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

what happens is people are so over activated they're in this alertness hyper alert stress for so long so the first thing for anyone trying to navigate stress and then we'll talk about trauma is all trauma anxiety fears they all map back to stress in some way now you can have stress without trauma you can have anxiety without trauma but you can't really have trauma without Stress and Anxiety so even though there aren't really strict definitions of the boundaries between trauma and stress and fear I think it's fair to say that trauma is a fear and or stress response that's happening at the wrong times right it's sort of carrying over from an experience it's making life uncomfortable or in some cases exceedingly challenging for example so um someone has a you know sexual assault um somebody sees a car accident or is in a car accident veterans come back from overseas there's kind of first-person trauma where something happens to somebody and then there's third person trauma where somebody sees something terrible happening there's grief and so there are a lot of categories and so we don't want to complicate the 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 handshaking heart beating oh my goodness oh my goodness they're really upset you're stuck in traffic something is really bothering you you're angry you're having the the fight or flight response that you know that phrase gets thrown around a lot and then that 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 ah so um 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 yeah they're they're a smart bunch and they're living this stuff too so um unfortunately there isn't a word for this but um what is this one type of story this is one type of stress which is you're 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 alerts hyper alerts hyper let's just do that forsake a 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 um 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 or 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 got this 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 we're controlling ourselves but there's a lot of friction with that limbic pathway I promise I'll get to the practices so when there's this friction we can call it limbic friction for sake of discussion there 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 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 don't say the thing that you know you shouldn't say don't do the thing you don't you know 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 we should come up with a name now so that would be um overwhelm stress or overwhelm stress or um 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 now there is something called um 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 okay 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 in 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 um 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 and kind of more clinical setting that double inhale followed by an exhale we know is the fastest real-time tool for taking one's state of alertness down the hyper alert stress right you're not going to crash into sleep but you're going from hype 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 calm down rarely works it also rarely Works to tell someone else to calm down to relax hey relax yeah usually it has the opposite effect don't tell me to relax and it can be damaging for relationships if you've ever you know someone's really stressed and you tell them to relax sometimes it actually can create more friction and they don't support it 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 Psy 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 if we have also yeah I've had a 10 year old bulldog his name's Costello he does barely does anything now because he's Costello but he 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 you pivot to something else and it's because they have 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 front of Temple dementia and in certain people who have front temporal brain damage they become very impulsive my dad went through I don't know if I talked about this the last time so my dad had a uh a traumatic car accident 15 years ago it's 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 re-teach him how to write how to talk how to walk like 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 he'll swear just compulsively he'll 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 front uh frontal cortex what what happens to the brain yeah so these top would 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 break and you know in adults uh older adults especially because their behaviors aren't quite as um you know because they're older they aren't necessarily going to walk over and punch people or sort of scream out explicatives and these kind of things um fortunately although sometimes you can see that sometimes you see that um 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 running around a ton and the teacher is constantly telling people yeah I was one of those kids me too exactly trying to Corral the children and children mature at different rates and what's 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 is that uh probably a mixture 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 um you know but like for instance I have a a niece who um is adopted and um she's a very deliberate and very calm and so we you know we wonder you know what what you know is this genetic is it nature nurture you know there's probably some genetic bias and then there's probably also um a lot of environmental influences I mean a lot of what we're taught in school and at home because a lot of kids are homeschooled now is about what not to do right you know sit still don't say this don't say that you know we get the plea say please and thank you you know sit up straight you know do your dishes kind of stuff but a lot of the the don't language is designed to around these things of top-down control we've set up a lot of important social constraints right 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 when we're very fatigued when we're fatigued or we're sick where we're in pain physical pain chances are when something bothers us we're closer to that threshold of saying the thing that we don't have patience exactly no patience that's right so how do we learn to have patience when we are hyper alert or overwhelm exhaustive stress okay so when we are in hyper alert there's a mechanism associated with that that makes our internal World measure time differently what happens under those conditions is you feel like the external world is moving very slowly I think I might have mentioned this in the our previous meeting but when you're really stressed on the hyper alert side it seems like the world is going very slowly you're gonna just knowing that and knowing that it's likely that you're going to feel impatient and if the world is moving much too slow sort of like if you're you're trying to get someplace on time and the person in front of you doesn't know you're like going I was the guy not knowing where I was going this morning and so and we can't see each other in cars you think what is this person doing oh my goodness and they're just looking for the right term yeah yeah so there's that and then when we are fatigued it seems like the world is going really fast okay and so for people who are exhausted Everything feels overwhelming now of course the rate that things are actually moving in the world is the same but the perception is that it's just too much and we can't cope so we talked about a tool to calm oneself the reason I like the physiological size we are all equipped with the pathways 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 PHR 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 PSI the physiological side I calm myself in a way you're engaging top-down control because you're you're taking control of your internal landscape rather than trying to take control of your thinking which is very hard you can't fix your mind with your mind sometimes trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog it's just gonna keep moving right if you've ever tried to grab or smoke it just moves it's Vapors you're never gonna grab it the key is to is to um is to take control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity this phrenic nerve and the reason I describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail but I think when people realize this isn't something that you build up over time and then are able to do that you literally have a wire set of wires that goes down to your diaphragm this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs and then as you blow off carbon dioxide when you do that exhale you your brain starts to calm down and then your mind the top down control the cortex can start taking control of the limbic system again it's like you're 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 state the steering wheel will stabilize for you so that's the way to think about the physiological sigh on the other side of things when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued there are two ways to approach that first is the kind of foundation of fatigue which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep this is something that doesn't get discussed a lot and I don't think I've discussed this on any podcast previously but you know 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 MBS know this which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe in your heart rate and so I'll give a little bit of the background and then I'll give the specific characters 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 uh this 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 because 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 this is happening quickly so if you inhale it's speeding up that's right if you exhale it's slowing it that's right so if you want to become more alert you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous or a little bit longer than your exhale shorter exhale that's right not to speed up your heart rate and to be more alert not longer exhale double intake right so yeah so longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert longer or more vigorous or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert wow and there's this has a name which is as you know it's a certain kind of a rhythmia 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 when you're asleep that's right well a 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 up and then your brain is slowing it down your heart rate is speeding it up and your brain is slowing down and that's what's happening all day long as you're moving through things in a kind of calm alert way but when you get that troubling text message or you see a post or a comment and you go and all of a sudden your heart rate just goes and you feel like you immediately want to respond or you're going to say the thing that maybe you shouldn't say you're going to do the thing that maybe you shouldn't do or you just want to be thought more thoughtful and more targeted in your response the key is to slow down the heart rate by making your exhales longer or more vigorous so it could simply be and then shorter inhales longer exhales or do the physiological PSI or if you wake up in the morning and you're experiencing the other kind of stress which is you look at yourself the world is overwhelming me my life is over I don't know what I'm going to do I don't even know what sequence I'm going to 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 and preparing your morning coffee or water or whatever it is and just start breathing in a way that's inhale emphasized ah 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 and while I'm a fan of breath work as its own thing because breath work can teach you how to operate these levers in your brain and body so to speak breath work is a dedicated practice that you do away from these stressful events whereas learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind using your breathing so it goes breathing heart rate mind in that sequence so if your mind isn't where you want it to be don't start with the Mind start with your breathing then which will control your heart rate which will then allow you to control your mind so don't don't think your way out of a moment of stress feel breathe your way out of this moment of stress that's right and and one of the things and I'm I'm certain they're going to be people out there listening to this saying wait a second the yo the yogis and the yogic community has been talking about this for centuries what are you doing you know this is just a re 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 um the diaphragm and the phrenic nerve and so the 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'm by I just want to be clear that I 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 that we can pull and push and people learn how to do this intuitively but we're never really taught the underlying neck mechanisms and I do believe that once and yoga is not big on mechanisms they're very good on naming and on you know 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 wait 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 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 so yeah and why we don't let 10 year olds Drive um 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 on and they pull over and I think the kid was six years old man should get onto the freeway oh 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 of 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 control trolls are there we have we're all most people are taught how to drive a car we 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 notices and you can't drive your nervous system with thoughts and controlling your mind alone you have to connect the whole vehicles 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 it's very hard to control the mind with the mind it can be done there are people that are get better at that right I mean it's like 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 brain stem 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 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 was also traditionally been called tumor breathing some people call it super oxygenation breathing although then there are other people like Patrick McEwen 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 is exhale emphasize but um tumor breathing wimmahoff breathing and super what sometimes is called superoxygenation breathing involves doing a lot of inhale exhale inhale exhale it's hyperventilating it's deliberate hyperventilator and followed by exhales and breath holds followed by inhales and holes 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 the calm your mind that's right so you're learning actually to separate them 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 types and passing out passing out it's it is it can be quite dangerous so people need to take the appropriate precautions before they do it if people have pulmonary issues it can there are you know it can be problematic if people get trained in how to do it properly it can be relatively safe okay and my lab has been doing experiments um on a now we have more than 100 people doing different types of breathing and exploring how it affects the mind in the body this particular pattern of breathing ah 25 or 30 times followed by an exhale and a hold and then a big inhale and a hold sometimes doing more and 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 you have to kind of fight it even if you learn to love it you talk to every time jumping in there okay I gotta construct 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 a something called the hour of pain which is um before you jump to conclusions the um the hour of pain was actually described to me by a friend of mine a former military Special Operations guy who said that you they place you this wasn't through military but this is a kind of outside the military extracurricular extracurricular activities of placing you into one position on 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 and on musculoskeletal 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 your 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 understand to just ask themselves the question if I 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 uh superoxygenation 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 yeah 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 going to get this so before I leave today there are several but um people can go on YouTube um some of the better ones