Best Dr. Andrew Huberman MOTIVATION (2 HOURS of Pure INSPIRATION)

want to be happy build a life not just a business hey it's evan carmichael and this channel is created to help you overcome the number one challenge that is holding you back a lack of belief in yourself you watch these videos because you know there's something more inside you too you've got michael jordan level genius at something so today let's live your best believe life and get some incredible motivation from the one and only andrew hueberman for any of us success in any endeavor is very closely related to how much focus we can bring to that endeavor and the reward system you start to realize is entirely internal no one's coming along and cramming dopamine in your ear or dripping it in your brain it's all internal and this starts to bring us into the kind of like discussion around mindsets because so my colleague carol dweck who you know popularized this growth mindset it's again a very misunderstood concept it's the idea that we can change so that's built into that but the discovery of growth mindset was of these kids that actually really enjoyed doing problem sets that they knew they couldn't get right but for them they would get this like dopamine release from just focusing on the problem they like doing puzzles they couldn't get right it sounds crazy but inevitably those kids are very good at puzzles and very good at math and on these kinds of things so growth mindset is i believe sort of a neuroscience lens on growth mindset would be that the agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something and when you're trying to lean into it and you can't focus is just a recognized gait you have to pass that through that gate to get to the focus component and then if you can reward the effort process you really start to feel joy and low levels of excitement in the effort process that's that buffering of adrenaline that's that feeling like yes i've got a lot of adrenaline in my system but i'm on the right path it feels good to walk up this hill so to speak and when you start to bring those neural circuits together you really start to create a whole set of circuits that are designed to be exported to any behavior you want so if it's writing a book great if it's podcasting great if it's building a business great if it's if it's you know building a terrific relationship great then the circuits that mother nature has designed are incredibly generic so that we could adapt to whatever it is that we need to do and i think the misunderstanding around how these circuits work has led to this idea that there's some secret entry point maybe marked flow on the door and there's a trampoline up to that door and you just open that door and you're gonna be in it right and nothing could be further from the truth and anyone who's done well in any career or athletic pursuit knows this but unfortunately there's a kind of obsession with the idea that it's all supposed to feel good and it does feel good but there's a whole staircase in which it feels kind of lousy we can be driven from a place of anger frustration and and you know revenge or we can be driven from a place of you know love gratitude and etc i i'm not here to judge which one is better or worse but the nervous system doesn't distinguish between them so if you're the kind of person that needs to you know kind of budge yourself into something great if you're the kind of person that wants to do things from more of a warm fuzzy feeling that's fine too what i will say is this the ability to tap into this dopamine reward system which is activated anytime you're in pursuit of something that's outside the boundaries of your skin and literally the boundaries of your body as well as the reward system the serotonin oxytocin system which is really about the things that are contained within your own body and immediate experience things like gratitude and you know touch and comfort and things like that with loved ones the ability to tap into both is crucial now you said something really important which was well negative thoughts negative thoughts what to do i don't believe that it's very easy to suppress negative thoughts however when you realize that thoughts can be deliberately introduced you can start replacing negative thoughts with new types of thoughts so you can always add something in but when people start to realize that thoughts are very much like physical actions of reaching and picking up a glass of water or taking a jog around the ball block or typing an email perfectly this is something i sometimes do because i'm i you know i struggle to do the perfect email not all my emails are perfect but when i do one i make sure that i i complete and i think okay it's possible it's not because the email being perfect is so important it's because i want to remind myself that my thoughts and my actions are essentially the same the nervous system can organize thoughts so for somebody that's struggling you know we have these examples like oh they were really back on their heels or they were so depleted no money and all this stuff what are they gonna we have so many examples like that but in trying to make it actionable it's really about saying yep that's all true but i'm going to introduce a thought which is i made it through today i'm i made it through today and that's actually worth celebrating at a micro level so if you can give yourself dopamine rewards in small increments right you're not trying to celebrate that you made it through one day sometimes that's a huge feat but most of the time you just want to dose yourself with a little bit of that internal release of dopamine you start rewarding incremental steps and if there's anything that your listeners could take away from this whole thing about dopamine and reward schedules and being in movement it's reward incremental steps in particular incremental steps that are about forward action so maybe that's writing an email maybe that's um maybe that's that run around the block maybe that's something much grander for you as you get better at things right the stairs get further and further away from one another because you've achieved more success and so they tend to be you have to take the rungs on the ladder further apart so to speak that's a time when you really need to implement not only the dopamine rewards but also those serotonin and oxytocin rewards etc so to make it actionable i would say remember don't spend so much time trying to suppress negative thoughts if you need trauma therapy pursue that with a professional but if you have negative thoughts just remember i can also introduce positive thoughts the same way i can control running around the block positive thoughts are the equivalent of forward physical action and if you reward them internally you buffer yourself against the quitting circuit this norepinephrine circuit we were talking about before you are building a stronger version of yourself completely between your own ears and some people say well that's silly it's like you're saying oh i'm going to jump up and down reward myself for doing nothing no you're building the neural circuits that reward that you can control self-reward and in doing that you can push through days and weeks of effort consistently i don't mean necessarily all-nighters but you can push and push and push you know my career is one that was made over two decades it wasn't we had our big you know peaks and we had a lot of valleys but learning to control these rewards is absolutely key and i know you've done this too tom it's like you know it the huge wins are great in fact there's a much better way to maintain ongoing action toward a goal that also involves visualization but it turns out it's not about visualizing success it's about visualizing failure the balsettus lab and other labs have looked at whether or not people make progress toward goals of different types whether or not they're thinking about the goal they're thinking about that goal line and what they want to achieve that long-term goal and all the wonderful things associated with it or whether or not they're thinking about all the ways in which they could fail and root to that goal right this is not typically what we are encouraged to do typically we are told don't imagine failure push failure out of your mind only focus on success you know fake it till you make it or it's a phrase that i absolutely hate uh frankly because it's not even clear what that means and it's not even clear what the ethical form of that is i think it means continue despite any anxiety or fear that things won't work out but if you look at the literature the scientific literature what the balcettis lab and other labs have shown is that there's a near doubling near doubling in the probability of reaching one's goal if you focus routinely on foreshadowing failure you think about the ways in which things could fail if you take action a or you take action b and instead therefore you take action c you're supposed to think about how things could fail if you don't get up and run each morning if your goal is say a fitness goal so let's use that as an example because even though i realize people are in pursuit of many things not just fitness fitness goals and physical goals are a very concrete thing that we can all get on the same page about because they're related to actions let's say somebody that sets a goal of running five miles four times a week minimum and as many as seven four times a minimum before eight am okay in a previous podcast on habits i talked about the benefits of not necessarily setting specific times that one will do things but setting time blocks that one will do things so you say before 8am you're gonna run five miles and that's gonna happen up to seven days a week okay one version of this would be okay sit back in a chair and think about how great you're gonna feel and look if you're doing this every day how your health is going to improve how everything is going through your blood markers of lipids etc are going to improve okay fine that's the visualization goal of visualizing the end point turns out that is far less effective and maybe even counterproductive compared to thinking about what's going to happen if you don't do this the negative health outcomes that are going to occur the disappointment you're going to have in yourself the fact that you're going to wait until 7 30 that's not long enough for many people to run five miles you got to put it on your shoes it can be pouring rain or even hailing or snowing outside and now you're not going outside unless you're somebody who's particularly motivated to do that okay so foreshadowing failure turns out to be the best way to motivate toward goal pursuit in fact as i mentioned before there's a near doubling in the likelihood that people will reach goals of any kind when they're constantly thinking about how bad it's going to be if they fail if we think back to the neural circuit associated with assessing value in our goal pursuits this makes perfect sense the amygdala that center of the brain that's involved in anxiety and fear and worry well the amygdala is one of the four core components of our goal setting and goal pursuit circuitry and there's no bypassing that there is no one listening to this or watching this whose amygdala is not involved in their goal-setting and goal pursuit behavior and so while i'd love to be able to tell you that all you should think about is rainbows and puppies and all the wonderful rewarding things that are going to happen when you achieve your goals the truth is you should be thinking mainly about how bad it's really going to get if you don't do it how disappointing yourself you're going to feel how it will negatively impact you if not in the immediate term in the long term if indeed your goal is to reach your goal so i want to emphasize that i'm not interested in encouraging people to flagellate themselves i'm encouraging people to achieve their goals and it turns out the best way to do that is by foreshadowing failure and the more specific you can get by writing down or thinking about or talking about how bad it will be if you don't achieve your goals the more likely you are to achieve those goals i really believe that we all have some superpower that reflects maybe this is a bit of a scientific explanation that reflects the fact that our biology is tilted in some direction people often think about their biology being tilted in a direction that doesn't serve them like oh you know my parents were this and my you know or i'm not a good athlete or um whatever but it's also tilted in the direction of something really special so like when i was a kid of that age i was fascinated by animals i was like my and so had i learned to listen to that more i used to hide my interest in animals because i thought it was kind of not it wasn't cool like i didn't play the guitar in college i didn't surf i always like like i can tell you all these facts about mustelids and ferrets like what good is that but like you know but i think that kind of leaning that kind of tilt towards like huh like that's me like you resonate with something and i'm not the first to say this i think robert green also said this like there's a adults will often remember back to a time where they interacted with something sometimes it's an object or sometimes it's an experience and it just felt so good like it kind of drew you in i would tell your young listeners to and viewers to really pay attention to that it can seem almost trivial like it's rarely about the thing you're looking at or the thing you're doing but sometimes it's the sensation of running sometimes it's it's it's the sensation of viewing seeing something or hearing something because there's a hint there and it's the it's not really about what you're looking at or you're doing it's that feeling like learn it that feeling is your compass like that's your true north because that's the feeling you want to get to for to find you know the mate for your life the you know the partner for your life the the career track and over time you're gonna pivot right i mean you're not gonna get it on the first try i eventually my story of science started there it told me right there i felt it in that conversation with my dad and then my compass was all over the place and spinning and eventually it's it's come back i found it but getting in get in touch with that feeling and if this seems at all abstract i would do it as an experiment i would sit in a chair and i would think about something you don't like like really don't like and i would pay attention to what that feels like in your mind and in your body i'm not a very somatic person i'm not somebody who like feels stuff at the level of the body i've always felt like my emotions were my head so when people talk about like their emotions in their other places i'm just like i don't get it but i would encourage them to think about that and then i would encourage them to think about something they really like it could be roller coasters could be music could be get specific and to get in touch with that feeling and that feeling is your guide that feeling is your compass because the nervous system it's not mystical the nervous system will orient toward the things that it's best equipped to do it really well and i really animals do this naturally my bulldog costello never tries to be a different kind of dog he never fetched once first time i threw the ball he walked to the ball he sat down with the ball he destroyed the ball because that's what bulldogs do you know throw to a retriever they bring it back because the brain of the retriever is wired to feel good by retrieving yeah and the brain of the bulldog is good to feel good by being horizontal with and pulling on things with their they like to tug so i think humans we're so we're similar enough but we're different in the sense that you have something installed in you that feels right and getting in touch with that feeling is key and you're not and i should tell that there's you're not going to get it right away this is a practice you learn like shooting basketballs or math you do it over and over so that but if you get started young at eight or nine oh my goodness great and if you do it when you're 12 or even if you're 60 and you do this you'll find that pretty soon you start steering in these directions i i do believe it's a nervous i think our it's a neural there's a real physical substrate for this it's not mysticism the brain is basically designed to be customized in the early part of life and then to implement those algorithms and that circuitry for the rest of your of its life and so the brain can change in adulthood and it can change provided that there's an emphasis on some perceptual event so in other words if you want to change your brain as an adult let's say you want to be less anxious you want to learn a new language you want to be more functional in some way presumably the key thing is to bring focus to some particular perception of something that's happening during the learning process and the reason for that is that there's a neurochemical system involving acetylcholine and it comes from these two little nuclei down in the base of the brain called nucleus basalis all day long you're doing things in a reflexive way but when you do something and you think about it very intensely acetylcholine is released from basalis at the precise neurons that were involved in that behavior and it marks those for change during sleep or during deep rest later so for people that want to change their brain the power of focus is really the entry point and the ability to access deep rest and sleep because most people don't realize this but neuroplasticity is triggered by intense focus but neuroplasticity occurs during deep sleep and rest one of the things that's really important also to think about how the brain works in terms of plasticity and all this stuff is what the brain really wants to do is also pass as much of what it does after reflexive behavior as possible so yeah so when we're talking about focus i think it can get a little bit vague but it might be useful think about like what exactly is focus and what triggers plasticity so the brain loves to be able to just do things pick up coffee cups and drink and walk and talk and do things and not put much energy into it when we decide to focus what the brain really does is it switches on a set of circuits