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Change Your Brain: Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman | Rich Roll Podcast

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Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast.

My guest today is Dr. Andrew Huberman.

Andrew is a neuroscientist.

He's a Neurobiology Professor at Stanford Medical School

and McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow

and the founder of Huberman Lab, where he's involved

in all kinds of really amazing breakthrough research

on brain function, brain plasticity and brain regeneration.

His work has been published in top journals like Nature.

He's been featured in publications

like Time, Scientific America and the BBC.

And he's here today to discuss the brain,

to discuss growth mindset, how to focus,

how to navigate the stressful times and many other subjects.

It's an incredible conversation.

I think you guys are gonna enjoy it.

I appreciate you watching

make sure to hit that subscribe button

and without further ado, this is me

and Dr. Andrew Huberman.

First of all, thanks for doing this.

I appreciate you coming out.

Yeah, my pleasure. Long time coming.

I'm glad we're doing it in person-

Likewise. And not remotely.

And I think what I wanna do is start with your origin story,

because you're a very,

it's your path is very unlikely,

your path to becoming a scientist.

And I think it actually also kind of contextualizes

some of the things that I wanna talk about with you today.

So maybe start there.

Sure, so on the one hand, you know,

maybe I was faded to become a scientist.

I guess the two things that are relevant there

are I always loved animals

and I've always been obsessed with animal behavior.

Like just could watch Cousteau shows growing up, you know

underwater life or animals hunting, animals doing anything.

It's just so fascinating to me because I'm, I think even

at a really young age, I've always just been intrigued

in sort of what drives different animals to behave

in the way they do and how body form matches to,

I didn't know what it was,

but brains and how that all works.

So I've always been obsessed with animals.

And then my dad's a scientist, so he's a physicist.

It was really early in chaos theory.

And so growing up in our home, you know, we had scientists

over for dinner and graduate students would come over

for barbecues and things like that.

Is he a Stanford professor?

Yeah, he was at Stanford.

He was mostly at Xerox Park, which is kind of famous

if you read the Steve Jobs book is for the, yeah.

The development of the gooey interface

the graphical user interface

and sort of early days of the computer.

So he had a lab there and he had a lab in applied physics

at Stanford and something called symbolic systems

which is a Stanford degree

in kind of ecology and computation, that kind of thing.

So I grew up in this family where science was very prominent

and we had lots of discussions

in our home that I would overhear

and I didn't understand about physics and we'd spend summers

at the Aspen Center for Physics, which was like-

Good times. Yeah, so, you know,

and we were, and to be clear, you know,

you hear the word Aspen, you know,

we were a middle-class family

but they have this Aspen Center for Physics.

So the Feynman, you know, Richard Feynman was there,

Murray Gell-mann,

like all these luminaries of physics, Peter Carruthers.

And my dad was really good at telling me the stories

about these guys and then I'd always wanna meet them.

And it was mostly guys back then,

there weren't many women in physics.

So I, you know, I was kind of immersed in science

from a young age, but right about age 13,

my parents split up.

And he moved overseas, he moved to Denmark

and my mom was really struggling with the breakup

and I wasn't in contact with him anymore.

So I had this really unusual childhood where, you know,

we didn't talk about sports, we talked about science,

and I had this close relationship with science

and the people around science

but then all of a sudden the structure around family

like instead of dinners together every night,

it was just like me and my mom

and I was an adolescent, I was hitting puberty.

So, you know, there was bound to be some shifts

in my world landscape and internal landscape anyway.

But basically what happened was, I stopped

really paying attention to school.

And I got really heavily into skateboarding

and the kind of punk rock music.

And I found my pack or my community

through like packing community of kids

that also just were kind of parentless.

So this was like late 80s, early 90s.

And so at a pretty young age, I started taking the,

I grew up in Palo Alto.

I was actually born at Stanford Hospital.

I started taking the seven F bus up to San Francisco

and hanging around in Embarcadero.

For the skateboarders out there, the Lizards,

this is the the now famous EMB crowd.

So this was the birth of a huge movement

of skateboarders that became professionals.

Like, so you'd see the young Danny Way

would come through town and you had Rob Dyrdek.

I remember when he came through.

So all these names that eventually became popular

during the kind of X games era and the,

but at that time it was really underground.

And so it was this pack of maybe a hundred guys

and it was run like a little city and it was chaos.

It was like there was fights,

and there was drinking and there was lawlessness,

there was also a lot of amazing skateboarding

and there were a lot of amazing people.

And there were some older guys,

like one in particular, a very famous skateboarder,

is this kid, Mike Carroll,

his older brother was kind of like the older brother

to everybody, kind of kept us all in check.

So it had its own unique organization.

And it's actually interesting

'cause the same thing was happening at that time

in Washington Square Park in New York,

and at Love Park in Philadelphia, there were all these

like communities of kids that were basically parentless.

And so in that time I saw some interesting things.

First of all, I learned what it was to be parentless.

Growing up in Palo Alto,

it was like soccer games and AYSO and you know,

swim club and all of a sudden I realized, you know,

I don't have to be home at any particular time,

or, you know, none of these kids are going to school.

And so we all, it was kind of a big group of truants.

And it was interesting because it gave me a perspective

that I had never had in Palo Alto.

And I was drifting further and further away

from any kind of academic rigor.

I think I would go to school every once in a while.

What's mom doing?

Does she have any idea

that you're going up to the city every day?

So she was totally checked out.

You know, I think she was just devastated

by a bunch of things that were happening

and she lapsed into a pretty serious depression.

And then in that community, what was interesting is,

I started seeing that, you know, some guys were clearly

faded to becoming professional skateboarders.

They were really good at it.

I just wanna say for full disclosure,

I was not particularly good.

I kept getting injured.

I just, I was not faded to be, you know, exceptional

or very good at it, but I love the comradery

and I love the community, but I also noticed that, you know,

some people were drinking all day and other people got

into hard drugs and people started to, you know,

some of the dysfunction really started to show up.

Yeah, the fracture. Begins.

Exactly, and so,

and I started seeing that, lot, a lot more violence.

You know, people start getting their girlfriends pregnant.

They didn't have money to support those kids.

You know, it started becoming apparent to me

that there was a lot of dysfunction

as well as a lot of incredible people in that community.

And so about that time, I got a girlfriend,

and the other thing was I got removed from high school.

So I went to kind of the famed/infamous high school

in Palo Alto, Gunn High School.

Oh, you went to Gunn.

I went to Gunn, which is famous because it's the,

one of the most academically rigorous schools

in the country, maybe the planet,

people moved to the area just to send their kids there.

But it also has this very complicated reputations

of the highest suicide rate of any school in the country.

The New York Times has written about this.

So, you know, I would come to school every once in a while

but I could tell you far more about the curbs

in the front of the Gunn High School parking lot

than I could about anything that I learned at Gunn.

So when they say they, you were removed,

I mean, you got, you were expelled.

No, I basically, they just said,

you need to either start coming to school or, you know-

You're done. Or you're done.

So I got shifted to another high school

and that was same story.

It was just was, it was a mess, it just fell apart.

And so at one point I was brought in, I have a kind

of vague recollection of this, but I was brought in

to have a discussion with a school counselor.

And I don't think I've ever told this story before.

And there was someone sitting in the corner,

this guy was sitting in the corner

and he didn't introduce himself.

And pretty soon I realized when I was like,

I think they're gonna take me away.

Like I started realized, 'cause they realized my mom

wasn't really able to control me.

Wasn't really in a place to support me at that time.

And that's what they did.

They took me away.

They took me into a place up the peninsula,

which was not a jail and it wasn't a hospital.

It was just sort of a place where they put kids

that were- Like some kind of

GV warehousing situation?

Yeah, a lot of psychologists,

lot of locks on doors, lot of,

lot of kids that, there were 12 of us in there

at any one time, it was locked down.

And the first night there,

I remember I had a roommate who was like really

into cutting on himself, that kind of thing.

And he told me, he was like, "Look, if you just

do what they say here, you'll be outta here in like a month.

And if you don't, you're gonna be here a very long time."

And I remember being pretty frightened for the first time.

And at that point I was like,

oh my goodness, like, this is bad.

You know, like, this is bad.

I'm a long way. It's so hard for me

to imagine. I know, I know.

This given you know, who you are and what you do now.

I know and you know, and it was literally like the kind

of one phone call a day kind of thing.

So actually I called I was skateboarding for a company

in San Francisco.

I think they put me on out of sympathy

and I called this guy up and I said, "Look, I've, you know,

they locked me up, I don't know what to do.

Can you help me?"

And he get, and I'll never forget,

I wanna say his name because you're the most normal guy

I know.

Well, he's like-

The least likely of that crowd.

Exactly. For that to happen.

So, in any event, I was permitted to go back to school

eventually, provided that I went to therapy.

And so I started going to weekly therapy

which in the early 90s was kind of a weird thing.

You would, wouldn't admit it to your friends

but tweets skateboard around Stanford campus.

I was doing my thing and then twice a week

I would go in and see this therapist.

He's a remarkable guy because A,

he had deep training in the mind, right?

And we started talking about what was going on.

And he really picked up on the fact

that there was essentially no structure,

no home life for me, but that I had a strong drive,

and I was really interested in learning.

I mean, I was, I was enthusiastic and motivated enough to,

you know, skateboard as hard as I could,

even though I wasn't gonna go anywhere with it.

So at that point, and the fact that I had a girlfriend,

I started looking for something that I could do.

And I started at one point

I thought I'd join the fire service,

'cause it seemed like the comradery was good.

At that point, I started strengthening my body a bit

because I didn't wanna keep getting hurt.

So I started running, I started lifting weights,

a football coach at Gunn actually turned me on to fitness.

It's actually an interesting guy.

He wrote the script for that movie "Mr. Mom,"

Oh my God.

Yeah, because his wife bet him

that he couldn't do what she could do,

which was stay home with the kids.

And he was this big strong football coach.

And so he made her a bet and he lost.

And so he wrote that script Michael Keaton played the, yeah.

So he taught me, he was like, look, you know

you can't even do a pull up.

You need to start doing your pull-ups and you start running

you know, and he said, the fire service

might be good for you.

So, I was spinning out, but there were people

that were willing to kind of, you know,

point me in the right direction.

So what ended up happening was my high school girlfriend

went off to college and I didn't, you know,

I didn't know what I was gonna do.

So I actually went and I lived in the parking lot

outside her dormitory. I just wanted to be near her.

She was my family at that point.

A college locally or?

She was at UC Santa Barbara.

So you just drove down and-

I just drove down and I just camped out in the parking lot

and people, and I was starting to get into some martial arts

and Thai boxing then.

So I think I was teaching some Thai boxing,

self-defense stuff on campus and doing this kind of thing.

And by the end of that year, I realized

that I should probably apply to college.

So I applied to UCSP and somehow I got in,

Lord knows how I got in.

I did, 'cause I did eventually graduate high school, barely.

Got in, and then after a year I just completely flailed it.

You know, I wasn't going to class.

I was getting into fights, a lot of that kind of mischief

and kind of wildness was still in me.

And what ended up happening was,

I got into a physical altercation on July 4th, 1994

with like a bunch of guys.

And at the end of that, I walked back to the place

I was staying, and of course I wasn't paying rent

because I had learned in those years,

like you can just squat in an empty house.

So, you know, it's Isla Vista California, you know?

So I was really running wild and went back

and just I realized I was like, this picture is really bad.

You know, at some point,

this isn't gonna be like a kid who had some problems,

this is gonna be,

truly. It's not cute anymore.

It's not cute anymore And no one,

no one's gonna make excuses about your upbringing

or the lack of parenting.

It just becomes, you just, you're gonna end up

being a ward of the state.

I mean, you were, it sounds like you were,

you were almost a feral animal.

Totally feral.

Actually, and I have some close friends

that's how they they referred to me, that feral.

And it's funny even to this day, I mean,

I'll get to where this eventually took me.

But even to this day, when I go into a home

where it's clearly like a loving home

where there's kids are happy

and there's good food and it's warm and cozy

I always feel this thing like, wow, like amazing.

Like I sort of wanna be adopted by them immediately,

but you know, I'm 45 years old

so that's not appropriate at this age.

What's so interesting,

I keep thinking about David Epstein's book "Range."

Did you read this book?

Which is basically this thesis

that some of the most successful people are not,

you know, we suspect that, you know,

the great talents of the world across all disciplines

are the people who discover their passion at an early age

and practice it voraciously for many, many, many years.

But in fact, it's people more like yourself,

who've dabbled in all different kinds of things

who end up being ultimately, you know,

the most proficient at their selected skillset.

And when I look at your experience,

I see trauma, I see adventure,

I see, you know, all these obstacles that you've had to face

and overcome and manage on your own essentially, right?

And all of those really informed perfectly

the things that you're interested in

and what you explore today in your lab.

Yeah, it really did.

You know, I think that I'm so grateful for those years.

I wouldn't wish them on any kid,

because I think having a secure, loving environment

at home is so key.

And, you know, I should say about a third of the kids

that I grew up with in that environment,

that whole skateboarding, punk rock culture,

about a third have gone on to found companies

or professional skateboarders,

about a third just kind of drifted off

and about a third are dead or incarcerated.

You know, a huge number.

And so there's real value in having a support system,

that's clear, but it exposed me

to all these things like addictions, schizophrenia, rage,

like all these incredible elements.

Like I was never really into drinking and drugs.

I could drink or not drink.

It just wasn't, I wasn't drawn to it, but other people

they took one sip and it was like, that was their thing.

It was like the magic elixir for them.

And so, you know, I was observing what was happening.

And then after that, you know, that July 4th '94 incident

was, I realized this is it, you know, it's now or never.

It really was one of those moments.

You know, you hear about those moments

but it was me realizing I'm living in this squat

where I've got a pet ferret.