out there these are all cost free company Desai has a really wonderful one that she I also just happen to like her voice so it works for me um there's a guy named Liam Gillen who has one if you like a male Irish voice there's that they're all you have to pick a voice that works for you yeah um 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 yeah 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 the 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 we'll make you more alert so deeper inhale shorter actually yeah so it looks something like speed it up for 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 and what about working out in sleep okay yeah you work out in the morning afternoon night how does that affect the sleep when you work out and how you work out yeah well I want to be um fair to the fact that people have different schedules and different constraints and that work you know getting that hundred and fifty to 180 minutes of Zone 2 cardio per week is essential people should be doing some resistance training regardless of of goals or um in order to maintain muscle because it's so important to avoid injury and maintain metabolism Etc so you need to get it in somehow but you then have to ask yourself what's happening around that workout so are you going into a brightly lit gym at 11 o'clock at night and blasting music and are you drinking three espresso a little energy drink before you go you're going to be awake you're gonna have a hard time going to sleep it's not just the workout it's the context around the workout yes my preference is always to work out as early in the day as possible that's my preference I don't always accomplish that we people should also know that if you work out at the same time for three or four days your body builds in an anticipatory circuit you will feel an energy increase a few minutes before that workout so if you are working out at 10 pm at night and you're finding it hard to go to sleep if you can shift that workout earlier in the day you will soon become a morning person you won't it might not be this as natural as somebody who naturally wakes up at 4 30 or 5 in the morning but let's say you're a you want to get on an earlier schedule you want to get that morning light but also force yourself to work out in the morning and then by the second or third day of doing that you will start to feel more alert as you arrive to the workout because there are these anticipatory circuits that's cool working out late at night some people say cardio okay but not weight some people say I I think it's highly individual and I don't think there's ever been a really good study addressing that regularity is key I think for me the best time times to work out are three hours after waking up 11 hours after waking up just based on body temperature rhythms or immediately like get up and just put the shoes on and just go and I don't tend to do that last thing very often these days I tend to wake up and move through the morning a little bit like a lazy bear yeah sunlight and then you wait for my caffeine caffeine but every time I do that early morning workout I feel much better and more alert all day I'm gonna fall asleep probably as I fall asleep much more easily and there the other thing you can do to fall asleep is this might seem a little counter-intuitive I said that you need to lower your body temperature by one to three degrees you can take a hot shower or do a sauna which you would think well it Heats you up but when you actually heat the surface of the body your brain cools off your core body temperature unless you stay in that heat for a very long time so you take a brief uh you know I want to say how long people should get in the sauna or when I and then or hot shower and then and you know maybe rinse off with some cool water for not cold but cool water lukewarm water for 10 seconds and dry off and get into bed your body temperature will drop if you get into an ice bath or a cold shower don't stay awake you are it's a it's very jolting so I don't recommend people do that late in the day unless they want to be awake for some reason at night but the other thing is when this is a little counterintuitive but my colleague at Stanford Craig Heller works on thermal regulation if you are want to cool down and you put a cold towel or ice around your neck you're cooling the surface of the body just like you would put a cold pack on a thermostat what's going to happen your brain's going to start to heat you up so I would avoid cold exposure right before sleep especially if it's very stimulating like to the point cold enough that you get that adrenaline bump so cold air is is key to drop the temperature down keeping the room cool cool yeah but you don't want like an ice box where you're shivering exactly the acute cold exposure as we call it of an ice bath or something rather a sauna or a lot of people don't have access to sauna maybe a warm or hot shower before sleep but people tend to be very specific about this too some people like to shower in the morning some people in the evening I I like to shower whenever I have an opportunity to shower right you know generally I try and shower after I work out because if I don't everyone suffers right but the uh but I think that the if people don't have access to a sauna that that hot shower or warm shower before sleep can be very beneficial because the body will naturally start to dump heat and cool off as you get into bed gotcha and then in terms of the actual architecture of sleep and dreams with dreams you know that dreams in the beginning of the night tend to be kind of mundane and seem kind of ordinary and the dreams toward mourning tend to be more intense this is the you wake up and you remember like what just happened that's right now what happened in hours before right and the the early part of the night in very broad Strokes the early part of the night tends to be when we release growth hormone when we tend to um repair motor circuits and and damaged tissues and there's a real lack of emotional context to those dreams now the dreams toward mourning tend to have much more emotional enrichment and be very intense um often if people visual see visual hallucinations that's in the so-called REM sleep dreams why is that it's interesting the uh great question it well two things you're also paralyzed during REM sleep you're eight you can breathe but you cannot move and there's this interesting thing that happens in sleep where when we are in rem rapid eye movement sleep we have high degree of emotionality of dreams but we are unable to release adrenaline this is very much like trauma treatment wow where there's a desensitization you're coupling an intense experience to an inability for your body to move or to have a reaction to that now if you suddenly wake up which I often do you'll notice that the adrenaline kicks in but this is kind of like therapy in your sleep or trauma release in your sleep and if you deprive people selectively of this rapid eye movement sleep a number of bad things happen but one of the primary things that happens that's bad is that when you don't get enough REM sleep you are more emotionally labile during the day little things bother you more you're more irritable yeah anytime I see a comment on on Instagram to me or anyone else and someone seems kind of prickly like well I always just think to myself I'm not getting enough for him to sleep wow yeah or I tell myself yeah because I want to have some empathy for them that they're they're just not neurologically up to Snuff you meaning they're not working as well as they could now there are other reasons why people can be combative but I think lack of REM sleep is one of the main reasons that we feel irritable easily set off um there are a number of very powerful things that happen in REM sleep that we should all be seeking so if you wake up in the middle of the night you really do want to try and get back to sleep and then as the night goes on you're spending more a greater Port proportion excuse me of your sleep in that rapid eye movement sleep and those are when you have your very rich dreams and when you wake up oftentimes spending some time with a pad and paper maybe while you're getting your afternoon your outdoor sunlight um is a great thing because you'll remember components of your dreams the meaning of dreams has had uh you know has been debated for thousands of years I would say and I think you I think Matt would agree Matt Walker would agree that some dreams do have tremendous significance others do not um there seems to be a very powerful effect of having a dream that makes people want to tell someone else I think we just we just need to want to put structure on something that seems very unstructured it is a way in a sense When We're Dreaming we're we're crazy like space and time are completely fluid everything's Anything could happen and when we have a dream that feels powerful to us I think we we understandably want to put some sort of information meaning behind it yeah I've had uh great insights through dreams um I've also had a lot of dreams that got me nothing uh I wake up in the middle of the night and I tend to write things down that come to mind I achieve my greatest Clarity for kind of psychological and relational things when I wake up first you know immediately I'll I'll have a solution in my head or I'll think I'm you know the other day this happened I've been uh as we were talking about before the the recording I've been working through a very complex set of of personal interactions and these are these are not traumatic or anything like that but I've been working with somebody trying to resolve a really hard problem that we have and we were both committed to solving this problem and I'll chip away at this and chip away at this and they are much smarter than I am so I'm struggling and then I will go to sleep and I'll wake up at three in the morning and boom the answer at least to whatever it is that I'm trying to resolve is right there and I think it's because in sleep you're trying you're getting those repeats of the different circuits they're prac you're rehearsing things you learn during the day you're dumping the emotional load through this trauma release type mechanism of REM sleep and then answers just kind of geyser up to the top but again I'm I'm speculating what we do know at the neural level is that there's a replay of the neurons that were active during the day in sleep but at much more rapid rates stuff a lot of stuff we won't remember that's what you're saying much of sleep is there much of the dreaming and sleep is designed to get you to forget things that are meaningless what is happening to the brain as you're sleeping is it just connecting neurons is it flushing is it you know creating these images for you to remember what's like the what's the actual mechanics of it yeah so several things are happening one is this glymphatic washout there's this literally like a spin cycle on the brain of dumping all the junk that's right elevated right so how you want your sleep that's why you want your feet elevated the glymphatic washout is one the other is adenosine this molecule that accumulates the longer that we are awake that actually gets reduced during sleep so that we can wake up feeling rested in other words have you been up for a day and a half you've got tons of adenosine in your system caffeine of any kind is an indeed blocks adenosine function I want to be careful because it's not actually an antagonist it's a competitive Agonist for the aficionados but you're basically reducing adenosine function with caffeine when you sleep you reduce adenosine which is why I delay my caffeine 90 minutes after waking up yeah so you've got adenosine getting pushed back down you've got the glymphatic system washout you have reordering of neurons and creation of new connections so that what you couldn't do previously you can do the next day and the next day you're learning the trigger for learning occurs during wakefulness through focused alert motivated States the actual rewiring of neurons meaning the changes in the connections occurs during sleep in particular deep sleep so A lot's happening in there and during rapid eye movement sleep the brain is incredibly metabolically active right it's just that the body is paralyzed and some people experience this invasion of that sleep paralysis into into the wakeful period it's really scary I've had this happen you wake up and you're still it's already paralyzed and jolt out perfect you can't move I feel like I'm screaming but nothing's coming out it's really terrifying terrifying terrific it's called what sleep paralysis uh yes essentially but that's an invasion of of sleep paralysis into the waking yeah it's like wake paralysis yeah and I know you're not a pot smoker but many pot smokers uh experience that more often than smokers for reasons that probably relate to the serotonin system and the so-called atonia the inability to move interesting so there's that uh what else happens during sleep well there's all sorts of interesting resetting of the digestive system the microbiome or your muscles growing or muscle growth probably occur occurs throughout the 24 hour cycle but a lot of repair of muscles and triggering a muscle growth probably occur during sleep he's passed now um he was 11 years old when I had to put him down but I had this Bulldog Costello he was a 90 pound English Bulldog Mastiff when he was a puppy I would take a picture of him and then the next day I'd take a picture of it when he was larger the next day well they're just growing at such a tremendous rate right and that's growth hormone enduring puberty sometimes kids will be kind of locked up during a sleep he'll go in and see a kid sleeping they'll be in some weird position they'll get growing pains because actually the bones you know it's a lot to orchestring the growth of the bones and the connective tissue in the brain and all that it's not always perfect and so sometimes there's a few days where things are a little while I remember for months my knees would hurt when I was a teenager yeah and kids that my dad used to come in and push my knees down because he was worried that something was going on that's the growing you're growing you're growing I mean you're growing bones are like spreading right that's right they're psychological growing pains in their physical right and in your case there was a lot of growing a lot of physical I'm not I'm not sure I'm I'm six one but you're six four yeah you're you're you're you're you're attacking six five so yeah um wow so the there's a lot of stuff going on in sleep and are you burning a lot of fat too and you're gonna sleep yeah a lot of metabolism is happening during sleep there's a beautiful paper that just came out gosh uh I I forget all the micro details so I'm only going to say a little bit about it but a lot of the the removal of fat from the body from when we burn fat is actually done through the breath we exhale get there's a carbon dioxide component that's interesting it's a sweat in the breath right and then what just uh not so much not so much fecal elimination but more uh that you're breathing breathing burns more fat than well no no sorry elimination of fat from the body if it's going to occur because I have to be careful because the nutrition crowd online that they have claws pitchforks and and they like them after you and they're and they're ready fire aim type trigger you said this exactly so I want to be very clear I believe in calories in calories out yes as a basic principle they're you know there are people out there arguing different but basically if you ingest more calories than you burn you're gonna gain weight if you keep them more or less equal you're gonna maintain and if you burn more than you ingest you're gonna lose weight okay whether or not you lose from muscle fat or other body compartments is a different story but the utilization of fat that as an energy source and the elimination of adipose tissue of body fat eventually boils down to something where yes indeed you are exhaling the the eventual molecules okay but among other there are some other routes as well I mean how much fat are we exhaling a week well it depends on whether or not you're in a caloric deficit or not if we're in a deficit are we then we're exhaling that fat essentially what but it's been broken down into a number of different metabolic components that's crazy it's really wild to think about well if you think yeah and you might think well why not just remove it through the digestive tract but it's part of a whole lipolysis meaning that the utilization of fat for energy that lipolysis cycle and an energy cycle you know if those of you that um uh enjoyed or suffered through college or high school you know the Krebs cycle and ATP