"This Is Why You FEEL LOST & UNHAPPY In Life" - Fix This TODAY! | Andrew Huberman

The old narrative 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. I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness. Really?

Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes. Welcome back in one of the School of Greatness podcasts. I'm super excited about our guest today, Andrew Huberman in the house.

Good to see you, my friend.

Great to be here, thanks. Very excited. You are a neuroscientist, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology, which is the hardest word to say. at Stanford, you run a lab, Human Lab, which is primarily studying brain states such as fear, courage, anxiety, calm, and how it can better move in and out of certain things. My first question, I've been super excited about this interview happening because I'm fascinated by how we think, how we feel, our emotions, how everything is connected in our body and our brains. And I'm curious, how much does the body control the mind and the mind control the body? Are they very connected or is the mind in complete control?

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

So, the spinal cord is connected to the brain.

That's right.

The back, it comes up the neck. That's right. The actual nerves are connected inside of your brain.

That's right. All the way down to lower back?

Yeah.

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

They're all connected. They're all connected.

If you took that out of the body, I would say they would all be connected. That's right. They're contiguous, as we said. They're just one unit. They're one piece. That's right. And sometimes they get challenged, people say the eyes aren't part of the brain. Well, then that means that the spinal cord is part of the brain, too. And I want to be really clear, this is not Semantics, there is a genetic program that ensures that early in development, during the first trimester when we were all in our mother's bellies, the retinas, the neural retinas and eyes were deliberately pushed out of the skull. And the reason you have those eyes outside your skull is so that you can evaluate things at a great distance from you, right? Because otherwise everything would have to be in contact with you. Other animals do this mainly using smell. we are very visually driven. So a lot of our genome is devoted to vision and understanding what's going on at a distance from us. And that's afforded us a huge evolutionary advantage.

To survive.

To survive, because the more that I can anticipate events at a distance, the more that I 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 is it, as we say, innervated. It receives nerve connections. To the brain? That's right, from the brain and spinal cord. So much so that if we were to just dissolve away everything except the nervous system, if we had a human nervous system splayed out here on the table in front of us, it would look like a human being. There would be a connection at every level down to, you'd be able to say, that's the big toe, and that's the pinky, and that's where the heart would belong, because it's almost like a silhouette of our entire body. And so when we think about the nervous system, it's really important, I think, for people to understand that the nervous system is all of that, brain and body and all the connections back and forth. And there have been thousands of years of debates about what's the mind, what's the brain, et cetera, the mind-body problem, all that. I think it's fair to say in 2020 that states of mind include the brain, the activity of the brain and the body. those two things coordinate. The brain and the body have a sort of what I call a contract. There's a brain-body contract that gives rise to things like states of mind. So feeling of depression or a feeling of awe or excitement or happiness.

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

Yeah, we could talk about why an.

Emotional experience is a state of mind.

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

To interrupt, but brain and body mean thought and feeling.

Yeah, so you're asking the key questions. Emotions are very hard to describe in an objective way, whereas states have certain properties that allow us to study them in different laboratories and from one experiment to the next. So some people may have heard this before, but We really, the brain does really five things. We have sensation, which is, you know, we're constantly being bombarded with sound waves and light and smells and things. And that stuff is ongoing and you can't negotiate that. It's just you have these receptors in your body that allow you to evaluate those things. A sea turtle has magnetoreception. It can navigate by magnetic fields. We cannot do that, but they can 'cause they sense it, you know, infrared vision in a pit viper or something. So unless you put on, you know, 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, the actual visual, the perception is your interpretation of the feeling.

Ah, so I would say that the perceptions are where your attention is, which sensations you're attending to. And then you have thoughts. And thoughts get a little complicated for us to parse because they are a little bit abstract. But thoughts are a combination of our perception, whatever it is we're attending to, and they have context, memory. You know, they're tapped into our memory systems, right? Because if I say a pen and you're like, I don't know what your relationship to pens is, but mine is kind of a trivial one, I write with one. But let's say I come from a family that, I don't know, had a pen factory in Germany in the 1930s. Then there's a whole, or you got stabbed by a parent when you're a kid. You got stabbed by a parent, right? So it's very contextual. So thoughts are like perceptions, but they carry memory and context. Thoughts are memory and context. Yeah, they include that. And then there are feelings/emotions. And this is where it really starts to get abstract and kind of hazy and where there's still a lot of debate. Because, for instance, if I ask you how you're feeling and you say, I feel, most people say, I feel good. Well, what does that mean? I mean, that's not a feeling. So if you ever do personal development work, they're always like, don't use a, don't say good or bad, what do you feel? And people say, well, I feel calm and excited or something like, you know, and it starts becoming very abstract. And so emotions are a real thing. And they certainly, perhaps more than anything else, recruit the brain and the body. When we feel depressed, we occupy certain postures, we feel it in our gut, we feel it in our limbs, we can feel, fatigue, we can feel anxious, and so the 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. And then of course beneath all that you've got memories and people always like to raise intuition. You know, they always say, what about that sixth thing, intuition? And we could talk about intuition, but the reason I like to talk about states and the reason we study states in my lab is that states have two properties that are easy to study somewhat compared to emotions. And that's how pervasive they are, meaning how long lasting they are. States tend to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Whereas emotions, it's sort of like they're more in combination. States are more like the primary colors from which you mix all that you get all the emotions. And the other thing is that they have an intensity that we can measure. You can have a state of being very alert or very drowsy or asleep.

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

That's right. And we can measure.

It's that experience.

