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Huberman Lab
Tools for Overcoming Substance & Behavioral Addictions | Ryan Soave
03:07:32
My guest is Ryan Soave, LMHC, a leading expert in addiction recovery with extensive experience helping people heal from all types of substance and behavioral dependencies.
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- [00:00]
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 Ryan Suave. Ryan Suave is a renowned expert in addiction treatment and trauma recovery. Ryan has spent decades on the front lines helping people overcome addictions to substances like like alcohol and various drugs, as well as behavioral addictions including gambling, video games and pornography. His approach combines evidence based protocols tailored to each person's unique family history and needs. During today's episode, we explore all aspects of addiction, including the relationship between addiction and trauma. Ryan shares insights from his extensive clinical work and provides clear zero cost protocols for effective recovery that leverage neuroplasticity, which is your brain's ability to change with intention and experience. We discuss and compare residential treatment programs, 12 step programs, self guided addiction recovery and more. If you or someone you know suffers from addiction, the information and tools offered in this episode ought to be of tremendous benefit to initiate and maintain sobriety from that behavior or substance. 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, this episode does include sponsors. And now for my discussion with Ryan Suave. Ryan Suave, welcome.
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Ryan Suave
I'm glad to be here. Thank you for having me.
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Andrew Huberman
You're the guy that people call reach out to cry to when everything comes crashing down. That's kind of your thing.
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Ryan Suave
Yeah.
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Andrew Huberman
And you have this incredible gift really to orient people in time and space when that sort of thing is happening. And you do this for men, women, teens, kids, adults, families. You've pretty much seen it all. Although I'm sure there's more to come. I would love for you to just explain to people listening what addiction is and how you see it show up in people's lives. I know that you tend to get things like a trauma surgeon would see the human body hemorrhaging and in need of great support. But how do you think about addiction?
- [02:36]
Ryan Suave
First, I'd like to make a little bit of a distinction. You know, we're going to talk about addiction when we look at the dsm, the diagnostic manual that we use for diagnosing psychological disorders. Not really addiction as a diagnosis. That's not super important necessarily because we can talk about it in the term of addiction, but you know, we can look at people and look at biological, psychological and social factors and make a diagnosis to see that they've got a substance use disorder, an alcohol use disorder, whether it's moderate or severe or they're dependent on it and not to give people an out. But not all people that show up with an alcohol use disorder for a point in time are necessarily an addict. They may not be forever. It might been a life circumstance that kind of brought them there. That said, someone that at a point in time in their life could have an alcohol use disorder or substance use disorder, they're probably prone to that, and they probably shouldn't continue down that path or gamble with it. Um, so talking about addiction in general, I like to broaden that definition to really, you know, question I'll ask people is, does it have you or do you have it? Is it driving you and your behaviors? Are you really leaning on it in a way that that's your. Your medicine? Because I. I don't really see addiction as the problem. You know, addiction is the solution. Whatever they're addicted to is the solution to some underlying stressor. You know, I think as humans, when we're uncomfortable, when we're experiencing pain, our kind of immediate reaction is to get out of that. And when that stress becomes really big, we're going to look for the things that are going to impact us a lot quicker. You know, taking a drink, using a drug. Now, once people start doing that, depending on what it is, you know, if it's heroin or fentanyl, they could become physically addicted to it very quickly, or alcohol over time. But I think the definition can be expanded to a lot of other things, maybe even things that seem mundane. And we can have addictive behaviors at different points in our life and maybe have the same behavior that sometimes is addictive and sometimes isn't. This is very mundane, but sometimes I'm binge watching Netflix because I'm on a plane and don't have anything to do, or I'm sick and I can't get out of bed. And other times I might have a really stressful day or have something going on that I don't want to deal with, and I end up watching TV too late, and then I don't sleep. And now is that a addiction that I need to get treatment for or be pulled away from my family for? Probably not, but it's. I think in talking about addiction, we want to understand, you know, what is it that people are using, whether it's a substance or a behavior, and why are they using it? You Know, while I say it's addiction is not the problem, it's the solution, it's a solution that becomes very problematic for people. And, you know, you will know this better than, than I will be able to explain it better than I would. But, you know, they get a benefit in their brain and body for feeling the sense of relief that they'll feel when they use the substance. You know, one of the doctors who initially supported the people who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, his name was Dr. Silkworth, and he wrote this opinion and he said men and women drink essentially because they like the effect produced by alcohol. I believe that effect is relief. So people are looking for some sort of relief. And the question has to be, I think, when we're talking about addiction, what is it that they're looking for relief from?
- [06:10]
Andrew Huberman
So when somebody comes to you, or someone or in some cases is brought to you, who's in the throes of addiction, what's your first line of attack, so to speak, Are you focused on what the underlying stressor is or you're trying to stabilize them? I mean, these are people who sometimes, and sadly I've seen this in my friends, fortunately, who are now sober, but people wrap the truck around a tree at 7 o'clock in the morning, haven't drank a bottle of wine and taking a Xanax or jail or worse. Right. And so when somebody comes in, what are the first questions that you're asking and what's the goal?
