HACK YOUR BRAIN To Fight Negative Thoughts with Andrew Huberman & Lewis Howes

i don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts i think there is great value however to introducing positive thought schemes does the mind have 100 power over what the body feels no but it doesn't mean that it doesn't have a significant control over it say i feel cold and ice right right i mean ice it's 30 degrees can i control my mind to say you know what this is actually a hot tub and you feel warm and you're feeling hot right now or is it too much physiological barriers to break through that uh to some extent you can so i think um the question you're asking is a very important one it's actually the question which is to what extent does our subjective narrative the story the story we tell ourselves actually means something for the body and to what extent does the body actually means something for the subjective narrative so this gets into some areas of work that we're doing now and so i do want to highlight that it's ongoing work but i think you know the old narrative meaning a few 10 years ago was that if you're feeling depressed just smile well if that worked right we would have a lot less depression than we see out right right now that does not mean most people actually who are depressed just aren't smiling as well like when you change your physiology doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit the reason i call it a brain body contract early on is that their the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue so you know the idea that when we're depressed we tend to be in more defensive type postures when we're feeling good we tend to be in more like relaxed and extended postures all true but it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that i'm going to completely shift the mind right that's a first step think about like two interlocking gears it's one gear that turns the other but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going and how do you get it to dance together exactly so subjective there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body to answer your question can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold so a couple things that are important first of all just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are thoughts happen spontaneously all the time they're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection but thoughts can also be deliberately introduced for instance right now i can say okay have a thought that um just decide to write your name and you're you can do that i'm going to decide write my name and you can do it so that's a deliberate thought which says that you can introduce thoughts so i think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them generally they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time but we can introduce a positive thought can you think of two thoughts at the same time probably not so you can only have one thought at a time right but they come very fast but it comes and goes right so you have to you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think otherwise and a spontaneous thought will pop back in based on your experience based on sensory based on how you're feeling or perceiving something your environment it's just going to keep popping in right so how do we deliberately have a positive thought more often right so i'm a big fan of wellness and and i think it's a great community but it tends to run in absolutes and there and there aren't a lot of operational definitions as we say in science and i what i love about your questions you're asking for really getting to the meat of things asking for the operational definitions one of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have what a terrible thing to put on people you know what what what a challenging thing i don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts i think there is great value however to introducing positive thought schemes now the reason is not because i think it's just because i think so but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort and that relates to the dopamine pathway so the molecule dopamine is a reward it's released in the brain when you win a game you you know close a deal you someone like to love your life someone likes you likes your photo the great love of your life you complete something but most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals it's actually released when we are enroute to our goals we're in pursuit of our goals and we think we're on the right path this is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal because they feel like i'm supposed to feel something greater i felt this thing for two minutes and now that's it that's right high achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process to the pursuit the day-to-day tasks the the growth the lessons the losses like everything right well and it can be to some wins along the way but growth mindset which is the academic discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague carol dweck at stanford is the hallmark of growth mindset is really two things one is i'm not where i want to be now but i but i will i'm capable of getting there eventually the other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself in fact don't reward the result reward the effort that's right and if you look at true high performers people that are consistently good at what they do they don't peek and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently those people attach dopamine to the effort process and actually carol's one of her original studies on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that love doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right so it's like the people love puzzles but in this case they knew they couldn't get it right but they loved doing it and it incidentally or not so instead then only these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they're they feel some sense of reward from the effort process yeah now the cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled we can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way our interpretation our interpretation and but it has to be attached to reality so you know one should never confuse what is real right so no so if you're if you're thinking about the effort you're expending so let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels and they're setting up a new business for instance and it's hard if they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially that it's giving them an opportunity that it's somehow they are on the right path or they're or if they're not in movement along that path or at least oriented on the right path they're not lying in bed all day they're thinking they're taking a step if they can reward that process internally two things happen first of all the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger so you get better at that process and second and most importantly dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine and what i mean by that is there was a study that