1073 The Science of Positive Thinking & How to Control Your Mind w/Dr. Andrew Huberman

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1073 with neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman.

Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, former pro athlete turned lion 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. Spiritual teacher Ram Dass said, don't think about the past, just be here now. Don't think about the future, just be here now. And William James said, the greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another. My guest today is back. It's neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who is also professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford. He also runs Huberman Lab, which studies brain states such as fear, courage, anxiety, calm and how we can better move in and out of them through practices like visual cues, breath, work, movement and supplementation. This is part two of our interview, so if you haven't checked checked out part one. Make sure to go back there after this Lewishouse.com 1072 or if you're subscribed over on Apple Podcast, just go right back to the previous episode there or over on Spotify or ever you're listening to podcasts and in part one we talked about how to use the mind to our benefit when we experience stress, fear or trauma. The two types of stress and how to deal with them. Different breathing techniques you should be practicing. The importance of sleep and how it affects our brains. This was nuts when I heard this sign and Huberman's thoughts on the Law of Attraction. But in today's episode we discussed the science of positive thinking. Is positive thinking actually positive? How dopamine is released into the body. How we can trick our minds into attaching internal rewards for external accomplishments. The science of gratitude and abundance. The best way to set long term goals for ourselves and the one belief Dr. Huberman believes everyone could benefit from. I am so excited for you to listen to this. Do me a favor. If you care about other people and having a better life and improving their life, then please share this with someone you think would enjoy it. You can copy and paste the link wherever you're listening to your podcast or you can go to Lewishouse.com 1073 and just share that link with your friends. Also, if this is your first time here, please click the subscribe button over on Apple Podcast right now and leave us a rating and review throughout this episode if you're enjoying it and let us know what you most enjoyed about this episode. Okay, in just a moment, meet the one and only Dr. Andrew Huberman.

Positive thinking is not about being delusional. Positive thinking is about learning how to take control of internal processes and understanding that that will shape your external environment. But it's about remaining in control of the internal landscape. It's about knowing that despite shifts in the external landscape, you're going to be okay. Now, there is a. There is a little twist. There's a little cul de sac that dopamine can take you into. I have a friend, he's a cardiologist up north and he has this anecdote he likes to tell, which is, he said, some people get so much dopamine release from these intermediate goals that they never make it to the end goal. And here's how this sometimes happens. I worry this might have happened to me several times in my lifetime, but.

Give me an example.

An example would be, I tell you, Lewis, I'm writing a book. You say, oh, that's awesome. That's gonna be so fantastic. I'm sure people are gonna be really excited. And I get so much dopamine that I stop continuing in the process just.

From the action of talking about it.

It becomes its own finish line. And we know people like this. Some of us can recognize behaviors like this in ourselves. People reflect back such confidence in our ability to do things that we never actually do.

I know I could do it. I got the skills.

This is the beauty of the underdog. An underdog mentality is I'm never going to allow myself to think I'm going to win so that I can keep winning. But that's a high friction way to go through life. So the way that it was taught to me best, I think was my graduate advisor. She said, we published our first paper, it turned out great. It was in great journal. And she said, this is wonderful. I'd worked very hard on it, frankly. And she said, look, just remember, you're never as good as you think you are. You're never as bad as you think you are. You're somewhere in the middle, but you can get really good at the process. And I think that there's a lot of kind of treacherous thinking around goal setting and dopamine and things. There's this idea that if we're really amped up, that we're just gonna have jet thrusters that are gonna take us to the end. But the key is to move that horizon in closer and closer. And a way that one could do this, for instance, would be you get up in the morning, or let's say you're kind of low energy in the afternoon. You do your breathing to get more alert, but you've got this voice of doubt. There's like a voice of doubt. Is this working? I don't know. I don't know. Remember, you can introduce thoughts on top of that. You're not gonna get very far trying to suppress these thoughts. The better thing to do is just, you know, kind of swamp them with positive thought then if you can.

So don't not think about the negative thought. Add positive thinking and possibilities and opportunities into your thinking.

That's right. But trying to suppress negative thoughts is like whack a mole. They just keep popping up all over the place. And it's a lot of work. But there is a way to play a slight different game, right? And I think that the. In learning how to think positively and register the positive feelings that come from that, and then you use that as a way to propel to the next to the next goal. Now we're talking about this in kind of, kind of self help wellness space and tacking some neuroscience to it, some, you know, speculative neuroscience explanations. However, we have to remember that this mechanism of dopamine and pathfinding to goals is in every animal. Humans, dogs, sheep, any animal that needs to forage for things, to find food or water. They don't just get that dopamine release at the end. They get it when they realize they're on the right track. So a grazing animal might be on a really barren landscape and then smell something off in the environment. Now that was an external pull or think, you know what, I'm gonna go that way because I don't know, I need to go some way. They go some direction and they don't smell water, which animals can do. And so they veer off course and then all of a sudden they get a little bit of scent of water. At that point, that's when the dopamine is released, not when they get the water and drink from it. So that puts them in energy to get there. You know, you think about walking in the desert and you're just dying of thirst and all of a sudden you spot a big lake. All of a sudden you will have the energy to run the remaining mile, whereas before you thought you were going to die. How is that? How is that? It's not like more glycogen is suddenly available. It's not like ketones did it for you. So what did it? That's dopamine. That's dopamine release. That says, there's a reward waiting for.

