4 SIMPLE STEPS To Hack Your Brain & DESTROY NEGATIVE Thoughts! | Andrew Huberman

The key is to reward the harder steps, not the easier ones and not the ones where you get. So if your mind isn't where you want it to be, don't start with the mind. Start with ultimately, unless you have electrodes in your head and someone stimulating them, we are in control of our thoughts and behaviors.

Understanding how to unlock the power of your brain is one of the most important things you can do for yourself. That's why in this video, I've put together the best advice from neuroscientists Dr. Andrew Huberman to help you maximize your brain's potential. This video is also presented by monday.com and you'll hear more about them in just a moment.

All trauma, anxiety, fears, they all map back to stress in some way. Now you can have stress without trauma, you can have anxiety without trauma, but you can't really have trauma without stress and anxiety. So even though there aren't really strict definitions of the boundaries between trauma and stress and fear, I think it's fair to say that trauma is a fear and or stress response that's happening at the wrong times, right? It's sort of carrying over from an experience that's making life uncomfortable or in some cases exceedingly challenging. For example, so someone has a, you know, sexual assault, somebody sees a car accident or is in a car accident, veterans come back from overseas, there's kind of first-person trauma where something happens to somebody, and then there's third-person trauma where somebody sees something terrible happen. There's grief. And so there are a lot of categories. And so we don't want to complicate the landscape and the answer, but I think it's important for people to understand that the stress response is at the core of all of this. And when we talk about stress, I think it's also important that we divide that into two kinds of stress because it defines the two approaches that people can take to combat stress, fear, anxiety.

What are the two types of stress?

Okay, the two types of stress are we... The one is the one we're almost all familiar with because when we hear stress, we think pupils dilating, hand shaking, heart beating, oh my goodness, oh my goodness, are really upset, you're stuck in traffic. Something is really bothering you, you're angry, you're having the fight or flight response that, you know, that phrase gets thrown around a lot. And in those circumstances, it's very important that people take control of their mind and their body in a way that allows themselves to calm down, to reduce the so-called stress response. And we can talk about tools to do that that are very concrete and that are very reliable. There's another side of the stress response.

So what would that stress be called? What's that type of stress?

So unfortunately, there's no name for this. This is one of the important things. Maybe we'll figure it out today. Maybe your audience will figure it out. They're a smart bunch and they're living this stuff too. So, unfortunately there isn't a word for this.

But this is one type of stress.

This is one type of stress which is you're too activated, you're too alert, you're too agitated and you want to be less alert, less activated and less agitated. The alert stress. That's right. We could call it the alert stress. Hyper alert stress. Hyper alert stress. Let's just do that for sake of conversation today. And we are by no means a nomenclature committee, so we can always revise later. There's another side of stress, which is when there are a lot of things happening in the world, pandemics, you can't work because there's another shutdown, or there's strife in your life, or things are really challenging and you're feeling exhausted, and you can't get mobilized and alert enough.

Mm.

And this has never really been cleanly laid out for people that what I call the whole process is one of limbic friction. Okay, so the limbic system are these areas deep in the brain. Limbic literally means edge. They're near the edge of the brain.

Mm.

And when we're stressed, there's a lot of activity in these brain regions. And then we've got our forebrain, our prefrontal cortex for the aficionados. And when we're in a thinking and calm and deliberate and rational manner, when we can control our body and our mind, it's called top-down processing. We're controlling ourselves. But there's a lot of friction with that limbic pathway. I promise I'll get to the practices soon. So when there's this friction, we can call it limbic friction for sake of discussion, you can't control all those impulses and all that anxiety or fatigue for too long. and in fact, as you get more tired, or if someone has frontal damage, if they have brain damage to the frontal lobes, what you find is they become more impulsive. When they feel like sleeping, they just sleep, even if it's socially inappropriate. When they feel like yelling or screaming or swearing, they just do that. And so there's two kinds of limbic friction. One is when we're too activated and we want to calm down and we're trying to say, okay, calm down. Don't say the thing that you know you shouldn't say. Don't do the thing you shouldn't do. And then there's the other kind of limbic friction, which is the world is happening really fast and we feel buried, we're overwhelmed and we need to get more activated. We need more energy. We need more energy.

We need to be able to lean.

Into life and we're feeling overwhelmed. What's that called?

Well, we should come up with a name now. So that would be exhaustion stress.

Overwhelm stress. Or overwhelm stress. Now, a lot of people start giving these names to things that sound almost like clinical syndromes. which sometimes they are, but they'll say things like adrenal burnout, which actually doesn't exist. Adrenal fatigue. Now, there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome, which is a real medical condition where people can't actually produce enough adrenaline, but most of us have enough adrenaline in our bodies to last 200 years, two lifetimes. So, the adrenals don't really burn out. What happens is people are so overactivated, they're in this alertness, hyperalert stress for so long that eventually they kind of crash into the overfatigue stress.

So one turns into the other one.

So the first thing for anyone trying to navigate stress, and then we'll talk about trauma, is to understand what kind of stress they're dealing with. Are you exhausted and having a hard time getting your energy up? Or is your energy too high and you're having a hard time getting your energy down? because the solutions to those are often quite different. So, on the previous time we met, we talked about a tool for calming the body very quickly, which is this double inhale, long exhale. Typically, the inhales are done through the nose, the exhale through the mouth. So, the physiological sigh, which was discovered by scientists in the '30s, and then Jack Feldman's group at UCLA has really identified the underlying brain circuits, and then my lab is Now looking at this stuff in humans in a kind of more clinical setting. That double inhale, followed by an exhale, we know is the fastest real-time tool for taking one's state of alertness down.

The hyper alertness.

Right, you're not gonna crash into sleep, but you're going from, you're not feeling good, you're too agitated, you wanna calm down. And what's interesting about that tool is it, speaks to a principle which is it's very hard to control the mind with the mind. So, when you're stressed, just telling yourself don't stress, don't stress, don't stress, calm down, calm down rarely works.

