1015 Hack Your Brain for Unlimited Potential w/Andrew Huberman

This is episode number 1015 with neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin. [Speaking of the stress that people feel doesn't come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they've started. And American novelist Jeffrey Eugenides wrote, Biology gives you a brain, life turns it into a mind. I am so excited because my guest today knows as much as anyone on the earth about how the brain interprets the world around us. and how we can use that knowledge to live a happier and healthier life. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist at Stanford University who also runs the Huberman Lab which studies how the brain functions, how it changes through experiences, and how to repair the brain after injury or disease. And we had an amazing conversation on a wide range of topics. In fact, I had such a great time talking to Andrew that I had to split this up into parts. And in this first episode, it's going to blow you away. We talk about why our brain allows us to get sick after stressful periods in our life. How much control your brain has over your emotions and experiences. Why subjective rewards are essential to accomplishing your goals. This is powerful. The positive effects stress can have on the body, huge for so many people right now. The science of hope. How we can rewrite our subjective experience to increase happiness and so much more just in this first part. Make sure to share this with someone who needs to hear it. Just copy and paste the link and share with a friend, text someone, post it in the WhatsApp group, post it on social media. I'm telling you, this is going to blow you away. And a quick reminder, if this is your first time here, click that subscribe button over on Apple Podcasts for the School of Greatness, as well as give us a rating and review as you finish this episode. Okay, after this quick message, the one and only Andrew Huberman. This podcast is sponsored by Northwestern Mutual. Everyone wants to feel good about their finances.

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Well, that's why I've had life insurance with Northwestern Mutual for years. Their financial professionals ask the right questions, truly listen, and help uncover opportunities most people miss. I've seen it firsthand. Northwestern Mutual has been a part of my journey from the very beginning, providing the security and peace of mind I need as a human and an entrepreneur. Find a better way to money@nm.com, the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, paid testimonial by a Northwestern Mutual policy owner.

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You run a lab, Huberman Lab, which is primarily studying brain states such as fear, courage, anxiety, calm and how we can better move in and out of certain things. My first question, I've been super excited about this interview happening because I'm fascinated by how we think, how we feel, our emotions, how everything is connected in our body and our brains. And I'm curious how much does the body control the mind and the mind control the body? Are they very connected or is the mind in complete control?

That's a great question. The short answer is the body has a huge and profound influence on our mind. And the reason is that we often talk about the brain and we think the brain, the brain, the brain. The brain is important, but the brain and the spinal cord, which makes up what we call the central nervous system, are extensively connected with the body and the body is extensively connected with the brain and spinal cord. So the spinal cord is connected to the brain.

That's right. The back, it comes up the neck.

That's right.

Actual nerves are connected inside of your brain. That's right.

All the way down to lower back or? Yeah, yeah. So basically we are a big tube, or our nervous system is a big tube. So your brain obviously is the thing that's shaped more or less like this, and then the spinal cord extends off the back, and all that is housed in skull, except for two pieces of the brain, which are the eyes, which are actually two pieces of the brain that are outside the skull. The eyes are a part of the brain. They are absolutely a part of the brain. They are central nervous system. so it's eyes, brain, and spinal cord. They're all connected. They're all connected.

If you took that out of the body, let's say, they would all be connected.

That's right. They're contiguous, as we said. They're just one unit. They're one piece. That's right. And sometimes they get challenged, people say, the eyes aren't part of the brain. Well, then that means that the spinal cord is part of the brain, too. And I want to be really clear, this is not semantics. There is a genetic program that ensures that early in development, during the first trimester when we were all in our mother's bellies, the retinas, the neural retinas and eyes were deliberately pushed out of the skull. And the reason you have those eyes outside your skull is so that you can evaluate things at a great distance from you, right? Because otherwise everything would have to be in contact with you. Other animals do this mainly using smell. We are very visually driven. So a lot of our genome is devoted to vision and understanding what's going on at a distance from us. And that's afforded us a huge evolutionary advantage. To survive. To survive, because the more that I can anticipate events at a distance, the more that I can coordinate with my environment, like daytime and nighttime, but also when objects are coming at me or things I want to chase and kill, or you think about mating behavior and hunter-gatherer behavior, all of that, evaluating faces and facial expressions without actually having to come into contact with people. afford a huge evolutionary advantage. But I want to make sure that I answer your question thoroughly. The nervous system includes the brain, which we now know includes the eyes as well, the spinal cord, and then what's called the peripheral nervous system, all the connections with the body. And every organ in our body, our heart, our diaphragm, our lungs, our spleen, our liver, all of it is, as we say, innervated. It receives nerve connections. To the brain? That's right, from the brain and spinal cord. so much so that if we were to just dissolve away everything except the nervous system, if we had a human nervous system splayed out here on the table in front of us, it would look like a human being. There would be a connection at every level down to, you'd be able to say, that's the big toe and that's the pinky and that's where the heart would belong because it's almost like a silhouette of our entire body. And so when we think about the nervous system, it's really important, I think, for people to understand that the nervous system is all of that brain and body and all the connections back and forth. And there have been thousands of years of debates about what's the mind, what's the brain, et cetera, the mind-body problem, all that. I think it's fair to say in 2020 that states of mind include the brain, the activity of the brain, and the body. Those two things coordinate. The brain and the body have a sort of what I call a contract. There's a brain-body contract that gives rise to things like states of mind. So a feeling of depression or a feeling of awe or excitement or happiness.

Which is a state of mind is what I'm hearing you say.

Yeah, we could talk about why an.

Emotional experience is a state of mind.

That's right. I prefer to talk about states and states of mind because they include the brain and body. So just by saying mind, I don't mean just brain. They include the brain and body and also because.

So when you say sorry to interrupt, but brain and body mean thought and feeling.

Yeah, so you're asking the key questions. emotions are very hard to describe in an objective way, whereas states have certain properties that allow us to study them in different laboratories and from one experiment to the next. So some people may have heard this before, but we really, the brain does really five things. We have sensation, which is, you know, we're constantly being bombarded with sound waves and light and smells and things. And that stuff is ongoing and you can't negotiate that. It's just you have these receptors in your body that allow you to evaluate those things. A sea turtle has magnetoreception. It can navigate by magnetic fields. We cannot do that. But they can, 'cause they sense it. Infrared vision in a pit viper or something. So unless you're put on night vision goggles, you can't do that. Then there's perception, which is which sensations you are paying attention to. So as you write with your pen, if I say, what does that pen feel like in your hand? Now, you're perceiving it, but the sensation was always there. Those receptors were always sensing it.

So, the sensation being the actual feeling or the actual visual, the perception is your interpretation of the feeling?

