Use This FORMULA To Unlock The POWER Of Your Mind For SUCCESS! | Andrew Huberman & Lewis Howes

the old narrative 10 years ago was that if you're feeling depressed just smile well if that worked right we would have a lot less depression than we see out right i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really yeah please welcome welcome back in one of the school of greatest podcast i'm super excited about our guest today andrew huberman in the house good to see you my friend hey great to be here thank you very excited you're a neuroscientist professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology which is the hardest word to say at stanford you run a lab human lab which is primarily studying brain states such as fear courage anxiety calm and how it can better move in and out of certain things my first question i've been super excited about this interview happening because i'm fascinated by how we think how we feel our emotions how everything is connected in our body and our brains and 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 in the back it comes up the neck and it's the actual nerves are connected inside of your brain that's all the way down to the 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 which are the eyes which are the 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 they are central nervous system so it's eyes brain and spinal cord 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 more that i can anticipate events at a distance the more that i can coordinate with my environment like daytime and nighttime 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 is 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 so 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 um 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 and 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 person 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 like you know when 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 you've got sensation perception emotions and actions thoughts yep 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 latter 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 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 why 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 a center piece of our lab is that brain and body the whole nervous system is key you got to look at all of it 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 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 explain the two views one is that these states i guess i'm i'm automatically calling things like depression a state of mind 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 um sometimes they're intermixed but one is anxiety-associated depression and you you if you've ever experienced it or for 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 anytime 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 like man i'm so bloated exactly 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 your 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 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 keep eating bad foods if i keep staying up till 4 a.m if i keep staying in the toxic relationship i want 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 the those tips are grounded in uh 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 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 possible is what i'm hearing you say 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 neurosciences 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 outside 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 it's 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 it seemed like they're moving really fast they're saying take off your shoes putting them on the conveyor 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 it up slow down or slow it 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 can just do that at any moment so the the neural arc you know real estate which is in the brainstem 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 gonna be the faster you breathe meaning shorter quick breaths or either way so um so we're just to take a brief um adventure through the the neuroscience of breathing and how it relates to brain states and and there's some fun tools in here so forgive me for this tangent but you have two brain areas that are responsible for breathing one is called for the aficionados the pre-butt singer complex it was discovered by jack feldman at ucla it's named after a bottle of wine so now you people won't forget it and it controls rhythmic breathing so inhale exhale inhale exhale it's just rhythmic breathing there's another brain area that controls breathing which is near what's called the parafacial nucleus which involves breathing anytime there are double inhales or double exhales or triple inhales you say well why would you have this second brain area for breathing well turns out when you're speaking or crying or coughing you need to coordinate your breathing with your speaking and that means sometimes you need to take multiple inhales or multiple exhales and this is all happening very very fast you don't notice but there's a very important discovery that was made a few years ago by jack's lab and by a guy named mark krasnow at stanford who discovered there's a set of neurons in your brain stem mind brings them everybody's brainstem and every animal every mammal's brain stem it's a very small number of neurons that controls a specific pattern of breathing which are called physiological size so these are not just sides where you go and exhale these are sides that involve doing two inhales and then an extended exhale we all do this you do this during sleep anytime carbon dioxide levels in your bloodstream get too high in order to get more oxygen into your system people also do this if they've been crying or sobbing they'll do this and then they'll exhale so what's happening with these physiological sides and why is this powerful so your lungs are two big bags of air but they actually are made up of a ton of little sacks of air called the alveoli of the lungs when we are exercising or when we are sleeping or anytime we're doing anything these these little sacks of air eventually start to collapse and what happens is carbon dioxide builds up in our system and we experience that as stress we actually feel the impulse to breathe because carbon dioxide levels get too high there are neurons that sense carbon dioxide and then without realizing it you do the double inhale and then exhale typically the inhales are done through the nose and the exhale is done through the mouth so it looks like and why the second inhale well if you've ever tried to blow up a balloon for a kid at a kid's party or just blowing up a balloon you sometimes blow into that empty balloon what do you do you do two in you do two you go and then it pops open so these double inhales pop open the avioli of the lungs they don't explode them but they pop them open which pulls carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream brings oxygen and then you offload carbon dioxide so if you watch a dog right before it takes a nap or something it often will do these now what's cool about these physiological sizes from work in our lab and that's still ongoing i just want to say it's still ongoing but work in other labs as well double inhales followed by an extended exhale are the fastest way that i'm aware of to bring the mind and the body into a more relaxed state really yeah it is fastest way but if i'm stressed i'm overwhelmed just do a three or two two inhale through the nose and then exhale slow through the middle one to three of those repeated will bring your level of autonomic arousal down basically to baseline what's that onomatic it's called a it's automatic sorry arousal what was it sorry so the autonomic nervous system yeah it just means uh automatic and it's a