Breathwork, Good Mental Health, & Tools For The Brain With Andrew Huberman PhD.

[Music] there are so many things that make revitalize special and and one of them is the futuristic content and when i think of the future i think a lot of what this man next to me is doing um specifically to our state of being with breath and sight really pioneering work so i'm going to hand it over for to dr andrew huberman who runs the huberman lab out of stanford a pioneering neuroscientist in this field who really is going to blow your mind so what we're going to do i'm going to turn it over to andrew and then with about 10 minutes left you can ask questions and i'll run around with the mic and you can ask ask questions so but i will please give andrew a warm welcome and i'll let him take it away thank you thanks okay great to be here thanks so much for the invitation and for your time um today we have about 45 minutes to cover a lot but the first thing i'll do is tell you a little bit about what led me here not a personal story but i have a deep and long-standing interest in how the brain works and i've always wanted to be a scientist so i became one and the brain is a really interesting organ because i would say that it's probably the only organ that can direct its own direction of health or lack of health or change and that's what makes it especially interesting and as humans we're an especially interesting species because we are truly the only species that directs our own neural changes we're the only species that invest so much time and energy into not just teaching our young which other animals do but even as we become adults working hard to modify this organ the brain in order to become better at certain things and to avoid uh and try and steer away from things that are not so pleasant okay so that's my motivation in being here and i run my lab back at stanford school of medicine the lab works on two main things so we can talk about pretty much anything you want within the realm of neuroscience but the two things that my lab works on specifically are neural regeneration that is how to repair neurons after they're damaged sick etc not so much stem cells and replacing them but more so on how to make ones that are damaged grow and change so that we are better emotionally physically and cognitively so neural plasticity that's why i'm referring to when i say plasticity the other thing that we're working on and this is a new and very exciting area of research for us is trying to understand how what we perceive in our environment is combined with our internal states what we feel on the inside you can call those emotions if you want but i'm going to call them states just for to ease the communication so that we know we're talking about the same thing how what you see mainly what you see but what you experience in your life is combined with how you feel on the inside to dictate whether or not you feel good you feel bad whether or not that drives you towards health or towards sickness and i'll put some more pointed definitions on that as we go so um we've done some uh pretty um unusual studies looking at the kind of standard stuff that like in the animal models like mice like where in the brain uh specific uh things like fear or courage reside we've identified recently we had this paper published in nature that identified and i should really credit the student i didn't do the work it was lindsay slay the graduate student in my lab identified a brain region sits right in the middle of the brain that actually shifts the animal from a state of paralysis and when it converts a visual threat or fear into a state of confrontation and we're now taking that and the unusual part is that we're taking that information directly to humans and we have a virtual reality lab where we have put people into very embedded environments like white sharks swimming around with white sharks out of a cage or heights or claustrophobia or spiders or snakes these kinds of things as a way to probe how people deal with and confront fear and also to treat things like um ptsd and phobia so those are more extreme versions of those so the lab is unusual in the sense that it that we toggle back and forth between humans clinical trials small animals like mice to really figure out what brain areas might be involved and today i'm not going to i'm going to try not to bore you with a lot of information or names or acronyms because i don't really think that's important i think what's really important to understand if you want to understand something about how the brain works is to understand some of the principles and in particular today i'm going to talk about the principles as they relate to wellness and sickness and um maybe just to kick off that discussion one of the very interesting topics that's come up in every pretty much every talk today repeatedly is a question about mental health you know i think that we're at a point in time where we appreciate that the brain and the body are kind of one and the same gut mind link today we'll definitely get into lung mind links or connections through the discussion and and we'll do some breath work and we'll also talk about vision and the application of the use of your visual system to adjust your state so it won't be all informational i promise it will be interactive um but in addition to that just really trying to think about you know what is it about the brain that allows it to direct us towards mental health and what is mental health oftentimes when we talk about mental health that's turns into a discussion about mental illness and the two are both very important and so we need to i think place better definition what really mental health is um are there good measures that we could provide and so as a scientist that's where i see myself providing roles kind of a bridge between the general public and the wellness community if you will and academic science as it as it stands today so um we'll just start by uh saying that to me uh the two things that are most interesting about the brain and i kind of alluded to one of them before are our states and states are just very powerful so we know when we're in a good state when we feel good you could call that happiness if you want when you feel creative when you feel focused but sometimes feeling focused is the worst thing if the thing that's in front of you is something that you don't want to be focused on so we can't really talk about being focused we need to put better definition on these things and so states can be broadly divided into different categories but i like to think of them in terms of what has traditionally been called arousal states i don't want to discard with the notion of stress right because you can be dead i don't think anyone wants that you can be in a coma nobody wants that you can be sleepy and that's a great state to be in when you want to go to sleep and it's a terrible thing to not be in that state when you want to sleep or you need to sleep we heard this morning about the importance of sleep you can be alert and focused which is great and i think that's the state that most of us want to be in most of the time unless we want to be asleep and then we start ascending in kind of these levels of arousal that have to do with being kind of like heart pumping a little fast breathing accelerates and you start losing your ability to make really good adaptive decisions you become self-conscious lots of these kinds of things start to escalate and then