If you ever want to hear me totally geek out, then guys you gotta listen to this part too, this supercharged episode featuring the neuroscience powerhouse herself, Tara Swore. She's given us powerful insights on how sex, stress and attraction start in the mind and play out in radical ways affecting our love lives. Because I hope you can hear it in my voice, I literally didn't want this interview to end when I had to say goodbye and do the sign off. I was like, can you please just stay for another like eight hours because I have so many questions to ask you. That's how powerful I thought this episode was and why you guys absolutely need to listen to this. It turns out that guys, what a surprise, we're not actually going crazy. We're going to release different hormones from men and we respond to life differently and that makes let's say

relationship pretty hard if you're not actually aligned. So whether you take notes on how to improve in existing romance, discovering reasons you should leave or just trying to not repeat the same crap in your next relationship, guys, honey, I got you covered in this two-part episode. So let's not waste another second. Let's dive right in to part two with my girl, Dr. Taurus War on Women of Impact. Thank you for correcting my never thought about it. It seems like it seems from the outside and not understand the brain that it was more of an addiction, but I totally understand your the spectrum of things. And then you actually mentioned where like you're going to the stalking road.

I've seen amazing well put together women go off the rails.

If they've been heartbroken and all of a sudden they're stalking

or they're doing a lot of them drive-by's,

where it's like, I'm just gonna see if he's cars there.

Or if they're in a relationship and they're worried about,

if they're cheating and then all of, and they become a different person. What actually is happening there? That is to do with psychological safety. Well, I have to separate the two because if you're in a relationship and you have suspicions, then what you're doing is to maintain your psychological safety, to give yourself data and evidence about whether you should trust that person or not. The one about after a relationship has broken down would be more about the inability to accept that fact, the inability to regulate your emotions around it and therefore difficulty letting go. So I think there are definitely inner subset of things, but they're slightly different. So one is to do with not being able to let go. And the other one perhaps is more to do with being able to let go if you get the right evidence. So it's checking should I let go? And it may be followed by the former state and that if you do have to end the relationship because of trust issues, you would still be heartbroken and you might still want to go and check if there are cars there or someone else's car is there, but I think they're just, they've got slightly different motivations in the brain. And it kind of, you know, it makes sense because if you've been in a relationship with someone, you've either lived with them or spent a a lot of time with them and suddenly that changes. It destabilises your whole day-to-day, you know, from the minute that you wake up because either you've gone from waking up with that person to waking up alone or you've gone from waking up thinking I might see him this weekend too, I'm never going to see him again. So it's actually okay to have those temporary periods of not being yourself and kind of losing your ability to behave in the way that you normally do, but it just can't go on for too long. And I remember, you know, when I was first getting divorced, because i was a psychiatrist at the time and i had

patience on the wall to like try to kill themselves because their relationship had ended. I remember thinking if i didn't know all the things i know now i can see why you could end up on a psychiatric ward. So it's very interesting that i've seen kind of the most broken result of a you ending or a cheating happening and been through a version of that myself and really understood how that can happen. But thank goodness had the emotional regulation to not go down that path. But it really made me actually so non-judgmental about how difficult that is and how if you don't have the tools within yourself or the right support around you, it can spiral out of control. I think that even in terms of like time bound that even like very, very supportive friends will let you have that period of time where you're just like crying and talking about it all the time and wanting to message him or whatever. But there is going to come a time where people are going to say, you know what you're better than this? Like you can start to move forward now. Other people will like be so keen to be with you and and that's what that support circle helps. And so you know I really feel for people that't have that, because it's very hard to navigate all these things by ourselves. We as humans aren't meant to deal with these things by ourselves, we're meant to be part of a tribe. So is it having people around you that can help you get out of that and then also having their ability to emotionally regulate? Yeah, so absolutely building up yourself, the up yourself the like emotional regulation and that can happen through journaling through therapy through talking with friends through like introspection But the circle that you have around you bring it back to everything else that you've picked up today You know the words that people say people say, the examples that they give you. You know, if you have friends around you that are saying, yeah, why not just like text him and see if he replies versus friends who are saying like, you know what, it's time to put this behind you. And there's a time and a place for both of those, but it's just being very conscious that you've got the right advice around you. Thank you for saying that all because I think that so many of us will beat ourselves up over an action where it may not align with the person that we want to be. And so that can trigger the shame, it's like I can't believe that I acted like that and then that shame then can just spiral down instead of giving yourself the grace that's like yes this is actually a moment in time, I'm having an emotion, this is very valid, this is very reasonable, I won't stay here, but right now not to feel the shame and that you're just freaking human. Yeah, I think thinking of it as temporary, you just made me think of a really funny analogy, I don't know why, but I was like, you know, that's break up Barbie. Break up Barbie can be in your life for a certain period of time, but not forever. Yeah, that's amazing, I love that. And you actually also mentioned the psychological trust. So, talk to me about the power of trust and actually the connection of trust and being able to orgasm. So, that phrase is psychological safety and it comes from how we existed in tribe, so when we lived in the cave, so when we lived in the cave, if you mistakenly let someone else into your tribe, that could bring in disease, it could lead You know, it was a risk. So we had to like keep our tribes like together and separate from our different tribes. And in those days, the way that we recognised our tribe was through skin colour, hair colour, hair texture, eye colour and eye shape mostly. So that's very racial, right? So these days it's not based on that, although that is still part of it. But when we meet a new person, we actually peg them on up to 150 identified stereotypes. Oh! And that will now in the modern world include things like social class, how much you earn, educational level, which sports team you support, which political party you vote for, physical attractiveness, and like many other, and I think obviously things like age and gender and race. So it doesn't mean you have to be the same to be in the tribe, but you know, you'll make a picture of someone and think, okay, this is someone who's about the same age as me, who's a woman that comes from London. You see her, I'm going. A chap. You're in my trap. So the safety issue came from the fact that you had to stick together as a tribe to be safe and any external element was a deep potential danger. So now it's based on a wider range of stereotypes. So even if you don't match on those stereotypes, once you've become in partnership or in tribe or whatever, there is a level of trust. Okay. Now, the risk of that being broken and it's not just in relationships, it's losing your job as a psychological safety factor because obviously that's what you rely on to pay for your life. So your relationship with your boss, your relationship with your team. We're constantly, our brain is constantly looking out for threats to our survival. That is its main job. It wants us to live long enough to reproduce, sadly. And so to achieve that, we have to sleep, eat, be hydrated, be healthy, be fertile. That is all our brains actually care about, that's how basic we actually are.

