NEUROSCIENTIST MASTERCLASS On The 4 SIMPLE STEPS To Hack Your BEHAVIOUR! | Andrew Huberman

the key is to reward the harder steps not the easier ones and not the ones where you get so if your mind isn't where you want it to be don't start with the mind start with ultimately unless you have electrodes in your head and someone's stimulating them we are in control of our thoughts and behaviors understanding how to unlock the power of your brain is one of the most important things you can do for yourself that's why in this video i've put together the best advice from neuroscientist dr andrew huberman to help you maximize your brain's potential this video is also presented by monday.com and you'll hear more about them in just a moment all trauma anxiety fears they all map back to stress in some way now you can have stress without trauma you can have anxiety without trauma but you can't really have trauma without stress and anxiety so even though there aren't really strict definitions of the boundaries between trauma and stress and fear i think it's fair to say that trauma is a fear and or stress response that's happening at the wrong times right it's sort of carrying over from an experience it's making life uncomfortable or in some cases exceedingly challenging for example so um someone has a you know sexual assault um somebody sees a car accident or is in a car accident veterans come back from overseas there's kind of first-person trauma where something happens to somebody and then there's a third-person trauma where somebody sees something terrible happen there's grief and so there are a lot of categories and so we don't want to complicate the the landscape and the answer but i think it's important for people to understand that the stress response is at the core of all of this and when we talk about stress i think it's also important that we divide that into two kinds of stress because it defines the two approaches that people can take to combat stress fear anxiety what are the two types of stress okay the two types of stress are we the one is the one we're almost all familiar with because when we hear stress we think pupils dilating hand shaking heart beating oh my goodness oh my goodness you're really upset you're stuck in traffic something is really bothering you you're angry you're having the the fight-or-flight response that you know that phrase gets thrown around a lot and in that those circumstances it's very important that people take control of their mind and their body in a way that allows themselves to calm down to reduce the so-called stress response and we can talk about tools to do that that are very concrete and that are very reliable there's another side of the stress response so what would that stress be called what's that type of stress ah so unfortunately there's no name for this this is one of the important things maybe we'll figure it out today maybe your audience will figure it out yeah they're they're a smart bunch and they're living this stuff too so um unfortunately there isn't a word for this but um what is this one type of structure there's one type of stress which is you're you're too activated you're too alert you're too agitated and you want to be less alert less activated and less agitated the alert stress that's right we could call it the alert stress hyper alerts hyper alerts let's just do that for sake of conversation today and we are by no means a nomenclature committee so we can always revise later yeah there's another side of stress which is when there are a lot of things happening in the world pandemics you can't work because they've shut there's another shutdown or um there's strife in your life or things are really challenging and you're feeling exhausted and you can't get mobilized and alert enough and this has never really been cleanly laid out for people that and what i call the whole process is one of limbic friction okay so the limbic system are these areas deep in the brain limbic literally means edge they're near the edge of the brain and when we're stressed there's a lot of activity in these brain regions and then we've got this our forebrain our prefrontal cortex for the aficionados and when we're in a thinking and calm and deliberate and rational manner when we can control our body and our mind it's called top-down processing we're we're controlling ourselves but there's a lot of friction with that limbic pathway i promise i'll get to the practices so when there's this friction we can call it limbic friction for sake of discussion there you can't control all those impulses and all that anxiety or fatigue for too long and in fact as you get more tired or if someone has frontal damage if they have brain damage to the frontal lobes what you find is they become more impulsive when they feel like sleeping they just sleep even if it's socially inappropriate when they feel like yelling or screaming or swearing they just they just do that and so there's two kinds of limbic friction one is when we're too activated and we want to calm down and we're trying to say calm down don't don't say the thing that you know you shouldn't say don't do the thing you don't you know you shouldn't do and then there's the other kind of limbic friction which is the world is happening really fast and we feel buried we're overwhelmed and we need to get more activated we need more energy we need more energy we need to be able to lean into life and we're feeling overwhelmed what's that called well we we should come up with a name now so that would be um exhaustion certain stress or overwhelm stress or overwhelm stress or um now a lot of people start giving these names to things that sound almost like clinical syndromes which sometimes they are but they'll say things like adrenal burnout which actually doesn't exist fatigue now there is something called um adrenal insufficiency syndrome which is a real medical condition where people can't actually produce enough adrenaline but most of us have enough adrenaline in our bodies to last 200 years two lifetimes so the adrenals don't really burn out what happens is people are so over activated they're in this alertness hyper alert stress for so long that eventually they kind of crash into the over fatigue stress okay so one turns into the other one right so the first thing for anyone trying to navigate stress and then we'll talk about trauma is to understand in what kind of stress they're dealing with are you exhausted and having a hard time getting your energy up or is your energy too high and you're having a hard time getting your energy down because the solutions to those are often quite different so on the previous um time we met we talked about a tool for calming the body very quickly which is this double inhale long exhale typically the inhales are done through the nose the exhale through the mouth so the physiological psi which was discovered by scientists in the 30s and then jack feldman's group at ucla has really identified the underlying brain circuits and then my lab is now looking at this stuff in humans in a kind of more clinical setting that double inhale followed by an exhale we know is the fastest real-time tool for taking one's state of alertness down the hyper-alert stress right you're not going to crash into sleep but you're going from hype you're not feeling good you're too agitated you want to calm down and what's interesting about that tool is it speaks to a principle which is it's very hard to control the mind with the mind so when you're stressed just telling yourself don't stress don't stress don't stress calm down calm down rarely works it also really works to tell someone else to calm down to relax hey relax yeah usually it has the opposite effect don't tell me to relax and it can be damaging for relationships if you've ever you know someone's really stressed and you tell them to relax sometimes it actually can create more friction and they don't share it what should they do in that moment they should look to the body the nervous system includes the brain but also all the connections to the body and back again and so the when you can't control your mind you want to do something purely mechanical like the physiological sigh because that you know once you take control of the body in that way then the mind starts to fall under the umbrella of this top down control again top down control is what children and puppies don't have you know if if we had also yeah i've got a 10 year old bulldog his name is costello he doesn't barely say anything now because he's costello but he but when he was a puppy everything was a stimulus he would walk over pick up a cord and chew on it then he'd drop it and he pivots something else and it's because they have they literally have no prefrontal cortex wired into this limbic system they don't have the suppression so there's no friction the limbic system just does whatever it wants and actually in humans with frontal temporal dementia and in certain people who have frontal temporal brain damage they become very impulsive my dad went through i don't know if i talked about this the last time so my dad had a uh a traumatic car accident 15 years ago 15 years ago a couple months ago where a car went on top of his car and went through the windshield and the bumper hit him in his head pretty much split open his head his girlfriend at the time was holding his head together went to the hospital airlifted in a helicopter was in a coma for three months and it's been a 15-year journey where we had to teach him re-teach him how to write how to talk how to walk like everything where it was almost like he was my father and his body but his mind was having to relearn like a child and even today when i see him and visit him he'll he'll swear just compulsively he'll he'll do things that maybe aren't appropriate because he probably doesn't have the i don't know you can probably tell me better as a neuroscientist but what happens when someone has brain damage especially in the front uh frontal cortex what what happens to the brain yeah so these top when i say top down control there's literally a set of wires we call them axons from the prefrontal cortex that suppresses these impulsive behaviors in the limbic system and when there's damage it's essentially removing that break and you know in adults older adults especially because their behaviors aren't quite as um you know because they're older they aren't necessarily going to walk over and punch people or scream out explicatives and these kinds of things um fortunately although sometimes you see that sometimes you see that sadly but those circuits aren't functioning well and in young children if you ever go to a classroom i guess now kids are home a lot but in a typical kindergarten classroom what you'll notice is that some of the kids can sit very still and other kids are rocking back and forth and moving around a ton and the teacher is constantly trying to people i was one of those kids trying to corral the children and children mature at different rates and what's what you're seeing there is the different maturation of their frontal cortex when you see a child that's very deliberate and can really control their speech and their behavior you're looking at a child that has a lot of top down control the frontal cortex is really engaged hey guys i want to take a quick break from this video to share one of my favorite platforms with you that helps my team and myself be more productive and if you're managing a team or if you're an entrepreneur like me then you need monday.com monday.com workos is a customizable platform that gives teams the ability to easily create the tools they need and want for their work there are so many things that go into building the operations for greatness media from our products to our community social media daily operations and of course our show the school of greatness and we use monday.com for everything tracking metrics reports production scripts literally everything we're using it it's been a game changer for team greatness and i know it will be for you as well make sure to check out monday.com greatness for your free two-week trial and i'll share more with you later in this video i have a niece who um is adopted and she's very deliberate and very calm and so we you know we wonder you know what what you know is this genetic is it nature nurture you know there's probably some genetic bias and then there's probably also um a lot of environmental influences i mean a lot of what we're taught in school and at home because a lot of kids are homeschooled now is about what not to do right you know sit still don't say this don't say that you know we get the plea say please and thank you you know sit up straight you know do your dishes kind of stuff but a lot of the the don't language is designed to around these things of top down control which set up a lot of important social constraints right and we've all felt this as adults too in two ways it becomes really extreme when we can't control that limbic system one is when we're when we're very fatigued when we're fatigued or we're sick or we're in pain physical pain chances are when something bothers us we're closer to that threshold of saying the thing that we wish exactly no patient that's right so how do we learn to have patients when we are hyper alert or overwhelm exhausted stress okay so when we are in hyper alert there's a mechanism associated with that that makes our internal world measure time differently what happens under those conditions is you feel like the external world is moving very slowly i think i might have mentioned this in the our previous video but when you're really stressed on the hyper alert side it seems like the world is going very slowly you're gonna just knowing that and knowing that it's likely that you're gonna feel impatient and if the world is moving much too slow sort of like if you're you're trying to get someplace on time and the person in front of you doesn't know where you're going i was the guy not knowing where i was going this morning and so and we can't see each other in cars so you think what is this person doing oh my goodness and they're just looking for the right turn yeah yeah so there's that and then when we are fatigued it seems like the world is going really fast okay and so for people who are exhausted everything feels overwhelming