Andrew Huberman: Regulate Stress in Real Time

so by doing a double inhale through your nose a big deep inhale through your nose and then a second inhale even if it's just sneaking in a little bit of air what happens is you reinflate those little sacks in the lungs and then you do a long full exhale to empty all the contents of your air from your lungs so it looks something like this now when you do that you naturally activate the neural circuits in the brain and body that shift that seesaw from sympathetic remember alertness and stress to parasympathetic and for most people it takes only one so-called physiological side double inhale through the nose long full exhale through the lungs to completely return to a calm state it's mine be alex's breakdown she's gonna break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two and now she's gonna break down so break down she's gonna break it down hi i'm mayam bialik and welcome to my breakdown this is the place where we break things down so you don't have to we're gonna be talking to a very special person today who might be the smartest human being on the planet i think he is he's very articulate but first let me introduce you to the second smartest person on the planet jonathan cohen i'll take the intro but not the title um we're having someone on who jonathan has told me about um andrew huberman phd he's a neuroscientist he's also a tenured professor in the department of neurobiology and i believe ophthalmology at the stanford university school of medicine but he he has so many impressive things about him as a scientist he also has been published in some of the top top top top scientific journals um well in in the field of neuroscience and biology and um he's been featured in many many magazines and he's that guy who has really made um you know neuroscience and science in particular a part of his literally what he what he does as a service to humanity um hubermann lab has a a podcast he has a podcast where he speaks to people on some of the most important really some of the most important topics regarding not only neuroscience but sleep wellness uh mental health everything from like psychedelics to um like optimizing performance optimizing reducing your stress what adrenaline actually does for you why everybody's telling you to take a cold shower or a cold plunge he covers so many things he's incredibly well spoken and also we ran into each other when i was interviewing for graduate school which is a funny story that he will tell um i just want to get right into it because we had so much to talk to him about and he was so generous with his time and it's really an honor to have someone with such an incredible presence in the world of science communication to speak to us so uh with that let's welcome andrew huberman break it down before we get started should we play the neuroscience uh geography game because we were basically in school at exactly the same time and i almost went to davis at the same time we met where did we meet did we meet at a society for neuroscience first of all it's a pleasure i'm very happy to be here we met um at davis i was a year ahead i think oh okay through on interviews yes and um as i recall you were studying um hebrew flashcards that's on brand for her that's very on brand for me i must i'm trying to think i did uh did you start trying to have a conversation with her and she was like no i can't do that i'm studying my flash cards here's a here's a deep cut it was probably yiddish because i studied yiddish and hebrew i did a minor in hebrew and jewish studies so my last year before i graduated i was probably finishing my yes coursework yeah well you know when as you know when students come through for interviews they're pretty much accepted and they at most programs the interview is very close to acceptance at most um and so not with mine sorry well it's unclear always in the in those configurations you know who's in the power position and i recall seeing you with your flashcards and i um figured well it's got to be a little bit um uncomfortable to be a known person as it were um so i'm gonna go over and say hello and i said hi you know if you have any questions about davis let me know i was at i was at berkeley and i've um left after my master's i had the option to stay you know and that might be surprising to people um but i really like it here and i loved the lab i was in and we had a nice exchange about what you wanted to study and at the time i think you were interested in um human imaging and uh maybe even neural basis of some things on the talent yes and you know what no one was doing that then and now everybody's doing it and there's a center for it at ucla and i i ended up yeah no one was studying what i wanted to study but i ended up i was going to study williams syndrome because they have very high rates uh well they have very strong musical ability and i was interested in working william syndrome and i ended up reading a book on um syndromes of mental retardation that the lab that i was considering uh it was elizabeth dykins and she wrote it and when i came across prouder willie syndrome i thought well gosh why has a neuroscientist not studied prader-willi syndrome because they've been studied in the genetic realm you know obviously human imprinting and psychiatry because they have very high rates of just about everything um but i ended up deciding to study prader-willi syndrome because she had a um a population that we could tap into so um yeah i ended up far from talent in the brain and like i said now people are talking about talent in the brain i'm really happy for all those people well from here on after we will officially call that the mayam effect so so one of the fun things about social media that probably drives my science colleagues crazy is like for instance there's this really um brilliant researcher up in uh scandinavia susana soberk who's done a lot on deliberate cold exposure and deliberate heat its effects on metabolism and a bunch of other things and uh she's come up with these protocols that are in peer-reviewed journals and if you parse these papers you come up with a number of different things that are really useful and so i just started naming these things like the soberg effect you know but when as soon as uh scientists get uh ruffled about this you can just um turn it back on them and say well in the fields of science how is it that something actually becomes designated in effect and it's the same way people designate and i think as long as one isn't designating effects after themselves um that's okay so from i have a lot do you like it to be the mayan effect well no the mayan effect is also being nominated for emmys and not getting them because the cable becomes a thing like my first nomination i was like the only show on television i was like oh am i going to get it and then cable exploded and i cannot win that's a little bit harder for him to help he can help me with everything i know i don't have any links to um hollywood or to your that landscape but i for here on after that this notion of searching for the neural basis of talent uh if you're comfortable with it and maybe even if you're not we'll call it the biologic effect or the mighty effect or both i think the bialic effect is perfect well okay there it is then we'll actually get into what we're going to talk to you about but i was raised in the zeidel lab so i'm as idelian as we call ourselves and i um i worked with um some of the callusotomy patients that were done at that time in the 90s so i actually got to work with patients who had had their corpus callosum section for those of you who don't know what california is and um and dr zeidel who passed away recently um he wanted me to study acting in the brain like this was a thing but we just we didn't have the capability to do it in his lab and i worked with marco yacoboni and went over to imaging but the thing that i most think could actually be something that i could actually study would be people who have very very specific mimicry ability because the it's it's not only the the kind of physical embodiment of people who do impersonations and i mean people who do impersonations startlingly well i want like i want i want that whole study i want it done anyway i've talked to several actors about this at who i would i think it's it's a very interesting area there's a a guy who um i'd love to see on your podcast a bit we we recorded an interview with him recently and and it should air soon um but he needs to be heard from much more his name is eric jarvis he's at the rockefeller he used to be a duke and he studied songbird learning and genomics and evolution but it turns out that eric actually was admitted to um and declined an invitation to the alvin ailey dance company um grew up in harlem very interesting life story but to make a long story short because he tells his story far better than i ever could for him what he told me because he's a real expert in the neuroscience of speech and language is that as we read we are if you were to record emg muscular activity in the larynx and pharynx and amplify that you would find that you're actually reciting the words of what you're reading at a very low level if you were to put that into an audio monitor and amplify it and so people and birds that have the capacity for fine mimicry yes or even for coarse mimicry are able to capture that so they can capture the voice in their head as if they're reading or turning it and yes and recreate the pharynx and layering signals now that's sort of a duh but it's very very cool in my mind right well and that's obviously who i should speak to but because i'm a vegan neuroscientist i don't work with humans i mean i don't i don't work with animals so my only way in like this was also part of my limitations with you know being a neuroscientist is that i didn't want to work with animals but yes go for the zebra finch do it but i i said well he's done this in humans now but you can't take their brains out like they can with superfoods no but you can chord but you can record from the from the pharynx and lyrics yeah anyway it's very very um what not it's fascinating you're just excited to hear me talk nervous this is what happens when nerds get together it's a multi-layered conversation i i'm very excited to learn from you as well today and that's a real statement i also want to know why there's a canadian flag on the desk jonathan is canadian i'm canadian whereabouts uh toronto originally where toronto originally i've been in the us for a long time i've lived uh did four years in victoria but originally from toronto great okay jonathan and i were talking about what we wanted to discuss with you today and so jonathan came up with a list you're one of a very special group of people who has brought not only real legitimate empirical science to the public but i happen to be kind of partial to you because you're a neuroscientist so likewise so you know jonathan and i talk about kind of all things mental health here and a special kind of emphasis that we have is on things that a lot of people don't know impact mental wellness uh which do meaning i'm happy to talk all day about diagnoses and the dsm-4-5 and whatever they're going to call it next i discourage that jonathan discourages me talking about diagnoses and medication um but we do but you you kind of have found a way to tackle so many aspects of the human experience in a way that people want to and can hear about and that's very very special um what what do you sort of see you also still have a lab like you are a research professor type and that's what you do but what do you kind of see as your role as you know this sort of science communicator that that you are yeah um well first of all i yeah i do still run a lab we've mainly shut down our animal program so for years we worked on um mice and other species and i say that from a somewhat conflicted stance to be honest we could have a whole discussion about that i'm not a vegan but um i love animals and i and you know i've i always wanted to work on humans now we work almost exclusively on humans we run clinical trials exploring stress and stress modulation i now have an appointment in psychiatry so i work with a lot of clinicians i'm very interested in mental health and physical health as well but in terms of science communication i'm not big on mission statements but if i had to cast one out for sake of simplicity my real interest is in sharing what i see and feel as the beauty of biology and also the utility of biology you know i think that what's unfortunate is that we go through school and young adulthood and adulthood and we never really get a handbook or an operating system for our physiology now of course we don't understand everything