Dr. Tara Swart
speaker
511 appearances
9 recordings
7 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 24 May
Dr. Tara Swart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Absolutely. And question number five, fifth and final question we ask this to everyone who's ever been on the show. If you could create one law that everyone in the world had to follow, what would it be?
Yeah. So needed. So needed, especially now. Well, Dr. Tara Swart, thank you so much for coming on On Purpose. The book is called The Source, The Secrets of the Universe, The Science of the Brain. Please, if you don't have a copy already, go and grab one. And of course, if you don't follow Dr. Tara on social media, please go and subscribe and follow on all channels. I can't wait to share this.
I want to hear what resonated with you, what connected with you. Please tag us both, sharing insights, your favorite clips, things you're practicing, your action boards. I want to see it all. And Dr. Tara Swart, thank you so much for your time and energy again. It was truly a joy. So thank you.
Hey, everyone. If you loved that conversation, go and check out my episode with the world's leading therapist, Laurie Gottlieb, where she answers the biggest questions that people ask in therapy when it comes to love, relationships, heartbreak and dating. If you're trying to figure out that space right now, you won't want to miss this conversation.
Check this out. So cortisol is known as the stress hormone, and it absolutely correlates with emotions such as fear, anger, disgust, shame, and sadness. Cortisol isn't all bad. You know, we need it to wake up in the morning. We need it to have an adaptive stress response to, you know, a car driving too fast on the street that we're trying to cross.
So as long as it stays within that range, that's fine. But when something super stressful happens, like the saber-toothed tiger that we spoke about earlier, the cortisol levels spike. And that enables us to run away, to warn our tribe, and it should go back to normal levels quite quickly. In the modern day, as I mentioned earlier, we're so overwhelmed with information.
There are so many psychological threats to our safety that it's most people, unfortunately, the levels are high and they're either at the higher end or higher. And that's pretty constant, whereas they should be, you know, kind of undulating between that range.
When that happens, because cortisol is carried in the blood supply around the body and it crosses the blood-brain barrier, there are receptors in the brain that monitor the levels of cortisol in a way to sense threat in our environment.
When those levels are high, most of the time or all the time, or higher than the higher end of the threshold, the brain immediately thinks, I'm about to die, what is the biggest threat to my survival? And in some ways, because it's from so long ago, we're wired in such a cave person way. The first threat that the brain will consider is starvation.
Even though that's, for most of us, thank goodness, not the biggest threat to our survival. In fact, quite the opposite. So to try to protect us from dying of starvation, one of the things that cortisol does is lay down extra fat in the abdominal fat cells so that if we are unable to hunt or gather for some time, we can digest that fat and stay alive until a food source becomes available.
Wait, so are you saying that
Yeah. It's not just causing fat. It's specifically causing belly fat. So you may not have changed your shape and the rest of your body, but if you're noticing that your belt has become tighter, that's a sign that you could have chronic cortisol. And the other thing is that it's fat that's particularly stubborn.
So if you do notice that the belt is tighter and you think, okay, I definitely need to move a bit more or eat a bit less, and you actually start doing one or both of those things, but the belly fat doesn't change because the cortisol is driving the fat there, regardless of your behavior in the physical world.
So I'm going to do brain and body, if that's okay. Yeah. So think of this cortisol as a corrosive agent that's literally flowing through your entire brain and body. So in the body, it starts to erode your immunity. So you might notice more colds and flus more often or ones that last for weeks and weeks.
I mean, I certainly remember during the financial crisis when I worked with a lot of banks and hedge funds, people saying, you know, I've had this cold for four, six, eight weeks, but everybody has it. And I had to say to them, do you hear what you're saying that it's not normal to have a cold for six weeks? And this is cortisol. Yeah.
And at the extreme end of that, people were dropping dead of heart attacks on trading floors. So lowering your immunity and corroding your body that much can cause everything from colds and flus to heart attacks and cancers. In the brain, what happens is what I call low power mode, like on your phone.
So once those receptors know there's an imminent threat to our survival, think of the highest functions of the brain. Thinking creatively, thinking flexibly, solving complex problems, overriding our biases. at regulating our emotions. How are those going to serve us now that we're just trying to survive physically? We don't need those things. Don't send any blood supply to those higher functions.
Bring it right down to get up in the morning, go and sit at your desk, look like you're doing your job even if you actually can't really do it. This is the reason that presenteeism costs businesses more than double what absenteeism does. In that low-power mode, it would be better to stay at home for two days and recover and then come back to work and actually function and work with your team.
Because stress impairs the higher functioning of the brain. It just moves the blood supply away from it because you're not going to give up your precious resources for functions like that. And just to put that into context for you, Mel, the brain is a tiny organ. It's a tiny percentage of your whole body. like maybe 2% or 3%. But it uses up 20% to 30% of the breakdown products of what you eat.
Wow. Yeah. That's how hard it's working. It's using up 20% of what you ate that day when you're asleep. It's using up 25% of what you eat when you're working, managing, leading, running your family, just thinking. Right now, we're probably both using 25%. But if you're stressed, it's using 30%.
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