- [06:53]
Ryan Suave
Let's talk about the most acute first. So I serve as a chief clinical officer for Guardian Recovery. We do treatment in different states. You know, we serve thousands of people a year and we have medical detoxes that we start with. So if somebody needs to be detoxed from alcohol or drugs, you know, they're going to come in. We're not going to start asking questions about what the underlying stressor is. You know, we're going to first do medical assessments, nursing assessments. Sometimes we have to send them to the ER if they're, you know, if they're in dire need or they're so acute that they can't even be in the facility that we have, we're going to just get them physically stabilized, you know, and as we're getting them physically stabilized, you know, the thing with addiction is a lot of people just say stop. But for people that just stop and assuming they're not in danger, like in alcohol, if you just stop, you could, you know, you can have seizures and die. You know, other drugs, if you just stop, it can be Extremely uncomfortable. But even if they went to a detox and were able to stop, you know, their life doesn't generally get better right away. In fact, a lot of times it gets worse. Now maybe it's better in the fact that they're not about to die. You know, they don't have these physical symptoms, but emotionally, you know, they've been using this substance or this or alcohol as a. As a medicator. Now all of a sudden, the medicine's gone, you know, and they've got to deal with life, and so they can actually feel a lot worse right when they come in. So first, what we're going to do is really understand what's going on with them biologically so that we can make sure they're safe. And then as we can support them over the days that they start, you know, becoming a little more comfortable, their. Their. Their physical conditions start to stabilize, then we can start to really understand what's going on with them in their environment. You know, what is their pattern of use, you know, when do they use. What are the. What are the effects that it's having in their life? You know, because we want to understand how it's playing out everywhere, like I said, biologically, psychologically, and socially, and really get a clear picture of who this person is, you know, and sometimes people come in more motivated than others. You know, sometimes they get brought to us, like you said. And I've seen it work either way that someone who comes in and says, I need help, you know, I'm willing to do anything, that they end up not following through with their treatment. And other people that come in fighting and screaming end up, you know, doing very well over time. I actually like it when people come in in that kind of struggle. I think, you know, the more people kind of struggle with something up front, it's kind of like the. You pull an arrow back, you know, the further you can pull the bow back and hold it, the more tension in it, the farther it's going to fly. And I. I really like when we have people who say, I'm not going to do this or I'm gonna leave. You know, they're actually telling us something about themselves and where they are, and we can be there with them in that struggle. You know, sometimes people come in and they're just like, checking the boxes and they're going to be a good student and everything's fine because they're not drinking anymore. And then we're never able to really get to kind of the causes and conditions of it. You Know, when they're in a treatment setting, we'll have them for anywhere from, you know, seven days to 90 days. You know, we like to keep them, you know, and understand, you know, what's going on with them so we can meet them at their different stages and the environment. We kind of try to create a microcosm of their social universe so that, you know, they can experience some stressors while we're not creating the stressors, but we're having them communicate with their families. We're having them face some of the things they don't want to face. And we have a saying that says, you know, treatment can't really begin till the crisis occurs. And what that means is more of the internal or existential crisis. If someone's coming in, going, well, I'm great, everything's great, you know, why were they, maybe things are feeling great right now, but why were they drinking or using in a way that was harming themselves, others ripping their lives apart? Sometimes people will say addiction is a choice. I don't buy that all the time, but people will say that. And what I would say to that is, even if it is a choice, even if people could wake up and say, I'm going to do this or I'm not, why would they continue to choose a life that they're hurting themselves and others? So while they're in treatment with us, we want to start to really understand who they are, start to understand what is happening in their environment. And then as they stabilize more physically, and then they stabilize emotionally as we can start to raise their capacity to experience difficult emotions. I mean, I say this all the time to my clients. What I really do with them is help them learn how to feel bad. You know, we don't put that on the website because no one's going to come to us to say, how can I feel really bad? But I think that's, that's at the core of it. You know, how can we build a distress tolerance so that they can face discomfort, they can face pain and not choose the thing that gives immediate short term relief that's going to end up hurting them and those around them to allow them to really lean in to whatever that discomfort is. And when people are able to be available for the depths of discomfort, then they really become more available for the heights of joy and satisfaction in life. So we start to build that capacity so that then we can start looking at the beliefs that maybe the limiting type beliefs that have been driving them that are often set from earlier on in their life and the way that they were shaped, you know, and that's often what we talk about as trauma. Not always a big event that happened on a single day, although that does occur. But the shapings that people had in their life that were the adapt, you know, we're adaptive. People are very adaptive. And, you know, kids, as they're in their formative years, will develop strategies to live life that adapt them in a way that they can survive the environments that they're in. And, you know, if that adaptation, which was appropriate in their family, their school, their environment, whatever it was, maybe all of those was something that was more toward like a survival response, like a fight or flight type response. And now that's never resolved in some way. And in a way, and then later in life, they're still applying these adaptive strategies in situations that it's not appropriate for.
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Andrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge our sponsor, BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out entirely online. Now, I personally have been doing therapy weekly for well over 30 years. Initially, I didn't have a choice. It was a condition of being allowed to stay in school. But pretty soon I realized that therapy is an extremely important component to one's overall health. In fact, I consider doing regular therapy just as important as getting regular exercise, which of course, I also do every week. There are essentially three things that great therapy provides. First of all, it provides a good rapport with somebody that you can trust and talk to about pretty much any issue with. Second of all, it can provide support in the form of emotional support and directed guidance. And third, expert therapy can provide useful insights, insights that allow you to better not just your emotional life and your relationship life, but of course, also the relationship to yourself and your professional life and to all sorts of goals. Better help makes it very easy to find an expert therapist with whom you resonate with and that can provide you those three benefits that come from effective therapy. Also, because better help allows for therapy to be done entirely online, it's super time efficient and easy to fit into a busy schedule. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, you can go to betterhelp.comhuberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp.comhuberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods affect your health by giving giving you real time feedback on your diet using a continuous glucose monitor. One of the most important factors in both short and long term Health is your body's ability to manage glucose. This is something I've discussed in depth on this podcast with experts such as Dr. Chris Palmer, Dr. Robert Lustig, and Dr. Casey Means. One thing that's abundantly clear is that to maintain energy and focus throughout the day, you want to keep your blood glucose relatively steady without any big spikes or crashes. I first started using levels about three years ago as a way to try and understand how different foods impact my blood glucose level levels. Levels has proven to be incredibly informative for helping me determine what food choices I should make and when best to eat relative to things like exercise, sleep, and work. Indeed, using levels has helped me shape my entire schedule. I now have more energy than ever, and I sleep better than ever. And I attribute that largely to understanding how different foods and behaviors impact my blood glucose. So if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a CGM yourself, go to Levels Link Huberman. Right now, Levels is offering an additional two free months of membership when signing up. Again, that's Levels Link spelled, of course. L I N K slash Huberman to get the additional two free months of membership. The thing you said earlier that's ringing in my brain is, does it have you or do you have it? And I think for people listening and watching, I think this is a really important distinction. And maybe you could just elaborate on how one starts to answer that question. Because these days we hear, you know, people are addicted to social media, people are addicted to sugar, people are addicted to, you know, all sorts of things and online shopping, you know, and on and on. Let's just set aside alcoholism for the moment because that's a unique case where, as you mentioned, immediate withdrawal can cause death. And it has its own kind of unique features. But. But for everything else, like, if somebody out there is listening and they're like, well, you know, I have a hard time clicking off of social media, even though I know I need to sleep, I need to study or have a hard time disengaging from video games, I think is a common one in a lot of young people. How do they know if they're addicted? Is there a litmus test? I mean, could we test ourselves as individuals? Like, can I go an afternoon without it? Can I go a week without it? Is that the test?