It also rarely works to tell someone.

Else to calm down.

To relax.

Hey, relax.

Yeah.

Usually it has the opposite effect. Don't tell me to relax. And it can be damaging for relationships.

If you've ever, you know, someone's really.

Stressed and you tell them to relax, sometimes it actually can create more friction and they don't feel supported. What should they do in that moment? They should look to the body. The nervous system includes the brain, but also all the connections to the body and back again. And so when you can't control your mind, you want to do something purely mechanical, like the physiological sigh. Because that, you know, once you take control of the body in that way, then the mind starts to fall under the umbrella of this top-down control again. Top-down control is what children and puppies don't have. -If we had- Explosive. Yeah, I've had a 10-year-old bulldog. His name's Costello. He barely does anything now because he's Costello. But when he was a puppy, everything was a stimulus. He would walk over, pick up a cord and chew on it, then he'd drop it and he'd pivot to something else. It's because they literally have no prefrontal cortex wired into this limbic system. They don't have this suppression. So there's no friction. The limbic system just does whatever it wants.

And actually in humans with frontotemporal dementia.

And in certain people who have frontal temporal brain damage, they become very impulsive.

My dad went through, I don't know if I talked about this the last time, but my dad had a traumatic car accident 15 years ago. It was 15 years ago, a couple months ago, where a car went on top of his car and went through the windshield and the bumper hit him in his head. Pretty much split open his head. His girlfriend at the time was holding his head together, went to the hospital, airlifted in a helicopter, I was in a coma for three months. And it's been a 15-year journey where we had to teach him, reteach him how to write, how to talk, how to walk, take everything, where it was almost like he was my father in his body, but his mind was having to relearn like a child. And even today, when I see him and visit him, he'll swear just compulsively. He'll do things that maybe aren't appropriate because he probably doesn't have the I don't know, you can probably tell me better as a neuroscientist, but what happens when someone has brain damage, especially in the frontal cortex? What happens in the brain?

Yeah, so when I say top-down control, there's literally a set of wires, we call them axons, from the prefrontal cortex that suppresses these impulsive behaviors in the limbic system. And when there's damage, it's essentially removing that brake. And in adults, older adults especially because their behaviors aren't quite as, you know, because they're older, they aren't necessarily going to walk over and punch people or scream out or explicatives and these kinds of things, fortunately. Although sometimes you see that, sometimes you see that sadly, but those circuits aren't functioning well. And in young children, if you ever go to a classroom, I guess now kids are home a lot, but in a typical kindergarten classroom, What you'll notice is that some of the kids can sit very still and other kids are rocking back and forth, moving around a ton and the teacher is constantly trying to. I was one of those kids, me too. Exactly. Trying to corral the children and children mature at different rates and what you're seeing there is the different maturation of their frontal cortex. When you see a child that's very deliberate and can really control their speech and their behavior, you're looking at a child that has a lot of top-down control. The frontal cortex is really engaged.

Hey guys, I want to take a quick break from this video to share one of my favorite platforms with you that helps my team and myself be more productive. And if you're managing a team or if you're an entrepreneur like me, then you need monday.com Monday.com Work OS is a customizable platform that gives teams the ability to easily create the tools they need and want for their work. There are so many things that go into building the operations for greatness From our products to our community, social media, daily operations, and of course, our show, the School of Greatness. And we use monday.com for everything. Tracking metrics, reports, production scripts, literally everything we're using it. It's been a game changer for team greatness and I know it will be for you as well. Make sure to check out monday.com/greatness for your free two week trial and I'll share more with you later in this video.

I have a niece who is adopted and she's very deliberate and very calm and so we wonder, you know, is this genetic? Is it nature nurture? You know, there's probably some genetic bias and then there's probably also a lot of environmental influences. I mean, a lot of what we're taught in school and at home, because a lot of kids are homeschooled now, is about what not to do. Sit still, don't say this, don't say that. We get the say please and thank you, you know, sit up straight, do your dishes kind of stuff, but a lot of the don't language is designed to around these things of top-down control, which set up a lot of important social constraints. We've all felt this as adults too, in two ways it becomes really extreme when we can't control that limbic system. One is when we're very fatigued. When we're fatigued or we're sick or we're in pain, physical pain, chances are when something bothers us, we're closer to that threshold of saying the thing that we wish we'd say.

Wait on our patients.

Exactly.

No patience.

That's right.

So how do we learn to have patience when we are hyper alert or overwhelmed, exhausted stress?

Okay. So when we are in hyper alert, there's a mechanism associated with that that makes our internal world measure time differently. What happens under those conditions is you feel like the external world is moving very slowly. I think I might have mentioned this in our previous meeting. When you're really stressed on the hyper alert side, it seems like the world is going very slowly. You're gonna, just knowing that and knowing that it's likely that you're gonna feel impatient and if the world is moving much too slow. Sort of like if you're trying to get some place on time and the person in front of you doesn't know where you're going. I was the guy not knowing where I was going this morning. And so, and we can't see each other in cars, so you think, what is this person doing? Oh my goodness. And they're just looking for the right turn.

Yeah.

So there's that. And then when we are fatigued, it seems like the world is going really fast. Okay, and so for people who are exhausted, everything feels overwhelming. Now, of course, the rate that things are actually moving in the world is the same, but the perception is that it's just too much and we can't cope. So we talked about a tool to calm oneself. The reason I like the physiological side is we are all equipped with the pathway. If people want to know if there's some medically oriented folks out there, if you want to teach this to other folks, there's a nerve called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R. ENIC that goes from the brain down to the diaphragm that controls that and then controls the lungs. And so when you decide, okay, I'm going to use the side, the physiological side to calm myself, in a way you're engaging top-down control because you're taking control of your internal landscape rather than trying to take control of your thinking, which is very hard.

You can't fix your mind with your mind sometimes.

Trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog. It's just gonna keep moving, right? If you've ever tried to grab or smoke, it just moves. It's vapors. You're never gonna grab it. The key is to take control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity, the sphenic nerve. And the reason I describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail, but I think when people realize this isn't something that you build up over time and then are able to do, that you literally have a wire set of wires that goes down to your diaphragm, this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs. And then as you blow off carbon dioxide when you do that exhale, your brain starts to calm down and then your mind, the top down control of the cortex, can start taking control of the limbic system again. It's almost like you're losing control of the automobile and you're trying to steer, but really there's another lever that if you just pull it, then the steering wheel will stabilize for you. So that's the way to think about the physiological sigh. On the other side of things when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued, there are two ways to approach that. First is the kind of foundation of fatigue, which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep. This is something that doesn't get discussed a lot. I don't think I've discussed this on any podcast previously.

But.

Getting better at sleeping is a whole set of practices. But sleep is a slow tool. It's not a real time tool. Because if you're feeling exhausted and you have to get up and have your day, Deal with children, deal with work, deal with life. We can talk about how to get better at sleeping, but in real time, what you want to do is you want to bring more alertness into the system.

Focus.

Focus and alertness. The way to do that is to take advantage of a very well-established medical fact. All medical students learn this, all MDs know this, which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe and your heart rate. I'll give a little bit of the background and then I'll give the specific practice just so that people understand where this is coming from. When we inhale, it almost feels like everything's moving up, but actually what happens is our diaphragm moves down. So when we inhale, our diaphragm moves down. When that happens, our heart literally gets a little bit bigger. The volume of the heart gets a little bit bigger. which means that whatever blood in there is moving per unit time a little bit slower. And there's a set of neurons in the heart called the sinoatrial node that sends a signal to the brain and says, hey, blood flow is slowing down. And the brain sends a signal back to the heart and says, okay, let's speed up and speeds up the heart rate. So the short, concise way to put it is when you inhale more vigorously or longer, you're speeding up your heart rate. This is actually, there's a name for it in the medical community, but the important thing to understand is as you inhale, you're sending a neural signal to your heart to speed up. And when you exhale, the diaphragm moves up, the heart gets a little bit smaller, literally, 'cause there's less space there. Then there's a signal sent to the brain, and the brain sends a signal back and says, slow down the heart rate. And so-- so this is happening quickly.

So if you inhale, it's speeding up.

That's right.

If you exhale, it's slowing it down.

That's right. So if you want to become more alert, you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous or a little bit longer than your exhales. So let's say you get a quicker--.

Or longer inhale, shorter exhale.

That's right. To speed up your heart rate and to be more alert.

Not longer exhale. double intake.

Right. So, longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert. Longer or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert. And this has a name, which is, you know, it's a certain kind of arrhythmia, but that makes it sound bad. This is actually what's happening all the time. This is the basis of heart rate variability. When people talk about heart rate variability is good, you know that you don't want your heart rate to be one level all day, high or low. A lot of people don't realize that. They think, oh, I got a nice slow heart rate. And you think, all day long, when.

You'Re asleep, that's right.

Well, slow heart rate is better than high heart artificially hot, you know, sorry, excessively high heart rate. But you don't want your heart rate to be like this. You want your heart rate to go through these fluctuations. Heart rate variability is good. Why? because heart rate variability reflects the activation of what's typically called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the brain's ability to slow down and calm the nervous system. So when your heart rate is going like this, it means that your heart rate is speeding up and then your brain is slowing it down, your heart rate is speeding up and your brain is slowing down. And that's what's happening all day long as you're moving through things in a kind of calm alert way. But when you get that troubling text message or you see a post or a comment and you go, and all of a sudden your heart rate just goes and you feel like you immediately want to respond or you're going to say the thing that maybe you shouldn't say, or you're going to do the thing that maybe you shouldn't do, or you just want to be more thoughtful and more targeted in your response. The key is to slow down the heart rate by making your exhales longer or more vigorous. So it could simply be, and then shorter inhales, longer exhales, or do the physiological sigh. Or if you wake up in the morning and you're experiencing the other kind of stress, which is you look at your phone in the news, the world is overwhelming me. My life is over, I don't know what I'm gonna do, I don't even know what sequence I'm gonna do things in. You're just discombobulated and a lot of people struggle with this. The key is to do a few breaths, even while you're getting out of bed and preparing your morning coffee or water or whatever it is, and just start breathing in a way that's inhale emphasized, which sounds weird, but basically what you're doing is you're speeding up your heart rate at some point, usually within only two or three of those breaths, you're gonna feel more alert and then you can just go back to breathing normally.

So you don't have to do this for hours, you do this for a.

Few moments or minutes. That's right, and while I'm a fan of breath work as its own thing, because breath work can teach you how to operate these levers in your brain and body, so to speak. Breath work is a dedicated practice that you do away from these stressful events, whereas learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind using your breathing. So it goes breathing, heart rate, mind in that sequence. So if your mind isn't where you want it to be, don't start with the mind. Start with your breathing, then, which will control your heart rate, which will then allow you to control your mind.

So don't think your way out of a moment of stress. Breathe your way out of this moment of stress.

That's right. And one of the things, and I'm certain there are going to be people out there listening to this saying, wait a second, the yogis and the yogic community has been talking about this for centuries. What are you doing? This is just a recasting of what we already know. I agree. I agree. Within the science community, these things have been given crazy names like arrhythmias and heart rate variability and the diaphragm and the phrenic nerve. And so the language of science has known all about this for many centuries also, but it's been shrouded by language. And the yoga community has known about this for a long time, but it's been shrouded by language. So by bringing this discussion forth, I just want to be clear. that I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel or pretend that I invented the wheel by any stretch. I'm trying to say that we all have these circuits, these levers in our body that we can pull and push. And people learn how to do this intuitively, but we're never really taught the underlying mechanisms. And I do believe that once, and yoga's not big on mechanisms. They're very good on naming and on yogis in different areas of the world when they say something, they usually know what the other one is talking about. Scientists do as well. But mechanism, if people can just understand a little bit about why the heart slows down when you exhale more than you inhale, or why the heart speeds up when you inhale more than you exhale. I do believe that having that knowledge in the mind allows people in a moment of stress to say, oh, I understand what's happening to me and therefore I should go to this particular tool. I do understand that one doesn't need to understand how an engine works in order to drive a car, but you do need to know how the control panels work. This is why we send people to driving school and why we don't let 10-year-olds drive. Although I'm sure there's some out there. Yeah, yeah.

