make it more rejuvenating to the point where it might just be gentle stretching.
Mark Waldman: So, I am going to be that CEO this busy company because I do not know all the words, Ari. Tell me, tell me, and tell me in 20 words or whatever else what should I do to get rid of this, this neck pain right now.
Ari Whitten: Just roll your neck around, do a little neck stretching.
Mark Waldman: Like that?
Ari Whitten: Yeah, that is that is pretty good, it could be better, but…
Mark Waldman: Here is what the neuroscience shows.
Ari Whitten: Okay.
Mark Waldman: I just caused more physical stress and pain in my neck. Yeah. So this is a, this is why the second technique has really moved to the whole front of one of the things that we are trying to teach the entire world about. The yawning is the fastest way to do this.
[Exercise] Stretching to eliminate pain
But here is what I want you to do, and what I want all of our viewers to do. If I ask you to slowly just do one rotation of your neck, okay. How long would you normally do that slow rotation? Everyone at home, see how long, how many seconds to spend rolling your head? Alright, so everyone does that, like that. That is about four seconds, right? One, two, three, four.
Here is what I want you to do now I am going to give you the experience first, and I think you will understand what happens. I want you to do just one single rotation of your head, but I want you to take a full 60 seconds doing it. So you are doing it so slowly, it is only this super slow motion that allows you to become aware about those little tiny aches and pains.
The slower you do anything the more aware you become. It is that awareness that allows your brain to send a relaxation signal to your muscle. So, how did that feel Ari?
Ari Whitten: Significantly different. Definitely much more relaxing. So you are saying, you know, beyond the distinction that I made between more intense and less intense movement, there is this other distinction of the slowness and the degree of mindfulness that you incorporate into.
How slow stretching will lower stress
Mark Waldman: The slower you move. So if you do the super slow twist, you will feel more aches and pains, and perhaps more pleasure, than if you do it fast. Awareness is the slowest part of our brain. What we are conscious of up here, is a very slow moving process but we do too many things too fast. Now, if you think this is kind of odd, and silly, or whatever else, so you keep saying, ”What do you mean, do you want me to go around the whole day, Mark doing super slow stretches and a bunch of yawns or whatever else.”
I am going to ask you a question. All of you who have dogs and cats, or watched animals in nature, or birds. What is the very first thing they all do the moment they wake up?
Ari Whitten: Downward dog.
Mark Waldman: Yeah. They are going to do, and do they do it fast? No! And when they are doing this kind of stretch, if you do this kind of stretch very slowly, they are actually, they are never pushing themselves into their pain, they are pushing themselves into the pleasure that can be experienced right prior to the pain.
So Feldenkrais came up with this type of discovery way back in the 1970’s, and we have now have brain studies to show that this really works. The slower you do something, the more you explore and observe the painful stretches in your body, and the pleasurable sensations as well. If you were to roll your head now there’s been a couple minutes since then, you are going to feel hardly any of the aches and pains that you felt five minutes ago. And this kind of relaxation in your neck will be there 20 minutes from now.
So imagine that a single mindful yawn is enough to reduce neurological stress and tension. Still too fast Ari.
Ari Whitten: Yeah sorry, I am getting back into interview mode. So that is right, I realized I was going too fast but you, it is hard when I am trying to be a good interviewer and do your exercises at the same time in multitasking.
How spending too much time in a deeply mindful state will cause your mind to tap into problem-solving mode
Mark Waldman: Right, and if you spend too much time in this deeply mindful state, what happens is that you will start tapping into the creative centers of your brain. Your mind will start to wander, you will begin to see almost like a daydreaming kind of scenario unfolding and in school we were always told, ”Do not do that, stay concentrated.”
But it is that mind wandering daydreaming state where your brain is creatively solving problems in this own way, much deeper, different than the way we analytically solve problems up here. So this is what, this is called brain-based experiential learning and it is as part of our model that we teach in our MBA program.
We want you to when you are in school when you are studying when you are learning something new, whether it is in sports, whether it is an education if you are a therapist, how do you stay in the present moment with no physical or mental or stress? Yes, just take a moment.