Ah, so I would say that the perceptions are where your attention is, which sensations you're attending to. And then you have thoughts. And thoughts get a little complicated for us to parse because they are a little bit abstract, but thoughts are a combination of our perception, whatever it is we're attending to, and they have context memory. You know, they're tapped into our memory systems, right? Because if I say a pen and you're like, I don't know what your relationship to pens is, but mine is kind of a trivial one. I write with one. But let's say I come from a family that, I don't know, had a.

Pen factory in Germany in the 1930s.

Then there's a whole. Or you got stabbed by a pen. You got stabbed by a pen. Right. So it's very contextual. So thoughts are like perceptions, but they carry memory and context.

Thoughts are memory and context.

Yeah, they include that. And then there are feelings/emotions and this is where it really starts to get abstract and kind of hazy and where there's still a lot of debate. Because for instance, if I ask you how you're feeling and you say, I feel... Most people say, I feel good. Well, what does that mean? I mean, that's not a feeling. So if you ever do personal development work, they're always like, don't use a... Don't say good or bad. What do you feel? And people say, well, I feel... calm and excited or something like, you know, when it and it starts becoming very abstract. And so emotions are a real thing and they certainly, perhaps more than anything else, recruit the brain and the body. When we feel depressed, we occupy certain postures, we feel it in our gut, we feel it in our limbs, we can feel fatigue, we can feel anxious. And so that emotions are really where you capture that mind, the brain-body contract and relationship very intensely. And then the fifth thing is actions. And what I love about actions and behaviors is they are very concrete. You're writing with your pen now, I'm speaking, I'm moving my hands. You can measure those things, you can analyze them, we know exactly what the neural pathways are. So we've got sensation, perception, emotions, and actions. Thoughts, yep. And then of course beneath all that, you've got memories and people always like to raise intuition. You know, they always say, what about that sixth thing, intuition? And we could talk about intuition, but the reason I like to talk about states and the reason we study states in my lab is that states have two properties that are easy to study somewhat compared to emotions. And that's how pervasive they are, meaning how long lasting they are. States tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, whereas emotions, it's sort of like They're more in combination. States are more like the primary colors from which you mix all that you get all the emotions. And the other thing is that they have an intensity that we can measure. You can have a state of being very alert or very drowsy or asleep.

And you can say from a one to 10, how are you feeling in this state?

That's right. And we can measure.

It's that experience.

That's right. And we can correlate it with things like heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing speed, sweating, levels of neural activity in brain areas that control wakefulness. And so I will be the first to say that I would love to be able to say that in my laboratory we are studying or someday we'll study awe and flow and all those things. But those are higher up on the ladder than we can get to right now. I think with the current technology, we can understand states and from there, I do believe that we can make a significant dent into certain mental health issues and optimize performance in certain communities that are trying to optimize performance and in the general public, but the states that we're focused on are very concrete. For instance, alert and focused. That would be a wonderful state to understand and be able to direct ourselves toward when we're not feeling alert and focused. How to get into that state. We could talk about tools for that if you like. Sleep. Sleep is so powerful and so important. I think now people really understand the extent to which it's important in large part because of Matt Walker's book, why We Sleep, and the important work that he's done in his lab at Berkeley and many other labs as well, of course. So it's focus, sleep, creativity, stress. These are the kind of core states that we would like to tackle first because we believe we can. And then hopefully in my career, but if not in my career, then maybe one of my scientific offspring or another laboratory, you know, 10, 20, 100 years from now, we'll be able to understand things like how does one get into a state of empathy? I mean, we could spend the whole hour talking about empathy, but it's hard and it's a fascinating topic and it's so important, but it's just very hard to understand at a neural level. So we're starting with the basics, with the confidence that by understanding those basics, they will build up to richer representations and understanding of things like empathy someday.

Would you need to be studying the heart as well to understand Empathy or does it all come from the mind?

That's a great question. To understand any state, we believe that you have to study the brain and the spinal cord and the body. So, in my lab, we talk about being neuroscientists. For me, that means we study the nervous system, the whole thing. So, people who come into my laboratory, we put them into VR environments that simulate some experience. And I realize it's not as real as being in the actual experience in the real world. but you get enough presence, especially because it's very visually and auditorily rich in those environments, people get what's called presence. They forget that they're in a VR environment, at least for moments. And in that time, we're measuring heart rate variability, we're measuring sweating, we're measuring, in many cases, we also have electrodes lowered into their brain because we do this with neurosurgery patients. And so we have access to the brain, we have access to the body, and it's really by recording from all these areas of the brain and body that we can get a fuller understanding of what a state of, say, focus or stress or anxiety really is. If we were just looking in one little corner of the brain or just at the heart, we wouldn't be able to do that. And so that's kind of a centerpiece of our lab is that brain and body, the whole nervous system is key. You've got to look at all of it.

With feelings. I want to talk about feelings and emotions for a second. Can a person make it so they never get depressed? They never react to their perception, their people's actions towards them where they never get to a state of, ah, I don't feel good. I'm feeling more depressed. I'm in a dark place now. I'm stuck in this place. Is there a way that we could ever Defend ourselves against negative stressors, negative emotions or are we just, do we need them as well to have contrast in life?

Well, there's sort of two views on this. I'll reveal mine after I sort of explain the two views. One is that these states, I guess I'm automatically calling things like depression a state of mind, a state of body. So when I say state of mind, I mean brain and body.

Because your body is really feeling, it's like the brain is connected to the body. And so if you're saying internally the thought of like, I'm depressed, I don't feel good, or I'm sad, or lonely, or I'm not good enough. The body's gonna react. Is that what I'm understanding? Absolutely. The body's going to manifest what the mind is telling you. Absolutely.

The thought, the idea, you're gonna be like, I'm sad, I'm not good enough, you're gonna shrink. Right. Is that right? That's right. I mean, there are really two forms of depression. Sometimes they're intermixed, but one is anxiety associated depression, and if you've ever experienced it or for anyone that's experienced it, they feel agitation in their body. and their mind races, but in their body. So the body is recruited. There are also depressive states that people feel very fatigued and exhausted, and overwhelmed, and they also experience that in their body. The idea of getting out of bed in the morning is hard, motivating to exercise, doing the sorts of things that we know are powerful for pushing back on depression. So the body is recruited I think most people would say that depressive states are bad when they bring down the baseline on life. Just as a brief aside, anytime there's a question about mental health or addiction or trauma or anything, one could look at it and make up some argument of, well, evolutionarily, this makes sense. We all get depressed. But we have to be fair to the person experiencing it, of course, and have sensitivity that Some behaviors will keep the baseline of our life steady, meaning job, relationships, et cetera, will continue as they are. Other activities will tend to improve the baseline on our life, job, activities, relationship, et cetera, will improve. And then there are some things like heroin, which very quickly we can predict that very quickly the baseline on life is going to creep down regardless of who that person is. So people say, can you get addicted to water? Well, maybe, but I have to drink a lot of water before the baseline on my life starts to go down.

