Andrew Huberman: How to Increase Your Dopamine by 60% & Optimize Your Brain’s Response to Stress

Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Friendship is one of the most reliable sources of predictability
that exists within human interactions.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
Professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, doctor Huberman, launched the
Humoran Lab podcast concentrating on neuroscience and other scientific topics
neuroscientists neurobiologists. Andrew Huberman.

Speaker 1 (00:16):
We could say this about any organism, but humans included.

Speaker 2 (00:20):
We need the feeling of safety and acceptance.

Speaker 1 (00:23):
If ever, there was a practice that I wish every
human being on the planet would do besides go out
in view morning sunlight, it would.

Speaker 3 (00:29):
Be weird throw to announce that we've reached three million subscribers.
We're incredibly grateful for each and every one of you.
If you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to hit that
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(00:52):
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(01:13):
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Speaker 2 (01:27):
The number one health and wellness podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Jay Seti, Jay Sheety. Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose.
I'm so grateful that you decided to lend me your
eyes and ears for the next few moments. Today's guest
is one of your favorites. He's been on the show before.
He's one of my favorite humans too. I'm speaking about
the one and only doctor Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and tenured

(01:52):
professor in the departments of Neurobiology and by courtesy Psychiatry
and Behavioral Sciences at Stama School of Medicine. Doctor Huberman
has made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development,
brain function, and neural plasticity. In addition to his role
at Stanford, doctor Huberman is the host of the incredible

(02:14):
podcast Huberman Lab. If you're not a subscriber already, which
I'd be very surprised, make sure you do subscribe. I'm
so excited to welcome my friend and incredible expert, doctor
Andrew Huberman. Andrew, it's such a pleasure to have you
here again. I'm so grateful that you took the time
out and I can honestly say I've spent time with
you offline and online, and what's been beautiful is just

(02:37):
your humility, your sincerity and genuineness across the board. And
I know we exchange texts and calls and messages frequently
and I'm just loving our growing friendship. So thank you
so much for what you do online but also who
you are offline to me personally as a friend.

Speaker 1 (02:54):
Thanks so much for having me here today and for
being such an amazing friend and a wonderful thing to
get get to know you better. And you know, the
public facing Jayshetty is an incredible person and the private
world Jayshetty is equally extraordinary in overlapping but also distinct ways.
So it's been a lot of fun and I look

(03:14):
forward to growing our friendship further.

Speaker 3 (03:16):
Thank you, And I mean that's actually you know, I
never thought about this when I was preparing for our
conversation today, but maybe there's something beautiful to tap into
there and to hear about the neuroscience of friendship because
I feel that we keep talking about the loneliness epidemic
that we're experiencing in the world right now. We keep
talking about this feeling that people have of not being

(03:37):
seen by their friends, not being understood by their colleagues,
not feeling heard by their family members. People are surrounded
by lots of people but feel really disconnected. We're seeing
this growing rise of interconnectivity and more friends and more
followers online, but then feeling really, saying what's the right word,

(04:01):
not even isolated or disconnected because we feel like we're
surrounded by people, but we feel emotionally distant from people.
What's happening from a neuroscience perspective as our friendships are
getting weaker even though our followerships and online friendships are
getting bigger.

Speaker 1 (04:17):
So at the neuroscience level, we have to remember that
the brain circuitry, which of course is always linked to
the body. We want to remember brain body are fortunately
now understood to be interconnected. Five years ago, ten years ago,
that wasn't so much an accepted idea. But the nervous system,
the brain, the spinal cord and all the connections to
the body and back to the brain and spinal cord

(04:38):
are bidirectional and highly interconnected. So when we say brain,
I'm more or less using it as a proxy for
a whole nervous system, including body. The circuits that are
responsible for feelings of social connectedness are deeply, deeply rooted in.

Speaker 2 (04:53):
Our need for safety.

Speaker 1 (04:54):
We could say this about any organism, but humans included
need two things. I believe we need the feeling of
safety and acceptance. And so we are to have a
conversation about the kind of loftier words like peace, contentment, fulfillment, belonging.

(05:15):
I think I borrow that list, by the way, from
the incredible Martha Beck. So it's not a coincidence that
those rattled off my mind, But I feel like those
four words are so critical to what we all want
and what we all need at an aspirational level. We
can't have a discussion about those without also, I believe
having a discussion about the fact that we have hardwired

(05:37):
aspects of our nervous system, meaning genetic programs that are
written into the script of all our genomes, regardless of color,
regardless of background, that are just scripted into our genome
that allow us to breathe without thinking about it, digest
food without thinking about it, keep our heart rate going
without thinking about it, elevated if it needs to be,
slowed down if it needs to be, etc. And then

(06:00):
hardwired circuitry that is there for bonding with our caretaker
during early infancy and bonding with others of our species,
and evaluating whether there is safety and acceptance from the
other members of our species. Now, these brain circuits have names,
and we could get into that they almost all have
some connectedness to an area of the brain called the hypothalamus,

(06:22):
which sits above the roof of your mouth, which has many,
many dense collections of neurons we call nuclei, responsible for
everything from temperature regulation to feeding, to reproductive behavior and
on and on, all the basic kind of housekeeping things.
But connected to those brain areas are brain areas that
are associated with evaluating whether one is safe or not.

(06:44):
So safety and acceptance. Then we can break down in
the following way. If we look at it through this
neuroscience lens, safety is really about the ability to predict outcomes. Okay,
and the brain, after being responsible for all these housekeeping
functions heart rate et cetera, is largely a predictive organ
It wants to understand what's going to happen next to
the extent that it can then free up mental real

(07:07):
estate neural real estate to work on creative projects or
to build things, or to imagine things. Right, there's no creativity,
there's no building in the absence of safety.

Speaker 2 (07:16):
Then it just becomes survival.

Speaker 1 (07:18):
So the kind of older discussion, meaning in the eighties,
nineties and early two thousands, the discussion about the nervous
system was we would hear about higher brain order functions
and limbic functions, right, weird hear about kind of primitive
lizard brain and more evolvrain and all of that is
frankly true. It remains true, and that language is perfectly fine.
But I think if we are to think about safety

(07:38):
and acceptance, we say, what is safety about? Safety is
about being able to predict outcomes when we are in
the company of people, or we know we have people
available to us. Should we need something food, maybe we
need a monetary loan, Maybe we need a word of encouragement,
Maybe we need somebody to bounce ideas off of whatever
it is that constitutes safety for us. Subjective, highly individual well,

(08:02):
then when those circuits can quiet down, it says, if
you know, they can finally quiet down, and so we
have enough safety, so that then we can start to explore,
iterating what we have in terms of new jobs, new
creative ideas, new art, new you know, take a walk
with somebody you care about. Right, those are not the
sorts of things you do when you feel that you

(08:23):
are under siege, either real siege, physical siege, or emotional siege. Okay,
then acceptance gets a little bit trickier to sort of
pinpoint in the brain. Acceptance likely dovetails neurologically with this
these brain circuits for safety, because acceptance is really about well,
given the range of expressions that we have, our range

(08:45):
of humor, our range of political beliefs, our range of behaviors,
can I predict that these safety mechanisms will still be there,
These people will still be there, These things will still
be there. Will they turn on me? Will they on
me right? Will they laugh with my jokes? Or will
they decide they don't want to talk to me anymore
because of my jokes? These kinds of things. Now, what

(09:07):
I'm trying to not do here and at the same
time do is to put a neuroscience lens onto these
two things of safety and acceptance. But if we were
to just take a step back and say, what do
we know to absolutely be true? Well, safety and acceptance, belonging, peace, contentment, etc.
Come from a variety of sources. Certainly in our early

(09:28):
relationship with our caretakers, the circuits form that are basically
all about resonance with the caretaker. Alan Shore here at
UCLA has done beautiful work on this. I think the
book's title is called right Brain Psychotherapy, and it's really
about how the bonding of infant and typically mother, but
how the word caretaker the bonding of infant and I'll
just say mother since that's the more typical scenario. There's

(09:51):
actually a lot of synchronization of brain networks early on,
such that one's physical and mental state reflects the other
and so on, and so from the very early stages
that we come into the world, we are resonating with
other people. Call it energy, if you want, call it emotions.
It's neurochemical. Yes, it involves oxytocin, but a whole lot else.
In other words, we leave infancy and childhood and adolescence

(10:14):
if we have a healthy upbringing with a sense of predictability.
Someone can be there and then not be there. They're
accessible if we need them, etc. Now, that sort of relationship,
that connectivity between humans and safety and acceptance in those
relationships has been explored extensively. I think we've all seen
the image of the mother and child and the brain
imaging and seeing some sort of collaborative activation of their

(10:37):
brain networks. That's been explored extensively, and it's beautiful work,
and we could always use more of that sort of work.
What's been explored far less is the safety and acceptance
that occurs between romantic pairs, although there are laboratories starting
to do that, having people, for instance, look at the
face of their significant other angry, sad, et cetera, while
in brain scanners, even scanning of two individuals separately at

(10:58):
the same time, those sorts of things. Far less has
been done on this notion of friendship. But I think
in this day and age, when well, it seems like
everything is more complicated.

Speaker 2 (11:09):
But I'm sure they've.

Speaker 1 (11:10):
Been saying that for for decades or not hundreds of
thousands of years. What do we know about friendship? Friendship
is one of the most reliable sources of predictability that
exists within human interactions. Why because you can have many,
many friends, and you don't have to break up with
one friend to have another friend. When you were when
we're little, they say who's your best friend? And maybe

(11:31):
then you could only have one. But pretty soon we
realize that we can have many great friends, many best friends,
and I consider you one of those, Like we're growing
our friendship. But there's no sense of trade off, even though,
of course time is always a trade off. In fact,
you were at a gathering at my home with many
other friends.

Speaker 2 (11:47):
Right.

Speaker 1 (11:48):
This seems can be collaborative, typically in romantic relationships. While
there are exceptions to this is typically a pairing right. So,
there are clearly brain networks that are overlapping with the
brain networks associated with parent, child or child caretaker relationships
and romantic relationships that involve the generation of safety and

(12:10):
acceptance among friends. The major difference, however, is that friends
throughout history, even when people lived in small villages, tended
to be dispersed by greater distances. And so when we
hear about the loneliness crisis, are we hearing about a
crisis of lack of connectivity with our parents, maybe with
our siblings, possible with romantic others. That's a whole domain

(12:33):
into itself. You cover a lot of that and the
challenges associated with finding and building healthy romantic relationship. But
what we know for sure, based on extensive research now,
is that there's a real dearth of close friendships for many,
many people, not just in the US, but abroad as well.
Now we could make an argument that it's by virtue

(12:55):
of smartphones, but I don't think we want to go
there just yet. I think Jonathan Heights doing a beautiful
job exploiting those ideas, and he's far better equipped to
to kind of pinpoint the relationships causal er otherwise than
I am. But here's what we know for sure. With friends,
we can both hope for and expect safety and acceptance
by virtue of having lots of different kinds of friends.

(13:16):
Friends with whom we play sport, friends with whom we
just hang out, friends with whom we don't really talk
too much at all, and friends with whom we drop
into deep conversation with. So one of the things that
I personally have found to be immensely beneficial in my
own life, and for which it's clearly had an outsized
positive effect relative that the time required is a simple

(13:37):
good morning text that comes on a reliable schedule, meaning
every single morning. Now this might sound almost trivial, but
when I wake up in the morning, I either receive
or send a good morning text to Right now, they
are about three people in that kind of collection. They're
not talking to each other. But if I don't receive

(13:58):
that text by noon, it activates something in me.

Speaker 2 (14:01):
It's not a ton of.