On a farm somewhere.

Well, actually there was this one news thing, I don't know if you've seen this, where a state trooper pulls, or a CHP or somebody pulls over a car that's kind of weaving through the lanes and they pull over and I.

Think the kid was six years old.

Oh my God. He actually managed to get onto the freeway and he was driving the left-hand lane, and his driving was pretty bad, but he was below the-- that's crazy. Well, that just tells you that the young mind is eager to steer things and press pedals and things of that sort.

And explore.

We are definitely not recommending that. But this is very different than driving a car in the sense that all the panels and all the controls are there. We have-- we're all-- most people are taught how to drive a car. Most people are not taught how to drive their nervous system. And so a lot of what I'm talking about here is just one language, one version of the language of how to drive and control your nervous system.

And you can't drive your nervous system with thoughts and controlling your mind alone. You have to connect the whole vehicle is what I'm hearing. You can't just steer thoughts. You need to also use the brakes or also use different levers, which is the entire car.

That's right.

Hey guys, chiming in again to share more tips with you on how my team stays productive in our business. And Team Greatness is growing quickly. And because of that, the platforms that we use also need to be able to grow with us. And what I love most about monday.com Work OS is that the platform is super flexible. So teams are able to customize it to fit their needs. And you can create workflows from scratch or just use a template and adjust it however you need. And if you want to be successful as a leader or a business owner, It's crucial that you know what's going on in your business. And my team is mostly remote and we used to work on documents and spreadsheets, which was difficult at the time because I didn't realize there was a better option out there. It literally made it hard to stay organized, but monday.com has been a godsend for us. Teams can create any workflow to manage anything they need from projects to processes, leads, client requests, or whatever your team manages. And it's great for teams of all sizes. Make sure to sign up for your free two-week trial at monday.com/greatness. Now let's get back into this video.

It's very hard to control the mind with the mind. It can be done. There are people that get better at that.

Right, it's a practice over time.

But using, I say, when in moments of stress, either excessively alert stress or excessively fatigue stress, look to the body because there are mechanisms that have been built into the body for hundreds of thousands of years designed to do this. Now, the reason I can say that is that the physiological side, the double inhale-exhale, is controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brainstem that Jack Feldman's lab discovered. When children or adults have been sobbing very hard or when they're out of air in a claustrophobic environment, they naturally do that to reopen these little sacks in their lungs. Now, inhale emphasized breathing can be practiced in a way, sort of away from stress in a kind of offline approach that can be beneficial for raising what we call stress threshold. So there's a whole other way to look at stress which is to say, how do I get calmer in the mind when my body is freaking out? 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 it 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- 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 it's easy, some days it's 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. That's right. I should just give up.

What am I doing this for?

That's right.

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, you know, positive self-talk oftentimes, unless you do it correctly, you're badly wrong. You know, 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. 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. And they really do that. And I think the way it was described was, 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. But I, 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.

And 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 back on our heels, flat-footed or forward center of 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, whereas 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 And then eventually 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 a thousand miles starts with single is made up of, you know, 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 is 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. What you want, however, is 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 special 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 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'd 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, like really dialed in so that the next time this, I'm gonna 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.

So, 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. And I was like, great. My editor is ready to kill me and because I'm slow and I know 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? -Yeah. -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. I think distraction 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.

Right?

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, 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. I don't think I'd pick up the phone because I don't even know what I'm looking for there anymore. It's just become reflexive. For me lately, the longer I can keep that phone safe and write a grant or this book, what I tell myself is the agitation is good. 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'll pause and say, okay, 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 that's 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 dopamine. I mean, there are certain songs that are really embedded in my emotional thing that go back to when I was a wild 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, 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, we use the make the bed example, 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 operations. 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? But how long should I do it and what's the outcome? Deliberate.

Intentional.

And it feels like work. This is what people need to understand. That 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. It's supposed to feel hard. But you should subjectively reward it so that you get better at doing that. So it's supposed to feel hard because it's associated with this release of these neurochemicals that create this agitation. The mental strain you feel when you're learning something is the trigger for neuroplasticity for your brain to change.

Say that again. The mental strain you feel while doing something is the what?

Is the trigger for neuroplasticity.

Which neuroplasticity allows you to expand your mind to do more things. That's right.

So, neuroplasticity is a process of taking something where there's duration, path and outcome, where I'm working hard, I'm thinking hard, maybe it's a hard conversation, maybe it's a business planned. Maybe it's a scientific career. And the goal of neuroplasticity is to make things reflexive so you don't have to think about them.

Right. For instance, I just started taking Spanish class one-on-one and it's extremely hard. It makes me want to say, why am I doing this? This is going to take me years until I'm conversational. Who knows how long until I'm fluent? You know, if it's this hard as like this stage, man, is it ever going to get easier? I have those moments every time I'm doing class. I'm like, this sucks.

Right.

Because I'm like, I'm 37. Can I learn this language at this point? It's so much easier when you're five. Now it's almost impossible. I watched your video on this a couple days ago on social media. And the video you talked about this is that, yes, it's harder when you're older to expand your neuroplasticity, but it's going, it's almost the, what I'm hearing you say is like, it's the only way to live. is the order you get, you need to constantly be expanding it, otherwise you'll be going backwards.