at some point that stress becomes often enough or severe enough that we would call that sort of chronic stress and you start getting all the deleterious health effects and things like that and then there's just like freaking out right so if you look think about that continuum really they're just sort of two states that i think would be so nice to be able to achieve like just as a start like let's not make the task too hard right already now it's 2018 and we're at this time in history where people are starting to pay attention to the brain we understand that this brain is this incredible device that we can modify modify etc what would be a good goal i think a really good goal would be a set of tools that would allow you and everybody else in the world to direct their states at will and the two states i think we should aim for first in thinking about developing tools are alert and attentive but so sort of alert and calm or asleep you know if we could get to sleep when we want to we could be alert and calm when we want to i think we would do many things i think we would improve what i'm vaguely referring to as mental health and i think we would also eliminate a lot of the suffering and poor decisions that lead to poor behaviors in the world and not to go off on too much of a tangent but when you think about most of the things that lead to incarceration most of the things that lead to really bad outcomes and trauma and ptsd it's someone failed to regulate their state often right and when you think about some of the best and most creative endeavors or some of the greatest creations that humankind has ever come up with those were the reflection of sometimes shared states sometimes individual states but states come into play again so states are important regulating them would be great and the two that i'd like to emphasize today and i'll give you some tools that are grounded in science although the science is still emerging that are grounded in science that will help you access those states when you choose the other aspect of neuroscience i think is extremely interesting and is sort of at the fundamental feature of what makes the brain so exciting to people is this notion of plasticity plasticity is simply a change in the set of connections so the arrangement of those connections the strength of those connections or the tendency of those connections to be involved let's just call it plasticity it means changing your brain now the your part is imper it's important because the difference between you folks or me and say my bulldog costello is that he doesn't sit around each day and think about how he can make himself better whereas i don't i i believe that statement is true the whereas humans have this innate desire to self-direct our own plasticity so this notion of self-directed plastic plasticity especially as an adult is very different than the sorts of plasticity that we know exists in children and young animals so in young children they are passive recipients of what's going on around them they learn four languages without any accents they do incredible things and for better for worse they are not in charge of their own plasticity they are little sponges and their caretakers and their environment dictate their plasticity at some point you grow up and it's up to you to direct your own plasticity and it's possible and i'll tell you some ways in which you can do that one of them is to think about attention and this came up this morning so i want to appropriately reference the people earlier this morning that attention to specific tasks or attention to a specific person or what's being said is one of the most powerful means to to get the brain to start changing its connections it's not enough to passively engage you have to attend and then there's some other features i actually did a podcast with ben greenfield recently who's here and ben is expert in this topic as well on ways to access plasticity and there's some incredible things that you can do using attention and using sort of limited times of learning in order to access more plasticity so as adults we can still learn you can still change your brain but you have to do it in more focused bouts and maybe you need more focus and shorter bouts that the literature sort of tells us that okay so states and plasticity are exciting as a tool to make us better to ward off sickness and today i'm going to give you some tools on how to access those states and perhaps even how to access plasticity the next thing i want to just mention however is that it's more of a global statement about kind of the relationship between science and wellness and mental health and here's i think the first key neuroscience concept that i'd like to think is a take away so today i want to give you information i also want to make sure that you have some actionable items if you look at the whole of wellness or you look at the whole of neuroplasticity literature or you look at all of what's out there for everything from psychoanalysis to brain machine interface to what's being done in these very interesting studies on psychedelics and everything else they kind of fall into two general categories and the categories that i think are really important and have not been discussed enough yet is this distinction between outside in and inside out okay so when you were a baby you got hungry and you didn't know what hunger was you felt anxiety you felt kind of an arousal and you cried and hopefully someone delivered milk in the form of a bottle or breast milk or breast milk in a bottle as the case may have been that contingency of when i feel something and i don't like it i'm going to look elsewhere and elsewhere the outside delivers that thing is the first learning event that occurred and many other events occurred like that during your childhood and they continue into your adulthood so the first sort of rule of plasticity that we learn without even realizing it is an outside-in rule and that's wonderful because when i'm hungry i go to look for food in fact arousal was designed to get me kind of anxious enough to start foraging for food right when i eat a big meal what do i do then i relax so arousal is this thing that kind of leverages our behavior and the behavior of those around us okay so outside in is wonderful until you can't get the thing you want or the person that once delivered it isn't there and so so much of what we think about when we talk about trauma or we think about our needs not being met these sort of kind of psychological terms which i don't have a problem with but are kind of hard to measure are really about the extent to which we're in a mode in which we're looking for outside-in solutions to our inner state right loneliness was in fact designed to get you to go forage for a mate and reproduce you're being manipulated right and it's a wonderful thing and there are many steps within that manipulation that are wonderful and when bonds break it feels terrible for the very same reason okay so we could go down any one of these rabbit holes but think about this it's just a great thing to know if you're in an if you're seeking an outside in solution or the other one would be an inside out solution and i think what's so exciting about what's happening now and this came up earlier in the discussion around potential tools to cure depression as david morin mentioned earlier i mean what a great goal right is that it's going to be a combination of both outside in tools some of those will