That's right. And we can correlate it with things like heart rate, heart rate variability, breathing speed, sweating, levels of neural activity in brain areas that control wakefulness. And so I will be the first to say that I would love to be able to say that in my laboratory we are studying or someday we'll study awe and flow and all those things. But those are higher up on the ladder than we can get to right now. I think with the current technology, we can understand states and from there, I do believe that we can make a significant dent into certain mental health issues and optimize performance in certain, you know, 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 large part because of Matt Walker's book, why We Sleep, and the important work that he's done in his lab at Berkeley and many other labs as well, of course. So 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 heart 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 the 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, ah, I don't feel good. I'm feeling more depressed. I'm in a dark place now. I'm stuck in this place. Is there a way that we could ever defend ourselves against negative stressors, negative emotions? Or are we just, do we need them as well to have contrast in life?

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

Because your body is really feeling, it's like the brain is connected to the body.

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 lonely, or I'm not good enough, the body's gonna react. Is that what I'm understanding? Absolutely. The body's going to manifest what the mind is telling you. Absolutely.

The thought, the idea, you're gonna be like, I'm sad, I'm not good enough, you're gonna shrink.

Right.

Is that right? That's right. I mean, there are really two forms of depression. Sometimes they're intermixed, but one is anxiety associated depression, and if you've ever experienced it, or for anyone that's experienced it, they feel agitation in their body. and their mind races, but in their body. So the body is recruited. There are also depressive states that people feel very fatigued and exhausted, and overwhelmed, and they also experience that in their body. The idea of getting out of bed in the morning is hard, motivating to exercise, doing the sorts of things that we know are powerful for pushing back on depression. So the body is recruited I think most people would say that depressive states are bad when they bring down the baseline on life. Just as a brief aside, anytime there's a question about mental health or addiction or trauma or anything, one could look at it and make up some argument of, well, evolutionarily, this makes sense. We all get depressed, but we have to be fair to the person experiencing it, of course, and have sensitivity that some behaviors will keep the baseline of our life steady, meaning job, relationships, 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's 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, 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, you know, tragedies like suicide, but also because when the baseline on someone's life goes down far enough, they find it increasingly hard to do the sorts of things that didn't get them out of depression. So you or I could say- so.

They stay in that state of depression because it's too hard to go work. It's too hard to change my habit of eating healthier. So I'm going to stay, I'm going to keep eating ice cream, which is going to make my body depressed. That's right. If I keep eating bad foods, if I keep staying up till 4:00 a.m., if I keep staying in a toxic relationship, I want to feel depressed.

That's right. And eventually, because of this very inseparable relationship between the brain and body, eventually what happens is that because the brain controls the body, but also the body can control the brain, people lose the ability to intervene in this depressive process. So you or I could say, look, if someone who's depressed, what they need to do is get up early, get some light in their eyes, get some movement. I know you've put this information out there, which I love because these, 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, certainly adults more than kids, but we're all responsible for 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?

Yeah, there are some genetic predispositions to depression, and there are certainly familial circumstances where the trauma and challenge that can head people down that path. I think one of the reasons I'm involved in public education about neuroscience is I want people to understand the nervous system, and I want them to understand that there are tools that can allow them to intervene in their thoughts and feelings and Most of the time those involve bringing in behaviors and the actual actions which are very concrete. And the reason is the following. It's very hard to control the mind just using thinking. It's just using the mind. Just thinking. It's very hard to, you know, if someone's stressed out and you say, Calm down, it doesn't work. Telling ourselves calm down doesn't work.

So it's like, what's a tool?

Breathe. Right, so a specific walk outside for a walk. A specific tool, right? And when it comes to depression and emotions, I mean, It's very hard to talk oneself out of an emotional state. It's just very challenging.

Very hard.

That's right.

It's like when I talk to my girlfriend and she's just like, she's not happy about something. And she gets on a tangent. 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, that's not what you're thinking. It's counterproductive. It's not what, you know, it's not the truth.

That's not what you're thinking or whatever.

It's kind of reactive, right? Makes them more emotional.

Well, that's because these states, like these emotional states of mind, they recruit the whole nervous system. So, we are actually a different- Your.

Whole body is out of control.

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

They're taking forever.

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 gonna be.

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

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

These are sighs that involve doing two.

Inhales, and then an extended exhale.

We all do this.

You do this during sleep. Anytime carbon dioxide levels in your bloodstream get too high in order to get more oxygen into your system. People also do this if they've been crying or sobbing. They'll do this, and then they'll exhale. So what's happening with these physiological sighs and why is this powerful? So your lungs are two big bags of air, but they actually are made up of a ton of little sacks of air. called the alveoli of the lungs. When we are exercising or when we are sleeping or anytime we're doing anything, these little sacks of air eventually start to collapse. And what happens is carbon dioxide builds up in our system and we experience that as stress. We actually feel the impulse to breathe because carbon dioxide levels get too high. They're neurons that sense carbon dioxide. And then without realizing it, you do the double inhale and then exhale. Typically the inhales are done through the nose and the exhale is done through the mouth. So it looks like... And why the second inhale? Well, if you've ever tried to blow up a balloon for a kid at a kid's party or just blowing up a balloon, you sometimes blow into that empty balloon. It doesn't go in at all. What do you do? You do two, you go, and then it pops open. So these double inhales pop open the alveoli of the lungs. They don't explode them, but they pop them open, which pulls carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream, brings oxygen, and then you offload carbon dioxide. So if you watch a dog right before it takes a nap or something, it often will do these. Now what's cool about these physiological sighs is from work in our lab and that's still ongoing, I just want to say it's still ongoing, but work in other labs as well, double inhales followed by an extended exhale are the fastest way that I'm aware of to bring the mind and the body into a more relaxed state.

No way.

Really?

Yeah. It's the fastest way. So if I'm stressed, I'm overwhelmed, just do a Three or two. Two inhales through the nose and then.

