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- [00:00]
Dr. Paul Conti
There's far more going right in any of us, in all of us, than there is going wrong. If we're here, right, and if we're listening to educational material, we want to better ourselves. There's so much more that's going right in us. And it's a good place for us to start because it helps us to be able to look at what's not going the way we want it to be, where we want to bring change in our lives. But we should start from a position of strength.
- [00:25]
Andrew Huberman
Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. My guest today is Dr. Paul Conti. Dr. Paul Conti is a medical doctor and psychiatrist and an expert in recovery from trauma. He is also one of the foremost public educators on how anyone can build a greater sense of agency, confidence and well being in their life. Today we discuss the practical aspects of building and maintaining mental health, in particular how to identify your natural strengths and the the often unseen opportunities to improve your reflexive mental framework and relationship with self and others. Dr. Conte's approach to building mental health and overcoming challenges with mental health are very different than most of the information that you'll find on the Internet and elsewhere. He has decades of clinical experience and he draws on that and data to explain the specific questions that we all need to ask ourselves when we're facing things like lowered motivation, mood or challenges overcoming bad habits. Today we discuss all of that as well as how to balance action and introspection. And this is very important because I think a lot of people think about mental health as merely an introspective process, but as Dr. Conti points out, it's really a balance of thinking and doing and often involves more doing than thinking. So during today's episode you'll get a specific framework of questions to ask yourself repeatedly, that is every day or every week, and specific action steps to take so that you can truly become the best version of yourself and derive the greatest sense of meaning along the way. I'd like to point out that Dr. Conte also has a new book coming out which is aptly entitled what's Going Right? A Powerful new method for optimizing your Mental Health. And I've read the book from front to back and I have to tell you it's a wonderful resource that includes both information and simple worksheet like prompts that can help anyone through sticking points, as well as to build on what the title suggests, what's already going right. So if you're currently suffering or if you're doing well and you want to level up your mental health further, today's conversation is definitely for you. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, today's episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Dr. Paul Conti. Dr. Paul Conti, welcome back.
- [02:54]
Dr. Paul Conti
Thank you. Thank you for having me back.
- [02:56]
Andrew Huberman
Congratulations on your book what's Going A powerful new method for optimizing your mental health. It's an amazing book. You also hold the record, not incidentally, I think, for the most viewed and downloaded episodes of this podcast ever. So, you know you got a lot of Huberman podcast listener fans out there, so they'll be reading if, if they're smart and they want to be better, they want to feel enriched in all the ways. So let's talk about.
- [03:24]
Dr. Paul Conti
Thank you.
- [03:26]
Andrew Huberman
Let's talk about individuals first. And then I also want to talk today about interactions between people, which we probably haven't talk quite as much about, at least not here. The self, right? We all have a name, a self concept. We wake up thinking and knowing essentially who we are, what bothers us, what we're excited about. And the question I've been living with for a long time is how malleable is our self view and our relationship to ourself and we can define those. Right? If we're not super comfortable or completely happy with our relationship to ourselves, how much flexibility is there on that whole picture?
- [04:10]
Dr. Paul Conti
I think it's very malleable. I think there's a lot of flexibility, but we have to be willing to look at ourselves. Very often we're not looking at ourselves. We're afraid of what we're going to find or we don't know how to understand or how to bring change. So we don't look at ourselves and then we can see ourselves as inflexible and think that we're just stuck in the same place over time. But if we're willing to look at ourselves and we bring this compassionate curiosity to ourselves of, hey, what can I learn about myself and what might I be interested in changing in myself or in emphasizing in myself, I think we can bring a lot, a lot of change.
- [04:48]
Andrew Huberman
The title of your book, what's Going Right. Is that a good lens to start looking through when we look at ourself? Like what works? 10 fingers, 10 toes, in my case, Is that a good place to start that I feel some sense of agency over a number of areas of my life? Is that the way to start wading into the questions about self?
- [05:10]
Dr. Paul Conti
I think to start off with what's going right. It's not just a way of looking at it because it feels better, but it's consistent with truth. I mean, there's far more going right in any of us, in all of us, than there is going wrong. If we're here, right? And if we're listening to educational material, we want to better ourselves. There's so much more that's going right in us. And it's a good place for us to start because it helps us to be able to look at what's not going the way we want it to be, where we want to bring change in our lives. But we should start from a position of strength. And the mental health system really tells us to look at ourselves in the opposite way, to look at ourselves through what is going wrong and to put labels on ourselves that often just make us feel worse or make us feel more helpless or hopeless in understanding. But if we start with what's going right and we bring curiosity to ourselves ourselves, then there are processes we can follow to understand and to bring real change.
- [06:08]
Andrew Huberman
What are some of those processes that people could use to explore? And if you would, what are some questions that people can. Or thoughts or landscapes to explore where people can ping themselves with specific questions?
- [06:24]
Dr. Paul Conti
So good places to start are looking at your self talk. What are you saying to yourself? In quiet moments when no one else is listening or when there's a pause in the action in your life, what are you saying to yourself? What messages are you giving yourself? And oftentimes we're telling ourselves things about ourselves that are often negative or often critical. And we're not aware that we're saying these things over and over to ourselves. So that's just one strategy. And another strategy can be to think about the life narrative that we're telling ourselves. So if you just tell yourself about yourself, or if you're telling someone else about you, what is it that you say? What is it that you say in a reflexive way? And does it match what's real and true about your life? You know, we both, all people have these two foundational pillars. And in the first part of the series that we did in 2023, we really sort of hashed this out. And it was the first time it really put together. Hey, there's a structure of self and we all share this. And I'd been thinking along these lines, but our talk helped me to pull together. Hey, there's something that applies to all of us. Just because we're human and we have a human brain and a human mind. There is a structure of self and a function of sel. And these foundational pillars are where we can look to understand ourselves better and to bring better health. So if we are aware of where to look and how to look. And we're willing to look because we're not afraid of what we're going to find. And we have a belief that we can bring change. And this is how we bring flexibility and malleability. And we can approach ourselves feeling really good that, hey, if I do this, I am going to be able to make things better. There's so much hopefulness to that, and it's reasonably grounded hopefulness.
- [08:12]
Andrew Huberman
I have a question that might seem like a leap somewhere else. But I promise it ties back to what we're talking about. In your experience with psychiatry and the brain and patience and interacting with people in your own life. Do you think that there's tremendous variation or little variation in how state dependent people are? You know, some people, it seems, you know, they're so affiliative that when they're in relating to somebody else. They think and feel completely differently than they do when they're on their own. Not necessarily even extroverted for that to be true. But that when they're suddenly alone, the internal state is very different. Almost like it's two different lives. There's a reason why I'm asking this, but I'm wondering about the role of state dependence and how we think and how we feel and how we think about the things around us and think about ourselves.
- [09:11]
Dr. Paul Conti
For most of us, life is moving very fast. And life has a lot of stressors in it. And what ends up happening is we're kind of rushing just to keep up with ourselves. And when that happens, we become very state dependent. As opposed to being able to observe ourselves. So to be able to see, okay, I'm here and this is what I'm doing. And this is the people I'm with and how I'm feeling and how I'm behaving. To be able to observe ourselves. Is how we knit together oneself across situations. So we can be aware I'm different in one situation than another. Right. So some of the behavior then and the sense of self is state dependent, but there's a whole self that's riding above all of it. It's observing us and knitting us together. What sometimes gets called an observing ego. And this is how we can both be state dependent but also have a self that is true across all of those states.
- [10:03]
Andrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor Helix Sleep. Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows that are customized to your unique sleep needs. Now I've spoken many times before on this and on other podcasts about the fact that getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of mental health, physical health and performance. When we aren't getting great sleep on a consistent basis, everything suffers and when we are sleeping well and enough, our mental health, physical health and performance in all endeavors improve markedly. Now the mattress you sleep on makes a huge difference in the quality of sleep that you get each night. How soft it is or how firm it is all play into your comfort and need to be tailored to your unique sleep needs. If you go to the Helix website you can take a brief two minute quiz and it will ask you questions such as do you sleep on your back, your side or your stomach? Maybe you know, maybe you don't. Do you tend to run hot or cold during the night? Things of that sort. You answer those questions and Helix will match you to the ideal mattress for you. For me, that turned out to be the Dusk D U S K mattress. I've been sleeping on a Dusk mattress for more than four years now and it's been far and away the best sleep that I've ever had. If you'd like to try Helix, you can go to helixsleep.com huberman take that 2 minute sleep quiz and Helix will match you to a mattress that's customized for you. Right now Helix is giving up to 27% off their entire site. Helix has also teamed up with True Med, which allows you to use your HSA FSA dollars to shop Helix's award winning Mattresses. Again, that's helixsleep.com Huberman to get up to 27% off today's episode is also brought to us by BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. I've been doing therapy for a long time and I can tell you that it's a lot like physical workouts. There are times when I want to do it and there are times when I don't want to do it. But whenever I finish a therapy session, I come away feeling better and I have specific actionable items that hadn't occurred to me that when I implement improve various aspects of my life. The data tell us that there are just so many benefits that come through effective therapy. And effective therapy involves having good rapport with your therapists, getting insights from them and with them, and coming away with specific actionable tools that you can apply outside of therapy. With BetterHelp they make it very easy to find an expert therapist who can help provide those benefits that come through effective therapy. They have a short questionnaire to help match you to a therapist. And while BetterHelp has an industry leading match rate, if you aren't happy with your match, you can switch to a different therapist at any time. If you would like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.comhuberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.comhuberman when somebody sits down to think about their strengths or to think about their self talk or to just think about what they're made of and how they want to change or not change certain things, build on certain strengths, when and how should they do it?
- [12:58]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yeah, I think all we need to bring is curiosity, that's all. And curiosity doesn't have to be overly serious or worried. Right. It doesn't have to have a gravity to it. I mean it can, but it can also be very lighthearted. There's so many things that we're curious about, so many things we want to learn about. And this is great. It's great for our brains and it's great for our health to be curious and to want to learn. But so often what we leave out of that equation is being curious about ourselves. And that can be a sort of high spirited thing to do of, you know, what is there in me that runs through all the things that I do? How is it that I feel so different doing one thing than another? What are the common threads of me that run throughout my life? You know, this is a great way to approach what's going right in us. Right. To be curious about ourselves. And it's from there that it's easier to see, wow, in one certain kind of situation, I'm really not doing as well, right. Or I'm not as happy, then we can think about that and we don't have to be afraid of it. So bringing curiosity to ourselves, what runs through everything we do, and also how we're different in different situations can help lead us to all sorts of answers about what makes us happy and what doesn't. When are we presenting a True and honest self. When are we presenting a false self that even we know is false? So I think the only crucial ingredient is curiosity. And then we can approach with seriousness and gravity, or we can approach with light heart. We can be alone or we can be thinking with someone else. There's all sorts of good places that curiosity can take us.
- [14:34]
Andrew Huberman
It's interesting that you talked about true self versus false self. I think the more state dependence we have, the more confusing that becomes, right? And I think perhaps even more so in this day and age. There seems to be not a complete, but at least to me, a kind of partial erosion of etiquette. I'm not saying this to encourage people to be more rigid. It just seems to me that I'm 50 now. When I was growing up, seemed like people would dress and act one way in one context, and dress and act one way in a different context. And there's some overlap, obviously, but now there's this sort of propensity for not just oversharing, but there's information from all corners of the world coming through our devices all the time. And people are putting out information about many facets of their life all the time. Even people I went to high school with who weren't public facing in the traditional sense are putting out pictures of their kids and what they ate and this and the wins and the losses. And it's a very odd thing to do when in fact we evolved for so long just kind of experiencing ourself separate from all the other activities that we were doing and certainly that other people are doing. In your clinical practice, are you seeing more challenges with people creating separation between kind of aspects of self and aspects of life because of all the information coming at them and maybe even that they're putting in the world?
