The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
Most Replayed Moment: Anxiety Is Just A Prediction! Rewrite Old Stories and Build Emotional Safety
21 Nov 2025
Chapter 1: What is the predictive brain and how does it function?
The predictive brain is this idea that I only pretty much know from you. I'd never heard it before. When we say the predictive brain, what does that mean? And what does it not mean?
So when you are living your everyday life.
Yeah. Like right now.
Like right now. So right now I'm guessing that I'm saying things to you and you're perceiving what I'm saying and then you're reacting to it. That's how it feels to you, right? Yes. Okay.
Chapter 2: How does anxiety relate to past predictions?
And that's how it feels to me too. So we sense and then we react. That's the way most people experience themselves in the world. That's not actually what's happening under the hood. Really what's happening is that your brain is not reacting, it's predicting. And what that means is if we were to stop time right now, just freeze time, your brain would be in a state and it would be remembering
past experiences that are similar to this state as a way of predicting what to do next, like literally in the next moment. Should your eyes move? Should your heart rate go up? Should your breathing change? Should your blood vessels dilate or should they constrict? Should you prepare to stand? Right? Movements. And these movements, the preparation for movement, literal copies of those
Signals become predictions for what you will see and hear and smell and taste and think and feel. So under the hood, your brain is predicting what movements it should engage in next, and as a consequence, what you will experience because of those movements. So you act first, and then you sense. You don't sense and then react. You predict action, and then you sense.
So give me an example which brings this to light of how my brain is predicting and then taking action.
Okay. So right now you and I are having a conversation and I'm speaking and you're listening. And what's really happening in your brain is that based on many gazillion repetitions of listening to language, your brain is predicting, literally predicting every single word that will come out of my mouth.
Yeah, okay.
And how surprising would it have been if I didn't say mouth, I said some other orifice of my body that words were coming out of? That would have been pretty surprising. Because your brain is predicting that. Your brain is always predicting. And it's correcting those predictions when they're incorrect. Correct.
And, you know, I have this video that I often show when I'm giving a talk to scientists or to civilians.
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Chapter 3: What role do past experiences play in shaping our emotions?
I'm giving a talk and it creates a situation where they can predict something and they can feel that a prediction is not just this abstract kind of thought. It's your brain is... is literally changing the firing of its own sensory neurons to anticipate incoming sensations. So you start to feel these sensations before the signals actually arrive for you to perceive them.
You start to have the experience before the world gives you those signals.
I think it was in your book, but it might have been elsewhere, about the example of being thirsty.
Yes, so when you drink, so say you're super thirsty and you drink a big glass of water, when do you stop being thirsty? Almost immediately. But actually it takes 20 minutes for that water to be absorbed into your bloodstream and make its way to the brain to tell the brain that you are no longer in need of fluid.
Because across millions of opportunities, you have learned that certain movements now and certain sensory signals now will result in that mental state. Or here's another example. So right now, keep your eyes on me. You're looking right at me. And in your mind's eye, I want you to imagine a Macintosh apple, like not a computer, but like an actual piece of fruit. Okay. Can you do it?
Yeah.
Can you see it? Yeah. What color is it? Green. Okay. Does it have any red? No. Okay. So it's a Granny Smith apple. Yeah. Okay. What does it taste like? Like imagine grabbing it.
Yeah.
biting into it, hearing the crunch of the apple. What does it taste like?
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Chapter 4: How can we rewire our brain to change our predictions?
Your brain is controlling your muscles. And so if you practice the same set of movements over over and over and over again, you just get really efficient at them because your brain is able to predict better. Now, if you're somebody who's exercising because you wanna become healthier or you wanna lose weight or you, right?
You don't wanna practice the same exercise over and over and over again because you will be burning fewer calories because you're being efficient. That's the goal, right? So instead you do interval training. If somebody's calling out to you every 30 seconds a different set of movements and you can't predict what they are, then your brain will make a prediction. It'll be wrong.
You'll have to adjust. And so you end up burning more calories and you end up throwing yourself out of balance, which we call allostasis. So you become dysregulated and then your brain has to work to get itself back in again. And so that's a different kind of workout. These two different kinds of workouts are completely predicated on the fact that sometimes you want to be able to predict better.
Sometimes you want to be able to disrupt yourself and get back into the pocket quickly, right? So basically you're learning how to take in prediction error, signals you didn't predict, and adjust to them.
What does this say about the nature of trauma and other mental health illnesses like depression, anxiety, etc.? Because is this a misfiring of my predictions? I say this because predictions reliant on something happening in the past and forming a pattern, like a pattern recognition system. So if I grew up and there were certain patterns that are now not the case.
So if I grew up and every time a man walked into the room, he hit me. And now when a man walks into the room and I'm 35 years old, I'm getting that same sort of prediction in my brain. So I've got a fear of men, for example. Does this somewhat explain childhood trauma and why it's so hard to shake and why as adults we can sometimes have dysfunctional lives?
I would say as a general principle, yes. There are a lot of, you know, the devil is in the details, right? But yeah, sure. So trauma is not something that happens in the world to you. Everything you experience is a combination of the remembered past and the sensory present. So there could be an adverse event that occurs. You're in an earthquake. Someone dies who's close to you.
Something bad happens to you. Someone hurts you in some way. There could be an adverse event that is not traumatic to you because you're not using past experiences to make sense of it as a trauma. On the other hand, something that could be like an everyday experience to somebody else, to you, it links to a set of memories that are very traumatic, were very traumatic.
Those events were very traumatic. And so to you, it is a trauma. So trauma is not an objective thing in the world. It's also not all in your head. Trauma is a property of the relation between what has happened to you in the past and what is occurring in the present. So here's an example.
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Chapter 5: What examples illustrate the concept of prediction error?
So your brain is wired for you to see out of eyes that are the exact distance of your eyes. from each other. If somehow, you know, magically we could transplant your brain into somebody else's skull, you would not be able to see out of that skull. You would not be able to see out of those eyes because they're not in the right place. You hear with ears.
Your ability to hear comes from signals that are shaped by the shape of your ear. So your brain is wired to hear out of these ears, not any ears, these ears. Similarly, you, as a baby, you are taught the meanings of physical signals. You're taught how to make sense of these things. That's called cultural inheritance.
Many things that we think of as hardwired into the brain are actually culturally inherited across generations. That's how people survive in a particular environment. You know, so like in the 1800s and 1900s when explorers would go off and they would go off to Antarctica or here or there and they would very quickly die. The Inuit lived there. They lived perfectly fine.
Well, because they had culturally inherited knowledge. We're always transmitting knowledge to each other. And that knowledge becomes fodder for our own predictions. So your predictions don't just come from your personal experience. They also come from you watching television, you talking to guests, you reading books, watching movies.
Also, your brain, like most human brains, can do something really fantastic, which is You can take bits and pieces of past experience and put them together in a brand new way so that you can use the past to experience something new that you've never experienced before.
You talked a second ago about therapists try and make you think about the past differently. But I do think there's an underlying belief in our culture and society and on social media that if something happens to you, almost like this Freudian approach of if this happens to you, this is who you become. And I was reading that book, The Courage to be Disliked over Christmas, and it kind of
changed my view on this quite profoundly in an important way because it helped me to understand I think it basically says that what happens to us doesn't create who we are we use what happened to us we apply meaning to it which then determines the behavior we have and really interestingly in that it means that many of the beliefs I have about myself who I say I am my identity and therefore like the ways that I behave every day whether they're productive or unproductive are actually just
choices I've made to apply meaning to the past. Does that make sense?
It completely makes sense.
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