Andrew Huberman: [Opening theme music] Welcome to the Huberman Lab Guest
series, where I and an expert guest discuss s cience and science
based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor
of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode marks the second episode
in our four episode series with Dr. Paul Conti about mental health. The first episode in the series
dealt with how to understand and assess your level of mental health. Today's episode is about how
to improve your mental health. I do want to emphasize that you do not
need to have heard or seen the first episode in order to understand or glean
important information from today's episode about how to improve your mental health. But I do encourage you to go and
listen to the first episode at some point if you have not already. Today's episode deals with several
topics important to all of us, as well as protocols to improve one's mental health. For instance, you will learn how to
guide yourself through a process of self inquiry in which you address certain key
questions about your drives, your level of aggressive drive, pleasure drive,
and the so called generative drive. These are essential things to understand
about oneself if you want to guide yourself toward your aspirations, and
if you want to understand how your subconscious processing is influencing
your thoughts and your behaviors and your feelings in ways that sometimes
serve your aspirations, and in other ways that can hinder your aspirations. Dr. Conti shares with us a way of assessing
our internal narratives, as well as a way of creating a constructive self
awareness and an understanding of where those narratives and that self
awareness stem from in our childhood, so that we can navigate forward
with the greatest sense of agency. We also talk about how to move
past common hindrances to improving one's mental health, such as
overcoming intrusive thoughts. And perhaps most importantly, today's
episode provides information and protocols that anyone can use to
cultivate their generative drive, which is a hallmark of mental health. Just a reminder that Dr. Paul Conti has generously provided
a few diagrams that we include as PDFs in the show note captions. They are completely zero cost to access,
and they can help you understand some of the material that was discussed
in t he first episode of this series, as well as the current episode about
how to improve your mental health. And while those simple PDF diagrams
are certainly not necessary in order to understand the material in today's
discussion or in the other discussions of this series, many people find them
useful, so I encourage you to check out those links in the show note captions. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize
that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and
effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science
related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to
thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Betterhelp
. Betterhelp offers professional therapy with a licensed
therapist carried out online. I personally have been doing weekly
therapy for more than 30 years, and while that weekly therapy was
initiated not by my own request, it was in fact a requirement
for me to remain in high school. Over time, I really came to
appreciate just how valuable doing quality therapy is. In fact, I look at doing quality
therapy much in the same way that I look at going to the gym or doing
cardiovascular training such as running, as ways to enhance my physical health. I see therapy as a vital way
to enhance one's mental health. The beauty of Betterhelp is
that they make it very easy to find an excellent therapist. An excellent therapist can be defined
as somebody who is going to be very supportive of you in an objective way,
with whom you have excellent rapport with, and who can help you arrive
at key insights that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to find. And because Betterhelp therapy is
conducted entirely online, it's extremely convenient and easy to
incorporate into the rest of your life. So if you're interested in Betterhelp,
go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. That's Betterhelp, spelled
he help.com/huberman. Today's episode is also
brought to us by Waking up. Waking up is a meditation app that
offers dozens of guided meditation sessions, mindfulness trainings,
Yoga Nidra sessions and more. By now, there's an abundance of data
showing that even short daily meditations can greatly improve our mood, reduce
anxiety, improve our ability to focus, and can improve our memory. And while there are many different
forms of meditation, most people find it difficult to find and stick
to a meditation practice in a way that is most beneficial for them. The Waking up app makes it extremely
easy to learn how to meditate and to carry out your daily meditation
practice in a way that's going to be most effective and efficient for you. It includes a variety of different types
of meditations of different duration, as well as things like Yoga Nidra, which
place the brain and body into a sort of pseudosleep that allows you to emerge
feeling incredibly mentally refreshed. In fact, the science around Yoga Nidra is
really impressive, showing that after a Yoga Nidra session, levels of dopamine in
certain areas of the brain are enhanced by up to 60%, which places the brain and
body into a state of enhanced readiness for mental work and for physical work. Another thing I really like about
the Waking up app is that it provides a 30 day introduction course. So for those of you that have not
meditated before or getting back to a meditation practice, that's fantastic. Or if you're somebody who's already a
skilled and regular meditator, waking up has more advanced meditations and
Yoga Nidra sessions for you as well. If you'd like to try the Waking up app,
you can go to wakingup.com/huberman and access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com/huberman. And now for my discussion
about mental health with Dr. Paul Conti. Dr. Conti, welcome back. Paul Conti: Thank you. Andrew Huberman: In the first episode
of this series, you laid out for us in a very structured way what true
mental health looks like, essentially what we should all be aspiring to. And you touched on these themes of
agency and gratitude as verb states, really, ways of being in the world
that allow everybody to have some sense of well being, to have some sense of
themselves in a way that is kind to themselves and to others, and really
to feel good and do good in their life. Without question, this is
what people want, right? You also spelled out for us these two
pillars, the structure of self and the function of self, that consist
of a number of different things that from which geyser up or kind of give
rise to these feelings of empowerment, humility, agency, and gratitude. And reminded us several times that when
we are challenged, when we're not doing as well as we would like, that we need
to look back to the structure of self and the function of self and ask specific
questions in order to arrive or re arrive at this sense of agency and gratitude. Yes, I think it would be wonderful for
us if you could just recap the overall model because it has the components that
I just mentioned, but some subtlety and some really key aspects of these pillars
of structure of self and function of self. I think if people keep in mind for
today's episode, which is about challenges that people commonly face,
and even, if you will, phenotypes that we see commonly out there. For people that haven't heard of
phenotypes, phenotypes are the typical appearance of something. So there is the phenotype of the anxious
person, the phenotype of the person who just can't seem to get out of a rut. There's the phenotype of the traumatized
person and these things play out differently in different individuals,
men and women, boys and girls. But we're going to visit many of the most
common phenotypes out there and think about how to do better, be better, feel
better through the lens of the model that we spelled out in episode one. And of course, if people have not seen
or heard episode one, today's discussion will still be entirely accessible to them. So in keeping with that, if you could just
give us an overview of what this structure of the healthy self looks like as a
roadmap for where we're all headed today. Paul Conti: Thank you. Thanks very much. Revisiting the pillars is, I think,
the best place to start, because there really are routes to understand. And if we understand, then we can
strategize, we can make change, right? We can make things better. So the first pillar, the structure of
self, starts with the unconscious mind. This incredibly complicated biological
supercomputer that's firing a mile a minute underneath the surface in us and
is throwing up to the surface all sorts of thoughts and ideas and states that
then the conscious mind apprehends. Then our awareness comes into play, and
then we have defense mechanisms that sort of rise up from the unconscious
mind, and they circle and sort of gird themselves around the conscious mind,
which they can do in an unhealthy way or in a healthy way or anything in between. And then the character structure is
sort of the nest around all of that. And it's from the character structure
that we are engaging in the world in the ways that we're engaging. It's our active engagement
with the world around us. And the idea is that the
self grows out of that. It grows out of that nest sitting on
top of the unconscious mind to the conscious mind rising above the defense
mechanisms and the character structure. And if we go back to that, when
we're trying to understand ourselves, trying to understand states of health
as well as states of unhappiness or states that aren't healthy, by going
back and looking at the structure, we can learn a tremendous amount. And the other side, the other
pillar, is the function of self. And it really starts
with a self awareness. The awareness that, hey, there
is an I, I am in the world. This is 24 hours in the day are
going to pass today, and I'm going to be doing one thing or another. I'm to some very significant extent
deciding how am I going to engage in the world around me during that time. So on top of that are the
defense mechanisms in action. So defense mechanisms,
remember, are unconscious. So there's a lot then going on
inside of us that's determining sort of the field set of options. There may be a lot of automaticity
that narrows down the set of options of what we may entertain, what we
may be aware of, what we may decide. And that could happen for better
or for worse, depending upon the health of the defense mechanisms. But on top of that lies salient. So the idea then we would next visit,
okay, what are we paying attention to. What's coming from inside,
what's coming from outside. And we have to not pay attention to
many, many things in order to pay attention to whatever our attention
has alighted on at the moment. So it's a complex process, and it's
worth looking at very closely if we want to understand ourselves. So after thinking about the defense
mechanisms in action, the unconscious aspects of how we're engaging with
the world, then next to consider is salience, which is sort of
where does the mind arrive at rest? Where does the mind trend towards? Is it something internal? Is it something external? What are all the things we're
not paying attention to in order to pay attention to something? And is that thing healthy? Is it not healthy? Is it serving us well? So there's so much to
understand about salience. And then the next step beyond
that is understanding behavior. How are we engaging with
the world around us? What are our behavioral choices? What are our automatic behaviors? And then sitting on top of
all of that are our strivings. So we have a sense of wanting something
in the world around us, and what is that, and how are we trying to get
to it, and how does it make us feel? So if we look at the ten elements, the
five under the structure of self and the five under the function of self,
then what we're really looking at is sort of like looking at ten cabinets. And if we're trying to understand
ourselves, whether we're trying to just generally understand ourselves or we're
trying to get at a problem, then looking in all ten of those cabinets makes sense. Some of them will be bare, meaning that
they may seem to have very little to do with the problem we're bringing. And we kind of maintain an open mind. We may be led back to that cabinet,
and there may be something there. But what usually happens is if we look
in all ten places, we find a couple where there's some rich material to
explore, sort of the X marks the spot, and then we go and we dig there to sort
of mix metaphors we dig in the cabinet where we're going to find something. And then it leads forward
a process of understanding. And if we're bringing those things into
line, where we have a healthy structure of self and a healthy function of self,
and we're aware of all of this and we're working on it, we're self aware, and
we're paying attention to everything built on top of that, then what we end
up with is a sense of humility, because one cannot be anything but respectful,
compassionate understanding the complexity of all of this and understanding,
how does it manifest itself in us? And just the very fact that
we can make our ways in the world, right, is so impressive. And in a way, I think it brings to
us a respect, just a respect for being here, navigating the world. And I think of that
respect is born humility. The complexity of us, the fact that
millions of things are going on underneath the surface, millions of neurotransmission
and endocrinological function. All of this is going on under the surface. I'm not even aware of it. And then it kicks up to the surface,
generates a tremendous amount of respect for the complexity and also
the diligence and perseverance it takes us to navigate through the world. And I think built upon that
understanding is a sense of humility and a sense of empowerment. And the humility and
empowerment in action, right? So expressed, become agency and gratitude. And agency and gratitude, as you said
at the beginning, we're seeing as verbs. That's how we're living life. It's through the lens, so to
speak, of agency and gratitude that we're actively living. And again, I would put forth that
when we look at measures of human happiness across disciplines and across
time, this is always what we see is some way of describing how agency
and gratitude, together, as verbs, manifest and then create happiness. It's the state that we're seeking
to be in, because from that state of active agency and active gratitude,
we achieve what it is that I think we're really searching for. And there are infinite words throughout
human history to describe what that is. We might choose to use words like
peacefulness, a sense of peace, a sense of contentment, being delighted by things,
like just being amazed and impressed by things in the world around us. Like, this is a state
that we're striving for. And I think when people talk about
happiness and what we're really trying to get to, it's this. But it's not that these
things are passive. These things are coming from the
active agency, the active gratitude. And they're then interacting with
a generative drive within us. We have an aggressive drive. We have a pleasure drive like this
has been thought about now for a long, long time within mental health
and validated in a lot of ways. But what hasn't been validated is
that they're the only things, right? We see human beings striving. We see human beings wanting better for
themselves and for the world around them. We see acts of kindness that
seem to be rooted to nothing other than the act of kindness. We have within us a drive to know, to
understand, to learn, to make better. And that has been described as many,
many things across human history. But I think the words we might
choose are a generative drive, a drive to create and to make better. And it's the generative drive as something
active within us that is then aligning with agency and gratitude, the active
ways in which we express ourselves. And then that altogether brings
us the peace, the contentment, the sense of delight. Sometimes that may exist
in us in a state of rest. But very often it's existing
in us in a state of activity. And that's why people find the quote
unquote happiness, like what people are seeking, not just in meditation. Sometimes we can find it there, but
people also find it in action, right? They find it in doing that thing that
they love to do, or in taking care of someone and learning something. So when we look at all of this, we
can then have a route of understanding what is going on inside of us and
how we can make the changes that let us be in this state, which is
really the state that we are seeking. Andrew Huberman: I really appreciate
that you highlight that agency and gratitude are verb states from which
peace, contentment and delight emerge. And also the way that you explain
the generative drive that is distinct from aggressive drives and pleasure
drives that exist in all of us. I'm smiling because a number of
examples of peace, contentment, and delight while in action come to mind. I mean, for me, podcasting, and in
particular, preparing for a podcast, trying to mine the literature and
figure out where the gems reside and where the confusion could emerge. And all of that brings about such
peace, contentment and delight for me, but it's anything but passive. Likewise, yesterday had the
experience of running into a puppy. It's been a while since I've owned
a dog, and dogs are delightful. Puppies are particularly delightful. Paul Conti: I had the experience of seeing
you light up when you ran into the puppy. Andrew Huberman: You did, and
I'm still buzzing from that short interaction with the puppy. Downstairs the way Mariner puppy. I don't know why, but I just delight
in animals of most all kinds. Not a fan of reptiles, sorry, reptile fans
so much, but I just drive so much energy from it, and it felt like life energy. And the way the animal is sort of
attentionally scattered is amusing to me as compared to the dog that he
will eventually be, which is going to be more linear in his thinking. It encapsulates so much of
the other things I love, like brain development, et cetera. Anyway, I highlight those examples
because there's nothing passive about it. It's pure delight and joy for me, and it
intersects with other delights and joys. And I think that as you describe agency
and gratitude, peace, contentment and delight in these generative forces as
well as other forces that exist in us, I think it's really critical that people
understand that these are not states that you sit down and place yourself
into, although perhaps one could through reflection or meditation or waking
up from a really great night's sleep, things of that sort, but that these are
things that we can find ourselves awash in if we are doing the right things. And those things can
oftentimes be very challenging. So assuming I understand the way the
model is spelled out correctly, I'm more and more delighted at the fact
that this is not just accessible in one domain, but is accessible in many,
many different domains for everybody. This is not something unique to my
experience, even though I give examples from my own life, but that we really all
do have access to this if we're looking in those cupboards, those ten cupboards,
and asking the right questions and. Paul Conti: To maybe comment
even a little further on the experience of you and the dog. So it was an experience of delight. And you enjoyed it, and it brought
a sense of peace and contentment, like, all of that happens. But think about what that's linked to. I believe there's a strong sense of
agency in you that you are enacting. There's a strong gratitude
in you that you're enacting. You're handling your life in a way. And also for all of us, good things always
come with good fortune, but it comes with our strivings and our achievements that
you're in a place to delight in that. If you are unhappy, like, I don't
like what I'm doing, I'm angry, I'm frustrated, then there's no
room in you to find the delight. And the delight that you find is also
very much linked to the generative drive. It makes me think of how you
loved and nurtured Costello. So you have it in you to love and
nurture a dog, and you have done that in a really wonderful way. And that generative drive is part
and parcel of the delight you feel when you see a dog, because
you love dogs and you think about nurturing, and it all comes together. The agency and the gratitude expressed
as verbs puts you in a position to have that sense of delight which is
so intertwined with your generative drive, with a sense of caretaking,
a sense of creating the beyond self. Because although you enjoyed
and loved Casello, you enjoyed and loved his happiness, right? So it all comes together. And I think it's interesting
because in some ways it's a simple example, but that's life. Life has its big moments, but so
much of our lives are the smaller moments that link together. And I think that smaller
moment becomes a big example. Andrew Huberman: I appreciate
that you mentioned Costello. For listeners of this podcast that have
tuned into early episodes, Costello was the source of the background snoring. For those of you that
haven't, you can go check. He was a 90 pound English bulldog
mastiff who had many skills, the best of which was snoring. So in addition to the generative
drive, which is something that we certainly want to talk more about
today, you mentioned these other drives, aggressive drives and pleasure drives. And much of what we're talking about