- [16:01]
Dr. Paul Conti
I think it can be different depending upon what the person is doing, how they're using that information. So if you think of falseness of self, it's possible a person can be engaged in something that even they themselves know isn't real. So wanting everyone to see what's best in my life and to think that I'm doing really well and maybe I'm doing that to hide something. Why am I doing that? If I want to appear externally differently than how I am, there's a good place for curiosity about the falseness of that. What am I trying to protect against? Why is it that I want people to see me in a certain way that might be different from how my life actually is, if it has not just all wins in it, but stressors too, that might not be as glamorous. So that's one way we can use those resources. Another way can be to engage in ways that are more true to self. So someone who has an interest or a passion that it's hard to find people right around them, but they can find that more distantly. Or people who have a lot of sensibility and compassion for some of the difficult things in the world, who can find kindred spirits through social media. So I think we can use or misuse anything around us to either be. We can use it to be closer to ourselves and to have a stronger sense of self. Right. Or we can use it to distract from who we really are and to maybe find solace somewhere else or find accolades somewhere outside of us because we're protecting against something. So I think the important point is always to be honest with ourselves. And if we bring compassionate curiosity, then we're not mad at ourselves in that we're not coming at ourselves of what's wrong with me? Or why can't I do this thing better or that thing better, or why don't people like me more? Whatever it may be, There are ways that we can. We can guide ourselves away from honesty and truth. And if we look at ourselves, we don't have to be afraid of what we find. Maybe if we're worried people aren't liking us, we're spending time with not a healthy group of people. Right. Or maybe there's something in myself I need to change if I'm feeling that. So the key is just bringing honesty and curiosity and not being so afraid or so negative towards ourselves that we're gonna hide from what it is that we can find to knit us together.
- [18:23]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I'm not trying to demonize social media, but we are in a strange new version of humanity where, let's say, somebody's sitting by themselves. Chances are their experience is vastly different than it would have been 30 years ago because they are most likely getting a lot of information about what other people are doing. Could be good information, could be interesting, but nonetheless, it's very, very different alone state and. Or they are doing things that hopefully they enjoy, but there's this additional layer where it's put out into the world. This is very unusual. So the reason I'm asking about this in the context of addressing the self, exploring the self, is that I wonder to what extent being really happy with oneself at some level involves being able to be curious and explore different ways of being and ways of thinking without the impulse of sharing that and without the feedback comparison of what other people are doing. Because the moment we see something else, there's more sensory input or the moment that we think what we're doing needs to be shared, it changes the experience. It's not truly an alone experience. And I don't think it matters if you put it out to one follower or to a billion followers. It's still externalizing this thing that for thousands of years was just us with our thoughts, us with our emotions. And so processing time alone has become, I believe, a very, very different thing altogether.
- [20:02]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yeah, I think that's true. I think there's a sweet spot of connectedness to others. And we know that it's not good to have too little, right? That isolation isn't good for us. But where the modern world has gone is it offers us too much the opposite, right? Where there's not enough aloneness, where if we're over connected, then in order to decide what it is, we even like or prefer how we feel about things, we're looking for external cues, right? So that sweet spot of having some external check ins, how does the world around me feel? How do people I like and trust feel? How do people who seem like me feel? How do people who seem different from me feel? It's good to have those tests outside, but to have enough aloneness that I am still thinking about myself and the questions of life, the questions of my own life I'm thinking about on my own before I'm pinging outside of me for information or validation or even guidance.
- [21:00]
Andrew Huberman
I'm willing to bet that many people will find just the being alone introspective process to be pretty anxiety provoking. In fact, there's been a little bit of a semi comedic exchange online recently because actually our mutual friend David Senra. And David Senra has a podcast with this very podcast production company. He sat down with Mark Andreessen of founded Netscape A16Z Investments and Mark made the statement that was very provocative, which was great men of history didn't sit around thinking about their thoughts. And of course I knowing Mark and he's a friend of mine, I think that was a bit tongue in cheek. I think he was pointing toward, I don't want to speak for him, but I think he was pointing toward the idea that too much thinking and not enough doing can be self destructive. Of course the media ran with it and in classic Andreessenian fashion he just doubled down and tripled down on that message. Which was fun for a while actually because it got people thinking about the role of Introspection versus the role of doing. And I have to say I think what he contributed with those statements, however provocative, were useful in thinking. Like how much thinking, how much doing. When exploring the self, we don't want to spiral into a tunnel that we can't get out of, but we also want to make sure that we're putting things out into the world. So when you have a patient that is not depressed, is maybe just struggling. Right. So no clinical issue that needs dealing with first. How much do you encourage them to explore the self through doing versus thinking about their thinking?
- [22:47]
Dr. Paul Conti
It depends very much on who is that person and where do they need to face to sort of break new ground of self. And you mentioned that most people would find the idea of just being with themselves to be anxiety provoking. And I think that that's unfortunate. I think that from a lack of leadership in the mental health field and then the stigma of mental health and our fears, those black box fears that we don't understand. So we're afraid of what we don't understand. What we don't understand is ourselves. So then the idea of being with ourselves becomes very anxiety provoking. And I think that's not good. I think there are ways that we can go about being with ourselves that we don't have to be afraid of and say, if I do that, it's interesting what I'm going to find. And the reflection and the thoughts and the ideas, the learning that comes from it is going to guide me towards the best balance for me. Right? So there are some people who are very assertive, right. And they want to have high levels of doing in the world, but they still need some reflection. Right. There are other people who are going to be very reflective and they're going to be doing less. We need to understand what profile works for one person. It's not one exact place, but we kind of have a profile of reflection and of doing. And if we are well balanced, where we're asserting ourselves in the world at levels that work for us and we're finding pleasure and gratification in ways that are healthy. Now we're finding balance. If there's too much doing and not enough reflection, not a lot of good will come from that. We'll find that there's diminishing returns. We feel unsatisfied because we're doing too much and we're maybe taking less pleasure in what we're doing. But if we're doing too little, then we can feel idle and there can be a sense of learned helplessness. So it's finding what is the optimal range for a person to be asserting themselves in the world and then finding gratification in what they're doing. And if that's going well, we'll see it. There's a happy, balanced person. And if not, we'll be able to figure it out of what is going on in that person. Is there an issue somewhere, say, in the unconscious mind? Are they asserting more and too much and reflecting too little? So by looking at the person and going through these steps, we can figure out what serves that person best and how might they adjust from where they are now to get there.
- [25:06]
Andrew Huberman
Is it true that there are just some people who just don't really think about their thinking very much? They just, like, do stuff. I mean, I've had friends say that, like, I don't want to speak for me, I'll speak for them. They'll say that they don't think about their thinking. They just get up in the morning and they brush their teeth and they use the bathroom and they go about their day. And they're not very introspective. They're not called to think about their thinking. And in some cases, these are people who are extremely busy. So maybe that's one reason. But in some cases, there are people who just, you know, for whatever reason that the mirror doesn't pop up in their cortex, it's. They're busy doing and observing, and they seem functional. Are they missing out on something fundamental, or is that maybe even the goal? I asked this from a very selfish perspective because growing up, I thought, how cool would that be to just, like, go through life, just do stuff, not think about stuff from the past too much, not reflect too much, just get stuff done. And I'm a get it done kind of person. But I think, like most people, I also am forced to think about my thinking from time to time.
- [26:22]
Dr. Paul Conti
When you say forced, what then forces you?
- [26:25]
Andrew Huberman
Sorry, it just spontaneously happens. Happens. I. I reflect, like, and the reflections, usually I'll try and generalize these because it's. This is not about me. The reflections generally come from, like, is that something I should explore? Like, is that a problem? Is the way I'm thinking about or doing that a problem? Or is the way that they're thinking about and doing something a problem? This us, them thing is it. It is kind of what it boils down to, and it's either positive or negative. I confess, I don't really sit around a lot and think about all the things going right. I should. I have a gratitude Practice. I generally don't sit around and things like, oh, like the walls are up and the ceiling's intact and I'm fed and I'm healthy. And of course, until something bad happens and then we start doing, we do our inventory.
- [27:10]
Dr. Paul Conti
Right, Right.
- [27:11]
Andrew Huberman
But yeah, I just kind of wonder whether or not there's a spectrum of reflexive self exploration.
- [27:17]
Dr. Paul Conti
People have different reflective capacity and people have different reflective interest. So there are people who, and that could serve them well to be more self aware. But, but also people may have less reflective capacity but be more naturally generative and then they're just moving forward. So the question is, even though we have different natural levels of reflective inclination, right. Are we happy? Are our lives going well? If life is going well and that person is, you know, they're healthy, they have good mental health and secure relationships and life is going well and they're not reflecting very much like that sounds good. How I would characterize that is they're living through the generative drive, right. They're being productive, contributory people in the world. They're making the world better, they're learning, they're growing, so they're making themselves better and they're just moving forward. That's a great way to be. For most of us, in order to get there, we do have to be reflective. And some of what will happen is it will come to us. You said you're not kind of planning maybe to sit down and be reflective. But then it comes to you, hey, I should think of this possibility at hand and what are other people thinking and how's that impacting what I'm thinking? So you become reflective because your brain is leading you there. Right? Because it's saying, hey, we do need to stop and think about things. That's how we're going to make better decisions. So our brains will lead us to reflection. But if we're moving so fast or we're defended against it, right. Then we're not reflective and that's not good for us. And that's how you could see, for example, someone who's always busy so they don't have time to reflect. But the big question is, is that happy? Right. If that person is not happy and they're complaining and they feel like they're working and never getting anything out of it or never getting any reward, then it's not good that they're not reflective. Right. They're blocking themselves from something that they need. There are spectrums that apply differently to different people and we all reside on different parts of the spectrum. Whether it's reflective capacity or it's assertion or it's pleasure. But in terms of what we're doing and whether it's healthy for us, it's different. For we're each, each and all unique. So we have to stop and look at ourselves like, hey, how's this going for me? Right? How am I functioning and is it working for me, right? Am I pausing and thinking enough? Maybe the answer is yes, maybe the answer is no, maybe I'm not sure. But if I'm not happy, let me go back and revisit that question. So this curiosity of self can lead us to, oh, how am I built to function? Am I functioning in a way that really works for me? If not, why not? What change might I bring? And here again, we're using the ability to understand and to go through a process to make our lives better.
- [29:56]
Andrew Huberman
I realize these aren't clinical terms, but someone recently said about themselves that they are an external processor. They need to talk things through in order to understand what's going on for them and make decisions. And that implies that some people are internal processors. Is that true? Do you see that in your practice that some people do best by, by thinking, sitting and thinking, walking and thinking, driving and thinking, kind of working things through. And other people actually work it out by talking either to you or to their friends or family, some trusted person. Is that really. Are those two probably not completely separate, but at least semi separate bins of people?
- [30:40]
Dr. Paul Conti
I don't know that they're separate bins of people. I think that the ability to think and to be objective in our thinking differs among young people. What happens often is we get stuck in our own minds. So then we're thinking, but we're not thinking productively because we get stuck in our own loops. And when we take the thought process outside of us. So if we write the words down or if we say the words, we say the words to another person, then we're bringing different brain processes online, different error checking processes online. So some of us can do more of this inside and say, hey, I've been thinking about this for a while and nothing's different or nothing's going better. Like, is there a different way? Is there a way I could think about it that's new or that's different, right? Sometimes we can do that, but a lot of times we just get stuck inside of ourselves and we have to bring different brain processes online. Like making words and putting those words out there in writing or in speech is different. It sort of holds the brain More accountable. That's why sometimes we'll just say something out loud, or we'll say something to someone else and say, oh, I figured that out, or, thanks for helping me figure it out. And you might realize all you did was laugh. Listen, right? Because just by being there, the other person is forming words. We do more due diligence inside of ourselves that way.
