"YOUR BEHAVIOUR Won't Be The Same AFTER THIS!" (Change Your Brain)| Andrew Huberman & Lewis Howes

you can't fix your mind with your mind sometimes trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog positive thinking is not about being delusional positive thinking is about learning how to take control of internal processes and understanding that that will shape your external environment i think you gotta have a dream the school of greatness really yeah please welcome when things are really tough in life when people are really stressed out they have some type of traumatic event whether it's the loss of the job the pandemic whatever may be how can people use their mind to then push past pain or is that not something we should be thinking about pushing past pain but how do we use the mind under some type of traumatic experience for our benefit okay um it's an excellent easy question it's an excellent question it has a couple different uh answers because there are a couple different categories depending on what of answer depending on what people are dealing with right so i think all trauma anxiety fears they all map back to stress in some way now you can have stress without trauma you can have anxiety without trauma but you can't really have trauma without stress and anxiety so even though there aren't really strict definitions of the boundaries between trauma and stress and fear i think it's fair to say that trauma is a fear and or stress response that's happening at the wrong times right it's sort of carrying over from an experience it's making life uncomfortable or in some cases exceedingly challenging for example so um someone has a you know sexual assault um somebody sees a car accident or is in a car accident veterans come back from overseas there's kind of first person trauma where something happens to somebody and then there's a third person trauma where somebody sees something terrible happening there's grief and so there are a lot of categories and so we don't want to complicate the the landscape in the answer but i think it's important for people to understand that the stress response is at the core of all of this and when we talk about stress i think it's also important that we divide that into two kinds of stress because it defines the two approaches that people can take to combat stress fear anxiety what are the two types of stress okay the two types of stress are we the one is the one we're almost all familiar with because when we hear stress we think pupils dilating hand shaking heart beating oh my goodness oh my goodness are really upset you're stuck in traffic something is really bothering you you're angry you're having the the fight-or-flight response that you know that phrase gets thrown around a lot and then that those circumstances it's very important that people take control of their mind and their body in a way that allows themselves to calm down to reduce the so-called stress response and we can talk about tools to do that that are very concrete and that are very reliable there's another side of the stress response so what would that stress be called what's that type of stress ah so um unfortunately there's no name for this this is one of the important things maybe we'll figure it out today maybe your audience will figure it out yeah they're a smart bunch and they're living this stuff too so um unfortunately there isn't a word for this but um what is this one type of structure there's one type of stress which is you're you're too activated you're too alert you're too agitated and you want to be less alert less activated and less agitated the alert stress that's right we could call it the alert stress hyper alerts hyper alerts let's just do that for sake of conversation today and we are by no means a nomenclature committee so we can always revise later yeah there's another side of stress which is when there are a lot of things happening in the world pandemics you can't work because they've shut there's another shutdown or um there's strife in your life or things are really challenging and you're feeling exhausted and you can't get mobilized and alert enough and this has never really been cleanly laid out for people that and what i call the whole process is one of limbic friction okay so the limbic system are these areas deep in the brain limbic literally means edge they're near the edge of the brain and when we're stressed there's a lot of activity in these brain regions and then we've got this our forebrain our prefrontal cortex for the aficionados and when we're in a thinking and calm and deliberate and rational manner when we can control our body and our mind it's called top-down processing we're we're controlling ourselves but there's a lot of friction with that limbic pathway i promise i'll get to the practices so when there's this friction we can call it limbic friction for sake of discussion there you can't control all those impulses and all that anxiety or fatigue for too long and in fact as you get more tired or if someone has frontal damage if they have brain damage to the frontal lobes what you find is they become more impulsive when they feel like sleeping they just sleep even if it's socially inappropriate when they feel like yelling or screaming or swearing they just they just do that and so there's two kinds of limbic friction one is when we're too activated and we want to calm down and we're trying to say okay calm down don't don't say the thing that you know you shouldn't say don't do the thing you don't you know you shouldn't do and then there's the other kind of limbic friction which is the world is happening really fast and we feel buried we're overwhelmed and we need to get more activated we need more energy we need more energy we need to be able to lean into life and we're feeling overwhelmed what's that called well we should come up with a name now so that would be um exhaustion certain stress or overwhelm stress or overwhelm stress or um now a lot of people start giving these names to things that sound almost like clinical syndromes which sometimes they are but they'll say things like adrenal burnout which actually doesn't exist fatigue now there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome which is a real medical condition where people can't actually produce enough adrenaline but most of us have enough adrenaline in our bodies to last 200 years two lifetimes so the adrenals don't really burn out what happens is people are so over activated they're in this alertness hyper alert stress for so long that eventually they kind of crash into the over fatigue stress okay so one turns into the other one right so the first thing for anyone trying to navigate stress and then we'll talk about trauma is to understand in what kind of stress they're dealing with are you exhausted and having a hard time getting your energy up or is your energy too high and you're having a hard time getting your energy down because the solutions to those are often quite different so on the previous um time we met we talked about a tool for calming the body very quickly which is this double inhale long exhale typically the inhales are done through the nose the exhale through the mouth so the physiological psi which was discovered by scientists in the 30s and then jack feldman's group at ucla has really identified the underlying brain circuits and then my lab is now looking at this stuff in humans in a kind of more clinical setting that double inhale followed by an exhale we know is the fastest real time tool for taking one's state of alertness down the hyper alert stress right you're not going to crash into sleep but you're going from hype you're not feeling good you're too agitated you want to calm down and what's interesting about that tool is it speaks to a principle which is it's very hard to control the mind with the mind so when you're stressed just telling yourself don't stress don't stress don't stress calm down calm down rarely works it also really works to tell someone else to calm down to relax hey relax yeah usually it has the opposite effect don't tell me to relax and it can be damaging for relationships if you've ever you know someone's really stressed and you tell them to relax sometimes it actually can create more friction and they don't support it what should they do in that moment they should look to the body the nervous system includes the brain but also all the connections to the body and back again and so the when you can't control your mind you want to do something purely mechanical like the physiological side because that you know once you take control of the body in that way then the mind starts to fall under the umbrella of this top down control again top down control is what children and puppies don't have you know if if we had also yeah i've got a 10 year old bulldog his name is costello he barely does anything now because he's costillo but he but when he was a puppy everything was a stimulus he would walk over pick up a cord and chew on it then he'd drop it and he pivots something else and it's because they have they literally have no prefrontal cortex wired into this limbic system they don't have the suppression so there's no friction the limbic system just does whatever it wants and actually in humans with frontal temporal dementia and in certain people who have frontal temporal brain damage they become very impulsive my dad went through i don't know if i talked about this the last time so my dad had a uh a traumatic car accident 15 years ago it was 15 years ago a couple months ago where a car went on top of his car and went through the windshield and the bumper hit him in his head pretty much split open his head his girlfriend at the time was holding his head together went to the hospital airlifted in a helicopter was in a coma for three months and it's been a 15-year journey where we had to teach him re-teach him how to write how to talk how to walk like everything where it was almost like he was my father and his body but his mind was having to relearn like a child and even today when i see him visit him he'll he'll swear just compulsively he'll he'll do things that maybe aren't appropriate because he probably doesn't have the i don't know you can probably tell me better as a neuroscientist but what happens when someone has brain damage especially in the front uh frontal cortex what what happens to the brain yeah so these top when i say top down control there's literally a set of wires we call them axons from the prefrontal cortex that suppresses these impulsive behaviors in the limbic system and when there's damage it's essentially removing that break and you know in adults uh older adults especially because their behaviors aren't quite as um you know because they're older they aren't necessarily going to walk over and punch people or scream out exploitatives and these kinds of things um fortunately although sometimes you see that sometimes you see that um sadly but those circuits aren't functioning well and in young children if you ever go to a classroom i guess now kids are home a lot but in a typical kindergarten classroom what you'll notice is that some of the kids can sit very still and other kids are rocking back and forth and moving around a ton and the teacher is comfortable trying to people yeah i was one of those kids trying to corral the children and children mature at different rates and what's what you're seeing there is the different maturation of their frontal cortex when you see a child that's very deliberate and can really control their speech and their behavior you're looking at a child that has a lot of top-down control the frontal cortex is really engaged now is that genetic is that uh probably a mixture it's probably a mixture of environmental influences and genetic like most things and i'm not trying to just hedge here sure i think um you know like for instance i have a niece who um is adopted and um she's very deliberate and very calm and so we you know we wonder you know what what you know is this genetic is it nature nurture you know there's probably some genetic bias and then there's probably also um a lot of environmental influences i mean a lot of what we're taught in school and at home because a lot of kids are homeschooled now is about what not to do right you know sit still don't say this don't say that you know we get to plea say please and thank you you know sit up straight you know do your dishes kind of stuff but a lot of the the don't language is designed to around these things of top down control we've set up a lot of important social constraints right we've all felt this as adults too in two ways it becomes really extreme when we can't control that limbic system one is when we're when we're very fatigued when we're fatigued or we're sick or we're in pain physical pain chances are when something bothers us we're closer to that threshold of saying the thing that we wish we're not patients exactly no patient that's right so how do we learn to have patients when we are hyper alert or overwhelm exhausted stress okay so when we are in hyper alert there's a mechanism associated with that that makes our internal world measure time differently what happens under those conditions is you feel like the external world is moving very slowly i think i might have mentioned this in the our previous meeting but when you're really stressed on the hyper alert side it seems like the world is going very slowly you're going to just knowing that and knowing that it's likely that you're going to feel impatient and if the world is moving much too slow sort of like you're trying to get someplace on time and the person in front of you doesn't