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Natalie Tysdal

Laura, it's a pleasure. And there are so many things I want to talk to you about today. I know we could go in a lot of different directions, but for the people that listen to this podcast, I think stress is one of the greatest problems we have. And it, as you are going to explain to us, leads to so many other issues, including weight gain, high blood pressure, you name it. So let's get to the root of you and your research and stress.

Laurel Mellin

What a great question. Actually, I spent 42 years at the University of California, San Francisco with the opportunity to figure out why we do what we do when we tell ourselves we won't do it, whether it's getting stressed out or anxious or overeating or drinking too much or whatever it is. And it turns out it's circuits in our emotional brain, our unconscious mind. Now you would probably say, you know, if you have an unconscious mind problem, you probably should go to a shrink. But at the university, we looked at it based on biology, based on essentially what is going on in your stress level. And it turns out you can rewire your own emotional brain to clear away the stress of the past and to spiral up out of today's stress in about one to three minutes just by using a very simple system we call emotional brain training to clear the stress and get back to a brain state of ultimate power and connection. We call that brain state one and you feel kind of a sense of joy inside, a glow in your body when you feel that way.

Natalie Tysdal 

Okay. You make it sound way too easy because we do. And I talk about, and I know it can be, and maybe that's the problem is we think we have to do so much to deal with our past and our everything else. But tell us what that looks like.

Laurel Mellin

What it looks like is, I mean, it's hard to imagine that it's this simple. And even people who are in EBT groups, emotional brain training groups, it takes them a while to figure out, oh, so I don't have to work so hard. I don't have to write down my food and I don't have to think positive thoughts. All I need to do is figure out my number. And so that's it. So essentially over the years, this was developed over more than 40 years. We started off with people just saying, how did they feel and what did they need?

And we realize that when people are in stress, they don't know how they feel and they don't know what they need because they're stressed out. So around 1980, we surpassed the ability of thinking and doing basically cognitive behavioral therapy to solve our stress problem and our health problems because there's just too much stress. And what happens is the brain downshifts from being able to think about things into the emotional brain, where if you want to clear stress, you must process emotions.

But it's not a matter of just saying, how do I feel? What do I need? There are five levels of stress in the brain. So this is a simple part. There are five levels of stress in the brain. When you're at low stress, feeling great and rewarded and a purpose, you're at brain state one and the thinking brain's on in charge. And then when you feel good, it goes down here. And then here, right around here, the limbic brain is involved. And then it goes down to the reptilian brain. So feeling great, feeling good, feeling a little stressed, definitely stressed and

stressed out. All you have to ask yourself for self -regulation, for immediate results, to turn off those chemicals that make you overeat or feel anxious, is you say, what's my number? And then you on the app use the emotional processing tool. It's emotions. You can't think your way out of an eating binge or drinking binge or an argument. Three, four, five, you apply it and within one to three minutes you get back to brain state one where chemically you feel at your best and you say,

What was I so upset about anyway?

Natalie Tysdal

Wow, okay, so tell me about, let's back up a little bit, because you have studied this, you have been a part of this, you've written books about this, and you are the expert in this. Tell me how you discovered this.

Laurel Mellin

I discovered it, you know, I'm, I don't like suffering in myself or anyone else. And I was suffering from binge eating and weight problems and, and I didn't know what to do about it. And so I became a nutritionist. I got a position, great faculty job at UCSF, and I began to work with an interdisciplinary team. And I tried to find the root cause of why I was overeating, what was going on with me.

and I was applying it to research on child obesity. What I did is I went into the literature, I knew that cognitive behavioral methods were not working. And there was this great study, always go to the library, the research, from a woman, Hildebrook, who was this tiny little lady who was a psychiatrist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. And she wrote that it was about emotional connection. And I was 28. And I said, oh, well, that's not a problem. I'll just teach emotional connection tools.

So I started doing it. And of course we researched it because we're scientists. And so we researched it and the results show that the kids stopped overeating. But what really impressed me is this mother. And you know how it is when you have children, your heart just bleeds for them. Whatever is going on, their pain is amplified in our own pain, right? And so this woman came up to me who was learning the skills with her daughter at the university. And she said, what did you do to my daughter?