that involve the frontal cortex and nucleus basalis and some others and it's trying to understand duration how long something's going to last path what's going to happen and outcome what ultimately is going to happen so duration path and outcome you know the the events of early 2020 are a good example of this one of the reasons why it's so exhausting to be alive in 2020 is because we are now having to pay attention to duration path and outcome how long is this thing going to last when are you know when are they going to open up all businesses did i touch that door handle does it matter you know right who are the experts are there any experts you know there are a lot of questions whereas normally we can just move through life without having to do all that analysis so if it's a simple example like trying to learn a new language or a new motor skill or a new way of conceptualizing something maybe somebody's in a therapeutic process and they're trying to work through a trauma or something like that duration path and outcome is built into the networks of the brain we can do that very easily but it takes work and it almost has a feeling of underlying agitation and frustration and that's because the circuits that turn on before acetylcholine are of the stress system so when you or i decide we're going to learn something and really dig in norepinephrine which is adrenaline is secreted in the brain stem and in the body and it brings about a state of alertness then our attention which is mostly a diffuse light is brought to a particular duration path in outcome analysis this would be thinking about what somebody is saying what are they really trying to say a hard passage of reading a hard you know set of math problems you know a challenging physical workout when you do that these two systems have to work very hard and the adult brain doesn't really want to change the algorithms it learned in childhood but if you do those two things you have alertness and focus the acetylcholine and the norepinephrine converge to mark those synapses for change and so dir so the way to think about neuroplasticity if one wants to change their brain is bring about the most intense concentration you can to something and then later bring about the least amount of concentration of that thing so growth mindset and these dopamine rewards that we subjectively apply are not about saying oh you know i had a terrible day i performed poorly but you know what it's great i just feel great anyway it's not about that it's not about attaching your sense of reward to the ultimate goal it's about attaching your sense of reward to the fact that you're making action steps that are generally in the right direction the more you can reward the effort process the better off you are at building these kinds of neural circuits and these kind of tendencies to be able to lean into anything challenging over essentially any duration so how does this work like how would somebody do this right well keeping in mind that adrenaline and epinephrine are all great for getting us into action this is mother nature's way of chemically making us feel kind of agitated remember stress was designed to agitate us to move us away from things and toward things and i didn't have the power of concentration i hadn't read all the good books that gun high school students read growing up i had to learn how to speak properly i learned how to learn how to think properly and really learn how to commit to something that was very linear and at times was very painful and and i went to some pretty extreme things i um you know i actually used to set a timer uh and i wouldn't allow myself to get out of the chair until i was the timer went off right so and i would experience extreme agitation but over time i got pretty good and now i can do long stints of work and when we step back and we look at what that really entails at a neurochemical level we have reward systems in the brain they generally fall into two categories there are the reward systems that make you feel really good with kind of the here and now and everything that's within the confines of your skin and the things you already have you know love of your dog love of your spouse gratitude for all the things you happen to have and that and those are generally governed by the release of molecules like serotonin and oxytocin okay but then there's another reward system which is the one that drove a lot of human evolution which is the dopamine reward system now dopamine is a very misunderstood molecule it's often talked about only in the context of reward like i'm going to work to this goal i'm going to build my company i'm going to you know get tenure as a professor whatever it is and you reach it and you get this dopamine reward and indeed that's true but what's often not discussed is that dopamine is secreted enroute to rewards while you pursue rewards now the ability to tap into that system to subjectively amplify that pathway of reward in pursuit of goals is an absolute game changer when it comes to things like anything challenging that of long duration or uncertainty or getting through this cove you know pandemic situation but the amazing thing is remember the brain only does five things and we get to decide which of those sensations and perceptions have relevance and which ones don't or which ones are attached to a goal and which ones aren't so growth mindset in its purest form is the attachment of these reward systems to the effort process to the friction process and not just to obtaining a reward and just as a kind of final point to that there's a very um well-known body of literature and neuroscience at least among neuroscientists that talks about something called reward prediction error and it says if you can dose the dopamine subjectively as you go through the pursuit of something and then have a lot of dopamine when you reach that thing it's very likely that you're going to reinforce that circuit there will be neural plasticity and that circuit will become stronger so the next time you will revisit those sets of behaviors the opposite can happen too where you're in real anticipation of something this is going to be great this is going to be great this can be great and then you reach that goal and it's kind of underwhelming and that generally triggers this the circuit that i referred to earlier this kind of disappointment or pro-depressive circuit so dopamine is involved in reward but it's also involved in the pursuit of rewards and so as you reach a milestone or as you tell yourself i'm on the right track this friction i'm feeling this late night this early morning this hard conversation with somebody that doesn't feel good i'm going to tell myself this is for a larger purpose that's that subjective insertion that abstraction that we're talking about earlier and when you start releasing dopamine to those kinds of things there's essentially no limit on the number of things you can do or the energy to do them so just as a last last point about dopamine when we're in effort we're always secreting adrenaline we're always in pursuit and it's draining it's tiring dopamine has this beautiful capacity to buffer adrenaline and you know this you've experienced this before because if you've ever been working really really hard maybe your team is depleted everything's just a mess and somebody cracks a joke and all of a sudden in an instant it's like everything's reframed that couldn't have been hormonal hormones work on that on the schedule of like hours to days to weeks it had to be neurochemical it absolutely had to be neurochemical and that neural chemical is dopamine dude what you just described is literally the scientific breakdown of how you turn your life around i would just tell people that that subjective insertion is one of the most powerful concepts i have ever heard in neuroscience you're the only one i've ever heard articulate it that succinctly we can all apply these mechanisms and these neurochemical reward schedules so that the study that you're referring to is a beautiful one there's a classic study where researchers not my lab put two rats or you could do this with mice into a tube and the tendency is for them to try and push one or the other one out one always wins and pushes the other one out we call the one that got pushed out the loser the one that pushed him out the winner here are the interesting things about this first of all the winner will tend to win with other in other battles even though these are just pushing battles more because it simply won the time before the loser by losing will tend to lose and so people say oh well that explains a lot about society etc well here's where it gets really interesting you can even take a mouse or a rat and push it from behind and make it the winner and then on subsequent trials where you're not pushing it it will tend to win more often so the win doesn't even have to come from itself so last year there was a very important paper published about this where a set of researchers just said well what is it like what is this winning circuit and this losing circuit enough with the demonstration that this happens like what's happening on what's under the hood and so they went into the brain and they identified a brain area which is part of the frontal cortex the area that we typically think about planning action executive function all the kind of high level stuff and what they discovered was this brain area is more active in the winter than in the loser in fact they could take the loser and over stimulate this area and turn the losers into winners now it gets even more ridiculous than that if you quiet this brain area winners become losers okay and and if you take a winner and let's say at this tube battle and you put them into let's say a cold environment with a bunch of other mice and you have just a warm corner mice don't like to be cold and you say who gets the warm corner right who gets the luxury spot it's always the winner so it even breaks down at the level of social interactions and so you say okay all right now we know that it's this brain area it's this it's this one area of the frontal cortex but what's it actually doing right okay what's it actually tran what how can we translate this turns out this brain area that's responsible and required for winning in this series of experiments is actually driving up the level of activation what you and i would call agitation or stress to the point where that animal is more likely to move forward it's simply taking stress which is wired into us in order to make us feel agitated instead of suppressing us you know instead of saying you know i'm just going to sit here i'm overwhelmed i'm just going to move into action so there's a circuit for winning there's a the same circuit when it's hypoactive not active enough is what causes losing in these competitive scenarios and similarly there's a circuit for quitting there's an a norepinephrine circuit in the brain stem this was published in the last couple years showing that when animals or people are in constant effort eventually that level of norepinephrine gets so high that it triggers a circuit that shuts down the motor control over the limbs and you just say that's it i give up i'm done so these mechanisms were hardwired into us we all have them whether or not it's from evolution mother nature god the universe it is it's irrelevant to the discussion that these circuits exist in everybody and i think it's a select few people who really understand that forward action is what drives these circuits it's the ability to take that agitation stress agitation increase our focus and they bias us for movement and nature wanted that they want us to move forward in the face of challenge not to be quiescent we weren't sitting around battling tigers and saber-toothed tigers all the time more likely we were in caves and we were getting hungry and we had to go out and search for things agitation and stress were designed to get us up and move us and when we try and fight that too much and we try and quiet that stress that actually can be problematic you have to decide are you gonna try and quiet stress or are you gonna actually lean into action that's critical choice point for everybody who's experienced anything negative or positive for that matter dude that that is so useful in terms of getting people to understand how to get themselves out of it this goes back to this notion that your thoughts are ultimately a choice like you get to decide what you think about it the mind plays an important role in interpreting whether or not it's overwhelming or tolerable so intense breathing like tumor breathing or ice baths or cold showers or intense exercise like you know high intensity interval training type stuff teaches the mind to be comfortable in these higher stress states where in other words it teaches people to be comfortable when they have a lot of adrenaline in their body this is basically stress inoculation but stress inoculation is not about not getting stressed it's actually about divorcing the mind-body relationship a bit so that you're calm in the mind when your body is very amplified yeah so if you've ever done tumor type breathing or you've done a cold shower the goal is to get the adrenaline release and then calm your mind and then calm your mind but both those things breathing and vision also run in reverse meaning if we change our pattern of breathing we change our inner state if our state changes our breathing changes so it's reciprocal it's bidirectional likewise with vision when we are excited or stressed the aperture of our visual window shrinks we get that soda straw view of the world when we are relaxed the aperture of our vision expands but as well it runs in both directions if we expand our view of the world literally force our our visual field or just it's very easy actually you can do it no matter where you are right now if you just try and expand your visual field not by looking around or moving your head or eyes but by trying to see yourself in the environment that you're in so you literally dilate your view so you could see the ceiling in the floor and the walls if you're inside or if you're outdoors seeing as big an aperture of your visual field or your your visual environment as possible so you're directing your attention to even though you might remain looking straight ahead you're just directing your attention to as wide a peripheral view horizontally and vertically as possible is that what you mean that's right exactly so essentially if you keep your head and eyes mostly stationary you don't have to be you know rigid about rock steady but if you look forward and you expand your field of view so you kind of relax your eyes so that you can see as much of your environment around you as possible to the point where you can see yourself in that environment what you do is you are turning off the attentional and believe it or not the stress mechanisms that drive your internal state towards stress this is why when you go to a vista or you view a horizon it's very relaxing because you naturally go into panoramic vision when you are indoors you're looking at your phone you're looking at a computer or a camera or something of that sort or you're talking to somebody or an intense conversation you may not notice it but your entire visual field shrinks to a much smaller aperture and that drives an increase in alertness in internal state and we sometimes call that stress if it's a negative experience if it's a positive experience we might call that love or obsession or fascination but the important thing to realize is that both vision and breathing have a profound and very rapid effect on our internal state of mind and body and it runs in both directions our internal state that could be triggered by a text message or hearing something that somebody says drives changes in our breathing and our vision but our breathing and our vision can also drive changes in our internal state and so that article in scientific american was a discussion about how we can leverage the visual system and the respiration the breathing system in order to take control over our internal state because it's not just that 20 20 was stressful it's that our internal state determines everything it doesn't just determine if we feel like we're having a hard time falling asleep or having a hard time focusing for instance it also determines how we batch time how we analyze where we are in the world in terms of our lifespan a good example this would be when we are very stressed we fine slice time this is why when people are in a car accident or something they might report that things were in slow motion they're actually your frame rate increases whereas when you're very relaxed your frame rate slows down and when we are relaxed we get so-called perspective we are able to say well this too shall pass or i can place this stressful event in a context so one thing that's just fundamental to how our nervous system works is that we are constantly placing our experience both our immediate and past experience as well as our anticipation of the future into some sort of larger context and our visual system literally how we are viewing the world at that moment dictates how we create perspective in terms of states of mind sounds a little bit abstract but it's actually it boils right down to optics of the eye and very concrete things like how you move your eyes and how you view the world growth mindset which is the academic discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague carol dweck at stanford is the hallmark of growth mindset is really two things one is i'm not where i want to be now but i but i will i'm capable of getting there eventually the other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself in fact don't reward the result reward the effort that's right and if you look at true high performers people that are consistently good at what they do they don't peek and go through the post partum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently those people attach dopamine to the effort process and actually carol's one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that loved doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right so it's like the people love puzzles but in this case they knew they couldn't get it right but they loved doing it and it incidentally or not so instead only these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they're