Change Your Brain: Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman | Rich Roll Podcast

hey everybody welcome to the podcast my guest today is dr. Andrew Huberman andrew is a neuroscientist he's a neurobiology professor at Stanford Medical School and McKnight Foundation and Pew foundation fellow and the founder of humor man lab where he's involved in all kinds of really amazing breakthrough research on brain function brain plasticity and brain regeneration his work has been published in top journals like Nature he's been featured in publications like Time Scientific American the BBC and he's here today to discuss the brain to discuss growth mindset how to focus how to navigate the stressful times and many other subjects it's an incredible conversation I think you guys are gonna enjoy it I appreciate you watching make sure to hit that subscribe button and without further ado this is me and dr. Andrew Huberman first of all thanks for doing this I appreciate you coming out yeah my pleasure long time coming I'm glad we're doing it in person and I think what I want to do is start with your your your origin story because you're a very it's your path is very unlikely your your path to becoming a scientist and I think it actually also kind of contextualizes some of the things that I want to talk about with you today so maybe start there sure so on the one hand you know maybe I was fated to become a scientist huh I guess the the two things that are relevant there are I always loved animals and I've always been obsessed with animal behavior like just could watch Cousteau shows growing up you know underwater life or animals hunting animals doing anything is just so fascinating to me because I'm I think even at a really young age I've always just been intrigued and sort of what drives different animals to behave in the way they do and how body form matches to I didn't know what it was but brains and how that all works so I've always been obsessed with animals and then my dad's a scientist so he's a physicist I was really early in chaos theory - growing up in our home you know we had scientists over for dinner and graduate students would come over for barbecues and things like that see a Stanford professor he he was at Stanford he was mostly at Xerox PARC which is kind of famous if you read the Steve Jobs book is for the yeah the development of the GUI interface the graphic user interface and sort of early days of the computer so he had a lab there in the out lab and Applied Physics at Stanford and something called symbolic systems which is a Stanford degree in kind of ecology and computation that kind of thing so I grew up in this family where science was very prominent and we had lots of discussions in our home that I would overhear and I didn't understand about physics and we'd spend summers at the Aspen Center for physics which was like eight times yeah so you know and we were and to be clear you know you hear the word Aspen you know we were a middle-class family but they have this Aspen Center for physics so the Fineman richard fineman is there murray gell-mann like all these luminaries of physics peter cows and my dad was really good at telling me the stories about these guys and then i'd always want to meet them and it was mostly guys back then there weren't many women in physics so I'd you know I was kind of immersed in science from a young age but right about age 13 my parents split up and he moved overseas he moved to Denmark and my mom was really struggling with the break-up and I wasn't in contact with him anymore so I had this really unusual childhood where you know we can talk about sports we talked about science and I had this close relationship with science and the people around science but then all of a sudden the structure around family liked it instead of dinners together every night it was just like me and my mom mm-hmm and I was an adolescent I was hitting puberty so you know there was bound to be some shifts in my world landscape and internal landscape anyway but basically what happened was I stopped really paying attention to school and I got really heavily into skateboarding and kind of punk rock music and I found my pack over my community through like a pack and community of kids that also just were kind of parentless so this was like late 80s Early 90s yeah and so at a pretty young age I started taking the group in college I was actually born at Stanford Hospital and started taking the 7f bus up to San Francisco and embarcadero for the skateboarders out there the listeners this is the the now-famous EMB crowd so this was the the birth of a huge movement of skateboarders that became professionals like so you'd see the young Danny Way would come through town or you had rob dyrdek I remember when he came through and so so all these names that eventually became popular during the kind of X Games era and but at that time it was really underground and so as this pack of maybe a hundred guys and it was run like a little city and it was chaos it was like there was fights and there was drinking and there was lawlessness there was also a lot of amazing skateboarding you know and there are a lot of amazing people and there were some older guys like one in particular a very famous skateboarders this kid Mike Carroll his older brother was kind of like the older brother to everybody kind of kept us all in check so it had its own unique organization and its actually interesting because the same thing was happening at that time in Washington Square Park in New York and I love Park in Philadelphia there were all these like communities of kids that were basically parentless and so in that time I saw some interesting things first of all I learned what it was to be parentless growing up in Palo Alto it was like soccer games and AYSO and you know swim swim Club and all of a sudden I realized you know I don't have to be home in any in particular time or you know none of these kids are going to school and so we all is a kind of big group of truants and it was interesting because it gave me a perspective that I had never had in Palo Alto and I was drifting further and further away from any kind of academic rigor right I think I would go to school every once in a while what's mom doing does she have any idea that you're going up to the city every day so she was totally checked out well I think she was just devastated by a bunch of things that were happening and she lapsed into a pretty serious depression and then in that community what was interesting is I started seeing that you know some guys were clearly fated to becoming professional skateboarders they were really good at it I I just want to say for full disclosure I was not particularly good I kept getting injured I just I was not fated to be you know exceptional or very good at it but I love the camaraderie you know love community but I also noticed that you know some people were drinking all day and other people got in the hard drugs and people started to you know some of the dysfunction really started to show how the fracture yeah the fractured yes exactly and so I started seeing that a lot a lot more violence you know people start getting their girlfriends pregnant they money support those kids you know it started becoming apparent to me that there was a lot of dysfunction as well as a lot of incredible people in that community and so about that time I got a girlfriend and the other thing was I got removed from high school so I went to kind of the famed / infamous high school in Palo Alto gun high school are you going to go I went to gun which is famous because it's the one of the most academically rigorous schools in the you know country maybe the planet people move to the area just to send their kids there but it also has this very complicated reputation as a high suicide rate of any school in the country the New York Times is real about this so you know I would come to school every once in a while but I could tell you far more about the kerbs in the front of the gun high school parking lot that I could about anything that I learned it yeah so they say they were you you were removed I mean you got you're expelled no I basically they just said you need to either start coming to school or you know or you're done so I got shifted to another high school and that was the same story it just was it was a message just fell apart and so at one point I was brought in I've kind of vague recollection of this but I was brought in to have a discussion with a school counselor and I don't think I've ever told this story before and there was someone sitting in the corner this guy was sitting in the corner and he didn't introduce himself and pretty soon I realized I was like I think they're gonna take me away like I started realized cuz they realized my mom wasn't really able to control me wasn't really in a place to support me uh-huh at that time and said and that's what they did they took me away they took me to a place up the peninsula which was not a jail and it wasn't a hospital it was just sort of a place where they put kids that were like some junkie wear a hat where housing situation yeah a lot of psychologists a lot of a lot of locks on doors a lot of a lot of kids that there were 12 of us in there at any one time it was locked down and the first night there I remember I had a roommate who was like really into cutting on himself that kind of thing and he told me he's like look if you just do what they say here you'll be out of here and like a month uh-huh and if you don't you're gonna be here a very long time and I remember being pretty frightened for the first time and at that point I was like oh my goodness like this is bad he's like this is bad I'm a long hard for me to imagine I know I know and it's given you know who you are and what you do I know and you know and it was literally like the kind of one phone call a day kind of things actually I called I was skateboarding for a company in San Francisco I think they put me on out of sympathy and I called this guy up and I said look I you know they locked me up I don't know what to do can you help me and he kept and I'll never forget I want to say his name because you're the most normal guy I know he's like he's like me of that crowd exactly happen so in any event I was permitted to go back to school eventually provided that I went to therapy and so I started going to weekly therapy which in the early 90s was kind of a weird thing you know I wouldn't admit it to your friends but sweet skateboard around Stanford campus I was doing my thing and then twice a week out going and see this this therapist he's a remarkable guy because he had deep training in the mind right and we started talking about what was going on and and he really picked up on the fact that there was essentially no structure no home life for me but that I had a strong Drive and I was really interested in learning I mean I was I was I was enthusiastic and motivated enough to you know skateboard as hard as I could even though I wasn't gonna go anywhere with it so at that point and the fact that I had a girlfriend I started looking for something that I could do and I started at one point I thought I'd joined the fire service because it seemed like the camaraderie was good at that point I started strengthening my body a bit because I didn't want to keep getting hurt so I started running I started lifting weights a football coach at Gunn actually turned me on to fitness it's actually an interesting guy he wrote the script for that movie mr. mom my god yeah cuz his wife bet him that was important to do what what she could do which was stay home with the kids and he was this big strong football coach and so he made her bet and they and he lost and so he wrote that script Michael Keaton played the yeah so he taught me he was like look you know you can't even do a pull-up you need to start doing your pull-ups when you start running you know and and he said the fire service might be good for you so sorry I was spinning out but there were people that were willing to kind of you know point me in the right direction so what ended up happening was my high school girlfriend went off to college and I didn't you know I didn't know what I was gonna do so I actually went and I lived in the parking lot outside her dormitory I just want to be near her she was my family that at that point the College locally or she was at UC Santa Barbara so you just drove down and I just drove down I just camped out in the parking lot and and and I was starting to get into some martial arts and Thai boxing then so I think I was teaching some Thai boxing self-defense stuff on canvas and doing this kind of thing and by the end of that year I realized that I should probably apply to college so I applied to UCSB and somehow I got in Lord knows how I got in I did because I did eventually graduate high school barely got in and then after a year I just completely flailed it you know I wasn't going to class I was getting into fights a lot of that kind of kind of mischief and kind of wildness was still in me and what ended up happening was I got into a physical altercation on July 4th 1994 we're like a bunch of guys and at the end of that I walked back to the place I was staying and of course I wasn't paying rent because I learned in those years like you can just squat in an empty house so you know it's Isla Vista California you know so I was really running wild and went back and just I realized I was like this picture is really bad you know at some point this isn't gonna be like a kid who had some problems this is gonna be true that's not cute and it's not you know and no one's gonna make excuses about your upbringing or the lack of parenting it just becomes you just you're gonna end up being a ward of the state I mean you were it sounds like you were you're almost a feral animal totally filled actually and I have some close friends that that that's how they they refer to me Ferro and it's funny even to this day I mean I'll get to wear this eventually took me but even to this day when I go into a home where it's clearly like a loving home where there's kids are happy and there's good food and it's warm and cozy I always feel this thing like wow like amazing like I I sort of want to be adopted by them immediately but you know I'm 45 years old so that's not appropriate and this it's so interesting yeah I keep thinking about David Epstein's book range did you read this book which is basically this thesis that some of the most successful people are not you know we suspect that you know the great talents of of the world across all disciplines are the people who discover their passion at an early age and practice it voraciously for many many many years but in fact it's people more like yourself who have dabbled in all different