We teach this the neurosurgeons before going into the operating room. We will have them yawn a few times, we will have them do a very super slow stretch, they come into the present moment. We have them do a few other things to upgrade their sense of awareness and positivity and then they can go through that 10-hour surgery with far less stress and anxiety. And sometimes they will even do it during it.
And so, we have started several pilot programs on hospitals to improve how oncologists and how doctors deal in very stressful situations, and you keep yourself mentally aware and awake, mentally less stressed out physically relaxed, and now there is more of your mind and brain and consciousness and awareness to accomplish any goal that you want or solve problems far more effectively.
Why you should use your intuition when it comes to stretching
Ari Whitten: Beautiful, I love it. So is the neck roll the main type of super, super slow stretch that you would recommend doing to eliminate physical stretch, or is there are other stretches is it any stretch?
Mark Waldman: We encourage creativity and to use your intuition. So you can experiment around with any kind of movement. The brain loves it whenever you do something that is new and different. So do not get into the habit of doing the same kind of mental activity, physical activity, or spiritual activity, in the same way.
If you keep repeating the same mantra over and over and over again, the brain gets bored with it, ignores it, and you end up getting very little, you see hardly any changes going on in the brain at all.
Any time you do something new, something that is a different kind of stretch than you have ever stretched before and this is how I got rid of 15 years of chronic pain. I would simply begin to explore moving my back around and as I felt, when I found I place a pain, now I would yawn I just become aware of it I would explore, I would allow that pain to be there and I would notice that the next time I moved into that position, the pain would be gone. Where did it go?
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Mark Waldman: And so, over about three months period of time I have been able to keep myself rather pain-free by mindfully I exploring my body’s movement, and I think what is happening is that I am beginning to learn, I am probably moving my body unconsciously throughout the day in ways that are very stressful and are causing pain to be there.
So that is why mindfulness is become such an important strategy in psychotherapy, in physical therapy, in dealing with past traumas, and improving mood, happiness, well-being. And increasing work productivity and mindfulness simply means allowing myself to be aware of what is happening in the present moment whether it is my thoughts, my feelings, the physical sensations in my body, or even being aware – this is what we called social mindfulness – I can begin to watch your face as I speak I can allow myself to take in all of your facial expressions and then when you are talking.
If I intuitively allow myself to listen to all the subtleties in the tone of your voice, and all the richness in the facial expressions. This is where my brain will, actually, begin to attune itself to neurologically resonate to the activity in your brain. That form of neural resonance is what we call empathy, that is how I actually get the semblance of how you are thinking and feeling. It is not through the words.
Ari Whitten: Awesome. So we have covered from here up, and we have covered from here down.
Mark Waldman: on the physical level. So just, one mindful yawn, one mindful stretch. At least just do one an hour if you can. But if you can not even do that, how about just one a day?
We are saying, ”start it out as little as possible, and you are going to feel a sense of pleasure, mental pleasure, and physical pleasure. And that will motivate your brain to do more of it because your brain is basically pain/ pleasure mechanism. It wants to have as much pleasure as possible and will move the organism – your body, you – towards that object of pleasure and away from anything that is painful.
One a day is enough to start with
Ari Whitten: Beautiful. So how often so at least one time of day is there a best time of day or certain frequency?
Mark Waldman: That is why I am saying, try putting a mindfulness clock on your computer or cell phone. That is free. Start out setting it to ring three times an hour. If it drives you nuts, set it to ring twice an hour. If it still drives you nuts, set it to ring once an hour. It will go off and you will hear that bell in the background, and you will be working busily, you can say, ”I do not wanna listen to that noise. Okay, I am going to give it a try, wherever else, all right.”
And what you will find, is that if you actually take a full 60 seconds – I mean you can even run in place, you can do anything that is pleasurable, you can even stroke your palms of your hands for 60 seconds that sense of pleasure immediately gets rid of all of this mental stress. And the pleasure releases dopamine from your nucleus accumbens. It actually moves into your frontal lobe consciousness. It makes you more awake, more aware, and more desirous to do any of the things that you are doing, even if the things that you are doing feels crummy.