today is going to be where people can go wrong or where people struggle. We are also, of course, going to go
deeply into where people succeed and in particular where people can ask
questions of themselves, in particular what is working for them and why, as
a route to understanding how to sift through those cupboards and understand
what's not working and why, and come up with real actionable answers and
then the ability to move forward. So if you would, could you tell
us a little bit more about drives? Generally, when I hear drives, I
can't help as a neuroscientist, but default to, okay, the dopamine
circuit, or the endogenous opioid circuit, or the serotonergic circuit. But how do you conceptualize
drives within us? And then perhaps you could tell us what
the nature of aggressive drives and pleasure drives and generative drives. Paul Conti: So the concept of a
drive, the definition of a drive, is something that's intrinsic to humans. So we could look at it as a motivation. I mean, we don't just lie on the ground
and do nothing until we passively die. So something is going on inside
of us that is driving us to do something other than that. And historically, the thinking in the
field arising from early psychodynamic principles, the theory in the field that
has really dominated the field, either directly or indirectly, in so many ways,
has been that there are two drives within us, that there's aggression and pleasure. And again, these are just words, right? So we could apply many, many
words, which is why, of course, we want to define what that means. So aggression, even though we're using
that word for it, because the word for it is commonly used, but it means
sort of forward active engagement. So a good, healthy amount of aggression
using that word for the drive would be a strong sense of agency. Too little aggression can be a
problem, then the person isn't bringing themselves to bear. So there's too little in the way
of self determination, forward movement, empowerment, agency, right. And in the same way, too much of
this drive becomes actual aggression. So the idea that I want more,
and if I can't get it in certain ways, I'll just take it, right. So it starts to become what we more
map to the word aggression, which would be something negative in most cases. Andrew Huberman: Like a
desire or a tendency to harm. Paul Conti: Sure. As aggressive drives get higher,
which you see why they're in us, because let's say we're defending
ourselves, or you're defending a family member or like an entire family. Then it makes sense to have high levels of
aggression if your family is threatened. So those drives are in us at potentially
those high levels for a reason. But we certainly access very high
levels of aggression without the indication of preservation of
life or preservation of safety. The thought is, that's a drive
in us, and that gets us up and off the ground, so to speak. And that the other drive, then, is
pleasure, which, again, doesn't just mean that we all want to be hedonists. So pleasure could be even the
pleasure of relief and safety. We're all back in the cave together, and
we roll the stone in front of the door. We're safe. Throughout human development,
pleasure comes in a lot of ways. It can come through the pleasure of food
or other people, friendship, romance, sex. There are a lot of ways
we can achieve pleasure. It can be relief of things that
are unpleasant, relief of pain. But there's a drive towards
this in humans, which, again, really does make sense. And too little of it, again, can be
problematic because the person, then isn't motivated to sort of seek things because
they're not anticipating or don't receive gratification and too much of a drive
for pleasure can also create problems. We can kind of see how these two
drives, like, okay, they get us up and off the ground, so to speak. But the question is, do
they explain everything? And it's a very important question,
because if they explain everything, then there's not room for behaviors
and choices that are beyond the self. Right? There's not an explanation
for the person who. I'll give you an example of a person
I've taken care of, who's just a very strong swimmer, knows how to swim,
has swimmed throughout his life, who was in a place, I saw video of it,
where there had been a hurricane, and the waves were so frightening. They were just this huge surf, and there
were people who had gotten dragged out. And you just see him,
he runs into the water. He runs in and he goes. And he was really at risk. He needed to be saved
himself, but he saved them. And I do not believe you can
explain that through these drives. I don't think you can say,
well, he was aggressive. He wanted to go and do something that
was imposing himself on the world, or he got pleasure in thinking,
I'm strong enough to go do this. I mean, I think we're really gyrating,
we're contorting ourselves, right, in order to explain it that way. If we think there's a goodness
in that man's heart, like, I know there's a goodness in that
man's heart, I know him, right? And that goodness sees him in the
moment, and he knows that maybe he can save them, maybe he can. He's not sure, but maybe he can. So the next thing you
know, he's in the water. And I think things like the love and
nurturing of other people, of children, love and nurturing of animals, of plants. There are things inside of us that we
can't explain with those two drives. And I think they have led to
a very sort of darker way of just conceiving of humans. I think it's a reason why now you look
at us in the modern day and age, we come at humans through the lens of pathology. I mean, there's a very, very thick
book that if a person is assessing, another person is thinking about, like,
okay, what numbers in that book apply. Which is like, that's not the way
to go about understanding humans. And I think if we just think
there are those two drives, we're not doing justice to humans. One, I think it's not true. I think it's evident that it's not true. And then if we're framing
it in a way that's not true. We are not appropriately
respectful of humans. And if we come from what I believe
to be the truth, that there is a generative drive in us, a drive for
the beyond self, a drive to make things better, whether it has anything
really directly to do with me or not. And as with the other drives, there
can be more or less, in people, a combination of nature and nurture what
genetically is in us, a predisposition based upon the genetic lineage that
comes down to us and the recombination. And now we're a unique person with
a unique set of drives, but they are impacted by the genetics and then they're
impacted by life experience, a more strongly formative life experience. So the younger the person, the
sort of deeper the impact of events they have, nurturing versus abuse
on the array, on the relative weighting of drives within people. But ultimately, we get to these
three drives and how they're functioning in a person, being a way
of understanding and assessing how healthy or not healthy the person is. And then we look back to those
ten cupboards for the answers. If we're finding things that we don't
like, those drives are out of balance. And here are the problems they're causing. So very, very concrete issues
of problems in people's lives. We can look and see where
is that out of balance. And if it's out of balance,
there's something in those pillars that are not in the right place. We can then go back and look in
all those cupboards for, like, oh, where do we dig to find the answer? We learn things, we bring
things more into balance. So the pillars are in a healthier place. And then what sits on top of
it, as you use the word geyser. The geyser that then comes up
and floats everything on top of it can do that in a healthy way. Andrew Huberman: Yeah. During episode one, we touched on
some of the similarities between understanding the self and building
towards a healthy or healthiest version of self, where agency and gratitude are
these states that are being expressed. And one of the themes there was this
idea, you know, people perhaps want to be healthy so that they live a long time, but
presumably they also want to be healthy so that they can walk up flights of
stairs, pick up their kids, move objects, not get injured, perhaps even do sport. And of course, some people want to be
healthy for aesthetic reasons as well. And if we were having a discussion about
physical health, we could address the major pillars there, which were items
within the covered, like most people want some ability to have endurance
or stamina to walk some distance or maybe even run some distance. As I mentioned before, walk up a flight
of stairs, have some strength, some degree of flexibility, certainly some mobility,
maybe even dynamic mobility, et cetera. And in order to address those or improve
upon those, they could look in those covers and say, well, how much running,
swimming, long form cardiovascular exercise am I doing per week? How many steps am I taking per day? How many times a week do I lift objects
that are slightly heavier than is comfortable for me to lift, et cetera? It's very tangible, very concrete. Here you're making the psyche and the
self and mental health very much concrete in some of the same way, saying, there
are ten cupboards that one can look in, and these drives, as you refer to them as
generative drive, aggressive drive, and pleasure drive, you'll probably tell us in
a few minutes, can be expressed to varying degrees in different people and how
that shows up and what that looks like. And I just want to frame this in
people's minds as very similar to addressing whether or not, okay, if
somebody can run very long distances, but they're always having aches and
pains, or they feel weak, or they are weak, there are good reasons for that. They're overemphasizing
one form of exercise. The expression is more along the
lines of endurance and stamina, not strength, or vice versa. The power lifter who can lift 750
pounds from the floor in a deadlift, but walks up two flights of stairs
and is belly breathing and has to stop at the top of the stairs. It's obvious in the physical realm,
it's slightly more cryptic, or more cryptic in the psychological realm,
but here it's becoming concrete for us. Paul Conti: I think it's very
interesting and very ironic. Right? So the field that I'm in, the field
of psychiatry, has historically wanted to be sort of part of the rest of
medicine, or like the rest of medicine. And what I believe it's ended up
doing is glorifying a taxonomy, glorifying a category, mechanism
of understanding human beings. So in the way that if I'm practicing
general medicine and you come in and you're congested, and I determine,
like, oh, you have bacterial sinusitis. So now I've made a diagnosis,
and now I know what I'm going to do about that, okay, I'm going
to prescribe an antibiotic. Now, the thought comes
in of what antibiotic. But the identify sinusitis, now
you need an antibiotic, is like kind of how medicine works. So the thought was psychiatry is
going to categorize everything. So we'd say, okay, I've listened to you
like, I know your number or your numbers. And then once I've given you the
numbers, now I know what to do. I prescribe this medicine, that
medicine, these many sessions of a certain kind of psychotherapy. And that doesn't work. It doesn't work in mental health. It may. It's not that it never works,
but if you're going to try and understand people, it's different. A problem of self. If I have a lack of confidence
in one area of life and not in others, that's a significant issue. It is not like bacterial
sinusitis, where then, okay, arrow goes to prescribe antibiotic. And I think what is ironic is that this
route of approach actually does bring psychiatry or mental health into line
with the rest of medicine, r ight. Which is why you can make that
parallel and it fits well, right. When you're making the
parallel to physical health and to I want to be healthy. Okay, what are the components of that? What am I doing to achieve that
if something's not the way I want? Let me go back and look
at those components. It may be because it's more
tangible, sort of essentially easier to comprehend, right. Because it's more concrete. But I don't, in a sense, see it
as cryptic, just less obvious. But if we go and we look at it and
we say, oh, that really makes sense. In a sense, it makes sense
that it makes sense, right? If there's a mechanism of understanding
that applies to lots and lots of things that are more concrete, why would
a similar kind of mechanism, like understand what the components are,
understand what's built on top of them? This, I believe, is how psychiatry
actually fits with the rest of medicine, not by glorifying a taxonomy, but by
coming through the lens of understanding. Andrew Huberman: Yeah,
I couldn't agree more. And I think that what's so reassuring is
that both in terms of creating physical health across the various domains of
heart health, lung health, endurance, strength, et cetera, cognitive health,
as well as mental health is verbs. It comes back to action items that
we each and all should engage in, in order to arrive at the states and ways
of being that we all want to be in. Right. We want to feel healthy,
look healthy, et cetera. We want to be happy. I know very few people who
don't want to be happy. I mean, certainly there are people
who give up, but we'll talk about that today and routes out of that. But at the end of the day, it's all
about looking in those bins, asking specific questions, and then moving
forward in specific actions to get to the place of empowerment, humility,
agency, gratitude, peace, contentment, delight, et cetera, as opposed to simply
using words and understanding to arrive at insight and then stopping there
and expecting everything to change. And I think that's where a lot
of people are confused about psychology, therapy and psychiatry. And as you mentioned, psychiatry has
its own shadows, if you will, within it, where the use of drugs, which certainly
can be very useful, even life saving. Paul Conti: Absolutely. Andrew Huberman: Oftentimes is seen as
a fix all that somehow could reorder everything within the cupboards and
make the recipe just right, when in fact, we'll talk about today. That is generally not the best route,
but again, with the understanding that drugs can be very powerful, tools Paul Conti: Play a role. Yeah, right. But it's important we understand
what role is appropriate for them, and that's where we often go astray. Andrew Huberman: I'd like to take a
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to claim this special offer. So as we move forward here in defining
and helping people gain, for lack of a better word, agency over their own
mental health and self understanding, and defining for them what action items to
take, I'd like to ask you about some of the things that I observe in the world
and hear a lot about, in particular from the audience of this podcast. It's obvious to me that people
vary in terms of their level of aggressive drive, pleasure drive, and
presumably generative drive as well. One common question is, how
do I become more motivated? Right? And of course, that opens up a
bunch of other questions, like, are people afraid of failure? And that's why they're not motivated? Are people afraid of success? Is that why they're not motivated? Is there some underlying childhood
trauma or unconscious process that's driving that fear? And so on? But if we were to take the psychiatrist's
perspective, your perspective, if someone comes to you and says, I
just don't really feel like trying. School is hard, school loans are
excessive, which is true, by the way. It's not even clear that with a degree I
can do much, or I had a series of failures in the work domain or in the relationship
domain, and they're just feeling weighed down as if it's not worth trying. What does that tell you
in terms of where to look? And what does that tell you
in terms of their drives? I mean, do we conclude something
about their innate level of aggressive drive or their pleasure
drive or their generative drive? I think there are many such people out
there, and then we'll consider some other kind of phenotypic examples. Paul Conti: So it's a great example
because any good clinician could hear that story and have thoughts about it
that could and would hopefully be helpful without necessarily referring to drives. I think you can anchor any set of
assessments, any evaluation, any attempted understanding to drives,
but it doesn't have to be that way. So, for example, you might ask that
person more questions about what they're doing, how they spend their
time, because you're telling me about someone who's not getting enjoyment
or gratification out of anything. And that then becomes of interest to me. Is there something this person does enjoy
or something they'd rather be doing? Did they go to college and take on
a bunch of loans because they felt that was better, because they thought
they were going to do something that now they actually don't want
to do ? Or that opportunity isn't there, and now they're frustrated? What is inside this person that
might seem different than that. And again, the answers
could be complicated. It could be. Maybe that person enjoys what
they're doing, but the cost of living where they are is so high
that they still feel miserable. There's a sense of privation, and then
that gets backmapped to like, I'm not getting any pleasure out of anything. So the answer could be as simple as
you strategize with the person of, for example, does a person like that
move or move to a different area? There's so many ways of looking at this
and so many ways of understanding this. But you're describing someone to me
who is kind of really complaining that nothing is feeling good, right? Nothing's providing a sense of
enjoyment or of pleasure, right? So I would probably be interested in that
first and think maybe the pleasure drive is higher than what's being fulfilled. Maybe the pleasure drive is low, and
that's an issue in and of itself. We sort of learn those things. Maybe the aggressive drive is
low, and if that person just put a little more energy into it, right. Like they could be in a different place. So you try and help the person understand
themselves so that you can make change. And again, that understanding doesn't
have to be anchored to the drives. But I do believe the drives are at the
root of all understanding, because if you sit with that person and you talk to
that person, then you're going to be able to understand what is out of balance,
either in the actual array of the drives or in how they're being experienced. Because again, if you have a
high pleasure drive, for example, and it's not gratified, right. That represents a problem. Andrew Huberman: What about people who
can experience some pleasure or can keep busy, say, for instance, on social media
or playing video games and I should also say perhaps it's bringing them to a
place of peace, contentment and delight. But in some sense, it's
not really generative. I'm not going to cast judgment and
say that video games and social media are all a waste of time. I mean, I'm on social media trying
to provide value to people and learnings, and I derive value and
learnings from other accounts as well. But there are these milestones,
if you will, in life. I mean, not that everyone has to go to
college and get married and have a family. There are a lot of different paths through
life that I would consider successful. But in some sense, there are milestones,
like we want to move forward. There's this phenomenon nowadays of a
lot of young people so called failure to launch, like they're not leaving
home or they're not finding a vocation. They're not feeling as if
they're good at anything. Or they have the sense that unless
you're going to be top 1% in something, it's not worth trying. But they can still find what most
people would describe as pleasures. Like they might enjoy food
maybe a little too much. They enjoy alcohol
maybe a little too much. They enjoy social media or video
games, maybe a little too much. And I say a little too much because
it's providing more or less a sink or a reservoir for their
aggressive and pleasure drives. That's not moving them forward in
the standard milestones of life. I hear about that a lot. I see that a lot. So it's a slightly more complex phenotype
than described before as just simply the a motivated or non motivated person. But what do you think of the
phenotype I just described? Paul Conti: Because we're unique. Each person is unique,
although we fit categories. So there are categories a person
there could fit that could be different from what I'm saying. But I think most people,
they say on balance. What is most prominent? I think what is most prominent in that
situation is there's something out of balance in the generative drive .
And what you see a lot of times is
the person has a generative drive in them that's higher than their
ability to realize that drive. The generative drive then is frustrated. So I'll give an example. And it's a real true story of a person
who had worked very, very hard, gone to school for a long time, and had
achieved a very high paying job. And that was the goal. It's a prestigious job,
it's a high paying job. And the person for a while was doing quite
well at it, and things went relatively rapidly in a negative direction. So maybe for a little while,
the person's doing okay. Then the person becomes very negligent
of themselves and their environment when they're not at the job. So the house is a mess, things are dirty,
the person is wasting time with things. So this is a person who enjoys
it wasn't exactly video games. Let's say it could have been. Well, it enjoys them to a certain
degree and can really gain pleasure and feel good about the time spent .
