This Neuroscientist Shows You the Secrets to Obtaining A Growth Mindset | Andrew Huberman

a ssin and stress were designed to get us up and move us and when we try and fight that too much and we try and quiet that stress that actually can be problematic you have to decide are you gonna try and quiet stress or are you gonna actually lean into action hey everybody I hope you enjoy this episode brought to you by our sponsors at whoop you can save 15% off your purchase when you go to whoop calm and use the code HT at checkout now enjoy the episode everybody welcome to hell theory today's guest is dr. Andrew Huberman he's a lab director and professor of neuroscience at Stanford University who has won numerous awards for his work including the pew biomedical Scholar Award and the McKnight neuroscience Scholar Award he also serves on the editorial board of several prestigious journals including Current Biology the Journal of comparative neurology Cell reports and many many others and welcome to the show dr. Huberman well thanks for having me I'm delighted to be here did as I was saying before we started rolling man to brain neuroscience is my area of absolute fascination this was the thing that ended up taking me from sliding towards depression feeling lost feeling frustrated not knowing how to make anything in my life this is in the late 90s so people were debating whether neuroplasticity was real Carol Dweck had not written her seminal book on growth mindset yet so I had cobble a lot of this stuff together but then once I did it was absolutely transformative for my life I'm super interested in something you said which is ultimately our thoughts or a choice I'd love to start with that I'd love to start with you're sort of I think really insightful definition about what a growth mindset really is yeah well first of all Carol is a wonderful colleague and friend and so we've been doing a bit of work on the neuroscience of growth mindset among other states of mind so you know the study of neuroscience is really about what the nervous system does and amazingly enough the nervous system is responsible for everything that happens to us from the time that we're born until the time we die but that really boils down to only five things the nervous system has the responsibility of sensation so sensing the physical events in the environment we have these so called receptors in the eyes and the ears in the nose in the mouth on the skin that take physical entities in the universe that are real fixed non-negotiable things like sound waves and photons of light and chemicals in the environment traveling that make it into our nose and things like that and convert those into the second thing which is perceptions so the nervous systems responsibility is to take those sensations which are non-negotiable and perceive certain ones and not others so for instance right now until I say you know what's the sensation of your feet contacting the floor or the bottoms of your shoes you weren't thinking about it but those pressure receptors were being engaged the entire time so your perception is like a window or a spotlight that's very much linked to attention then there are emotions often called feelings and those are really designed to push us down particular avenues of perception and the next thing which are thoughts okay so we've got sensation perception feelings and then there are thoughts which really have a lot to do with what we're perceiving and the way we're organizing those perceptions what they mean and generally that's put into the context of what we already know or memories and then the fifth thing is behaviors or actions and of course neurons are responsible for generating actions and they're really two kinds of actions they're the actions that you generate reflexively like your breathing and your heart rate right now are largely reflexive or you could decide role of your respiration and be make it voluntary right and not just reflexive so those five things sensations perceptions feelings thoughts and actions really encompass all of our life experience and that's from the very mundane of getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth to the most awe-inspiring goal motivated pinnacle moments of your life the nervous system not the immune system not the digestive system all of which are important but the nervous system meaning the brain spinal cord in the connection with the body and the connections from the body back to the brain and spinal cord are responsible for all of that and as a just a final point the nervous system is also responsible for telling the immune system something that's very relevant right now in this kovat pandemic when to be active you know we don't often think about the immune system is governed by anything but it's actually governed by the nervous system yeah one thing that I find really interesting is the way that the and in fact it'll be interesting to hear your take on this so I think of the brain as basically creating a virtual reality environment that we're engaging in now it's a very useable virtual environment that I can walk around without bumping into too much [ __ ] like you said I can translate you know the things that are floating around in the air into a sense of smell and I can navigate the world based on what I see and hear and smell and taste and all of that stuff but at the end of the day it really is all happening in this enclosed dark skull and the brain itself doesn't ever actually interact with light it doesn't interact with sound waves it's all an interpretation of that which I find really interesting and I find it really interesting whether that plays out into our lives how do you think about that as somebody who is is literally lifting a brain out of somebody's I would assume deceased head you know there you have such a tactile relationship with the brain yeah so you said something really important which is that you know we're essentially just this collection of cells and yet everything is organized in this almost video game virtual reality like version of the world so the way that neuroscientists think about these sorts of things nowadays is in the following way that you're absolutely right to them everything about life experience is an abstraction and the brain has a language it's creating an abstract representation of everything that's out there in the world everything and that might seem sort of obvious to some of your listeners but when you think about it that's perhaps one of the most interesting and profound features of life in general the galaxies any organism because somehow you're AB tractions and my abstractions and the abstractions of the brains of all your listeners are able to converge on some common meaning at least in many cases about what these words mean or what different events in the natural world mean now objects fall down they don't generally fall up so there are some rules that we learn very early on that are obvious right but there are some other rules that are less obvious that come about when we start