She used to steal money from my purse to get food. She would go into the refrigerator and start hiding cookies. And she didn't want to do anything except watch television. And she says, now she wants to go out and play. And she doesn't care about the extra food. In that moment, the brain science to explain that would not be available for 25 years. But I knew I would devote my career to finding out what stopped her suffering. And it turned out that it was

the emotional brain that we were rewiring the stress response so people get back to that state of connection where chemically they're at their best and those chemical drives stop. And so it's easy to be happy, healthy and move forward with life. So that's the story. What can I say? One little girl changed my life.

Natalie Tysdal 

Wow, and it's interesting and fun to look back and think how those small moments turn out to be so huge in our lives and how it led to your career. Today, I see so many people who are stressed, who are maybe overeating, over drinking, all of that. And I do a lot of these interviews. I was a health reporter for many years. And we find ways obesity medications are the big hot new thing or different diets or different therapies. And do you think any of those work or is it really as simple as the emotional element?

Laurel Mellin

Actually, I love the fact that you said the emotional element. So let me just address that as well. So essentially, when I'm talking about using emotional tools, instantly everyone thinks psychology. Essentially, what is unknown and why this science is hidden in all these journals that no one ever reads is that it's the emotional circuits in your brain that determine your chemicals, your electricities, thoughts, your emotions, and your behaviors.

And if they have been wired for stress, you're going to through no fault of your own be triggered, be in chronic stress for the rest of your life really. It's the only reason we have emotional there is because it's the emotional brain and it requires emotional tools to change it. What I know is that all the methods that we work so hard and we, you know, we use nothing, you know, everything helps a little bit. But there's no question in the science that when you're thinking your way through it,

You're trying to change your behavior. You're trying to change your activities. This is all in your head, in your neocortex. And your neocortex has all these plans and has to do everything right. If you just let go of control, say it's really about the circuits in my emotional brain, these survival circuits that drive me to do things I keep doing over and over again, all I have to do is relax and trust my body and learn these tools where when I'm stressed, this is how magnificent this is. Ultimately, it's always about the circuit.

That is the science. We are our circuits. And we used to think that we had to go to a therapist to fix our circuits. We can actually identify and change the circuit. So let's say this. Let's say all of a sudden you find yourself overeating. In that moment, if you did an MRI of your brain or an fMRI and you tried to find the circuit that was causing you to overeat, it would not tell you the answer. However, you can do it naturally because in the moment,

that you are about to overeat or even later when you bring up a memory of having overeaten, the exact circuit that drives you to overeat is unlocked. The neurons are unlocked and it is open to change. You can't change a pattern unless you activate the circuit in stress. And what EBT allows you to do is in the moment or when you think about it later, oh, what did I just do? You bring up the thought, you essentially quickly process your emotions with these

Laurel Mellin

precise tools and in about three minutes you will get the message from your brain that is telling you why you overeat or over drink or get into arguments or have to be perfect or whatever it is and the circuits are open and if you give it a new message it will begin to change it. In the moment you'll feel better and then as you learn how to rewire and you hit that over and over again what happens is you automatically and spontaneously change. You don't have to work on it. You just essentially like stop

the overeating. Stop the people pleasing. Stop the perfections. Whatever you decide that you want to stop, the emotional brain training tools will give you the power and the support to change it.

Natalie Tysdal 

So let's talk about some of those specific things. You mentioned perfectionism, overeating. The list goes on and on, right? For a lot of people, they might not know, or give me your opinion on this, what the problem is. Like, do you think most people would identify, I'm a perfectionist? Or I'm, I mean, I think a lot of people don't know. They just know they're not happy.

Laurel Mellin

Right. So EBT takes the analysis out of it. All you do is get up in the morning and because remember neuroscientist Antonio Demacio, one of the greatest neuroscientists of all time, renamed homeostasis joy. When you get to that optimal state of biochemistry, you're in joy. So you wake up in the morning and you say, what in the world am I doing with my day? Like this morning I get up, you know, the dog's doing this, my husband is doing this, go to this thing, all these things. You say, what matters? Matters is my mindset my brain state. So you say, what I'm doing is going to the optimal brain state to joy. Say, what am I doing with my day? I am creating joy in my life. That's what I'm doing. And when I'm not in joy, and again, this is not happiness. This is being grounded in purpose. This is being connected to your body. This is knowing that you have that glow and that you can handle whatever it is. And you're going to do the right thing, even when it's hard, that sense that we all need to be that kind of person, right?