they feel some sense of reward from the effort process yeah now the cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled we can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way our interpretation our interpretation and but it has to be attached to reality so you know one should never confuse what is real right so no so if you're if you're thinking about the effort you're expending so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels and they're setting up a new business for instance and it's hard if they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially that it's giving them an opportunity that it's somehow they are on the right path or they're or if they're not in movement along that path or at least oriented on the right path they're not lying in bed all day they're thinking they're taking a step if they can reward that process internally two things happen first of all the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger so you get better at that process and second and most importantly dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine and what i mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal cell excellent journal cell press journal a couple years ago showing that with repeated bouts of effort we use and we release more and more epinephrine it's kind of adrenaline but in the brain with more effort every time every time you put in effort so every time you make look for this let's keep it if i were to keep it in the business context every time you make write that email every time you let's see it's a person who's a craftsman or a craftsman every time you're working in the in the shop and doing that every bit of effort you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account you're spending epinephrine at some point those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you you feel like quitting it feels exhausted this was done in a beautiful study actually where um they control the visual environments and they have the subjects exert effort and they can control the visual environment so sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward is actually kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion um would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress and other times it was an exercise in futility where they would just keep the the visual world stationary and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere epinephrine's climbing climbing climbing and eventually they quit now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you anyone the the feeling that you could continue and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue and you've seen this actually football is a good example two teams play say the super bowl both teams are max effort the entire time yeah max effort the team that wins suddenly in a moment has the energy to jump all over the place party for days they can talk i mean they they they're well that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind except it was neural energy and what happened was effort is this adrenaline adrenaline adrenaline adrenaline eventually people quit they just quit the dopamine is able to suppress that and so then you're expending effort but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it there was a paper published that essentially was asking why any human or animal quits at any behavior now certain behavior is like i can't lift a car unless it's a very small car can't lift a car but if it's we're talking about running or we're talking about long bouts of work the question is why do we quit like what is that it turns out that every time we exert effort a certain amount of noradrenaline in the brain is released and there's a sort of a counter in the brain stem and at some point enough noradrenaline is released and it shuts down cognitive control deliberate control over the motor circuitry and we quit that's it but the thing that can restore those levels or it can sort of reset those levels lower and give us more gas more mileage is dopamine and it makes perfect sense because our species had to move against very challenging things in in nature and in in terms of in culture at every stage of our evolution including now 2020 is a good example of this and when a good example would be if you're really slogging it out and things are miserable just think like the worst family vacation everything is a disaster or a very hard physical event and someone cracks a joke you almost immediately feel a sense of relief you see this in the team that wins the super bowl both teams slogged it out you have to believe they were both at max effort the entire game look at the team that wins they have extra energy they're jumping all over the place so it can't be physical energy it can't be glycogen related it's not ketone related it's nothing in the body in that sense it's dopamine's ability to take that level of norepinephrine and smack it back down and so we can learn this right i mean i think this is where there's real power like in your story or the story that i'm familiar with from your book like the the ability to push through those pain points is something that we really can export to other aspects of life because it's the same neurochemicals that are involved so when you get to a particular location or maybe i recall um you know a portion where you're just you're feeling lousy you know you're injured or you feel like you're hurt and you can reframe it mentally and think i'm actually still on the ladder i'm still holding on to a rum i know at least that much i'm still breathing i know that much and the lift that we get is not some psychological pump up it's a neurochemical thing it's dopamine suppressing norepinephrine and saying you're on the right path you can keep going it's a permission to keep going and we grant that permission to ourselves no one grants that permission to us i think one of the other kind of misconceptions that we want to dissolve is this idea that external rewards can actually propel us down long paths of of success and high performance and they can't no it's a it's an internal sustainable fuel source yeah yeah i have a friend from the seal teams and somebody asked us recently we were given a talk and somebody said how can i make sure that i continue to self-reward and i'm not driven by these um external rewards how can i continue to have that drive and uh his answer was very good he said give away all the external rewards you know now not all everyone can afford to do it's just about you and you it's just you and you and the more attached there's a famous stanford study done at bing nursery school probably not far from where you were in the dormitory there's a little nursery school in escondido village and they did this study where they looked at kids that liked to playing during their recess it's all recess in nursery school but they're drawing and they took the kids that really liked to draw and they started giving them little gold stars on their drawings and then they like the gold stars for a kid that's an extrinsic reward and then they stopped doing that and the kids stopped drawing they just they they associated the good feeling of doing it with the external rewards we have to be very cautious about how much of our internal dopamine we attach to external rewards if we want to continue to grow and pursue and focus and work hard if you just want to get to some place and cash in then fine but most people find themselves in a pretty miserable place because their dopamine was so attached to external rewards they need more and more of well breathing can be used to shift the brain into different states and um i've talked to david about this and so i'm sort of borrowing from his words here so i want to be fair that these are from those conversations so hypnosis inevitably involves relaxing the nervous system taking the nervous system into states that are more like sleep now what i mean by that is in high alert states where you're talking and planning and inaction and stress in particular the brain is very linear it's saying okay if this then this if then then this is why we tend to be forward thinking when we're when we're stressed we tend to be not in our immediate experience but really kind of forward thinking so clinical hypnosis involves going into a state of deeper relaxation so that our analysis of space and time meaning the way that the brain is perceiving events is slightly dismantled so that it's a little bit dreamlike and then the hypnotist and this could be by listening to a script or listening to a hypnotherapist starts to narrow our context take our thoughts if you will it down a particular path and that path could be one of um stress reduction or smoking cessation um hypnosis is incidentally is very good for treatment of smoking cessation or for feelings of well-being or confronting traumas so what it is is it's really opening up the window for neural plasticity which is of course the brain's ability to change in response to experience to trigger neuroplasticity you have to have focus especially as an adult you need acetylcholine released but high levels of attention acetylcholine and norepinephrine together norepinephrine to create that sense of urgency and acetylcholine to bring that spotlight of focus in really really tight that triggers plasticity but the actual it marks certain synapses in the brain for change but the actual changes in the synapses the rewiring okay that happens during states of sleep and deep rest so this is why when you're trying to learn a motor skill you go and you go in your tennis serve it's not happening it's not happening you take a break you come back and you nail it you're like wait what happened well you needed time to set those circuits in motion and allow them to do to the rewire and the sort of adaptation hypnosis seems to capture both the high attentional state and the deep relaxation at the same time it's this very unusual state of mind where you're neither asleep nor awake and in tight focus or narrow focus and it's very clear that it leads to these rapid changes in behavior because you're rewiring the brain and the reason you're able to rewire the brain so quickly is because you're getting the trigger event the focus and you're also getting the relaxation event simultaneously and so it's much faster than separating out the learning trigger from the actual rewiring of the brain my lab has a deep interest and david spiegel's lab has a deep interest now in using respiration or breathing to shift our state to either heightened states of focus and alertness to open up neuroplasticity dopamine is not just about reward it's one of the biggest misconceptions dopamine is about motivation and drive it's like a jet that propels you along a path how do we get more dopamine you practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind like wow okay so that's a great question first of all there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements i want to be really clear there is a drug there are two drugs actually that will cause massive release of dopamine they're called cocaine and methamphetamine the problem that's what gets us addicted because it feels so good the problem is exactly the problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulates so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source it becomes the goal of the path it becomes the path and the destination and you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine and that baseline on their life goes dopamine is this incredibly powerful molecule that allows us to buffer the effort process it allows us to be an effort longer and it allows us to actually eventually enjoy the process of effort and not think about the reward but just say oh i'm enjoying the process right well you just described the first step the first step in learning to attach dopamine to the effort process which is the key operation in order to succeed is to be very careful about how much you focus on the end goal keeping the goal in mind is important for like a proper orientation you have to know the ultimate destination but if at any point we were to evaluate our progress relative to that end goal or if we don't know what the end goal is there's a huge gap there and it can feel overwhelming the key to this is if we want to be very concrete we should probably focus on actions and i'll use fitness as an example because it translates to everybody whereas you know people's circumstances differ let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine they hate running or they want to lose weight in a healthy way this kind of thing so we've all heard the example well you put your shoes by the door on day one day two you put them on day three you go out the door day four you walk around the block and then you know and then eventually like they're running marathons okay great but to sustain that behavior or even to make the behavior pleasureful and to give you energy the key is to subjectively reward those steps so it's not going to be let's say i go out and i run a mile and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks the key is as you're in the strain of that mild the hard part you want to tell yourself this is the good part this is the part that gives me energy and i'll be very surprised if people don't actually feel like they could continue further so it's a journey of a thousand miles starts with the single is made up of you know single steps but the key is to reward the harder steps not the easier ones and not the ones where you get the thing that you want there's a process i'm going through right now where i'm trying to write a book and um it's hard and it's hard and i was told that the harder it is the better i'm probably doing it i was like great my editor's ready to kill me and because i'm slow and i and i know and i'm a very slow person i i drive people crazy i'm like glacially slow because science is slow and i like to get things right i want to rush it yeah i like to get things right but i'm very proud of the fact that everything we've published i can stand behind it was the best we could do with the tools at the time and i just know that when i look back on a writing career or a scientific career i want to be able to say you know every journal we put it in was rock solid everything was rock solid we had fun doing it the relationship so i go slow yeah but as a consequence what i'm finding is there are a lot of interferences these days i'm i'm i think social media is great i teach neuroscience on social media because i think it's important to do public education too but it's incredible and it's it's incredible how much time and energy it can take so what i've started doing now is i turn off my phone and i lock it in safe and i experience extreme anxiety right it's so weird why is that is it because it gives you so much dopamine that when you're not having it well this is scary because i actually think um brief anecdote on the weekend i was driving there's a kid that i mentor and i picked up my phone and i was texting while i was driving and he said to me this was really embarrassing for me he said you know i wish you wouldn't text while you drive and i put it and i put it down and i realized this is crazy i know that i that my life in his life is far more important and the lives of the people around me are far more important than any text message which means i wasn't doing it rationally it's just pure reflex at this point so i would i don't think i pick up the phone because i'm i don't even know what i'm looking for there anymore it's just become reflexive so for me lately the longer i can keep that phone in a safe and write on a grant or my or this book what i tell myself is the agitation is good i'm it's at least i'm not doing that and then i find that as i start to write and i get into the process i start feeling good about it and i'll pause and say okay i have control i have ultimate control over my behavior i can put that thing away there might be a nuclear war out there and i'm just doing this anyway i have control over my thoughts my feelings and behavior so i tell myself that and then i find i have immense energy and all i want to do is write and i kind of tunnel into the process wow and i think that sometimes people need to write these things out for themselves so it's really concrete i think some people are so unskilled at subjective rewards that writing it out is really powerful so what would you write out for yourself as a subjective reward for this experience as long as i'm writing i'm on the right path as long as i'm not writing and looking at my phone i'm not on the right path because for me the the two or three things that are most important for my career are writing grants working on this book manuscript and writing scientific manuscripts i mean there are other things as well anything else that you're not doing is is holding you back from doing that that's right so you need to be focused center mass forward on doing those things that's right so i don't do any jumping around power poses things like that i will use tools to kind of ramp up my dope i mean there are certain songs that are really embedded in my emotionally my emotional thing that go back to you know when i was a you know while you know skateboarding punk rock teenager that will get me fired up and i think there's real utility that's pure dopamine you know a lot of people hashtag growth mindset is one of the most popular hashtags in social media but most people don't actually know what it means and then again this is carol dweck's discovery not mine it was discovered in a group of kids that were doing math problems or other kinds of puzzles that they knew they couldn't get right but they enjoyed doing them and they perform exceedingly well on lots of sorts of tests of that sort when there is the right answer of course and so what they do is they somehow they're wired for effort they're wired for the puzzle not for the solution and when i say puzzle i don't mean the noun puzzle i mean the verb for being puzzled it for them feels good and so we need to think uh if we're talking about the nervous system and we want to make it actionable for high performance whether or not it's in business or sport or otherwise we want to think in terms of processes not events and verbs not nouns so growth mindset as a verb as an action item you know uh reward