Dr. Andrew Huberman: "YOU WILL NEVER FEEL STRESSED AGAIN"

foreign how do I get calmer in the mind when my body is freaking out there you go and I think people will recognize some of what I'm about to describe as kind of Wim hof-like breathing it was also traditionally been called Tumo breathing some people call it super oxygenation breathing although then there are other people like Patrick McEwen and company that will say well you're actually blowing off more carbon dioxide than you are bringing in oxygen and so the naming again now is a mess Yoga Nidra is exhale emphasize but um tumor breathing wimaof breathing and super what sometimes is called superoxygenation breathing involves doing a lot of inhale exhale inhale exhale it's hyperventilating it's deliberate hyperventory and followed by exhales and breath holds followed by inhales and holes now the repetitive breathing more quickly and deeply this kind of thing ah or some variant of that all through the mouth or all through the nose brings up the heart rate and causes the adrenal glands which sit right above the kidneys to secrete adrenaline they make you more alert and we know this my lab's been looking at this with a number of different measures exploring the nervous system and the periphery like the heart rate and you see these big inflections in heart rate when people do this typically it makes people feel agitated at first they feel a little bit agitated and then when you exhale and hold your breath for 15 seconds or so or longer in some cases if somebody's skilled at this what you're doing essentially is you're learning to be calm as your body is flooded with all this adrenaline and the heart rate is going you're learning to calm your mind that's right so you're learning actually to separate them your body might be shaking that's vibrating and you're learning to suppress that and you're just and that is 100 top-down control what you're doing in those moments is you're learning to take your forebrain and say fight the temptation to move fight the temptation to breathe now I don't want to suggest anyone do this to the point where it's unsafe you should never do this anywhere near water even in a puddle because people have drowned people have died doing High oxygenation breath packing and passing out passing out it is it can be quite dangerous so people need to take the appropriate precautions before they do it if people have pulmonary issues it can there are you know it can be problematic if people get trained on how to do it properly it can be relatively safe okay and my lab has been doing experiments um on but now we have more than 100 people doing different types of breathing and exploring how it affects the mind and the body this particular pattern of breathing ah 25 or 30 times followed by an exhale and a hold and then a big inhale and a hold sometimes doing more and inhaling and exhaling type repetitive breathing that is really somebody training themselves how to self-induce stress and we know from some good literature and some emerging science that's still ongoing that it is possible to get comfortable in these agitated States so that your mind is okay feels okay when the body is feeling like it wants to tremble or move that you can learn to suppress that activity the ice path is another good example of this some people go straight to the ice bath because cold water will almost always induce a low level of stress in people you have to you have to kind of fight it even if you learn to love it you still have to every time jumping in there okay I gotta control the Mind essentially to calm exactly so the body is saying this is really cold this is really cold get out now and you're pushing back on that it's top down control it's pure top down control and you could do this any number of ways there's actually a something called the hour of pain which is um before you jump to conclusions the um the hour of pain was actually described to me by a friend of mine a former a military Special Operations guy who said that you they place you this wasn't through military but this is a kind of outside the military extracurricular extracurricular activities of placing you into one position on on the floor and you have to stay there for an hour which can be excruciating there's so much limbic friction where you want to move so badly because the stabilizing muscles of the body and the feedback in our musculoskeletal system says move move move I just want to move the tiniest bit and so all that practice is it's just a different version of the ice bath yes it's you're learning top down control so you know we started off with a question about trauma yes and we'll get there but I think it's very important just to kind of summarize that people understand to just ask themselves the question if I am I feeling too much agitation or am I feeling too much exhaustion if it's too much agitation emphasize exhales and do the physiological sigh Yoga Nidra is also a wonderful practice that is kind of the mirror image of uh superoxygenation breathing it involves long exhale breathing lying down on your back completely relaxing your body and learning to completely turn off thinking which sounds hard but you can learn how to do it very