"YOUR BEHAVIOUR Won't Be The Same AFTER THIS!" (Change Your Brain)| Andrew Huberman & Lewis Howes

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

Trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog. Positive thinking is not about being delusional. Positive thinking is about learning how to take control of internal processes and understanding that that will shape your external environment.

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness. Really? Yeah. Please welcome Lewis Howes.

When things are really tough in life, when people are really stressed out, they've had some type of traumatic event, whether it's the loss of the job, the pandemic, whatever it may be, How can people use their mind to then push past pain? Or is that not something we should be thinking about, pushing past pain? But how do we use the mind under some type of traumatic experience for our benefit?

Okay. It's an excellent question. It's an excellent question. It has a couple different answers because there are a couple different categories depending on what of answer, depending on what people are dealing with. Right. So I think all trauma, anxiety, fears, they all map back to stress in some way. Now you can have stress without trauma, you can have anxiety without trauma, but you can't really have trauma without stress and anxiety. So even though there aren't really strict definitions of the boundaries between trauma and stress and fear, I think it's fair to say that Trauma is a fear and/or stress response that's happening at the wrong times. It's sort of carrying over from an experience. It's making life uncomfortable or in some cases exceedingly challenging.

For example...

So someone has sexual assault. Somebody sees a car accident or is in a car accident. Veterans come back from overseas. There's kind of first-person trauma where something happens to somebody and then there's third-person trauma where somebody something terrible happen. There's grief and so there are a lot of categories and so we don't want to complicate the landscape and the answer but I think it's important for people to understand that the stress response is at the core of all of this. And when we talk about stress, I think it's also important that we divide that into two kinds of stress because it defines the two approaches that people can take to combat stress, fear, anxiety.

What are the two types of stress?

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

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

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

This is one type of stress, which.

Is you're too activated, you're too alert, you're too agitated, and you want to be less alert, less activated, and less agitated. The alert stress. That's right. We could call it the alert stress, hyper alert stress. Hyper alert stress. Let's just do that for sake of conversation today. And we are by no means a nomenclature committee, so we can always revise later. Yeah. There's another side of stress. which is when there are a lot of things happening in the world, pandemics, you can't work because they've shut, there's another shutdown or there's strife in your life or things are really challenging and you're feeling exhausted and you can't get mobilized and alert enough. And this has never really been cleanly laid out for people that what I call the whole process is one of limbic friction. Okay, so the limbic system are these areas deep in the brain. Limbic literally means edge, they're near the edge of the brain. And when we're stressed, there's a lot of activity in these brain regions. And then we've got our forebrain, our prefrontal cortex for the aficionados. And when we're in a thinking and calm and deliberate and rational manner, when we can control our body and our mind, it's called top-down processing. we're controlling ourselves. But there's a lot of friction with that limbic pathway. I promise I'll get to the practices soon. So when there's this friction, we can call it limbic friction for sake of discussion, you can't control all those impulses and all that anxiety or fatigue for too long. And in fact, as you get more tired or if someone has frontal damage, if they have brain damage to the frontal lobes, what you find is they become more impulsive When they feel like sleeping, they just sleep, even if it's socially inappropriate. When they feel like yelling or screaming or swearing, they just do that. And so there's two kinds of limbic friction. One is when we're too activated and we want to calm down and we're trying to say, okay, calm down. Don't say the thing that you know you shouldn't say. Don't do the thing you shouldn't do. And then there's the other kind of limbic friction, which is the world is happening really fast and we feel buried, we're overwhelmed and we need to get more activated.

We need more energy.

We need more energy. We need to be able to lean into life and we're feeling overwhelmed. What's that called? Well, we should come up with a name now. So that would be Exhaustion stress.

Exhaustion stress.

Or overwhelm stress. Or overwhelm stress. Now, a lot of people start giving these names to things that sound almost like clinical syndromes, which sometimes they are, but they'll say things like adrenal burnout.

Which actually doesn't exist.

The adrenal fatigue. Now, there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome, which is a real medical condition. where people can't actually produce enough adrenaline, but most of us have enough adrenaline in our bodies to last 200 years, two lifetimes. So, the adrenals don't really burn out. What happens is people are so over activated, they're in this alertness, hyper alert stress for so long that eventually they kind of crash into the over fatigue stress.