My girlfriend's gone, she broke up with me.

She was smart enough to break up with me, you know,

I'm getting in fights, I'm working at a bagel shop.

I'm barely making ends meet.

And at that point I just made the decision.

I just said, okay, look,

I'm not gonna be a professional athlete.

I think I'm pretty good at memorizing things.

I think I have an interest in people,

I'm going to just decide, I just decided to do school.

I decided that was the, that was the track.

And so like, some people pick the military

because it's like, if you know what to expect

at least in terms of the, you know,

the passages that you're gonna go through.

And for me that was school.

And so I had decided, get back in school.

I moved into a studio apartment by myself.

I quit partying completely, I didn't go to parties.

I got really serious about fitness.

So I just started running and lifting weights and I studied.

You went like Henry Rollins style.

I did.

Yeah.

I did. It's a lot of self-awareness

you know, I mean, people go into the military

because on some level, I mean,

some people do because they're, there's some yearning

for having that structure imposed upon their lives.

But you constructed that kind of structure for yourself.

Yeah, I think I was really afraid.

I think I was like, you know, and I and these days,

you know, 'cause of my lab studies fear

and I get into this whole thing around mindsets

and people always ask me like,

is it better to do something from a place of love or fear?

Like depends.

And at that point, fear was the best motivator for me.

And I just basically worked like crazy.

And it's interesting because I didn't have a mentor

or someone to bring me to that.

But once I started doing that, you know,

there was one professor in particular who took note,

he was like, "Oh, you know,

you seem really interested in this stuff."

And I was like, yeah, 'cause he was teaching me

about depression, schizophrenia, neuro-chemicals.

I thought, I was totally turned on

by the world of neuroscience.

It didn't, it wasn't even called neuroscience back then.

But this one guy, Harry Carlisle

he was teaching me about thermal regulation

and how the brain works and how receptors

in the skin relate to perceptions in the mind.

And he also had a deep sensitivity to mental disease.

And I'd seen a lot of that, you know,

I'd seen a lot of depression and anxiety in my own family.

I had had a friend commit suicide.

Another friend becomes schizophrenic.

I think he's still walking the mission district

of San Francisco now.

Seeing some friends become addicts.

And so here was someone explaining that there's actually

an underlying basis for this.

And I just poured myself into it.

Is that the same guy who, you know,

would smoke underneath the vacuum hood and stuff like that?

Like a bit of an (indistinct).

Yeah, he was amazing.

So he was a favorite teacher of many students,

but if you could get into his lab

then you were kind of one of the chosen ones I guess.

He's like the perfect mentor at the perfect time for you.

Yeah, so he used to drink coffee in lab

which you're not supposed to do.

He's just smoke cigarettes in lab in the fume hood.

And they used to come and yell at him

and he would do it anyway.

And I thought, you know, this guy

he doesn't even know what it is, but you know,

he's a punk rocker and he doesn't even know.

And so, you know,

he gave me an opportunity to work in his lab.

And at some point he told me, if you go to graduate school

they'll actually pay you to do science.

And what ended up happening at that point

was I hit a brick wall because I was,

I had a lot of resentment toward my dad.

I felt, you know, here's my dad.

He was a scientist, he had, you know,

left us all this kind of thing.

And I realized if I didn't do this,

if I didn't take this opportunity,

it was going to be the most foolish thing ever.

You know, what am I gonna do to spite my, you know,

my parents, you know, I was 20 years old at that point.

So I just made the decision.

I'm gonna get a PhD and become a professor.

I'm going to get tenure and be like this guy, you know

this guy who has looked like he had a pretty good life

to me, and so that's pretty much how I spent the, you know

the last 25 years of my life is doing experiments.

It worked out.

It worked out, is it, a lot of work,

I mean, I didn't have the power of concentration.

I hadn't read all the good books that Gunn High School

students read growing up.

I had to learn how to speak properly.

I learned how to, learn how to think properly

and really learn how to commit to something

that was very linear and at times was very painful.

And I went to some pretty extreme things.

I, you know, I actually used to set a timer

and I wouldn't allow myself to get out of the chair

until I was, the timer went off.

So, and I would experience extreme agitation

but over time I got pretty good.

And now I can do long stints of work without any breaks.

And yeah, it worked out.

It developed that neuroplasticity

in your favor, ultimately.

You're always a reader though, right?

I loved books.

So I would, you know, I would hide

in the tower books section in the evenings

and I would read everything about fitness, psychology,

anything I could, I've always devoured information.

My favorite book when I was a kid was the "Encyclopedia,"

or the "Guinness Book of World Records."

So I was like, when I was a little kid,

I'd walk around the Aspen Center for Physics.

And I would tell anyone, I didn't even ask them,

if they want to hear about like the,

what's the world's smallest ethereum mammal.

You know, I would like, it could tell you all these facts

that were kind of meaningless at the time,

but I've always been fascinated

by the inventory of different animals on the planet

and their different behaviors.

And so yeah, voracious reader and still now.

I love, I love information.

Well, as a neuroscientist, I mean,

you're your own patient.

I mean, the fact that you were able to, you know,

turn your life around in such a dramatic fashion

and do it essentially through sheer will and you know

setting up practices that would feel you,

you in that right direction,

and then being available when those mentors

showed up from the, from the, you know,

the early therapist, sounds like that guy

almost saved your life, right?

He absolutely saved my life.

He gave me the book, "Wherever You Go, There You Are"

the Jon Kabat-Zinn book.

And he said, no pressure, but if you can develop

a mindfulness practice where you can sit still

for like 10 minutes a day, it'll serve you very well.

So I started doing that.

Like he could've, he could've told me to hang out

of a window by my ankles, I would have done it.

I think there was a, there was a self preservation thing

was kicking in for me.

So I got very interested in mindfulness meditation.

He also, it was, I think, quite smart in saying,

look there's a whole world of psychedelic drugs

that are powerful in influencing the mind.

He said, "If you're going to explore those,

wait until your brain has already developed,"

which I think is a controversial statement in and of itself.

He, so he actively discouraged me to go down that path,

which I think was the right thing,

given I was a minor, you know,

and nowadays there's all this discussion now

about psychedelics and their power.

And I think they are very interesting compounds

but he really steered me towards behavioral practices.

Like what could I do each day from waking up

to going to sleep that would serve my mental health

and my productivity well.

I owe him a tremendous amount.

And especially because he wasn't just

in the psychoanalytic theory,

he also was like cognitive behavioral.

He understood the power of practices

not just discussing issues.

Yeah, to begin a meditation practice at that age

in the mid 90s, that's pretty radical.

Yeah, I felt it was funny 'cause I thought

if I didn't sit in the lotus position

like I wasn't doing it properly, you know,

back then there was all this stuff around,

it was very mystical and in my family

'cause my dad's very conservative

and my mom was a little bit more of a free spirit.

I was taught that anything that related to hippie culture

was doomed to fail and cause problems.

And then anything that was related

to like conservative culture was faded

to advance the progress of humanity.

It turned out neither one was true, of course.

So I, but I needed people to push me in those directions,

lift weights, run, meditate,

do your schoolwork, do your homework.

And so I think I, you know, now I have a good relationship

with my parents, but I think I had to go out

into the world and find those, you know, sort of paternal

and maternal figures because they weren't in my home.

I needed to find those.

Do you look back on your upbringing with gratitude?

Like how do you reflect on that experience

and how it informs how you think about what you do now?

I'm immensely grateful for it because you know,

where I'm at today is, you know, my lab works on a number

of issues related, you know, sort of hardcore neurobiology

of regenerating the brain, you know, trying to fix,

basically cure blindness and repair visual systems,

but also things related to, you know, fear, courage,

mindset, stress, anxiety, trauma, et cetera.

And the early seed of seeing how science is done,

definitely gave me an advantage.

I won't lie, you know, I seeing how scientists interact

and behave and understanding that they are just people.

'Cause a lot of what was discussed in my home was

about the people, not just the science they do,

that really gave me an advantage.

And then seeing all that dysfunction and realizing

that the human animal is amazing at making plans,

at modifying its brain if it wants to, but the human brain

and the human animal are also dreadfully bad

at doing what's best for us.

Because of this, what I think it comes down to is the fact

that our reward systems are not designed

for things that are just good for us.

They're designed for things that optimize the progression

of our species, but they're also, they will grab on to

and ratchet into any behavior that makes us feel good.

And so the human brain is really not optimized

for making best choices.

And so, those years of seeing all that.

I could testify to that.

Yeah, it's and it's, I wouldn't trade those years

for anything.

And I still have great friends in that community.

I mean, I think, you know, any, had I joined

a different community, I would have found the right people

as well, but to be with a, you know, a huge pack

of feral kids at that age

and to see the function and dysfunction

and also it was wild, it was a lot of fun.

I can imagine. It was a lot of fun.

That's a whole set of stories

for another time. Did you see that movie,

"Mid 90s?"

"Mid 90s" and the movie "Kids", the Larry Clark movie.

When I saw that movie, first of all, I had a lot

of friends that were in that movie

'cause he used actual skateboarders.

In "Kids?"

Yeah, I actually knew a couple of those kids

and you know, it's a movie, but there are a lot of things

about that movie they're very accurate.

And when I saw that movie

I was like, yeah, that's like right.

Pretty much a day in the life in Washington Square Park.

And you know, I mean it was a little extreme on some end

but you didn't know where you're gonna end up each night.

And that was a unique experience, you know?

So yeah, and "Mid 90s" was really good.

I think it captured the essence of what it is to be a kid

that's just looking for some group of people to join.

And skateboard is a unique sport because you get young kids

and grown men and now women and girls do it as well.

It didn't happen so much then, but now there are a lot

of great, awesome skateboarders that are female

but they're all hanging out together.

You wouldn't find that in soccer.

You're not gonna get little kids playing with grown men.

So you get exposed to a lot 'cause everyone's

at develop, different developmental stages.

But yeah, it was an amazing thing.

I wouldn't change it for anything.

Cool, well, let's segue into talking about the brain

and maybe we could start with, you know,

how you think about the brain specifically?

Like, what is the brain, what does it do?

What does it not do?

You know, it helps us survive.

It's our portal into trying to make sense of the world.

Like what's the starting point

in the discussion around the brain?

Yeah, so the brain and nervous system, which

so it's like brain spinal cord connections

with the body and back in.

I don't distinguish between brain and mind.

I think that's like an 80s discussion or earlier.

And I think it would take us down the wrong track.

So brain or mind to me is interchangeable.

Mind, body, is kind of interchangeable

because the brain is connected to the body

and the body is connected to the brain, right?

If I, you know, pinprick my hand and it hurts

my brain registers it where it happens

it's kind of an irrelevant discussion.

I think we really need to just appreciate

that the nervous system is designed

to orchestrate all the processes in the body

not just thinking and not just behavior

and really can be divided into five things.

So there's sensation and sensation is really bound

or restricted by the receptors in the body.

So receptors in the eye that perceive photons, light energy

per se, receptors in the skin that perceive pressure

you know, touch receptors, smell, taste, hearing, et cetera.

And the interesting thing about sensation and the fact

that the nervous system needs to pay attention

to sensation is it's non-negotiable.

The nervous system of humans is designed

to extract physical phenomenon from the universe

that are non-negotiable, photons of light.

I can't see in the infrared with my eyes

and I can't see ultraviolet light with my eyes.

And I can't perceive that

because I don't have the receptors for it.

So, you know, other animals can perceive

some of those things

but that leads us to the next thing, which is perception

which is which sensations are you paying attention to.

So all the time you're sensing things like right now

your feet are sensing the contact with your shoes,

but you're not thinking about it until I say that.

And then you shift your perception.

So perception is like the spotlight.

So the brain wants to constantly bring in sensation.

It's non-negotiable what's coming in.

It's just dependent on your environment

Perception is negotiable, you can control that.

'Cause I just said shoes

and you thought about your feet and there you are.

Then there are feelings which can be a little bit nebulous

but feelings are a link between our emotion

and generally invokes the body,

sensations in the body and concepts in the mind

and what those sensations are about.

That's really what emotions are.

Animals definitely experience them.

I'm kind of appalled to think that 10 years ago

people like, do animals have emotions?

Of course they have emotions, right?

Because those are bodily sensations merged

with some perceptions, so of course they do.

And then there's thoughts and thoughts are interesting

because thoughts happen spontaneously.

Think about like a web browser

that's constantly giving you pop-ups

but thoughts can also be deliberate.

So you and I can decide right now that we're gonna think

about a plan for something or we're gonna think

about what's going on in the world.

So thoughts happen spontaneously and they can be deliberate.

And then the final thing is behaviors and actions.

So the nervous system is responsible for sensation,

perception, feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

And what's interesting,

we start to think about that as you're like, okay

that's a lot, but what is the nervous system

really trying to accomplish?

Like on any given day or at any moment,

what's it trying to accomplish?

And it's really trying to accomplish one thing

which is to take perceptions of the outside world

and merge those with perceptions of the inside world

what we call interoception and to link those in a way

that's operating on an environment in the appropriate way.

So what do I mean by that?

So if I'm feeling anxious,

and I'm in a very calm environment, I'm gonna perceive

that rapid heart rate and kind of feeling of agitation

in my body as inappropriate for the moment, right?

And my goal then as an organism is to adjust

my level of what they call autonomic arousal

or alertness down.

If I'm in a great party or I'm at a wedding

or it's a celebration or I'm at a protest or, you know,

then I might feel that my level of alertness

is appropriate for my environment.

So the nervous system is in this constant,

dynamic interaction with the outside world

and trying to figure that out.

One way and this can be kind of conceptualized

is there's an emerging idea that's kind of interesting

about impatience.

So we've all had the feeling of being impatient.