That's right. So, you know, when you want to learn something new like Spanish or a new physical skill, your mind shifts over. The forebrain comes on and says, okay, we're going to pay attention to things and now what am I doing? I get so tired. I'm like-- and we start doing evaluative stuff to other people, to ourself, and you can start using all sorts of examples like, wait, you know, I was a professional athlete in your case, or I want to be clear, I was never a professional athlete. but you were a professional athlete, you've been successful in other regimes of life, but it still feels like effort, right? And so, but that effort is because two things are happening. One is adrenaline epinephrine is being released, so it doesn't feel great.

It's not fun.

It's like, ugh. And then, in addition to that, by bringing focus to something, you're recruiting a neuromodulator called acetylcholine, which is the molecule of focus. Now, it's important.

Which takes energy and effort.

It takes energy and effort. You feel it in your body and in your brain. And it tends to highlight, acetylcholine will highlight the areas of your brain that are active during that learning phase when the teacher's talking or you're talking and making that effort, it's paying attention how you're moving your mouth, what it sounds like to you, feedback cues. And it's marking those brain areas for change. And then later when you sleep or when you work out or when you're having a conversation with somebody, that's actually when the brain changes occur.

So during the actual activity, it's when you're not doing the activity, resting or recovering, when it starts to expand or.

It starts to contract. So neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to change in response to experience and is the main way in which we go from deliberate action, duration, path, outcome stuff to reflexive action and thought, that process has two parts. One is the trigger, which is in adults is triggered by focus and attention and even a heightened state of agitation. The more frustrated you feel, the more you're actually triggering learning. It's saying, this is important, this is important. Because the brain just wants to do whatever it wants to do. It needs to cue itself to, oh, this must need to change. And then the second part is deep relaxation, meditation, in particular a form of meditation called yoga nidra, which we could talk about, but forms of deep relaxation, deep sleep, like slow wave sleep, that's when the connections between neurons called synapses actually get stronger. That's when the connections that you don't want get removed. And that's also in certain cases where you get new neurons actually born in your brain to help these circuits speak Spanish.

This is why in sports growing up, I remember I would go to like basketball camps in the summer and I would always learn new footwork. And I always just wanted to be like the fancy guy doing like whatever. finger roll layups or something as a kid, but then we would go to these basketball camps and we'd just work on the fundamentals and the footwork and like all this different stuff. And I remember being in the moment of being very frustrating and challenging. I was like, I don't get this and I would suck at it. But then the next day I would come back and I would all of a sudden have it after a few times of doing it. But I never learned how to do it in the moment. It was always like, okay, I might have got it once, but then I fumbled on it. It was the next day or the next few days where it's like, oh, I can do it. It just shows up.

It shows up.

It just shows up. And that's because when the mind is able to relax, it's then making the.

Connections on how to do that thing. Yeah, so in deep sleep and rest is when the connections actually get built up. It's sort of like in with resistance training, right? The gym is a little misleading. Resistance training because people get the, you know, the famous pump. And so they get a visual glimpse into what they might look like later. But then of course it goes back down, right? But actual hypertrophy, the enlargement of the muscle fibers and the strengthening of the neural connections, which you sleep, is later when you sleep. So it's the same thing with neuroplasticity.

How important is it for us to constantly be learning and challenging our mind the older we get?

Well, I believe it's very important for living a full life. And my hero in this, two heroes actually, I would say Richard Feynman, the great physicist who had a very playful attitude about learning. That's one thing that I really should illustrate if you are in frustration and strain.

Just have fun.

A sense of play is great because in play you have focus, you have intention and alertness, and it keeps you light enough that there's that dopamine release. Dopamine is released in play for a reason. because kids and animals, young animals and young children, learn social interactions through play. A puppy bites another puppy and the puppy barks out loud, that's why they have those sharp puppy teeth, to say that's too much of a bite. Then they play a little bit more. They're finding the boundaries. They're finding the limits to which they can use physical force for hurting another or just for playing. They learn soft bite. Play in animals as an ancient form of sampling these neural pathways. And as adults, we tend to be more demanding of ourselves. We don't tend to embrace as much play. Richard Feynman is somebody who really incorporated a lot of play into his adult life. He learned how to, in addition to being a Nobel Prize winning physicist, he also played bongo drums. He would learn how to sketch and paint late in his life. He did float tanks. He was kind of a wild man, but he had a lot of fun, and he was a lifetime learner. So I think it's important because it's a great way to learn dopamine release. And it's a great way to expand one's experience of life.

This is when we were, when I was in Poland with Wim Hof earlier this year, I took a group of like 13 guys and we were all nervous to get into this ice club together for 10 minutes, like up to here. And for the first two minutes, it was not fun. We were just like, this sucks, this is cold. But then all of a sudden we were like, let's have fun. We're gonna be in here for eight more minutes. We might as well try to enjoy it. So we started chanting, we started singing, we started just in a rhythm together, smiling, and it was like, it's more enjoyable. It's still gonna be challenging, but you might as well try to have the most fun in the challenge than just suffer, right?

Yeah, team and community, not by coincidence, is a powerful tool for buffering stress. Again, look at high performing teams like SEAL teams or other special operations units. Team is a big part of it for being functional in the actual job.

It almost be impossible to do it.

Alone if you're a Navy SEAL, right? Yeah, there are other divisions of special operations where actually it's more focused on solo missions. Yeah, where, and so there are people that are very good at that, but teamwork is a great way to buffer the stress response. Yeah. And so earlier you asked, is there any way to make it not cold? I guess the answer is no, but there is a way to make the cold not painful.

Right.