Speaker 1 (14:03):
Anxiety, but it activates something. Are they okay? What's going
on with them? You know it isn't Why aren't they
checking up on me? I assume something's come up. But
the simple receival of a text from somebody saying good morning,
I think has both ancient and modern significance. Ancient in
the sense that one of the first things that everyone
experienced when we lived in small villages, because that's essentially

(14:25):
how we evolved, was to see faces of other what
biologists call conspecifics, other you know, and other same non
conspecific people like people that could be romantic partners or
family members or people we were going to work with.
We saw faces first thing in the morning, and we
know with certainty, because there's a ton of beautiful work,
mainly from Nancy Canwisher's laboratory MIT, a brilliant researcher, as

(14:48):
well as a woman named Doris Soo who now is
at Berkeley was at Caltech, that there's an immense amount
of neural real estate devoted to the processing of faces,
not just facial expressions, but human faces in particular. Now
monkeys have the same brain area for monkey faces, so
this is not an area that's just designed to.

Speaker 2 (15:05):
See eyes, nose, and mouth.

Speaker 1 (15:07):
It's a brain area that has neural real estate that
responds specifically to the faces of other humans in humans,
And there's a whole lot to talk about how it's
connected with areas of the brain involved in emotion and
emotion regulation, et cetera. But the simple act of sending
a good morning text to one person and receiving that back,

(15:27):
perhaps exchanging a note or two about what's your plan
for the day, doesn't have to be an extensive back
and forth, but the same person or persons consistently. I've
experienced in my own life, in times both good and
bad and kind of neutral, that it has this outsized
positive effect. And I don't think that's because you know,
I was lacking social interaction. My life is very full.

(15:50):
I have a very busy business life. I can go
online and see faces. But when we go online and
see a familiar influencer, or a familiar political figure, or
a familiar even family member, yes they're there, and I
think there's great power to that, But they aren't there
specifically to see us. Although as creators we know that
we are there to see our audience and for them

(16:11):
to see us, that's a real thing, but it's quite
different to have this exchange, this reciprocity. And I really
believe that if there was one thing that we could
each and all do to better our lives, no matter
how busy our social schedule or are at home environments,
is to have at least one, but probably one to three,
depending on your bandwidth, one to three friends that every

(16:32):
single morning, when you wake up, you text them and
they text you back, just a simple good morning. Why
Because it's the reliability. It's this notion of expectation being fulfilled.
It's not a huge expectation, and this brings us back
to safety and acceptance. Right, No one's going to text
us good morning if they don't accept us if they
dismiss us, and the safety is in the predictability of

(16:55):
the interaction. Now for people that walk to the corner
and they see the barista and they get their or
they see their neighbor, et cetera. The importance of saying
hello to people on the street. This is something that's
really fallen away these days. Depends on where you live,
but people are very much in their phones. People are
very much afraid, frankly, of how they will be reacted
to if they were to reach out to somebody that

(17:15):
they don't know. These basic human interactions take us back hundreds,
if not thousands, maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands
of years.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
And if I were to put.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
My money on any experiment, it would be that there
is dedicated neural machinery for these sorts of practices. And
while social media has wonderful contributions and significance to make
in the well being of our lives, I truly believe
that I am absolutely certain that these simple practices, just
as morning sunlight can profoundly affect our daytime mood, focus

(17:46):
and alertness in nighttime sleep. I think these simple practices
of saying good morning by text each morning to the
same person or people and receiving a text back sets
something on the shelf like Okay, we're good to move
forward to today.

Speaker 3 (18:02):
Hey everyone, it's Jay Schetty and I'm thrilled to announce
my podcast tour. For the first time ever, you can
see my on Purpose podcast live and in person. Join
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or a CEO or business leader. We'll dive into experiences

(18:26):
designed to inspire growth, spark learning, and build real connections.
I can't wait to see you there. Tickets are on
cell now, Head to Jayshetty dot me and get yours today. Yeah.
Two things came to mind as you were speaking. Your
habit of the text every morning makes me feel like
you're getting to write a story with someone and force someone.

(18:49):
And so there's this sense of someone knows my story.
And now it's not like, oh, I speak to you
once a month and we're catching up on everything that
happened and you're missing the nuance and the extra in
the detail. It's like I'm getting to log my story
in every day which means I really feel this person
knows me and I know them. So now when we
do get together this weekend to break bread, I don't

(19:12):
have to do that in between small talk. They're already aware.
And now we're just almost connecting all the dots, as
opposed to I'm now using my time with you to
plot all the dots. So there's that sense of like
story exchange, which I think is so important. I find
that that my friends you've known me the longest, but
the ones that I also consistently text every day, they're

(19:35):
the ones that I feel understand the tapestry of my
life and I know theirs. And so now you're not
just looking at dots on a wall. Look, you're connecting
the dots in that meeting, which I think is I
don't know. I'd love to hear how that works out
from a neuroscience perspective. But the second thing that I
was reminded by as you were speaking was I feel
like writing down. I always encourage a lot of my

(19:56):
clients to do this, to write down a list of
emotions they'd like to experience with people. So it could
be things like adventure, discovery, comfort, humor, love, whatever it
may be just write down the list and then for
each one write down the name of a different person.
Ideally that fulfills that need in your life, because often

(20:20):
I feel like we put a lot of pressure on
our romantic partners or one person in our life to
be all these things, and the truth is, no matter
how phenomenal anyone is or how much they love us,
they just can't be that. And so if you have, hey,
I've reached out to this friend when I want some
adventure because they love it too. If I want to
see a sports game, this is the person I reach
out to. And then do the same in the opposite way.

(20:43):
Which one of those do you fulfill for your friends?
What emotions do you help other people create? And I
feel like if you look at friendship as a spectrum,
as this broad set of connection points, rather than like
this is my best friend as you were saying, or
this is my number one friend, and we get away
from hierarchy and we move more into a spectrum, I

(21:05):
feel like that mixed in with the text today starts
creating a much more healthier network of what connection means.
As well. It's also not just the same person doing
the same thing every week.

Speaker 2 (21:19):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (21:19):
I love the idea that by staying in contact regularly
we don't have to get caught up, and that then
we can just drop into what's most meaningful on that
particular day and maybe even have more available to us
to have a new experience, right as opposed to just
catching up. And then, of course there are those friends
that we catch up with and it feels like it

(21:41):
was just yesterday. Definitely, But I'd be willing to bet
that those were people that you spent a lot of
day to daytime activity with them from a university, or
you spend a lot of time just in the kind
of everyday shared experience for a while, and then when
you see each other again, it's like being right back there.
The neuroscience of this hasn't been explored near but given

(22:02):
that our very own Surgeon General highlighted the loneliness crisis
as one of the major crises in the world today,
I think that in terms of simple solutions to big
important problems, developing more connectivity with people through simple practices,
and again we're talking about a text here. I mean
I will be the first to say that if you

(22:23):
can hop on a phone call or you can get
on you know, a video chat with somebody that would
certainly be better, but many people just don't have time.

Speaker 3 (22:30):
For that show.

Speaker 1 (22:31):
So in terms of spending time with people in a
deeper and richer way, you know, getting the drop in time,
as it were. I love that you mentioned adventure. I'm
almost forty nine. I turned forty nine in just over
a month, and I would say that the first forty
nine years of my life have been marked by a

(22:52):
real thirst for adventure, a ton of curiosity. Now I
really feel myself entering a completely different season of my life.
I'm sort of hoping this would eventually happen, in part
because you know, I took some some kind of dangerous turns.
You know, I took risks with my with my life
at points where I didn't really intend to do that.
But you know, you seek enough adventure, you're gonna you're

(23:12):
gonna find adventure, and you have to be quite careful.
I have friends with whom I had tons of adventure,
and then now the adventures are far more docile and quiet,
and of course the internal adventure is real as well.
I think that friends with whom we can just be
one version of ourselves are wonderful friends. With whom we

(23:35):
can be all versions of ourself is especially wonderful. That's
the acceptance piece. Typically, I think we look more for
that in romantic relationship. This notion of just like safety
and acceptance being hallmarks of healthy romantic relationship, I think
those are also the hallmarks of healthy friendship. It's just
that with friendship we can be a bit more segmented
in terms of the number of different aspects of self

(23:57):
that we need safety and acceptance with. I think with
friendship also, you know, I've found it to be the
case that really knowing what's going on with people has
become a little bit more difficult. There's this there's this
kind of odd thing right where we're more interconnected in
terms of availability of communication, but we're less aware of
what's really going on for people. In fact, on the

(24:19):
way here, I had a call with a friend and
their headset was making a lot of noise, and so.

Speaker 2 (24:27):
We agreed.

Speaker 1 (24:28):
They said, Hey, how about I just turned mute mine
and for the next two minutes. I'm not kidding. This
is how they this is what they said.

Speaker 2 (24:35):
They said, just tell me, like what's on your heart
or what's in your heart.

Speaker 1 (24:40):
Hopefully it wasn't on your heart? What's in your heart?
And I was like, oh, wow, that's tough. You know,
that's tough. I mean, I okay, and I know that
they're listening, and then but it's very silent on the
other end, and I'm kind of speaking into a vacuum
there because they're not hearing anything. And then had maybe
just two minutes before we curled up the hill because
of the reception in the area that we're in, as

(25:02):
you know, is always complicated to just get feedback. It
was very interesting, like I realized that I felt close
to them before, but just the notion that they would
ask me that how do I feel? Not what's going
on lately? Not you know, am I feeling good or bad?
Like a valuation of feelings, but just like what's going on?
And I stumbled a bit at first, but I can

(25:24):
realize in saying it now, like I'm quite moved by
the fact that they would ask that of all things,
as opposed to like what's going on, what's your next
podcast about? And coming to visit that sort of thing.
And so like I'm taking a lot of cues these
days from people that make me feel very seen and accepted,
you're one of them, I must say, Like, I don't
just say that because we're in front of these microphones

(25:45):
and sitting here, like you and I have been in
touch a lot lately, through good times and hard times
and a lot of different things.

Speaker 2 (25:51):
It's not.

Speaker 1 (25:53):
A coincidence, though, that I think that we're here because
and talking about this, because I think that ultimately the
questions that we ask of the people we care about
are just as important as reminding them that we're there.
Because when we ask a question like you know, what's
in your heart, what we're really saying is you know,
like what's really going on for you, as opposed to

(26:14):
like what's the next podcast about? Which is an interesting
question to me, but you know, so you know, this
is more your territory than mine. But I think in
the end, I think it comes back to safety and acceptance,
simple behaviors like a good morning check in, and then
asking questions that might feel a little bit challenging for
the other person to answer at first, but that really

(26:35):
show a depth of care and interest that go beyond
just kind of like narrative and storytelling. And I think
one thing that I'm also very eager about these days
is breaking down some of the traditional stereotypes, like you know,
for anyone that's listening to this and goes, oh, you know,
I didn't you know, men don't talk that way or something,
it's like, actually they do. They do, and if given

(26:58):
the chance, they will open up about things that perhaps
they hadn't even thought about. And I confess on one
of those people, maybe it was my y chromosome and
got in the way of me thinking like, wait, what
do you want me to talk about? What's in my heart? Hey,
actually that's a really great question, thank you. And so
I think this brings us back to these early circuits
that are all about safety and acceptance, that are all

(27:19):
about being able to predict things and basically to say, okay,
I don't have to be vigilant. That's really what safety
is about, is about turning off the neural circuits for vigilance.
When we turn off the neural circuits for vigilance, we
can start to direct our neural circuits, vision, auditory, whatever
thoughts towards an awareness of things that are both inside

(27:40):
us and around us that keep us in that calm state.
I mean, vigilance is associated with stress. Stresses associated with
a narrowing of the visual field and narrowing of the
auditory fields. I'll just use this analogy because my sister
and I last last summer, we always go to New
York for our birthdays together. We went and saw what
the Harry Potter like. Oh it's so good, right, and yeah,

(28:03):
is wild? I mean the effects are so unbelievable. She's
a big Harry Potter fan. I'm not okay, but just
just spectacular effects.

Speaker 2 (28:12):
It was just so wild. I couldn't believe it.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
But there's this library in the play where it's a
magic library, where when one of the books is taken
out about a particular subject, the books around it actually
morph and change to reflect the same subject material. And
when I saw that, I immediately said, that's how the brain works.
The way the brain works is a kind of pseudo hypnosis.
Hypnosis is about context and context setting and narrowing of context.