know where you're going i was the guy not knowing where i was going this morning and so and we can't see each other in cars so you think what is this person doing oh my goodness and they're just looking for the right turn yeah yeah so there's that and then when we are fatigued it seems like the world is going really fast okay and so for people who are exhausted everything feels overwhelming now of course the rate that things are actually moving in the world is the same but the perception is that it's just too much and we can't cope so we talked about a tool to calm oneself the reason i like the physiological side is we are all equipped with the pathway if people want to know if there are some medically oriented folks out there or if you want to teach this to other folks there's a nerve called the phrenic nerve p-h-r-e-n-i-c that goes from the brain down to the diaphragm that controls that and then controls the lungs and so when you decide okay i'm going to use the psi the physiological side to calm myself in a way you're engaging top down control because you're you're taking control of your internal landscape rather than trying to take control of your thinking which is very hard you can't fix your mind with your mind sometimes trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog it's just going to keep moving right if you've ever tried to grab or smoke it just moves it's vapors you're never going to grab it the key is to is to is to take control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity this phrenic nerve and the reason i describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail but i think when people realize this isn't something that you build up over time and then are able to do that you literally have a wire set of wires that goes down to your diaphragm this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs and then as you blow off carbon dioxide when you do that exhale you your brain starts to calm down and then your mind the top down control the cortex can start taking control of the limbic system again it's like you're it's almost like you're losing control of the automobile and you're trying to steer but really there's another lever that if you just pull it then the stake the steering wheel will stabilize for you so that's the way to think about the physiological side on the other side of things when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued there are two ways to approach that first is the kind of foundation of fatigue which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep this is something that doesn't get discussed a lot i don't think i've discussed this on any podcast previously but you know getting better at sleeping is a whole set of practices but sleep is a slow tool it's not a real-time tool because if you're feeling exhausted and you have to get up and have your day deal with children deal with work deal with life we can talk about how to get better at sleeping but in real time what you want to do is you want to bring more alertness into the system focus focus and alertness the way to do that is to take advantage of a very well-established medical fact all medical students learn this all mbs know this which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe and your heart rate and so i'll give a little bit of the background and then i'll give this specific check just just so that um people understand where this is coming from so when we inhale when we inhale it almost feels like everything's moving up but actually what happens is our diaphragm moves down okay so when we inherit our diaphragm moves down when that happens our heart literally gets a little bit bigger the volume of the heart gets a little bit bigger which means that whatever blood in there is moving per unit time a little bit slower and there's a set of neurons in the heart called the sinoatrial node that sends a signal to the brain and says hey blood flow is slowing down and the brain sends a signal back to the heart and says okay let's speed up and speeds up the heart rate so the short concise way to put it is when you inhale more vigorously or longer you're speeding up your heart rate this is this actually there's a name for it in the medical community but the important thing to understand is as you inhale you're sending a neural signal to your heart to speed up and when you exhale the diaphragm moves up the heart gets a little bit smaller literally because there's less space there then there's a signal sent to the brain and the brain sends a signal back and says slow down the heart rate and so this is happening quickly so if you inhale it's speeding up that's right if you exhale it's slowing down that's right so if you want to become more alert you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous or a little bit longer than your exhale so let's say you get up in the morning our longer inhale uh shorter exhale that's right not to speed up your heart rate and to be more alert not longer exhale double intake right shorter yeah so longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert longer or more vigorous or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert and there's this has a name which is as you know it's a certain kind of arrhythmia but that makes it sound bad this is actually what's happening all the time this is the basis of heart rate variability when people talk about heart rate variability is good you know that you don't want your heart rate to be one level all day high or low a lot of people don't realize that they think oh i got a nice slow heart rate you think all day long when you're asleep that's right well slow heart rate is better than high heart artificially high you know sorry excessively high heart rate but you don't want your heart rate to be like this you want your heart rate to go through these fluctuations heart rate variability is good why because heart rate variability reflects the activation of what's typically called the parasympathetic nervous system which is the brain's ability to slow down and calm the nervous system so when your heart rate is going like this it means that your heart rate is speeding up and then your brain is slowing it down your heart rate is speeding it up and your brain is slowing down and that's what's happening all day long as you're moving through things in a kind of calm alert way but when you get that troubling text message or you see a post or a comment and you go and all of a sudden your heart rate just goes and you feel like you immediately want to respond or you're going to say the thing that maybe you shouldn't say you're going to do the thing that maybe you shouldn't do or you just want to be thought more thoughtful and more targeted in your response the key is to slow down the heart rate by making your exhales longer or more vigorous so it could simply be and then shorter inhales longer exhales or do the physiological sigh or if you wake up in the morning and you're experiencing the other kind of stress which is you look at your skin the world is overwhelming me my life is over i don't know what i'm going to do i don't even know what sequence i'm going to do things in you're just discombobulated and a lot of people struggle with this the key is to do a few breaths even while you're getting out of bed and preparing your morning coffee or water or whatever it is and just start breathing in a way that's inhale emphasized which sounds weird but basically what you're doing is you're speeding up your heart rate at some point usually within only two or three of those breaths you're going to feel more alert and then you can just go back to breathing normally so you want to do this for hours you do this for a few moments or minutes that's right and and while i'm a fan of breath work as its own thing because breathwork can teach you how to operate these levers in your brain and body so to speak breath work is a dedicated practice that you do away from these stressful events whereas learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind using your breathing so it goes breathing heart rate mind in that sequence so if your mind isn't where you want it to be don't start with the mind start with your breathing then which will control your heart rate which will then allow you to control your mind so don't don't think your way out of a moment of stress feel breathe your way out of this moment of stress that's right and and one of the things and i'm i'm certain they're going to be people out there listening to this saying wait a second the yo the yogis and the yogurt community has been talking about this for centuries what are you doing you know this is just a re recasting of what we already know i agree i agree within the science community these things have been given crazy names like arrhythmias and heart rate variability and um the diaphragm and the phrenic nerve and so the the language of science has known all about this for many centuries also but it's been shrouded by language and the yogic community has known about this for a long time but it's been shrouded by language so by bringing this discussion forth i'm by i just want to be clear that i i'm not trying to reinvent the wheel or pretend that i invented the wheel by any stretch i'm trying to say that we all have these circuits these levers in our body that we can that we can pull and push and people learn how to do this intuitively but we're never really taught the underlying mechanisms and i do believe that one and yoga is not big on mechanisms they're very good on naming and on you know yogis in different areas of the world when they say something they usually know what the other one is talking about scientists do as well but mechanism when people can just understand a little bit about why the heart slows down when you exhale more than you inhale or why the heart speeds up when you inhale more than you exhale i do believe that having that knowledge in the mind allows people in a moment of stress to say oh i understand what's happening to me and therefore i should go to this particular tool you know i i do understand that one doesn't need to understand how an engine works in order to drive a car but you do need to know how the control panels were right right this is why we send people to driving so yeah and why we don't that 10 year olds drive um although i'm sure there's some yeah yeah on a farm somewhere yeah well actually there was this one news thing i don't know if you've seen this where a state trooper pulls or a chp or somebody pulls over a car that's kind of weaving through the lanes on and they pull over and i think the kid was six years old oh my goodness a man should get onto the freeway oh and he was driving the left-hand lane and his driving was pretty bad but he was below the that's crazy well that just tells you that the young mind is eager to steer things and press pedals and things of that sort of explore we are definitely not recommending but this is very different than driving a car in the sense that all the panels and all the controls are there we have we're all most people are taught how to drive a car we most people are not taught how to drive their nervous system and so a lot of what i'm talking about here is just one language one version of the language of how to drive and control your nervousness and you can't drive your nervous system with thoughts and controlling your mind alone you have to connect the whole vehicle is what i'm hearing you can't just steer thoughts you need to also use the brakes or also use different levers which is the entire car that's right it's it's very hard to control the mind with the mind it can be done there are people that are get better at that right maybe it's like practice over time but using i say when in moments of stress either excessively alert stress or excessively fatigued stress look to the body because there are mechanisms that have been built into the body for hundreds of thousands of years designed to do this now the reason i can say that is that the physiological side the double inhale exhale is controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brain stem that jack feldman's lab discovered when children or adults have been sobbing very hard or when they're out of air in a claustrophobic environment they naturally do that to reopen these little sacks in their lungs now inhale emphasized breathing can be practiced in a way sort of away from stress in a kind of offline approach that can be beneficial for raising what we call stress threshold so there's a whole other way to look at stress which is to say how do i get calmer in the mind when my body is freaking out there you go and i think people will recognize some of what i'm about to describe as kind of wim hof like breathing it was also traditionally been called tumo breathing some people call it super oxygenation breathing although then there are other people like patrick mcewen and company that will say well you're actually blowing off more carbon dioxide than you are bringing in oxygen and so the naming again now is a mess breathing yoga is exhale emphasize but um tumor breathing wim hof breathing and super what sometimes is called super oxygenation breathing involves doing a lot of inhale exhale inhale ex it's hyperventilating it's deliberate hyperventilation and followed by exhales and breath holds followed by inhales and holes now the repetitive breathing more quickly and deeply this kind of thing or some variant of that all through the mouth or all through the nose brings up the heart rate and causes the adrenal glands which sit right above the kidneys to secrete adrenaline they make you more alert and we know this my