and ATP production and the mitochondrion cells and so forth that was a whole business there but um so in sleep this paper shows that you know each stage of sleep is actually associated with a different mode of energy utilization and carbon dioxide offloading and so forth or in the last episode we talked about ideally your you are nose breathing during sleep you are not mouth breathing so some people actually will take shut their mouth with a little bit of medical tape huge benefits to that for getting enhanced oxygenation of the brain and body you do not want to have sleep apnea sleep apnea is associated with sexual side effects in men and women It's associated with Cardiac Arrest It's associated with a number of bad things a lot of people who are carrying a lot of extra weight who sleep on their back or even just who are carrying a lot of extra weight unfortunately there have a buildup of carbon dioxide in their system at night especially if their mouth breathing and they wake up not feeling rested um in all individuals regardless of of you know phenotype as we say they're genotypes and their phenotypes regardless of phenotype the kind of droopiness and the bagging of the eyes that can occur from sleep apnea and the effects on so get become a nose breather we talked about that in the last episode how to become a nose breather but you want a nose breathe during sleep if you can yes and your partner will thank you too because you're not snoring as much um are you know do you nose breathing sleep I think I do yeah I think I do uh I I'm told I snore a little bit from time to time right and you know a lot of people even people who aren't carrying a lot of fat but people are carrying a lot of muscle who sleep on their back oftentimes they are they're kind of suffocating during sleep every time I hear about a bodybuilder or a very large athlete dying it's almost always a heart attack during sleep they're on their back and or their side but they're they're asphyxiating and they're really there's a beautiful relationship between breathing and heart rate they're very simply when you inhale your heart rate goes up and when you exhale your heart rate goes down wow this has to do with the movement of the diaphragm and the change of the shape of the heart and signals from the brain I won't go into all that but when you inhale your heart rate speeds up and when you exhale it slows down and that's respiratory sinus a rhythmia for the for the efficient Autos so you know you want to create an environment around your sleep where it's dim lights in the evening you've had your meal maybe a couple chamomile tea towards sleep maybe use supplements maybe you don't you wake up get sunlight in your eyes this is the kind of landscape you want to create sure cool room you want to avoid very stimulating stuff conversations and activity you know right before sleep yeah now some stimulating activities before sleep we won't go into details have a rebound effect afterwards Matthew Walker's actually talked about this how certain types of activities cause a rebound and relax you know they're very sexual activities yes I'm not trying to be vague here yes I'm just what does that do for sleep if you have uh sexual activities before sleep so sexual activity includes a it's really remarkable at the level of autonomic nervous system so sexual activity involves an increase at first in the so-called parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system the relaxation system but then it involves increases in the sympathetic arm of the of the of the autonomic nervous system and orgasm in men and women is actually purely driven by the sympathetic nervous system the stress system huh and then the post-coital period is when the parasympathetic nervous system kicks back on and there's a deep relaxation so is it good to have sexual activity before bed or or not that good according to the architecture of what I just described yes um yes it's good yes it's good yes it's good um yes it's good it helps people sleep and Matt actually when Matt Walker came on my podcast we talked a little bit about some of the data on this now even um then you know so there are all sorts of questions about this that are now coming out now the the the interesting thing about studying sex in the laboratory is very hard to do right I mean there are ethical reasons there are complicated reasons and good Studies have to be done in Laboratories or by self-report and with self-report people lie right and look up stories in One Direction or the other they're doing more of what they would like to be they're either reporting more of what they'd like to be reporting of or less of what they would like to be reporting less of but doing those sorts of studies in the laboratory is very difficult there are sleep Laboratories but it's not often that couples are coming in and staying in those sleep Laboratories together although that does happen from time to time but yes after sex there there's a rebound in the parasympathetic nervous system which is a deeply relaxing component of the nervous system and wow the the reasons for that aren't clear I mean one idea is that it's designed to put people in close proximity not just run off and look for another mate immediately and to smell each other and pair bond through some of the pheromonal systems yeah powerful yeah yes very powerful an interesting form of a pre-sleep uh you know um biology for sure and one that let's be fair as we were talking about during the break every species has two main goals to protect it's young and to make more of itself and while not all sex is designed for reproduction or used for reproduction I mean the the whole architecture of the reproductive access as we say from brain down to genitals is designed for that Arc of parasympathetic sympathetic and then parasympathetic that's interesting yeah oh and the duration of that varies between individuals okay yeah you got to go at least 10 minutes to get the full effects I'm not setting the parameters that people should or should not follow that is not my domain I'm curious where does brain fog come from and how can we make sure that we have great morning routines to support us so that we don't have brain fog at all in the morning or later in the afternoon great question well there are a lot of sources of brain fog the most obvious one would be a poor night's sleep okay and sleep of course being the most fundamental layer of mental and physical health I mean you don't sleep well for one night you're probably okay for two nights you start to fall apart three four nights you're really a degraded version of yourself in every aspect emotionality is off ability to do most anything is off hormones start suffering so sleep is is fundamental but assuming that you slept well there are a number of things one is your breathing patterns and we often get into discussions of breathing but this is a slightly different one than we've had in the past you know a lot of people have sleep apnea they are not getting enough oxygen during their sleep or they are mouth breathing during sleep these days it's become popular in some circles to take a little bit of medical tape and tape the mouth shut yeah and to learn to be a nasal breather and there is excellent evidence now that being a nasal breather most of the time as long as you're not speaking or eating or exercising hard enough that you would need to breathe through your mouth that it's beneficial to be a nasal breather for a couple of reasons first of all if you are nasal deliberately nasal breathing during the day the tendency is that you will nasal breathe at night which tends to lead to less sleep apnea less mouth breathing during the middle of the night and less brain fog why brain fog well during sleep a number of restorative processes occur but if you're not getting enough oxygen into the system the brain is literally becoming hypoxic and a lot of the cleaning out mechanisms that the lymphatic system Etc as they're called don't get an opportunity to function as well as they ought to so you wake up in the morning you slept your normal six to eight hours but you're feeling kind of groggy and out of it and of course there could be other reasons that you're experiencing brain fog maybe you know for people that drink alcohol the night before maybe they had alcohol for people that maybe they ate a meal that was too large before sleep maybe any number of reasons right gotcha but um getting adequate oxygenation of the brain during sleep is key so learn to be a nasal breather and for those of you out there that say well I have a deviated septum a lot of people think they have deviated symptoms the problem is they're not nasal breathing enough the sinuses actually can learn to dilate if you nasal breathe exercising while nasal breathing it will kind of depend on the sport like if you box oftentimes there's the need to do a sh or you know kind of like exhale on impact type thing so I I don't think anyone should tamper with their normal breathing patterns as it relates to sport or singing or some you know activity but what I'm talking about is when you're just standing around when you're walking down the street any low level activity you're working at your desk yeah you should be nasal breathing and breathing regularly that will reduce brain fog in many cases absolutely it's interesting when I went to India to study meditation I guess it was five years ago now I learned that the monks breathe through they keep their mouth shut all day long you know their mouths are shut they breathe through the nose unless they're eating or they're having a conversation their mouths are shut and um they seem to always just be very relaxed and you know sharp and with it they probably get great sleep and it's interesting as you were saying these symptoms breathing through the mouth poor sleep I realized two days before this brain fog day I was in Vegas at the Canelo fight and I stayed up really late it was Daylight savings but I stayed up way past the time I was on an early flight back I just didn't get a lot of sleep in 24 hours before then I had a good night's sleep the next night but the next day so two days after the poor sleep and for the last month I've been breathing through my mouth because I had um a surgery where I had three implants or missing teeth are so I had three titanium rods and a bone graft so I couldn't keep my mouth shut I had to keep it open and breathe because it was just painful so maybe those combinations of poor sleep a couple nights before and and breathing through the mouth is what caused it which is makes sense to me seems very likely and in Vegas you you've got the air conditioning so you're breathing a lot of dry air in the middle of the night the other thing is about the immune system so the we hear about the gut microbiome yes and and indeed we have a lot of microbiota that live in our gut you can have healthy or unhealthy microbiota it's essential part of our biology it is you know supports the nervous system the immune system and all of that but if you think about the gut the gut is obviously when we think about the gut we think about the stomach but of course it runs all the way up to the mouth and nose we have a microbiome we have a nasal microbiome a mouth microbiome we have a urethral microbiome and in women there's a vaginal microbiome and the microbiome are these these bacteria that maintain a healthy ideally a healthy condition of the mucosal lining so without doing a whole electron on the immune system your primary barrier to infections of all kinds bacteria viruses and parasites is your skin if you have a cut in your skin you're more susceptible right but these are your entry points you actually have an Oculus too but it's mainly um it's mainly eyes nose and mouth are the primary sites of entry for infection and the nose has a filter where the mouth is just like you're sucking it in that's right so the nose actually is better at scrubbing or filtering out bacteria viruses and will leave parasites aside for the moment but then is the mouth and so being a nasal breather actually is better in terms of combating different types of infections all kinds of infections and there's a wonderful book about this that was written by a couple of my colleagues at Stanford if people want to do a deep dive the book is called Jaws a hidden epidemic and the the authors are Paul Ehrlich and Sandra Khan and it has a forward by Jared diamond and an intro by Robert sapolski so some serious Heavy Hitters on this book and it talks about how nasal breathing deliberately nasal breathing during the day leads to better sleeping at night leads to better jaw structure it actually creates more space for the tongue on the roof of the mouth and and the teeth they have some beautiful and not so beautiful images of twins that were raised apart one was a nasal breather and chewed a lot of hard food so a lot of using of the jaw to chew your food um you know really gnawing on food is actually good for the jaw whereas the twin in these twin studies were went off to cultures or areas of the world where they were eating a lot of soft foods there's there are examples for instance of kids that had allergies um to a pet hamster there's one example and the change in this kid's face he went from having a very attractive face to a extended um you know the eyes right because the sinuses are all changing shape now the beauty of of this system is that when you switch to becoming a nasal breather the entire structure of the face and Jaws change and the eyes become less droopy this book documents all this just wait so you can reverse it too it's reversible come on it is reversible wow it involves a little bit of work one of the things that you can do that's kind of fun and a little challenging is just on your jogs or on the treadmill or any kind of low level cardio besides swimming just nasal breathing only go as hard as you can still maintain nasal breathing it's very hard for the first few sessions they are but by the second week or third week you actually discover that you have a greater capacity to exercise my friend Brian McKenzie who's done a lot of work on this he's a works with Elite performers in terms of singers opera singers but also athletes and he's done a lot in terms of using nasal breathing during exercise but the point is that if you deliberately nasal breathe even when emailing or texting you also avoid what's called email apnea or what we should call Now text apnea they've done studies where people are texting and they're holding their breath so you're cutting off oxygen supply so I think the important thing to bring us back to brain fog is that you want to get oxygen into the system and ideally you're bringing that oxygen into the system mainly through your nose and not through your mouth it doesn't mean that breathing through your mouth is a terrible thing to do it just means that most of the time you want to be breathing deeply and rather slowly through the nose maybe anywhere from four or five breaths per minute I don't hold me too close to that number but you want to be breathing slowly and deeply through your nose most of the time so it's probably the 80 20 rule right where you're speaking and eating sure 20 of your day yeah if you're sprinting you're going to huff and puff through your mouth if you're weight lifting you're doing martial arts you're doing anything that requires breathing through your mouth in order to perform better than just obviously do that right but um the rest of your resting time try to breathe through your nose as much as possible that's right and while you sleep that's right and it also helps with ear infections and things and that's right because the whole system when you hear ear nose and throat you have ear nose and throat doctors ents it's because the the whole system of drainage from the ears nose and throat they run together like a bunch of little rivers that all drain to the same location the microbiome of the nose stays healthier if you're a nasal breather if your the mouth is a terrible filter for viruses meaning things can get in and cause problems most of the time an illness starts with a throat tickle like something's happening back there like a little cough or something right yeah it's that little itching you know that's the uh oh what is that tickle uh it's your irritation of the muco of the mucosal lining and there are neurons that sit right below there that are now getting exposed because the mucosal lining is getting worn away or the chemistry of the mucosal lining is changing what's the best way to reverse that when you start to feel the tickle in your throat ah there we can look to our uh good friend well a couple things uh slow down whatever you're doing obviously if you can get some if you can get a nice hot shower or bath or sauna and then get