(28:37):
All of us have such a wealth of historical, present,
and future thinking cognition in our brains, but when we
get anchored to a particular emotional state or topic, what
ends up happening is that the available topics around it
change in reference to how stressed we are. When we
are stressed. All the topics, all the books on the

(28:57):
shelf around that stress, are about that thing in how
to solve it. And actually, this is why stress enhances
our memory for solving that the things that can help
us solve that particular issue. But guess what is given
up all the other distantly or not so distant, really
related topics that lend themselves to creativity, to thinking about
novel combinations of things. This is why our friend Rick Rubin,

(29:20):
I think, is such a spectacularly creative individual, because he
spends a lot of time putting his brain and body
into a state in which he can remain in contact
with these other related or seemingly unrelated topics. Whereas when
we're in a stressed mode, when we have to problem solve,
when we are in vigilance, excuse me, we absolutely narrow

(29:44):
our cognitive fields, our visual fields, our auditory fields. We
limit what we think is possible. And so I think
great friendships, to bring it back to it, great relationships
of all kinds have enough safety and acceptance in them
that we can make our way through the practical constraints
of the relationship in the day, the week, and the year.

(30:04):
But that there's also a sense of creativity that there
are new elements allowed to be brought in because there's
enough safety and acceptance that we can turn down those
vigilance circuits absolutely.

Speaker 3 (30:16):
How do we then with circuitry that's built for safety
and acceptance When you're talking about everything that you talk
about on the Hoopoman Lab, things that I talk about
from a maybe more spiritual wisdom perspective, they're all hard things,
and safety and acceptance generally in our current understanding of

(30:37):
those words, feels like comfort and security and easy and simple.
And then all of a sudden you're saying cold plunges,
infrared sauna, beginning of a circadian rhythm in the morning,
strength workouts, like all this other stuff, which initially is discomfort.
It's difficult, it's doing hard things. And I know this
was something you've been thinking about a lot, but I'm

(30:58):
just trying to make that connection. We're wired safety and acceptance,
but then all the stuff that's good for us seems
to be hard, at least in the beginning.

Speaker 2 (31:06):
Yeah, it's a great question.

Speaker 1 (31:07):
So the twist in all of this is that the
nervous system loves predictability, even if the predictability is arriving
through hard things. So I would say the major theme
of the Huberman Lab podcast has been tools we call
them protocols to anchor one's physiology in some predictable states.

(31:29):
I've never actually articulated that, but that's really what it's about.
So why you get sunlight in your eyes in the
morning because.

Speaker 2 (31:38):
It wakes you up. I could tell you it increases.

Speaker 1 (31:40):
Cortisol in a good way early in the day, that
it sets the time around your melatonin secretion for later
at night.

Speaker 2 (31:45):
It helps you sleep at night.

Speaker 1 (31:46):
And that's all true, but it creates a sense of predictability.
It allows you to know that for the next series
of hours, you're going to feel more alert, and at
night you're likely going to be able to fall asleep
more easily. Cold plunges, to my mind, people debate whether
or not they're valuable.

Speaker 2 (32:03):
For combating inflammation.

Speaker 1 (32:05):
They are, whether or not they're valuable for increasing metabolism,
probably not to a huge extent. But one thing we
know for sure is that they if done correctly, they're uncomfortable,
But after you get out, you have an increase in
these three neurochemicals that we call the catacholamines, dopamineupen effort
nor epinifferent and you feel more energized and slightly blissed.

Speaker 2 (32:25):
Out for the next two to four hours.

Speaker 1 (32:28):
It's a real effect because those are real chemicals, and
they've served that role for hundreds of thousands of years
in humans, and they will continue to serve that role
in humans. So the cold plunge is not so much
about pushing yourself as it is figuring out a way
that you can overcome a sense of stress and then
safely overcome a sense of kind of resistance to getting

(32:49):
in the thing, and then safely increase these neurochemicals that
then predictably shift your state to be more alert and
at the same time relaxed, little bit blissed out, if
we want to call it that. So you know, we
could list off protocol after protocol, right. If you tend
to eat meals at a consistent time plus or minus
an hour, doesn't matter if you're fast or not, you'll

(33:12):
tend to be hungry about fifteen minutes or so before
those meals. This is a wonderful thing because it increases
this predictability. This lends itself to safety and acceptance because
it allows you to have to not have to think
about a number of other things. So, you know, I've
been criticized and fairly so that, gosh, there's so many protocols.
How could anyone possibly do all these protocols? And the

(33:32):
truth is that many of the protocols are you know,
it's a buffet, and many of them, like how to
organize your workspace or when you travel for jet lag,
it's individual as to whether or not people.

Speaker 2 (33:42):
Want to do them, and of course they're all optional.
You know, this isn't law.

Speaker 1 (33:47):
So the idea, however, is that through some simple basic
behaviors viewing sunlight, a little bit of a walk after
a meal, a little bit of sunlight in the evening,
dimming the lights in the evening.

Speaker 2 (33:59):
You know, these are the base.

Speaker 1 (34:00):
Eating it more or less consistent meal times and mostly
unprocessed or minimally processed foods for the majority of your
food intake. Doesn't matter if you're vegan, vegetarian, or otherwise,
you're going to feel much much better. And part of
the much much better is feeling more alert and more
vitality during the waking hours and better sleep at night,
which just kind of seesaw back and forth into feeling

(34:20):
better overall, and thereby free up energy for things like
sending the morning text.

Speaker 2 (34:26):
You know.

Speaker 1 (34:27):
So I think I'm very glad you brought this up
because I think people hear, oh goodness, another thing to do.
But if you think about it that way, it's going
to be self limiting. But if you think about it
as each one of these things takes a minimum amount
of time, and you can do the walk and sunlight
thing in the morning combined, and may if you miss
a day, no big deal, No big deal. These are slow,
integrative systems. Your system will recover just flying, but down

(34:48):
on a consistent basis. You're going to feel much better,
and you're going to have more energy, and you're going
to be able to think about what you might want
to do in your creative life and then do that.
You'll have the time and energy to think about what
you might want to do relationship wise, or friendship wise,
or building out these aspects of life. So it was

(35:09):
never the intention that people do so many things that
they don't have time for friendship or kids or relationship,
or that their entire family or relationship be centered around
these protocols. Rather, they're designed to be weaved into everyday life,
and sometimes when people experience pain points like people are
having attentional issues, or people are experiencing depression, or they
have a particular creative project and they want to tap

(35:30):
into like open monitoring meditation for instance, very different as
you know, far better than I than other forms of meditation.
Then they can access those specific tools. But I don't
want to romanticize ancient times, but there was a lot
more predictability in some domains of life in ancient times,
assuming people were living in small villages, there was a
lot more predictability, but there was also a lack of predictability.

(35:51):
Someone could take off on a hunt or a gather,
and if they didn't come back, we might assume they're
never coming back. Two nights later, they might come back
and say that was a close call, or they come
back with a great yield.

Speaker 2 (36:04):
We don't know, you know, we don't know.

Speaker 1 (36:06):
What it was like, but you can be sure that
the same neural circuits that were responsible for stress and
lack of safety and therefore vigilance back then are very
much alive in our brains now. So again, the protocols
are designed to think about it like putting ingredients in
the refrigerator. You don't know what you're gonna cook, but

(36:27):
you have a lot more available to you as options
when you have when you know that all the basic
macronutrients are covered, everything's all the bases are covered, and
then you can start to think about what you would cook.
Whereas if you've ever arrived late in the city, you
get to your airbnb or your hotel and you see
like three or four things and one lousy pan and
thing one. Now you have to get the other kind
of creative. We have to adapt. And we've all done

(36:49):
the unhealthy option because that was the only thing, or
fasted because that was the healthiest option. So I think
what we're what we're getting to here is that the
human brain, like all animals, all animals need to know
where they're going to sleep that night. I mean a
dog goes into a new environment and is like trying
to figure out where's its spot. It's all about space.

(37:10):
You talk to any expert dog trainer, they'll tell you,
you know, it's all about negotiating space. Can they touch you?
Can they not touch you? Are they allowed to be
near you? Do they have to stay afar? Can they
go into every room?

Speaker 2 (37:21):
You know?

Speaker 1 (37:21):
You look at small children foraging an environment, however rambunctious
or calm, they're trying to figure out, like, what am
I allowed to do here? What am I not allowed
to do here? Sometimes by testing us as adults, we
do the exact same thing. We need to know where
we are, We need to orient in space and in time,
and then we need to know, like what's available to me?

(37:43):
Where am I going to stay tonight? Is one of
the most fundamental questions that we ask ourselves every single day,
except if you know where you're going to stay to night,
you don't ask yourself that, and you have mental real
estate to devote to other things. So what we're really
talking about here is is bookending the extremely basic fundamental
drives of the human brain for safety and acceptance. And
then at the very other end is these aspirational things

(38:04):
that we all seek, right, these notions of connectedness, of purpose,
of fulfillment of peace. Again, I'm borrowing from Martha's beautiful
list because I think it's so fundamental and it captures most,
if not all, of what we all seek. But I
think that we get very much caught up in the
how to reach goal A or be how to write

(38:25):
the book how to make the money, how to grow
a social media account, and we forget that at the
core of everything is our relationship to our surroundings, to
our inner landscape, into each other. And it always comes
back to safety and acceptance and where we feel uncomfortable,
where we feel like we didn't do things right or

(38:46):
others didn't do them right for us or to us.

Speaker 2 (38:48):
It always boils down to those two things.

Speaker 3 (38:52):
Yeah, you reminded me of a question I have to
ask people, is what's your most repeated door? Because when
I was looking at the research on thinking, the idea
was that not only well, we're having a lot of
thoughts every day, but a lot of the thoughts we
have are repetitive. And going back to your point on protocols,
I feel like the reason we have repeated thoughts is
because we haven't yet built a protocol to help that

(39:15):
thought go away. So if you built a protocol, like
I know where I'm sleeping tonight, you're now no longer
having that thought of where am I sleeping tonight? And
we may be asking ourselves a very different thing today
because we figured out where to sleep, but we might
be thinking like how I'm going to pay that bill.
How am I gonna deal with that issue at home?
What should I say to my kid?

Speaker 2 (39:35):
You know?

Speaker 3 (39:35):
Whatever? It is, right, We all have different challenges. Everyone
has a different set of issues that they're struggling with
or dealing with. And because we haven't created a protocol,
we keep asking that question, and that question then creates
panic and creates anxiety and create stress and eventually could
lead to burnout if someone just keeps propelling that thought

(39:56):
and doesn't create a protocol. So I love the idea
that people shou build the protocol that links with their
most repeated thor rather than having to think, oh god,
I've got to do twenty five things, it's like, well, no,
what is the thing that is keeping you up at
night or what is the thing that's causing you the
greatest anxiety and try and solve for that. It's like,
if you're out of milk, you go and buy milk.

(40:18):
You don't say I've got to buy twenty five other things.
You just go filled a part of the refrigerator that's empty.
Does that align on Yeah?

Speaker 2 (40:25):
Absolutely?

Speaker 1 (40:26):
I love what we're bridging over and over here is
the very practical foundational elements of safety with these aspirational things.
You know, I'm a big believer in physiology driving mental states.
They go the other way to emotional states drive physiology.

(40:46):
It's bidirectional. Of course. One of the reasons why I've
been so emphatic about respiration protocols is a my lab
published a clinical trial on this in collaboration with David
Spiegel in our department of psychiatry, which basically could be
summarized the following way. If you emphasize exhales, you tend
to calm down, meaning you make them longer, more and intentional. Normally,

(41:09):
we inhale actively and we passively exhale. Other species do
it the other way around some other species. If you
deliberately emphasize your exhales, the duration, the intensity, or just
even control the exhale actively, your heart rate slows. When
we emphasize inhales, we don't necessarily have to do hyperventilation
or tumo breathing or anything like that. We could, but

(41:32):
those forms of breathing tend to bring up our activation state,
and they emphasize inhales, both by virtue of vigor duration
or just putting more conscious attention to them. And there's
a reason for this, it's called respiratory sinus a rhythmia.
It's an actual phenomenon that links the heart and the
vagus nerve and our diaphragm and our lungs.