lab has been looking at this with a number of different measures exploring the nervous system and the periphery like the heart rate and you see these big inflections in heart rate when people do this typically it makes people feel agitated at first they feel a little bit agitated and then when you exhale and hold your breath for 15 seconds or so or longer in some cases if somebody's skilled at this what you're doing essentially is you're learning to be calm as your body is flooded with all this adrenaline and the heart rate is going you're learning to calm your mind that's right so you're learning actually to separate the mind your body might be shaking and vibrating and you're learning to suppress that and you're just and that is 100 top down control what you're doing in those moments is you're learning to take your forebrain and say fight the temptation to move fight the temptation to breathe now i don't want to suggest anyone do this to the point where it's unsafe you should never do this anywhere near water even in a puddle because people have drowned people have died doing high oxygenation breath packing type and passing out passing out it is it can be quite dangerous so people need to take the appropriate precautions before they do it if people have pulmonary issues it can there are you know it can be problematic if people get trained and how to do it properly it can be relatively safe okay my lab has been doing experiments um on a now we have more than 100 people doing different types of breathing and exploring how it affects the mind and the body this particular pattern of breathing ah 25 or 30 times followed by an exhale and a hold and then a big inhale and a hold sometimes doing more inhaling and exhaling type repetitive breathing that is really somebody training themselves how to self-induce stress and we know from some good literature and some emerging science that's still ongoing that it is possible to get comfortable in these agitated states so that your mind is okay feels okay when the body is feeling like it wants to tremble or move that you can learn to suppress that activity the ice bath is another good example of this some people go straight to the ice bath because cold water will almost always induce a low level of stress in people you have to you have to kind of fight it even if you learn to love it you still have to every time jumping in there okay i gotta control control the mind essentially that's calm exactly so the body is saying this is really cold this is really cold get out now and you're pushing back on that and it's top down control it's pure top down control and you could do this any number of ways there's actually a uh something called the hour of pain which is um before you jump to conclusions the um the hour pain was actually described to me by a friend of mine a former military special operations guy who said that you they place you this wasn't through military but this is a kind of outside the military extracurricular extracurricular activities of placing you into one position on the floor and you have to stay there for an hour which can be excruciating there's so much limbic friction where you want to move so badly because the stabilizing muscles of the body and the feedback in our muscular skeletal system says move move move i just want to move the tiniest bit and so all that practice is it's just a different version of the ice bath yes it's you're learning top-down control so you know we started off with a question about trauma yes and we'll get there but i think it's very important just to kind of summarize that people understand to just ask themselves the question if i am i feeling too much agitation or am i feeling too much exhaustion if it's too much agitation emphasize exhales and do the physiological sigh yoga nidra is also a wonderful practice that is kind of the mirror image of super oxygenation breathing it involves long exhale breathing lying down on your back completely relaxing your body and learning to completely turn off thinking which sounds hard but you can learn how to do it very quickly if you do that practice for about 10 minutes a day yeah it literally means yoga sleep and probably the most commented thing we have on the previous interview is where are the links for this yoga nidra stuff so we're gonna get that so before i leave today there are several but um people can go on youtube um some of the better ones out there these are all cost free um kamini desai has a really wonderful one that she i also just happen to like her voice so it works for me um there's a guy named liam gillen who has one if you like a male irish voice there's that they're all you have to pick a voice that works for you yeah um so i'll make some suggestions but if people don't like the particular voice that's walking them through the yoga differently find a different voice so that's a practice that you can do offline meaning not in the moment of stress that will allow you to learn how to relax more then on the fatigue side if you're in motion in the morning or in the afternoon and you need to keep going you need to keep studying you need to drive to the airport to pick someone up and you're exhausted the please don't drive if you're really really exhausted but inhale emphasize breathing making your inhales just a little bit longer or more vigorous than your exhales will speed up your heart rate will make you more alert so deeper inhale shorter accident yeah so it looks something like that'll speed it up yeah for and even two or three of those and you'll notice your heart rate will pick up because there's a neural signal from the brain stem sent to the heart to speed up the amount of blood flow but at the end of the day what i'm hearing you say is you can control the mind the body or the mind with the mind to an extent for for moments or even extended periods of time hours maybe but really we need to be thinking the mind and the body connection at all times because if you stop breathing if you're or if you're only doing short breaths the whole time for a whole day it's gonna affect the body right and the mind and if you're um so it's using the body using the breath using it where it's connected to the brain to constantly support you throughout the day but if you're just like all day it'll help you get to a certain point but then it'll be detrimental to your health right so these these breathing practices are about shifting the gears but they're not something that you continue doing throughout all day yeah really what i've described here are hardwired meaning we were all born with these neurons and connections in our body we're all born with these organs to be able to do these things there's not a lot of learning involved once you know how to do it it works the first time it works every time yes but it's sort of like shifting gears there aren't too many manual transmissions these days but let's say you're driving down downhill it's going too fast you would if this is like taking it into a lower gear so then you slow down you're not going to constantly be riding the clutch right you're not going to constantly be in the shifting mode or riding the brake some people do that but that's not good right you don't want to have to do that just like if you're going uphill you might have to hit on the gas a little bit otherwise you're not going to get up that hill but at some point you switch gears and then you're just cruising up yeah exactly right so it's a transmission system rather than you're supposed to breathe this way all day or breathe that way it's so smart and the the fast breathing followed by exhales and breath holds the super oxygenation tumor wim hof type breathing i look at that as learning how to drive on um on a slick pavement you know it's it's self-induced stress it's like taking your car to a parking lot you know when you a kid's learning to drive i was teaching a kid to drive recently you teach them a drive you go through the neighborhood you do things but when you really want to learn how to for instance drive through puddles or driving fog or driving heavy rain you kind of want to be in a parking lot or a safe and a safe environment for that you don't want to be on a you know on the autobahn right so you these are ways in which you can teach yourself how to navigate the bad weather of the nervous system so you're prepared for when it comes that's right and i and i have to say from personal experience and from some emerging data when i say emerging data i mean studies in my lab and other labs that are still ongoing it does appear that when people self-induce this stress it can be beneficial for i'm going to quote a colleague of mine my colleague david spiegel who's our associate chair of psychiatry says it's not just about the state that you're in the state of mind that you're in it's how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it so when you self-induce stress and then you say oh i can calm my mind even though my body is feeling agitated that's a very positive experience for many people whereas when someone else is causing your stress and you're trying to calm down it feels like you're battling 25 different things so these are skills that anyone can develop um and they are skills that essentially require information of what to do but zero training i mean so it's like i'm sure you played football i didn't you can probably i'm certain you can throw a football way better than i can that took some some learning yeah it would take me a long long time maybe forever to be able to approximate that skill level but these are things that we can all do right yeah yeah and so now i think we've kind of spelled out a two tools on either side physiological size first for calming down in real time exhale emphasize breathing of the yoga nidra sort maybe even doing yoga nidra 10 to 20 or 30 minutes a couple times a week daily if you want to teach your nervous system to calm down and then also having tools that emphasize inhales so longer more vigorous inhales or doing an offline practice of some point during your day you decide i'm going to do five or ten minutes of this more rapid breathing followed by some breath holds yeah and provided those are designated safe for you the the super oxygenated breathing you decide is safe for you i'm not aware of any dangers of the exhale emphasize breathing at all but people should always approach any new thing with caution of course but once you have those four tools in hand you've really learned how to press on the accelerator so that's inhaling more than you exhale you've learned how to drive faster be comfortable at higher speeds that's kind of like the wim hof type breathing comfortable at high speeds it's like oh i can drive 65 and feel calm i'm good here whereas previously you couldn't as well as learning how to slow down by with the physiological side that's sort of a break and then the yoga nidra is sort of like coming off the accelerator and slow down yeah you're just turning off your system the beauty of having these different tools and practicing them now and again is that there's this other phenomenon which is neural plasticity which is that then you start doing it reflexively without even realizing it you start doing physiological size when you're too stressed automatically automatically and even before you start to hit the alertness threshold people just start to engage these things and so it's kind of like when you see a dog who's just tired it automatically does this side when it's like panting it'll do like a big sigh and then it's like almost like it's relaxed right and it's just like it goes to sleep that's right i see this with my dog all the time it's like running around panting and then it's just like exactly and that little extra inhale i know we've talked a lot about this before but i don't think we can over emphasize the power of the physiological side because that little extra inhale is what opens up those little sacs in the lungs just a little bit more and that when you exhale it pulls a lot more carbon dioxide out of the system which when you pull carbon dioxide out of the system what does that do you feel calm wow there you go you feel calm in fact it's a physiological mechanism to make you calm that's right and in fact um you know in claustrophobic environments or god forbid if you're you know you're drowning the reason you're stressed is because you have neurons in your brain stem that sense carbon dioxide in the bloodstream and as that goes up it says you need to find air you need to offload this carbon dioxide oh man so it's it's a these are all real physiological mechanisms that are really about balancing the oxygen and carbon dioxide in your system and when we see these really extreme feats of breath holds and people doing all these really wild things usually it's because they're learning to manipulate the oxygen carbon dioxide packing or ratios or how they manage them free divers there's air packing there's all sorts of dangerous stuff that should only really be done by highly trained highly skilled people but you know once people have these tools in hand they can start coupling to them to the tools that involve the mind i mean it's fine to do a physiological sigh and to tell yourself to calm down we're not saying don't think or be mindless but what we're saying is it's it's powerful to look to these mechanics of the body-mind relationship and you said the body and the minor connected it's really a two-way street you know the mind controls the body the body controls the mind it's a loop i just think of it like a loop i don't even think of it as one controlling the other it's just if one of those things