- [31:56]
Andrew Huberman
I must confess, I'm fascinated by this notion of people differing in their tendency to work things out internally and then bring that forward into the world, maybe for more help or some additional solutions, or maybe just they've made. They've figured it out, so they're bringing a version of self into the world that is vetted by them. I notice. I tend to respect that picture, but I realize that's not necessarily the way it always works. I had a conversation with my sister this morning, and I love my sister. We're quite close, and there was no friction. But the direction she was taking, what we were talking about, and the direction I was taking it, they weren't aligned. And so we kind of did a little bit of our brother sister pushback and this kind of. And then at some point, we both realized that we weren't aligned with the other person, and we kind of arrived at this overlap in the Venn diagram. And that's when it was like, okay, there was some real clarity that came to something important. I thought, like, how cool is that, right? She has her way of doing things. I have my way of doing things. I don't think I could have gotten there without that conversation. And yet, for the two thirds. Sorry, I won't say her name for her own privacy, but for two thirds of the conversation, I'm thinking to myself, like, oh, God, this is like, this is an already difficult thing. Made more difficult by the fact that there's this other picture of it and a version of it that she's extra. But then, boom, you hit this convergence. And that's real synergy.
- [33:31]
Dr. Paul Conti
Right.
- [33:31]
Andrew Huberman
I certainly couldn't have come up with that on my own. So while I say I place value on the internal processor, I know with certainty I could not have gotten there if I hadn't actually felt and met the friction of what she was bringing forward and her willingness to bend a bit and my willingness to accept a bit.
- [33:46]
Dr. Paul Conti
Right, because you were doing something together. Right. You were doing something together that involved real and open communication. So you had to be able to say, hey, this is how I think and feel, and put that out there and test it and bounce it off the other person and take inside what the other person thinks and said. There's a really complicated process there, which is how human beings come to understand one another or come to agree or come to a place where there's a way forward even if there isn't complete agreement. We have to do these things outside of us. Most often if we're going to be at our healthiest, we do want to be able to do some of it inside. It's a good place to start. And we can do that alone with ourselves. And we're talking about reflective capacity and inclination, but none of us knows how to do something we haven't been taught to do. So very often we haven't had a way of going inside of saying, well, I'm going to think about myself and I want to do that productively. And part of what I'm trying to bring to the fore is that there are ways of going about being with yourself, thinking about yourself, thinking within yourself that can lead us towards progress at least, and sometimes answers. And if we're doing that, we can probably all do more of that than we're doing. And if we're given a way to do it where we think, okay, this works for me. I'm actually learning about myself while I'm doing this. And I'm bringing a vetted self. I'm bringing my best self to what I'm going to find outside of me. And that may be collaboration with another person, it may be talking with another person and coming to some middle ground when there is an agreement. So if we start with ourselves and we're able to reflect and to bring self understanding to the fore, we're much, much stronger. Right. In a good way. Not stronger in that we're going to force our way through things, but we're much stronger in terms of both self knowledge and ability to be flexible when we're out in the real world meeting other people.
- [35:41]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I think to me, the picture of internal processing people is one that, and maybe I've seen too many movies and shows from my childhood, but the picture is one of, okay, people who internally process, bring the best version of themselves forward. They don't burden other people. But I think by now we understand as a culture that that person, while traditionally was kind of revered. This is a kind of a male centric phenotype here. Picture that I'm drawing, it could be about a woman as well. There's also this idea that they're a little bit disconnected from all the chatter. But in my mind I have this belief, like, if People are externally processing a lot, that they're also revealing their uncertainty and that that's not a good thing to reveal to the world. And again, this probably reflects my age in the times when I was raised and a bit about the culture and my family, et cetera. But I think in general that's. That's like. We never really talk about, like strong silent type, but lazy. Right. Like we're thinking strong silent and therefore getting stuff done.
- [37:03]
Dr. Paul Conti
Right.
- [37:03]
Andrew Huberman
Like the tacit message there is strong and silent, so they're not burdening other people with their internal stuff. We also assume that people who process internally are actually processing, that they're not just sitting there. I used to joke, you know, what's my bulldog Costello thinking about? And I. I know this isn't true, but I used to think it was white noise. Like maybe he was just sitting there, white, noising white, experiencing the world as white noise. I mean, I don't know what he was thinking about.
- [37:30]
Dr. Paul Conti
So quantum physics could have been.
- [37:32]
Andrew Huberman
Quantum physics. I doubt that, but it could have been quite. And if it was, you know, he
- [37:37]
Dr. Paul Conti
was good at keeping a secret.
- [37:38]
Andrew Huberman
Exactly. Right, yeah. And the picture actually works because he was a big kind of stoic dog. He had his joyful expression. But there's something about this notion of somebody that processes internally that gets a lot done and maybe even serves others, although more than somebody who's processing externally. And it's hard to probe this area without kind of setting up natural gender stereotypes here. I think the stereotype is that women externally process more than men. I don't know that that's actually true. It just might be that men process less overall. I mean, who knows? Hell knows what anyone else is thinking. Half the time I don't know what I'm thinking. So do you think that people who hold it in more are coming to a greater understanding and get more done in the world than those that externally process?
- [38:30]
Dr. Paul Conti
No, I think. Not necessarily. I think what's best for us is a balance and again, it's going to be different for each person. But there has to be a balance of things that I know and understand inside of myself, myself that aren't up for question, that I am sure of and resolved about. So it might be a line not to cross because it's a certain moral boundary. I know how I feel about it and I know where I am, I know how I feel and I know where I stand. So it's just one example. There are issues of self that we want to feel very resolved, how I want to treat People in the world and how I want to be treated, for example, it's good to know those things inside of us, but it is good to see, then test externally about how we're interfacing with the world. If too much internal processing can be too self referential. And now I may think that how I think it should be is actually how it should be, because I haven't tested outside of me and I haven't done enough of that testing to see a lot of other people feel differently than me. And this isn't a moral point where I feel sure about how I feel. There's actually more gray in it than I might have thought as an example. So there has to be a balance. I mean, I. And it's always been this way for humans, a balance of what we discern and know inside. But bringing that vetted self to the world means that the vetted self also knows that it doesn't know everything. Right? And it's testing in the outside world to learn what is it that other people are thinking. Can I learn from that? So bringing in openness is also very important about a lot of things. So I think that no one way of being is better. I think we all need a balance. That balance is going to differ. And it involves knowing things about ourselves and feeling resolute and also having the humility to face the world with openness and realizing there's a lot of things I may think I know or think I know exactly how something is or how something should be. But. But let me hold on for a second and kind of check that with the outside world so that I don't become too self referential. Where we can become, you know, we can become bigoted or prejudiced. I mean, those can be outcomes or we can just, just step a little bit into it in ignorance that there. That there's more in the world than our own opinions.
- [40:42]
Andrew Huberman
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- [44:26]
Dr. Paul Conti
Right.
- [44:27]
Andrew Huberman
So I guess I'm asking this because I want to kind of break down the notions of quiet versus verbal. Introspective necessarily means calm. I mean, so many assumptions around all this. None of it is necessarily true. And the reason I'm so genuinely curious about this is I think that most of the world is confronted with this Marc Andreessen provocative question, like, how much time should we spend in here and how does it serve us when we're out here in the rest of the world? And vice versa. If we're just talking, talking, talking, doing all day, maybe we are processing and we can be peaceful inside, lay our head down and that's it. It's all out there for better or worse, but for us it's great. Yeah, but there's this assumption that we're constant. Whatever we see is also happening internally.
- [45:18]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yeah. I think we have to just be very, very wary of either mapping some stereotype, oh, this is good, and that's not good, and applying some value system to it when we're outside of looking at a person in a context. Because all of those things, you know, being internalized, speaking less, or being hyperverbal, they could mean anything, you know, anything under the sun. It has to be who is the person and what is the context. So if you're describing Barbara Chapman in meetings. Right. I interpret that as she's communicating judiciously. Right. She's in a place where maybe sometimes people say excess things because they're self aggrandizing or they want to bring something up, or they, you know, they're trying to guide a conversation one way or another. And know you, you think, no, that's a place where less is more. We're not doing that and just communicating about something that matters, when it matters. Say, wow, that's speaking Judiciously. That's what it tells me about her. I don't know if her mind was going a mile a minute inside or if there was a calm and equanimity. But I think who that person was and what that situation was adaptive. Same thing if there's someone who's speaking a lot, but they just have a lot of ideas and they're really constructive ideas, and they're talking to people about those ideas, and they're in enthusiastic and it's helpful. Well, that sounds good to me. That sounds very different than someone who's hyperverbal and they're talking, but, you know, you can tell they're saying the same thing but coming from a different angle. And they're anxious and they may want validation. Right. So the person in the context makes all the difference. I mean, we want to be able to identify, you know, when a person might fit a certain profile. Right. You know, there are people who are quiet because they said they're strong and they're silent and there's not a lot going on inside, but they're resolute. Okay. That's a of kind of person. Right. But we shouldn't assume that someone is that way until we've looked at who is that person and what is the context in which we're assessing them. We're human, so we fit patterns. Right. But we're all unique. So you won't know what pattern we may be fitting until you really look at us.
- [47:21]
Andrew Huberman
One thing I love about your book is you have probe questions. You have questions for people to ask themselves.
- [47:26]
Dr. Paul Conti
Thank you.
- [47:27]
Andrew Huberman
To explore the self. And I think. I think for me, that is a huge gift of the book and the work in it. When I got to see an advanced copy, I was like, obviously you understand the theory and the science and you're a clinician, but for me, like, okay, what do I ask myself and how do I go about doing that? How do I figure out what's going right, at least as a stepping stone to maybe exploring what's not going right, but certainly to really understand where my strengths might lie. And I think that's a. It's a really unique gift because I think that we don't have enough of that. I think we have a lot of what's going wrong, where are the friction points, what's wrong with me kind of stuff and what's wrong with the world? And I think starting from that place of really knowing what the questions are to ask oneself is. I just personally found it immensely useful.
- [48:23]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yeah.
- [48:23]
Andrew Huberman
And I realize we're mainly discussing theory. And up until now, although I'm about to ask you a very practical question, which is assuming no pathology, no life crippling anxiety or depression or panic, how much do you think people should try and adjust their, what I call the autonomic set point? Some people are just more, more, you know, expressive with their hands, with their words. They, they want to move a lot more and if they don't, it makes them anxious, right? Other people are more still and we again assume that if they're physically still, that things are probably a bit more still internally. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. But there is a lot of emphasis, including on this podcast, on learning to sit with stress, learning to sit with anxiety, and not just letting it out or experiencing it. And sometimes I wonder, despite knowing the immense value of those tools, I mean, I've benefited so much from things like non sleep, deep rest and meditation and things like that. And I know others have as well. But I mean, how much should we be trying to control our states? I do wonder if it's good for us to think that there's something wrong for us if we feel a certain way, way, period.
- [49:44]
Dr. Paul Conti
I think controlling our states in order to help us be at our best is different from trying to control our states so that we change ourselves, right? So if you're finding a deep state of peace, that's not sleep, right? You find, oh, that helps you be a better you, that finding that peace, it gives you some groundedness and you feel healthier for it and you're better able to solve problems. So you're learning something and doing something because it serves you well and it helps you be at your best, that's different than thinking, oh, I need to be different, right? If a person thinks, well, I need to be different and I need to be calmer or more peaceful, what does that mean? And is that person imposing something external on themselves? So there are people who are very active and yes, they can sit quietly sometimes, but they're not really built for it, right? They're active people and it works for them to be active. And they may be quite meditative when they don't seem to be quite meditative, right? They can be doing something and we see a lot of movement in them, but inside they can be in a meditative state. So it's so easy for us to. It's well meaning in that we're trying to understand, right? We're trying to understand ourselves and we're trying to understand others and we're trying to find patterns. But it's so tempting to think that we know something because we're just observing someone in a certain state, or we're observing someone talking or not talking, right? What does that mean? And we have to ask the right questions, right, in order to get there. So the only way we really know the answers for a person is we have to understand that person and we have to understand their context. So we must ask the right questions. You had talked about trying to write practical routes of approach to ourselves in the book. I'm doing that because think of, if someone wanted to learn physics, would you say, well, just stop, go somewhere and think about physics? No, there has to be a route of approach of saying, well, here's some of the basic knowledge. Think about this approach that way. Read from this book and then that book, right? There are ways that we are guided in how to learn things. And it's interesting that we don't have these guides for what's most important, which is learning about ourselves. So it brings us back to why it can make us so uncomfortable, so anxious to say, okay, we're going to sit with ourselves. It's like saying, well, sit with yourself and learn horticulture. It's like, I don't know, I'll sit with myself. But you have to help me. You have to help me figure out how to learn that, or I'm going to feel anxious about sitting there if I don't know how to go about it. Right? So if we have the prompts to look at ourselves now, what we're doing is we're making it real. We're asking the right questions of ourselves to think, oh, how do I function? What does work well for me? How do I think of myself? How do others think of me? Am I introverted or extroverted? Am I a combination of both? Do I sometimes feel in one state and sometimes in another? Is it working for me? Right? Is it working for me in the big picture? Are there parts of the small picture that work for me or things I really don't like or things where I really don't feel uncomfortable? Now, we're bringing curiosity. And yes, we want to learn from patterns and learn from all the knowledge we have of the world. But we're taking that and saying, hey, none of that actually means anything until it's directed towards me. If I'm the person reflecting about myself or if it's a helping process, we're helping a friend, or we're in a therapy. Therapy process. You know, we have to take everything that we know. And then it's all seen through the lens of that person. We have to do it that way or we'll lead ourselves astray.