thinking about things like growth mindset and what's rewarding what is punishing what it means to lean in hard to a problem or what creativity is but I want to just mention there's one exception to all this which is very interesting and it happens to be the one that my lab works on so I am biased in this regard but there's one piece of your brain that is outside your skull in fact you have to every the rest of your central nervous system is inside your skull and spinal cord except lining the back of your eye is the neural retina which is three cell layers thick meaning it's about as thick as a credit card and the neural retina is not attached to the brain it is brain the cells in in the neural retina were deliberately placed during development they got pushed out of the skull and deliberately to sense light events in the environment and not just the shapes of things and what's moving around out there but fundamentally to tell the rest of the brain and nervous system when to be alert and when to be asleep based on how much light is in the environment and the quality of that light so viewing morning sunlight around the time of sunrise as well as evening sunlight around the time of sunset not just at sunset rise and sunset but near those times a couple hours on either side is fundamental for instructing the brain a special collection of neurons right above the roof of the mouth which then instructs all the cells of the body when to be active it's so like you're a factory and you need your digestion to work on a particular schedule and you need your spleen to work on another schedule and it's morning light an evening light in particular and the cells that do this they pay attention not to blue light everyone's kind of obsessed with blue light as it relates to this stuff wrong that's only half the equation it's the it's the contrast between yellow light and blue light so in the morning and at sunset yellows are getting brighter watch a sunrise err but sometime or sunset and blues are getting darker and that contrast is relayed to the brain you don't perceive it even blind people can transmit this information into the brain and it's and it says make a cortisol pulse early in the day to give you act 2 you know energy and agitate your body to go be active and then it times the onset of the melatonin pulse in the evening which is going to put you to sleep and so when we think about the brain and the nervous system being isolated it is isolated but it's a as much as it's a machine and a collection of cells they need to work together and they need to know when to be active and so it's viewing of morning sunlight in particular an evening sunlight in particular that anchors everything that goes on from the top of your skull to the bottom of your feet in terms of this basic thing of when to be alert and when to be asleep and screens but not just screens and not just blue light making their way into the hours of say 11 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. do just the opposite there was a paper published in cell of a very an excellent journal showing that bright light activation between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. sends a signal from the eye to a brain structure called the habenula the name doesn't matter but it kicks off a dissapointment circuit it starts suppressing dopamine and the habenula is linked to the pancreas right the brain-body connection and starts dis regulating blood sugar so the key point is it why does it trigger disappointment yeah so this is very interesting so every circuit in the brain has a push in a pull so we have a reward system for viewing light at the particular times of day which are morning and evening and during the day and avoiding bright lights in the middle of the night but there's a punishment signal literally upon it a chemical punishment signal whereby dopamine which is this feel-good molecule that's essential for things like growth mindset and pursuit of goals and well-being of all sorts is suppressed when human beings or animals view bright light in the middle of this dark phase of their circadian cicle which is between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. approximately and so nature this it creates rewards for doing the right things that move you in the direction of general adaptation and wellness and it punishes you Mother Nature is kind of a double-edged sword she's very benevolent when she wants to be but if you don't obey her rules she punishes you too and so you have circuits in the brain that are Pro depressive and this light viewing and that from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. is a kicks off a pro depressive circuit and their reasoning I want to get into some of the other things that are Pro depressive as well but before we do that one one thing that I really want to anchor us to is what you were saying you're saying that people have an oversimplified view of what a growth mindset is you were just talking about that relationship to dopamine give us your sort of a brief nutshell version of what a growth mindset really is yeah so Carol and I have had a lot of discussions about this idea of yet I'm not there yet but that I can get there that's the whole principle behind growth mindset however when you the discovery of growth mindset is worth thinking about so Carol's discovery was these kids that for whatever reason you know like doing math problems even though they knew they couldn't get the answers right these were sure failed problems so it's the same kind of people that like doing puzzles and these kids not surprisingly go on to do phenomenally well in a number of different areas of academic pursuit you know but what's interesting about growth mindset is that it seems like there's some attachment of the reward systems of the brain to the action or the pursuit of a goal not just achieving a goal and when we step back and we look at what that really entails at a neurochemical level we have reward systems in the brain they generally fall into two categories there are the ward systems that make you feel really good with kind of the here-and-now and everything that's within the confines of your skin and the things you already have you know love of your dog love of your spouse gratitude for all the things you happen to have and then and those are generally governed by the release of molecules like serotonin and oxytocin okay but then there's another reward system which is the one that drove a lot of human evolution which is the dopamine reward system now dopamine is a very misunderstood molecule it's often talked about only in the context of reward like I'm gonna work for this goal I'm gonna build my company I'm gonna you know get tenure as a professor whatever it is and you reach it and you get this dopamine reward and indeed that's true but what's often not discussed is that dopamine is secreted and route to rewards while you pursue rewards now the ability to tap into that system to subjectively amplify that pathway of reward in pursuit of goals is an