So now, the yawning, and the stretching, and the mindfulness bell, and all these simple 60-second meditations become your reward. ”Great, I am going to really work my butt off over this next half hour to an hour, and I am going to reward myself with something really pleasurable that only takes 10 to 60 seconds to do. And that is how we can get an entire corporation to do that.
Ari Whitten: Nice. I dig it. Yeah, every everything in our modern world has got to be fast paced. 60 seconds or less, otherwise nobody has time for it, right?
Mark Waldman: Yes. So what I am saying, we can do that. Yet the old notion was no you have to do, I have to go off and live in a cave for ten years if you are going to learn how to become enlightened. Fair enough, you might not be a kafir. You could become enlightened for ten seconds once an hour is good enough.
Ari Whitten: I love it. So is, so we talked about mental stress and physical stress. What about anxiety? How does anxiety fit into this picture? Is it, is it different than from mental stress and physical stress?
[Exercise] How to stop anxiety when it emerges
Because I know, you know, if I am anxious I feel it is very much intertwined with mental stress it is also, it also feels intertwined with physical stress. I know my breathing gets shallower, might, you know, I’ll start to hold tension in certain parts of my body. So, how does anxiety specifically fit into all of this and is there a better way to deal with anxiety specifically, or is it the same thing as the last couple things we talked?
Mark Waldman: I am going to teach you and everyone the fastest way to eliminate mental anxiety.
Ari Whitten: Okay.
Mark Waldman: But this is going to require both you and I to lift up our hands like this
Ari Whitten: Okay.
Mark Waldman: When you run out of fingers you must stop talking.
Ari Whitten: Okay, so that is one word okay. I get it now.
Mark Waldman: Tell me in 10 words, what is anxiety?
Ari Whitten: Well… Well, you explained this earlier – I am gonna run out of words
Mark Waldman: But then you just stop and let me talk.
Ari Whitten: Ok, perfect. Excessive mental chatter would be my definition.
Mark Waldman: That is the best neurological definition of anxiety I have heard in years. This is called this is called the 10-10 game.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Mark Waldman: But in business meetings, if you insist upon a 20-word-20 second rule, you will solve problems remarkably.
Ari Whitten: Why is that?
Mark Waldman: When you are doing this, what change happens in your mind?
Ari Whitten: You slow down and become mindful of what you are saying.
Mark Waldman: Thought processes are extraordinarily fast and endless. Consciousness, however, can only hold four to seven chunks of information in your mind.
How to communicate effectively
Ari Whitten: Aha, so how does, how does that, so how does that relate to anxiety? How does, how does that figure into?
Mark Waldman: This strategy originally grew out of how to improve effective communication. What we discovered, is that in communication the other person’s mind is only going to be able to grasp about four or seven of your words. And then it does all kinds of things non-consciously. If we try to put words to our thought processes, we ourselves will get lost in an endless jumble that is going on. It is one of the least effective ways to think, but nobody has ever taught anybody how to think until the last few years. So again, we are applying mindfulness of the communication process. What is the experience of a single sentence? Because you have reduced the number of words, not only have you increase listener comprehension, but you force yourself not to have all this internal chatter going on all the time.
The internal chatter of your left and right prefrontal cortex
That is what is causing, that is what meddlings ideas- and here is an interesting thing we have discovered about thought process anxiety, okay? This side of your prefrontal cortex in the area over here tends to be kind of a pessimist. It is a worrywart. ”Well, what if this?” ”You know, I am running out of time,” and it is still growing. It is kind of sitting there just worrying and fretting and having doubts about everything.
This side, the optimist, almost an impulsive thing ”oh, I can do this.” ”I am going to do that when the chapter there whatever else” and so you can imagine what happens for example if you are trying to lose weight and here you are you are, sitting in front of a great big bowl of ice cream. This side is going, ”yes! That is pleasure!” And all the memories are going ”yes” at this pleasure more, and more, and more. And this side is going, ”you are going to add 500 pounds to you if you eat that, whatever else.” ”this is bad for you!” ”you are pre-diabetic” ”you are going to DIE!!!” ”I want the pleasure, I want the pleasure.” ”no! You are going to die, you are going to die!”