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Ryan Suave
I think that's a great test. I mean, probably more than an afternoon or a week, but, you know, can I quit for a month? And, you know, if you're, if, when you're, when you've stopped, if all you're thinking about is either doing it or when you're doing it. All you're thinking about is, how can I. How can I stop doing this? That's a pretty good indication that it has you, you know, and, you know, you also have to look at, like, what are the things that it's impacting in your. In your life. And that's one of the things we can help people kind of orient to. They might think that if it's somebody that comes to us at their family saying this is a huge problem, they may not see it yet or they may be avoiding it. We call that denial. But a lot of times there's something deep down where they know that I'm really disengaged from life. I'm lonely. I don't have the quality of relationships. I'm not able to be motivated to do the things that I want to do.
- [18:08]
Andrew Huberman
What if it still feels good to them, however? Like, family isn't saying, look, kid isn't getting their schoolwork done, but it's kind of outrageous. Four hours a day playing video games, three hours a day. That might not even seem like that much to a lot of people, but parents can see the opportunity cost of that. This is time that kid isn't running around and getting exercise. This is time that is eating into sleep. This is time that could be spent studying. So maybe grades haven't cratered yet. And we live in the quote unquote, American dream model where kids say, well, so and so makes millions of dollars every year playing video games. So I'm actually on the path. I think you see that fairly often these days. Right?
- [18:51]
Ryan Suave
Yeah. I'll relate it back to drugs for a second. You and I are the same age, and you probably remember the, you know, this is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. When they crack the, you know, showed the egg. This is your brain.
- [19:00]
Andrew Huberman
And yeah, disrespectful to eggs, which I'm a big fan of. But.
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Ryan Suave
And then this is your brain on. Well, it did call the egg a brain, so that was pretty.
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Andrew Huberman
Oh, that's true. You're right.
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Ryan Suave
Your logic is impeccable. Thank you. And this is your brain on drugs. And it showed the fried egg. I think that was a terrible example for kids because most of the time when people do drugs the first time, it doesn't feel like that. It feels good, it feels great. You know, it's over time when you keep doing that, that it, you know, especially, you know, a kid that doesn't have all of the responsibility and the things in life that they might have or want to have later on. You know, they're not gonna, they're not gonna see that that's a problem necessarily.
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Andrew Huberman
And some of their heroes are very public about the fact that they like smoke a ton of high THC weed. I mean that, when I was growing up, that was associated with lack of agency and kind of being a quote unquote burnout was the idea. Nowadays there are just as many examples of people that smoke a lot of weed, are vocal about that and by all external measures are doing very well, perhaps better than most.
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Ryan Suave
It also wasn't as highly concentrated when we were kids. I mean, this is pretty intense these days and can add some really long lasting effects on people. And there's some people that it's not gonna affect in the same way other, you know, it does others. Some people are gonna be able to smoke that amount of THC or vape it or however they're doing it. Right. I mean the delivery methods are very. It's crazy these days because, you know, people used to have to roll a joint, go behind the store. You know, it was like an event to go do that now.
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Andrew Huberman
And you had to break the law.
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Ryan Suave
You had to break the law. Now it's everywhere. It's in a candy. I mean, it's, it's candy, right? It's gummy, gummy bears.
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Andrew Huberman
Wild.