Me, and that's from the brain. It's from releasing dopamine. Or is it a nerve connected to the gut that goes back to the brain? What is the process?

Great question. So there's an area of the brain called the ventral tegmental area, substantia nigra. All these areas have different names, but that release dopamine into the brain and they give the immediate sense of possibility and they promote energy.

Wow.

And epinephrine, or adrenaline is a molecule that we're all associated with. It's what gives us energy. It's actually that when it goes really high, it's the basis of the stress response, which is a lot of energy. But epinephrine is manufactured, it's made from the molecule dopamine. It's a couple biochemical steps, but it's actually made from dopamine.

Epinephrine gives you energy.

Epinephrine is essentially the basis of neural energy. It's the way brain energy. Yeah, the ability to focus, the ability to be alert, the ability to continue working. So dopamine is kind of the building block of.

So we need dopamine to have focus, to work towards a goal, to accomplish things.

That's right.

So if we think negative thoughts consistently. Does negative thoughts generate dopamine?

Okay, so there are a couple things that can suppress dopamine. One of them which I'll just put out there because I think a lot of people will either like this or not like this. A lack of sleep or what turns out that. And this was published in the journal Cell by two groups working together. Sama Hatar is a good friend of mine, but he's head of the chronobiology unit. The National Institutes of Mental Health and David Burson's lab at Brown University published a paper showing that exposure to screen type light between the hours of 11pm and 4am activates a specific circuit in a brain area called the habenula. That's a weird name that lowers dopamine and creates a sense of disappointment. So it's pro depressive.

So every teenager in the world is depressing themselves.

That's right.

Or any adult.

We all do it.

Who's on their phone after 11 after midnight? 1, 2. Whether it be watching a movie, whether it be on an iPad, does it matter how close to a screen you are on your phone?

If you dim it way, way down, you don't get this dopamine or you.

Wear the glasses or the biohacking stuff.

You could do that as well. Although it's really the brightness of light, not the color of the light.

So the studies by multiple groups are showing that from 11pm to 4am, if you're on your phone, if you're looking at a TV or iPad or screen consistently, it's going to make you more depressed.

In theory, yes. In practice you would have to do that pretty consistently. Got it.

So there's not like one exposure, it's gonna dim dopamine.

That's right. It's gonna blunt dopamine. And so our levels of things like dopamine and epinephrine, serotonin and these other so called neuromodulators reflects our average behaviors, our average thinking. It's not like one thought's gonna crush your dopamine. However, if you've ever been working very, very hard or things are really bad and someone cracks a joke and it's actually funny to you, you feel an immediate lift. That's dopamine.

Interesting.

But here's the interesting thing. It has to be funny. If I don't think the joke is funny. Let's say we're working very hard. Let's turn this around. Let's say we're working very hard and things are really terrible. Like something really bad is happening and I make a joke and it's a bad joke, it's gonna make it worse. But what's a good or bad joke? It's totally subjective. It's totally subjective.

Wow. What's your best dad joke? Do you ever get one?

Oh, I have loads of these. I'm really. I'm a. I'm an incurable punter and I have really, really bad jokes.

What's your favorite dad joke? Give me one. I've only got like one hour.

They're really nerdy. They're really, really nerdy. Okay, okay, I've got one. Which. Okay. But I like weird animals. So if anyone gets this, I mean, I get it. If anyone gets this. You're definitely my kind of person. If you don't, you might be my kind of person. I don't know.

So.

And you might not get this. This is dangerous territory, doing this in real time. All right, so what's the hardest thing about having a platypus for a pet?

I don't know.

The electric bill. Someone out there will get it. Yes, it's a really nerdy joke. That's really bad.

Why is it. Is it.

They have an electric bill.

Oh, the electric bill.

I know you asked for a dad joke. Although I told that joke and then a colleague of mine who's actually a very well renowned biologist actually said, well, actually, that joke doesn't work because it's an electric sensing bill. So you have to remember, I hang out with scientists, so it's super nerdy. So if I try another. What's your best dad joke?

I can only remember one. What do you call a guy with no shins? Tony.

Oh, that's good. That's good, Tony. That's good. That's good. That's anatomical. So, yeah, I think, you know, if you hang around a laboratory or biologist long enough, you learn that their humor is just about the body. It's just ridiculously nerdy. If you hang around MDs long enough, medical doctors, what you learn is that their humor is incredibly morbid.

That's true.

This is true.

Because they live in all day.