But starts spending too much time. Now what was pleasurable starts
becoming a distraction mechanism. And then what that transitioned
to was overuse of alcohol. So now you have either something that
is actually destructive and was negative to job performance towards the person. This wasn't a person who was drinking
a lot before, and this is a person who was miserable when they were drinking
or they were sort of wasting their time. And we're aware of all of this. Well, there was a very clear problem,
which is that that person had no interest in what they were doing. None whatsoever. It felt like the majority of waking
hours were spent in an automaton like way, but being awake and aware of the
tedium of it, the frustration of it. Andrew Huberman: The professional side. So they essentially had very little
intrinsic curiosity or desire to do the job that they were successfully doing. Paul Conti: Right. Which comes out only after exploration,
because it seems like, well, what's going on with this person? This person has a good job and
their life was going really well, and they're doing well financially. And is this person trying to
now overly indulge themselves? Is that why they're drinking? What's going on? And what you feel is that this person
had a strong, generative drive, and it wasn't met one little bit by what he was
doing, which was creating such frustration inside that the person was either
taking himself online or doing something that was punitive and self injurious. And this is a real story. The person exchanged that job
for a job that paid a 10th of what the job they had paid. And the change in the
person's life was amazing. Like, I didn't know this guy could smile. He became happy. He loved what he was doing. He sold the larger house,
bought a smaller house, kept it beautifully, like he was happy. That's what he needed to be happy. Because then the generative drive in
him, he loved what he was doing, gets enacted, it gets expressed, and then
other things can come then into line. He's not being over aggressive towards
himself and drinking too much because he's saying, oh, to help with you, to
the world around him and to himself. He's not taking something that
serves a purpose in his life. Like, again, if the example had been video
games, it would be like, yeah, great. You enjoy doing that X amount of time and
go do that and get gratification from it, as opposed to then over relying on it. And then it's not providing gratification. It becomes a distraction. So those things came back into
balance in his life, but there had to be the understanding. And I think there's a lot of that in
people who have a generative drive in them that they feel is frustrated by a
world around them that isn't cooperating. Now, do I think we can understand that
and change that in the vast majority of people who are in that place. Yes, but it has to be
looked at first, right. Because it's not always that. It's just that a lot of the time. So it has to be understood
what is it in that person? And then how do you go back to those
pillars and look at what's going on, that the person is in that place? Because the world can bring us
a lot of difficulties, right? And that person who now is saddled
with a lot more loans than they expect. I have tremendous compassion
for that and sympathy for that. That's real. Right? So people can be up against a lot of
things and that's just one of them, right? But it doesn't mean
that life can't be okay. It doesn't mean that, but the person has
to feel that there's some way, they have to understand enough about themselves
to say, okay, this is what this is. And I kind of see what this
is and why and how I'm here. And from there I can start to plot
a route to something that is better because, yes, we have our difficulties
and we can have a lot of them, right? But for the vast majority of us, it's
not like they're not surmountable. We have to just understand them. And let's say if that person goes and
says, I'm going to get some help, and they go and someone says, okay, you get
ten sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy and you try and like, how
can that person think differently? Then they'll feel differently. And look, cognitive behavioral
therapy has its place, right? But it's not going to solve that. That person needs to understand
something about themselves, not redirect their thoughts to better places. So if the person gets a reflex, because
that reflex works well for the system, a reflex works well for the system
that's treating that person, for the medical system, the insurance system,
that person isn't helped one bit, right? And maybe a medicine can help. Maybe a medicine helps to just take down
the anxiety and the tension in the person. Then the person can sort
of think more about it. And truly medicine did help this person
because the idea of leaving the job. I'm leaving the prestige, I'm leaving
the money, is that okay to do like? It generated a lot of anxiety and
it helped to kind of bring the temperature down a little bit of
that so that he could think about it, engage in therapy, ultimately
navigate to where he wanted to be. Then we could back away from the medicine. So medicine has a role. But if he just got medicine, what
are the odds of that helping? Like, zero, right? Because it's not going to make
the answers unless somehow the person feels a little bit better
and figures it out on their own. It's not how it works, right? So medicine has its place, but a kind of
therapy that recognizes the limitations of medicine in most situations and
is designed to really help the person understand, like, that's what we need. Andrew Huberman: The example you gave
is a spectacular one because, as you mentioned, medication had its place. Perhaps even redirection of thought in
some sense had its place, because, as I recall, under the pillar of function of
self, one of the key items is salience. What we pay attention to
internally or externally, what our internal narratives are. But in staying with the example of this
individual, again as a phenotypic example for everybody to learn something from, the
asking of better questions about oneself is really what leads to the understanding. So, like, better forms of inquiry,
to me, these better forms of inquiry, better questions are really
the cardiovascular exercise, the strength training, the flexibility
training, the mobility training, coordination training of physical
health just translate to mental health. Paul Conti: It's so interesting, right? Because if you think about it,
in the example I gave, both the therapy part through the system. The CBT has a place. And the medicine part also had a place. So both of those things have their role. But if we build the whole story of, like,
this is what this is, and this is how you're going to be helped around those
things, we don't help that person at all. In fact, we ultimately, if you
take on balance, you take all comers, we end up doing harm. Andrew Huberman: Well, in some ways,
if we stay with the analogy of physical health, it would be like the person
who wants to get in shape and then they get a, i'm not picking on peloton as
a brand, but just a stationary bike. And they pedal every morning and they
lose weight, their blood pressure goes down, they're doing better. But then at some point, we know
with certainty that if you just do the same form of exercise over and
over again, sooner or later you're going to get overuse injuries. So then there's like the lower
back piece and another piece and you become out of balance. But I guess this is stealing
from the Lance Armstrong book. But it's not about the bike, right? It's not about the bike. It's about the elevation of heart rate. It's about whatever other healthy
activities go along with exercising first thing in the morning and all
the things that you're not doing as a consequence of exercising in the morning. So it seems to me that these better
lines of inquiry as the path to better mental health, a better life, that sit
under these pillars of structure of self, function of self, are really the key. Paul Conti: But in this
example, the parallel that you made is even more dramatic. It wouldn't be the stationary bike, right? Because a stationary bike is
achieving a lot of ends, right. It would be more like telling
the person, you should walk more briskly when you're going upstairs. That's a good idea, but that's
not going to make the change. So the idea that some CBT, some medicine
makes sense, it's more like that. It's not that walking more briskly up the
stairs isn't a good thing, it's that we can't build the story around your whole
health is going to change based upon that. And then that's a problem. Then if the person thinks, just
walk more briskly up the stairs and you'll be healthier, because when
it doesn't work now they've failed. And this gets used a lot in mental health. That person failed this
therapy, failed that medicine. I think it's so also ironic because
that's often what the person internalizes. Well, they failed because we set
them up 100% for failure, right? Because we took things that have their
role, at least potentially have their role, and we built the whole story around
them because that story is convenient for the systems that are providing the care. It's convenient for the healthcare
systems, it's convenient for the insurers. CBT packages very nicely. And you could see how if you start
changing thoughts and how they make you feel like you can get some
movement on the surface, even if there's no movement underneath. And again, I'm not saying CBT is bad,
but to see it as the whole answer guarantees failure in so many situations. Same thing with the medicine. If you build the whole story
just because it's convenient. And by and large, medicines
are cheaper than people, right? So you can prescribe
medicines very reflexively. Psychiatrists with 15 minutes with
a patient that they can't then see back for a couple of months. Like, how does that go well? The answer is it only goes well
the way a broken clock is right a couple of times, twice a day, right? I mean, look, sometimes it goes well
where it just somehow it works out. And that person can do a little bit of
therapy in 15 minutes and choose the right medicines, but by and large, we do those
things because they're convenient for the systems, even though that's why people
don't get better like we think they would. That's why they stay in systems. That's why they come in
and out of emergency rooms. That's why they're not able to
stop the drugs that end up only being stopped when the person dies. This happens all the time, and we
don't stop it because we're coming from a perspective that is so limited. That's not saying, let's take a step back
and look, can we really help someone? Can we really help that person understand? Can we help that person make change? Which ultimately would be, of course,
so much better for the person and so much better for society, but
is also better if we just look at, bottom line, dollars and cents. Because the short term view of
it is cheaper today to have a psychiatrist at a 15 minutes
appointment reflexively prescribe a medicine that is cheaper today. Is that cheaper across time when that
person is utilizing more resources or they're in and out of emergency rooms? It's so short sighted, which fits with
many ways in how our society works, right. That we want gratification and
we want gratification rapidly. That's why a person would accept
that their problems could be changed by medicine, right? We're kind of conditioned that way. Andrew Huberman: Well, of course there's
the cost we don't see, which is that person doesn't get the opportunity to
express their generative drive, and the consequence of that is incalculable. Paul Conti: Right? Yes. And if we take a step back and we look
at that, I think that what we will see is that we have, it's not quite like painted
ourselves into a corner, but it's like the idea that if there's a beautiful tapestry
that's the size of the wall, that you can see that only standing back from it. I mean, this goes back, I think,
a couple of thousand years, this sort of thought and idea. But if you come up too close to it, then
you can't see what it means anymore. And we're up so close to it
that we're thinking, well, okay, how could one parameter change? And can this person get a 15 minutes
visit sooner rather than later? Or how about this
medicine instead of that? And then it's like our noses are right up
against the tapestry and we don't see that we're not doing right by individual people
a lot of the time, and we're not doing right by society, which then, if you stop
and think about it, we're not doing right by us because any one of us could be in
that position, and many of us have been in that position being on the other side of
things and really needing help and needing to understand so any of us can be there. So if we're failing a lot of individual
people and we're failing the society, it doesn't matter who we are listening to
this, ultimately we're failing ourselves. Andrew Huberman: I'd like to take
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in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.com/huberman. Lets therefore talk about what does
know, and again, placing on the shelf the fact that medications can help
and CBT cognitive behavioral therapy can help, but they are just but two
components of a much larger picture. The map that we described briefly
at the beginning of today's episode, and that is, by the way, available as
a downloadable PDF in the show note captions if people want to look at it
visually and that was described in a lot of detail in episode one, which I
hope people will take the time to listen to because it's so rich with depth of
understanding and I'm certain everyone will learn a ton about themselves and
others simply by listening to your words, I'm absolutely certain of that. That map provides essentially
a description of the bins, the cupboards to look in to arrive at
better answers and even the sorts of questions that one might ask. If we could just talk about that in
the context of the example that you gave of this person who made this
really incredible choice to move away from this higher paying job. They were overindulging in
certain maladaptive behaviors. And again, we will use this example. But this example is but one of an
infinite number of examples that we could use of a person who's in a struggle. They're doing something that's
not working for them, and they're also not doing things that they
know they ought to be doing. Okay, this is important for people
to understand, because there are going to be people out there that
are thinking, oh, like this poor guy, he's making tons of money. Poor him. But he was experiencing deep
misery, lack of satisfaction. So it could have been the reverse example. Like, the person isn't in a
job that brings about enough wealth for them to thrive. Right. Because there are financial
realities to life. Paul Conti: It's just one example , right. Andrew Huberman: Right. Paul Conti: But it's a good one, I
think, because the person left the money. Right. So it's like, well, what
would make you leave that? Right. Well, what would make you leave
that is if you're miserable in the situation with that, and you're
happy in the situation without it. Andrew Huberman: Right. So it's about leaving misery
and finding happiness. So if you'd be willing to share with us
a little bit of your mindset during those sessions, meaning the sorts of questions
you asked him about the structure of his self or to reveal the structure of his
self and the function of his self that allowed the both of you to eventually
set him down this far better course. What's better than moving away from
frustration and overindulgence and maladaptive behavior to deep satisfaction,
peace, contentment and delight, and to become a generative human being. Paul Conti: Right. So we can look in each
of those ten cabinets. Right? So let's say we look in the
unconscious mind cabinet. There's not much there. When the person was growing up,
it was very clear that having more money and having a job that impressed
people was an important thing. He internalizes some of it, so
some of it's unconscious, but by and large, he's aware of it. Andrew Huberman: And then
that was revealed to you how? You would ask him a question about,
tell me about your upbringing. And he would say, yeah, money
was important to my family but I always felt like we had enough. He wasn't super wealthy,
but it had enough. When you say there wasn't a lot there, do
you mean that there was no kind of like, X marks the spot or blinking red light? Like, whoa, there's something really in
his unconscious mind that's in his way. Do I have that right? Paul Conti: Well, more
because it was conscious. So he was aware that it was
very much like beat into him. Right? Like, this is the only way to be okay
is to have a prestigious job that makes a lot of money but he's aware of it. If he weren't aware of it, we
have to bring that to light. Right? But he was aware. He's like, look, it
has a big impact on me. It makes it hard to step away. Like, I know I don't really care that much
about the money, but I also kind of do. Andrew Huberman: Sure, I always say money
can't buy happiness, but it certainly can buffer certain stressors in life. Sometimes you hear people who have
a lot of money saying, like, money can't buy happiness because there
are a lot of miserable rich people. But it's very different to have two night
nurses to take care of a baby than to be the person who has to stay up all night
taking care of a kid, especially, or a single mother versus a mother that has
a partner who's willing to pitch in. You just can't compare Paul Conti: That's absolutely true. In this case, we're just looking at
money as money as an endpoint, right? The idea that no matter what, how
secure and safe is more money better? And he had an intrinsic overvalue of that. So it made it harder to step away
from it because he was overvaluing it. He knew he was overvaluing
it just in and of itself. Not even for what it gets you, right? But for the psychological meaning of it. Then we look at his defensive structures. If we look in that cupboard, you see
that they've really shifted, right? They shifted from healthy places. Now they're sort of twisted and distorted. And he's doing a lot of denial, a lot
of avoidance, a lot of rationalization. He's enacting a lot of
aggression towards himself. And he's doing a lot of projecting. He's harming himself with the alcohol. He's punishing himself. So his defensive structure,
it can be healthy. We know that because it
was healthier, right? But then we see that it is so twisted. So we learn a lot from that, right. A lot is conscious in this person,
the defensive structure, can be healthy because it was healthy... Andrew Huberman:
Eventually it was healthy. Paul Conti: Well, it was healthy before. Andrew Huberman: I see. Paul Conti: It was healthy before. So you know that it can be healthy again. He has it in him to have healthy defenses. They just started getting away from him
as he felt less and less satisfied with his job and more and more angry with
himself and more and more miserable. Andrew Huberman: This is a
really key point for me and everyone else to understand. Throughout the years of high school and
college and friends and things of that sort, I would hear this like, "I used to
be really good at fitness, or if I had a dollar for every time someone said,
you should have seen me in high school". Like, the person who lets themselves
go and arguably is very busy with professional duties and family
duties, and you can understand why their time is more compressed than
it was when they were in high school. But nonetheless, you hear these
sorts of things all the time. I used to have this sense of I could
do things or that things could work out, and then it's as if there was a
previous version of themselves that is completely atrophied and the new
version of themselves or the later version of themselves rather just simply
doesn't have access to that anymore. Paul Conti: That's the impact of trauma. Whether it's big trauma or it's
a big event or it's multiple things, like, oh, the world just
isn't rewarding me, I'm trying. The world's not rewarding me. I'm trying. The world's not rewarding me. Then people become
dispirited, demoralized. It's the trauma of that that takes away
the sense of self, the sense of agency. Like, I thought I could do things before,
now I don't think I can do things, right. But nothing has really changed in me. That's a problem and it's a problem. The vast majority of
times it's born of trauma. Andrew Huberman: Does that necessarily
mean early childhood trauma? Or I suppose it could
be later life trauma. I mean, one of the things that I like
about what you're saying so much is that you, the psychiatrist, hears, I used to
be able to do something well or feel well. And that's like, it
sounds like is a signal. It's really a beacon of health that
still exists in the person, but that they're out of touch with. I think for most people, when they think
about themselves or people who talk about how they used to be functional
in some domain, and they're no longer functional in that domain any longer. It sounds as if things
are fundamentally broken. It's as if a piece of them
that was functioning drifted out of their body and left. But I love the optimism, because
I think so much of what we're interested in covering today is not
just what's not working and why, but also what's working and why. And what used to work and why. And the idea that within these cupboards
there can be the discovery of problems. Clearly, that's why one goes to the
cupboards as we're defining it, but that there are a lot of answers. The ingredients for success
already exist within us. Paul Conti: Especially if we know
we've had that ability before, right? Because we know that we had it before. So think about in this man. He felt that he couldn't make change. Like now he's stuck. I got a lot of things done. I was able to get myself into this school
and achieve this and then get this job. He could do all of those things. But now he feels like he can't do
anything to make himself happy. So we know he could do that. He had a strong sense of agency. He does it now, right? And like people often do,
they feel a sense of loss. Like, naturally, I've had
this happen in myself. It feels like something's cut out
of you and there's something hollow. I had that thing, and now I don't. Hence the I'm broken, I'm hopeless. The things that we hear over
and over and over again. So think about the shift in this
person to what's actually going on, which isn't that hard to discern. We just pay attention to it. So then if we run up the structure of