absolute game changer when it comes to things like anything challenging that of long duration or uncertainty or getting through this kovat you know pandemic situation the but the amazing thing is remember the brain only does five things and we get to decide which of those sensations and perceptions have relevance and which ones don't or which ones are attached to a goal and which ones aren't so growth mindset in its purest form is the attachment of these reward systems to the effort process to the friction process and not just to obtaining a reward and just as a kind of final point to that there's a very well-known body of literature in neuroscience at least among neuroscientists that talks about something called reward prediction error and it says if you can dose the dopamine subjectively as you go through the pursuit of something and then have a lot of dopamine when you reach that thing it's very likely that you're going to reinforce that circuit there will be neural plasticity and that circuit will become stronger so the next time you will revisit those sets of behaviors the opposite can happen to where you're in real anticipation of something this is gonna be great this is gonna be great this can be great and then you reach that goal and it's kind of underwhelming and that generally triggers this the circuit that I referred to earlier this kind of disappointment or des Pro depressive circuit so dopamine is involved in reward but it's also involved in the pursuit of rewards and so as you reach a milestone or as you tell yourself I'm on the right track this friction I'm feeling this late night this early morning this hard conversation with somebody that doesn't feel good I'm gonna tell myself this is for a larger purpose that's that subjective insertion that abstraction that we're talking about earlier and when you start releasing dopamine to those kinds of things there's essentially no limit on the number of things you can do or the energy to do them so just as a last last point about dopamine when we're in effort we're always secreting adrenaline we're always in pursuit and it's draining it's tiring dopamine has this beautiful capacity to buffer adrenaline and you know this you've experienced this before because if you've ever been working really really hard maybe your team is depleted everything's just a mess and somebody cracks a joke and all of a sudden in an instant it's like everything is reframed that couldn't have been hormonal hormones work on that on the schedule of like hours to days to weeks it had to be neurochemical it absolutely had to be neuro chemical and that neural chemical is dopamine did what you just described is literally the scientific breakdown of how you turn your life around I would just tell people that that subjective insertion is one of the most powerful concepts I have ever heard in neuroscience you're the only one I've ever heard articulated that succinctly now you talk a lot about meaning walk me through like the how we assign meaning how we leverage the reward and Punishment to to really get us in a situation where we can push through something other people might not be able to push through yeah so when you start thinking about things like growth mindset in terms of how they convert to neuro chemical signatures it leads us this place of okay if it's all subjective then you know if I just say look I'm gonna stand up out of my chair and and that's gonna feel amazing is that going to work well no it depends on the meaning that I attach to something and this and this subjective part can be a little tricky and a little bit hard for people so I want to try and lay it out in a in a concrete way so that if they want to applies this they can incidentally or not so incidentally I should say when you look at communities of very high performers and I'm fortunate enough to do some consulting with some people from special forces communities and so forth they're very good as are you at attaching a reward to specific behaviors in subjective ways so growth mindset and these dopamine rewards that we subjectively apply are not about saying oh you know I had a terrible day I performed poorly but you know what it's great I just feel great anyway it's not about that it's not about attaching your sense of reward to the ultimate goal it's about attaching your sense of reward to the fact that you're making action steps that are generally in the right direction the more you can reward the effort process the better off you are at building these kinds of neural circuits and these kind of tendencies to be able to lean into anything challenging over essentially any duration so how does this work like how would somebody do this right well keeping in mind that adrenaline and epinephrine are all great for getting us into action this is Mother Nature's Way of chemically making us feel kind of agitated remember stress was designed to agitate us to move us away from things and toward things but realizing that that's a limited resource that eventually that same chemical is what makes you have a negative mindset it feels painful it's the burn in your body it's uncomfortable and realizing that dopamine can push back on that neural chemically it can suppress those sensations of wanting to quit you say well then how do I get this dopamine to work for me before I hit a goal because not every day is gonna be a real win there some days I mean I know from my science career there were days that were really hard experiments didn't work papers got rejected and yet you know I've spent two decades or more just drilling on and drilling on and it's been a sheer pleasure at times but there's been you know some pain points along the way so what is this process really about and how would somebody implement these dopamine and epinephrine type nor chemical events in their own life well we all know the example of like wanting to run a marathon I've never run a marathon but that'd be a nice goal to have let's say tomorrow morning I set my shoes near the door now a lot of people have talked about this day one you set your shoes near the door day two you go out the door day three you run around the block day four but the key thing is not just to go through the actions but when you hit each one of those self designated milestones the milestones that you're setting out for yourself you have to pause for a moment and tell yourself I'm heading in the right direction I haven't run the marathon yet but this is the foundation upon which I'm going to lay another foundation upon which I'm going to lay another foundation and those little pulses of dopamine allow you to get that action step without the depletion that it would normally bring otherwise you're it's like you're spending money this is like replenishing this bank account that you have it's a neural bank account and so dopamine is the is the thing that you can control the dosing of and so if you say today it's my shoes at the door but tomorrow it's around the block and that's it but that's in the direction I want to go what you do is you