come in the form of medication some of those will come in the form of better therapies or existing therapies there are many different tools in wellness and in health but the tools that are really starting to pick up force and this is where and traditionally sat within the kind of confines of the meditation culture or in very kind of obscure environments to most people are the inside out tools the ones that allow you to say okay i'm not feeling good and instead of looking elsewhere i'm going to do something to change my state and then i'm going to arrive in the world differently right and those are the tools that are picking up so much force and those are a few of the ones that i'm going to give you today to take with you so as you forage if you will to stay with the sort of evolutionary biology theme that i'm putting behind this if you you know as you forage through life and as you think about the things that are good for you and for your children and for other loved ones and as you think about what might be good for the world and delivering tools i think it's very important to think about whether or not you're looking for an inside out tool which i believe are going to actually be the most powerful levers in terms of moving human evolution forward and getting us to actually think about our own thinking and now also think about our own states regulate them and make better adaptive decisions as well as the first rule we learned which was i'm thirsty so i drink i look for the water which makes perfect sense neither is good nor bad it's just a question of this truly powerful healthy individuals in fact i'll put a i'll risk a definition for mental health i'll say that mental health at least has something to do to a very strong degree with the ability to know whether or not you should go with an inside out tool or an in tool in fact if i know you and i know that you have the ability to know which one is the better one it builds trust because we can go anywhere we might not have the skills to deal with what shows up but we would have the attribute which is very different than a skill to know okay i'm working with this person this manner with this woman and i know that in the face of stress they can keep it together and they keep it together through a wide variety of tools not just one because if that tool is gone then everything goes put and that's not good so anyway that's the inside out outside and distinction now what is so i'm gonna focus mainly today on states and i'm gonna talk about how is it that one can modify their inside out architecture if you will it sounds kind of nerdy but what i really mean is how you can calm yourself down when you're stressed and get calm and focused and how you can also ramp up your energy if you're feeling tired and in theory what how you can better access sleep states although sometimes that takes a little more practice the tools that i'll talk about and i encourage people to chime in i know we have a q a at the end but i we have some experts in the room too and i don't claim i'm not a physician i'm not an md phd so i don't prescribe anything although as a professor i profess lots of things so you can decide and and make the distinction for yourself what what you think is valuable there's some individual variation but there are also some universals and we're grateful for that so breathing and vision i would argue are the most accessible and most powerful levers on your state if you're going to do an inside out manipulation meaning you're going to shift your state from the inside out a cup of coffee or a glass of wine as an outside in those are also very effective right but for inside out the questions are how readily available are they very if you're blind then there's a different discussion to be had probably not for this audience but since my lab works on blindness i'm sensitive to the fact that not everybody is sighted you've got your vision most all the time and you've got your breathing most all the time and those are the levers that you can use to manipulate and push your nervous system in the directions up or down that you want to go so that you can make more adaptive decisions whatever those things are that you're confronting so let's start with breathing okay um i don't want to knock on meditation i've been meditating since i was a a high school student um it's served me very well in life but that we do face a problem which is that if you're not in the community that readily accepts meditation meditation the kind of concepts and symbols that go with their like meditation uh breathing in robes chanting sorcery no thank you right and that's changing but remember that in the 70s and 80s the only people that went to gyms and did resistance training were bodybuilders and ex-cons and now they're on every corner so there's a transition that still has to take place i prefer therefore not to talk about breath work but to talk about respiration tools for manipulating state and manipulating even sounds like a bad word for adjusting your state and in particular if you're going to carry any of this message out to the broader audience respiration it's absolutely clear is a powerful lever on state one our not our lab but the krasno lab at stanford discover there's a direct link between the portion of your brain that controls emotion and the portion of your brain that controls breathing and they run in both directions voluntary breathing can shift your emotions and your inner state your interstate can shift your uh your breathing patterns so that's our just fundamental um without that in hand you can't really believe that breathing is a powerful lever but with that in hand there's strongly reason to believe it is that not just that you're breathing quickens when you get scared but if you quicken your breathing you can also get scared right okay so breathing has a couple different components you can breathe through your nose you can breathe through your mouth and you got a couple nostrils and so you can do that kind of variation and then there's these different patterns of breathing and we don't have time to get into all of them today but here's some general themes to think about and then we'll do we'll start stepping through some protocols and then i'll give some more information first is in general most of the breathing protocols that you'll encounter either emphasize inhaling or emphasize exhaling across the breathing session okay and the ones that emphasize inhaling not surprisingly tend to bring more oxygen into your system and kind of ramp up your energy levels get you into a higher arousal state and the ones that emphasize exhales tend to bring you down a notch in what they call paris more parasympathetic mode or kind of into more relaxed state okay and your nose in your mouth it's been argued blow off carbon dioxide which is the stuff that actually makes you breathe you take a breath because your brain senses oh i'm you know carbon dioxide's going up if your head's underwater you quickly start panicking and then you go for a gulp of air right so you don't breathe for oxygen you breathe to blow off co2 and you get oxygen as a consequence of that so we're familiar or some of you are probably familiar with wim hof type breathing kundalini breathing breath of fire all these things but i want to just sort of emphasize that it's two points about inhales versus exhales okay so the first thing if i were going to teach somebody breath work and i'll teach you some breath work