about our physiology far from it but i think we know enough about how the nervous system and other systems of the body and brain work that we ought to inform each other or be informed about how to for instance regulate stress in real time i think everyone knows meditation vacation exercises community good nutrition sleep etc are important but how do you regulate stress when it inevitably hits in real time things of that sort we all know now thanks to the beautiful work of matt walker and others that sleep is really important but how do you get better at sleeping if you're no good at it and so a big part of my public education effort is to excite people about science and sometimes i try and do that by getting them excited about health topics and then teaching science in that process and sometimes i teach them about health through the process of teaching science so i sort of pivot back and forth and these are topics that i've long enjoyed obviously because i selected a career in it but in terms of the health aspect i think that one of the more exciting things that i really emphasize is the relationship between brain and body and as you know that the nervous system is not just the brain it's the brain body connections in both directions and that the brain body connection is no longer this new agey mystical wu science uh northern california esselyn bathing staring at the sunset all things like by the way is wonderful don't get me wrong but very few people are going to get the opportunity to ever go there unfortunately and even those who do have to return to the real world with um hopefully with tools and and things they can use in their daily life so i would um bullet point that as the beauty and utility of biology uh is important to me the mind-body connection as a real concrete physiological thing that's very useful to understand and use is secondary and then the third one is you know my um somewhat of a i i somewhat joke about it although i'm i am sympathetic to those that actually suffer from tourette's i have a bit of a scientific tourette's when i find something i really am excited about i can't help but tell people about it and so that's a an impulse control issue for me i got a pill for you my mb alex breakdown is supported by better help jonathan how well would you take care of your car if you you had to keep it your whole life i would take such good care of it right and that's how our brains work but we don't always take such good care of them how we care for our brains and our minds affects everything about how we experience life so it is really important to invest time and care into keeping them healthy and there are so many ways to support a healthy brain eating well sleeping well exercising exercising there's also better help online therapy jonathan how important is therapy to me it is so important to me that you go to therapy it's important for both of us that i go to therapy therapy has been a real game changer um in my life and continues to be a game changer in my life better help is online therapy that offers video phone and chat only therapy sessions so if you don't want to see someone on camera guess what you don't have to also better help is more affordable than in-person therapy which is a huge plus and you're matched with someone really quick under 48 hours our listeners get 10 off their first month at betterhelp.com break that's betterhelp.com break my mb alex breakdown is supported by third love jonathan you know how much of a struggle it is for me to go bra shopping i do i cannot tell you how good it feels to finally have a bra wearing it right now that makes me look and feel amazing it's comfortable enough to wear all day even in the summer heat and hit his hot potatoes this summer i love third love because it was extremely easy to fit me and here's the thing jonathan they have half cup sizes you are so terminally unique so unique that i thought i'd never find a bra that would fit but third love's 24 7 classic t-shirt bra is their number one best-selling bra for a reason it forms to my body makes you look your best the straps do not slip i was like they're gonna slip they do not slip there's no pinching there's no digging they literally invented this half cup concept so that i literally have i do i have the perfect fit now feeling is believing give your breasts the 24 7 comfort and support that you deserve and they deserve upgrade your bra today get 20 off your first order at thirdlove.com breakdown that's 20 off at thirdlove.com breakdown [Music] i want to touch on the beauty and utility of biology because based on a lot of what i've learned from you and others in the space what i i've shared with miami and the people that have listened to us is that there is a handbook an owner's manual for our bodies that almost none of us have and it's it's growing and expanding but there are cause and effect relationships to our behavior and we have our experience which is often very difficult and challenged and we're you know experiencing different emotions and thoughts and we're struggling and we're suffering but we have no concept that the actions or that we're taking or not taking have are having a direct impact on what we're experiencing and there's this massive disconnect so if like we all are given more of the owner's manual and the ability to read and understand it then we'll have the tools to be able to help suffer less i couldn't agree more i mean i think for instance something that was very powerful for me to learn in my textbooks long ago and then to revisit in my own laboratory and that i keep trying to tell the world about in some form or another is that adrenaline comes in waves so stress comes in waves that kind of compound one another and grow and grow and there are two ways to modulate the stress response one is in real time you can literally push back on stress in real time by leveraging the certain tools that are part of our physiology and then there are also ways to increase your so-called stress threshold yes um you know we've heard so much in the last 10 15 years so many wonderful books and ted talks about great resilience and mental toughness but these have been rather elusive psychological attributes right so the question then becomes how do you become gritty uh how do you become mentally strong what is that about can i go back and be born to a different family well well and well that's an interesting question because i think what we're really talking about is this notion of of an autonomic set point right the autonomic nervous system as you both know is this system inside us that regulates our baseline level of alertness or calmness and that's of course impacted by sleep and food and life events but we all kind of idle at a different level right um some people's our resting rpm is higher and and a lot of that is genetic some of it is life circumstance sure a childhood trauma can do that but we know for instance that a childhood trauma can make somebody very exhausted all the time childhood trauma in another individual can make that person hyper vigilant right so you know when you start as you know when you start looking at the landscape of these things the the power is in understanding how to control these systems because of course picking your parents is is not possible yet we're working on it he's working on it that's what he's really working on christopher yeah um yeah so this is um this is an area also that that jonathan and i have a strong interest in both because we are we happen to be people that rev really high and you know are i would say we have a very kind of similar way of sort of functioning and coping and surviving in that we can be really really really really productive often to the exclusion of self-care and you know other things and you know so you can kind of get into that sort of like hyper efficiency which is very exhilarating it's very thrilling and on the other hand i really crave peace i crave quiet you know i've i've learned as an adult um to to learn that it's okay to be alone sometimes you know and these you know these things also it it for me it is very kind of addiction based meaning i will work like it's my drug and i will do it you know i mean i did it for many many years on a real treadmill and what happened was like my body started breaking down from the inside out and you know i i think jonathan and i have both had these kind of experiences and i went i went to a western doctor and didn't tell them anything and i was like what's wrong with me they ran every test does she have god forbid cancer look at like they ran i gave them all my symptoms like my gums are bleeding like crazy variety of symptoms and the diagnosis was there's nothing wrong with you you're a workaholic and it was one of the first mo and this is like as a grown-up with children meaning this wasn't like in my 20s i started figuring it out like i was a grown ass woman still like wha and a scientist like what's going on so maybe you can speak a little bit to some of this kind of tension between you know the kind of productivity that is often you know it's it's very it's very motivational like it's very it can make you feel so alive and also that's not gonna make your whole life work is that general enough too specific no it's um it's a it's a great framework because i think it's one that a lot of people struggle with one way or the other if i were to identify four points that most people need to work on in order to improve their mental and physical health i would say these are the following four but everyone should strive to get sufficient amount of quality sleep eighty-five percent of the nights of their lives him with the sleep all right wait so i just wanna wait but i'll i'm not gonna go into sleep right away there are tools for that there are many useful tools that i'm happy to share that are research tested and people derive immense benefit from um why well because in sleep we re-establish our ability to be calm when we want to be calm and alert when we want to be alert in our waking hours that's just the nature of the sleep wake balance and that brings up point number two which is i think the second most essential thing for mental and physical health and performance which is regulation of this thing that we call the autonomic nervous system the autonomic nervous system can be best thought of as a seesaw it has different components the sympathetic and parasympathetic rest and digest fight and flight etc they get these names but just think of this as sort of a seesaw in your body of nervous system connections that can either ramp up your alertness all the way to a full-blown panic attack or the seesaw can swing to the other way and make you very calm and peaceful and make you want to fall asleep most people don't learn how to regulate that seesaw and many people have a seesaw if you will of an autonomic nervous system where the hinge on that seesaw is locked to one side or the other they have or they have a hard time budging it from one side to the other can i interrupt just so you can clarify for people when we talk about the autonomic nervous system it's not like one place it's not a like i think it's important for people to realize it's not like oh there's like these different parts of the brain and then there's the autonomic nervous system so can you just explain so people understand what that means sure so i'm gonna hit people with a little bit of nomenclature but i'll try and make it clear for the non-scientists nomenclature means words that name things sorry yeah so um there's a system in your body meaning a collection of neurons neurons are just nerve cells that is called the sympathetic nervous system it has nothing to do with emotional sympathy nothing whatsoever simpa means together and there's a stretch of neurons nerve cells along your spinal cord that goes from about your clavicles down to about your navel a little bit lower called the sympathetic chain ganglia these neurons get activated together very quickly when something is alert or alerts you excuse me when something alerts your nervous system and they cause the massive and very fast release of things like adrenaline also called epinephrine into your body and the release of adrenaline also within your brain for those that want to know from a little compact set of neurons called the locus ceruleus which essentially sprinkler the rest of the brain with norepinephrine and wake up your brain if ever you've been sleepy and suddenly you look at your phone and there's an emergency you go oh my goodness and you're wide awake well there was no coffee involved there was no breathing technique that is your sympathetic nervous system amplifying your level of alertness in melee seconds thousands of seconds that's just how mayan wakes up that's