Exhale slow through the mouth. One to three of those repeated will bring your level of autonomic arousal down basically to baseline. What's that? Autonomic arousal. It's called a, sorry. Autonomic arousal, what was it? Sorry, so the autonomic nervous system, it just means automatic and it's a misnomer because as I'm describing, it's not all automatic. I'm sorry, so autonomic arousal is kind of your level of alertness. or your level of calm. People sometimes call it sympathetic nervous system, parasympathetic. I avoid sympathetic, parasympathetic because sympathetic sounds like sympathy. And then people think it means calm.

And nice when it actually means stress and fear.

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

Because you're blowing off carbon dioxide. I heard you do a, does it.

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

That's not a good habit.

It's not a good habit. You'll be depressed once you're done. That's right. People have learned long ago, thousands of years ago, that the best way to suppress a cortisol response is with carbohydrates because it blunts cortisol.

But this is why people eat carbohydrate-rich.

Foods when they're stressed. And when cortisol is spiked, what happens?

So, every morning when you wake up.

There'S a cortisol spike. That's a good cortisol.

That's a stress spike, right?

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

A lot of mental health issues.

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

Is the brain connected to those then and it sends a signal to each other? That's right. Really.

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

So adrenaline is liberated into the body.

Very fast in less than a second. second, half of it, 500 milligrams.

You see something, you're reacting to it, it's just boom.

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

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

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

Why is that?

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

Right?

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

They didn't.

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

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

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

What does that mean, suppress the immune system?

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

A cold shower or an ice bath.

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

It might take 10-20 minutes.

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

And then calm your mind.

And then calm your mind.

And stay in the ice. Not like, I'm freezing, but more like, no, I can handle this.

That's right.

And have power over your thoughts and your mind so that you can have more control of your body. Obviously, you're gonna feel cold.

Right.

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

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

Say if, 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 at all. That's right. Like when you change your physiology, doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit?

The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. So, you know, the idea that When we're depressed, we tend to be in more defensive type postures. When we're feeling good, we tend to be in more relaxed and extended postures. All true. But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind. That's a first step. Think about like two interlocking gears. It's one gear that turns the other, but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going. So how do you get it to dance together? Exactly. So subjective, there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body. To answer your question, can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold? So a couple things that are important. First of all, just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are. Thoughts happen spontaneously all the time. They're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection. But thoughts can also be deliberately introduced. For instance, right now, I can say, 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. That's a deliberate thought which says that you can introduce thoughts. 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.

That's right.

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

Right.

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

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

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

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

To the pursuit, the day-to-day tasks, the growth, the lessons, the losses, everything, right?

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

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

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

Our interpretation.

Our interpretation. But it has to be attached to reality. So, you know, one should never confuse- what is real.

Right.

So, if you're thinking about the effort you're expending, so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels and 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 forward.

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

To be exhausted right before that.

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

Is that what I'm hearing you say?

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

If any, how do we get more dopamine?

You practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind.

Like how?

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

The problem is that's what gets us.

Addicted because it feels so good. The problem is exactly. The problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source. It becomes the goal of the path. Enjoying 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 reminds you that's.

Not the path to go down. That's right. Interesting. And we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here, which is the brain's ability to change itself. 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 gonna repeat those. Those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those.

So dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path.

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

And is there such thing as too much dopamine? If you're not on drugs?

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 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 there are 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 going to 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 exerting effort. Dopamine is about reward, but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards. And then we'll get to it in a little bit, but serotonin is a different source of reward, but it comes from more relaxed states and it resets the whole system and it's associated with things like sleep and gratitude and meditation and especially gratitude. And then just, I guess, to round this out, the cortisol system is more of a longer-term stress. Okay, so we've all heard the sayings, Journey of a Thousand Miles Starts with a Single Step, or How do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? Or all these sayings, and it goes back to the Bible and earlier, right? I mean, 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 of 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.

You start, yeah, maybe it's possible for me.

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

But with this finish, 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. Well, it's just very non-linear you know.

It'S, it's some days go, you know, I know this from my scientific career. It's, you know, some days is easy, some days is hard. It's all over the place. Right. So I think The thing to remember is that dopamine is this incredibly powerful molecule that allows us to buffer the effort process. It allows us to be in 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 like 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.

And those thoughts will affect us.

And they're very realistic, right? I mean, as Carol will say and other people have said in the psychology field, 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. Right. You're like, and then you're losing your ability to have confidence because you're just lying to yourself.

Right. And if it's really extreme, there's a name for it. It's called delusional.

Right? Right.

And people will start to point that out and then it becomes harder to recruit people into your goals. So I think the key thing is to attach that sense of reward to the effort process. It's saying, look, I am oriented in the right direction and rewarding the things you're not doing. I'm not back on my heels, I'm not just staying in bed in the morning. I'm not, yeah. A good example of this came to me recently. I have a good friend, he did nine years in the SEAL teams. His name is Pat Dawson. And we were talking about the Admiral McRaven thing, you know, 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.

And so I said that, and I--.

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

You're not on your phone.

That's right. When you look at, and I've 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.

But running the 10 miles, that's right.

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 gonna go there to think about, this is the hard part, 'cause 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 want, you just, that's when you want to start telling yourself, this is the good part because I'm not speaking, or this is the good part because I'm not reacting, or this is the the good part because I'm probably not doing it correctly, but I'm on the right path, right? They're upset, they're not feeling your empathy, this kind of thing, or you're not really understanding what's going on, you're getting frustrated, but if you tell yourself, this is the neural pathway getting ground in there, like really dialed in so that the next time this, I'm going to breeze right past this, that's really how the process works. Because remember, no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear, even if you get a billion dollars. or you win a Nobel Prize, or you win the presidency, it's all internal. These neurochemicals are all internal. And while some of them are designed to be released in response to things very reflexively, like food, sex, sleep, all these things will trigger these neurochemicals, we have this big forebrain which allows us to place subjective context on things.