some state altering tools the first thing that is effective for many people and this can be used throughout the day and this is just kind of your um kind of basic i was thinking this is like the jog this is like the jogging of breath work or of respiration tools for adjusting state is to simply shift to nasal breathing so without leading you through a long session on this for the next you know minute or two i'll continue talking and see whether or not you can just regularly breathe in an even way through your nose when you do that you start shifting the kind of blow-off times of carbon dioxide versus oxygen okay and we're all a little different in how we respond to this there's actually kind of a back of the envelope test that we can do and we'll all do it together which and it's not perfect i i can anticipate getting a bunch of emails you know telling me this isn't exactly right but it's not a perfect calculation but how well you can regulate or time or blow off your co2 your carbon dioxide is actually a pretty good indicator of how well you can buffer stress in the kind of breath work regime free drive free divers are excellent at diving down to depth and getting comfortable with having increasingly high levels of co2 in their system now occasionally they're so calm that they don't come back up right so it's a dangerous sport for that reason but learning how to blow off co2 through the nose more slowly in a more controlled way is something that you can do throughout your day to keep you in kind of a regime of alert and focused unless you're sleepy in which case i'll give you another tool that can kind of ramp up your level of arousal or unless you're stressed in which case i'll give you one that can take you down a notch okay so now we're gonna do what we're folks in the um respiration breathwork community are now starting to refer to as the carbon dioxide tolerance test so i'll be the timer all you have to worry about is this you can close your eyes you can keep them open but do it through your nose you're just gonna take when i get to a five count you're just gonna do one big inhale through your nose so when i when i get to five i haven't gotten there yet just continue to nasal breathe and then i'm gonna start timing and calling off five or ten second intervals and you're just gonna blow off that big air through blow off co2 through your nose in the most controlled way you can until you're empty and if you want to sit empty for a little bit that's fine you don't have to and just listen for the number you call that as you get rid of all your air and what number is up this is not related to your overall fitness ability it's not a competition although as humans we're going to make it a competition i'm sure one way or another okay jason's very tall he probably has lungs like this so maybe he will already give him the winning slot but um in any event so let's do it on five so one two three four and five just a nice big inhale until you're full and then starting everyone's fault now start releasing that air through your nose in the most controlled way that you can five seconds ten seconds 15 20. i have fast co2 blow off time so if you've already if you're empty already don't feel bad 25 30. 40 we'll go for a minute 45. nobody pass out on me please 50. 55 and a minute if you're still going keep going so did anyone blow out quick like let 20 seconds or less and there's no shame in this yeah okay i'll tell you so where you sit on this um about 30 40 seconds most people 45 yeah it's sort of like the relatively normal distribution and then anyone's still going there's always one or two any free divers anyone hit a minute yeah cool um that's great so your ability to to regulate the blow off of co2 is very high other people's are is lower and that's going to vary when you're jet lagged or when you haven't had sleep it's a great kind of back of the envelope measurement that you can use to sort of say how well am i buffering stress via the breathing system in this moment and you can do it anytime and it has the auxiliary benefit of also getting you to shift into nasal breathing which generally is good for brain function my colleague paul ehrlich wrote this book jaws i've not i've actually never met him i don't have any relationship to the book professionally but it's all about we've become mouth breathers and the deleterious effects of that on kind of jaw structure and etc and the benefits of nasal breathing and he's not the first one to write to talk about this or write about it but um interesting um set of ideas there so shifting and nasal breathing is good now you've got sort of a back of the envelope test of your stress that also can you know kind of work with your more standard things like your your pulse rate okay so now we start getting into the kind of more interesting or esoteric or exciting applications of breath work now um happen to be good friends with wim hof actually my exploration of of respiration work and breath work started a few years ago when i decided i wanted to work on emotion systems and internal states and i literally just emailed wim and uh said i think what you're doing is amazing mostly because what you do is amazing but he's made all of what he does available to people through scientific studies so there's this beautiful paper in proceedings of the national academy of sciences which is a legitimate journal showing that the wim hof type breathing causes these increases in anti-inflammatory cytokines that literally uh allowed people to resist the effects of e coli injections flu vomiting fever it's really brilliant study i had nothing to do with it it's very very cool and so wim said come out to the pyrenees and we uh where he was for the summer and i learned some of these protocols from him i'm not going to take you through a full wim hof type method but wim the iceman right um also likes to put himself in cold that's a great yeah you get the brown fat thermogenesis and and all that stuff but a lot of if you look back at the story the reason wim found breath work was actually through cold exposure so he puts himself in the eyes to get the breathing going then he realized voluntary breathing and controlling your breathing is powerful and he came up with what some people call wim hof method there are other people have developed methods that are similar we're not going to do any of the breath holds i'm actually um the breath holds take some skill and they you never want to do this in water because you can pass out and drown and people have done that and the breath holds can be a little bit complicated for people with pulmonary issues so but there is a principle here which is that inhaling more oxygen than you ex exhale over a series of time can get you into kind of an upstate now so we'll do this together feel free to opt out it's a little uncomfortable first and please no breath holds unless you're like skilled wim hoffers um because i don't want to pick up anybody off the floor and i don't want to be responsible for what happens okay but what we're going to go through is actually pretty standard without the breath hold and it still can get you into that state so now you're actually going to use your mouth also so it goes something like this it goes i've got the microphone on so i hope hopefully i don't blow out your ears with this it's going to be a big inhale so it's big inhale and then kind of letting your lungs drop and exhaling so the inhale's just a little bit longer go ahead