just how i wake up every day but okay well and indeed i'm glad you brought that up when you wake up in the morning it's from an increase in body temperature that triggers activation of the sympathetic nervous system but not to the point of panic attack if you ever wake up from a troubling dream that's because i wake up all the ways and also empowered by the lord so i just wake up ready to do god's work okay go ahead sorry no it's uh it's an excellent point we wake up and and that jolt or even if we wake up slowly that means a slower activation of the system and actually the waking up in the morning will return to this is largely the consequence of the release of cortisol uh so-called stress hormone but there's a healthy release of cortisol that occurs when our body heats up in the morning now just to return to sleep briefly just to frame that proper amounts of deep sleep allow the sympathetic nervous system to be engaged when it needs to but not to be engaged when it doesn't need to be you may have heard also that you can have so-called adrenal burnout well guess what there is no such thing as adrenal burnout you have enough adrenaline in your adrenal glands these little glands that ride atop your kidneys for two lifetimes now there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome where people actually don't make enough adrenaline but that's a distinct thing no an adrenal burnout also it's a it's kind of a colloquial holistic term for basically you're way too stressed out and there are different pressure points and things that they test those things from but yes that's going back to the see-saw absolutely well the and then as long as we're talking about this the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system autonomic just means automatic but it's a misnomer because i'll teach you tools that we know from our lab and other labs can allow you to regulate the system voluntarily and then the parasympathetic nervous system is a collection of neurons in your neck more or less base of your brain and neck and from your navel down they actually control sexual arousal the genitals it controls defecation urination the relaxation response rest and digest it's sometimes the same now why is it called para because it's on either side of those sympathetic chain ganglions this is getting down into the the nuts and bolts of um neuroanatomy okay that's really that's really that's very helpful just so people understand it's not one place that's right it's not one place and for every bit that i described in the spinal cord there are collections of neurons in the brain that are more associated with calm states versus alert states and they're always operating in parallel the reason i mention a seesaw is that the seesaw is either level or this more alert or more calm but it's not that one side is eliminated it's always in the balance even when you're in deep sleep in fact in certain stages of sleep your sympathetic nervous system is cranking out activity this is why some dreams can seem very stressful now there are mechanisms to make sure that your body doesn't move in those states but again the seesaw is always going back and forth and back and forth so i'll bridge to points three and four by saying that understanding that you have an autonomic nervous system that has the see-saw-like architecture conceptually anyway and that you have the ability to control it open up the opportunity to control points three and four which are the other major pain points for most people so we have sleep autonomic regulation then focus people nowadays are obsessed with adhd and focus and challenges in focusing and and then the fourth point is motivation people sometimes lump focus and motivation together but those are distinct neurobiological and psychological phenomena they overlap in time so sometimes we think they're the same thing kind of like grief and depression kind of feel like the same thing but turns out they are not they're distinct phenomena so um so if you can get better at sleeping you will get better autonomic regulation if you get better autonomic regulation you'll get better at sleeping if you get better autonomic regulation you will get better at focus and if you get better at focus you will better understand and be able to access long sustained motivation in healthy ways that don't deplete you because your question mine was about go go go go go and then the the consequences of that mayan be alex breakdown is supported by athletic greens we use athletic greens every day why did we start taking athletic greens because we're very busy people jonathan we don't always get to eat the way we want you just told me you're hungry right now i don't know if you've eaten well good thing you took your athletic greens what's athletic greens well one delicious scoop of athletic greens gives you 75 high quality vitamins minerals whole food source superfoods probiotics and adaptogens to help you start your day right ag-1 is a micro habit with big benefits it's one thing you can do every single day to take great care of yourself and right now it's time to reclaim your health and arm your immune system with convenient daily nutrition one scoop in a cup of water 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prediction error which is when something really wonderful happens that you didn't expect you get a big release of dopamine when some when you anticipate something great dopamine is released in anticipation of reaching that goal but when you reach that goal you actually start to diminish the amount of dopamine that's available and if you do not reach that goal your dopamine drops below baseline the key thing for people to understand is that dopamine is regulated by all sorts of things it's not unique to sex or to social media or to food or to any one thing it's a generic moment it's very redundant it's a redundant molecule very redundant very it's like a currency right it's a it's like a cryptocurrency no i don't know we should start a cryptocurrency because there seemed to be 25 000 other crypto i don't know what that means but yes and the um maybe i was spending too much time on twitter um and the the key thing to understand about dopamine is it is that is it is a non-infinite yet renewable resource so if you go go go go in fact i always like to think at any moment you should ask yourself first are you back on your heels flat-footed or forward center of mass with respect to work with respect to relationships with respect to stress always if you're always forward center of mass what think about dopamine as kind of a wave pool so if you're always forward center of mass you're getting waves in this wave pool if those dopamine highs go too high the water will splash out and that reservoir of dopamine will drop if you keep pursuing things dopamine will eventually be depleted to near zero right however if you get good at modulating pursuit so pursue pursue rest pursue pursue rest for super super pursuit rest rest rest then what happens is you're able to generate large amplitude releases of dopamine which is a good thing for pursuit without getting into a mode of burnout and of course large amplitude dopamine is also what happens when people for instance take methamphetamine 2 2 000 x increase in baseline dopamine but for every increase in dopamine there is a mirror symmetric sometimes even more dramatic drop in dopamine after this is the pleasure and pain are balanced also like a seesaw in the nervous system and there i'm referring to the beautiful work of two colleagues of mine mainly um rob malanka stanford has done the animal work he's a psychiatrist and um dr anna lemke who wrote dopamine nation who a truly important book for everyone to read because it really illustrates how sex porn love food if she even describes a patient that gets addicted to water i mean anything can drive these systems right gambling um work um success praise um and you once you start to understand that the postpartum depression the post honeymoon depression the monday morning after a great weekend that it's supposed to feel low because of the weekend it's so great you stop trying to pursue things on monday tuesday and wednesday in the same kind of way right so to speak um there's two things that i wanted to to um kind of highlight um the first was when you were listing you know the things that um you know are kind of these key things right sleep regulation the autonomic nervous system um focus and motivation many people want to skip over that second one because what they hear is like i don't know those words those words are not for me i'm gonna do the other ones but what's important is that even the smallest amount of information and awareness that this exists in your body and you have some sort of i don't want to use the word control you have access to regulation just because you exist that in and of itself is an empowering and very significant piece of information that really has been left out of all medical progress for all of history and it's what dr sarno realized when he started doing his what is now called like mind body syndrome work or tms not transcranial magnetic stimulation which people always think that's what i'm talking about when i say tms um the notion that once you have the awareness that things start shifting because you understand that it's not happening to you it's happening through you that is hugely important so even the basics of what dr huberman just described to understand that there are cells in your body and they're lined up in ways that are coded to help you ramp up and ramp down those things can be regulated and for thousands of years eastern philosophy eastern practice has used breath to essentially regulate in a way that we needed thousands of years of time and research and doctors to tell us about the other thing i wanted to say about those four things that you that you highlighted those things are critically important i mean i would say for every mammal i mean i i don't want to like exclude non-mammalian things but the things that that dr hubermann is talking about these are just things that are important because you're a mammal those things are true for a raccoon they're true for mice they're true for your cat your dog like th those are the principles of how we perpetuate the species that's how we exist on this planet and it's really powerful to me that what we as you know homo sapiens get to do is articulate it we get to have guys like this who can talk about it and spread it to millions of people it's really very exciting to me this goes back to the handbook most of us have forgotten that relationship and you know not consciously but we've fallen into the trap that we are users of computers and electronics with no connection to our animal selves i really want like what are your top four things that are preventing us from honing these things like if you had to tell us what you think those things are no um so one brief point about the autonomic nervous system so i don't forget because i have a feeling you can keep more things in working memory than i can um in fact i'm certain um so if people are put off by the notion of autonomic nervous system what i will tell you is point number two autonomic nervous system and controlling your autonomic nervous system first of all is easy once you understand how and i'll be sure to tell you how you can it works the first time and it works every time which is pretty cool and that's not because of any program that i developed it's really about anchoring and using anchoring to and using your innate rights as your innate genomic map and basically leveraging a system of your body this is very distinct from what people call biohacking biohacking to me i hate the word i'd love to see it disappear because a hack is taking an object or a thing that's designed for one purpose and using it for another rather i'll just give one example so that uh we depart the abstract a little bit if you want to calm down very quickly there is a way to do that everyone can do it and in fact you mentioned other animals miami and i'm glad you did because dogs do this um and you'll know exactly the pattern of breathing i'm talking about now this is a pattern of breathing that was discovered in the 1930s and discovered in the yes yeah right unearthed in the 1930s and then the underlying neural mechanisms were really detailed by your former colleague at ucla the great jack feldman who has pioneered the study of breathing and the neural underpinnings when you are low in oxygen and or stressed claustrophobic or in apnea which is a lack of oxygen basically you're you're breathing poorly we'll just leave it at that in sleep or in waking the tendency is to do a very big inhale and maybe even a second inhale prior to doing a long exhale dogs do