into bed and take get 10 hours of sleep that would be ideal but if you're at the Canelo fight and you've got that our friend um Wim Hof um practices something called tumor breathing it's it's sometimes called and that goes by other names as well and there's a beautiful study that was published in the Journal of proceeds of the National Academy of Sciences so this is peer-reviewed work showing that if you take two groups of people you inject them both with E coli a bacteria which makes you very very sick but one group does a simple meditation and another group does breathing of the sort that I'll describe in a moment that whim and Tumo type breathers and other people have talked about actually for centuries Yogi breathers yoga yeah it what you do what it involves is hyper-oxygenating the system so that you release adrenaline from the adrenal glands which ride which sit right about your kidneys and adrenaline is the trigger for a number of different immune system uh cell types to combat infection and what they found was if people do a particular style of breathing prior to the injection of E coli they are able to greatly avoid fever they reduce the amount of inflammatory cytokines things like il-6 interleukin-6 Etc and increase anti-inflammatory kinds like interleukin-10 it's a really wonderful study the pattern of breathing is really simple I do it anytime I'm starting to feel a little worn out or like I might be catching something or if I was on a plane and someone around me seemed like they weren't doing so well or I just am feeling a little worn out and uh forgive me because there's no other way to do it but just to do it but it involves 25 deep breaths in through the nose in this case out through the mouth okay so this is a case where breathing through the mouth is appropriate so in through the nose out through the mouth then at the end of that exhaling all your air holding your breath for 15 to 6 60 seconds don't fight the impulse debris when you feel the impulse to breathe breathe in and then hold your breath for as long as you can until you feel the impulse to breathe obviously don't do this in your water believe it or not a few people have actually died doing this because they did it in a bathtub or before um underwater so please don't do that but it basically I won't do the all 25 but it's it goes something like this so big deep breaths right and I can already feel I'm kind of heating up yeah that's the release of adrenaline a little tingly feeling and Hyper oxygenating you're releasing adrenaline adrenaline is the signal for the immune system to deploy these killer cells and these cells that go in combat infection and we don't often think about the fact that stress actually is the go signal for the immune system we always hear stress depletes your immune system and that's true if you remain chronically stressed but humans are phenomenally good at combating stressors and then they stop they relax and boom they get sick because the adrenaline signal drops the other way you could do this would be to do an an ice bath or really cold shower you get the adrenaline release that's basically the effect of the iceberg shower it's the adrenaline release some people will do well by doing a short HIIT workout you know a hit high intensity interval training workout because again it's adrenaline so it's not a depleting workout but you know 12 minutes of spring my Sprints are very different than your Sprints because like you actually Sprint they're faster than me still yeah and not in my best best dream uh but thank you you can lift more that's for sure not not at my best best dream but uh but thank you for that uh so this is something that I occasionally do if I'm traveling or I'm just feeling kind of worn down I'll do it I'll do maybe two or three rounds of what I just described and it's it all boils down to Adrenaline release really as you can tell by this episode we can always count on Andrew for science back tips and advice on how to optimize ourselves and after this conversation I was so inspired myself to actively seek out a product that will help improve my day-to-day life and today's sponsor is endel an award-winning app that harnesses the power of sound to improve your focus sleep and overall mental health and let me give you a quick tour of this app Engel takes into account the current amount of outdoor natural light in my low location the weather my heart rate my wake-up time and my activity level to create a soundscape in real time just for me now endl uses AI technology to understand your exact needs and enhance your State of Mind through sound whether you need to get sleep concentrate on the task at hand or unwind after a long day endl generates personalized soundscapes in real time that are customized to you andle also integrates with Apple watch or ring and Alexa allowing you to deepen its personalization I use it while doing some work to prep for an interview and I was able to Zone in and get into deep focused state if you want to try it for yourself I've worked with the team at endle to give you a whole month for free with full access to endless soundscapes library and features if you want to try it for free right now head to endle dot IO slash Lewis to grab your free month now let's get back to the interview that bolus as we call it a shot of adrenaline to your system signals the immune system to turn on and defend itself to defend itself getting sick that's right and this is why uh people who have ever taken care of a sick child or a sick relative you can go go go you don't eat you don't sleep there's no we you know no self-care and you're not getting sick now of course if you're exposed to enough viral load where you're exposed to enough of a bacteria you know it might get you but this is the sort of thing I would do if I was feeling a little bit of a throat tickle a little run down but then I would also do the the shower make sure you get some decent food and get a good good sleep so what's the routine then the ultimate morning and evening routine to set your brain and your mind up for Optimal Performance and not getting brain fog okay um I will describe that uh by listing out the protocol first and then I'll give some of the scientific mechanism second yes because in the past what I've tended to do is uh give the mechanism and then give the protocols I know some people it's like you know enough for these academic guys they'll just give me the give me tell them just tell me what to do but if people want the mechanism I'll be happy to flesh that out yes I should say that what I will mention is not everything I do um so for instance I get up and like most humans I use the restroom and I have a glass of water so if I I'm not listing every in every right foot left foot step through the morning but but the things that are geared towards getting the Mind into a proper place for me I'll describe it as my routine I generally get up somewhere between 5 30 and 7 in the morning depending on when I went to sleep I'm not super regular about when I go to sleep but generally that's between 10 30 and midnight you know I try and avoid that Midnight Hour but um happens so I get up obviously I use the restroom I drink some water I do think that hydrating is very important yes uh so I will I'll drink some some water and then the fundamental layer of health is to set your circadian rhythm the simplest way to do that is to go outside for 10 minutes and get some bright light in your eyes I'll just list off some of the things that people always ask what if you wake up before the sun rises well simple rule if you want to be awake turn on as many bright lights in your house as possible but then when the Sun goes out it comes out excuse me get outside and see some sunlight you do not have to look directly into the Sun but you do want to get outside out of shade cover if you can don't wear sunglasses if you can do that safely don't try and do this through a window don't try and negotiate with me on this point what about a window well the filtration of the of the important wavelengths of light through the window is just too high and so it would take hours for you to set your circadian clock that way you want to do this because once every 24 hours you're going to get a peak in cortisol which is a healthy Peak you want that Peak to happen early in the day because it sets up alertness for the remainder of the day there are really nice studies done by my colleagues in Stanford Psychiatry and biology Department showing that if that cortisol Peak starts to drift too late in the day you start seeing signs of depression it's actually a well-known marker of depression so you want that cortisol almost stressed out kind of the day's beginning I have a lot to do feeling that's a healthy thing you want that happening early in the day the sunlight will wake you up and what's really cool is that over time you'll start to notice the sunlight waking you up more and more the system becomes tuned up if you miss a day it's not the end of the world because it's a as we call a slow integrating system but don't miss more than one day and if you live in an area where it's very cloudy outside just know that the sunlight the photons coming through that cloud cover are brighter than your brightest indoor lights now if you live in a very dark region of the world or it's unsafe or purely impractical to get outside in the morning then it might make sense to get a sunrise simulator or one of these lights but they tend to be very expensive what I recommend people use instead is it just a ring light a green blue light this is a case where you can blast your system wow so get that morning light that this is it sets a number of things in motion such as your melatonin Rhythm to happen 16 hours later to help you fall asleep I would say this is the fundamental step of any good morning and if you don't do this enough you are messing yourself up in a number of ways does this mess with digestion also yeah so every cell in your body has a 24-hour clock all those clocks need to be aligned to the same time so imagine a clock shop with lots of different clocks and you don't want them alarming off at different times this sunlight viewing or bright light viewing early in the day I would say within 30 to 60 Minutes of waking up for about 10 minutes or if it's very cloudy maybe 30 minutes or so that activates a particular type of neuron in the eye called the intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell if people want to look that up signals to the circadian clock which is right above the roof of your mouth but that is the master circadian clock that then releases a bunch of signals into your body this all happens very fast and every cell in your body gets tuned to the exact same time reference point so that your system can work as a nice concert of cells as opposed to out of whack your gut has a clock your liver has a clock your heart cells have a clock every skin cell has a clock and for those that are not incentivized enough by the cortisol stuff and all the other things actually the replenishment of stem cells in the skin hair and nails is activated by the system so hair grows more readily skin turns over and nails grow more quickly because you have stem cells literally cells that release more cells that become new hair cells or new skin cells and new cells that make up the nails so skin hair and nails also benefit and it has to be light exposure to the eyes when we talk about all these things like the gut and the skin Etc it's tempting to say oh it's sunlight on the skin no it's actually only can be signaled Through The Eyes because the clock lives deep in the brain that Master Clock and you need the signal to get to that Master Clock so don't wear sunglasses if you can avoid if you can avoid wearing sunglasses safely right there are people for instance who have macular degeneration who have to avoid bright lights and and they know this because their ophthalmologist tells them uh if you wear corrective lenses contacts even if it has UV filtration that's fine in fact if you think about what a what an eyeglass or a contact lens does is it focuses light onto the eye actually on the back of the eye whereas looking through a window filters it it it it blocks a certain amount of light coming in even if it's a very clear window so go outside if you wear glasses fine if you wear contacts fine and if you can get out on a porch and be you know east facing in the morning when the sun comes up great you don't need to see The Sun Cross The Horizon but ideally you see the sun when it's at what we call low solar angle it's not directly overhead if you wait two or three hours after waking up to get bright light in your eyes you are setting yourself up for a complicated sleep wake cycle that leads to a lot of what we call insomnia so this is important to do in the first 60 Minutes of waking up get outside 10 minutes you don't have to speak in the Sun but you want to be able to look and see the sun right or is it okay to be in the shade or you want the sunlight hitting your skin off it depends on how bright it is so for instance this morning I woke up because of where I live there's a lot of tree cover but I saw that the sun was was uh there were a lot of Shadows but it was casting a nice patch of light in the street right in front of my house so I'm the weirdo that walked out there with my coffee uh actually I delay my coffee it was with my water in the morning I'll talk about why I delay coffee and I um and I you know I'm leaning against a tree I confess I was text messaging it part for part of that yeah you know forgive me I'm human and catching the sunlight coming in through my eyes for a few minutes I allow myself to Blink obviously I'm not sure look you want to look directly at the sun you know what you'll there's a safety I guess if it's a lower lower Horizon that's intense yeah do we have a built-in safety mechanism which is if you need to Blink and close your eyes close your eyes yeah but yeah I got sunlight in my eyes I get the weird looks from my neighbors but they know me um and they do it too sometimes they'll join me animals will naturally do this they'll migrate to the Sun so then I go inside it's 10 minutes um or so it seems like a long time but it is so beneficial and then inside if I want to be awake I try and turn on as many Bright Lights as I can one of the big mistakes that we've made in the last few years as a as a culture is assuming that blue light is bad during the day lots of blue light is great because it that's the the best signal for these cells that wake up your your system it activates all sorts of important hormone Pathways and wakefulness Pathways interesting we can reduce brain fog in some sense sure it's in the evening that you want to avoid blue lights and bright lights of any kind we can talk about that but okay so then I come back inside and then I do not drink caffeine right away that it's important in many ways to delay caffeine enough so that you can clear out some of the chemical signals in the brain and body that lead to a that lead to a feeling of fatigue so the longer you're awake the more a molecule called adenosine builds up in your system and when you sleep you push that adenosine level back down when you wake up in the morning that adenosine level can be zero but oftentimes there's still some hanging around caffeine is an adenosine antagonist it blocks adenosine function it's a little more complicated than that but that's effectively what it does so if you wake up and you've got let's say 20 let's make this is arbitrary but 20 of your adenosine has still hasn't been cleared out that's sort of a drowsiness that you woke up with then you go and you drink your coffee and you crush that that uh ability of adenosine to have that effect but it hasn't gone away so that when your coffee wears off mid-morning now that adenosine is there and you feel like there's a mid-morning crash or an afternoon crash so I delay my caffeine intake for about 90 and ideally 120 minutes after I wake up because in that way you bring your adenosine level down very very low to zero and then you don't get this rebound crash in the afternoon for years I would get this post-lunch crash and I thought maybe I'm eating too much for lunch which I probably was or maybe I'm eating the wrong Foods turned out it was all related to my timing of caffeine so and your system learns how to wake up naturally right you get the natural cortisol and adrenaline give it the time give it the time and people hate this one because it's a little painful for the caffeine addicts but I'm a pretty serious caffeine addict and I embrace that and I'll tell you it also makes the joy of the coffee so much greater like waiting for that you're saying you're like oh my first I tastes so much better and that relates to the dopamine