now get those two events plus the next day the mile-long runners and so forth without it depleting you it actually builds this capacity to build more reward and this is what you've done this is what people from elite Special Forces can do they know how to make small simple physical steps in the real world that allow them to build on these rewards circuitries but they don't get delusional about how they're doing they know they keep the end in mind but they get very micro they move the horizon in very close and so if you can move the horizon to something you know you can complete and you reward that you essentially are where you were before you're just as strong if not stronger but you're heading in the direction you need to go you're not depleting and not spending out anything and it feels a little weird because none of us like to reward things that aren't external but the ability to control these internal reward schedules is everything one thing that you've talked about that I think is along these lines be interesting to see if if they feel as related to you when you know so much about it but for me at a high level these feel very related talked about somebody gets in a car accident acetylcholine if I'm not mistaken is released it says [ __ ] pay attention to this pay attention right now and it it basically responds to peaks and valleys so something really bad happens or something really good happens it's present you begin to hardwire the association of whatever emotion is with that thing and so if you have something a traumatic advantage of whatever and you now see something is very negative you can actually flip that by getting in a state where you're secreting acetyl choline again and now in a positive right so that you can feel good about that thing so how do people take that take control of that process so if you've been in a car accident you now have this negative association with driving how do you grab a hold of the production of acetylcholine how do you reframe yeah so it's great you're mentioning acetylcholine so acetylcholine is the neurochemical that we want to think about anytime we're talking about neural plasticity and in particular attention high attentional states so everyone knows that the brain is very plastic early in life so from birth until about age 25 you can learn so much for better or for worse I always say the downside is that early in life you're you have less control over your life circumstances but your brain is very plastic so there's a you know dark and light to that later in life you have a lot more control generally over your life circumstances but the brain becomes less plastic however we know based on Nobel prize-winning work and recent work in addition to that that the neuromodulator acetylcholine is secreted when we pay attention to something very specific it acts as sort of a spotlight in the brain making certain synapses the connections between neurons more active and more likely to be active again than others so when you hear that song that you love so much and it moves you and you feel dopamine being pulsed into your body that's a real thing you're actually getting dopamine secretion you've formed that deep association with that and acetylcholine draws your attention to that and that song is essentially wired in a very indelible way into your nervous system at multiple you can probably even with certain songs you can feel your body start to energize because of course the brain through connections with your muscles controls your body so for things that are traumatic or negative what we're really talking about is neural plasticity that's focused on unlearning and most of the therapies for this whether or not it's EMDR eye movement desensitization reprocessing or its traditional psychoanalysis and psychotherapy or its somatic embodied release big you know Kundalini breathing type almost all of those are designed to do something which is to bring the person or you bring yourself into a state of heightened alertness right you can't do this stuff when you're sort of half asleep heightened alertness and then focusing your attention on the traumatic or negative event this is the way that works and then pairing that with something new you know traditionally this was done with things like NLP or in talk therapy where people would feel the relation the positive relationship with the therapist that was kind of the main rationale in association with this very traumatic sometimes even you know shameful type events and the idea is that you you would simultaneously have those two experiences the negative one and the feeling of safety and you would rewire those circuitry's actually believe that can work but it can take a lot of times it can take a lot of visits to the therapist which is not to say it's bad it's just not everyone has access to those resources things like eye movement desensitization reprocessing simply moving the eyes laterally while recounting these negative events the woman who devised this figured out that somehow when people recount these traumatic experiences when they're doing these lateralized eye movements not vertical eye movements they somehow separate out the negative emotions and I thought for years people would ask me about this stuff Tom and I thought this is ridiculous we're so I'm a vision scientist and I work on stress it's like there's no way and then I really ate my words because for papers to in humans to in mice and then a fifth paper published in Nature which is kind of our Super Bowl of scientific publishing showed that these lateralized eye movements quiet the amygdala they actually suppress activation of this threat detection center in the amygdala and I would that be true ah so this is really where it gets cool turns out because of when the way that we view the visual world when we move through space when our head moves or when we walk and things flow past us that these lateralized eye movements are what happens when you move forward in space when you're walking when you're moving forward towards something and that suppresses activation of the amygdala now you say why well okay so then 2018 my laboratory did an experiment there's actually graduates in my laboratory where we're looking at fear in this case we're looking at fear too big looming objects that either trigger freezing or running and hiding there's a brain area that's in your brain and my brain that mice also have that triggers a third option not run and hide not freeze but forward confrontation this is the no I'm gonna fight I'm gonna move forward in the face of adversity this is the growth mindset I'm going to lean into friction and it turns out that this circuit is linked to the dopamine reward pathway when we move word in the face of a threat and obviously we want to do this in healthy adaptive ways we suppress activity of the amygdala through physical action of moving forward and there's a signal sent to the areas of the brain that control dopamine reward those reward centers then trigger the release of dopamine to reward forward