this before they go down for a nap yes and here's the reason we actually are triggered to breathe by the buildup of a gas in the bloodstream called carbon dioxide and as a consequence we bring in oxygen and then offload carbon dioxide now why two breaths in and then one long breath out well a couple things the sort of breathing 101 um humans unlike other species we actively inhale we put effort into the inhale but we generally passively exhale unless we're in a yoga class or someone's telling us to put effort in the exhale we generally and then it just kind of let the air fall out of us passively okay now as a consequence of that when we read or we're emailing or texting there's something actually called text email apnea where people hold their breath once every one to three minutes people will do a deep sigh this is not an eye roll teenage side it is a this kind of thing now your lungs are too big bags of air but you have millions hundreds of millions actually little sacks in there called avioli of the lungs those avioli of the lungs when you under breathe they collapse they flatten out like empty balloons and as a consequence you're not getting enough oxygen and carbon dioxide is building up in your bloodstream if you're very stressed this happens even more now the way the lungs work is that as you bring air in it's actually able to pass from the lungs into the bloodstream as incredible as that seems so when you do a big inhale and then a second inhale sneak it snuck you know and ideally you do this both through the nose and for those of you who think you can't breathe through your nose the problem is you're not breathing through your nose enough you don't have a deviated septum people if you do not have a deviated septum i know the ents are going to come after me with pitchforks or whatever it is that they use to clear noses but most people are not breathing enough through their nose they're mouth breathers which is a terrible thing for other reasons but so if by doing a double inhale through your nose a big deep inhale through your nose and then a second inhale even if it's just sneaking in a little bit of air what happens is you re-inflate those little sacs in the lungs and then you do a long full exhale to empty all the contents of your air from your lungs so it looks something like this now when you do that you naturally activate the neural circuits in the brain and body that shift that seesaw from sympathetic alertness and stress to parasympathetic and for most people it takes only one so-called physiological side double inhale through the nose long full exhale through the lungs to completely return to a calm state this is as far as i know the fastest way to shift yourself from stressed to calm you can do this in real time unless you're under water you can do this generally anywhere if you have to do it through your mouth because you don't have a nose or because there's something up your nose you can but in general if you have trouble breathing through your nose it's because you are too much of a mouth breather to begin with and there's a beautiful book about this called jaws a hidden epidemic which was written by sandra khan and paul ehrlich at stanford with a forward by robert sapolsky and an introduction from jared diamond so there's like every heavy hitter in human biology and evolution is in there um living one anyway so and they talk about the def the problems with mouth breathing you want to be a nose breather most of the time um whether or not unless you're speaking or you're eating you should probably even tape your mouth shut while you sleep i should save my mouth shut all the time many people should take their mouth shut while they do uh their extended cardio to learn how to breathe through their nose their real benefits to this it's hard for the first week or so and then what you find is you actually tap into a whole other level of aerobic capacity you didn't realize you had um but the point is if you want to calm down quickly and you want to do that in real time right you're not going to run off and meditate in the middle of a doctor's exam or as you're stepping out onto stage to do public speaking or as you suddenly find yourself becoming flushed because you have a social anxiety or you drink too much coffee or you're about to have a hard conversation or ask for a raise you're stressing me out listing all this stressful things exactly stressful things right my lab studies this and we love stressing people out with various tools and we love giving them tools that can teach them to modulate in real time the double inhale through the nose and long extended exhale is by far the best way and it's not a hack this is what you do when you are in a claustrophobic environment and you do it every one to three minutes during sleep and the last thing i'll just sneak in on this is becoming one long exhale sentence i confess is though is that if somebody is stressed or if you are stressed taking a deep breath is not the best solution the best solution is to take two deep breaths then one long full extended exhale if you just take a deep breath actually you will increase your heart rate through a process called respiratory sinus arrhythmia yeah okay i do want you to i do still want your list of things that are essentially ruining the world but i do want to say one thing remember i wanted you to give me like a so i'll get back to that like what are the things that are most basically eroding our ability to sleep regulate our autonomic nervous system uh be focused and motivated but first i wanted to say little tidbit i've had two children and how did i have them jonathan we play a drinking game on this show every time she mentions her natural birth but okay i had two children i had two children with no drugs and one of those children was born where was he born jonathan just a few feet from here and um i i was alone until the very end did everything yourself i did everything by myself but what i wanted to say is i did not i am not a superhero to have children with no drugs what i did is i underwent a process of they call it self-hypnosis but it is literally regulating your autonomic nervous system and literally you do not have to have any experience you don't have to believe in god you don't have to believe in chakras you can teach yourself to completely trans it's not even i promise it's not even that hard to completely shift your perception of sensation pain which we call sensation in labor and during incredibly physiological stressful situations like the cervix has to go from 0 to 10 centimeters that happen you can do that without experiencing pain fear frustration and stress there are a lot of things you do experience but it is so much exactly what we're talking about you have that ability i mean i don't know about men but they don't have to practice that well i mean i've never given birth but the um you could do it i think you could i have a i have a colleague at stanford our associate chair of psychiatry is a close collaborative mind his name is david spiegel he and his father founded the fields of clinical hypnosis this is not stage hypnosis hypnosis is where someone else gets you to do things clinical hypnosis is where you get yourself to be able to do things and hypnosis is the state very unusual brain state that involves a convergence of alertness and calm so it's it's a kind of it's like twisting the seesaw in a very unique way and actually if people want to try self-hypnosis there's a um you can there's a zero-cost app i mean so i think you can try it out they may have now put some of it behind pay well anyway it's called reverie r-e-v-e-r-i dot com uh reverie was developed by david and others at stanford it's based on clinical trials and brain imaging etc and it a lot of meditative practices where people close their eyes but try and maintain focus on breathing is that itself is a form of hypnosis in the sense that usually when we close our eyes when these little shutters go down on our eyes we actually enter a state of more parasympathetic calm mode state whereas when our eyes are really open wide-eyed et cetera that's usually associated with an alert state so hypnosis and certain forms of meditation involve being alert and calm and what you describe for childbirth is interesting because david's lab has done a lot of work using pain as a way to modulate outcomes in breast cancer treatment chemotherapy and in controlling pain in particular chronic pain to great clinical success actually so you've obviously taught yourself how to do this naturally did you take a lamaze class or no look so no lamaze it's like a yiddish class definitely no so lamaze you know which was revolutionary you know when it when it came out because it was you know kind of the first time women were again being empowered to sort of be part of their birth experience after you know decades and decades of women being effectively anesthetized and put to sleep while the baby was removed lamaze is that right they were being they were yeah women were oh yeah i have spoken to many women who were um like knocked out to ha and when they woke up they had a baby and this was in the like late 60s i mean this was still kind of you know and i'm sure that there were reasons but anyway uh meaning reasons that they were given why this was the way to do it but lamaze has fallen a little bit out of favor um because of the kind of forced breathing aspect the notion being you don't want someone standing over you telling you to poop like poop poop poop and lamaze can feel a little bit like breathe breathe breathe breathe so um bradley method is more also the the partner facilitated way that a lot of people are choosing to do natural birth and home birth in particular um but i used a a a hypnosis program that was on cds because it was in the year one and um it was you know produced by a doula nurse practitioner midwife and there are now classes and organizations and but i literally like kind of did it myself i did have a doula for my first labor and my second as i said i was alone um but uh yeah it was it's you know one of the most not only transformative experiences just as a human being who you know who is a female uh but also as a scientist to get to experience that um was you know it's a it's really it was very special and i'll stop talking about it so you know it's a beautiful example of of the autonomic meaning automatic nervous system being a misnomer it's not actually autonomic we can control the balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity i have a genuine question that just popped to mind as you were describing that and this is a real question you mentioned that that women have been knocked out under general anesthesia for childbirth um i have to assume that the term knocked up is unrelated to the term knocked no really where does that term come from no we're just knocked up come where does i know it was a movie [Music] i think it was a term before i mean jonathan can look i do not know where does that term come from i mean was it like knocked up then knocked out i mean the thing about putting people in in assisi is terrible i mean that just seems like a terrible idea many many of the euphemisms regarding kind of sex do involve often sports metaphors and conquering and that's just sort of like patriarchy johnson what'd you find it first appeared in print in 1830 okay what did it say 1860 slang dictionary defined the term knocked up uh so okay around a minute well i'm gonna i'm gonna look well the reason i asked this is i i have a um a interest in you know one of the things that we don't learn or teach because it's it's tricky but their real biological systems obviously is sexual health right i mean this is um you know and in doing more uh science and health education most of the questions i get through dms and back channels where people aren't putting things in comments but even in the comments are questions about sexual health i mean i think most of the world is pretty clueless about sexual health and um and i i think that's something i don't think i'm the person to lead the charge um but i think that there is a um a real desperate need for um people uh of all backgrounds to better understand the system there this relates to the autonomic nervous system if i may just briefly because earlier you said this system is in all of us other animals and the large part it's why we're here and i'm not trying to make this discussion about sexual health but one thing that i think people might find interesting is that it is actually a prerequisite for you being here that your parents one way or another by dish or by in vivo conception managed to regulate their autonomic nervous system the following way and i'm not trying to be um you know move the topic but here