self, we say, okay, not a lot of it is rooted in the unconscious mind, right? There are problems of overvaluing certain
things, but they're in the conscious mind. Andrew Huberman: He knows. Like in his household, over dinner,
it was dad or mom being proud of some dollar amount that they had achieved. So that narrative exists. And he's like, yeah, money was a
big deal in my family kind of thing. By the way, I'm not
speaking about my family. Rarely were their discussions about money. There were discussions about
other things, of course. But in this hypothetical.Sorry. Paul Conti: He knows. He overvalues it, right? He knows that independent of what money
buys and what he needs and all that, he just puts too much importance in money. And he knows that. Right? So, okay, they're conscious mind issues. He's pretty aware of them, and
they're pretty kind of set in him. Like those are the
issues, and they're there. Okay, we learned that. Then we go look at his
defensive structure. Boy, that's very, very
helpful to talk about. Wow, you had a very healthy
defensive structure. What were you doing before? A lot of sublimation. Right? Andrew Huberman: Could
you explain sublimation? Paul Conti: Yeah. Take anxiety or tension or something
negative in the self, or that could be negative, and you channel
it towards something positive. He channeled that energy towards learning. He channeled some of the
aggressive drive into a sense of agency that got achievement. So he looked and he said, right, that
network of defense mechanisms that comes up out of the unconscious mind
was like looking pretty good, right. It was pretty clear. Light was coming through it in
a way that wasn't distorted. And now we could look at, wow, things
are pretty different now, right? As he's saying, no, it's
okay what do you mean? I spent 10 hours of my
weekend utterly wasting time. And what's wrong with that. Or he's rationalizing even that
he likes to drink when he doesn't because he's so mad at himself. Like the defensive
structure now is twisted. So we can say, okay, that's
a big observation, right? And then the character structure,
when we look at that, we find a person who's pretty good at figuring
out and understanding things and coming right up to the precipice of
change, but has a long history of then difficulty making the change. I know it, and I'm on the verge of
it, but I can't bring myself to do it. That's in his character structure. Andrew Huberman: By the
way, s uch a common thing. I mean, people that know
better know they know better. Sometimes you almost have to
wonder whether or not it's like a medication in the pocket. Like, they could take
it if they wanted to. That might even give them some comfort. But they just don't do it. They just don't engage in the
proper actions to move their life from one place to the next. Paul Conti: And if we look
then at the level of strivings, he does know what he wants. He wants a feeling of contentment. It's really what he wanted was a
feeling of contentment, a feeling of like, I'm taking good care of myself. I'm doing something that's of value. I'm enjoying doing it. He wanted those things. And even when we talked more, he had
ideas of what jobs would do that in the beginning, he said he had no ideas. What he really meant that he said to
me, but was also saying to himself, is, I have no ideas of jobs that would
meet these requirements for me that pay as much as the one I have, right? But within him, which we got to
where he knew that there were jobs that would make him happy. He just had to get over
that they were lower paying. So think of what we learn about that. There's nothing lost in this man. There's nothing cut out of him. He's not damaged, he's not hopeless. And now he can understand that. He understands himself
actually pretty well, right? And his conscious mind is
apprehending pretty well what's going on and where he wants to go. But, boy, as he hasn't taken good
care of himself, the defensive structure gets sort of warped. And then it makes it a lot
harder to take care of yourself. It starts making other problems in life. And he starts feeling lousy about himself. Like, maybe I can't do
much of anything right. Why? Because work isn't going as well. Because he's drinking too much
and role performance goes down. So we can see that. And then what's of most interest there
is that there's a character structure that can come right up to the precipice
but not pull the trigger, so to speak, on what the thing the person wants to do. Because now we start getting,
okay, an understanding of what's actually going on, right? And then if we look at function of self,
let's look in those cabinets too, right? To help him be more aware of. There's an I here which he was
pretty well aware of, but not enough. Like, there's a person here
I'm shepherding through 24 hours in the day, right? Like, I am an I and I'm aware
of what's going on inside of me. And it can make me happy or
it can make me miserable. Let's be more aware of that. Andrew Huberman: How did
he go about doing that? Because I find this first step within
addressing the function of self awareness and really understanding
that there's an I, there's a me, and I'm moving myself through life. I find this to be so interesting and
on the one hand, kind of obvious. Like, okay, there's a
me, like, tangible thing. You look in the mirror, you see yourself. But at the same time, it's a
bit abstract, I think to me and to many people out there. How does one go about building up a
sense of self in a way that provides positive agency in the world? Is it to tell? We hear all the time
about these affirmations. And I'm sure there are people
who look at themselves in the mirror and say, you are enough. And I'm not making fun of these people. Right? I actually have my own internal
list that I tell myself on waking every morning, which has nothing
to do with positive affirmation. It's just actually defining the
different roles that I play. I don't know why this is useful to me,
but I find it incredibly useful to me. It reminds me who I am. It also reminds or reassures me
that I don't have any dementia yet. So we'll see going
forward, but hopefully not. But yeah. Let's talk about this line of
inquiry within the category of self awareness that people can do
regardless of whatever challenges they might be having or not having. What does that look like and what
do you think that accomplishes at the level of self understanding
and agency in the world? Paul Conti: So one way of looking
at that is, and it's not the words I would use, but what's pervading a
person and sort of setting the stage? Which you can discern by inquiry. For example, in this case, the person. So there's a person who would
really not think, this is okay. This person taking a job at
10% of the previous pay and the job has less prestige. Who's a person who would be very unhappy
about that and very faulting of that. And talk to this person, my
patient, through the lens of that, he should feel shame for that. That person's not alive. The person is not alive. So one way of looking at is
what master are you serving. And a lot of the givens. The automaticity in him was as if that
person was alive inside of him, really telling him how this wasn't okay. He was fighting that he wasn't aware that,
hey, that's some other person's voice. He's like, no, I'm very,
very conflicted about this. Actually, he wasn't very
conflicted about this. When he starts focusing on the
I, what do I actually think? What do I actually think? I don't care if I make 90% less. Like, I don't care. My needs are met. I put some money away. I want to be happy. I'm not conflicted. But in order to get there,
we have to look at the I. How much is the I at center stage? I don't mean in some way of paying
too much attention to the self, but we're all acting through the lens of
the I, no matter what we're choosing. So to be aware of that and do
I want to be impacted by the opinions of this other person? Because I can let someone
else's opinions very much. I mean, we all do, right? Very much impact my thoughts. But I want to kind of decide that, do
I really value that person's opinions? I don't want them automatically inside my
head telling me how I feel about myself. Andrew Huberman: I can't tell you how many
people I know come to me in a place of struggle, even though I'm not a clinician. And as I listen to what they're struggling
with, it's so clear that they know the best answer and route forward, but that
they're dealing with some internal, oppressive voice about whether or not
they are a good person or a bad person, whether or not the choice they want to
make is really a good choice at all. Sometimes those voices are the
voices of parents in these particular examples, or the voices of peers. And so I think, if I understand correctly,
what you're talking about is getting really firmly rooted in who a person
is for themselves and what they really value and what they really know to be
true for themselves and really trying to not necessarily quiet those voices, but
see those voices truly as other, even though they come from within their head. Is that right? Paul Conti: Yes. To stop and think, what
voices do I want inside? So maybe I want the voice of a
kind mentor who still held me to account for a very high standard. It's a good voice to have inside of me. Andrew Huberman: A few of those. Paul Conti: But what might not be
a good voice is like, say, a not so kind mentor for whom you could
never do anything good enough. That's not so good. Or maybe you take part of that
and you leave part of that. But the earlier and more formative
the voices are, the more they're in our head automatically. Like, think about that man thought
that he was deeply conflicted. Absolutely, 100%. And he was right. Like, his experience was
to be deeply conflicted. But when you go in and dig, if
you just dig and you get to like, okay, the I is going to assess
this, he's not conflicted at all. Which is why then if you're coming up
the function of self ladder and you look at defense mechanisms in action, and
what's on top of that salience right now is when it creates an immediacy. So defense mechanisms in action
sort of inform the process and say, hey, the defenses are
shifting to denial, acting out. And that's what sort of gives us
a time horizon, like this thing. This is not going to be okay. That if he kept down this path, what
was very clearly going to happen. You don't have to roll the tape
forward that much to see that he's going to lose his job. He's going to feel very ashamed of that. Like a bunch of negative
things are going to happen. So it helps the person apprehend
that there's something going on here. I'm changing, right. Because in some way I'm thinking now
that it's okay that I'm wasting 10 hours on something that I could really
enjoy if I spent 90 minutes on it. Whoa, I'm kind of losing a
little bit perspective there. So it adds a sense like
it frames the situation. And the salience of it. Andrew Huberman: Could you elaborate
a little bit on this defense mechanism in action of acting out? I think we covered in episode
one, and I'm sure we'll come up several times more during today's
discussion about things like denial, projection, displacement, et cetera. Those defense mechanisms seem to
have their own intrinsic definition. But acting out is something that we
hear more and more about these days. Like, they're acting out. What is acting out? Is it acting out of some conflict? Is it trying to demolish a struggle
by going and doing something else? Paul Conti: We can think of it as, by
and large, an unhealthy manifestation of a lot of aggression, which could
be a very high aggressive drive or an aggressive drive that's not too high,
but is then furthered, its power is furthered by a negative situation. Say, like this one. Because the acting out, what
was going on here inside of this person is he was very, very mad. And this isn't a person who expressed
a lot of anger or had outlets for. He wasn't going and running 10
miles or this was all inside of him. He wasn't getting it out
in one way or another. So what he starts doing is he
starts acting out the anger. Now, he's angry at the world around
him because he's unhappy in it, and it's not giving him more choices. Now, of course, this is about
him and not the world around him. But he's feeling an anger towards
the world that won't cooperate. Right. And he's angry towards himself. Because he can't make himself happy. Look at all of this. Look at all that he did, and
look how miserable he is. So a way of acting out
then is the drinking. Because the drinking is to
hell with the world, right? You think I shouldn't be drinking at
night and coming to work hungover? I'll do it anyway, right? To hell with the world. It's a way of snubbing
his nose at the world. He's also snubbing his nose at him, right? To hell with me, right? The guy who now doesn't come across
the way he did before, because I'm showing up at work, not in the
responsible way I showed up before, but in a way that's a little disheveled. Function is lower. To hell with me. It's a form of self denigration. Like, let people think worse of me. Why? Because I'm so mad at myself that
I think it's justified, right? And then there's also the inviting
of, hey, if I really have an addiction problem here, I lose my job. It's like, fine, I
deserve that too, right? There's an acting out against the self
that if the person doesn't stop and look at that, that can become true, right? Because that person didn't really wasn't
built to say to hell with the world and with me, or to not even understand that,
what's the hell with the world mean? It also means to hell with me. And it's not good for the or me. But he was able to understand
that because we would look at, like, wow, what shifted in you? This is a person who did a lot of
sublimation before, who now all of that's going into acting out. So they're not taking negative energy
and doing something good with it. They're taking negative energy and
doing things that are bad with it. Why? Because there's too much. There's a lot of negative energy. It's overwhelming everything else. And then it's going down these
pathways where the unhealthy defenses are always beckoning us. Send the energy down here. It's easier to avoid than it is to
face something and figure it out. It's easier to just act out than it
is to hold what's inside of us and then think about why it's there. So the unhealthy defenses
are beckoning us. And for him to see you have had
a healthy defensive structure, like, you can be healthy again. You're not broken, right? But to also see the way these defenses
are going is bringing real risk to your ability to even be happier. You get further down the shame and
loss path, it can be hard, sometimes impossible for the person to get back. So it sets the stage. Like, this is very, very important,
what these defenses are, how they're being enacted, and for him to be
able to see that, like, oh, this could be healthy, but it's not now. Andrew Huberman: Yeah. These slow, degrading forms of acting
out and self sabotage and sabotage of others, I think, are the particularly
dangerous ones because they're slow. And sometimes the change
is imperceptibly slow. And then one day somebody arrives
at a place where, as you said, they unfortunately can't get back, or it
requires going into residential treatment or things that really big departures
in order to get back into life. And I would never wish for
somebody to choose to act out by driving off a cliff instead. But there are other forms of acting
out that immediately wake people up. But it seems like people
don't often select those. They select these more subtle forms
of acting out where they don't get caught or no one's calling them out on
it because plenty of people have five or six drinks at happy hour, right? As opposed to 50, right? So it's slow self sabotage as opposed
to immediate self destruction. And again, we're talking about alcohol,
but we talk about food, video games, social media, arguing with spouse. I mean, all of these kinds of things that
build up over time to eventually deliver people to a place of real problems. I'm curious, for this particular
individual you worked with, sounds like that's not what happened. They started this process of self
inquiry around self awareness. And did you see that the salience
that is what they paid attention to internally and externally immediately
shifted and the defense mechanism of acting out immediately dissolved. I mean, what was the kind
of contour and time course. Paul Conti: There was less. If we're looking in the cabinets, there's
a lot in the defence mechanisms in action cabinet, there's not as much in the
salience cabinet because this is the major thing on his mind right above all else. And he was having intrusive thoughts
about it and his self talk was about it. But we kind of already knew that, just
like we knew it was in the conscious mind. So if you think, where's the money at? It's not as much in that realm
because he's aware of it. If he thought, oh, this
isn't bothering me very much. And then he said, well, all his internal
dialogue is about it, right then, okay, there's a lot to achieve there. But just as he brought a lot that
was unconscious into the conscious mind, was aware of it, it was salient. There's less to do there because
the things to understand and change are not residing so much there. Andrew Huberman: For people that are, no
doubt everyone is thinking about their own internal processes and where they
could ask better questions and arrive at better answers to help themselves along. Perhaps you could elaborate a
little bit more on this salience cupboard under function of self. To me, salience is what's most apparent. As you talked about yesterday and
again today, there's this internal narrative, like what's on my mind
often or what kind of jumps to mind. I've started doing this recently based
on our discussions here, and I've noticed that under different states of arousal. And here I'm talking specifically about
sleepiness versus alertness type arousal when I wake up in the morning or when
I'm tired in the evening, where my mind is at, where it defaults to and what I'm
paying attention to throughout the day is that just asking myself to notice,
and I've certainly noticed some patterns. For instance, I've noticed that anytime my
overall state is elevated, more alertness, or in the middle of exercise, my mind
goes to some not so pleasant thoughts. And it's interesting to me,
it's like, wow, this is strongly correlated with states of
internal arousal that are healthy. Exercise within a limited frame
or exercise in general, if done in a healthy way, is healthy. And when I'm sleepy, those
thoughts never come about. When I wake up in the morning,
certain thoughts tend to leap to mind. Other thoughts know. So sort of categorization of
different types of thoughts depending on my internal state. Is that the sort of line of inquiry that
you're suggesting or describing here? Paul Conti: Yeah, I think it's quite
half the picture, because half the picture would be what's going on in your
mind when your mind is sort of at rest. What then starts playing
itself right in your mind. The other side of it is what
comes to the fore when there's a lot of competition for attention. So I'm making this up, but the idea
that if he stubbed his toe really badly, he'd still be thinking about this. Because it's so much power. Now, again, maybe if, God forbid, he has a
badly broken bone, there's a lot of pain, like he's going to think of that first. But it takes a lot of other stimulus
to be more salient than this. So you can look at what's coming
in your mind when your mind is sort of free and open, that's
very, very important and relevant. And then what's winning out when
there's maybe a high arousal state and a lot of competition for attention. Andrew Huberman: That's very helpful. Again, I think that along with this self
awareness piece, the asking of oneself what is happening in my mind when I'm
in different states or throughout the day, and as you're describing now,
also including when there are other things available to think about. Does that include how often I'm
distracted by a particular thought? Like how many times throughout the
day my mind goes from the conversation I might be in to something else? Paul Conti: Yes. Does it hijack your attention? Is one way of putting that. Andrew Huberman: A lot of people mention
to me challenges with intrusive thoughts. What can be done about
those intrusive thoughts? Or is it simply a matter of paying
attention to the fact that they're there and then thinking about
the origins of those thoughts? Paul Conti: Right. Absolutely. One example, you could have intrusive
thoughts because there's trauma in your background, maybe very clear
trauma that you're not facing and addressing, and then you have intrusive
thoughts that say, I'm not safe. Okay, go look for what's
still in the unconscious mind. Or when it comes out a little bit, you
push back into the unconscious mind. That's a very different scenario
than, like, in this case. This man was having intrusive thoughts
about his job situation, his overall situation, and it made sense that
he was having those intrusive. They were markers of the acuity of it, of,
like, you have to do something about this or something very bad is going to happen. So the intrusive thoughts there. And this made sense, right. This is not going well, and your
mind is sort of forcing you to pay attention to this because time
really kind of is of the essence. You're at real risk now. So intrusive thoughts can be anything
from, as they often are, they can be markers of something that is traumatic,
something that's underneath the surface, something that is really bothering us,
that we've shoved down, that's making guilt, shame, distress, vulnerability. That's very often the case. But sometimes intrusive thoughts
are a marker of like, oh, right. That's the thing to pay attention to. Andrew Huberman: And once we identify the
intrusive thought, how do we eradicate it? I mean, how do we work with it? Talking about trauma now, of course, it
might map back to a childhood experience, some internal narrative, but is there
some roadmap for moving intrusive thoughts from a place of intrusive and disturbing
to simply there and kind of, meh. I mean, it'd be wonderful to hit
a delete switch, but obviously, we don't work like that. Paul Conti: Well, let's take a look,
if we could, at this example, right, which is a little bit different if we
run through this example of the person in the job, because then we should talk
about trauma driven intrusive thoughts, which is, I think, in many ways, the
biggest topic about intrusive thoughts. But think of this person here. If we go up from salience,