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Ryan Suave
It's really wild. And you know the thing with those people that are succeeding at it, like when we really look at that, like what, what percentage of the people is it? Is that right? It's a very, very small percentage. Of course kids are going to look at that and say, well, I can do that. You know, I would, I've had a conversation with my teenage son about that, you know, and even if he's playing, if they're playing games four hours a day, I imagine those guys that win these video game or they're the YouTubers that are making all kinds of money. I mean, they're approaching it like a, like a pretty intense job. You know, they're really working at it. But you know, we don't want to take away that imaginative imagination and creativity from kids. But you know, it's our job as parents to look and see. You know, the kids aren't going to see what's happening. Their kind of timing is like now or not now. They're not really looking too far into the future. And that's, that's a beautiful thing about being a kid as well. It's, it's our job to put those guardrails on. And as parents really understand what are the things that may impact them over the long term. But we also have to understand, you know, it's easy for me to look at. You know, I had video games when I was a kid, you know, but it was Nintendo and Sega. Sega. And you know, it was not as. It didn't pull you in as much and we were outside all the time. It was a little bit, you know, it was a different. We'd come in and play video games at night, you know. You know, now these things really pull you in and you're interactive and they communicate with other people. You know, they. A lot of kids have their social connection out of playing video games. I actually had a, a mentor once who was involved in a leadership program with all these other adults and they did their leadership program. They were all over the world and they would meet in, I think it was World of Warcraft and play together. And they had different things that they would do to work through their. Whatever they were doing in the leadership program. So there is some benefits to it for people. You know, these kids can really connect with each other when they. And especially through the pandemic, this, this happened. I'm going to come back to what I was going to say about. As a parent, it's easy for me to look at and say, well, there's too much social media, it's too much video games, it's too much this. You know, it would be great if all that stuff was taken away. Well, guess what? It's not going anywhere. You know, and I can't really relate to it in the same way that my kids will relate to it. You know, I have younger kids that I have no idea what's going to be there when, when they're of age to look at screens or be in the world or communicate with others. But, you know, it's our job as parents to look at and get to know our kids in a way that we can see what are the things that are gonna benefit them and what are the things that aren't. You know, I, I don't think every kid shouldn't play video games.
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Andrew Huberman
No, neither do I. I think that the contrast with the video games that you played when you were younger is. And then you mentioned going outside. I think. I realize this is not a strict definition of addiction by any means, but if something in the electronic sphere makes, quote, unquote, real life, underwhelming, I don't know if that means it's addictive, but it certainly means it Has a gravitational pull. Right. And we can set this as kind of a pillar for context when we talk about pornography, for instance. Right. So when, I mean, there's a saying, right. A picture is worth a thousand words. And I would say as a vision scientist that a movie or even a reel or a clip on TikTok is worth a billion pictures. You know, never before have we been exposed to so many movies with so much richness in sound and eyes. You know, the more times we see eyes and you've got all this elaborate context. So whether or not you're talking about pornography, whether or not you're talking about video games, you know, the sort of sensory richness of it. Richness feels like the wrong word, right. But the kind of like the amount of sensory information coming in through any one of those very brief experiences in a moment, it doesn't necessarily overwhelm the brain. Clearly the brain can handle it. But then you walk out into a landscape like a park with a couple basketball hoops and some paint drawn on the concrete and a ball and it looks boring. It's the difference between eating as a kid a hot fudge sundae, banana split, and then being offered a plate of broccoli. You have to know a lot about nutrition and care, a lot about the long term effects of nutrition on the body to not think that the hot fudge sundae is the better option. I mean, it just makes sense from a neural perspective. So I wonder whether or not this definition of addiction or habit forming behaviors or dependence could be expanded to include, you know, the ratio of kind of gravitational pull versus, you know, how it makes other things seem. Right. And obviously, you know, I don't believe that we should remove technology. I think technology is wonderful. But I could imagine that for a young brain and for an older brain. Right. I mean, can I just ask you, do you find any adults or do you encounter many adults who are addicted or have a habit of excessive online shopping? I mean, it's so easy to buy stuff online. I mean, just the barriers to entry are so low.
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Ryan Suave
Yeah, absolutely.
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Andrew Huberman
So does that make sense like this contrast between richness and dullness that exacerbates the dullness the more that you engage in some behavior?
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Ryan Suave
Yeah, And I want to be clear, you know, while I said it's not necessarily a problem for everyone, I believe it can. Absolutely. The video games as an example, can absolutely be addictive. I mean, there's been studies that have shown and that, you know, it's impacting the brain in the same way as a lot of drugs are. You know, I've worked with, with kids who were. Video games were taken away and they were like, and their WI fi was shut down and they were somehow stealing some console and like in the bushes near another home, somehow pirating their wifi to play the video games during the day.
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Andrew Huberman
I mean, it's like an addict, like.
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Ryan Suave
A crack addict, you know, or you know, in the street, a kid like, you know, it was probably 15 or 16 year old kid.
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Andrew Huberman
So they took away his, his WI fi. Yeah, and video games and he's hiding. I'm chuckling, but it's terrible. I mean, you can only imagine what's going on inside that kid that they can't, as you've mentioned before, handle the discomfort of this thing. That's like their medicine. It's the thing that makes them feel good.
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Ryan Suave
And we have these adolescent treatment centers and these kids come in and they'll be very dysregulated. Even if they're, you know, they've been off of drugs or usually it's a lot of marijuana these days and you know, they start to clear up from that. But they're extremely dysregulated, agitated, reactive, and you know, after sometimes three, four weeks, we start to see a completely different person. And one of the things I'm convinced is that they haven't been with their phones, they haven't been on social media, they haven't been playing video games. And I'm not saying the answer is to take that away, but you can start to see the impact that that has on them. You know, they're so anxious about not being connected in that way or being, I would imagine, in that universe that you're talking about. That's hot fudge sundae all the time. Like, who doesn't want to eat hot fudge sundae all the time?
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Andrew Huberman
Well, and then hot fudge sundae doesn't seem to taste so good.
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Ryan Suave
No, then you need more hot fudge sundae.
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Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I mean, that's the dopamine dynamic stuff that, thank goodness, Anna Lemke, author of Dopamine Nation, made so clear that those big fast inflections in dopamine very quickly lead to smaller and smaller peaks in dopamine from the same behavior or substance. And then the trough of low that comes after is just immense. In fact, there's just what I. The other day, before I forget, there was a post on AXA of a guy, he sold his company for a billion plus dollars and he was expressing the extreme depression of not knowing what to do. With himself now. And everyone will say, oh, poor guy. Right. I don't illustrate that point to make a point about billionaires or not. But it wasn't the pursuit of pleasure. It was the pleasure of pursuit that drives dopamine. He gets the goal. There's no more pleasure from pursuit because he's not pursuing anything anymore. And you think, how could that possibly be? He can buy anything he wants. But the whole point is that dopamine isn't deployed for the reward. It's deployed for the pursuit of the reward. So that trough is a very real thing.
