Those who read my regular articles know that I have a passion for science that offers practical solutions to the problems we face in our daily lives. I recently learned about the work of Dr. Kyra Bobinet who has pursued and studied the truth about behavior change for nearly three decades as a physician, public health leader, healthcare executive, and behavioral expert.
I recently had the privilege of sitting down with Dr. Bobinet and learning about the secret part of the brain that controls motivation and what we might be doing to unknowingly sabotage our success. She breaks down the mysterious habenula and explains how to achieve our goals. You can watch this exclusive interview here.
One of the most important things I learned from Dr. Bobinet was what her studies show about how to improve our love lives.
“Valentine’s Day is meant to celebrate love, but it often comes with unspoken expectations,” says Dr. Bobinet. “Be more romantic. Be more connected. Be more intimate. Be better for each other this year. Moments like Valentine’s Day can turn love into pressure.”
She goes on to say,
“When the brain senses evaluation or comparison, even from someone who cares deeply, motivation shuts down, leading to defensiveness or withdrawal rather than closeness or change.”
But it isn’t just our relationships that can be undermined. To-Do Lists & New Year’s resolutions of all kinds can secretly hurt us. Dr. Bobinet helps us to lose weight, and how to stop everyday habits that may be destroying your motivation.
In her book, Unstoppable Brain: The New Neuroscience That Frees Us From Failure, Eases Our Stress, and Creates Lasting Change. Dr. Bobinet also explains:
- Different types of failure
- Dangers of doom-scrolling
- Ties between addiction, depression, and failure
- Best sources of motivation for short term goals vs long term goals
- Ketamine effects on the habenula in treating depression
- Why porn can be so addictive to some
- Why we’re more likely to focus on losses vs wins
- What triggers imposter syndrome and who is most susceptible to it
- Positive & negative effects of the latest GLP-1 weight loss drugs on the brain
- Effects of inauthenticity in sexual relationships
- Downside of institutions overusing performance-based tools
- Difference between “performing” vs authentically being.
Beyond her professional accomplishments, Dr. Bobinet is an enrolled member of the Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe in Minnesota. Her diverse interests include meditation, horsemanship, and herbalism. She lives in California’s Santa Cruz Mountains with her family and draws inspiration from both animal and plant teachers in her daily life.
She points out that most of us know what we should do to improve our lives, but we often don’t do it. We make resolutions to lose weight, improve our relationships, exercise regularly, improve our work/life balance. We make To-Do Lists to keep us on track and make goals that we hope will reduce the constant stress in our lives. Yet, we often blame ourselves when things don’t work out the way we planned, and we too often feel like we are failing at life.
Today’s performative work and social environments, based on fixed goals, competitions, relentless tracking, chasing likes and followers on social media, cause us to perform constantly for others, masquerading our true selves in our desire to be safe and to belong. Yet loneliness continues to increase, for many of us the world seems to be going to hell in a handbasket, and we feel cutoff and alone.
I pride myself on keeping up with new findings in brain science, but I had never heard of the most critical part of the brain that can help us or forever keep us from achieving our goals. It is called the habenula. Dr. Bobinet has been studying this area of the brain for many years and for the first time is bringing her findings to the attention of the world.
This newly studied brain area is perhaps the most powerful behavior controller ever found. She helps us understand how the habenula holds the key to everything from our constant feelings of failure to our anxiety, addictions, and depression.
I learned that the habenula is a pea-sized pair of nuclei that acts as a central hub controlling areas involved in emotion, reward, and cognition. Though tiny, the habenula reaches into nearly every aspect of our psychology.
Dr. Bobinet explains that the habenula has two superpowers over your behavior.
“First, it acts as a failure detector anytime you think you failed, even in some tiny way, even subconsciously without your knowing. Second, and more impactful, it is a kill switch for your motivation. This means that whenever you think you have failed at something, you will suddenly find yourself unmotivated to keep doing it.”
In my interview with Dr. Bobinet, I learned that the habenula is an ancient brain structure, dating back over 560 million years to our earliest vertebrate ancestors. The most well-defined purpose of the habenula is to act as an “anti-reward” center. It signals when an individual is failing or experiencing a negative outcome, such as missing an expected reward or facing a punishment. It teaches the brain to avoid making the same mistake by suppressing actions that lead to aversive outcomes.
In an environment where eating the wrong kind of berry might cause serious illness or fighting an adversary we could not beat might lead to death, the habenula’s kill switch kept us from making fatal mistakes. In our modern world this lifesaver can become a problem. What once kept us alive, now drives us in the wrong direction and causes us to feel we are failing when we are unsuccessful at making positive changes in our lives. But Dr. Bobinet helps us to reclaim our true power.
She reveals the failsafe way to change our behavior using the power of iteration to neutralize failure and liberate your true inner wisdom and power. Instead of our all or nothing thinking where we constantly set goals that we can never stick with, she offers us a whole series of small, yet effective, tools to make small changes that add up to a successful life.
She says,
“There are hundreds, maybe even thousands, of frameworks that promise to help you make or break habits. But almost all of them rely on a performative mindset: if you do X, then Y will happen. When ‘Y’ happens, you get a star, a cookie, or a reward. When ‘Y’ doesn’t happen, you fail (and you feel like a failure). Most people who have tried a fad diet or budget or exercise plan have felt the disappointment of this approach.”
Dr. Bobinet founded a company, Fresh Tri, which offers a different way to succeed. She calls it the “Iterative Mindset Method.” You can learn more here. In describing the emotions connected to the Iterative Mindset, she draws on the work of renowned neuroscientist Jaak Pansepp who described seven main neural networks of emotions we share with all mammals. “Searching is the dominant emotion,” says Dr. Bobinet. In this book, The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotions, Dr. Pansepp calls this network, the SEEKING system and says, “When the SEEKING system is aroused, animals exhibit an intense, enthused curiosity about the world.”
We all need to tap into our searching and seeking system to continue to find new ways to succeed in life.
My colleague James R. Doty, M.D. was the Founder and Director of the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University and bestselling author of the book Into the Magic Shop: A Neurosurgeon’s Quest to Discover the Mysteries of the Brain and the Secrets of the Heart. Dr. Doty worked with Dr. Bobinet for many years and wrote the Foreword to the Unstoppable Brain. He said,
“From obtaining her medical degree at the University of California San Francisco and her master’s degree in public health at Harvard University, Dr. Bobinet has been at the forefront of understanding not only the neuroscience but the critical aspects of behavioral change. She has built programs to help individuals and organizations change their behavior for the better.”
After meeting Dr. Bobinet, I better understand why Dr. Doty recommended her work so highly.
“Dr. Bobinet is unique in that she brings together two critical aspects that are extraordinarily powerful, and those are behavioral change combined with design thinking. Fundamentally, she is a designer of tranquility, transformation, and healing,” said Dr. Doty.
You can learn more about Dr. Bobinet and her work at https://drkyrabobinet.com/.
You can see my interview with Dr. Bobinet here.
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Disclaimer: This story is auto-aggregated by a computer program and has not been created or edited by healthlydays.
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