Again, so this is what is normally going on…
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
How realistic negative thinking can cause anxiety
Mark Waldman: And we are not aware that there is this positive and negative chatter going on, all the time. So again, we have to mindfully learn how to listen to our thought processes. This is all the anxiety side over here, but there is another form of anxiety. If you try to listen to everything you are just going to feel overwhelmed.
So it is true.
You have five minutes left, and you know you have 20 minutes of work that has to get done. You cannot complete your task, so you know you are going to fail. The failure creates a sense of disappointment.
How to interrupt negative thinking and anxiety
You really have to learn how to interrupt even realistic negative thinking. You have to create what is called a positivity ratio, you have to be able to generate five positive thoughts for every negative thought or feeling you have where you are going to end up being chronically depressed.
Ari Whitten: How do you do that?
Mark Waldman: First you have got to slow your thinking process down. If you are not talking to somebody, pick up a pen and write it down, make sure that whatever sit there, and actually, you can make a list the mindful list of what all of your thoughts.
So, the formal practice of mindfulness was again to – and we added the yawning and stretching because you can get into a meditation or mindfulness state much faster if you have no mental or physical stress – so you take a moment, yawn, stretch, relax.
Now, watch how your thoughts emerge, or your feelings – just sit there and observe – and you will see this particular thought will come up. If I was to do this right now, I am feeling my breath, I am hearing the fan. I am wondering ”Am I spending too much time and is this
Interview going too long?” And then back to my breath. ”gee, I think this is a good interview.” Well, there I am judging that we can let that go. Here is my breathing again, and so we are slowly teaching ourselves that we can watch our thoughts. That also slows down the thought process.
What happens is that, because we are so used to ”oh, I have been a worrier all my life so I am constantly fretting, and how am I going to get this book done?” And it becomes a habit. So the more you do any kind of positive or negative mental activity, or positive or negative behavior – I mean, if I am just habitually always overeating, I have created in the deeper part of my learning center of my brain an automatic behavior – so we train our brains to form habits and behaviors. Then they can be good or they can be bad, and they operate outside of consciousness.
Now, if we want to change a bad behavior, we are going to have to watch that behavior. So again, we have to slow everything down. See how I am saying, slowness, super slowness is the key to everything. We are going to watch and observe without judgment.
So the fastest way to interrupt anxiety is to actually increase pleasure. And this is where we come up with the third thing the most mammals and birds will do after they have yawned and stretched. They are going to do something else as well. They are going to start to preen themselves.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Mark Waldman: [inaudible] Well actually, they are lowering anxiety levels. So, you know, dogs, for example, have all kinds of tics and OCD behavior. They are just like they are just like human beings and they are doing that to soothe themselves, it is self-soothing, they are self-medicating through pleasure.
And so we found if you take a few minutes – try it right now – begin to slowly explore the feelings on your fingertips and then explore the sides of your fingers. Again, remember the slower you go, the more you are going to feel. So, nobody brings in that important part, that if the slower you go, the more you feel. And you cannot go too slow. See with us, I see how absolutely slow you can go stroking just one finger, and the slower you go, the more you will discover.
Then if you stroke the palms of your hand find different ways of squeezing, touching, stroking your hands, your fingers, even your face, and you will notice that when you find an area in a way of creating self-pleasurable stimulation.
Notice that you are having no thoughts going on at all, and you are certainly having absolutely no anxiety-driven thoughts.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Mark Waldman: So again, the brain is pain/pleasure. Anxiety is unpleasant. So if you are feeling anxious slow down, yawn, stretch, do something pleasurable.
People with traumatic experiences, people who have gone through cancer, sometimes they have difficulty falling asleep at night. They are actually afraid that they will wake up dead -which I do not think actually happens from a neuroscientific perspective – but we asked them to give themselves a self-massage before going to bed. And many people will say, ”that is the best night’s sleep I have ever had.”