So, one turns into the other one.

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

The hyperalert stress.

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

Else to calm down.

To relax, hey, relax, yeah. Usually it has the opposite effect. Don't tell me to relax. And it can be damaging for relationships. If you've ever, you know, someone's really stressed and you tell them to relax, sometimes it actually can create more friction and they Sure.

What should they do in that moment?

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

And actually in humans with frontotemporal dementia.

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

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

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

Me too.

Exactly. Trying to corral the children and children mature at different rates and what you're seeing there is the different maturation of their frontal cortex. When you see a child that's very deliberate and can really control their speech and their behavior, you're looking at a child that has a lot of top-down control. The frontal cortex is really engaged.

Now, is that genetic?

It's probably a mixture of environmental influences and genetic, like most things. And I'm not trying to just hedge here.

Sure.

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

-Wait on our patients. -Exactly. -No patience. -That's right. So how do we learn to have patience when we are hyper alert or overwhelming stress and distress.

Okay, so when we are in hyper alert, there's a mechanism associated with that that makes our internal world measure time differently. What happens under those conditions is you feel like the external world is moving very slowly. I think I might have mentioned this in our previous meeting, but when you're really stressed on the hyper alert side, it seems like the world is going very slowly. Just knowing that and knowing that it's likely that you're gonna feel impatient and if the world is moving much too slow. So like if you're trying to get some place on time and the person in front of you doesn't know where you're going. I was the guy not knowing where I was going this morning. And we can't see each other in cars, so you think, what is this person doing? Oh my goodness. And they're just looking for the right turn. So there's that. And then when we are fatigued, it seems like the world is going really fast. And so for people who are exhausted, everything feels overwhelming. Now of course the rate that things are actually moving in the world is the same. but the perception is that it's just too much and we can't cope. So we talked about a tool to calm oneself. The reason I like the physiological sigh is we are all equipped with the pathway. If people want to know if there's some medically oriented folks out there, if you want to teach this to other folks, there's a nerve called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C, that goes from the brain down to the diaphragm that controls that and then controls the lungs. And so when you decide Okay, I'm going to use the side, the physiological side to calm myself. In a way, you're engaging top-down control because you're taking control of your internal landscape rather than trying to take control of your thinking, which is very hard.

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

Trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog. It's just going to keep moving, right? If you've ever tried to grab or.

Smoke, it just moves.

It's vapors. You're never going to grab it. The key is to take control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity, the sphenic nerve. And the reason I describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail, but I think when people realize this isn't something that you build up over time and then are able to do, that you literally have a wire, a set of wires that goes down to your diaphragm, this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs, And then as you blow off carbon dioxide, when you do that exhale, your brain starts to calm down and then your mind, the top-down control of the cortex, can start taking control of the limbic system again. It's almost like you're losing control of the automobile and you're trying to steer, but really there's another lever that if you just pull it, then the steering wheel will stabilize for you. So that's the way to think about the physiological sigh. On the other side of things, when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued, There are two ways to approach that. First is the foundation of fatigue, which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep. This is something that doesn't get discussed a lot. I don't think I've discussed this on any podcast previously. But getting better at sleeping is a whole set of practices. But sleep is a slow tool. It's not a real time tool because if you're feeling exhausted and you have to get up and have your day, Deal with children, deal with work, deal with life. We can talk about how to get better at sleeping, but in real time, what you want to do is you want to bring more alertness into the system.

Focus.

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

So if you inhale, it's speeding up.

That's right.

If you exhale, it's slowing it down.

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

Are longer inhales, shorter exhales.

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

Not longer exhale. double intake.

Right. So, longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert. Longer or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert. And this has a name, which is, you know, it's a certain kind of arrhythmia, but that makes it sound bad. This is actually what's happening all the time. This is the basis of heart rate variability. When people talk about heart rate variability is good, you know that you don't want your heart rate to be one level all day, high or low. A lot of people don't realize that. They think, oh, I got a nice slow heart rate. You think all day long, we were asleep during that. That's right. Well, slow heart rate is better than high heart artificially hot, you know, sorry, excessively high heart rate. But you don't want your heart rate to be like this. You want your heart rate to go through these fluctuations. Heart rate variability is good.

Why?