effort in the face of stress or threat so when you hear about people saying look take some physical action when you're feeling exhausted take some forward physical action when you're feeling overwhelmed by this traumatic experience now that could be in the form of a walk in the now this therapist she figured out with EMDR because you can't take people walking around for therapy sessions she figured out that these lateralized eye movements are what triggers suppression of the amygdala and it makes perfect sense because the amygdala this threat detection center in our brain it doesn't connect to the limbs so how does it know if you're moving forward well because the eyes are moving you have these reflexive my movements that move in time you're moving through space so to make this a little more succinct it's really forward movement action pushing yourself across that threshold not only rewards you but it suppresses activity of the fear centers in the brain and these are ancient hardwired mechanisms these aren't hacks these are things that Mother Nature installed in us so I love this more than you could possibly imagine this is so interesting one of the things that I've heard talked about I think is really powerful is that overcoming of fear isn't about diminishing the fear response it's about making more robust a sense of being brave in the face of that fear so moving forward to translate it to you know like you say if if your brain is meant to interpret stimuli what at a stimulus level what is that thing that's going to trigger the response talk about the I don't know if there's mice or rats I think it's rats where you force them to fight and they're like in a tube and you like that that study to me tied with what you just said is insanely especially for people who've allowed themselves to become paralyzed by you know fear or whatever forward movement provided it doesn't endanger you or kill you is absolutely the remedy for fear stress and all and at least in the clinical literature to these sort of trauma events you know that that people carry with them for many years of course trauma needs to be dealt with hopefully with a professional but we can all apply these mechanisms and these neurochemical reward schedules so that the study that you're referring to is a beautiful one there's a classic study where researchers not my lab put two rats or you could do this with mice into a tube and the tendency is for them to try and push one or the other one out one always wins and pushes the other one out we call the one that got pushed out the loser the one that pushed them out the winner here are the interesting things about this first of all the winner will tend to win with other in other battles even though these are just pushing battles more because it's simply one the time before the loser by losing will tend to lose and some people say oh well that explains a lot about society etc well here's where it gets really interesting you can even take a mouse or a rat and push it from behind and make it the winner and then on subsequent trials where you're not pushing it it will tend to win more often so the wind doesn't even have to come from itself so last year there was a very important paper published about this where a set of researchers just said well what is it like what is this winning circuit and this losing circuit enough with the demonstration that this happens like what's happening on what's under the hood and so they went into the brain and they identified a brain area which is part of the frontal cortex the area that we typically think about planning action executive function all the kind of high-level stuff and what they discovered was this brain area is more active in the winter than in the loser in fact they could take the loser and over stimulate this area and turn the losers into winners now it gets even more ridiculous than that if you quiet this brain area winners become losers okay and and if you take a winner and let's say at this tube battle and you put them into I'll say a cold environment with a bunch of other mice and you have just a warm corner mice don't like to be cold and you say who gets the warm corner right who gets the luxury spot it's always the winner so it even breaks down at the level of social interactions as you say okay all right now we know that this brain area is this it's this one area of the frontal cortex but what's it actually doing right okay what's it actually Trant what how can we translate this turns out this brain area that's responsible and required for winning in this series of experiments is actually driving up the level of activation what you and I would call agitation or stress to the point where that animal is more likely to move forward it's simply taking stress which is wired into us in order to make us feel agitated instead of suppressing us you know instead of saying you know I'm just gonna sit here I'm overwhelmed and I'm just gonna move into action so there's a circuit for winning there's the same circuit when it's hypoactive not active enough is what causes losing in these competitive scenarios and similarly there's a circuit for quitting there's an nora and Efrain circuit in the brainstem this was published in the last couple years showing that when animals or people are in constant effort eventually that level of norepinephrine gets so high that it triggers a circuit that shuts down the motor control over the limbs and you just say that's it I give up I'm done so these mechanisms were hardwired into us we all have them whether or not it's from evolution mother nature God the universe it is it's irrelevant to the discussion that these circuits exist in everybody and I think it's a select few people who really understand that forward action is what drives these circuits it's the ability to take that agitation stress agitation increase our focus and they bias us for movement and nature wanted that they want us to move forward in the face of challenge not to be quieted we weren't sitting around battling Tigers and saber-toothed Tigers all the time more likely we were in caves and we were getting hungry and we had to go out and search for things agitation and stress were designed to get us up and move us and when we try and fight that too much and we try and quiet that stress that actually can be problematic you have to side are you gonna try and quiet stress or are you gonna actually lean into action that's a critical choice point for everybody who's experienced anything negative or positive for that matter yeah that that has so useful in terms of getting people to understand how to get themselves out of it and this goes back to this notion that your thoughts are ultimately a choice like you get to decide what you think about and when you understand that you're living in this vr environment and that there are things like simply moving forward is going to make you feel entirely different that you're being essentially manipulated by evolution by nature or however you want to think about it to get you agitated enough