misnomer because as i'm describing it's not all automatic i'm sorry so autonomic arousal is kind of your level of alertness or your level of calm people sometimes call it sympathetic nervous system parasympathetic i avoid sympathetic parasympathetic because sympathetic sounds like sympathy and then people think it means calm and nice when it actually means stress and sympathetic is stress exactly the naming parasympathetic is non-stress that's right and and those names have to do with the anatomy and the locations of the neurons involved but i think for anyone that experiences anxiety from time to time which is everybody knowing that you can consciously take control over these neurons that control the ratio of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the lungs et cetera even if you don't remember any of that it's just two inhales through the nose what you're trying to do is maximally inflate those little sacs in your lungs and then exhale long through the mouth because you're blowing off carbon dioxide i heard you do a does it matter the cadence because you did a long deep breath and then a shorter not so much that's just your style yeah you're just trying to fill those those as big as you can so the advice that we hear of take a deep breath or just exhale is sort of right but it doesn't capture the the this neural circuit so a lot of what my lab is focused on because there's so many great labs and people doing great stuff in the breath work community patrol mcq and brian mckenzie they're all these incredible people doing this work wim hof yeah but my lab's been mainly focused on what is the neural machinery that controls these brain body states and the reason these physiological sides work is partially because you offload carbon dioxide you reinflate the lungs so when the body has oxygen it's happy when it doesn't have oxygen it gets stressed but the other reason is the most direct and fastest connection between the brain and body for controlling your state of mind is what's called the phrenic nerve p-h-r-e-n-i-c the phrenic nerve connects these neurons that i'm referring to in these two brain centers that control breathing with the diaphragm a lot of people get excited about the vagus nerve and i'm not out to punish the vagus nerve or the veganistas but the truth is the vagus nerve is a very slow system for calming the brain and body it's called the rest and digest pathway people are engaging their vegas all the time when they eat a big meal when the stomach is distended it sends a signal to the brain that oh i have enough food it's time to rest and digest but eating first of all if you're only using food as a way to control your stress that's not going to happen it's not a good habit you'll be depressed that's right people have learned long ago thousands of years ago that the best way to suppress a cortisol response is with carbohydrates because it blunts cortisol but this is why people eat carbohydrate-rich foods when they're stressed and when cortisol is spiked what happens so every morning when you wake up there's a cortisol spike that's a good question it's also a breast spike it's like a it's a good one it's the one that wakes you up out of sleep and you want that early in the day you're not just like groggy all day right that's right cortisol has important positive health promoting functions there's a signature of depression and anxiety however that the psychiatrists know about which is a 9 pm cortisol spike there for people who are depressed there's a second spike of cortisol late in the day and that's problematic and is associated with a lot of mental health issues cortisol is a stress hormone is that right cortisol is a stress hormone so you have your adrenal glands which are right above your kidneys and your lower back and they agree they have the two parts to it they release adrenaline which is also called epinephrine and adrenaline is what makes you feel agitated once you you know if you're calm you're walking along you look at your phone and there's a troubling text message you immediately have focus energy and alertness is the brain connected to those then and it sends a signal to each other that's right really and then it affects the body that's right too when the body feels it that's right so adrenaline is liberated into the body very fast in less than a second half of 500 milliliters if you see something you're reacting to it and it's just boom that's right and it recruits a set of neurons that live right in the core of your body they then send the signal out to your body and all of a sudden you feel like you want to move and let's go the stress is just it's going to dilate your pupils cue your alertness and make you agitate and want to move the body is pretty fascinating it's really fascinating and you want this because you know um the other night i was taking a hike um i was out here a couple days ago and taking a hike in topanga and i saw a shadow i looked down and did move it was a snake it wasn't a rattlesnake but but still all that happened in less than a second right and these are primitive pathways designed to get you to your alertness your my night vision is so so but all of a sudden i felt like i could see clearly and you just that's adrenaline cortisol is a bit more slow acting so when that adrenaline is up over and over and over again for days and days cortisol starts getting liberated from also from the adrenals it comes from other places too but mainly from the adrenals and the cortisol system is an anti-inflammation system as well as an inflammation system but it's both it's both but people you know they give cortisone shots to football players you know in the locker room for a reason um it blocks pain and all these things so the but too much of it over extended period of time does what it can cause chronic inflammation it can cause chronic fatigue i mean there is a debate out there most serious mds don't believe in adrenal burnout people think of adrenal burnout there is something real fatigue or adrenal burnout so there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome which is a real medical phenomenon where the adrenals are incapable of making these cortisol and adrenal hormones but the the truth is that you have enough adrenaline and cortisol in your body you'll last two lifetimes and 25 famines i mean we were built with a lot of robustness right this explains you know that you know the david goggins of the world they they you know we we all do have that greater capacity that people talk about the stress is very misunderstood because people think of stress as this ancient carryover that's very unfortunate it kind of gets lumped with depression like oh this is just a flaw in our design or something but actually stress is wonderful it actually activates our immune system so anytime you liberate adrenaline into your bloodstream you also protect yourself against infection of bacteria and viruses because if you think about if we had to gather food and we didn't have it and we had to then pack up and you know migrate long distances you can't afford to get sick and this is why people who work work work work and then rest they usually get sick when they finally stop and rest yeah it's like the post finals phenomenon in university or after the season for a game or the caretakers thing where you're taking care of somebody who's ill and you're just work work work or taking care of young children and then you finally stop to rest you go on vacation and you get slammed with with what is that because you're being in your comfort zone now are you getting a stress turned off and adrenaline so that these the stress response recruits the immune organs of the body to release killer t cells in fact wim hof breathing i know you're familiar with whim of doing 20 or 30 deep inhales and exhales and also combined with some breath hold type work exhale hold inhale hold is known to stimulate adrenaline release and