- [29:28]
Ryan Suave
Yeah. And in the trough, you're still not gonna go back to a plate of broccoli. You're gonna keep going after, you know, the hot fudge sundae feeling, even though the hot fudge sundae isn't giving it to you anymore.
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Andrew Huberman
Well, that's an extremely important point that people are chasing a feeling. I had a friend who, thankfully is a recovered addict. I obviously won't disclose who this is. A former methamphetamine addict, very successful in life, but had a serious meth issue. Got sober and contacted me not long ago requesting some support because they were thinking about abusing Adderall, and we had a conversation. Fortunately, they didn't do this. He's doing great. Goes to meetings, has a sponsor, is taking care of that. But the description of why they were pursuing this idea of abusing Adderall was this recollection of a feeling. You know, he kept talking about. Like, there's. I just remember that feeling. It was. You know, and everything felt. And he was talking about something that I can't relate to. Cause I've never done meth. Have no intention of doing meth. But his. It's almost like it was a. Like a. Like a love affair that had been spectacular. That he was missing this person, but it was a thing. Yeah, it sounded like love. Like, I missed that feeling.
- [30:46]
Ryan Suave
I think that's a very important point because I see people as having spiritual relationships with alcohol and drugs. You know, I mean, they use them as something that makes them feel connected, they feel whole. I mean, what do we. What is alcohol called? Spirits. You know, that it's something that can allow them, even if for a period of time, to feel the way that maybe they want to feel or not feel the way that they don't want to feel.
- [31:19]
Andrew Huberman
You know, can we dissect that a little bit? To feel the way they want to feel versus not feel the way they don't want to feel. I remember reading Augustine Burroughs book Dry He's a recovered alcoholic. And there's this paragraph in there where he talks about his first drink of alcohol. And I'm going to get the exact wording wrong, but it went something like, you know, on that first drink, he felt he's in the first person. He's saying, I felt it mesh with my blood and my physiology, and my physiology felt correct for the first time. And I thought, oh, my goodness. Like, I certainly don't have that relationship to alcohol, but I have friends who are serious alcoholics, fortunately now sober, who describe alcohol that way. From the first drink, it was like, this is. They. They say, this is me. It's like they're finding themselves.
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Ryan Suave
Yeah.
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Andrew Huberman
And that's very different than avoiding the way they felt previously.
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Ryan Suave
Yeah.
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Andrew Huberman
Most of them didn't pick up a drink the first time because they were trying to find that person or because they were trying to avoid something else. It was because there was booze at a party or booze at home.
- [32:24]
Ryan Suave
Even the people that like, like him, that are talking about alcohol like that. And I've heard this story thousands of times, you know, from people that never read that book, you know, that that's how they felt. They. They couldn't have been using it most of the time to get away or to move away from how they're feeling, because they didn't even recognize that's how they're feeling. That was just the world they were in. You know, we're. Especially a lot of times, this is kids and adolescents who. That's the first time they're drinking. And, and they, they didn't realize that they could feel the way that they're feeling. You know, these are. The way that we grow up are just the waters we swim in. We don't often know that there's a difference between who we are and how we can be. And to be able to. A lot of people, the first time, even the first time, they'll do it. And it's not always like that for everybody. Right. Some people just are using it socially and then later on when there are stressors, realize that, you know, I can use this to medicate as well. But the ones that are having the relationship that you just described is, you know, they didn't even know. They had no idea that life or their emotional state or their physiological state could be different than it was.
- [33:38]
Andrew Huberman
So how do you persuade somebody that it's a good idea to take that away from themselves? Because I imagine some of the first thoughts that go through their mind include, I can't imagine Life without that feeling.
- [33:55]
Ryan Suave
You know, St. Augustine said, and I'm not going to get it exactly right, but he said something like, you know, well, living depends on reordering your loves. And he was talking about people living with a disordered life. And the question it begged is, what are you loving the most? And his argument, I think was, whatever you're loving the most becomes your God, your higher power. You know, if. If I'm loving money the most, if that's the most important thing to me, then money is my higher power. The thing is, money will fail me, right. Like you just talked about, like, I could. The guy could get a billion dollars and want to kill himself. Right. Or if I put my relationship at the, you know, the. If I. If I said, you know, the most important thing to me is that my wife is happy, you know, and that's my most important thing. That sounds great, but she's not going to be happy all the time. And when she is, I'm going to feel great. When she's not, I'm going to feel like I'm doing something wrong. You know, are we making sex? The most important thing are we making, you know, and his argument was, love God first and then do as you do as you will. Like, find the highest power. Because these powers don't. That we're putting up there, like money, sex, food, all things that aren't problematic, we need them. They only become problematic when they're problematic. Right. When they're. When we're making them that thing that's going to solve our problems.
- [35:23]
Andrew Huberman
What about kids? I know a number of people who are excellent parents who are super devoted to their kids. And they say, like, my kids are my life. My kids are everything. That might just be language. Right. They could also have a relationship to a higher power. But do you see people suffering by virtue of overemphasizing their kids or their. You mentioned spouse, but as a priority in their life.
- [35:53]
Ryan Suave
Yeah. And it's great that you made a distinction about just being language because, you know, people can say those things like, my kids are very important to me, probably I would say, you know, one of the most important things in my life is to be a father. Right. But if the energy in the house again and again is that my kids are my life, what a burden that is for that child. That means that that child might, in those instances, show up in a way that they need to be happy, they need to perform, they need to. They can't show sadness in order for their. It becomes their job to make their Parents. Okay.