is out of whack you you need to control the other one right you're not gonna try and just think about trying to control your mind again is like grabbing it fog or it's smoke it's it just moves away so that most of the time i want to ask you a question on a shift gears in a in a in a strategic way um and i love to have practitioners scientists doctors um researchers who are in the practicality of things but i also love to have philosophers spiritual leaders and manifestors like i call people that are talking about the law of attraction and the way we think and how our thoughts allow us to attract the things we want in our life whether it be a positive thing or something they don't want but our thoughts really start to attract and i want to understand the science of the law of attraction oh my okay because i recently had the author of the secret which has kind of made the law of attraction more mainstream and popularized this is something that's been around for a long time the uh manifesting your thoughts and the law of attraction is not a new thing but she popularized it with the secret rhonda byrne and as i was interviewing her and i've interviewed a lot of different experts who talk about the law of attraction it's always been fascinating to hear the results they get in their life based on using this principle called the law of attraction or thinking of certain things that you want desiring certain things that you want as if it's already happened imagining as if you already have it visualizing it and also acting it's not just thinking and it comes to you but thinking manifesting attracting the people you need in your life for to to manifest taking the actions necessary learning the skills but as opposed to having a mind of chaos it's hard to manifest what we want under a mind of chaos but when we're clearer we start to manifest those things with the process can you break down the science of the law of attraction oh my and and and why this idea of thinking a certain thing will manifest why that is accurate or not so i i confess i'm not super familiar with it although i've heard about it the law of attraction essentially just being uh what you think you become what you think you create what you what you think about consistently you'll start to attract in your life it's kind of the baseline principle there's more to it but i'm simplifying it okay so when we think about something consistently in our minds is there science around this that validates or doesn't validate that we start to in the physical world attract our thoughts whether it be a negative thought about what i don't want or a thought around what i do want it's almost like saying okay when you think about a pink elephant you you see it everywhere is this is there science to this so um well i can't give a uh intelligent answer about the the law of attraction specifically but what i can perhaps do is shed some light on what we think we know what neuroscientists think we know about um how thoughts and thinking actually work and how those relate to behaviors and then i'll give a little anecdote that um that uh i think people might appreciate because it's something that i keep in mind a lot in thinking about goal setting and focus and okay so thoughts are let me back up one second um and i know i've covered this before so i'm going to cover it very quickly because we talked about this last time but in case someone um didn't hear that discussion or forgets senses are these cells within our body our eye our skin our nose or our mouth it's that are taking physical entities in the universe they're like wavelengths of light physical touch and translating that into nerve signals into electrical signals in the body that's something senses and people always say what about intuition that's different that's not a sense that's a that's it actually a sense of your internal world it's called interoception as opposed to reception since the outside world so the five senses and we are very whether or not people like it or not we are heavily constrained by those senses for instance a mantis shrimp of all things can see like 64 different shades of color that we can only see one shade of for instance because they have receptors that can pick out those things some animals can see ultraviolet emissions others can see infrared a pit viper can see your heat emissions you know humans sometimes think they can see heat emissions but they can't see heat emissions unless they put infrared goggles on then they can't so the senses constrain our experience of the world and i don't doubt that there are some people that have a little quarter of a percent more uv detection or there's even some evidence for weak magneto reception in humans from good labs a little bit yeah and turtles have very strong magnetoreception what does that mean magnetosense magnetic fields so they sense them as you know like that's magnetically humans have there's some evidence written up in science magazine if people want to look look it up which is quality journal for weak magnetic sensing in humans some humans not strong but it's not strong okay and it's not in most strong in most people by any stretch whereas turtles can navigate long distances based on magnetic fields in the in that's cool very cool that's cool it's very cool um so our experience of the world all humans experience of the world is kind of tunneled by these what we can see and what we can't see there's a lot happening that we can't see it's just a reality that's why we that's why people need night vision goggles as opposed to just looking at things of the night without them so that's key so there's sensation and then there's perception which is simply to say which of those things are we paying attention to so i can see that this water bottle is you know a mixture of blue and glass and you know because i decided to look at it but i was sensing it out of the corner of my eye the whole time but i was focusing on it i can sense the air touching my skin because i'm deciding to focus on that that's right that's right so that's perception and you want to just make sure that we close the hatch on interoception perception of what's going on like i don't think about my heart rate too much but if i stop and think about it i'm thinking about my heart rate and then i'm just sensing my heart rate it's but it's still just pressure it's you know it's a physical phenomenon okay um then there's thinking which we'll get to then there's emotions slash feelings and those are complicated but they are tractable as we say we can we can figure it out and then there's behaviors like you're writing right now it's a measurable thing it's a real thing okay so what about thoughts what in the world is thinking well in many ways thinking is a lot like perception perception again being which sensations i'm focusing on except that thinking incorporates sensations from the past sensations from the present and can include sensations from the future that we haven't even had interesting so this i think speaks to your question about law of attraction which is you know never really been formalized for the scientific community so i'm trying to take take it and cram it through a neuroscience filter here see what comes out the other side but the the interesting thing about thinking is it's very hard to control our spontaneous thoughts so for instance i can't prevent myself from thinking something however i can deliberately introduce a thought people forget this that one of our enormous powers as human beings is is another form of top down control which is to say i'm going to write out my name i am andrew or i can think i am injured now it takes a little bit of work you kind of notice to think something specific like you would write it out in your head just as you would write it out on paper it feels like a little bit of work because it is work you're taking that spontaneous thought process and you're inserting a thought on top of it and we know that you can't hold too many thoughts in mind at once so the what i will say is that it's hard to suppress thoughts but it's actually quite easy to introduce thoughts and it sounds to me like this this law is basically a process of introducing thoughts and when you start introducing thoughts and you start thinking of thoughts as a form of perception the way you view the world they're going to shape the way you they're going to shape what you see wow they're very going to heavily constrain what you see now this has a dark side and a light side and i you know the dark side is is that beliefs are essentially thoughts that are recurring thoughts or things that are kind of like books on a shelf that you can reach to any time if i say hey what about that book out there you know um jay shetty's but you can go grab it because it's on the shelf right there and you can show it to me right it's there all the time you know where it is and it's very accessible whereas so beliefs are reoccurring thought right so you said yeah yeah whereas if you where whereas if you have um have never thought about something in particular like um if i you know we start having a discussion about something that you're not very familiar with or you tell me about something i'm not very familiar with then it's going to take some work it feels like work so to understand it to perceive it to experience it that's right take it in to to question your previous beliefs about something right and there's some interesting data that were published in the journal neuron this last year not from my group that showed that beliefs actually have their own rewarding quality that there's actually dopamine release associated with beliefs having a belief yes so when you believe something you're there chemical reward systems in your mind that are associated with just repeating that belief now again this has a dark side and a light side the dark side is it means that people can be very fixed in their beliefs and they're actually being chemically rewarded for having the same belief the world is flat i believe the world is flat and just saying it over and over again or in group out group type thinking of any kind or i mean in group well when people think oh i believe that that group of people over there is this way and or good or bad right there's a self-reward mechanism that's getting involved i'm greater than this group greater than or less less than so is you know that beliefs are attached to a set of rewards so what now the dopamine system is exceedingly powerful because dopamine is is a kind of a dumb molecule it has no brain of its own it's just a it's just a molecule right it's just a chemical but when dopamine is released in our brain we first of all it tends to orient us towards goals in the outside environment it's the it's the molecule not just a reward but of motivation and when we release dopamine we tend to see the world in terms of external goals and so you can imagine now if there's a process built up inside us where our thoughts are causing dopamine release and dopamine is shaping what we see as rewards what we perceive as rewards that can be wonderful or terrible depending on how that's harnessed so let me understand this when we have dopamine triggered in our body it's attached to because it's attached to some type of belief we're going to continue to say this feels good that's right so let me keep thinking this way and viewing the world in this way because it's going to keep making me feel good that's right physically that's right wow even if it's fact or not fact right scientifically true or not or harmful to other people or harmful to yourself if it makes you feel good you might stick to that belief that's right so a good example with dopamine is it with any time thinking about science and neuroscience in particular thinking at the extremes can be kind of useful so people who are very depressed who see no possibility in the world who if you talk to a depressed person every response they give is going to be but it's not going to work out it doesn't they are absolutely that things are going to turn out bad and there's a benefit for having that belief and they're they're entrenched in it they may actually be rewarding that somewhat although typically depressed states have very low dopamine at the opposite extreme is mania when people are in a manic phase dopamine is very high we know this and they see possibility everywhere and there's certain things are going to work out they they will spend money they don't have they'll create relationships they don't have time and energy for they will overdo everything and so somewhere in the middle is this healthy range where we're con where we realize that how we view the world is shaping the release of these chemicals and i do believe this happens when we have positive thoughts we we get a lift if we if we can get a lift from our positive thoughts and then dopamine itself puts us in relationship with the outside world such that we view the outside world as having more possibility that is going to put us into forward momentum they're good there are a lot of studies to support that when dopamine is low we tend to see very little possibility in the world and so a positive thought triggers forward movement potentially yes yeah so positive thinking which a lot of people will say well that's just positive thinking it doesn't work some people say be positive think positive others say well it doesn't work but with science i'm hearing you say it gives you a little bit of a lift absolutely the the key with positive thinking it is that it has to be honest it it can't be i've already won you know i don't have an olympic gold medal if i could tell myself i'm going