we look at behaviors, right? And behavior actually now is
very, very important, right. This person is drinking. They're still going to
that job they don't want. They haven't gone and interviewed
for the jobs they want. So we start looking at the behaviors
that are making problems, the changes in behaviors that could make things better. And then on top of that,
we arrive at strivings. And I think when I was talking about
structure of self, I think at least one time I misspoke and said striving instead
of self at the top of these pyramids, self and striving have a lot of overlap, right. Because if you're growing a healthy self
out of the sort of top of the structure of self pyramid, then that self is
going to be aware of strivings and it's going to be better able to enact them. So his sense of self was shaken
here, but he was aware of the strivings for a better life. So now let's see the roadmap. It's interesting, right? Because the roadmap is his roadmap. If we look in those ten cupboards,
we come up with a roadmap, and the roadmap doesn't have us spending very
much time in unconscious land, right. Because he doesn't really need that. If we look at what makes the
difference for him, what did we do? We really cultivated the self awareness,
the I that is making decisions for him. We looked at how his defensive structure
had changed and the things he didn't want to be there now and the good
things that were there before, and how could he get back some of that? How could he trend back towards
what was working before? So we start to really look at
that and then we go from there really to changing behaviors. Like it requires a behavioral
change, which is not to walk up to the precipice of doing this each
day, but to actually do it, right. Because it was very clear all the
vectors, so to speak, inside of him were pointing towards doing it. And that that was consistent with
the self being healthier, that garden growing on top of the structure and
the strivings then being realized. So for him, that was the roadmap and
the salience, it wasn't really part of it, because the intrusiveness, the
salience bias inside of him made sense. And then, of course, it went away
once he made the decisions, right. Because the intrusive thoughts of,
like, you have to figure this out. You have to figure this out. Weren't there anymore, along
with the intrusive thoughts of, you'll never figure this out. It goes away because he made the
change, but he made the change because we looked at self awareness
and we strengthened self awareness. We looked at defense mechanisms, how
they could be versus how they are. We looked at the behavioral
change, which was really necessary. And then also referencing a character
structure that has difficulty. Coming across the precipice. So we say, okay, that's a
baseline characteristic of him. We kind of understand that. But how do we help him
change the behaviors anyway? When he does that, the self is in
a better, happier, healthier place. The strivings are realized. This person stops drinking
in the way they were. They start doing the enjoyment
aspects of their life. They start doing them within
reasonable bounds again, they're taking care of themselves. Person's smiling and now think the
generative drive is much more fulfilled. What comes on top of those pillars, right. Is that person has a sense of humility. Enough humility to say, I'm
going to walk away from this job. It's okay that people in the
job will think I'm crazy. How could you leave that? And it triggers something
in me in some way. But it's okay. I'm not out there for that. I'm not out there for the big
thing that everybody is guiding. I can have the humility to go
to the job that I know makes a difference and feels good to me. He's empowered to make change. He's moving away from the disempowerment
of the alcohol and the avoidance. So there's empowerment and humility
and absolutely, if you talk to that person on the other side of it, like
shortly as he was enacting it, right. Getting just to the other side of
it, there was so much empowerment and so much humility, which were
then brought to bear through a sense of agency that made the changes. That changed the job, that stopped
drinking, that dealt with the people who thought negatively of it through a
sense of gratitude of, it's not awful that I'm going to go make less money. A lot of people said that to him. Like, how could you do it? It was so terrible. It's not terrible. I'm grateful. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go make an amount of money. That's all that I need. So it was like, that's what
helps a person do that thing. And that's actually true. That's what mattered to him. So an activated, an active, a verb,
sense of agency and gratitude, then leads him to the place where there
was at peace, contentment, delight. He was delighting in the job
that he chose, and his generative drive was in accord with it. Then eventually, we stopped at
some point, working together. He didn't need me anymore. He could always come back,
but we didn't need me anymore. Then you look at. How are those last sessions? A lot of the last sessions were
him in an excited way, telling me what he was doing, right. Like, oh, and then we
did this, and I did this. I figured this out. He was so happy about it. And you can see that man's generative
drive, which naturally is quite high in him, but was being squelched. That brings him out of balance. Now, the generative drive was in quite a
good place, and he had enough aggression or assertion to go and do that job and
to do that well, and even enough to counter anybody who would still kind of
rise up and say, that wasn't a good idea. He could counter all that. He was getting pleasure from it. He didn't need to seek pleasure. By what? Not even pleasure? Because alcohol was pleasurable? No, pleasure. Because harming himself and
saying, to hell with you, to the world, and to him was pleasurable. He's not getting pleasure that way. He's getting pleasure in healthier ways,
taking care of himself, doing the job he loves, doing his leisure activities. Like, the man comes into
balance, and then life is good. And when you say, yeah, okay, come back
in a couple of months, comes back in a couple of months, maybe in six months. Comes back one more time,
I don't see him again. That's great. He totally doesn't need me again. And I atrophied from his life. Great. That's the success state of it. Andrew Huberman: He eventually
arrived at being truly wealthy with all the components of mental health
and peace, contentment, delight. As you describe his story, which is
a remarkable one, it occurs to me that the narratives that we hear as
children end up being so powerful. Paul Conti: Yes. Andrew Huberman: And I'm sure there are
people out there that receive such direct messages from their mother and or father. Like, you have to do this. You cannot do that. But often we get messages through
observing and overhearing. Right. The way that our mother talks about
our father when he's out of the room. The way that our father talks about
our mother when she's out of the room. And some of this could be nonverbal,
like a rolling of the eyes or somebody saying, yes, yes, agreeing, and
then they walk out and they just. And kind of blowing them off. I mean, kids are, we are all so aware
and integrating all of that all the time. And I do think those messages get
woven into us at a very deep level. Paul Conti: Absolutely. Andrew Huberman: And then, of course,
there are the conscious narratives that we build up as we go through
in particular, I think, elementary and middle school and high school. I mean, I can still remember a
negative comment somebody made about a jacket that I was wearing in,
like, the third or the fourth grade. I forget everything else
that happened that year. Remember that? Yeah. And I'm not insecure about
the clothing that I pick. I mean, obviously it's a
black button down shirt. I've had similar shirts
since the first grade. Just kidding. But the fact that that's embedded
in my memory systems is, like, just speaks to the salience of
negative, of insults basically. It was an insult. And I'm sure I've insulted plenty
of kids coming up as a teenager and back and forth, but these
narratives get so deeply embedded. And the idea that one could pick a
different path of vocation or, like, you miss the opportunity to be truly happy at
a deep level based on these narratives. I mean, on the one hand, it's obvious. On the other hand, you just go
like, whoa, this is not good. This is a flaw in the design. And yet you're giving us a roadmap to
understanding and to overcoming it. Paul Conti: Right? Let's say we take your
examples and we really look. They're great examples and
we look at them, right? The person making fun of
the coat in third grade. We're assuming it hasn't harmed you, it
hasn't changed the course of your life. What does it tell us? It shows that negative
stimuli are very salient. I'm sure you got a lot of compliments
in third grade too, right? But it's the negative that stands
out, which just shows that there's a salience bias in us towards the negative. And that's probably about
survival and threat sensing. Like, in some ways it makes sense
around human survival, but it doesn't make sense around human trauma. So you had given the example of what
gets communicated to the child when, say, mother says something negative about
father when father's out of the room. Father says something negative about
mother when mother's out of the room. Just to give an example. So, children, because the
complex cognitive mechanisms haven't been formed yet, right? Then the natural way that the brain
functions is in a self referential way. So the child generally doesn't
have the capacity to say, like, oh, mom and Dad aren't really getting
along well in this certain way. So when Dad's not here, mom vents a little
bit about something about him by saying. The child isn't thinking
about that, right? Then what the child will often
internalize is, okay, there's me and there's mom and dad. And mom says dad is bad,
and dad says mom is bad. And I must be bad too, right? Because in general, if your
parents are bad, then the child takes that on themselves. Now, again, I'm giving a simple example,
but I'm very much extrapolating it. I mean, imagine if that were very,
very aggressive where the mother, when this happens, just tells
the child how awful the father is and the father does the same. Someone's not going to come out the other
side of that being like, you know what? Maybe they're both awful, but I'm not. That's not how that goes. So the lessons, the traumatic lessons
of childhood get internalized. And they don't even always
have a solution state. So you think about the man who knew,
like, okay, you have to go get this job. And all those things he internalized. You might say, well, I mean,
he got to a good place for him. So for better or for worse, at
least there was a place to go. To go work hard, go succeed. Go check this box you've been
told you're supposed to check, but oftentimes there is no solution state. So how many children, I mean, it's
terrible that this is such a high percentage of the work adult practitioners
do is helping people who, as children were told one way or another that
they were worthless, incapable, bad. That gets put into the child. Unfortunately, far, far... I mean, one time on the
planet is too frequent, let alone how often this happens. Andrew Huberman: That example
makes really good sense. And this is a question. Could we add to that the example
whereby the child overhears examples of what say, men should be like or
women should be like these things. It's not so much like, you did wrong
Andrew or you did wrong Paul, or telling the daughter you screwed up. But it's more, again, narratives that
we overhear, or even a parent showing delight or excitement about a certain
phenotype in the world, like, oh, wow, look at that person, or look at them. Isn't she beautiful, right? That the young child thinks like,
okay, well, then that's the epitome of beauty through the lens of the parent. Or, gosh, like this person. Then that child internalizes
that this is the epitome of disgust with another human being. And I think children are so savvy without
realizing it, it's like, okay, well, then I guess you move toward that and you
aspire to that and you deflect from that. And you can see how these
trajectories can be set very early on. I mean, these are the four lane
highways that we were talking about in episode one, where just routes of
neural processing that can bring us to choices in life and places in life
that oftentimes you go like, I don't want to go down this path anymore. The exploration of early narratives,
both direct and indirect, first person and third person, seem so critical. How does one go about that? I mean, clearly, with a trained
clinician like you, you would guide somebody through the process. But if somebody were to try and
do this in some sort of structured way for themselves, what do
those lines of inquiry look like? Because we have vast number of experiences
from childhood, but some messages are going to be more salient than others. Paul Conti: Sure. Yeah. The idea that reflective self scrutiny can
help us, I think, is just a great idea. It's a great concept. And we do a lot of different things
sort of inside, and we're guided to do a lot of things inside. But this, I think, should overshadow many,
if not most of all those other things of what's really going on inside of me. Because if you think about
it, a lot of people will come through that and they'll learn. So the person is told like, this is what
beautiful is, this is what successful is, this is what good enough looks like. And that person may, through all sorts
of experiences, maybe other people in their lives who are more balanced, be
able to arrive on the other side of that even still sometimes going through
the midst of it, depending upon age and situation, and know, like, okay, my
father and mother thinks like, this is what beauty is, this is what success is. But it's one set of opinions,
and there's not a set of opinions that are going to define me. Sometimes people get to that place,
but a lot of times they don't. And they carry that lesson forward
and they're not aware of it, right? So they think that they're very
unattractive, even though other people are giving them different signals. They think that they're very
dumb, even though other people are giving them different signals. And their own grades and their own success
may be giving them different signals. But they're not putting
the two things together. And that's going to generate tension. That might be why that person doesn't
follow up on potential relationships. They just don't think they're
good enough and the person's eventually going to reject them
because of what they look like. They're taking that with them
in this example from childhood. Or they're not satisfied with the job
that in other ways is really great. They enjoy the work. They enjoy everything,
but doesn't pay enough. Why? Because they have some false idea
inside of what it's supposed to pay. Because it's what the parent
said by self scrutiny. What are the givens? I always think it goes
back to the math minor. If you can't solve the problem,
go back and look at the givens. What are you taking for granted? Like, oh, I know that every time
I see an X, that X equals four. Really? Maybe you wrote down four somehow
because you were thinking of four at the time and X actually is a three. Right. Just go back and look at what
you're taking for granted. And a lot of times this is what we're
doing in the therapy process, and then that's when the person can realize. So I'm simplifying, but for the
person to realize, like, oh, there's a voice in my head, so to speak. It's a natural voice. That is the voice of this person who
may not even be around anymore, whose opinion doesn't mean to me what it
did before, but that voice is saying, you're unattractive, you're not making
enough money, you're not good enough. And you know what? I don't believe that
they can identify that. And then it doesn't happen all at once. But you can get it out of you. Generally, you don't get it out of you
unless you realize that it's there. Andrew Huberman: What is the
process of getting it out? Because I think that we all have the
capacity to remember certain things and to arrive at a place where we can understand. Okay, I'm taking for granted
the fact that there's a voice in my head that says blank. Actually, I have a brief anecdote
to say about this, and this isn't I have a friend thing. I literally have a female friend
who the other day called me laughing and crying because she was
being evicted from her apartment. And she told her mother
about this over the phone. And her mother's response was,
well, at least you're thin. Paul Conti: Wow. Andrew Huberman: And she was laughing
and crying about it because it reflected so much of her childhood that no other
accomplishment of having a job, having an apartment, et cetera, mattered. It was about one thing. It was about a certain form of
aesthetic beauty that I'm not even sure she subscribes to, even though
she happens to be thin, right? So the fact that her mother would
lift that from the conversation, there's such a deprivation of so
many things in that interaction. But it really wasn't
about that interaction. She was calling me because it was really
about her entire childhood, right. And obviously, I'm not
equipped to solve the problem. And it wasn't a request for
money or anything of that sort. It was almost like the hilarity and the
sadness of the whole picture, right? But again, it speaks to these
narratives that we internalize and that sometimes show up in very
glaring ways in the real world. It's like to hear that, I
think, was shocking to her. I think she needed to
tell me to, is this real? But then it was clear that
that message had existed in her head for a long time anyway. Paul Conti: That could be very
pivotal if she realizes that, right? And even the power of the humor of
it is like, this is absurd, right. That can be very powerful in creating
change, because if there's some vestige of that inside of her where she still
believes, like, oh, I'm not good enough because I achieved A, B and C, but I
don't look like X or whatever, it can very much help because there's a lot of
power behind realizing that absurdity of, like, oh, my, that's bizarre. But wait, is any of that inside of me? Am I carrying some of that with me? I mean, there's an incentive for
self scrutiny through what you're describing, because what's the ideal
amount of that to still be in her? Zero. Andrew Huberman: So as one comes to
realize, the messages they've heard, or perhaps, like, in this case,
that they're still hearing, is the process of overcoming those messages
and really arriving at the self. It sounds to me like it's a two part
process, at least two part process. It's to look in the bin
of what are the givens? What am I taking for granted
about the internal narratives and thinking about their origins in
childhood or elsewhere, but then also cultivating the self awareness piece
that's under the function of self. Like, wait, what's really true
for me at the level of me? And this is really, I think, about
separating out the voices in one's head, these internalized narratives from
the person that we really truly are. Paul Conti: Because the idea is
that those two pillars encompass everything we need to look at. Those ten cupboards encompass everything. So it's all that. The person who's going and looking
at the givens, they're trying to understand what might be in my
unconscious mind that I'm not aware of. And, wow. The last time I got this big award
at work, I had this reflexive thought of like, but you're not thin enough. Wow. Whoa. Right? There could be a process, like,
that's going on inside of me. I don't want that going on inside of me. So the process of trying what is
unconscious in us that may be causing us harm, which is often where,
that's where the trauma goes, right. It's where the childhood trauma
seats itself, which brings us back around to the intrusive thoughts. Intrusive, negative thoughts. A negative self dialogue usually
does not mean what it meant to the man who need to change jobs, right. Because they were there for a good reason. Then he needed to make change more often. The vestiges, the hangover, the
lingering badness of some prior trauma. So oftentimes when you think, we
talked a little bit yesterday about the person who was driving in the
car and just telling themselves over and over that they're a loser, right? And then they can't achieve
the things that they achieved when they stopped doing that. I'm simplifying a little,
but that's the basics of it. Because the intrusive thoughts, the
self narrative, all the negativity in us is often coming from places that
are in the unconscious mind, right? Not always. But this idea that I don't think
I'm good enough, I'm saying it to myself over and over again, like,
wow, let's go back and look at why. Because the answer to that,
again, lies in a different place. There's just a different roadmap, right? The man who needed to change jobs
had a roadmap that spent a little bit of time in the I, self awareness. And then it went through self defense
mechanisms in action land, and it spent a lot of time with behavior,
and then it got up to the strivings. That's his roadmap. Whereas for someone who's laboring under
the intrusive thoughts, the negative self talk, the automaticity, the givens of
childhood trauma then needs to go to a different place where now we're spending
time in the unconscious mind thinking about what's there, figuring out what's
there, bringing things to consciousness. That person, say, realizing
maybe your friend, you had this realization of, like, oh, my goodness. We say, wow, did that bring something
to the conscious mind in her. If so, great, let's look at that and
let's look a lot at it and let's look. Are there other things there too? Are there other givens? Let's bring them to conscious, to
consciousness so that we can talk about them, we can identify them, and then
look at how does that relate to defense mechanisms and character structure? And now what are we doing? A process of interested inquiry
like this is really interesting. I mean, it should be interesting
to the person doing it. It's them, right? And it should be interesting to the
person doing it with them, right? Because if you're a therapist
and it's not interesting to you, you need another job, right? Or you're talking to a friend. Like if it's a friend is
going to be interested. So there's an interested, honest,
open inquiry with the idea of holiday .