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

So you don't have to do this for hours. You do this for a few moments or minutes.

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

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

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

Yeah.

And why we don't let 10-year-olds drive. Although I'm sure there's some now. Yeah, yeah.

On a farm somewhere, yeah.

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

Think the kid was six years old.

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

And explore.

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

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

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

Right, maybe it's a practice over time.

But using, I say, when in moments of stress, either excessively alert stress or excessively fatigue stress, look to the body because there are mechanisms that have been built into the body for hundreds of thousands of years designed to do this. Now, the reason I can say that is that the physiological side, the double inhale, exhale, is controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brainstem that Jack Feldman's lab discovered. When children or adults have been sobbing very hard or when they're out of air in a claustrophobic environment, they naturally do that to reopen these little sacks in their lungs. Now, inhale emphasized breathing can be practiced in a way, sort of away from stress in a kind of offline approach that can be beneficial for raising what we call stress threshold. So there's a whole other way to look at stress, which is to say, how do I get calmer in the mind when my body is freaking out? There you go. And I think people will recognize some of what I'm about to describe as kind of Wim Hof-like breathing. It is also traditionally been called tumo breathing. Some people call it super oxygenation breathing, although then there are other people like Patrick McKeown and company that will say, well, you're actually blowing off more carbon dioxide than you are bringing in oxygen.

And so the naming again now is a mess.

Yoga Nidra, breathe, breathe, breathe. So Yoga Nidra is exhale emphasized. But tumo breathing, Wim Hof breathing, and what sometimes is called super oxygenation breathing involves doing a lot of inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale. It's hyperventilating. It's deliberate hyperventilating, followed by exhales and breath holds, followed by inhales and breath holds. And hold, yeah. Now, the repetitive breathing more quickly and deeply, this kind of thing.

Or some variant of that, all through.

The mouth or all through the nose, brings up the heart rate and causes the adrenal glands, which sit right above the kidneys, to secrete adrenaline. They make you more alert. And we know this. My lab has been looking at this with a number of different measures, exploring the nervous system and the periphery, like the heart rate, and you see these big inflections in heart rate when people do this. Typically, it makes people feel agitated. at first, they feel a little bit agitated. And then when you exhale and hold your breath for 15 seconds or so, or longer in some cases if somebody's skilled at this, what you're doing essentially is you're learning to be calm as your body is flooded with all this adrenaline and the heart rate is going. You're learning to calm your mind. That's right.

So you're learning actually to separate the mind body.

Your body might be shaking, that's vibrating. And you're learning to suppress that. And you're just... And that is 100% top down control. What you're doing in those moments is you're learning to take your forebrain and say, fight the temptation to move, fight the temptation to breathe. Now, I don't want to suggest anyone do this to the point where it's unsafe. You should never do this anywhere near water, even in a puddle, because people have drowned, people have died doing high oxygenation, breath packing type of things. And passing out. Passing out, it can be quite dangerous. So, people need to take the appropriate precautions before they do it. If people have pulmonary issues, it can be problematic. If people get trained in how to do it properly, it can be relatively safe. My lab has been doing experiments on it, but now we have more than 100 people doing different types of breathing and exploring how it affects the mind and the body. This particular pattern of breathing, 25 or 30 times followed by an exhale and a hold, and then a big inhale and a hold, sometimes doing more inhaling and exhaling type repetitive breathing. that is really somebody training themselves how to self induce stress. And we know from some good literature and some emerging science that's still ongoing that it is possible to get comfortable in these agitated states so that your mind is okay, feels okay when the body is feeling like it wants to tremble or move that you can learn to suppress that activity. The ice bath is another good example of this. Some people go straight to the ice bath because cold water will almost always induce a low level of stress in people. You have to kind of fight it. Even if you learn to love it.

You still have to every time jumping in there, okay, I gotta control the mind, essentially, to calm.

Exactly. So the body is saying, this is really cold. This is really cold.

Get out now.

And you're pushing back on that. It's top-down control. It's pure top-down control. and you could do this any number of ways. There's actually something called the hour of pain, which is, before you jump to conclusions, the hour of pain was actually described to me by a friend of mine, former military special operations guy, who said that they place you, this wasn't through military, but this is kind of outside the military.

Extracurricular activities.