So sure, it feels uncomfortable.

That's right. It's like, man, I'm so bloated all the time. Exactly. So we tend to throw around things like addiction and depression a little loosely. So I think that it's fair to say that depression is wired into us as a possible state that we can all fall into, but that it's very important, in my opinion, that humans have tools to remove themselves from that state. of course, to avoid tragedies like suicide, but also because when the baseline on someone's life goes down far enough, they find it increasingly hard to do the sorts of things that didn't get them out of depression. So you or I could say- so they stay in that state of depression.

Because it's too hard to go work. It's too hard to change my habit of eating healthier. So I'm going to stay, I'm going to keep eating ice cream, which is going to make my body depressed. That's right.

If I keep eating bad foods, if.

I keep staying up till 4:00 a.m., if I keep staying in a toxic relationship, I want to feel depressed.

That's right. And eventually, because of this very inseparable relationship between the brain and body, eventually what happens is that because the brain controls the body, but also the body can control the brain, people lose the ability to intervene in this depressive process. So you or I could say, look, if someone who's depressed, what they need to do is get up early, get some light in their eyes, get some movement. I know you put this information out there, which I love because those tips are grounded in, they're not even tips, they're really tools. And they're very powerful because they're grounded in excellent science. You get that dopamine release early in the day that's anti-depressive. You time your sleep better when you get sun in your eyes and you get movement early in the day. For most people, that's accessible and they absolutely should be doing it. Everyone should be doing that. But for people who are far enough down that path of depression, because the body and the mind have this relationship that's so close, there is a crossover point where they really can't do those activities.

Because they're so far deep in the depression.

The body won't do what they decide to do.

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It's hard to get out of it.

It's hard to go back to a healthy state. That's right, once your insulin is dysregulated.

You'Re hungry all the time, so it's much harder to control your hunger. Now, you have to have so much discipline and willpower to, I guess, break through and try to get back to a healthier state.

That's right.

Is that right? It's possible is what I'm hearing you say. Absolutely. But it's really, really hard. That's right. So is depression a disease then? Are people who have certain brain chemistry that are born differently with their brains that are just more depressed or is it possible to get out of that state if you have the functionality to think, to act, to move, to create routines and habits for yourself, is that possible?

Yeah, there are some genetic predispositions to depression and there are certainly familial circumstances where the trauma and challenge that can head people down that path. I think One of the reasons I'm involved in public education about neuroscience is I want people to understand the nervous system and I want them to understand that there are tools that can allow them to intervene in their thoughts and feelings. And most of the time, those involve bringing in behaviors and the actual actions, which are very concrete. And the reason is the following: it's very hard to control the mind just using thinking.

Just using the mind.

Just thinking. It's very hard to, you know, if someone's stressed out and you say, Calm.

Down, it doesn't work.

Telling ourselves, Calm down, doesn't work. So it's like, what's a tool? Breathe.

Right.

So a specific tool for a walk. A specific tool. And when it comes to depression and emotions, I mean, it's very hard to.

Talk oneself out of an emotional state. It's just very challenging. Very hard. That's right. It's like when I talk to my girlfriend and she's just like, she's not happy about something, and she gets on a tangent. There's nothing I can say to calm her down. There's nothing I can say to someone who's emotional about an idea in the moment and tell them like, okay, let's talk later. Otherwise, me trying to tell them to relax, no, it's not what you're thinking. It's counterproductive. It's not the truth. That's not what you're thinking or whatever.

It's kind of reactive, right? Makes them more emotional. Well, that's because these states, like these emotional states of mind, they recruit the whole nervous system. So we are actually a different- Your.

Whole body is out of control.

Your mind, your body. Like for instance, if you're angry, upset or stressed, your pupils dilate. This is subconscious. As a consequence of that, you view the world in kind of like portrait mode, not panoramic, excuse me, portrait mode on your phone, where the thing that's upsetting you is in sharper focus and everything else is blurry. So you actually see the world differently. In addition to that, the timing, your perception of time, excuse me, is now faster so that things outside you seem to be moving more slowly in comparison to how you feel inside. You've experienced this if you were ever in line at the airport or something and it's taking a long time and you're about to miss your flight. It seems like the person in front of you is moving very slowly.

They're taking forever.

Yeah, but time is time. It's moving at the same rate regardless. When you're very calm, or let's say you're fatigued, let's say you're exhausted, you didn't sleep well the night before, things in front of you are going to seem like they're moving really fast or saying take off your shoes, putting them on the conveyor belt, it's kind of overwhelming. -It's slowing down here. -That's right, because your internal clock is moving more slowly. And so these states of mind when someone's upset, they recruit their entire being, their way of being. And so one of the reasons why I mentioned that sensation, perception, feeling, thought, and action before is that the actions are very concrete. and because of this reciprocal relationship between the brain and body, brain connects to body, body connects to brain, we know that when the mind isn't where we want it to be, we need to use the body to intervene.

What does that mean?

So there are two ways that you can shift your brain state quickly. You mentioned one already, which is respiration or breathing. And the reason is there's a direct connection from the brain to an organ in our body called the diaphragm, which is skeletal muscle. The diaphragm is designed to move the lungs up and down, bring in more oxygen, expel more oxygen. And it's unlike other organs like the heart or the spleen or the liver because it's actually made up of what's called striated muscle, just like a bicep, tricep or quadricep. It can be voluntarily controlled. You can't voluntarily control your heart directly right now.

Like you can't say speed up and speed it up. Slow down. Or slow it down. But you can slow down your breathing. And you can slow down the way.

You think about things, I'm assuming.

Or change your thought to something else to help you be more relaxed.

That's right. So one of the reasons why breathing is such a powerful tool for shifting one's state is that A, it's always available for voluntary control. It's just right there. I can decide right now to do three inhales or I can just go back to breathing reflexively. I can just do that in any moment. So the neural real estate, which is in the brainstem that controls breathing, is in a unique position because it's at the kind of boundary between conscious control and unconscious control. I can't do that for my digestion. I can't do that for most everything that happens internally. The other thing is that breathing controls our level of alertness very dramatically. So the faster you breathe, generally, the more alert you are. The slower you breathe, the more calm you're gonna be.

The faster you breathe, meaning shorter, quick breaths, or either way.