- [53:17]
Andrew Huberman
If you're willing, I'm curious about throwing out a sort of a generic clinical session example. Let's assume you know something about the family background of a patient and there's nothing glaringly obvious in the background about trauma. Or maybe there is, but you know, that there's nothing really to dig into there just yet. And the person comes to you and says, yeah, I don't know, I'm. I like. I'm like work is okay, but this. And so. And so at work at that. And I guess this is good. And you know, and they're. I don't know, they're dating, they're in their life. And I swear I'm not trying to get a free therapy session here. I'm to trying. I'm just trying to imagine. So someone says, you know, and then like, the news is really bothering me and you know, and just kind of reporting.
- [54:06]
Dr. Paul Conti
Right, right.
- [54:07]
Andrew Huberman
You observe human patterns. I mean, your pattern recognition is presumably oriented towards where there's emotion, where there's patterns in them, how it matches to templates that only you could harbor. The same way that a really amazing neurosurgeon would look into the brain and see a pattern of epileptic seizure and would be like, okay, this is. Even without remembering those specific cases, I know which direction to go at this, to explore. When you hear all that stuff and the stuff I'm talking about here is deliberately meant to reflect what you see a lot of on social media, upset about that, political team, upset about that. Politically, my life is this, but this, but this. But what does that tell you, and what does it tell you specifically about where that person should invest effort into thinking or doing? I realize it's impossible to give it a pan prescriptive here, but what does that mean when somebody's just really absorbed by all the things going on around them and things feel good. But where do you start to probe and where do you start to encourage them? At least until the next session?
- [55:13]
Dr. Paul Conti
The way to probe is to encourage reflection. Right. Because with what you said, I think, well, I'm hearing somebody reporting. It's like they're just telling me the news of what went on. I'm doing this, I'm doing that. My mom did this. And that way it's kind of an inventory or a line. So what it makes me think is I wonder how much of that you're really choosing or how much of that is intentional, or how much of that is just a reflex?
- [55:38]
Andrew Huberman
The behaviors in their life, how much of it they're choosing or the reporting?
- [55:42]
Dr. Paul Conti
No, the behaviors. How much of what they're reporting? How much of that are you really choosing? How much of that is what you want to be doing? How much of that is working for you? What we're trying to do then, and what I want to do then is encourage to have some interest in examination of, like, whoa, why am I doing all of this? Right? Maybe some of this I really like and I am interested in, and others of it I'm just doing because it's habit or it's routine. I don't even know why I'm doing it or, you know, if I'm dating. But who am I dating? Why? Why am I dating? How am I choosing? Is that. Is that also just something that I do? How much am I just kind of along for the ride of what I'm doing that just has forward momentum versus what am I really choosing now? If we stop and we look at it that way, what are you really choosing? And also what's working working for you? Now we're off to the races of an examined life. And, you know, we see this as. I know, you know, we do a lot of intensive work. We do it with individuals, we do it with couples, where we try and move this process forward very, very, very, very rapidly of looking at one's own life. And it's very interesting that sometimes, you know, by midway through the second day of an intensive process, the person wants to revisit almost every. Everything they realize, you know, 10, 20% of all those things I just said, this is what I do, right? I really value, and I want to be doing more of the others I'm not so sure of. Right? I don't know why I'm doing some of those things. Now we're really along the process of change because we're looking at ourselves. And it may seem strange that someone would see the 80% of what I just told you I do. I don't know if I want to do or if it's working for me, but that happens all the time when we're not examining our lives. Lives, they just kind of run forward and we accumulate what we accumulate, right? And it's like, well, this is what we are, because this is what I've accumulated by grabbing and carrying with me as I'm moving through life. And there's not an organization to it. So this idea that we must examine our Lives is at the heart of all of this. That's how we keep mental health and our structure of self and our function of self. We keep our drives in balance. We set ourselves on a path where we are in a place to meet future challenges from the best health we can have and also to meet future opportunities. So just like we want to do with our physical health, right, we want to build good physical health. Likewise, we want to build good mental health when that's the best way to be, when life throws us whatever curve balls are going to come our way. And it's also the best way to have a good life, to be on the front foot of life. But we need to examine ourselves and we need a process and a structure. Structure in order to build good mental health the way we build good physical health. And ultimately, that's how we build good health.
- [58:22]
Andrew Huberman
So what I'm hearing is in order to gain more agency over any areas of our life, we have to ask the why question. Why am I doing what I'm doing now? And why aren't I doing this other thing that perhaps would serve me better? It starts with questions of self. What do you do? And this must be incredibly frustrating. At least it would be to me. What do you do if somebody. You say, well, why aren't you? And the person says, well, I know I should work out, but I don't. And you say, well, why not? And they say, well, I don't know, I'm tired. I know I should. Then you say, well, why do you still hang out with Sharon when you always come back from it feeling totally exhausted and feeling like you've just had all this stuff done? Oh, you know, I don't know. Like, what do you. How do you work past the person who's just like, this is just life. Life. This is just. This is just what life requires. I gotta work. I got my friends. Like, what am I gonna do, overhaul my life? You know, and, and, and I. This probably varies by region and by generation. The extent to which people are willing to, like, look at things and think and kind of spin them around, like rotate the cube, as I like to call it, and look at it from underneath a bit. And just as a practice, like, to some people, that's okay, cool, you know, I'll. I'll, you know, play the. No one listens to albums anymore, but the same way they used to. But I'll play the album in reverse for a bit. Maybe it'll give me something different. Maybe many people are like, ah, that's the album like, this is how I do it. So how do you get somebody to do this? And of course, I'm not asking you to tell us this so that people can play therapist with others, even though they. They naturally do. I'm asking this because hopefully this is what people will do for themselves.
- [60:04]
Dr. Paul Conti
Well, if someone is talking in the way of the person you described, right? Saying, well, this is just what I do. And. And they're describing, I think you said, every time they. They go out with Sharon, they come home and they feel kind of drained, they don't feel good. Then they move on to something else and to something else, and they might talk about their job and something that's frustrating them all the time, and they just keep going forward. Then I might say, well, what you're doing is you're showing both of us where the X's are. The X's mark the spot to dig. So you're showing us, hey, here's where there's some treasure. Let's dig where there's this ex is. So if you're going out with someone and every time you see that person, you come home and you feel a sense of lethargy and you feel a sense of time wasn't well spent, and you kind of feel hopeless, well, it's really important to think about why you're doing that. Right? And I would link it to something else, so I might say so. You know, you had said earlier on or a couple of sessions ago that you really want to find a partner and you really want to find a good relationship. So that's important to. You told me that it was. And now you're telling me that you keep seeing this person where you know every time you go out the front door that nothing good is going to come of it and you're going to come back feeling worse than when you left. Like, we should look at why and we don't have to be scared to look away, because this is where the fear comes in. Like, oh, my gosh, what is wrong with me? Why would I be doing that? Right. Somewhere inside of them, that person knows that's not working for me, but I'm still doing it, so there's some fear of looking at that. So if we say, hey, no harm, no fat. Wow. Like, let's just. Let's think about why. You know, it may be that that person really wants that person. In this case, I think it's Sharon. I want Sharon to like them, right? And maybe they feel a need to be liked so they don't like this person, but they think they need this person to like them. Maybe, maybe they're a person who always takes too, too much care of others versus themselves. And they don't like Sharon, but Sharon likes them, right? So they don't really want to end that relationship. There's something going on there because the person is saying, hey, I'm doing this thing that absolutely won't get me what I want and I'll keep doing it. You say, well, that's not really what you want. If you are doing it over and over again, you think you're going to keep doing it. It's just because you haven't felt empowered enough that, hey, I can understand myself and I can bring some change so that my behaviors, my choices are actually in line with my wishes, with my strivings. So now we get that person interested, right? We tell them that there is an X. Let's understand why it is that you're still going out with Sharon. Right. There's got to be something to learn there, and there always is. If we dig where the X's are, we do get some treasure. It might be a little, it might be a lot, but we learn from that and we bring that learning to life. The rubber hits the road as that leads to real life change.
- [62:54]
Andrew Huberman
That makes really good sense. And thank you for the clarity of that answer. It brings us back to asking why. To develop more agency around possibly making different choices. It's not always, I mean, I guess one could realize like, they really, they want that kind of relationship but with someone else, or they want a completely different kind of relationship with the same person. Right, right. And to work on that. But it starts with asking questions. Yes, I realize I'm going backwards into this, but it goes from, from inventories are a start toward informing what questions are useful. Useful questions probe understanding that hopefully develops more agency. Do you encourage people, once they get to a point of, oh, yeah, like, maybe I want a different sort of relationship to this person or thing or activity in life. Do you give them specific action directives? Like, yeah, how about between this session and next session, you go to the gym twice, you do whatever there, maybe watch TV and just like pedal on the bike, or maybe you go and you really take a course or a class, rather. Do you tend to give people clear directives about what could really help if you sense that that could really help?
- [64:14]
Dr. Paul Conti
Sometimes. But I think it's much more effective if it's arrived at collaboratively. So if we decide, hey, you know, it'd be really, really good and we both agree, we've talked back and forth now. And if you can get to the gym once before you come back next week, right? And then we talk about that back and forth. Like maybe that person wants to go to the gym five times, you know, before they come back. But each time they do that, they get frustrated with themselves and they don't go at all, right? So we might say, look, we've been talking about this, and maybe I'll say it and maybe the other. Maybe the patient will say it, right? And to say, look, I. I do want to be going to the gym. I want to be getting exercise. And I see, I go between too much and too little, right? I go between taking on too much and I get frustrated. I don't do anything. How about something that's more measured? Okay, Maybe I'll try and go on Monday and Friday, maybe decide, yeah, you know what? Maybe twice is okay. Or should it be once? Right? Because if you get once under your belt, you can get twice under your belt the next week. So we're just trying to understand. So there's no mystery to it and we know what we're doing. So someone who wants to have a different relationship and says, well, maybe I could have a good relationship with Sharon, but I'd have to talk to her about A, B, and C. That isn't really going well. Okay, how might you do that? Right? Like, let's think about it, right? Because that communication isn't going to happen unless you bring it. And what's keeping you from that? How might you approach her in a way that you could really talk? What's holding you back? So we're trying to problem solve, but we're doing so in a way that's. That's open, where we know what we're doing and we're not bringing some magic or mystery to it. We're trying to move ahead. And we understand it's one step at a time, and we want to take those steps. So we don't want someone to think often. We want a process of change to occur so fast that it can't possibly occur as fast as we want it to. And then we'll get frustrated in two weeks, right? So we have to set reasonable expectations of, hey, it might be you could really get somewhere with this in a couple of months. It seems like that from our current conversations. What do you think? We make sure we're on the same page, and then we say, well, one week after another, we could put one foot in front of the other and we can get ourselves there. And it's not easy. So it might not be easy to say, broach that first conversation with Sharon or get yourself to the gym that first time, but we can help you bolster yourself so all your arrows are going in the same direction. You set yourself up for success. You're not going to try to go the morning after a long night out and we set you up for success and you get a win. And small wins empower and embolden us to take a little bit more chances and get bigger wins. And if our structure of self and our function of self are in good places, then what rests on top of that is empowerment. There's a sense of empowerment in us and also a sense of humility that lets us accept that we're human, that things aren't perfect. And maybe I have been making the same mistake over and over again. It's all okay, I'm human. And if I have the humility to accept that and I have empowerment, then I can meet the world through agency and this active gratitude. You know, I'm grateful that Sharon's still here and I can, I can talk to her, right? I'm grateful that there's a gym for me to go to. I'm healthy enough for me to get myself there and I've got enough agency inside of myself that I'm going to do these things that I've decided to do. This is how we make life change, whether it be small or big. And how do we get to big life change? It starts with small steps. Steps.