as a verb not just as a oh you're going to just pat yourself on the back like it's no it's what you internalize it's a process that's how the neural circuits that underlie reward get stronger and the beauty of of the brain is that you have this thing of neural plasticity which is its ability to change itself throughout the whole lifespan and the more you practice this the better you get at it and it does not mean you're walking around talking delusionally about how great life is when everything is terrible it means you might even be very stoic you might be hopefully you're very rational but you have the energy to continue to push forward there's an interesting process that that occurs when people start to realize that rewards are all internal and what they start to do is they start linking this duration path outcome thing to their internal rewards and so to put this simply one of the most powerful things that any person can do is to learn to control this idea of duration path and outcome and attach an internal sense of reward just that you're doing well to reward yourself mentally just say i'm doing well i'm actually on the right path to do that inside of the demands that come from the external world the more often that we can self-reward some aspect of the process provided it's in the right direction of what we're trying to achieve the more energy we're going to have for that the more focus we're going to have for that and remember that nor the reason i say energy i don't throw that around loosely is that limiting amount of noradrenaline is constantly being kept at bay you're literally buffering the quit response and so when people start realizing that if they set the goals inside of the larger goal and self-reward each one of those they essentially have an infinite amount of energy to pursue those goals they have an infinite amount of focus to pursue those goals you see this most uh in the special operations community and people that are selected essentially for this process so one of the things that's been intriguing to me i have some friends from the seal teams and i don't begin to you know really understand the real work that they do deployed because i've never done that kind of work but i've always been intrigued by the selection process the so-called buds process right because carrying logs and getting in cold water and all that that's not really how the work is that's really not what the work is about so the selection process is interesting because everyone shows up fit motivated and convinced that they're not going to quit i mean i think like there might be a couple to show up to show up but everybody is absolutely convinced and then a very small subset of them make it through and i'd be willing to bet that the ones that make it through of course they're gritty and resilient but they all are essentially right so that's necessary but not sufficient obviously otherwise everyone would make it through the people that make it through somehow are able to tap into a process maybe it's a reward process maybe it's through self-punishment maybe it's through self-reward um in the positive sense but they're able to control something inside an environment that is not controlled by them it's controlled by the by the instructors and i've always been struck by the fact that in order to to not in order to get through you just have to not quit remember people aren't being deselected they're not saying get out of here you're not good enough you're not people are deciding that for themselves and so it's interesting because it brings about a real world experiment of people who are quitting and i believe they're quitting because they can't manage these neurotransmitters and the people when i say manage i think that the people that get through knowing some of these people quite well had an internal process by which they could reward themselves for doing something that might have just looked trivial to everybody else but it gave them more gas more energy right right and what's interesting is the process the kind of unconscious genius of of the buds process is that they've picked two sensory events that are across the board challenging for everybody one is cold water which is great because it most of the time it can't kill you right it's not like heat which can kill you it's cold water and sleep deprivation and so the ability to do these like what i'm calling dpos this uh duration path and outcome steps and procedures is great on when you're rested you know uh you know when you have a when you have well-fed slept you can do anything you can be in any hard conversation you can work through anything so what they do is they start taking the autonomic nervous system which is these deep reserves of the nervous system that when our autonomic nervous system is off it starts making us pay more attention to how we feel than the demands of the world around us remember that yeah basic challenge in the nervous system and so sleep deprivation is the best way that you can pull somebody down from their ability to analyze duration path and outcome and reward themselves sleep deprivation is the way in which you essentially pull apart the nervous system and the way that it wants to function because it's very easy again rested to do all this but so what they do is they're sleep deprived people they put them in cold water they're trying to get them more in touch with the way that they feel inside than what they need to do in response to the external demands right everyone i know that's made it through that process did it slightly differently but i'll tell you how they didn't do it they didn't do it through sheer grit and determination they did it through attaching a sense of meaning they did it by micro slicing the day or slicing the day into a series of meals that they just need to get to and then rewarding themselves for getting to that next milestone so they don't know i mean most of them you know probably had very low concept of dopamine and norepinephrine but that's the process that's also the process i think that allows someone to finish an ultra i've never run an ultra but i think that process of self-reward is grit and resilience in a kind of neurochemical definition yeah and i think it's a thing that anybody can tap into and i think it's therefore i think it's it's so key because i think people think that uh it's just so key that people understand excuse me that these circuits are not unique to people who run ultras or people that make it through uh you know stringent filter special operations command yeah it's the same thing that it is interesting yeah so why why fear why do we have fears why do we have trauma why do we have shame and here's the stinger it was all set up for you in your youth i don't want to focus on the bad but most of the stuff when you're young you're just a passive learning machine it's all coming in little kids are learning three languages with no accents flexibly they're not even thinking about they're learning instruments you know someone asked a great question the other day at the workshop wait now i know i want all that stuff how come it's so much tougher and there's a lot of biology that i'd be happy to tell you about that explains why that all shuts down after these so-called critical periods during development so what happens when you're an adult and you want to change your brain so now i'm going to get into stuff that hopefully is useful to you okay so these basic facts that changing your brain in a real way as an adult requires that you do particular things that activate particular chemical systems in your brain so how do you do that right i could tell you all about the chemicals and i'll tell you a little bit about them but how do you do it okay so this is a right here right now urgent situation car wreck it's terrible you can imagine any other trauma in its place when that happens a little area in the base of the brain the name isn't important but if you care it's called nucleus basalis does its job which is just it's an alert system it puts all its attention on right here right now get everybody safe it's your alert system and it has this effect of dumping out a certain chemical called acetylcholine at specific locations in the brain that are paired with that experience and forever that experience will be traumatic unless something else is done okay so there's some nuance and some details to this but that pretty much summarizes it it's been replicated many many times in dozens of studies you compare pretty much any experience with stimulation of nucleus basalis this thing in the in the base of the brain and that experience will be mapped or remapped in your brain as an adult and that's remarkable it's also exciting because then i someone like me says well then how do i change my experience how do i change the meaning of what happens how do i change something from traumatic to positive the good news is nucleus basalis is just a slave to whatever is exciting traumatic it likes emotion it like it likes peaks and lows and so if acetylcholine is released that means you can massively change your brain at that moment with whatever's paired with it and so when you get into a peak state here you're jumping up and down or in a really low state and you're thinking how miserable something is you have to be really careful because those are the things that you're wiring in alright so you can move to a state like this about driving later if you form enough associations with driving to really eliminate to override the fear you need to create a positive experience in its place so how do you do that so i'm gonna tell you that the way to do that is not to think too hard and to not verbalize things too much and this is coming from someone who spent 25 years three times a week on a couch letting subconscious things geyser up and that's where i really learned that it was really the things that you don't realize that have the potential to have the most impact but this power of emotion the ability to couple really strong emotions with things is so useful if you want to change your brain for the better and the way you do that is clear in the physical space we all know this story there are many news cases like this woman's child stuck under car super human strength we heard a lot of amazing stories about desperation jj's story was one of desperation she's like no i'm not going to accept failure because failure in the case in the case she was describing was potentially the death of her child so desperation is a strong one and it's motivate motivated by fear but what if you're not in a desperate state and you really want to do something in that case there's something remarkable and then we should and we should ask ourselves why are children such great passive learners they're not trying they're just learning they're coming home with all sorts of things sometimes things you don't want them to come home with right it's because they have this element of play and what is play play isn't just movement although it includes movement it's giving things everything you've got but keeping it in perspective it's that sweet spot of enjoying life and trying really really hard at it at the same time it's essentially what we all strive for and there are these incredible cases throughout history famous scientists because i grew up in a house where people you know revered scientists like like richard feynman nobel prize winner he's most famous for bongo drumming naked on the roof of caltech and he became an amazing artist in his 60s and he developed all sorts of other skills and he always had this childlike way of looking at the world he never let himself get stuck in his ways never became a curmudgeon and a remarkable man and that's something that i if you come away with nothing else i encourage you to do that you want your brain to change stay light stay loose but give it everything you've got can a person make it so they never get depressed they never react to um their perception their people's actions towards them where they never get to a state of uh i don't feel good i'm feeling more depressed i'm in a a dark place now i'm stuck in this place is there a way that we could ever defend ourselves against negative stressors negative emotions or are we just are they do we need them as well to have contrast in life well there's sort of two views on this um i'll reveal mine after i um sort of explain the two views one is that these states i guess i'm i'm automatically calling things like depression a state of mind so when i say state of mind i mean brain and body because your body is really feeling it's like the brain is connected to the body right and so if you're saying internally the thought of like i'm depressed i don't feel good or i'm sad or lonely or i'm not good enough the body's going to react is that what i'm understanding absolutely the body is going to manifest what the mind is telling you absolutely the thought the idea you're gonna be like i'm sad i'm not good enough you're gonna shrink right is that right that's right i mean they're really two forms of depression um sometimes they're intermixed but one is anxiety-associated depression and you you if you've ever experienced it or anyone that's experienced it they feel agitation in their body and their mind races but in their body so the body is recruited there are also depressive states that people feel very fatigued and exhausted it's been overwhelmed and they also experience that in their body the idea of getting out of bed in the morning is hard um motivating to exercise doing the sorts of things that we know are powerful for pushing back on depression so the body is recruited i think most people would say that depressive states are bad when they bring down the baseline on life i just to as a brief aside anytime there's a question about mental health or addiction or trauma or anything one could look at it and make up some argument of low evolutionarily this makes sense we all get depressed but we have to be fair to the person experiencing it of course and have sensitivity that some behaviors will keep the baseline of our life steady meaning job relationships etc will continue as they are other activities will tend to improve the baseline on our life job activities relationship etc will will improve and then there's some things like heroin which does very quickly we can predict that very quickly the baseline on life is going to creep down regardless of who that person is right so people say can you get addicted to water well maybe but i have to drink a lot of water before the baseline of my life starts to go down so sure it feels uncomfortable that's just like man i'm so bloated exactly so we tend to throw around things like addiction and depression a little loosely so yeah i think that it's fair to say that depression is wired into us as a possible state that we can all fall into but that it's very important in my opinion that humans have tools to remove themselves from that state of course to avoid tragedies like suicide but also because when the baseline on someone's life goes down far enough they find it increasingly hard to do the sorts of things that are going to get them out of depression so you or i could say so they stay in that state of depression that's right it's too hard to go work out it's too hard to change my habit of eating healthier so i'm going to stay i'm going to keep eating ice cream which is going to make my body you know depressed that's right right if i keep eating bad foods if i keep staying up till 4 a.m if i keep staying in the toxic relationship i want to feel depressed that's right and eventually because of this very um inseparable relationship between the brain and body eventually what happens is that because the brain controls the body but also the body can control the brain people lose the ability to intervene in this depressive process so you or i could say look if someone who's depressed they what they need to do is get up early get some light in their eyes get some movement i know you put this information out there which i love because these the those tips are grounded in uh they're not even tips they're really tools and they're very powerful because they're grounded in excellent science you get that dopamine release early in the day that's anti-depressive you time your sleep better when you get sun in your eyes and you get movement early in the day for most people that's accessible and they should be they absolutely should be doing it everyone should be doing that but for people who are far enough down that path of depression because the body and the mind have this relationship that's so close there is a crossover point where they really can't do those activities because they're so far deep into the depression the body won't do what they decide to do and so now i'm not trying to give anyone a pass because ultimately we are all responsible for our own mental health certainly adults more than kids but you know we're all responsible for our own mental health and only we can direct our own brain changes that's the that's the stinger once we're you know 25 years and older we are the only ones that can change our brain and we can talk about neuroplasticity if you like but the depressed person has to take responsibility for their behavior but this is why it's so important to catch this brain-body relationship early and build routines that keep one out of depression so that was a long path back to answer your question succinctly i hope which is we can stay out of depression but we have to keep depression at bay by doing things regularly we have these so-called receptors in the eyes and the ears and the nose and the mouth on the skin that take physical entities in the in the universe that are real fixed non-negotiable things like sound waves and photons of light and chemicals in the environment traveling that make it into our nose and things like that and convert those into the second thing which is perceptions so the nervous system's responsibility is to take those sensations which are non-negotiable and perceive certain ones and not others so for instance right now until i say you know what's the sensation of your feet contacting the floor or the bottoms of your shoes you weren't thinking about it but those pressure receptors were being engaged the entire time so your perception is like a window or a spotlight that's very much linked to a then there are emotions often