They're around it all day. And so I have some friends who are MDs, and you start to realize that their view of the world and their Humor around the world is a coping mechanism. But I'm glad that we're having this discussion or trade of bad jokes, because the dopamine system is vaulted, meaning these neurons don't release dopamine regularly. They're not supposed to. You can't be walking around all day and thinking, I love this table, I love this wall. I look, that's not the way it works. That's mania. But every once in a while, something comes along which just delights you or awes you or thrills you, and that's how dopamine is released. And so it's a system that you can learn to regulate. You know, every once in a while I'll just see something. I think I saw something in your office this morning. I was like, I really like that piece of art. And that moment, what happens, it draws your attention. You have an energy lift. And you know, so there's really something to it. I don't think we can exaggerate the powerful effect that dopamine has. But this doesn't just mean, oh, you want to take a supplement or a pill and take and increase your dopamine because that makes everything exciting to you, which makes you kind of useless, right? This is designed to be a targeted system to propel you toward particular goals and outside you.

How much dopamine should we have a day? How many times should we be triggered in dopamine? And do we have dopamine just by sitting and doing kind of mindless stuff? Do we still have a low level of dopamine?

Okay.

Or does it only come in moments when our senses are heightened?

So dopamine can come from surprise. So if you're bored and all of a sudden, I don't know, someone you really want to hear from calls you, suddenly you have energy, you were lethargic and depressed, and suddenly there's your lift. That's the dopamine response. How much? It depends. So there's some hardwired things that are important to the propagation of our species that have direct access to the dopamine system. Finding mates, for instance, the birth of a new child. Right? Creating more progeny.

Food.

Great tasting food. Social connection. Water. When we're thirsty, the amount of dopamine that's released will be proportional to how badly we crave that thing. Now, in the sort of world of addiction, this is a well understood phenomenon because what happens is I define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. Meaning a progressive narrowing of what allows for dopamine release.

Right.

And relief from Addiction, in addition to people moving away from the addicting substance, often involves a progressive expansion of the things that give them belief, more appreciation. A lot of 12 step programs na AAA have these elements of finding gratitude, something else. That's right.

Than the addiction.

Right. Because people have been living in this tunnel of addiction. Now, barring addiction and taking mania out of the equation, pushing aside depression, we say, well, how much dopamine? Well, throughout your day, what will happen is if you're used to succeeding at certain things, one you have to be, I'm not talking to you particularly, but one has to be a little bit cautious to continue to pick up those dopamine rewards. So $100 to you at one point in your life probably meant a lot. Nice crisp hundred dollar bill later in life. It might not get you as much in life, but having an appreciation for the fact that you have money at all. If you understand that that dopamine release actually gives you energy to continue to pursue more of what you want, then you start to think of dopamine as not just an endpoint but a way to propel you forward. That's why gratitude and sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, but that's why gratitude and appreciation is important because ultimately you don't want to be delighted by everything, but you also don't want to be constantly feeling as if you have nothing. The sort of ideas lacking. That's right. I mean the idea of abundance. I do like this concept of abundance. The idea of abundance is not that you have so much that you don't need more. It's that there's enough out there that there's plenty for everybody. And so it's very important when we're thinking about reward mechanisms in the brain that we understand that dopamine is thoughts about movement towards and the experience of pursuing things that are outside the reach of your skin. Mates, mate, you know, a partner, food, money, a career, a degree, things that are outside your reach. There's another reward system which is the serotonin system, which is a system that doesn't put us into forward motion but tends to make us feel good in our current position. It makes us feel calm. It's not about pursuing things, it's about feeling good with what we already have. And that the serotonin system is more activated by sense of gratitude. Reflection on I love my dog, I love my friends, I love my partner. I'm so grateful to have what I have. I have everything I need within the confines of my skin. And that's an important reward mechanism that nature has built in to have to balance the dopamine system.

So that creates us more relaxed serotonin, right?

That's right.

And it makes us invest in the resources that we already have.

What do you mean invest in those resources?

To look around your office at the end of the day and go, so great. I have.

Appreciate what we already know.

Appreciation, it's gratitude. It builds social bonds. Remember, these chemicals exist in us and they exist in other animals as far down as mice and dogs and monkeys. And obviously there are huge differences between humans and all the other species of the planet. I mean, huge differences. So I'm not trying to say that we're all the same, but there are some basic mechanisms of reward for moving toward things and basic mechanisms of reward for helping us build social bonds with the people we already have that are fundamental to the survival of our species and fundamental to the evolution of our species. So I think that when we think about rewards, we want to be able to access both. We want to be in pursuit, but.

We also appreciate what we have.

Absolutely. And the two balance each other. And they actually reset each other. And this is often why people who are in rabid pursuit of a metal or money or a big IPO or to set up their company, they get there and then they go, now what?

I'm depressed.

They didn't exactly.

Because they didn't appreciate what they had along the way. It was always, I need this to fulfill some need within myself.