- [67:26]
Andrew Huberman
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- [70:16]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yes, it does. Yes, it's insight that sets us free and it's insight that puts us in the driver's seat of our lives. Otherwise we're just reacting. So in the example that you gave, so imagine a person who had a very over controlling parent. So they don't have insight and they become over controlling themselves. They, they associate that high level of control with being powerful. They feel less vulnerable when they're being powerful. So they end up being over controlling with their own children just like their parents were. We say, okay, we can recognize that and we'll Say it's pattern, repetition or whatever words we want to put to it and we go, oh gosh, that person doesn't have insight, right? But when the person is doing the opposite, that's not necessarily good either. So a person could say, well, my parent was over controlling. I'm going to be easygoing, I'm going to be more easygoing. But if that person doesn't have insight, then they can become too permissive. So now they're not controlling things in a way that does make sense. They're not exercising the healthy control of a parent. So they could identify with what the parent did and do the same thing, or they could push away from it and do the opposite. But the opposite isn't good good either, right? It's insight that lets us say, oh no, my parent or parents were over controlling and maybe that even it got to a place where it was very, very difficult and maybe even abusive. And I don't want to be like that, right? And I'm not going to be like that. But I'm not going to rush to the opposite pole either. Right now I get to, I both have to, and get to figure out what's a healthy level of control, right? How much control does it make sense to exert to keep the child safe, for example, but also to then allow the child enough latitude to be growing and making their own decision. So it's insight that says, oh, I, I see, I see what that was in my past. And often we do need to do that. Often early childhood experiences, especially experiences within family units, have a great impact upon us and often will guide our behaviors. And then kind of like automatons, we're acting one way or we're acting another and we don't know why. But it's insight that lets us gain the understanding. Here's how it was when I was growing up. I can look at that, I can see it good, bad or otherwise, right? And then I can decide how do I want to integrate that information to how the whole me is going to be in the driver's seat of being a good parent.
- [72:43]
Andrew Huberman
So there seems to be something fundamentally valuable about insights where we realize, I want to push away from something, a pattern, or I want to get more like someone or something that is, you know, would serve me better. And I realize that might just be a giant duh based on what you said, but I'm trying to think about what that means about the mind, about the human mind. Mind. I can imagine that there are instances where people are in patterns of behavior and they're struggling with them. They're not working for them, and they know it, and they want to make the change. This is the thing I hear all the time, I want to make. I know I should do it. I know I should do it, but they don't do it. What you're saying is, when we can know that that pattern was something we observed or we're doing the opposite of something we observed, doesn't matter which, suddenly we have agency. What do you think that is? This is a different kind of question than I've been asking up until now. What is that? Because my clinician can tell me, hey, you know what? You should really start to eat better and get to sleep on time, because we both know this isn't serving you well. And the person comes back and they're not doing the behaviors. They're not changing their behaviors. They're not changing. And then you ask, Ask them, hey, like, what is this about? And you get to a place where it reflects something in childhood. They're either going against or they're going with that pattern. You're telling me that that realization gives them a sense of agency. Aha. It comes from me, but I didn't program that. What is the insight? Like, what allows that? What is the wedge that lets people change their behavior simply by understanding that some or all of it is inherited from a pattern?
- [74:41]
Dr. Paul Conti
When we realize that there's something, whether it's external or internal, controlling us, right? It diffuses that tension. And part of why it diffuses the tension and lets us see clearly and gives us control is because we don't like it. You know, none of us want to be like the Manchurian Candidate, right? Where there's a sound and then we behave in a certain way and, you know, we're triggered in a certain way, and. And then we just do something, and we do it automatically. Like, we don't like that. And if we realize, oh, that's happening in me. So if I realize, gosh, I've been programmed, right? And if someone is disagreeing with me, like, it makes me feel so bad or so vulnerable or insecure, you know, it makes me feel like I felt when I was a kid, right? So now what I'm doing is I'm being just like the parent was. I'm not giving my. My child a chance to have his or her own opinion. And now, because I won't let myself tolerate that feeling. So. So what's happened is it's just been automatic from when I was a kid, and it felt so Bad. And now I'm in the position of trying to make myself feel good by imposing that on my own child. I don't want to do that. Right. Wow, I see that. Or realizing that because that happened and I wasn't allowed to have my own say when I was growing up, I'm letting you, my children, kind of run wild in ways that aren't even safe for them. And, wow, I pushed so hard against that. It's this realization that something inside of us is being triggered, and then we just do something automatically that we haven't thought about or decided to. That is a very, very strong effect on humans. We really don't like that. So if we can combine that with compassionate curiosity, like if one of us were really, really, really hungry and there's food right outside the door, but we're not getting up to get it, it's a reasonable question to ask why. Right. I mean, it's got to be something very powerful to keep a person who's so hungry from just going and getting food. What are these forces within us that are exerting such control over us now? We get the person to be on their own side. Instead of saying, I want to do A, B, and C, but I just can't, or there's just not enough time, they're like, whoa, that's not. You know, I don't know. Why is it that I'm telling myself, do I really want to do it? If I. What's keeping me from doing it? How am I keeping me from doing it? Now we bring our gumption, we bring our resources internally and externally to the problem, and the whole thing shifts.
- [77:06]
Andrew Huberman
Oh, man, that helps a lot. Not just me, I have to say. People not feeling motivated, people not being able to break a pattern that isn't serving them. Whether or not it's action or inaction, action is probably the most common question I get. It's the most common theme. It's probably the reason why podcasts like this can exist. I mean, I think people have a natural curiosity about the science and the intellectual aspects and neural circuits and hormones and all that kind of stuff. But I think ultimately people want more agency over their behavior. They want to feel that, yes. And I think what you said is blaring in the room, at least for me, that people don't like to be controlled. So much so that we know that we got kids to quit smoking back in the, you know, in the 90s, early 2000s, by advertisements of rich old white men writhing, their hands cackling about the health Problems that people are getting while they're getting rich. That's what stopped teens from smoking. Right. It was, you're not going to control me.
- [78:15]
Dr. Paul Conti
It wasn't.
- [78:16]
Andrew Huberman
They didn't like smoking. Nicotine is incredibly reinforcing. Right. The moment that you have an animal enemy, you feel the sense of agency that you. You said, no, you're on your own side. So realizing one is being controlled.
- [78:28]
Dr. Paul Conti
Right.
- [78:28]
Andrew Huberman
Is. I realize, I'm just saying what you're saying, but I want to make sure this really resonates in my own mind and for the listeners. That's the essence of agency. You have to be on your own side and to get on your own side, it's helpful to not necessarily have an enemy, but to say, oh, this is all about my parents. Parents. And I'm going in the opposite direction in ways that are defeating me. I'm. They're controlling me, even though I think I'm controlling me. Boom.
- [78:53]
Dr. Paul Conti
Right. Right.
- [78:54]
Andrew Huberman
Behavior changes or, oh, shit, this is just like my mom or just like my dad or just like the environment I grew up in. And now you. Somebody can advocate for themselves.
- [79:06]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yes.
- [79:06]
Andrew Huberman
I also see this in the. In the media nowadays. I mean that so much of social media is about us, them.
- [79:11]
Dr. Paul Conti
And.
- [79:11]
Andrew Huberman
And gosh, people are, like, perfectly happy for understandable reasons to be like, you're not going to control me. We saw this during the pandemic. We see this at every level. What is this human thing about not wanting to be controlled? That in this context is very positive, right?
- [79:30]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yeah.
- [79:30]
Andrew Huberman
There's something about the human primate brain. We don't like to be controlled. And that sense of agency can blossom out of that.
- [79:41]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yeah.
- [79:41]
Andrew Huberman
I think that's incredible.
- [79:42]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yeah. We don't want to think or know that someone or something is putting one over on us. Like, you know, humans don't want to be dupes. We don't like that. Right. It makes us upset. And here the magic realization is that there is no enemy. Right. That we can get in our own way. And who's most likely to thwart my efforts towards being healthier? It's absolutely me. Right. So I can get in my own way, but it doesn't mean I'm my enemy. So if I do, really, I want to be healthier and I want to get to the gym to be healthier. Okay. Who's standing in my way then? It will be me. Well, why am I standing in my way? I secretly hate myself and I want myself not to be healthy. No, it's not that. If I'm standing in My own way. There's a reason I really think that I have so much to do and it's for other people and it means more than me. So really, I don't think think I deserve the time and energy it would take. I'm not going to spend it on myself. Maybe that's why I don't go. Or maybe I don't go because I'm trying to protect myself, because I'm worried. The last couple of times I tried, it didn't go well and I felt worse. So I don't even want to start. So I'm standing in my own way because of fear of failure, right? There's a lot of reasons. There's many, many, many reasons. We could be standing in our own way, but we're not our own enemy. So the realization of, like, why am I doing this? I don't, I don't have to do this. Actually, there's one me and I could say, well, if I both. If I really want to go to the gym, but I'm not going. I want to go and I don't want to go. It must be true or I'd be there, right? Why is it that I don't want to go? Am I not worth the time and energy? Maybe. Do I think there are more important things to do? Really? I do really think that, right? And I'm not admitting it to myself. Am I afraid that if I try, I'll fail? Right? There's got to be a reason for that. So let me get on the same page as I've often said, said to further the example would be, hey, you get to decide if you go to the gym or not. We just want you to be on the same page with yourself. You can decide not to. If you say, actually there are more, there are things that are bigger priorities for my time now someone else is sick. I'm taking care of that person. That is what I'm choosing now, okay? So I'm not going to go now. And the whole me decides that. But on the other side of this, when this drain on my time and energy is different, then I am to going, going to go. Right now the person's on the same page and they're not making themselves feel worse by wanting to go and not going. Or I might say, I really do want to go, but I know I'm standing in my own way because I'm afraid I'll fail, okay? And then maybe I get upset. The last eight times I tried, I failed, right? You know, now we're really Digging, you know, where the money's at, right? Because we go and look and say, okay, you're, you're protecting yourself. How do we, how do we try and set you up for success? So, so you'll want to go forward this time because you'll see that it's different from the other time times and you won't just be repeating something that just made you feel bad. So that's how we get our, all our arrows pointing in the same direction. We realize there is no enemy here. There is me standing in my own way. But like that's okay. I, I can look at that and I can figure that out. And now we're at that simple goodness principle where, you know, we're all on the same page with ourselves and we accomplish our goals.
- [82:49]
Andrew Huberman
We wouldn't wish trauma on anybody. But how is it that than people who had reasonably healthy or trauma free childhoods, how do they operate in the world? Are they moving toward things from a genuine place of curiosity? And they're not pushing off anything in this idyllic example. They're not countering a childhood example. Does that represent the ultimate goal? That we're moving towards things because we want them and we're not resisting anything, nor are we copying bad patterns from our childhood?