- [36:35]
Andrew Huberman
And can you imagine that kid later, grown up, looking for a partner and the expectation on that partner or the expectation on themselves just based on that role, internalization of that they're the center of the universe, or that maintaining this beam of love from the other person is essential, or else it feels life threatening.
- [37:01]
Ryan Suave
Yeah. I mean, it's a covert form of abuse to use our children to meet our needs. You know, we're there to meet their needs, depending on their age.
- [37:10]
Andrew Huberman
Right.
- [37:10]
Ryan Suave
I mean, we're gonna. You have an infant, you're their highest power. You have to do it. They can't survive without you. You know, they can't feed themselves. And you carry them all the time, right. And then, you know, eventually they start crawling and walking and you carry them more than you don't. And then eventually they're walking all the time and you're carrying them just a little bit and, you know, then you're not carrying them anymore. If you're still carrying them all the time when they're 16 or 17, that's a. That, that's a. That's a problem. But when we're using them to meet our needs again and again, now it becomes their job to care for us. And most parents that do this, I see this all the time, are not setting out and saying, I'm going to use my child to make me happy. They really have the best intentions, and it probably comes out of however they were shaped growing up and how their family was shaped growing up. But, you know, I see this, you know, with my kids. You know, sometimes I come home, two that are six and three, and I come home from work and they're like, daddy, Daddy, Daddy. And they're running to me and they jump on me and it feels amazing. And other times I walk in and like, they've got a show on or something, and I'm like, hey, kids. And they're like, they don't even say anything. Now. That doesn't feel great. But what I know is that doesn't mean they don't love me. Right? If every day I came home and they were like, in the middle of this and I forced them to get up and give me a hug, you do this once, it's not going to be a problem necessarily. But if I did that every day and now I need them to give me a hug in order for me to feel safe and comfortable coming in the home or just feel happy, they're going to start having the job of, we got to hug daddy in order for him to have A nice evening. That's a big job for a little kid to have. And I see that play out a lot in the people that come to us, in that they've unconsciously been assigned these roles in childhood. Like, you know, they're the hero of the family. You know, we can use those. The terms or the scapegoat, or they're the. You know, but really, what was the job that they were given? You know, it's my job to take care of mom and dad. You know, maybe they were in the middle of the relationship, or, you know, mom and dad are fighting all the time. But kids are often assigned these roles early on, and then they don't know how to shed them later on, and so then they just use that role later in life. I mean, my field is full of people who are assigned roles, you know, therapists and nurses and things like that. You know, we want to care for people, but it's hard to parse some of that stuff apart, you know, because we don't want to blame parents for how their kids end up. But when we're doing work with our clients, we want to understand the patterns that were developed, not to blame them, but to start understanding what were the systemic challenges in the family system so that we can, you know, develop and deploy systemic solutions for them.
- [40:04]
Andrew Huberman
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Drinking Element dissolved in water makes it extremely easy to ensure that you're getting adequate hydration and adequate electrolytes. To make sure that I'm getting proper amounts of hydration and electrolytes, I dissolve one packet of element in about 16-32oz of water when I wake up in the morning and I drink that basically first thing in the morning. I also drink Element dissolved in water during any kind of physical exercise that I'm doing, especially on hot days when I'm sweating a lot and therefore losing a lot of water and electrolytes. They have a bunch of different great tasting flavors of Element. They have watermelon, citrus, et cetera. Frankly, I love them all. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drinkelement.comhuberman to claim a free Element Sample pack with the purchase of any Element drink mix. Again, that's drinkelement.com huberman to claim a free sample Pack. There's this thing that happens around any conversation about addiction where at some point, any logical listener starts to say, okay, well. And it sounds like everyone's addicted to something. And it's so hard to stay right in the, you know, between the lane lines of healthy and healthy. Because, yeah, I like. I'm not speaking for myself because I'm not a drinker, but, like, I like a drink at the end of the day. It helps me relax, makes me a better parent, makes me a better spouse, and I like it. Is it my spiritual higher power? No, but I like it. Would I take 30 days off? Prefer not to, but I'm not addicted, you know? But then you think, okay, well, a kid that likes playing video games, it lets him connect with his friends. He's doing it a bit excessively, but is he addicted? You know, okay, obviously, if somebody. If it's harming people's profession, it's harming their relationships in very overt ways, then we place into the category of addiction. But there's this thing that happens in these conversations around addiction where people start, go, okay, it sounds like I can't really enjoy anything that much because then it takes over everything. Like, I'll come clean. I've worked anywhere from 10 to 16 hours a day, five to six days a week on average since I was 19. Am I a work addict? Workaholic? Maybe. But I love my work, and it's done wonderful things for my life. And I have a life that I wouldn't trade for anything. Did I miss out on a lot of things? Probably. But I also love the life I've lived and that I continue to live. And a lot of that comes from the relationships and experiences I've had through work.
- [44:52]
Ryan Suave
Right.
- [44:53]
Andrew Huberman
So, you know, at some point, this is where diagnostic criteria become handy. But I do like the fact that we have a litmus test now. Could you take 30 days away from it and not completely lose your mind? Or could you just take 30 days away from it? If I didn't work for 30 days, that would be very difficult for me, but I could do it. So how should we frame this thing of addiction so that people can ask themselves, like, do I have it or does it have me?
- [45:21]
Ryan Suave
Yeah, I mean, I think, how are you using it, and what is it impacting, if anything, but to be able to be honest with yourself about it? You know, it's very hard to be. It's easy to say, be honest with yourself about it, but it's very hard to be honest with ourselves. You know, that's where being in relationship with others, sharing what you're experiencing, if you're taking 30 days off, really communicating to somebody else, whether it's a therapist or a trusted friend, you know, how am I thinking about this? You know, am I waking up every day wishing I could be doing this other than something? Am I sitting in a business meeting completely dissociated from what's going on? Because I'm really focused on that I'm not gambling or that I'm not drinking. You know, you've got to be able to look at what it's impacting in the way that we're thinking and the way that we're feeling.