Extracurricular activities of placing you into one position on the floor. and you have to stay there for an hour, which can be excruciating. There's so much limbic friction where you want to move so badly because the stabilizing muscles of the body and the feedback in our muscular skeletal system says, move, move, move. I just want to move the tiniest bit. And so all that practice is, it's just a different version of the ice bath. Yes. It's, you're learning top down control. So, you know, we started off with a question about trauma. Yes. And we'll get there. But I think it's very important just to kind of summarize that people under stand to just ask themselves the question, am I feeling too much agitation or am I feeling too much exhaustion? If it's too much agitation, emphasize exhales and do the physiological sigh. Yoga Nidra is also a wonderful practice that is kind of the mirror image of super oxygenation breathing. It involves long exhale breathing, lying down on your back, completely relaxing your body and learning to completely turn off thinking, which sounds hard, but you can learn how to do it very quickly if you do that practice for about 10 minutes a day. It literally means yoga sleep.

And probably the most commented thing we have on the previous interview is where are the links for this yoga nidra stuff?

So, we're gonna get that. So, before I leave today, I'll send. There are several, but people can go on YouTube. Some of the better ones out there, these are all cost-free. Kamanee Desai has a really wonderful one that she I also just happen to like her voice so it works for me. There's a guy named Liam Gillen who has one if you like a male Irish voice. There's that. You have to pick a voice that works for you. So I'll make some suggestions but if people don't like the particular voice that's walking them through the yoga, find a different voice. That's cool. So that's a practice that you can do offline, meaning not in the moment of stress that will allow you to learn how to relax more. Then on the fatigue side, if you're in motion in the morning or in the afternoon and you need to keep going, you need to keep studying, you need to drive to the airport to pick someone up and you're exhausted, please don't drive if you're really, really exhausted. But inhale, emphasize breathing. Making your inhales just a little bit longer or more vigorous than your exhales will speed up your heart rate and will make you more alert.

So deeper inhale, shorter exhale.

Yeah, so it looks something like.

That'll speed it up.

And even two or three of those, and you'll notice your heart rate will pick up because there's a neural signal from the brain stem sent to the heart to speed up the amount of blood flow.

But at the end of the day, what I'm hearing you say is you can control the body or the mind with the mind to an extent for moments or even extended periods of time, hours maybe. But really, we need to be thinking the mind and the body connection at all times.

That's right.

Because if you stop breathing, if you're only doing short breaths the whole time for a whole day, it's going to affect the body and the mind. So it's using the body, using the breath, using it where it's connected to the brain to constantly support you throughout the day. But if you're just like all day, it'll help you get to a certain point, but then it'll be detrimental to your health.

Right. So these breathing practices are about shifting the gears. But they're not something that you continue doing throughout your day. All day, yeah. Really what I've described here are hardwired, meaning we were all born with these neurons and connections in our body. We were all born with these organs to be able to do these things. There's not a lot of learning involved. Once you know how to do it, it works the first time, it works every time. Yes. But it's sort of like shifting gears. There aren't too many manual transmissions these days, but let's say you're driving down downhill, it's going too fast, you would, this is like taking it into a lower gear, so then you slow down, you're not going to constantly be riding the clutch, right? You're not going to constantly be in the shifting mode or riding the brake. Some people do that, but that's not good, right? You don't want to have to do that. Just like if you're going uphill, you might have to hit on the gas a little bit, otherwise you're not going to get up that hill, but at some point you switch gears and then you're just cruising up.

Yeah, exactly.

So it's a transmission system rather than you're supposed to breathe this way all day or breathe that way all day.

All day smart.

And the fast breathing followed by exhales and breath holds, the super oxygenation, Tumo Wim Hof type breathing. I look at that as learning how to drive on a slick pavement. It's self-induced stress. It's like taking your car to a parking lot. A kid's learning to drive. I was teaching a kid to drive recently. You teach them to drive, you go through the neighborhood, you do things. But when you really want to learn how to, for instance, drive through puddles or drive in fog or drive in heavy rain, you kind of want to be in a parking lot or a safe environment. Safe environment for that. You don't want to be on the Autobahn, right?

So.

These are ways in which you can teach yourself how to navigate the bad weather of the nervous system.

So you're prepared for when it comes.