here goes um the initial finding of a mate and sort of desire if you will is very strongly regulated by dopamine remember pursuit motivation reward etc unless someone just sort of falls on you or you fall on them um you have to go out and find someone and meet someone and there's usually some sort of courting process of varying duration involves motivation and focus is what it involves it certainly does and and if there's a psychological component but it's very strongly regulated by dopamine that whole system that's a a sympathetic dominated set of interactions it actually requires movement of animals right you actually have to get to the other to your mate you have to find them motivate you actually have to mobilize to get there now sexual arousal itself and here i'm presuming all the important things uh age-appropriate context appropriate um consensual and species appropriate behavior so here as we frame that up in that context what the sexual arousal itself is strongly parasympathetic if people are too aroused they're actually they're too alert there actually isn't um a arousal response in the male or the female right okay and males or females i should say right who knows what the architecture of this interaction looks like and then what's very surprising to people is that orgasm is actually 100 controlled by the sympathetic nervous system it is very much like the stress response except that it doesn't involve the stress molecules it's associated with a lot of these molecules associated with pleasure and then what follows that a very strong parasympathetic dominance of common relaxation at some point thought to be because it encourages exchange of pheromones or at least scents of some kind maybe pheromones maybe not pheromones but at least odors and pair bonding an opportunity for you've also just described birth right so the seesaw so we are all here because one or both of your parents presumably both but there's also in vitro conception etc but one or both of your parents was able to regulate this seesaw at least well enough to bring egg and sperm together which as far as i know is still the only way that humans can conceive it turns out that um there was a paper this last summer in prisons in the national academy that vault turkey vultures two females can conceive um but absolutely i think you can look this up condors excuse me condors two females can conceive by trans differentiation of the uh of the egg into a different cell type but in humans as far as we know this can only happen by um sperm to egg uh meeting in body or in dish and so the autonomic nervous system going back and forth the see saw swinging back and forth is the architecture of your of the events leading up to your conception all of our conception if you had to say the the things that you feel are kind of most impeding our ability to access these kind of big four what are they and you can feel free to say like the patriarchy you can like just go that's always the answer there's always the patriarchy um but what what are those things you know jonathan and i have our kind of list of things that we both love and hate you know like our cell phones right um but what is it in in your opinion like kind of on a larger level yeah i think if i were to list them off in uh order of importance it would be um degraded relationship to our interactions with light and i don't just mean too much screen time right i'll explain what that means so not getting adequate sunlight at the right times of day and getting too much artificial light at the wrong times of day and i'm happy to flush that statement out with more studies than you ever want to hear about but also some tools and practices that evolve from that excuse me um in particular some of the work because i have an appointment in ophthalmology some of the work showing that myopia nearsightedness is at almost epidemic levels now in part because kids and and adults are spending too much time just looking at things up close my parents said your eyes are not going to work if you said that close to the television right so that the classic work of human weasel and others won the nobel prize i mean the and others have shown if you look at things up close actually during development and even an adult with the eyeball lengthens the term nearsightedness in part is because of where the image is focused to in front of right the neural retina etc there are ways to remedy this basically in short if you don't make it to the end of this podcast although i hope you would because i'll give more protocols but kids that spend or adults to spend two hours a day outside even just getting sunlight through cloud cover so you do not need to live in california i don't care if you're in minnesota if it's cloudy out you're still getting a lot more photons light energy through the clouds than you would um if you were indoors with a lot of bright lights on those they see great relief from some of these visual deficits getting a lot of sunlight in your eyes early in the day even if it's not very bright if you wake up before the sun comes out turn on bright lights in your house but then go outside when you can even if it's cloudy take off sunglasses etc okay so deficits in uh relationship to sunlight and overuse of artificial light late in the evening that's a huge one from the mental health and physical health metabolic health perspective we can talk about that even lights too many lights in your room while you're asleep some people have thinner eyelids this actually can create metabolic dysfunctions upon waking oh new paper just out in pnas oh kids that sleep and i'm talking i'm talking just 10 or 20 lux very dim light in your room you don't have to be in a cave but if you have too much light even though you're sleeping through the night it's disrupting but i'm scared of the dark dr huberman there's a way to deal with this there's a way and i'll be happy to share so disrupted disrupted um relationship to light is one big one two is i look i i use social media i love social media one of the issues with social media however is first of all let's think about the format it arrives in let's forget the content violent political happy sad bullying non-bullying let's just forget the content and just pretend that we were looking into a box about this big for more than an hour a day that bringing together of our eyes we call a virgin's eye movement and and restricting into a narrow region um and having the image scroll as opposed to our eyes scanning and reading like when with a book where our eyes are actually doing the scanning but when you're scrolling actually the the image itself the content is what's going by that is very um demanding on the sympathetic nervous system so where the seesaw is being pushed into onto one side and that hinge is getting locked so to speak of in the more active state and we're not getting as much modulation of the autonomic nervous system remember when you used to walk to your car and you weren't looking into a little box you just walked to your car remember when you um used to go for a jog or a walk or would have dinner and you were actually looking around the room and at people's faces and not into waiting in line i always point out you would wait in line and people watch you just look at this that's right um so narrowly restricting our visual focus to a particular small target for too much of the day very serious so light narrow restriction a visual angle as we call it in geek speak ophthalmology type thing um then there's of course the content and the speed of turnover of content so if a picture is worth a thousand words um you know a movie is worth 10 million pictures and no this is the first time in human evolution first of all that people have written with their thumbs at least as far as we know it's also the first time in human evolution that you can context switch your brain can flip to different locations different people through the viewing of movies in a matter of minutes so in two minutes on instagram i can look at 200 movies crazy and tick-tock is a whole other order of magnitude worse and um i i'm not going to beat up on tick-tock but it has their number of things about tick-tock including issues of national security that concerned me very much in addition to the content and the format so there's that where there's a lot of context switching so you're basically teaching the brain adult or child brain to defocus or to not be able to focus well you're saying context rich context switch context switch and that's why it's hard to read two pages of text that's why it's hard to leave the phone out of the room um now with that said um you know i've been doing a lot of research into the grief and attachment and social healthy social attachment literature and knowing where people are knowing that you care about knowing where they are in space and time is one of the most fundamental ways in which we build and maintain attachments so it makes sense why the phone is so critical you really want to be able to know where people are in space and time and it's a wonderful tether to that but it also brings with it a number of other things and then i think the last category is there are two areas which are healthy social connection and physical touch that we are really struggling with right now i was waiting for this i thought that would be number one okay it's number four you know physical touch obviously there's romantic touch there's also um child to parent again always age-appropriate consensual context appropriate species appropriate touching but you know that yeah i just want to just say this is appropriate you have to cover all your bases when you work at stanford well i do well it's not just for being at stanford it's also because um as you know in doing anything public facing the gaps you leave are the gaps that people fill with assumptions and and i take this and you know i i like to be somewhat light-hearted about some of these discussions but for some people as just like i'm not um trying to be politically correct it's just what i've come to realize is that if i don't if i don't put those uh points out there then sometimes a statement about you know people are feeling deprived of touch does that mean we should run around hugging people that don't want to be hugged like there's the close talker people they're the bad breath people they're the um they're the people who uh touch too much but i think many people nowadays are feeling deprived of healthy social connection and there are all these molecules as you know david anderson's lab at caltech has just been doing beautiful work on tachycaynin and these molecules that exist in flies mice and humans that when we are deprived of social contact our aggressive and irritable uh tendencies um increase and you know whenever i hear like this horrible incident in new york or this guy this kind of loner guy who basically started shooting at people on the subway and you know they said and then they do the the forensics on this and they go who was this guy and they go you know he's been alone in his room for for two years and i'm not giving him an excuse he's obviously responsible he needs to pay for what he did it's terrible but when you deprive animals of any species of social contact they either turn against themselves or they turn against others or both and i think that we're in a real social deficit right now where people are craving healthy social interaction and um and the pandemic for all its um you know problems and controversies i mean one thing you can't argue is people been more stressed sleeping less well right and um and social connection has been greatly diminished um i want to ask you a few questions just i mean i literally i mean could talk to you forever um but i wanted to ask you a few things that i'm just kind of curious about um are you a partnered person or are you uh you're a part are you a parent i'm not okay so you're a partnered person is your partner also in science no a normal person um and what do you like to do for fun like what i'm just curious about you like for what for no i'm just kidding my guy do jiu jitsu um do you do jiu jitsu i don't do jiu jitsu i did one jiu jitsu class with lex friedman also podcaster okay all i can tell you are the things that i enjoy so um i enjoy so i i define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure and i define a good life as a progressive broadening of the things that give you pleasure and i consider myself lucky in that i've i think i put some effort into making sure that my dopamine system is very responsive to the little things the big things and everything in between so um i'm having fun right now i know that seems you know but i won't no really no but so my days are very straightforward i wake up and i get