Some people are far more patient than others,

but if you've ever been in line at the store

and you feel like something's going very slowly, you know,

the person in front of you is taking a long time,

they're doing some returns, you're getting kind

of impatient, maybe you're breathing in a mask,

and you're like, ah, like you're, you know,

what's the ideas that if you're getting a certain frequency

of pulses from your body,

and if those pulses are coming in quickly,

like you're perceiving yourself that interoception quickly,

it's like pulse, pulse, pulse, pulse.

You're gonna be more geared

towards your internal representation.

And then you're seeing what's going on in the outside world.

And it seems like it's going very slowly,

but there are other times when you're in line at the store,

someone's getting some returns and you're texting

on your phone or you've had a great day,

you've had a great run, your family's in great shape,

and you're fine, why?

Well, that frequency of those pulses, that interoception,

is matched pretty well to your outside environment.

And so impatience is really when your internal

sort of metronome, tick, tick, tick, tick,

is not matched well to the external environment.

There are other times when you're feeling

like your internal metronome is tick, tick, tick,

and you've got a million things coming at you through email

or texts, you've got a bunch of things and you're feeling

overwhelmed and tired.

Well, in either case there's nothing right or wrong

it's just your body and your brain are trying to say

what's going on in the outside world,

and how well matched am I to it?

Right.

So if you think about some of the, sort of core practices

of mindfulness and self-regulation of like focusing

on breathing or focusing on, you know, state of mind,

a lot of that is trying to bring more awareness

to your internal state,

but what our brain is normally doing when our eyes are open

and we're interacting in the world

is we're constantly trying to update our internal state

to match external demands of the world.

And this hearkens back to a, you know,

like a really early design of all nervous systems

which is how do you take an organism that needs

certain things, food, water, mates, reproduction, shelter.

How do you move that organism?

How do you create a system that will do that

in best relation to the environment?

And so what mother nature has done is designed a system

a series of systems.

Let's just take agitation and stress for one,

if an animal or a human is very thirsty

you feel kind of agitated might get up

and get a drink of water.

If you're very thirsty,

it can put you into a state of panic.

If you're extremely thirsty and water is a limited resource

you might even result the violence to get it

or negotiation of some sort that you wouldn't

if you were calmer.

So the stress and agitation were designed

to actually mobilize the body

to take us into the direction of something that's adaptive.

So you can start to see these kind of core elements

of what the brain and nervous system do.

Sensation, perception, feeling, thought, and action

and this constant challenge

of trying to match our internal state

to the external real estate, the outside world.

And you start to see that the sensations that we call stress

or impatience or calm are really the result

of those attempts that the nervous system

is trying to perform.

That's a lot to take in and super interesting.

And it, you know, it's prompting in me this,

you know, attempt to try to wrap my head around

what within the brain is mutable, which is kind of, you know

what your work is all about versus what is immutable

like you were talking about thoughts

like pop up windows on a browser.

You know, some, sometimes our brains are just doing

what they do and that there are things that we can do

like mindfulness and breath work

and the practices that you're talking about,

hypnosis which is another thing that you're involved in

to help, you know, help us like take better,

manage better that process to kind of take the reins

and be more in charge rather than be prey or victim

to these kinds of things that just occur

without our conscious awareness.

Well, I think that, you know,

in terms of value of understanding the nervous system

and where it can be steered,

it's absolutely clear that the nervous system can change

in response to experience.

So this thing we call neuroplasticity is really that,

it's the brain's ability to modify itself

in response to experience.

And I think it's important to understand that from birth

till about age 25, the brain is extremely malleable,

in a kind of almost passive way where kids are exposed

to things and the brain is just wiring up.

I mean, the brain is designed to adjust itself,

in order to be in concert with its surroundings

and to optimize that just the way we described it

a minute ago.

Like a way that a child can learn a language

very quickly- Or three languages.

Play a guitar or something like that.

Yeah, without an accent, you know,

three languages without an accent, it's remarkable

and try and do that after age 25, it's very challenging.

And so the brain is basically designed to be customized

in the early part of life,

and then to implement those algorithms

in that circuitry for the rest of your, of its life.

And so the brain can change in adulthood

and it can change provided that there's an emphasis

on some perceptual event.

So in other words, if you wanna change your brain

as an adult, let's say you wanna be less anxious,

you wanna learn a new language,

you wanna be more functional in some way, presumably,

the key thing is to bring focus

to some particular perception

of something that's happening during the learning process.

And the reason for that is that

there's a neurochemical system involving acetylcholine.

And it comes from these two little nuclei

down in the base of the brain called the nucleus basalis.

All day long you're doing things in a reflexive way,

but when you do something and you think about it

very intensely, acetylcholine is released from basalis

at the precise neurons that were involved in that behavior

and it marks those for change

during sleep or during deep rest later.

So for people that wanna change their brain,

the power of focus is really the entry point

and the ability to access deep rest and sleep.

Because most people don't realize this

but neuroplasticity is triggered by intense focus,

but neuroplasticity occurs during deep sleep and rest.

And we can talk about how to optimize

those different brain functions.

One of the things that's really important

also to think about how the brain works

in terms of plasticity and all this stuff

is what the brain really wants to do is also pass as much

of what it does off to reflexive behavior as possible.

So, when we're talking about focus

I think it can get a little bit vague,

but it might be useful to think about like

what exactly is focus and what triggers plasticity?

So the brain loves to be able to just do things,

pick up coffee cups and drink and walk

and talk and do things and not put much energy into it.

When we decide to focus what the brain really does

is it switches on a set of circuits

then all the frontal cortex

and nucleus basalis and some others

and it's trying to understand duration,

how long something's gonna last, path, what's gonna happen,

and outcome, what ultimately is gonna happen.

So duration, path and outcome.

You know, the events of early 2020

are a good example of this.

One of the reasons why it's so exhausting to be alive

in 2020, is because we are now having to pay attention

to duration, path and outcome.

How long is this thing gonna last?

When are, you know, when are they gonna open up

all businesses?

Did I touch that door handle?

Does it matter?

You know, who are the experts?

Are there any experts?

You know, there are a lot of questions

whereas normally, we can just move through life

without having to do all that analysis.

So if it's a simple example

like trying to learn a new language or a new motor skill,

or a new way of conceptualizing something,

maybe somebody who's in a therapeutic process

and they're trying to work through a trauma

or something like that,

duration, path and outcome is built

into the networks of the brain.

We can do that very easily, but it takes work.

And it almost has a feeling

of underlying agitation and frustration.

And that's because of the circuits that turn on

before acetylcholine are of the stress system.

So when you or I decide we're gonna learn something

and really dig in, norepinephrine which is adrenaline

is secreted in the brainstem and in the body.

And it brings about a state of alertness.

Then our attention which is mostly a diffuse light

is brought to a particular duration,

path and outcome analysis.

This would be thinking about what somebody is saying,

what are they really trying to say?

A hard passage of reading, a hard, you know,

set of math problems, you know,

a challenging physical workout.

When you do that, these two systems have to work very hard

and the adult brain doesn't really wanna change

the algorithms they learned in childhood.

But if you do those two things,

you have alertness and focus, the acetylcholine

and the norepinephrine converge

to mark those synopsis for change.

And so, so the way to think about neuroplasticity

if one wants to change their brain is bring

about the most intense concentration you can to something.

And then later bring

about the least amount of concentration to that thing.

So I'll talk about that in a second,

but there were some studies that were done at Stanford

by a guy named Eric Knudsen that showed that plasticity

in the adult brain any age, can be as robust

as it is in childhood, as fast and as dramatic,

provided the focus is there and it's all contingent

on this acetylcholine molecule coming from nucleus basalis.

So you say, well, how do you do that?

How do you get it, you know?

Well, I've got friends that you nicorette thinking

that's gonna get them there

because nicorette is a nicotinic acetylcholine agonist

but that's gonna globally increase acetylcholine.

So I always tell them that's not the right approach.

The right approach is to bring as much focus

to a behavior or to a thought or to an action pattern

and there has to be a sense of urgency.

So what Knudsen lab showed and another lab at UCF

Mike Merzenich's lab showed is that

if there's a serious contingency, like in order

to get your ration of food each day,

you have to learn this thing.

The degree of plasticity is remarkable.

But if there isn't an incentive,

it just isn't gonna happen.

So the circuits in the brain that mother nature set up,

are designed to be anchored to a real need.

And people always say to me, well, should I do something

out of love and a real desire to learn,

or should it be out of fear, but either one works.

The sense of urgency is just acetylcholine.

It's norepinephrine, that's all it is.

It doesn't, the brain doesn't have a recognition

of whether or not something is pleasureful or not

until later.

Once you start accomplishing your goal,

the reward systems like dopamine start kicking in.

But I think if people are interested

in modifying their brain for the better, at least some,

you know, top contour understanding of how urgency

and focus must converge for that to happen can be useful.

Because I think there's a lot of attention paid

to whether or not something feels like flow

or whether or not it's see what I call

highly desirable states or whether or not you can,

you can eat a plant out of the ground

that will magically put your brain

into a state of plasticity.

And the answer is yes, such plants exist,

but what's missing is the focus component.

If that work is not done with a particular end goal in mind,

you'll get plasticity, but you'll get plasticity

in a kind of across the board,

it's like learning nine lang, learning a little bit

of nine languages all at once, is not gonna make you

speak coherently in any one of them.

So focus is the key.

Right, I mean, this idea of flow

is so much in the vernacular now.

And you know, my sense is that people

are trying to measure their level of engagement

against some sort of theoretical idea

of what it's like to be in that flow state.

And if they're not experiencing it,

they feel like they're doing it wrong

or they're, they feel guilty or they beat themselves up.

And for me, it's, a lot of it is just hard work.

Like right now, I'm trying to finish this book

and I should have been working

on this book for like the last nine months, right?

And I just couldn't, couldn't get it together.

Like it's a collaborative project.

So there's a lot of different people

that are involved in this,

and they've been working diligently sort of daily, you know

putting this thing together.

And I've just been focusing on the podcast

and been unable to immerse myself in this project

because I know from past book projects, when I go in,

I go all in, like the addict in me kicks in

and it's like, it just becomes my universe.

And I've been completely paralyzed from taking that on.

And so I've dithered away most of the quarantine

without being productive on this project.

And then about 10 days ago, we had a meeting,

and we established this deadline at, you know,

July 10th to turn this thing in.

And it was like a switch got flicked.

And I went all in and it's all I can think about now.

And in fact, everything else feels like extraneous

and a distraction.

I just wanna get back so I can focus on this thing.

And 10 days ago, I couldn't get myself into that position.

And it's made me think about like,

what is going on in my brain that, you know,

it's such a drastic state change.

And what did I do to switch that

while a deadline was imposed upon me and whatever happened

neuro-chemically with that set in motion

like a chain reaction of events that got me into the chair.

And once I began the project for me,

it's all about like momentum, right?

It's like, to start getting to the starting line

and beginning is so hard.

Like, I will just go forever without doing it.

And then I'm in, and then I'm all in 110%.

And I'm like, why can't I just,

why can't I be that person who just worked on it, you know

an hour and a half every day for the last three months?

Well, I can offer some potential explanations.

I can relate.

And none of it involves a flow state.

It's all hard.

Yeah, and you know, I'm friends with Steven Kotler

I think flow and I think the chicks in Mohali

who originated this thing of flow is really interesting.

But I say right now, the most we can say about flow

mechanistically is backwards it spells wolf.

We don't really understand flow.

Now people have come up with these theories.

It's like, you know, hypo hyper frontality.

I haven't seen the data and I'm not picking on anybody.

I'm putting that out there

as a prompt for people to discover this.

I think that, and to work on it.

I think it's a really interesting, highly desirable state

but I think we need to get comfortable as a culture

in trying to understand our species and how we work,

that the early stages of hard work

and focus are gonna feel like agitation,

stress and confusion, because that's the norepinephrine

and adrenaline system kicking in.

None of us would expect to walk into the gym

and do our PR lift, or, you know,

a performer go do something without warming up.

The brain also needs to warm up

and start to hone in which circuits are gonna be active.

And it's unreasonable for us to think,

"Oh I've got an hour, I'm gonna plop down

and write beautifully for an hour my best work."

We need to accept that there's a period

of agitation and stress that accompanies the dropping

into these highly concentrated states.

Now, in terms of the reward that accompanies the feeling

that we're funneling into that groove

of being productive in one regime

like for you writing this book,

the dopamine system is really important to understand.

So we've talked about norepinephrine kind of

gets you going, acetylcholine is the spotlight of attention.

The dopamine system is mother nature's hardwired,

ancient system in all animals

including humans to put us on the right path.

Now it's, a lot of people talk about dopamine

as this thing that you get when you publish the book

or when you get the book deal

or when something wonderful happens like your child's born.

And that's true, but dopamine's main role is to be released

anytime you achieve a milestone,

or you think you're on the right path.

And when the dopamine system is tethered

to a particular pattern of focus,

remember duration, path and outcome.

So it's like, okay, you sit down,

maybe you don't get much text out

but then the next day you get 800 words

of really solid text and you feel good, like I'm into this.

What does that dopamine system do?

The dopamine system takes the norepinephrine

which is normally rate limiting.

Like at some point there's so much norepinephrine

that you quit and we can talk about that.

It's actually the substrate for quitting,

dopamine can push that noradrenaline back down,

that adrenaline back down and give you more room,

more space to do duration, path and outcome work,

highly focused work.

And I'm making duration path outcomes

synonymous with highly focused work.

Why would this happen?

So let's think about an animal.

Let's think about a deer that wakes up and is thirsty

and it's wandering out looking for water.

That animal needs water.

It doesn't know that it needs water.

It experiences agitation the same way that a baby

feels agitation when it wants food

but it doesn't know it needs food.

It just feels agitation and cries

and a caretaker comes, hopefully.

That deer is now foraging for something that it needs.