now of course the rate that things are actually moving in the world is the same but the perception is that it's just too much and we can't cope so we talked about a tool to calm oneself the reason i like the physiological side is we we are all equipped with the pathway if people want to know if there's some medically oriented folks out there if you want to teach this to other folks there's a nerve called the phrenic nerve p h r e n i c that goes from the brain down to the diaphragm that controls that and then controls the lungs and so when you decide okay i'm going to use the psi the physiological side to calm myself in a way you're engaging top down control because you're you're taking control of your internal landscape rather than trying to take control of your thinking which is very hard you can't fix your mind with your mind sometimes trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog it's just going to keep moving right if you've ever tried to grab or smoke it just moves it's vapors you're never going to grab it the key is to is to um is to take control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity this phrenic nerve and the reason i describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail but i think when people realize this isn't something that you build up over time and then are able to do that you literally have a wire set of wires that goes down to your diaphragm this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs and then as you blow off carbon dioxide when you do that exhale you your brain starts to calm down and then your mind the top down control the cortex can start taking control of the limit system again it's like you're it's almost like you're losing control of the automobile and you're trying to steer but really there's another lever that if you just pull it then the state the steering wheel will stabilize for you so that's the way to think about the physiological side on the other side of things when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued there are two ways to approach that first is the kind of foundation of fatigue which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep this is something that doesn't get discussed a lot i don't think i've discussed this on any podcast previously but you know getting better at sleeping is a whole set of practices but sleep is a slow tool it's not a real-time tool because if you're feeling exhausted and you have to get up and have your day deal with children deal with work deal with life we can talk about how to get better at sleeping but in real time what you want to do is you want to bring more alertness into the system focus focus and alertness the way to do that is to take advantage of a very well-established medical fact all medical students learn this all mbs know this which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe and your heart rate and so i'll give a little bit of the background and then i'll give this specific check just just so that um people understand where this is coming from so when we inhale when we inhale it almost feels like everything's moving up but actually what happens is our diaphragm moves down okay so when we inherit our diaphragm moves down when that happens our heart literally gets a little bit bigger the volume of the heart gets a little bit bigger which means that whatever blood in there is moving per unit time a little bit slower and there's a set of neurons in the heart called the sinoatrial node that sends a signal to the brain and says hey blood flow is slowing down and the brain sends a signal back to the heart and says okay let's speed up and speeds up the heart rate so the short concise way to put it is when you inhale more vigorously or longer you're speeding up your heart rate this is this actually there's a name for it in the medical community but the important thing to understand is as you inhale you're sending a neural signal to your heart to speed up and when you exhale the diaphragm moves up the heart gets a little bit smaller literally because there's less space there then there's a signal sent to the brain and the brain sends a signal back and says slow down the heart rate and so this is happening quickly so if you inhale it's speeding up that's right if you exhale it's slowing down that's right so if you want to become more alert you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous or a little bit longer than your exhales so let's say you get up in the morning our longer inhale shorter exhale that's right not to speed up your heart rate and to be more alert not longer exhale double intake right shorter yeah so longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert longer or more vigorous or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert wow and there's this has a name which is as you know it's a certain kind of arrhythmia but that makes it sound bad this is actually what's happening all the time this is the basis of heart rate variability when people talk about heart rate variability is good you know that you don't want your heart rate to be one level all day high or low a lot of people don't realize that they think oh i got a nice slow heart rate you think all day long when you're asleep that's right well slow heart rate is better than high heart artificially high you know sorry excessively high heart rate but you don't want your heart rate to be like this you want your heart rate to go through these fluctuations heart rate variability is good why because heart rate variability reflects the activation of what's typically called the parasympathetic nervous system which is the brain's ability to slow down and calm the nervous system so when your heart rate is going like this it means that your heart rate is speeding up and then your brain is slowing it down your heart rate is speeding it up and your brain is slowing down and that's what's happening all day long as you're moving through things in a kind of calm alert way but when you get that troubling text message or you see a post or a comment and you go and all of a sudden your heart rate just goes and you feel like you immediately want to respond or you're going to say the thing that maybe you shouldn't say you're going to do the thing that maybe you shouldn't do or you just want to be thought more thoughtful and more targeted in your response the key is to slow down the heart rate by making your exhales longer or more vigorous so it could simply be and then shorter inhales longer exhales or do the physiological sigh or if you wake up in the morning and you're experiencing the other kind of stress which is you look at your skin the world is overwhelming me my life is overwhelm i don't know what i'm going to do i don't even know what sequence i'm going to do things in you're just discombobulated and a lot of people struggle with this the key is to do a few breaths even while you're getting out of bed and preparing your morning coffee or water or whatever it is and just start breathing in a way that's inhale emphasized which sounds weird but basically what you're doing is you're speeding up your heart rate at some point usually within only two or three of those breaths you're gonna feel more alert and then you can just go back to breathing normally so you have to do this for hours you do this for a few moments or minutes that's right and and while i'm a fan of breath work as its own thing because breathwork can teach you how to operate these levers in your brain and body so to speak breath work is a dedicated practice that you do away from these stressful events whereas learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind using your breathing so it goes breathing heart rate mind in that sequence so if your mind isn't where you want it to be don't start with the mind start with your breathing then which will control your heart rate which will then allow you to control your mind so don't don't think your way out of a a moment of stress feel breathe your way out of this moment of stress that's right and and one of the things and i'm i'm certain there are going to be people out there listening to this saying wait a second the yog the yogis and the yogurt community has been talking about this for centuries what are you doing you know this is just a re recasting of what we already know i agree i agree within the science community these things have been given crazy names like arrhythmias and heart rate variability and um the diaphragm and the phrenic nerve and so the the language of science has known all about this for many centuries also but it's been shrouded by language and the yogurt community has known about this for a long time but it's been shrouded by language so by bringing this discussion forth i'm by i just want to be clear that i i'm not trying to reinvent the wheel or pretend that i invented the wheel by any stretch i'm trying to say that we all have these circuits these levers in our body that we can that we can pull and push and people learn how to do this intuitively but we're never really taught the underlying mechanisms and i do believe that one and yoga is not big on mechanisms they're very good on naming and on you know yogis in different areas of the world when they say something they usually know what the other one is talking about scientists do as well but mechanism if people can just understand a little bit about why the heart slows down when you exhale more than you inhale or why the heart speeds up when you inhale more than you exhale i do believe that having that knowledge in the mind allows people in a moment of stress to say oh i understand what's happening to me and therefore i should go to this particular tool you know i i do understand that one doesn't need to understand how an engine works in order to drive a car but you do need to know how the control panels work right right this is why we send people to driving so yeah and why we don't that 10 year olds drive um although i'm sure there's some now yeah yeah on a farm somewhere yeah well actually there was this one news thing i don't know if you've seen this where a state trooper pulls or a chp or somebody pulls over a car that's kind of weaving through the lanes on and they pull over and i think the kid was six years old oh my god should get onto the freeway oh and he was driving the left-hand lane and his driving was pretty bad but he was below the that's crazy well that just tells you that the young mind is eager to steer things and press pedals and things of that sort of explore we are definitely not recommending but this is very different than driving a car in the sense that all the panels and all the controls are there we have we're all most people are taught how to drive a car we most people are not taught how to drive their nervous system and so a lot of what i'm talking about here is just one language one version of the language of how to drive and control your nervous system you can't drive your nervous system with thoughts and controlling your mind alone you have to connect the whole vehicle is what i'm hearing you can't just steer thoughts you need to also use the brakes or also use different levers which is the entire car that's right hey guys chiming in again to share more tips with you on how my team stays productive in our business and team greatness is growing quickly and because of that the platforms that we use also need to be able to grow with us and what i love most about monday.com work os is that the platform is super flexible so teams are able to customize it to fit their needs and you can create workflows from scratch or just use a template and adjust it however you need and if you want to be successful as a leader or a business owner it's crucial that you know what's going on in your business and my team is mostly remote and we used to work on documents and spreadsheets which was difficult at the time because i didn't realize there was a better option out there it literally made it hard to stay organized but monday.com has been a godsend for us teams can create any workflow to manage anything they need from projects to processes leads client requests or whatever your team manages and it's great for teams of all sizes make sure to sign up for your free two-week trial at monday.com greatness now let's get back into this video it's very hard to control the mind with the mind it can be done there are people that are get better at that right like practice over time using i say when in moments of stress either excessively alert stress or excessively fatigue stress look to the body because there are mechanisms that have been built into the body for hundreds of thousands of years designed to do this now the reason i can say that is that the physiological side the double inhale exhale is controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brain stem that jack feldman's lab discovered when children or adults have been sobbing very hard or when they're out of air in a claustrophobic environment they naturally do that to reopen these little sacks in the locks now inhale emphasized breathing can be practiced in a way sort of away from stress in a kind of offline approach that can be beneficial for raising what we call stress threshold so there's a whole other way to look at stress which is to say how do i get calmer in the mind when my body is freaking out we've all heard the sayings you know how do you you know journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step or how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time or you know they're all these sayings and and it goes back to the bible and earlier right i mean this is not new these are not new sayings but they're showing up in different forms what's lost in those short descriptions however is that every step is not equivalent if it were just that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step everyone would pursue their goals everyone would push back against adversity everyone i mean you can read the inspirational stories as many times as one needs and i do think inspirational stories are very high value in fact i think they're vicarious dopamine i think they give us the sense that we could which then orients hope which then orients us to the world they start yeah it's maybe it's possible for me that's right so let's say um let's take the example of somebody