to get one tomorrow but i just don't have the skills so that's not going to release dopamine in my system how do you know it's honest if you're in a depressed state and you don't believe that you are actually better off than where you're at the key is to attach the so one thing to understand is that dopamine release in the brain is always subjective there's no experience that that says uh that has unique domain over dopamine release that will only allow dopamine release so if it's very subjective so if i say to myself i'm going to um get into the process of doing something we have a new year coming up so there'll be a lot of resolutions soon the it's not a if you attach the dopamine release to the process of effort or goal setting itself you'll have more energy to be in effort and then if you can attach dopamine release to the belief that you're at least heading in the right direction you'll have more energy to keep going in the right direction people make the mistake of thinking that the the positive thought process should be attached to the finish line it's not about thinking you've already won it's not about being delusional it's about thinking that your training is going to take you to the finish line and so it's about moving that mental horizon in more close more closely and then triggering some sort of positive internal representation of what you're doing meaning thinking positive and people this is usually where i get stopped and people say wait but it sounds so subjective tell me exactly how to do it but here's the thought it's it's supposed to be subjective this is for you right yeah everyone needs to figure out what allows them to continue to be in forward momentum what allows them to constrain the world of possibilities and to go after goals and how often to self-reward because but the key is the self-worth because if you start only pursuing external rewards that's when you are no longer in control of your dopamine system because you're reliant on actually something physically happening in the physical world not internal that's right and let's be really really honest and burst the the bubble that i feel like should have been burst a long time ago which is yes everybody including me it is possible that you can do everything and still fail no one wants to say that but the way that you insure against that is to attach reward to the effort process because the dopamine molecule creates a sense of certainty and you're not trying to create certainty about the final outcome you're trying to create certainty only about the next outcome that's enroute to the final outcome the next action you want to think about milestones yes and so people set out with oh i'm gonna i'm gonna write the great american novel or i'm going to um you know get the ipo and of course that's an important you need to have a sense of what the finish line would actually look like but the more that one can attach this subjective release of dopamine process to the intermediate steps through positive thinking and action positive thinking and action the the higher that probability goes toward in science we say there's a probability of zero to one the higher that probability goes to one which is certainty now everyone knows in the back of their mind that there is no absolute certainty when i hear about you know athletes or fighters i was certain i was going to win we all know that there's a .000 doubt in everybody right point zero zero whatever that is now for some people they might be able to push that number way way out but certainty about outcome is actually a form of delusion certainty about romania yeah that's right that's right you see this in mania and that's why people start engaging their behavior online this is going to happen that's right the silver lining in this is that when you create certainty about outcomes you know you can control you take over this neurobiological system and you create almost certainty that you will complete the process to the end goal perfectly right and by perfectly i don't mean that you won't have to re-steer or orient differently along the way what i mean is that you're you're learning to engage a process and so to make this concrete because we you threw a somewhat radical question obviously like weave through that is that positive thinking is not about being delusional positive thinking is about learning how to take control of internal processes and understanding that that will shape your external environment but it's about remaining in control of the internal landscape it's about knowing that despite shifts in the external landscape you're going to be okay now there is a there is a little twist there's a little cul-de-sac that that dopamine can take you into i have a friend he's a cardiologist up north and he um he has this uh this anecdote he likes to tell which is he said you know some people get so much dopamine release from these intermediate goals that they never make it to the end goal and here's how this sometimes happens i worry this might have happened to me several times in my lifetime but like give me an example an example would be i tell you louis i'm writing a book and you say oh that's awesome that's going to be so fantastic i'm sure people are going to be really excited and i get so much dopamine that i stop continuing in the process just from the action of talking about it it becomes its own finish line and we know people like this some of us can recognize behaviors like this in ourselves people reflect back such confidence in our ability to do things that we never actually do i know i could do it this is the skills this is the beauty of the underdog an underdog mentality is i'm never gonna allow myself to think i'm going to win so that i can keep winning but that's a high friction way to go through life so the way that it was taught to me best i think was my graduate advisor she said we published our first paper it turned out great it was a great journal and she said this is wonderful i'd worked very hard on it frankly and she said look just remember you're never as good as you think you are you're never as bad as you think you are you're somewhere in the middle but you can get really good at the process and i think that um there's a lot of kind of you know treacherous thinking around goal setting and dopamine and things there's this idea that if we're really amped up that we're just going to have jet thrusters that are going to take us to the end but the key is to move that horizon in closer and closer and a way that one could do this for instance would be you get up in the morning or let's say you're you're kind of low energy in the afternoon you do your breathing to get more alert but you've got this voice of doubt there's like a voice of doubt is this working i don't know i know remember you can introduce thoughts on top of that you're not going to get very far trying to suppress these thoughts the better thing to do is just you know kind of swamp them with with possibilities then if you can not think about the negative thought add positive thinking and possibilities and opportunities into your your thinking that's right but trying to suppress the negative thoughts is like whack-a-mole they just keep popping up all over the place you know it's and it's a lot of work yeah but there is a way to play a slightly different game right and i think that the in learning how to think positively and register the positive feelings that come from that and then you use that as a way to propel to the next to the next goal now we're talking about this in kind of um kind of self-help wellness space and tacking some neuroscience to it some you know speculative neuroscience explanations however we have to remember that this mechanism of dopamine and path finding to goals is in every animal humans dogs sheep any animal that needs to forage for things to find food or water they don't just get that dopamine release at the end they get it when they realize they're on the right track so a grazing animal might be on a really barren landscape and then smell something off of the environment now that was an external pull or think you know what i'm going to go that way because i don't know i need to go some way they go some direction and they don't smell water which animals can do and so they veer off course and then all of a sudden they get a little bit of scent of water at that point that's when the dopamine is released not when they get the water and drink from it so that puts them in energy to get there you know you think about walking in the desert and you're just dying of thirst and all of a sudden you spot a big lake all of a sudden you will have the energy to run the remaining mile whereas before you thought you were gonna die how is that how is that it's not like more glycogen is suddenly available it's not like ketones did it for you so what did it that's dopamine that's dopamine release that says there's a reward waiting for me and that's from the brain it's from the brain it's releasing dopamine or is it a nerve connected to the gut that goes back to the brain what is the process great question so there's an area of the brain called the ventral tegmental area substantia niagara all these areas have different names but that release dopamine into the brain and they give the immediate sense of possibility and they promote energy wow and epinephrine or adrenaline is a molecule that we're all associated with it's what gives us energy it's actually the when it goes really high it's the basis of the stress response which is a lot of energy but epinephrine is manufactured it's made from the molecule dopamine it's a couple biochemical steps but it's actually made from dopamine epinephrine gives you energy epinephrine is essentially the basis of neural energy it's the brain energy yeah the ability to focus the ability to be alert the ability to continue working so dopamine is is kind of the building block of so we need dopamine to have focus to work towards a goal to accomplish things that's right so if we think negative thoughts consistently does negative thoughts generate dopamine okay so there are a couple things that can suppress dopamine one of them which i'll just put out there because i think a lot of people will um they were either like this or not like this lack of sleep or what turns out that and this was published in the journal cell by uh two groups working together samurai is a good friend of mine but he's head of the chronobiology unit the national institutes of mental health and david berson's lab at brown university published a paper showing that exposure to screen type light between the hours of 11 pm and 4 am activates a specific circuit in a brain area called the habenula that's a weird name that lowers dopamine and creates a sense of disappointment so it's pro-depressive so every teenager in the world is depressing themselves that's right or any adult we all do it who's on their phone after 11 after midnight one two whether it be watching a movie whether it be on an ipad does it matter how close to a screen you are on your phone if you dim it way way down you don't get this dope or you wear the glasses or the biohacking stuff you could do that as well but although still it's really the brightness of light not the the color of the light so the studies by multiple groups are showing that from 11 p.m to 4 a.m if you're on your phone if you're looking at a tv or ipad or screen consistently it's going to make you more depressed in theory yes um in practice you would have to do that pretty consistently so there's not like one exposure it's gonna work dim dopamine that's right it's gonna blunt dopamine and so our our levels of things like dopamine and epinephrine serotonin and these other so-called neuromodulators reflects the our average behaviors our average thinking it's not like one thought is going to crush your dopamine however if you've ever been working very very hard or things are really bad and someone cracks a joke and it's actually funny to you you feel an immediate lift that's dopamine interesting but here's the interesting thing it has to be funny if i don't think the joke is funny let's say we're working very hard let's turn this around let's say we're working very hard and things are really terrible like something really bad is happening and i make a joke and it's a bad joke it's to make it worse but what's a good or bad joke it's totally subjective it's totally subjective wow what's your best dad joke do you ever get what i have loads of these i'm really i'm a um i'm an incurable uh punter and i've had really really bad jokes what's your favorite dad joke give me one i've only got like one iron they're really nerdy they're really really okay okay i've got one which um okay but i like weird animals so if anyone gets this i mean i get it if anyone gets this you're definitely my kind of person if you don't um you might be my kind of person i don't know so um and you might not get this dangerous territory doing this in real time all right so um what's the hardest thing about having a platypus for a pet i don't know the electric bill someone out there will get it yes it's a really nerdy joke um that's really bad why is it is it they have an electric bill i know you asked for a dad joke that's great that's good um although i told that joke and then a colleague of mine who's actually a very uh a very well-renowned biologist actually said well actually that joke doesn't work because it's an electric sensing bill so you have to remember i hang out with scientists so it's super nerdy so if i try another what's your best dad joe i can only remember one uh what do you call a guy with no shins tony