And let's say it smells water,

'cause a deer can actually do that and arrives at a stream

and takes a sip of water, there's dopamine released then,

that puts it on a path to maybe a larger lake

or something of that sort, or to be able to go cheap food.

So when we are on the right path,

and we hit a milestone, dopamine is released

and it tends to tighten our focus more for that activity.

So the dopamine, this is why drugs of abuse

and why alcoholism and some process addictions,

which are behavioral addictions are so dangerous

because they, a lot of those drugs of abuse are dopamine.

So it becomes this cyclical loop where there's

no other behavior that can evoke the same level of release.

In fact, I sort of define addiction

as a progressive narrowing of the things

that bring you pleasure.

And I say that

because it really is the way that the dopamine system works.

Normally the dopamine system is designed to be generic.

It's designed to get me to do lots of things,

social quality, social interactions

you know, work, exercise, all those things,

just like the stress system is designed to get me

out of bed in the morning,

cortisol pulse is what gets me out of bed in the morning.

It's also what leads me to, or led me to pursue a career

in science out of fear, initially, and eventually pleasure.

So the dopamine system is tethered to those states of focus

and it's what mother nature designed

so that the neuroplasticity would occur

and you would want to continue those behaviors again

in the future.

That deer needs to know and remember

and create a memory, not just aware that stream is,

but the process of, oh, when I feel that agitation

I'm gonna get up and go down this particular path.

And so people think of the dopamine system

as this kind of like catch all for reward,

oh, you get likes on Instagram and it makes you feel good.

That's not really how it works.

And the important thing to understand

is when you start getting a convergence of norepinephrine

so that level of agitation

duration, path, outcome, acetylcholine, and dopamine,

now you're starting to wire in the behaviors

that make people really good at certain things.

Now in a functional view of this, so not addiction,

what this means is that for any of us,

success in any endeavor is very closely related

to how much focus we can bring to that endeavor.

And the reward system you start to realize

is entirely internal, no one's coming along

and cramming dopamine in your ear

or dripping it in your brain, it's all internal.

And this starts to bring us

into the kind of like discussion around mindsets.

Because, so my colleague Carol Dweck,

who popularized this thing, growth mindset,

it's and again, a very misunderstood concept.

It's the idea that we can change.

So that's built into that, but the discovery

of growth mindset was of these kids that actually

really enjoyed doing problem sets

that they knew they couldn't get, right?

But for them, they would get this like dopamine release

from just focusing on the problem.

They liked doing puzzles they couldn't get right.

It sounds crazy, but inevitably,

those kids are very good at puzzles

and very good at math and on these kinds of things.

So growth mindset is I believe,

if a certain neuroscience lens on growth mindset

would be that the agitation and stress that you feel

at the beginning of something

and when you're trying to lean into it

and you can't focus is just a recognized gate.

You have to pass that through that gate

to get to the focus component.

And then if you can reward the effort process

you really start to feel joy

and low levels of excitement in the effort process.

That's that buffering of adrenaline.

That's that feeling like, yes,

I've got a lot of adrenaline in my system

but I'm on the right path.

It feels good to walk up this hill, so to speak.

And when you start to bring those neural circuits together

you really start to create a whole set of circuits

that are designed to be exported to any behavior you want.

So if it's writing a book, great, if it's podcasting great,

if it's building a business great.

If it's, you know, building a terrific relationship, great

then the circuits that mother nature is designer

incredibly generic so that we could adapt

to whatever it is that we need to do.

And I think the misunderstanding

around how these circuits work,

has led to this idea that there's some secret entry point

maybe marked flow on the door

and there's a trampoline up to that door

and you just open that door and you're gonna be in it.

And nothing could be further from the truth.

And anyone who's done well in any career or athletic pursuit

knows this, but unfortunately there's a kind of obsession

with the idea that it's all supposed to feel good

and it does feel good but there's a whole staircase

in which it feels kind of lousy.

Yeah, I mean, the feel good aspect

of that experience is very subtle.

And I think, you know, in a kind of global way,

what you're talking about is falling in love

with the process.

Like you have to push this gate open, which might require

you know, more effort than you're comfortable with.

But once you push through, it is about, you know, that daily

the daily rigor and the tiny wins that you get from that,

rather than, you know, it's easy to, you know,

you set a goal, but that goal becomes very abstract, right?

And it's those tiny little things that you're getting done

every day that bring you that internal satisfaction

that are like calibrating that plasticity.

Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, absolutely.

And what's incredible is the extent to which the mind

and thoughts, remember earlier we were talking about

how thoughts are spontaneous.

You can't control them,

negative thoughts, traumatic thoughts, bad thoughts,

trying to suppress those is futile.

If there's one message I can send people

it's just don't even work at that,

but work at the process of introducing thoughts

as almost like you would introduce actions,

because we can introduce thoughts.

And, you know, Carol Dweck has talked about this,

that positive self-talk is not the same thing

as growth mindset, because positive self-talk

is almost always linked to the ultimate outcome.

If I'm losing badly in something,

and I tell myself, I'm doing great,

I know that I'm lying.

There's no dopamine release from that.

And you know, a lot of the self-help wellness culture

of the 80s and 90s was like, it's impossible

to be in a bad mood if you're smiling.

We won't have any depression on the planet if that's true.

There's probably some feedback

from the face to the brain, but it's not that simple.

But the idea that you can self reward

the effort process is extremely powerful,

because what it means is

that if you can recognize agitation, stress, and confusion

as an entry point to where you eventually wanna go,

I do think that just that even just mental recognition

can allow people to pass through it more easily.

They think they're doing something wrong

and then rewarding yourself when you achieve any milestone,

like, you know, running to a particular location

if you're trying to run a long distance

and then registering that as a partial win,

what we know is that the dopamine that's released

in response to that suppresses the total amount

of adrenaline and gives you more room, more time,

more energy to run in the running example.

And this is anchored in a real scientific result.

So last year there was a paper published

that essentially was asking why any human

or animal quits at any behavior.

Now, certain behaviors like I can't lift a car,

unless it's a very small car.

I can't lift a car, but if we're talking about running

or we're talking about long bouts of work, the question is,

why do we quit?

Like, what is that?

And it turns out that every time we exert effort,

a certain amount of noradrenaline in the brain is released,

and there's a sort of a counter in the brainstem.

And at some point enough noradrenaline is released

and it shuts down cognitive control, deliberate control

over the motor circuitry, and we quit, that's it.

But the thing that can restore those levels

or it can sort of reset those levels lower

and give us more gas, more mileage, is dopamine.

And it makes perfect sense because our species had to move

against very challenging things in nature

and in certain, so in culture at every stage

of our evolution including now,

2020 is a good example of this.

And when a good example would be,

if you're really slogging it out and things are miserable,

just think like the worst family vacation,

everything's a disaster or a very hard physical event,

and someone cracks a joke,

you're almost immediately feel a sense of relief.

You see this in the team that wins the Super Bowl.

Both teams slogged it out.

You have to believe they were both at max effort

the entire game.

Look at the team that wins,

they have extra energy,

they're jumping all over the place.

So it can't be physical energy.

It can't be glycogen related.

It's not ketone related.

It's nothing in the body in that sense.

It's dopamine's ability to take that level

of norepinephrine and smack it back down.

And so we can learn this, right?

I mean, I think this is where there's real power

like in your story,

or the story that I'm familiar with from your book.

Like the ability to push through those pain points

is something that we really can export

to other aspects of life

because it's the same neuro-chemicals that are involved.

So when you get to a particular location

or maybe your, recall, you know, a portion where you're just

you're feeling lousy, you know, you're injured,

or you feel like you're hurt and you can reframe it mentally

and think I'm actually still on the ladder.

I'm still holding onto a wrong.

I know that at least that much, I'm still breathing.

I know that much.

And the lift that we get is not some psychological pump-up,

it's a neurochemical thing.

It's dopamine suppressing norepinephrine, and saying

you're on the right path, you can keep going.

It's a permission to keep going.

And we grant that permission to ourselves,

no one grants that permission to us.

I think one of the other kind of misconceptions

that we wanna dissolve is this idea

that external rewards can actually propel us

down long paths of success and high performance.

They can't.

It's internal rewards. No, that's a sustainable

fuel source.

Yeah. Yeah.

I have a friend from the SEAL team

and somebody asked us recently, we were giving a talk

and somebody said,

"How can I make sure that I continue to self reward,

and I'm not driven by these extra rewards?

How can I continue to have that drive?"

And his answer was very good.

He said, "Give away all the external rewards."

You know, now not everyone can afford to do that.

It's just about you and you.

And the more attach there's a famous Stanford study done

at being nursery school, probably not far where

from where you were in the dormitory,

there was a little nursery school in Escondido village.

And they did a study where they looked at kids

that like to playing during their recess,

it's all recess in nursery school, but they're drawing.

And they took the kids that really liked to draw.

And they started giving them little gold stars

on their drawings.

And then they liked the gold stars

for a kid that's an extrinsic reward.

And then they stopped doing that and the kids stop drawing.

They just, they associated the good feeling of doing it

with the external rewards.

We have to be very cautious about how much

of our internal dopamine we attach to external rewards,

if we wanna continue to grow

and pursue and focus and work hard.

If you just wanna get to someplace and cash in, then fine.

But most people find themselves in a pretty miserable place

because their dopamine was so attached to external rewards,

they need more and more of that.

Well, the why has to be deeper than that.

I mean, the thing that I kind of always default to

when I hit that breaking point or, you know

I'm training or I'm racing or whatever,

and I'm at that stage where it's just like,

I can't go any further,

the first thing I do is I reflect inward

on why I'm doing this to begin with, like, what is the,

you know what is the value system

that I'm trying to tap into?

What is it that I'm trying to express?

Like what got me to this point?

So it's a reminder, and then I just set,

like I just say, well, I'm just gonna get

to the next lamppost or I'm gonna, you know,

get to the next intersection or whatever it is.

I break it down into the tiny, I'll quit after that.

Like the more I can just root myself in the present moment

and distill it down into the tiniest of digestible chunks,

that's the only way I can, you know,

continue to move forward.

And I've learned over time that the more I do that, then

you know, suddenly I'll find myself

in a different mental, like it will shift, right?

Just because I feel that way in that moment

is not determinative

of how I'm gonna feel 10 minutes later.

Absolutely, there's an interesting process that occurs

when people start to realize that rewards are all internal

and what they start to do is they start linking

this duration, path, outcome thing,

to their internal rewards.

And so to put this simply one of the most powerful things

that any person can do is to learn to control

this idea of duration, path, and outcome

and attach an internal sense of reward

just that you're doing well to reward yourself mentally

just say, "I'm doing well, I'm actually on the right path."

To do that inside of the demands

that come from the external world.

The more often that we can self reward

some aspect of the process provided

it's in the right direction of what we're trying to achieve,

the more energy we're gonna have for that,

the more focus we're gonna have for that.

And remember that the reason I say energy,

I don't throw that around loosely is that limiting amount

of noradrenaline is constantly being kept at bay.

You literally keep buffering the quit response.

And so when people start realizing

that if they set the goals inside of the larger goal

and self reward each one of those

they essentially have an infinite amount of energy

They have an infinite amount of focus to pursue those goals.

You see this most in the special operations community

and people that are selected essentially for this process.

It's one of the things that's been intriguing to me.

I have some friends from the SEAL teams

and I don't begin to really understand the real work

that they do deployed

'cause I've never done that kind of work

but I've always been intrigued

by the selection process,

the so-called BUD/S process, right?

Because carrying logs and getting in cold water

and all that, that's not really how the work is.

That's really not what the work is about.

So the selection process is interesting

because everyone shows up fit, motivated,

and convinced that they're not gonna quit.

I mean, I think like there might be a couple of days

you'll just show up to show up,

but everybody is absolutely convinced.

And then a very small subset of them make it through.

And I'd be willing to bet

that the ones that make it through,

of course they're gritty and resilient

but they all are essentially, right?

So that's necessary, but not sufficient, obviously,

otherwise they, everyone would make it through.

The people that make it through somehow

are able to tap into a process.

Maybe it's a reward process.

Maybe it's through self punishment,

maybe it's through self reward in the positive sense,

but they're able to control something

inside an environment that is not controlled by them.

It's controlled by the instructors.

And I've always been struck by the fact that in order to

to not in order to get through, you just have to not quit.

Remember people aren't being deselected.

They're not saying, get out of here,

you're not good enough, you're not,

people are deciding that for themselves.

And so it's interesting because it brings

about a real-world experiment of people who are quitting.

And I believe they're quitting because they can't manage

these neurotransmitters.

And the people, when I say manage,

I think that the people that get through

knowing some of these people quite well,

had an internal process

by which they could reward themselves

for doing something that might've just look trivial

to everybody else, but it gave them more gas, more energy.

And what's interesting is the process,

the kind of unconscious genius of the BUD/S process

is that they've picked two sensory events

that are across the board, challenging for everybody.

One is cold water, which is great, because it

most of the time it can't kill you, right?

It's not like heat, which can kill you.

It's cold water and sleep deprivation.

And so the ability to do these, like what I'm calling DPOs

this duration, path and outcome steps and procedures

is great on when you're rested, you know,

you know, when you have, when you're well fed, well slept,

you can do anything.

You can be in any hard conversation

you can work through anything.

So what they do is they start taking

the autonomic nervous system, which is these deep reserves

of the nervous system

that when our autonomic nervous system is off,

it starts making us pay more attention

to how we feel than the demands of the world around us.

Remember that basic challenge in the nervous system.

And so sleep deprivation is the best way

that you can pull somebody down from their ability

to analyze duration, path and outcome and reward themselves.

Sleep deprivation is the way

in which you essentially pull apart the nervous system

and the way that it wants to function

because it's very easy, again, rested to do all this.