who's um because there's a finnish that's that story of it's not about just taking a single step and one step at a time is it because there's adversities every 10 steps you go and so it's harder and harder it's not just well it's just very non-linear you know it's some days go you know i know this from my scientific career it's you know some days it's easy some day is hard it's all over the place right so i think the thing to remember is that dopamine is this incredibly powerful molecule that allows us to buffer the effort process it allows us to be an effort longer and it allows us to actually eventually enjoy the process of effort and not think about the reward but just say oh i'm enjoying the process right well you just described the first step the first step in learning to attach dopamine to the effort process which is the key operation in order to succeed is to be very careful about how much you focus on the end goal keeping the goal in mind is important for like a proper orientation you have to know the ultimate destination but if at any point we were to evaluate our progress relative to that end goal or if we don't know what the end goal is there's a huge gap there and it can feel overwhelming and depressing and i'm not good enough that's why i should just give up what am i doing this for that's right those thoughts will affect us and they're very realistic right i mean as carol will say and other people have said in the psychology field you know positive self-talk oftentimes unless you do it correctly you're badly wrong you know lying to yourself won't work saying saying i'm i'm a winner i'm a winner i'm a winner when you haven't lost or you haven't won yet is is great but that's not the most effective use of these systems well you're also being out of integrity with yourself you're you're telling yourself a lie right you're like and then you're losing your ability to have confidence because you're just lying to yourself right and if it's really extreme there's a name for it's called delusional right right and people will start to point that out and then it becomes harder to recruit people into your your goals so i think the key thing is to attach that sense of reward to the effort process it's saying look i am oriented in the right direction and rewarding the things you're not doing i'm not back on my heels i'm not just staying you know i'm bad yeah a good example this came to me recently i have a good friend he did nine years in the seal teams his name is pat dawson and we were talking about you know the admiral mcraven thing you know get up and make your bed and you know and they they really do that and i think the way it was described was um you know so at the end of the day even if everything doesn't go well your bed is still made for me that's not that big of a reward frankly right but i and so i said that and i i love it though i make my bed oh i definitely made my bed in the morning but i mean going back and seeing that at the end of a hard day it's not enough i felt like there was something else there so i asked him he said well it's very interesting because part of it is about not just making your bed but it's the things you're not doing by making your bed you're not lying in bed and ruminating you're not back on your heels on your phone that's right yeah when so when you look at and you have spent a lot of time with people in high performing communities mainly through some consulting work but what you find is that you know we can all be either be back on our heels flat-footed or forward-centered and when you look at people who are in these high-performance communities they try and keep their center of mass forward almost through what seemed like trivial things like making your bed or making the cup of coffee but it's not just about what you're doing it's all the things you're not doing that can put you down the path of ruminating or put you down the path of um unhealthy behavior so the key to this is if we want to be very concrete we should probably focus on actions and i'll use fitness as an example because it translates to everybody whereas you know people's circumstances is different let's say somebody really wants to take on a fitness routine they hate running or they want to lose weight in a healthy way this kind of thing so we've all heard the example well you put your shoes by the door on day one day two you put them on day three you go out the door day four you walk around the block and then you know and then eventually like they're running marathons okay great but to sustain that behavior or even to make the behavior pleasureful and to give you energy the key is to subjectively reward those steps so it's not going to be let's say i go out and i run a mile and my goal is to run 10 miles in a few weeks the key is as you're in the strain of that mile the hard part you want to tell yourself this is the good part this is the part that gives me energy and i'll be very surprised if people don't actually feel like they could continue further so it's a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single is made up of you know single steps but the key is to reward the harder steps not the easier ones and not the ones where you get the thing that you want don't reward yourself for putting your shoes on and taking a step outside you could if that was a huge barrier for you it was very hard it was very hard for you running to 10 miles that's hard find the wall and push a little bit further through that wall and reward that process so this is why i think reps in the gym the final reps like reps to failure are usually not the best example first of all most people aren't doing reps to failure and it doesn't translate to young kids and stuff where they probably shouldn't be doing heavy reps to failure this kind of thing what you want however is if you're going to go there to think about these are the this is the hard part because that's when adrenaline norepinephrine are getting maxed out and that's when you have an opportunity to bring dopamine in and teach those neural pathways to slam that back down and i don't want to highlight them too much because they are a very niche and specialized community but you look at people in special operations you look at the process like the whole evaluation process of who gets in and who doesn't it's really about putting people into stress and seeing who can not just make it through that stress but buffer that stress reward the process through teamwork reward the process of stress through some internal dialogue that has everything to do with not being back on your heels not being flat-footed but center of mass forward and i should also be clear i'm not talking about everybody being super aggro and always like you know work work in fact if you're spending too much epinephrine if you're too much of an adrenaline junkie you will burn out eventually unless you can find ways to recover yourself or to buffer that with dopamine and the recovery process is especially important there's a second reward system so you've got the dopamine system and i guess to really put a box around it the subjective reward needs to be done at the hardest portion of a process the tough conversation with a significant other it's like when it's really tough and you want you just that's when you want to start telling yourself this is the this is the good part because i'm not speaking or this is the good part because i'm not reacting right i'm not reacting or this is the good part because i'm probably not doing it correctly but i'm on the right path right um they're upset they're not feeling your empathy you know this kind of thing or you're not really understanding what's going on you're getting frustrated but if you tell yourself this is this is the neural pathway getting ground in there like really dialed in so that the the next time this i'm going to breeze right past this that's really how the process works because dope remember no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear even if you get a billion dollars or you win a nobel prize or you win the presidency it's all internal these neurochemicals are all internal and while some of them are designed to be released in response to things very reflexively like um you know food sex sleep you know all these things will trigger these neurochemicals we have this big forebrain which allows us to place subjective context on things how do you do it then how do you bring dopamine in your brain subjectively through daily conversation with yourself so um there's a process i'm going through right now where i'm trying to write a book and um it's hard and it's hard and i was told that the harder it is the better i'm probably doing it i was like great my editor's ready to kill me and because i'm slow and i and i know and i'm a very slow person i i drive people crazy i'm like glacially slow because science is slow and i like to get things right i want to rush it yeah i like to get things right but i'm very proud of the fact that everything we've published i can stand behind it was the best we could do with the tools at the time and i just know that when i look back on a writing career or scientific career i want to be able to say you know every journal we put it in was rock solid everything was rock solid we had fun doing it the relationship so i go slow yeah but as a consequence what i'm finding is there are a lot of interferences these days i'm i'm i think social media is great i teach neuroscience on social media because i think it's important to do public education too but it's incredible and it's it's incredible how much time and energy it can take so what i've started doing now is i turn off my phone and i lock it in a safe and i experience extreme anxiety right it's so weird why is that is it because it gives you so much dopamine that when you're not having it well this is scary because i actually think um brief anecdote on the weekend i was driving there's a kid that i mentor and i picked up my phone and i was texting while i was driving and he said to me it was really embarrassing for me he said you know i wish you wouldn't text while you drive and i put it and i put it down and i realized this is crazy i know that i that my life and his life is far more important and the lives of the people around me are far more important than any text message which means i wasn't doing it rationally it's just pure reflex at this point so i would i don't think i pick up the phone because i'm i don't even know what i'm looking for there anymore it's just become reflexive so for me lately the longer i can keep that phone in a safe and right on a grant or my or this book what i tell myself is the agitation is good i'm it's at least i'm not doing that and then i find that as i start to write and i get into the process i start feeling good about it and i'll pause and say okay i have control i have ultimate control over my behavior i can put that thing away there might be a nuclear war out there and i'm just doing this anyway i have control over my thoughts my feelings and behavior so i tell myself that and then i find i have immense energy and all i want to do is write and i kind of tunnel into the process wow and i think that sometimes people need to write these things out for themselves so it's really concrete i think some people are so unskilled at subjective rewards that writing it out is really powerful so what would you write out for yourself as a subjective reward for this experience as long as i'm writing i'm on the right path as long as i'm not writing and looking at my phone i'm not on the right path because for me the the two or three things that are most important for my career are writing grants working on this book manuscript and writing scientific manuscripts i mean there are other things as well anything else that you're not doing is is holding you back from doing that that's right so you need to be focused center mass forward on doing those things that's right so i don't do any jumping around power poses things like that i will use tools to kind of ramp up my dope i mean there are certain songs that are really embedded in my emotionally my emotional thing that go back to you know when i was a you know wild you know skateboarding punk rock teenager that will get me fired up and i think there's real utility that's pure dopamine that's just but it's not sustainable you have to subjectively keep yourself motivated i guess that's right and so and then if i finish a chapter i will stop for a moment and i'll just kind of smile and laugh at myself i'm big on like self-reflection with humor and just thinking this is crazy you know my brain is under my control there would be people out there that say there's no free will but i do not believe that i put my hands in a lot of brains you stimulate certain brain areas people do things you stimulate other brain areas people think things ultimately unless you have electrodes in your head and someone's stimulating them we are in control of our thoughts and behaviors we can't control all of them but my goal is to be as you know deliberate and non-reflexive as possible in life that's my goal from when i wake up in the morning until i go to sleep how do we get to that place little by little and by rewarding each thing if you get up and you used to make the bed exam make the bed you're you're not back on your heels you make a cup of coffee you sit down you script out something in a journal you exercise maybe you call a relative that you think might need to hear from you or that you'd like to talk to you do something in a deliberate way just being deliberate and learning to push away the things that are trying to make you reflexive is so important i think the same thing as reactive or what's reflective yeah so um there are two modes of brain operations so now this is um getting a little nitty-gritty but one is deliberate where we're in thinking duration path and outcome what should i do what you know how long should i do it and what's the outcome deliberate yeah intentional and it feels like work this is what people need to understand that deliberate thought deliberate action writing the book doing the workout you don't want to do whatever it is having the conversation it's supposed to feel hard hard it's supposed to feel hard but you should subjectively reward it so that you get