“DO THIS For 7 Days To Change Your Behavior & Rewire Your Brain” | Andrew Huberman & Lewis Howes

What happens is people are so over activated, they're in this alertness, hyper alert stress for so long. So the first thing for anyone trying to navigate stress and then we'll talk about trauma is 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. 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 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. Unfortunately, there isn't a word for this.

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. 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. 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 wanna 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.

Exhaustion stress or 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.

The 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, 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. You know, 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 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 and 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 to 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.

Now, is that genetic?

It's probably a mixture of environmental influences and genetic like most things. And I'm not trying to just hedge here. I think, for instance, I have a niece who is adopted and she's very deliberate and very calm. And so we wonder, is this genetic? Is it nature nurture? 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 home-schooled now, is about what not to do.