Tweak your brain chemistry toward happiness, purpose, meaning | Jillian Michaels | Big Think

There is a definite connection between the physical laws of inertia: a body in motion tends to stay in motion, and the psychological components of inertia. It's like when we become sedentary, it's very difficult to begin moving again and to become motivated once more. And it's not just emotional; it's also physiological. Depression and feeling sedentary and feeling down, and engaging once again in being hopeful, because essentially that's what motivation does require, can become a bit like a spider web.

So in The Six Keys, one of the major pathways we need to travel down is comprehending the connection between the state of our mind and how it very tangibly affects our bodies. When you look at something like depression, or sadness, or tragedy, that kind of emotional stress, we see that it literally changes our brain; it shrinks the size of our amygdala, our hippocampus. It shifts the ratios between gray matter and white matter; it changes our brain chemistry.

And what all of these physiological changes do is essentially gear us to be more impulsive, less emotional regulation, more prone to depression. And these thoughts then, of course, lead to our behaviors, which dictate the outcome of our reality. So, as I mentioned, it's a bit of a black hole, so to speak. So how do we turn it around? And it has to be something, in my opinion, that is fought on a myriad of fronts.

First and foremost, we need to establish a why. So we're going to look at the actual psychology of motivation. I believe it was Nietzsche who said, "If you have a why to live for, you can tolerate the how." Because anything worth having, be it a healthy marriage, a thriving career, a healthy body, is going to require work and sacrifice. But work with purpose is passion; work without purpose is punishing, and a lot of us already feel very punished by the rigors of our daily lives.

So forming a very concrete goal, not just health—what does that even mean? How do you emotionally connect to being healthy? Somebody says, "Well, don't have that pizza tonight and don't watch How to Make a Murderer, season two, and you'll be healthy." Like that's not sexy. However, if it was, "Hey, you know what? Give me 20 minutes in your living room with a quick exercise routine and get the sauce on the XY or Z meal you just ordered on the side; forgo the soda, get water instead, and you're going to fit into those skinny jeans, have sex with the lights on with confidence," although I think that's greatly overrated; it's light at least 12 hours out of your day, so why not open up your options?

I mean walk your daughter down the aisle, or look good in your wedding dress, or meet your great, great grandchildren, or watch humans land on Mars. I don't care what your reason is. It doesn't matter how profound it is; it doesn't matter how superficial it is, but it has to move you, and you have to care because that's what makes that work, in order to achieve it, more manageable and turns it into passion versus punishment.

At the same time, how do we make this concept of neural plasticity work for us instead of against us? How do we change our brain chemistry and the shape and size of various parts of our brain so that we're more prone to positivity and hopefulness as opposed to nihilism? Well, things like meditation, these mind-body interventions, and for the longest time, I was like, "I live in L.A.; I can't hear this one more time." You know what's going to stress me out? Wasting five minutes chanting in my car on my lunch hour when I have stuff to do.

But the evidence is overwhelming, and we see that five minutes, even of meditation—I don't care when you get it in, if it's in the morning, if it's at night, if it's in your lunch hour—even if you suck at it, download an app, be consistent with it. Over time, we see that it helps to shift the physiology of our brain so we are more geared towards happiness, purpose, and meaning.

And in fact, when we look at it holistically, in conjunction with that ball getting rolling, so now maybe you've got just enough motivation to take that first step and you're moving. So the first step at th...