But we are living a richer life than that. But in terms of what the brain is doing,

all it, you know, it's main job is, is there a threat to my survival right now? When I meet a new

person, could this person like somehow threaten my survival? As soon as I've decided that that's not

the case, then I can think about, okay, do I want to trust you? Do I want to be friends with you? Do I want to bring you into my circle? So that's what psychological safety is. And then bringing in trust and orgasm. So obviously you can have an orgasm with somebody that you don't necessarily know if you can trust because you can have a one night stand. Um, but oxytocin does underlie both love and trust and orgasm, childbirth, breastfeeding. So hormones and neurotransmitters have more than one, they can underlie more than one pathway. So for example dopamine, which most people will recognise as the reward chemical, so that's released when you get something that you like, to like eating a bowl of ice cream. Yeah. Also underlies motivation, so it's the hormone that will drive you to get, to move towards a goal that you want to achieve, but it's also very much part of the movement system. So in different pathways of the brain, dopamine is doing different things. So let me just give you some really tangible examples. So when dopamine is reduced in a certain pathway in the brain, that's when you can see symptoms of Parkinson's disease. So Parkinson's disease is a movement disorder. That's what I did my PhD in. And it's reduction of dopamine in the nigro striatal pathway of the brain. In schizophrenia, you have an increase in dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway of the brain. So forget the terms necessarily, but they're just in different places in the brain, same hormone going up or down. So with oxytocin, when it's underlying an orgasm, it's having, it's, you know, working differently to how it does when it's underlying breastfeeding or childbirth or trust or, you know, obviously love an orgasm tend to be more connected. But yeah, so just, you know, there's this, there's so many systems and subsystems in the brain and they've got all sorts of chemicals like racing around in them. We try to simplify it by saying oxytocin is for bonding, but it's actually way more complicated than that. But, you know, it would go on to say that you're much more likely to have more orgasms and better orgasms, certainly as a woman, if you're in a trusting relationship, than if you are having serial, non-trusting relationships. Yeah, thank you, because I've spoken about this, behind the scenes with a lot of my girlfriends. And we've all spoken about the second that we have the trust. It's like multiple orgasms. I was with a guy before my husband, and I didn't all guys and ones. And now my husband is like, you know, a lot. So I've just spoken to a lot of women, and I had no idea why. And I do of the safety element, I think is a big deal because especially as a woman, you're just, you're giving yourself over so completely that you were leaving yourself completely susceptible to so much, but I didn't understand what actually was happening in the body or the brain for that to be true. And let's be realistic, because I think people will comment on this if we don't, which

is that it's perfectly possible to have an amazing orgasm or multiple orgasms with a complete stranger. It is possible. But in terms of evolutionary wiring and long-term satisfaction, it's just a different, you know, it's like watching an advert instead of watching a movie. I love that.

She made that up.

That was good.

That was good. That was good. I am so obsessed with understanding the brain and evolution because anytime I just, I'm going to go to myself, anytime I don't understand myself, why am I doing this? Why am I acting? Like it doesn't serve me. I go back to, oh, it must be an evolution. Something's happened back in the caveman days.

It's led me to feeling like it's a different world. Lisa doesn't mean you should be like this, but at least once I understand where it comes from, it allows me to just take that and then go, cool, now I get it, now how do I change? Because if I wanna try and be better at improved, and yet, the orgasm thing was definitely one of the things I was like, when you come on, I'm definitely all king in this one.

And they can just it just, the orgasm thing was definitely one of the things that I was like, when you come on, I'm definitely arguing with this one. And they say,

and I just say something, please. I know I'm the guest, but I think that sound by it from you of whenever I'm feeling a certain way, I go back to evolution and I say, Lisa, it's a different world now. What do I want to do with this? If that is the one thing that people take away from this conversation, I think that is potentially life-changing.

Wow.

Coming from you, thank you. I think you've dropped so

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