the one of the better papers that's out there scientific peer-reviewed papers is a study published in the proceedings in the national academy of sciences where they brought in two groups one group um did wim hof breathing the other group did just uh mindful meditation both groups were injected with e coli right crazy right it's crazy the meditators got fever diarrhea and and um and vomiting and the people who did wim hof either didn't get it or got it to a much lesser extent sluggish but that's right they didn't right this is not an experiment to do at home isn't this crazy but it makes perfect sense because it inc that breathing simulates a stress response it stimulates cortisol and adrenaline which signals protects the body right which signals to the thymus the spleen and the other you know the the nodes of the immune system to liberate killer cells and so when that bacteria comes in the system is ready for it your body is defending against viruses that's right disease that's right essentially when you create a routine of healthy stress that's right and and we can talk about we definitely want to you don't want stress on all the time sleep is really important etc but that stress response combats infection because it recruits immune cells now i want to be really clear because there's been a lot of discussion about that study out there most of which is totally wrong and i'm not off the breathing study the study was done correctly um but when people re recap that study and summarize it oftentimes they'll say it suppressed the immune response that people were able to suppress the immune response and that's absolutely wrong what does that mean suppress the immunity well exactly it doesn't make any sense what what that did was and if you look at the graphs in that paper which i've done what it did is it stimulated cortisol release it stimulated adrenaline release or epinephrine release so that the system was primed to battle infection and so i think it's a very impressive thing and you know hats off to whim for discovering and thinking about a way to recruit the what's called the innate immune system before that study it was thought that you couldn't really recruit the immune system in that way now you don't have to do that breathing you could if you like but you don't have to do that breathing to recruit the immune response what else could you do a cold shower or an ice bath is another way to induce stress which is what he does exactly exactly and so i think that um you know when you look at states of stress i mean they're cold water is one way to do it um intense what's the breathing that they do that sort of wim hof breathing is also classically called tumor breathing it's kind of the opposite of the physiological side that i described the double inhale exhale because it's not designed to to reduce stress it's actually designed to increase your level of alertness and it's interesting because a lot of people find great relief from stress by doing this tumor type wim hof intense breathing once a day now the reason i suggest physiological size is they can be done in real time you can get into the elevator and do a physiological site you could also do tumor type breathing in any moment you can do that right exactly whereas the more intense forms of breathing are more of a practice that you do might take 10 20 minutes what they tend to do and what cold showers and ice baths and things like that do is they raise the ceiling on your stress threshold and what i mean by that is throughout the day and throughout the year we're confronted with different things right now we're confronted with a lot of things 2020 is the year of being confronted with stress of various kinds the mind plays an important role in interpreting whether or not it's overwhelming or tolerable so intense breathing like tumor breathing or ice baths or cold showers or intense exercise like you know high intensity interval training type stuff teaches the mind to be comfortable in these higher stress states where in other words it teaches people to be comfortable when they have a lot of adrenaline in their body this is like is basically stress inoculation but stress inoculation is not about not getting stressed it's actually about divorcing the mind-body relationship a bit so that you're calm in the mind when your body is very amplified yeah so if you've ever done tumor type breathing or you've done a cold shower the goal is to get the adrenaline release and then calm your mind and then calm your mind and stay in the ice now like i'm exhausted i'm freezing but more like no i can handle this that's right that's right and have power over your thoughts and your mind so that you can have more control of your body obviously you're gonna feel cold right but if you can but i mean does the mind have a hundred percent 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 as well like when you change your physiology doesn't it also start to change the way you think about yourself a little bit the reason i call it a brain body contract early on is that their the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue so you know the idea that when we're depressed we tend to be in more defensive type postures when we're feeling good we tend to be in more like relaxed and extended postures all true but it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that i'm going to completely shift the mind right that's a first step think about like two interlocking gears it's one gear that turns the other but then they need to kind of dance together before you can get the whole system going and how do you get it to dance together exactly so subjective there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body to answer your question can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold so a couple things that are important first of all just to go a little deeper on what thoughts are thoughts happen spontaneously all the time they're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection but thoughts can also be deliberately introduced for instance right now i can say okay have a thought that um just decide to write your name and your you can do that i'm going to 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 ten 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 have to you have to constantly be intentional and deliberate about what you think otherwise and a spontaneous thought will pop back into based on your experience based on sensory based on how you're feeling or perceiving something your environment it's just gonna 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 question is you're asking for really getting to the meat of things asking for the operational definitions one of the most dangerous ideas in wellness and in popular psychology is that your body hears every thought you have what a terrible thing to put on people you know what what a challenging thing i don't think people should try and suppress their negative thoughts i think there is great value however to introducing positive thought schemes now the reason is not because i think it's just because i think so but because there's actually a neurochemical basis for controlling stress and actually making stress more tolerable and extending one's ability to be in bouts of effort and that relates to the dopamine pathway so the molecule dopamine is a reward it's released in the brain when you win a game you you know close a deal you someone like to love your life someone likes you likes your photo the great love of your life you complete something but most of our dopamine release is not from achieving goals it's actually released when we are enroute to our goals we're in pursuit of our goals and we think we're on the right path this is why a lot of people get depressed after they achieve a big goal because they feel like i'm supposed to feel something greater i felt this thing for two minutes and now that's it that's right high