- [83:19]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yes, in the sense that I think that's what I would map to living intentionally, right? To being as self aware as we can be while also realizing we can't be completely self aware and then living intentionally. So yes, that's what we're trying to get to. And the presence of trauma, of real trauma that overwhelms our coping skills and leaves our brain function different going forward, it does make it harder to achieve these things, which is why we want to look at trauma. If there are traumas in our lives and how, how they may have changed us, but it doesn't prevent that. I mean, people can have significant traumas and still be on this path and have some insight into how the trauma is affecting them and even insight that the trauma needs more work, maybe to really get our arms around it, but that person can still get there. Likewise, someone who hasn't had trauma might have real difficulty getting there. If I haven't had major trauma, but just circumstances or my own, maybe overly ambitious with not enough time and energy. Hey, I did try and get to the gym four or five times in a. It didn't work out and I really do feel down on myself. And it's not linked to any prior trauma. It's just I've gotten in this Cycle. And every time I think about being healthier now, I'm telling myself, oh, you'll never be able to do it, or you messed it up three times. And so I'm inadvertently making it harder for myself. And without any pre existing trauma, that person can end up having much more trouble than someone who does have pre existing trauma.
- [84:40]
Andrew Huberman
Or how do you respond to the words? I get tired just thinking about it. Like something that would be good for somebody. I get tired just thinking about it. And it involves energy. I'm not giving you a very full picture, but I'm guessing you've heard those words before.
- [84:56]
Dr. Paul Conti
Well, I want to understand a lot more about that. What that tells me is there's a lot of brain space and a lot of energy that's taken up in the thinking of it. So for a lot of people, they get so tired of thinking about trying to go to the gym. But because thinking about trying to go to the gym takes more energy from them than actually being there. Right? Because it's running around in their head how they failed and how bad they're going to feel and how they really want to do this. And maybe they will, maybe they won't. And there's so much going on inside of them that they're making something very, very complicated. So I want to understand why all that energy inside, right? And is there a way that we can simplify that? That's a marker that there's something going on that we want to be able to get at. Because it's not the healthiest process to say that there's a lot of internal turmoil about something that almost certainly can be better understood and simplified.
- [85:45]
Andrew Huberman
So that statement represents 10 mental workouts that is exhausting them. At least that's the sense it might
- [85:54]
Dr. Paul Conti
give you with no improvement in physical health. So the 10 mental workouts just wasted that energy. There is no improvement in physical health. Let's take those 10 mental workouts and figure out how can we turn that into one physical workout. That person's going to feel a lot better physically and mentally.
- [86:10]
Andrew Huberman
I want to table a couple of common statements about the mind and psychology. I'm perfectly willing to accept that they're true, but I have a feeling they're at least not entirely true. One is, however you talk to others, that's also how you talk to yourself. Is this just like, nonsense? I mean, there's some people that are very harsh with other people. Are they walking around being harsh to themselves or are they like just so peaceful in there and they're like externalizing all. I had a former colleague, let's just keep him anonymous. A former colleague. And he used to say, I don't get stressed. I give stress. That feels true to me. You know, he gave up all his cards by telling me that.
- [86:51]
Dr. Paul Conti
But.
- [86:52]
Andrew Huberman
So I was grateful for that statement. But he was very proud of it. It was like, I don't get stressed. I give stress. And I thought, I bet you he's pretty stressed in there. And then I realized, I don't know what the hell's going on in there. Maybe he's just absolutely right. So can we make that assumption that how people treat others is really how they treat themselves?
- [87:11]
Dr. Paul Conti
No. Sometimes that may be true, but sometimes that may not be true. So this statement has no validity? Maybe yes, maybe no. You have to look at the person and look at the situation. For most people, when there's a difference between the two, it is not the person who say, is externalizing all that stress, giving everybody stress, but they feel calm inside. That is not a healthy way to be. And there's something going on there that's different. Right? That is an issue that warrants really looking at and addressing. There's a problem there for most people. If it's different, it's the opposite where people are treating others more, much, much better than they're treating themselves. And they may say, well, that's okay, you know, maybe we each made a mistake. And I get it, everyone makes mistakes, right? I may say that to you, but then go, what's wrong with me? Or, you know, I'm. I maybe act very differently inside. And that's mostly what good people do, is we'll give other people a kind word or a benefit of the doubt, but we get very harsh. And our, and our language and our tone inside of ourselves can be, can be very different. And, you know, this idea of if you, if you're going to make yourself special, don't make yourself special in a negative way. Right? I mean, it's, it's, you know, partly in jest, but it, but it is saying for most of us who are making ourselves special, it is in a negative way. Other people can, can, you know, can get. They can get a pass about something. They made an honest mistake, or, you know, we'll give them another chance, whatever it may be. But for us, we may use much harsher language, you know, what's wrong with me? Or I mean, idiot, I mess that up again. And there's a lot of that going on inside of us. So, no, if we're treating other people Kindly. It may be that we're treating ourselves kindly inside, but that is certainly not a given. And if we're being unkind to other people, that most of the time there is some real turmoil and that person is not feeling okay inside. The person who's making other people unhappy and they themselves feel okay, that's a different kind of problem and it's not a complex common one.
- [89:08]
Andrew Huberman
In your book you talk about intrusive thoughts and things that people can do to deal with intrusive thoughts. If you wouldn't mind, could you give us a few, you know, a few examples of things that people can do to deal with intrusive thoughts.
- [89:24]
Dr. Paul Conti
Well, the first is we have to identify it. Then there are people who have intrusive thoughts, something they may say to themselves hundreds of times a day and they're not aware of, of it until they stop and think like, what am I saying to myself over and over again? What's running around being aware of our self talk, right? The idea that like we're not gonna, we're not safe or worried about one's children and safety or worried about I'm gonna get fired or there's not gonna be, there's not gonna be enough. You know, these things can come to us over and over again without us being aware of it. So. So the first thing is we must be aware of. And it may sound strange to say we could say something to ourselves hundreds of times over and not be aware of it. But absolutely that happens. So we have to be curious. What is it that I'm saying to myself in these quiet moments? And then what purpose is it serving? So if I keep telling myself that nothing's going to be okay, why am I saying that? Am I so afraid that nothing's going to be okay? That I'm trying to save myself from the shock of nothing being okay? Maybe, maybe, right, maybe that's going on. Am I just so afraid about something? You know, something happened in the past, someone was hurt or there was a loss. And now the intrusive thoughts tell me that things can't be okay. But what it's telling me is I haven't processed that loss. Like there is going to be a meaning. There is a meaning to intrusive thoughts, there always is. So we want to recognize them, we want to look for that meaning. And then there are strategies of what we can do. And they can range from thought redirection. Sometimes we think something thing because we're thinking it over and over again. And if we thought redirect it gives us greater control. Sometimes we diffuse some of the energy in it by understanding, you know, why we're thinking that thing and maybe taking measures. If I'm worried that, like, I'm not safe and things aren't going to be okay, maybe I'm letting myself be in an unsafe situation, right? And I need to change that situation. This is a place. Sometimes medicines can help. So there are a lot of things that we can bring to bear, but we first have to recognize that they're happening. Then running counter current to modern mental health often is. We have to actually understand why if we want that to change for the better, if we want to really get into the engine and figure it out, instead of just trying to polish the hood and not look at where that problem is coming from.
- [91:36]
Andrew Huberman
In keeping with commonly discussed themes out in the world that I question, are our dreams informative? And is there anything that we can know about ourselves, like patterns of thinking when we're awake that make our dreams more informative? For example, if I tend to think in analogy or parallel construction, and will the content of my dreams be more meaningful to me to understand through the lens of analogy or parallel construction destruction.
- [92:12]
Dr. Paul Conti
I'm not sure about the last point. I don't know, you know, I just don't know. And my clinical experience has been people's dreams can have a lot of meaning, you know, regardless of what kind of thinker they are. So someone who might be, for example, a very concrete thinker may have dreams that are really telling us a lot. Because what the unconscious mind wants to bring to the surface doesn't have a lot of room to do that. Right? Because that person is, you know, is thinking concretely and they're not thinking in analogy or parallel processes and they're not opening up their mind that way. So the dream is expressing something. There's no other way of getting to the surface. Or it may be people who are very expressive and cultivate routes of expression have informative dreams. I think the one factor is being curious about ourselves, because then we tend to remember more what went on inside of us. We tend to then either think through enough or write down and, and become curious about ourselves. So I think being curious about what our brains are telling us during sleep can be very helpful. I haven't known of another quality or characteristic of a person that really points strongly one way or another. And sometimes dreams don't have meaning or they don't have meaning we can clearly discern. So we have to be careful, we have to be respectful of how complex our minds are and sometimes we're looking to read something in to a dream or we want to see it as a marker of along the path where our thought is going. So we have to be very careful and very level headed. But if we approach that way it can be remarkable. Amazing what dreams can sometimes tell us and how something can come at allegorically in a person that is speaking to events that have unfolded across years in a large family system. And you find in a very simple way, an allegorical way the brain is capturing that. So curiosity about ourselves and our dreams can really give us a lot of insight. But we have to be. We have to be careful about it and be respectful of our own complexity.
- [94:10]
Andrew Huberman
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- [96:56]
Dr. Paul Conti
It has to start with understanding we have to be able to shine the light everywhere and look at what's true. So as I found myself saying many times, you know, you can say that was then, this is now, but your limbic system doesn't care, right? And our limbic system or the emotion systems in us, so we can say, well, the past is in the past, right? So I'm going to put it in the past. We can say that, but we're saying that through logical mechanisms in us. So if there's logical mechanisms in limbic or motion mechanisms, it's a simplification. But you know, we can look at the brain that way and say, well, the logic mechanisms are telling me that that, and they're declaring that it's true because the clock says that it's in the past. But the limbic, the emotion systems have a very different reality. It doesn't. They don't see it that way. They don't know that there's a clock or the calendar. So, so it's not that that was then, this is now A trigger in the now can make then now. So we want to be aware of the emotions that are going on inside of us and the strong emotional states that we can get into, right? Because they're telling, telling us something, you know, if something happens just in, in going through life and something that might even seem small from the outside, but I'm triggered or I'm cued in a way to be in a very deep emotional state of, of fear or vulnerability. Like, and I can map that to like I felt, you know, when X happened or like I felt 20 years ago when this happened, right? That's telling me something, right? It's Telling me time is not like a steel rod going, you know, in one direction. That's the law. Logic systems in the limbic systems. It's like a string, right? And something just made me feel right now exactly the way I took the string from now to this thing that happened, say, 10 years ago. And it put the two parts of the string together. That's real for me. And it's telling me there is emotion in something from that time that I have not worked through. Was I aware of that? Am I kind of aware of it? But I'm pushing it down under the surface. If I'm happy having strong emotions where I'm lost in the past while in the present, it's a marker of something. And very often we get afraid of that. We turn away from it. We're worried that it's telling us we're not healthy or we're worried we're going to go crazy. These are the things that people say when this happens. And so for us to know, whoa, that is not what's happening. This is normal and human. This is what will happen. These emotion systems that pay very, very strong attention, right, to negative things, to negative emotions, you know, fear and loss and terror and despair inside of us, they don't know the clock or the calendar. So they're going to bring to our present, right, things from our past that. That are then markers of saying, go dig there. Because that is not just in the past emotionally, it is still in your
- [99:40]
Andrew Huberman
present at this point in time. What. What do you think is the most efficient way to root out and heal childhood traumas?