So, we're just to take a brief adventure through the neuroscience of breathing and how it relates to brain states. And there's some fun tools in here, so forgive me for this tangent, but you have two brain areas that are responsible for breathing. One is called, for the aficionados, the pre-Butzinger complex. It was discovered by Jack Feldman at UCLA. It's named after a bottle of wine, so now people won't forget it. And it controls rhythmic breathing. so inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. It's just rhythmic breathing. There's another brain area that controls breathing, which is near what's called the parafacial nucleus, which involves breathing anytime there are double inhales or double exhales or triple inhales. You say, well, why would you have this second brain area for breathing? Well, it turns out when you're speaking or crying or coughing, you need to coordinate your breathing with your speaking. And that means sometimes you need to take multiple inhales or multiple exhales, and this is all happening very, very fast. You don't notice. But there's a very important discovery that was made a few years ago by Jack's lab and by a guy named Mark Krasnow at Stanford who discovered there's a set of neurons in your brainstem, mind-brainstem, everybody's brainstem, and every animal, every mammal's brainstem. It's a very small number of neurons that controls a specific pattern of breathing, which are called physiological sighs. So these are not just sighs where.

You go and exhale.

These are sighs that involve doing two inhales and then an extended exhale.

We all do this.

You do this during sleep. Anytime carbon dioxide levels in your bloodstream get too high in order to get more oxygen into your system. People also do this if they've been crying or sobbing. They'll do this and then they'll exhale. So what's happening with these physiological sighs and why is this powerful? So your lungs are two big bags of air. but they actually are made up of a ton of little sacks of air called alveoli of the lungs. When we are exercising or when we are sleeping or anytime we're doing anything, these little sacks of air eventually start to collapse. And what happens is carbon dioxide builds up in our system and we experience that as stress. We actually feel the impulse to breathe because carbon dioxide levels get too high. They're neurons that sense carbon dioxide. And then Without realizing it, you do the double inhale and then exhale. Typically the inhales are done through the nose and the exhale is done through the mouth.

So it looks like.

And why the second inhale? Well, if you've ever tried to blow up a balloon for a kid at a kid's party or just blowing up a balloon, you sometimes blow into that empty balloon. It doesn't go anywhere. What do you do? You do two in, you do two, you go and then it pops open. So these double inhales pop open the alveoli of the lungs. They don't explode them, but they pop them open, which pulls carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream, brings oxygen, and then you offload carbon dioxide. So if you watch a dog right before it takes a nap or something, it often will do these. Now, what's cool about these physiological sighs is from work in our lab and that's still ongoing, I just want to say it's still ongoing, but work in other labs as well, double inhales followed by an extended exhale are the fastest way that I'm aware of to bring the mind and the body into a more relaxed state.

No way. Really?

Yeah.

It's the fastest way. I'm stressed, I'm overwhelmed, just do a three or two.

Two inhales through the nose and then exhale slow through the mouth. One to three of those repeated will bring your level of autonomic arousal down basically to baseline.

What's that?

Autonomic arousal. Sorry. Sorry.

What was it?

Sorry, so the autonomic nervous system, it just means automatic. And it's a misnomer because as I'm describing, it's not all automatic. I'm sorry, so autonomic arousal is kind of your level of alertness or your level of calm. People sometimes call it sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic. I avoid sympathetic parasympathetic because sympathetic sounds like sympathy. And then people think it means calm and nice when it actually means stress and fear. Sympathetic is stress. Exactly, the naming. Parasympathetic is non-stress.

Right.

And those names have to do with the anatomy and the locations of the neurons involved in it. But I think for anyone that experiences anxiety from time to time, which is everybody, knowing that you can consciously take control over these neurons that control the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the lungs, et cetera, even if you don't remember any of that, it's just two inhales through the nose. What you're trying to do is maximally inflate those little sacs in your lungs, and then exhale long through the mouth because you're blowing off carbon dioxide.

I heard you do a, does it matter the cadence because you did a.

Long deep breath and then a shorter?

Not so much.

That's just your style. Yeah, you're just trying to fill those as big as you can. So, the advice that we hear of take a deep breath or just exhale is sort of right, but it doesn't capture this neural circuit. So, a lot of what my lab is focused on, because there's so many great labs and people doing great stuff in the breath work community, Patrick McKeown, Brian MacKenzie, they're all these incredible people doing this work, Wim Hof. But my lab's been mainly focused on what is the neural machinery that controls these brain body states. And the reason these physiological sides work is partially because you offload carbon dioxide, you reinflate the lungs, so when the body has oxygen, it's happy. When it doesn't have oxygen, it gets stressed. But the other reason is the most direct and fastest connection between the brain and body for controlling your state of mind is what's called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C. The phrenic nerve connects these neurons that I'm referring to in these two brain centers that control breathing with the diaphragm. A lot of people get excited about the vagus nerve, and I'm not out to punish the vagus nerve or the vaganistas, but the truth is the vagus nerve is a very slow system for calming the brain and body. It's called the rest and digest pathway. People are engaging their vagus all the time when they eat a big meal. When the stomach is distended, it sends a signal to the brain that, oh, I have enough food. It's time to rest and digest. But eating, first of all, if you're only using food as a way to control your stress. That's not a good habit. It's not a good habit. You'll be depressed once you start. That's right. People have learned long ago, thousands of years ago, that the best way to suppress a cortisol response is with carbohydrates because it blunts cortisol. But this is why people eat carbohydrate-rich.

Foods when they're stressed.

And when cortisol is spiked, what happens? So, every morning when you wake up.

There'S a cortisol spike.

That's a good cortisol spike. It's a stress spike, right? It's like a... It's a good one. It's the one that wakes you up out of sleep and you want that early in the day. So, you're not just groggy all day, right? That's right. Cortisol has important positive health-promoting functions. There's a signature of depression and anxiety, however, that the psychiatrists know about, which is a 9:00 p.m. cortisol spike. For people who are depressed, there's a second spike of cortisol late in the day. And that's problematic and is associated with.

A lot of mental health issues.

Cortisol is a stress hormone, is that right? Cortisol is a stress hormone. So you have your adrenal glands, which are right above your kidneys in your lower back, and they have two parts to it. They release adrenaline, which is also called epinephrine. And adrenaline is what makes you feel agitated. If you're calm, you're walking along, you look at your phone and there's a troubling text message, you immediately have focus, energy and alertness.

Is the brain connected to those then and it sends a signal to each other?

That's right. That's right. And then it affects the body. That's right. The body feels it. That's right.

So adrenaline is liberated into the body.