Ari Whitten: Wow!
Mark Waldman: So we are looking for these little simple things that you can add to whatever ritual, you have whatever regimen you have, whatever style lifestyle that you have, just add some yawning, stretching, 60 seconds of pleasure once each hour that eliminates anxiety.
Ari Whitten: Yeah. I love it. I mean, it is, they are such simple little things you would think that you know, ”oh that cannot possibly be powerful.” ”Yawning?” You know, ”just little stretch here and there or rubbing my fingers or something like that.” And yet, what you are saying is these simple actions are, you know, the most powerful way to eliminate mental stress, to eliminate physical stress, to interrupt anxiety.
I mean this is really, really good stuff. I love it! So…
How believing our negative thoughts can cause anxiety
Mark Waldman: One more thing I want to add to this though, there is another form of anxiety which is caused by the fact that we tend to believe our thoughts.
In other words, we are worried that, you know, ”I am worried I am going to lose all of my money. Maybe the stock market will fail again. Many people after 2008 who made millions of dollars lost it all, they were high rollers they put all their money in houses that collapsed and everything else.”
They never find the motivation again to jump back into work that they used to love doing, because in the back of their mind there is the thought, ”well it happened once before, it is going to happen again.”
Well, statistically speaking that is true. But if you believe that thought – and we are always projecting thoughts about what is going to happen in the future – if you believe in that, you could run into trouble if you are believing in your negative thoughts.
So mental anxiety requires mindfulness training on how to begin to watch those anxious thoughts, how to interrupt them, how to replace negative thoughts with positive thoughts, how to increase that positivity ratio, and how that usually – you know, I am a neuro-coach, so I work with people internationally. When you really get stuck, I will guide you through these strategies in this way. I will be keeping this very deeply relaxed state and then we will go into that crazy mind of yours. We will explore how those things are, where those fears and fantasies are.
And then, I will just ask you to ask your intuition. One, is this really happening in the present moment? The answers almost always, ”no.” Do you really believe this is true? And sometimes it is the first time a person says ”oh, wait, I am just I am reliving my past, and I have forgotten it is part of the past” so we are still using these very simple strategies to bring them into, and modify, and change traditional psychotherapy so that neural coaching can solve virtually anybody’s problem in about three sessions
Ari Whitten: Yeah, that is a pretty big contrast to traditional psychoanalysis, I would say.
Mark Waldman: Yes, because you are, you are being taught what to do with your thoughts and feelings when you walk out of the therapy room.
[Exercise] The fastest way to eliminate negativity
Ari Whitten: Yeah, beautiful. I love it. So let us get into my personal favorite of all the stuff I have learned from you, which is what is the fastest way to eliminate negativity?
Mark Waldman: Meditate on your C.R.A.P.
Ari Whitten: All right, so explain what that means. I know what you mean but explain to everybody else what that means.
Mark Waldman: One time I was, I had, I was invited out to Texas to give literally something like 12 to 16 talks and workshops in like four days. I mean, I did not even know what town I was in. It was so fast or whatever. It was incredibly succ, it was incredibly successful, it was, it was a wonderful experience.
I got back onto the airplane to fly back home, and I found myself feeling depressed. Like my thoughts were, you know, ”why bother, my life is worthless.” Me, I am going, ”Jesus Christ! After 15 years of psychoanalysis, five years of mindfulness based cognitive theory, everything else, here I am right back” and this, you know, this is about, this is about 10 years ago. And I said, ”this is unbelievable to me.” I took out a sheet of paper, and I just decided to write down all of my C.R.A.P.py thoughts. I wrote down all night, and I used C.R.A.P as I do not know what word right now, you know, it stands for Conflicts, Resistances, Anxieties, and Problems that you have, and I made a list of all those things, ”I am no good, I do not make enough money, I am not attractive enough, it is all gonna fall apart, I have this health problem.” I put it all on the sheet of paper and I was too tired then. I had all of this C.R.A.P. written down here on my sheet of paper here. I just sat there and I decided to, ”I am just going to yawn, and stretch, and mindfully look at all the things I wrote down.”