achievers know to attach dopamine to the effort process to the pursuit the day-to-day tasks the the growth the lessons the losses like everything right well and it can be to some wins along the way but growth mindset which is the academic discovery and laboratory discovery of my colleague carol dweck at stanford is the hallmark of growth mindset is really two things one is i'm not where i want to be now but i but i will i'm capable of getting there eventually the other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself in fact don't reward the result reward the effort that's right and if you look at true high performers people that are consistently good at what they do they don't peek and go through the post partum 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 attached 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 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 there 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 taking their heels 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 a craftsman 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 should 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 and 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 let's say is hunting where it needs food for its young it's gonna feel agitation that's stress that's cortisol it's like hunger my babies might not eat i might not eat maybe it's looking for a mate it's gonna feel agitation and start looking and roaming and searching foraging is called 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 down that's right interesting and we're sort of veering towards neuroplasticity here which is the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience dopamine is one of the strongest triggers of neuroplasticity because it says those actions led to success previously you're going to repeat those those actions led to failure previously and don't repeat those so dopamine triggers us to stay on the right path that's right so you asked how do you do this so to really make it concrete and is there too much is there too much thing is there such thing as too much dopamine well if you're not on drugs so cocaine amphetamine are bad because they lower the baseline on life they make people very focused on things outside of themselves that's the other thing that dopamine does it can be positive or negative but when we have dopamine in our system we tend to be outward facing and in pursuit of things in our environment you can look at somebody on cocaine and realize that that's the extreme version of that but but that you know i love social media for the reason that you see the molecules in the memes so it's like get after it you know what do sharks do on monday or i can't remember the specific things or then they're the like sometimes it's just time to chill well that's a different molecule that's serotonin right and then dopamine is the get after it molecule and epinephrine is effort so if we were to break this down really concrete we'd say adrenaline and epinephrine are about effort just effort with no subjective label on them good or bad effort whether or not stress or you're pursuing something you want to do it's just it's in exerting effort dopamine is about reward but more so about motivation and pursuit of rewards 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 a like a longer term stress yeah okay so 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 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 we're finished 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 well it's just very non-linear you know it's it's some days go you know i know this from my scientific career to 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 just lined 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 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 doss and 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 i mean 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 seem 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 differ 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 pleasurable 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 the ten miles that's right 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 um 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 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 dope meaning 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 and i was like great and 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 i drive people crazy i'm like glacially slow because science is slow and i like to get things right 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 in 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 write 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 that's great 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 while 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 dominance 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 work out you don't want to do whatever it is having the conversation it's supposed to feel hard 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 i'm because i'm like oh i'm 37 can i learn this language 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 your case or i want to be clear i was never a professional athlete but you were 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 would 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 of 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 connection is later when you sleep so it's the same thing with neuroplasticity yeah so 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 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 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 the 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 feynman 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 would be learned how to sketch and paint late in his life he didn't 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 um 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 club 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 um 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 a new navy seal 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 energy you know and effort and strain is you know children can learn very easily 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 and beliefs automatically 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 rest 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 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 all religions really there's a kind of sabbath there's a rest period you know for many many 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 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 less good about the annual vacation i've never done it i've been doing science 25 years i i you know there's a i i'm sure uh some of my former relationships will be like that's right we never actually took a proper vacation yeah my former girlfriend i was like we'd go to like paris england and we would reach germany and i was giving talks and talks and then and then i'd get sick and then one day she was so understanding it's like i still feel some guilt about that but we would take an afternoon and go to a gallery but then i was like right back at it you know that's been my life too it's it's hard i mean you have to find that balance you know luckily i was in my 30s then and 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 ninja it also involves some intentions which has a kind of pseudo hi 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 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 is 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 dopamine pathway so now there's sort of what we're seeing is kind of a logic to it you need to alt 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 in you know so they're clinically depressed people that need a boost in dopamine or need a 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 