to go out and do the things you need to do but that it has this just feedback loop of how it makes you feel about yourself that winning baguettes winning and losing baguettes losing but it's it isn't like it's some sort of grand intangible level that it's happening at the level of neuro chemistry that there are regions of the brain that are designed for this so how can somebody begin to turn things around in their life cuz I know one thing that people really struggle with is they have this negative voice in their head that's just playing this loop and so even if they understand the mechanisms some part of them is gonna discount it right because it's like wow you're just trying to say that because you think you can manipulate neuro chemistry but you you're a loser like you just fall in like and that's what's playing in their head how do people go in and and really take the reins of that process so that they can start winning yeah great question so you know I'm never gonna argue that we can subjectively control all of our experience because there are some things that just genuinely suck right and when they and it's important to it and it's important to register those those not so great events or terrible events because they can drive us all so you know we can be driven from a place of anger frustration and and you know revenge or we can be driven from a place of you know love gratitude and etc I'm not here to judge which one is better or worse but the nervous system doesn't distinguish between them so if you're the kind of person that needs to you know kind of budge your self into something great if you're the kind of person that wants to do things from more of a warm fuzzy feeling that's fine too what I will say is this the ability to tap into this dopamine reward system which is act anytime you're in pursuit of something that's outside the boundaries of your skin and literally the boundaries of your body as well as the reward system the serotonin oxytocin system which is really about the things that are contained within your own body and a media experience things like gratitude and you know touch and comfort and things like that with loved ones the ability to tap into both is crucial now you said something really important which was well negative thoughts I give thoughts what to do I don't believe that it's very easy to suppress negative thoughts however when you realize that thoughts can be deliberately introduced you can start replacing negative thoughts with new types of thoughts so you can always add something in but when people start to realize that thoughts are very much like physical actions of reaching and picking up a glass of water or taking a jog around the ball block or typing an email perfectly this is something I sometimes do because I'm I you know I struggle to do the perfect email not all my emails are perfect but when I do one I make sure that I I complete and I think okay it's possible it's not because the email being perfect is so important it's because I want to remind myself that my thoughts and my actions are essentially the same the nervous system can organize thoughts so for somebody that's struggling you know we have these examples like oh they were really back on their heels or they were so depleted no money and all this stuff what are they we we have so many examples like that but in trying to make it actionable it's really about saying yep that's all true but I'm gonna introduce a thought which is I made it through today I mean I made it through today and that's actually worth celebrating at a micro level so if you can give yourself dopamine rewards in small increments right you're not trying to celebrate that you made it through one day sometimes that's a huge feat but most of the time you just want to dose yourself with a little bit of that internal release of dopamine you start rewarding incremental steps and if there's anything that your listeners could take away from this whole thing about dopamine and reward schedules and being in movement its reward incremental steps in particular incremental steps that are about forward action so maybe that's writing an email maybe that's maybe that's that run around the block maybe that's something grandeur for you as you better at things right the stairs get further and further away from one another because you've achieved more success and so they tend to be you have to take the rungs on the ladder or further apart so to speak that's a time when you really need to implement not only the dopamine rewards but also those serotonin oxytocin rewards etc so to make it actionable I would say remember don't spend so much time trying to suppress negative thoughts if you need trauma therapy pursue that with a professional but if you have negative thoughts just remember I can also introduce positive thoughts the same way I can control running around the block positive thoughts are the equivalent a forward physical action and if you reward them internally you buffer yourself against the quitting circuit this norepinephrine circuit we were talking about before you are building a stronger version of yourself completely between your own ears and some people say well that's silly it's like you're saying oh I'm gonna jump up and down reward myself for doing nothing no you're building the neural circuits that reward that you can control self reward and in doing that you can push through days and weeks of effort consistently I don't mean necessarily all-nighters but you can push and push and push you know my career is one that was made over two decades it wasn't we had our big you know Peaks and we added a lot of valleys but learning to control these rewards is absolutely key and I know you've done this to Tom it's like you know it the huge wins are great but it's really about rewarding these increments so you can keep going another 30 another 40 years 50 years 100 years if that's how long you know David Sinclair has his way you know we'll live 100 more years all of us so yeah people if people learn to tie things to the process then they've got a real shot the this the success is not guaranteed but the struggle is right so if you are able to get to the point where you get excited about the learning process you get excited about trying something even if you fail that if you can associate in your own mind that I feel better about Who I am because I tried this thing then it begins to stack because even the failures become something that you learn and so you actually have made some progress because you took action because you tried something and now understanding you know some of the brain mechanisms around it it it really gets super powerful now for people to make use of every tool that they have there at their disposal something that you've talked about that I've always been really interested in at the periphery but never have Dogen into it enough is hypnosis when people think of hypnosis I think they think of stage hypnosis what's the real deal why is it useful and and how do people actually use it yeah so um