And so that's where dopamine intervenes. The other thing that's important because we talked about neuroplasticity, you trigger it with focus and effort and strain is children can learn very easily. Their brain is hyper plastic and very quickly is the whole job of the young brain is to take things that it's taught and very quickly pass it over to reflex, including morals and beliefs. It's automatic. Yeah, and this is what's scary is also the things that kids hear and they're exposed to those beliefs become reflexive. Now, around age 25 or so, the brain is still plastic and forever for the entire life, but then you need more focus and you need what's called self-directed plasticity, neuroplasticity. Self-directed meaning the only person that can change their brain for the better after about age 25 is the actual person. You. You can't force neuroplasticity on somebody, positive neuroplasticity. So, the other element that's really important to Plastiq is this deep rest phase. And it's associated with the release of the molecule neuromodulator serotonin. Serotonin is a reward molecule just like dopamine, except that it's released in the brain in response to the subjective experience that we have enough resources. So, when we eat a big meal or we enjoy, even better, when we enjoy a meal with friends or family and it just feels like one of those incredible evenings, you know, you're reset. It's that feeling of being reset. It's an anti-depressive effect. When we are, when you hold, you know, if you hold your child or a partner that you love or your dog, if you love your dog, there's this feeling of having enough. And so whereas dopamine is really the molecule that makes us look at things outside the boundaries of our skin, like to be in pursuit of things, It really is the pursuit motivation molecule. Serotonin is really about feeling like we have enough in our immediate environment. And it's so powerful because unless that serotonin box is checked off periodically, we cannot lean back into the dopamine outward pursuit process for very long.

So we need serotonin.

Absolutely.

To feel more, what, complete, whole, safe. Safe.

Once you feel, this is where people I think that the go-getters get it wrong, no pun intended, where getting after it and being hard driving is really important. We've all seen examples of this. I've seen a number of these in Silicon Valley friends that did very well in tech get to the point where they reach that finish line and then they don't have a whole lot or a whole lot of people to share that with and they end up very isolated and depressed. They go through this whole cycle of trying to find themselves. You need to balance serotonin and dopamine. Maybe across the day, maybe across the week. I think in religious practices, all religions really, there's a kind of Sabbath, there's a rest period for many or I think all of them. That makes sense because there needs to be a renewal, whether or not people have a religious practice or not, there needs to be a renewal. A recovery. A recovery to recover the immune system. You can't drive the immune system all week, all week, all week. recovery.

That's why I love sports analogies because there's a pre-season, there's a season, there's a post-season where you're really in high stress and emotion and then there's a post-season there's an off-season for a reason. You can't be in season 10 years, you know, in a row. You've got to find time to relax and have a buy week. It's like if you don't have a buy week, you're probably going to get injured eventually.

So it's just like trying to create that in your own life. Do you do that for yourself as well? Do you have Definitely. I've got things I do each day and I've got things I do on a weekly basis.

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 is 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 and it's the actual nerves are connected inside of your brain.

That's right. Go all the way down to lower back. 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 belly, 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 could 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, you know, 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 embodiment means 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 the brain does really five things. We have sensation, which is 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 because they sense it. Infrared vision in a pit viper or something. So unless you 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. They're tapped into our memory systems. 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 when you're a kid. Right. So it's very contextual. yeah. 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 slash 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, 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. emotions are really where you capture that mind, the brain-body contract and relationship very, 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. 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 the, 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. That'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.

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 larger 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?

It's a great question. So, 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 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, 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 they 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 state of body so when I say a state of mind, I mean brain and body because your body is.

Really feeling it's like the brain is connected to the body, right? And so if you're saying internally the thought of like I'm depressed, I don't feel good, or I'm sad, or I'm 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 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, etc., will continue as they are. Other activities will tend to improve the baseline on our life. Job, activities, relationship, etc., 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.

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 the pressure.

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've 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. And so now I'm not trying to give anyone a pass because ultimately we are all responsible for our own mental health. adults more than kids, but we're all responsible for our own mental health and only we can direct our own brain changes. That's the stinger. Once we're 25 years and older, we are the only ones that can change our brain. And we can talk about neuroplasticity if you like, but the depressed person has to take responsibility for their behavior. But this is why it's so important to catch this brain-body relationship early and build routines that keep one out of depression. So that was a long path back to answer your question succinctly, I hope, which is we can stay out of depression, but we have to keep depression at bay by doing things regularly. The same way we can stay out of obesity by eating the right foods in the right times and ratios and things of that sort. But once one is obese, there are massive endocrine changes, type 2 diabetes that make it hard to eat correctly. Right. Right.

So there's this- 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?

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. 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, 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. it's on a tangent. I'm like, 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 until I'm 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, your perception of time 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, they're saying take off your shoes, putting them on the conveyor belt, it's kind of overwhelming. -Slow 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. 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 going to be.

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 a stand-up comic on 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. 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 this story, or it's a famous story that he said, you, know, this is what I would do. I would visualize this. I'd think about it. I wrote a check to myself years before it actually happened. it happened, but then it came to me. And this idea of thinking again, and you mentioned the idea of like neediness in a sense of like if someone's like too needy, then they're not gonna get it. People are gonna be rejecting that neediness, but when someone's comfortable in their own skin, it's almost like everyone comes to them or things-- Like they already have it. Like they already have it. And they talk about this in the Law of Attraction community about when 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 to 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 is 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 it's chemical equivalent in the body is adrenaline. Those are the same thing. And if you're constantly in pursuit, 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 become mentally depressed. The key is to figure out what are the rewards that you 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 are doing this, yeah.

That we have engagements before we have weddings, typically. There are those rare instances where people just go and get married. But typically, there's a lot of build up that is designed, that fortunately provides these reward mechanisms. 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. 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 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-pursued.

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 we're talking now in terms of sort of neuroscience lens on these things, but the key is always going to be practices. It's going to be just as earlier we were 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 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, well, 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 a 100% subjective. It's like hearing funny jokes all day long. You can just keep going. Incidentally, 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. It 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 again. 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 like 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 thought they 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 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? 'cause I really want this pain.

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 gonna be great, or I have to imagine it's really gonna be great.

Champ, you're this, yeah.

It's huge. But that, 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 in 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 with the striving process. The reward was really trying to strive. His joy at the end of that was really called it was interesting. He called it to his family to hit 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 it away.

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 and 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, you know, 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 neuro chemicals 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 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 them. 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. I mean, I could 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. So, I know that this is a little bit less concrete than 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 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 with your bed, it could.

Be writing a page, it could be.