it 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 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 has been shown to increase levels of serotonin in the brain it's a scienti now it's i did an interview with um dr lori santos 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 home 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 um 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're the same tools that andrew 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 seeing a lot of 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 some 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 i want to go back to um neuroplasticity at a later age in life how much like let's say i want to every year i want to challenge myself to learn something that's harder or maybe not it comes easy to me maybe it's spanish this next couple years and then something else 10 years the older i get say 80 90 100 hopefully i get there if i keep pushing my mind to be challenged in that way that's uncomfortable will that actually help me to live longer or will it hurt me to living a shorter life oh that's a great question i hear people like who live in the blue zones around the world right who they kind of have their normal routine they have their family they walk up a hill every day they eat a certain way and they have good community relationships but they're i don't know if i've heard them say like they're constantly challenging their mind to expand i pretty confident saying that it's not going to shorten your life remember that the dopamine system and so dopamine and acetylcholine are the primary triggers for adult neuroplasticity we know this because if you there are experiments done by a guy named mike marzinick at ucsf if you stimulate the areas of the brain that release dopamine and acetylcholine you can rapidly induce plasticity like one trial learning like spanish today right like fluent in spanish today which is kind of scary this is actually the basis of companies that are thinking about inserting wires into the brain and stimulating i could be fluent in spanish today in theory if you stimulate enough acetylcholine and dopamine release while experiencing enough spanish you probably have to speak that spanish you probably have to read it wow you could remember it and connect it yeah it's it's possible it's like matrix it's possible i know kung fu yeah we're not quite there yet but it's possible it's been done in in other forms of learning in other studies really yeah what's it called well if you release that well you'd have to actually have an electrode down in your head i don't know that you want to drill a point put something in your hand you'd have to drill through enough dopamine in your you would remember the dopamine comes from the neurons that are in there so you'd be stimulating the dopamine neurons acetylcholine neurons and you'd be probably reading a spanish script there are i i will say there are yeah well there are programs happening right now to accelerate language learning through implantable electrodes no way it's already happening it's happening someone's done it before it's happening now they're testing it i don't think they're at one day for an entire for fluency but they are definitely at massively accelerated language learning really yeah i have close friends that do this sort of no one for a living you know someone who's done this who run the laboratories who do this kind of thing absolutely so what do they do they put something in your head well the goal so we we know that dopamine acetylcholine from experimental already published results if those are released then in massive amounts whatever you pair that release with whatever sensory experience massively rewires the brain wow according to that experience so merzenik has these beautiful studies where he showed that if you play a certain auditory tones and you stimulate these brain areas the auditory cortex the area of the brain that listens and hears and understands sounds massively rewires according to what was played in that moment but because these neurochemicals are like gates they open the gate to plasticity you normally engage them by focus agitation stress and strain self-reward etc or going to you know and having a conversation in spanish we're like wow i'm i'm doing it i'm fluent i'm doing it that's going to keep it i'd get it right but you can imagine there are um groups on this planet that are very interested in rapidly accelerated language learning that would be willing to put many millions or billions of dollars probably not billions toward programs to get massively accelerated language learning by putting either implantable chips in the brain that will stimulate these brain areas including memory areas or stimulating acetylcholine or dopamine so people have already done this where they put a cut open their head and put a chip in their brain these are neurosurgery patients who are already undergoing surgery for other reasons and have agreed that you want to try this yeah really yeah and there are animal studies doing this all the time shut up absolutely and are there any results of this well they're not the groups that are doing these sorts of things are not going to reveal the results just yet so you can imagine that these are related to you know these are government military type contracts it makes sense right you'd want to do this um yeah absolutely and it's definitely happening overseas too i mean massively accelerated learning is kind of the holy grail of neuroscience right right how can we learn anything faster right because time is the thing that we're all trying to maximize right and you know and you could imagine that because the human brain can in development can be biased toward becoming exceptional at math or exceptional athletics i mean you could build brains that are you could bias brains to be very very good even exceptional at the level of surpassing all previous behavior by triggering these sorts of plasticity events yeah i mean i wouldn't run out and put the chip in your head immediately i mean this stuff has to be worked out but there are certainly there's a whole community that's spinning up right now around nootropics smart drugs right it's not a it's not a word or an area that i'm really a big fan of because like what are you talking about creativity task implementation focus like the word smart drugs is terrible new tropics is even worse because it's not pointed enough it's not it doesn't it doesn't illustrate exactly what the end goal is it's sort of a throwaway catch-all kind of like smart drug like what is smart right so but there are you know for instance i know a um nobel prize-winning neuroscientist who chews immense amounts of nicaragua each day he's in the 70s because it increases his focus he quit smoking which stimulates nicotine and those stimulate acetylcholine so nicaragua is a nicotinic stimulant and nicotine is acetylcholine receptor so his goal is to continue to learn in his old age by stimulating the nicotine pathway certainly yeah he chooses non-stop nicotine now i'm not recommending people chew nicaragua i want to be clear i'm not a doctor i'm not prescribing anything i'm professors i'm professing things but the the there are things like um choline alpha gpc that will stimulate acetylcholine release and will allow you in theory to learn quicker and better in about of learning so something to give you more focus yeah under adversity they'll so they will trigger the plasticity event to be you know it's like driving like carving that knife in deeper but then you need a corresponding increase in the amount of rest in order to make sure that those pathways get better think about it like going to the gym i actually have seen these guys in the gym in la where they've got electrodes on the muscles so they're maximally recruiting motor units but then you need that much more recovery because it's not