We can't be that way all the time because we're in stress and it knocks us out. So the moment that you don't feel good in your body, you don't have to know why. You essentially process your emotions. It switches off the circuit, the survival circuit that tells you that you're bad or that you're, or you're perfectionistic or, or, you know, there's, you know, other people are bad. You have to be right all the time or eating, drinking, whatever. And it switches it to one of your choosing that promote promotes health. So essentially you don't ask yourself.

Why am I doing this? You say the reason I'm doing it is a wire. I'm going to switch off the wire that makes me stressed out and I'm going to activate the wire that makes me my best self connected to the deepest part of myself.

Natalie Tysdal

Yeah, that's so interesting. I had a therapist tell me once that you can't fix anything until you can see it from up here. You know, if you're in the thick of all of this stuff, and what I'm kind of hearing from you is that when you activate this, you can see what the problem is. Yes?

Laurel Mellin

It is. Yeah. So what happens is you activate it, you say, you complain, you do everything your mother told you not to do. So what we've learned in EBT, we've just followed one thing, how the brain likes to work. And we've just copied it with these tools. But almost everything that we've learned from studying the brain is opposite what we're typically heard here in therapy. Many therapists bolt on EBT to their practice, so do physicians. So we want to be part of that system.

But the issue is in order to find out what is going on inside of you and to alleviate it quickly and then use the same information to rewire it over time, you have to start, wait till you hear this, by complaining. I mean, you have to not be sensible and say, well, you know what? I don't really like what's going on. You have to be four years old and in about three or four sentences complain. That activates the circuit. And then what else did your mother tell you never to do is anger. You do.

few expressions of productive quick anger in your head and that circuit opens up like a flower. You have one sadness, one fear and one what was my part of it. And what happens in your mind and this is why we always say if it's not fun, it's not EBT is then the unconscious mind is open. You think you're doing something because your mother told you not to do whatever or whatever, but the actual message comes up from your unconscious mind. It floats up.

to your conscious mind and once you have that information, you can use positive emotional neuroplasticity and say the opposite and hit the wire and begin to destroy it. That's how simple it is.

Natalie Tysdal 

Wow. Okay, so in a minute here, I want you to give us more about EBT in the app. But before you do that, can you give me some very practical things that people listening can do right now to help themselves?

Laurel Mellin

Yeah. Right. What I want you to do right now is do two things. Number one, whenever you don't feel good, do not blame or shame yourself. The response that you don't like is actually been planted in your emotional brain because the emotional brain has no walls through no fault of your own. And then it was buried in long -term memory. And once it's buried in long -term memory, you have to have emotional skills to process it. So it just keeps...

running over and over again. Number one, so when you do something you don't like, it's not you, it's a wire, and just say that. Say, it's not me, it's just a wire, and I can rewire it. No shame or blame. Can I get one more? One more? Okay, what I want you to do is also appreciate, do not ask yourself, how do I feel when you're stressed? Because your brain can only work to give you an accurate answer when you're at,

Natalie Tysdal 

Good one, okay. Yes, give me two more if you can. Let's give three practical things.

Laurel Mellin, PhD 

that the lower stress levels. So again, there are five levels of stress in the brain. One, two, three, four, or five. When you're at one, you have elevated emotions and you have love and gratitude and hope, forgiveness, awe and joy. You don't have any needs. At two, you know exactly, I feel lonely. I need a hug. I feel hungry. I need some food. And so you know exactly, but after you cross this level into the limbic brain, these emotions are trouble. They are scattered, stuck.

or toxic and either you'll avoid them and eat, drink, spend or whatever, or you'll get ramped up with overthinking, feeling overwhelmed, whatever. Don't ask. Ask yourself, what's my number? Am I at one, two, three, four or five? And then for now, if you don't have these skills, just say, well, I'm at brain state five right now. I'm in stress overload. And there's a lot of people in this world who are in stress overload. I'm not.