That's right. And I have to say from personal experience and from some emerging data, when I say emerging data, I mean studies in my lab and other labs that are still ongoing, it does appear that when people self induce this stress, it can be beneficial. I'm going to quote a colleague of mine, my colleague David Spiegel, who's our associate chair of psychiatry, says it's not just about the state that you're in, the state of mind that you're in, it's how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it. So when you self induce stress and then you say, oh, I can calm my mind even though my body is feeling agitated, that's a very positive experience for many people. Whereas when someone else is causing your stress and you're trying to calm down, it feels like you're battling 25 different things. So these are skills that anyone can develop. They are skills that essentially require information of what to do, but zero training. I mean, it's like, I'm sure you played football. I didn't. You can probably, I'm certain you can throw a football way better than I can. That took some learning. It would take me a long, long time, maybe forever, to be able to try and approximate that skill level. But these are things that we can all do right. And so now I think we've kind of spelled out two tools on either side, physiological size for calming down in real time, Exhale, emphasize breathing of the yoga nidra sort, maybe even doing yoga nidra 10 to 20 or 30 minutes, a couple times a week, daily if you want, to teach your nervous system to calm down. And then also having tools that emphasize inhales, so longer, more vigorous inhales, or doing an offline practice of some point during your day you decide, I'm going to do five or 10 minutes of this more rapid breathing followed by some breath holds. And provided those are designated safe for you, the super oxygenated breathing you decide is safe for you. I'm not aware of any dangers of the exhale emphasized breathing at all, but people should always approach any new thing with caution of course. But once you have those four tools in hand, you've really learned how to press on the accelerator, so that's inhaling more than your exhale. You've learned how to drive faster, be comfortable at higher speeds, that's kind of like the Wim Hof type comfortable at high speeds. It's like, oh, I can drive 65 and feel calm. I'm good here. Whereas previously you couldn't, as well as learning how to slow down with the physiological side, that's sort of a break. And then the yoga nidra is sort of like coming off the accelerator to slow down. You're just turning off your system. The beauty of having these different tools and practicing them now and again is that there's this other phenomenon, which is neuroplasticity, which is that then you start doing it reflexively without even realizing. You start doing physiological sighs when you're too stressed. Automatically. Automatically and even before you start to hit the alertness threshold where you're- Interesting. Yeah. People just start to engage these things.

And so- It's kind of like when you see a dog who's just tired and it automatically does this sigh when it's like panting and it'll do like a big sigh and then it's like almost like it's relaxed.

That's right. And it's just like it goes to sleep. That's right. I see this with my dog all the time. It's like running around panting and then it's just like, Exactly. And that little extra inhale, I know we've talked a lot about this before, but I don't think we can overemphasize the power of the physiological sigh, because that little extra inhale is what opens up those little sacs in the lungs just a little bit more, and that when you exhale, it pulls a lot more carbon dioxide out of the system.

Which when you pull carbon dioxide out of the system, what does that do?

You feel calm.

There you go.

You feel calm.

In fact, this is a physiological mechanism to make you calm.

That's right. In fact, in claustrophobic environments or, God forbid, if you're drowning, the reason you're stressed is because you have neurons in your brainstem that sense carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. And as that goes up, it says you need to find air, you need to offload this carbon dioxide. Oh, man. So these are all real physiological mechanisms that are really about balancing the oxygen and carbon dioxide in your system. And when we see these really extreme feats breath holds and people doing all these really wild things. Usually it's because they're learning to manipulate the oxygen, carbon dioxide packing or ratios or how they manage them. Freedivers get rid of this. Freedivers, there's air packing. There's all sorts of dangerous stuff that should only really be done by highly trained, highly skilled people. But, you know, once people have these tools in hand, they can start coupling to them. to the tools that involve the mind. I mean, it's fine to do a physiological sigh and to tell yourself to calm down. We're not saying don't think or be mindless, but what we're saying is it's powerful to look to these mechanics of the body-mind relationship. And you said the body and the mind are connected. It's really a two-way street. You know, the mind controls the body, the body controls the mind. It's a loop. I just think of it like a loop. I don't even think of it as one controlling the other. It's just if one of those things is out of whack, you need to control the other one. You're not going to try and just think about trying to control your mind again as like grabbing at fog or at smoke. It just moves away. So that most of the time.