unusual to get those high threshold motor units you need to rest for two days you can't go back to the gym tomorrow right and a lot of these guys are also drug assisted to the point where you can almost smell it from across the room right but um that's another story yeah but but that whole area is geared around maximum stimulus maximum recovery maximum stimulus maximum recovery so drugs supplements can accelerate these processes a fun one from sports because it should have been the olympics this year but you know the sprinters have their own drug community it's not just the anabolics they those sprints are won by who gets out the blocks fastest that's reaction time and there's a there's lore i'm not involved in this but there's lore of sprinters taking drugs to accelerate nerve transmission by focusing on the the on the gun it's all about hearing the gun and getting out the blocks so they take drugs to stimulate dopamine and acetylcholine because that's what you have a faster reaction more focus faster reactions so is that activating the adrenaline receptor adrenal receptors so you react quicker it's actually happening at the neural level and it's it they're it's allowing them to hear the gun as it's going off and not hear it after the fact that's right because you can lose by being the last person out the block most of those drugs are illegal but there's a whole there's a whole world of drugs in sports that are geared around the mental side and focus and the ability to get into sleep i mean you can bet given now the the understanding that sleep is so fundamentally important for performance people are hacking sleep like crazy chilly blankets magnesium you know theanine certain things that i think do work you know people are wearing whoops and the aura rings and it's all about sleep now right it's all about sleep susie because it's so powerful and they're the ultimate drug and people are now developing drugs that will allow people to fall asleep and sleep better get function better on less sleep optimize the amount of slow wave sleep time anyway it's a whole whole world i'm fascinated by it because it's the extreme of the things that we're talking about but for the typical person behaviors are the way to go behaviors and nutrition is not an area of my expertise but incidentally you know the body is connected to the mind the body's connected to the mind and if the body doesn't have good gut health and good nutrients then it's going to be affecting the way you think and the way you feel and the way you act absolutely it's going to be harder and harder if you don't have energy right and food and nutrition gives you proper energy that's right or it takes the energy away from you that's right depletes you from energy so so the older we get it's harder to expand our neuroplasticity but that's why we should be learning new challenging things every year is what i'm hearing you say right help us yeah and whether or not it extends the lifespan i don't know but i do know this so the dopamine pathway is intimately tied to the reproductive hormone pathway so testosterone and dopamine have a very close relationship so much so that they're released and they're triggering their releases from very neighboring areas in the brain because if you think about it it's the pursuit molecule right like testosterone's main effect is to make stress and effort feel good that's what it does it suppresses that kind of grinding response that gets painful and increases recovery in women which are more estrogen dominant the testosterone dominant and both men and women both have testosterone estrogen of course estrogen is sort of similar to testosterone in that it's coupled to dopamine a lot of people think the opposite of testosterone is estrogen it's not it's it's a molecule called prolactin prolactin is what's secreted after orgasm it's what secreted after a big win and there's that crash it's designed to keep organisms in the place they are so that there's pair bonding there's recovery and shift them into that serotonin machine so the reason i mention this is that being in pursuit of goals and trying to trigger neuroplasticity isn't just about changing your brain it's closely linked to the reproductive hormones testosterone in men and estrogen in women meaning it's linked to the will to live the will to to pursue and it's not just about sex i know as soon as we talk about testosterone and estrogen people start people think about mating behavior it's that but there's a lot more it's the will to live so when dopamine is reduced the will to live is reduced when serotonin is too high and dopamine is too low people feel like they have everything they need think chronic pot smokers no no beef against the pot smokers but they don't tend to be the most ambitious people sometimes they are but they tend to make people pretty placid i think um you know any high levels of antidepressants that make you feel like you have enough of everything you need they make people kind of there's a passivity there so that's why it's important to keep these things in the right range so the will to live is tied to the dopamine system and to the reproductive system so what do we do what are we doing when we when we don't have a goal in our life what happens to us we are essentially on idle doesn't mean that we don't have the will to live it means that we are idling and the brain and body because they are so intimately related with one another and affect one another they see when we're in pursuit of a goal and that sends every organ in the body the message to keep going that you know the will to live is getting out of kind of a deeper abstract concept but it's a real thing and so people that are low in estrogen and typically in women or in men people are low in testosterone or people are or low in dopamine so it's ultimately dopamine which is motivation and drive in pursuit you don't want too high but you definitely don't want it too low and we need in order to increase our dopamine we do some of these tools right you want to be in pursuit of something you want friction but you also want to be able to reward the effort process reward that friction process now keep in mind children which have the ultimate will to live you know in positive environments children are wonderful because they're all about the will to explore and live and learn that it's just their their default is to explore live and learn yeah yeah and children are flooded with dopamine you show them a baby something new and it's like because it's the mother nature has wired them to use that process to incorporate new ideas and new learnings that's how they can learn that's how they learn the more you know what they have they can learn they connect ideas and they can grow they and they play i mean you tell kids a story a ridiculous story and they'll go with you on that as we become set in our ways it's kind of interesting the brain over time the space between the neurons tends to fill in with this stuff called extracellular matrix it's like pouring concrete between the neurons makes it much harder for them to rearrange and move around but a lot of beautiful studies experimental studies have shown that that extracellular matrix if it can be reduced the neurons can move around and form new connections and the way to do that is by triggering some strong pursuit goal the more important the goal is the more the faster the plasticity is going to happen how does someone like you i don't want a stereotype a scientist and a professor but how does someone like you have fun when most scientists are more like lab rats that are just like focused on the research and the work and getting it done how do you incorporate play and fun in your life well i love doing science because to me being a brain explorer is like the coolest thing i mean when i was a little kid i want to be an astronaut and then i didn't pursue that path and but for me the next best thing is to be