Did you know there was a fascinating experiment done on weightlifters where they didn’t lift any weights for two weeks? Instead, they just sat there and visualized themselves lifting weights. The result is that they experienced a 13% increase in muscle mass. This isn’t magic—it’s neuroscience.
Most people have no idea how much potential is locked inside their own brains.
To unpack how to unlock this potential, entrepreneur Steven Bartlett sat down with Dr. Tara Swart, a neuroscientist, medical doctor, executive advisor, and best-selling author. Dr. Swart’s work confronts the unhelpful preconceptions we hold about human potential, specifically breaking down how the brain-body connection dictates our success, our health, and our resilience.
If you want to overcome your biggest challenges and build mental resilience, you need to understand the physiological truth of how your brain works. Here are the core insights from Dr. Swart on how to rewire your brain for success.
1. The Brain-Body Connection: Stop Treating Your Body Like a Vehicle
Early in her career, right around the financial crisis, Dr. Swart worked with high-performing executives who treated their bodies merely as vehicles designed to carry their brains from meeting to meeting. They were being paid for their cognitive abilities, yet they completely disrespected their physical health, creating the worst possible conditions for their brains to operate.
“This tiny organ, if it’s not in an environment that is giving it the best chance of doing its job, it’s not going to and a crack’s going to appear somewhere.” — Dr. Tara Swart
The basic foundations of high performance aren’t a secret: sleep, diet, hydration, movement, and stress management. When you ignore these, the cracks inevitably show up. For these executives, the cracks appeared when people literally started dropping dead on the trading floor from heart attacks induced purely by stress, not high cholesterol or smoking.
If you want your brain to perform at an elite level, you must first optimize the physical environment it lives in.
2. Cortisol and The “Contagion” of Stress
Stress is not just in your head; it is a physiological response driven by cortisol, your main stress hormone. In a normal 24-hour cycle, cortisol levels should fluctuate. When a challenge arises, cortisol spikes so we can adapt, but it must return to baseline.
When stress becomes chronic, your cortisol levels stay elevated. Your brain’s receptors interpret this as an imminent threat to your survival, triggering a cascade of hormones that cause severe inflammation throughout your body. As a survival mechanism, excess cortisol also causes your body to store stubborn fat around your abdomen.
Even wilder? Stress is contagious. Cortisol literally leaks out of our sweat and can travel roughly a foot around us, absorbing into the skin of the people nearby. As a leader, your stress levels significantly impact your team. You cannot simply “hide” your stress by suppressing your emotions; your physiology will still affect those around you.
How to combat high cortisol:
Aerobic Exercise: You can literally sweat excess cortisol out of your body.
Journaling or Speaking: Get the negative thoughts associated with your stress out of your brain-body system by writing them down or speaking to a trusted friend or therapist.
3. The Power of Neuroplasticity: You Are Not “Hardwired”
For decades, scientists believed that once you reached adulthood, your brain was physically set for the rest of your life. We now know this is entirely false. Through a process called neuroplasticity, your brain is actively growing and changing.
If you do nothing to challenge your brain between the ages of 25 and 65, it will plateau. However, if you engage in activities that are intense enough to force your brain to adapt, you can actively improve your executive functions.
When you learn a new language, pick up a musical instrument, or tackle a massive cognitive challenge, you don’t just learn a new skill—you improve your ability to regulate emotions, solve complex problems, think flexibly, and override unconscious biases.
The 4 Steps to Rewire Your Habits
If you want to use neuroplasticity to break stubborn habits (like procrastination, negative thinking, or picking the wrong partners), Dr. Swart outlines a specific process:
Raised Awareness: Identify the pattern that is holding you back. Spotting the pattern is 50% of the battle.
Focused Attention: Look at your past decisions and the consequences they created. Understand why you are making those choices (e.g., digging into underlying beliefs about self-worth).
Deliberate Practice: Actively look for scenarios to practice your new, desired behavior. At first, your brain will resist because it wants to use the old, energy-efficient pathway. But with repetition, the new pathway becomes stronger than the old one.
Accountability: Because this process is hard, most people quit at step three. You need an external force—a friend, a coach, or a visual action board—to hold you accountable.
4. The 8-Hour Brain Flush (The Glymphatic System)
If you think you can “get by” on 4 or 5 hours of sleep, you are actively destroying your brain’s ability to clean itself.
Between 2012 and 2014, scientists discovered the glymphatic system, an active waterway channel in the brain that flushes out toxins overnight. This system clears out the exact proteins (like amyloid plaques and tau proteins) that are linked to dementing diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s.
This active cleaning process takes 7 to 8 hours of actual sleep to complete. If you are constantly cutting your sleep short, your brain is accumulating toxins.
Pro-Tip: Dr. Swart notes that sleeping on your side is the optimal position for this overnight cleansing process.
5. The Truth About “Manifestation”
The word “manifestation” often gets a bad reputation as being “woo-woo” or overly mystical. However, Dr. Swart believes in manifestation based purely on cognitive science.
The brain is the source of your reality. You cannot simply “think” about becoming a millionaire and have the universe deliver it to you. True manifestation requires aligning your thoughts, your beliefs, and your actions.
For example, if you want to manifest an amazing partner, you must write down all the attributes you want in that person—and then ensure you actually represent those qualities yourself. Psychologically, you meet people at the level of psychological evolution you are currently at (or at the depth of your unhealed wounds).
If you want to jump-start your success right now, Dr. Swart offers a simple, 5-minute practice: Get very clear on what you want, visualize those things being true, and give gratitude for them. This simple act moves your brain from a state of fear to a state of trust, opening the gateway to making massive changes in your life.
What is one habit you want to rewire using neuroplasticity? Let us know in the comments below!
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