But so what they do is they're sleep deprived people

they put them in cold water,

they're trying to get them more in touch

with the way that they feel inside than what they need to do

in response to the external demands.

Everyone I know that's made it through that process,

did it slightly differently

but I'll tell you how they didn't do it.

They didn't do it through sheer grit and determination.

They did it through attaching a sense of meaning.

They did it by micro slicing the day, or slicing the day

into a series of meals that they just needed to get to

and then rewarding themselves

for getting to that next milestone.

So they don't know, I mean, most of them,

you know, probably had very low concept

of dopamine and norepinephrine, but that's the process.

That's also the process

I think that allows someone to finish an ultra.

I've never run an ultra, but I think that process

of self reward is grit and resilience,

in a kind of neurochemical definition.

And I think it's the thing that anybody can tap into.

And I think it's, therefore, I think it's so key

because I think people think that it's just so key

that people understand, excuse me,

that these circuits are not unique

to people who run ultras or people that make it through

you know, stringent filter, special operations command.

These, it's the same thing

that anyone can do. It is interesting.

Yeah, the ultimate determinant

isn't your physical conditioning.

And yet that's what everybody focuses on.

It's what's going on in, you know,

internally, mentally, neuro-chemically

that's making the difference

and the people that are able to best calibrate that

and find these, you know, strategies for managing

are the ones that get through whether it is an ultra

or BUD/S and BUD/S is like this perfect,

it's almost like its own lab, right?

For studying human resilience in a certain respect

but you have actually taken some of these people

and tested them in your lab, including David Goggins, right?

So, what do you do when you, when these people visit you

and you're like, I'm gonna deconstruct you here,

figure out what makes you tick.

Yeah, so I had the good fortune of meeting David

at a consulting event a few years ago.

And I guess I should just say, David,

you probably know this already, but he is,

every bit is intense as he comes across.

Yeah, I mean,

what you see online. His private persona is-

Yeah it's exactly the same.

What you see is what you get.

Really wonderful and obviously extremely impressive

human being.

David anecdote, so the night before we had this event,

he came out to the lab.

My lab, we do, we study fear.

We study courage, we say resilience.

And we say the underlying neurochemical substrates

for those.

So we had a bunch of guys there,

a couple of team guys, some other folks, and we bring them

in this little room and we do virtual reality there.

And one of the things that we used to scare people

or to generate a sense of autonomic arousal

is this experience of diving with great white sharks.

Which of course, you're not in water,

you're in the laboratory, but it's very immersive.

And for people that are afraid of sharks,

it can be quite scary, not always,

but we also have heights, we have claustrophobia,

we got something where you can feel spiders

crawling all over your body, if you're an arachnophobe.

You know, if you have a pain point, we find it.

Do you spend time trying to figure out

what that pain point is?

We do and we do it through some very covert methodology

that involves AI and some fun tools.

A bunch of weird questions that, right, all right.

Let's just say this, from the moment you step

into our laboratory, we're studying you.

so the-

Now I know. And yeah, exactly.

So what was fun was, you know,

so I sort of explained what the platform was

and what we were gonna do.

And David said, he goes, "I don't like sharks."

And I was like, all right, well, and so then, you know,

this was not a typical experimental day in the lab.

So I just kind of, at one point I finished describing

what the tech is and how we're going to wire people in.

And then I said, "So who wants to go first?"

And he's like, I'll go.

Right, of course.

And what was funny to me at that moment

I realized this is interesting because he,

He was very explicit about the fact

that he was going to be first, you know, first man in.

I mean, it would be inappropriate

for me to describe his data, right?

And we didn't do a full-blown experiment

but what I can say is he's, whatever it is

that David has figured out how to do,

it clearly involves taking whatever adrenaline pulse

he feels and understanding something fundamental to biology

which is that adrenaline response was designed

to move us not to keep us stationary.

He uses behavior as the way to shift sensation,

perception, feelings, and thoughts.

He understands how to run that program

in the right direction.

Whereas most people, when they don't like what they feel,

they start negotiating sensation, which will never work.

They start trying to control their perception

which is hard, right?

They're like, I'm not gonna think about that

or I'll think about it differently.

Very hard to control the mind with the mind.

He knows that's a tough one.

Yeah.

Feelings, Lord knows what those are

and how to control them.

I mean, we'll eventually figure that out as a field,

but thoughts are complicated.

So he just goes immediately into action.

He goes forward towards it.

So when he says, just for clarity, when he says,

"I don't like sharks", he's basically saying

put me in the shark tank, like, he's cuing you to say

this is the thing I'm afraid of

and I'm gonna be the first one to volunteer

and I know you're gonna put me in the shark tank

if I tell you that, right?

Exactly, and I think, and I obviously can't speak for him,

but one of the things I think is very clear

is that he's tapped into this neuroplasticity process

through the door through the portal of agitation and stress,

he's figured out the, and this is really the holy grail

of neuroscience is how can I modify my brain?

Well, you modify it by placing yourself into discomfort

and using that as a propeller to move you into action.

And, you know, a couple of years later

when David was working on his book

and I heard the book was coming out,

I think I saw a pre-release announcement,

I texted him and I just said, look

"I'm really excited to see your book."

And he said, "Oh great, thank you.

You know, be great if you'd write something

like an endorsement."

I said, "Oh, I'd be honored to, I'm happy to."

And he said, "But I need it tonight."

And this was Saturday.

I think it was like 10:30 at night when I texted him.

So it's a great, well, I'd be happy to, I won't do it now.

He said, "I need it by midnight."

So I sit down and I start writing this thing

and these are short blurbs, but I kind of realized

that you know, you wanna get it right.

It's David and you know, my name's next to it.

And I wanna do do it justice.

So I'm sitting down, I'm working on the saying

and I texted him, "Look, I'm gonna be a few minutes late.

No problem, no problem."

Finally, I sent him the thing at like 12:30 at night

and he's like, "Aw, bro, thank you, thank you, thank you.

I promise I'll send you a copy of this and that."

And I was like, grateful, you know, thank you.

And then I realized that that time he was living in New York

and I said, "Wait a second, where are you?"

He said, "New York."

And I said, "It's 3:30 in the morning."

And he goes, "Yeah, I'm going running."

And I realized at that point, I was like, okay

you know, there's, it's undisputable.

You know this guy lives the persona

that he projects into the world.

And even that day, that consulting gig, you know,

there was a four o'clock lag

and he was like, no, let's keep going.

So he's figured something out.

And I think that his enormous popularity is it's earned,

because he's figured out that it really doesn't matter

if you come at something from a place of joy and love.

And that would be wonderful, but there's a whole other set

of ways to approach this, that involve slogging

through the discomfort, the doubts, the wish for things

to be different and starting with behavior.

And it's incredible 'cause if you think about sensation

perception, feeling, thought and behavior,

actually the way to control our nervous system

and feel the way we wanna feel is to run that backwards.

Behavior, thoughts.

So if you change your behavior, then generally

your thoughts, your feelings and your perceptions change.

And everyone tries to come at it from the other end,

but he's figured out through whatever process led him there

and incredible life circumstances, how to run it

in this direction of behavior first.

And I really think that if neuroscience has anything

to offer, it's some understanding of what the underlying

chemicals and neuro-circuits are, but the sooner

that the human animal, the human species can start

to understand that our feelings and our thoughts

and our memories and our all that is very complicated,

but that when behaviors are very concrete

and they are the control panel for the rest of it.

I don't wanna relegate feelings,

feelings are extremely important.

I don't wanna relegate perception,

they're extremely important, but when it comes to wanting

to shift the way that you function, to get better

or to perform better, or to show up better,

or to move away from things like addictive behaviors,

it's absolutely foolish for any of us, me included,

to think that we can do that by changing our thoughts first,

it's behavior first, thoughts, feelings

and perceptions follow.

Mood follows action.

This is like been my mantra forever.

And, you know, I swear by it.

And David's example illustrates that that act first

he's developed so much neuroplasticity that it's reflexive

for him to just move towards the hard thing

or the challenge or the discomfort, right?

And now the science establishes

that this is indeed the case.

And yet our programming, our default hard wiring is to,

you know, put us in this place where we want to ruminate

on all this stuff.

And wait until we feel like doing something before we do it

or check our motivations for it.

But anytime I'm in a funk or I wanna change my state,

I have to move forward.

I have to do something with my physical body in order

to shake things up and, you know,

rearrange whatever's going on mentally.

So, and it, and it works every time.

It works every time because the brain circuits

meaning sets of connections and chemicals

they're there from birth, they're there your whole life,

and they were designed for that.

So in 2018, a graduate student in my lab published a paper

in Nature, showing that in the face of a physical threat,

there are three options.

You can obviously freeze,

you can retreat, or you can move forward.

And the moving forward response actually triggers activation

of a connection in the brain to the dopamine circuitry

of the brain and makes it more likely

that you're gonna be able to move forward in the future.

Now, what was interesting to us was that,

not only is forward action rewarded at a neurochemical level

which then sets you up for more forward action

but the highest level of agitation and stress was associated

with moving forward, we always think, well,

if I just call myself enough, I'll be able to move forward.

But it's the exact opposite, you know?

And so people who are paralyzed in fear

or that have a hard time initiating, sometimes the key

is to raise the level of stress and agitation.

This is why deadlines are so effective.

This is why fear is so effective.

This is why that deer gets up out of its, you know,

nice little den and starts to move

because it feels a certain level of agitation.

If that agitation isn't high enough,

we will not move forward.

And so, especially in the U.S you know, we have a culture

in which stress has been created, you know, these ideas

around stress is that it's terrible for us.

When in fact stress is designed to move us forward

towards these action steps that are rewarded

which then move us forward and so on.

So what is the process of combating that, you know

monkey mind that is, you know,

running whatever narrative that's keeping you stuck.

Like, it's easy to say, like, just move

you gotta take the action.

But a lot of people still, despite understanding that,

intellectualizing that, are unable to, you know,

basically act as if.

Yeah, I think we're dealing with two general categories

of people who have problems with motivation and focus.

And I think we've failed to decide, excuse me,

I think we failed to describe the fact

that there are two groups and not one we think,

well I need to calm myself enough to move forward.

I think, and then other people say, well, no

you need to kind of ramp yourself up to move forward.

Here's the way I conceptualize it

based on the data that I'm aware of.

Some people are just hypo aroused.

They're just not motivated enough.

And those people would benefit greatly

from cultivating practices, like super oxygenated breathing.

So this is something along the lines

of like tummo type breathing, so rapid.

And we look at this and allow

we're actually running a human study on this now.

So 25 or 30 deep breaths through the nose and out

through the mouth, then exhaling the breath and holding,

learning to how to self generate adrenaline.

That's what you're doing when you're doing that.

Some version of the Wim Hof technique.

That's what that is.

Brian McKenzie talks about.

Right, an ice bath is doing the exact same thing,

stimulating adrenaline response.

It actually improves the immune system.

There's a published paper on this, releases adrenaline

which buffers the immune system against infection

but getting good at taking yourself from low,

low energy to higher energy

and then learning how to compress your focus.

And I'll talk about the focus thing in a minute.

Some people are so agitated, the monkey mind

they got too many things going on and they're thinking, okay

they're trying to sit down and write.

I suffer from this, and I'm feeling like, wait

I've also got this person I need to connect with.

And I'm kind of being drawn off course

by not being able to put the blinders on.

For people that have that issue,

I think learning how to calm the nervous system

is very powerful.

And the best way that I know how to do that is based

on two studies, one published in Nature, one published

in Cell Reports recently showing that physiological size

there's actually a thing in the literature

called physiological size, are one of the fastest ways

to bring our overall level of sub autonomic arousal down.

And a physiological sigh is a two inhales,

followed by an extended exhale.

So it's like, it's not just a deep breath.

It's two inhales followed by an exhale, okay?

And what that, what that does.

And this has been shown several times now in humans

and other species, as well is it dilates

the little sacks of the lungs and that second inhale

dilates them a little bit more,

and it pulls a little bit of carbon dioxide

out of the bloodstream so that when we exhale,

we offload the maximum amount of carbon dioxide

and it perfectly adjust the ratio of carbon dioxide

and oxygen in the bloodstream and lungs.

And sometimes it only takes one of these double

inhale exhale.

Sometimes somebody needs to do two or three,

but that's the fastest way

to bring the autonomic nervous system down.

A lot of people need such a tool because I think

we talk a lot about meditation and tools for calm

and, you know I can go to Esalen for a weekend

and get a massage, I'm gonna feel very good,

but then when I'm thrown back in real life

I need something that's gonna work in real time.

What I call a real time tool.

And most people don't know how to control

their autonomic nervous system because it's complicated.

I can't control my liver function.

I can eat that will calm me,

but that has complicated, you know, issues with it too

if I'm just eating to calm myself.

So the diaphragm is the one skeletal muscle organ

that was internally, right?

We've got obviously skeletal muscles

designed to move things.

It's a skeletal muscle organ, unlike the spleen, the liver,

the heart, et cetera

it was designed to be moved voluntarily.

And these physiological size are actually

occurring fairly regularly during sleep,

to adjust our levels of carbon dioxide and oxygen.

And there's a recent study showing that in claustrophobia

this is the breathing pattern that people default to,

to try and offload that carbon dioxide.

So, whereas there are a lot

of really interesting breathing techniques,

Wim Hof, Brian McKenzie does great work.

Patrick McHugh, you know, the Laird and Gabby, there're tons

of people doing really interesting things out there.

My lab has been focused on what are the neural circuits

that are designed to achieve particular states

that happen to impinge on and capture diaphragm function.

And so the reason I think breathing is so powerful

is that everyone has a diaphragm

and it's the immediate link to the body.

A lot's been made at the vagus nerve.

You know, oh, the vagus is the path

between the body and mind, but the vagus is very slow.

The vagus nerve calming is what you experience

when you eat a really rich carbohydrate-rich meal

or you've had a long day and you put your feet up

and you're finally relaxing.