a brain explorer and you know dig around in the brain and try and understand the brain and um but i enjoy let's see i i'm a little bit of a sicko in the sense that i love music i love food i love to eat i love to train i love friendship yeah i i'm at this point now and i wasn't always like this i've definitely experienced depression i've been there i i'm at the point now where maybe it's the gratitude practice maybe it's the fact that i'm trying to get enough sleep and i sometimes do but i'm i just feel so happy to be in relation to all these opportunities and the fact that people care about neuroscience and they want to learn and that there's a place for me in this world to teach it you know it's just kind of like an endless source of joy i love movies music friendship training food dog my dog um goodness uh art i you know i i think i've found enough things in the world that i love that um you know i feel like i have like five times five lifetimes worth of things to pursue what about fears do you have a lot of fears and how much does fear play into to the body of my connection well the fear is huge in the body-mind connection because it can shut us down i mean fear can really take us to the point of you know from a place of feeling really great to just they can like crump us all at once and i mean the things that um well i have several fears one is you know i had this weird um history in science where my undergraduate advisor my graduate advisor my postdoc advisor are all dead they all died young so it's like it was suicide cancer cancer was really rough because i was close with all of them and so i have one major fear which is dying without getting the information that i believe should be out in the world out into the world because i'm struck by this all the time you know when people die there's no download from their brain there's no fossil record of their thoughts unless they write they speak they put things out into the world for some people it's art for other people it's their family whatever it is but one fear is that uh you know i'll get hit by a bus or something or have a heart attack before i'm able to express you know sort of put out my expression that's one and then the other is you know these days i have a lot of irons in the fire doing public education running my lab my lab's actually two labs um i guess a big fear of mine is that you know in trying to take on so many things that the quality will drop and so as a consequence i've had to really put boxes around my life so that i can really dig in and i'm blessed to have amazing people in my lab i mean i've just my lab operations manager i would die without him like you know my graduate students in post docs you know they're phenomenal and so i'm blessed to have great people around me but yeah i would say that's one of the big fears is that um you know that i can't do it all yeah and of course i can't but but i have not tried to learn spanish fluently do you want to or no i do actually a few years ago i i promised on social media i was going to learn spanish as proof of principle for neuroplasticity and that i would deliver some of the tutorials in spanish because there's huge parts of the world that i think are curious about neuroscience they don't have access to them and i i abandoned mission temporarily tell you what man i've been saying this for 20 years i want to learn spanish and foreign i have a spanish girlfriend now from from mexico which gives me more of a a motivation which i know you talked about needing some greater motivation it'll accelerate the process if you have like a reason why that's supposed to just i want to do this because you're going to quit probably unless there's a bigger reason a bigger reward at the end and i've been saying this since you know high school i took spanish in high school college i've traveled all over latin america spain everything i'm a passionate salsa dancer for 15 years been dancing extreme amounts of guys like you have bumped me out a number of times because because once salsa picks up their salsa dancing i'm like uh like the door like perfect exactly yeah and i that was another thing that i was committed to learning because it was so challenging to learn that i was like i need to go all in i need to create like reward loops for myself all this stuff because it was so embarrassing and humiliating to get started in something in a completely uncomfortable setting but now you're very skilled at it now i can go anywhere in the world any salsa club and find the best dancer and dance with them in a moment without speaking to them and feel 100 that's admirable it's the greatest feeling and i want that in every other area of my life i want it in spanish because i want this message to reach 100 million people a week and i know the latin community could use this message so your incentive was the same and like information transfer exactly and i'm also like okay you can translate things you could have a translator with you you have subtitles but my dad's from a latin country is from argentina and um when people make the effort to respect it well it's it's just it's such a deep sign of respect to really go over to somebody else's side and deliver it in a form that's really designed for them yeah that's a it's almost like you have empathy for someone else when you try to learn something that they know and that's hard for you to learn so i said to myself okay i've tried to do this many times the last 20 years and i've always failed i was like i need to pay for it i need to do it every week i need to have a one-on-one teacher because i've tried apps i've tried this stuff all these things didn't work and i need to stop thinking about becoming fluent right i need to start appreciating the process of every day just doing it right and after six months i'll be able to see and look back like okay i actually know some stuff then after a year or two i'll know a little more and then hopefully one day i'm just fluent and attach reward to the intention and the effort process yes i mean what i heard you say was that it at a very core level you really want to meet people where they're at so that they can derive more from the message absolutely and so if you can build so as an example of the the subjective reward process the more that you can tap into that intention this is why i think intentions and um being able to be pulled by some bigger greater greater mission is is the ultimate thing because then the discomfort we feel is offset by this reward that you can always look to yes it's like it's always there it's it's like having that magic drug on the shelf that you can just take but yeah because it's internal it's always with you which is far more powerful than needing it from some external source exactly exactly so i'm excited so i'm excited i'm excited for this the spanish speaking people out there they're gonna hear something so not to hold your feet to the fire no but i feel like um it's just i gotta enjoy the process and i gotta enjoy like the challenges of day to day and i'm starting to make it fun now i'm starting to when i'm like really stressed because i'll get tired when i'm just like i have no clue what this means and all i want to do is like go watch sports or go work out but the confusion is the trigger that's what i'm learning from it's saying it's like raising a flag and it's saying there's something special about this mental track that we need to return to later and it's flagging it yes and so when you sleep where you're doing something else you'll reconnect you're actually yeah that's that's so that's what i'm doing learning when i'm getting frustrated and challenged now i'm just like i just start having fun i'm just like okay fantastic i'm just like being playful in the moment and it brings me with more energy as opposed to like this lazy tired feeling i'm like excited i'm like okay i don't know this but i'm gonna figure it out one day so good