Speaker 2 (41:52):
It's a beautiful mechanism.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
When I'm overthinking at night and I want to fall asleep,
I start doing long axhale breathing through my mouth. Now,
sometimes I'm out, I just fall asleep. I know that
because I wake up sometime later I realize it worked again.
Other times it doesn't work so well right. And one
of the most common questions I get is how to
turn off repetitive thoughts. Now there, it's a bit of

(42:15):
a skill because you know, frankly, repetitive thoughts oftentimes are
serving an adaptive purpose. But we can get stuck on them, right,
or they can get stuck in us. I don't know
which one it is. But one of the reasons why
I'm such a strong believer in people doing a practice
like yoga nidra, which you know, and I must say,
I know I've upset to some extent some people by

(42:38):
coining something very similar non sleep deep rest or NSDR.
I want to make very clear that I have the
utmost respect for yoga nidra as an ancient practice. Neither
Yoga nidra, of course, nor NSDR or anything I developed.

Speaker 2 (42:53):
It's just that NSDR.

Speaker 1 (42:54):
It's a little bit different in that it removes intentions
and it tends to involve a little bit less of
some of the linking of chakras and things like that
that yoga nidra does. With no specific purpose in mind
behind designing that way except to be able to adapt
it to the laboratory context. Okay, what do we know
about Let's just call it it's original named yoga nidra.
The goal is to stay awake, to be conscious while

(43:18):
deliberately relaxing the body. That's a very useful practice feel
similar to meditation in a way, could be called a meditation,
but it has some distinct benefits. First of all, a
beautiful study that was done in Denmark I had a
medical school in Copenhagen showed that people that do a
yoga nidra practice get a sixty percent increase in baseline

(43:41):
dopamine levels in the basal ganglia brain area that's associated
with the preparation for movement and the withholding of movement.
So it essentially can be looked at as a practice
that changes neurochemicals in the brain that restore mental and
physical vigor. That's how I think of yoga nidra. It's
sort of like sleep. There are some stuff that he's emerging,
including some that I'm planning with doctor Matt Walker at Berkeley,

(44:03):
one of the pre eminent sleep researchers in the world,
that are going to explore whether or not little pockets
of the brain are actually sleeping or in rapid eye
movement sleep like states during yoga nidra.

Speaker 2 (44:12):
If you think about rapid.

Speaker 1 (44:13):
Eye movement sleep just as a very relevant aside, it's
a state in which the brain is very active and
the body is completely still, much like yoga nidra. Okay,
brain active, body still. Now, what's unique about yoga nidra
is that there's this instruction in the nidra if it's
a traditional one that talks about going from thinking and
doing to being and feeling. Okay, So let's step back

(44:37):
as neuroscientists when we say thinking is a lot about
anticipating future. It could be about thinking about the past,
it could be thinking about things that are happening now.
But it's a very four brain dependent process doing is
basal ganglia action generation withholding action and four brain circuitry
as well, you know, I should say prefrontal cortical circuitry

(44:58):
as well.

Speaker 2 (44:59):
Now being and feeling.

Speaker 1 (45:02):
Now, this is starting to sound a little bit like
quote unquote softer language, but there's nothing soft about this language,
because if we just put a neuroscience lens on it,
we say, okay, what is that really about. That's about
bringing ourselves from exterroception monitoring of the external world beyond
the confines of our skin, to monitoring of the internal
world within the confines of our skin. And there's something
magical about shifting our perception to inter reception from our

(45:25):
skin inward in that it takes us out of thinking.
Whereas when we're monitoring the external world for reasons that
are sort of logical but a little bit harder to articulate,
then it's more about anticipating things, trying to figure out
what goes with what, what's separate from what. The moment
we get to the level of our skin and inward
we know what's what and what's separate from what.

Speaker 2 (45:47):
It's just us inward. So there's one thing. Rarely do we.

Speaker 1 (45:51):
Think, oh, here's my brain and here's my leg now
Ndra then steps us through that. And so what it
does is it brings all of our cognition into this
internal receptive mode and then boom, we are in this
mode of being and feeling. So I don't think of
being and feeling as turning off thinking. I think of
it as bringing thinking to the level of our sensation

(46:11):
of our body. Yoga nidra, I think, is perhaps the
most powerful practice for learning how to turn off one's thoughts.
And so when one steps back from the research literature
and says, Okay, what do we know for sure about
yoga nidra and SDR. We know that this can be
done for ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, or an hour.

(46:32):
We know that it can very reliably improve levels of wakefulness, cognition,
and vigor post nidra. We know that it restores dopamine
levels to a market extent in the basal ganglia.

Speaker 2 (46:47):
We know that the brain goes.

Speaker 1 (46:48):
Into little pockets of sleep like states. This needs to
be explored further. And we know that it mimics rapid
eye movements sleep. And we know that people who do
it find it easier to make themselves fall back asleep
should they need, and they develop much stronger powers of
autonomic regulation, their ability to take themselves out of stress
if they need to. I mean, if ever, there was
a powerful practice, Yoga Nidra is that practice.

Speaker 2 (47:12):
And so when I step back.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
From the landscape of practices that can help us turn
off thinking or etc.

Speaker 2 (47:16):
This is probably a good time to just, you know,
mention that you know.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
Meditation I view as an exploration of one's own consciousness.
I also view it as a perceptual exercise, shifting one's
perception to a particular location as opposed to just wherever
the mind may take it. Put simply, it's far more
profound than that, as you know and as many know.
But meditation has been shown to reduce stress, improve focus,

(47:43):
improve memory. I'm thinking mainly of the studies by Wennie
Suzuki's lab at NYU. I'm thinking of the studies that
were done out of the University of Wisconsin that are
talked about in Altered States, which is a wonderful book,
and the work that you've talked about in your books.
When I think about Yogan Non Sleep, Deep Breast, it's
really about restoring mental and physical vigor and getting better

(48:04):
at regulating one's own autonomic internal kind of hinge, going
back and forth between sympathetic and parasympathetic, that you know,
kind of fight or flight and rest and digest, alert
and calm, learning how to adjust that in a conscious way.
And then when I think of practices like breath work,
well depends on the breath work. And then we can

(48:24):
simplify it by saying, when inhales are more vigorous and
made longer deliberately than exhales, heart rate goes up.

Speaker 2 (48:30):
Alertness goes up.

Speaker 1 (48:31):
When ex sales are made longer and more vigorous and
done deliberately, well, then heart rate tends to go down,
and we tend to shift more towards the state of calm.
And then, of course there's hypnosis, and hypnosis to me
is self hypnosis, which is a clinical tool that David
Spiegel and others around the world, but mainly David Spiegel
and his father popularized within the formal field of psychiatry,

(48:54):
and hypnosis is a combination of alertness and calm that
we know lends itself to neuroplaticity. What is hypnosis really for.
It's not meditation, it's not to calm down, is to
solve a specific problem, to quit smoking, to learn how
to regulate pain, to you know, any number of different
things that hypnosis has been shown in peer reviewed studies
to do. So when I step back, I say, okay, meditation,

(49:16):
non sleep, deep breast aka yoga nidra, I should say
yoga nidra aka non non sleep, deep breast breath work
and hypnosis. Well, now we have a kit of tools
that are available to us to adjust our internal state,
and any one of those could be used to turn
off thinking. But the most powerful one, in my opinion,
and by way of experience and sort of how I'm

(49:37):
viewing the research literature, I'm sure there are others out
there that would disagree with me, and that's fine, is
yoga nidra. If ever, there was a practice that I
wish every human being on the planet would do besides
go out in view morning sunlight, it would be yoga nidra.
And of course this has been available for thousands of years,
and unfortunately it has not gotten the traction worldwide that
I think it deserves, and especially at this time I'm

(50:00):
in human history, when the world seems so tense with
friction of all sorts of kinds, but also internal friction
for people, I think it's just, you know, it's something
that I really really want to shine a light on
as a tremendously beneficial tool for turning off thoughts when
it's necessary and for accessing you know, some people call

(50:23):
these atypical states, but most people go from sleep to
waking and sleep to waking without really an exploration of
what those different states are like. So, in any event,
forgive me for being long winded, but are those are
the tools that when I step back and I say,
where is there great neuroscience and physiology to support their use?

(50:43):
What are the specific uses that seem especially valuable for
one practice versus another? And how do these practices differ
because they often get conflated. Somebody starts breathwork and we think, oh,
it's this type of breath work or that type of
without thinking about what's being emphasized and where the heart
rate is going. Or you think meditation, and of course
there are many different kinds of meditation. Actually, I'd love

(51:04):
to know from you. I know of kind of traditional
third eye meditation, and I'm aware of open monitoring meditation.
What other sorts of meditation do you do.

Speaker 3 (51:13):
As you mentioned this breath work, there's visualization and there's
mantra or sound. So the meditation on the repetition of sound,
whether that be natural sounds, whether it be instruments, or
whether it be the repetition of mantra in your own voice,
or the collective chanting, which it's done through ancient times,

(51:36):
of the collective chance of sacred sounds. It is considered
one of the forms of meditation. And it almost feels
like a humming, kind of cocoon effect of being kind
of surrounded by this sound that's repeated again and again
and again. So it can kind of get you into
that kind of submerged, immersive, drowning feeling that I think

(51:59):
most if they've done a sound bowl meditation, have experienced
some form of what that could feel like. And again
you're getting into that atypical state. But going back to
what you were saying, what really resonated for me and
what I've always appreciated about your work, Andrew, I said
this last time you came on the show, is this
connection between these ancient practices and the modern euroscience. To

(52:23):
back it up, like when you've talked about many many
times about sunlight in the morning. I mean Suria numashkara,
which I mentioned last time is sun salutations. That is
the practice that you would do when you wake up
in the morning and you salute the sun. And it
was this idea of allowing the sunlight to enter it
through your eyes. And now you're talking about yoga nedra
at the end of the day to go to sleep again.

Speaker 2 (52:45):
To me, it's you've found.

Speaker 3 (52:47):
This way of not only broadcasting and helping people come
to these practices, but helping them be translated into modern
day language, which I think is so needed with a
scientific backing and going back to yoga, I can personally say,
just from a personal practice point of view, I had
a surgery two years ago, and I was in so
much physical pain during that first month of recovery. The

(53:10):
only way I could go to sleep was through yoga
nidra because the thoughts of pain and of stress and
of potential redamage or whatever it may have been, were
so high that that state could only be lowered through
yoga nidra. And when I'm jet lagged and I'm traveling
across the world, yoga nedras might go to to be
able to switch off in a new country when I'm like, gosh,

(53:32):
I'm going to be up all night, will I make
it to my work thing tomorrow. Yoga nidra completely allows
me to remove those thoughts and allow myself to fall asleep.
So I use it all the time, and I couldn't
encourage it. I'm so glad that you're broadcasting and helping
people understand the science behind it, because, yeah, these ancient
practices make sense, but they need a new language and
a new translation today.