They actually end up. They end up with a lot of resources that don't trigger the dopamine response because they. It was about the pursuit. Now, attaching dopamine to the pursuit is kind of the definition of a growth mindset. Learning how to attach the dopamine reward system to effort pretty much ensures that you're going to perform well over time, pretty much. It pretty much ensures you're going to be resilient over time, provided you can keep doing that. But in the absence of the serotonin system and learning how to tap into the serotonin system, taking some time, whether or not it's through meditation or prayer or journaling or reflection or some combination of those, that's where you really restore the system and allow it to renew so that you can get back into the pursuit of things.

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Is why cycling rest and cycling pursuit are so vital to not just like optimal performance, which is great and performing well, but also to just enjoying life and resetting. So for instance, when serotonin is very low, people tend to feel agitated and aggressive. When serotonin like kind of irritable. When serotonin is very high, people tend to actually have much lower levels of aggression. And if serotonin is really high, people stop pursuing goals. It can lower all sorts of basic biological functions that make people motivated. So the key is to have a dopamine system that can be accessed, to have a serotonin system that you can access. And I would say the right unit of time to think about this is across the 24 hour day trying to think about your whole lifetime. Dopamine and serotonin is overwhelming. So I think you wake up in the morning and you assess how you feel too alert or too exhausted, you might do something to adjust that you might want to spend some time in appreciation for what you have. And then yes, you absolutely should think about the things that you want to pursue. And then you should think about what brings the dopamine release that will allow you to continue to pursue. But you want to definitely think about how you can control the dopamine release and not just make it contingent on the sale someone else is going to bring you or the praise someone else is going to bring you. We all know what it's like to be in the presence of somebody that just feels good enough within themselves and doesn't constantly need things from other people. And you know, and through a kind of a twist, those people tend to acquire more and succeed more. And oftentimes when one describes a kind of a high achiever or somebody that can do this process well, people think, oh well, I'm terrible at that. Look, everybody struggles with this and learns how to do it when people are delusionally lost in the sense that they're winning, when they're losing, that's bad too. So the idea is, you know, it's an average. How many days out of the week are you miserable? How many days out of the week are you feeling good? And I think most people can build up these circuits pretty quickly so that they feel good most of the time. And when they feel bad, they know how to work through that.

Yeah. This is so fascinating. I want to unpack a few things going back to. There's a famous story about Jim Carrey where he said he would drive up Mulholland Drive here in Los Angeles pretty much every day or once a week and visualize himself acting in the main movies, the blockbuster hits. When he was like a stand up comic on like open mic night type of stuff, right? He would visualize it and he would sit there and he'd feel a feeling as if he's on the set with the big actors, as if he's receiving the checks. And he would write himself a check, I think it was for $10 million or $5 million. And he would imagine this happening, him receiving it. And then he would go do his work throughout the day and take action on it. And he always tells his story, or it's a famous story that he said, this is what I would do. I'd visualize this. I think about it. I wrote a check to myself years before it actually happened. But then it came to me and this idea of thinking again, you mentioned the idea of like neediness in a sense of like, if someone's like too needy, then they're not going to get it. People are going to be rejecting that neediness. But when someone's comfortable in their own skin, it's almost like everyone comes to them or things.

It's like they already have it.

Like they already have it. And they talk about this in the Law of Attraction community, about when you're chasing something or you're saying you don't have it, you're like needing something, you're saying you don't have it. But when you become comfortable with where you are, things start to attract you and you have energy and you have energy and you're like a magnet as opposed to an opposite magnet, resisting these things that you need and want.

Pursuit is very taxing. And the reason is there's a biochemical reason for this. It's like wandering in the desert not knowing if there's water at all. That's really depleting. I Mean, epinephrine is in the brain and its chemical equivalent in the body is adrenaline. Those are the same thing. And if you're constantly in pursuit, Right. You're just pursuing external goals. External goals. External goals. It will wear your nervous system down, you will be exhausted, and one will eventually run aground. You'll become mentally depressed. The key is to figure out what are the rewards that you can acquire along the way internally. Remember, it's subjective. There can also be external rewards because many things have milestones. A series A or a series B for a company, then the IPO later.

Reaching a million users or doing this.

Yeah, we have engagements before. We have weddings, typically. Right. There are those rare instances where people just go and get married. But typically there's a lot of buildup that is designed that fortunately provides these reward mechanisms. So the key thing is that you can't just be all gas pedal all the time without rewarding yourself. However, the reward that dopamine is so powerful because it actually, as I mentioned before, it actually is the chemical substrate for epinephrine. It creates a reservoir of more energy. And again, I'm not talking about caloric energy or glycogen, mind energy. It's mental energy. It's the desire to push on, it's the desire to keep going.

So we need some consistent, consistent dopamine hits throughout the days or our months to give us more energy to pursue.

That's right.

But we don't want to be over pursuit because then we'll burn out.