sunlight in my eyes and i take a walk and i really enjoy that i do that with my partner if we're in happen to be in the same city at that moment um i love exercise i'm fortunate that way i i guess um i like to either run or do some sort of gym workout for about an hour every morning one or the other and just kind of alternate and then i love to read and learn and so i spend time reading and i spend time trying to learn and then i try and tell people about it on part are you like a nonfic you're a non-fiction person or like do you see a are you like a romance novel fan like i just want something so i have some hobbies and some addictions um healthy addictions um besides what i just described i i love to eat by the way i love food i love i'm very lucky that i generally like good food like healthy food but i love to eat but um i have a couple of weird uh hobbies first of all i'm i'm obsessed with what's called aquascaping which is there's a guy named takashi amano who developed this thing called aquascaping these are freshwater um fish tanks with no metal on them they're just glass boxes and the lighting's very important um i have freshwater discus for a long time and i love the plants and i love that it's a japanese craft you can look at takashi amano he built a number of museums i love that i also in a very disparate way from all that i um are disparate axis i um i collect a lot of and i'm sort of obsessed with a certain um music related memorabilia and i have an obsession with oliver sacks and his life and i've been collecting a number of his things wait what's your music thing can we know uh i mean i'm i'm i have a lot of kind of like second wave third wave rare punk stuff oh i'm a huge joe strummer fan i happen to i'm not trying to name drop here but i happen to be close friends with rick rubin so i one of my favorite things to do is is uh hang out with rick and ask him to tell me stories about dead second wave third wave yeah punk punk guy so we share a lot of stories back and forth um and i've learned a lot from rick about that world even though i have no musical talent whatsoever zilch zero nada uh i was terrible i can memorize lyrics very easily but i have no i can't keep a tune i can't keep a beat um you'll there you go um and i love movies so what do you like um i mean i love the not the documentary but um i loved um basquiat that movie i've seen with um everyone's in it right dennis hopper yeah benicio del toro who i think plays the young vincent gallo so i have this obsession with new york in the 80s um and when i'm in new york i spend a lot of time kind of hunting down i have a lot of friends from the new york city punk rock community people like toby moore's who has this amazing podcast one life one chance he's from band h2o guys like i'm obsessed with that whole world of of culture as it relates to kind of um punk rock and skateboarding because i grew up in the skateboarding culture so i have a lot of friends in the skateboarding world so anyway i mean i could go down these deep notes no i just no that's very interesting i'm kind of obsessive about these things and i collect a lot of them and i spend a lot of time um on those things i also like to sit in the sauna and do cold dunks and all that kind i do that stuff and i've done it for a long time and uh yeah and i love um wendell berry poetry what can i tell you um go ahead jeff well this is purely for my benefit can you give mime the oh my god 20 second version of why she should try cold plunge let me make it very clear that this doesn't have to be done with cold plunge it could also be cold shower it could also be done with what's called cyclic hyperventilation some people call it wim hof breathing some people call it tumor breathing laboratory yes we call it cyclic hyperventilation which is if you do that for 25 breaths in inhale you know or you get into a cold shower or you get into an ice bath or you get into a cold water bath up to your neck guess what the effect is exactly the same adrenaline is released in your brain and body now i'm robbing the words of david spiegel here it's not just about the state that you're in it's about this how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it deliberate cold exposure through cold shower ice bath deliberate adrenaline release through cyclic hyperventilation are a way of deliberately increasing adrenaline and adrenaline does several things first of all it makes you very alert if you breathe like that you're going to be very alert you're going to heat up that's adrenaline right you're going to be in a panic mode if you're in an ice bath but your ability to learn to calm your mind while it having a lot of adrenaline circulating in your system is a very useful tool to have in your kit because when you get into a car accident this happened to me i was hit driving in los angeles we were rear-ended and actually there was a pregnant woman not by me but pregnant in the passenger seat in front of me and her husband and the drivers you know and i remember getting out and running after the car because the car tried to take off and maybe we made sure she was okay first of course i'm not a particularly gritty or calm person i but you do enough deliberate cold exposure or if you're familiar with having a lot of adrenaline in your system when it hits you feel alert and calm and you're able to function in that state and so this is something that you can use to increase your stress threshold so a lot of people talk about cold showers as a way to increase metabolism or to blah blah and it's true it will increase dopamine for up to two hours afterwards by a significant amount it increases focus etc but that's by way of adrenaline and last point is that an adrenaline that's chronically high is bad that's chronic stress but adrenaline that spikes for a bit you know the beautiful work of james mcgowan larry cahill from uc irvine and university of arizona the spikes in adrenaline they enhance your memory they enhance your focus they enhance your feelings of well-being they deploy your immune system he's so smug right now this is also kundalini yoga is this the breath the fire breath that's what they do that's the thing absolutely so if you do it right what i'm a big fan of is finding the the way to trigger adrenaline release in a way that's um tight that you can titrate you can control it right the problem with cyclic hyperventilation is a lot of people feel so uncomfortable and agitated that they don't know should i have done 10 breaths or 15 adrenaline comes in these big peaks and waves i think getting it taking a cold shower for a minute each morning then i like to go back to the hot shower frankly afterward um is a great practice because you if you learn how to stay calm in there if you get into the ice bath or a cold water learning to calm your mind while your body is very activated is a great tool so that when you get a text message like hey your kid didn't show up today i actually had a friend this happened we they the kid was missing and we were all at the house looking for this then nine-year-old child i mean think about the stress of that right but what's required in that moment is to be able to think clearly so there are tools you can use to learn to train your nervous system kind of uncouple that brain body reflex and uh cold showers are a great if anything you save on the heating bill i've done it like i've gone to like hot natural baths and then i will go in the cold but sometimes it makes you feel like you're gonna pass out you definitely don't want to jump into 30 or 40 degree water if you're not trained up to do that i mean you know warning i mean you can't stop your heart if you could jump into like that i see you later i'm never doing it again this was going on really well until we're down here no just here the biggest effects on dopamine actually have been observed in a study where they had people get into 60 degree water for a prolonged period of time up to their neck whereas if you get into really cold water 40 degree fahrenheit water at for 20 seconds you can get this effect but you know i'm a big believer in people doing something they can do consistently and you could do the cold shower three times thank you yeah so that's that's a reason to do it wait what do you do for fun mine because i'm not about to let you off the hook that that easily i collect small things i like very tiny things so like i have a collection of like tiny little vases or like really anything miniature i like um i grew up with a strong appreciation for uh japanese art and architecture and also um i like poetry i do i exercise i do taekwondo i'm um testing for my black belt candidacy belt which is called a puma amazing i'm impressed i'm very i actually i thought after having children i might never lift my body off the ground again because there's a heaviness to you after you have kids but yeah i did jujitsu in college and then i i took up taekwondo um i i wha what else do i like to do i i like documentaries i like crime documentaries i'm not allowed to watch you share a few that are particularly well so it's interesting because um for i've been i've been for eight months i've not watched the kind of documentaries that i really like because jonathan said they were upsetting my sleep um she was watching them right before bed having yeah intense nightmares i mean she has intense nightmares other times i have yeah but we were trying to work on those um i i don't do a lot of things for fun i like cleaning a lot like i like um cleaning and organizing jonathan likes to say i organize my closet every night and it looks the same but it doesn't to me so i like things really in order um i um i mean music i love music um i play piano since i'm four and then i i can play i was a trumpet player in middle school i play bass guitar um but not like actively i had to learn harp for the big bang theory um but mostly i love piano i um i'm very jewishly aligned i like studying jewish text and philosophy um and i also do liturgical like jewish quartet stuff um yeah i mean about music she if if you sit with her in the car and you're just listening to the radio she knows every lyric to every song that comes on that i've ever heard but i'm a huge elvis costello fan which is adjacent i think to some of the music that um that you probably are a fan of but my bulldog unfortunately he passed away but yeah i had a bulldog mastiff with a giant head and his name was costello because i got him from a guy named elvis oh wow i'm i confess i'm not in elvis costume you don't have to be a lot of people learning but not but i don't dislike it i just don't know where i love it it's a well look i mean the also the early elvis was much closer to a lot of the music scene that was very important and critical at that time we wanted to ask you briefly um before we let you go ish we wanted to ask you about emdr um and if you can speak to it a little bit because we we talk about it a lot here um and you know not exclusively because of your optical uh connections uh that you have in terms of research and um knowledge but um you know this is one of those things that i'm you know kind of nervous to talk about because while it's not super out there it is one of those things that um is hard to to describe or necessarily quantify and yet um people people do have a lot of um success i put success in quotes because it's kind of weird to talk about sort of working on trauma in particular as success but but movement and progress um and in many cases it does more than traditional psychoanalysis would do um or you know even more modular kind of cbt stuff so can you explain a little bit um just for people who might not really understand how moving your eyes can help you process trauma can you explain a little bit in in your terms sure and and if i may i'm just going to briefly describe some of the general relationship between your eyes and internal states and offer some tools along the way when you focus your eyes on a narrow location phone as i'm doing right now into the zoom screen talking to somebody and paying very close attention to their eyes looking at them you know like this especially if you don't blink which is actually you know every time you blink you reset your time referencing system this idea that people who don't blink are sociopaths there's absolutely no truth to it zero zip nada um guess when we blink more when we're tired think about it as you get tired you start shutting down the sensory input to your brain the neurons that control closing of the eyelids and actually pushing the pushing the eyes down is part of the parasympathetic nervous system the neurons that control opening of the eyelids and eyes up are part of the sympathetic nervous system i just thought about dead bodies and how