And if you do this, if you create a C.R.A.P. board – what we found out since that time, is that the brain, when you take all of the things are worried about and put it down on a piece of paper, the brain is kind of funny when it has stuff of it worries about, it does not want to forget about what it is worrying about, because if you push it out of your mind then you are going to make a mistake, and forget to do this, or this, or this. If you put it down on the piece of paper this comes like a second hard drive, and your brain knows that all your problems are on that sheet of paper, you are now free to go back to work.
Once you put them all down on your sheet of paper, I do not want you to immerse yourself in the things on the list. I want you to, again, look at the list yawn, and stretch, relax, and just observe them. You look at the words, and the more you look at the words on that piece of paper, the more they lose their meaning. So, here is what we are using repetition and you begin to see that they are just words on the piece of paper – and suddenly on the plane, all of my stress and anxiety fell away. And I found myself literally in a state of bliss that lasted for about three weeks
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Why the C.R.A.P. board is so powerful
Mark Waldman: We started to do some experiments and now there are about 25,000 people through facebook who have done the C.R.A.P. board and it is by far everybody’s most favorite exercise in the world. So, you take your C.R.A.P. board, you do not want to throw it away – and this is my actually my list of all the things I have to get done today – if I throw it way, my mind’s gonna go crazy, ”am I going to forget something?” So this is time management, and you can manage your anxiety, and your C.R.A.P., and your negativity, in the same way, make a list of all your creativity.
Now, when you are looking at something that is negative – let us pick something that is really true for me. I have three medical problems going on with one of my eyes, I could lose my eye vision and everything else. This drove me nuts for a good year, I mean almost, you know, it is our kind of work, affecting my work, and business, and everything else. Finally, had enough and I put down all my worries about my eye am a piece of paper. And then I would do something very interesting. I would begin to do something pleasurable while I looked at something terrible happening. This is causing neuro dissonance. How can I feel pleasure about losing my eyeball? Well, what it does, it just interrupts chronic negativities.
Many of us are negative, and we are not aware that we are being negative. So, by having it on a sheet of paper and by doing any of these relaxation or mindfulness exercises, you will begin to see your negativity in a new way. There will be distance between your mind, and the thoughts are on the paper. And the most beautiful thing about sitting there and watching your thoughts, whether it be positive or negative, is that the more you wash your thoughts, the more you begin to become aware that you are not your thoughts.
That is a mind-blowing experience, ”oh… No… My brain is thinking. I am NOT my thoughts, because I,” -which is, actually takes place back here in your parietal lobe is literally watching your thoughts.
Ari Whitten: Yeah.
Why the cognitive function is not as clear as we think it is
Mark Waldman: ”oh well, what is this ’I’ about?” Well then, ”I” turns out to be very calm most of the times – what some people call the observing self. So of course, I am curious, so I will start to watch my eye. ”oh really? Well, who is this observing self, sitting there watching it kind of like my own visual the inner gurus? Oh… Wait a minute, who is this person that is watching my guru?” Suddenly the whole brain collapses.
This is when the cognitive functioning gets overwhelmed. This part our awareness, this limited view of consciousness, does not see the world as clearly as we think it does. And so, when you get into some of these more deeper meditation practices that we have been doing brain scans studies on, when you are doing chanting, and heavy breathing, and channeling, and all the wonderful things that we put into our last book, something very interesting happens. Frontal lobe activity again drops. Your ability to think it is turned off. You can turn off your thinking and still, have awareness.
Now, this is amazing. And yes, we mapped out six different levels of human consciousness or awareness that we have. You can learn how to keep shifting yourself back and forth. A relaxed state of awareness is different than a concentrated form of task-oriented gold standard activity. That is different from just being creative and mind wandering and having fun. And so, we begin to realize that our brain has many discrete levels of functioning.
Can we become aware of them, and then learn how to manipulate, and move them through? Yes!