kinds of things who end up being ultimately you know the most proficient at their selected skillset and when I look at your experience I see trauma I see adventure I see you know all these obstacles that you had to face and overcome and manage on your own essentially right and all of those really inform perfectly the things that you're interested in and what you explore today in your lab yeah it really did you know I think that I'm so grateful for those years I wouldn't wish them on any kid because I think having a secure loving environment at home is so key and you know I should say about a third of the kids that I grew up with in that environment that whole skateboarding punk rock culture about a third have gone on to found companies or professional skateboarders about a third just kind of drifted off and about a third or debtor incarcerate you you know a huge number and so there's real value in having a support system that's clear but it exposed me to all these things like addictions gets a friendly a rage like all these incredible elements like I was never really into drinking in drugs I could drink or not drink it was I wasn't drawn to it but other people they took one sip and it was like that was their thing where I was like the magic elixir for them and so I you know I was observing what was happening and then after that you know that July 4th 94 incident was was this is it you know it's now or never it really was one of those more you know you hear about those moments but it was me realizing I'm living in the squat well I've got a pet ferret my girlfriend's gone she broke up with her she was smart enough to break up with me you know I'm getting in fights I'm working at a bagel shop I'm barely making ends meet 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 that was the track so like some people pick 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 didn't decide 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 I did not a self-awareness you know I mean people go into the military because on some level I mean some people do because they're there's some yearning for having that structure imposed upon their lives but you you constructed that that kind of 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 and and it's interesting because I didn't have a mentor or someone to bring me to that but once I started doing that you know there was one professor in particular who Gunn took note he was like oh you know you seemed really interested in this stuff and I was like yeah because he was teaching me about depression schizophrenia neurochemicals and I was totally turned on by the world of neuroscience it wasn't even called neuroscience back then but this one guy Harry Carlisle he was teaching me about thermal regulation and how the brain works and how receptors in the skin relate to perceptions in the mind and and and he also had a deep sensitivity to mental disease and I'd seen a lot of that you know I'd a lot of depression and anxiety my own family I had had a friend commit suicide another friend becomes schizophrenic I think he still walk in the Mission District of San Francisco now seen some friends become addicts and so here was it someone explaining that there's actually an underlying basis for this and I just poured myself in is that the same guy who who you know would smoke underneath the the vacuum hood and stuff like that like a bit of an iconoclast yeah he was amazing so he was a favorite teacher of many students but if you could get into his lab then you were kind of one of the chosen ones I guess it's like the perfect mentor at the perfect time for you yes he used to drink coffee in lab which you're not supposed to do he's to smoke cigarettes in lab friendly in the fume hood and they used to come and yell at him and he would do it anyway and I thought you know this guy's he doesn't even know what it is but you know he's punk rocker he doesn't even know and so you know he gave me an opportunity to work in his lab and at some point he told me if you go to graduate school they'll actually pay you to do science and what ended up happening at that point was I hit a brick wall because I had a lot of resentment toward my dad mm-hmm I felt you know here's my dad he was a scientist he had you know left us all this kind of thing and I realized if I didn't do this if I didn't take this opportunity it was gonna be the most foolish thing ever you know the what am I gonna do spite my you know my parents speak it you know I was 20 years old at that point so I just made the decision I'm gonna get a PhD and become a professor I'm gonna get tenure and I'm gonna be like this guy you know this guy who has looked like he had a pretty good life to me and so that's pretty much how I spent there you know the last 25 years of my life is doing experiment worked out it worked out there's a lot of work I mean I didn't have the power of concentration I hadn't read all the good books that got 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 you know I actually used to set a timer 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 without any breaks and yeah it worked out it developed that that neural plasticity in your favor ultimately you are always a reader though right I loved books so I would you know I would hide in the tower books section in the evenings uh-huh 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 World Records so I would 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 that what's the world's smallest eutherian mammals you know it could tell you all these facts that were kind of meaningless at the time but 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 well as a neuroscientist I mean your your your your own patient I mean the fact that you were able to you know turn your life around in such a dramatic fashion and do it essentially through sheer will and you know setting up practices that would fuel you you in that right direction and then being available when those mentors showed up from the from the you know the early therapists sounds like that guy almost save your life he absolutely saved my life he gave me the book wherever you go there you are Jon kabat-zinn book and he said no pressure but if you can develop a mindfulness practice where you can sit still for 10 minutes a day it'll serve you very well so I started doing that like he did it Wow he coulda told me to hang out of a window by my house I would have done it I think there was a there was a self-preservation thing was kicking in for me so I got very interested in mindfulness meditation he also it was I think quite smart in saying look there's a whole world of psychedelic drugs that are powerful in influencing the mind he said if you're gonna explore those wait until your brain has already developed which i think is a controversial statement in and of itself he so he actively discouraged me to go down that path which I think was the right thing given I was a miner you know and nowadays there's all this discussion now psychedelics and their power and I think they are very interesting compounds but he really steered me towards behavioral practices like what could I do each day from waking up to go into sleep that would serve my mental health and my productivity well right yeah I owe him a tremendous amount and especially because he wasn't just in the psychoanalytic theory he also was like cognitive behavioral he understood the power of practices not just discussing who knows yeah at it began a meditation practice at that age and the mid 90s that's pretty radical yeah I felt it was funny because I thought if I didn't sit in the lotus position mmm like I wasn't doing it properly you know back then there was all this stuff around it was very mystical and in my family because my dad's very conservative and my mom's a little bit more of a free spirit I was taught that anything that related to hippie culture was doomed to fail and cause problems and anything that was related to like conservative culture uh-huh was fated to advance the progress of humanity right and turned out neither one was true of course so I but I needed people to push me in those directions lift weights run meditate do your schoolwork do your homework and so I think I you know I now I have a good relationship with my parents but I think I had to go out into the world and find those you know sort of paternal and maternal figures because they weren't in my home I needed do you find those do you look back on your upbringing with gratitude like how do you reflect on that experience and how it informs you know how you think about what you do now yeah I I'm immensely grateful for it because you know where I'm at today is you know my lab works on a number of issues related you know sort of hardcore neurobiology of regenerating the brain you know trying to fix basically cure blindness and repair visual systems but also things related to you know fear courage mindset stress anxiety trauma etc and the early seed of seeing how science is done definitely gave me an advantage I won't lie you know I seeing how scientists interact and behave and understand you that they are just people because a lot of what was discussed in my home was about the people not just the science they do that really gave me an advantage and then seeing all that that function and realizing that the human animal is amazing at making plans at modifying its brain if it wants to but the human brain and the human animal are also dreadfully bad at doing what's best for us right because of this what I think it comes down to is the fact that our reward systems are not designed for things that are just good for us they're designed for things that optimize the progression of our species but they're also they will grab onto and ratchet into any behavior that makes us feel good and so the human brain is really not optimized for making best choices right and so those years of seeing all that yeah it's and and it's a I wouldn't trade those years for anything and I still have great friends in that community I mean I think you know any had I joined a different community I would have found the right people as well but to be with a you know a huge pack of feral kids at that age and to see the function and dysfunction and and also it was wild it was a lot of fun I can imagine it was a lot of fun yeah that's a whole movie mid 90s mid 90s and the movie kids the Larry parks when I saw that movie first of all I had a lot of friends that were in that movie because he used actual skateboarding kids yeah I actually knew a couple of those kids and you know it's a movie but there were a lot of things about that movie they're very act and when I saw that movie I was like yeah that's like right pretty much a day in the life in Washington Square Park and you know I mean there's a little extreme on on some on some end but you didn't know where you're gonna end up each night that was a unique experience you know so yeah and mid-90s was really good I think it captured the essence and what is to be a kid that's just looking for some some group of people to to join and skateboard is a unique sport because you get young kids and grown men and now women and girls do it as well who didn't happen so much then but now there are a lot of great awesome skateboarders that are female but they're all hanging out together you wouldn't find that in soccer you're not you know little kids playing with grown men yes so you get exposed to a lot because everyone's had developed different developmental stages but yeah it was amazing thing I wouldn't change it for anything cool yeah well let's uh let's segue into talking about the brain all right and maybe we could start with you know how you think about the brain specifically like what is the brain what does it do what does it not do you know it helps us survive it's our portal into trying to make sense of the world like what's the starting point in the discussion around the brain yeah so the brain and nervous system which so it's like brain spinal cord connections with the body and back again I don't distinguish between brain and mind I think that's like a 80s discussion or earlier and I think it it would take us down the wrong track so brain or mind to me is interchanging them mind body is kind of interchangeable because the brain is connected to the body and the body is connected to the brain right if I you know pinprick my hand and it hurts my brain registers it where it happens it's kind of irrelevant discussion now I think we really need to just appreciate that 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 pursue receptors in the skin that perceive pressure you know touch receptors smell tastes appearing 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 so perception is like this spotlight so the brain wants to constantly bring in sensation it's non-negotiable what's coming in it's just depending on your buyer 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 doing animals have emotion 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 mm-hmm but thoughts can also be deliberate so you and I can decide right now that we're gonna think about a plan for something or we're gonna think about what's going on in the world so thoughts happen spontaneously and that they can be deliberate and then the final thing is behaviors in action so the nervous system is responsible for sensation perception feelings thoughts and behaviors and what's interesting I start to think about that is you 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 an 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 gonna 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 level of what they call autonomic arousal or alertness down if I'm gonna get a great party or I'm in a wedding or it's a celebration or I'm at a protest or you know 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 and that this can be kind of conceptualized as 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 he is taking a long time they're doing some returns you're getting kind of impatient we were 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 you're yourself that interoception quickly it's like pulse pulse pulse pulse you're gonna 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 int internal sort of metronome to do tick tick 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 texting you 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 how well matched am I to it right so if you think about some of 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 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 to assist a series of systems let's just take a jeté ssin and stress for one if an animal or a human is very thirsty you feel kind of agitating 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 the violence to get