That's right. And so everyone has to find where that sweet spot is, that kind of, you know, on the freeway driving, where it's really smooth and seamless, where you're not on the accelerator the whole time, where you're in a gear that's appropriate. And, you know, we're talking now in terms of sort of, you know, neuroscience lens on these things. But the key is always going to be practices. It's going to be just as earlier. We're talking about bringing stress levels up or down, depending on alertness levels, up or down, depending on the kind of stress you're experiencing. The reward system is great because when you, let's say you're a person that can very easily access this dopamine reward. So you're always excited. You know, people say, hey, let's do this. And your mantra is, let's go. And you just kind of go, what we call in science, very low activation energy. You just go, that's great. Those people do run the risk of burnout, although there are these people that we occasionally encounter that just seem to have boundless energy for everything. And they tend to get a lot more done because they have a lot more internal reward. And you'll notice they're getting rewards from all the little things. And it's 100% subjective. It's like hearing funny jokes all day long. You can just keep going. And suddenly the beginning of relationships, when people fall in love, you know, it's a real thing. But it is associated with a big flood of dopamine in the system, Makes everything seem exciting and possible and new. And I think that we also know other people that they have a very hard time accessing this dopamine system, and they either place it under the complete control of external things. So they're miserable until they get the payoff, and then sometimes they're even miserable.

Yeah.

Or they really just don't. They haven't learned the skills of how to access it.

So how do we trick our mind to find rewards in subjective things that aren't actually physically coming to us?

Okay, so I'll tell a brief anecdote about an experiment that's really important. This was done many years ago in a psychology department. I think it was done at Bing Nursery School at Stanford, but I could be wrong about that. So I don't want to state that as absolute fact, but the experiment nonetheless was done where they looked at kids in schools. These are kids about nursery school age or maybe a little bit older. And they looked at what they did during recess, and they found that some kids really liked to draw. And so these kids would naturally just orient towards the crayons and pens and draw. And then for a short while, they rewarded the kids for drawing Those same kids, they would give them a gold star or a little sticker or something that was special and made them feel special. So they were giving them an external reward. Then they removed the reward. And what they found is those kids drew at a much lower frequency. They somehow lost the intrinsic pleasure of drawing.

Huh. Because they were used to getting an extrinsic reward.

Suddenly they associated the drawing. They weren't conscious, but their nervous system said, oh, I guess I was doing it for the reward. Now there's less reward. And without going into a lot of details, there's a very small solid scientific phenomenon called reward prediction error, which says that if you get less dopamine at the end than you anticipated, it's a letdown. If you get more at the end, then it feels great. Now, what this all translates to is once again learning how to attach internal rewards to the process of whatever it is that you want to do in order to get you to the thing you really want. And so the short answer in this. Actually, I was asked this recently. Someone said, okay, how can I ensure that once I succeed? This was somebody who was doing very well in their pursuit of a goal, and they were getting close, and they said, how can I be sure that when I get to the win that I don't lose the ability to keep working because I really want this pay.

I'm not satisfied.

Right?

And I said, well, there's two ways. One is make sure that that reward really bask in it. Really appreciate what you've done and what's come to you. And, but. And here's a very important but is, but take that feeling of being saturated with dopamine, the huge win, and attach it to the effort process that got you there.

So when you're thinking, this took me five years to accomplish this thing, but reminding yourself of every day, week, year, all the little things you did on a daily basis to get you there, not we're here, right?

That's right. If you think that you sort of, let's say, super bowl win, the party at the end is going to be great, right? I have to imagine it's really going to be great.

Champagne. You're this huge.

But at that moment, people, the winners, anyway, their system is flooded with dopamine, flooded with dopamine. And there's an opportunity because dopamine, we haven't talked about this, but dopamine is a signal to the brain that it should rewire so that in the future it has a higher probability of getting back to that experience. This is how animals learn how to find water and food. This is at the basis of so many reward pursuits. And so if you attach all that plasticity, all that brain rewiring to the celebration and only to the celebration, you actually can erase a lot of the valuable content that your brain, you know, skills that your brain acquired en route to that goal.

So it's almost like that whole night after you celebrate and maybe the next few days really reflect on the years it took to get you there.

That's right. We tend to so overemphasize the wins. It's the things of movies, right? I mean, there's some movies that are really good, like Rocky, the first Rocky, where he didn't actually win, he loses. And it was. But so many people, I think it won Academy Award for best Picture, right? So many people associate that film with the Striving process. The reward was really striving. His joy at the end of that was really called. It was interesting. He called it to his family, to the process. Right. It was really a movie that captured that in its best form. When it's just about the win, you lose this amazing opportunity to attach the dopamine to everything that came before it. Now, in addition to that, there's one other way to do it. Nobody likes this one, but it works, which is also, when you get there, give away the gold star. Give. Give it away.

And really, so you don't fixate on the gold medal all the time.

And really high performers. There are a few people whose names, unfortunately I can't mention that I know who have done incredibly well in the Silicon Valley world. And some of them have given away a substantial portion of what they have. And everyone thought, oh, they want a simpler life. And this, that. No, actually they were just setting themselves up for the next big win. And they've gone on to do this two or three times now, really. So they keep moving the carrot out in front of them, but they also are somehow intuitively understanding this process that what got them there was not the last one yard into the end zone.

Was the 10 years of the journey.