system which I know we're going to talk about later I sometimes will drink guerba mate instead of yeah I love mate mate has a can you put honey in it or anything I don't eat Stevia or something I don't really like sweet stuff too much I wish I had that disease yeah it's you know I wish I like Savory things and salty things um I I like your bromate for a number of reasons I don't like the really Smoky mates and my dad's Argentine so I grew up drinking mate but you don't speak Spanish so do you I I let's be like four words of Spanish and and those I speak uh poorly so if your dad's fluent he's fluent come on I know parents who are you that's a crime isn't it it's a crime well it's not a crime I committed I love it I committed well bilingual parents please encourage your children to learn multiple languages musicians parents take your kids the instrument yeah have you ever seen who the people who play guitar in college let's just say their lives are better than everyone else's how much does the body control the mind and the mind control of the body are they very connected or is the mind in complete control that's a great question the short answer is the body has a huge and profound influence on our mind and the reason is that we often talk about the brain and we think the brain the brain the brain the brain is important but the brain and the spinal cord which is makes up what we call the central nervous system are extensively connected with the body and the body is extensively connected with the brain and spinal cord so the spinal cord is connected to the brain that's right in the back it comes up the neck that's right and it's the actual nerves are connected inside of your brain that's go all the way down to lower back yep Yeah so basically we are a big tube uh or our nervous system is a big tube so your brain obviously is the thing that's shaped like 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 the actually two pieces of the brain that are outside the skull the eyes are 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 don't connect they're all connected and if you took that out of the body okay 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 when sometimes they get challenged people say the eyes aren't part of the brain and 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 mothers 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 the more that I can anticipate events at a distance the more that I could coordinate with my environment like daytime and night time but also when objects are coming at me or things I want to Chase and kill or um you know you think about mating behavior and hunter-gatherer behavior all of that evaluating faces and face 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 rain 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 as we say innervated it receives nerve connections to the brain that's right from the brain and spinal cord so much so that if we were to just dissolve away everything except the nervous system if we had a human nervous system splayed out here on the table in front of us it would look like a human being there would be a connection at every level down to you'd be able to say that's the big toe and that's the pinky and that's where the heart would belong because it's almost like a silhouette of our entire body and so when we think about the nervous system it's really important I think for people to understand that the nervous system is all of that brain and body and all the connections back and forth and you know there have been thousands of years of debates about what's the Mind what's the brain Etc 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 and 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 I I mean we could talk about why and why 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 when you say sorry to interrupting the brain embodiming thought and feeling yeah so you're asking the key questions um 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 um 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 because 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 of 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 tacked into our 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 depends 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 person right so it's very kind textual so thoughts are like perceptions but they carry memory and context thoughts are memory and context yeah they include that and then there are feelings slash emotions and this is where it really starts to get abstract and kind of hazy and where there's still a lot of debate because for instance if I ask you how you're feeling and you say I feel most people say I feel good well what does that mean I mean that's not a feeling so if you ever do personal development work they're always like don't use a don't say good or bad what do you feel and people say well I feel calm and excited or something like you know when it 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 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 ship 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 action thoughts and then of course beneath all that you've got memories and um 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 that you get all the emotions yeah 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 ten how are you feeling in this state that's right and we can measure that experience yeah that's right and we can correlate it with things like heart rate heart rate variability breathing speed sweating levels of neural activity and 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 latter 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 that 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 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 while 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 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 um empathy like 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 yeah 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 we to understand any state a we believe that you have to study the brain and the spinal cord and the body so in my lab you know 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 auditory auditorally 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 in just at the heart we wouldn't be able to do that and so that's a kind of a center piece of our lab is that brain and body the whole nervous system is key you got to look at all of it with 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 um their perception their people's actions towards them where they never get to a state of uh 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 are they 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 um sort of explain the two views one is that these states I guess I'm automatically calling things like depression a state of mind and a 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 I'm lonely or I'm not good enough the body's gonna react is that what I'm understanding absolutely the body's going to manifest what the Mind Is Telling You absolutely the thought the idea you're going to be like I'm sad I'm not good enough you're gonna shrink right that right that's right I mean they're really two forms of depression sometimes they're intermixed but one is anxiety-associated depression and you you 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 it's been overwhelm and they also experience that in their body the idea of getting out of bed in the morning is hard um 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 I 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 low 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 will improve and then there's some things like heroin which does very quickly we can predict that very quickly the Baseline on life is going to creep down regardless of who that person is right so people say can you get addicted to water well maybe but I have to drink a lot of water before the Baseline of My Life Starts to go down so it just feels uncomfortable that's just like man I'm so bloated exactly so we tend to throw around things like addiction and depression a little Loosely so yeah 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 are going to 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 you know depressed that's right right if I can keep eating bad foods if I keep staying up till 4am if I keep staying in a toxic relationship I want to feel depressed that's right and eventually because of this very um 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 they what they need to do is get up early get some light in their eyes get some movement I know you put this information out there which I love because these those tips are grounded in oh 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 should be 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 you know we're all responsible for our own mental health and only we can direct our own brain changes that's the Stinger once we're you know 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 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 saying absolutely but it's really really hard that's right so is depression a disease then are 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 you know move to create routines that happens for yourself is that possible yeah there are some genetic predispositions to depression and they're certainly familial circumstances where you know trauma and challenge that can had people down that path I think you know one of the reasons I'm involved in public education about Neuroscience is I I want people to understand the nervous system and I want them to understand that there are tools that can allow them to intervene in their thoughts and feelings and most of the time those involve bringing in behaviors and the actual actions which are very concrete and the reason is the following it's very hard to control the mind just using thinking just using the mind just thinking it's very hard 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 it's right so a specific one outside for a walk a specific tool right and when it comes to depression and emotions I mean that 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 they're 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 productive right it makes them more emotional well that's because these states like these emotional states of mind they they recruit the whole nervous system so we are actually a difference 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 as a consequence of that you view the world in pan 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 that 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're ever in line at the airport or something and it's taking a long time and you're about to miss your flight seems like the person in front of you is moving very slowly they're taking forever yeah but time is time it's you know it's moving at the same rate regardless when you're very calm or let's say you're you're fatigue let's say you're exhausted you didn't sleep well the night before things in front of you and it seem like they're moving really fast they're saying take off your shoes putting them on the conveyor to it 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 they recruit their entire being their way of being and so one of the reasons why I mentioned that sensation perception feeling thought in 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 slow down or slow it down you can slow down your breathing you can do 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 state is that a it's always available for voluntary control it's just right there you can I can decide right now to do three inhales or I can just go back to breathing reflexively I can just do that at any moment so the the neural architect you know real estate which is in the brain stem 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 most everything that happens internally the other thing is that breathing controls our level of alertness very dramatically So the faster you breathe generally the more alert you are the slower you breathe the more calm you're going to be the faster you breathe meaning shorter quick breaths or either way so um so we're just to take a brief um Adventure through the the Neuroscience of breathing and how it relates to brain States and 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 you 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 parafatial 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 turns out when you're speaking or crying or coughing you need to coordinate you're 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 krasno at Stanford who discovered there's a set of neurons in your brain stem mind brainstem everybody's brain stem and every animal every mammal's brain stem it's a very small number of neurons that controls a specific pattern of breathing which are called physiological size so these are not just size where you go and exhale these are size 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 sides 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 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 there are 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 blown up a balloon you'd sometimes blow into that empty balloon so what do you do you do two in 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 size 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 really yeah it's the fastest way so I'm stressed I'm overwhelmed I'm just doing three or two two inhales through the nose and then exhale slow through the middle one to three of those repeated will bring your level of autonomic arousal down basically to Baseline what's the automatic it's called a it's automatically sorry arousal what was it sorry so the autonomic nervous system yeah it just means uh 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 sympathetic it's stress exactly the naming parasympathetic is non-stressing that's right and 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 the lungs Etc 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 along 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 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 the the this neural circuit so a lot of what my lab is focused on because there's so many great labs and people doing great stuff in the breathwork community pattern and Q and Brian McKenzie 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 sides work is partially because 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 Vegas 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 relax 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 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 question 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 you're not just like groggy all day right that's right okay 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 pm cortisol Spike they're 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 and your lower back and they they address they have the two parts to it they release adrenaline which is also called epinephrine and adrenaline is what makes you feel agitated once you you know 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 right and then it affects the body that's right the body feels it that's right so adrenaline is liberated into the body very fast in less than a second half of 500 million you see something you're reacting to it and 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 a signal out to your body and all of a sudden you feel like you want to move and stress is just it's going to dilate your pupils cue your alertness and make you agitate and want to move the body is pretty fascinating it's really fascinating and you want this because you know um the other night I was taking a hike um I was out here a couple days ago and taking a hike in Topanga and I saw a shadow I looked down and it did 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 your 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 from 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 but it's both it's both but people you know they give cortisone shots to football players you know in the loss for a reason um it blocks pain and all these things so the 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 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 the truth is that you have enough adrenaline and cortisol in your body you'll last two lifetimes in 25 famines I mean we were built with a lot of robustness right this explains you know that you know the David Goggins of the world they they you know we we all do have that greater capacity that people talk about the 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 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 you know migrate long distances you can't