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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