Speaker 1 (53:53):
Yeah, Yoga nidra has such similarity to rapid eye movement
sleep as far as we know, it's not the exact
same brain state, but the similarity again is mind alert,
body still, which is exactly what happens during rapid I
movement sleep. And we know rapid eye movement sleep is
essential for formation of memories, for uncoupling of negative emotions

(54:15):
from previous day experiences. It tends to be more enriched
in the later parts of the night and so on.
For me, yoga nidra is the practice to do when
I wake up in the morning but I don't feel
completely rested. I'll do anywhere from ten minutes to thirty
minutes of that and then in the afternoon instead of
a nap, I'll do Nidra and sometimes I'll fall asleep, admittedly,

(54:36):
and then if I wake up in the middle of
the night, Nidra is my solution. I think that mind
active body still is such an interesting and frankly unusual
state unless we're in rapid movement sleep that most people,
until they try it, can't really appreciate the immense value
that it brings. But the beautiful thing is it works

(54:56):
the first time, and it works every time. Our mutual
friend Krubin, we're both lucky enough to know him and
to spend a little bit of time with him. And
Rick has a practice that he does. I know because
I went and visited him last summer and he would
just sit there with his eyes closed, in his body
very still. And at some point I asked him what
are you doing and he said, well, I'm thinking. And

(55:19):
I said, what's the benefit of doing this, you know?
And he said, well, I come up with ideas this way,
and I thought, oh, that's interesting, and it immediately rung
A bell I had a guest on my podcast. It
was actually the first guest ever on my podcast. Professor
by the name of doctor carldis Roth. He's an MDN
a PhD. He's the world's arguably top bioengineer in the

(55:39):
field of neuroscience. He's also a psychiatrist, so he sees patients,
and he also has raised five children. He's one of
these feetoms. His wife's centurologists at Stanford that you know.
He is a remarkable person, very deep thinker. And I
was talking to him on the podcast and he said
that he has a practice whereby at night, after his
kids go to sleep, he sits at the table or

(56:00):
on the couch, stills his body completely and forces himself
to think in complete sentences for about an hour. And
I thought to myself, WHOA, that's a wildly unusual practice.
And I said, what is it about? And he said, well,
that's how I structure my ideas. That's where new ideas
come to me. So Carl's doing that, Rick's doing that.

(56:20):
You start looking back through history, you find out that
Einstein had a walk in practice.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
That then he would.

Speaker 1 (56:25):
My father's a theoretical physicist, so this is where I
learned this.

Speaker 2 (56:28):
But presumably this is verifiable.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
I'm sure someone will tell me it's not true, but
enough people have told me it is that I'm inclined
to at least describe it where he would walk, then
stop and allow his thoughts to continue as if emotion,
mind active, body still, and then repeat. So this is
a very unusual state of mind that I think has

(56:52):
real value. And we know in sleep rap an eye movement,
sleep in the associated dreams, or where we work out
a lot of novel solutions to hard daytime problems. And
I can confidently say that the field of neuroscience can
say so much more about the different states of the
mind in sleep than we can about the states of
the mind in waken.

Speaker 2 (57:10):
It's kind of amazing. It's twenty twenty four.

Speaker 1 (57:12):
We know all this information about different brain areas, what
happens when you stimulate this, these neurochemicals in that, and
yet we have words stage one, two, three, four, rapidi
movement sleep, slow wave sleep. We have real mechanistic understanding
of the states of the mind and body in sleep,
and very very little language to describe like the state

(57:33):
of mind that we happen to be in right now.
So we can talk about hypnosis, which is a narrowed
context calm but alert, in which neuroplasticity brain changes are
more available to us. This is supported by clinical and
research data. We can talk about being attentive, we can
talk about being stressed, but if you think about a
it's not like very crude understanding. And so when I

(57:55):
think about practices like body still, mind active, or even
you know, something that I found immensely beneficial. Every Sunday,
I try and take a long hiker walk, and I
try and just let my mind spool out whatever ideas
it happens to have. You know, I like to think
it's accessing some subconscious that's been you know, kind of
packed with ideas and experiences during the week.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
But what do we call that? I call it a
walk or a run or a hike.

Speaker 1 (58:20):
But I think that the different states of mind that
we can go into during the day need more attention,
not just from neuroscience researchers, but from people in the
fields of meditation, people in the fields of health and wellness.
You know, what are the different states of mind? And
so I would say that the last you know, really forty,

(58:41):
but you know, thirty mainly, But five or six years
of my life I've been a public educator in the
realm of trying to teach people ways to harness their
physiology in ways that serve them best for mental health
and physical health and performance. But I'm now starting to
get very, very curious about how to evolve this thing
that we call brain states, and our understanding of not

(59:04):
just through language, but really understanding how to bring our
mind into sharp focus, how to be in the best
state of mind for connectedness, when to turn off empathy,
when to turn on empathy. I mean, these are all
circuitries within us that are possible, and of course we
have variation among us as a species as to whether
or not we lean more towards logical thinking or empathic

(59:25):
you know, affiliative thinking, these kinds of things. But you know,
I really believe that you know, people like you Jay
have an important role to play, and that the conversation
between neuroscientists, people who have knowledge of meditative practices like yourself,
there's real value in the overlap. And you said, you
know that you were grateful that we're talking about these things,
ancient practices and what they might mean if I've learned anything,

(59:48):
And I think I'm finally old enough that I can
make that statement if I've learned anything in my life, right, hopefully,
my life will continue, but if it, you know, should
I go someplace else before I anticipate. I think it's
become very clear to me that whether or not you're
talking about yoga tradition, or you're talking about neuroscience, or
you're talking about traditional medicine or some of the more

(01:00:08):
alternative medicines, the overlap in those Venn diagrams is where
the real money is. And I don't necessarily mean financial gain.
I mean that's where the great ideas are. So I'm
perfectly happy to talk about yoga, NIDRA, NSDR, brain circuits,
associated dopamine, basal ganglia, because ultimately, if I'm here to

(01:00:29):
do anything, it's to try and bridge these silos and
bring people's awareness to the fact that we've all been
talking about the same thing, and we're all seeking the
same things. Safety, acceptance, creativity, you know, these connectedness, purpose fulfillment.
These loftier ideals start with having our physiology in a

(01:00:52):
place where we can.

Speaker 2 (01:00:53):
Reliably move forward not have to worry about.

Speaker 1 (01:00:55):
Certain things, and then a little space opens up and
so on and so forth. But I think there's a
real calling now for anyone that's interested in the brain,
anyone that's interested in health and anyone that's interested in
humanity to really start paying attention to the overlap in
the ven diagrams between rem sleep and waking states, between
ancient practices and modern practices. And I should warn that

(01:01:17):
that person or those people, You're going to take some heat,
you know. But ultimately, the ability to go between these
silos and to bridge them, as we're trying to do
now and hopefully making some ground in this I believe
we are is going to serve humanity very very well,
because it's just been too long whereby people are holding
back knowledge. The secret of some chemical, the secret of

(01:01:42):
some practice, there's no secret. The secret is they all
work to some extent. The question is what are the commonalities,
what are the mechanisms, and what are the practices that
allow people to bring their brain and body into the
state that best serves them and other people. And it's accessible.
But we have to have a slightly open mind about
the language. We have to give up the ego saying oh,

(01:02:02):
that's my practice, that that breathwork is the domain of
my school or my thing. And frankly those arguments aren't
working anymore anyway, because information is so freely available on
the Internet. So in any case, there's a little bit
of editorializing there, I realize, but it's also a calling
to anyone that's interested in the mind and in the
brain that you know, neuroscience is no longer the unique

(01:02:24):
domain of neuroscientists, and I know that some of my
neuroscience colleagues are like, oh boy, you know here he is,
just as if it's accessible to anybody. I'm not saying
you can be a neurosurgeon if you aren't trained in neurosurgery, right,
but I'm not saying that you can be an advanced
meditative practitioner without putting in the hours. What I am
saying is that there's overlap in the ven diagrams of

(01:02:44):
these different fields. Sure, and the more collegiality, the faster
and further we're going to go as a species.

Speaker 3 (01:02:52):
Well, I think it goes back to what you were
just saying a few moments ago that we only have
a language for and I'm going to an umbrella term here,
but we only have language for the extremes of experience.
So what you were saying is when you're on a
hiker a walk, you don't have a term for what
that feels like, because it's not an extreme of being
asleep or being awake. It's kind of like this in

(01:03:15):
between cerebral state that we don't have a language for.
And I think that on a micro level makes sense
to all of us, where we have words like I'm
angry or I'm sad or I'm upset, but our word
for is okay, right, Like our word for okay is okay,
which isn't a great descriptor of how we actually feel.

(01:03:35):
And so we're only good at describing things in extremes
on a micro level. And then if you zoom out
and take that on a macro level, that translates as well,
where we're only good at dealing with these extremes. And
when you're saying ven diagram, it's saying, well, get away
from the extremes and look at the overlaps. But I
think we as a society on a micro level and
at a macro level, have only learned how to deal

(01:03:58):
with the pendulum swing on either side, all the extremes
on either side, and therefore anything in the middle or
the gray starts to feel uncomfortable, starts to feel It's
not easy to say whether it's right or wrong, and
therefore it's like, well, we're not even going to go there.
And I think anyone that I've spoken to at the
top of their field, you being one of them, anyone

(01:04:19):
we've ever had on the show, is far more interested
in the gray, is far more in the gray, and
is spending far more time exploring thought that is unclear, uncomfortable,
and uncertain, because that's where life really has lived, in
the unpredictable. That's the adventure, that is the adventure, that
is the adventure. And I feel that that's why humans

(01:04:42):
want to go to space, Like why is everyone fascinated
by space? Because it's not clear as to what it
is and what's out there and where it is. And
of course not many people will get to go to space,
at least for now, but the idea being the same,
that there has to be that curiosity from all of
us to say, oh, where where are we in the
same place? Like where are we connected on our idea?

(01:05:04):
And where are there things that aren't similar but maybe
they're connected in a different way. And I think being
able to oscillate between connectivity and disconnectedness is a need
for the brain and the mind as opposed to this
feeling of again, it goes back to what we started
with safety and acceptance makes us feel today that you

(01:05:25):
can't allow yourself to engage in an idea that doesn't
fully connect with yours because that feels unsafe.

Speaker 1 (01:05:34):
Right, especially right now, right things feel very polarized.

Speaker 3 (01:05:39):
Correct.

Speaker 1 (01:05:40):
You know, I'm putting in a very strong vote for
the League of Reasonable People, which is hopefully everybody, right, Like,
I don't want to sound overly sentimental, but like I
and maybe I'm just too emotional lately, but I am
so pained by the amount of fighting that I see
that I know will not result in any anything. It's

(01:06:00):
not going to solve the problem for either side, right.
I guess at forty nine, I feel old enough to
say this, Like, I still have hope, but that's obviously
not a solution. I think that when we really get
down to the neuroscience of self understanding, when people really
start to understand that the human brain is a magnificent

(01:06:21):
machine and organ but that it has limitations, and we
can start to understand our own limitations, you know that
it can take us just up to this point, but
not further, and that we can rely on healthy collective
thinking healthy collective thinking to get us over these divides.
I think that's when we're finally going to evolve as

(01:06:41):
a species. I really do, when we start being able
to exit our own brain and our group think to
be able to really come to solutions, because often we
just think in terms of compromise and conflict, which are
essential things to think about, But ultimately, understanding the limits
of our cognit and how emotion drives cognition is really

(01:07:03):
how we're going to be able to evolve our beliefs
about what's possible. And by the way, that's not meant
to just be a bunch of aspirational word salad. That's
like a real possibility if we can just have the
self reflection to understand we know certain things, we believe
certain things, but that this neural architecture that we call
our brain is limited in the extent to which it
can see into the future and make the best decisions

(01:07:25):
for everybody. We operate thinking that, but that's not how
it works. And of course we can't look to any
one individual to solve the problem for everybody, now, will
it be AI?

Speaker 2 (01:07:35):
I don't know.

Speaker 1 (01:07:35):
That involves a lot of trust in AI and these
large language models are trained in many ways the same
way that a neural network. It trains itself up how
a young brain develops and makes sense of the world.
So I don't have any immediate solutions. What I do
have is a piece of neuroscience knowledge that was at
least new to me that most neuroscientists aren't aware of.
But I think this is one of the most important

(01:07:57):
discoveries in the last one hundred years of neuroscience. It's
a collection of studies on an area of the brain
called the anterior mid singulate cortex. Most people have never
heard of this brain area, including many neuroscientists, doctor neurosurgeon.
They know where it is talktor a neuroscientists unless they
teach neuroanatomy, which I happened to. Most don't know where
it is in the brain, and most didn't know what

(01:08:19):
it did because it hadn't been explored. And then a
colleague of mine at Stamford School of Medicine named Joe
Parvezi did an incredible study where he was doing neurosurgery
and stimulating different brain areas as a means to try
and find the location where he needed to do the surgery,
and he stumbled upon an area called the anterior mid
singulate cortex, where if he stimulated with an electrode, people

(01:08:40):
because they were awake during the neurosurgery, would report feeling
as if there was some conflict pressing on them. Some
one't even described as I feel like I'm driving into
a storm, but I feel ready.