was published in the journal cell excellent journal cell press journal a couple years ago showing that with repeated bouts of effort we use and we release more and more epinephrine it's kind of adrenaline but in the brain with more effort every time every time you put in effort so every time you make look for this let's keep it if i were to keep it in the business context every time you make write that email every time you let's see it's a person who's a craftsman or crafts woman every time you're working in the in the shop and doing that every bit of effort you're taking a little bit of money out of this epinephrine account you're spending epinephrine at some point those levels of epinephrine get high enough that you you feel like quitting it feels exhausted this was done in a beautiful study actually where um they control the visual environments and they have the subjects ex exert effort and they can control the visual environment so sometimes the effort of taking steps and moving forward is actually kind of pushing forward and kind of swimming motion um would give them the sensation that they were actually making progress and other times it was an exercise in futility where they would just keep the the visual world stationary and they would expend effort and they didn't think they were going anywhere epinephrine's climbing climbing climbing and eventually they quit now dopamine is able to push back on that epinephrine and give you anyone the the feeling that you could continue and maybe even the feeling that you want to continue and you've seen this actually football is a good example two teams play say the super bowl both teams are max effort the entire time yeah max effort the team that wins suddenly in a moment has the energy to jump all over the place party for days they can talk i mean they they they exhausted right before that well that wasn't glycogen or stored energy of any kind except it was neural energy and what happened was effort is this adrenaline adrenaline adrenaline adrenaline eventually people quit they just quit the dopamine is able to suppress that and so then you're expending effort but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it so we need dopamine to keep the effort going is what i'm hearing that's right dopamine is not just about reward it's one of the biggest misconceptions dopamine is about motivation and drive it's like a jet that propels you along a path how do we get more dopamine you practice subjectively releasing dopamine in your mind like wow okay so that's a great question first of all there are ways you can get more dopamine release through thoughts or through drugs or through supplements i want to be really clear there is a drug there are two drugs actually that will cause massive release of dopamine they're called cocaine and methamphetamine the problem gets us addicted because it feels so good the problem is exactly the problem is cocaine and methamphetamine stimulates so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source it becomes the goal of the path it becomes the path and the destination and you look at people's lives when they do a lot of cocaine and methamphetamine and that baseline on their life goes down because there's no reason to work hard at anything else because you feel good that's right and that's the greatest feeling you'll have so why do anything else when you can have that feeling that's right if you think about do remember these neurochemical systems adrenaline cortisol dopamine epinephrine they weren't designed to keep us safe from tigers and to hunt and gather or to build fortune 500 companies they were designed to do anything they were designed to be generic so that depending on our circumstances we could adapt so in an animal context an animal that um let's say is hunting or it needs food for its young it's gonna feel agitation that's stress that's cortisol it's like hunger my babies might not eat i might not eat maybe it's looking for a mate it's gonna feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching foraging is called an animal behavior world it's foraging at some point it might catch a smell of something a potential mate or berries or a stream if it's thirsty at that moment dopamine is released and now it has energy to continue along that path whereas there's a specific pathway in the brain and that's involved in depression and disappointment that if it goes to that place and turns out it was the wrong path there's a signal that actually suppresses dopamine so that you don't repeat that mistake again so you don't give up that's right you just don't repeat it again that's right and those events that reminds you like that's not the path to go down that's right interesting and we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions led to success previously you're going to repeat those those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those so dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path that's right so you asked how do you do this so to really make it concrete and is there too much is there too much thing is there such thing as too much dopamine well if you're not on drugs so cocaine amphetamine are bad because they lower the baseline on life they make people very focused on things outside of themselves that's the other thing that dopamine does it can be positive or negative but when we have dopamine in our system we tend to be outward facing and in pursuit of things in our environment you can look at somebody on cocaine and realize that that's the extreme version of that but but that you know i love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes so it's like get after it you know what do sharks do on monday or i can't remember the specific things or then they're the like sometimes it's just time to chill well that's a different molecule that's serotonin right and then dopamine is the get after it molecule and epinephrine is effort so if we were to break this down really concrete we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort just effort with no subjective label on them good or bad effort whether or not stress or you're pursuing something you want to do it's just it's in exerting effort dopamine is about reward but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards if you want more greatness in your life then you gotta check out this video right here you know people feel like they gotta be the best so they gotta be number one but there's so much room out here for so many information is the only thing that's limiting the opportunities yeah everybody wants to be keep it secret

Channel: Greatness Clips - Lewis Howes

Views: 92,495

Keywords: andrew huberman, andrew huberman joe rogan, andrew huberman breathing, andrew huberman rich roll, andrew huberman hypnosis, andrew huberman sleep, andrew huberman interview, lewis howes, lewis howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, unlock your mind, hack your brain for success, unlock your mind joe dispenza, success habits, growth mindset, brain

Id: Dl4d_Hoazdg

Length: 14min 4sec (844 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 11 2020