Let's learn things so that we
can make change for the better. And even though, as we talked about
yesterday, the intrusive thoughts and the self dialogue that's gone on over
and over and over again, it doesn't go away easily, but that doesn't mean it
doesn't atrophy over time and go away. Or that the person can have that
reflexive thought like, oh, there's the thought again that I'm a loser
or that I should cut myself or I should drink or whatever it is. I know that thought appears in me
automatically at times because it was in my head for so long, but
it does not telling me anything, it's just an automatic thought. It's not telling me I should drink,
it's not telling me anything, right? Other than the fact that, oh,
that's what happens in human beings. That's how the self understanding
brings change in us and gets us over the barriers of why i've been
trying this for what modern mental health would often have us think. I took the Silexan, I did
the ten sessions of CBT. I'm a failure. Nothing will ever get better. A different framing that says,
hey, this can get better over time. And my understanding and my efforts
and my thought redirection, my behavioral changes all makes it better. And then those things I don't want
in my head, they're going away. It's taken time, but they're going away. Andrew Huberman: I'm relieved to hear
you say that one can have intrusive thoughts and that one approach to dealing
with those is to acknowledge them and look at them and not try and push them
back deeper, not try and eradicate them. I'm familiar with having intrusive
thoughts, not all the time, but at various periods throughout my life. And the idea that one can just
extinguish them is a great idea, but that's simply not the way
it's worked, at least not for me. But I have found that if I just say, okay,
this is spontaneously coming up through the neural circuits of my subconscious,
and they're intrusive, and I don't like them, but I eventually arrive at exactly
the place that you describe, which is that there's nothing actionable here. They go from being intrusive and
troubling to intrusive and just kind of mildly irritating to intrusive. And like, okay. And yes, I go through some redirect,
like, try and redirect my attention from time to time when they're happening,
but I eventually just get to a place where it's like, okay, it's just
a boring story or boring imagery. There's nothing there. There's nothing there. And then they eventually
break up like clouds. That process could take a while because... Paul Conti: You took the energy
out of them, you made them go away, which happened over time. And then the energy that was so
powerful becomes less and less and less. And what happens? They dissipate, they atrophy. That's how they go away,
because there's no more power. There's no more power in them. And that really is the
way that we make change. And I think your emphasis upon the
fact that it takes time, the fact that it takes effort, the fact
that it only goes away slowly. Over 20 years of, at times, being a
therapist, what I've seen the most daunting, the thing that makes people
just give up and go away and go back to the things that hurt bad, give up
on themselves, are that it takes time. And if you think it's supposed to take
two weeks, and the world around you is kind of leading you to think that,
and then you go for help, and the help kind of leads you to think that
whether it's two weeks or it's ten weeks, if it's going to take two years,
you're going to go away disheartened. Or maybe more angry at
yourself or maybe demoralized. So we have to look at the truth of
all of this, parallel to your story. In my own life, for years and years
and years, I carried a negative voice inside that was always waiting
for me to do something wrong. So if I say something that's a little
bit off or not exactly what I want to say now, it would say, like, that wasn't good. It says something negative inside to me,
or it's waiting for me to drop something and say that I'm stupid and clumsy, right. With me all the time. But over time, through self reflection,
through therapy, like, through a lot of hard work, but a desire for
things to be better and a desire to understand it, it's not there anymore. I mean, every now and then,
it'll raise its head, right? I'll do something. Really? I dropped a cup of coffee. I haven't done it in ten years,
and it made a mess, and now people are coming to clean it up, and,
man, the voice came back, right? But I could recognize it. I really feel bad about this. And now it gives that voice
a chance to come out, but it doesn't come out much anymore. Whereas I lived with it for years,
it doesn't come out much anymore. And when it came out not that
long ago, I could recognize it. I'm not happy I did this and
let me help clean it up, but it doesn't mean I'm an idiot, right? So the voice in my head can just
go away, as I've been helping it to do for a bunch of years now. Andrew Huberman: Yeah. I think also important for people to
understand is that it takes time, but that we can all potentially engage in,
right, actions, moving towards strivings and hopefulness as we cope with those
and try and diminish those internal narratives, those intrusive thoughts. It's not as if during the entire
process, you can't function. I mean, I think that it's cognitively and
sometimes even physically demanding to do, but we can still engage in healthy ways in
the world, and we can still try and avoid acting out and avoid forms of denial. As I say this, I'm realizing that the
wish for or the impulse to really just suppress intrusive thought born of
trauma or whatever else is really futile. That's not going to work. It's not going to work. We have to embrace these narratives and
not expect them to disappear in a finger snap, but embrace them and see them and
look at them and be unafraid to look at them and discount where they are. Absolutely not true. Paul Conti: I would say
unafraid to understand, right? Because we must understand means we must
look at what's going on inside of us. When I didn't like that voice
but was afraid of it, like, what is going on inside of me? What does this say about me? And I'm directing away from it. Well, that's why it was with
me for, like, several decades. But when I start to go look at
it, I can find an answer to it. And again, you have to look at what's
going on in that person because one might presume, and maybe people listening
are presuming this or maybe not, but a reasonable presumption that might
just reflexively happen in a person would be to think that, oh, when I was
younger, the messaging I was getting was that you're not good enough. Right? You're not good enough. That's why I carry with
me, you're not good enough. But it's not that sometimes it's the
opposite, that I was rewarded a lot when I was younger for doing things
in a way everyone thought was great. Like getting great grades and being well
behaved, doing all sorts of things that brought a lot of positive reinforcement
to me, but I never handled well things that fell even a little bit short of that. And then it would evoke a lot of shame. So the oppression inside is not
coming from denigration, it's coming from something different. Which is also why this is not
a search to blame someone. Because sometimes the people
who are giving the message, they're doing the best they can. I mean, someone who's saying to a child,
you're a loser, like, that's not okay. No matter what, that's not okay. But that's often not how it happens. The parent, like you says, communicating,
they don't realize that every time they're admiring a certain level of
wealth or a certain kind of beauty, they're giving that message that the
child that doesn't meet that or ends up not meeting that isn't good enough. But they don't know that. Or my parents tried to nurture me
and they did a good job of it in many ways, and teachers did a good job. So they're not realizing, hey,
this person's going to end up a bunch of years from now not
thinking anything's good enough. They don't know that. So it's not a search for blame. And I think that's very, very important. Very important. Because often people don't want to look
inside because they think either I'm going to find something dramatically
wrong with me, and the answer I would give is there's almost surely not
something dramatically wrong with you if you're having that thought. And if somehow there is, you're better
off looking at it now than later. So that's part of it. The other part is that people
become worried that they're going to ruin something. I like my parents and if I go look
at this, I'm going to hate them. People say things or
think things like that. And the idea that we may get down
to something that really involves someone being responsible for something
bad, now, if that's the truth, the person already knows that inside. The vast majority of times, they know
that they're just not facing that. But most of the time also, it's not that. It's just like, okay,
that's how life evolved. And what's the predisposition? Like, I was smart enough to get good
grades, and I have a low threshold for shame, and people reinforced me
and like, oh, I can kind of understand that, so then I can get control over it. It's not a search for anger,
frustration, blame of self or others. Andrew Huberman: Yeah. Oftentimes I hear that people are afraid
of dealing with these deeper issues or addressing these deeper issues for fear
that they'll lose, say, their drive. Right. The thing that makes them
successful in the first place. And that allows them perhaps even to
afford therapy or afford the time to think about these sorts of questions. So it seems to me that the drives that you
referred to earlier, the generative drive, the aggressive drive, and the pleasure
drive, are such critical nodes or areas to look for all of us in terms of figuring
out whether or not we're doing well or less well according to some features
that are pretty much universal in people. Essentially what I'm saying is, at
least by my understanding, we all have drives to some extent or another. And to the extent that our aggressive
drive is very high and pleasure drive is very high, and whether
or not it's pointed in the right direction, it can be generative. If it's not, perhaps it can
undermine our generative drive. I'm very curious to know how you've
observed the different ranges of these drives in people and how that
predicts whether or not people will do more or less well in different
areas of life, essentially how the different drives play out. Paul Conti: I think that the first
thing to say is where the drives are at, so to speak, in any of us is a
combination of nature and nurture. So the nature part tells us the range,
sort of that the drive is going to be. But because nurture means so much
to humans, as we understand from epigenetics, from the advancement
of science, we see more and more and more how much nurture matters. So the range that's denoted by
nature is probably pretty broad. We see the manifestation of that, and then
the nurture lets us then move that drive. Now, sometimes nurture, that's not
gone in the right place can move the drive in the wrong direction. But as adults, as people who can
take care of ourselves, who can learn about ourselves, we can
change where the drives are seated. It's not an easy thing to do because
it requires a lot of changes of self knowledge and hard work. But we can do it. We can change the sort of
array of how those drives are manifesting themselves within us. And we see that, I mean, that's
part of the hopefulness of mental health treatment, right? That we see not just surface changes,
but we can see changes on a deeper level. So I think it's important that
these things are not fixed. Although there are some natural elements. Someone who may have a natural sort of
low aggression or low self assertion, okay, it's going to be in the lower
range, but it doesn't mean that it's locked in at any one particular point. And that the place that we want to be,
what is the place that's consistent with the things that we want, the
agency and gratitude as verbs, and the sense of well being and all of that. So the idea is the state of health
has the generative drive as prominent. It's the dominant drive, and then
aggression and pleasure, which are still active in us, but they're
subserving the generative drive, and that's the state that we wish to be in. So when we're assessing, okay, why is
there something that doesn't feel okay or something that's not going okay, then? One way to start is to look at,
okay, what's going on in the person, what may be off in the drives. That gives us a very strong
idea of, okay, what's going on. A way of understanding what's going on as
we then go and look in the ten cupboards to figure out the specifics, okay, what
is actually going on here that we can then change, but the framing of what's going
on can come through the lens of looking at the drives and how they're manifest in us. Andrew Huberman: What does it look like
when the aggressive drive is very high and the pleasure drive is also very high? Paul Conti: So if these drives are
running too high, where we end up at is in a place of envy and envy. I'm always sort of on the soapbox
about envy, because I think envy is just so wildly destructive. And if the aggressive drive is
very high, so the person say, in one way this can manifest itself,
just wants more and more and more. They're not getting satisfaction
from anything, but they want more. That may be because of a strong
vulnerability inside of them. So something that might map
to narcissism, for example. There could be a strong aggressive
drive to get more, and that leads to something that's very unhealthy. So the idea that I want more, I need more,
I don't have enough, I can't get enough, then fosters envy, which is not the desire
to be better or to have more, but it's just the desire to feel better about the
self, whether that involves raising the self up or bringing someone else down. That's why envy is destructive. So very high levels of aggression that
are not tempered, for example, by a generative drive that would also be
high, then create a circumstance of envy, and the envy is destructive. And the same happens if the
pleasure drive is very, very strong. So if one continues to want more pleasure. So I can't find any satisfaction. I don't feel good about myself. I feel bereft inside. And I see that pleasure can make me
feel better, but just for a little bit. Then it fades away and I want
more of it, and I want more of it. That also can lead to the place of envy. Like that's the outcome. So if the aggressive drive is running
very high, or the pleasure drive is running very high, or if both are running
very high, but it only takes one in order to end up in a place of envy. So if the generative drive is not high
enough to overcome how high the aggressive drive is, which would mean then the
aggressive drive would be sublimated towards good, productive things. So take the energy and put it
towards something that is goodness. But if the aggressive drive was way
out there ahead of the generative drive, that ends up in a place of
envy, as does the pleasure drive. If I want more and more and more,
but I never get satisfaction from anything, it never brings me any sense
of goodness that where it ends is in a place of vulnerability and resentment. Because envy involves wanting more. If we look at what's really
going on, envy under the surface involves wanting everything, right? If a person is at the outer limits of
envy, which is why envy is so destructive. Because if I can't get enough pleasure
and there's so much aggression in me, then I'm not going to make myself feel better. But what I can do is make
other people feel worse. Andrew Huberman: I want to
ask you more about envy. But first I want to ask is one way to
characterize the generative drive and to distinguish it from the other drives
is to say that generative drives are pro social, meaning they tend to bring about
benevolent interactions between people in. Paul Conti: The sense that pro
social as constructive, right? In a sense, building goodness, then yes,
because it's the drive in us that makes us want to love and nurture things. That makes us want to learn and
sometimes learn to make better in the world or learn for learning's sake. The drive is a drive of goodness. So if the drive is then going to
enact itself in the world around us, it's going to be pro social,
because we exist as social units. I mean, if we decide, oh, I want
to be an island off somewhere, that's not healthy, right? We exist in social units from small, like
a nuclear family to a neighborhood, all the way up to nations and to the planet. So if we perceive the truth of that,
that, hey, there's an interdependence between me and others, and I see that
then the drive will lead to choices and behaviors that are socially constructive. Andrew Huberman: Earlier, you talked
about aggression, and you were clear to make sure that we all understood
that aggression does not necessarily mean violent aggression, that there
are different forms of aggression. I'm curious if you could give us
some examples of how you've observed people with high levels of aggression
and high levels of pleasure drive as well, both male and female, and here,
without defaulting to stereotypes. I think a lot of people just despite
the fact that you've clarified what aggression is and isn't in
the context of this conversation, we hear the word aggression and we
think verbal attack, physical attack. However, the way you're describing
aggression and the aggressive drive, I have a feeling that you're referring to
other expressions of aggression as well. Paul Conti: So if the aggressive drive
is running too high, and that could have factors of nature, factors of nurture,
factors of the situation the person is in, factors of their whole life, but it
ends up at the moment in a place that is too high, then what that person is
doing in one way or another is to try and exert an unhealthy level of control. And that can be done in
so many different ways. It can be done in that overt
way of just intimidating people. Of using harsh language towards people. It can be done by manipulating people. It can be done through passive aggression. There are all sorts of ways that the
person can try and exert unhealthy control, but that's where we end up. If there's too much expression
of the aggressive drive in us, Andrew Huberman: That makes sense. And it reminds me of an example from
my own life, where, first off, I should say I've had almost exclusively
positive collaborations among my colleagues at Stanford and elsewhere. Every one of those collaborations
has ended in a paper that we were all happy with. But more importantly, the relationships
grew and were not diminished. But I had one collaboration with
someone, not to be named, where it was going very well, but I had the
need to reschedule an appointment. So I sent ahead a note about the
fact that my car dealing with. I had some other things. I explained why I need to reschedule the
appointment and didn't receive a reply, which was a little unusual, but then
eventually received a reply that said, well, it's clear that you don't want to
pursue this collaboration, which is like the furthest thing from the truth, right? And so I expressed that, and then
the collaboration was reinstated. But it brought to mind some concern for
me because it was sort of an extreme reaction to something that happens among
academics or anyone we get busy with. Things come up. It was important to tend
to the car, that is. And then at some point later, they
were late to a number of meetings. Okay, no big deal. We're academics, we tend to run late. That's typical of many academics. But then I was late once to a meeting,
and they essentially left and wrote an email that said something of the
sort, like, I've got my own great ideas, so I'm no longer interested
in pursuing the collaboration. And I was pretty shocked, because there
was nothing really outside the ordinary in terms of busyness and prefaceorial
schedules, and there were other people involved, postdocs and things like that. And there was a great
project to be worked out. So I remember being disappointed,
but also really kind of surprised. But then when I mapped it back to the
earlier example of the car incident, I thought, well, there's a real sort
of lack of ability of this person to handle disappointment, and yet they're
exerting or demonstrating rather some of the same behavior, of occasionally
running tardy and these kinds of things. And I remember feeling like
it was pretty aggressive. It's a pretty aggressive reaction
to something that could have been handled with a conversation. Now, I must say I'm very grateful that
the collaboration didn't proceed and it went elsewhere and it worked out great,
and they're doing great and we're doing great, and so, no hard feelings, but
it stands out to me as a pretty salient example of aggression, but not played
out at the level of yelling or anything. There's a passivity in there,
but then there's also kind of a kind of entitlement. And here, of course, I'm only looking
at the other person's behavior. And I should acknowledge, I
realize canceling, not good. Being late, not good. But listen, I'm a human being, and I... Paul Conti: You canceled once. You were late once. This isn't habitual. This is human stuff. Right? Andrew Huberman: Right. And a lot of good work had gone
into the project, and there was a cost where, most importantly, the
postdoc suffered because they weren't involved in these interactions at all. And yet the project halted at that point. So to me, that seems like an
example of somebody who has a, well, strong, aggressive drive. And that's clear from that
they are incredibly successful in the academic domain. And when disappointed, lashes back
or is passive, one or the other. Is that what we're getting at here? Not surprisingly, perhaps, the person
rarely publishes with other people. Paul Conti: Right. Andrew Huberman: Probably that doesn't
make a very good collaborative partner. Paul Conti: Right. And it totally makes sense. Think about what you're describing here,
which is some vulnerability in the person. There's some way in which the person
doesn't feel good enough, no matter what this person has achieved. So then there's a sense of the
need and the right to over control. So when you agree to work together,
you didn't agree that I'll never have to cancel anything. Right? Sure. But the thought was different, the
framing is different on the other end, that now we're going to work together. So I'm exerting significant
control over you. And again, you're not aware of it. And maybe that he's not aware of it. Andrew Huberman: In
this case, it was a she. Paul Conti: Okay, so I was thinking of
someone different, but she has to have some deficit of self that results then
in the reflexive need to over control. And think about the first
response is a non response. Which is, that's aggression. But it's just passive aggression. The thought would be, well, you're
worried something doesn't feel good in you because I didn't respond, which was true.. You're expecting a response,
maybe you don't know. Did you get the email? What's happening? Is she mad? So it's sort of effective. It creates some consternation
and some dissonance in you. Then on top of that, the person
is willing to potentially, at that point, sacrifice the relationship. So you think about
aggression now is not good. This excess aggression
is not good for you. It also is clearly eclipsing
the generative drive. Because it's not good for this
person and their research. It's not good for this person
and the postdocs in their lab. But the person is willing to
accept that in the service of gratifying the excess in aggression. Now, so then you said something
that then sort of made it okay. For the short term. Okay. Then the person feels gratified, like,
whether you apologize or not, they took it as you've, to some degree,
bowed down before me now, like, it'll be okay, at least for the short term. But then the next thing that happens
actually does end the collaboration. So that's not good. And you say, even from a self
serving perspective, that person was collaborating with you for a reason. She saw a benefit to the science
that she's very, very interested in through the collaboration with you. But then let that all go
in the service of what? In the service of the ego. Of, I don't feel good enough about myself. The response to that then,
is a response of envy. That I don't like that you
have the freedom to behave differently than I want you to. I don't like any of it. I don't like that I don't control
you as much as I would like to. And ultimately, it's that
envy that becomes destructive. So it's a setback for that person. It's destructive of the
science that person was doing. It's destructive of the
science that you were doing. So envy is destructive. And here, the high level of
aggression, the aggressive drive, is at a very high place. It's exceeding the generative drive. The pleasure drive isn't high enough
either, because there's not enough pleasure coming from the great
science that's being done, right? So then the person is approaching the
world through the lens of envy, right? They don't feel good enough. They want to exert that
aggression through over control. And what they end up doing
is destructive, right? And it's very clearly destructive. It's a great example because
it's destructive of the science, which is ostensibly the reason
that you're there, right? It's the reason you were there. But someone who needs to
exert over control is there, not just for that reason. And then the other reasons can trump the
generative reason that they're there. And that's how envy, when it is the
product of aggression or pleasure seeking, being too high, always