afford to get sick and this is why people who work work work and then rest they usually get sick when they finally stop and rest yeah it's like the post finals phenomenon in University or after the season the game or the caretakers 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 with why is that because you're being in your comfort zone now or you're just stress turned off and adrenaline and so that these 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 whim 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 the one of the better papers that's out there scientific peer-reviewed papers is a study published in the proceedings and 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 crazy it's crazy the meditators got fever diarrhea and um and vomiting and the people who did Wim Hof either didn't get it or got it to a much lesser extent sluggish but not they didn't right isn't that 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 protects the body right which signals to the thymus the spleen and the other you know the the 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 that's right disease when you create a routine of healthy stress that's right and and we can 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 Hofstra breathing study the study was done correctly um but when people re 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 the and that's absolutely wrong what does that mean suppress the immune well exactly it doesn't make any sense what what that did was and if you look at the graphs in that paper which I've done what I 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 and you know hats off to whim 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 um you know when you look at states of stress I mean their cold water is one way to do it um intense what's the breathing that they do that sort of Wim off breathing is also classically called tumor breathing it's kind of the opposite of the physiological side that I described the double inhale exhale because it's not designed to 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 tumotype Wim Hof intense breathing once a day now the reason I suggest physiological size is they can be done in real time you can get into the elevator and do a physiological site you could also do tumotype breathing in any moment right exactly whereas the more intense forms of breathing are more of a practice that you do you get 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 tumor breathing or ice baths or cold showers or intense exercise like you know high intensity interval training type stuff teaches the mind to be comfortable in these higher stress states where in other words it teaches people to be comfortable and they have a lot of adrenaline in their body this is like 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 but at the end of the day what I'm hearing you say is you can control the mind the body or the mind with the mind to an extent for for moments or even extended periods of time hours maybe but really we need to be thinking to mind the Body Connection at all times that's right because if you stop breathing if you're or if you're only doing short breaths the whole time for a whole day it's going to affect the body right and the mind and if you're um so it's using the body using the breath using it where it's connected to the brain to 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 they're going to be detrimental to your health right so these these breathing practices are about Shifting the gears but they're not something that you continue doing throughout 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 if 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 yeah 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 them yeah exactly right so it's a transmission system rather than you're supposed to breathe this way all day or breathe and the the fast breathing followed by exhales and breath holds the superoxygenation tumor Wim Hof type breathing I look at that as learning how to drive on um on a slick pavement you know it's it's self-induced stress it's like taking your car to a parking lot you know when you 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 driving Heavy Rain you kind of want to be in a parking lot or a safe safe environment for that you don't want to be on a you know on the Audubon with people right so you 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 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 for 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 yeah so these are skills that anyone can develop um and there are skills that essentially require information of what to do but zero training I mean so 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 some learning yeah 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 away yeah yeah and so now I think we've kind of spelled out a two tools on either side physiological size first 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 ten minutes of this more rapid breathing followed by some breath holds yeah and provided those are designated safe for you the the the superoxygenated breathing you decide to say for you I'm not aware of any dangers of the Excel 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 you exhale you've learned how to drive faster be comfortable at higher speeds that's kind of like the Wim Hof type breathing comfortable at high speeds it's like oh I'm I can drive 65 and feel calm I'm good here whereas previously you couldn't as well as learning how to slow down by with the physiological side that's sort of a break and then the Yoga Nidra is sort of like coming off the accelerator will slow down yeah 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 it you start doing physiological size when you're too stressed automatically automatically and even before you start to hit the alertness threshold 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 the 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 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 Psy because that little extra inhale is what opens up those little sacks 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 wow there you go you feel calm in fact this is a physiological mechanism to make you calm that's right and in fact um you know in claustrophobic environments or God forbid if you're you know you're drowning the reason you're stressed is because you have neurons in your brain stem 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 it's it's a re these are all real physiological mechanisms that are really about balancing the oxygen carbon dioxide in your system and when we see these really extreme Feats of 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 free divers 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 tool that involve the mind I mean it's fine to do a physiological PSI 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 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 yeah 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 you need to control the other one right you're not going to try and just think about trying to control your mind again is like grabbing it fog or it's smoke it's it just moves away so that most of the time I want to ask you a question I want to shift gears and a in a strategic way um and I love to have practitioners scientists doctors um researchers who are into the practicality of things but I also love to have philosophers spiritual leaders and manifesters 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 Ron and 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 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 us those things with the process can you break down the science of the Law of Attraction oh my and and 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 it's a law of attraction essentially just being uh what you think you become what you think you create what you 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 okay 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 you see it everywhere is this is there science to this so um well I can't give a uh intelligent answer about the 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 um that uh I think people might appreciate because it's something that I keep in mind a lot in thinking about goal setting and focus so thoughts are let me back up one second um 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 um didn't hear that discussion or forgets senses are these cells within our body our eye our skin our nose our our mouth it's our 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 senses meaning taste feel sight hearing the five sounds the five senses and people always say what about intuition that's different that's not a sense that's a that's a actually a sense of your internal work it's called interoception as opposed to extra reception since 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 um 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 Magneto reception in humans from good Labs a little bit of yeah and turtles have very strong Magneto reception what does that mean magnetic sense magnetic fields so they sense them as you know like that's a magnetically humans have there's some evidence written up in Science magazine if people want to look look it up which is quality journal for a week magnetic sensing in humans Some Humans not strong 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 it's very cool that's cool it's very cool um 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 not a reality that's why we that's why people need night vision goggles as opposed 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 you know a mixture of blue and glass and you know because I decide to look at it but I was sensing it out of the corner of my eye the whole time but I was focusing on it I can sense the air touching my skin because I'm deciding to focus on that that's right 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 like I don't think about my heart rate too much but if I stop and think about it I'm thinking about my heart rate and then I'm just sensing my heart rate it's but it's still just pressure it's you know it's a physical phenomenon okay um then there's thinking which we'll get to then there's emotion slash feelings and those are complicated but they are tractable as we say we can 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 then 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 take it and cram it through a neuroscience filter here see what comes out the other side but the 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 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 injured now it takes a little bit of work you kind of notice to 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 the 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 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 sh they're going to shape the way you they're gonna shape what you see wow they're very gonna heavily constrain what you see now this has a dark side and a light side and I I you know the dark side is 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 um Jay shetties but you can go grab it because it's on the shelf right there and you can show it to me right it's there all the time you know where it is and it's very accessible whereas the belief's a reoccurring thought right so you said yeah whereas if you where whereas if you have um have never thought about something in particular like um if I you know 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 so to understand it to perceive it to experience it that's right take it into to question your previous beliefs about something that's all right and and there's some interesting data that were published in the journal neuron this last year not from my group that showed 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 you're their 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 or I mean in group well when people think oh I believe that that group of people over there is this way and or good or bad right it's there's a self-reward mechanism that's getting involved I'm greater than this group can be greater than or less less than so is you know the beliefs are attached to a set of rewards so what now the dopamine system is exceedingly powerful because dopamine is is a kind of a dumb molecule it has no brain of its own it's just a it's just a molecule right it's just a chemical but when dopamine is released in our brain we first of all it tends to orient us towards goals in the outside environment it's the it's the molecule not just a 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 what we perceive as rewards okay so water bright light no caffeine until nine to 20 minutes what's next a water assault okay and then it's a question of whether or not I'm training that day or not so I do believe getting exercise is important I think the data having reviewed the data and talked to a number of experts on this in particular there's a guy who's really terrific um you may know him Dr Andy Galpin Who's down at Cal State Fullerton uh excellent exercise physiologist but also if you look across the the massive studies on exercise and heart health there are a couple things that become clear one is that everybody should be getting 120 to 150 and maybe even 150 to 180 minutes of so-called Zone 2 cardio a week this is the kind of cardiovascular exercise where you're doing work you could have a conversation but you're kind of at the threshold where it's not super easy to have a conversation we're not talking sprints the there's just a myriad of effects on heart health you know vascular Health all over the body gut microbiome muscular musculoskeletal stability mental health all these kinds of things so I have a routine where I either weight train for an hour in the morning or I do a portion of that Weekly cardio and I just alternate weight train one day cardio the next weight drink and then one day a week I don't do anything I don't do any exercise six days a week you exercise yeah and I miss day so you know occasionally because of travel or other schedules or appointments I might take two days off I never go seven days I always I personally do well having a complete day off each week but the hour of exercise generally is you know five ten minutes a warm-up and then and it's hard work yeah you know and I don't this is a new thing that we can get into when I talk about dopamine but I do not allow myself to check social media text message phone calls and lately not even music when I train uh for reasons that we can get into later I'm really trying to get focused on what I'm doing and I'm trying to extract the greatest amount of Joy from the process in its purest form so no phone essentially I try not to have the phone occasionally I'll use music or I'll listen to a podcast because it's such a great time to do that so I don't want to say I never do but most of the time I'm trying very hard to just do what I exercise yeah okay and it doesn't matter if you you know run Swim Bike row uh you know people these days can do calisthenics or weight training or something of that sort the weight training thing is interesting because muscle building aside it's very clear that five sets a week per muscle group is what's required to maintain muscle and this is true for men this is true for women and obviously in young kids you don't want them weight training with heavy loads because it could shut down their long bone growth that's the myth or the what they say anyway but I don't know kids are developing anyway right so I don't know I'll leave that to the to the coaches to decide that and the parents but I think for people that are in their late teens early 20s and onward it's really important if you look at longevity a lot of the major injuries and early deaths and um not just due to accident but you know chronic illness comes from people falling and breaking a hip just not being strong and so I think being strong regardless of who you are is important and so that's five sets per week minimum per muscle group and probably more like 10. routines splay out differently so I do my thing people have their thing um so I I try and exercise or I do a 90 minute workout and if I exercise we can talk about that then I would shower and do my 90 minute workout but sometimes they do the 90 minute workout first and that's generally why when I'm starting to drink the caffeine and the 90 minute workout is a serious non-negotiable time in which I don't allow myself to be on the internet I'm not checking email I'm not texting my phone is off off and not you know not on airplane mode and and it's a process of learning to focus and learning to do what we call no go functions in the brain so we have an area of the brain called the basal