It takes minutes to hours to kick in.

Whereas the diaphragm is real-time control

over your brain state.

So the brain knows what the body is doing

by how fast the diaphragm is moving.

It knows its overall activation state.

So when you breathe quickly

those 25 or 30 breaths, the brain says, oh, I must be alert.

I'm gonna start secreting some noradrenaline.

And when you breath slowly,

that level of noradrenaline drops down.

So it sounds so simple, but I think it's only in the last

two or three years that my lab and Mark Krasnow's lab

at Stanford and other labs elsewhere in the world

have started to identify the neurons

in the brain that are linked to breathing

and how those two things relate to one another.

And I think everybody should have a kit of tools

that they can use to bring themselves down

and ramp themselves up.

I'll just say one other thing about focus.

So when we're in a high alert state,

something very powerful happens

that I think partially explains your your ability now

to drop into this book writing.

When there's a certain amount of adrenaline in our system,

our pupils dilate,

remember the eyes are not connected to the brain.

Our eyes are actually two pieces of central nervous system.

They are two pieces of brain outside the skull

that were designed to control our overall arousal state.

And so we can talk about this as it relates to sleep

and sleep quality, but when I bring up the level

of adrenaline in my body through breathing, or let's say

I see a troubling text, or let's just say,

I just use a very Goggins-type-approach

and just figure out the most painful, inspiring for me

reason to do it, you know, it sounds vague,

'cause obviously David

I don't know what goes on in your head

but a tremendous respect for your ability to do this.

But he just ratchets himself out of that ditch

and puts himself in motion, the pupils dilate,

and when that happens,

our visual system actually enters something

that's a little bit more like portrait mode on our phone.

There's a process called accommodation

and your ability to focus on one thing visually

actually becomes better

and your ability to see everything else blurs away.

And that's the ability to just see that screen of text

or that if you were work on, you know, pad and paper

to just see that pad and paper.

And then as you start writing, what people don't realize is

that mental focus follows visual focus.

Now in blind people, it's slightly different,

it follows auditory focus, but in most people,

your visual focus as you bring that

into really sharp relief, that image of your book

and you stare at you're gonna feel some agitation

and your mind's gonna be jumping all over the place.

But if you wait just a couple minutes,

the rest of the world will disappear.

I think this is sort of like the flow state

people are looking for.

But remember the gate of entry is one of which

you have to wade through some sewage

before you can swim in clear water.

That's the way I always think about it.

But the visual focus is what brings the rest of the brain

into cognitive focus

and people in the martial arts understand this.

You've probably experienced this running when

you're feeling exhausted and you can just concentrate

on one milestone and get there.

You can almost bring that into like you

what you're doing is you're linking that

to the dopamine circuitry.

You're saying that thing is the milestone

not winning the race, not some other thing outside this,

this immediate environment, that thing.

And when you're able to start capturing

these peripheral circuits, meaning the body, the diaphragm,

the visual system, then you start getting past

this whole idea of mindsets

and it really becomes about the body setting the mind.

And this is where I think when you say action

leads the rest, right?

It's that's what you're saying is grounded

in real neuro biological data.

There's also a shift in your perception of time

when you're in that state, you know,

suddenly your relationship with time

becomes completely different.

So, I'm really glad you-

And I'm not like, you know,

it's easy to say it slows down or it speeds up,

to me it's neither.

You're in this weird liminal state

where it's almost like it doesn't exist.

It's not, it's not a relevant like vector in your,

in your emotional experience.

I'm really glad you brought this up

because one of my obsessions is time perception.

And, you know, having spent the last 20 years

or so studying the visual system

what you start to realize is that space,

meaning physical space, not outer space, but physical space

around you and your time perception are absolutely linked.

And when our focus is very narrow,

time starts to feel thin sliced.

So, you're right.

It's not that it's going fast or slow,

it's that you're perceiving more events per unit time.

So it's like a metronome that's going faster.

When our gaze is dilated,

so when we're relaxed, there's actually a,

what happens is the pupil kind of relaxes a bit.

It doesn't always get bigger or smaller

but what happens is when we're relaxed,

so if you view a horizon for instance,

or you go into what's called panoramic vision,

so even though I'm looking at you right now,

I can dilate my gaze without moving my head or eyes.

So I can see the corners of the room and the ceiling.

I can see myself in the environment, when we do that,

our perception of time broadens.

And we feel like we have more time.

And what we're doing when we do that focus

versus de-focus as I call it,

or focal vision versus panoramic vision is you're toggling

on and off the autonomic nervous system for alertness,

you're turning on and off that norepinephrine circuit.

And so it's conscious control over a brainstem circuit.

And this is why I don't like the phrase autonomic,

'cause that means automatic, it's a misnomer.

All the breathing I can control my autonomic nervous system.

I can breathe, I can control my autonomic nervous system,

I can eat a big meal.

I can control my autonomic nervous system,

I can focus or de-focus.

And if you really look at the realm of high-performance

what you start to realize is people who are very good

at their respective sport or career

or in the special operations community what they do,

are exceptionally good at turning it on and off

these systems.

So they're highly functional at achieving their milestones

but they're not spending out extra energy.

Because when you go into panoramic vision,

you start to uncouple the space time thing

and you get some rest and relaxation.

The way to think about this

as we go back to duration, path and outcome,

that's the most stringent high focus regime for the brain.

The way to get better

at duration, path, and outcome is to engage

in activities that are low duration, path, and outcome

where your brain is not in modes

of analyzing duration, path, and outcome.

What's the one phase of our life when we're not thinking

about duration, path, and outcome at all?

Sleep, and so the reason why

you can pull somebody's mind apart,

their ability to think rationally and analyze duration,

path and outcome by sleep depriving them, is because sleep

despite all its neurochemical complexity is really when

we restore our ability to analyze duration,

path and outcome. Now you think about BUD/S and you go

no wonder they're sleep deprived.

They're trying to figure out who has the ability to control

these mechanisms and who doesn't, most people fail.

So when I think about how to recover,

I've I actually don't think about recovery as its own thing.

I think about recovery as giving buoyancy

or improving my ability to focus.

So sleep is the turning off of these brain circuits

that are thinking about what's happening next.

So some people experience challenges in falling asleep,

they need to learn how to turn off thinking.

And there's actually a way to do this.

We're doing a study on this now, it relates to hypnosis.

That will be fun to talk about.

And we can, if you like, the other thing is that

just merely going into panoramic vision,

say between a meeting instead of looking at your phone,

more focal vision we're hard on your book.

Maybe you walk to the kitchen, just two seconds of,

what I call deliberate decompression, where you just kind of

let your mind go broader, will allow you to reset your focus

much more intensely when you return to that book

as opposed to if you'd looked at your phone

or engaged even in some other kind of deep duration,

path, outcome type function of the brain.

So when you start thinking about meditation,

it's also valuable because a lot of meditation

involves focusing on your breath.

I actually think a lot of people

are spending out this ability.

They're working too hard in the activities

that are designed to reset them.

So the two ways to reset yourself in wakefulness.

Being just very adamant about my meditation practice.

That's right.

Because it's an, it's a letting go.

It's not it's, you know, it's we're so programmed

to like force ourselves to do things

or to like dive in with intentionality.

But so much of this is more elusive than that.

I think that we can all do ourselves a great service

and perform much better in what we're doing

by taking little micro recoveries in the form of dilating

our gaze in between meetings, just for a second,

viewing a horizon is the best way to do it

because it naturally brings the eyes into de-focus.

We're doing this in VR because we can control

the visual environment completely.

When you go into this de-focus mode, you turn off

that brainstem circuit, you're conserving norepinephrine

for your next bout of focus in activity.

Otherwise you're spending it and the brain doesn't care

how you spend it.

Doesn't care if it's on Instagram, doesn't care

if it's watching the news, but learning how to de-focus

and then refocus very quickly can get you through a race

that you wouldn't otherwise have been able to get through.

It saves you energy and it builds energy.

The other thing is we talk a lot about sleep

and sleep is extremely important, but there are other modes

of, and brain states that can allow you to recover.

One of the ones that I'm a huge proponent of

and that my lab has been studying and other labs

are studying is what many people call yoga nidra,

where you-

I've done yoga nidra a lot.

It's a wonderful practice, you know, just lying down

and focusing enough of your attention

so that you don't fall asleep and enough of your attentions

on and moving it around

so that you're not really concentrating on any one thing.

I fall asleep every time.

I do too, yeah, I do too.

But what we know,

so I fundamentally disagree with respectfully though,

with the idea that we can't recover sleep that we've lost.

Because what are we really talking about there?

For me it's the ability to perform these duration,

path, outcome analysis.

So in my lab, we have people do a cognitive task

and then we place them into these very deep states

of relaxation through things

that are kind of like yoga nidra

and people can find yoga nidra scripts out there.

They're everywhere on YouTube, elsewhere,

or we have them do a hypnosis script.

Hypnosis is very similar, deep relaxation,

wandering sort of attention, fairly narrow context,

but it brings the brain into these unique states

where you're neither asleep nor awake.

And for people that have trouble falling asleep,

or trouble relaxing themselves, these kinds of practices

are extremely useful,

because they're really teaching you how to turn off

those modes of focus.

So, you know, we live in a stress society.

Some people are stressed 'cause they're overwhelmed

but other people are stressed because they just don't know

how to turn off their brain and fall asleep.

And so if you wanna learn how to turn off your brain

and fall asleep, these practices are immensely useful.

How do you practice hypnosis by yourself though?

So there's some scripts.

I would recommend people go to one of the scripts

on YouTube or there's some good ones I've never met him.

I don't have any relationship to him, but Michael Sealey,

S-E-A-L-E-Y, an Australian guy

has some really good hypnosis scripts.

And they're just audio programs?

Yeah, you just listen to them and these-

And he's not gonna make you walk off a cliff or anything.

No, so stage hypnosis is very different.

So I have a very close collaboration

with a guy named David Spiegel,

who's in our psychiatry department at Stanford.

We're now looking at how daily breathing exercises

can impact people's sleep and levels of stress.

He's done a lot of work on addiction and trauma

and pain management through hypnosis

and most all of hypnosis that's clinical

involves bringing one's state

into one of deeper relaxation, not full sleep.

And then thinking about some behavioral change

that one wants to make.

These are ancient practices, really.

And I think that they were developed

by people that understood that rewiring

of the brain requires focus and deep rest.

What's interesting about hypnosis is it brings

those two things together at the same moment.

So normally you'll work really hard

on something work really hard, then you'll sleep

and that's when the plasticity occurs.

But hypnosis likely accelerates that whole process

by having people enter a state of deep relaxation

and focus at the same time

and allows those circuits to reshape themselves.

And there's some published data

from David's lab to support that.

That's fascinating.

So I think these practices are really useful.

And I think that if you wanna get better at performing

everyone now knows thanks to Matt Walker's book

and others like "Sleep More, Sleep Better,"

but what if you have trouble sleeping,

well or falling asleep?

Well, we want to define what that is.

Some people have a hard time turning off their thoughts.

It's really hard, remember you can't do it.

What you can do is to learn to control

that perceptual window and distribute it so that your sense

of time starts to kind of drift off

and you end up in sleep more easily.

And it's a practice that most people find if they do it

for 10 minutes a day or so, they start sleeping

much better within a week or more.

And sometimes more, they sometimes people need

some other help, like not drinking caffeine

late in the day et cetera.

But that brain state of no duration,

path and outcome analysis is gonna be the most restorative

and you can get it in wakefulness too.

So taking a walk where you're just letting your mind go

is very powerful.

And the other thing that's powerful is optic flow.

So self-generated optic flow by walking, running,

or cycling shifts the brain into a state of relaxation

that's not seen when you're stationary.

This is well-described in the neuroscience literature

for some reasons not well-described

in the wellness literature, but it's a real thing.

When you move through space, you're active,

you're, there's a natural calming of the brain circuits

involved in threat and threat detection.

This is the basis for EMDR,

eye movement desensitization reprocessing,

the lateralized eye movements they have people do

in the clinic that on a goofy-looking thing

while they do counter trauma. I've heard you talk

about that, to overcome fear and trauma.

That lowers stress and the rationale is that

by coupling a low stress state, to the recall of the trauma

it's gonna allow people to reshape the relationship

to the trauma, to tolerate that discomfort.

And it, EMDR my clinical colleagues tell me

works best for fairly well-defined traumas.

It's not gonna be like my childhood or, you know

a whole series of events, but for single event traumas

or trauma that's repeated, but of the same sort,

it seems to work best.

It's not gonna work best to completely reshape

all relationships to all traumas,

but it does seem to be powerful

for a certain group of people.

So, basically an example would be if you got

into a car accident, and then you're afraid to get in a car

or something like that, right?

So you take this person and you submit them

to this therapy where they move their eyes

back and forth laterally, which seems absurd.

Seems goofy, right.

So this is supposed to help them

get over their fear or their blockage?

Yeah, so, okay.

So my lab studies vision and we study stress

and states of mind, and people used to talk

to me about EMDR and asked me about EMDR.

And I was like, this is crazy.

This sounds like a music genre.

This is absurd, right?

Or a drug.

Makes no sense, why would moving the eyes

from side to side, have any impact on states of mind?

That's ridiculous.

But then what happened was in 2018, 2019 and 2020,

five quality manuscripts came out in very good journals,

from groups that were studying eye movements,

not studying stress or trauma that found

that these lateralized eye movements not up and down,

but lateralized eye movements,

quiet the activity of the amygdala,

the limbic structure in the brain

that's primarily responsible for threat detection

and stress.

And I was like, oh my goodness

this thing might actually be real.

Then I started to dig into the backstory of this.

And there was a woman named Francine Shapiro

who came up with this idea, actually walking behind Stanford

in the Stanford Hills, she was a therapist.