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

So, there's a process I'm going through right now. 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 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 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 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, you know, I wish you wouldn't text while you drive. And I put it down and I realized this is crazy. I know that my life and his life is far more important and the lives of the people around me are far more important than any text message, which means I wasn't doing it rationally. It's just pure reflex at this point. So I don't think I'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.

-Wow.

-And I think that sometimes people need to write these things out for themselves so it's really concrete. I think some people are so unskilled at subjective rewards that writing it out is really powerful.

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

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

I mean, there are other things as well. Anything else that you're not doing is holding you back from doing that.

That's right. So you need to be focused, center mass forward on doing those things. That's right. So I don't do any jumping around, power poses, things like that. I will use tools to kind of ramp up my dopamine. I mean, there are certain songs that are really embedded in my emotionally. In my emotional thing that go back to, you know, when I was a, you know, wild, you know, skateboarding punk rock teenager that will get me fired up. And I think there's real utility.

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

You have to subjectively keep yourself motivated, I guess. That's right. And so, and then if I finish a chapter, I will stop for a moment and I'll just kind of smile and laugh at myself. I'm big on self-reflection with humor and just thinking, this is crazy. 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's 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, 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.

I thought 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 in thinking duration, path and outcome. What should I do? But you know, how long should I do it and what's the outcome? Deliberate.

Yeah.

Intentional. And it feels like work. This is what people need to understand. The deliberate thought, deliberate action, writing the book, doing the workout you don't want to do, whatever it is, having the conversation, it's supposed to feel hard. 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 hard conversation. Maybe it's a business plan, 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? Absolutely. 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, 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.

It's when the, 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 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 basketball camps in the summer and I would always learn new footwork. And I always just wanted to be the fancy guy doing whatever. finger roll layups or something as a kid. But then we would go to these basketball camps and we just work on the fundamentals and 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 like 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, 'cause people get 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 feel, 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, is 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, 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 tub 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 like, just like 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, you know, 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. 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. 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, neuroplasticity. So the other element that's really important to plasticity 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 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 or recovery to recover the immune system. You can't drive the immune system all week, all a week all week, you need to recover.

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.

Right.

For a reason. You can't be in season 10 years.

Yeah.

You know, in a row, you've got to find time to relax and have a bi-week it's like, if you don't.

Have a bi-week you're probably gonna 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 less good about the annual vacation. I've never done it. It's so hard. I've been doing science 25 years. I, you know, I'm sure some of my former relationships will be like, that's right. We never actually took a vacation. We never took a vacation. Yeah, my former girlfriend and I was like, we'd go to like Paris, England, Germany. And I was giving talks and talks and talks. And then I get sick and then one day she was so understanding. It's like I still feel some guilt about that. But we would take an afternoon and go to a gallery. But then I was right back at it. That's been my life too. It's hard. I mean, you have to find that balance. Luckily, I was in my 30s then and 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 kind of 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. They are in pain mitigation and even breast cancer outcomes. David's work has shown that. So we're not saying a 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, relax, 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 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 really, 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 is accomplished, 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.

Now food or wine or... For some.

People, a drink is fine. I'm focused on behavioral tools. Supplements and drugs have their place in, you know, so 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 can should take them when you need them, when you're unable to physically create those habits for yourself and routines for yourself. But then once you take it, you're always gonna need it until you can learn how to behaviorally change your actions.

That's right.

Right?

It's like the obese person that finally, you know, if they really can't move, right? You know, maybe they do need to do some sort of surgical procedure or they need to or they do something that. But then once they start exercising, you, you. 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 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. That'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, you know, 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 brain waves, 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 brain waves. We're still in the infancy of good commercially available brain machine interface, but I think that will eventually show up. 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 not complacency. People think it's navel gazing, 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 naval 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 a 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 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.

Well, 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 practice, I try and 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.

Yeah, yeah. I want to go back to neuroplasticity at a later age in life. How much, let's say I want to, every year I want to challenge myself to learn something that's harder or maybe not it comes easy to me, maybe it's Spanish this next couple of years and then something else 10 years. The older I get, say 80, 90, 100, hopefully I get there. If I keep pushing my mind to be challenged in that way that's uncomfortable, will that actually help me live longer or will it hurt me to living a shorter life?

-That'S a great question.

-I hear people who live in the blue zones around the world who They kind of have their normal routine, they have their family, they walk up a hill every day, they eat a certain way, and they have good community relationships, but I don't know if I've heard them say they're constantly challenging their mind to expand.

I'm pretty confident saying that it's not going to shorten your life. Remember that the dopamine system, so dopamine and acetylcholine are the primary triggers for adult neuroplasticity. We know this because there are experiments done by a guy named Mike Merzenich at UCSF. If you stimulate the areas of the brain that release dopamine and acetylcholine, you can rapidly induce plasticity, like one trial learning, like Spanish today. Right. Like fluent in Spanish today, which is kind of scary. This is actually the basis of companies that are thinking about inserting wires into.

The brain and stimulating.

Wait, I could be fluent in Spanish today? In theory, if you stimulate enough acetylcholine and dopamine release, while experiencing enough Spanish, you'd probably have to speak that Spanish. You probably have to read it.

-Wow. You could remember it and connect it.

-Yeah, it's possible.

-It'S like Matrix.

-It'S possible. -Like I know Kung Fu. -Yeah, we're not quite there yet, but it's possible. It's been done in other forms of learning and other studies. -Really? -Yeah.