ganglia that control go functions like reaching out for a pen and no go which is resisting the urge to do something and these are circuits that are very important for learning how to control attention and for controlling Behavior Young animals puppies humans don't do no go very well do you know the two marshmallows yeah okay the two martial like you offered kids uh to a marshmallow and you say if you don't eat it you'll get two marshmallows in 10 pounds in 10 minutes some kids can do it that's pure that's a no-go task you're saying how well can you resist the urge to just go and eat the marshmallow and there are a number of things that mimic this another no-go type Behavior would be meditation for instance where you sit down it's kind of painful to sit cross-legged your thoughts are drawing you off you remember something you need to do and you're resisting the temptation to get up and do something else and so this 90 minute workout is a kind of combined meditation but also functional work for me so for me that could be writing it could be planning a podcast it could be um reading it's something that's kind of hard and the thing to understand about this 90 minute work bout is that you should expect some friction early on it's not like you just flip a switch and you're in that it takes some time to get into this Focus mode and throughout that time your brain will flicker in and out and there's a tool that you can use to enhance your focus prior to this 90 minute workout and I actually do this sounds a little crazy but it actually is grounded in really good Neuroscience which is that you place a cross hatch of you know just a Target at some distance on a piece of paper and you force yourself to stare at it and not blink for about 30 to 60 seconds and what you're doing is you're ramping up the neural circuits in the brain that drive go no go and harnessing your visual attention your focus you're focusing visual Focus drives cognitive focus and for people that aren't cited auditory focused drives cognitive so visual focused drives cognitive Focus yes these two little bits of that we call eyes or as people probably heard me say before are two little bits of brain that are outside the cranial Vault they're the only way that your brain knows what to do in terms of whether or not it's day or night who's out there Etc but it's also a mechanism by which you draw your attentional systems into from kind of everywhere just you know imagine spotlights just kind of moving around bringing those spotlights to a common location and then intensifying that spotlight and since most work involves what we call exterocepting looking outside ourselves this is very different than lie you know sitting in meditation where you're focusing internally because when you sit down to work you kind of want to forget about your heartbeat and how your feet feel on the floor and that your back and you know might be a little sore or something you want to be in the work and so I do I set a timer and I force 90 minutes of this and it and it's really tough Lewis some days some days I it's anything to go get something out of the fridge anything get up and distract myself and occasionally I fail I will get up and go do something and or I'll look at my phone I do falter sometimes but if you can learn to do this 90 minute bout I bet consistently you can create some amazing work you can do you will do your best work and what's really wonderful is it's not just about the work that you perform in that bout what ends up happening is really special this sort of combined meditation work bout as I'm calling it has this effect of you are actually tuning up and making your neural circuits for focus and attention better so that after that okay you flip on the internet you check your email you're doing text messaging you're probably hungry now I'm hungry if I'm about to exercise I'll eat my meal at my lunch I tend to fast till about lunch most days but what happens then is after lunch or something you decide oh you know I'm gonna sit down and read something or I'm going to do some more work but I've only got 20 minutes you can drop in like a laser it's because the circuits have learned you you recognize that state it's a I guess the the analogy would be you do your hardest workout in the morning and you you or maybe it's a skill learning period I know you just used to play professional sports and then in the afternoon it's going to be hard to recreate that entire 90-minute session but you go back and you can drill it and you're right there because your nervous system recognizes you're right there and you and so that's a a holy part of my morning as holy as the sunlight viewing and it's something that's very hard to build in but I actually schedule it just like I would a zoom call and and it's really it's cool because when you then for instance if you have a social interaction where someone comes to you and they say I've got something to do and you're sort of distracted right something I need to tell you you'll notice that you can quickly intensify that at what we call a tensional spotlight in neuroscience and so it's a skill and I hear these days a lot about attention deficit and trouble focusing and indeed some people have clinically diagnosed attention deficit and I want you know I there are resources for them I did a whole podcast on ADHD but many people don't have attention deficit in the clinical sense they created it because they've never actually taught their brain how to focus for very long and the phone's sitting right here and there's distraction everywhere and then of course it raises all these questions like people say well do you listen to music do you listen to White Noise there are a lot of tools and tricks sometimes music helps sometimes music hinders sometimes being in a cafe can help sometimes pure silence it's really individual and it's really context dependent so I don't want to give a prescriptive but that 90 minute workout if I can do all those things and then get that 90 minute workout and then eat my lunch I feel like the the system is set to make the rest of the day even better because we often hear about the perfect morning routine but we're not thinking about how that routine influences the rest of the day's routine yes say I feel cold and ice right I mean ice it's 30 degrees right 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 uh to some extent you can so I think um 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 the story We Tell ourselves actually means 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 all right we would have a lot less depression than we see out right right now that does not mean most people actually who are depressed just aren't smiling as well 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 their 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 like 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 right 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 that's how you get it to dance together exactly so subjective there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful Over States of mind and body to answer your question can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold so a couple things that are important first of all just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are thoughts happen spontaneously all the time they're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection but thoughts can also be deliberately introduced for instance right now I can say okay have a thought that just decide to write your name and your you can do that I'm going to decide right now and you can do it so that's a deliberate thought which says that you can introduce thoughts so I think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them generally they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time but we can introduce a positive thought can you think of two thoughts at the same time probably not so you can only have one thought at a time right but they come very fast but it comes and goes right so 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 and I think it's a great Community but it tends to run in absolutes and there and there aren't a lot of operational definitions as we say in science and I 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 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 you know close a deal like your photo the great love of your life you complete something but most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals it's actually released when we are in route to our goals where we're in pursuit of our goals and we think we're on the right path this is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal because they feel like I'm supposed to feel something greater I felt this thing for two minutes and now that's it that's right High Achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process to the pursuit the day-to-day tasks the the growth the lessons the losses like everything right well and it can be to some wins along the way but growth mindset which is the academic Discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague Carol dweck at Stanford is the Hallmark of growth mindset is really two things one is I'm not where I want to be now but I but I will 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 loved doing it and it incidentally or not so instantly these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they they feel some sense of reward from the effort process yeah 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 and but it has to be attached to reality so you know one should never confuse what is real right so no so if you're F if you're thinking about the effort you're expending so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels and they're setting up a new business for instance and it's hard if they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially that it's giving them an opportunity that it's somehow they are on the right path or if they're not in movement along that path or at least oriented on the right path they're not lying in bed all day they're taking a step they're taking a step if they can reward that process internally two things happen first of all the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine gets stronger so you get better at that process and second and most importantly dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine and what I mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal cell excellent Journal cell Press Journal a couple years ago showing that with repeated bouts of effort we use and we release more and more epinephrine it's kind of adrenaline but in the brain with more effort every time every time you put in effort so every time you make look for this let's keep it if I were to keep it in the business context every time you make to write that email every time you let's say it's a person who's a Craftsman and a crafts woman every time you're working in the 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 you feel like quitting it feels exhausting this was done in a beautiful study actually where um they control the visual environments and they have the subjects EX exert effort and they can control the visual environment so sometimes the effort of of taking steps and moving forward is actually kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion um 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 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 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 they they're 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 I'm hearing yourself 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 how do we get more dopamine you practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind like wow okay so that's a great question first of all there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements I want to be really clear there is a drug there are two drugs actually that will cause massive release of dopamine they're called cocaine and methamphetamine the problem what gets us addicted because it feels so good the problem is exactly the problem is cocaine and methamphetamine so stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source it becomes the goal of the path it becomes the path and the destination and you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine and that Baseline on their life goes down because there's no reason to work hard at anything else because you feel good that's right and that's the greatest feeling you'll have so why do anything else when you can have that feeling that's right if you think about remember these neurochemical systems adrenaline cortisol dopamine epinephrine they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build Fortune 500 companies they were designed to do anything they were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances we could adapt so in an animal context an animal that let's say is hunting or it needs food for its young it's going to fuel 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 an 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 and that's involved in depression and disappointment that if it goes to that place and 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 will remind you like that's not the path to go down that's right and we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions led to success previously you're going to repeat those those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those so dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path that's right so you asked how do you do this so to really make it concrete and is there too much is there too much thing is there such thing as too much dopamine well if you're not on drugs so cocaine 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 but you know I love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes so it's like get after it you know what do sharks do on Monday or I can't remember the specific things or then they're the like sometimes it's just time to chill well that's a different molecule that's serotonin right and then dopamine is the get after it molecule and epinephrine is effort so 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 stress or you're pursuing something you want to do it's just it's been exerting effort dopamine is about reward but more so about motivation and pursuit of Rewards and then we'll get to it in a little bit but serotonin is a different source of reward but it comes from more relaxed States and it resets the whole system and it's associated with things like sleep and gratitude and meditation and especially gratitude and then just I guess to round this out the cortisol system is more of a like a longer term stress yeah Okay so we've all heard the sayings you know how do you you know Journey Of A Thousand Miles starts with a single step or how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time or you know there are all these sayings and and you know goes back to the Bible and earlier right I mean this is not new these are not new sayings but they're showing up in different forms what's lost in those short descriptions however is that every step is not equivalent if it were just at 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 a very high value in fact I think they're vicarious dopamine I think they give us the sense that we could which then Orient hope which then orients us to the world to start yeah maybe it's possible for me that's right so let's say um let's take the example of somebody who's um okay there's a fitness that's that story of it's not about just taking a single step and one step at a time is it because there's adversities every 10 steps you go and so it's harder and harder it's not just well it's just very non-linear you know it's it's some days ago you know I know this from a scientific career it's you know some days it's easy some day 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 an effort longer and it allows us to actually eventually enjoy the process of effort and not think about the reward but just say oh I'm enjoying the process right well you just described the first step the first step in learning to attach dopamine to the effort process which is the key operation in order to succeed is to be very careful about how much you focus on the end goal keeping the goal in mind is important for 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 where I should just give up what am I doing this for that's right it's 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 saying I'm I'm a winner I'm a winner I'm a winner or you haven't won yet is 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 you're telling yourself a lie right you're like and then you're losing your ability to have confidence because you you just lined 