you have to close the eyes exactly um not coincidentally the test as to whether or not someone is hypnotizable or not it's a one to four clinical scale called the spiegel eye roll test involves having people look up but then close their eyes while maintaining upward gaze now why would a clinician develop such a test the reason is that people that can do that look up and close their eyelids at the same time are highly hypnotizable compared to those that can't do those two things simultaneously these are this is like the seesaw going in both directions at the same time look up well i'll have to we can do it now but we'll have to get you close to the camera to do this properly but let me just the the state of hypnosis is a state of remember alertness but calm so the i and and this might sound like quackery or craziness this is keep in mind when when clinicians neurologists look for concussion what do they do they shine light into one eye and they're looking for the so-called consensual pupil reflex in the other eye that it also constricts it should be called non-consensual because if it's systems working it doesn't have a choice but non-consensual gets people uncomfortable so the consensual pupil reflex so the idea that the eyes are a window into deeper brain function is not crazy that's actually a neurologist's main tool unless you're going to crack open the skull or put somebody into a scanner so so we can actually assess um and again this is developed by david spiegel and his father the um the extent to which somebody can be hypnotized um the spiegel eyre test you can look this up again this isn't for stage hypnosis of a clinical note so someone can get close to the camera um and what you're going to do or you could do this to each other what you're going to do maybe i could demonstrate i'm very hypnotizable or you could come forward i'd rather do it on one of you okay i'm going to make a joke about canadians being more hypnotizable but actually there's no such thing there is no there are no such thing they're just so nice they just they want to make you happy if you want to hypnotize me i will be hitting them okay here comes all right here comes jonathan so john then i uh can you kind of go down in the screen great so um you don't have to take off your hat but what if you could look up there you go and now while maintaining upward gaze this is a little bit challenging for some you're going to slowly close your eyes and what i'm looking for is whether or not i can there you go you are very hypnotized because i can still see the whites of your eyes so let me do it both ways if i i don't know if you can see this but if you can your eyes roll back right now this is um now some people can't do this when they close their eyes that the eyes roll forward and they just go shut remember there are two sets of cranial nerve nuclei that are like a push in a pull on alertness and calmness and people who can maintain upward gaze with eyes closed can very easily enter these hypnotic states because what is the hypnotic state it is a very deep state of calm while being very focused on a narrow context and then the narrow context is fed to you either through an audio script or through a trained uh hypnotist now inside of hypnosis your brain is able to access neuroplasticity more readily he get off his knees dr huberman oh yeah sorry about this uh the uh obedience oh obedient no no no no no it's always the ones that are obedient in public that are very defiant in private um and often vice versa and often vice versa not always but you know hence the uh well we'll stop there the uh so um uh right yeah we could talk about it but that's a whole other dimension of autonomic control that's the spin-off podcast we'd like to pitch to you actually is the sex podcast well i actually yeah i think well i mean some of the most interesting topics in all of the landscape of human experience are right sex relationships power dynamics i mean and it's i actually think it's because we are unwilling to have the conversation that there's so many problems in the world around the four things i was saying before right around uh consent context appropriate species appropriate i do say somewhat facetiously although you know i you know i am an animal lover so i like the idea that they're protected too um but so here's the the idea your eyes and how you position your eyes and move your eyes have a profound influence on the state of your brain so it's not just how you breathe it's not just how you exercise or slept the night before it's all that but it's also the fact for instance that getting sunlight in the morning wakes up your brain why because the neurons in your eye communicate to your hypothalamus that send a body-wide signal including the increase of cortisol to wake you up the eyes are not a window to the soul the eyes are the two pieces of brain that are outside the cranial valve these are two pieces of central nervous system i was just talking about that the other day sorry yes so emdr emdr is eye movement desensitization reprocessing it was um discovered and characterized by francine shapiro who actually worked not far from stanford campus she was a psychologist um who figured out or into that when she had problems if she took a walk she was a therapist but if she took a walk somehow that made it easier to parse the issue now she worked in a clinic where people had to sit down and so she somehow and i don't know how she made the bridge to this unfortunately she's passed away so we can't ask her that if she had people move their eyes from side to side but not up and down and they did that with eyes open that they were able to better recollect painful experiences verbally and could somehow dissociate the emotional state they experienced during those painful experiences with their current bodily state now what this led to over time she reported was that the emotional trauma or anxiety provoking event would have less of an emotional effect on the body so an uncoupling of the emotion to the troubling experience hence emdr um trained emdr therapists will have you move your eyes from side to side sometimes tracking a light sometimes tracking a pen and you report the painful thing now i've talked to david spiegel about this he's again an md's that works in this area of trauma and hypnosis and again our associate chair of psychiatry he's a he's a serious scientist and clinician right and david said emdr tends to work best for single trauma or single type of trauma issues so an entire childhood might not be amenable to an entire painful childhood might not be amenable to emdr we're done here dr hubermann that's what i need i need my whole childhood fixed with eight sessions no you need the men in black swipe he he also speculated to me and again i'm paraphrasing so forgive me david if i'm getting any of this wrong um he also speculates that some of the effect of emdr might be a kind of hypnotic effect induced during the therapy keep in mind that clinical hypnosis was discovered when a patient was focusing on a mole in the center of their psychiatrist's face and somehow then went into kind of a trance-like state where they could report experiences with much more ease than they could if they were just kind of not focusing on that so again the eyes are anchoring a brain state that are allowing for more report etc now this does relate to sleep in the following way oh excuse me emdr i should should just kind of wrap up by saying this is a power potentially powerful tool for certain kinds of trauma and you really do want to work with somebody expert in this if you're going to explore it i just wanted to add and and with all due respect to to david obviously and this entire field that is not my field um there are many people who do use emdr for larger trauma and for compounded trauma what often what i think happens to many people who have experienced trauma is that we set aside most of our trauma and then something happens when we're adults or whatever and we realize we're having a tremendous difficulty or or what might be considered an exaggerated reaction or why can't you get over it and what often happens is that we've you know been taught to compartmentalize what many of us also may not have even called trauma it was just life right and so what happens is if you have a system that has had this compounded trauma this one incident can be sort of a a trigger point for awareness and starting to work on it but often it's because you have a system that essentially has been primed for your entire life so i just wanted to say that also that it it it does and can work for other things the reason that people are such sticklers people like dr hubermann and myself the reason we are such sticklers for people who are certified is not because we're trying to promote an elitist form of psychiatric or psychological care it's not because we think degrees are more important than not having a degree but the the the potential for an emdr experience becoming exploitative or becoming um not helpful and possibly harmful is not completely able to be prevented however when people have been trained in a certain way they are also taught a certain amount of liability protection for how to handle things that may come up that doesn't mean they're perfect it doesn't mean there's not problems but that's the reason especially that i don't like when internists start prescribing psychiatric medication is because they're often not asking full questions about people's profile that people who are trained to work in those fields are trained to know and field anyway sorry go ahead excellent points and i'm grateful you you made them um you know for many years people would ask me about emdr and what i thought about it because my lab works on stress and we work on vision and i quite honestly i said this is ridiculous i thought it was absolutely crazy and then what happened was i was asked to review a number of papers a couple of papers on mouse a couple papers on monkey and then some papers on humans these were brain imaging papers that were mainly focused on eye movements not on emotionality and what they discovered in these manuscripts this was from the sort of 2016 to 2020 span was that when the eyes move from side to side again with eyes open up and down movements of the eyes don't do this there is a dramatic reduction in the activity of certain components of what we call the limbic system including the amygdala uh which is an area of the brain commonly associated with threat detection and sometimes even with full-blown fear although it does other things too so at that point i thought wow there's really something to this why would that be and it turns out that forward ambulation walking forward actually evokes the same kind of eye movements and the same suppression of amygdala activity so this is interesting and important when you start to think about sleep okay just very briefly sleep has two major phases deep sleep and slow wave sleep excuse me deep slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement rem sleep there's more rem sleep towards morning these are happening all night long in 90 minutes ultra radiant cycles and so on and so forth and you dream every night even if you don't remember them you do and you and your dreams at the beginning of the night tend to be less emotionally laden and your dreams toward mourning which are associated with mostly with rem sleep tend to be more emotionally intense now what's interesting about dreams during rem sleep is that they can often be very emotionally intense but in rem sleep you are unable to release epinephrine adrenaline into your body you are also paralyzed it's sleep-induced atonia as it's called this is important it's almost like what we're talking about in terms of emdr or some other form of trauma therapy where you are creating a calm bodily state while you are recalling a very intense emotional experience so the late phase of sleep actually turns out to be a bit of a trauma release or trauma therapy whereas um emdr is a waking state designed to suppress the amygdala it wasn't designed for that but we now know it suppresses a legal activity hence it makes you less uh alert and vigilant and in a state of fear so interesting i love you so you're uncoupling the the event from the emotion and you know i think most people would be upset to learn that you never actually forget the traumatic experience but they should be reassured by the fact that the goal of trauma therapy is always to move something from a very troubling almost uh you can't think about that can't think about that all trauma therapies involve getting closer and closer and closer to the precise recollection of that thing to the point where it just becomes a boring somewhat sad unfortunate story but at