called feelings and those are really designed to push us down particular avenues of perception and the next thing which are thoughts okay so we've got sensation perception feelings and then there are thoughts which really have a lot to do with what we're perceiving and the way we're organizing those perceptions what they mean and generally that's put into the context of what we already know or memories and then the fifth thing is behaviors or actions and of course neurons are responsible for generating actions and they're really two kinds of actions there are the actions that you generate reflexively like your breathing and your heart rate right now are largely reflexive or you could decide troll of your respiration and be make it voluntary right and not just reflexive so those five things sensations perceptions feelings thoughts and actions really encompass all of our life experience and that's from the very mundane of getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth to the most awe-inspiring uh goal-motivated uh pinnacle moments of your life the nervous system not the immune system not the digestive system all of which are important but the nervous system meaning the brain spinal cord and the connections with the body and the connections from the body back to the brain and spinal cord are responsible for all of that and as a just a final point the nervous system is also responsible for telling the immune system something that's very relevant right now in this covid pandemic when to be active you know we don't often think about the immune system as governed by anything i want to just mention about the diaphragm why it's so important for what were these state changes is that a lot of people talk about the vagus nerve and all this stuff the vagus and these connections between the brain and this vagus nerve or the gut it's what gets activated when you're really full and you eat a big meal and you feel relaxed those are great but it's very slow the diaphragm is skeletal muscle just like your bicep just like your tricep just like your quadricep it is the only internal organ except maybe a couple muscles in your throat that are actually skeletal muscle meaning it was designed to be voluntarily moved and the diaphragm isn't just designed to move your lungs it also sends a signal through the so-called phrenic nerve back to the brain to inform your brain about the status of your body so when you breathe fast deliberately the reason you feel kind of an elevated sense of alertness is because the other chemicals secrete but mostly because the phrenic nerve is firing off it's telling you hey the body's moving we're really running now even though you're stationary in a chair if you're doing breathing or if you're breathing very slowly and rhythmically right box type breathing or you know slow slow breathing your diaphragm is telling your brain hey we're calm we're good and you calm down very quickly on the order of seconds and so once you start tapping into this you start realizing okay movement of the body was designed to inform the brain of where to be not just the brain telling the body and how does the body communicate with the brain through the phrenic nerve from the diaphragm so my lab is really pursuing two questions and this is still being worked out so i just want to highlight that it's still in progress but certain patterns of breathing will calm you very much like entering a hypnotic state and so you have a subset of neurons in your brain stem that are responsible for sighing is it you have a subset of neurons in your brainstem responsible for for coughing subset of neurons responsible for laughter and a subset of neurons in your brainstem for sign this was a paper published in nature this is a real thing these neurons are every so often and your dog does this too you inhale twice and then you exhale long now that double inhale best done through the nose on the inhales and then long exhale through the mouth activates these sine neurons that trigger the so-called calming reflex the parasympathetic arm of the nervous system so we have a hard-wired mechanism a set of neurons connection in the diaphragm and back again from the diaphragm to the brain that was designed to activate calm and when people ask me how should i breathe to calm myself down i always say double inhale through the nose followed by exhales two or three of those will reset your autonomic nervous system faster than any other mechanism we're aware of because it's really capitalizing on a set of neural circuits now once you're calm you say well how do i get into plasticity states there you want to go the other direction that's going to be inhaling a lot more than you exhale you're going to be driving in more oxygen than you are breathing out generally carbon dioxide and that will lead to states that are kind of more elevated this is typical of things like tumor breathing wim hof breathing kundalini breathing and when people enter those states their whole world changes because it shuts off the frontal cortex it really this is why sometimes people pass out or they feel like they want to get up and move you know you get some odd behavior when you're doing this kind of thing so the key is if you want to access states of heightened plasticity let's say you want to learn faster or you want to be more um you want to bring more out of some physical training that you're doing the key is to apply those principles first you need to focus you need to bring yourself to that heightened state of alertness you can breathe to do that so this would be super oxygenated breathing then you want to drop into a state of calm and you do that by these a couple maybe two or three rounds of inhale inhale exhale inhale inhale exhale and then now your brain is in a state we believe this is still again being worked out in labs like mine and david's but then you're in a state for heightened learning because you're in a state where neurochemicals like acetylcholine are going to be at levels that are higher than they typically would be things like noradrenaline slightly higher than they typically would be but not in a discombobulated way in a very regulated way and the cool thing is you're regulating them so you could argue you know earlier we were talking about subjective emotions and thoughts and all these things but one thing that's absolutely concrete is breathing i always think of physical exercise movement writing whatever singing dancing talking those are physical actions in the universe then you have thoughts and somewhere in between those is controlling your respiration once you can control everything that's within the confines of your skull and skin once you can really control that relationship that brain body relationship you start to realize that relationship is a lot like any other relationship to forward action it's just all happening within the confines of my body so it's heightened states of focus followed by states of relaxation that are going to prime your nervous system for learning and plasticity just like hypnosis sorry for the long-winded discussion do don't you dare apologize that is some of the most powerful and useful information literally ever i can't i can't tell you how much i love what you're studying how do you get motivated well one way to do that is if you are good at subjectively attaching dopamine to the pursuit just knowing okay i really am hungry for this i'm just i'm going to tell myself that you know making you know making it one percent of the way is a success and i'm going to keep going and i'm going to keep ratcheting on and that's great if you can do that but for people that can't do that understanding this relationship with a pleasure pain balance can be more powerful just understanding the more friction and pain that you experience the greater the dopamine reward you will get later and that serves as its own amplifier of the whole process of pursuing more dopamine and then the other aspect of it is that any time that we're leaning into action you know it has the possibility of being an amplifying process or a depleting process and the key to that is making sure that you're balancing the dopamine and epinephrine systems you know epinephrine being this molecule of universal currency of energy output could be out of hate or could be out of love epinephrine doesn't care and actually dopamine doesn't care none of these systems care about us they just work underneath our underneath our conscious control but when you start to understand that hitting the gas pedal is great but hitting the gas pedal and then coming off the gas pedal a little bit you can kind of sit in a more relaxed rpm actually allows you to go much further i think that people leaning into action is terrific i always say you can either be back on your heels flat-footed or forward center of mass the best situation is actually to be right upright but just know that you can be forward center of mass at any point and you know that to take it back to sex and reproduction because it's a salient example the arc of of sex is very interesting because when you think about autonomic arousal it turns out that the the arousal stage of sex actually involves release of dopamine but is what we call parasympathetic dominant it's actually has to be relaxed enough in order to occur okay everyone can read between the lines on this orgasm is actually a i want to say full blown it's a it's a it is a sympathetic nervous system driven response it's identical to the stress system it's driven by the same neural circuits as stress and then what comes afterward the parasympathetic system goes back up again it's that deep relaxation so why do i say this not to talk about sex to be you know to to serve as a highlighter but rather our species arrived here because of this dance between arousal and relaxation arousal and relaxation and one thing we can say for sure about every human being that's alive now is that their parents at least once mastered this dance of relaxed but not and excited but not too excited then really excited and then relaxed that dance was mastered by all of our parents and that's what delivered us here to some extent and so i what this means is that all the neural circuits from the ones that led to our conception to the ones that lead to us pursuing goals have this balance this almost like a like a seesaw right there's activation and calm activation and calm and it's that dynamic process that's important to master in every endeavor so we use sex as an example but in pursuit of goals you have to learn how to pursue short-term goals and like the goals within the day make a cup of coffee and go and long-term goals and when i said dopamine is what's setting the your time perception it's an interval timer what you're saying is it's like the two marshmallow experiment done at stanford def defer the dopamine and actually if you can turn the waiting into the dopamine and then you can extend out the reward for you know waiting for the second marshmallow 15 minutes later et cetera et cetera and there are many many examples of this in the psychology and neuroscience literature and i would say finally in 2020 we finally as a field got a clear idea of how dopamine is really working because before it was all about work dopamine hit right sex gives you a doubling hit the internet gives you a dopamine what we didn't realize is that repeated engagement with these things leads to dopamine depletion and that the pain and pleasure balance is always at work there are other things that if it's a physical skill that you're trying to learn as opposed to just a mental skill then there's a whole kingdom of things that are fun for instance if it's a physical skill you want to generate as many repetitions as you safely can per unit time so if you say i'm going to learn dance you want a ball machine if you're playing tennis exactly you literally want to generate repetitions and in particular you want to generate failures every time you you give a bad serve playing tennis oh yeah that activates the circuits for focus and alertness for the next yeah it's true that's right so when you're losing that's right so so that and a lot of people don't like failures and so they back away from it so remember the nervous system will only change if you give it a reason to do that and the other one that's kind of an interesting twist on this is the way the nervous system is wired is it wants to pass off all of its work to circuits that are reflexive as much as it can you don't think about walking anymore because you learned how to walk but when you were learning you were very focused on sure one of the things that can set the stage for more plasticity overall is when you disrupt the vestibular or the balance system it does appear that whenever we are physically off balance the brain is primed to pay attention and the mil the chemical milieu is such that it can actually rewire itself faster and whereas i think the 90s and 2000s brought out a lot of important work on saying hey er exercise of aerobic type or maybe even weight training can create neuroplasticity it was that was great but it wasn't directed enough it didn't say well what kind of exercise yeah and what will get me even more plasticity and so there are some basal things about heart rate and blood flow etc but anything that involves balance or coordination it's incredible how fast the brain can learn so things like dance martial arts a real sport not just exercising and i'm not no disrespect to the the ex i'm more of a just an exerciser than a sport guy um but if you're 40 50 60 80 whatever learning a new physical skill we know is tremendously powerful for opening up neuroplasticity broadly so some people will even leverage this where after they finish some physical skill learning or something they might take a 20-minute nap and then they might read yeah and they might try something so when we see these people i've been learning surfing i'm like 60 years old perfect so similar and i'm like yeah exactly exactly i learned started learning tennis when i was 45 and it's really a challenge because it's not automatic and i have to really focus and be present well these and these individual cases are are not necessarily the place to hang our hat completely but for instance the great physicist richard feynman he was well known for learning bongo drums in the six when he was in well it was in the 60s but in his 60s then he became a quite accomplished um painter later in life and you know his whole thing was approach all of these things from a standpoint of play with intense focus yeah and i think the play element is key because the play element keeps the agitation in check so that when you're stepping on your partner's feet trying to learn how to dance or you're failing miserably it it can frustration is a real thing and so i think that the element of playfulness some people call it beginner's mind but i think that should be the anchor point to return to and people that maintain curiosity or i should say that cultivate curiosity and that cultivate a sense of play and willingness to take on new vestibular experiences of all things they show very they show remarkable plasticity into their late life and i think that it all comes back to this thing that the brain won't change unless something changes in the weather of the brain the overall milieu has to say oh wait everything that's about to happen is different yeah otherwise why would it change there are other goals that are very different last time we talked you were learning spanish yeah still learning yeah still learning and there's a and there's a little bit more friction there because it's very challenging it takes more effort to lean in because you when you don't already know how to do something it's a very different goal pursuit mm-hmm right sort of like so if i already have my business and i've been running it for a few years you know certain practices of how to get to where you've been that's right and you're thinking how do i double my business that's right it's different than i'm trying to learn a whole new skill goal right you already know how to forage for water as opposed to you're some young calf or some animal that needs to learn how to walk right so you so i think you know one big goal of the sort that um you know we don't actually have the skill set yet we're not even aware that of what we need in order to accomplish it per year seems like a pretty good goal to me so learning entirely new language or an entirely new physical skill but with any long-term goal the problem is remember don't focus on the destination that's right well so you have to move the horizon in but you have to remember there's that one little pitfall that cul-de-sac that i described where you'll tell people this year i'm going to do blank and if they reward you enough you might not do it remember if you get enough dopamine it's amazing i'm so happy you're doing that congratulations and you say i know i can do it and then you don't you sort of lose the incentive to do it so a lot's been made out of making uh goals public is it is it better to make them public or not well so this is this is a question i don't know i think that in my case it has um for me telling people several people that i'm going to do something because i will work very hard to avoid uh humidity but i tend to do that with things i really want to do anyway but there's a strong fear element like i'm afraid to do this or i'm i'm kind of anxious about doing this so i'll tell people and then i'm like okay now i'm committed yeah you gotta do this you gotta do it now and i tell people that i'm certain they're gonna give me a hard time yeah that's just my name right um and i'm not trying to prove them wrong i'm just trying to make sure that they don't have any ground to stand on yeah and that's how i do it i think for some people the continuation of what they're already doing if it's feeling like a lot of work it's feeling exceedingly challenging and like oh my god another year of this another five years of that i think that's when you have to move the horizon in really close i think a lot of people right now are feeling back on their heels because 2020 was such a trying year for a lot of people so everyone many people are recalibrating what's possible although many people are feeling expansion and they're really going to go forward full steam so i think continuing in pursuits that we already have