- [99:50]
Dr. Paul Conti
Bringing compassionate curiosity to ourselves, where we just look at our past and we look at it without sort of having a dog in the fight, so to speak, where, like, I don't. I don't have to see it a certain way, right? I don't have to look at this. And sometimes people will say they have to make it less bad than it was because they. They feel otherwise. They won't be okay if they see all that was bad in it. You know, others might feel they have to look at the way worst of it because they're trying to anchor to things in their life now that they're not happy with and why that might be, right? So what it ends up doing is it brings so much emotion into it that we can't look in a way that has equanimity, right? Because we're living in the emotion now. We can't feel no emotion if we're thinking about difficult things that have happened to Us, but to be able to have that observation of self, of what is going on inside of. Of me, what do I feel about it? Where does my own mind want to go? Do I want to minimize it? Do I want to take it and dial it up so that it'll explain why I did X or why I didn't do Y? Right. So we're trying to observe our own motivations as we look at our childhood. And if we can gain more equanimity that way, then we can come to understanding this idea that we don't have to be afraid to go and do that and to say, okay, I can look at this and I see this part of my childhood or this person in my childhood, like that wasn't good or wasn't okay, or maybe it was even abusive. It was wrong. Right? We can look at that and say, okay, what am I going to do with that now? It doesn't define who I am. It doesn't determine any one single thing about me. If I can look at it with a calmness of mind and I can see the realness of how it's affected me right now I started talking about malleability, kind of where we started with malleability of ourselves and how we see ourselves, ourselves, then I can start to make progress. But we have to be able to look at ourselves. And very often we just don't want to do that because we don't bring compassion, we bring fear and criticism. But if we can just observe ourselves now, we can get in touch with what did happen in childhood. What am I making of that now? And then now maybe I might want to put those words outside of me in writing or in speech, or I might want to talk to a trusted other, or I might want to see a therapist about it. So it's taking the strong emotion that can keep us from understanding. Right. Which can get very complicated. Right. If we bring fear to our past, we're going to see it through the lens of fear. If I know I can look at my past and I don't have to be afraid, even if it raises difficult emotion in me, I'm much more likely to keep a calm presence of mind and then to learn some things about myself.
- [102:24]
Andrew Huberman
Do you think that people look back and think about good things that happened to them often and enough?
- [102:29]
Dr. Paul Conti
No. I mean, this is a clear no. Not often enough. The answer then is no. We tend to have a bias in us towards the negative, and we don't stop and think, hey, you know, I did that really well, or, you know, that didn't come out the way I wanted it to, but I learned from it. Or it didn't come out the way I wanted to, but I really tried. And we tend not to do that. And this bias towards the negative means we then start making the stories of ourselves about the negative. Or we feel like, well, if I look at what I've done right, you know, what's gone right in my life or what is going right, then I'll get complacent. Or like, what is there to be gained from that? I'm going to look at what's not the way I want it to be. And really, quite the opposite is true. Right? If we're looking at what's gone well in our life, at our successes and even things that weren't successes, maybe from the outside, but hey, I grew. I learned something. The school of hard knocks taught me something. Then we are bolstering ourselves, we're empowering ourselves by doing that. So, no, we should all do a lot more of that. And we wouldn't become complacent, right? We would become happier, healthier, more effective in our lives.
- [103:32]
Andrew Huberman
I think when we talk about looking backward, most of us, including myself, just kind of reflexively go to, okay, my family growing up, or elementary school, middle school, high school, so on. I have a colleague from the past, Larry Squire is a kind of a luminary and the field of memory. And it worked out a lot of stuff about human hippocampus. And when I was visiting UC San Diego some years ago, there were a bunch of photos on his office wall.
- [104:00]
Dr. Paul Conti
I was like, oh, cool. Like, I was looking at some meetings and things.
- [104:02]
Andrew Huberman
I figured if they're on his wall, I'm allowed to look at them. So, like, probing around, oh, there's so and so. And he said, you know, having photographs on your wall of times that were really good is very good for your adult memory, and it cues up emotional states for you. And this is where it got interesting, because he studied explicit and implicit memory, the ones that we're aware of versus the ones we're not aware of, just to be clear to people. And he said, even if you don't look at them deliberately each day when walking past them, if you have some implicit understanding about what those are, you're surrounding yourself with positive memories.
- [104:37]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yes. And.
- [104:38]
Andrew Huberman
And I thought, that's pretty cool. And he's not just somebody saying this, right? This wasn't some just thing thrown out into the world. This is arguably one of the people who knows more about human memory structure. Function than anybody in the last 200 years or so. That's cool. And so I said, so it should be. Party should be. And he just said, just things and people and experiences that you liked, you just put them up. And I said, do you find yourself looking at them on your wall? And he goes, yeah, from time to time. But he's like, I'm basically in a vessel of awesome memories and doesn't, you know, solve all my problems. But, but why wouldn't you? And I think that's such a cool idea. And these days we spend a lot of time looking at other people's experiences. A lot of news coming in and things like that. I wonder if we're just doing a lot less of this. And as a last point, I've always liked. I mean, who knows what's really going on behind the scenes? But I've always liked, you go into somebody's home and they, you walk down a stairwell or up a stairwell sometimes, and they've just got the wall lit with all these photos, not necessarily big families. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. And you're like, wow, like they're like posting all their experiences. And I, I think it's kind of cool. I don't tend to do it, but this is a version of thinking about and exposing oneself kind of basking in the past in a positive way. I think it's kind of, kind of cool. Maybe we should do more of it.
- [106:02]
Dr. Paul Conti
Absolutely. I think what he's talking about and what, what you're talking about here is actually being able to have control over the climate within us. Right. The structure of self, which is foundational, has at its foundation our unconscious mind. And the unconscious mind sets parameters for us. It's kind of the climate in which we're living. And if that climate is being predisposed, it's programmed to have a bias towards the negative because we're thinking negative thoughts. A lot of the time we're thinking about what we did wrong or what we should have done differently or what's going to go wrong. Then we're biasing the unconscious mind to throw to the surface the negative answer. Am I going to be able to do that? No. Right. We're biased towards the negative. Now. We don't know why. Why did I say no instead of yes? Right. That arises from the climate inside of me, which is my unconscious mind. So he's saying, hey, you can sort of pre program a bias into you towards the positive. And it's not a false bias. Those memories that are up on his wall or Real. Right. And whether he's looking at them or he's just kind of glancing and he walks by and there's a registration inside, you know, that he. That he's not even aware of. Right. He's. He is priming the unconscious mind to see the positive side of things. If he thinks, well, can I do that? Or yes, I can. Right. It changes things inside of him. And he's then able to exercise control over his own climate. And we can do that, too. And often what we're inadvertently doing. Doing is creating a climate of fear and a climate that is. That lacks confidence right inside of us because we're just looking at the negative all the time, whether it's about us or the world around us. And that's a reason why the title of that book is what's Going right. Because there's way more going right in all of us than there is going wrong, or we wouldn't be here. So why not prime ourselves with that the way that he was doing with the photo. Photographs on the wall? It absolutely makes sense. And it's not a Pollyanna concept. It's not saying, well, just look at what's going right. It's saying, no, this is consistent with what's real and true. And it's good for you, too. It helps you be effective in the world. It helps your mental health. Helping your mental health helps your physical health. Everything about this aligns with truth, and it sets us up to be in better control of our lives and to be on the front foot as we're approaching life.
- [108:21]
Andrew Huberman
I'm going to start printing out some photos and posting them because I don't do enough of that because of all the online stuff. I just. I have photos, but I just feel like that's. Just remember this Larry Squire thing now as we were talking about this. But I'm definitely going to do that.
- [108:35]
Dr. Paul Conti
I'm going to do more of it, too. It's a good reminder to do that.
- [108:38]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Our physical spaces, you know, to impact us so much. And yeah, there are a lot of. Lot of good memories and some hard ones, too, but put up the good memories, you know, it makes perfect sense to me why one would want to do that. Earlier we were talking about the sense of internal control that we feel, the sense of being on one's own side when we're pushing off against something. And I have to ask. I'm fascinated by scripture and by spirituality and notions of God and devil. I mean, if people are told. I'm not telling people what to believe, but we are told, many people are told that there are evil forces out there or perhaps even in us, and there are positive for forces out there and in us. Typically this is presented as God and devil. Just for sake of conversation, we'll stay with that. Do you think that it helps people choose better behaviors by being told and believing that there's a devil out there or inside of them to push against and therefore to be more on their own side? And of course, if it's internal, it's an aspect of their own side that is better than the bad decision maker in them. The way I'm wording, it's a little complicated, but I can't think of a simpler way to get there. If so, this seems like a brilliant idea, right? If it's true or not, it's not up to me to tell people. But one has to choose for themselves. But if the best way to change one's behavior is to be on one's own side, and the best way to be on one's own side is to not be be controlled by something else and to actively be resisting, that seems like this God devil thing is pretty rational.
- [110:21]
Dr. Paul Conti
I think maybe from the psychological perspective. Yes and no. I think if we get too over reductionist, there's a single force of good and there's a single force of evil. I think our major religious tenets, I think do see the world we live in is more complicated than that, that there's more than just a single force of good and a single force of evil. Because then I think what we tend to do is over identify either I want to be the good force, but I can't be good enough and I've done something wrong. And now I feel that I feel bad about myself because now I feel evil because I don't feel good enough. Or I feel that the evil in the world is clearly coming for me and it's directed for me, it's a force directed at me. We can tend to personify then good and evil and either over identify or feel that we are beleaguered. So if we over identify that we want to be good and we do something wrong, we feel bad that there can be a push towards self persecuting or really not understanding ourselves. If we oversimplify, if we think in a broader way, which I do think is consistent with spirituality, and I think it's consistent with the spirituality of major religious traditions and we see there are forces for good, there are pushes towards good in the universe around us and that includes within us. And there are Forces towards what is not good, towards looking the other way, for example, from someone's needs. Right. Not something that's pure evil. Like most of us aren't going to step on someone when they're down. But could we be tempted to look the other way? Right. If we see there's a lot of subtlety and needs nuance to how good and evil plays out in the world around us and inside of ourselves, then I think we're viewing ourselves and the world around us much more consistent with what religion says. And I think also where science guides us and is more and more guiding us as we have more and more knowledge and understanding now we feel that we're part of something greater than us. Right. There are forces that push towards good and forces that push towards evil, forces that push towards good construction and towards destruction. And we know how we want to be and where we want to be in that spectrum. We want to be generative and we want to be making the world better than we left and we want to be bettering ourselves now we're being, I think, much more true to the reality that we experience as opposed to being so reductionist that we see one good, one evil and where are we going to be in that? Polarized opposite opposites.
- [112:53]
Andrew Huberman
Is it a reasonable goal to want to be happy go lucky? Can I aspire to that and also be a productive person?
- [113:02]
Dr. Paul Conti
Unfortunately, no. Happy go lucky. To me it implies that there's not an awareness that hey, there are difficult things in the world and in fact there are difficult things in my own life. Right. I think happy go lucky implies that we're not aware of how difficult life can be or maybe life has at times been. So I don't think that you can be happy go lucky and I think it's good that you can't be because who wants to lose the grounding of the things that are real in life that might take away the go lucky part. Right? I think that you can be happy and I think that that's better than happiness. That includes some turning away or some forget. So if we take away the go lucky which is I think not desirable or possible, I do absolutely believe that you can be happy. Because what we want and I think there's studies that show us this. And just thinking about how humans have written in literature and philosophy across time of what do we mean when we say happy? We do want to find peace, contentment and the capacity for delight. We just want to be able to just be and not have, have so much going on inside or coming at us, right? We all say we just want a little bit of peace. I want to just sometimes walk around and be able to look up at the trees around me and see that the trees are pretty. For me, that's peace. And I think, yes, we can all find our way to peace. We may not be able to have it every moment. We don't have to have it every moment to be happy. So we need some peace and we need some contentment. And contentment means that there's awareness of our lives, of the things that have gone well and the things that. That haven't. So I can find contentment in my life. Not every moment, but I can find it even holding in my mind awareness of tragedies that have happened in my life or things that I haven't done or performed about the way I would have ideally wanted to. I can be aware of those things inside of me, but be aware of the whole arc of my life and feel good about it. You know, there was a thought about embracing our fate, embracing what we've created for ourselves. In early human, this was sort of written about of the faith that we create for ourselves. Can we embrace it and want to live it over and over again, even knowing the things in it that may be tragic or not Great? Yes, I think we can find peace. We can find contentment, and we can find the capacity for delight. We all had it as children, and if we don't have it now as adults, there's something we can do about that. We all need to be able to see something that just makes us light, light up. So I think you and all the rest of us, it may be different how we're going to find it and how much of it and how much time we live in happiness. But I think the answer for you and me and everyone else is we can find happiness because we can weave peace, contentment and delight into our lives.
- [115:51]
Andrew Huberman
So is it the case that the things that bring us delight make us for moments, feel very joyous, joyful? What I'm hearing is that has to be on a backdrop of some hard things and some strivings, that the goal is not complete peace and ease?