and practice right so it's going to be noisy in here so 30 of those and you're going to get a little tingly and for some people it's really uncomfortable you're generating adrenaline that's actually the adrenal adrenaline release is part of the way in which you get the anti-inflammatory effect and that was described in this in this pnas paper and so but the net effect here is more oxygen coming into your system the second round to me is where the real magic happens because the first one's a little uncomfortable if you feel it well enough push into the second round if you feel light headed to the point where you feel like you're gonna keel over just stop and it's not a problem no shame in that okay um and we might do a little mini breath hold in there i'll a whim um and here's how it goes okay so we'll do it together so it's gonna be an inhale through the nose and then dropping the air out through your mouth or through your nose but it's kind of a little bit longer on the exhale so it's inhale excuse me a little longer on the inhale so it's inhale emphasized all right so um this is a tool that you can use to up regulate your auto level of autonomic arousal so you might see fighters doing this or before when people get psyched up sometimes if you're nervous you're naturally doing this you kind of get a demonic look on your face like i just did it right there and i'm going to talk about it and i'm not telling you where to look you can do whatever you want close your eyes keep them open whatever is comfortable for you okay all right let's do it um 30 has gone a lot excuse me uh on your marks that always gets people nervous it's like pe class and let's go so let's do one now i'm gonna stop so i can count you guys keep going good [Applause] keep going it's actually 20 to 30 that works the exact number isn't same now let's pick up the pace just a tiny bit good good and now slow down again okay now big inhale and then blow out all your air empty yourself out empty yourself out good now traditional sort of wim hoffish-esque thing would be to now hold that exhale but let's not stay down there too long but you're pretty much all oxygen out of your lungs and you've kind of primed your system for bed believe it or not through this thing called the bore effect and your shift in your alkalinity to kind of prime your cells to absorb more oxygen so let's give them some oxygen so big inhale and if you like you can hold and i like to push the oxygen around a little bit kind of like breathe into your feet sound so wacky but you can kind of the idea here and now let go okay so for how many people in the room was that totally uncomfortable like that yeah a little bit uncomfortable if you what's that okay after lunch that's true so that probably the best time to do this is when you're when you haven't just eaten but as i say with any good sort of state regulating practice you've got two things at your disposal things that you're going to do to shift the baseline so that you can buffer stress better over time this is like getting more fit like taking a run but then and so then you let's say you had to run some distance not during your morning run you're able to do it right so you've shifted the baseline on your endurance and your vo2 you know your vo2 max and all that good stuff but there's also the acute tool so when things hit and you need to do it you don't have the option when that happens so let's do a second round and this is really where you start to access the state shifts okay so let's start again so big inhale through the nose and then out through your mouth and then just start cycling two good and if you go out of sync with one another that's fine good good if you feel a little tingly just push through it you're bringing more oxygen into your system than you're exhaling overall we have an astronaut in the room so i'm very curious what's if he's going to start levitating or what he's going to do he's probably do anything because great let's do five more each and then blow out all your air and then hold that exhale hold it hold it hold it i promise no breath holds these are kind of mini breath holds people sometimes like to push for their maximum time i i personally don't recommend that and now big inhale and hold and what you're doing is you're bringing more oxygen into your system now and this and the system is primed to use that oxygen that's the theory anyway and make sure your eyes are open now and then just relax and go back to nasal breathing so there are occasionally a few people that feel differently but typically what this does is kind of increases your energy levels right so dedicated whim hoffers do this for i've heard people doing this for like an hour a morning i to me three rounds tends to be get me into a state where i'm very clear and we haven't completed all the science on this style of breath work i've been saying wim hof breathing just to for simplicity um there are other people that do this kind of thing i don't have any business relationship to whim either we just happen to be friends but i um this is what you can learn more about it by looking looking it up and a practice like this done each morning we'll do a couple things one is you learn to be calm er in the face of elevated adrenaline within your system because the kind of breathing that you were doing actually starts to kind of ramp up the adrenaline in your system this all this style of breathing also seems to do something powerful for getting your state into a mode in which it can access and absorb information right so kind of anti-sleepy states okay so now let's try kind of go in the other direction all right so some of us were kind of ramped up or you don't want to be ramped up you're heading in for a doctor's appointment you want to be present and attentive for people in your life and you're feeling too keyed up you're carrying stress and there's so many methods now that are kind of would fall under kind of inside out methods i recently had the experience of learning this um neurogenic yoga it's pretty interesting like the shaking thing like using physical release um steve jobs who you know grew up not far from where i grew up um used to hear him screaming in his yard in the morning like he has part of a release thing so there's a real power in in releasing physical tension yeah he was fanatic about it and uh we live about eight blocks from where you couldn't hear it all the way there but i confess i'd hear him when i'm biking down byron street so he doesn't live on he didn't live on byron street so i didn't just give away his address um you can edit that out thanks the um so in any event um screaming and release and these kinds of things work but x they're all exhale emphasized right so you can take things down a notch before i do that i want to just i'm kind of tip my hat to a really cool method another person i've never met but i've been researching this area a guy named mark devine who works out of encinitas has developed this box breathing technique which you would call a one one one one in essence and i hope i'm not getting this wrong mark um in its details but in its kind of overall arc it's about inhaling for a count of whatever maybe four seconds holding for four seconds exhale for four seconds hold for four seconds repeat to box and box breathing mark's a former seal team guy is a tool that people use to regulate their state and stay in these kind of balanced oxygen co2 ratios to kind of stay in a plane of focus that