I'm really glad you asked about this so I have a colleague his name is David Spiegel in our department of psychiatry at Stanford and he and I have a collaboration going now looking at how respiration or breathing can be used to shift the brain into different states and I've talked to David about this and so I'm sort of borrowing from his words here so I want to be fair that these are from those conversations so hypnosis inevitably involves relaxing the nervous system taking the nervous system in two states that are more like sleep now what I mean by that is in high alert states where you're talking and planning and inaction and stress in particular the brain is very linear it's saying okay if this then this if then that this is why we tend to before we're thinking when when we're stressed we tend to be not in our media experience but really kind of forward thinking so clinical hypnosis involves going into a state of deeper relaxation so that our analysis of space and time meaning the way that the brain is perceiving events is slightly dismantled so that it's a little bit dreamlike and then the hypnotist and this could be by listening to a script or listening to a therapy hypnotherapist starts to narrow our context take our thoughts if you will it down a particular path and that path could be one of stress reduction or a smoking cessation hypnosis is incidentally is very good for treatment of smoking cessation or for feelings of well-being our confronting traumas so what it is is it's really opening up the window for neural plasticity which is of course the brain's ability a change in response to experience to trigger neural plasticity you have to have focus especially as an adult you need a ctul calling released but high levels of attention acetylcholine and norepinephrine together norepinephrine to create that sense of urgency and acetylcholine to bring that spotlight of focus in really really tight that triggers plasticity but the actual marks certain synapses in the brain for change but the actual changes in the synapse is the rewiring okay that happens during states of sleep and depressed so this is why when you're trying to learn a motor skill you go and you go and your tennis serve it's not happening it's not happening you take a break you come back and you nail it like wait what happened well you need a time to set those circuits in motion and allow them to do to the rewire and the sort of adaptation hypnosis seems to capture both the high attentional state and the deep relaxation at the same time it's this very unusual state of mind where you're neither asleep nor awake and in tight focus or narrow focus and it's very clear that it leads to these rapid changes in behavior because you're rewiring the brain and the reason you're able to rewire the brain so quickly is because you're getting the trigger event the focus and you're also getting the relaxation event simultaneously and so it's much faster than separating out the learning trigger from the actual rewiring of the brain my lab has a deep interest and David Spiegel's lab has a deep interest now and using respiration or breathing to shift our state to either heightened states of focus and alertness to open up neural plasticity right there are going to be lots of ways to access can you give me some examples like what are we doing very specifically breathwork I find incredibly interesting I changed my life through meditation just shifting my breathing to diaphragmatic breathing was no joke it changed my life it changed my relationship dang xiety my feeling of being able to control my state as it started to spiral so I'd be very curious to know what type of breathing are we talking about here yeah so I'm really glad you mentioned the diaphragm diaphragm of course being this muscle inside of all of us at least all mammals that works all the time to move our lungs because all the cells our body need oxygen of course we get rid of carbon dioxide it does that but it's done reflexively but we can also take voluntary control over it I want to just mention about the diaphragm why it's so important for what we're these state changes is that a lot of people talk about the vagus nerve and all this stuff the vagus and these connections between the brain and this vagus nerve or the gut it's what gets activated when you're really full and you eat a big meal and you feel relaxed those are great but it's very slow the diaphragm is skeletal muscle just like your bicep just like your tricep just like your quadricep it is the only internal organ except maybe a couple muscles in your throat that are actually skeletal muscle meaning it was designed to be voluntarily moved and the diaphragm isn't just designed to move your lungs it also sends a signal through the so called phrenic nerve back to the brain to inform your brain about the status of your body so when you breathe fast deliberately the reason you feel kind of an elevated sense of alertness is because yeah there are chemicals secrete but mostly because the phrenic nerve is firing off it's telling you hey the body's moving we're really running now even though you're stationary in a chair if you're doing breathing or if you're breathing very slowly and rhythmically right box-type breathing or you know slow slow breathing your diaphragm is telling your brain hey we're calm we're good and you calm down very quickly on the order of seconds and so once you start tapping into this you start realizing okay movement of the body was designed to inform the brain of where to be not just the brain telling the body and how does the body communicate with the brain through the phrenic nerve from the diaphragm so my lab is really pursuing two questions and this is still being worked out so I just want to highlight that it's still in progress but certain patterns of breathing will calm you very much like entering a hypnotic state and so you have a subset of neurons in your brain stem that are responsible for sighing is that you have a subset of neurons in your brain some responsible for coughing subset of neurons responsible for laughter and a subset of neurons in your brain stem for sign this was a paper published in Nature this is a real thing these neurons are every so often and your dog does this to you inhale twice and then you exhale long now that double inhale best done through the nose on the inhales and then long exhale through the mouth activates these sign neurons that trigger the so called calming flex the parasympathetic arm of the nervous system so we have a hardwired mechanism a set of neurons connection to the diaphragm and back again from the diaphragm to the brain that was designed to activate calm and when people ask me how should I breathe to calm myself down I always say double inhale through the nose followed by exhales two or three of those will reset your autonomic nervous system faster than any other mechanism we're aware of because it's really capitalizing on a set of neural circuits now once you're calm you say well how do I get into plasticity States there