A little hash flipped open, a little dopamine got deployed. It's like people who are like Lisk crosser offers.

Yeah.

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 of a discussion 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 so, you know, 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 the year and say, you know, 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 what the landscape is. But I think that that doesn't require a lot of us except more of the same. Right? But those are nonetheless growth goals. And there's a little bit more friction there because 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. So I think one big goal of the sort that we don't actually have the skill set yet or we're not even aware 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 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 gonna do something, because I will work very hard to avoid the shame and the disappointment. But I tend to do that with things I really want to 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 gotta do this. You gotta do it now. And I tell people that I'm certain are gonna give me a hard time. Yeah. That's just my nature. Right. 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. Yeah. 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. So many people are recalibrating what's possible. although many people are feeling expansion and they're really gonna 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 incredibly valuable. I think that provides a lot of value to the individual, to their families, and to society really, because a 2% improvement of what you're already doing is gonna have an outsized effect on what other people receive. 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 and 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. When you're in your 20s and 30s, you can get away with less serotonin in your system. But now you need more serotonin.

Oh, absolutely.

So what do you do every day.

To get more serotonin?

Sleeping an adequate amount is key. The practice that served me the best has not been a meditative practice. There are two practices. One is called Yoga Nidra, which doesn't involve any movement. It literally means yoga sleep. This was introduced to me about five years ago. Just laying on your back, You listen to a script, there are a lot of scripts on YouTube, and it teaches you to, there's some breathing involved, but it's really a body scan. You learn to go into deep relaxation. Yes. I do this once or twice a day.

If I wake up and I haven't.

Had enough sleep, I do it first thing. 5-10 minutes. There's a 20-minute script I like. There is a 10-minute script that's out there too. I can give you the links to these if people are interested in them. I have no affiliation with any Yoga Nidra businesses, but I love the practice because I feel like I recover the sleep I didn't get. I then feel really alert. In the afternoon, if I'm feeling tired, I'll do yoga nidra. It also involves some intentions, which has a pseudo self-hypnosis component. And I have a colleague, David Spiegel, in the Department of Psychiatry, who does clinical hypnosis. And these intentions that we do in states of deep relaxation are known to have positive effects on thinking and action. And pain mitigation and even breast cancer outcomes, David's work has shown that. So we're not saying stage hypnosis with like a pendant, we're talking- Self hypnosis.

Self hypnosis or medical hypnosis.

Well, it's like you said deliberate thought as opposed to reactive thought. Right. And you're teaching your body and brain to go into deep relaxation deliberately.

You're doing it. And that's, I think, a power- you-'re saying, okay, lay down, relax your body.

Relax your face, breathe slower, you're telling yourself to do it. You're using the body to control the mind. That's again, and you're deliberately turning your thoughts off. Most people can't do that. And so for me, Yoga Nidra has been a absolute amplifier, accelerator, whatever you want to call it, on my career and life and well-being. It also gets you better at falling asleep because one of the reasons why people have trouble falling asleep is they can't turn their thoughts off. So you're training your nervous system how to do this. I should say, because it sounds a little bit out there in the kind of new agey space, there are several studies imaging studies, positron emission tomography studies, and others, looking at yoga nidra specifically. This wasn't worked on by my lab, although we are exploring it in my lab as a tool for stress mitigation, anxiety mitigation. But these studies show that 30 minutes, I believe it was, of yoga nidra resets the levels of dopamine in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia, which prepares the brain and body for action. So these deep relaxation states, even if we're wide awake still, allow the nervous system to reset so that it can get back into action. So for the go-getters, if you want to have a long career, you want to high perform your whole career, you want to have tools that allow you to reset that dopamine level because that has a huge effect, excuse me, on buffering adrenaline, as we said earlier. But in addition to that, serotonin is what resets the dopamine pathway. So now there's sort of what we're seeing is kind of a logic to it. You need to alternate rest and effort. You need to reward effort. You need to understand- With rest. With rest. So there's yoga nidra and I would say the best time to do it is first thing in the morning before you go to sleep at night or any time of day. In other words, I believe everyone should have some deep relaxation process that's deliberate, that doesn't involve ingesting anything.

Not food or wine or- For some.

People, a drink is fine. just on behavioral tools. Supplements and drugs have their place. There are clinically depressed people that need a boost in dopamine or need a boost in serotonin. I think even though drugs like Prozac get a bad rap, those drugs have also saved millions of lives. There's just an appropriate dose and context.

And some people shouldn't take them. Well, people also, what I'm hearing you say is you should take them when you need them, when you're unable to physically create those habits for yourself different routines for yourself, but then once you take it, you're always going to need it until you can learn how to behaviorally change your actions.

That's right. It's like the obese person that finally, if they really can't move, maybe they do need to do some sort of surgical procedure or they need to do something that, but then once they start exercising, I believe you always want to go behaviors. Focus on behaviors first. Get the behaviors dialed in. Everything we've talked about today is free. Everything we talked about is self-directed, so it's behaviors. Then I think diet is very important or nutrition. I think supplementation definitely has its place. I think we are past the ridiculous idea of the 80s and 90s, like, oh, can't you get everything from what you eat? No one can even agree on what we're supposed to eat. Every scientist I know who's serious about their mind and body takes supplements. I don't have a supplement company. I'll be very clear about this, but they all have their regime for them. And I think we're seeing a tide change now where supplements are no longer being thought of as this niche thing that only bodybuilders and people who are selling snake oil are about. There is a lot of snake oil out there, but there are also some supplements that are powerful for the sorts of things that we're talking about, for sleep and all the others. We could talk about them if you like, but I think it's behaviors nutrition supplements. And then there is a place for prescription drugs. There are people that are clinically depressed and suicidal and need help and they need to talk to a board certified MD and get a hold of, in some cases, the opinion of whether or not they should take these drugs. Doesn't mean they should take them forever. But, you know, we tend to jump to drugs and that's why I think a lot of those drugs, they won't change your behaviors.