Very fast in less than a second, 500 milliseconds. You see something, you're reacting to it. Boom. That's right. And it recruits a set of neurons that live right in the core of your body. They then send a signal out to your body and all of a sudden you feel like you want to move. Let's go. The stress is just, it's going to dilate your pupils, cue your alertness and make you agitated and want to move. The body is pretty fascinating. It's really fascinating. And you want this because, you know, the other night I was taking a hike. I was out here a couple days ago and taking a hike in Topanga and I saw a shadow. I looked down and it didn't move. It was a snake. It wasn't a rattlesnake but But still, all that happened in less than a second, right? And these are primitive pathways designed to get you to your alertness. My night vision is so-so, but all of a sudden I felt like I could see clearly and you just, that's adrenaline. Cortisol is a bit more slow-acting. So when that adrenaline is up over and over and over again for days and days, cortisol starts getting liberated also from the adrenals. It comes from other places too, but mainly from the adrenals. And the cortisol system is an anti-inflammation system as well as an inflammation system. It's both. It's both. But they give cortisone shots to football players in the locker room for a reason. It blocks pain and all these things.

But too much of it over an extended period of time does what?

It can cause chronic inflammation. It can cause chronic fatigue. I mean, there is a debate out there. Most serious MDs don't believe in adrenal burnout. people think of adrenal burnout. There is something called adrenal fatigue or adrenal burnout. So there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome, which is a real medical phenomenon where the adrenals are incapable of making these cortisol and adrenal hormones. But the truth is that you have enough adrenaline and cortisol in your body to last two lifetimes and 25 famines. I mean, we were built with a lot of robustness, right? This explains the David Goggins of the world. We all do have that greater capacity that people talk about. Stress is very misunderstood because people think of stress as this ancient carryover that's very unfortunate. It kind of gets lumped with depression like, oh, this is just a flaw in our design or something. But actually, stress is wonderful. It actually activates our immune system. So anytime you liberate adrenaline into your bloodstream, you also protect yourself against infection of bacteria and viruses. because if you think about if we had to gather food and we didn't have it and we had to then pack up and migrate long distances, you can't afford to get sick. And this is why people who work, work, work, work, and then rest, they usually get sick when they finally stop and rest.

Really?

Yeah. It's like the post-finals phenomenon in university or after the season for a game or the caretaker thing where you're taking care of somebody who's ill and you're just work, work, work or taking care of young children and then you finally stop to rest. you go on vacation and you get slammed with, why is that?

Because you're being in your comfort zone now?

Because the stress turned off. And adrenaline, so that the stress response recruits the immune organs of the body to release killer T-cells. In fact, Wim Hof breathing, I know you're familiar with Wim, of doing 20 or 30 deep inhales and exhales, and also combined with some breath hold type work, exhale, hold, inhale, hold, is known to stimulate adrenaline release. And one of the better papers that's out there, scientific peer-reviewed papers, is a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, where they brought in two groups. One group did Wim Hof breathing. The other group did just mindful meditation. Both groups were injected with E. Coli.

This is crazy.

Right? It's crazy. The meditators got fever, diarrhea, and vomiting. and the people who did Wim Hof either didn't get it or got it to a much lesser extent.

It felt sluggish, but not.

They didn't. Isn't that crazy? This is not an experiment to do at home. Isn't this crazy? But it makes perfect sense because that breathing simulates a stress response. It stimulates cortisol and adrenaline, which signals to the body. Right, which signals to the thymus, the spleen, and the other, you know, the nodes of the immune system to liberate killer cells. And so when that bacteria comes in, the system is ready for it.

Your body is defending against viruses, disease, essentially, when you create a routine of healthy stress.

That's right. And we could talk about, we definitely want to, you don't want stress on all the time. Sleep is really important, etc. But that stress response combats infection because It recruits immune cells. Now, I want to be really clear because there's been a lot of discussion about that study out there, most of which is totally wrong. And I'm- the Neumann-Haefling breathing study or the- the study was done correctly, but when people recap that study and summarize it, oftentimes they'll say it suppressed the immune response, that people were able to suppress the immune response, and that's absolutely wrong.

What does that mean? Suppress the immune system?

Well, exactly. It doesn't make any sense. What that did.

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Fidelity Brokerage Services member NYSEsIPC. Was, and if you look at the graphs in that paper, which I've done, what it did is it stimulated cortisol release. It stimulated adrenaline release or epinephrine release so that the system was primed to battle infection. And so I think it's a very impressive thing and, you know, hats off to WIMM for discovering and thinking about a way to recruit the, what's called the innate immune system. Before that study, it was thought that you couldn't really recruit the immune system in that way. Now, you don't have to do that breathing. You could if you like, but you don't have to do that breathing to recruit the immune response.

What else could you do?

A cold shower or an ice bath is another way to induce stress.

Which is what he does.

Exactly, exactly. And so I think that when you look at states of stress, I mean, cold water is one way to do it. Intense, the breathing that they do, that sort of Wim Hof breathing, is also classically called tumo breathing. It's kind of the opposite of the physiological side that I described, the double inhale exhale, It's not designed to reduce stress. It's actually designed to increase your level of alertness. And it's interesting because a lot of people find great relief from stress by doing this tumo type Wim Hof intense breathing once a day. Now, the reason I suggest physiological size is they can be done in real time. You can get into the elevator and do a physiological size. You could also do tumo type breathing. In any moment you can do a- Right, exactly. whereas the more intense forms of breathing are more of a practice that you do.

10, 20 minutes, whatever.

What they tend to do and what cold showers and ice baths and things like that do is they raise the ceiling on your stress threshold. And what I mean by that is throughout the day and throughout the year, we're confronted with different things. Right now we're confronted with a lot of things. 2020 is the year of being confronted with stress of various kinds. the mind plays an important role in interpreting whether or not it's overwhelming or tolerable. So intense breathing like tumo breathing or ice baths or cold showers or intense exercise like high intensity interval training type stuff teaches the mind to be comfortable in these higher stress states where in other words it teaches people to be comfortable when they have a lot of adrenaline in their body. This is basically stress inoculation. But stress inoculation is not about not getting stressed, it's actually about divorcing the mind-body relationship a bit so that you're calm in the mind when your body is very amplified. So, if you've ever done two-mo type breathing or you've done a cold shower, the goal is to get the adrenaline release and then calm your mind.

And then calm your mind. And stay in the ice, not like, I'm freezing, but more like, no, I can handle this. That's right. And have power over your thoughts in your mind so that you can have more control of your body. Obviously, you're gonna feel cold.

Right.

But if you can. But, I mean, does the mind have 100 power over what the body feels?

No. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a significant control over it.

Say I feel cold and ice.

Right. It's.

I mean, ice, it's 30 degrees. Can I control my mind to say, you know what? This is actually a hot tub. and you feel warm and you're feeling hot right now, or is it too much physiological barriers to break through that?

To some extent you can. So, I think the question that you're asking is a very important one. It's actually the question, which is to what extent does our subjective narrative-- the story we tell ourselves-- the story we tell ourselves actually mean something for the body. And to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative? So this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now. And so I do want to highlight that it's ongoing work. But I think, you know, the old narrative, meaning a few 10 years ago, was that if you're feeling depressed, just smile. Well, if that worked, we would have a lot less depression than we see out there. Now, that doesn't That's not mean.