What the experiential exercises and workshops are about
So, that is what all of our experiential exercises and workshops are about.
How to train the person to become aware of negative thinking, how to become aware of positive thinking, how to manipulate those negative thoughts, how to turn down activity in that side of the brain, how to increase the optimism centers in this part of the brain, how to tap into your creative aspects of your brain, how to watch them in a way that provide you with insights. Aha experiences beginning to see how you are actually functioning in the world. And we find that when you do those five or six strategies that I just lay it out life becomes more meaningful it becomes more fun you are engaged in discovering one basic human fact: we do not have a clue what we are doing on this planet. And when you are aware of that, suddenly we take a much greater interest in what we are doing. We are doing the same old boring job, but we realize we are not even aware of what we are doing when we watch that boring job in this mindful way, and the boring job becomes interesting.
That is how we help people increase their work career, move them out of a financial situation, show them how to take this job that is become repetitious and boring and move into something that is new and exciting. I have written and published 14 books. Right now, it is just starting to become a habit. It is losing that excitement. So I am beginning to say, ”what can I do instead of that? Where do I go from here?” And this is how we are using our brain science to map out the simple strategies of what motivates us, what keeps us optimistic and alive, what helps us achieve the goals we desire, how do we make use of bringing more pleasure into our life – more mindfulness into our life. Can we document it and can we actually see that more people end up with less stress, more productivity, they are enjoying their lives more, we give them a battery of tests, and these are some of the happiest people in the world.
Ari Whitten: I love it. Yeah, and of course, people who are not stressed out and anxious, who are happy and positive people that absolutely correlates and corresponds to one subjective sense of vitality and energy. And it is literally, you know, in terms of the hormonal state that those emotions are bringing into your body it is literally putting your body into a state where your cells are going to work and produce energy better. So, I love it. Mark, thank you so much for this. I know you have to run in a couple minutes, I want to say a couple things really fast.
One is on the C.R.A.P. board, that has, just as far as my own personal experience, that has been one of the absolute most powerful things I have ever done. I have studied meditation and mindfulness for years, and years, you know, all sorts of esoteric Eastern religious stuff, and yoga, and by far, you know, that exercise – what you would think would be the last thing to be the most beneficial the most powerful thing – that was the most powerful thing I have ever done. And, you know, I, when I did that originally when I actually sat down to write out all of my conflicts, my resistances, my anxieties, my problems, I was blown away by how much I actually wrote down on that paper. Really, I needed to flip the paper over and keep writing a list of more and more stuff. There was such a profound release and lowering of anxiety for me when I just put it all out on the paper and I could just look at it. And it really likes, I mean, it is not metaphorical it really takes the stuff out of your brain and puts it somewhere else so that your brain is not constantly wrapped up in those.
How to tackle the real problems on your C.R.A.P. board
Mark Waldman: as long as you stay in a deeply relaxed contemplative mindful state when you do that. Otherwise, you have got, you some people believe that all that C.R.A.P. is real and says, ”wow that is a bunch of C.R.A.P. and sometimes some of the things on the C.R.A.P. board are real problems.
So, when you identify the three or four things out of the 50 things you wrote down, then take that piece of the serious problem instead of, you know, and turn it into a problem, if it is a problem. Your brain is designed to find solutions. Take out a piece of paper and write down three possible things you can do to help solve some part of that problem. Write it down, because the writing is again, essential to creating, to stimulate the goal oriented center, and then charge yourself by the end of the day – just take a look and reflect on the three things you did well that day. If you did that for seven days.
How reflecting on your successes at the end of the day can improve self-esteem
Research shows – this is what put positive psychology on the map – that your self-esteem continues to increase for the next three months.
Ari Whitten: Wow.