-What'S it called?

-Well, if you release that, you'd have to actually have an electrode down in your head. I don't know that you want to drill a hole in your head. -You put something in your head. -You'd have to drill through a skull. -Enough dopamine in your You would remember the dopamine comes from the neurons that are in there. So you'd be stimulating the dopamine neurons, the acetylcholine neurons, and you'd be probably reading a Spanish script. There are, I will say there are- Shut up! Yeah, well there are programs happening right.

Now to accelerate language learning through implantable electrodes.

No way. It's already happening?

It's happening.

Someone's done it before? It's happening now. They're testing it now. I don't think they're at one day for an entire for fluency, but they are definitely at massively accelerated language learning.

Really?

Yeah. I have close friends that do this sort of thing for a living.

You know someone who's done this?

Who run the laboratories who do this kind of thing? Absolutely.

So what do they do? They put something in your head?

Well, the goal, so we know that dopamine and acetylcholine from experimental already published results, if those are released, then in massive amounts, whatever you pair that release with, whatever sensory experience, massively rewires the brain according to that experience. So, Merzenich has these beautiful studies where he showed that if you play a certain auditory tones and you stimulate these brain areas, the auditory cortex, the area of the brain that listens and hears and understands sounds, massively rewires according to what was played in that moment. But because these neurochemicals are like gates, they open the gate to plasticity. You normally engage them by focus, agitation, stress and strain, self-reward, et cetera, or going to, you know, and having a conversation in Spanish where you're like, wow, I'm doing it. I'm fluent. I'm doing it. That's gonna keep me- I get it. I get it. Right. But you can imagine there are groups on this planet that are very interested in rapidly accelerated language learning that would be willing to put many millions or billions of dollars, probably not billions, toward programs to get massively accelerated language learning by putting either implantable chips in the brain, that will stimulate these brain areas, including memory areas, or stimulating acetylcholine or dopamine.

So people have already done this where they put a, they cut open their.

Head and put a chip in their brain. These are neurosurgery patients who are already.

Undergoing surgery for other reasons and have.

A very good reason to try this. Really?

Yeah, and there are animal studies doing this all the time. Shut up.

Absolutely. And are there any results of this? Well, they're not, the groups that are doing these sorts of things are not going to reveal the results just yet. So you can imagine that these are related to government military type contracts. It makes sense, right? You'd want to do this. Yeah, absolutely. And it's definitely happening overseas too. I mean, massively accelerated learning is kind of the holy grail of neuroscience. Right. Right.

How can we learn anything faster? Because time is the thing that we're all trying to maximize.

Right. And you could imagine that because the human brain in development can be biased toward becoming exceptional at math or exceptional athletics. You could build brains that are, you could bias brains to be very, very good, even exceptional at the level of surpassing all previous behavior by triggering these sorts of plasticity events. I wouldn't run out and put the chip in your head immediately. This stuff has to be worked out. But certainly there's a whole community that's spinning up right now around nootropics, smart drugs. Right. It's not a word or an area that I'm really a big fan of because what are you talking about, creativity, task implementation, focus? The word smart drugs is terrible, nootropics is even worse because it's not pointed enough. It doesn't illustrate exactly what the end goal is. It's sort of a throwaway catch-all kind of like smart drug. What is smart? But there are, for instance, I know a Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist who chooses immense amounts of Nicorette each day. He's in his 70s. because it increases his focus. He quit smoking, which stimulates nicotine, and those stimulate acetylcholine. So, Nicorette is a nicotinic stimulant and nicotine is acetylcholine receptor. So, his goal is to continue to learn in his old age by stimulating the nicotine pathway. So, yeah, he chooses non-stop nicotine. Now, I'm not recommending people chew Nicorette. I want to be clear, I'm not a doctor, I'm prescribing anything. I'm a professor, so professing things. But there are things like choline, alpha-GPC that will stimulate acetylcholine release and will allow you, in theory, to learn quicker and better in a bout of learning.

To give you more focus under adversity.

So they will trigger the plasticity event to be, you know, it's like carving that knife in deeper, but then you need a corresponding increase in the amount of rest in order to make sure that those pathways get better. Think about it like going to the gym. I actually have seen these guys in the gym in LA where they've got electrodes on the muscles. So they're maximally recruiting motor units, but then you need that much more recovery because it's unusual to get those high threshold motor units.

So you need to rest for two days.

You can't go back to the gym tomorrow. Right. And a lot of these guys are also drug assisted to the point where you can almost smell it from across the room. But that's another story. But that whole area is geared around maximum stimulus, maximum recovery. Maximum stimulus, maximum recovery. So, drug supplements can accelerate these processes. A fun one from sports because it should have been the Olympics this year, but the sprinters have their own drug community. It's not just the anabolics. Those sprints are won by who gets out the blocks fastest. That's reaction time. And there's a, there's lore, I'm not involved in this, but there's lore of sprinters taking drugs to accelerate nerve transmission by focusing on the gun. The gun. It's all about hearing the gun and getting out the blocks. So they take drugs to stimulate dopamine and acetylcholine because that puts you in.

A faster reaction, more focused faster reaction. So is that activating the adrenal receptor.

So you react quicker? It's actually happening at the neural level and it's allowing them to hear the gun as it's going off.

And not hear it after the fact, that's right.

Because you can lose by being the last person out the block. Most of those drugs are illegal, but there's a whole world of drugs in sports that are geared around the mental side and focus and the ability to get into sleep. I mean, you can bet given now the understanding that sleep is so fundamentally important for performance, people are hacking sleep like crazy. Chili blankets, magnesium, you know, theanine. Certain things that I think do work, you know, people are wearing whoops and aura rings and it's all about sleep now, right? It's all about sleep because it's so powerful and there are- Sleep is the ultimate drug. And people are now developing drugs that will allow people to fall asleep and sleep better, function better on less sleep, optimize the amount of slow wave sleep time. Anyway, it's a whole world. I'm fascinated by it because it's the extreme of the things that we're talking about. But for the typical person, Behaviors are.