oh that's good that's good tony that's good that's good that's anatomical so yeah i think you know if you hang around a laboratory or a biologist long enough you learn that their their humor is it's just about the body the mind that's just ridiculously nerdy if you hang around mds long enough medical doctors what you learn is that their humor is incredibly morbid that's true this is true because they live in all day they're around it all day and so i have some friends who are md's and you start to realize that their view of the world and their humor around the world is a coping mechanism so but i'm glad that we're we're having this um discussion um or trade of of uh bad jokes because um the the dopamine system is is vaulted meaning these neurons don't release dopamine regularly they're not supposed to you can't be walking around all day and think i love this table i love this wall i look that's not the way that's mania but every once in a while something comes along which just delights you or awes you or thrills you and that's how dopamine is released yeah and so it's a system that you can learn to regulate you know every once in a while i'll just see something i think i saw something in your office this morning i was like i really like that piece of art and that moment it what happens it draws your attention you have an energy lift and you know so there's really something to it i don't think we can exaggerate the the powerful effect that dopamine has but this doesn't just mean oh you want to take a supplement or a pill and take and increase your dopamine because that makes everything exciting to you which makes you kind of useless right this is designed to be a targeted system to propel you toward particular goals outside you how much dopamine should we have a day how many times should we be triggered in dopamine and do we have dopamine just by sitting and and doing kind of mindless stuff do we still have a low level of dopamine okay or does it only come in moments when our senses are heightened so dopamine can come from surprise so if you're bored and all of a sudden i don't know someone you really want to hear from calls you suddenly you have energy you were lethargic and depressed and suddenly there's your lift that's the dopamine response um how much it depends so there's some hardwired things that are important to the propagation of our species that have direct access to the dopamine system finding mates for instance the birth of a new child right creating more progeny food great tasting food social connection um water when we're thirsty the amount of dopamine that's released will be proportional to how badly we crave that thing now in the sort of world of addiction this is a well understood phenomenon because what happens is i define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure meaning a progressive narrowing of what allows for dopamine release right and relief from addiction in addition to people moving away from the addicting substance often involves a progressive expansion of the things that give them belief more appreciation a lot of 12-step programs naaa have these elements of finding gravity something else that's right then the addiction right because people have been living in this tunnel of addiction now for if barring addiction and taking mania out of the equation pushing aside depression we say well how much dopamine well throughout your day what will happen is if you're used to succeeding at certain things one you have to be i'm not talking to you particularly but one has to be a little bit cautious to continue to pick up the those dopamine rewards so a hundred dollars to you at one point in your life probably meant a lot a nice crisp hundred dollar bill later in life it might not get you as much in life but having an appreciation for the fact that you have money at all if you understand that that dopamine release actually gives you energy to continue to pursue more of what you want then you start to think of dopamine as not just an endpoint but a way to propel you forward so that's so that's why gratitude and sorry i mean that's why gratitude and appreciation is important because ultimately you don't want to be delighted by everything but you also don't want to be constantly feeling as if you have nothing the sort of ideas lacking that's right i mean the idea of abundance i do like this concept of abundance the idea of abundance is not that you have so much that you don't need more it's that there's enough out there that there's plenty for everybody and so it's very important when we're thinking about reward mechanisms in the brain that we understand that dopamine is thoughts about movement towards and the experience of pursuing things that are outside the reach of your skin mates mate you know a partner um food money money a career a degree things that are outside your reach there's another reward system which is the serotonin system which is a system that doesn't put us into forward motion but tends to make us feel good in our current position it makes us feel calm it's not about pursuing things it's about feeling good with what we already have and that the serotonin system is more activated by sense of gratitude reflection on i love my dog i love my friends i love my partner i'm so grateful to have what i have i have everything i need within the confines of my skin and that's an important reward mechanism that nature has built in to have to balance the dopamine system so that creates us more relaxed and it makes our tone that's right and it makes us invest in the resources that we already have what do you mean invest in those resources to look around your office at the end of the day and go so great i have appreciate what we are appreciation it's gratitude it builds social bonds remember these chemicals exist in us and they exist in other animals as far down as mice and dogs and monkeys and obviously there are huge differences between humans and and all the other species of the planet you know i mean huge differences so i'm not trying to say that we're all the same but there are some basic mechanisms of reward for moving toward things and basic mechanisms of reward for helping us build social bonds with the people we already have that are fundamental to the survival of our species and fundamental to the evolution of our species so i think that when we think about rewards we want to be able to access both we want to be in pursuit but we also appreciate what we have absolutely and the two balance each other and they actually reset each other and this is often why people who are in rabid pursuit of a medal or money or a big ipo or to set up their company they get there and then they go now what i'm depressed they didn't exactly because they didn't appreciate what they had along the way it's always i need this to fulfill some need within myself they actually end up they end up with a lot of resources that don't trigger the dopamine response because they don't appreciate them it was about the pursuit now attaching dopamine to the pursuit is kind of the definition of a growth mindset you know learning how to attach the dopamine reward system to effort pretty much ensures that you're going to perform well over time pretty much it pretty much ensures you're going to be resilient over time provided you can keep doing that but in the absence of of the serotonin system and learning how to tap into the serotonin system taking some time whether or not it's through meditation or prayer or journaling or reflection or some combination of those that's where you really restore the system and allow it to renew so that you can get back into the pursuit of things and so this is why cycling rest and cycling pursuit are so vital to not just like optimal performance which is great and performing well but also to just enjoying life and resetting the so for instance when serotonin is very low people tend to feel agitated and aggressive when serotonin like kind of irritable when serotonin is very high people tend to actually have much lower levels of aggression and if serotonin is really high people stop pursuing goals it can lower all sorts of basic biological functions that make people motivated so the key is to have a dopamine system that can be accessed to have a serotonin system that you can access and i would say the right unit of time to think about this is across the 24-hour day trying to think about your whole lifetime dopamine and serotonin is overwhelming so i think you wake up in the morning and you assess how you feel too alert or too exhausted you might do something to adjust that you might want to spend some time in appreciation for what you have and then yes you absolutely should think about the things that you want to pursue and then you should think about what brings the dopamine release that will allow you to continue to pursue but you want to definitely think about how you can control the dopamine release and not just make it contingent on the sale someone else is going to bring you or the the praise someone else is going to bring you we all know what it's like to be in the presence of somebody that just feels good enough within themselves and doesn't constantly need things from other people and you know and through a kind of a twist those people tend to acquire more and succeed more and and oftentimes when it when one describes a kind of a high achiever or somebody that can do this process well people think oh well i'm terrible at that look everybody struggles with this and learns how to do it when people are delusionally lost in uh in the sense that they're winning when they're losing that's bad too so the idea is you know it's an average how many days out of the week are you miserable how many days out of the week are you feeling good and i think most people can build up these circuits pretty quickly so that they feel good most of the time and when they feel bad they know how to work through that yeah this is so fascinating i want to unpack a few things going back to there's a famous story about jim carrey where he said he would drive up mulholland drive here in los angeles pretty much every day or once a week and visualize himself acting in the main movies the blockbuster hits when he was a like a stand-up comic on like open mic night type of stuff right he would visualize it and he would sit there and he'd feel a feeling as if he's on the set with the big actors as he's receiving the checks and he would write himself a check i think it was for 10 million dollars or 5 million dollars and he would imagine this happening him receiving it and then he would go do his work throughout the day and and take action on it and he always tells a story or it's famous story that he said you know this is what i would do i'd visualize this i think about it i wrote a check to myself years before it actually happened but then it came to me and this idea of thinking again in you mentioned the idea of like neediness in the sense of like if someone's like too needy then they're not gonna get it people are gonna be rejecting that neediness but when someone's comfortable in their own skin it's almost like everyone comes to them or things like they already have it like they already have it and they talk about this in the law of attraction uh community about when you're chasing something or you're saying you don't have it you're like needing something you're saying you don't have it but when you become comfortable with where you are things start to attract to you and you have energy and you're like a magnet as opposed to an opposite magnet resisting these things that you need and want pursuit is very taxing and the reason is there's a biochemical reason for this is it's like wandering in the desert not knowing if there's water at all that's really depleting i mean epinephrine is in the brain and it's a it's chemical equivalent in the body is adrenaline those are the same thing and if you're constantly in pursuit right you're just pursuing external goals external well as external goals it will wear your nervous system down you'll be exhausted and you will one will eventually run aground you'll become mentally depressed the key is to figure out what are the rewards that you can acquire along the way internally remember it's subjective there can also be external rewards because many things have milestones you know a series a or a series b for a company then the ipo later reaching a million users or doing this yeah we have engagements before we have weddings typically right um there are those rare instances where people just go and get married but typically there's a lot of build up that is designed you know that fortunately it you know provides these uh reward mechanisms so the key thing is that you can't just be all gas pedal all the time without rewarding yourself however the reward that dopamine is so powerful because it actually as i mentioned before it actually is the chemical substrate for epinephrine it creates a reservoir of more energy and again i'm not talking about caloric energy or glycogen mind it's it's it's mental energy it's the it's the desire to push on it's the desire to keep going so we need some consistent dopamine hits throughout the days or our months to give us more energy to pursue that's right but we don't want to be over pursued because then we'll burn out that's right and so everyone has to find where that sweet spot is that kind of you know on the freeway driving where it's really smooth and seamless where you're not on the accelerator the whole time where you're in a gear that's appropriate and you know we're talking now in terms of sort of um you know neuroscience lens on these