- [46:09]
Andrew Huberman
Can I ask a question about the. How it's impacting things? Because one thing I've observed in myself and in others is that sometimes behaviors that if we were to just look at through a kind of tunnel vision, you'd say, wow, this person just works a lot, or this person exercises a lot. But it provides energy that feeds a bigger ecosystem, gives me a sense of purpose. I have great relationships through my work and relationships that are not through my work. But, you know, it. It sits not as my higher power, but kind of at the center of my life, and a bunch of other things wick out from it. And to remove that thing would be to disrupt the whole web. I think that sometimes what scares people, especially, again, I don't. I can't relate to alcohol specifically, but what my friends who have made the decision to try and quit or quit drinking alcohol, for them, it's like that. Their ability to socialize, the lack of anxiety while they're intoxicated, the knowing there's something to do for them as, you know, as opposed to, like, what they would fill that space with. So sometimes I feel like these addictive behaviors fit into a larger ecosystem so that it masks any dysfunction. But it's. But it has this, again, gravitational pull so that, you know, it gets to bigger questions of, like, how. How are we supposed to live our life? And I like this quote from St. Augustine, you know, that a life well lived is a constant reordering of love.
- [47:36]
Ryan Suave
Reordering of our loves. Yeah, yeah, something like that.
- [47:38]
Andrew Huberman
So it gets to these questions of, like, what. What is a good life?
- [47:41]
Ryan Suave
This is a great discussion point, you know, that, you know, people will come in and say, I just want to be happy. I just want to be at peace. First thing we have to ask them is, what does that mean? We have to define it. A lot of times maybe they're saying that happiness is kind of the absence of all this bad stuff, you know, or that peace is. You know, everything outside of me is going okay. Everything is fine. You know, we've got to really explore with them what. How would they know when they got there, you know, what a balanced life is going to be different for everybody. And especially, like with behavioral addictions, you know, it's not about necessarily removing those forever. In fact, a lot of those. We can't remove food addiction. You can't remove food. I mean, the things around sex addiction, you know, you're not going to. I suppose someone could not have sex. But really, a lot of that is about connection and relationship and love and intimacy. You know, even gambling, you know, people don't have to gamble, but you're dealing with. With money, you know, and you've got to touch it and spend it and be around it.
- [48:43]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Buying a house is an investment or.
- [48:45]
Ryan Suave
A gamble sometimes, as we've seen, you know, and we've got to look at how we're using these things, you know, and going back to drugs. You know, you look at like we've got pain medication, you know, aside from being abused, right. We've got opioid pain medication, and then we've got heroin. And both of them either came from or derivatives of the poppy, which is a beautiful flower, right. So we've taken this flower and we've been able to make these drugs and one of them, you know, of course, prescription pain abuse and fentanyl that we see is, you know, it can be deadly. But I think an argument could be made that it's probably saved more lives than it's killed when used appropriately. We're able to have surgeries that we probably never would have been able to have before because of the medications that people can use. And then we've got people who are either abusing that or taking heroin and dying, you know, having a. You know, we started calling it the opioid epidemic. I think 50,000 people died. It, like, surpassed the number of the people in the US that died by car accidents last year. It was something like 100,000. Right?
- [49:57]
Andrew Huberman
100,000 people died at least.
- [49:59]
Ryan Suave
You know, it's more than doubled. You know, now it's in a lot of different things. There's a lot of kids that are taking something that they think is a less harmful pill, like a Valium or Xanax, and it's got fentanyl in it, and they. They die. You know, it's doubled since we started calling it an epidemic. And of course, that hundred Thousand doesn't include all of the other drugs and alcohol. And. But, you know, it goes back to how did we use it? You know, we manipulated this flower in a way that we can save lives and kill or die. That's a more extreme example. But how are we using the things in our life? You know, are we using exercise as a way to completely, you know, to dissociate from things? If I. If I take away that exercise, am I going to fall apart? Am I not going to be okay? You know, and that doesn't mean don't ever exercise again. But understand, like, if I were to stop for a week, do I fall into a deep depression? Not everybody is going to do that. But if somebody's oriented in the way that it is a problem that may happen for them. And then it begs the question, like, what am I using this for? What I think is so important about treatment for addiction and then recovery from addiction is that, you know, at first it's about eliminating something, it's about moving away from something, but that's not sustainable. Just to cut something out isn't because it's being used for something to give them that sense of relief or that sense of peace or that sense of connection or spiritual or otherwise. They've got to eventually start building towards something. You know, what's the life I'm going to create? If you look at the 12 steps, the last part of the 12 steps is to practice these principles and all our affairs, which means go out and build a life. You know, don't. Don't find yourself really small. That we were talking beforehand, there was a. I think he was a biophysicist. I can't remember. E.M. jellinek. He was at Stanford for a bit, the end of his career. And he had done a lot of research on alcoholism and wrote a book in the 50s or 60s called the disease Concept of Alcoholism. And out of that book there was a curve. And you can look this up. It's called the Jelinek curve. I don't think he actually created the curve. It was credited towards him. In fact, I think he even kind of dissociated himself from it. But it came out of his works, and it starts off with at the top, and it's for alcoholism where people start drinking, and it's in the crucial phase as they start drinking more. And at first, when people are drinking more, you know, their tolerance increases, you know, but they start to experience some problems. They're hungover, they're late for work, they're having arguments. But it's nothing that drastic. And as they keep drinking and descending down this curve, actually they enter the, I think it's called the critical phase. And that's where actually tolerance decreases, right? It's, it's. They're dependent on it. They need it just to get by. They need it to get to work. You know, they can't keep the job, they can't keep their relationships. Their physical body is starting to fall apart. They're getting sick because of it. There's a lot of other factors in it. And