it or negotiation of some sort that you wouldn't if you were calmer so the stress and agitation were 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 that's a lot to take in and super interesting and and it you know it's prompting in me this you know attempt to try to wrap my head around what within the brain is mutable which is kind of you know what your work is all about versus what is immutable like you were talking about thoughts like pop-up windows on a browser you know some sometimes our brains are just doing what they do and that there are things that we can do like mindfulness and breath work and the practices that you're talking about hypnosis which is another thing that you're you know involved in to help you know help us like take better manage better that process to kind of take the reins and be more in charge rather than be prey or victim to these kind of things that just occur without our conscious awareness mm-hmm well I think that you know in terms of value of understanding the nervous system and where it can be steered it's absolutely clear that the nervous system can change in response to experience so this thing we call neural plasticity is really that it's the brain's ability to modify itself in response to experience and I think it's important to understand that from birth till about age 25 the brain is extremely malleable in a kind of almost passive way where kids are exposed to things and the brain is just wiring up I mean the brain is really designed to adjust itself in order to be in concert with its surroundings and to optimize that just the way we described a minute like a way that a child can learn a language very quickly or three language ATAR or something yeah without an accent you know three languages without an accent it's remarkable and try and do that after age 25 it's very challenging and so the 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 bacillus 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 bacillus at the precise neurons that were involved in that behavior and it marched 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 a deep rest and sleep because most people don't realize this but neuroplasticity is triggered by intense focus but neural plasticity occurs during deep sleep and rest and we can talk about how to optimize those different brain functions one of the things that's really important also 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 off the reflexive behavior as possible so so when we're talking about focus I think it can get a little bit vague but it might be useful thing 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 then for all the frontal cortex and nucleus bus Alice and some others and it's trying to understand duration how long something's gonna last path what's gonna happen and outcome what ultimately is gonna happen so a duration path an 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 gonna last winner you know when are they gonna 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 gonna learn something and really dig in norepinephrine which is adrenaline is secreted in the brainstem 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 and 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 hmm and so do so the way to think about neural plasticity 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 I'll talk about that in a second but there were some studies that were done at Stanford by a guy named Eric Knudsen that showed that plasticity in the in the adult brain any age can be as robust as it is in childhood as fast and as dramatic provided the focus is there and it's all contingent on this acetylcholine molecule coming from nucleus Basava so you say well how do you do that right yeah get it you know exactly well I've got friends that you Nicorette thinking that's going to get them there because Nicorette is a nicotinic acetylcholine agonist but that's gonna globally increase acetylcholine so I always tell them that's not the right approach the right approach is to bring as much focus to a behavior or to a thought or to an action pattern and there has to be a sense of urgency so what newts in lab showed and another lab at UCSF Mike Mirza next lab showed is that if there's a serious contingency like in order to get your ration of food each day you have to learn this thing the degree of plasticity is remarkable right but if there isn't an incentive it just isn't going to happen so these circuits in the brain that mother nature set up are designed to be anchored to a real need and people always say to me well should I do something out of love and a real desire to learn or should it be out of fear but either one works the sense of urgency is just acetylcholine its norepinephrine that's all it is it doesn't the brain doesn't have a recognition of whether or not something is pleasureful or not until later once you start accomplishing your goal the reward systems like dopamine start kicking in but I think if people are interested in modifying their brain for the better at least some you know top Contour understanding of how urgency and focus must converge for that to happen can be useful because I think there's a lot of attention paid to whether or not something feels like flow or whether or not see what I call highly desirable rights or whether or not you can you can eat a plant out of the ground that will magically put your brain into a state of plasticity and the answer is yes such plants exist ah but what's missing is the focus component if that work is done with a particular end goal in mind you'll get plasticity but you'll get plasticity in a kind of across the board it's like learning 9 length learning a little bit of 9 languages all at once is not going to make you speak coherently in any one of them so focus is the key right I mean this idea of flow is so much in the vernacular now and you know my my sense is that people are trying to measure their their level of engagement against some sort of theoretical idea of what it's like to be in that flow state and if they're not experiencing it they feel like they're doing it wrong or there or there they feel guilty or they beat themselves up and for me it's a lot of it is just hard work like right now I'm trying to finish this book and I should have been working on this book for like the last nine months right and I just couldn't couldn't get it together like it's a collaborative project so there's a lot of different people that are involved in this and they've been working diligently sort of daily you know putting this thing together and I've just been focusing on the podcast and been unable to immerse myself in this project because I know from past book projects when I go in I go all in like the addict in me kicks in and it's like it just becomes my universe and I've been completely paralyzed from taking that on and so I've dithered away most of the quarantine without being productive on this project and then about ten days ago we had a meeting and we established this deadline at you know July 10th to turn this thing in and it was like a switch got flicked and I went all in and it's all I can think about now and and in fact everything else feels like extraneous and a distraction I just want to get back so I can focus on this thing and ten days ago I couldn't get myself into that position and it's made me think about like what is going on in my brain that you know it's such a drastic state change and what did I do to switch that well a deadline was imposed upon me and whatever happened neurochemically with that set in motion like a chain reaction of events that got me into the chair and once I began the project for me it's all about like momentum right it's it's like to start getting to the starting line and beginning is so hard like I will just go forever without doing it and then I'm in and then I'm all in a hundred and ten percent and I'm like why can't I just why can't I be that person who just worked on it you know an hour and a half every day for the last three months well I can offer some potential explanations I kind of laid and none of it involves a flow state right it's all hard yeah and you know I'm friends with Steven Kotler I think flow and I think the cheeks um oh hi who originated this thing and flow is really interesting but I I say right now the most we can say about flow and mechanistically is backwards it spells wolf we don't really understand flow people have come up with these theories it's like hyper you know hypo hyper frontality I haven't seen the data and I'm not picking on anybody that out there as a prompt for people to discover this I think that and to work on it I think it's a really interesting highly desirable state but I think we need to get comfortable as a culture in trying to understand our species in how we work that the early stages of hard work and focus are going to feel like agitation stress and confusion because that's the norepinephrine and adrenaline system kicking in none of us would expect to walk into the gym and do our PR lift or you know performer go do something without warming up the brain also needs to warm up and start to hone in which circuits are going to be active and it's it's unreasonable for us to think oh I've got an hour I'm gonna plop down and write beautifully for an hour my best work we need to accept that there's a period of agitation and stress that accompanies the dropping into these highly concentrated states now in terms of the reward that accompanies the feeling that we're funneling into that that groove of being productive in in one regime like for you writing this book the dopamine system is really important to understand so we've talked about norepinephrine kind of gets you going acetylcholine is the spotlight of attention the dopamine system is mother nature's hardwired ancient system in all animals including humans to put us on the right path now it's a lot of people talk about dopamine as this thing that you get when you publish the book or when you get the book deal or when something wonderful happens like your child's born and that's true but dopamine's main role is to be released anytime you achieve a milestone or you think you're on the right path and when the dopamine system is tethered to a particular pattern of focus remember duration path and outcome so it's like oh you sit down maybe you don't get much text out but then the next day you get 800 words of really solid text and you feel good like I'm into this what does that dopamine system do the dopamine system takes the norepinephrine which is normally rate limiting like at some point there's so much norepinephrine that you quit and we can talk about that it's actually that the substrate for quitting dopamine can push that noradrenaline back down that adrenaline back down and give you more room more space to do duration path and outcome work highly focused work and I'm making duration path outcome synonymous with highly focused work why would this happen so let's think about an animal let's think about a deer that wakes up and is thirsty and it's wandering out looking for water that animal needs water it doesn't know that it needs water it experiences agitation the same way that a baby feels agitation when it wants food but it doesn't know it needs food it just feels agitation and cries and them caretaker comes hopefully that deer is now foraging for something that it needs and let's say it smells water because deer can actually do that and arrives at a stream and takes a sip of water there's dopamine release then that puts it on a path to maybe a larger lake or something of that sort or to be able to go achieve food so when we are on the right path and we hit a milestone dopamine is released and it tends to tighten our focus more for that activity so the dopamine this is why drugs of abuse and why alcoholism and some you know process addictions which are behavioral addictions are so dangerous because they a lot of those drugs of abuse are dopamine so it becomes this cyclical loop where there's no other behavior that can evoke the same level of release right in fact I sort of define addiction as a program of narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure and I say that because it really is the way that the dopamine system works normally the dopamine system is designed to be generic it's designed to get me to do lots of things social quality social interactions you know work exercise all those things just like the stress system is designed to get me out of bed in the morning it cortisol pulse is what gets me out of bed in the morning it's also what leads me to or led me to pursue a career in science out of fear initially and eventually pleasure so the dopamine system is tethered to those states of focus and it's what Mother Nature designed so that the neural plasticity would occur and you would want to continue those behaviors again in the future that deer needs to know and remember and create a memory not just of where that stream is but the process of oh when I feel that agitation I'm gonna get up and go down this particular path and so people think of the dopamine system is this kind of like catch-all for reward oh you get likes on Instagram and it makes you feel good that's not really how it works and the important thing to understand is when you start getting a convergence of norepinephrine so that level of agitation duration path outcome acetylcholine and dopamine now you're starting to wire in the behaviors that make people really good at certain things now in a functional view of this so not addiction what this means is that 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 liked doing puzzles they couldn't get right it sounds crazy but inevitably those kids are very good at puzzles and very good at math these kinds of things so growth mindset is I believe it was sort of 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 you can't focus is just a recognize gate 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 when 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 mmm it feels good to walk up this hill so to speak and when you start to bring that 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's design 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 may be 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 yeah I mean the the the the the feel-good aspect of that experience is very subtle and I think you know in in a kind of global way what you're talking about is falling in love with the process like you have to push this gate open which might require you know more effort than you're comfortable with but once you push through it is about you know that daily the daily rigor and the tiny winds that you get from that rather than you know it's easy this you know you set a goal but that goal becomes