The way to go.

Behaviors. And nutrition is not an area of.

My expertise, but incidentally, you know...

The body is connected to the mind.

The body is connected to the mind. And if the body doesn't have good gut health and good nutrients, then it's going to be affecting the way you think and the way you feel and.

The way you act.

Absolutely. It's going to be harder and harder if you don't have energy.

Right.

And food and nutrition gives you proper energy. That's right. Or it takes the energy away from you. That's right. Depletes you from energy. So, the older we get, it's harder to expand our neuroplasticity, but that's why we should be learning new challenging things every year is what I'm hearing you say to help us.

Yeah, and whether or not it extends the lifespan, I don't know, but I do know this. So, the dopamine pathway is intimately tied to the reproductive hormone pathway. So, testosterone and dopamine have a very close relationship. So much so that they're released and they're triggering or their releases from very neighboring areas in the brain. Because if you think about it, it's the pursuit molecule, right? Like testosterone's main effect is to make stress and effort feel good. That's what it does. It suppresses that kind of grinding response like it's painful and increases recovery. In women, which are more estrogen dominant than testosterone dominant, and both men and women both have testosterone and estrogen, of course, estrogen is sort of similar to testosterone in that it's coupled to dopamine. A lot of people think the opposite of testosterone is estrogen. It's not. It's a molecule called prolactin. Prolactin is what's secreted after orgasm. It's what's secreted after a big win, and there's that crash. It's designed to keep organisms in the place they are so that there's pair bonding, there's recovery, and shift them into that serotonin regimes. So the reason I mention this is that being in pursuit of goals and trying to trigger neuroplasticity isn't just about changing your brain. It's closely linked to the reproductive hormones, testosterone in men and estrogen in women, meaning it's linked to the will to live. The will to pursue, and it's not just about sex. I know as soon as we talk about testosterone and estrogen, people start thinking about mating behavior. that, but there's a lot more. It's the will to live. So when dopamine is reduced, the will to live is reduced. When serotonin is too high and dopamine is too low, people feel like they have everything they need. Think chronic pot smokers. No beef against the pot smokers, but they don't tend to be the most ambitious people. Sometimes they are, but they tend to make people pretty placid. Think, you know, any high levels of antidepressants that make you feel like you have enough of everything you need, they make people kind of there's a passivity there. So that's why it's important to keep these things in the right range. So, the will to live is tied to the dopamine system and to the reproductive system.

So, what are we doing when we don't have a goal in our life? What happens to us?

We are essentially on idle. It doesn't mean that we don't have the will to live. It means that we are idling and the brain and body, because they are so intimately related with one another and affect one another, they see when we're in pursuit of a goal and that sends every organ in the body the message to keep going. That will to live is kind of a deeper abstract concept, but it's a real thing. And so people that are low in estrogen, typically in women, or in men, people that are low in testosterone or low in dopamine, so it's ultimately dopamine which is motivation and drive and pursuit. You don't want too high but you definitely don't want it too low.

And we need in order to increase our dopamine we do some of these tools.

Right, you want to be in pursuit of something, you want friction but you also want to be able to reward the effort process, reward that friction process. Now keep in mind children which have the ultimate will to live, you know in positive environments children are wonderful because they're all about the will to explore and live and learn. It's just their default is to explore, live and learn. And children are flooded with dopamine. You show them a baby something new and it's like because the mother nature has wired them to use that process to incorporate new ideas and new learnings.

That's how they can learn.

That's how they learn.

The more dopamine they have, they can learn, they connect ideas and they can grow.

And they play. I mean, you tell kids a story ridiculous story and they'll go with you on that. As we become set in our ways, it's kind of interesting. The brain over time, the space between the neurons tends to fill in with this stuff called extracellular matrix. It's like pouring concrete between the neurons. It makes it much harder for them to rearrange and move around. But a lot of beautiful studies, experimental studies have shown that that extracellular matrix, if it can be reduced, the neurons can move around and form new connections. And the way to do that is by triggering some strong pursuit goal. The more important the goal is, the faster the plasticity is gonna happen.

How does someone like you, I don't wanna stereotype a scientist and a professor, but how does someone like you have fun when most scientists are more like lab rats that are just focused on the research and the work and getting it done? How do you incorporate play and fun in your life?

Well, I love doing science, 'cause to me being a brain explorer is like the coolest thing. I mean, when I was a little kid, I wanna be an astronaut and then I Didn't pursue that path. And, but for me, the next best thing is to be a brain explorer and dig around in the brain and try and understand the brain. And, but I enjoy, let's see, I mean, I'm a little bit of a sicko in the sense that I love music, I love food, I love to eat, I love to train, I love friendship. I am at this point now, and I wasn't always like this. I've definitely experienced depression. I've been there. I'm at the point now where Maybe it's the gratitude practice, maybe it's the fact that I've been trying to get enough sleep, and I sometimes do, but I just feel so happy to be in relation to all these opportunities. And the fact that people care about neuroscience and they want to learn and that there's a place for me in this world to teach it, you know, it's just kind of like an endless source of joy. I love movies, music, friendship, training, food.

Your dog.

My dog. Goodness, art. I think I've found enough things in the world that I love that I feel like I have like five lifetimes worth of things to pursue. Sure.

What about fears? Do you have a lot of fears? And how much does fear play into the body and mind connection?