better at doing that so it's supposed to feel hard because it's associated with this release of these neurochemicals that create this agitation the mental strain you feel when you're learning something is the trigger for neural plasticity for your brain to change it let's say that again the mental strain you feel while doing something is the what is the trigger for neural plasticity which neuroplasticity allows you to expand your mind to do more things that's right so neuroplasticity is a process of taking something where there's duration path and outcome where i'm working hard i'm thinking hard maybe it's a hard conversation maybe it's a business plan maybe it's a scientific career and the goal of neuroplasticity is to make things reflexive so you don't have to think about them right for instance i just started taking spanish class one-on-one and it's extremely hard it makes me want to say why am i doing this this is going to take me years until i'm conversational who knows how long so i'm fluent you know if it's this hard as like this stage man is it ever going to get easier i have those moments every time i'm doing class i'm like this sucks right because because i'm like oh i'm 37 can i learn this language at this point it's so much easier when you're five now it's almost impossible i watched your video on this a couple days ago on social media and and the video you talked about this is yes it's harder when you're older to expand your neuroplasticity but it's going it's almost the what i'm hearing you say is like it's the only way to live is the order you get you need to constantly be expanding it otherwise you'll be going backwards that's right so you know when you want to learn something new like spanish or new physical skill your mind shifts over the forebrain comes on and says okay we're going to pay attention to things and now what am i doing and i get so tired i'm like and we get and we start doing evaluative stuff to other people to ourself and you can start using all sorts of examples like wait you know i was a professional athlete in that case or i want to be clear i was never a professional athlete but you're a professional athlete you've been successful in other regimes of life but it still feels like effort right yeah and so but that effort is because two things are happening one is adrenaline epinephrine is being released so it doesn't feel great it's not fun it's like and then in addition to that by bringing focus to something you're recruiting a neuromodulator called acetylcholine which is associated which is the molecule of focus now it's important it takes energy and effort it takes energy and effort you feel it in your body and in your brain and it tends to highlight acetylcholine will highlight the areas of your brain that are active during that learning phase when the teacher is talking or you're talking and making that effort it's paying attention how you're moving your mouth what it sounds like to you feedback cues and it's marking those brain areas for change and then later when you sleep or when you work out or when you're having a conversation with somebody that's actually when the brain changes occur so during the actual activity that's right it's when you're not doing the activity resting or recovering when it starts to expand or it starts to it's when the so neuroplasticity which is the brain's ability to change in response to experience and is the main way in which we go from deliberate action duration path outcome stuff to reflexive action and thought that process has two parts one is the trigger which is in adults is triggered by focus and attention and even a heightened state of agitation the more frustrated you feel the more you're actually triggering learning it's saying this is important this is important because the brain just wants to do whatever it wants to do it needs to cue itself to oh this must need to change and then the second part is deep relaxation meditation in particular a form of meditation called yoga nidra which we could talk about but forms of deep relaxation deep sleep like slow wave sleep that's when the connections between neurons called synapses actually get stronger that's when the the connections that you don't want get removed and that's also in certain cases where you get new neurons actually born in your brain to help these circuits speak spanish this is why in sports growing up i remember i would go to like basketball camps in the summer and i'd always learn new footwork and i always just wanted to be like the fancy guy doing like whatever uh finger roll layups or something as a kid but then we would go to these basketball camps and we'd just work on the fundamentals and the footwork and like all this different stuff and i remember being in the moment it being very frustrating and challenging i was like i don't get this and i would suck at it but then the next day i'd come back and i would all of a sudden like have it after a few times of doing it but i never learned how to do it in the moment it was always like okay i made it got it once but then i fumbled on it it was the next day or the next few days where it's like oh i can just shows up it shows it just shows up and that's because when the mind is able to relax it's then making the connections on how to do that thing yeah so in deep deep sleep and rest is when the connections actually get built up it's sort of like in with um resistance training right the gym is a little misleading resistant training because people get the you know the famous pump and so they get they get a visual glimpse into what they might look like later but then of course it goes back down right um but so but actual hypertrophy the enlargement of the muscle fibers and the strengthening of the neural connectivity fibers is later when you sleep so it's the same thing with neuroplasticity yeah how important is it for us to constantly be learning and challenging our mind the older we get well i believe it's very important for living a full life um and you know my hero in this uh two heroes actually is i would say um richard feynman the great physicist who had a very playful attitude about learning that's one thing that i really should illustrate if you are in frustration and strain a sense of play is great because in play you have focus you have intention and alertness and it keeps you light enough that there's that dopamine release is a dopamine is released in play for a reason because kids and animals young animals and young children learn social interactions through play yeah a puppy bites another puppy and it the puppy barks out loud that's why they have those sharp puppy teeth to say that's too much of a bite then they play a little bit more it's their phone they're finding the boundaries they're finding that the limits to which they can use physical force for hurting another or just for playing they learn soft bite play in animals is an ancient form of sampling these neural pathways and as adults we tend to be more demanding of ourselves we don't tend to embrace as much play richard fineman is somebody who really um incorporated a lot of play into his adult life he learned how to in addition to being a nobel prize winning physicist he also you know played bongo drums he learned how to sketch and paint late in his life he had float tanks he was kind of a wild man but he had a lot of fun and he was a lifetime learner so i think it's important because it's a great way to learn dopamine release right and it's a great way to expand one's experience of life this is when we're when i was in poland with wim hof earlier this year i took a group of like 13 guys and we were all nervous to get into this ice dub together for 10 minutes like up to here and for the first two minutes it was not fun we were just like this sucks this is cold but then all of a sudden we were like let's have fun we're gonna be in here for eight more minutes we might as well try to enjoy it so we started chanting we started singing we started like just like in a rhythm together like smiling and it was like it's more enjoyable it's still going to be challenging but you might as well try to have the most fun in the challenge than just suffer right yeah team and community not by coincidence is a powerful tool for buffering stress um again you know look at high performing teams like seal teams or other special operations units they the team is a big part of it for being functional in the actual job it must be impossible to do it alone if you're new navy seals yeah there are other divisions of special operations where actually it's more focused on solo missions yeah where and so there are people that are very good at that but teamwork is a great way to buffer the stress response yeah and so earlier you asked is there any way to make it not cold uh i guess the answer is no but there is a way to make the cold not painful right and so that's where dopamine intervenes the other thing that's important because we talked about neuroplasticity you trigger it with focus and ener you know and effort and strain is you know children can learn very easily um their brain is hyperplastic and very quickly is t the whole job of the young brain is to take things that it's taught and very quickly pass it over to reflex including right morals yeah this is what's scary it's also you know the things that kids hear and they believe and they're exposed to those beliefs become reflexive now around age 25 or so the brain is still plastic and forever for the entire life but then you need more focus and you need what's called self-directed plasticity neuroplasticity self-directed meaning the only person that can change their brain for the better after about age 25 is the actual person you can't force neuroplasticity on somebody positive neuroplasticity so the other element that's really important to plasticity is this deep breast phase and it's associated with the release of the molecule neuromodulator serotonin serotonin is a reward molecule just like dopamine except that it's released in the brain in response to the subjective experience that we have enough resources so when we eat a big meal or we enjoy even better when we enjoy a meal with friends or family and it just feels like one of those incredible evenings you know you're reset you feel it's that feeling of being reset it's as an anti-depressive effect when we are um when you hold you know if you hold your child or or a partner that you love or your dog if you love your dog there's this feeling of having enough and so whereas dopamine is really the molecule that makes us look at things outside the boundaries of our skin like to be in pursuit of things this really is the pursuit motivation molecule serotonin is really about feeling like we have enough in our immediate environment and it's so powerful because unless that dope that excuse me that serotonin box is checked off periodically we cannot lean back into the dopamine outward pursuit process for very long so we need serotonin absolutely to feel more what complete whole safe safe once you feel this is where people you know i think that the go-getters get it wrong no pun intended where getting after it and being hard driving is really important but you know we've all seen examples this i've seen a number of these in silicon valley friends that did very well in tech get to the point where they reach that finish line and then they don't have a whole lot or a whole lot of people to share that with and they end up very isolated and depressed and they go through this whole cycle of trying to find themselves and um you need to balance serotonin and dopamine maybe across the day maybe across the week you know i think in religious practices um all religions really there's a kind of sabbath there's a rest period you know for many many or i think all of them um that makes sense because there needs to be a renewal whether or not people have a religious practice or not there needs to be a renewal or a recovery a recovery to recover the immune system you can't drive the immune system all week all week all week you need to recover this is why i love sports analogies because there's uh a preseason there's a season there's a postseason where you're really in high stress and emotion and then there's a postseason there's an off season right for a reason you can't be in season 10 years yeah you know in a row you've got to find time to relax and have a bye week it's like if you don't have a bye week you're probably injured eventually so it's just like trying to create that in your own life do you do that for yourself as well do you have definitely i've got things i do each day and i've got things i do on a weekly basis i'm curious how much does the body control the mind and the mind control the body are they very connected or is the mind in complete control that's a great question the short answer is the body has a huge and profound influence on our mind and the reason is that we often talk about the brain and we think the brain the brain the brain the brain is important but the brain and the spinal cord which is makes up what we call the central nervous system are extensively connected with the body and the body is extensively connected with the brain and spinal cord so the spinal cord is connected to the brain that's right the back it comes up the neck the actual nerves are connected inside of your brain that's all the way down to lower back yeah yeah so basically we are a big tube uh or our nervous system is a big tube so your brain obviously is the thing that's shaped like more or less like this and then the spinal cord extends off the back and all that is housed in skull except for two pieces of the brain uh which are the eyes which are actually two pieces of the brain that are outside the skull the eyes are part of the brain they are absolutely a part of the brain their central nervous system so it's eyes brain and spinal cord they're all connected they're all connected and if you took that out of the body they would all be connected that's right they're contiguous as we said they're just one unit they're one piece that's right and when sometimes they get challenged people say the eyes aren't part of the brain well then that means that the spinal cord is part of the brain too and i want to be really clear this is not semantics there is a genetic program that ensures