allows you to be in good decision-making mode right or good kind of adaptive mode for a physical endeavor so you're and so box breathing is something you can pretty much do all the time and kind of learning to rotate your breathing around a one one one one so inhale hold exhale hold what if you start to exhale emphasize the exhale the people vary here but the overall effect tends to be one in which it's less autonomic arousal like you want to go to sleep soon and so the way to do this is very simple we can do this now so i'll give you the tool is you're going to inhale slowly through your nose or let's say a three count one two three then hold for three then exhale for six five four three two one hold for three two one inhale for three hold for three two one exhale for six five four three two one okay makes sense so nice even plane if you like where you're at you wanna stay where you at that's a good healthy mode of breathing nasal if you can do it nasal even better and then you say well how long should those things be you know it should be three three six three your co2 tolerance that you did earlier will tell you you can do that first if you're blowing off within about 25 00 to 25 seconds i think like three to four seconds on the inhale and then just double for the exhale is about right if you're blowing off in five seconds then just do one one two one and if you're holding for if you're doing a like a minute long exhale and some of you will find that even if you couldn't do that today you'll find yourself there then you can go with some longer inhales you'll doing an inhale for six hold for six exhale for 12 hold for six does that make sense so you can do this as kind of a test of how well you're buffering stress in the moment and in doing that also get your breath work done which is kind of fun and then head into the world now so i've given you some tools to kind of upregulate your state down regulate your state especially if you want to go into sleep a while ago i started thinking about like most of the misfortune in the world does not come from people who decided they were going to do something bad although something a lot of times that happens um that has happened in historically excuse me i misspoke but most of what we call you know so lack of impulse control or it doesn't even have to be violent in behavior sometimes you say the wrong thing right or you you swear on your life you're not gonna speak and you're just gonna let someone else finish right maybe i'm familiar with this one right and then suddenly you find yourself interrupting it's like what happened you know and so learning to control your state in real time is valuable and let's face it the tools just aren't there right otherwise the world wouldn't look like it does and i'll also say this on the kind of positive side people that can regulate their state very well moment to moment are very very powerful people in the world and we tend to gravitate toward them for leadership and we tend to gravitate toward them for partnership if we're making good choices and we tend to gravitate toward them for co-parenting these are great assets to have and yet we're never really taught how to do it we're mainly taught how to do outside in right that's what we learn so an inside out tool that would be ready on demand would be extremely useful that was the idea in mind and so then i sort of um pivoted back towards my role as a vision scientist because i've spent about 20 years studying the visual system how it worked et cetera i was trying to think about animals in the world that are very calm versus animals that are not calm and how some animals are very good at shifting between very focused say hunting predatory states and some are good at staying calm all the time and it turns out that the visual system is a valuable lever and we're still doing the work and there are other groups doing this kind of work now to getting control over your state and so if you have a visual system and it works you have a powerful set of tools which are your eyes and your intention if you will that will allow you to do this and it goes like something like this if one of us god forbid got picked off now by a lion i'm pretty sure we wouldn't feel so great about coming back into the room five minutes later right it just would be an intensely traumatizing event for us there are many animals on this planet mainly the grazing animals that are so calm they're so placid that even though they can detect threats and respond to them very soon after one of those threats or one of their members of their tribe is killed off they go right back to eating they're pretty calm they're so placid they can't even stay in stress and now i'm drawing a correlation here not not causation but those animals all have in common that they have panoramic vision they don't have the ability to engage in what you would call a virgin's eye movement like focusing on that gentleman in the back of the room and focusing all their attention into kind of a narrow soda straw view of the world they're always in panoramic vision to detect threats while they do their lawnmower thing okay so it turns out you have two visual systems in your brain they have one and it's designed for panoramic vision and they tend to be pretty placid animals and in the face of threat they can respond to it but they return quickly to a low level of autonomic arousal right think your sheep your cows etc my bulldog etc okay so they're always kind of grazing and they're in this panoramic vision mode and so we've been exploring and i don't want to claim the data are all in but we and other groups have been exploring the extent to which going into what the yogis called soft gaze which is actually to defocus so try this so just look forward see yourself but also see the entirety of the room and when you do that you're shifting into what's called the magnacellular portion of your visual system magno means big and the neurons that carry information in the system you're using now if you're still kind of looking at the world as kind of a globe and not a focal point are like big pipes and they can push neural information faster so it kind of paradoxically your reaction time goes up in this regime but your overall mode of autonomic arousal tends to go down and it tends to relax you very quickly and it's available in real time so the next time you're in an interaction that's challenging you want to calm down sure focus on your breathing we'll talk about how you can integrate these two but allowing yourself to go into panoramic vision and seeing yourself within the scene can be very valuable for adjusting down your state now think about the opposite too if you go into a high vigilance state like you're tracking a threat there's a change in the optics of the eye that i won't get into now which serves to basically erase the background but the optics literally change so you can track that individual threat through space for good reason and it tends to put you into kind of a high vigilance higher autonomic arousal mode now you can start thinking about a lot of the activities we do throughout our day instead of just taking a walk and being in panorama or listening to your headphones or whatever it is you're doing that and you're texting constantly in virgin's focal eye movements animals like lions or i mentioned my bulldog are really good at laying around lazy all day long until it's time to zero in on something and then engaging what's called a virgin's