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 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 you know 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 dossett and and we were talking about you know the Admiral mccraven thing you know get up and make your bed and you know and they they really do that and I think the way it was described was um you know 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 right but I and so I said that and I I love it though I make my bad 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 and on your phone that's right yeah when so when you look at and you have spent a lot of time with people in high performing communities mainly through some Consulting work but what you find is that you know we can all be either be 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 um 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 you know people's circumstances different 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 you know and then eventually like they're running marathons okay great but to sustain that behavior or even to make the 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 a 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 was very hard for you running to 10 miles that's hard find the wall and push a little bit further through that wall and reward that process when we have dopamine triggered in our body it's attached to because it's attached to some type of belief we're going to continue to say this feels good that's right so let me keep thinking this way and viewing the world in this way because it's going to keep making me feel good that's right physically that's right wow even if it's a fact or not fact scientifically true we're not sure harmful to other people or harmful to yourself if it makes you feel good you might stick to that belief that's right so a good example with dopamine is it with anytime thinking about science and Neuroscience in particular thinking at the extremes can be kind of useful so people who are very depressed who see no possibility in the world if you talk to a depressed person every response they give is going to be but it's not going to work out they are absolutely certain that things are going to turn out bad and there's a benefit for having that belief and they're entrenched in it they may actually be rewarding that somewhat although typically depressed states have very low dopamine at the opposite extreme is Mania when people are in a manic phase dopamine is very high we know this and they see possibility everywhere and there's certain things are going to work out they they will spend money they don't have they'll create relationships they don't have time and energy for they will overdo everything and so somewhere in the middle is this healthy range where where can where we realize that how we view the world is shaping the release of these chemicals and I do believe this happens when we have positive thoughts we we get a lift if we if we can get a lift from our positive thoughts and then dopamine itself puts us in relationship with the outside world such that we view the outside world as having more possibility that is going to put us into forward momentum they're good there are a lot of studies to support that when dopamine is low we tend to see very little possibility in the world and so a positive thought triggers forward movement potentially yes yeah so positive thinking which a lot of people will say well that's just positive thinking that doesn't work some people say well be positive think positive others are saying that doesn't work but with science I'm hearing you say it gives you a little bit of a lift absolutely the the key with positive thinking it is that it has to be honest it it can't be I've already won you know I don't have an Olympic gold medal if I could tell myself I'm going to get one tomorrow but I just don't have the skills so that's not going to release dopamine in my system how do you know it's honest if you're in a depressed state and you don't believe that you are actually better off than where you're at the key is to attach the so one thing to understand is that dopamine release in the brain is always subjective there's no experience that that says uh that has unique domain over dopamine release that will only allow dopamine release so if it's very subjective so if I say to myself I'm going to um get into the process of doing something we have a new year coming up so there's going to be a lot of resolutions soon the it's not about if you attach the dopamine release to the process of effort or goal setting itself you'll have more energy to be an effort and then if you can attach dopamine release to the belief that you're at least heading in the right direction you'll have more energy to keep going in the right direction people make the mistake of thinking that the the positive thought process should be attached to the finish line it's not about thinking of already one it's not about being delusional it's about thinking that your training is going to take you to the finish line and so it's about moving that mental Horizon and More close and more closely and then triggering some sort of positive internal representation of what you're doing meaning thinking positive and people this is usually where I get stopped and people say wait but it sounds so subjective tell me exactly how to do it but here's the keyboard it's it's supposed to be subjective this is for you it's true yeah everyone needs to figure out what allows them to continue to be in forward momentum what allows them to constrain the world of possibilities and to go after goals and how often to self-reward because but the key is the self-word because if you start only pursuing external rewards that's when you are no longer in control of your dopamine system because you're relying on actually something physically happening in the physical world not internal that's right and let's be really really honest and burst the the bubble that I feel like should have been burst a long time ago which is yes everybody including me it is possible that you can do everything and still fail no one wants to say that but the way that you ensure against that is to attach reward to the effort process because the dopamine molecule creates a sense of certainty and you're not trying to create certainty about the final outcome you're trying to create certainty only about the next outcome that's enroute to the final outcome the next action you want to think about Milestones yes and so people set out with oh I'm gonna I'm gonna write the Great America a novel or I'm going to you know get the IPO and of course that's an important you need to have a sense of what the Finish Line would actually look like but the more that one can attach this subjective release of dopamine process to the intermediate steps through positive thinking and action positive thinking and action the the higher that probability goes toward in science we say there's a probability of zero to one the higher that probability goes to one which is certainty now everyone knows in the back of their mind that there is no absolute certainty when I hear about you know athletes or Fighters I was certain I was going to win we all know that there's a point zero zero zero zero zero doubt in everybody right point zero zero whatever that is now for some people they might be able to push that number way way out but certainty about outcome is actually a form of delusion certainty about Romania yeah that's right that's right you see this in Mania and that's why people start engaging their behaviors this is going to happen that's right the silver lining in this is that when you create certainty about outcomes you know you can control you take over this neurobiological system and you create almost certainty that you will complete the process to the end goal perfectly right and by perfectly I don't mean that you won't have to re-steer orient differently along the way what I mean is that you're you're learning to engage a process and so to make this concrete because we you threw a somewhat large like weave through that is that positive thinking is not about being delusional positive thinking is about learning how to take control of internal processes and understanding that that will shape your external environment but it's about remaining in control of the internal landscape it's about knowing that despite shifts in the external landscape you're going to be okay now there is a there is a little twist there's a little cul-de-sac that don't that dopamine can take you into I have a friend he's a cardiologist up north and he um he has this uh this anecdote he likes to tell which is he said you know some people get so much dopamine release from these intermediate goals that they never make it to the end goal and here's how this sometimes happens I worry this might have happened to me several times in my lifetime but like give me an example an example would be I tell you Lewis I'm writing a book and you say oh that's awesome that's going to be so fantastic I'm sure people are going to be really excited and I get so much dopamine that I stop continuing in the process just from the action of you talking about it it becomes its own Finish Line and we know people like this some of us can recognize behaviors like this in ourselves people reflect back such confidence in our ability to do things that we never actually do I know I could do it this isn't the skills this is the beauty of the underdog an underdog mentality is I'm never gonna allow myself to think I'm gonna win so that I can keep winning but that's a high friction way to go through life so the way that it was taught to me best I think was my graduate advisor she said we published our first paper it turned out great it was in great journal and she said this is wonderful I'd worked very hard on it frankly and she said look just remember you're never as good as you think you are you're never as bad as you think you are you're somewhere in the middle but you can get really good at the process and I think that um there's a lot of kind of you know treacherous thinking around goal setting and dopamine and things there's this idea that if we're really amped up that we're just gonna have jet thrusters that are going to take us to the end but the key is to move that Horizon in closer and closer in a way that one could do this for instance would be you get up in the morning or let's say you're you're kind of low energy in the afternoon you do your breathing to get more alert but you've got this voice of doubt there's like a voice of Doubt is this working I don't know I know remember you can introduce thoughts on top of that you're not gonna get very far trying to suppress the these thoughts the better thing to do is just you know kind of swamp them with with hospitality thought then if you can so let's not think about the negative thought add positive thinking and possibilities and opportunities into your your thinking that's right but trying to suppress the negative thoughts is like whack-a-mole they just keep popping up all over the place and you know it's and it's a lot of work yeah but there is a way to play a slightly different game right and I think that the in learning how to think positively and register the positive feelings that come from that and then you use that as a way to propel to the next to the next goal now we're talking about this in kind of um kind of self-help Wellness space and tacking some Neuroscience to it some you know speculative Neuroscience explanations however we have to remember that this mechanism of dopamine and pathfinding to goals is in every animal humans dogs sheep any animal that needs to forage for things to find food or water they don't just get that dopamine release at the end they get it when they realize they're on the right track so a grazing animal might be on a really Barren landscape and then smell something off the environment now that was an external pull or think you know what I'm going to go that way because I don't know I need to go some way they go some direction and they don't smell water which animals can do and so they Veer off course and then all of a sudden they get a little bit of scent of water at that point that's when the dopamine is released not when they get the water and drink from it so that puts them in energy to get there you know you think about walking in the desert and you're just dying of thirst and all of a sudden you spot a big lake all of a sudden you will have the energy to run the remaining mile whereas before you thought you were going to die how is that how is that it's not like more glycogen is suddenly available it's not like ketones did it for you so what did it that's dopamine that's dopamine release that says there's a reward waiting for me and that's from the brain it's from releasing dopamine or is it a a nerve connected to the gut that goes back to the brain what is the process great question so there's an area of the brain called the ventral tegmental area substantia Niagara all these areas um have different names but that release dopamine into the brain and they give the immediate sense of possibility and they promote energy wow and epinephrine or adrenaline is a molecule that we're all associated with it's what gives us energy it's actually the when it goes really high it's the basis of the stress response which is a lot of energy but epinephrine is manufactured it's made from the molecule dopamine it's a couple biochemical steps but it's actually made from dopamine epinephrine gives you energy epinephrine is essentially the basis of neural energy it's the the brain energy yeah the ability of focus the ability to be alert the ability to continue working so dopamine is is kind of the building block of of so we need dopamine to have Focus to work towards a goal to accomplish things that's right so if we think negative thoughts consistently does negative thoughts generate dopamine okay so there are a couple things that can suppress dopamine one of them which I'll just put out there because I think a lot of people will um they will either like this or not like this a lack of sleep or what turns out that and this was published in the journal cell by two groups working together Samuel hatar is a good friend of mine but he's head of the chronobiology unit the National Institutes of mental health and David burson's Lab at Brown University publish a paper showing that exposure to screen type light between the hours of 11 pm and 4 AM creates a specific circuit in a brain area called the habenula it's a weird name that lowers dopamine and creates a sense of disappointment so it's pro-dopressive so every teenager in the world is depressing themselves that's right or any adult yeah we all do it who's on their phone after 11 after midnight one two whether it be watching a movie whether it be on an iPad it doesn't matter how close to a screen you are on your phone if you Dim it way way down you don't get this dopamine or you wear the glasses or the biohacking stuff you could do that as well but although still it's really the brightness of light not the the color of the world so the studies by multiple groups are showing that from 11 P.M to 4 a.m if you're on your phone if you're looking at a TV or iPad or screen consistently it's going to make you more depressed in theory yes in practice you would have to do that pretty consistently so there's not like one exposure dim dopamine that's right it's going to blend dopamine and so our our levels of things like dopamine and epinephrine serotonin and these other so-called neuromodulators reflects the our average behaviors our average thinking it's not like one thought it's going to crush your dopamine however if you've ever been working very very hard or things are really bad and someone cracks a joke and it's actually funny to you you feel an immediate lift that's dopamine interesting but here's the interesting thing it has to be funny if I don't think the joke is funny let's say we're working very hard let's turn this around let's say we're working very hard and things are really terrible like something really bad is happening and I make a joke and it's a bad joke it's gonna make it worse but what's a good or bad joke it's totally subjective it's totally subjective is doing the things you know you should discipline is doing the things you know you should be doing even when you don't feel like doing them if you can develop the ability to do that then you literally have unlocked the ability to do anything in life which unlocks the ability to achieve virtually anything

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 626,254

Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation

Id: 9LwlglxrjXg

Length: 180min 5sec (10805 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 23 2022