Fear is huge in the body-mind connection because it can shut us down. I mean, fear can really take us to the point of, you know, from a place of feeling really great to just, they can like crump us all at once. And I mean, the things that, well, I have several fears. One is, you know, I had this weird history in science where my undergraduate advisor, my graduate advisor, my postdoc advisor are all dead. They all died young. So it was like, it was suicide, cancer, cancer. It was really rough because I was close with all of them. And so I have one major fear, which is dying without getting the information that I believe should be out in the world, out into the world. Because I'm struck by this all the time, you know, when people die, there's no download from their brain. There's no fossil record of their thoughts unless they write, they speak, they put things out into the world. For some people it's art, for other people it's their family, whatever it is. But one fear is that, you know, I'll get hit by a bus or something or have a heart attack before I'm able to express, you know, sort of put out my expression. That's one. And then the other is, you know, these days I have a lot of irons in the fire, doing public education, running my lab. My lab's actually two labs. I guess a big fear of mine is that, you know, in trying to take on so many things that the quality will drop. And so as a consequence, I've had to really put boxes around my life so that I can really dig in. And I'm blessed to have amazing people in my lab. I mean, I've just my lab operations manager, I would die without him. My graduate students and postdocs, they're phenomenal. And so I'm blessed to have great people around me. But yeah, I would say that's one of the big fears is that I can't do it all. And of course I can't, but I have not tried to learn Spanish fluently.

Do you want to or no?

I do. Actually, a few years ago, I promised on social media, I was going to learn Spanish as proof of principle for neuroplasticity. And then I would deliver some of the tutorials in Spanish because there's huge parts of the world that I think are curious about neuroscience, they don't have access to them.

And I abandoned Mission temporarily. Tell you what, man, I've been saying this for 20 years. I want to learn Spanish. And for whatever reason, I have a Spanish girlfriend now from Mexico, which gives me more of a. A motivation, which. I know you talked about needing some greater motivation.

It'll accelerate the process.

If you have like a reason why, I suppose just I want to do this because you're going to quit probably unless there's a bigger reason, a bigger reward at the end. And I've been saying this since, you know, high school. I took Spanish in high school, college. I've traveled all over Latin America, Spain, everything. I'm a passionate salsa dancer for 15 years. I've been dancing.

Extreme amounts of guys like you bumped me out a number of times. Because when salsa picks up, there's salsa dancing, I'm like, like, periphery of the room.

Exactly. And that was another thing that I was committed to learning, because it was so challenging to learn that I was like, I need to go all in. I need to create reward loops for myself, all this stuff, because it was so embarrassing and humiliating to get started in something. in a completely uncomfortable setting.

But now you're very skilled at it.

Now I can go anywhere in the world, any salsa club, and find the best dancer and dance with them in a moment without speaking to them and feel 100% confident. That's admirable. It's the greatest feeling. And I want that in every other area of my life. I want it in Spanish because I want this message to reach 100 million people a week and I know the.

Latin community could use this message. So your incentive was the same.

I mean, like, information transfer. Exactly. And I'm also like, okay, you can translate things, you can have a translator with you, you can have subtitles.

But my dad's from a Latin country, he's from Argentina and when people make the effort...

They respect it.

Well, it's such a deep sign of respect to really go over to somebody else's side and deliver it in a form that's really designed for them. Yeah.

It's almost like you have empathy for someone else when you try to learn something that they know. And that's hard for you to learn. I said to myself, okay, I've tried to do this many times the last 20 years and I've always failed. I was like, I need to pay for it. I need to do it every week. I need to have a one-on-one teacher because I've tried apps, I've tried this stuff. All these things didn't work. And I need to stop thinking about becoming fluent. I need to start appreciating the process of every day just doing it. And after six months, I'll be able to see and look back like, okay, I actually know some stuff. And then after a year or two, I'll know a little more and then hopefully one day I'm just just fluent.

And attach reward to the intention and the effort process. I mean, what I heard you say was that at a very core level, you really want to meet people where they're at so that they can derive more from the message. And so if you can build, so as an example of the subjective reward process, the more that you can tap into that intention, this is why I think intentions and being able to be pulled by some bigger, greater, greater mission is the ultimate thing because then the discomfort we feel is offset by this reward that you can always look to. It's like it's always there. It's like having that magic drug on the shelf that you can just take. But because it's internal, it's always with you, which is far more powerful than needing it from some external source. Exactly. Exactly.

So I'm excited.

I'm excited for the Spanish-speaking people out there. They're gonna hear it from you. So not to hold your feet to the fire.

No, but I feel like It's just I got to enjoy the process and I got to enjoy like the challenges of day to day and I'm starting to make it fun now. I'm starting to when I'm like really stressed because I'll get tired when I'm just like, I have no clue what this means and all I want to.

Do is like go watch sports or go work out or.

But the confusion is the trigger.

That's what I'm learning from you. It's saying it's like raising a flag and it's saying there's something special about this mental track that we need to return to later and it's flagging it. Yes. And so when you sleep or you're doing something else, you'll reconnect the.

Yeah, that's that's.

So that's what I'm doing.

When I'm getting frustrated and challenged now, I'm just like, I just start having fun. I'm just like, okay, I'm just like being playful in the moment and it brings me with more energy as opposed to like this lazy, tired feeling. I'm like excited. I'm like, okay, I don't know this, but I'm gonna figure it out one day. So good. And so it's just like I'm committing.

To the process and making the process the prize, not the end result of prize. And also, maybe someday you'll run for office and then you can you can reach more people with a specific message.

I think it's like, what, 60 million Spanish-speaking people in America, 40 million or something like that. There's a lot of people. So who knows? Anyways, my team's telling me I need to wrap this up because I want to go into talking a lot about fear and how to overcome fear and eliminating stress and all these different things. But they'll have to get you back on and talk about these things. So hopefully you'll come back on and.