Most people actually who are depressed just aren't smiling at all. That's right. Like when you change your physiology, doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit?

The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. So, you know, the idea that when we're depressed we tend to be in more defensive type postures. When we're feeling good we tend to be in more relaxed and extended postures, all true. But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind. That's a first step. Think about like two interlocking gears. It's one gear that turns the other, but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going.

So how do you get it to dance together?

Exactly. So subjective, there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. to answer your question. Can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold? So, a couple things that are important. First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced. For instance, right now, I can say, okay, have a thought that just decide to write your name and you can do that. I'm going to decide to write my name and you can do it. So that's a deliberate thought which says that you can introduce thoughts. So I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them. Generally they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time.

But we can introduce a positive thought. Can you think of two thoughts at the same time? Probably not.

So you can only have one thought at a time, right?

But they come very fast. But it comes and goes. You have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you otherwise, and a spontaneous thought will pop back in.

That's right.

Based on your experience, based on sensory, based on how you're feeling or perceiving something, your environment, it's just going to keep popping in.

Right.

So how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often?

Right. So I'm a big fan of wellness and I think it's a great community, but it tends to run in absolutes and there aren't a lot of operational definitions as we say in science. And what I love about your questions, you're asking for really getting to the meat of things, asking for the operational definitions. One of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have. What a terrible thing to put on people. You know, what a challenging thing. I don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts. I think there is great value, however, to introducing positive thought schemes. Now, the reason is not because I think it's just because I think so, but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort. And that relates to the dopamine pathway. So the molecule dopamine is a reward. It's released in the brain when you win a game, you close a deal, you make a love your life, someone likes your photo, the great you love your life, you complete something. But most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals. It's actually released when we are in route to our goals, we're in pursuit of our goals, and we think we're on the right path.

This is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal, because they feel like I'm supposed to feel something greater. I felt this thing for two minutes, and now that's it?

That's right. High achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process.

To the pursuit, the day-to-day tasks, the.

Growth, the lessons, the losses, everything, right? Well, and it can be to some wins along the way, but growth mindset, which is the academic discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague Carol Dweck at Stanford, is the hallmark of growth mindset. It's really two things. One is, I'm not where I want to be now, but I'm capable of getting there eventually. The other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself.

In fact, don't reward the result, reward the effort.

That's right. And if you look at true high performers, people that are consistently good at what they do, they don't peak and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs, but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently, those people attach dopamine to the effort process. And actually, Carol's one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that love doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right. So it's like the people love puzzles, but in this case, they knew they couldn't get it right, but they love doing it. And it incidentally or not so incidentally, these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they feel some sense of reward from the effort process. Now, the cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled. we can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way.

Our interpretation.

Our interpretation. But it has to be attached to reality. So, you know, one should never confuse- what is real? Right. So, if you're thinking about the effort you're expending, so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels and setting up a new business, for instance. And it's hard. If they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole, potentially, that it's giving them an opportunity, that it's somehow they are on the right path, or if they're not in movement along that path, or at least oriented on the right path, they're not lying in bed all day.

They're taking a step forward.

They're taking a step. if they can reward that process internally, two things happen. First of all, the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger, so you get better at that process. And second, and most importantly, dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine. And what I mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal Cell, excellent journal, Cell Press journal, a couple years ago showing that with repeated bouts of effort we use and we release more and more epinephrine. It's kind of adrenaline but in the brain. With more effort, we're going to get more epinephrine. Every time you put in effort. So every time you make, for this, let's keep it, if I were to keep it in the business context, every time you make, write that email, every time you, let's say it's a person who's a craftsman or a crafts woman, every time you're working in the shop and doing that, every bit of effort you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account. You're spending epinephrine. At some point, those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you feel like quitting. It feels exhausted. This was done in a beautiful study, actually, where they control the visual environments and they have the subjects exert effort and they can control the visual environment. So sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward, this is actually kind pushing forward in kind of swimming motion, would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress. And other times it was an exercise in futility where they would just keep the visual world stationary and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere. Epinephrine's climbing, climbing, climbing, and eventually they quit. Now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you anyone the feeling that you could continue. and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue. And you've seen this actually, football is a good example. Two teams play, say the Super Bowl, both teams are max effort the entire time. Max effort. The team that wins suddenly, in a moment, has the energy to jump all over the place, party for days. They can talk, I mean, they have to.

They were exhausted right before that.

Well, that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind. except it was neural energy. And what happened was effort is this adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, adrenaline, eventually people quit. They just quit. The dopamine is able to suppress that. And so then you're expending effort, but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it.

So we need dopamine to keep the effort going.

Is that what I'm hearing you say? That's right. Dopamine is not just about reward. It's one of the biggest misconceptions. Dopamine is about motivation and drive. It's like a jet that propels you along a path.

How do we get more dopamine?

You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind. Like how? Okay, so that's a great question. First of all, there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements. I want to be really clear. There is a drug, there are two drugs actually that will cause massive release of dopamine. They're called cocaine and methamphetamine.

The problem is that's what gets us.

Addicted because it feels so good. the problem is exactly. The problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source. It becomes the goal and the path. It becomes the path and the destination. And you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine, and that baseline on their life goes down very, very quickly.

Because there's no reason to work hard at anything else because you feel good.

That's right.

And that's the greatest feeling you'll have. do anything else when you can have that feeling.

That's right. If you think about, remember these neurochemical systems, adrenaline, cortisol, dopamine, epinephrine, they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build Fortune 500 companies. They were designed to do anything. They were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances, we could adapt. So in an animal context, an animal that, let's say, is hunting or it needs food for its young. It's going to feel agitation. That's stress. That's cortisol. It's like hunger. My babies might not eat. I might not eat. Maybe it's looking for a mate. It's going to feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching. Foraging is called in the animal behavior world. It's foraging. At some point, it might catch a smell of something, a potential mate or berries or a stream if it's thirsty. At that moment, dopamine is released, and now it has energy to continue along that path. Whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain that's involved in depression and disappointment that if it goes to that place and it turns out it was the wrong path, there's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine so that you don't repeat that mistake again. So you don't give up. That's right.

You just don't repeat it again.

That's right.

And those events that remind you like.

That'S not the path to go down. That's right. And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience. Dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions led to success previously. You're going to repeat those. Those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those.

So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path.

That's right. So you asked how do you do this? so to really make it concrete. And.

Is there such thing as too much dopamine? Well, if you're not on drugs.