unfailingly creates destruction. And how different is that from
agency and gratitude as active verbs. There's a sense of agency, but the agency
isn't being exactly enacted, because if the agency is being enacted in the service
of science or career or whatever it may be, that's not going so well, right. And the gratitude part isn't active. Like, my goodness, I'm here,
I have this great career. I'm discovering things. I get to spend my life in science. I get to collaborate with you. There's so many things to feel good about. I have postdocs in my lab, right? I get to nurture them because
I know more and I can guide. That's not leading. Envy is not those things, which is why
people who are doing that, at least in this realm of life, although this often
this bleeds into other realms of life, the vast majority of times you see, is
someone who does not have happiness in the way that happiness with the quotes. That happiness is the sense of peace,
the sense of well being, right? Being able to delight
in things, contentment. The person doesn't have that. And here it's interesting, right? This person gets to the highest
levels of academia, and they're very successful, and they have a lab of
their own, and they're collaborating. You think that's all great, right? But not inside of them. It's not bringing them those things, as
evidenced by how this person is behaving. And I would bet almost 100% if you say,
what's that person like in other aspects of life, at least in the professional
realm, probably in others, too. No one's going to describe a happy person. Andrew Huberman: So much of
what you just said captures this individual extremely well. And it also reminds me that so much
of the way that you're describing this aggressive drive can also be observed,
perhaps in the way that people show up to social interactions, not necessarily
big interactions, maybe even just interactions between two people. What I'm thinking of here is the
person, male or female, who shows up and just kind of takes over, talks
the whole time and tells stories. I went to a meal when I graduated
university, and someone showed up for the first time at this meal,
meaning we had never met them before, and just sat down and just started
telling stories for like an hour. And it was interesting. Portions of it were captivating. And then at some point I realized
this is either total pathology. Like, this person is crazy, but they
weren't crazy, or they have no recognition that they're absorbing all the oxygen in
the room, as it's sometimes described. But it seemed like they had this need to
just control the whole environment by way of speech, just like fire hose stories. And I've seen this definitely
in the academic realm. I've seen this in the non academic
realm, in social settings. What's interesting is perhaps why this
person does this or these people do this. But what's also interesting
is how people react to it. On the one hand, I think most people find
that kind of obnoxious, but there also seem to be people who see this as like,
oh, that person has a lot of agency. Like they're a leader. They actually grab a lot of the
attention that they're seeking. And we tend to view those
people as kind of empowered. I don't actually think that they're
necessarily empowered, but perhaps it stems from the feeling that the rest
of us, I like to think, have, which is some sense of social etiquette,
where there's some give and take. You walk into a room, you kind of
assess what's the context here. There's some listening as well
as some speaking and so on. When someone shows up and kind of violates
all those rules, on the one hand, it can be obnoxious and overtake everything. But as it said before, there's also the
sense of like, oh, that must be nice to just be able to be as one feels. And so I'm describing this not because
I think people should mimic this type of behavior either way, be really
meek and not say anything that's on their mind or just overtake, but
because I feel like it might be an exploration of this aggressive drive. And if someone's doing that, are
they trying to mask something else? And why do people react to these
seemingly powerful people in this way? Paul Conti: These things happen
in the world around us, right? They're independent of the
spectrum of gender, the spectrum of intelligence, achievement. They're human problems. So a person you're describing,
whether that person has character structure, problems that are present
with them across time, or whether they're in a certain place, whether
it's in life or today, we don't know for sure what the underpinnings. But what you're describing is
it's a presentation of narcissism. And narcissism is rooted not in
confidence, not in arrogance. It's rooted in vulnerability. It's rooted in I don't feel good enough. And narcissism then engages with
the world through the lens of envy. So no one else gets to have any time. No one else gets to say anything funny. No one else maybe gets
to say anything at all. There's a dominance of the room, right? There's a dominance of the room
that comes through an inability to tolerate the back and forth of human
interactions, human engagement. So then that person becomes very dominant. And why is that? Because when they tell a story and they
get a laugh or even if it's not that funny and it's a 15 minute story, but somebody
smiles a little bit or nobody smiles. They can perceive inside that. Like, I just did that, I said that. And maybe somebody responded positively. I feel good about that for a split second. Now that's gone. And then the next thing comes, and
the next thing comes, because people who are coming at the world through
the lens of narcissism, whether it's just in that particular event or it's
across life, are never satisfied. And nothing ever brings enough
goodness, nothing ever brings enough feeling of pleasure. So the person then wants more, and
that's how the person dominates the room. Now that can be very seductive. Narcissistic people, not always, but
are often very seductive because of that appearance of mastery, of control. So that person did have, we could
look at it in the short term and say that person had mastery over the room. No one said anything for an hour but them. So they had mastery over the room. They had control over the room. But what they're doing
is exerting over control. It's like Pennywise and
Pound Foolish, right? That borrow a dollar today
to pay back 100 tomorrow. Because they got to control that room. But a lot of people, not everyone,
some people are seduced by it. But a lot of people will take away
from that something that's not a good feeling, something that wasn't mutual,
that doesn't make a person want to collaborate with that person, even
be in the same space as that person. So it's counterproductive
because the people who might come under the spell, so to speak. They're the people who were
brought under the spell, right. They're less observant, dynamic,
intuitive, introspective. They're not the people that you
want, in a sense, on your side. The people that would be most valuable
to collaborate with, even as thought partners have conversations with
those people are going to be put off because even if they don't know exactly
what's wrong, they know, like, that didn't feel good and they map, do I
want that feeling more in my life? No. So that's the counterproductive aspects. That's why narcissism is destructive,
because you might say, well, there's nothing destructive in that
interaction, but again, you have to be standing so up close to it that
you don't see the bigger picture. Because when you stand back from that,
that's not a person who's, by and large, you see that's not a person
who's interconnected in the world around them, has a group of good, supportive
friends, has a bunch of colleagues where they can sort of exchange information,
because all that social dynamic has to happen in the rest of life. So you're seeing a situation that is
counterproductive, that is destructive. And you always see that when people are
enacting narcissism, whether it's okay, a bunch of bad things have happened,
and for whatever reason, like, I'm in an unhealthy place and I'm enacting it right
now, or if I'm enacting it every day of my life, because it's in my character
structure and I haven't recognized and changed it, it's always destructive. Andrew Huberman: The narcissists that
I've known and observed almost always seem to have a partner who clearly
supports their narcissism, or at least doesn't speak up very much against
it, at least not publicly, and not much else except a professional role. In fact, there's one scientist who I did
not work with who comes to mind, and the joke about him was always that this person
would talk about themselves endlessly for the first half hour that you run into
them and say, okay, well, enough about me. Why don't you tell me about me? This person, moved to a different country
with their partner, comes back every once in a while, has essentially done
nothing over the last decade or so, kind of left the field, and it's kind of
secretly the laughingstock of the field. There was one other
anecdote about this person. I'm not picking on them. I'm just trying to explore these
dimensions of aggression and low pleasure drive and envy. At lab meetings, it was well known
that they would host a basketball game, but it was well known that you did not
want to score on this person because you would be asked to leave the lab. And Indeed, several people were
asked to leave the laboratory for having embarrassed the lab
head at one of these lab events. Paul Conti: By participating in
exactly the event that was described in the way it was described and
doing something competent, right? Andrew Huberman: So the game was
essentially a way for the person to build themselves up, and they were a
mediocre, at best, basketball player. So here's this game where everyone's
expected to pretend, right? And I have to pretend that the
person is actually better at what they do than they are. And in some ways, it feels like
a replica of how narcissism shows up in so many other areas of life. Like you said, these people are rarely
surrounded by people who are actually very bright, self effacing, et cetera. They tend to gather people that
just support them or no one at all. Because no reasonably healthy person
would choose to be around that. Paul Conti: Because that game is a
metaphor for all of life for that person. It's sending that message, like,
see this message and extrapolate it out to everything else. What's the metaphor? What's it communicating? It's communicating that you don't
do anything better than I do. You don't rise above me
interestingly, right? You don't arise above me in any way. You don't get to know things I don't know. You don't get to do anything better than
I do or I will be destructive towards you. It's fascinating because
it's not about the game. The game is a way of
communicating that message. Interesting. The person's not even
that good at the game. Like why not choose something
you're really good at. Because then the message is
not communicated as clearly. And a lot of this is unconscious. Let's choose something I'm kind
of fair to middling at, right? And then make it very clear that
no one gets to be better or I do something destructive to them. That's exactly what that is. And imagine someone is
thrown out of the lab. I mean, this is in many ways
the biggest thing in their life or one of the biggest things. Andrew Huberman: Antigenerative. I mean, the cost of that in the
larger world is one less potentially fantastic scientist, right? Paul Conti: And that's always the broader
picture because the narcissist is standing very, very close to the tapestry, right? So the interaction there is you have
squared a basket when I have not. So you don't understand the message
that you're not supposed to exceed me. And now I will get rid of you because
you're dangerous to have around. Because you don't get the message
and you may exceed me in other ways. And also I'm going to feel better
because I have the power to be punitive, even though it's wantonly punitive. And completely unjustified. But I have the power to do that and it'll
make me feel good than to push you away. And I know that's not going to be good
for you and I'll feel good about that. But that doesn't last, of course. That's why the person continues to do it. And it also doesn't understand at all
that that's not good for science or most importantly, that's not good for me. There's a graduate student in that
lab because you didn't say fire the graduate student, make the graduate
student leave if the person wasn't good. No, it's make the graduate
student leave no matter what. So the person is doing things that are
injurious to the society around us, obviously to the specific person they're
targeting, and also to themselves. And that's where, if you follow
envy and you see high levels of it in situations that are unbounded. It's like this situation is unbounded in
the sense that the person can do that. There's no higher authority. Andrew Huberman: This is changing. And by the way, I should back up a second
and say that I do believe, and it's been my experience, that most scientists
and lab heads are not narcissists, are quite kind, are benevolent. I mean, they'd be a little quirky. We're scientists, after all, but
not narcissists at the same time. It is true that for a long time,
less so now, laboratories were sort of like little fiefdoms. There was very little oversight
from the universities. And so the lab you joined became
your entire world and landscape. And there was some exploitation by
narcissistic lab heads for sure. As you said, it was unbounded, right? Like there was no oversight. Whereas this would be much harder to
recreate today if someone wanted to. Paul Conti: And I think that's why
by almost everyone listening to this, it will resonate with them. They'll find some familiarity,
because you see this, or you can see this in situations where
there's a bounded group of people. There's just a certain group of
people in a certain situation, and that's who they are. But the authority of the person
leading the group is unbounded. So there's a situation where if that
person has narcissistic tendencies, aggressive drive is too high, pleasure
drive is high, but not being met. If all of those things are happening,
that's when you see this come to light. Which is why the destruction varies
based upon the destruction that's permissible within the framework. So here that this person wasn't
going to fire everyone in their lab. So in a sense, they could
only damage their lab so much. Although maybe if you damage your
lab so much, you don't get funding, you inadvertently sink yourself. So even there, that person could
bring about their own destruction. But when you see the other end,
where it's truly unbounded in the sense of war, someone who can
control a machine of war, who then has everything, what do they need? Well, they need something they
don't have and never will get. So now they start enacting war,
and war is destructive, right? And you think, oh, that
person wants something. How many times does someone start a war? There's clearly an unjustified war, right? It's a war because they want
something, then they get something and they're satisfied. That's not how it goes, right? Then they get something and they're
not satisfied, and they want more. So in discussions at times about
narcissism and envy and how that can play out on the world stage. So sometimes huge events in human
history will come up and people, for example, will bring up Adolf Hitler
and the idea that Hitler wanted things. Wanted things. No, the unbound narcissism, the
unbound envy wanted destruction. This is a person who, if things
had continued to go as this person intended, there would have been no
one left on earth but him, because the process is nothing but destructive,
which is why, after the fact, there's incalculable human carnage, right? And he himself was among the
incalculable human carnage, because that's the endpoint of narcissism. Of narcissism on a broad stage. That's the endpoint of envy
at its highest magnitude. And we see that as examples. Whether we see on the smaller stage of
the lab head that you're describing or on the larger stage of unbounded war, we
end up with destruction, like 100% time. That's the final common
pathway for all of that. Andrew Huberman: Are there some
consistent themes of childhood that lead somebody to become a narcissist? And in addition to that, I'm curious
whether or not narcissists ever have insight, whether or not, if offered the
opportunity to explore the ten cupboards under the structure of self and function
of self, whether or not they eventually see inside those cupboards and go,
oh, my goodness, I've got this self that's clearly overinflated, and I've
got these defence mechanisms, and I'm so envious and modify their behavior,
or whether or not the narcissists are immune from constructive self reflection. Paul Conti: To answer the first part
is the vast majority of narcissism. It may be all of it, we don't know for
sure, is rooted in the childhood trauma of not feeling good enough, which is not
an excuse for people doing awful things. That's not what we're saying. We're trying to have an
explanatory mechanism, right? Which goes back to formative life
experiences and not feeling good enough, whether it was because that person was
directly denigrated, or that person wasn't denigrated, but could never
work hard enough, never could be enough to get approval right again, it's not
100%, and human beings are complicated, but if you go and look, you see that,
that there was never a state of like, oh, I feel good enough about myself. And if there's never a state of, I feel
good enough about myself because someone has told me that and given me the pat
on the head or given me the positive comment, you can see how in a certain sort
of natural lay of the land, genetically and in concert with other experiences,
that person can get to adulthood with a lot of aggression in them. And never having experienced
I'm good enough, it's still running along inside of them. And then they're enacting that
aggression in the world around them. That's most commonly what we see. And because there's such deep
vulnerability and such deep insecurity, then people say, people who suffer from
full blown narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder, so inaction of
envy on the highest levels, that is, they're so defended, they're so strongly
defended in an unhealthy manner from seeing their own vulnerability that it
is extremely difficult to get that person to come around and say, okay, let's look
in those ten cupboards within the field. People often talk about
treating narcissistic people. They talk about it in a nihilistic way. And some, you'll see, very experienced
people say, oh, that's impossible, right? That never gets better. Now, I'm not a believer
in therapeutic nihilism. I think that, yes, it is the norm
that that person just can't get it together to go look at that thing. They're so defended against
it, they're so afraid of it. They won't look anywhere near it. So they're looking in the other direction
and they're furthering all that unhealth. It's not the case that
it's always that way. And on a couple of occasions I
have worked with, seen, witnessed narcissistic people who can make changes. Now, it's usually in the context
of something very extreme that causes them to do that. So someone who will no longer have
access to family members they want to see or to financial resources that they
need to keep themselves afloat, it's things that often are that dramatic. It's not always that. But we can see, though, in those kind
of extenuating situations where the problem is so big, the envy is so high. But the motivation for change is
very, very high, because since on the carrot and stick model, the stick
here is very, very strong, that if a person then goes and does that,
you can see change inside of them. So we're never in a place of therapeutic
nihilism, but the barriers to that are very, very high because the self
is so wounded that the person is protecting that self so strongly. That's why the narcissism
and envy are so full blown. And it's hard to get that
person to go back and look. But not impossible. Andrew Huberman: Based on what you're
telling me, it seems that it's a very low probability that a non
clinician could change a narcissist. In other words, if one is engaging in
the world with a narcissist because they have to, presumably, or they
just find themselves in that place, would you say to that person, there's
very little, if anything, that you can do to change the narcissist's
behavior or psychological framework? Because, of course, if the narcissist
can't often do it for themselves with the help of a skilled clinician, why would
anyone else be able to achieve that? Paul Conti: We're coming at what
we're doing here from a perspective of truth about human beings, right? And that truth brings with it hopefulness. It brings with it hopefulness that people
can change and how people can change. And I am 100% all for that. It's the way to look at ourselves. But it is also true that there are
aspects of pathology that require clinical treatment in order to improve. S o now we're looking from the other
side and saying, hey, there's a problem here and there's a deep
problem here, and that we have to come at from a different perspective
of how can you help that problem? And there's a science behind this,
too, of what level of clinical care, for example, is most likely
to be helpful to someone like this? And it's not an individual clinician even. It's a team of people who work
through different modalities who can sort of wrap around that person. So it's not just a level of clinical
care is needed, but it's a relatively high level of clinical care. And that, in general, is the only
way that we get at narcissism. That's not 100%, but that's
the vast majority of time. So what can then, the person do? Andrew Huberman: Right. Paul Conti: A person cannot be
a team of clinicians, right. What that person can do,
one choice is to disengage. But disengagement can come with
the promise of reengagement. Many, many times I've worked with
people and practiced and rehearsed with them, like, okay, what might you say
to someone along the lines of, I've known you for a long time, or, I care
about you, or, I love you, whatever they may say to lead in, but I can't
be with you, or I can't be around you. There's something going on
that makes it not okay for me. It doesn't feel okay in person. Maybe says things like, you're aggressive
or demeaning or whatever it is. Or maybe they just say, it just
doesn't feel okay, I can't have it. And then the need to step
away from the person. But, look, if you got some help, right,
if you took better care of yourself in ways that would be better for you
and for the people around you, then of course I'd want to be in your life. Something like that. So disengagement can come with that
encouragement, right, to the person. But one way or another, you have to
set boundaries, which is okay, I have to deal with this person, so I'll deal
with them a little bit, or I don't have to deal with this person, so I won't. Or I can't get away from this person,
so I have to take with a grain of salt what they're saying to me. But ultimately, some form of
strong boundaries or disengagement is like, that's the response. That's the self care response. For the person who's with the narcissist. Andrew Huberman: What are some
other ways that the aggressive drive and pleasure drive and generative
drive, for that matter, play out? For instance, we talked about the former
patient of yours who eventually switched jobs, clearly had a generative drive
within him, but it was being blocked by a number of choices rooted in narratives
that originated in childhood, et cetera. We talked about individuals with
high aggressive drive, high degree of pleasure drive, but a very diminished
capacity to experience pleasure and therefore a lot of envy and the
destruction that comes with envy. Paul Conti: Yes. Andrew Huberman: What are some of the
other variations on these drives as you observe them in your clinical practice? Paul Conti: Well, our overall framing
is we want the generative drive to be the one that's deterministic . It's
the one with the strongest influence. So we want to nurture the generative
drive in us and in others, and it makes sense for us to talk about that. But we've looked at how do
things get out of balance. And from the perspective of,
well, what if the aggressive drive or the pleasure drive. What if they're too high? Right? And then it makes sense that often, not
always, what can be driving them to be so high are things that aren't healthy in us. Then the higher they get, the
harder it is to gratify them. So we end up with that problem of envy. But we can be out of balance in the
other direction too, where the person does not experience an ability to
engage with the world around them. They don't think they can do anything
to change anything for the better, inside or outside of themselves. And they're not doing much. They don't feel that they can do much and
also not receiving pleasure from things. There's no gratification from
the things a person is doing. Like, we see situations like this
too, with the aggressive drive, the pleasure drive, or both. And then we end up not at envy, because
envy is the side of excess, but we end up at demoralization on the lower side. Now, demoralization is not a
specific psychiatric diagnosis. It can predispose to psychiatric
problems like the biochemical abnormality of depression. But what we're talking about here is
not a psychiatric diagnosis, right? Like envy is not a psychiatric diagnosis. It's a thing that can be experienced,
that can lead to diagnoses. The same thing with demoralization. If you don't feel that you can make