We'Ll do more and talk about fear.

And how to overcome fear and all these different things. things. But this has been fascinating. And I want to ask you a couple final questions, Andrew. One is called the Three Truths. So imagine it's your last day on Earth and you've actually accomplished all of your, you've gotten all your work out there in the world that you wanted to create. Your books, your lab results, all the research you got to do, 99% of it, right? You're always going to want to do more, but you got to do as much as you could. You have books out there, lectures, everything is out in the world that you wanted to do. But it's your last day and you've got to, for whatever reason, you've got to take all of your work with you. So, this podcast is gone, your books, your results, everything. So, it's all gone with you to the next place, wherever you go. But you got a pen and a piece of paper and you get to write down three things you know to be true about your entire life and the lessons you've learned that you would share with the world. This is all we have to remember you by or your lessons. I call it the three truths. What would you say are your three truths?

Okay, well, the first one I'm going to poach from the Oracle, which is know thyself. I do believe that through whatever exploration, whether or not it's therapy, meditation, religious exercise, all of the above, I think people should explore what they're, you know, sort of how they're showing up in the world. And then obviously based on today's discussion, I believe that we can make changes around that. But know thyself. Wish I had said it, but someone beat me to the punch. The second one is, it's rather Freudian, but I do think there's a core set of operations about the way we work that are important. You can imagine three boxes, it's like a three box diagram. And in the first one it would say wish, and there's an arrow next to it, it would say anxiety, and then there would be an arrow, and then the last one would say defense. Typically we have a wish, it creates some anxiety in us, and then we get into some reflexive defensive behavior. For some people that's addiction, for some people that's rabid ambition to the point of neglecting things, whatever the defense is. And I think our job is to intervene between anxiety and defense, or at least come up with defenses that serve humanity so that we're giving as opposed to destroying. But I do think that wish anxiety defense is a big one. And then, goodness. And then for the last one, a couple days ago I might not have said this, but I had an experience that leads me to say, I think, you know, have fun.

Yeah.

Because it's the ultimate reset. It's not the only thing you want to do, but it's really tragic when people are so hard driving that they can't derive pleasure. And as we talked about today, the pleasure process is part of the renewal process, it's part of the ability to be in greater pursuit. And I think that when we're having fun, provided it's not at somebody else's expense, I think that it has a regenerative quality to it. and that we can, I think that's the best experience of life.

It's hard to learn and grow without having fun, is what I've heard you say.

I stole this, I feel bad because I stole it. The great pleasure of knowing Laird Hamilton, the great Laird Hamilton, and we've done some training. We were leaving their house and he said, what Laird said, he said, Remember, I'm gonna get this wrong, Laird, so sorry, but he said something like, Remember, in fear of death, have fun. And he was not saying go and do stupid things that put you in risk. What he was saying was, you know, this fear of death is something we all live with and we all struggle with, so we have to remember to have fun.

That's it, man.

Something like that. I think I botched it, but I was thinking, you know, Laird's done some incredible things in his life. He's an incredible human being and family man and husband and father, all this stuff, and friend. And so I was like, you know, I could afford to have more fun. So that's what I'm telling myself these days.

Good for you. Yeah, trying to say the scientists gotta have fun too. I'm trying. Where can we follow you on social media and how can we support you in this moment?

You got a book coming out in the future. The future, I know I haven't gotten around to actually writing the whole thing. I teach neuroscience and do regular neuroscience posts on Instagram. Yeah, they're fascinating, by the way. What's your handle there? It's Huberman Lab, so H-U-B-E-R-M-A-N-L-A-B. Okay. And right now I'm doing 100 days of neuroscience in the 15-second reels format. Yeah, great. Which is a real challenge to me. But I do some longer posts. We talk about everything from stress, fear, dopamine, learning. We touch on some stuff related to like autism, Alzheimer's, things like that. It's not medical advice, but I talk about the research. I invite researchers on to talk about their work and it's a lot of.

Fun and I love the questions there so people can send me questions. Very cool. So, follow you on Instagram. Instagram, Twitter as well, Huberman Lab, and you reply to people there.

I do, yeah, mainly Instagram.

I do have a Twitter account, but mainly Instagram. Okay, cool. Awesome. This is fascinating, man. I can't wait to have you back on in the future. And I want to acknowledge you, Andrew, for the incredible gift that you have to educate us about understanding thoughts, feelings, emotions, all this stuff. I think it's so confusing, especially in 2020, on how to improve our lives when there's so much destruction and distraction. and noise and stress, anxiety like we've talked about. So for you to come and bring a scientific practical and then make it practical as well how we can apply this in our life, it's really empowering to so many people. So I acknowledge you for the gift you are, man, for constantly showing up.

This is really beautiful. Thank you. Thanks for having me on. It's been a real pleasure. I was a fan long before you invited me on.

So for me, it's especially gratifying. We'll have you back on a bunch, man.

I'm excited.

And My final question, what's your definition of greatness?

The human species was given this tremendous gift of neuroplasticity, the ability to change ourselves and be better in deliberate ways. And my definition of greatness is anyone that's making that effort even in a tiny way just to take this incredible machinery that we were given, this nervous system, and to leverage it toward being better, feeling better and showing up better for other people. That's I really believe that's why we're here.

Yeah, amen. Thank you very much, brother.

Thank you.

Appreciate it, man. And if you want to learn more about how to master your mind, check out this next video right here.

25% of our blood flow goes into this thinking brain and the rest is like on standby.

Bye. Do you think it's possible? Yeah, do you think it's possible for someone to if they're getting a cold or a flu like symptoms.