And she figured she had this idea based on the fact that she

didn't feel as upset about certain things

when she was walking, that this might be useful.

And she was smart enough to know

that these lateralized eye movements

are what reflexively occur anytime we're in optic flow.

We don't realize it 'cause they're subconsciously generated

and they're very subtle,

but she realized she couldn't really take people walking

on their therapy sessions, I suppose she could,

but it's not really practical, it's raining, et cetera.

So what she decided to do

was to bring the eye movement component to the clinic

and have them move their eyes from side to side

while they would recount these traumas,

and people experienced tremendous benefit.

And in fact, now there's a lot of evidence to show

that these lateralized eye movements

really do quiet the stress of the nervous system

and allow people to continue to move forward.

This is probably all anchored.

I go back to that story of that deer that needs something.

And as it's feeling that agitation and gets up

and starts moving, the movement feeds back

onto the brain to quiet that stress and anxiety.

So it can be observant of its environment.

And that panoramic mode is what we are in

when we are in a position to be very situationally aware.

When we're stressed, we are gonna have, you know,

soda straw view of the world, right?

This relates directly to addiction

because I've spent some time at addition treatment clinics

and talking to people in that community.

And it's very clear that of course there are a huge number

of factors that play into why people become addicted

and relapse, et cetera.

But if you can get at people's ability

to control their anxiety,

and their feelings of peak states and happiness,

you don't guarantee, but you help reinforce the possibility

that they're gonna get sober and stay sober.

As an addict gets more tethered

to the idea that some substances, the thing they need,

the progressive narrowing

of the things that bring them pleasure

and everything else kind of falls away

like portrait mode on the phone,

they're essentially in a state of high stress

trying to meet that dopamine need all the time

and they don't see other possibilities.

The reason I mentioned not just stress

and treating stress to get at addiction

but also pleasure is that we've also seen this.

When do people relapse?

When they're feeling really good.

When they're feeling really lousy and stressed

and when they're feeling really good.

They've been sober for five years.

We hear about this in the news,

usually from celebrity examples,

people have been doing great,

all of a sudden they're back in treatment.

And you're like, what happened?

What happened was the dopamine circuit from other things

maybe a great life event or things are going well

or stress, the loss of a job, everything crashing,

puts our visual system

and the rest of our brain into a myopia.

We become near, we literally become near-sighted

and the dopamine system says

that's the only thing that's gonna get me

out of the mode that I'm in.

They literally don't see the other possibilities.

So some of the work that I'm starting

to get involved in now is to try

and inform the addiction treatment community,

the trauma community, that there are ways to use action

in the body to move people out of states of myopia,

near-sightedness.

And this is kind of a cognitive near-sightedness,

and allow them to start pursing

their time perception differently.

It hard, you know, it goes right back to time perception.

When an addict needs something,

their sense of time is fixed to the retrieval of that thing

or the, you know, reaching that thing.

And then when they can dilate their sense of time,

they realize they have time for other options,

but until you can dilate that,

there's really no chance, frankly.

You can't find a way in.

You can't find a way.

You can tell somebody you're gonna lose your kids,

and they'll do it anyway.

And that just tells us we need another route to it.

And so one of the things I think is powerful is to think

about how can we leverage the visual system?

How can we leverage the diaphragm system?

In the same way that you would tell a, you know,

somebody who's in, you know, has cancer

or needs a surgery of a certain sort,

like we need to leverage certain technologies.

Well, we need to leverage certain inborn technologies

of respiration and vision to be able to access states

of mind that will allow us to make better choices.

For the addict in that really near-sighted view fixated,

there is no other choice.

And I think those early years of skateboarding and being

you know, feral, it showed me that these, the people I knew

that became addicts and frankly, I know some adults

who have become addicts, even who have very quote-unquote

functional lives, it wasn't just them,

those people, you know, we like to think

they're making a bad choice and they had,

they're making a bad decision.

It's unclear to me whether or not they have a choice

in those highly myopic states of mind.

And so what we need to do is we need to dilate

their perception of the world around them.

We need to dilate their perception of time.

We need to learn.

They need to learn how to relax themselves

so they can actually see other options.

And it all relates to how the visual system

and the breathing system relate to autonomic function.

Addiction is the perfect sort of laboratory

to do this, and it's so important, I think,

because if it were simply the case that people just

needed family support and which they do, and they needed

you know, encouragement and they need discouragement

about making the wrong behaviors, then this,

we wouldn't even

be having this discussion. It's so much

more complicated than that.

It's so much more complicated.

I mean, the thing, I think all of those are,

you know, really powerful tools and important things

to look at with respect to the addict mentality

or that disposition.

There has to be a level of self-awareness in that addict

that the decision to pick up the drink or to use the drug

begins so far in advance of the actual behavior.

By the time they actually pick up that drink,

there's no getting in the way of that.

Like that decision has so much momentum

behind it that it's almost impossible to reverse.

So a breathing technique or any technique

at that juncture is unlikely to be successful.

So it's about recognizing, you know,

when that state is starting to shift in that direction

whether it's days or hours or weeks

before the behavior choice to intervene at a place in time

when you can actually have an impact.

I agree.

I think that it's always an uphill battle with addiction

at least at first, but even just given

that the numbers on relapse, you know, I think every

what was it that someone wants told me?

I don't know if this is actually true,

but for most people, but he said,

a recovered addict told me, you know, he

that everyday he tells himself, no matter how far I drive,

I'm always the same distance from the ditch, you know?

I mean, the addiction community has-

There's so many awesome.

There's so many great takeaways, yeah.

What's interesting is there's a, some verbiage

around the yoga community that is very valuable.

I can't recall it off the top of my head,

but they talk about the great support that one can get

from learning to access brain states of timelessness, sleep

being very restorative, wakeful, deliberate disengagement

being very restorative, maybe meditation,

maybe through yoga nidra, maybe through simple,

quick breathing techniques, but being able to dilate

and contract one sense of time and not being locked

to one kind of space-time regime, the ability to recognize

that I'm not seeing clearly

or I see what I see, but I don't know what I don't see,

the ability to introduce that understanding

for somebody can be very powerful.

And I think we need to give them tools

that they can look to very quickly.

I don't think we're ever gonna have a treatment

for addiction that's in the form of a pharmaceutical,

like one pill,

because if you start tapping

into the dopamine system itself,

you start degrading other aspects of life.

So I think one of the reasons why addiction treatment

is so complicated is that you need many elements,

but the elements that come from the person themselves

are ultimately the most important ones, of course.

And I think physiology and neuroscience does have some tools

that can lend support to that.

Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.

I mean, I think that every couple of years

you see new science emerge on addiction

and there's some new protocol and, you know

12 steps constantly getting thrown under the bus

and, you know, 12 steps, what got me sober,

and I'm very rooted in that community.

I remain open to other, you know, modalities and protocols

and super interested in seeing where all of this is going,

but I think it is important to appreciate how complex it is.

Like there's a trauma element to it.

There's a, you know, behavioral modification element to it.

There's an emotional, like how do you,

how do you find a way to anchor this person to a path

a life path that has meaning and purpose

and all of these things inform this complex, you know,

soup that's going on in their head, that's dictating

whether they're gonna pick up a drink or not?

Yeah, and you know and I love the neuroscience community

with, you know, it's been my family

and home for many years now.

And the people working on addiction are, you know,

motivated from the right place.

And they are, you know, working exceedingly hard.

There are a lot of data now that show,

you know, for instance, there are complete genetic changes

in the cells that can, you know,

and the pathways that control dopamine and reward.

And that's all wonderful to understand.

But meanwhile, I think there are enough tools out there

that they need to be aggregated in a way that's structured

and that addiction treatment communities can leverage.

One of the things that would be of great use

is the idea of a biomarker.

So you described that, you know,

and it's really a beautiful example of how when some,

early on you might be able to intervene,

but later it gets much harder.

We need biomarkers that are gonna tell us

for some people or their family, that somebody is at risk.

Some of you have biomarkers-

Some kind of whooped device, right?

Well, I think it's gonna come from once you know

how well somebody is regulating

their own autonomic nervous system,

you can predict pretty well whether or not

they're going to succeed or fail in making good decisions.

And so I do think a whoop type device

or other sensor device could be tremendously beneficial

in detecting and telling people

whether or not they are veering off course.

Right.

And I think-

It's getting very minority report though.

It is, I mean, I think machines are gonna help us

make a lot of decisions

that we're actually pretty poor at making.

But the simplest of those that we might see

in the next two or three years is saying, look,

you've been working extremely hard on your book.

You're doing very well, but you're gonna need an extra hour

of sleep, I mean,

that's essentially what it's doing for you, or-

In 12 hours you're gonna make a bad decision.

or even cuing it, or insert might in there, right?

You might make a bad decision so that you're more aware

and you're gonna devote a little more mental energy

to the kinds of decisions you're making.

I think that as I pull a lot of all nighters and I still do

unfortunately in my career writing grants and so forth.

And I have this rule that I learned,

my gosh about 15 years ago which is I don't trust

any of my thinking that occurs between 3:00 AM and 7:00 AM

if I've been up all night, I just don't trust it,

because I start to think the world's falling apart.

I start thinking the word the is misspelled.

I mean, I really know I'm sleep deprived when words

like the look misspelled

and then I'm like, what's going on?

That's that duration, path, outcomes circuitry

starting to try and starting to fall apart.

So I think that that's an extreme example

but I think that short of having people buffer their lives

with tons of activities

and perfect nutrition and perfect social interactions,

people learning to control their autonomic nervous system,

I think is really the next step in our species evolution.

I really believe that what we are seeing now in the world

is a call to arms, if you will, or a request

from mother nature to have everybody learn

how to control their autonomic nervous system

a little bit better or ideally a lot better.

Yeah, it's absolutely critical, I think.

I mean, right now, you know, irrespective of what's going on

with the pandemic and the political climate,

and the protests and all the upheaval that we're seeing,

as a culture, we're experiencing an extraordinary poverty

of attention and focus.

We're so distracted by our devices.

We're more anxious and stressed

and depressed than we ever have been before.

This is not going in a good direction.

And to the extent that we can commandeer

a little bit more control over these things and understand

that we have some level of agency

and we can reverse this sort of automatic pattern

that we're on of just scrolling endlessly and, you know,

doing what we're doing that we know is not leading us

in a good direction is critical

if we're gonna find our way forward.

And to speak a little bit to what's going on right now,

I think, you know, and it's related,

and I'm interested in your thoughts on, you know,

the neuroscience that is, you know,

I think relevant to this is that we've lost the ability

to have civil discourse.

There's a real breakdown in communication right now,

culturally and socially, and it's fractured our society

and it's not good, right?

So what is going on neurologically

with human beings that are attaching themselves

and it's so self identifying with certain narratives

that it's polarizing our population and preventing us

from being able to just be together or united

or agree upon what is true and what is not true

and share a value system so that we can see our way

through the challenges that we're facing right now,

which many of which are an existential threat

to the future of humanity and the planet.

It's a huge problem, you articulated it beautifully.

And I think neuroscience can offer a couple of insights

into why it's happening

and perhaps what we might do about it.

So, one of the scientific results that I'm very intrigued by

is in the 1960s, a guy named Robert Heath recorded

from the human brain, there are people

you can't do this experiment nowadays,

but skull popped off, my neurosurgery friends tell me

that's no big deal, electrodes lower deep into the brain,

all over the brain and people can stimulate

wherever they want

and they just report what they're feeling.

So press one lever, they feel drunk.

They press another lever, they feel happy.

They press another lever, they feel sexually aroused.

And they're reporting all of this, right?

When was this done?

In the 1960s, the early 1960s.

Several times actually, and published twice

essentially the same data, different populations

in the journal science which is sort of our Super Bowl

science and nature cell, those are the big ones,

journals rep that is,

so the number one brain area that people want to stimulate.

They finally hit this lever where they go, oh, I like that.

And they just keep hitting that thing and hitting that thing

and hitting that thing, frustration and mild anger.

And I saw that result. That's the choice.

I could be drunk, I could be happy.

I could be, I'm gonna choose frustration and anger.

Exactly, it's, what that told us is it's clearly tapped

into the dopamine reward system.

It feels like a hit of dopamine to them,

more than anything else.

So, we need to put that on the shelf and keep it visible

as we kind of march into this sort of answer

to your question.

The other thing is an understanding that,

and there's some recent data on this

that are really impressive, not from my lab

but from another lab, which is that beliefs

and information that supports our prior beliefs,

also increases the activity of these reward systems.

So the more I see stuff that verifies what I already think

or feel that they are bad and they are good

or that we are good and they are bad,

the more dopamine and adrenaline is released into my system.

Which we now know from our discussion a few minutes ago,

It actually changes the way I view the world.

It means that I'm gonna see certain things

and not see others.

And this also relates to the auditory system.

I'm gonna hear certain things and not hear others.

The things that verify my beliefs

are I'm gonna feel rewarded for,

the things that are counter to my beliefs,

I'm not gonna be it's rewarded for.

So we have all these barricades

to empathy and to really listening

and to really hearing what the other side is trying to say.

And we have all these support networks

in our body and our brain

which are building a bigger and bigger divide.

Now that's all very depressing.

So the question is, what's the boat

that's gonna get us across that divide.

And I believe, and I am not just defaulting to this

'cause it's what my lab works on,

but I fundamentally believe

that the boat that's gonna get us to the other side

is our ability to control our internal state,

to be able to ratchet down our level of autonomic arousal,

just enough so that I can dilate not just my vision,

of what's happening in my immediate environment,

but I can dilate my cognition, my thinking,

to the possibility that there may be a kernel of value

in what somebody else is saying, even if it's about me,

and I don't like what I'm hearing.