very abstract right and it's those tiny little things that you're getting done every day that bring you that internal satisfaction that are like calibrating that plasticity it's not what you're saying yeah absolutely and what's incredible is the extent to which the mind and thoughts remember earlier we were talking about how thoughts are spontaneous you can't control them negative thoughts traumatic thoughts bad thoughts trying to suppress those is futile if there's one message I can send people it's just don't even work at that but work at the process of introducing thoughts as almost like you would introduce actions because we can introduce thoughts and you know Carol Dweck has talked about this that positive self-talk is not the same thing as growth mindset because positive self-talk is almost always linked to the ultimate outcome if I'm losing badly in something and I tell myself I'm doing great I know that I'm lying yes there's no dopamine release from that and you know a lot of the self-help wellness culture of the 80s and 90s is like it's impossible to be in a bad mood if you're smiling we wouldn't have any depression on the planet if that's true there's probably some feedback from the faces of the brain but it's not that simple but the idea that you can self reward the effort process is extremely powerful because what it means is that if you can recognize agitation stress and confusion as an entry point to where you eventually want to go I do think that just that even just mental recognition can allow people to pass through it more easily they think they're doing something wrong and then rewarding yourself when you achieve any milestone like you know running to a particular location if you're trying to run a long distance and then registering that as a partial win what we know is that the dopamine that's released in response to that suppresses the total amount of adrenaline and gives you more room more time more energy to run innings in the running example and this is anchored in a real scientific result so last year 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 I 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 real 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 nature and in in service 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 neural chemicals that are involved so when you get to a particular location or maybe your recall you know 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 rung 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 a stop down law past of success and high performance they can't know it's a its 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 external rewards how can I continue to have that drive and his answer was very good he said give away all the external rewards you know now not everyone can afford to do this 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 were from where you were in the dormitory there's a little Nursery School in Escondido village and they did a study where they looked at kids that liked playing during their recess but 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 liked the gold scars for a kid that's an extrinsic reward and then they stopped doing that and the kids stopped drawing they just they they associated that the good feeling of doing it with the external rewards and 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 someplace 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 them well the Y has to be deeper than that I mean the thing that that I kind of always default to when I hit that breaking point or you know I'm training or I'm racing or whatever and I'm at that stage where it's just like I can't go any further the first thing I do is I reflect inward on why I'm doing this to begin with like what is the you know what is the value system that I'm trying to tap into what is it that I'm trying to express like what got me to this point so it's a reminder and then I just set like I just say well I'm just gonna get to the next lamppost or I'm gonna you know get to the the next intersection or whatever it is I break it down into the tiny I'll quit after that like the more I can just route myself in the present moment and and distill it down into the tie digestible chunks that's the only way I can you know continue to move forward and I've learned over time that the more I do that then you know suddenly all find myself in a different mental like it will shift right just because I feel that way in that moment is not determinative of how I'm gonna feel 10 minutes later absolutely there 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 gonna have for that the more focus we're gonna have for that and remember that north 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 in the Special Operations community and people that are selected essentially for this process it's 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 bud's 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 a couple really just 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 they 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 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 and when I say manage I think that the people they 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 the kind of unconscious genius of the buds process is that they've picked to sensory events that are across the board challenging for everybody one is cold water which is great because 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 uh-huh and so the ability to do these like what I'm calling TPO is this duration path and outcome steps and procedures is great on when you're rested you know I you know when you have a when you have well fed well 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 rest it 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 then what they need to do in response to the external demands all 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 needed 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 and ultra I've never run in 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 it's it's just so key that people understand scuse me that these circuits are not unique to people who run ultras or people that make it through you know stringent filter Special Operations Command yeah it's the same thing that it is yeah the the ultimate determinant isn't your physical conditioning and yet that's what everybody focuses on it's what's going on in you know internally mentally neuro chemically that's making the difference and the people that are able to best calibrate that and find these you know strategies for managing that are the ones that get through whether it is in ultra or buds and buds is like this perfect it's almost like its own lab right for studying human resilience in a certain respect but you have actually taken some of these people and tested them in your lab including David Goggins right so what what what what do you do when you when these people visit you and you're like I'm gonna deconstruct you here figure out what makes you tick yeah so I I had the good fortune of meeting David at a consulting event a few years ago and um I guess I should just say David you probably know this already but he is every bit as intense as he comes across yeah I mean yeah it's exactly what you see is what you get really wonderful and obviously extremely impressive human being so little David anecdote so the night before we had this event he came out to the lab my lab we do we study fear we study courage we study resilience and we say the underlying neural chemical substrates for those so we had a bunch of guys there a couple team guys some other folks and we bring them in this little room and we do virtual reality there and one of the things that we use to scare people or to generate a sense of autonomic arousal is this experience of diving with great white sharks which of course you're not in water in the laboratory but it's very immersive and for people that are afraid of sharks it can be quite scary not always but we also have Heights we have claustrophobia we got something where you can feel spiders crawling all over your body if you want arachnophobe we you know if you have a pain point we find it you spend time trying to figure out what that pain point is we do and we do it through some very covert methodology that involves AI and some some tools a bunch of weird questions that right where let's just say this from the moment you step into our laboratory where we're studying you so the you know I know and yeah exactly so what was fun was you know so I sort of explained what the platform was and what we were gonna do and um and David said he goes I don't like sharks and I I was like alright well and so then you know this was not a typical experimental day in the lab so I just kind of at one point and finished describing what the tech is and how we're gonna wire people in and then I said so um so who wants to go first and he's like I'll go right of course and and what was funny to me at that moment I realized this is interesting because he he was very explicit about the bhakti didn't like sharks he's very explicit about the fact that he was going to be first you know first men and I mean I would be inappropriate for me to describe his data right and we didn't do a full-blown experiment but what I can say is he's whatever it is that David has figured out how to do it clearly involves taking whatever adrenaline pulse he feels and understanding something fundamental to biology which is that adrenaline response was designed to move us not to keep a stationary he uses behavior as the way to shift sensation perception feelings and thoughts he understands how to run that program in the right direction whereas most people when they don't like what they feel they start negotiating sensation which will never work they start trying to control their perception which is hard right they're like I'm not gonna think about that or I'll think about it differently very hard to control the mind with the mind he knows that's a tough yeah feelings lord knows what those are and how to control them I mean we'll eventually figure that out as a field but thoughts are complicated so he just goes immediately action for it immediately tortious so when he says just for clarity when he says I don't like sharks he's basically saying put me in the shark tank like he's cueing you to say this is the thing I'm afraid of and I'm gonna be the first one to volunteer and I know you're gonna put me in the shark tank if I tell you that right exactly yeah and I think and I obviously can't speak for him but one of the things I think is very clear is that he's tapped into this neural plasticity process through the the door through the portal of agitation and stress he's figured out then this is really the holy grail of neuroscience is how can I modify my brain well you modify it by placing yourself into discomfort and using that as a propeller to move you into action and you know a couple years later when David was working on his book and I heard the book was coming out I think I saw a pre-release announcement I texted him and I just said look I'm really excited to see your book and he said oh great thank you you know it'd be great if you write something about like an endorsement I said oh I'd be honored to I'm happy to and he said but but I need it tonight right and this was Saturday I think was like 10:30 at night when I texted him so that's a great well I'd be happy to I won't do it now he said I need it by midnight so I sit down I start writing this thing and these are short blurbs but I kind of realized that you know you want to get rights David and you know my name's next to it and I want to do do it justice so I'm sitting down I'm working on the sending I text him look I'm gonna be a few minutes late no problem no problem finally I send them the thing like 12:30 at night he's like all bro thank you thank you thank you I promise I'll send you a copy this and I was like grateful you know thank you and then I said I realized that that time he was living in New York and I I said wait a second where are you he said New York and I said it's 3:30 in the morning he goes yeah I'm going running before and I realized at that point I was like okay you know there's it's it's undisputable you know this guy lives the persona that he projection to the world hmm and even that day that consulting gig you know there was a four o'clock lag and he was like no let's keep going so he's figured something out and I think that his enormous popularity is it's earned because he's figured out that it really doesn't matter if you come at something from a place of joy and love and that would be wonderful but there's a whole other set of ways to approach this that involve slogging through the discomfort the doubts the wish for things to be different and starting with behavior and it's incredible because if you think about sensation perception feeling thought and behavior actually the way to control our nervous system and feel the way we want to feel is to run that backwards behavior thoughts so if you change your behavior then generally your thoughts your feelings and your perceptions change yeah and everyone tries to come at it from the other end but he's figured out through whatever process led him there and incredible life circumstances how to run it in this direction of behavior first yeah I really think that if neuroscience has anything to offer its some understanding of what the underlying chemicals and neural circuits are but the sooner that the human-animal the human species can start to understand that our our feelings and our thoughts and our memories and all that is very complicated but that when behaviors are very concrete and they are the control panel for the rest of it I don't want to relegate feelings feelings are extremely important I don't want to relegate perception they're extremely important but when it comes to wanting to shift the way that you function to get better or to perform better or to show up better or to move away from things like addictive behaviors it's absolutely foolish for any of us me included to think that we can do that by changing our thoughts first its behavior first thoughts feelings and perceptions follow mood follows action mood fall this is like been my my mantra forever and you know I swear by it and David's example illustrates that that act first he's developed so much neural plasticity that it's reflexive for him to just move towards the hard thing or the challenge or the discomfort right and now the science establishes that this is indeed the case and yet our programming our default hardwiring is to you know put us in this place where we want to ruminate on all this stuff and wait until we feel like doing something before we do it or check our