Necessary but not sufficient. Right. But everything that came up until then is so important. So when we have dopamine in our system and when we've taken control of that process, we want to make sure that we capture everything that led up to that. And it's vitally important in these big kind of, we're talking in these big milestones type of examples. But this can be done across the day. It can be, you know, I'm going to get to noon just really being the most reflective person I can with my child. And not just doing that as a sheer effort, like I really don't want to do it, but doing it and thinking, this is going to be a lot of work. And when I get there, I'm going to take a couple minutes to just register everything that I managed to control, all the things I managed to not do that would have been destructive. And so dopamine turns out to be, I would argue, one of the most, if not the most powerful neurochemicals in our system. There's a great book called the Molecule of. More. I didn't write it. I wish I had. That gets into this whole description, which is quite accurate, about how dopamine isn't just about reward at the end, it's really the molecule of motivation. It's what propels us forward. It's an incredible read. Really a lot of real world examples, very accessible book. And it really points to how so much of what we're about is the pursuit of these external goals, but that if we can learn to control these things internally, that's when things become kind of limitless. You know, this word that everybody wants, wants to access, Everyone wants to know, what's the pill that's going to make me limitless? What's the technology? We actually have the chemical inside us. The key is to learn to regulate it. And the subjective part, the example of good joke, bad joke is the best example I can give that. You have to decide for you what lets you access that. And obviously those things should be things that are not destructive to you or to other people, because that will take you down a bad path. It also, we have to understand that dopamine can be attached to the trivial. To trivial. Anything I can attach it to picking up and putting down this cap for my water bottle. But the point is that if that's not attached to some other thing, it doesn't really work.

Yeah.

So I know that, you know, this is a little bit less concrete than like two inhales and an exhale.

I like this.

But this is the way I think. I'm certain this is the way that the mind can be trained. We can train our mind to be in pursuit and in regular wins. Regular wins. And this is why I think there's a lot of interest these days in like habits and habit formation. Because when you move that horizon in close and you complete something small, it's not about what you completed, it's the fact that you completed.

You're engaging your bed. It could be writing a page flipped.

Open, a little dopamine got deployed. It's like people who are like list crosser offers, they're engaging this process. So I think what I'm describing again is not completely new. People will look to different examples of their life or other people's lives and say, oh, right, that's that, that's that. But that's exactly the point. I think that's the real utility of a discussion like, about neuroscience like this, which is that once you understand the mechanisms, you can start asking yourself, where does this work for me? Where does it not work for me? And how can I maneuver this in healthy ways?

I'm curious, as we're getting to the beginning of the year and a lot of people set goals for the year for themselves or if they're ending a career, exiting a Business, getting out of a relationship, they'll usually set some new type of goal for themselves. So whether it's the beginning of the year or you're just in transition, you want to set new goals. What do you think is based on neuroscience is the best way to set a year long goal for yourself? Should we have 20 massive goals? Should it just be one big goal? Should we have three key goals and how do we create the goal to where it drives us to perform at our optimal best and get closest to that goal, if not accomplish it? And what should we be thinking about throughout the year in order to accomplish the goal?

Yeah, well, I can give an opinion on this, but it's just my opinion. I mean I break up my Life into these 12 week. I think it was because I've always done 12 week training cycles.

You're like an athlete. It's a season.

12 week training cycles just seems manageable somehow with the understanding that there will be setbacks and things of that sort. I think that certain goals are goals of practices that we've already mastered. So you know, you're trying to next level what you've already accomplished. And so those goals are going to require a lot less limbic friction, if you will. And you already know how to access the rewards. You actually can predict the rewards and when they come, you actually know what the rewards are. You've really clearly defined them. Those are goals that I think we're sort of on autopilot with and I think everyone should probably check in at the end of day the, the year and say, you know, my, if I'm going to continue along that trajectory, it might make sense for me to set some really concrete goals. Sometimes those are quarterly financial quarters or academic quarters if that's a landscape they're in. But I think that that doesn't require a lot of us, except more of the same. Right. But those are nonetheless growth goals. There are other goals that are very different. Last time we talked you were learning Spanish.

Yeah.

Still learning.

Yeah, great.

Still learning.

And there's a, and there's a little bit more friction there because it challenging. It takes more effort to lean in because you, when you don't already know how to do something, it's a very different goal pursuit. Right. Sort of like so if I already.

Have my business and I've been running it for a few years, you know certain practices of how to get to where you've been.

That's right.

And you're thinking, how do I double my business?

That's right.

It's different than I'm trying to learn a whole new skill goal.

Right. You already know how to forage for water as opposed to you're some young calf or some animal that needs to.

Learn how to walk to survive.

Right.

So I think, you know, one big goal of the sort that, you know, we don't actually have the skill set yet. We're not even aware that of what we need in order to accomplish it per year seems like a pretty good goal to me. So learning entirely new language or an entirely new physical skill. But with any long term goal, the problem is don't focus on the destination. That's right. So you have to move the horizon in, but you have to remember there's that one little pitfall, that cul de sac that I described where you'll tell people, this year I'm going to do blank, and if they reward you enough, you might not do it. Remember, if you get enough dopamine.