You still need to change your behavior. It's the easy way out to start is taking the drugs, but what you should be doing is the behavioral nutrition supplements. If you do us three things first, you should start to feel better.

Oh, absolutely. Sunlight in the morning, the things we've talked about. Breathing, relaxing, yeah, all these things. I have a friend, he's an MD and he says it beautifully. He says, better living through chemistry still requires better living. There is no pill or substance or psychedelic that's going to completely rewire you. It's not even clear what that would look like. And then there's a fifth category that's starting to emerge now, which is brain machine interface. Things like devices that people put on and to adjust their brainwaves, enhance plasticity. There are great devices out there for what I would say reading and measuring from the nervous system, monitoring sleep for instance, monitoring brainwaves. We're still in the infancy of good commercially available brain machine interface, but I think that will eventually show up. the, the other thing, because you asked about tools each day, I have a daily practice of doing yoga nidra. For me, that's my form of meditation and sort of serotonin reset. The other one is gratitude. I know gratitude gets a lot of discussion nowadays, but I always want to point out that gratitude is, it's not complacency. People think it's navel gazing, and it's, but it has been shown to increase.

Levels of serotonin in the brain. It's a science now. I did an interview with Dr. Lori Santos. She's the Yale professor, Science of Happiness at Yale. Oh, yeah. I had her on and I was like, okay, what are the top scientific reasons for happiness right now that are proven? And she was like, Gratitude is like one of the top three or four. It's like, okay, so this is not woo-woo anymore. She's like, no, this is scientifically proven.

That gratitude makes you happier. I think gratitude is wonderful. It resets the system so that you can be in pursuit. I think gratitude sounds like complacency and people are like, oh, I don't want to be a navel gazer. I'm just, then I'm not going to be content. Then I'm, excuse me, then people fear.

That they're not going to be.

They're going to be complacent. They're like, I'm just happy with where I'm at. But serotonin resets dopamine, which puts you back in the fight and allows you to fight longer and further. And I guess I'm doing this a lot today, but I've had the great you know, privilege of doing some work with these communities. If you look at high performers in these very high risk, high consequence special operations communities, they have gratitude practices.

Really?

They do. And they incorporate them. And so, you know, people think there's like some secret sauce or there's something, you know, and they are very unique individuals and very special individuals, but they, but they have those practices.

They have the same tools that anyone can use.

That's right.

We all have these tools. You do yoga nidra, you do gratitude.

Practice throughout the day. What else do you do? So the first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is I actually is it gratitude. No matter what pops in my head, I reorient to being grateful that I'm waking up. I mean, you know, it's, you know, I've had a number of close calls in life. I've lost people like everybody. I'm 45, so, you know, seen a lot of babies born, seen a lot of people die. That's just the way it goes. I express some gratitude for just waking up. And that puts me in forward motion. And then I can do things like make my bed, reward that that I'm not doing something else and start getting into things. And I tend to reward relationships in a big way. My dog's 10 years old. I raised him since he was a puppy. He's a bulldog. He's probably getting to the end. I try and really just focus on the sheer pleasure of having a bulldog. They're such characters and him in particular. relationships of all kinds. Like if I spend time with people or just, I just try and think about mentors, people that got me where I am. I do that all the time. And I'm pretty, as you probably imagine, I talk fast, I work a lot, I'm pretty intense, but I finish my days now not feeling ground out and depleted. It doesn't mean I'm grateful for every opportunity or everything that comes my way. I have to be conscious of it, but I think a deliberate practice that of relishing or enjoying what we have is so powerful and not just going through the motions.

If we're not enjoying it and we're just waiting for the end result, we're going to be unhappy.

Well, absolutely. And there's something called dopamine reward prediction error where people work, work, work, work, work or they expect something to be great. And as you do that, you actually raise the level of dopamine that's required to make it feel good when you get there. this is why people achieve great things and kill themselves.

It's crazy.

The failure to respect these neurochemical pathways and these neural pathways is actually, I mean, it's basically throwing away everything that we were given, in my opinion. And I don't want to give the impression that people have to follow these protocols because I'm talking about them. We were all given these. People will sometimes ask me, they'll say, is there an app or a product around this? I just say, look, Mother Nature has the patent for this. Whatever people's beliefs, this stuff was built into us for whatever reason. And we can use these different neurochemical pathways to organize our life in a way that really serves us and the people around us best. And the gratitude practice can be one second long. It can be 10 minutes if you want. People do love and kindness meditation. I've never done that. I've always had a hard time. being in meditation for a long period of time. I'm not good at mental visualization. So, I tend to gear more towards behaviors.

Wait, you're a neuroscientist. You're not good at mental visualization.

Well, I try, but I think we all differ in our ability to hold on to a mental imagery. And mine's kind of fleeting. So, I tend to write things out. But, yeah, gratitude practices, I try to get sun in my eyes. I mean, exercise, I love, I'm fortunate that I love exercise and training. I think that got into me young. For people that that's harder to do, then you just build these things up through subjective reward.

Before we continue this video, make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day. Does the mind have 100% power over what the body feels?

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

Say I feel cold. And ice, right? I'm in 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, 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 does not mean- Most people.

Actually who are depressed just aren't smiling as well. 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, 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 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 think otherwise and a spontaneous thought will pop back in 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 reach a level of your life, someone likes your photo, the great love of 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 where 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, like 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 is 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 loved 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 loved 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, 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 they're 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. 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. Now 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 of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion, would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress and other times it was 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.

Yeah.

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 had.

A lot of energy. 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, 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. If any.

How do we get more dopamine?

You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind. Like, wow. 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.

That's where it gets us addicted because it feels so good. The problem is, exactly. The problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulates so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source. It becomes the goal of 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.

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, so why 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 too much, 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, 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 like a longer term stress. So all you need is an image and an emotion, a thought and a feeling, a stimulus and a response and you're conditioning your body emotionally into the past. So now the memories and this is just not in the brain now, it's in the body. Okay, so now that thought of that person.