least it doesn't overwhelm your bodily state right or your bodily state doesn't overwhelm you and so if you that's the at this current state of technologies that's the what we can do there is no erasing of the trauma there's the unloading of the emotional load of the of the previously traumatic experience so that's emdr and the last thing i'll say about this is that when you bring your eyes to a common virgin's point on your phone or in conversation even if it's a good conversation even if you're looking at something on your phone that you like you are increasing the activity of that sympathetic nervous system your the seesaw is tilting conversely when you allow your vision to expand in what we call panoramic vision so without moving your eyes or your head i'm not doing this but i can actually expand my field of view so right now i can see the screen but i can also see the periphery of the room i can also see the floor and now i can see myself in the environment i'm in that's like taking your foot off the accelerator a bit right before i was talking about see-saw you could also think about sympathetic as like an accelerator and parasympathetic is like a break physiological size the double inhale exhale that's like slamming on the break of alertness but there's another way to become more calm which is to come off the accelerator and when you expand your field of view you're coming off the accelerator you asked what is the major problem nowadays and i said and i still believe that uh one of them is the fact that we are on the accelerator all the time we're looking into a little box we're doing zooms then we go to lunch and we're while on the way to lunch we're looking into a small location to say nothing of the content that's coming through now the political shifts the legislative shifts that the fact that everyone seems to hate each other nowadays um you know i'm only sort of half joking i guess you know i i it's amazing how tense things have become and sometimes i wonder if part of that tension certainly not all of it but part of that tension is the consequence not just of what we are learning and seeing and hearing but the venue the format the visual format through which we're receiving and hearing that information well there's also benefit to having sensory perception on multiple planes of field right like so like for example if you're going through the forest and you're having to do process things that are close to you and then further away i've heard that that's also you know it's not it's opening your field of vision but then also like having a diverse environment that you're having to process immensely beneficial and uh probably beyond the scope of today's conversation but that the one thing i'm obsessed with is uh time perception actually your former colleague at ucla dean romano i know you pronounce his name beautiful book the brain is a time machine a wonderful book you know when you are in a focused mode you are essential with eyes focused on a narrow location you are fine slicing space duh but you are also fine slicing time it's like taking increasing the frame rate on a camera so you're getting micro slices when you are in panoramic vision you are taking larger time bins now what does this mean well the simplest way to think about this is the focused mode is more associated with the adrenaline dopamine pursuit system and the panoramic vision relaxation staring up at the clouds not looking at your phone while you're doing it relax walking with someone and just talking and having a good time but not really focusing anywhere in particular with your eyes well that's more of this if you will the serotonergic kind of parasympathetic system broad strokes here i realize but what does this mean well if you've ever had the experience of having a really exciting day it feels like it went by really really fast and yet when you look back it seems like a lot happened whereas if you ever went to the doctor's office and had to wait for three hours it feels like it takes forever we have this visual aperture that can contract and expand and that controls obviously how we parse physical space but then that visual aperture also changes the way in which we parse to use nerd speak my immune is the time domain right you start slicing time differently right and um and this is really important because what makes the human brain so remarkable is that we can orient our thinking to past present or future and we can also think about the past and present the present and the future and we are able to in theory we're able to control those switches of where our thinking is in time using the prefrontal cortex that you know top down as it's called modulation but when we become reflexively slaves to all the things around us and we're just locked in that mode you know here what i'm trying to keep painting is a picture where most people they wake up and that seesaw is tilted towards activation states all the time and that's either going to make you exhausted or locked into modes of thinking about pursuit thinking that the thing that you need lies outside of you and if you if you engage in this way for too long what ends up you know you've been using your visual system incorrectly if the following happens if you ever find yourself doing something like scrolling social media and it doesn't feel good well guess what you're not getting dope mean hits everyone's like oh social media is dope i mean maybe the first time you used it but that's not a dopamine hit what's happening is your dopamine is at least for as it relates to that activity is depleted you are effectively like a rat pressing a lever just hoping that things and you don't even enjoy it anymore dopamine is about motivation it's not about pleasure and so i really encourage people to do what i call deliberate decompression which is take a walk with in panoramic vision you don't even have to focus on it too much do it with somebody else or really try and get your visual field out of that narrow box for some portion of the day i realize it's hard and of course you can go back to enjoying it an hour later or something look off into the distance that will help your vision as uh correct itself over time get outside and get sunlight the corrective power of these things is immense so if you start getting some sunlight in your eyes for 10 minutes each morning even through cloud cover no sunglasses eyeglasses and contacts are fine even if they have uv protection don't do it through a window don't do a car windshield it doesn't work takes too long if you start doing that you will feel better all day and you will sleep better and it's a nice practice you just go outside and you don't you don't stare at the sun obviously you just get indirect sunlight these are simple things but many people are doing all of this backward wrong or not at all in other words everyone gets an f backward wrong or not at all the title of my memoir dr huberman just named it for me i mean look i really i don't even have much to say he said all the things that was one of our longest conversations it was super awesome and you know people should check out his podcast like yeah his huberman labs podcast all the things he talks to incredible people um he obviously is such an amazing communicator and i really i don't feel the need to say anything else it's incredible i want to talk to him about all the things but like he's the guy who needs to teach all of us how to live our lives that's it we figured it out it's him what did you think about the light conversation i was surprised that when you know i sort of asked like what's the best thing to kind of like optimize you know whatever that i thought the first thing he'd well i was hoping the first thing he'd say was like connection to other humans and he's like our connection and relationship with light it's like what light i mean it's he got there at the end and number four no i yes he but he said i think they were in order of importance you know light is like a huge one i mean i i need to and want to know more about it you know we are creatures that are supposed to live outside and we are you know animals that are supposed to be in tune with the rhythms of nature and but a lot of people live in places you know where they like we didn't talk about focus he had focus as numbers i wanted to talk to him about adhd i was like maybe i don't have adhd i just need more light you don't know how to control your autonomic nervous system well that's clear if anyone out there has tried morning light has integrated that into their room you've been taking these morning walks i listened to so i got it from him and i listened to some of how he described the impact of light on the brain and what that does for us um take your morning walk i try as much as i can as to get outside right when i wake up uh even when it's raining i'll throw a my raincoat on i'll go out i literally wake up just 10 minutes i literally wake up 10 minutes before i need to leave the house so now i have to have a new system of waking up 20 minutes before i need to leave the house just get outside for a little bit and it's interesting like the the moment you step outside or the moment i i should say i step outside and the light hits my eyes there is a noticeable impact it's like oh wait a second that my body is clearly processed you know i try not to but then i call you and i wonder where you are sometimes i'll listen to a podcast i think it's better to let your brain you know just kind of wander a little bit um but i think i i think about my kid i think about my kid who's carries his phone around everywhere and i'm like you know i get a visceral annoyance i think it's a protective mechanism because i see him just staring at his phone and oh yeah what i liked to hear and was slightly reassured is that the up scrolling is actually worse it puts us in that uh revved up state where he described it like putting your foot on the gas because your that down scroll where your eyes are going up and down is so bad for us or it's not it's not bad but it is exerting energy and processing information here's the thing and this is sort of like what i've come to as i'm doing a lot of examining and observing my kids and trying not to have conflict about it um their dad has started just instituting like tech free days i think he's doing it like one day every other week like in the middle you know like a thursday or whatever i don't think whatever i'm supposed to be hoping that they can regulate for themselves they just can't and the only thing 100 the only thing that i think is the solution is to be like we don't use phones like you know from this time to like it's too much and sometimes when i take him places he tries to bring his phone and i'm like and we'll be sitting at a rest like outside of a restaurant waiting for pick up or take out food yeah and he's like but i'm not doing anything and i'm like that's right just sit and watch they don't they don't they don't get it because that's the thing we did it because there's nothing else to do yeah anyway this was really i have so many more things i would love to discuss with him and i want to have him on every day i'll just add that we should be cautious of our progress that we're making because it's separating us from the systems that are are sort of biologically inherent to us although i thought you meant the progress we're making individually i was like but i want to be proud of myself when i take a cold shower you mean the yeah but we just sound like 90 year olds when we talk like that like be careful young children right scott be careful of all your scrolling beware you'll never find a partner if you're scrolling on your phone all the time as we say this we're like hit us up on the instagram channel and tell us about your scrolling appialic breakdown use it use it wisely you know use it wisely and i hope that we are all starting to become more aware of when it's too much when everything's too much when it's too much interacting with people that are not healthy for us when it's too much uh not getting help when it's too much scrolling when it's too much overwhelm when it's too much trying to be all things to all people what i'm hoping is we're all gaining better awareness get some natural light in your eyes look at the horizon from from our breakdown to the one we hope you never have we'll see you next time it's miami alex breakdown she's gonna break it down for you she's got a neuroscience phd or two non-fiction and now she's gonna break down it's a breakdown she's gonna break it down

Channel: Mayim Bialik

Views: 151,384

Keywords: mayim bialik, big bang theory, amy farrah fowler, mayim, celebrity news

Id: Mk5GC269WT0

Length: 107min 19sec (6439 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 23 2022