Speaker 2 (01:08:52):
I can do this.

Speaker 1 (01:08:54):
Others reported a different set of words, but the words
essentially converged around the same set of subjective experiences, which
are I feel challenged, but I can do it. It's
kind of forward center of mass. And then other studies
separate laboratories discovered that people that take on a new
practice that's challenging for them, their anterior mid singulate cortex

(01:09:15):
grows in volume. Other people who fail to successfully engage
in a regular challenging activity, the anterior mid singulate cortex
didn't increase in volume in the same way.

Speaker 2 (01:09:25):
So very interesting brain structure.

Speaker 1 (01:09:27):
And there's I would say about a dozen or so
really quality studies in humans, a bunch of animal models,
but they're a bunch in humans that point to the
intermid singulate cortex as a site in the brain associated
with the feeling of tenacity and will power.

Speaker 2 (01:09:40):
To push through.

Speaker 1 (01:09:42):
It's heavily interconnected with the dopamine reward system, heavily connected
frankly with a lot of different brain areas. It's a
hub for a lot of inputs and outputs. So what
do we know about the interimid singulate cortex. Perhaps most
interesting of all is that this is the brain area
that seems to preserve its size and even grow in
size in what are called superagers. Superagers are people that

(01:10:02):
maintain their cognition later into life. These are people that
don't undergo the normal age related decline in cognition separate
from Alzheimer's type dementia. You know, everybody as they get
older develops less working memory, the ability to keep ideas
in mind in the short term. Superagers seem to overcome
all that and they live longer. So you could say, well,

(01:10:25):
this is a case of reverse causality. They live longer,
so they have a bigger brain area called the interim
and singular cortex. We don't really know what the direction
of causality is. Could just be correlation, but it all
gets ultra interesting when you start to tack together willpower
the taking on of new things, learning things in neuroplasticity

(01:10:45):
and life span. And it may be that that quad
fecta represents what we think of as the will to
live is associated with an intense curiosity and desire to
bring in new ideas and modes of thinking. And new
ideas and modes of thinking then feedback on our feelings
of how we could gain reward internal reward of course,
dopamine being the universal currency of reward as a means

(01:11:07):
to move forward.

Speaker 2 (01:11:08):
What does this mean?

Speaker 1 (01:11:09):
This means that everybody I believe can become a better
human being by taking on challenges. What is a challenge
that can grow the inter amid singulate cortex. Well, unfortunately,
it's a challenge that you don't want to engage in.
So if you love running, it's not going to do it.
If you love resistance ring, it's not going to do it.
If you don't want to meditate in the morning, and

(01:11:30):
you do five minutes or ten minutes of meditation, then
you just enhanced the activation of your inter amid singulate cortex.
So it's about it's not just about doing hard things,
it's about really pushing through resistance. And the reason I
bring this up now as opposed to a discussion about
like how to get more tenacious or have stronger willpower.

Speaker 2 (01:11:48):
It will do that.

Speaker 1 (01:11:50):
Okay, we know that when the inter amid singulate cortex
gets bigger, it translates to a lot of different areas
of challenge, not just the area in which you challenged it.
The reason is, I believe that this lofty notion of
humans evolving to more collective thinking, to embracing new ways
to bridge divides that harm human beings at scale or

(01:12:12):
just locally, is going to emerge through only through the
willingness to embrace the internal friction that is hearing things
and seeing things that we don't like and being able
to take a stance of adaptive response whatever that is. Now,
of course, there are things that we hear and see

(01:12:33):
and don't like that activate enough of a sense of
injustice in us that that's all it does. It just
brings us to the point of wanting to impart justice.
But what I'm talking about here differences in opinion, strongly
polarized views that lead to all sorts of things, as
we know, good and bad and everything in between. And
if people had the capacity to feel that friction and

(01:12:56):
to stay in a mode of some open cognition. I
think we would come up with novel solutions. I really
think the next iteration of human beings is collective consciousness.
You know, it sounds lofty, sounds woo, but it's basically
lots of minds working together, even minds that oppose one another.
In ideology, as a means to find out novel solutions

(01:13:20):
to hard problems that vex us all and that in
some cases really harm us all.

Speaker 2 (01:13:27):
It's it's a.

Speaker 1 (01:13:28):
Real thing with real possibility. But it's going to require
that we all get not necessarily tougher, but that we
get more resilient at the level of being able to tolerate
internal states that normally would impede adaptive thinking.

Speaker 3 (01:13:42):
Yes, yes, and and the ability to engage in uncomfortable thinking.
And I love that definition that you gave. I saw
this brilliant quote the other day on social media, and
it is from a Christian page or post, and it
said the essence of Christianity is not learning to love Jesus,

(01:14:06):
but learning to love Judas. And I was thinking how
brilliant that was because it goes back to that point
of what's uncomfortable, like it's easy to love the good
person it's learning to love or understand, at least the
person who may have done, you know, something that you
didn't recognize or didn't understand or didn't fully connect with.

(01:14:26):
And I think often we see that and we think, oh,
but then there's no accountability, there's not this, there's no that.
But really, what we're saying is are we willing to
do as you said, the most challenging thing, which is
something you don't enjoy doing. It's not something you're excited by.
If you're enjoying the challenge, it's no longer the challenge
right if you're it's always like I remember a training

(01:14:47):
and conditioning coach used to tell me, like Jay, if
you're sitting in the cold plunge, just to get your
minutes up so you can tell someone how long you
sat in there. He goes, then that means it wasn't
hard beyond that certain point. It was like, you should
get out once it's easy because it's not having the
effect you wanted to have.

Speaker 2 (01:15:02):
That's right, and no longer an adaptive stimulus.

Speaker 3 (01:15:04):
Correct?

Speaker 2 (01:15:05):
Can I offer an alternative protocol?

Speaker 3 (01:15:07):
Please?

Speaker 1 (01:15:07):
People always ask me how cold should the cold plunge
be or the cold shower and how long should I
stay in? And it's so variable depending on the person,
the time of day. Obviously, only do what's safe, right,
So don't go so cool that you can you can
get a cardiovascular effect that's not good. But it's very simple. Actually,
if you want it to translate into the real world
in the best way, you ask yourself right before you

(01:15:30):
get in, on a scale of one to ten, how
badly do I not want to get in? And I
would say that if it's five to ten, well that's
a wall. If it's anywhere in the fire, that that's
one wall you have to get over. So then you
get in, and then at some point there will be
the desire to get out. That's the second wall. Maybe
it comes within five seconds, maybe it comes within twenty seconds,

(01:15:51):
that's the second wall. So what I would do is
count walls. What are the quote unquote walls. The walls
are waves of adrenaline being released into your body. And
sometimes they are very close together, those waves, and sometimes
they're more distantly spaced apart. Now, of course, at some
point you go numb and then you don't feel them anymore.
We don't suggest that, but if you think to yourself, gosh, today,
I really don't want to get in.

Speaker 2 (01:16:12):
That wall is a really tall wall.

Speaker 1 (01:16:14):
Well, just getting in for fifteen twenty seconds is going
to accomplish something meaningful for this anterimid singulate cortex. It's
going to accomplish something meaningful for the adrenaline release that
you're going to experience. So it's less about the temperature.
I mean, obviously the temperature plays a role than it
is your subjective relationship to the whole thing. For instance,

(01:16:34):
if you do cold exposure at night when you're tired,
it's a far and away different experience than in the
morning after going for a run and you're too warm.
So I can't say forty five degrees fahrenheit for ninety seconds,
although if you want to start there, that's fine, provided it.

Speaker 2 (01:16:47):
Safe for you.

Speaker 1 (01:16:48):
But as you watch these walls of adrenaline come at you,
as it were, pay attention to what they feel like.
That's what you'll recognize outside the ice bath. Yeah, in
a hard conversation, it's not that you can make yourself
so resilient that your adrenaline system doesn't work. It's that
you learn to recognize the state of having adrenaline in
your system and staying calm. And then I actually had

(01:17:10):
this happen the other day. I was in a really
hard yesterday, a hard conversation something first thing in the morning.
It was like, wait, what seriously misunderstanding hard conversation? And
I remember, here we are, our voices are going up.
We weren't yelling, but like it was a peaceful morning
until that moment, and you could kind of feel the
energy in the room going up. And I was thinking

(01:17:31):
to myself, Okay, how am I And I thought, Oh,
this is like a wall in the thing. And I said,
and I said, because we have this language at home.
I said, I feel like there's a wall of adrenaline
hitting us. Whether we both started laughing, and then we
kind of reverted to what we were doing and then
we calmed down, and you know, we talk about taking breaks,
and that's wonderful. It's a wonderful tool that you talked

(01:17:52):
about in your book on relationships. There's so many valuable
tools in there. By the way, it's like, thank you
for writing that book, so valuable.

Speaker 2 (01:18:00):
Everyone should read.

Speaker 1 (01:18:01):
It should be standard curriculum, standard curriculum in every school,
in every home. I really mean that Jay doesn't tell
me to say this, I really mean this, I really
truly mean it. Well, it's entirely appropriate because it's true.
But noticing those walls of adrenaline and realizing that when
we're in those adrenaline filled states, our cognition is shifted.

(01:18:24):
We don't have solutions that we had five minutes ago.
So learning to watch those pass in the cold plunge,
in the cold shower, on a hard run or whatever
it is, but the cold seems to be the universal
stressful stimulus for everybody is so valuable more than marking off,
you know, fifteen minutes or five minutes in the cold plunge,

(01:18:44):
and some days it's fifteen seconds, sometimes it's thirty. And
for somebody learning the cold plunge, it's like, hey, can
you just even get near the thing or in it?
And I think there's real value there. Yeah, So in
any event, But.

Speaker 3 (01:18:56):
I know, I love that translation into real life because
I think what's happened is we're dealing with a lot
of everyday things with so much pain that that pain
is then creating more pain for us for others, and
we never end this, or we create this never ending
cycle and loop for ourselves and others where we stay

(01:19:18):
in the pain. And what we're all saying is what
does it take. Just as we have to learn to
sit in that cold and regulate ourselves and adapt, what
does it take to sit in the pain outside of
the tub, regulate ourselves, rise to a place of peace,
and then respond and then get together. And as you said,
the League of reasonable the real league of reasonable people,

(01:19:41):
Like I think we'd all aspire towards that. I think
when I hear that, I think we all go. I
think I'm a reasonable person. I think most of us
would say that.

Speaker 2 (01:19:49):
I think it lives in all of us.

Speaker 1 (01:19:50):
Yeah, and it's a brain state that takes certain things
to get to on a regular basis. I mean, there's
some people that perhaps are outside the margins for which
participation in the League of Reasonable People is impossible. But
even as I say that, you know, one thing that
I've tried to do as I get older is to
limit cynicism. You know, in my home growing up that

(01:20:11):
there were many beautiful emotions and concepts and things I
was exposed to by virtue of the wonderful people that
my parents were. They had flaws like everybody else. But
one of the things that I've really tried to discard
as I've gotten older, is cynicism. It's one of the
things that my sister and I talk a lot about,
like it never served anyone well to be cynical. You
can be critical and discerning, but cynical doesn't accomplish anything

(01:20:35):
except to separate us from people. That's my belief. And
I'm not trying to encourage people to be soft in
a way that's unsafe for them. Like I said, be discerning.
You know, safety is important. But cynicism, I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:20:52):
What it is.

Speaker 1 (01:20:52):
It's like an ego fed negativity that sort of implies
one is better than other people, but it actually is
usually the opposite. It usually comes from a place of
deep insecurity, right. It's a very dismissive stance. And so
I almost caught myself a second ago saying, oh, you know,
making a kind of joke about what's a cynical joke about? Well,
there are probably people who can't. I actually believe that

(01:21:15):
we are all capable of having access to this reasonable
feature within ourselves. But it involves a state of calm,
a feeling of safety, and you know, I guess you know,
laced into everything I'm saying today is is it is a.