That's amazing.

I'm so happy you're doing that. Congratulations.

And you say, I know I can do it, and then you don't. You sort of lose the incentive to do it. So a lot's been made out of making goals public.

Is it better to make them public or not?

Well, so this is a question. I don't know. I think that in my case it has for me telling people, several people, that I'm going to do something because I work very hard to avoid humiliation. But I tend to do that with things I really want to do do anyway. But there's a strong fear element, like I'm afraid to do this or I'm kind of anxious about doing this, so I'll tell people. And then I'm like, okay, now I'm committed.

Yeah, you got to do it now.

And I tell people that I'm certain they're going to give me a hard time. That's just my nature. And I'm not trying to prove them wrong. I'm just trying to make sure that they don't have any ground to stand on. And that's how I do it. I think for some people, the continuation of what they're already doing. If it's feeling like a lot of work, it's feeling exceedingly challenging. And they're like, oh my God, another year of this, another five years of that. I think that's when you have to move the horizon in really close. I think a lot of people right now are feeling back on their heels because 2020 was such a trying year for a lot of people.

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Well, so everyone, many people are recalibrating what's possible, although many people are feeling expansion and they're really going to go forward full steam. So I think continuing in pursuits that we already have some degree of mastery over and thinking about where could I notch that up another 2 or 3%? I think that's incredible valuable. I think that provides a lot of value to the individual, to their families and to society really, because a 2% improvement of, like, what you're already doing is going to have an outsized effect on what other people receive. Right. Even though for you, you've been down that road many times. But taking on a new pursuit in parallel to that means really getting excited about the possibility. You give the Jim Carrey example about the possibility, starting to imagine what that would actually be like to be, well, let's say fluent in Spanish and you can just do this reflexively without having to try. That's totally within your reach. And I think there, it makes sense to really think about the end point quite a lot as a way to get over those barriers of fear. Because when you already know how to do something, there's no fear barrier, it's just an energy barrier. But when you don't know how to do something, there's all this sense of clunkiness that is really uncomfortable. Beginner's mind is a painful place.

So hard, man.

A lot of people think about it like, beginner's mind is such a, you know, it's such a delightful place to be so hard.

The friction, the amount of energy to build momentum is so challenging in the beginning.

Well, this is where play becomes very important.

You need play.

You know, the great physicist, you know, Richard Feynman was also famous in addition to being a, you know, physics phenom, for having this sense of play. Learned to bongo drum late in life. He became an artist late in life. And he had this lightness and this, and this kind of joyful way to approach things. Humor at oneself is incredibly powerful. Now we know the chemical basis for that. Laughing at oneself is often the best way to move forward.

Really?

Yeah, because you, you. I mean, I do this. Well, maybe, I don't know, maybe I'm biased, but I do this all the time. I'll just laugh at myself for how it works up. I can get about the fact that a file won't load or something like that. I just laugh. It's crazy. I mean, and all of a sudden I have the energy to do it.

So what does that do for our brain when we laugh at ourself? But there's probably a difference between laughing ourself or something like that versus making fun of something that's a bad habit. Like, oh, not shaming ourselves. Not shaming ourselves. 200 pounds overweight. Let me laugh at myself.

Shame is of kind, kind of written into, like, who we are. It's not about what we're doing. It has this element of, like, who we are. You know, guilt is Sort of more about. I forget who said this, but it wasn't me first. I just want to be clear. I recognize it wasn't me first. Guilt is sort of more about what we did. You know, shame is like an identity thing.

Laughing at ourself.

Yeah.

Like, laughing ourselves. Like how ridiculous the human mind can. I mean, let's face it, as brilliant as the nervous system and our minds and our bodies can be, they make a lot of mistakes. And we are a fallible species. We're not a perfect species. And perfection should never be the goal. In fact, if anything, laughing at oneself is the right thing to do because it reminds us that perfection is impossible, but that really incredible sort of feats of accomplishment or feats of creativity of any kind or anything come from having a lightness and a humor. I mean, those are the people that we enjoy being around. I'm always amazed that we know the kind of people we like being around, but then we don't actually become that person to just be around in our own skin. Yeah, I think about this a lot. I'm like, why do I make myself such a terrible person to be around for me? And that's the conversation. That's the internal working of thinking, oh, like, what would it. What would it mean to just, you know, make myself more pleasant for me to be around for myself? Because I think a lot about the people I really enjoy being around in my life. And I know who those people are, and it's because they have lightness, humor, you know, they. The appropriate amount of, you know, making fun of me, which they all seem to do, which is great most of the time, you know, just trying to create an internal representation of myself that is light enough that I'd want to have myself over for dinner. For dinner with myself. Because I think in the pursuit of goals, there's a tunnel vision that's associated with that, which is really wonderful and beautiful and explains so much of what humans are capable of. It's what's going to carry us forward in the next, I hope. Yeah, forever, infinity. But it can be tough to be around because there's a rigidity to it in pursuing goals. And I think learning to relax inside of our own skin a little bit is the best thing that any of us can do because it opens up possibility. It's almost counterintuitive, but it creates the sense that, oh, I can handle this. There's nothing. You know, getting constrained is the worst thing, Right?