eye movement where the eyes kind of converge on a single focal point that focal point can be at the at the distance of your hand and for any of you have done meditation there are a lot of um and are schooled in this there are a lot of meditative practices that that actually involve staring at your hand right or at a focal point at a distance again more data are needed but what this seems to do is to bring the nervous system the whole of the nervous system into a mode in which your focused and vigilance and kind of arousal levels are up so for so many of us including myself that struggle with focus one practice that can be very valuable is to learn how to focus on a single point for maybe anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute and then moving into the task that you need to perform as you find your attention drifting that's fine if you find that you're drifting because your level of arousal is too high you're stressed about a deadline you can go into panoramic vision so seeing yourself in the scene instead of this panoramic soft gaze is the term that others have used can help lower your overall levels of autonomic arousal kind of downshift you and focusing on a single virgin's point whether or not it's at hand's length or whether or not it's a dis a point at some distance away can also serve to teach your brain to better focus for some period of time afterward and then a kind of mastery iteration on this would be to then shift between the two to move from focal plane and into panoramic vision now incidentally when you walk outside and you go for a hike or a walk and you leave your phone behind which might be a good idea you naturally go when you view a horizon or when you're hiking into these panoramic modes where you're not really thinking about any one point and those tend to be some of the most relaxing and gratifying experiences that we have in terms of bringing us back to focus and i don't even need to do the experiment which is the opposite one is i can also put you in a small box it's called claustrophobia and not give you any horizon to look at for a while and i can make you go crazy right so these are tools that you can use and i wasn't paying attention to each and every one of you whether or not your eyes were open or closed but since we're running low on time i just wanted to weave this into the earlier discussion about breathing which is that where you place your eyes now can be layered on top of the of the respiration work so that if you're trying to enter a more relaxed state going to soft gaze as you ex do exhale emphasize breathing can be very powerful now if you're in conversation that's a lot to carry inside while you're also supposedly trying to listen to this person in this very empathic and evolved way so one thing that you can do is just simply go into soft gaze and start emphasizing nasal breathing if you want to ramp up and oftentimes we're not as focused as we'd like to be think about where you're using this virgin's point and if you're drifting it all over the place you're actually teaching your brain to attend to 50 things in the room per 10 seconds or the scroll on your phone i'm not anti-phone i'm from silicon valley i work there i use the thing all the time but you need to think about how you're using these attentional mechanisms that were designed for you to be a hunter for you to lay around lazy all day and then make the decision to stock and kill something or to go out and forage for nuts or fruits so it doesn't have to be such a lethal predatory example but that's where you were really selecting for things and using your attention for these adaptive evolutionary purposes we've been co-op co-opted by these mechanisms and we're using them for different things in modern life so i've tried to give you some tools that are actionable pepper that with some information that hopefully makes it at least gives you the feeling that it's grounded in at least a solid line of inquiry right that the questions themselves are solid and they're based on some solid um uh techniques if not um solid evidence and i'm happy to talk more about where we have evidence and where we need more and i just want to end by saying that you know in the culture of wellness there's so many things that we can think about what we eat breathing uh you know breath work and we're talking earlier this morning about alzheimer's about depression i'd love for since i'm not in this community of sort of exporting wellness tools although at full disclosure i do have a relationship like the cognitive health institute i'm involved in people that develop nootropics i'm in this discussion and i care about it but i'm not sure that there's any one technique but i am sure that both inside out tools and outside-in tools are going to be valuable and i'd love for us and people more skilled in this than i am of course in the room to start thinking about how to get how to get that to the broadest possible audience especially people that are this big and this big and this big because their brains are so plastic you could conceive of the idea that you could build an entire generation like literally evolve the species to have a fair portion of their neural architecture their brain devoted to having tools that they can pull out like a swiss army knife like oh i'm stressed and i need to down regulate because i need to focus and study okay i don't want to shift off studying we're overstudied i want to go play and be in kind of a free mode and maybe panoramic vision is a way i can shift out right all these tools i think are going to be valuable and i mentioned just a few i'm very grateful for your time as in typical academic fashion i went over and i apologize thanks so we have uh we have we're gonna we have time for a couple questions i'd like to i'm just gonna start with my first question you mentioned because i have the microphone why not uh you mentioned being stuck in a box so one of my not nightmares but like it wouldn't be a fun activity for me would be being stuck in an elevator so like what could someone do like i'm stuck in an elevator what do you do okay i'll give you an answer and trying to get out is not a thing you should yeah trying to get out sooner or later you'll you'll get out one way or another um sorry it's a sadistic joke sorry um so okay so you don't have the benefit of um horizon viewing you don't really have the benefit of panoramic vision but you can place yourself in the context so the more that you go into your internal experience of of high levels of rails like heart beating and i'm stressed and i'm sweating the more you're bringing your virgins point in and even in a small box you can go into somewhat of a panoramic vision mode so that's going to help emphasizing exhales is going to help inhale for three years that's right that's going to help and if you have a serious claustrophobia that's legitimately a phobia um this is a shameless plug for my lab but this is how we recruit subjects and since you're american taxpayers or at least some or most of you are you paid for this research so we're doing work on this and we're always looking for subjects we actually pay you so the pitch here is we pay you but we can put you into a virtual environment which is locked in the elevator of the hospital with other people lower down into the basement and we don't tell you when you're going to get out and then the lights go out and what was cool is then we can give you a breath work tool he's always