I want to ask you a question. I want to shift gears in a strategic way. And I love to have practitioners, scientists, doctors, researchers who are in the practicality of things. But I also love to have philosophers, spiritual leaders, and manifestors like I call people that are talking about the law of attraction and the way we think and how our thoughts allow us to attract the things we want in our life, whether it be a positive thing or something they don't want, but our thoughts really start to attract. And I want to understand the science of the Law of Attraction.

Oh my. Okay.

Because I recently had the author of the Secret, which is kind of made the Law of Attraction more mainstream and popularized. This is something that's been around for a long time. The manifesting your thoughts and the Law of Attraction is not a new thing, but she popularized it with the Secret. Rhonda Byrne. And as I was interviewing her, and I've interviewed a lot of different experts who talk about the Law of Attraction, It's always been fascinating to hear the results they get in their life based on using this principle called the Law of Attraction or thinking of certain things that you want, desiring certain things that you want as if it's already happened, imagining as if you already have it, visualizing it, and also acting. It's not just thinking and it comes to you, but thinking, manifesting, attracting the people you need in your life for it to manifest. taking the actions necessary, learning the skills. But as opposed to having a mind of chaos, it's hard to manifest what we want under a mind of chaos. But when we're clearer, we start to manifest those things with a process. Can you break down the science of the law of attraction?

Oh, my.

And why this idea of thinking a certain thing will manifest, why that is accurate or not.

So, I confess I'm not super familiar with it although I've heard about it.

So, law of attraction essentially just being what you think you become, what you think you create, what you think about consistently you'll start to attract in your life. It's kind of the baseline principle. There's more to it but I'm simplifying it. So, when we think about something consistently in our minds, Is there science around this that validates or doesn't validate that we start to in the physical world attract our thoughts? Whether it be a negative thought about what I don't want or a thought around what I do want. It's almost like saying, okay, when you think about a pink elephant, you see it everywhere. Is there science to this?

I can't give a intelligent answer about the law of attraction specifically, but what I can perhaps do is shed some light on what we think we know, what neuroscientists think we know about how thoughts and thinking actually work and how those relate to behaviors. And then I'll give a little anecdote that I think people might appreciate because it's something that I keep in mind a lot. in thinking about goal setting and focus and this kind of thing. So thoughts are, let me back up one second. And I know I've covered this before, so I'm going to cover it very quickly because we talked about this last time. But in case someone didn't hear that discussion or forgets, senses are these cells within our body, our eye, our skin, our nose, our mouth, that are taking physical entities in the universe. They're like wavelengths of light, physical touch, and translating that into nerve signals, into electrical signals in the body. That's how the senses...

Senses meaning taste, feel, sight, hearing, the five senses.

And people always say, what about intuition? That's different. That's not a sense. That's actually a sense of your internal world. It's called interoception, as opposed to exteroception, sense of the outside world. so the five senses. And we are very, whether or not people like it or not, we are heavily constrained by those senses. For instance, a mantis shrimp, of all things, can see like 64 different shades of color that we can only see one shade of, for instance, because they have receptors that can pick out those things. Some animals can see ultraviolet emissions, others can see infrared, a pit viper can see your heat emissions. You know, humans sometimes think they can see heat emissions, but they can't see heat emissions unless they put infrared goggles on. Then they can. So the senses constrain our experience of the world. And I don't doubt that there are some people that have a little quarter of a percent more UV detection or there's even some evidence for weak magnetoreception in humans from good labs. A little bit of, yeah. And turtles have very strong magnetoreception.

What does that mean?

Magnetoreception. They can sense magnetic fields. So they sense them as, you know, like that's magnetically. Humans have, there's some evidence written up in Science Magazine if people want to look it up, which is a quality journal, for weak magnetic sensing in humans. Some humans. Not strong in most people. But it's not strong, okay? And it's not in most, strong in most people by any stretch. Whereas turtles can navigate long distances based on magnetic fields in the ocean. That's cool.

That's cool.

It's very cool. So our experience of the world, all humans experience of the world, is kind of tunneled by these, what we can see and what we can't see. There's a lot happening that we can't see. It's just a reality. That's why people need night vision goggles and supposed to just looking at things in the night without them. So that's key. So there's sensation and then there's perception, which is simply to say which of those things are we paying attention to? So, I can see that this water bottle is a mixture of blue and glass because I decided to look at it. But I was sensing it out of the corner of my eye the whole time, but I was focusing on something else.