some degree of mastery over and thinking about where could i notch that up another two or three percent i think that's incredibly valuable i think that provides a lot of value to the individual to their families and to society really because a two percent improvement of like what you're already doing is going to have an outsized effect on what other people receive right even though for you you've been down that road many times but taking on a new pursuit in parallel to that means really getting excited about the possibility you give the jim carrey example about the possibility and starting to imagine what that would actually be like to be well let's say fluent in spanish and you can just do this reflexively without having to try that's totally within your reach and i think there it makes sense to really think about the end point quite a lot as a way to get over those barriers of sure of fear because when you already know how to do something there's no fear barrier yeah it's just an energy barrier right but when you're don't know how to do something there's all this sense of clunkiness that is really uncomfortable beginner's mind is a painful place that's so hard man a lot of people think about it like beginner's mind is such a you know it's such a delightful place to be so hard the friction the amount of energy to build momentum is so challenging in the beginning well this is where play becomes very important because you know the great physicist you know richard feynman was also famous in addition to being a you know physics phenom for having the sense of play he learned to bongo drum late in life he was became an artist late in life and he had this lightness and this and this kind of joyful way to approach things humor at oneself is incredibly powerful now we know the chemical basis for that laughing at oneself is often the best way to move forward really yeah because you you you i mean i do this well maybe i don't know maybe i'm biased but i do this all the time i'll just laugh at myself for how worked up i can get about the fact that a file won't load or something like that i just laugh and it's crazy i mean and all of a sudden i have the energy to do it so what does that do for our brain when we laugh at ourself but not but there's probably a difference between laughing ourselves or something like that versus making fun of something that's a bad habit like i'm always shaming ourselves we're not shaming ourselves 200 pounds overweight let me laugh at myself shame is kind of written into like who we are it's not about what we're doing it has this element of like who we are you know guilt is sort of more about i forget who said this but it wasn't me first i just want to be clear i recognized it wasn't me first guilt is sort of more about um what we did you know shame is is like an identity thing um laughing at herself yeah like laughing ourselves like how ridiculous the human mind can touch i mean let's face it as brilliant as as the the nervous system and our minds and our bodies can be they they make a lot of mistakes and we are a fallible species we're not a perfect species and perfection should never be the goal and if i finish a chapter i will stop for a moment and i'll just kind of smile and laugh at myself i'm big on like self-reflection with humor and just thinking this is crazy you know my brain is under my control there would be people out there that say there's no free will but i do not believe that i put my hands in a lot of brains you stimulate certain brain areas people do things you stimulate other brain areas people think things ultimately unless you have electrodes in your head and someone's stimulating them we are in control of our thoughts and behaviors we can't control all of them but my goal is to be as you know deliberate and non-reflexive as possible in life that's my goal from when i wake up in the morning until i go to sleep how do we get to that place little by little and by rewarding each thing if you get up and you used to make the bed exam make the bed you're you're not back on your heels you make a cup of coffee you sit down you script out something in a journal you exercise maybe you call a relative that you think might need to hear from you or that you'd like to talk to you do something in a deliberate way just being deliberate and learning to push away the things that are trying to make you reflexive is so important the nervous system is designed to orchestrate all the processes in the body not just thinking and not just behavior and really can be divided into five things so there's sensation and sensation is really bound or restricted by the receptors in the body so receptors in the eye that perceive photons light energy receptors in the skin that perceive pressure you know touch receptors smell taste hearing etc and the interesting thing about sensation and the fact that the nervous system needs to pay attention to sensation is it's non-negotiable the nervous system of humans is designed to extract physical phenomenon from the universe that are non-negotiable photons of light i can't see in the infrared with my eyes and i can't see ultraviolet light with my eyes i can't perceive that because i don't have the receptors for it so you know other animals can perceive some of those things but that leads us to the next thing which is perception which is which sensations are you paying attention to so all the time you're sensing things like right now your feet are sensing the contact with your shoes but you're not thinking about it until i say that and then you shift your perception right so perception is like the spotlight so the brain wants to constantly bring in sensation it's non-negotiable what's coming in it's just depending on your environment perception is negotiable you can control that because i just said shoes and you thought about your feet and there you are then there are feelings which can be a little bit nebulous but feelings are a link between our emotion and it generally invokes the body sensations in the body and concepts in the mind of what those sensations are about that's really what emotions are animals definitely experience them i'm kind of appalled to think that 10 years ago people like do animals have emotions of course they have emotions right because those are bodily sensations merged with some perception so of course they do and then there's thoughts and thoughts are interesting because thoughts happen spontaneously think about like a web browser that's constantly giving you pop-ups but thoughts can also be deliberate so you and i can decide right now that we're going to think about a plan for something or we're going to think about what's going on in the world so thoughts happen spontaneously and they can be deliberate and then the final thing is behaviors and actions so the nervous system is responsible for sensation perception feelings thoughts and behaviors and what's interesting we start to think about that as you're like okay that's a lot but what is the nervous system really trying to accomplish like on any given day or at any moment what's it trying to accomplish and it's really trying to accomplish one thing which is to take perceptions of the outside world and merge those with perceptions of the inside world what we call interoception and to link those in a way that's operating on our environment in the appropriate way so what do i mean by that so if i'm feeling anxious and i'm in a very calm environment i'm going to perceive that rapid heart rate and kind of feeling of agitation in my body as inappropriate for the moment right and my goal then as a as an organism is to adjust my my level of what they call autonomic arousal or alertness down if i'm in a at a great party or i'm at a wedding or it's a celebration or i'm at a protest or you know um then i might feel that my level of alertness is appropriate for my environment so the nervous system is in this constant dynamic interaction with the outside world and trying to figure that out one way that this can be kind of conceptualized is there's an emerging idea that's kind of interesting about impatience so we've all had the feeling of being impatient some people are far more patient than others but if you've ever been in line at the store and you feel like something's going very slowly you know the person in front of you is taking a long time they're doing some returns you're getting kind of impatient maybe you're breathing in a mask and you're like oh like you're you know what's the idea is that if you're getting a certain frequency of pulses from your body and if those pulses are coming in quickly like you're perceiving your yourself that enteroception quickly it's like pulse pulse pulse pulse you're going to be more geared towards your internal representation and then you're seeing what's going on in the outside world and it seems like it's going very slowly but there are other times when you're in line at the store someone's getting some returns and you're texting on your phone you've had a great day you've had a great run your family's in great shape and you're fine why well the frequency of those pulses that interoception is matched pretty well to your outside environment and so impatience is really when you're in internal sort of metronome is not matched well to the external environment there are other times when you're feeling like your internal metronome is tick tick tick and you've got a million things coming at you through email or text you've got a bunch of things and you're feeling overwhelmed and tired well in either case there's nothing right or wrong it's just your body and your brain are trying to say what's going on in the outside world and how well matched am i to it right so if you think about some of the the sort of core practices of mindfulness and self-regulation of like focusing on breathing or focusing on on you know state of mind a lot of that is trying to bring more awareness to your internal state but what our brain is normally doing when our eyes are open and we're interacting in the world is we're constantly trying to update our internal state to match external demands of the world and this harkens back to a you know like a really early design of all nervous systems which is how do you take an organism that needs certain things food water mates reproduction shelter how do you move that organism how do you create a system that will do that in best relation to the environment and so what mother nature has done is designed a sys a series of systems let's just take agitation and stress for one if an animal or a human is very thirsty you feel kind of agitated you might get up and get a drink of water if you're very thirsty it can put you into a state of panic if you're extremely thirsty and water is a limited resource you might even result to violence to get it or negotiation of some sort that you wouldn't if you were calmer so the stress and agitation we're designed to actually mobilize the body to take us in the direction of something that's adaptive so you can start to see these kind of core elements of what the brain and nervous system do sensation perception feeling thought and action and this constant challenge of trying to match our internal state to the external real estate the outside world and you start to see that the sensations that we call stress or impatience or calm are really the result of that those attempts that the nervous system is trying to perform they get very micro they move the horizon in very close and so if you can move the horizon to something you know you can complete and you reward that you essentially are where you were before you're just as strong if not stronger but you're heading in the direction you need to go you're not depleting you're not spending out anything and it feels a little weird because none of us like to reward things that aren't external but the ability to control these internal reward schedules is everything one thing that um you've talked about that i think is uh along these lines be interesting to see if if they feel as related to you when you know so much about it but for me at a high level these feel very related talked about somebody gets in a car accident uh acetylcholine if i'm not mistaken to what extent does our subjective narrative the story the story we tell ourselves actually means something for the body and to what extent does the body actually mean something for the subjective narrative the reason i call it a brain body contract early on is that their the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue so you know the idea that when we're depressed we tend to be in more defensive type postures when we're feeling good we tend to be in more like relaxed and extended postures all true but it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that i'm going to completely shift the mind right that's a first step think about like two interlocking gears it's one gear that turns the other but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going and how do you get it to dance together exactly so subjective there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body to answer your question can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold so a couple things that are important first of all just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are thoughts happen spontaneously all the time they're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection but thoughts can also be deliberately introduced for instance right now i can say okay have a thought that just decide to write your name and your you can do that i'm going to decide write my name and you can do it so that's a deliberate thought which says that you can introduce thoughts so i think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them they ten generally they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time but we can introduce a positive thought an ability to control your levels of stress in real time is extremely powerful it turns out you can do this using physiology and neuroscience your breathing can directly impact your heart rate and your level of stress or calm here's how it works when you inhale your diaphragm moves down this creates more space in your thoracic cavity and your heart actually gets a little bit bigger as a consequence the rate of blood flow through that larger heart volume slows down a signal is sent from a group of neurons on your heart called the sinoatrial node that signal goes up to the brain and your brain sends a signal to speed the heart up in other words inhaling speeds your heart rate up the opposite is true as well when you exhale your diaphragm moves up your heart gets a little bit smaller because there's a little bit less space in your thoracic cavity as a consequence blood flows more quickly through that smaller volume the sinoatrial node registers that and sends a signal to your brain and the brain sends a signal to slow the heart down so in other words inhaling speeds your heart rate up exhaling slows your heart rate down so if you want to speed up your heart rate and be more alert inhale more or make those inhales more vigorous more intense if you want to calm down you can do that quickly by making your exhales slightly longer than your inhales or making them more vigorous this doesn't require any breath work this is something that you can do in real time and that's what's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia that's the technical phrase it's also the basis of what's called heart rate variability or hrv but all you need to remember is inhaling deeper and longer will speed your heart rate up exhaling longer and more intensely will slow your heart rate down and will allow you to calm down in real time you can learn so much for better or for worse i always say the downside is that early in life you're you have less control over your life circumstances but your brain is very plastic so there's a you know darken light to that later in life you have a lot more control generally over your life circumstances but the brain becomes less plastic however we know based on nobel prize winning work and recent work in addition to that that the neuromodulator acetylcholine is secreted when we pay attention to something very specific it acts as sort of a spotlight in the brain making certain synapses the connections between neurons more active and more likely to be active again than others so when you hear that song that you love so much and it moves you and you feel dopamine being pulsed into your body that's a real thing you're actually getting dopamine secretion you've formed that deep association with that and acetylcholine draws your attention to that and that song is essentially wired in a very indelible way into your nervous system multiple you can probably even with certain songs you can feel your body start to energize because of course the brain through connections with your muscles controls your body so for things that are traumatic or negative what we're really talking about is neuroplasticity that's focused on unlearning and most of the therapies for this whether or not it's emdr eye movement desensitization reprocessing or it's traditional psychoanalysis and psychotherapy or it's somatic embodied release big you know kundalini breathing type almost all of those are designed to do something which is to bring the person or you bring yourself into a state of heightened alertness right you can't do this stuff when you're sort of half asleep heightened alertness and then focusing your attention on the traumatic or negative event this is the way that it works and then pairing that was something new you know traditionally this was done with things like nlp or in talk therapy where people would feel the relation the positive relationship with the therapist that was kind of the main rationale in association with this very traumatic sometimes even you know shameful type events and the idea is that you you would simultaneously have those two experiences the negative one and the feeling of safety and you would rewire those circuitries i actually believe that can work but it can take a lot of times it can take a lot of visits to the therapist which is not to say it's bad it's just not everyone has access to those resources things like eye movement desensitization reprocessing simply moving the eyes laterally while recounting these negative events the woman who devised this figured out that