that early in development during the first trimester when we were all in our mother's bellies the retinas the neural retinas and eyes were deliberately pushed out of the skull and the reason you have those eyes outside your skull is so that you can evaluate things at a great distance from you right because otherwise everything would have to be in contact with you other animals do this mainly using smell we are very visually driven so a lot of our genome is devoted to vision and understanding what's going on at a distance from us and that's afforded us a huge evolutionary advantage to survive to survive because the the more that i can anticipate events at a distance the more that i could coordinate with my environment like daytime and night time but also when objects are coming at me or things i want to chase and kill or um you know you think about mating behavior and hunter-gatherer behavior all of that evaluating faces and face facial expressions without actually having to come into contact with people afford a huge evolutionary advantage but i want to make sure that i answer your question thoroughly the nervous system includes the brain which we now know includes the eyes as well the spinal cord and then what's called the peripheral nervous system all the connections with the body and every organ in our body our heart our diaphragm our lungs our spleen our liver all of it is as as we say innervated it receives nerve connections to the brain that's right from the brain and spinal cord so much so that if we were to just dissolve away everything except the nervous system if we had a human nervous system splayed out here on the table in front of us it would look like a human being there would be a connection at every level down to you'd be able to say that's the big toe and that's the pinky and that's where the heart would belong because it's almost like a silhouette of our entire body and so when we think about the nervous system it's really important i think for people to understand that the nervous system is all of that brain and body and all the connections back and forth and you know there have been thousands of years of debates about what's the mind what's the brain etc the mind body problem all that i think it's fair to say in 2020 that states of mind include the brain the activity of the brain and the body those two things coordinate the brain and the body and have a sort of what i call a contract there's a brain body contract that gives rise to things like states of mind so feeling of depression or a feeling of awe or excitement or happiness which is a state of mind is what i'm hearing you saying yeah i i mean we could talk about why an emotional experience is a state of mind that's right i prefer to talk about states and states of mind because they include the brain and body so just by saying mind i don't mean just brain they include the brain and body and also because when you say start interrupting the brain and body means thought and feeling yeah so you're asking the key questions um emotions are very hard to describe in an objective way whereas states have certain properties that allow us to study them in different laboratories and from one experiment to the next so some people may have heard this before but we really the brain does really five things we have sensation which is you know we're constantly bombarded with sound waves and light and smells and things and that stuff is ongoing and you can't negotiate that it's just you have these receptors in your body that allow you to evaluate those things a sea turtle has magnetoreception it can navigate by magnetic fields we cannot do that but they can because they sense it you know infrared vision in a pit viper or something so unless you put on you know night vision goggles you can't do that then there's perception which is which sensations you are paying attention to so as you write with your pen if i say what does that pen feel like in your hand now you're perceiving it but the sensation was always there those receptors were always sensing it so the sensation being the actual feeling of the actual visual the perception is your interpretation of the feeling ah so i would say that the perceptions are where your attention is which sensations you're attending to and then you have thoughts and thoughts get a little complicated for us to parse because they are a little bit abstract but thoughts are a combination of our perception whatever it is we're attending to and they have context memory you know they're tacked into our you know they're tapped into our memory systems right because if i say a pen and you're like i don't know what your relationship depends is but mine is kind of a trivial one i write with one but let's say i come from a family that i don't know had a pen factory in germany in the 1930s then there's a whole or you got stabbed by a parent right so it's very contextual so thoughts are like perceptions but they carry memory and context thoughts are memory in context yeah they include that and then there are feelings slash emotions and this is where it really starts to get abstract and kind of hazy and where there's still a lot of debate because for instance if i ask you how you're feeling and you say i feel most people say i feel good well what does that mean i mean that's not a feeling so if you ever do personal development work they're always like don't use a don't say good or bad what do you feel and people say well i feel calm and excited or something you know when it and it starts becoming very abstract and so emotions are a real thing and they certainly perhaps more than anything else recruit the brain and the body when we feel depressed we occupy certain postures we feel it in our gut we feel it in our limbs we can feel fatigue we can feel anxious and so the emotions are really where you capture that mind the brain body contract and relationship very very intensely and then the fifth thing is actions and what i love about actions and behaviors is they are very concrete you're writing with your pen now i'm speaking i'm moving my hands you can measure those things you can analyze them we know exactly what the neural pathways are so we've got sensation perception emotions and actions thoughts and then of course beneath all that you've got memories and um people always like to raise intuition you know they always say what about that sixth thing intuition and we could talk about intuition but the reason i like to talk about states and the reason we study states in my lab is that states have two properties that are easy to study somewhat compared to emotions and that's how pervasive they are meaning how long lasting they are states tend to have a beginning a middle and an end whereas emotions it's sort of like they're more in combination states are more like the primary colors from which you mix all the you get all the emotions and the other thing is that they have an intensity that we can measure you can have a state of being very alert or very drowsy or asleep and you can say from a one to ten how are you feeling in this state that's right and we can measure that experience yeah that's right and we can correlate it with things like heart rate heart rate variability breathing speed sweating levels of neural activity and brain areas that control wakefulness and so i will be the first to say that i would love to be able to say that in my laboratory we are studying or someday we'll study awe and flow and all those things but those are higher up on the ladder than we can get to right now i think with the current technology we can understand states and from there i do believe that we can make a significant dent into certain mental health issues and optimize performance in certain uh you know communities that are trying to optimize performance and in the general public but the the states that we're focused on are very concrete for instance alert and focused that would be a wonderful state to understand and be able to direct ourselves toward when we're not feeling alert and focused how to get into that how to get into that state we could talk about tools for that if you like sleep sleep is so powerful and so important i think now people really understand the extent to which it's important in large part because of matt walker's book while we sleep and the important work that he's done in his lab at berkeley and many other labs as well of course so focus sleep creativity stress these are the the kind of core states that we would like to tackle first because we believe we can and then hopefully in my career but if not in my career then maybe one of my scientific offspring or another laboratory you know 10 20 100 years from now we'll be able to understand things like how does one get into a state of um empathy like i mean we could spend the whole hour talking about empathy but it's hard and it's a fascinating topic and it's so important but it's just very hard to understand at a neural level so we're starting with the basics with the confidence that by understanding those basics they will build up to richer representations and understanding of things like empathy someday yeah would you need to be studying the heart as well to understand empathy or does it all come from the mind it's a great question so we to understand any state a we believe that you have to study the brain and the spinal cord and the body so in my lab you know we talk about being neuroscientists for me that means we study the nervous system the whole thing so people who come into my laboratory we put them into vr environments that simulate some experience and i realize it's not as real as being in the actual experience in the real world but you get enough presence especially because it's very visually and auditory auditorily rich in those environments people get what's called presence they forget that they're in a vr environment at least for moments and in that time we're measuring heart rate variability we're measuring sweating we're measuring in many cases we also have electrodes lowered into their brain because we do this with neurosurgery patients and so we have access to the brain we have access to the body and it's really by recording from all these areas of the brain and body that we can get a fuller understanding of what a state of safe focus or stress or anxiety really is if we were just looking in one little corner of the brain or just in just at the heart we wouldn't be able to do that and so that's a kind of a center piece of our lab is that brain and body the whole nervous system is is the key you got to look at all of it with with with feelings i want to talk about feelings and emotions for a second can a person make it so they never get depressed they never react to um their perception their people's actions towards them where they never get to a state of uh i don't feel good i'm feeling more depressed i'm in a dark place now i'm stuck in this place is there a way that we could ever defend ourselves against negative stressors negative emotions or are we just are they do we need them as well to have contrast in life well there's sort of two views on this um i'll reveal mine after i um sort of uh explain the two views one is that these states i guess i'm i'm automatically calling things like depression a state of mind and a body is it so when i say state of mind i mean brain and body because your body is really feeling it's like the brain is connected to the body right and so if you're saying internally the thought of like i'm depressed i don't feel good or i'm sad or lonely or i'm not good enough the body's going to react is that what i'm understanding absolutely the body is going to manifest what the mind is telling you absolutely the thought the idea you're going to be like i'm sad i'm not good enough you're going to shrink right is that right that's right i mean they're really two forms of depression and sometimes they're intermixed but one is anxiety-associated depression and you you if you've ever experienced it or anyone that's experienced it they feel agitation in their body and their mind races but in their body so the body is recruited there are also depressive states that people feel very fatigued and exhausted it's been overwhelmed and they also experience that in their body the idea of getting out of bed in the morning is hard um motivating to exercise doing the sorts of things that we know are powerful for pushing back on depression so the body is recruited i think most people would say that depressive states are bad when they bring down the baseline on life just to as a brief aside any time there's a question about mental health or addiction or trauma or anything one could look at it and make up some argument of low evolutionarily this makes sense we all get depressed but we have to be fair to the person experiencing it of course and have sensitivity that some behaviors will keep the baseline of our life steady meaning job relationships etc will continue as they are other activities will tend to improve the baseline on our life job activities relationship etc will will improve and then there's some things like heroin which does very quickly we can predict that very quickly the baseline on life is going to creep down regardless of who that person is right so people say can you get addicted to water well maybe but i have to drink a lot of water before the baseline of my life starts to go down so sure it feels uncomfortable that's just like man i'm so bloated exactly right so we tend to throw around things like addiction and depression a little loosely so yeah i think that it's fair to say that depression is wired into us as a possible state that we can all fall into but that it's very important in my opinion that humans have tools to remove themselves from that state of course to avoid you know tragedies like suicide but also because when the baseline on someone's life goes down far enough they find it increasingly hard to do the sorts of things that are going to get them out of depression so you or i could say so they stay in that state of depression that's right it's too hard to go work out it's too hard to change my habit of eating healthier so i'm going to stay i'm going to keep eating ice cream which is going to make my body you know depressed that's right right if i can keep eating bad foods if i keep staying up until 4 