Mark Waldman: Imagine doing that at the end of the day for the next month. Just three things you have done well that day, that you feel grateful for, that you are positive, and that is another way of training your brain. You have identified your C.R.A.P., you use these techniques to neutralize, and you realize that half of the C.R.A.P. on your paper is just a fantasy in the first place. There are some problems, we have solved that and now we are going to continually reward ourselves by reminding ourselves how successful we have been throughout the day. We have a hundred tiny success, as a thousand tiny successes every day. You and I are successful right now. We are breathing, I am sitting here, the lighting is – these are all successes – it has been a great talk. If we savor all of those successes, the few negative things that we have, lose their weight. That is that 5 to 1 positivity ratio that I was talking about.
And of course, all of these are the exercises that are in the audio program neurowisdom 101. So I take you through the C.R.A.P. board, show you how to do it while you are in this deeply relaxed state.
Ari Whitten: Absolutely, and by the way. The three things at the end of the day that went well that day, and just being bringing yourself at – I do it at night every night before I go to bed – just bringing yourself into that state of gratitude, absolutely one hundred percent you know, I can speak to, both me and my girlfriend, it has absolutely changed our brains and rewired us towards positivity and gratitude and it has actually improved our relationship too. Just how that change in how you see the world and being more conscious of appreciating things, and being grateful, and being positive about things. It has such wide-reaching consequences and side effects. So…
Mark Waldman: And this is not a new age woo. Everything that I have been sharing with you is based upon dozens of studies, and now we even have meta-analytic studies. Studies of the studies of the studies, how effective positivity and mindfulness is, and relaxation, and awareness can be to transform your life.
So these mindfulness based practices have now turned out to be the most successful ways of dealing with chronic anxiety and chronic depression as well.
Ari Whitten: I love it. So, just to recap super quickly. We covered the most effective way to eliminate mental stress, the most effective way to eliminate physical stress all based on the neuroscience. We covered most effective way to interrupt anxiety and increase pleasure. We covered the most powerful way to eliminate negativity, and how to rewire your brain for gratitude and increase your self-esteem.
Mark Waldman: Yes.
How to learn more about Mark Waldman’s work
Ari Whitten: So Mark, I cannot thank you enough. This is such amazing content, and I literally I mean that because I practice this stuff daily and I have seen the results in my own life. So I love it. Thank you so much for all of this.
For everybody watching this who wants to learn more about your work and, you know, just learn more about what you do and about all the other stuff, all your other aspects of the research that we did not talk about today, where can they find out more information about your books and your products?
Mark Waldman: You can go to www.markrobertwaldman.com for the audio program neurowisdom, you can go to neurowisdom.com. But also, if you go to my web page you will see up in the little corner as a little gift that I have for you all called, 10 mind-blowing discoveries about the human brain. Then you will love this, with number one is that The reality that you think you see, has nothing to do with the reality that is actually out there. And this is one of the biggest discoveries that we have made in our neuroscience research.
I think you will love that little ebook and it is at my, just go to www.markrobertwaldman.com and you can click on that, and you will get that ebook. And that will also, you can get weekly neuro tips from for me as well.
I like to add people to an email list and I will send you weekly neurotips and invite you into Q&A programs, and things like we are doing here.
So Ari, thank you so much for having me on your program.
Ari Whitten: Yeah, my pleasure. One last thing, for anyone that is dealing with severe depression or anxiety issues. I would also recommend you to do one-on-one neuro coaching with Mark himself. And just spend the time, you know, he can achieve amazing results in just two or three sessions. So if that is been a lifelong struggle of yours, if you are just always in stress, anxiety, depression mode and you are looking for a way out. I would really personally endorse Mark as someone to do that one-on-one coaching with.
Mark Waldman: Even if you have a particular problem, you are having a relationship conflict, or you are stuck in procrastination, or you are just feeling like you are not really living your life to the fullest, and really identified with your true meaning and purpose it really only these only take a couple sessions to do, and you can drop me an email to [email protected] or go to my website and there is a contact page that you can send me, and I will send you a brochure and a fascinating intake form that will help you discover yourself. You may not even need me after you do the intake form.
Ari Whitten: Awesome Mark, I love it. Thank you so much again, it has been a pleasure talking to you and I hope to talk to you again very soon.
Mark Waldman: As always, it has been a wonderful conversation. Thank you, Ari.
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