Not alone. And I'm just going to accept that for who I am right now. Later, get the EPT skills and you can just spiral up, but know your number. Go then I'm talking about relationships now. If you're in a relationship and you have a, you know that you're at brain state five a lot. In fact, your set point is five and maybe your partner is at three, four or five. Anytime you're not wired. In other words, have a habit or a set point at one intimacy is not going to work too well.

intimacy, spirituality, sexuality, and food are all very primitive and very sensitive distress. So don't leave your partner. Okay. Unless that's just something you need to do for, for safety, because essentially instead raise your own set point, raise your own set. Get to one. All of a sudden this person that looks so unappealing, you're like, what was wrong with me? Why did I ever choose that person? All of a sudden they catch.

Natalie Tysdal

Yeah.

Laurel Mellin

your higher brain state and it brings out the best in them. And oftentimes the relationship just blossoms. So, and the same is for food. You know, you feel like at five, you feel like you're going to, you're an addict and you're never going to get over it. Raise your set point and feel the difference.

Natalie Tysdal 

So as you're talking about these different brain states, and I know you're going to give us the tool here in a minute so that we can help with this with your app, do they really go up and down through these brain states, like daily, hourly, yearly? Or do you find people get stuck in one for a long period?

Laurel Mellin

What a great question, Natalie. I met my husband about 11 years ago and I had decided to start dating after I'd been single for about 12 years and we just hit it off, right? And we just met and we knew we'd spend the rest of our lives together, but he had to get into EBT because it would never work otherwise. So I said, go and do it. The first thing he says, this is too complicated. What's a brain state? What's a set point? The most important thing to know is that your brain state is like your heart rate. It changes all the time.

Laurel Mellin

All of a sudden, someone came in the door here that was scary to me. My brain state needs to go to five. And so it's always changing, just like blood pressure or heart rate. And so that's good. But if you spend a lot of time at three, four, or five, the brain says, OK, I'm adaptable. We'll just make this your new set point, your new default position. So there's two numbers. Your brain state is always changing. And your set point, when your brain gets into the

set point of stress, you're going to get emotional health problems, physical health problems, relationship work, and most problems will come, whatever your vulnerability is. So the goal of EBT is to change your brain state over and over again, to train your brain to go up, to rewire those really strong survival circuits and have a set point at one. Except instead of taking 20 years in psychotherapy or meditation, it takes one year.

And so we have a program you can go into and just raise your set point. And that is the most powerful thing that anyone can do for their health and quality of life.

Natalie Tysdal

What about people who say that it's gone to an extreme, that they've been an addict for years or they've been an overeater and now they're dealing with a hundred pounds they need to lose. Like they're in an extreme state. How did they use this to get to a better place?

Laurel Mellin

When you come into EBT, you complete the EBT brain map. And one of the things you do is you find out what your set point is. And if you determine that your set point is at five, you need comprehensive care. You probably need one -on -one therapy. You need medications because you're so far down in the brain that your brain's kind of stuck. But you also need EBT to turn it around. And then if your brain say

Laurel Mellin

your set point is four or three or two, you just need EBT, then anything else you want to use. But you're right, when you get down to that stage, you need comprehensive care. But the truth cause of why people are there other than their genetics and circumstance is that they didn't learn how to process emotions early on. So if you don't solve the root problem, you are going to be overly dependent on medications and you won't truly get back to joy.

Natalie Tysdal

Yeah. I know a lot of my listeners are moms who are stressed or professional women who are always in a state of stress, but how can we use this for other people in our lives, our children, our spouses?

Laurel Mellin

Oh my gosh. The most important thing with your children is you get EBT. Don't send your children to EBT because there's no one more powerful in the lives of your children than you. And when you learn how to spiral up, you will naturally teach it to them. And several of the tools on our app are perfect for children. It helps parents. The kids are a little squabbling and they use this one tool is called the flow tool. And what happens is the kids.

biologically change, their chemistry change, because these circuits control and they stop squabbling. In terms of being with a spouse, we really welcome all people to share their app with their spouse. And we have special sessions where you can be stress protected in your marriage or in your relationship, because people care, they don't care as much about their diabetes or their different health problems. They care when their loved one they can't connect with. EBT works quickly to help people.

have that intimate connection with themselves and to set boundaries with others in a healthy way. So we recommend families. We have some families where there are 20 people in the family all across the world, all using EBT. And so it was based initially on children and families and it's really come back to that.

Natalie Tysdal 

So, okay, let's get to the technology now and how that came about and how people can access it and use it.