- [116:10]
Dr. Paul Conti
I think complete peace and ease isn't possible. Right. I think for most of us, life has brought difficulties for everyone in one way or another. And life does have its risks and its dangers and its vulnerabilities. So to think that we need to not have that anywhere in our minds in order to feel good, in order to be happy, I think tells us that we can't be happy being human. And oftentimes it leads us to say, well, I want to not worry about anything. I don't have anything weighing on me. And we start listing a bunch of things that sound like death when we're trying to talk about how we're going to be happy. And that's not what we're going for, for. Right. I do want to have times of peace when, like, I'm not thinking about bad things that have happened. I'm just at peace. And I'm looking at the tree or the bird sitting up in the tree or, you know, the log floating down the river, which, which made me, brought me a lot of peace not that long ago. So we can have these moments. It has to also be an awareness of our lives. And we have to at times be able to. To have in our minds the things that are not the way we want them to be and the things that are tragic and still feel good about our lives. And I think that's how we find real happiness. And we're not just looking for escapes because often the happy go lucky part is where we're looking for an escape. And it's kind of easy to feel that way sometimes if a person chooses an escape. And it could be even in a substance where, okay, it's felt good for a couple of hours, but at what cost, right? We're not looking for escape. What we're looking for is the ability to apprehend our own lives, feel enough in control of our own lives that I don't have to be really afraid of the future. I know that there may be scary things in them, but I'm going to meet them as best I can. I don't have to be afraid of the future. And I feel good about my life. I feel enough in control and I have enough understanding that I can say, okay, I'm good with me at the moment. And now that moment has become another moment and I'm moving forward and I'm doing the best I can because this sequence of moments are the only time I'm alive and I want to be really present for it.
- [118:12]
Andrew Huberman
There used to be a lot of articles written and you could still find this stuff online about, you know, regrets that people had close to the end of their life. And, you know, no one ever said they wish they spent more time at the office. I don't know. I know some people that loved their work and love their work. Did they love it to the, you know, to the detriment of their family? In some cases, yes. In a lot of cases, no. And so I don't like those lists. I think those lists serve as prompts for asking questions. Am I over invested in one area versus another? But I'm guessing you've spent some time with people who are close to the end of their life or at the end of their life.
- [118:53]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yes.
- [118:53]
Andrew Huberman
Have you ever encountered someone who really nailed it? You didn't think they were just telling you a story about how they really. They felt really good about how they had spent their mental life and their energies? We don't hear about those people very often. Yes, but we just don't. We hear the. Oh, you know, no one lies on their deathbed thinking. You know, we hear all the stuff you're not supposed to do. Are there any insights or just. And if you can't remember, just feelings that arrived for you when talking to these people that you genuinely believe, like if they didn't hit the bullseye, they were darn close.
- [119:29]
Dr. Paul Conti
Close, yes. Yeah.
- [119:31]
Andrew Huberman
What did that look like or feel like? And what did they say?
- [119:34]
Dr. Paul Conti
It makes me think actually of a real example in my own life where a family member much older than me, he would probably be 120, so if he were still alive. So he was very, very old at the time, who had really made something of himself. He didn't have much in the way of education, and he'd been a successful member of the community. He'd given back to the community. He had not no education. He started a bank and, you know, the bank became international. And he was so good and so helpful to the place he had come from. And he'd had real tragedies in his life. He'd lost a child. And when he learned that I was going to medical school a long, long time ago, he asked to see me. And he was in his. He would have been in his early 90s at the time. And he told me that he was happy with his life and that he realized that he could die at any moment. And he understood and he accepted that, that he tried to do the best that he could and he'd made something of himself and that there were sadness in his life and things he certainly wished would have been different, but that he was happy with his life and he was okay with dying. And he wanted me to know that he thought that was a good way to feel. Right. And that it was tempting to want to be so much and put so much pressure on yourself that you. That you could achieve a lot and not be able to feel good about it. And it's not something I forgot. I mean, I do think of that with fair frequency. And it made me think of that here I thought, that's a person who's lived a good life. And now I wasn't thinking it at the time, but he was clearly describing being able to have peace and have contentment, to feel good about his life, even knowing the things that were not great and then the capacity for delight. There were still things he was very, very excited about and his face would still light up. And I think that was probably earlier role modeling for me of, oh, that's. I'd like to feel that way. I'd like to be in my 90s and be able to say that. And it's really stuck with me.
- [121:32]
Andrew Huberman
That's awesome. I think we need to think a lot more about what's going right. What went right. We were talking about that today.
- [121:42]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yes.
- [121:42]
Andrew Huberman
What went right.
- [121:43]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yes. What's gone right in my life. What I've made go right in my life. Right. What hasn't gone right. And I showed up anyway. Right. That's part of what's going right.
- [121:52]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. We so easily default to the losses, which can also be beautiful in some sense sometimes. Sometimes. But we. We so easily go to, what's wrong, what's wrong, what's wrong. But I'm also hearing that happy go lucky and just thinking about what's going on.
- [122:08]
Dr. Paul Conti
Right.
- [122:08]
Andrew Huberman
That's not the answer either. It's just not. There has to be that contrast. This is what I'm hearing you saying today.
- [122:14]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yes. Yes, we have to be living an examined life in order to live intentionally. So, yes, we do have to look at ourselves, but the good news is that's okay. Most of us don't want to be dragged kicking and screaming to looking at ourselves, but that's just because we're afraid. And if we know, I'm not going to find anything there that's going to really shock me or probably not going to find any. Anything I'm not already well aware of. Even if I've, you know, even if I'm trying to hide it from myself. And then there's a process I can go through. Go. Go through. If I look at myself, I can use the knowledge to make things better, you know, then that's the simple goodness of it's okay to look at ourselves. We have to. But we also get to. Right. And. And that's how we're going to live good lives. It's how we live the best life we can get. And. And maybe we get to that point where we can look back and feel good about the choices that we've made and maybe feel okay about choices we've made, even if they haven't led to places where we've wanted them to be, that we can still embrace ourselves and the lives we've led.
- [123:10]
Andrew Huberman
If you don't mind, I just want to ask a couple of questions that are a little bit different than the ones we've been exploring. Was writing the book informative for you about the mind, about people, in a way that all the clinical work and certainly the podcast you've done, was it different? Did it teach you anything? And if so, are you willing to share one or two of those things?
- [123:32]
Dr. Paul Conti
I think writing about what we know helps us know it better. Right. Because part of knowing something is also being aware that we don't know everything about it. So then when we organize our thoughts and we say, I'm doing the best I can to put this down so other people can understand it, we just have to learn from that process. So, yeah, I do feel that I learned as of part. Part of writing it and incorporating clinical examples and just incorporating events from life. It helped me, I think, have a fuller view of. Oh. I do think that this says a lot about how we're being humans in the world and how our mind is structured, that there is this parallel to the body and we can bring it to the fore. And I felt very hopeful and optimistic that it holds together and it leads somewhere. So, yeah, I think I got a lot out of organizing my thoughts better and writing the book.
- [124:27]
Andrew Huberman
Last question, which is completely outside the realm of what we've been talking about. Has Lex Friedman texted you back? Because he hasn't texted me back in a while.
- [124:36]
Dr. Paul Conti
I have not heard from Lex Friedman.
- [124:39]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [124:39]
Dr. Paul Conti
Despite multiple efforts, there has been no response.
- [124:42]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, there are rumors that he's in Dagestan. There are rumors that he's in Austin. Kennedy and Lex, we love you and you don't have to text us back, but just maybe just throw up a sign that you're okay.
- [124:59]
Dr. Paul Conti
Or we're going to send a search party to Dagestan. Right.
- [125:02]
Andrew Huberman
And if you're not there, then we'll really be really in trouble. Dr. Paul Conti. This was awesome. I have to say I'm not going to repeat everything, I promise. But I have to say what I love so much about talking with you is that that explore these caverns of things, and then these gems just pop out this idea that we can be on our own side by seeing what we don't want to be controlled by. I know that's really gonna resonate with people because behavioral change is the hardest thing. And behavioral change, when people realize they're not changing, it's like a double whammy.
- [125:42]
Dr. Paul Conti
Right.
- [125:42]
Andrew Huberman
So that alone is, is enormous and, and the focus on what's right. I'm not trying to just repeatedly, you know, state the title of the book. I mean, what's Going right is just so vital. I think, especially in this time when you turn on the news and it's just like all these things that are challenging to the world, which certainly many of them need attention. But focusing on what's going right, what has gone right is just, it's so, it's so essential. Right know, and it's really what I've learned from you today is that it's really the lifeblood of what it is to be a joyous human being. With the caveat that we also have to address the challenges and if they're there, the traumas, and that there's really no other way. That's what I'm taking from this.
- [126:27]
Dr. Paul Conti
Yes. And that we can do that. And instead of thinking maybe that we can do that or we have to do that, we get to do that. That there should be an acceptance, excitement that we bring and enthusiasm and hopefulness that we bring to that process.
- [126:40]
Andrew Huberman
Well, thank you for being here today. Thank you for writing the book. It's going to serve so many people. And yeah, thank you for taking your training and your, your clinical experience and putting it out into the world. You know, you don't have any obligation to do that. And most everything that you know and that transpires in those sessions, everything would not serve the larger world to the extent that it does where you're not willing to get out here and there and share with people. So thank you. You're clearly one of the leading public educators on the mind and the self and navigating this life landscape. So thank you so much for coming here today and come back again, please.
- [127:21]
Dr. Paul Conti
You're very welcome. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to do so.
- [127:24]
Andrew Huberman
It's my pleasure. Thank you for joining me for Today's discussion with Dr. Paul Conti to learn more about his work and to find links to his new book, what's Going Right. Please see the links in the show. Note captions. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe to our YouTube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us. In addition, please follow the podcast by clicking the follow button on both Spotify and Apple and on both Spotify and Apple. You can leave us up to a five star review and you can now leave us a comment comments at both Spotify and Apple. Please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. If you have questions for me or comments about the podcast or guests or topics that you'd like me to consider for the Huberman Lab podcast, please put those in the comments section on YouTube. I do read all the comments. For those of you that haven't heard, I have a new book coming out. It's my very first book. It's entitled An Operating Manual for the Human Body. This is a book that I've been working on for more than five years and that's based on more than 30 years of research and experience and it covers protocols for everything from sleep to exercise to stress control, protocols related to focus and motivation, and of course I provide the scientific substantiation for the protocols that are included. The book is now available by pre sale@protographsbook.com there you can find links to various vendors. You can pick the one that you like best. Again, the book is called Protocols An Operating Manual Manual for the Human Body. And if you're not already following me on social media, I am Huberman Lab on all social media platforms. So that's Instagram X threads, Facebook and LinkedIn. And on all those platforms I discuss science and science related tools, some of which overlaps with the content of the Huberman Lab podcast, but much of which is distinct from the information on the Huberman Lab podcast. Again, it's Huberman Lab on all social media platforms and if you haven't already subscribed to our Neural Network newsletter, the Neural Network Newsletter is a zero cost monthly newsletter newsletter that includes podcast summaries as well as what we call protocols in the form of one to three page PDFs that cover everything from how to optimize your sleep, how to optimize dopamine, deliberate cold exposure. We have a foundational fitness protocol that covers cardiovascular training and resistance training. All of that is available completely zero cost. You Simply go to hubermanlab.com, go to the menu tab in the top right corner, scroll down to newsletter and enter your email. And I should emphasize that we do not share your email with anybody. Thank you once again for joining me for Today's discussion with Dr. Paul Conti. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science. Your next chapter in healthcare starts at Carrington College's School of Nursing in Portland. Join us for our open house on Tuesday, January 13th from 4 to 7pm you'll tour our campus, see live demos, meet instructors, and learn about our Associate Degree in Nursing program that prepares you to become a registered nurse. Take the first step toward your nursing career. Save your spot now at Carrington. Edu Events. For information on program outcomes, visit carrington. Edu Sci.