Yeah.

If there's one new belief that someone could try on in the new Year, after a year of a lot of stress and anxiety and overwhelm, if there's one new thought or belief that someone could say, you know, just take a look at this idea, this belief that could help them tremendously in their life, whether it be in their relationships, their career, business, whatever it may be, health, what would that belief be that they should try on?

Okay, I promise to be succinct about it. The belief I think everybody can benefit from is the belief that the reward mechanisms in the brain, dopamine release in particular, are completely under their subjective control. And the immediate retort that I get is, yeah, but I don't want to be out of touch with reality. I don't want to tell myself I won when I've actually lost. And I'd say, exactly. You have to maintain control of that system so that you're not just releasing dopamine into your system through thoughts or humor of any kind, randomly. You need to attach it to things that to you also feel very real and important in life. And if you can start to identify those things, what's real and important to you in life, and then learn to access this subjective release of dopamine in your mind, that essentially guarantees that you're going to be able to continue to move forward in the pursuit of goals, and it essentially guarantees that you'll be joyful in the process, not always, but a lot of the time. And it essentially guarantees that the way that you're going to show up in the world is with more capacity. Because we've been talking about a lot of these things in the kind of vacuum that is individuals and their pursuits. But the other thing that's really wonderful to be around are people that know how to access this, because those are the people we orient to as leaders and as co workers and as teammates. I'm not just talking about in sports teams and in the workplace, but also in family. When we see that other people have a capacity and they're not just grinding it out, there's an interaction that happens between members of the same species where we start to feel more possibility for ourselves. And that's really, I think, what we really need, especially heading into 2021. I think, you know, especially in 2021 and beyond, I think we really need to ask ourselves, how are we showing up for ourselves in the pursuit of goals and what kind of process we're using and what kind of process we're doing, demonstrating for others? I think that's really important. I think there could be tremendous benefits. So the belief to play with is that your beliefs are under your control, that it takes some practice, and that this dopamine system is really incredibly valuable and that you were endowed with one and you are able to use it how you like. Don't leave it at the control and discretion of external events.

This has been fascinating. I want to go for another three hours, but I think there's a lot to unpack here for people. So I want you to take this information, run with it, start applying it. I want to have you back on in the future because there's a lot of things I have written down that I didn't ask. And I want to dive into the neuroscience of developing powerful, intimate relationships. The neuroscience behind making more money and what money does to the brain, whether it be good or bad, why some people view money as a bad thing and others view it as a good thing. And the neuroscience behind healing the body with the mind. So that's what I want to talk about the next time. If you guys want Andrew to come back on, leave a comment below. Greatness. If you want him to come back on and talk more about some of those things and everything else that we've covered today. It's been powerful. You've got an amazing Instagram account, Huberman Lab, that people can go follow every day. You're posting incredible, incredible little 30 second neuroscience ideas around the brain and the body connection. You're breaking it down in a simple way for us to understand our bodies, our minds, how to achieve goals. So make sure to follow you on Instagram, Twitter as well, Huberman Lab. And I know you've committed to writing a book and having that out sometime soon. So we're all going to hold you accountable to it.

I do have a.

Is there a date with that coming out or.

No, it's going to come out in 2021. And I'm starting a podcast which is going to be a little bit different than most podcasts. I'm going to take a month at a time and really go deep into one topic through repeated episodes. Things like sleep, motivation, plasticity, focus. I now have homework for our future conversations, the topics that you raised. And there is going to be a YouTube channel. It would be called Huberman Lab. It's pretty easy to find on the.

Do you have a YouTube channel yet?

I do. I just set one up.

What's that first?

That's Huberman Lab. That's going to be Huberman Lab.

Great.

Okay, cool.

So it should be pretty easy to follow.

So go subscribe there on YouTube now.

Yeah, you can subscribe there now. And there's going to be a welcome video posted very soon where the comment section and people's votes for different topics will be the topics that I'll cover.

But that's cool.

But any of those venues should be pretty easy to find nowadays. Yes, I definitely want to thank you for having me on.

Of course.

You always challenge my thinking very hard. I have to say there's a hard thinking. Hopefully people will find some utility in the practices. I realize we covered a lot and this discussion was went into some more kind of challenging and complicated aspects of our neurology. But hopefully that's the goal, man, drive benefit from it. So thanks for keeping me on my toes.

Of course, man. Yeah, I want to make sure people follow you. And also if you're listening to this, we'll have some links in the show notes of the podcast wherever you're listening, whether it be Apple Podcasts or Spotify or you can go to YouTube and check out. We'll have all the links in the description for also the Yoga Nidra links that you recommend. We'll have it in this channel as well. This is great man. I appreciate it. Thanks again for coming on, man.

Really appreciate it.

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I'd love for you to do that.

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