a difference to anything and you're not enjoying anything or feeling
gratification from anything, then that pool is going to win out. That's going to be a demoralized person. The same way, of course, we know in
experiments, when you have a rat going for food, if you do it enough, when
the rat goes for the food and you take the food away, the rat stops trying. Andrew Huberman: And they
learned helplessness, right? Paul Conti: That exists in us too. And it comes along with
all sorts of other things. Because being not rats, we have
a whole bunch of thoughts about that, of, oh my God, I'm not good
enough and nothing will ever be. Okay. So demoralization then can be very strong
in taking a person away from the other things we're trying to seek, either
because that person has essentially the learned helplessness and all the things,
the complicated things inside of us that can come along with that, or the person
isn't gaining pleasure from anything. So when we're considering the ways
in which we can be out of balance, we think, okay, aggression and pleasure
drive, if one or the other or both is too high, we end up at envy. And if one or the other or both are
too low, we end up with demoralization. And you can take almost any scenario. It could be a scenario of
something that's just not really not going well for a person. It's not a clinical scenario,
it's a thing in a person's life. Or we can take clinical scenarios
and the vast majority outside of outliers, like a head injury, for
example, we can take those scenarios and we can look at it in that way,
and we can understand what's going on. At least we can understand enough
that when we go back and look in the ten cupboards of the two pillars,
we can then have some understanding of, okay, what is going on. We know the basic picture and how things
are not in the balance we want them in now, we can understand that enough to go
back and then look in those ten cupboards. And I believe that just about everything
except those biological outliers, like a head injury, fits into that
heuristic, which is why we can use it to understand, we can use it to help. We can use it to make change. Andrew Huberman: What a powerful lens
to think about and explore the self and where things are working for us and where
things are possibly not working for us. If I or anyone else out there wanted
to get some read on, assess their level of aggressive drive and their
level of pleasure drive and their ability to experience pleasure, what
sorts of questions would one ask? For instance, is it a
question of how driven am I? How much get up and go do I have? How much pleasure do I experience
from an interaction with a puppy, an interaction with food? Is it too much? Does it draw me off course? Are those the sorts of very
simple, but perhaps also very informative questions that we could
start to use to probe our psyche? Paul Conti: Yeah, I think yes,
but I would come top down. So if the goal of health is that
aggression and pleasure, those drives are subserving the generative
drive, then start to look there. If a person can take an honest inventory
of self, like, what kind of force am I being in the world around me? And that could mean, for example, what
kind of force am I being in my family? Am I denigrating to the people around me? Are the other people in
the home afraid of me? What kind of force am I
being a force for good? Am I bolstering? People can't always see that in
themselves and take stock of themselves. But what we're talking about is
situation where we think a person can like they can bring to bear. Who am I being in the world in other ways? Think of the example of the person
who needed to leave the job. Who could look at that and say,
no, I'm not being generative in the world in the way I want to. I'm certainly not doing my job
as well as I would want to. I'm making my own life worse. So that person could then see that's out
of balance or in another way, a person might see a lot of what I'm doing is sort
of self serving or maybe destructive. People can realize that, right? So you can realize by taking an
inventory of self, is the generative drive what's deterministic in me? And again, not always, but we're
talking about a process of exploration. If the answer to that is yes, if you
say, I'm trying to be the best person that I can, and I think about the
people over whom I have any authority. And I try to be reasonable, and I try to
be fair, and I try and be circumspect, and I try and think in someone else's shoes. Sometimes I have to set boundaries or
expectations or even punishment, right? But I'm careful about how I'm doing that. And I'm certainly not perfect, and I
get things wrong at times, but I do think I'm contributing to the world. I'm doing whatever I take
on as well as I can do it. I'm productive at work. My kids are doing okay or my
friends are doing all right. Whatever it is that if we can come
up with that, then we can say, okay, exhale a little bit, like
you're in a good place, right. It doesn't mean everything
is optimal, of course. So then go look at the level
of the aggressive drive, which might mean how assertive am I? Right? Am I the kind of person who
comes up to the precipice but doesn't make the decision? Am I the kind of person
who's a little too assertive? And sometimes I'm sort of
walking on people a little bit. Like a person can go look at
the aggressive drive within them or pleasure seeking. Am I doing things that
bring me gratification? Am I engaging with the people around me
in a way that brings the gratification that one might wish for, right? So if it's in a romantic
relationship, is there romance? Like, are we being nice to one another? So you can go and look at that and
say, am I getting gratification from the things I'm doing? Am I taking wherever this drive
is within me and trying to satisfy it in reasonable, healthy ways
that are also good for others? And we're back to the generative drive. So that's one way of coming at it, and
it's the way that we would like to, because now what are we trying to do next? And what can we make things better? Can we optimize things? Okay, things are okay, but
can we make them better? But let's say we see that the generative
drive is not winning the day, right? And people can see that. Look, I'm seeking pleasure, right? It's why I got, for example, I
hear over and over, that's why I got addicted to this substance. It now is not providing any pleasure
to me and is now making me miserable. But I wanted what it was giving me. Again, this doesn't mean that the person
just wants to have the world's best time. Right? It may mean that they're
really suffering a lot. And the pleasure that that drug
gave them was some relief from pain. This is how many, many people
tragically ended up becoming addicted to and dying from opiates, right? Because, say, the opiate after the
surgery or the opiate after the injury, then is soothing something. And it's soothing something
because that person feels less bad about something inside of them. You hear this all the time. That. That then fosters addiction. So that person looking for pleasure,
this isn't something where we would say in some light hearted manner, that
person took chances with their life. I mean, sometimes we'll see that. But more and more, what people are looking
for then is relief from suffering, right? But we can get to that point where we
can ascertain, for whatever reason, that the pleasure seeking is too much. And if pleasure seeking and
aggression are too much, we become aware of dissatisfaction. If you're relying too much on
aggression, I always want my way. It's not always going to happen. Or I always want that pleasurable thing. I always want to feel better. That also doesn't happen. Right? So then that can guide us towards
being aware of where are those drives? And if the drives are high, how
much dissonance is created by what's actually coming of the drive
versus the level the drive is at. I guess it's a long way of saying yes to
your question, but I would sort of come top down because the generative drive is
so important and it does gate forward. Like, kind of, where are we at in
the spectrum of how healthy am I? Or are there elements of unhealth I want
to kind of go after, or am I seeing things in myself that really say things that
are unhealthy are really dominating my life are deterministic, like addiction. Just one example. Addiction. Things that are self destructive. Because then that's a place to then look
at it more through the clinical lens. And maybe I won't just talk to a
trusted other and go get a book, but maybe I should have clinical care. Andrew Huberman: Yeah the example of
addiction is very potent, and it also brings to mind the perhaps less apparently
dangerous situation, but one that I think is really common, where people
have a certain amount of aggressive drive, they have a certain amount of
pleasure drive, but there's a kind of passivity and draining out of the
generative drive or competing out of the generative drive because of social media. And the reason I bring this up is, again,
not because I dislike social media. I rely on and use social media for
teaching and learning extensively. Really. But in going back to the pillars that
underlie whether or not we achieve and experience agency, gratitude,
peace, contentment, and delight within the pillar of function of self. There's this thing, salience,
and what we're paying attention to, internal and external. And social media does seem to me a
unique circumstance, never before observed in human evolution, where
you have a near infinite number of environments available to you. And we know that a picture is
worth 1000 words and a movie is worth a billion pictures. When it comes to drawing our attention. I mean, you give a young child,
even an infant, an iPad, I mean, that kid is in the tunnel. I don't necessarily
think that's a bad thing. And computers and computer screens
are going to be a part of their lives now and forever, presumably. But it is the case that there are a lot
of people who perhaps have the propensity for a strong generative drive, but
because they also have a propensity for a pleasure drive, they wake up, they pick
up the phone, they look at the phone, something captivates their attention,
then they're thinking about that. It might be something that brings
them delight, but more often than not, it's something that brings
them either mild irritation or mild entertainment, maybe even intense
entertainment for a short while. But very quickly, minutes and hours go by
in which we are not engaging in the world unless we are posting valuable content. And so social media is a bit
of a drain on these drives. I mean, it taps into these
drives in very strong ways. And all one has to do is observe
the behavior of people in public spaces, now, in airports, on
trains, even in their cars. And people are essentially
watching TV all day long. And it does concern me, and I raise
it because I feel like it can distract from our generative drive in a way that
doesn't necessarily speak to any kind of, like, deep character flaw or any kind of
subconscious narrative, but just that. That salience cupboard, clearly
something within that salience cupboard is happening that's
unprecedented and very, very powerful and potentially quite destructive. Paul Conti: Yeah. I think to understand this,
I would cite this belief. I believe this to be true,
that human beings have a long history of underappreciating the
power of the discoveries that are then in their own hands. So we discover gunpowder. How long until we're shooting each other? We discover nuclear fission. Now, are we going to destroy the planet? So social media, in a
sense, it's a discovery. It's a thing that comes from what we've
figured out as humans that now is there in front of us, and big, powerful discoveries
deserve to be treated with respect. Gunpowder is very powerful, and if
people need to hunt in order to survive, gunpowder can help them hunt without
getting hurt, and we'd be more successful. Nuclear fission has provided
some good things to humanity, but it can also destroy humanity. So I think the same is true here,
that what you're talking about is something of immense power, and you
can see how, if it gets out of balance. So let's use the salient. So let's say the social
media is too salient. That's going to make a problem. If it's too salient in the sense that
the person is always looking at things that don't make them feel good enough. Well, that's not going to go well,
and that's going to affect what's in those other ten cupboards. And what is built on top of it. So then it gets into the unconscious
mind, like, oh, I thought I was good enough until now. I'm looking at all this social
media, and I realize I'm not. I mean, this is. People who treat teens often talk about
this, that you see something that you didn't often see before, where a person
who might have gotten through a lot of formative years thinking like, oh,
how I look is okay, for example, then is bombarding themselves with social
media that tells them how they look is not okay, and then that changes. Andrew Huberman: Absolutely. Or perhaps social media is just
simply absorbing a ton of time and energy, but mostly time that could
be devoted to a generative force. Paul Conti: Right. That's the other side of it. So think about the example of
the person who, I know it wasn't social media, but we were saying,
well, what if it were social media? That instead of 90 minutes a day, it's
8 hours because there's an analog there and we see a lot of this, then it's
taking something that can be good in sense, you could say even should be good. There's enough out there in
terms of learning and bolstering that why should it not be good. But it's not good because
the defenses then shift. Like if you're relying on it 10 hours a
day, there has to be some denial, right? Because there are other
things to do in the world. There has to be some avoidance. There has to be some rationalization,
like something is going on there that's not healthy. So if you tell me this person is utilizing
social media 10 hours a day, they're not looking at things that make them feel bad
about themselves, they're just doing it. Then I think, okay,
something is out of balance. Now it may be that that person's
defenses are out of balance. So think about the example of the
person with the job they didn't like. Then their defensive structure changes. Then the thing that was good
for them, they rely on too much. And now it becomes something
that's not good for them, right? So then you go and look at what
else is out of balance here. What else is driving this now? Maybe it's being driven by the change
in defense mechanisms, et cetera. Maybe it's the other way around that this
person just kind of habituated to doing more and more and more and more of it. And then you would come at it in a
different way of, okay, can you slowly but surely do less, replace the time
with things that were good before? Because you could then back that person
out to where they were before, but you're not going to back the person
out to where they were before if it's being driven by something else. So we again come to the curiosity. You tell me that person is on
social media 14 hours a day. I'm curious. I want to understand what is
the balance of those drives. You've just told me a very
powerful point about salience that doesn't sound like a good one. So already you're giving me clues
about where the drives are, which means, where's that person at? What's going on in all those cabinets? Then you give more information. Now sit and talk with the person. Now you're going to understand what
is the lay of the land here and how do we go about making it better. Andrew Huberman: I love the
concept of the generative drive. First of all, because it's pro social. It brings about great things
for us and for the world. And what is better than peace,
contentment and delight. Especially when we remind ourselves that
those are active phrases or those can be achieved and experienced inside of action. It's not just sitting, levitating,
navel gazing, that sort of thing. So it's not enlightenment, right. It's peace, contentment and delight. Paul Conti: Very big difference. Andrew Huberman: Very big difference. Yes. One of the other reasons I love this
concept of the generative drive so much is also because it is a verb state. It has to do with creating things in
us and in the world, in cultivating our experience of things and what
we do and what we say and how we respond to what others do and say. And I also like it because it's distinct
from the way that we're normally taught to think about psychological well being
or being a healthy individual, which usually centers around a discussion of
goals and values and what am I trying to focus on, and what sorts of people
do I want to engage with in the world? And certainly all of that is really
important goals and who you engage with. But I think for many people out there,
much of their time is spent thinking about other people, like how healthier
or unhealthy are the people they're dating or their friends, or what's going
on between two family members, which, of course, is fine to think about. But a lot of emphasis is placed
on our assessments of others and how those are impacting us. And in some cases, people default to
just thinking about others and their problems and seeing their problems. And what we're really talking about
here is a process of introspection and inquiry that's very structured. And as it's been laid out by
you, these two pillars, structure of self, function of self. With these ten cupboards, that might
sound like a lot of cupboards, but as we talked about in the first
episode, all of that flows up to these very simple ideals and concepts and
action, states and ways of being. And to me, there's nothing more
powerful than the statement that what we are all seeking are
states of agency and gratitude. Because, again, to go back to
the analogy of physical fitness, there are not an infinite number
of different physical states or states of fitness that one can seek. There's endurance, there's
strength, there's flexibility, there's dynamic movement, there's
explosiveness, there's speed. There are a bunch of subtleties to it. But here it really seems that the
psyche, ourselves and our mental health is really tractable if we
turn the lens and we look inward. Paul Conti: Yes, I think that hits
upon a very, very important point as we talk about understanding
oneself and the process of change. And I would describe that
as rational aspiration. So let's use the physical health example. If I think, okay, I want to be healthier,
I want to have more strength, I want to have more endurance, and I might
even have ideas of what that would be. I want to be able to run a certain
distance in a certain time, lift a certain amount of weight, I
have an idea of what that is it. But rational aspiration
is rooted in our present. I'm aware that there's a me
now that isn't in that state. And I'm aware that there are things
that I'm going to do to get to that state and I'm not that dreading them,
like, okay, they'll be difficult, right? But that's okay, I can do
difficult things, I can take pride in doing difficult things. And that's how we all achieve things. So I see myself in the present
because of course goals are good, and that's true as long as we're
still living our lives in the present because otherwise goals just become
fantasies or things we want to possess. So if I'm aware of the state of physical
health I'm in right now, and I'm aware of the state of physical health I want
to be in, and I know there's a bunch of pathways I could take to get there,
but I have to think about it, figure it out, do those things, and then
I'm going to navigate myself there. That's how the whole process is good. I don't feel bad about myself now. I recognize something
I would like to change. I'm not saying, oh, you're
a loser, because you don't have those things, right? I feel good about myself now. I recognize there's something I want
and there's going to be a process, a process across time, across effort
that's going to navigate me there. Then when I get there, I
feel good about being there. It's very, very different
if I think I want that. I want to possess in a sense. I want to possess the ability to run
a certain distance in a certain time. I just want the thing. I'm covetous of the thing. That is not good, right? Because a person then often
is denigrating to the self. Not always, but that's a motivation to
go out and get that thing that's better. And they're really lamenting
the process of getting. They just want something as an endpoint. And that doesn't make for happiness,
it doesn't make for even the humility and humility in action,
the gratitude, the humility is, I can't just do that overnight. I'm going to have to work hard. People have to work hard. I'm no different than anybody else. I'm not special. I got to get in there and work and use the
elbow grease, and then I'll get healthier. Like all of that is good. That I just want to possess
something is not good. And that's why people in scenarios like
this, they might go through maybe in an unthinking way or they're gutting
it out or wherever they go, and they get that thing, right, but then that t
hing is not enough and they want more. Now, there's nothing wrong with wanting
more if it's the healthy inaction of self. I'm going to now map my way. This feels better. I want to map myself from here to the
next level of better physical fitness. That's different than
I just want that thing. Because then if I get it,
it won't be good enough. It doesn't make me happy. It doesn't satisfy me. And that's the unhealthy state of
just wanting things to possess them. And then we don't feel good
about them, which is the thought of if you give people. If you give a person something,
they'll resent you for it. Again, we're painting it in a sort
of certain way, the context of that statement, which I used to hear
a lot, even when I was younger, people would say that, right. And what were they trying to get at? What they were getting at is it
doesn't feel good if you didn't work for something, right? Like if you didn't work very hard
and you got a C, but I give you an A or somebody gives me an A. I know that that's not good. I know that I got the thing. I got the A. And I might feel happy in the moment
because I wanted that thing, but there's no real pleasure in it. There's no satisfaction, there's
no contentment, there's no sense of self, there's nothing generative. I didn't work hard enough
to go from a C to an A. And that really brings us back
to the self that we're growing on top of the structure. Right. And how that self is functioning. How it's striving. Because now we're really
talking about strivings. And if I'm going to strive for something
and work hard to get it, will I get the good feeling on the other side of it. And now we're living in
the generative space. Andrew Huberman: Well, I love the
structure of what you've laid out. Again... Paul Conti: Thank you. Andrew Huberman: The pillars of
structure of self and function of self, with ten cupboards between
the two of them that, when explored, can seem a little bit complex. But they're really some very
straightforward types of inquiry that anyone can go about, about self awareness
and address potential defense mechanisms. What we're conscious of, maybe
what we're not conscious of. Look at our behaviors and our strivings
and how that flows up to these simple ideals again, of empowerment, humility,
agency and gratitude as verbs. And then from that, peace,
contentment and delight. And the generative drive, which, gosh,
if there ever was a more powerful concept and something to strive for,
I don't think it exists, because the generative drive is extraordinary in the
number of different ways it plays out, and it seems always positively right. And of course, the aggressive drive,
the pleasure drive, exists to varying extents in all of us, but cannot be
allowed to overcome the generative drive if we're going to really thrive. So thank you again so
much for this framework. And again, to remind people listening
and watching that this framework is mapped out in a downloadable PDF. If people want to see it visually,
even though we've touched on it several times before, I really appreciate
how logical, clear and actionable this framework is, and also that in
providing a framework for us, it gives us something to hold our mind to. I think I, and so many people out
there are familiar with being in a struggle and not being able to orient. Where am I in the struggle? Not knowing what to do? And you've provided some incredible points
of reference for us to really focus on. Start asking questions about I and
how I see myself, what am I paying attention to, and so on and so forth,
to really first anchor and orient, and then be able to move forward in this
process as many times as is required to get where we each and all want to go. So thank you so much for this. I know in our next discussion we're
going to touch on the relational aspects of human existence, not just
selves, but interactions between selves, including some of the, let's call
it, darker and unfortunate aspects of human existence, like narcissists, and
some of the challenges of different full blown personality disorders. But also just in terms of building healthy
relationships between friends, romantic partners, parents and children and
siblings and coworkers and all the rest. So thank you again for this
incredibly rich knowledge that you provided us, and a map forward. Paul Conti: You're very
welcome and thank you. I appreciate the opportunity
to talk about it with you. Andrew Huberman: Great. Well, to be continued. Thank you for joining me for
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