a.m if i keep staying in the toxic relationship i'm going to feel depressed that's right and eventually because of this very um inseparable relationship between the brain and body eventually what happens is that because the brain controls the body but also the body can control the brain people lose the ability to intervene in this depressive process so you or i could say look if someone who's depressed they what they need to do is get up early get some light in their eyes um get some movement i know you put this information out there which i love because these those tips are grounded in they're not even tips they're really tools and they're very powerful because they're grounded in excellent science you get that dopamine release early in the day that's anti-depressive you time your sleep better when you get sun in your eyes and you get movement early in the day for most people that's accessible and they should be they absolutely should be doing it everyone should be doing that but for people who are far enough down that path of depression because the body and the mind have this relationship that's so close there is a crossover point where they really can't do those activities because they're so far deep in the depression the body won't do what they decide to do and so now i'm not trying to give anyone a pass because ultimately we are all responsible for our own mental health certainly adults more than kids but you know we're all responsible for our own mental health and only we can direct our own brain changes that's the that's the stinger once we're you know 25 years and older we are the only ones that can change our brain and we can talk about neuroplasticity if you like but the depressed person has to take responsibility for their behavior but this is why it's so important to catch this brain body relationship early and build routines that keep one out of depression so that was a long path back to answer your question succinctly i hope which is we can stay out of depression but we have to keep depression at bay by doing things regularly the same way we can stay out of obesity by eating the right foods in the right times and ratios and things of that sort but once one is obese there are massive endocrine changes type 2 diabetes that make it hard to eat correctly right right so there's this hard to get out of it it's hard to go back to a healthy state that's right once your insulin is dysregulated you're hungry all the time so it's much harder to control your hunger now you have to have so much discipline and willpower to i guess break through and try to get back to a healthier state that's right is that right it's impossible is what i'm hearing you saying absolutely but it's really really hard that's right so is depression a disease then are are people who have certain brain chemistry that are born differently with their brains that are just more depressed or is it possible to get out of that state if you have the functionality to think to act to you know move to create routines and habits for yourself is that possible yeah there are some genetic predispositions to depression and there's certainly familial circumstances where you know trauma and challenge that can head people down that path i think you know one of the reasons i'm involved in public education about neuroscience is i want people to understand the nervous system and i want them to understand that there are tools that can allow them to intervene in their thoughts and feelings and most of the time those involve bringing in behaviors and the actual actions which are very concrete and the reason is the following it's very hard to control the mind just using thinking it's just choosing the mind just thinking it's very hard you know if someone's stressed out and you say calm down it doesn't work telling ourselves calm down doesn't work so it's like it's a tool breathe right so right so a specific side for a walk a specific tool right and when it comes to depression and emotions i mean that it's very hard to talk oneself out of an emotional state it's just very challenging very hard that's right like when i talk to my girlfriend and she's just like she's not happy about something and she gets on a tangent i'm like there's nothing i can say to calm her down there's nothing i can say to someone who's emotional about an idea in the moment until i'm like okay let's talk later otherwise me trying to tell them to relax no that's not what you're counter-producing it's not you know it's not the truth that's not what you're thinking or whatever it's kind of reactive right makes them more emotional well that's because these states like these emotional states of mind they they recruit the whole nervous system so we are actually a different whole body is out of control your mind your body like for instance if you're angry upset or stressed your pupils dilate this is subconscious as a consequence as a consequence of that you view the world in panic in kind of like portrait mode not panoramic excuse me portrait mode on your phone where the thing that's upsetting you is in sharper focus and everything else is blurry so you actually see the world differently in addition to that the timing that your perception of time excuse me is now faster so that things outside you seem to be moving more slowly in comparison to how you feel inside you've experienced this if you were ever in line at the airport or something and it's taking a long time and you're about to miss your flight it seems like the person in front of you is moving very slowly they're taking forever yeah but time is time it's you know it's moving at the same rate regardless when you're very calm or let's say you're you're fatigued let's say you're exhausted you didn't sleep well the night before things in front of you and it seemed like they're moving really fast they're saying take off your shoes putting them on the conveyor to it it's kind of overwhelming slow down here that's right because your internal clock is moving more slowly yeah and so these states of mind when someone's upset they they recruit their entire being their way of being and so one of the reasons why i mentioned that sensation perception feeling thought in action before is that the actions are very concrete and because of this reciprocal relationship between the brain and body brain connects to body body connects to brain we know that when the mind isn't where we want it to be we need to use the body to intervene what does that mean so there are two ways that you can shift your brain state quickly you mentioned one already which is respiration or breathing and the reason is there's a direct connection from the brain to an organ in our body called the diaphragm which is skeletal muscle the diaphragm is designed to move the lungs up and down bring in more oxygen expel more oxygen and it's unlike other organs like the heart or the spleen or the liver because it's actually made up of what's called striated muscle just like a bicep tricep or quadricep it can be voluntarily controlled you can't voluntarily control your heart directly right now like you can't say speed up and speed up slow down or slow down you can slow down your breathing and you can slow down the way you think about things i'm assuming or change your thoughts to something else to help you be more relaxed that's right so one of the reasons why breathing is such a powerful tool for shifting one's state is that a it's always available for voluntary control it's just right there you can i can decide right now to do three inhales or i can just go back to breathing reflexively i just do that in any moment so the the neural arc you know real estate which is in the brain stem that controls breathing is in a unique position because it's at the kind of boundary between conscious control and unconscious control i can't do that for my digestion i can't do that for most most everything that happens internally the other thing is that breathing controls our level of alertness very dramatically so the faster you breathe generally the more alert you are the slower you breathe the more calm you're going to be there's a famous story about jim carrey where he said he would drive up mulholland drive here in los angeles pretty much every day or once a week and visualize himself acting in the main movies the blockbuster hits when he was a like a stand-up comic on like open mic night type of stuff right he would visualize it and he would sit there and he'd feel a feeling as if he's on the set with the big actors as he's receiving the checks and he would write himself a check i think it was for 10 million dollars or 5 million dollars and he would imagine this happening him receiving it and then he would go do his work throughout the day and and take action on it and he always tells a story or it's famous story that he said you know this is what i would do i'd visualize this i think about it i wrote a check to myself years before it actually happened but then it came to me and this idea of thinking again in you mentioned the idea of like neediness in a sense of like if someone's like too needy then they're not going to get it people are going to be rejecting that neediness but when someone's comfortable in their own skin it's almost like everyone comes to them or things like they already have it like they already have it and they talk about this in the law of attraction community about when you're chasing something or you're you're saying you don't have it you're like needing something you're saying you don't have it but when you become comfortable with where you are things start to attract to you and you have energy and you have energy and you're like a magnet as opposed to an opposite magnet resisting these things that you need and want pursuit is very taxing and the reason is there's a biochemical reason for this is it's like wandering in the desert not knowing if there's water at all that's really depleting i mean epinephrine is in the brain and it's a it's chemical equivalent in the body is adrenaline those are the same thing and if you're constantly in pursuit right you're just pursuing external goals external as external goals it will wear your nervous system down you will be exhausted and you will one will eventually run aground you'll become mentally depressed the key is to figure out what are the rewards that you can acquire along the way internally remember it's subjective there can also be external rewards because many things have milestones you know a series a or a series b for a company then the ipo later reaching a million users or doing this yeah we have engagements before we have weddings typically right um there are those rare instances where people just go and get married but typically there's a lot of build up that is designed you know that fortunately you know provides these uh reward mechanisms so the key thing is that you can't just be all gas pedal all the time without rewarding yourself however the reward that dopamine is so powerful because it actually as i mentioned before it actually is the chemical substrate for epinephrine it creates a reservoir of more energy and again i'm not talking about caloric energy or glycogen mind it's it's it's mental energy it's the it's the desire to push on it's the desire to keep going so we need some consistent dopamine hits throughout the days or our months to give us more energy to pursue that's right but we don't want to be over pursued because then we'll burn out that's right and so everyone has to find where that sweet spot is that kind of you know on the freeway driving where it's really smooth and seamless where you're not on the accelerator the whole time where you're in a gear that's appropriate and you know we're talking now in terms of sort of you know neuroscience lens on these things but the key is always going to be practices it's going to be just as early we're talking about bringing stress levels up or down depending on you know alertness levels up or down depending on the kind of stress you're experiencing the reward system is great because when you let's say you're a person that can very easily access this dopamine reward so you're always excited you know people say hey let's do this and your your mantras let's go and you just kind of go what we call in science very low activation energy you just go that's great those people do run the risk of burnout although there are these people that we occasionally encounter that just seem to have boundless energy for everything and they tend to get a lot more done because they have a lot more internal reward and you'll notice they're getting rewards from all the little things and it's a hundred percent subjective it's like hearing funny jokes all day long you can just keep going and suddenly the beginning of relationships when people fall in love you know that's a real thing but it is associated with with a big flood of dopamine in the system makes everything seem exciting and possible and new and i think that we also know other people that they have a very hard time accessing this dopamine system and they either place it under the complete control of external things so they're miserable until they get the payoff and then sometimes they're even miserable again or they really just don't they haven't learned the skills of how to access it so how do we trick our mind to find rewards in subjective things that aren't actually physically coming to us okay so um i'll tell a brief anecdote about an experiment that's really important this was done many years ago in a psychology department i think it was done at bing nursery school at stanford but i could be wrong about that so um i don't want to state that as absolute fact but the experiment nonetheless was done where they looked at kids in schools these are kids about nursery school age or maybe a little bit older and they looked at what they did during recess and they they found that some kids really like to draw and so these kids would naturally just orient towards the crayons and pens and draw and then for a short while they rewarded the kids for drawing those same kids they would give them a gold star or a little sticker something that was special and made them feel special so they were giving them an external reward then they removed the reward and what they found is those kids drew at a much lower frequency