Mind Optimization Part 1: Understanding Fundamental Mood States

A house cannot be built on a poor foundation. At the core of all living things is our biology. Understanding the basic underlying principles of mood, anxiety, energy, and cognition is essential to building the foundation for better mental and physical health. Our psychology and interpersonal relationships are all ultimately dependent on these more fundamental mood states. Here, we analyze fundamental mind states, before looking into more complex psychology, and interpersonal relationships.

This video is part one of twenty-six excerpts from a presentation hosted by SOUL Food Salon in March 2019.

You may check out the full playlist of this video series on The Art and Science on Mind Optimization here. Alternatively, you can also click here to watch the second part of this series.

Video Transcript

We’re going to start by focusing on some core biological factors. What I wanted to point out is I think underlying everybody’s psychology and everybody’s social interactions is your fundamental mood state. There are certain key vital signs that to me are always so important. I think before you ask yourself what are you doing in life and how’s your family and everything else, you need to kind of fall back on some basic internal metrics that are so important. To me, those metrics are fundamentally mood. Are you happy, are you sad, are you enthusiastic? Are you expecting good things or bad things to happen? And your mood state plays a very fundamental role.

The next thing I assess often is anxiety. And you’ll notice that next to anxiety I also have flexibility. My belief is that people that are very anxious tend to be very rigid. They tend to get stuck in patterns and ways and in some ways the less anxiety you have the more openness you have to new experiences.

The other factor I look at which plays a tremendous role is energy and sleep. Energy, fundamentally just drives you. It gives you the energy to either be happy or sad. And for that reason, to me, it’s also a very fundamental marker. And lastly is cognition and that’s our cognitive performance, that’s your memory, your ability to recall, your ability to retain information and process the experiences that you’ve had through life.

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