Now, as somebody who spent time

in the addiction treatment community, you probably know,

this is a lot of what you get good at as you learn to move

through something that to you feels very good and you know

all the reasons why it would probably be good to change it,

but you know what you don't want to,

because it feels so good.

So we're talking about an addiction to entrenched thinking.

We're talking about an addiction and neurochemical systems

that support, lack of change my refusal to change,

and stubbornness.

And I actually think just like in, for the treatment

of addiction and trauma, the key is to get people to learn

to tolerate progressively higher levels of stress,

and maintain dilation of sensory experience,

of thought experience.

We've got to create some small little portals

through which information can come in.

A lot's been made of mirror neurons.

I hate to break it to the crowd, but the data in support

of mirror neurons in humans is not that impressive.

And now the mirror neuron people are gonna come after me,

but fine.

There are circuits in the brain

that control emotional contagion.

And those are what's powerful.

My ability to recruit you into stress is much more powerful,

than my ability to recruit you into empathy

for something good.

That's a well-established neuro-biological fact.

Or empathy for someone's perspective

that you know, that I'm fundamentally

going to disagree with.

Right, so I think there are three gates to getting there.

And by there, I think we're, you know,

I'm referring vaguely to the idea

that we need to increase our level of understanding

at least our level of discourse

so that we can hear other really hear other people's ideas,

even though we don't like the way it feels,

and we love the way that we feel.

This is one of the results, so we love the way we feel.

We don't like the way other people feel.

The first thing is to bring the level of urgency

that we feel internally down.

We need to learn to calm ourselves

in order to really have the information start to come in.

Now, the system right now, and people out there

everyone's in a frenzy and you can see it, our collect

the collective consciousness is kind of losing its mind.

It's kind of out of its mind.

We need to learn how to turn off those amygdala circuits.

So are we all gonna get together and do EMDR?

Probably not.

Are we all gonna get together and do breathing exercises?

Probably not, not at scale.

What we need to do is start to figure out how we can,

I think, especially for the next generation of kids,

how to teach them to regulate their nervous system,

so that they recognize that pulse of adrenaline

as placing them in a compromised position.

Like we have to leverage the idea that being able to hear

and listen, hinges on the ability to be calm.

So therefore the ability to be calm is crucial to hearing

and listening and hearing and listening is crucial

to our advancement as individuals and as groups.

The problem is everyone's been trying to do this backwards.

They've said we all have to get along.

We have to cancel, cancel culture.

We all have to, you know, listen to one another.

And I think, again, we have to start from the inside.

We have to teach it physiologically.

Now I don't have a master plan on how to do that,

but one of the reasons I'm here

and one of the reasons I'm teaching neuroscience

on Instagram and not just in my laboratory is,

until we can learn to regulate the self,

I don't think we're gonna get where we wanna go

as a culture.

I think it really does start

with our own individual ability to do that.

And so, you know,

David's a really good example for instance,

of somebody who learn how to deal with his own internal mess

and build something beautiful out of that.

And he continues to do that.

And everyone's got to find that process for themselves

and whether or not you have a perfect family,

or whether or not you consider yourself the most inclusive

and accepting person in the world or not,

everyone needs to learn how to do that for themselves.

And everyone thinks we do it pretty well,

but I think it's clear that none of us do it well enough.

So, autonomic arousal, autonomic arousal, autonomic control.

I think those are the entry points for addiction,

for trauma, and for really impact that hearing

and listening, and until we do that

I think our species is gonna continue to go

around this merry-go-round where every 50

or a hundred years we crash

right up against the same general set of issues,

only now social media has made it slightly more,

or a lot more complicated.

It's a little bit similar to what you were talking about

in terms of the seeking external validation,

versus finding it within yourself.

Like essentially the protocol,

the prescription that you just gave has a strain of Buddhism

in it, in the sense that the world's gonna change

when we change ourselves.

Like the best, most impactful way

that you can make a difference for the world,

is to focus on being the best version of yourself.

How can you comport yourself in a way

that allows you to be more receptive,

and objective and empathetic and able to listen and hear?

And I think that's true, it's a hundred percent true.

And then I think about the person losing their shit

and, you know, target or whatever

over the masks or whatever, you know,

insane video clip of the day,

I happened to see on social media.

And I think we're doomed, like,

is this person gonna do that?

No, I can't control that, I can only control myself.

And I worry that when the onus is on the individual

to solve the problem, that,

that we're not gonna find our way through it, right?

Like we obviously need organizational, institutional,

and systemic changes.

We need to change the way these social media platforms work,

the way in which we're delivered information

and the way in which we're siloed,

but I don't have any control over any of those things.

The only thing I have control over

is my own internal mechanism.

So what other choice do we have?

Well, I think we need people in positions of power

and leadership who are very good at internal control.

You know, I think emotions are great.

I experienced them often intensely, but-

Congratulations.

Thank you.

They're not always wonderful to experience,

but I think it's clear that the level of autonomic arousal

that's associated with emotion's either very high

or very low, very happy or very sad, very anxious

or very angry, clouds our judgment.

It's very clear and I think the sooner-

We give them too much credence too,

they're just feelings, man.

Like we don't have to allow them to overtake us

and monopolize everything that we do.

They were designed to push us

along certain behavioral paths,

but they've grown in importance in the last few years.

And, you know, we could get into a discussion about how,

you know, social media marketing are designed to capture

these very deep limbic aspects of ourselves,

and they are, but what's amazing is and important is

that everybody has a forebrain.

Some people, it seems it's more developed than others,

but everybody has one.

And we have this capacity for what we call top down control

which is the ability to intervene in our own feeling states

and our own action states and to set some rigor

and some real clear marks that we're out to achieve.

And I think it's gonna start with the generation

that's very plastic right now.

You know, most parents are afraid of stressing their kids

because they don't wanna, you know, again, I went

to a high school where kids literally at Gunn High School

in the last 10 years, kids have, you know,

there've been over a dozen, you know, train track suicides.

So those are kids that are committing suicide

for different reasons, but a lot of them

is 'cause they just feel too much pressure.

So obviously we can't, you know, we can't pressure kids

beyond their capacity to regulate.

But the idea that all of our internal state

should be driven by external things,

that's a foolish misstep also.

So, I think we need to operationalize

what we're gonna teach the next generation.

You know, maybe our generation isn't really rescueable,

but maybe the next generation is.

And if they understand that there's some concepts

that sound a little mushy, like gratitude,

or mindfulness or these kinds of things, but as long

as they understand that, for instance, gratitude,

which we didn't really touch on,

involves a whole other neurotransmitter reward system

in the brain, the serotonin system, which buffers us

against injury, it can improve wound repair,

it can allow us to lean back

into these high stress regimes, learning

and kids learning how to toggle their nervous system

back and forth between highly, you know,

duration, path, outcome focus states of trying to improve

and learn and then learning how to really relax

and chill out and enjoy and be socially connected,

because it will allow them to ratchet back in,

and focus with extreme depth.

I think in doing that,

we might not get every child to learn how to do that,

but if we can distribute that information widely enough

and there's so many brilliant examples

and beautiful example, yours, David's, many others

of people that have been able

to tap into those systems intuitively,

if we can get that information out there,

I really believe that at least a subset of those kids

will grow up to be the leaders that our species really needs

in order to get through this next filter.

And right now we're feeling the stringency of that filter.

And I think our level

of autonomic dysregulation as a species,

the fact that we're there, we're here right now says,

okay, here's the task.

Are you guys gonna figure yourselves out?

You got this forebrain, my dog doesn't have

the forebrain I've got, he can't figure it out,

but we can work this out.

And it'll involve technologies,

like devices to measure how we're doing,

maybe some machines to guide that,

that's a different discussion,

but I think it's entirely possible.

And I think that's the evolutionary pressure

that we're in right now.

And I think that the next generation,

if they can hear about it and learn about it,

is gonna meet that demand.

Our species has done it for every other demand.

I toggle back and forth between extreme optimism

and, you know, dystopian despair.

Because on the one hand, you know,

you described the experience of going to therapy

and you know, how that was kind of, you know,

novel at that time, but we're not in that place anymore.

And everybody's got a smartphone and there's, you know,

head space and calm and waking up

and all these incredible apps

and mindfulness is part of the mainstream modern vernacular.

Like these kids are growing up,

not only aware of these practices, but amenable

and you know, they're, it's being done in the households

in which they're being raised,

which I find to be, you know, that's an amazing thing.

I think there is a consciousness that is emerging

out of these young people that hopefully, you know,

we can rely on to solve some of these problems.

And then, you know, I just think about the endless scrolling

and the associated, you know, I'm just like,

oh yes, we're fucked.

Well, I think it's clear that most people, young or old,

are content to be passive consumers

and spend out their dopamine doing

essentially meaningless activities,

and consuming food and consuming air

and light that is basically damaging to themselves.

And they, I don't think they care.

I think there are species let's be fair, our species is-

Non-essential.

Well, no, no, I didn't say that.

our species, although sometimes I think it'd be interesting

if some other species ran the earth

but we're the curators of the planet.

So I think that our species is probably divided

into those that are really going to try

and maximize on this gift of neuroplasticity, right?

We're the only species that has neuro-plasticity

throughout the lifespan and that neuroplasticity

in childhood lasts as long as it does as a function

of our total lifespan, it's incredible.

So we were gifted this and I think some people leverage it

and take advantage of it and other people don't.

And I think we need to accept

that we're not gonna get everybody,

but what we need to do is attach the reward systems

of society, financial, socio-economic, et cetera

to the kinds of behaviors that are

is gonna give rise to people that can lead us

into the next hundred years, 200 years.

Now that is not saying, oh do away with monetary systems,

actually the opposite.

I think that once people start to realize

that you're high performing military elite, military

your high performing athlete,

your high performing academics,

you're high-performing business people,

they actually have practices that they use

to regulate themselves to in order to

not just perform better, but sleep better

and not just to sleep better, but to listen better,

not just listen better but incorporate ideas that allow them

into states of creativity and states of mind

that really lead to new and exciting ways

that humans can interact.

And the many people will just be consumers of everything

they produce.

Well, all of the, what's what's great about new media

is that we've democratized access to this information.

And we're able to realize that these people

are not just freaks of nature

but that they have a methodology,

and they've created this canon, this tool kit

and these practices are available to everybody.

And you have people like David who are explaining this

in very plain terms, that it is within your power

to take advantage of these things,

to take better control of your life.

And we've never seen anything like that before,

in the history of humanity.

And I think that, that, you know,

that bodes well for the empowerment of the next generation

as well.

I do too, I, as you can probably tell,

I'm optimistic, I have to be,

because otherwise I can't justify the work that we're doing

but I think that there's so much interest now

in psychology and the brain and the self

in physical fitness, which, you know,

I think it's fair to say is inextricably linked

to mental fitness.

And the fact that people are so curious

about what other people are doing

and what are the paths to success and you know,

what are the resources for trauma and addiction?

I think there's been a kind of swarm of information.

It's been hard to sort through,

but I think 2020 is our, you know, is our sort of call

I keep calling it a call to arms,

and I, 'cause I guess I do feel that way.

It's very serious, this is serious business

and this is the time for us and the next generation

to step up and, you know, and to lead people

toward a place where we can function better

and where the next generation

will reflexively function better.

That's that beauty of early childhood is that

if some of this stuff is taught and passed off,

it's not gonna be perfect, but there'll be a generation

of people coming up, that will naturally understand

stress and agitation is taking them off their game

and leading to bad decisions

and will make the appropriate adjustments.

And there are people that will that read David's book

and your book, and we'll see the possibility

of doing something differently with a terrible childhood

or a brutal addiction.

And, you know, I think we need more stories of success.

I think it's easy to look out there

and see all the things that are going wrong

and we need to keep paying attention to those,

but we need these beacons that draw people forward.

And I say that from a place of experience, I mean,

I used to have to find it in books in the bookshelf.

I, there was no online back then or in mentors and you know,

you have to forage, you know, I think kids,

they have to have that foraging capacity.

They can't just sit there and wait for it to rain on them

or for a parent to dump it on them.

But I trust that they're out there

and that they're gonna figure it out.

Just like you're doing on Instagram.

You're dropping these videos basically every day, right?

Like more or less little lessons on neuroscience.

I'm trying, I'm trying to show people

that I have a kind of no acronym rule.

So I don't like embedding things

in a lot of complex language.

Sometimes I have to use an acronym, but yeah,

teach people a little bit about how their brain works

how it interfaces with psychology.

Everyone's got different goals and purposes in the world

but you know, that scientists are normal people

and that hopefully science has something,

I think really science has something to offer,

but it's not gonna happen if I'm vaulted in my lab

where my papers are read by the 12 people that care enough

to read the papers start to finish.

So I'm doing it, there are others out there.

Of course, David St Clair is doing it,

(indistinct) doing it.

I'm trying to recruit more people

from the scientific community to do this.

I think it's our responsibility.

You paid for it, it's your tax dollars.

You know, there's a tremendous cost to doing science

that is not often discussed

but I don't really consider it an option.

I consider it my obligation and I'm gonna keep going.

Well, keep doing it, man.

I appreciate the work that you're doing.

I think it's really important work.

We need it now more than ever.

And it's cool that you're getting out there

and sharing your wisdom with everybody.

It's super empowering, so thanks man.

Appreciate it. Thank you.

Really appreciate the chance to be here.

If you're digging on Andrew

best way to find him is-

Huberman Lab. Instagram.

Yeah, Huberman Lab. Huberman Lab, cool.

All right, man.

Coming back, I made all these notes

all this stuff I wanted to talk to you about.

We got through like 10% of it, so

come by and talk to me again. My apologies.

I realize you're pretty verbose.

Yeah, I just was getting out of the way man,

to, you know, listen to what you have to say.

I appreciate it, thanks man.

Thank you.

Peace.

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Change Your Brain: Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman | Rich Roll Podcast