quickly if you do that practice for about 10 minutes a day yeah it literally means yoga sleep and probably the most commented thing we have on the previous interview is where are the links for this Yoga Nidra stuff so we're going to get that so before I leave today there are several but um people can go on YouTube um some of the better ones out there these are all cost free comedy Desai has a really wonderful one that she I also just happen to like her voice so it works for me um there's a guy named Liam Gillen who has one if you like a male Irish voice there's that they're all you have to pick a voice that works for you yeah um so I'll make some suggestions but if people don't like the particular voice that's walking them through the yoga find a different voice yeah um that's cool so that's a practice that you can do offline meaning not in the moment of stress that will allow you to learn how to relax more then on the fatigue side if you're in Motion in the morning or in the afternoon and you need to keep going you need to keep studying you need to drive to the airport to pick someone up and you're exhausted the please don't drive if you're really really exhausted but inhale emphasize breathing making your inhales just a little bit longer and more vigorous than your exhales will speed up your heart rate will make you more alert so deeper inhale shorter actually yeah so it looks something like I gotta speed it up yeah for and even two or three of those and you'll notice your heart rate will pick up because there's a neural signal from the brain stem sent to the heart to speed up the amount of blood flow but at the end of the day what I'm hearing you say is you can control the mind the body or the mind with the mind to an extent for for moments or even extended periods of time hours maybe but really we need to be thinking to mind the Body Connection at all times that's right because if you stop breathing if you're or if you're only doing short breaths the whole time for a whole day it's gonna affect the body right and the mind and if you're um so it's using the body using the breath using it where it's connected to the brain to constantly support you throughout the day but if you're just like all day it'll help you get to a certain point but then it'll be detrimental to your health right so these these breathing practices are about Shifting the gears but they're not something that you continue doing throughout all day yeah really what I've described here are hardwired meaning we were all born with these neurons and Connections in our body we were all born with these organs to be able to do these things there's not a lot of learning involved once you know how to do it it works the first time it works every time yes but it's sort of like shifting gears there aren't too many manual transmissions these days but let's say you're driving down downhill it's going too fast you would if this is like taking it into a lower gear so then you slow down you're not going to constantly be riding the clutch right you're not going to constantly be in the shifting mode or riding the brake some people do that but that's not good right you don't want to have to do that just like if you're going uphill you might have to hit on the gas a little bit otherwise you're not going to get up that hill but at some point you switch gears and then you're just cruising them yeah exactly right so it's a transmission system rather than you're supposed to breathe this way all day or breathe and the the fast breathing followed by exhales and breath holds the superoxygenation tumor Wim Hof type breathing I look at that as learning how to drive on um on a slick pavement you know it's it's self-induced stress it's like taking your car to a parking lot you know when you a kid's learning to drive I was teaching a kid to drive recently you teach them to drive you go through the neighborhood you do things but when you really want to learn how to for instance drive through puddles or drive in fog or driving Heavy Rain you kind of want to be in a parking lot or a safe safe environment for that you don't want to be on a you know on the Audubon with people right so you these are ways in which you can teach yourself how to navigate the bad weather of the nervous system so you're prepared for when it comes that's right and I and I have to say from personal experience and from some emerging data when I say emerging data I mean studies in my lab and other labs that are still ongoing it does appear that when people self-induce this stress it can be beneficial for I'm going to quote a colleague of mine my colleague David Spiegel who's our associate chair of Psychiatry says it's not just about the state that you're in the state of mind that you're in it's how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it so when you self-induce stress and then you say oh I can calm my mind even though my body is feeling agitated that's a very positive experience for many people whereas when someone else is causing your stress and you're trying to calm down it feels like you're battling 25 different things so these are skills that anyone can develop um and there are skills that essentially require information of what to do but zero