he's almost how you go what was cool yeah yeah and the cool part is then we'll tell you okay we're measuring all your responses in this experiment and then we'll give you a tool like okay jason now start breathing at the following cadence and we can teach it to you and then watch your data until you achieve the state that you that you want to achieve and you self-report that back to us and then we can let you out of the virtual box the claustrophobic vr it's not it's vr that's right at any moment you could take it out you can bail out of the experiment so we are always looking for subjects and you can we have a lab instagram which is at huberman lab or you can just google hubermann fear stanford and then you'll find it it's like you know for better for worse so the short answer is grab your breathing grab your vision first that's the most accessible tool if you don't have access to vision or is dark in that elevator grab your breathing and then if neither of those work definitely come to the lab okay we have time for one or two questions i'll run back here anacita thank you my question's on intergenerational trauma has there been studies about historical trauma and being able to be filtered through different generations and how far back does that go and how far back and how forward in the future can we look at that um healing that intergenerational trauma people have yeah so the questions about intergenerational traumas part of this um exploration of tools that we could build in the lab in some sort of like meaningful and rigorous way i went on this three-year self-funded tour of like addiction treatment centers trauma release centers and there's a there are amazing tools for trauma release that are anchored in breathing they should be done with somebody who's really certified in that they generally and don't go run and do this on your own folks because it can be very intense they generally focus around now just the mouth inhale exhale kind of even breathing for about 30 minutes while lying on your back just after having spoken about the traumatic event with a ideally a board-certified therapist i've seen some amazing just physical transformations around just the way people carry themselves afterwards and some long-term follow-up that people are staying out of addiction some now you asked um so i think there's power and breath work there too um i don't think it should be the only tool but i think there's power and breath work there also intergenerational trauma is a little bit harder for us to get out but you could start building a story like a just so story where you know if certain cultures are not giving children the tools to regulate their state and there's always going to be trauma right there's always going to be trauma thinking about it as we're going to get rid of all the trauma is an outside in approach i'm not saying that's what you're suggesting in fact i think you're suggesting the opposite but some cultures give their children and each other tools to get rid of stuff to unload traumatic experiences which are everywhere and all the time it comes in the form what you hear what you tell yourself what happens to people physically etc third person trauma we actually have something for this in vr where you see somebody else experience something is very traumatic also television internet can it can carry a lot of that information so we haven't tried to parse like really like you know mother to son to son and son and to their their child and so forth but you can start thinking about how we are designing our cultures and our families in a way in which this isn't built into this we think macronutrients if we're lucky pe class maybe you talk about meditation but we're not teaching people how to do this so intergenerational um sort of uh mental health with the emphasis like health in bold would be something that i i'm really hoping people are going to jump on and leverage to getting out to the bigger community i hope that's enough of a clear answer i realized i kind of danced around the uh an exact answer so time for one more question do you have any specific or favorite body movements that you use to change state typically to a more focused or energetic state did someone pay you to make me look ridiculous on stage uh um one of my good buddies probably put you up to that in this so i'm gonna find out who they are um i do and um what's interesting is so i don't think there's any i think the brain mind thing is starting to fall away which is great because this thing is obviously sorry not brain mind brain and mind is falling away also body brain mind body it's all the same right it's an organ in your body and so it's makes sense that the physical the emotional and the cognitive and if you dare the spiritual which is not a topic i get into but is certainly important in people's lives and in culture that those are all going to be bridged so what you're talking about is can you take a physical movement like a sort of macro movement and couple it to a respiratory movement and get some sort of effect that's enhanced i think that's what you're asking and you'll see people naturally start to develop these um so when we do body tracking in the lab there is a kind of human universal which is that as people tend to kind of cringe there's the cringe reflex and hide their vital organs that's a real thing you're also gonna sort of upset or disrupt your sort of open breathing hollow body breathing patterns that people have talked about i do one and it basically i'm not gonna do it up here um it basically involves something like doing like a windmill like like reaching down and grabbing my my toe right um and then to the other side and i inhale on the way up and then i exhale hard on the way down that's because i tend to in case you haven't realized tend to i tend to have a lot of energy i wake up in the morning and i'm like it's all about trying to funnel my energy i'm not one of these people wakes up i'm like how am i going to get going today i have to down regulate a bit and so movement for me is much it helps me get into a focus mode more quickly because i'm also expelling some physical energy i'm not doing the screaming thing outside but i am doing and then dropping and kind of like grabbing the floor on one side there and grabbing the floor on the other side and it starts to look a little bit like a kind of um tai chi type qigong type breathing but i'm not formally trained in any of that that's just mine but i think it's cool that people are starting to explore the link between the physical the emotional and the cognitive and i think in two years and you know thank goodness for mindbodygreen for doing these sorts of things i think in two years we won't even be distinguishing between them we'll talk about therapeutics that are both nutritional and breathing physical and pharmaceutical right it's not a bad word the drugs just aren't specific enough in some cases right so i think physical movements coupled with the vision and breathing type things i talked about today are going to be immensely powerful and there i invite you guys to be the scientists and of your own experience and kind of figure out what works and then tell me about it yeah awesome thank you dr andrew huberville give a round of applause thank you thanks a lot thank you thanks so much

Channel: mindbodygreen

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Length: 56min 27sec (3387 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020