somehow when people recount these traumatic experiences when they're doing these lateralized eye movements not vertical eye movements they somehow separate out the negative emotions and i thought for years people would ask me about this stuff tom and i thought this is ridiculous first of all i'm a vision scientist and i work on stress it's like there's no way and then i really ate my words because four papers two inhumans two in mice and then a fifth paper published in nature which is kind of our super bowl of scientific publishing showed that these lateralized eye movements quiet the amygdala they actually suppress activation of this threat detection center in the amygdala and why would that be true ah so this is really where it gets cool turns out because of when the way that we view the visual world when we move through space when our head moves or when we walk and things flow past us that these lateralized eye movements are what happens when you move forward in space when you're walking when you're moving forward towards something and that suppresses activation of the amygdala now you say why well okay so then 2018 my laboratory did an experiment there was actually a graduate student in my laboratory where we're looking at fear in this case we're looking at fear to big looming objects that either trigger freezing or running and hiding there's a brain area that's in your brain and migraine that mice also have that triggers a third option not run and hide not freeze but forward confrontation this is the no i'm gonna fight i'm gonna move forward in the face of diversity this is the growth mindset i'm gonna lean into friction and it turns out that this circuit is linked to the dopamine reward pathway when we move forward in the face of a threat and obviously we want to do this in healthy adaptive ways we suppress activity of the amygdala through physical action of moving forward and there's a signal sent to the areas of the brain that control dopamine reward those reward centers then trigger the release of dopamine to reward forward effort in the face of stress or threat so when you hear about people saying look take some physical action when you're feeling exhausted take some forward physical action when you're feeling overwhelmed by this traumatic experience now that could be in the form of a walk in the now this therapist she figured out with emdr because you can't take people walking around for therapy sessions she figured out that these lateralized eye movements are what trigger suppression of the amygdala and it makes perfect sense because the amygdala this threat detection center in our brain it doesn't connect to the limbs so how does it know if you're moving forward well because the eyes are moving you have these reflexive movements that move anytime you're moving through space so to make this a little more succinct it's really forward movement action pushing yourself across that threshold not only rewards you but it suppresses activity of the fear centers in the brain and these are ancient hardwired mechanisms these aren't hacks these are things that mother nature installed in us so i love this more than you could possibly imagine uh this is so interesting so i'm a big fan of wellness and and i think it's a great community but it tends to run in absolutes and there and there aren't a lot of operational definitions as we say in science and i what i love about your questions you're asking for really getting to the meat of things asking for the operational definitions one of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have what a terrible thing to put on people you know what what what a challenging thing i don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts i think there is great value however to introducing positive thought schemes now the reason is not because i think it's just because i think so but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort and that relates to the dopamine pathway so the molecule dopamine is a reward it's released in the brain when you win a game you you know close a deal you someone like a level the great love of your life you complete something but most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals it's actually released when we are enroute to our goals we're in pursuit of our goals and we think we're on the right path is one meditation very short five minutes where for one breath one breath you close your eyes and go internal and you get behind and some people call it the third eye right i'm gonna get the the language wrong but we all know what we're talking about you get inside your breath and then the second thing you do is you focus on something at a short distance there's a powerful system in your brain when you focus both eyes on a single point like a watchmaker making a watch or you're reading that state is accessing very specific channels in your brain that are very different from the one that when you close your eyes okay and it's called a virgin's eye movement when you put both your eyes on the same thing and then the last one is the one that we get a lot of here that feeling awesome feeling when you go out to the beach or you're on the top of a mountain or you look at the horizon or you arrive in new york city if you're me and you just go oh my god and you're defocused and that's when you're these ideas the creativity kind of spontaneously geysers up from below but then you have to get back and you need to get to work on something and so the what's been very powerful and we're going to put we're putting patients through this or subjects in brain imaging is this way of accessing all these different brain states is really about accessing different notions of space and time trying to get access to your whole brain and it's a short meditation i recommend just one breath at each of these kind of stations in your mind up close and focusing on your hand and out and i'll repeat that a few times during my morning or maybe once or twice during the day it's quick and we're getting remarkable feedback from the people that are doing this about the kind of state that it puts them in both engaged and present with the bigger picture and in the end it's all about the bigger picture right because it's about not just what you do with your life but how you're going to create good in the world so one of the reasons why breathing is such a powerful tool for shifting one's state is that a it's always available for voluntary control it's just right there you can i can decide right now to do three inhales or i can just go back to breathing reflexively i just do that at any moment so the the neural arc you know real estate which is in the brainstem that controls breathing is in a unique position because it's at the kind of boundary between conscious control and unconscious control i can't do that for my digestion i can't do that for most most everything that happens internally the other thing is that breathing controls our level of alertness very dramatically so the faster you breathe generally the more alert you are the slower you breathe the more calm you're going to be the faster you breathe meaning shorter quick breaths or either way so um so we're just to take a brief um adventure through the the neuroscience of breathing and how it relates to brain states and and there's some fun tools in here so forgive me for this tangent but you have two brain areas that are responsible for breathing one is called for the aficionados the pre-butt singer complex it was discovered by jack feldman at ucla it's named after a bottle of wine so now you people won't forget it and it controls rhythmic breathing so inhale exhale inhale exhale it's just rhythmic breathing there's another brain area that controls breathing which is near what's called the parafacial nucleus which involves breathing anytime there are double inhales or double exhales or triple inhales you say well why would you have this second brain area for breathing well turns out when you're speaking or crying or coughing you need to coordinate your breathing with your speaking and that means sometimes you need to take multiple inhales or multiple exhales and this is all happening very very fast you don't notice but there's a very important discovery that was made a few years ago by jack's lab and by a guy named mark krasnow at stanford who discovered there's a set of neurons in your brain stem mind brainstem everybody's brainstem and every animal every mammal's brainstem it's a very small number of neurons that controls a specific pattern of breathing which are called physiological size so these are not just size where you go and exhale these are sides that involve doing two inhales and then an extended exhale we all do this you do this during sleep anytime carbon dioxide levels in your bloodstream get too high in order to get more oxygen into your system people also do this if they've been crying or sobbing they'll do this and then they'll exhale so what's happening with these physiological sides and why is this powerful so your lungs are two big bags of air but they actually are made up of a ton of little sacks of air called the alveoli of the lungs when we are exercising or when we are sleeping or anytime we're doing anything these these little sacks of air eventually start to collapse and what happens is carbon dioxide builds up in our system and we experience that as stress we actually feel the impulse to breathe because carbon dioxide levels get too high there are neurons that sense carbon dioxide and then without realizing it you do the double inhale and then exhale typically the inhales are done through the nose and the exhale is done through the mouth so it looks like and why the second inhale well if you've ever tried to blow up a balloon for a kid at a kid's party you're just blowing up a balloon you sometimes blow into that empty balloon it doesn't work what do you do you do two in you do two you go and then it pops open so these double inhales pop open the aviolae of the lungs they don't explode them but they pop them open which pulls carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream brings oxygen and then you offload carbon dioxide so if you watch a dog right before it takes a nap or something it often will do these now what's cool about these physiological size is from work in our lab and that's still ongoing i just want to say it's still ongoing but work in other labs as well double inhales followed by an extended exhale are the fastest way that i'm aware of to bring the mind and the body into a more relaxed state really yeah it is this way i'm stressed i'm overwhelmed just do a three or two two inhale through the nose and then exhale slow through the middle one to three of those repeated will bring your level of autonomic arousal down basically to baseline i would hide in the tower books section uh in the evenings and i would read everything about fitness psychology anything i could i've always devoured information my favorite book when i was a kid was the encyclopedia or the guinness book of worlds records so i was like when i was a little kid i'd walk around the aspen center for physics and i would tell anyone i didn't even ask them if they want to hear about like the what's the world's smallest eutherian mammal you know i would like i could tell you all these facts that were kind of meaningless at the time but um i've always been fascinated by the inventory of different animals on the planet and their different behaviors and so yeah voracious reader and still now yeah i love i love information you know that beliefs are attached to a set of rewards so what now the dopamine system is exceedingly powerful because dopamine is is a kind of a dumb molecule it has no brain of its own it's just a it's just a molecule right it's just a chemical but when dopamine is released in our brain we first of all it tends to orient us towards goals in the outside environment it's the it's the molecule not just of reward but of motivation and when we release dopamine we tend to see the world in terms of external goals and so you can imagine now if there's a process built up inside us where our thoughts are causing dopamine release and dopamine is shaping what we see as rewards what we perceive as rewards that can be wonderful or terrible depending on how that's harnessed so let me understand this when we have dopamine triggered in our body it's attached to because it's attached to some type of belief we're going to continue to say this feels good that's right so let me keep thinking this way and viewing the world in this way because it's going to keep making me feel good that's right physically that's right wow even if it's some fact or not fact scientifically true or not or harmful to other people or harmful to yourself if it makes you feel good you might stick to that belief that's right so a good example with dopamine is it with any time thinking about science and neuroscience in particular thinking at the extremes can be kind of useful so people who are very depressed who see no possibility in the world who if you talk to a depressed person every response they give is going to be but it's not going to work out it doesn't they are absolutely certain that things are going to turn out bad and there's a benefit for having that belief they're entrenched in it they may actually be rewarding that somewhat although typically depressed states have very low dopamine at the opposite extreme is mania when people are in a manic phase dopamine is very high we know this and they see possibility everywhere and there's certain things are going to work out they they will spend money they don't have they'll create relationships they don't have time and energy for they will overdo everything and so somewhere in the middle is this healthy range where we're con where we realize that how we view the world is shaping the release of these chemicals and i do believe this happens when we have positive thoughts we we get a lift if we if we can get a lift from our positive thoughts and then dopamine itself puts us in relationship with the outside world such that we view the outside world as having more possibility that is going to put us into forward momentum they're good there are a lot of studies to support that when dopamine is low we tend to see very little possibility in the world and so a positive thought triggers forward movement potentially yes yeah so positive thinking which a lot of people say well that's just positive thinking it doesn't work some people say be positive think positive others say well it doesn't work but with science i'm hearing you say it gives you a little bit of a lift absolutely the the key with positive thinking it is that it has to be honest it it can't be i've already won you know i don't have an olympic gold medal if i could tell myself i'm going to get one tomorrow but i just don't have the skills so that's not going to release dopamine in my system how do you know it's honest if you're in a depressed state and you don't believe that you are actually better off than where you're at the key is to attach the so one thing to understand is that dopamine release in the brain is always subjective there's no experience that that says uh that has unique domain over dopamine release that will only allow dopamine release so if it's very subjective so if i say to myself i'm going to um get into the process of doing something we have a new year coming up so there'll be a lot of resolutions soon the it's not a if you attach the dopamine release to the process of effort or goal setting itself you'll have more energy to be in effort and then if you can attach dopamine release to the belief that you're at least heading in the right direction you'll have more energy to keep going in the right direction people make the mistake of thinking that the positive thought process should be attached to the finish line it's not about thinking you've already won it's not about being delusional it's about thinking that your training is going to take you to the finish line and so it's about moving that mental horizon in more close more closely and then triggering some sort of positive internal representation of what you're doing meaning thinking positive and people this is usually where i get stopped and people say wait but it sounds so subjective tell me exactly how to do it but here's the thought it's it's supposed to be subjective this is this for you right yeah everyone needs to figure out what allows them to continue to be in forward momentum what allows them to constrain the world of possibilities and to go after goals and how often to self-reward because but the key is the self-worth because if you start only pursuing external rewards that's when you are no longer in control of your dopamine system because you're reliant on actually something physically happening in the physical world not internal that's right and let's be really really honest and burst the the bubble that i feel like should have been burst a long time ago which is yes everybody including me it is possible that you can do everything and still fail no one wants to say that but the way that you insure against that is to attach reward to the effort process because the dopamine molecule creates a sense of certainty and you're not trying to create certainty about the final outcome you're trying to create certainty only about the next outcome that's enroute to the final outcome the next action you want to think about milestones yes and so people set out with oh i'm gonna i'm gonna write the great american novel or i'm going to um you know get the ipo and of course that's an important you need to have a sense of what the finish line would actually look like but the more that one can attach this subjective release of dopamine process to the intermediate steps through positive thinking and action positive thinking and action the the higher that probability goes toward in science we say there's a probability of zero to one the higher that probability goes to one which is certainty now everyone knows in the back of their mind that there is no absolute certainty when i hear about you know athletes or fighters i was certain i was going to win we all know that there's a .000 doubt in everybody right .00 whatever that is now for some people they might be able to push that number way way out but certainty about outcome is actually a form of delusion certainty about romania