training I mean it's so it's like I'm sure you played football I didn't you can probably I'm certain you can throw a football way better than I can that took some some learning yeah it would take me a long long time maybe forever to be able to try and approximate that skill level but these are things that we can all do right away yeah yeah and so now I think we've kind of spelled out a two tools on either side physiological size first for calming down in real time Excel emphasize breathing of The Yoga Nidra sort maybe even doing Yoga Nidra 10 to 20 or 30 minutes a couple times a week daily if you want to teach your nervous system to calm down and then also having tools that emphasize inhales so longer more vigorous inhales or doing an offline practice of some point during your day you decide I'm going to do five or ten minutes of this more rapid breathing followed by some breath holds yeah and provided those are designated safe for you the the the superoxygeny breathing you decide to say for you I'm not aware of any dangers of the Excel emphasized breathing at all but people should always approach any new thing with caution of course but once you have those four Tools in hand you've really learned how to press on the accelerator so that's inhaling more than you exhale you've learned how to drive faster be comfortable at higher speeds that's kind of like the Wim Hof type breathing comfortable at high speeds it's like oh I'm I can drive 65 and feel calm I'm good here whereas previously you couldn't as well as learning how to slow down by with the physiological side that's sort of a break and then the Yoga Nidra is sort of like coming off the accelerator to slow down yeah you're just turning off your system the beauty of having these different tools and practicing them now and again is that there's this other phenomenon which is neuroplasticity which is that then you start doing it reflexively without even realizing it you start doing physiological size when you're too stressed but automatically automatically and even before you start to hit the alertness threshold yeah people just start to engage these things things and so it's kind of like when you see a dog who's just tired and it automatically does the Sigh when it's like panting it'll do like a big sigh and then it's like almost like it's relaxed right and it's just like it goes to sleep that's right I see this with my dog all the time running around panting and then it's just like exactly and that little extra inhale I know we've talked a lot about this before but I don't think we can overemphasize the power of the physiological PSI because that little extra inhale is what opens up those little sacs in the lungs just a little bit more and that when you exhale it pulls a lot more carbon dioxide out of the system which when you pull carbon dioxide out of the system what does that do you feel calm wow there you go you feel calm in fact this is a physiological mechanism to make you calm that's right and in fact um you know in claustrophobic environments or God forbid if you're you know you're drowning the reason you're stressed is because you have neurons in your brain stem that sense carbon dioxide in the bloodstream and as that goes up it says you need to find air you need to offload this carbon dioxide oh man so it's it's a re these are all real physiological mechanisms that are really about balancing the oxygen carbon dioxide in your system and when we see these really extreme Feats of breath holds and people doing all these really wild things usually it's because they're learning to manipulate the oxygen carbon dioxide packing or ratios or how they manage them free diversity yes there's air packing there's all sorts of dangerous stuff that should only really be done by highly trained highly skilled people but you know once people have these tools in hand they can start coupling to them to the tool that involve the mind I mean it's fine to do a physiological PSI and to tell yourself to calm down we're not saying don't think or be mindless but what we're saying is it's it's powerful to look to these mechanics of the body-mind relationship and you said the body and the mind are connected it's really a two-way street yeah the Mind controls the body the body controls the mind it's a loop I just think of it like a loop I don't even think of it as one controlling the other it's just if one of those things is out of whack you need you need to control the other one you're not going to try and just think about trying to control your mind again is like grabbing it fog or at smoke it's it just moves away so that most of the time

Channel: MindsetMatters

Views: 16

Keywords: andrew huberman, dr. andrew huberman, huberman lab podcast, motivational video, speech, motivation, motivational, dr andrew huberman, andrew huberman motivation, andrew huberman stress, andrew huberman podcast, dr andrew huberman stress, andrew, huberman, podcast, stress, stress advice, how to overcome stress, try it for 1 day, neuroscientist, neuroscientist dr andrew huberman, tools for managing stress, manage stress, anxiety, habits, routine, huberman routine, huberman lab

Id: tpDIJuUfy5A

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 24 2023