motivations for it but anytime I'm in a funk or I want to change my state I have to move forward I have to do something with my physical body in order to shake things up and you know rearrange whatever's going on mentally so and it and it works every time it works every time because the the brain circuits meeting sets of connections and chemicals they're there from birth they're your whole life and they were designed for that so in 2018 graduates do my lab published a paper in nature showing that in the face of a physical threat there are three options you can obviously freeze you can retreat or you can move forward and the moving forward response actually triggers activation of a connection in the brain to the dopamine circuitry of the brain and makes it more likely that you're going to be able to move forward in the future now what was interesting to us was that not only is forward action rewarded at a neurochemical level which then sets you up for more forward action but the highest level of agitation and stress was associated with moving forward we always think well if I just call myself enough I'll be able to move forward right but its exact opposite you know and so people who are paralyzed in fear or that have a hard time initiating sometimes the key is to raise the level of stress and agitation this is why deadlines are so effective right this is why fear is so effective this is why that deer gets up out of its you know nice little den and starts to move because it feels a certain level of agitation if that agitation isn't high enough we will not move forward and so especially in the US you know we have a culture in which stress has been created you know these ideas around stress or that is that it's terrible for us when in fact stress is designed to move us forward towards these action steps that are rewarded which then move us forward and so on so what is the process of combating that you know monkey mind that is you know running whatever narrative that's keeping you stuck like it's easy to say like just move you got to take the action a lot of people still despite understanding that intellectualizing that are unable to you know basically act as if yeah I think we're dealing with two general categories of people who have problems with motivation and focus and I think we've failed to decide excuse me I think we've failed to describe the fact that there are two groups and not one we think well I need to calm myself enough to move forward I think and then other people say well no you need to kind of ramp yourself up to move forward here's what the way I conceptualize it based on the data that I'm aware of some people are just hypo aroused they're just not motivated enough and those people would benefit greatly from cultivating practices like super oxygenated breathing so this is something along the lines of like - mo type breathing so rapid and we look at this and allow we're actually running a human study on this now so 25 or 30 deep breaths through the nose and out through the mouth then exhaling the breath and holding learning - how did self generate adrenaline that's what you're doing you doing some version of the wim HOF yeah technique that's what that is Brian Mackenzie talks about right an ice bath is doing the exact same thing stimulating adrenaline response it actually improves the immune system there's a published paper on this really is adrenaline which buffers the immune system against infection but getting good at taking yourself from low low energy to higher energy and then learning how to compress your focus and I'll talk about the focus thing in a minute some people are so agitated the monkey mind they've got too many things going on and they're thinking okay they're trying to sit down and write I suffer from this and I'm feeling like wait I've also got this person I need to connect with and I'm kind of being drawn off course by not being able to put the blinders on for people that have that issue I think learning how to calm the nervous system is very powerful and the best way that I know how to do that is based on two studies one published in nature one publish and sell reports recently showing that physiological sighs there's actually a thing in the literature called physiological sighs are one of the fastest ways to bring our overall levels of autonomic arousal down and a physiological sigh is a two inhales followed by an extended exhale so it's like it's not just a deep breath it's two inhales followed by an X mm okay and what that what that does and this has been shown several times now in humans and other species as well as it dilates that the little sacs of the lungs and that second inhale dilates them a little bit more and it pulls a little bit of carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream so that when we exhale we offload the maximum amount of carbon dioxide and it perfectly adjusts the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the bloodstream and lungs and sometimes it only takes one of these double inhale exhales sometimes somebody needs to do two or three but that's the fastest way to bring the autonomic nervous system down a lot of people need such a tool because I think we talked a lot about meditation and tools for calm and you know I can go to Esalen for a weekend and get a massage I'm gonna feel very good but then when I'm thrown back in real life I need something that's gonna work in real time what I call a real time tool and most people don't know how to control their autonomic nervous system because it's complicated I can't control my liver function I can eat that will calm me but that has complicated you know issues with it too if I'm just eating to calm myself so the diaphragm is the one skeletal muscle organ that was in right we've got obviously skeletal muscles designed to move things it's a skeletal muscle organ unlike the spleen the liver the heart etc it was designed to be moved voluntarily and these physiological sighs are actually occurring fairly regularly during sleep to adjust our levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen and there's a recent study showing that in claustrophobia this is the breathing pattern that people default to to try and offload that carbon dioxide so whereas there a lot of really interesting breathing techniques wim hof Brian Mackenzie does great work Patrick McEwan you know the Laird and Gabi the tons of people doing really interesting things out there my lab has been focused on what are the neural circuits that are designed to achieve particular states that happen to impinge on and capture diaphragm function and so the reason I think breathing is so powerful is that everyone has a diaphragm and it's the immediate link to the body a lots been made of the vagus nerve you know or the vagus is the path between the body and mind but the vagus is very slow the vagus nerve calming is what you experience when you eat a really rich carbohydrate rich meal or you're you've had a long day and you're and you put your feet up and you're finally relaxing it takes minutes two hours to kick in whereas the diaphragm is real-time control over brain state so the brain knows what the body is doing by how fast the diaphragm is moving it knows its overall activation state so when you breathe quickly those 25 or 30 breaths the brain says oh I must be alert I'm gonna start secreting some noradrenaline and when you breathe slowly that level of noradrenaline drops down so it sounds so simple but I think it's only in the last two or three years that my lab and mark Krasner's lab at Stanford and other labs elsewhere in the world have started to identified the neurons in the brain that are linked to breathing and how those two things relate to one another and I think everybody should have a kit of tools that they can use to bring themselves down and ramp themselves up that I'll just say one other thing about focus so when we're in a high alert state something very powerful happens that I think partially explains your your ability now to drop into this book riding when there's a certain amount of adrenaline in our system our pupils dilate remember the eyes are not connected to the brain our eyes are actually two pieces of central nervous system they are two pieces of brain outside the skull that were designed to control our overall Rowell state and so we can talk about this as it relates to sleep and sleep quality but when I bring up the level of adrenaline in my body through breathing or let's say I see a troubling text or let's just say I just use a very Goggins type approach and just figure out the most painful inspiring for me reason to it you know it's it sounds vague because obviously David I don't know what goes on in your head but a tremendous respect for your ability to do this but he just ratchets himself out of that ditch and puts himself in motion the pupils dilate and when that happens our visual system actually enters something that's a little bit more like portrait mode on our phone there's a process called accomodation and your ability to focus on one thing visually actually becomes better and your ability to see everything else blurs away and that's the ability to just see that screen of text or that if you work on you know pattern paper to just see that pad in paper and then as you start writing what people don't realize is that mental focus follows visual focus and blind people it's slightly different it follows auditory focus but in in most people your visual focus as you bring that into really sharp relief that image of your book and you stir it you're gonna feel some agitation and your mind's gonna be jumping all over the place but if you wait just a couple minutes the rest of the world will disappear I think this is sort of like the flow state people are looking for but remember the gate of entry is one of what you have to wade through some some sewage before you can swim in clear water right the way I always think about it but the visual focus is what brings the rest of the brain into cognitive focus and people in the martial arts understand this you've probably experienced this running when you're feeling exhausted and you can just concentrate on one milestone and get there you can almost bring that into like you what you're doing is you're linking that to the dopamine circuitry you're saying that thing is the milestone not winning the race not some other thing outside this this immediate environment that thing and when you're able to start capturing these peripheral circuits meaning the body the diaphragm the visual system then you start getting past this whole idea of mindsets and it really becomes about the body setting the mind and this is where I think when you say action leads the rest mm-hmm right it's that's a what you're saying is a is grounded in real neural neurobiological data there's also a shift in your perception of time when you're in that state you know suddenly your relationship with time becomes completely different so I'm and and I'm not like you know it's easy to say it slows down or it speeds up to me it's neither you're in this weird liminal state where it's almost like it doesn't exist it's not it's not a relevant like vector in your in your emotional experience I'm really glad you brought this up because one of my obsessions is time perception and you know having spent the last 20 years or so studying the visual system what you start to realize is that space meaning physical space not outer space but physical space around you and your time perception are absolutely linked mm-hmm and when our focus is very narrow time starts to feel thin-sliced so it's oh you're right it's not that it's going fast or slow it's that you're perceiving more events per unit time so it's like a metronome that's going faster mm-hmm when our gaze is dilated so when we're relaxed there's actually a what happens is the pupil kind of relaxes a bit it doesn't always get bigger or smaller but what happens is we really when we're relaxed so if you view a horizon for instance or you go into what's called panoramic vision so even though I'm looking at you right now I can dilate my gaze without moving my head or eyes so I can see the corners of the room and the ceiling I can see myself in the environment when we do that our perception of time broadens and we feel like we have more time and what we're doing when we do that focus versus D focus as I call it or focal vision versus panoramic vision is you're toggling on and off the autonomic nervous system for alertness you're turning on and off that is that a nephron circuit and so it's conscious control over a brainstem circuit and this is why I don't like the phrase autonomic because that means automatic it's a misnomer all the breathing I can control my autonomic nervous system I can breathe I can control my own an oven or a system I can eat a big meal I can control my autonomic nervous system I can focus or D focus and if we really look at the realm of high performance what you start to realize is people who are very good at their respective sport or career or in the Special Operations Committee what they do are exceptionally good at turning it on and off these systems so they're highly functional at achieving their milestones but they're not spending out extra energy because when you go into panoramic vision you start to uncouple the space time thing and you get some rest and relaxation the way to think about this is so we go back to duration path and outcome that's the most stringent high focused regime for the brain the way to get better at duration path and outcome is to engage in activities that are low duration path an outcome where your brain is not in modes of analyzing duration path and outcome what's the one phase of our life when we're not thinking about duration path and outcome at all sleep and so the reason why you can pull somebody's mind apart their ability to think rationally and analyze duration path and outcome by sleep depriving them is because sleep despite all its neurochemical complexity is really when we restore our ability to analyze duration path and outcome now you think about buds and you go no wonder they sleep deprived them they're they're trying to figure out who has the ability to control these mechanisms and who doesn't most people fail so when I think about how to recover I I actually don't think about recovery as its own thing I think about recovery as giving buoyancy or improving my ability to focus so sleep is a turning off of these brain circuits that are thinking about what's happening next so some people experience challenges in falling asleep they need to learn how to turn off thinking and there's actually a way to do this we're doing a study on this now it relates to hypnosis that would be fun to talk about and we can if you like the other