things but the key is always going to be practices it's going to be just as early we're talking about bringing stress levels up or down depending on you know alertness levels up or down depending on the kind of stress you're experiencing the reward system is great because when you let's say you're a person that can very easily access this dopamine reward so you're always excited you know people say hey let's do this and you're you're mantras let's go and you just kind of go what we call in science very low activation energy you just go that's great those people do run the risk of burnout although there are these people that we occasionally encounter that just seem to have boundless energy for everything and they tend to get a lot more done because they have a lot more internal reward and you'll notice they're getting rewards from all the little things and it's 100 subjective it's like hearing funny jokes all day long you can just keep going and suddenly the beginning of relationships when people fall in love you know that's a real thing but it is associated with with a big flood of dopamine in the system makes everything seem exciting and possible and new and i think that we also know other people that they have a very hard time accessing this dopamine system and they either place it under the complete control of external things so they're miserable until they get the payoff and then sometimes they're even miserable yeah or they really just don't they haven't learned the skills of how to access it so how do we trick our mind to find rewards in subjective things that aren't actually physically coming to us okay so um i'll tell a brief anecdote about an experiment that's really important this was done many years ago in a psychology department i think it was done at bing nursery school at stanford but i could be wrong about that so um i don't want to state that as absolute fact but the experiment nonetheless was done where they looked at kids in schools these are kids about nursery school age or maybe a little bit older and they looked at what they did during recess and they they found that some kids really like to draw and so these kids would naturally just orient towards the crayons and pens and draw and then for a short while they rewarded the kids for drawing those same kids they would give them a gold star or a little sticker or something that was special and made them feel special so they were giving them an external reward then they removed the reward and what they found is those kids drew at a much lower frequency they somehow lost the intrinsic pleasure of drawing huh because they were used to getting an extrinsic suddenly an ex they associated the drawing they thought they they they weren't conscious but they their nervous system said oh i guess i was doing it for the reward now there's less reward and without going into a lot of details there's a very solid scientific phenomenon called reward prediction error which says that if you get less dopamine at the end than you anticipated it's a letdown if you get more at the end then it feels great now what this all translates to is once again learning how to attach internal rewards to the process of whatever it is that you want to do in order to get you to the thing you really want and so the the short answer in this actually i was asked this question recently someone said okay how can i ensure that once i succeed this was somebody who was doing very well in their pursuit of a goal and they were getting close and they said how can i be sure that when i get to the win that i don't lose the ability to keep working because i really want this paper i'm not satisfied right and i said well there's two ways one is make sure that that reward really bask in it really appreciate what you've done and what's come to you and but and here's a very important but is but take that feeling of being saturated with dopamine the huge win and attach it to the effort process that got you there so when you're thinking this took me five years to accomplish this thing but reminding yourself of every day week year all the little things you did on a daily basis to get you there not we're here right that's right if you think that you sort of uh let's say super bowl win the party at the end is going to be great or i have to imagine it's really going to be great huge but that at that moment people the winners anyway their system is flooded with dopamine flooded with dopamine and there's an opportunity because dopamine we haven't talked about this but dopamine is a signal to the brain that it should rewire so that in the future it has a higher probability of getting back to that experience oh wow this is how animals learn how to find water and food this is at the basis of so many reward pursuits and so if you attach all that plasticity all that brain rewiring to the celebration and only to the celebration you actually can erase a lot of the valuable content that your brain you know skills that your brain acquired in root to that goal so it's almost like that whole night after you celebrate and maybe the next few days really reflect on the years it took to get you there that's right we we tend to so over emphasize the wins it's the things of movies right i mean there's some movies that are really good like rocky the first rocky where he didn't actually win he loses and it was but so many people i think one academy award for best picture right so many people associate that film with with the striving process the reward was really true his joy at the end of that was really called it was interesting he called it to his family to hit to the process right it was really a movie that captured that in its best form when it's just about the win what you you lose this amazing opportunity to attach the dopamine to everything that came before it now in addition to that there's one other way to do it nobody likes this one but it works which is also when you get there give away the gold star give give it away and really so you don't fixate on the gold medal all the time and really high performers there are a few people whose names unfortunately i can't mention that i know who have done incredibly well in the silicon valley world and some of them have given away a substantial portion of what they have and everyone thought oh they want a simpler life in this net no actually they were just setting themselves up for the next big win and they've gone on to do this two or three times now really so they keep moving the carrot out in front of them but they also are somehow intuitively understanding this process that what got them there was not the last you know one yard into the end zone was the ten years of the journey necessary but not sufficient right but everything that came up until then is so important so when we have dopamine in our system and when we've taken control of that process we want to make sure that we capture everything that led up to that and it's it's vitally important in these big kind of we're talking in these big milestones type of examples but this can be done across the day it can be you know i'm going to get to noon just really being the most reflective person i can with my child and not just doing that as a sheer effort like i really don't want to do it but doing it and thinking this is going to be a lot of work and when i get there i'm going to take a couple minutes to just register everything that i managed to control all the things i managed to not do that would have been destructive and so dopamine turns out to be i would argue one of the most if not the most powerful neurochemicals in our system there's a great book called the molecule of more i didn't write it i wish i had um that gets into this whole description which is quite accurate about how dopamine isn't just about reward at the end it's really the molecule of motivation it's what propels us forward it's an incredible read really a lot of real world examples very accessible book and it really points to how so much of what we're about is the pursuit of these external goals but that if we can learn to control these things internally that's when things become kind of limitless you know this word that everybody wants to access everyone wants to know what's the pill that's going to make me limitless what's the technology it we actually have the chemical inside us the key is to learn to regulate it and to and the subjective part the example of good joke bad joke is the best example i can give that you have to decide for you what lets you access them and obviously those things should be things that are not destructive to you or to other people because that will take you down a bad path it also we have to understand that dopamine can be attached to the trivial to trivial anything i could attach it to picking up and putting down this cap for my water bottle but the point is that if that's not attached to some other thing it doesn't really work yeah so i know that you know this is a little bit less concrete than like two inhales in an exhale i like that but but this is the way i think um i'm certain this is the way that the mind can be trained we can train our mind to be in pursuit and in regular winds regular wins and this is why i think there's a lot of interest these days in like habits and habit formation because when you move that horizon in close and you complete something small it's not about what you completed it's the fact that you complete it you're dopamine got deployed it's like people who are like list crosser offers yeah um they're engaging this process so i think what i'm describing again is not completely new people will look to different examples of their life or other people's lives and say oh right that's that that's that but that's exactly the point i think that's the real utility of of a discussion like about neuroscience like this which is that once you understand the mechanisms you can start asking yourself where does this work for me where does it not work for me and how can i maneuver this in healthy ways i'm curious as we're getting to the the beginning of the year and a lot of people set goals for the year for themselves or if they're ending a career exiting a business getting out of a relationship they'll usually set some new type of goal for themselves so whether it's the beginning of the year or you're just in transition you want to set new goals what do you think is based on neuroscience is the best way to set a a year-long goal for yourself should we have 20 massive goals should this be one big goal should we have three key goals and how do we create the goal to where it drives us to perform at our optimal best and get closest to that goal if not accomplish it and what should we be thinking about throughout the year in order to accomplish the goal yeah um well i can give an opinion on this um but it's just my opinion um i mean i break up my life into these 12-week site you know i think it's because i've always done 12-week training cycles it's like an athlete it's a season 12-week training cycles um just seems manageable somehow with the understanding that there will be setbacks and things of that sort i think that certain goals are goals of practices that we've already mastered so you know you're trying to next level what you've already accomplished and so those goals are going to require a lot less limbic friction if you will and you already know how to access the rewards you actually can predict the rewards and when they come you actually know what the rewards are you've really clearly defined them those are goals that i think we're sort of on autopilot with and i think everyone should probably check in at the end of the year and say you know my if i'm going to continue along that trajectory it might make sense for me to set some really concrete goals sometimes those are quarterly um financial quarters or academic quarters if that's what the landscape but i think that um that doesn't require a lot of us except more of the same right but those are nonetheless growth goals before we continue this video make sure to subscribe below and turn on the notification bell right now so you don't miss out on these great videos every single day there are other goals that are very different last time we talked you were learning spanish yeah still learning yeah still learning and there's a and there's a little bit more friction there because it's challenging it takes more effort to lean in because you when you don't already know how to do something it's a very different goal pursuit mm-hmm right sort of like so if i already have my business and i've been running it for a few years you know certain practices of how to get to where you've been that's right and you're thinking how do i double my business that's right it's different than i'm trying to learn a whole new skill goal right you already know how to forage for water as opposed to you're some young calf or some animal that needs to learn how to walk right so so i think you know one big goal of the sort that um you know we don't actually have the skill set yet we're not even aware that of what we need in order to accomplish it per year seems like a pretty good goal to me so learning entirely new language or an entirely new physical skill but with any long-term goal the problem is remember don't focus on your destination that's right well so you have to move the horizon in but you have to remember there's that one little pitfall that cul-de-sac that i described where you'll tell people this year i'm going to do blank and if they reward you enough you might not do it remember if you get enough dopamine it's amazing i'm so happy you're doing that congratulations and