Speaker 2 (01:21:31):
Kind of a hope and an aspiration.

Speaker 1 (01:21:33):
You know, I've kind of gotten to the point now
where I feel like, if I don't say it now,
what am I going to say it? And how old
do you have to be? I used to think you
had to be forty years old to write a book.
I thought that, I thought I have to be forty
years old to write a book, and I realized that's ridiculous.
People much younger than forty write amazing books, amazing and
important books. And then I thought, well, how old do

(01:21:53):
you have to be in order to have had enough
life experience to be able to say things that are
aspirational about how you'd like to see the world where
people change for the better. And you know, I've decided
that the age on that is is one day, you know,
like one day. So this is a bit of an
encouragement for people out there. If you have ideas about

(01:22:15):
ways that you and others can be better to really
like write them down and evolve them right that they
often need some evolution to be able to be received
in the right way, But then share those I was
thinking a moment ago, I wanted your opinion on this
so in thinking about emotional interaction and the ways in
which the world can be beautiful or challenging depending on

(01:22:38):
the energy that's around us. I once read, I forget
his name, so forgive me. He's an investor. I think
it was on the Tim Ferriss podcast, A very successful investor,
young guy. I think he lived in Trucky, of all places.
He once said, you know, email is a public post
to do list. And it completely changed in that one
moment the way that I thought about email, because the

(01:23:00):
emails are useful, but then I realized, oh yeah, I'm
like going in there. It's like all these things I
need to do. And when I started my laboratory, I
knew I had two major challenges. One, get grants so
I could do the work you need money to do research,
publish great papers. And that meant had to interact with
my lab into a bunch of other things. Other things
were important, teaching included, but those were the main ones.

(01:23:20):
Email was a public post to do list, so I
needed to be very careful in terms of my interaction
with email. Nowadays, I feel like social media is a
public not necessarily projection, but evacuation of emotion. So when
I go on to social media in the morning. If
I'm not careful, they really careful and thoughtful about what
I look at. I'm basically getting the emotional energy of

(01:23:43):
all these people. And some of them, like you, are
trying to help people, and some of them are just
in evacuative expression of their pain. Others are in evacuative
expression of cynicism. And I don't think I'm alone in this.
Like I'm a pretty sensitive person, or maybe I'm getting
more sensitive, but I'm very sensitive to this stuff.

Speaker 2 (01:24:04):
Like it's not like.

Speaker 1 (01:24:04):
It can throw off my whole day, but I can
quickly get drawn down a rabbit hole of something. And
then we talk about dopamine hits or the addictive properties
of social media, and that would be a fine conversation,
but that one's been had.

Speaker 2 (01:24:16):
But what about all the energetic bombardment and that the
need for discernment and filtering of all this stuff.

Speaker 1 (01:24:23):
I wish, you know, I could label up like a
positivity score, And it's not to avoid the realities of
the world. But I think, I don't know, does this
stuff affect you? Because I do my work so that
it doesn't permeate me. But you know, just like if
someone wakes up in a bad mood, you can take
care of them. But if they wake up in a
bad mood every single day, it's pretty draining on your

(01:24:44):
home environment. So what do you do in order to
keep emotional boundaries? Especially online?

Speaker 3 (01:24:51):
And the funny thing is the predictability of negativity doesn't
reduce its effect.

Speaker 1 (01:24:57):
Well, it also has a gravitational pull. I mean, I'm
on X and Instagram and the other you know, threads
and Facebook and all of them, you know, but I
noticed that on some of the platforms in particular, like
there's a gravitational pull, like people are there to fight.
And now when I look at that, I think, you know,

(01:25:20):
some of them are saying highly intelligent things, some of
them are not, but like they gotta have a lot
of like pain inside.

Speaker 3 (01:25:28):
I think that's what I was going to touch on.
I think it's that. To me, the thing that has
been most helpful in all of it is a genuine
sense of deeper empathy and compassion for the energetic state
of the world. The systems that have let people down

(01:25:48):
and truly made them feel that they can't rely on them,
and the systems that have done a disservice in justice,
which has now led to this emotional evacuation as you
called it, and to me using it as a way

(01:26:09):
of having deeper empathy, deeper compassion, a genuine sense of
recognition that although everyone does have choice and does have agency,
definitely there is an overarching energetic system that is almost
keeping people imprisoned in this space, and that prison is

(01:26:32):
now addictive to stay in. I feel for that. I
deeply feel for that, and it affects me because I
recognize that people haven't been set up for success by
the education system, by the way the economy is set up,
by the way anything's set up, like, it's not set

(01:26:53):
people up for success. And naturally for people in their
home they went a lot of people went set up
for success. And so we have to zoom our and
look at the context because if I zoom in and
just look at that one tweet or that one comment,
oh god, it's like a bullet to the chest, you know.
And it's like I've always had this vision and I've
kind of done it mentally sometimes because I can't do

(01:27:14):
it physically. And for every person that feels that way,
I've always wanted I was like I wish I could
sit down with every person individually who felt a certain
way and have a contextually relevant, honest, authentic conversation with
each person and beare my soul and be vulnerable and
open my heart. But we can't. And I also know

(01:27:35):
that one post can't do that for everyone, Like it's
not possible for one quote, one image, one message, one
podcast episode that will speak to everyone to make everyone
feel seen, heard and understood. I could just about do
that on a one to one level, let alone a
one to one hundred million level. How are you going
to do that? And so I also have empathy for myself,

(01:27:57):
and I extend that compassion back to myself and recognize
I'm a limited human being who, just as that individual
is limited by their systems and their setup and their energy,
so am I. And there's no way in which I
could respond to this individual and satisfy this exchange with
one hundred and forty two hundred and eighty characters, like,
how's that even possible? And so I think, to me,

(01:28:22):
deepening my compassion and empathy externally and internally have been
the only relevant tools, as woo wo or as spiritual
as they may sound, because there is no practical habit
based solution that I can give you some tactics and ideas,
but I know as well that at one point they're

(01:28:43):
just logical and theoretical and practical, but they're not. Yeah,
they don't feel. They don't hit me there, and so
to me, I've seen it all as a simulation and
an experiment to deepen human emotion, deep in human empathy,
deep in human compassion, and a reminder of my fallibility,

(01:29:06):
so that I can embrace my own insignificance, so that
I can therefore take shelter in the Source and the
universe and God, and to allow for space for that.
If I was able to control every one of these
things and make it work perfectly, I may, in a
very crude sense, you may, under false pretenses, stop believing

(01:29:27):
you're the controller to some degree. And I think anyone
who's experienced success in certain domains starts to feel like
the controller in their relevant fields. And I think all
of these things are expedited in order just to encourage
you to have an ego death and pulverize the arrogance
of whatever kind. By the way, I don't mean in

(01:29:47):
a sense of that I feel I'm important, but we
all have a sense of I'm the controller. I can
make things work, I know what's right, I'm this, I'm that,
And this is all reminding us of we're not the controller.
We have to ultimately take shelter. We have to ultimately
give up the reins, and I ultimately have to surrender
and accept that there is a greater source, there is

(01:30:10):
a greater power, and that when I'm in connection with
that and I'm in service of that, then I'm happy
and I'm joyful. But if I'm trying to be that
or extrapolate energy from that to control and navigate, then
I'm forever going to be unhappy. So to me, that's
a quick version of the stuff that I try and
work on not to be helpless. I don't feel helpless

(01:30:32):
in that I feel at home. It's almost like, you know,
when you're taking shelter of a greater source to take
care of things you can't take care of. It's not
because you're helpless or because you're weak. It's actually the
greatest sign of strength to know I can call up
a friend to help me. You know, Am I more
strong because I can move home myself and not ask

(01:30:54):
anyone for help? Or am I stronger because three of
my friends came and helped me out and carry the load.
I'm stronger asking for help. I have a bad community
and network. You'd say that person smarter in healthier, and
so I think of that same way on a universal level,
at least I tried to. I'm working on it.

Speaker 1 (01:31:11):
I love that, and I realized from what you said that,
you know, the greatest sense of safety seems to arrive
from not trying to control everything. And it's counterintuitive, right,
you know, we think, okay, well, how do you get safety, Well,
you have to get rid of vigilance.

Speaker 2 (01:31:27):
How do you get rid of vigilance?

Speaker 1 (01:31:28):
Well, you decide what you do and don't have to
pay attention to And at some point, if one decides
I can't control all of this, you have one of
two options. Either that means you're just waiting for that
wave to come demolish you wave of whatever, or you
trust like you trust in something. Two, make everything okay

(01:31:54):
even if that wave comes. You know, and I've talked
before on podcasts. I believe in God, I do, you know,
And of course I believe in everyone's right to believe
or not believe what they believe in. I think that
the notion of giving up trying to control everything and
giving over control two more universal forces or a universal force,

(01:32:17):
whatever one's mode of thinking happens to be I believe
they're entitled to is probably the most peace inducing step
I've ever taken.

Speaker 2 (01:32:30):
And I thought it.

Speaker 1 (01:32:31):
Would be, you know, matched with a little sneaking, you know,
voice in the back.

Speaker 2 (01:32:36):
Yeah, But but it's not.

Speaker 1 (01:32:39):
And I don't know how that works at the level
of neuroscience. I know there are neuroscientists who are trying
to explore this, and as the data evolve, I'll certainly
pay attention to it, not with the intention of trying
to undermine any kind of larger sense of anything, but
just out of interest.

Speaker 2 (01:32:59):
Far far, too interesting.

Speaker 1 (01:33:01):
There's actually a woman at Stanford. I haven't yet to
talk to her. We should both talk to her, she said.
I forget her name at the moment, because I just
learned about her work in the Department of Anthropology, who
has spent her entire career studying people's inner voices, people
who hear voices, people hear the voices of others, and
sure this sometimes goes into the domain of people who
have auditory hallucinations and so forth, but also just these

(01:33:24):
different scripts that people have in their mind that include
their own voices and other voices, voices we've internalized from childhood.
This resonates with me a lot because when I was
a kid, after my parents who put me to sleep,
I used to arrange dialogues between people I had heard
that day, and I could hear their voices in very
clear ways in my head, and I would remember things

(01:33:45):
they said, and I could create these dialogues. And so
I've also always had a very strong audiographic memory. It's
not as if everything I hear I remember a verbatim.
That actually would be a super skill would have saved
me in a lot of arguments. But in all seriousness,
I think what you describe about essentially a letting go
or a giving over of the need for the control

(01:34:07):
that we all experience. The desire for control is really
where the solution wise. I think I know this because
many people have said it, and it's very hard to do,
but that once one does it.

Speaker 2 (01:34:20):
Once, you know you can do it again.

Speaker 3 (01:34:22):
Yeah, And it's a practice, a practice.

Speaker 1 (01:34:23):
It's not you write it down and it's done. It's
a practice. And you know, I also am thinking about
the kind of counterintuitive nature of the fact that we're
talking at once about letting go and not trying to
control everything, but also pushing oneself to be more resilient
and tenacious and things of that sort.

Speaker 2 (01:34:42):
And so I feel like all of life is like that.

Speaker 1 (01:34:45):
All of life is about, Yes, you need to take
care of your physiology, you need to get your sleep
at night, but it's also okay to get a bad
night's sleep every.

Speaker 2 (01:34:52):
Once in a while.

Speaker 1 (01:34:53):
It's okay to not do every protocol. In fact, it's
encouraged to not do every protocol. The expectation on us
is not perfection rights, it's I think being able to
toggle between these different states. I think that one of
the best things about social media. One of the best
things about podcasts is that you know, speaking and listening

(01:35:14):
is the human narrative. Certainly writing certainly plays poetry and
music as well dance. There are other forms of communication,
certainly sculpture and I hear we go on and on.

Speaker 2 (01:35:25):
But as a great.

Speaker 1 (01:35:27):
Podcaster David Cenra, who hosts The Founder's Podcast, it's kind
of a like a nerds podcast of if so many
interesting founders, like a founders of companies that he sort
of does for that what I do for science and health,
and what you do for health and spirituality and so
many more topics, psychology and so on.