they somehow lost the intrinsic pleasure of drawing huh because they were used to getting an extrinsic suddenly an ex they associated the drawing they thought they they weren't conscious but they their nervous system said oh i guess i was doing it for the reward now there's less reward and without going into a lot of details there's a very solid scientific phenomenon called reward prediction error which says that if you get less dopamine at the end than you anticipated it's a letdown if you get more at the end then it feels great now what this all translates to is once again learning how to attach internal rewards to the process of whatever it is that you want to do in order to get you to the thing you really want and so the the short answer in this actually i was asked this question recently someone said okay how can i ensure that once i succeed this was somebody who was doing very well in their pursuit of a goal and they were getting close and they said how can i be sure that when i get to the win that i don't lose the ability to keep working because i really want this page i'm not satisfied right and i say well there's two ways one is make sure that that reward really bask in it really appreciate what you've done and what's come to you and but and here's a very important but is but take that feeling of being saturated with dopamine the huge win and attach it to the effort process that got you there so when you're thinking this took me five years to accomplish this thing but reminding yourself of every day week year all the little things you did on a daily basis to get you there not we're here right that's right if you think that you sort of uh let's say super bowl win the party at the end is going to be great right i have to imagine it's really going to be great this is huge but that at that moment people the winners anyway their system is flooded with dopamine flooded with dopamine and there's an opportunity because dopamine we haven't talked about this but dopamine is a signal to the brain that it should rewire so that in the future it has a higher probability of getting back to that experience oh wow this is how animals learn how to find water and food this is at the basis of so many reward pursuits and so if you attach all that plasticity all that brain rewiring to the celebration and only to the celebration you actually can erase a lot of the valuable content that your brain you know skills that your brain acquired in root to that goal so it's almost like that whole night after you celebrate and maybe the next few days really reflect on the years it took to get you there that's right we we tend to so over emphasize the winds it's the things of movies right and there's some movies that are really good like rocky the first rocky where he didn't actually win he loses and it was but so many people i think one academy award for best picture right so many people associate that film with with the striving process the reward was really true his joy at the end of that was really cult it was interesting he called it to his family to his to the process right it was really a movie that captured that in its best form when it's just about the win what you you lose this amazing opportunity to attach the dopamine to everything that came before it now in addition to that there's one other way to do it nobody likes this one but it works which is also when you get there give away the gold star give give it away and really so you don't fixate on the gold medal all the time and really high performers there are a few people whose names unfortunately i can't mention that i know who have done incredibly well in the silicon valley world and some of them have given away a substantial portion of what they have and everyone thought oh they want a simpler life in this net no actually they were just setting themselves up for the next big win and they've gone on to do this two or three times now really so they keep moving the carrot out in front of them but they also are somehow intuitively understanding this process that what got them there was not the last you know one yard into the end zone was the ten years of the journey necessary but not sufficient right but everything that came up until then is so important so when we have dopamine in our system and when we've taken control of that process we want to make sure that we capture everything that led up to that and it's it's vitally important in these big kind of we're talking in these big milestones type of examples but this can be done across the day it can be you know i'm going to get to noon just really being the most reflective person i can with my child and not just doing that as a sheer effort like i really don't want to do it but doing it and thinking this is going to be a lot of work and when i get there i'm going to take a couple minutes to just register everything that i managed to control all the things i managed to not do that would have been destructive and so dopamine turns out to be i would argue one of the most if not the most powerful neurochemicals in our system there's a great book called the molecule of more i didn't write it i wish i had um that gets into this whole um description which is quite accurate about how dopamine isn't just about reward at the end it's really the molecule of motivation it's what propels us forward it's an incredible read really a lot of real world examples very accessible book and it really points to how so much of what we're about is the pursuit of these external goals but that if we can learn to control these things internally that's when things become kind of limitless you know this word that everybody wants to access everyone wants to know what's the pill that's going to make me limitless what's the technology it we actually have the chemical inside us the key is to learn to regulate it and to and the subjective part the example of good joke bad joke is the best example i can give that you have to decide for you what lets you access them and obviously those things should be things that are not destructive to you or to other people because that will take you down a bad path it also we have to understand that dopamine can be attached to the trivial to trivial anything i could attach it to picking up and putting down this cap for my water bottle but the point is that if that's not attached to some other thing it doesn't really work yeah so i know that you know this is a little bit less concrete than like two inhales in an exhale i like that but but this is the way i think um i'm certain this is the way that the mind can be trained we can train our mind to be in pursuit and in regular wins regular wins and this is why i think there's a lot of interest these days in like habits and habit formation because when you move that horizon in close and you complete something small it's not about what you completed it's the fact that you complete it mm-hmm you're engaging in your bed it could be writing a page like a little hash flipped open with dopamine got deployed it's like people who are like list crosser offers yeah um they're engaging this process so i think what i'm describing again is not completely new people will look to different examples of their life or other people's lives and say oh right that's that that's that but that's exactly the point i think that's the real utility of of a discussion like about neuroscience like this which is that once you understand the mechanisms you can start asking yourself where does this work for me where does it not work for me and how can i maneuver this in healthy ways i'm curious as we're getting to the the beginning of the year and a lot of people set goals for the year for themselves or if they're ending a career exiting a business getting out of a relationship they'll usually set some new type of goal for themselves so whether it's the beginning of the year or you're just in transition you want to set new goals what do you think is based on neuroscience is the best way to set a a year-long goal for yourself should we have 20 massive goals should this be one big goal should we have three key goals and how do we create the goal to where it drives us to perform at our optimal best and get closest to that goal if not accomplish it and what should we be thinking about throughout the year in order to accomplish the goal yeah um well i can give an opinion on this um but it's just my opinion um i mean i break up my life into these 12-week site you know i think it's because i've always done 12-week training cycles like an athlete it's a season 12-week training cycles um just seems manageable somehow with the understanding that there will be setbacks and things of that sort i think that certain goals are goals of practices that we've already mastered so you know you're trying to next level what you've already accomplished and so those goals are going to require a lot less limbic friction if you will and you already know how to access the rewards you actually can predict the rewards and when they come you actually know what the rewards are you've really clearly defined them those are goals that i think we're sort of on autopilot with and i think everyone should probably check in at the end of the year and say you know my if i'm going to continue along that trajectory it might make sense for me to set some really concrete goals sometimes those are quarterly financial quarters or academic quarters if that's what landscapes they're in but i think that um that doesn't require a lot of us except more of the same right but those are nonetheless growth goals and there's a and there's a little bit more friction there because it's very challenging it takes more effort to lean in because you when you don't already know how to do something it's a very different goal pursuit mm-hmm right sort of like um so if i already have my business and i've been running it for a few years you know certain practices of how to get to where you've been that's right and you're thinking how do i double my business that's right it's different than i'm trying to learn a whole new skill goal right you already know how to forage for water yes as opposed to you're some young calf or some animal that needs to learn how to walk right so i think you know one big goal of the sort that um you know we don't actually have the skill set yet or we're not even aware that of what we need in order to accomplish it per year seems like a pretty good goal to me so learning entirely new language or an entirely new physical skill but with any long-term goal the problem is remember don't focus on your destination that's right well so you have to move the horizon in but you have to remember there's that one little pitfall that cul-de-sac that i described where you'll tell people this year i'm going to do blank and if they reward you enough you might not do it remember if you get enough dopamine it's amazing i'm so happy you're doing that congratulations and you say i know i can do it and then you don't you sort of lose the incentive to do it so some a lot's been made out of making uh goals public is it is it better to make them public or not well so this is this is a question i don't know i think that in my case it has for me telling people several people that i'm going to do something because i will work very hard to avoid humiliating but i tend to do that with things i really want to do anyway but there's a strong fear element like i'm afraid to do this or i'm i'm kind of anxious about doing this so i'll tell people and then i'm like okay now i'm committed yeah i gotta do this you gotta do it now and i tell people that i'm certain they're gonna give me a hard time yeah that's just my name right um and i'm not trying to prove them wrong i'm just trying to make sure that they don't have any ground to stand on yeah and that's how i do it i think for some people the continuation of what they're already doing if it's feeling like a lot of work it's feeling exceedingly challenging and like oh my god another year of this another five years of that i think that's when you have to move the horizon in really close i think a lot of people right now are feeling back on their heels because 2020 was such a trying year for a lot of people so everyone many people are recalibrating what's possible although many people are feeling expansion and they're really going to go forward full steam so i think continuing in pursuits that we already have some degree of mastery over and thinking about where could i notch that up another two or three percent i think that's incredibly valuable i think that provides a lot of value to the individual to their families and to society really because a two percent improvement of like what you're already doing is going to have an outsized effect on what other people receive right even though for you you've been down that road many times but taking on a new pursuit in parallel to that means really getting excited about the possibility you give the jim carrey example about the possibility and starting to imagine what that would actually be like to be well let's say fluent in spanish and you can just do this reflexively without having to try that's totally within your reach and i think there it makes sense to really think about the end point quite a lot as a way to get over those barriers of sure of fear because when you already know how to do something there's no fear barrier yeah it's just an energy barrier right but when you don't know how to do something there's all this sense of clunkiness that is really uncomfortable beginner's mind is a painful place when you're in your 20s and 30s you can get away with less serotonin in your system but now you need more serotonin oh absolutely so what do you do every day to get more serotonin sleeping an adequate amount is key the the practice that served me the best has not been a meditative practice there are two practices one is called yoga nidra which is doesn't involve any movement you just it literally means yoga sleep this was introduced to me about five years ago just laying on your back you listen to a script there are a lot of scripts on youtube and it teaches you to there's some breathing involved but it's really a body scan you learn to go into deep relaxation i do this once or twice a day if i wake up and i haven't had enough sleep i do it first thing 5-10 minutes