you want to go the other direction that's going to be inhaling a lot more than you exhale you're gonna be driving in more oxygen than you are breathing out generally carbon dioxide and that will lead to states that are kind of more elevated this is typical of things like - mo breathing wim hof breathing Kundalini breathing and when people enter those states their whole world changes because it shuts off the frontal cortex it really this is why sometimes people pass out or they feel like they want to get up and move you know you get some odd behavior when you're doing this kind of thing so the key is if you want to access states of heightened plasticity let's say you want to learn faster where you want to be more if you want to bring more out of some physical training that you're doing the key is to apply those principles first you need to focus you need to bring yourself to that heightened state of alertness you can breathe to do that so this would be super oxygenated breathing then you want to drop into a state of calm and you do that by these a couple maybe two or three rounds of inhale inhale exhale inhale inhale exhale and then now your brain is in a state we believe this is still again being worked out you know in labs like mine and David's but then you're in a state for heightened learning because you're in a state where neuro chemicals like acetylcholine are going to be at levels that are higher than they typically would be things like noradrenaline slightly higher than they typically would be but not in a discombobulated way in a very regulated way and the cool thing is you're regulating them so you could argue you know earlier we're talking about subjective emotions and thoughts and all these things but one thing that's absolutely concrete is breathing I always think of physical exercise movement writing whatever singing dancing talking those are physical actions in the universe then you have thoughts and somewhere in between those is controlling your respiration once you can control everything that's within the confines of your skull and skin once you can really control that relationship that brain body relationship you start to realize that relationship is a lot like any other relationship to forward action it's just all happening within the confines of my body so it's heightened states of focus followed by states of relaxation that are gonna prime your nervous system for learning and plasticity just like hypnosis sorry for the long winded discussion do don't you dare apologize that is some of the most powerful and useful information literally ever I can't I can't tell you how much I love what you're studying what you're talking about this is so incredible dude thank you so much where can people engage with you where can they learn more I think this is so important and so powerful I want people to really connect with you oh well thanks so much so I teach Instagram in little short bits and sometimes in longer bits on Instagram and that's Huberman lab hu ber ma n la b so that's why I teach neuroscience and offer up things about plasticity and sleep and also some tools and we talk about things like autism and etc lots of things anytime I see a paper it's interesting I try and discuss it my lab is Huberman lab comm there we put our papers and our research that we publish and we were always recruiting subjects for experiments where we pay you to participate in these different kinds of things we're launching a big respiration breathwork study soon so if you reach out by Instagram or I'll probably announce it there as well be wonderful we were looking to recruit people we're teaming up with some tech companies they will arm people with some really terrific at-home tech so we can get their data and really get a clear sense of how these tools and practices aren't just landing subjectively but really what's happening at a concrete level even things like cortisol measures and stuff so if you're interested you could reach out through either venue the Huberman lab or the instagram cube Rubin lab and I generally try and respond to everybody's requests sometimes I'm a little slow but I really aim to do that as much as possible nice man I love it dude so last question if you were gonna have people make one change but have the biggest impact on their health what changes you have them make now that is a great question I think the fundamental step that everybody should be taking every day for many aspects of their health mental physical digestive immune all of that is to get 2 to 10 minutes of bright light first thing in the morning on waking ideally it's sunlight you could do it through a window if you wear it you probably shouldn't wear sunglasses while you do it don't stare at the Sun until you burn your retinas out or something and make it painful please don't do that but just getting bright light exposure first thing in the morning organizes the nervous system and the rest of the organs of the body in such a powerful way that I feel like if you do that most days if you miss a day no big deal but if you do that most days you're setting yourself on the path to do all the other sorts of things correctly and your biology will thank you for it love that dude this was amazing thank you so much I definitely win the quarantine is lifted we've got to get together in the same room I think that would be so much fun I could easily go on for another hour or two or three hours talking about this with you so you have an open invitation to come back in the very near future so thank you so much that definitely thank you absolutely man thank you for coming on everyone I want to tell you all about our sponsor whoop life can be stressful we're all impacted by stress differently though from what we do at work how we train and our lives at home work constantly exerting ourselves and oftentimes we only think about what we do to stay fit and how we eat but we overlook the importance of sleep in all of this tomorrow's best work though is done by night and our sponsor loop is a fitness tracker strap with an incredible app that helps monitor your sleep loop provides the personalized insights to make smarter performance habits from your sleep loop tracks all things sleep from your sleep cycles stages disturbances and efficiency based on how strenuous your day is loop will provide suggested sleep times so 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Channel: Tom Bilyeu

Views: 529,732

Rating: 4.9314647 out of 5

Keywords: Tom Bilyeu, Impact Theory, ImpactTheory, TomBilyeu, Inside Quest, InsideQuest, Tom Bilyou, Theory Impact, motivation, inspiration, talk show, interview, motivational speech, Andrew Huberman, Health Theory, neuroscience, Stanford, stress, neuroplasticity, nervous system, dopamine, acetylcholine, unlearning, negative experiences, lateralized eye movements, negative thoughts, andrew huberman jre, joe rogan andrew huberman, andrew huberman joe rogan, joe rogan, huberman jre, huberman rogan

Id: OGa_jt3IncY

Length: 54min 56sec (3296 seconds)

Published: Thu May 21 2020