Speaker 2 (01:35:48):
David does for founders and company founders.

Speaker 1 (01:35:51):
And he said, you know that podcasting and to some extent,
social media, but really podcasting is the human narrative record.
Did radio Radio used to be live, Sometimes it was
recorded and then played, but there wasn't an archive that
you could go access, and where there was, it was
a fairly sparse archive. I think we're going to look
back one hundred years from now, and whether it's in

(01:36:13):
AI form or in its traditional form as it is now.
I think people speaking onto the internet is our you know,
this is our stone tablets, these our cave drawings.

Speaker 2 (01:36:26):
It's wild, it's wild, and.

Speaker 1 (01:36:29):
I like to think it's serving the evolution of our
species at some level. Certainly it's creating a historical record.
I often think about this, like so many thoughts, so
many emotions that people have don't get transmuted into useful
tools that others could benefit from. I think this is
why we love music and poetry and things that capture

(01:36:51):
an essence. Actually, I recall now, this is what I
wanted to ask you about please. Lately, I try I
spend real time trying to feel experiences more than just
think about them.

Speaker 2 (01:37:06):
I have a very.

Speaker 1 (01:37:07):
Like you know, kind of dominant analytic mind. I'm trying
to think, strategize, understand, makes sense of always been like that,
but in recent years, and especially this last year, I've
just tried to like sense what's going on outside me
and in me. And this form of intelligence is something
that people have talked about for hundreds of thousands of years.

(01:37:29):
It's a different form of intelligence. It's the one that
I think has access to our unconscious mind in a
way that thinking doesn't always have access to.

Speaker 2 (01:37:40):
It's not necessarily linked to emotion.

Speaker 1 (01:37:43):
It's just more of a are we drawn toward away
from where we kind of neutral about a given person
or experience, and it draws on a different set of
neural circuits.

Speaker 2 (01:37:55):
And I started.

Speaker 1 (01:37:56):
Thinking about this in large part because of my love
of dog. You know, my dog Costello I put down
in July of twenty twenty one, and I always loved
the bulldog because the first time I ever went to
a dog show, which everybody should do.

Speaker 2 (01:38:09):
By the way, have you ever been to a dog show?

Speaker 3 (01:38:11):
Now we should go.

Speaker 1 (01:38:12):
So I was taken to a dog show by my
then girlfriend when I was a post doc, and she said,
you gotta go to a dog show, and it was
and so we went to the dog show, but we
didn't attend the show in front is the show where
they're going over things and walking around and getting preyed around,
and that part's cool. But the really cool part is
you go in the back where you have all the
dog breeders, with all the different breeds of dogs, usually

(01:38:33):
five or six of each breed, and you can see
the immense variation both in the structure but also the
temperaments and therefore the nervous systems of these different animals
all the same species also dogs, by the way, you
have little ones and you have giants in Chihuahuas and
great Danes in the same species. As far as I know,
it's the greatest variation and brain and body size of

(01:38:54):
any species. There's probably a you know, another species out
there that someone will point doubt that you know makes
me wrong, but it's at least the far end of
the continuum in that sense. So I'm back there and
I'm thinking I really want a dog. At some point
I'm thinking I want a Rhodesian ridgeback, or I really
like the you know, the wolf founds. I really love
the Afghans. They look like people in dog suits, the

(01:39:15):
way they want to move around and so so bright eyed.
And then I looked over in the corner and there's
this row of bulldogs snoring like a xylophone. And I
went over and I asked the woman there, I said,
an interesting breed of dog and said, oh, they're the best.
And I said, well, everyone here says that about their
breed of dog and said, yeah, but they're really the

(01:39:36):
sweetest and they are the essence of efficiency. And so
I woke one up and I started playing with it,
and you realize that they don't react unless they need to.
Some have more energy than others, but when they need to,
they have a lot of energy available to them. But
they have very little spontaneous movement. Now I'm not like this.
I think I'm probably becoming more like this as the

(01:39:56):
years go by, through some effort. But other breeds of
dogs are constantly moving. They're like peripatetic. They're constantly moving.
They're constantly moving, and it makes me a little nervous.
Whereas the bulldog just made me feel very calm. So
I got Costello not that day. I got him elsewhere,
and I found that his presence, even his loud snoring,
made me very calm. And he was not reactive to

(01:40:19):
things that did not require reactivity to He was reactive
when appropriate. And I'm not saying the bulldog is the
perfect breed. In fact, I discourage people from getting them
unless they have the means to take care of them,
because they tend to have a lot of health issues.

Speaker 2 (01:40:31):
They're very inbred.

Speaker 1 (01:40:32):
It's kind of a cruel breed, especially in its modern iterations.
But every dog has a different energy. So pay attention
to how much spontaneous movement there is. Pay attention to
where they put their eyes, how readily they just go
to sleep or or not, how quickly they stand up
and move, and then start to look at people, and
you start to realize there's tremendous variation there. There's a

(01:40:53):
bright eyed inness to certain people you're one of them,
other like really at the level of their eyes that
are there with you, and that also exude a feeling
of calm. And so I've started paying more attention to
how things make me feel. And I think This is
why going on social media now, I feel like I'm
eating twenty fifty five different cuisines at once, which would

(01:41:14):
be disgusting, Whereas if I just kind of focus on
one or two things, like I love different cuisine, different types.

Speaker 2 (01:41:20):
Of food, but I don't want them all at once.

Speaker 1 (01:41:23):
And so I think as humans, we are meant to
experience a huge array of what life has to offer,
and people have to offer not all of it, but
a lot of it. And I feel like being able
to sense into kind of the essence of music, or
the essence of a person's presence, or the essence of
a group, for me, has been very informative toward just
kind of like realizing they're these different ways of interacting

(01:41:46):
with the world. I don't want to sound too abstract here.
I think what we're really talking about here is turning
off traditional modes of thinking, which tend to be single
track or dual track, and sensing energy, I think is
more about taking a broader band analysis of what's going on,
more visual field, more sensory field, and bringing it all

(01:42:07):
in at once. And this is what we at least
understand other animals to do, because they lack language at
least in our form, and so they have to make
decisions about moving toward, away from, or staying in a
neutral position based on a kind of gestalt, like a
whole picture of something. And I think it can be
a very useful rudder with which to navigate. Now, of course,

(01:42:30):
we also have to sharpen our attention and sharpen our
intellect around certain things. But I think as time goes on,
I'm I don't know, I'm trying to become more bulldog
like for myself and for the people in my life.
Because Costello made me feel safe, certainly made me feel accepted.
He was very stubborn, but he also he took great

(01:42:50):
delight in things, and he also could be quite the
protector if he needed to be. And so I really thought, like, wow,
if ever there was some energy is to embody, it
would be the bulldog energy. And maybe for other people
they need to embody a different energy. I think we
can learn a lot by paying attention to animals, you know,
Like I said, I spend some time with Rick Rubin,

(01:43:11):
and I won't compare him to a bulldog. He's not
like a bulldog like he's like a wolfhound. He's extremely
still but then when he opens his mouth, that mind
is it's like it's a force. And I know Rick
well enough to know that he has this amazing ability
to get very close to the energy of music and

(01:43:31):
other people, but he doesn't get absorbed by it. It
doesn't change him in a way that changes your experience
of him. He's having experiences, but like there's a stability
to him.

Speaker 2 (01:43:42):
He's like this cord of reliability, and I.

Speaker 1 (01:43:46):
Think that's one of the reasons why people gravitate towards him.
It's also that beard is pretty often and your energy too,
my friend. I haven't figured out what animal you are
I'm looking for. I haven't figured it out, but it's
You're very loving, but you're also very discerning. I think
this is something that people probably don't realize about you.
I'm not your psychologist, but you know, but you know

(01:44:08):
you have a gift. You have a gift, and you
give your gift in such plentiful ways and so many
people benefit. And so you've also clearly learned to surround
yourself with people that allow you to give and to receive.

Speaker 2 (01:44:26):
I say this with great admiration.

Speaker 1 (01:44:29):
I think I know you well enough now to like
I know your heart like and yeah, yeah, I can
feel it, like I can feel your love for what
you do and how badly you want people to get it,
but you know better than to do anything but just
create an offering, and as a consequence, people flock to it.

Speaker 2 (01:44:52):
I love it.

Speaker 1 (01:44:53):
I love it, and I've grown tremendously from your books,
from your teaching. I tell you this offline, so I'm
now saying it. I'm now saying it recorded because I
think it's really important that people understand that the podcasters,
especially like whether or not it's you or Rick or
Lex or and there's so many others, right or Joe

(01:45:14):
or Tim or Whitney or whoever, Like, there's so many,
too many to list, Like, we're all just being ourselves.
That's the beauty of it. It's like Costello being Costello.
And to some extent, sure there's you know edits and
production all that kind of stuff, but it's just you
being you. And to me, that's the most beautiful thing.
It's what really works and it's what really matters, and

(01:45:36):
I think it's what people should do even when there's
no recording. You certainly do you know you're the same
am mic and off Mike. It's one of the things
I love about you, and I think it's what people
we need to do. We all need to like also
embrace that unique wiring that we each have.

Speaker 3 (01:45:54):
So absolutely well, Andrew, thank you for those kind words,
and I don't take them lightly. I know you mean them.
And what I've really share today is you've also shared
the part of you that comes out naturally when we're together,
and same with me, the part of me that's fascinated
by neuroscience and everything you teach and and I think
that's the beauty of it too. It's that I hope
that everyone has been listening and watching today knows and

(01:46:17):
loves you for what you do on a daily basis,
but then can accept that there are different facets to you,
There are different elements to you. There are different things
that you're curious about, and you've shown them all today
and laid them out. When they come to Huberman Lab,
they're getting something very specific and they're getting that part.
But you allow yourself to showcase different parts of your

(01:46:37):
personality and I'm grateful that you shared that with me,
you share that with my community. I want to thank
you for joining me today and being so open and
vulnerable and giving with your space and energy. And I'm
glad that you feel confident and open enough to be
able to do that, because it goes back to everything
we've discussed today. We all want to feel safe and accepted,

(01:46:59):
but in order to do that, we want all parts
of ourselves to be accepted. Otherwise we can't truly feel safe.
And so if I'm only accepted for one part of me,
then I don't feel safe, and I feel safe only
sharing one part of myself, then I'm not truly accepted.
And so I think everything we've talked about today comes
around beautifully full circle. And thank you for making me

(01:47:22):
feel safe and accepted. Thank you for being safe and accepted.
And I hope everyone who's listening and watching today focuses
on doing that for themselves and the people they love.
That would be a beautiful ripple effect from this show,
that people go off and create that space for the
people in their lives.

Speaker 2 (01:47:38):
So thank you, my friend, Well, thank you so much,
thanks for having me. And as I said, I'm such.

Speaker 1 (01:47:43):
A huge fan of what you do and who you are,
and you know and thank you for the kind words
you know. I confess I have a bit of low
level anxiety and sharing parts of myself I haven't shared
publicly before, but since I was a kid, I always
want to venture out a little bit further than the rest,

(01:48:04):
usually with a pack, but sometimes alone. And you know,
I'm trying to embrace positive change in myself by example.

Speaker 2 (01:48:14):
I mean, I am fallible and flawed like everybody.

Speaker 1 (01:48:17):
I have areas that still need work, certainly, and I'm
going to keep working away and sharing what I learn.

Speaker 2 (01:48:24):
And I'm grateful for all of it. And I'm especially
grateful to you right now, So thank you, my thank you,
and I appreciate you.

Speaker 3 (01:48:31):
If this is the year that you're trying to get creative,
you're trying to build more, I need you to listen
to this episode with Rick Rubin on how to break
into your most creative self, how to use unconventional methods
that lead to success, and the secret to genuinely loving
what you do. If you're trying to find your passion
and your lane, Rick Rubin's episode is the one for you.

Speaker 2 (01:48:54):
Just because I like it, that doesn't give it any value,
Like as an artist, if you like it, that's all
of the value. That's the success comes when you say
I like this enough for other people to see it.

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Jay Shetty

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