uh there's a 20 minute script i like there is a 10 minute script that's out there too i can give you the links to these if people are interested in them i have no affiliation with any uh yoga nidra businesses but i love what the practice because i feel like i recover the sleep i didn't get i then feel really alert in the afternoon if i'm feeling tired i'll do yoga nidra it also involves some intentions which has a kind of pseudo-hypno self-hypnosis component and i have a colleague david spiegel in the department of psychiatry who does clinical hypnosis and these intentions that we do in states of deep relaxation are known to have positive effects on thinking in action they are in pain mitigation and even breast cancer outcomes david's work has shown that so we're not saying stage hypnosis with like a pendant we're talking self-hypnosis or medical hypnosis it's like you said deliberate thought as opposed to reactive thought right and you're in going you're teaching your body and brain to go into deep relaxation deliberately you're doing it and that's i think a power you're saying okay relax lay down relax your body relax your face calm you know breathe slower you're telling yourself to do it you're using the body to control the mind that's again and you're deliberately turning your thoughts off most people can't do that and so for me yoga nidra has been a absolute amplifier accelerator whatever you want to call it on my career in life and well-being it also gets you better at falling asleep because one of the reasons why people have trouble falling asleep as they can't turn their thoughts off so you're training your nervous system how to do this i should say because it sounds a little bit out there in the um kind of new ag space there are several studies imaging studies positron emission tomography studies and others looking at yoga ninja specifically this wasn't worked on by my lab although we are exploring it in my lab as a tool for stress mitigation anxiety mitigation but these studies show that 30 minutes i believe it was of yoganidra resets the levels of dopamine in an area of the brain called the basal ganglia which prepares the brain and body for action so these deep relaxation states even if we're wide awake still allow the nervous system to reset so that it can get back into action so for the go-getters if you're really if you want to have a long career you want to high-perform your whole career you want to have tools that allow you to reset that dopamine level because that is accomplished that has a huge effect excuse me on buffering adrenaline as we said earlier but in addition to that serotonin is what resets the the dopamine pathway so now there's sort of what we're seeing is kind of a logic to it you need to all you need to alternate rest and effort you need to reward effort you need to understand with rest with rest so there's yoga nidra and i would say the best time to do is first thing in the morning before you go sleep at night or any time of day in other words i believe everyone should have some deep relaxation process that's deliberate that doesn't involve ingesting anything you know not food or wine for some people you know a drink is fine i'm i'm focused on behavioral tools you know supplements and drugs have their place and you know so there are clinically depressed people that need a boost in dopamine or need to boost in serotonin and i'm i think even though drugs like prozac get a bad rap those drugs have also saved millions of lives there's just an appropriate dose and context and some people shouldn't take them well people also what i'm hearing you say is you can should take them when you need them when you're unable to physically create those habits for yourself and routines for yourself but then once you take it you're always going to need it until you can learn how to behaviorally change your actions that's right right it's like the obese person that finally you know if they really can't move right you know maybe they do need to do some sort of surgical procedure or they need to or they need to do something that but then once they start exercising you you i believe you always want to go behaviors focus on behaviors first get the behaviors dialed in everything we've talked about today is free everything we talked about is is self-directed so it's behaviors then i think it i think diet and is very important or nutrition i think supplementation definitely has its place i think we are past the the ridiculous idea of the 80s and 90s like oh can't you get everything from what you no one can even agree on what we're supposed to eat right every scientist i know who's serious about their mind and body takes supplements yeah i don't have a supplement company i'm very clear about this but they all have their regime for them and i think we're seeing a tide change now where supplements are no longer being thought of as this like niche thing that only bodybuilders and like people are selling snake oil are about there is a lot of snake oil out there but there are also some supplements that are powerful for the sorts of things that we're talking about for sleep and all the others we can talk about them if you like but i think it's behaviors nutrition supplements and then there is a place for prescription drugs there are people that are clinically depressed and suicidal and need help and they need to talk to a board-certified md and get a hold of in some cases the opinion of whether or not they should take these drugs doesn't mean they should take them forever but you know we tend to jump to drugs and that's why i think a lot of those drugs they won't change your behaviors you still need to change your research the easy way out to start is taking the drugs but what you should be doing is the behavioral nutrition supplements if you do us three things first you should start to feel better oh absolutely yeah sunlight in the morning the things we've talked about breathing relaxing yeah all these things i have a friend he's a md and he says it says it beautifully he says you know better living through chemistry still requires better living right there is no pill or substance or psychedelic that's going to completely rewire you it's not even clear what that would look like and then there's a fifth category that's starting to emerge now which is brain machine interface things like devices that people put on and to adjust their brain waves enhance plasticity there are great devices out there for what i would say reading and measuring from the nervous system monitoring sleep for instance um monitoring brain waves we're still in the infancy of good commercially available brain machine interface but i think that will eventually show up the the other thing because you asked about tools each day i have a daily practice of doing yoga nidra um for me that's my form of meditation and sort of serotonin reset the other one is gratitude i know gratitude gets a lot of discussion nowadays but i always want to point out that gratitude is it's not complacency people think it's navel gazing and it's but it it has been shown to increase levels of serotonin in the brain it's a scient now it's i did an interview with um dr laurie santos so she's the yale professor science of happiness at yale yeah i had her on and i was like okay what are the top scientific reasons for happiness right now that are proven and she was like gratitude is like one of the top three or four it's like okay so this is not woo-woo anymore she's like no this is scientifically proven that gratitude makes you happier i think gratitude is wonderful it resets the system so that you can be in pursuit i think gratitude sounds like complacency and people like oh i don't want to be a naval gazer i'm just then i'm not going to be content then i'm only excuse me then people fear that they're not going to be complacent they're like i'm just happy with where i'm at but serotonin resets dopamine which puts you back in the fight and allows you to fight longer and further and i guess i'm doing this a lot today but i've had the great you know privilege of doing some work with these communities if you look at high performers in these very high risk high consequence special operations communities they have gratitude practices really they do then they incorporate them and so you know people think there's like some secret sauce or there's something you know and they are very unique individuals and very special individuals but they but they have those practices they have the same tools that eduardo can use that's right we all have these tools you do yoga nidra you do gratitude practice throughout the day what else do you do so the first thing i do when i wake up in the morning is i actually is a gratitude no matter what pops in my head i reorient to being grateful that i'm waking up i mean you know it's uh you know i've had a number of close calls in life i've lost people like everybody i'm 45 so you know seen a lot of babies born and seen a lot of uh people die that's just the way it goes but just i express some gratitude for just waking up yes and that puts me in forward motion and then i can do things like make my bed reward that that i'm not doing something else that you know and start getting into things and i tend to reward uh relationships in a big way my dog's 10 years old i raised him since he was a puppy he's getting he's a bulldog he's probably getting to the end i try and really just focus on the sheer pleasure of having a bulldog there are such characters and him in particular relationships of all kinds like if i spend time with people or just i just try and think about mentors people that got me where i where i am i do that all the time and i'm pretty as you probably imagine i talk fast i work a lot i'm pretty intense but i finish my days now not feeling ground out and depleted doesn't mean i'm grateful for every opportunity or everything that comes my way i have to be conscious of it but i think a deliberate practice that of relishing or enjoying what we have is so powerful and not just going through the motions if we're not enjoying it and we're just waiting for the end result we're going to be unhappy absolutely and there's something called dopamine reward prediction error where people work work work work work or they expect something to be great and as you do that you actually raise the level of dopamine that's required to make it feel good when you get there this is why people you know achieve great things and kill themselves it's crazy you know the failure to respect these neurochemical pathways in these neural pathways the is actually i mean it it's basically throwing away everything that we were given in my opinion and i don't want to give the impression that people have to follow these protocols because i'm talking about them we were all given these you know people will sometimes ask me they'll say you know is there an app or a product around this i just say look mother nature has the patent for this you know whatever people's beliefs you know this stuff was built into us for whatever reason and we can use these different neurochemical pathways to organize our life in a way that really serves us and the people around us best and the gratitude practice can be one second long it can be 10 minutes if you want people do love and kindness meditation i've never done that i've always had a hard time being in meditation for a long period of time i'm not good at mental visualization yeah um so i tend to gear more towards behaviors when you're you're a neuroscientist you're not good at mental visualization well i you know i try but i think so we all differ in our ability to um hold on to a mental imagery and mine's kind of fleeting so i tend to write things out but yeah gratitude practices i get try and get sun in my eyes i mean exercise i love i'm fortunate that i love exercise and training i think that got into me young um for people that that's harder to do then you know you just build these things up through subjective rewards yeah yeah before we continue this video make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day 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 that 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 mean 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 ten 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 so 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 your you can do that i'm gonna decide to 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 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 wow 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 a loved one like 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 loved 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 their 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 to 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 that's 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 stimulate so much dopamine release that the drug becomes the only source it becomes the goal 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 going to feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching foraging is called in the 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 now 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 and then we'll get to it in a little bit but serotonin is a different source of reward but it comes from more relaxed states and it resets the whole system and it's associated with things like sleep and gratitude and meditation and especially gratitude and then just i guess to round this out the cortisol system is more of like a longer term stress yeah so all you need is an image and an emotion a thought and a feeling a stimulus and a response and you're conditioning your body emotionally into the past so now the memories and this just not in the brain now it's in the body okay so now that thought of that person

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 245,345

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Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, success, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, andrew huberman, andrew huberman interview, andrew huberman podcast, andrew huberman sleep, andrew huberman mindset, unlock your mind, mindset motivation

Id: 1Frhvz4bj8c

Length: 120min 51sec (7251 seconds)

Published: Wed May 26 2021