Laurel Mellin

What we realized is that I was training therapists, I was training physicians and nutritionists. And I thought, wow, we've got to get this in an app. And so that's what we did. And recently we had a donation from a grateful patient of a half a million dollars. And they said, we want everyone on the planet. This has changed our marriage, has changed our health. We want everyone on the planet. So what we did is we have a brand new app that is very consumer friendly. Even though there's five levels of stress in the brain, you can use those levels in three different ways.

If you are at work and you don't want to feel your feelings and you want to shut off the stress in one minute, you push number one. If in fact you have two minutes, you want to feel your feelings more than you want to use all five tools if you want to and really have a heyday, it takes a couple of minutes that you push to. And if you want to do the essential of self therapy, rewiring trauma and addiction, you press three and it teaches you how to use these tools in a deep way so that you're not completely dependent on your therapist medications. You have another source.

of resilience.

Natalie Tysdal 

That's fantastic. The app is called what?

Laurel Mellin

Well, the website is ebt .org, emotionalbraintraining .org. The book is 123 Joy. It's just the latest book, but we want you to come there. It's only $1 to join ebt .org. If in one month we haven't changed your life with EBT, then you can quit. And after that, it's inexpensive.

Natalie Tysdal

Yeah. If there's one thing, another piece of material or message that you'd like people to have to change their lives, to feel better from years and years of your work and your research, what would that be?

Laurel Mellin

It would be on the day you were born, you had all the inherent strength, goodness and wisdom you would ever need to solve any problem. All you required were the tools to access it. And these emotional tools will be what brings you to that state of joy over and over again. Trust yourself, trust your beautiful emotional brain, which has gorgeous resilience pathways we're not using when we think our way out of it. So don't think and don't ask yourself how you feel. Ask yourself, what's my number?

and then spiral up out of stress and get that glow all over your body. That's your natural state. Your brain will do it for you.

Natalie Tysdal

What a beautiful message. I appreciate you, your work. I mean, this isn't your only book. Tell us about the other ones because this has been part of your history.

Laurel Mellin

Yeah, I have about 14 books and another 30 that are workbooks and essentially this book the one two three joy the reason I wrote it is I'm appalled at all the people who are spending so much money and Time and opportunity on the weight loss drugs. I believe anyone should take any drug they want to take But the truth is the reason we have an obesity epidemic is a stress epidemic There are eight major chemicals in your body that are related to stress

that cause people to overeat, be hungry, be lethargic, be depressed, and gain weight. If you instead, one of those is GLP -1, which people are injecting. All eight of them matter. If you inject one, you have to see what happens. You know, when you stop using that injection, you haven't solved the problem because the problem is the brain. If you learn to turn off the stress response, all eight of those chemicals naturally change.

and you have the solution inside you. You have those tools for life. And EBT is the only method that has shown lasting weight loss after treatment ends. And it's completely natural, and it's inexpensive.

Natalie Tysdal 

That's powerful. And your other books.

Laurel Mellin

Whether books are another one that's very popular is wired for joy because that's just a general easy read. I'll tell you the story really quick. I wrote that book for Hay House and they didn't like the book that I wrote. And I had just read a story in a journal that essentially that somebody in my county had written a book in 12 days. So I was in New York and they say, we don't like this book that you just wrote. And I said, well, I have 12 days left to meet my deadline. Goodbye.

So I went home, called all my friends. I got coffee, diet coke, I got whatever I had, food brought in. And in 12 days, I wrote a fun book, okay? A really fun book called Wired for Joy. They accepted it. And it's been very popular because it's a fun read. I just sat down and just told the story with a lot of fun anecdotes. And so it's a light read and it's good. But mainly come to ebt .org and get started and learn the tools and see the difference.

Natalie Tysdal

I'm so excited to do so myself and really just of all the stories that I do, all the interviews I do, a lot of times it's let's find a quick fix for something. And I personally am about getting to the root and I look for people like you who are gonna help us get to the root of issues instead of cover them up and just find a quick fix that doesn't really help in the long run.

Laurel Mellin

Thank you.

Natalie Tysdal

Yeah, yeah. It's so nice to meet you and to learn from you and I'll get those links and make sure and put them in the show notes. All the best to you.

Laurel Mellin

Wonderful. Thanks again, Natalie. Thank you.