I can sense the air touching my skin because I'm deciding to focus on that.

That's right. So, that's perception. And you want to just make sure that we close the hatch on interoception, perception of what's going on. I don't think about my heart rate too much, but if I stop and think about it, thinking about my heart rate and then I'm just sensing my heart rate. But it's still just pressure. It's a physical phenomenon. Okay. Then there's thinking, which we'll get to. Then there's emotions slash feelings. And those are complicated, but they are tractable as we say. We can figure it out. And then there's behaviors. Like you're writing right now. It's a measurable thing. It's a real thing. Okay, so what about thoughts? What in the world is thinking? Well, in many ways, thinking is a lot like perception. Perception again being which sensations I'm focusing on, except that thinking incorporates sensations from the past, sensations from the present, and can include sensations from the future that we haven't even had yet.

Interesting.

So this, I think, speaks to your question about Law of Attraction, which is, you know, never really been formalized in for the scientific community. So I'm trying to take it and cram it through a neuroscience filter here, see what comes out the other side. But the interesting thing about thinking is it's very hard to control our spontaneous thoughts. So for instance, I can't prevent myself from thinking something. However, I can deliberately introduce a thought. People forget this, that one of our enormous powers as human beings is another form of top-down control, which is to say, I'm going to write out my name, I am Andrew, or I can think, I am Andrew. Now, it takes a little bit of work. You kind of notice to think something specific, like you would write it out in your head, just as you would write it out on paper. It feels like a little bit of work because it is work. You're taking that spontaneous thought process and you're inserting a thought on top of it. And we know that you can't hold too many thoughts in mind at once. So what I will say is that it's hard to suppress thoughts, but it's actually quite easy to introduce thoughts. And it sounds to me like this law is basically a process of introducing thoughts. And when you start introducing thoughts and you start thinking of thoughts as a form of perception, The way you view the world. They're going to shape the way you... They're going to shape what you see. -Wow. -They're very going to heavily constrain what you see. Now, this has a dark side and a light side. And I... You know... -Tell me. -The dark side is that beliefs are essentially thoughts that are recurring thoughts or things that are kind of like books on a shelf that you can reach to anytime. If I say, Hey, what about that book out there? You know, Jay Shetty's book, you can go grab it. sits on the shelf right there and you can show it to me. It's there all the time, you know where it is and it's very accessible.

Whereas it's beliefs are reoccurring thought.

Right.

So you said?

Yeah. Whereas if you have never thought about something in particular, like if we start having a discussion about something that you're not very familiar with or you tell me about something I'm not very familiar with, then it's going to take some work. It feels like work.

To understand it, to perceive it, experiences, to take it in to question your previous beliefs about something. That's right.

And there's some interesting data that were published in the journal Neuron this last year, not from my group, that show that beliefs actually have their own rewarding quality. That there's actually dopamine release associated with beliefs.

Having a belief.

Yes. So when you believe something, there are chemical reward systems in your mind. that are associated with just repeating that belief. Now again, this has a dark side and a light side. The dark side is it means that people can be very fixed in their beliefs and they're actually being chemically rewarded for having the same belief.

The world is flat. I believe the world is flat and just saying it over and over again.

Or in group out group type thinking of any kind.

I mean in group out group.

Well, when people think, oh, I believe that that group of people over there this way and/or good or bad, right? There's a self-reward mechanism that's getting engaged.

I'm greater than this group.

Could be greater than or less than. So, beliefs are attached to a set of rewards.

Interesting.

So, now the dopamine system is exceedingly powerful because dopamine is a kind of a dumb molecule. It has no brain of its own. It's just a molecule. right? It's just a chemical. But when dopamine is released in our brain, first of all, it tends to orient us towards goals in the outside environment. It's the molecule not just of reward but of motivation. And when we release dopamine, we tend to see the world in terms of external goals. And so you can imagine now if there's a process built up inside us where our thoughts are causing dopamine release and dopamine is shaping what we see as rewards. Dopamine, we tend to see the world in terms of external goals. And so you can imagine now if there's a process built up inside us where our thoughts are causing dopamine release and dopamine is shaping what we see as rewards.