thing is that just merely going into panoramic vision say between a meeting instead of looking at your phone more focal vision we're working hard on your book maybe you walk to the kitchen just two seconds of the lit what I call deliberate decompression where you just kind of let your mind go broader will allow you to reset your focus much more intensely when you return to that book as opposed to if you would look at your phone or engage even in some other kind of deep duration path outcome type a function of the brain so when you start thinking about meditation it's also valuable because a lot of meditation involves focusing on your breath I actually think a lot of people are spending out this ability there they're working too hard in their the activities that are designed to reset them so the two ways to reset yourself in wakefulness being just very adamant about my meditation practice that's right is it's a it's a letting go it's not alright it's a you know it's we're so programmed to like force ourselves to do things or to like dive in with intentionality but so much of this is more elusive than that I think that we can all do ourselves a great service and performing much better in what we're doing by taking little micro recoveries in the form of dilating our gaze in between meetings just for a second viewing a horizon is the best way to do it because it naturally brings the eyes into D focus we're doing this in VR because we can control the visual environment completely when you go into this D focus mode you turn off that brainstem circuit you're conserving norepinephrine for your next bout of focus and activity otherwise you're spending it and the brain doesn't care how you spend it doesn't care if it's on Instagram doesn't care if it's watching the news but learning how to defocus very and then refocus very quickly can get you through a race that you wouldn't otherwise have been able to get through it saves you energy and it and it builds energy the other thing is we talked a lot about sleep and sleep is extremely important but there are other modes of and brain states that can allow you to recover one of the ones that I might proponent oven that my lab has been studying in other labs are studying is what many people call yoga nidra where you I've done you draw a lot it's a wonderful practice you know just lying down and focusing enough of your attention so that you don't fall asleep and enough of your attentions on and moving it around so that you're not really concentrating on any one thing I fall asleep every time I do too I do too but what we know so I fundamentally disagree with respectfully though with the idea that we can't recover sleep that we've lost because what are we really talking about there for me it's the ability to perform these duration path outcome analyses so in my lab we have people do a cognitive task and then we place them into these very deep states of relaxation through things that are kind of like you're gonna drum and people can find yoga nidra scripts out there they're everywhere on YouTube elsewhere or we have them do a hypnosis script hypnosis is very similar deep relaxation wandering sort of attention fairly narrow context but it brings the brain into these unique states where you're neither asleep nor awake and for people that have trouble falling asleep or trouble relaxing themselves these kinds of practices are extremely useful because they're really teaching you how to turn off those modes of focus so you know we live in a stress Society some people are stressed because they're overwhelmed but other people are stressed because they just don't know how to turn off their brain and fall asleep and so if you want to learn how to turn off your brain and fall asleep these practices are immensely used how do you practice hypnosis by yourself though so there's some scripts I would recommend people go to one of the scripts on YouTube or there's some good ones I've never met him I don't have any relationship to him but Michael C Lee s EA lui Australian guy has some really good hypnosis scripts now just audio programs yeah you just listen to them and these and he's not gonna make you walk off a cliff or anything no so stage hypnosis is very different right so I have a very close collaboration with a guy named David Spiegel who's in our psychiatry department Stanford we're now looking at how daily breathing exercises can impact people sleep in levels of stress he's done a lot of work on addiction and trauma and pain man through hypnosis and most all of hypnosis that's clinical involves bringing one's state into one of deeper relaxation not full sleep and then thinking about some behavioral change that one wants to make these are ancient practices really and I think that they were developed by people that understood that rewiring of the brain requires focus and deep rest what's interesting about hypnosis is it brings those two things together at the same moment so normally you'll work really hard on something work really hard then you'll sleep and that's when the plasticity occurs but hypnosis likely accelerates that whole process by having people enter a state of deep relaxation and focus at the same time and allows those circuits to reshape themselves and there's some published data from David's lab to support that that's fascinating so I think these practices are really useful and I think that if you want to get better at performing everyone now knows thanks to Matt Walker's book and others like sleep more sleep better but what if you have trouble sleeping well or falling asleep well we want to define what that is some people have a hard time turning off their thoughts it's really hard remember you can't do it what you can do is to learn to control that perceptual window and distribute it so that your sense of time starts to kind of drift off and you end up in sleep more easily and it's a practice that most people find if they do it for ten minutes a day or so they start sleeping much better within within a week or more you know and sometimes more they sometimes people need some other help like not drinking caffeine late in the day etc but that brain state of no duration path and outcome analysis is gonna be the most restorative and you can get it in wakefulness too so taking a walk where you're just letting your mind go is very powerful and the other thing that's powerful is optic flow so self-generated optic flow by walking running or cycling shifts the brain into a state of relaxation that's not seen when you're stationary this is well this well described in the neuroscience literature for some reasons not well described in the wellness literature but it's a real thing when you move through space you're active you're there's a natural calming of the brain circuits involved in threat threat detection this is the basis for EMDR I move into sensitization reprocessing the lateralized eye movements they have people do in the clinic that got a goofy looking thing while they're talking about that to overcome fear and trauma that lowers stress and the the the rationale is that by coupling a low stress state to the recall of the trauma it's gonna allow people to reshape their relationship to the trauma it says tolerate that the discomfort and it EMDR my clinical colleagues tell me works best for fairly well-defined traumas it's not going to be like my childhood or you know a whole series of events but for single event traumas or a trauma that's repeated but of the same sort it seems to work best it's not gonna work best to completely reshape all relationships to all traumas but it does seem to be powerful for a certain so people basically an example would be if you got into a car accident and then you're afraid to get in a car or something like that right so you take this person and and you submit them to this therapy where they move their eyes back and forth laterally which seems absurd seems goofy right so this is supposed to help them get over their their fear their blockage yeah so okay so my lab studies vision and we study stress and states of mind and people used to talk to me about a EMDR and asked me about EMDR and it's like this is crazy this is music John this is absurd right or drug makes no sense why would moving the eyes from side to side have any impact on states of mind that's ridiculous but then what happened was in 2018 2019 and 2025 quality manuscripts came out in very good journals from groups that were studying eye movements not studying stress or trauma that found that these lateralized eye movements not up and down the lateralized eye movements quiet the activity of ium of the amygdala the limbic structure in the brain that's primarily responsible for threat detection and stress and I was like oh my goodness this thing might actually be real then I started to dig into the backstory of this and there was a woman named Francine Shapiro who came up with this idea actually walking behind Stanford in the Stanford Hills she was a therapist and she figured she had this idea based on the fact that she didn't feel as upset about certain things when she was walking that this might be useful and she was smart enough to know that these lateralized eye movements are what reflexively occur anytime were an optic flow we don't realize it because they're subconsciously generated and they're very subtle but she realized she couldn't really take people walking on their therapy sessions I suppose she could but it's not really practical if it's raining etc so what she decided to do was to bring the eye movement component to the clinic and had them move their eyes from side to side while they would recount these traumas and people experienced tremendous benefit and in fact now there's a lot of evidence to show that these lateralized eye movements really do quiet the stress of the nervous system and allow people to continue to move forward this is probably all anchored I go back to that story of that dear that needs something and as its feeling that agitation and gets up and starts moving the movement feeds back onto the brain to quiet that stress and anxiety so it can be a observant of its environment and that panoramic mode is what we are in when we are in a position to be very situational Earwood aware when we're stressed we are gonna have you know so distraught over the world right this relates directly to addiction because I I've spent some time at addiction treatment clinics and talking to people in that community and it's very clear that of course there are a huge number of factors that play into why people come become addicted and relapse etc but if you can get at people's ability to control their anxiety and their feelings of peak states and Happiness you you don't guarantee but you help reinforce the possibility that they're gonna get sober and stay sober as an addict gets more tethered to the idea that some substance is the thing they need the progressive narrowing of the things that bring them pleasure and everything else kind of falls away like portrait mode on the phone they're essentially in a state of high stress trying to meet that dopamine need all the time and they don't see other possibilities the reason I mentioned not just stress and treating stress to get out of addiction but also pleasure is that we've also seen this when do people relapse when their feeling really good when they're feeling really lousy and stressed and when they're feeling really good they've been sober for five years we hear about this in the news usually from you know celebrity examples people have been doing great all of a sudden they're back in treatment you know like what happened what happened was the dopamine circuit from other things maybe a great life event or things are going well or stress the loss of a job everything crashing puts our visual system and the rest of our brain into a myopia we become we literally become nearsighted and the dopamine system says that's the only thing that's gonna get me out of the mode that I'm in they literally don't see the other possibility so some of the work that I'm starting to get involved in now is to try and inform the addiction treatment community the trauma community that there are ways to use action in the body to move people out of states of myopia nearsightedness and this is kind of a cognitive nearsightedness and allow them to start parsing their time perception differently it Hart you know it goes right back to time perception when an addict needs something their sense of time is fixed to the retrieval of that thing or the you know reaching that thing and then when they can dilate their sense of time they realize they have time for other options but until you can dilate that there's really no chance frankly you can't find a way you can't find a way you can tell somebody you're gonna lose your kids and they'll do it anyway and that just tells us we need another route to it and so one of the things I think is powerful is to think about how can we leverage the visual system how can we leverage the diaphragm system in the same way that you would tell a you know somebody who's in you know has cancer or needs a surgery of a certain sort like we need to leverage certain technologies well we need to leverage certain inborn technologies of respiration and vision to be able to access states of mind that will allow us to make better choices for the Attic in that really nearsighted view fixated there is no other choice and I think those early years of skateboarding and being you know feral it showed me that these the people I knew that became addicts and frankly I know some adults who have been come attics even who have very quote-unquote functional lives it wasn't just those people you know we like to think they're making a bad choice and they had it they're making a bad decision it's unclear to me whether or not they have a choice in those highly myopic states of mind and so what we need to do is we need to dilate their perception of the world around them we need to dilate their perception of time we need to learn they need to learn how to relax themselves so they can actually see other options and it all relates to how the visual system and the breathing system relate to autonomic function addiction is the is the perfect sort of laboratory to do this and it's so important I think because if it were simply the case that people just needed family support and which they do and they needed you know encouragement and they need discouragement about making the wrong behaviors then this we wouldn't even be having our complicated it's so much I mean the thing I think all of those are you know really powerful tools and important things to look at with respect to the Attic mentality or that disposition there has to be a level of self-awareness in that addict that the decision to pick up