and uh and so it's just like i'm committing to the process and making the the process the prize not the end result the price right and also maybe someday you'll run for office and then you can you know you can reach more people with a specific message i think it's like what 60 million uh spanish-speaking people in america 40 million or something like that there's a lot of people so who knows anyways um my team's telling me i need to wrap this up because i want to go into talking a lot about fear and how to overcome fear and eliminating stress and all these different things um but they'll have to get you back on and talk about these things so hopefully you'll come back on and i'll be i'd be happy to come back any time we'll do more and talk about fear and how to overcome fear and all these different things but this has been fascinating and i want to ask you a couple final questions andrew one is um call the three truths so imagine it's your last day on earth and uh you've you've actually accomplished all of your you've gotten all your work out there in the world that you wanted to create okay your books your lab results all the research you got to do 99 of it right okay you're always going to want to do more but you got to do as much as you could yeah you have books out there lectures everything is out in the world that you wanted to do but it's your last day and you've got a for whatever reason you've got to take all of your work with you so this podcast is gone your books your results everything so it's all gone with you to the next place wherever you go but you got a pen and a piece of paper and you get to write down three things you know to be true about your entire life and the lessons you've learned that you would share with the world this is all we have to remember you by or your lessons i call it the three truths okay what would you say are your three truths okay well the first one i'm gonna poach from the oracle which is know thyself i do believe that through whatever exploration whether or not it's therapy meditation religious uh exercise all of the above i think people should um explore what they're you know sort of how they're showing up in the world yeah and then obviously based on today's discussion i believe that we can make changes around that but know thyself wish i had said it but someone beat me to the punch the second one is um it's rather freudian but um i do think there's a core set of operations about the way we work um that are important is you can imagine three boxes it's like a three box diagram and in the first one it would say wish then there's an arrow next to it it would say anxiety and then there'd be an arrow and then the last one would say defense typically we have a wish it creates some anxiety in us and then we get into some reflexive defensive behavior for some people that's addiction for some people that's you know rabid ambition to the point of neglecting things whatever the defense is and i think our job is to intervene between anxiety and defense or at least come up with defenses that serve humanity so that we're giving as opposed to destroying right but i do think that wish anxiety defense is a big one and then goodness and then for the last one a couple days ago i might not have said this but i had an experience that leads me to say i think um you know have fun yeah because it's the ultimate reset it's not the only thing you want to do but it's really tragic when people are so hard driving that they can't derive pleasure and as we you know talked about today the pleasure process is part of the renewal process as part of the the ability to be in greater pursuit yeah you know and i think that when we're having fun you know provided it's not at somebody else's expense i think that it has a regenerative quality to it and that we can um yeah i think that's the best experience of life it's hard to learn and grow without having fun is what i've heard hearing you say yeah i actually i stole this i feel bad because i stole it later i i uh the great pleasure of knowing you know the laird hamilton great hamilton and we've done some training and we were talking about and i was we were leaving uh their house and he said um what laird said he said you know remember i'm gonna get this wrong laird so sorry but um he said something like remember in fear of death have fun yeah and he he was not saying go and do stupid things that put you in in risk what he was saying was you know this fear of death is something we all live with and we all struggle with so we have to remember to have fun that's it or something like that i think i i botched it but i was saying you know um you know larry's done some incredible things in his life he's incredible human being and family man and husband and father all this stuff and friend and so i was like you know i could afford to have more fun so that's what i'm telling myself these days yeah the scientists got to have fun too yeah i'm trying where can we follow you on on social media and how can we support you in this moment you got a book coming out in the future but future i know i haven't gotten around to actually writing the whole thing um i teach neuroscience and do regular neuroscience posts on instagram yeah they're fascinating by the way what's your what's your handle there it's huberman lab so h-u-b-e-r-m-a-n-l-a-b okay and uh right now i'm doing a hundred days of neuroscience in the 15-second reels format yeah which is a real challenge to me but i do some longer posts we talk about everything from stress fear dopamine learning we touch on some stuff related to like autism alzheimer's things like that it's not medical advice but i talk about the research i invite researchers on to talk about their work and it's a lot of fun and there's a lot of the questions there so people can send me questions cool so follow you on instagram twitter as well hubermann lab and you you reply to people there i do yeah mainly instagram i do have a twitter account but mainly instagram okay cool awesome this is fascinating man i can't wait to have you back on in the future and i want to acknowledge you andrew for the incredible gift that you have to educate us about understanding thoughts feelings emotions all this stuff i think it's so confusing especially in 2020 on how to improve our lives when there's so much destruction and distraction and noise and stress and anxiety like we've talked about so for you to come and bring a scientific practical and then make it practical as well how we can apply this in our life it's really empowering to so many people so i acknowledge you for oh thank you gift you are man for constantly showing up this is really beautiful thank you thanks for having me on it's been a real pleasure i was a fan long before you invited me on so for me it's especially gratifying we'll have you back on a bunch man i'm excited and my final question what's your definition of greatness the human species was given this tremendous gift of neuroplasticity the ability to change ourselves and be better in deliberate ways and my definition of greatness is anyone that's making that effort even in a tiny way just to take this incredible machinery that we were given this nervous system and to leverage it toward being better feeling better and showing up better for other people that's i really believe that's why we're here yeah amen thank you very much thank you appreciate it man and if you want to learn more about how to master your mind check out this next video right here 25 of our blood flow goes into this thinking brain and the rest is like on stand by do you think it's possible yeah do you think it's possible for someone to if they're getting a cold or a flu like symptoms

Channel: Lewis Howes

Views: 1,527,553

Rating: 4.8952641 out of 5

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

Id: A1KSvTboNgA

Length: 119min 45sec (7185 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 07 2020