So cocaine and amphetamine are bad because they lower the baseline on life. They make people very focused on things outside of themselves. That's the other thing that dopamine does. It can be positive or negative. But when we have dopamine in our system, we tend to be outward facing and in pursuit of things in our environment. You can look at somebody on cocaine and realize that that's the extreme version of that. But, you know, I love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes. So it's like get after it, you know, what do sharks do on Monday or I can't remember the specific things. Or then they're the, like sometimes it's just time to chill. Well, that's a different molecule. That's serotonin, right? And then dopamine is the get after it molecule. And epinephrine is effort. So if we were gonna break this down really concrete, we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort. just effort, with no subjective label on them, good or bad effort, whether or not it's stress or you're pursuing something you want to do, it's just exerting effort. Dopamine is about reward, but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards. And then we'll get to it in a little bit, but serotonin is a different source of reward, but it comes from more relaxed states and it resets the whole system and it's associated with things like sleep and gratitude and meditation and especially gratitude. And then just, I guess, to round this out, the cortisol system is more of a longer term stress. Okay, so we've all heard the sayings, you know, how do you, you know, journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step or how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time or, you know, all these sayings and, you know, goes back to the Bible and earlier, right? I mean, this is not new. These are not new sayings, but they're showing up in different forms. What's lost in those short descriptions, however, is that every step is not equivalent. If it were just that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, everyone would pursue their goals. Everyone would push back against adversity. Everyone, I mean, you can read the inspirational stories as many times as one needs. And I do think inspirational stories are very high value. In fact, I think they're vicarious dopamine. I think they give us the sense that we could, which then orients hope, which then orients us to the world again.

Maybe it's possible for me.

That's right. So let's say, let's take the example of somebody who's.

But with Dostoevsky, that's that story of it's not about just taking a single step and one step at a time. Is it because there's adversities every 10 steps you go, and so it's harder and harder?

It's not just very hard. Well, it's just very non-linear. You know, it's some days go, you know, I know this from my scientific career. It's a, you know, some days is easy, some days is hard. It's all over the place, right? So I think the thing to remember is that dopamine is this incredibly powerful molecule that allows us to buffer the effort process. It allows us to be an effort longer, and it allows us to actually eventually enjoy the process of effort.

And not think about the reward, but just say, oh, I'm enjoying the process.

Right. Well, you just described the first step. The first step in learning to attach dopamine to the effort process, which is the key operation in order to succeed, is to be very careful about how much you focus on the end goal. Keeping the goal in mind is important for a proper orientation. You have to know the ultimate destination. But if at any point we were to evaluate our progress relative to that end goal, or if we don't know what the end goal is, there's a huge gap there. And it can feel overwhelming and depressing.

And I'm not good enough, I should just give up. What am I doing this for?

That's right.

And those thoughts will affect us.

And they're very realistic, right? I mean, as Carol will say and other people have said in the psychology field, positive self-talk oftentimes, unless you do it correctly, you're badly wrong. Lying to yourself won't work. saying, I'm a winner, I'm a winner, I'm a winner, when you haven't lost or you haven't won yet is great.

But that's not the most effective use of these systems. Well, you're also being out of integrity with yourself. You're telling yourself a lie. You're like, and then you're losing your.

Ability to have confidence because you're just lying to yourself. And if it's really extreme, there's a name for it. It's called delusional. And people will start to point that out, and then it becomes harder to recruit people into your goals. So I think the key thing is to attach that sense of reward to the effort process. It's saying, look, I am oriented in the right direction and rewarding the things you're not doing. I'm not back on my heels. I'm not just staying in bed in the morning.

I'm not, yeah.

A good example of this came to me recently. I have a good friend, he did nine years in the SEAL teams. His name is Pat Dawson. And we were talking about the Admiral McRaven thing, get up and make your bed. you know, and they really do that. And I think the way it was described was, you know, so at the end of the day, even if everything doesn't go well, your bed is still made. For me, that's not that big of a reward, frankly.

Right.

And so I said that, and I--.

I love it though. I make my bed.

Oh, I definitely make my bed in the morning, but I mean, going back and seeing that at the end of a hard day, it's not enough. I felt like there was something else there. So I asked him, he said, well, it's very interesting. because part of it is about not just making your bed, but it's the things you're not doing by making your bed. You're not lying in bed and ruminating. You're not back on your heels.

You're not on your phone.

That's right. When you look at, and you have spent a lot of time with people in high performing communities, mainly through some consulting work, but what you find is that we can all be either be back on our heels, flat-footed or forward, center, or mass. And when you look at people who are in these high performance communities, they try and keep their center of mass forward, almost through what seemed like trivial things like making your bed or making the cup of coffee. But it's not just about what you're doing. It's all the things you're not doing that can put you down the path of ruminating or put you down the path of unhealthy behavior. So the key to this is if we want to be very concrete, we should probably focus on actions. And I'll use fitness as an example because it translates to everybody. because people's circumstances differ. Let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine. They hate running or they want to lose weight in a healthy way, this kind of thing. So we've all heard the example, well, you put your shoes by the door on day one. Day two, you put them on. Day three, you go out the door. Day four, you walk around the block and then, you know, and then eventually like they're running marathons. Okay, great, but to sustain that behavior or even to make the behavior pleasureful, and to give you energy, the key is to subjectively reward those steps. So it's not going to be, let's say I go out and I run a mile and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks. The key is as you're in the strain of that mile, the hard part, you want to tell yourself, this is the good part. This is the part that gives me energy. And I'll be very surprised if people don't actually feel like they could continue further. So, it's a journey of 1,000 miles starts with single steps, is made up of single steps. But the key is to reward the harder steps, not the easier ones and not the ones where you get the thing that you want.

Don't reward yourself for putting your shoes.

On and taking a step outside. You could if that was a huge barrier for you. It was very hard.

It was very hard for you.

Running the 10 miles, that's hard. Find the wall and push a little bit further through that wall and reward that process. So this is why I think reps in the gym, the final reps like reps to failure are usually not the best example. First of all, most people aren't doing reps to failure and it doesn't translate to young kids and stuff where they probably shouldn't be doing heavy reps to failure, this kind of thing.