you say i know i can do it and then you don't you sort of lose the incentive to do it so some a lot's been made out of making uh goals public is it is it better to make them public or not well so this is this is a question i don't know i think that in my case it has for me telling people several people that i'm going to do something because i will work very hard to avoid humiliating um but i tend to do that with things i really want to do anyway but there's a strong fear element like i'm afraid to do this or i'm i'm kind of anxious about doing this so i'll tell people and then i'm like okay now i'm committed yeah you gotta do this you gotta do it now and i tell people that i'm certain they're gonna give me a hard time yeah that's just my nature right um and i'm not trying to prove them wrong i'm just trying to make sure that they don't have any ground to stand on yeah and that's how i do it i think for some people the continuation of what they're already doing if it's feeling like a lot of work it's feeling exceedingly challenging and like oh my god another year of this another five years of that i think that's when you have to move the horizon in really close i think a lot of people right now are feeling back on their heels because 2020 was such a trying year for a lot of people so everyone many people are recalibrating what's possible although many people are feeling expansion and they're really going to go forward full steam so i think continuing in pursuits that we already have some degree of mastery over and thinking about where could i notch that up another two or three percent i think that's incredibly valuable i think that provides a lot of value to the individual to their families and to society really because a two percent improvement of like what you're already doing is going to have an outsized effect on what other people receive right even though for you you've been down that road many times but taking on a new pursuit in parallel to that means really getting excited about the possibility you give the jim carrey example about the possibility and starting to imagine what that would actually be like to be well let's say fluent in spanish and you can just do this reflexively without having to try that's totally within your reach and i think there it makes sense to really think about the end point quite a lot as a way to get over those barriers of fear because when you already know how to do something there's no fear barrier yeah it's just an energy barrier right but when you're don't know how to do something there's all this sense of clunkiness that is really uncomfortable beginner's mind is a painful place that's so hard man a lot of people think about it like beginner's mind is such a you know it's such a delightful place to be so hard the friction the amount of energy to build momentum is so challenging in the beginning well this is where play becomes very important because you know the great physicist you know richard feynman was also famous in addition to being a you know physics phenom for having the sense of play he learned to bongo drum late in life he was became an artist late in life and he had this lightness and this and this kind of joyful way to approach things humor at oneself is incredibly powerful now we know the chemical basis for that laughing at oneself is often the best way to move forward really yeah because you you i mean i do this well maybe i don't know maybe i'm biased but i do this all the time i'll just laugh at myself for how worked up i can get about the fact that a file won't load or something like that i just laugh and it's crazy i mean and all of a sudden i have the energy to do it so what does that do for our brain when we laugh at ourself but not but there's probably a difference between laughing ourselves or something like that versus making fun of something that's a bad habit like i don't know always shaming ourselves not shaming ourselves because i'm 200 pounds overweight let me laugh at myself shame is kind of written into like who we are it's not about what we're doing it has this element of like who we are you know guilt is sort of more about i forget who said this but it wasn't me first i just want to be clear i recognized it wasn't me first guilt is sort of more about um what we did you know shame is is like an identity thing yeah like laughing ourselves like how ridiculous the human mind can control i mean let's face it as brilliant as as the the nervous system and our minds and our bodies can be they make a lot of mistakes and we we are a fallible species we're not a perfect species and perfection should never be the goal in fact you know if anything laughing at oneself is the right thing to do because it reminds us that perfection is impossible and that but that really incredible sort of feats of accomplishment or feats of creativity of any kind or anything come from having a lightness and a humor i mean those are the people that we enjoy being around i'm always amazed that we we know the kind of people we like being around but then we don't actually become that person to just be around in our own skin yeah i think about this a lot i'm like why do i make myself such a terrible person to be around for me yeah right and that's the the conversation that's the internal working of thinking oh like what would it um what would it mean to just you know make myself more pleasant for me to be around for myself right because i think a lot about the people i really enjoy being around in my life and i know who those people are and it's because they have lightness humor um you know they the appropriate amount of of you know making fun of me which they all seem to do which is great um most of the time um you know just trying to create a an internal representation of myself that that is light enough that i'd want to have myself over for dinner with myself exactly right because i think in the pursuit of goals there's a tunnel vision that's associated with that which is really wonderful and beautiful and explains so much of what humans are capable of it's what's going to carry us forward in the next i hope yeah forever infinity but it it can be tough to be around because it's there's a rigidity to it in pursuing goals and i think learning to relax inside of our own skin a little bit is the best thing that any of us can do because it opens up possibility this is it's almost like counter-intuitive but it creates the sense that oh i can handle this there's nothing you know getting constrained is is the worst thing right yeah if there's one new belief that someone could try on in the new year after a year of a lot of stress and anxiety and overwhelm if there's one new thought or belief that someone could say you know let's just take a look at this idea this belief that could help them tremendously in their life whether it be in their relationships their career business whatever may be health what would that belief be that they should try on okay um i promise to be succinct about it the belief i think everybody can benefit from is the belief that the reward mechanisms in the brain dopamine release in particular are completely under their subjective control and the immediate retort that i get is yeah but i don't want to be out of touch with reality i don't want to tell myself i won when i've actually lost and i'd say exactly you have to maintain control of that system so that you're not just releasing dopamine into your system through thoughts or humor of any kind randomly you need to attach it to things that to you also feel very real and important in life and if you can start to identify those things what's real and important to you in life and then learn to access this subjective release of dopamine in your mind that essentially guarantees that you're going to be able to continue to move forward in the pursuit of goals and it essentially guarantees that you'll be joyful in the process not always but a lot of the time and it essentially guarantees that the way that you're going to show up in the world is with more capacity because we've been talking about a lot of these things in the kind of vacuum that is individuals in their pursuits but the other thing that's really wonderful to be around are people that know how to access this because those are the people we orient to as leaders and as as you know co-workers and as teammates and i'm not just talking about in sports teams and in the workplace but also in family when we see that other people have a capacity and they're not just grinding it out it there's a there's an interaction that happens between members of the same species where we start to feel more possibility for ourselves and that's really i think what we really need especially heading into 2021 i think you know especially in 2021 and beyond i think we really need to ask ourselves how are we showing up for ourselves and the pursuit of goals and what kind of process we're using and what kind of process we're demonstrating for others i think that's really important i think there could be tremendous benefits so the belief to play with is that your beliefs are under your control that it takes some practice and that this dopamine system is really incredibly valuable and that you were endowed with one and you were able to use it how you like yeah don't leave it at the at the control and discretion of external events this has been fascinating i want to go for another three hours but i think there's a lot to unpack here for people so i want you to take this information run with it start applying it i want to have you back on in the future because there's a lot of things i have written down that i didn't ask and i want to dive into the neuroscience of developing powerful intimate relationships the neuroscience behind making more money and what money does to the brain whether it be good or bad why some people view money as a bad thing and others view it as a good thing and the neuroscience behind healing the body with the mind so that's what i want to talk about the next time if you guys want andrew to come back on leave a comment below hashtag greatness if you want him to come back on and talk more about some of those things and everything else that we've covered today it's been powerful you've got an amazing instagram account uh huberman lab that people can go follow every day you're posting incredible little 30-second neuroscience ideas around the brain and the body connection you're breaking it down in a simple way for us to understand our bodies our minds how to achieve goals so make sure to follow you on instagram twitter as well huberman lab and i know you've committed to writing a book and having that out sometime soon so we're all going to hold you accountable to it i do have a is there a date with that coming out or now yeah it's going to come out in 2021 okay um and i'm starting a podcast which is going to be a little bit different than most podcasts i'm going to take a month at a time and really go deep into one topic through repeated episodes things like sleep motivation plasticity focus i now have homework um for our future conversations um the the topics that you raised and that's that there is a going to be a youtube channel it would be called huberman lab it's very easy to find on them do you have a youtube channel yet i do i just set one up um they'll what's that the first that's humor in the lab that's going to be huberman lab right okay cool so it should be pretty easy to go subscribe there on youtube now yeah you can subscribe there now and i'm there's going to be a welcome video posted very soon where the comments section and people's votes for different topics will be the topics that i'll cover that's cool but um but any of those venues should be pretty easy to find nowadays yes i definitely want to thank you for having me on course you always challenge my thinking very hard i have to say there's a hard thinking um hopefully people will find some utility in the practices i realize we covered a lot and this discussion was went into some more kind of um challenging and complicated aspects of our neurology but uh hopefully that's the goal drive benefit from it thanks for keeping me on my toes of course man yeah i wanna make sure people follow you and also if you're listening to this we'll have some links in the show notes of the podcast wherever you're listening whether it be apple podcast or spotify or you can go to youtube and check out we'll have all the links in the description for also the yoga nidra links that you recommend we'll have it in this channel as well um this is great man i appreciate it thanks again for coming on really appreciate it if you're looking for more greatness in your life make sure to check out this video right here and also check out our free pdf the three secrets to unlock the power of your mind to help you change your life download it right here if you look at high performers in these very high risk high consequence special operations communities they have gratitude practices

Channel: Lewis Howes

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Keywords: Lewis Howes, Lewis Howes interview, school of greatness, self help, self improvement, self development, personal development, success habits, wealth, motivation, inspiration, inspirational video, motivational video, success principles, millionaire success habits, how to become successful, success motivation, Andrew huberman, andrew huberman interview, andrew huberman motivation, andrew huberman speech, unlock your mind, change your behavior, unlock the power of your mind

Id: ges5AdZIv_s

Length: 106min 23sec (6383 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 19 2021