the drink or to use the drug begins so far in advance of the actual behavior by the time they actually pick up that drink there's no getting in the way of that like that decision has so much momentum behind it that it's almost impossible to reverse Oh a breathing technique or any technique at that juncture is unlikely to be successful so it's about recognizing you know when that state is starting to shift in that direction whether it's days or hours or weeks before the behavior choice to intervene at a place in time when you can actually have an impact I I agree I think that it's always an uphill battle with addiction at least at first but even you know just given that the numbers on relapse you know I think every but what was it that someone once told me um I don't know if this is actually true but for most people but he said a recovered addict told me you know you know that every day he tells himself no matter how far I Drive I'm always the same distance from the ditch you know I mean the addiction community has there's so many awesome there's so many great takeaways yeah the what's interesting is there's a a some verbage around the yoga community that is very valuable I I can't recall it off the top of my head but they talk about the the great support that one can get from learning to access brain states of timelessness sleep being very restorative wakeful deliberate disengagement being very restorative maybe meditation maybe through yoga nidra maybe through simple quick breathing techniques but being able to dilate and contract one sense of time and not being locked to one kind of space-time regime the ability to recognize I'm that I'm not seeing clearly right I see what I see but I I don't know what I don't see the ability to introduce that understanding for somebody can be very powerful and I think we need to give them tools that they can look to very quickly I don't think we're ever gonna have a treatment for addiction that's in the form of a pharmaceutical like one pill because if you start tapping into the dopamine system itself you start degrading other aspects of life so I think one of the reasons why addiction treatment is so complicated is that you need many elements but the elements that come from the person themselves are ultimately the the most important ones of course and I think physiology and neuroscience does have some tools that can lend support to that yeah yeah it's interesting I mean I think that every couple years you see new science emerge on addiction and there's some new protocol and you know 12-steps constantly getting thrown under the bus and you know 12 steps what got me sober and I'm very rooted in that community I remain open to other you know modalities and protocols and super interested in seeing where all of this is going but I think it is important to appreciate how complex it is like there's a trauma element to it there's a you know behavioral modification element to it there's a emotional like how do you how do you find a way to anchor this person to a path a life path that has meaning and purpose and all of these things in for this complex you know soup that's going on in their head that's dictating whether they're gonna pick up a drink or not yeah and you know and I love the neuroscience community with you know it's been my family and home for many years now and the the people working on addiction or are you know motivated from the right place and they are you know working exceedingly hard there are a lot of data now that show you know for instance their complete genetic changes in the cells that can you know and the pathways that control dopamine and reward and that's all wonderful to understand but meanwhile I think there there are enough tools out there that they need to be aggregated in a way that's structured and that addiction treatment communities can can leverage one of the things that would be of great use is the idea of a biomarker so you described that you know and it's it's really a beautiful example of how when some early on you might be able to intervene but later it gets much harder we need biomarkers that are gonna tell us for some people or their family that somebody's at risk some way you have biomarkers some kind of loop device right well I think it's gonna come from once you know how well somebody is regulating their own autonomic nervous system you can predict pretty well whether or not they're going to succeed or fail and making good decisions and so I do think a whoomp type device or other sensor device could be tremendously beneficial in detecting and telling people whether or not they are veering off course right and I think it's getting very minority report though it is I mean I I think machines are gonna help us make a lot of decisions that we're actually pretty poor by making but the simplest of those that we might see in the next two or three years is saying look you've been working extremely hard on your book you're doing very well but you're gonna need an extra hour sleep I mean that's essentially what you're doing for you or well 12 hours you're gonna make a bad decision 12 hours you're gonna make a bad decision or even cueing it or inter or insert might in there right you might make a bad decision so that you're more aware and you're gonna devote a little more mental energy to the kinds of decisions you're making I think that as I always pull a lot of all-nighters I still do unfortunately in my career writing grants and so forth and I have this rule that I learned my gosh about 15 years I don't trust any of my thinking that occurs between 3:00 a.m. yeah and 7:00 a.m. if I've been up all night I just don't trust it because I started to think the world's falling apart I started thinking the word the is misspelled I mean I really know I'm sleep-deprived when words like the look of misspelled and then I'm like yeah that's going on that's that duration path outcome circuitry starting to trying to starting to fall apart so I think that that's an extreme example but I think that short of having people buffer their lives with tons of activities and perfect nutrition and perfect social interactions people learning to control their autonomic nervous system I think is really the next step in our species evolution I really believe that what we are seeing now in the world is a call to arms if you will or a request from Mother Nature to have everybody learn how to control their autonomic nervous system a little bit better or ideally a lot better yeah it's it's absolutely critical I think me right now you know irrespective of what's going on with the pandemic and the political climate and the protests and all the upheaval that we're seeing as a culture we're experiencing an extraordinary poverty of attention and focus we're so distracted by our devices were more anxious and stressed and depressed than we ever have been before this is not going in a good direction and to the extent that we can commandeer a little bit more control over these things and understand that we have some level of agency and we can reverse this sort of automatic pattern that we're on of just scrolling endlessly and you know doing what we're doing that we know is not leading us in a good direction is critical if we're gonna find our way forward and to to speak a little bit to what's going on right now I think you know and it's related and I'm interested in your thoughts on you know the the neuroscience that that is you know I think relevant to this is that we've lost the ability to have civil discourse there's a real breakdown in communication right now culturally and socially and it's fractured our society and it's not it's it's not good right so what is going on neurologically with human beings that are attaching themselves and I so self identifying with certain narratives that it's polarizing our population and preventing us from being able to just be together or United or agree upon what is true and what is not true and share a value system so that we can see our way through the challenges that we're facing right now which many of which are an existential threat to the future of humanity and the planet it's a huge problem you articulate articulate it beautifully and I think neuroscience can offer a couple insights into why it's happening and perhaps what we might do about it so one of the scientific results that I'm very intrigued by is in the 1960s a guy named Robert Heath recorded from the human brain these are people you couldn't do this experiment nowadays but skull popped off my neurosurgery friends tell me that's no big deal mm-hmm electrodes lower deep into the brain all over the brain and people can stimulate wherever they want and they just report what they're feeling so press one lever they feel drunk they press another lever they feel happy they press another lever they feel sexually aroused and they're reporting all this spike when was this done in the 1960s early 1960s several times actually and published twice essentially the same date at different populations in the journal science which is sort of our Super Bowl science and nature cell those are the the big ones journals rat that is so the number one brain area that people want to stimulate they finally hit this lever where they go oh I like that and they just keep hitting that thing and hitting that thing and hitting that thing frustration and mild anger uh-huh I saw that result I'm gonna be drunk I could be happy I could be I'm gonna choose frustration and anger exactly it's what that told us is it's clearly tapped into the dopamine reward system it feels like a hit of dopamine to them more than anything else so we need to put that on the shelf keep it visible as we kind of march into this a sort of answer to your question the other thing is in understanding that and there's some recent data on this that are really impressive not from my lab but from another lab which is that beliefs and information that supports our prior beliefs also increases the activity of these reward systems so the more I see stuff that verifies what I already think or feel that they are bad and they are good or that we are good and they are bad the more dopamine and adrenaline is released into my system which we now know from our discussion a few minutes ago changes the way I view the world it actually changes the way I view the world it means that I'm gonna see certain things and not see others and this also relates to the auditory system I'm gonna hear certain things and not hear others the things that verify my beliefs are I'm gonna feel rewarded for the things that are counter to my beliefs I'm not gonna be its rewarded for so we have all these barricades to empathy and to really listening and to really hearing what the other side is trying to say and we have all these support networks in our body in our brain which are building a bigger and bigger divide now that's all very depressing so the question is what's the boat that's gonna get us across that divide and I believe and I am NOT just defaulting to this because it's what my lab works on but I fundamentally believe that the boat that's gonna get us to the other side is our ability to control our internal state to be able to ratchet down our level of autonomic arousal just enough so that I can dilate not just my vision of what's happening in my immediate environment but I can dilate my cognition my thinking to the possibility that there may be a kernel value in what somebody else is saying even if it's about me and I don't like what I'm hearing now for as somebody who spent time in the addiction treatment community you you probably know this is a lot of what you get good at as you learn to move through something that to you feels very good and you know all the reasons why it would probably be good to change it but you know what you don't want to because it feels so good so we're talking about an addiction to entrench thinking we're talking about an addiction and neurochemical systems that support lack of change my refusal to change and stubbornness and I actually think just like in for the treatment of addiction and trauma the key is to get people to learn to tolerate progressively higher levels of stress and maintain dilation of sensory experience of thought experience we've got to create some small little portals through which information can come in a lots been made of mirror neurons I hate to break it to the crowd but the data in support of mirror neurons in humans is not that impressive and now the mirror neuron people are gonna come after me but fine there are circuits in the brain that control emotional contagion and those are what's powerful my ability to recruit you into stress is much more powerful than my ability to recruit you into empathy for something good that's a well-established neurobiological fact or empathy for for for someone's perspective that I'm you know that I'm fundamentally going to disagree with right so I think there are three gates to getting there and by there I think we're you know I'm referring vaguely to the idea that we need to increase our level of understanding at least our level of discourse so that we can hear other really hear other people's ideas even though we don't like the way it feels and we love the way that we feel this is one tenet results that we love the way we feel we don't like the way other people's feel the first thing is to bring the level of urgency that we feel internally down we need to learn to calm ourselves in order to really have the information start to come in now the system right now and people out there everyone's in a frenzy and you can see it our collective collective consciousness is kind of losing its mind it's kind of out of its mind we need to learn how to turn off those amygdala circuits so are we all going to get together and do EMDR probably not are we all gonna get together and do breathing exercises probably not not at scale what we need to do is start to figure out how we can I think especially for the next generation of kids how to teach them to regulate their nervous system so that they recognize that pulse of adrenaline as placing them in a come from position like we have to leverage the idea that being able to hear and listen hinges on the ability to be calm so therefore the ability to be calm is crucial to hearing and listening and hearing and listening is crucial to our advancement as individuals and as groups the problem is everyone's been trying to do this backwards they've said we all have to get along we have to cancel cancel culture we all have to you know listen to one another and I think again we have to start from the inside we have to teach it physiologically now I don't have a master plan on how to do that but one of the reasons I'm here and one of the reason I'm you know teaching neuroscience on Instagram and not