yeah that's right cer that's right you see this in mania and that's why people start engaging their behavior online this is going to happen that's right the silver lining in this is that when you create certainty about outcomes you know you can control you take over this neurobiological system and you create almost certainty that you will complete the process to the end goal perfectly understanding that pain and pleasure in this really dynamic balance can also help us which in the following way any pain that you feel the longer day the less sleep the the kind of agony that things aren't working that power outlet doesn't work or the internet is slow whatever it is the amount of pleasure that you will eventually experience is directly relation related excuse me to how much pain you experience so we know this from actually what nowadays would be considered quite barbaric and unethical experiments where they would give people electrical shocks and they would measure their response and then they'd say we're going to increase it we're going to increase it eventually they get to the point where a slight shock that was previously very painful actually evokes a sense of pleasure now you couldn't do these experiments anymore these are not the experiments i do in my lab and these are older experiments but for instance uh and this has been discussed in scientific research papers uh giving somebody a like a 10-minute ice bath for instance or even a three-minute ice bath or a one-minute ice bath it's quite painful but there was a study from the university of prague uh european journal of physiology showed that after a painful ice bath stimulus the amount of dopamine released goes up for two and a half hours to 250 above baseline and that's not because the ice bath itself evokes dopamine release a lot of people think oh cold water evokes dopamine release no pain evokes dopamine release after the pain is over yesterday i tweaked my back because i do this stupid thing every few years the same stupid thing and it's really painful and then you just remember all the ways in which you can't move around i was like standing up and swearing like ah and just walking is so painful as the pain has started to dissipate you get a little bit of a high right you get a little bit of a euphoria that's dopamine because of the the degree of pain you experience previously predicts how much pleasure so when you start a company down in the dregs and you're shoveling again that's beautiful because that means that the win that you achieve is going to be as good or greater than the one you had previously in your case with quest and so we go back to this example the person that's not motivated that can't get off the couch that doesn't want to do anything well this is the problem we remember the rad experiment they are effectively the rat with no dopamine but they can still achieve some sense of pleasure by consuming excess calories by consuming social media and look i'm not judging i do this stuff too right scrolling social media if you've ever scrolled social media and you're like i don't even know why i'm doing this it doesn't really feel that good and i can remember a time where you'd see something it's just so cool or you see something online i remember this when ted talks first came out i was like this is amazing these are some at least some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights and then now that they're like a gazillion ted talks i remember spending a winter in my office at when i was a junior professor cleaning my office finally and binging ted talks in the background thinking this is a good use of my time pretty soon they all sucked to me i was like this isn't good so what you need to do is stop watching dead docks for a while wait and then they become interesting again and that's this pain pleasure balance and so for people that aren't feeling motivated the problem is they're not motivated but they're getting just enough or excess sustenance so they're getting the little mild hits of opioid it becomes an opioid system and if you think about the opioid drugs as opposed to dopamine dopaminergic drugs dopaminergic drugs make people rabid for everything you know drugs of abuse like cocaine amphetamine make people incredibly outward directed or they hardly notice anything except what they want more of more more more it's very it's bad because those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward it's very circular the only the drug can give that much dopamine nothing they could pursue would give them as much dopamine as the drug itself so there's that and then there's the kind of opioid-like effects of constantly indulging oneself with social media or with video games or with uh with food or with anything to the point where it no longer evokes the motivation and craving and this is really the new evolution of the understanding of dopamine in neuroscience which is that dopamine itself is not the reward it's the build up to the reward and the reward has more of a kind of opioid bliss-like property which itself is not bad if it's endogenous released from within but when we can just sit there like the like the rat with no dopamine gorging ourselves with pleasures so to speak what you end up with is somebody that feels really unmotivated and those pleasures no longer work to tickle those feel-good circuits and so there's no reason for them to go out and pursue anything and that's a pretty dark picture so the the keys are to pursue rewards but understand that the pursuit is actually the reward if you want to have repeated wins okay you the celebration has to be less than the pursuit and that's hard for some people to do they you know that they it's got to be that your celebration is slightly less dopaminergic it can be very reflective you can be in gratitude those are other neurotransmitter systems but you don't want to be on that high as you celebrate the wind you want to be trickling out your dopamine regularly until you pursue things previously i told you that it's great to foreshadow failure that that's a great way to get your system into a state of activation i also told you that you want to set goals that are challenging but possible and again here i'm paraphrasing from the work of emily balcetis i want to be very clear there are a few other things that one can do in order to bias the likelihood that you will succeed in trying to achieve your goals first of all limit your options trying to pursue too many goals at once can definitely be counterproductive now i realize that life is complicated we all have multiple goals that we're trying to pursue but if we have particular goals that are important to us we have to be careful to not get distracted by other goals and many people run into this problem so setting one or two or maybe three major goals for a given year is going to be more than enough for most people and is actually going to be challenging for most people now of course we have daily goals and monthly goals and yearly goals but if we have big lofty goals we need to be careful not to contaminate our mental space and our visual space with too many goals and why do i say visual goals well what various department stores and supermarkets have discovered is that the greater the number of things in our visual attention the more that we can draw our attention and our goals off a line of pursuit what does that mean well let's think about in the practical context this has actually been done big department stores have figured out that if they stock their shelves chock a block with many many options of food or clothing items or objects or anything like that people simply buy more stuff people are very prone to orienting their attention to whatever's in front of them you put a lot of stuff in front of them their attention drifts you put fewer things in front of them their attention is more narrow in a later episode we'll talk about designing a workspace that's optimized on the basis of this it doesn't mean being in a room with nothing except just your desk and a computer doesn't have to be that sparse but visual sparseness actually can help us orient our focus and our behavior when we have a lot of things in our visual environment or a lot of things in our cognitive environment it's the same thing and so if you're going to try and pursue a fitness goal a relationship goal an academic goal and a long-term life financial goal all at once that's four things and you're going to have to come up with systems that allow you to isolate those goals in a very rigid way if you want to learn and change your brain as an adult there has to be a high level of focus and engagement there's absolutely no way around this because so focus and intensity and that kind of the goggins phenotype right i think gog is now a noun a verb and a pronoun right it's like it's amazing so if you're going to goggins this process we need to do is you need to regardless of how agitated you feel you have to lean in and focus extremely hard now the reason for that is that there's a neurochemical norepinephrine also called adrenaline same thing that's released in the brain and body most people back off at that point because they feel this agitation but we have to remember that that neuroadrenaline was designed to get us into movement that's the purpose of noradrenaline to take us out of stillness and into movement and then the other thing we have to do is we have to take that elevated level of alertness and we have to focus it and there's a second neuromodulator called acetylcholine which is secreted from this little structure in the base of the forebrain when we visually focus on something or in the case of maybe if you're doing auditory learning when you focus with your auditory attention so there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome which is a real medical phenomenon where the adrenals are incapable of making these cortisol and adrenal hormones but the the truth is that you have enough adrenaline and cortisol in your body to last two lifetimes and 25 famines i mean we were built with a lot of robustness right this explains you know that you know the david goggins of the world they they you know we we all do have that greater capacity that people talk about the stress is very misunderstood because people think of stress as this ancient carryover that's very unfortunate it kind of gets lumped with depression like oh this is just a flaw in our design or something but actually stress is wonderful it actually activates our immune system so anytime you liberate adrenaline into your bloodstream you also protect yourself against infection of bacteria and viruses because if you think about if we had to gather food and we didn't have it and we had to then pack up and you know migrate long distances you can't afford to get sick and this is why people who work work work work and then rest they usually get sick when they finally stop and rest yeah it's like the post-finals phenomenon in university or after the season for a game or the caretaker thing where you're taking care of somebody who's ill and you're just work work work or taking care of young children and then you finally stop to rest you go on vacation and you get slammed with with what is that because you're being in your comfort zone now or you're just because stress turned off and adrenaline and so that these the stress response recruits the immune organs of the body to release killer t cells in fact wim hof breathing i know you're familiar with whim of doing 20 or 30 deep inhales and exhales and also combined with some breath hold type work exhale hold inhale hold is known to stimulate adrenaline release and the one of the better papers that's out there scientific peer-reviewed papers is a study published in the pristine national academy of sciences where they brought in two groups one group um did wim hof breathing the other group did just uh mindful meditation both groups were injected with e coli right crazy right crazy it's crazy the meditators got fever diarrhea and um and vomiting and the people who did wim hof either didn't get it or got it to a much lesser extent sluggish but that's right they didn't right this is not an experiment to do at home isn't this crazy but it makes perfect sense because it inc that breathing simulates a stress response it stimulates cortisol and adrenaline which signals protects the body right which signals to the thymus the spleen and the other you know the the nodes of the immune system to liberate killer cells and so when that bacteria comes in the system is ready for it your body is defending against viruses that's right disease that's right essentially when you create a routine of healthy stress that's right and and we could talk about we definitely want to you don't want stress on all the time sleep is really important etc but that stress response combats infection because it recruits immune cells so everything that happens to you your entire experience i don't care what anyone says i don't care what alignment the earth is in everything is happening because your brain has these three jobs and all of your experience is filtered through that thing in your head that pile of cells that's arranged in a very specific way that we're still trying to understand called your brain just like we could be talking about the heart whose job is to pump blood so i want to describe just how the brain works in three basic ways two of which you've heard about before we all heard the lizard brain the thing that freaks you out when you think there's someone standing in the corner and they turn on the light there's nobody or if you were to come up on a car wreck and all of a sudden your heart's pumping your brain is very good at that stuff and that's great that's why you're alive at this moment it is an unerring unfailing system keeping you alive your lizard brain and it's generally designed to keep you alive and to scare you from doing things that would hurt you it's a shame because i would have liked it to be generally good at making me feel good all the time but that's generally not what it's good at and i'm stealing from the great tony robbins who says you know there's paved roads to fear and misery and cobblestone or dirt roads to happiness and that's true at the level of neuroanatomy you don't have a whole lot of your brain devoted to happiness you got a lot of your brain designed to keep you safe so anxieties and fears come about a lot easier you need to combat those we're all getting better at that thinking planning imagining and doing is the other kind of end of the spectrum i talked about that and then there's the one that really counts right which is this thing in the middle which is the way that those things are connected what do you think depends on how you feel what you feel depends on how you think we know this now there's kind of common knowledge and it's these maps of your experience it depends on what happened to you and how you view the world and we know this at a psychological level neuroscientists sometimes talk like this they often don't i'm in the minority but there's a lot of neuroanatomy there's a lot of powerful neuroscience to support this what do i mean by your maps of experience i mean what happened to you shapes how you view the world and so what's important is how you change how you view the world if you want to go forward beyond what would just how you were programmed let's say it was me realizing i'm living in this squat well i've got a pet ferret my girlfriend's gone she broke up with me she was smart enough to break up with me you know um i'm getting in fights i'm working at a bagel shop i'm barely making ends me and at that point i just made the decision i just said okay look i'm i'm not gonna be a professional athlete i think i'm pretty good at memorizing things i think i have an interest in people i'm going to just decide i just decided to do school i decided that was that was the track so like some people picked the military because it's like if you you know what to expect at least in terms of the you know the passages that you're gonna go through and for me that was school and so i hadn't decided to get back in school i moved into a studio apartment by myself i quit partying completely i didn't go to parties i got really serious about fitness so i just started running and lifting weights and i studied you went like henry rollins style i did yeah i did it's a lot of self-awareness you know i mean people go into the military because on some level i mean some people do because there's some yearning for for having that structure imposed upon their lives but you you constructed that that kind of um structure for yourself yeah i think i was really afraid i think i was like you know and i and these days you know because my lab studies fear and i get into this whole thing around mindsets people always ask me like is it better to do something from a place of love or fear like depends and at that point fear was the best motivator for me and i just basically worked like crazy because you made it this far in a video i want to celebrate you most people start and don't finish most people never actually follow through most people say they want something but they don't ever do the work to actually get it but you are different you are special believe nation you made it here all the way to the end and i love you so it's a special celebration if you put a hashtag believe down in the comments below on this video i will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome to learn the 10 neuroscience hacks that can make you unstoppable check the video right there next to me i think you'll love it continue to believe and i'll see you there we have the ability to actually change the story all the time if you can move the horizon to something you know you can complete and you reward that you essentially are where you were before

Channel: Evan Carmichael

Views: 21,121

Keywords: entrepreneur, yt:cc=on, evancarmichael, evan carmichael, dr. andrew huberman top 10 rules for success, dr. andrew huberman, life advice, career advice, dr. andrew huberman’s motivation, success motivation, dr. andrew huberman interview, best of dr. andrew huberman, motivational speaker, entrepreneur motivation, entrepreneurship, growth mindset, motivational speech, growth mindset vs fixed mindset

Id: AL1Fe4Q10Ro

Length: 140min 7sec (8407 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 08 2022