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You want, however, if you're going to go there to think about, this is the hard part because that's when adrenaline, norepinephrine are getting maxed out and that's when you have an opportunity to bring dopamine in and teach those neural pathways to slam that back down. And I don't want to highlight them too much because they are a very niche and specialized community, but you look at people in operational operations, you look at the process like the whole evaluation process of who gets in and who doesn't. It's really about putting people into stress and seeing who can not just make it through that stress but buffer that stress, reward the process through teamwork, reward the process of stress through some internal dialogue that has everything to do with not being back on your heels, not being flat-footed but center of mass forward. And I should also be clear, I'm not talking about everybody being super aggro and always like, you know, work, work, work. In fact, if you're spending too much epinephrine, if you're too much of an adrenaline junkie, you will burn out eventually, unless you can find ways to recover yourself or to buffer that with dopamine. And the recovery process is especially important. There's a second reward system. So you've got the dopamine system, and I guess to really put a box around it, The subjective reward needs to be done at the hardest portion of a process. The tough conversation with a significant other, it's like when it's really tough and you want, you just, that's when you want to start telling yourself, this is the good part because I'm not speaking or this is the good part because I'm not reacting. Right, I'm not reacting or this is the good part because I'm probably not doing it correctly but I'm on the right path, right? they're upset, they're not feeling your empathy, this kind of thing, or you're not really understanding what's going on, you're getting frustrated. But if you tell yourself, this is the neural pathway getting ground in there, really dialed in so that the next time I'm going to breeze right past this. That's really how the process works. Because remember, no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear, even if you get a billion dollars, or you win a Nobel Prize, or you win the presidency, it's all internal. These neurochemicals are all internal. And while some of them are designed to be released in response to things very reflexively, like food, sex, sleep, all these things will trigger these neurochemicals, we have this big forebrain which allows us to place subjective context on things.

How do you do it then? How do you bring dopamine in your brain subjectively through daily conversation with yourself?

There's a process I'm going through right now where I'm trying to write a book and it's hard. And I was told that the harder it is, the better I'm probably doing it. I was like, great. And my editor is ready to kill me because I'm slow. And I'm a very slow person. I drive people crazy. I'm like glacially slow because science is slow and I like to get things right.

You want to rush it?

I like to get things right but I'm very proud of the fact that everything we've published, I can stand behind, it was the best we could do with the tools at the time. And I just know that when I look back on a writing career or a scientific career, I want to be able to say, you know, every journal we put it in was rock solid, everything was rock solid, we had fun doing it, the relationship. So I go slow. But as a consequence, what I'm finding is there are a lot of interferences these days. I think social media is great. I teach neuroscience on social media because I think it's important to do public education. Distractions, I can too. But it's incredible. And it's incredible how much time and energy it can take. So what I've started doing now is I turn off my phone and I lock it in a safe and I experience extreme anxiety.

It's so weird. Why is that? Is it because it gives you so.

Much dopamine that when you're not having it? Well, this is scary because I actually think, brief anecdote, on the weekend I was driving, there's a kid that I mentor and I picked up my phone and I was texting while I was driving. And he said to me, this is really embarrassing, for me. He said, you know, I wish you wouldn't text while you drive. And I put it down and I realized, this is crazy. I know that my life and his life is far more important and the lives of the people around me are far more important than any text message, which means I wasn't doing it rationally. It's just pure reflex at this point. So I don't think I pick up the phone because I don't even know what I'm looking for there anymore. It's just become reflexive.

Wow.

So for me lately, the longer I can keep that phone in a safe and write a grant or my, or this book, what I tell myself is the agitation is good. I'm, it's, at least I'm not doing that. And then I find that as I start to write and I get into the process, I start feeling good about it. And I, I'll pause and say, okay, I, I have control. I have ultimate control over my behavior. I can put that thing away. there might be a nuclear war out there and I'm just doing this anyway. I have control over my thoughts, my feelings and behavior. So I tell myself that and then I find I have immense energy and all I want to do is write. And I kind of tunnel into the process. And I think that sometimes people need to write these things out for themselves so it's really concrete. I think some people are so unskilled at subjective rewards that writing it out is really powerful.

-So, what would you write out for yourself as a subjective reward for this experience?

-As long as I'm writing, I'm on the right path. As long as I'm not writing, I'm looking at my phone, I'm not on the right path. Because for me, the two or three things that are most important for my career are writing grants, working on this.

Book manuscript and writing scientific manuscripts. I mean, there are other things as well. -Anything else that you're not doing is holding you back from doing that.

-That'S right. -So, you need to be focused Center.

Mass forward on doing those things.

That's right. So I don't do any jumping around, power poses, things like that. I will use tools to kind of ramp up my dope. I mean, there are certain songs that are really embedded in my-- Emotionally embedded in my emotional thing that go back to, you know, when I was a, you know, wild, you know, skateboarding punk rock teenager that will get me fired up. And I think there's real utility.

That's pure dopamine. That's just dopamine. But it's not sustainable.

You have to subjectively keep yourself motivated, I guess. That's right. And so, and then if I finish a chapter, I will stop for a moment and I'll just kind of smile and laugh at myself. I'm big on like self-reflection with humor and just thinking that this is crazy. You know, my brain is under my control. There would be people out there that say there's no free will but I do not believe that. I put my hands in a lot of brains. You stimulate certain brain areas, people do things. You stimulate other brain areas, people think things. Ultimately, unless you have electrodes in your head and someone stimulating them, we are in control of our thoughts and behaviors. We can't control all of them, but my goal is to be as deliberate and non-reflexive as possible in life. That's my goal from when I wake up in the morning until I go to sleep.

How do we get to that place?

Little by little and by rewarding each thing. If you get up and you use the make the bed, make the bed, you're not back on your heels. You make a cup of coffee, you sit down, you script out something in a journal, you exercise, maybe you call a relative that you think might need to hear from you or that you'd like to talk to. You do something in a deliberate way, just being deliberate and learning to push away the things that are trying to make you reflexive is so important.

Reflexive, same thing as reactive or what's reflective?

Yeah, so there are two modes of brain operation. So now this is getting a little nitty-gritty, but one is deliberate where we're thinking duration, path, and outcome. What should I do? How long should I do it and what's the outcome? Deliberate. Yeah. Intentional.

And it feels like work.

This is what people need to understand. The deliberate thought, deliberate action, writing the book, doing the workout you don't want to do, whatever it is, having the conversation, it's supposed to feel hard. Hard. It's supposed to feel hard. You should subjectively reward it so that you get better at doing that.

Thank you so, so much for listening to this episode. Make sure to share it with a friend. Just copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to this, or you can use lewishowes.com/1015. And this is just part one. And on the next episode, we dive deeper into the science of teamwork, where go getters go wrong and the value of gratitude. There's so much science and research that's backing what he's about to share next. I cannot wait for you to listen to episode two, but make sure to share this with a friend because episode one is just so great by itself. Also, click that subscribe button and leave us a five star rating and review over on Apple Podcasts. And if you want inspirational messages from me, then text the word podcast to 614-350-3960. And I want to close with a quote from Marie Marie who said nothing in life is to be feared. It is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more so that we may fear less. I want to remind you, if no one sold you lately, you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. I'm so grateful for you. You know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.

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