just in my laboratory is until we can learn to regulate the self I don't think we're gonna get where we want to go as a culture I think it really does start with our in own individual ability to do that and so you know David's a really good example for instance of somebody who learned how to deal with his own internal mess and build something beautiful out of that and he continues to do that and everyone's got to find that process for themselves and whether or not you have a perfect family or whether or not you consider yourself the most inclusive and accepting person in the world or not everyone needs to learn how to do that for themselves and everyone thinks we do it pretty well but I think it's clear that none of us do it well enough so on anomic arousal autonomic arousal autonomic control I think those are the entry points for addiction for trauma and for really empathic hearing and listening and until we do that I think our species is going to continue to go around this merry-go-round yeah where every fifty or hundred years we crash right up against the same general set of issues only now social media has made it slightly more a lot more complicated it's it's a little bit similar to what you were talking about in terms of the seeking external validation versus finding it within yourself like essentially the protocol the prescription that you just gave has a strain of Buddhism in it in the sense that the world's going to change when we change ourselves like the best most impactful way that you can make a difference for the world is to focus on being the best version of yourself how can you that allows you to be more receptive and objective and empathetic and able to listen and hear and and I think it's true it's a hundred percent true and then I think about the person losing their [ __ ] and you know Target or whatever over the masks or whatever in you know insane video clip of the day I happened to see on social media and I think we're doomed like is this person gonna do that no I can't control that I can only control myself and I worry that when the onus is on the individual to solve the problem that that we're not going to find our way through it right like we obviously need organizational institutional and systemic changes we need to change the way these social media platforms work out the way in which were delivered information and the way in which were siloed but I don't have any control over any of those things the only thing I have control over is my own internal mechanism so what other choice do we have well I think we need people in positions of power and leadership who are very good at internal control you know I I think emotions are great I experience them often intensely but congratulations thank you they're not always wonderful to experience but I think it's clear that the level of autonomic arousal that's associated with emotions either very high or very low very happy or very sad very anxious or very angry clouds are judgment it's very clear and I think the sooner they give them too much credence to they're just feelings man like we don't have to allow them to overtake us and monopolize everything that we do they were designed to push us along certain behavioral paths but they they've grown in importance in the last few years and you know we could get into a discussion about how you know social media marketing or designed to you know capture these very deep limbic aspects of ourselves and they are but what's amazing is and important is that everybody has a forebrain if some people some it seems though it's more developed than others but everybody has one and we have this for what we call top-down control which is the ability to intervene in our own feeling states and our own action states and to set some some rigor and some some real clear marks that we're out to achieve and I think it's gonna start with the the generation that's very plastic right now yeah you know what most parents are afraid of stressing their kids because they don't want to you know again I went to a high school where kids literally Gunn High School in the last 10 years kids have you know they've been over a dozen you know train track suicides so those are kids that are committing suicide for different reasons but a lot of them is because they just feel too much pressure so obviously we can't you know we can't pressure kids beyond their capacity to regulate but the idea that all of our internal states should be driven by external things that's that's a foolish mr. Paul so so I think we need to operationalize what we're gonna teach the next generation you know maybe our generation isn't really rescue Abul but maybe the next generation is and if they understand that there's some concepts that sound a little mushy like gratitude or mindfulness or these kinds of things but as long as they understand that for instance gratitude which we didn't really touch on involves a whole other neurotransmitters reward system in the brain the serotonin system which buffers us against injury it can improve wound repair it can allow us to lean back into these high stress regimes learning and you know kids learning how to toggle their nervous system back and forth between highly you know duration paths outcome-focused states of trying to improve and learn and then learning how to really relax and chill out and enjoy and be socially connected because it will allow them to Ratchet back in and focus with extreme depth I think in doing that we may not get every child to learn how to do that but if we can distribute that information widely enough and there's so many brilliant examples and beautiful examples yours David's many others of people that have been able to tap into those systems intuitively if we can get that information out there I really believe that at least a subset of those kids will grow up to be the leaders that are super she's really needs in order to get through this next filter and right now we're feeling the stringency of that filter and I think our level of autonomic dysregulation as a species the fact that we're there we're here right now says okay here's the here's the task are you guys gonna figure yourselves out you got this for brain my dog doesn't have that for brain I've got he can't figure it out but we can work this out and it'll involve technologies like devices to measure how we're doing maybe some machines to guide that that's a different discussion but I think it's entirely possible and I think that's the evolutionary pressure that we're in right now and I think that the next generation if they can hear about it and learn about it is gonna meet that demand our species has done it for every other demand I toggle back and forth between extreme optimism and and you know dystopian despair because on the one hand you know you described the the experience of going to therapy and you know how that was kind of you know novel at that time but we're not in that place anymore and everybody's got a smartphone and there's you know headspace and calm and waking up and all these incredible apps and mindfulness is part of the mainstream modern vernacular like these kids are growing up not only aware of these practices but Amina Bowl and you know they're it's it's being done in the households in which they're being raised which I find to be you know that's an amazing thing I think there is a consciousness you know that is emerging out of these young people that hopefully we can rely on to solve some of these problems and then you know I just think about the endless scrolling and the associated you know I'm cycled yes we're [ __ ] well you know I think it's clear that most people young or old are content to be passive consumers and spend out their dopamine doing essentially meaningless activities and consuming food and consuming air and light that is basically damaging to themselves and they I don't think they care i I think they're our species let's be fair our species is non-essential no no I didn't say that our species although sometimes I think it'd be interesting some other species around the earth where the curators are the planet so I think that our species is probably divided into those that are really going to try and maximise on this gift of neuroplasticity right we're the only species that has a neural plasticity throughout the lifespan and that neural plasticity and childhood lasts as long as it does as a function of our total lifespan it's incredible so we were gifted this and I think some people leverage it and take advantage of it and other people don't and I think we need to accept that we're not going to get everybody but what we need to do is attach the reward systems of society financial socioeconomic etc to the kinds of behaviors that are going is going to give rise to people that can lead us into the next hundred years and 200 years now that is not saying oh do away with monetary systems are actually the opposite I think that once people start to realize that your high-performing military elite military your high-performing athlete your high-performing academics your high-performing business people they actually have practices that they use to regulate themselves to in order to not just perform better but sleep better and not just to sleep better but to listen better not just listen better but incorporate ideas that allow them into states of creativity and states of mind that really lead to new and exciting ways that humans can interact and the many people will just be consumers of everything they yeah produce well all of the what's what's great about new media is that we've we've democratized access to this information and we're able to realize that that these people are not just freaks of nature but that they have a methodology and they've created this Canon this toolkit and these practices are available to everybody and you have people like David who are explaining this in very plain terms that it is within your power to take advantage of these things to take better control of your life and we've never seen anything like that before in the history of humanity and I think that that you know that bodes well for the empowerment of the next generation as well I do too i as you can probably tell I'm I'm optimistic I have to be because otherwise I can't justify the work that we're doing but I think that there's so much interest now in psychology and the brain and the self in physical fitness which you know I think it's fair to say is inextricably linked to mental fitness and the fact that people are so curious about what other people are doing and what are the past its success and you know what are the resources for trauma and addiction I think there's been a kind of swarm of information it's been hard to sort through but I think 2020 is our you know is our sort of call I can't find a call to arms and I cuz I guess I I do feel that way it's very serious this is this is serious business and this is the time for us and the next generation to step up and you know and to lead people toward a place where they we can function better and where the next generation will reflexively function better that's that beauty of early childhood is that if some of this stuff is taught and passed off it's not gonna be perfect but there will be a generation of people coming up that will naturally understand stress and agitation is taking them off their game and leading to bad decisions will it make the appropriate adjustments and though people that will that read David's book in your book and will see the possibility of doing something differently with it with a terrible childhood or a brutal addiction and you know I think we we need more stories of success I think it's easy to look out there and see all the things that are going wrong and we need to keep paying attention to those but we need these beacons that draw people forward and I say that from a place of experience I mean I used to have to find it in books in the bookshelf I there was no online back then or in mentors and you know you have to forage you know I think kids they have to have that foraging capacity they can't just sit there and wait for it to rain on them or for a parent to dump it on them but I trust that they're out there and they're gonna figure it out just like you're doing on Instagram you're dropping these videos basically every day right like more little little lessons on neuroscience I'm trying I'm trying to show people that I have a kind of no acronym rule so I don't like embedding things in a lot of complex language sometimes I have to use an acronym but yeah teach people a little bit about how their brain works how it interfaces with psychology everyone's got different goals and purposes in the world but you know that scientists are normal people and that hopefully science has something I think really science has something to offer but it's not gonna happen if I'm vaulted in my lab you know my papers are read by the 12 people that care enough to read the papers start to finish so I'm doing it there are others out there of course David's and Claire's doing it and such and pandas doing it I'm trying to recruit more people from the scientific community to do this I think it's our responsibility you paid for it it's your tax dollars you know there's a tremendous cost to doing science that is not often discussed but I don't really consider it an option I consider it my obligation and I'm gonna keep going well keep doing it man I appreciate the work that you're doing I think it's really important work we need it now more than ever and it's cool that you're getting out there and sharing your wisdom with everybody it's super empowering so thanks man thank she ate it really appreciate the chance to if you're if you're diggin on Andrew best way to find him is Bram here at human lab Huberman lab cool all right man coming back I made all these notes all the stuff I wanted to talk to you about we got through like 10% of itself run I know it's great rainbows yeah I just I just was getting out of the way man to you know listen to what you have to say I appreciate it thanks man thank you peace [Music] [Music]

Channel: Rich Roll

Views: 1,664,053

Rating: 4.9184012 out of 5

Keywords: rich roll, rich roll podcast, self-improvement podcasts, education podcasts, health podcasts, wellness podcasts, fitness podcasts, mindfulness podcasts, mindset podcast, plant-based nutrition, neuroscience podcasts, neuroscience podcast, brain plasticity, how to learn new skills, brain health podcast, restoring eyesight to the blind, dr. andrew huberman, dr andrew huberman meditation, david goggins brain study, wim hof andrew huberman, david goggins andrew huberman

Id: SwQhKFMxmDY

Length: 132min 41sec (7961 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2020

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