then they come down to the bottom of this and it's this cycle of drinking and stopping and drinking and stopping, you know, drinking until I can't anymore. Physically sick and then going back to it as soon as they can. When those people are able to get treatment and find recovery, now the curve starts to go back up and the recovery side of the curve and in the beginning, you know, they're not feeling that great. They've lost the thing that helps them get through life. But if they can stay in a contained environment, and that contained environment could be a treatment center or contained environment like in a 12 step program, you know, where they're engaged in something. I don't mean contained by the walls that you're in, but in some sort of, in a community and they can stay away from it. Eventually they start seeing that they see in others that they can build a life that they can go after the things that they wanted to go after. And they start finding pleasure from life rather than from the, the, the substance. You know, they start to be able to handle the stressors of life, their tolerance for stress instead of their tolerance for alcohol building, their tolerance for, for stress starts to build and then eventually they're kind of moving towards what we would call in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, the self actualization. You know, they're able to build a life that they never thought they could have before. You'll hear people say, a life beyond my wildest dreams, you know, and a lot, for a lot of those people, that's just that I'm able to meet anything with some sort of sense of peace. And when I'm not, I think recovery is. It's not about finding a, let's just use the word peace. It's not about finding a sense of peace that you stay in. You know, balance is not. I'm on both feet standing still. Balance is like, like this, right? And as we're taking risks in life, as we should, to really build awesome lives, sometimes we're going to feel way off kilter. But the recovery process, to be able to recognize when I'm out of balance sooner or out of peace sooner, and return to it quicker, recover again and again, you know, and have the tools to know, you know, what are the emotional conditions that I might be facing on every day and what, what, what am I made of up and who of am I that might bring to that. So for instance, something I give to a lot of my clients is we call it like the emotional weather forecast, you know, when the first part of this is they've got to really know themselves. And that's something that we see in 12 step a lot with a. We hear if, you know, people identify their character defects. Not everybody I know is familiar with 12 step, but that's one of the. But as part of identifying your defects, you're also identifying your virtues, right? Just like a balance sheet, you want to know your liabilities and your assets. And sometimes those things are. Sometimes they change. And something that's a liability in this situation might be an asset in this situation, right? Like if uncontrolled anger and violence in my home when my kids do something wrong and I'm not doing this, but is a liability if my family's attacked, it's an asset, right? So understanding what these defects in virtue or assets and liabilities are so that I really know myself. And that can be through a process of, of sharing with others. And the 12 step, that's how they do it. We do it in therapy all of the time to kind of know who I am. Actually, there's a line in one of the AA literature that Bill Wilson wrote, and he gives a definition of humility. And it goes something like this, that humility is an honest recognition of who and what we've become, followed by a deep desire to become who we can be. And it's not about like that I'm all bad. It's just to note it, to recognize who I am. If I don't know where I'm starting, I can't know. Just like finding directions. If I asked, you know, to get directions to the studio and your team started giving me directions from over the canyon, but I was, you know, south of here. They're going to give me the directions to turn left on this road and right on this, and I'm going to. I'm not going to know how to get there. I'm not. I'm going to be disoriented. I'm going to feel lost. I gotta. It starts with really knowing where I Am who and who and what I am. And from there, then we can start to build a life. So one of the things I give people a lot is once they kind of understand these assets and liabilities of theirs, you know, to look at each day ahead and say, you know, first we start off with gratitude. You know, it kind of gives a mindset. And gratitude just isn't about being thankful for things. I really believe gratitude is meeting what is as it is. You know, that I always. When I give people this and when I practice it myself, I try at least to be one of the things I'm grateful for, to be something that I'm challenged by. And not just to say, I'm going to learn a lesson from this, but I might not know what that is, but to really express gratitude for some challenge I'm having. So that's kind of a mindset. And then the next thing is just laying out your plans for the day. And not like a detailed calendar, but like, you know, I'm gonna wait, you know, take the kids to school, go to work, travel, you know, have a business dinner tonight, right? And then so I kind of know what's happening that day. And then from there, look at what are my. What's my emotional state currently? What am I experiencing now? Especially if it's like fears, resentments, anger, guilt, shame, it could be something else. It could just be like, I'm feeling. I feel really solid today. But when I can take what's going to happen today and what I'm already experiencing, I can look at what I'm doing today and think, you know, there are some character liabilities or defects that might come up. Like if I have to travel today and I've got to take three flights instead of one, I can know that if I know myself, I might say I could. I have the ability to become impatient, controlling, and. And look at my day to say, almost predict what are the emotional disturbances that can. That can happen that day. And then coupled with the state that I'm in, if I'm already upset about something else, I've got a higher likelihood of going into these reactive patterns that I don't necessarily want to go into. And so, you know, much like going on a trip where I would look and see what the weather is going to be, you know, if it's going to be. Looks like it's going to be rainy the whole time I'm there, I'm going to pack a raincoat. Now, that doesn't mean I'm not going to get wet, but Once I start getting wet, I can go get my raincoat. Raincoat. And put it on. Same thing in this, you know, the last part of it is to look for what I'm going to watch for because of my plans and my emotional state. Now I know that I have to watch for being, like, maybe short or controlling. I want to watch for these character defects or liabilities. And then what do I want to strive for? I'm going to strive for being patient, tolerant, kind. Now, just because I write this down just like the rain jacket doesn't mean I'm not going to experience these things. But when I can look at, like, a day as an example, I can break it down and in a chunk where, you know, I'm not going to be shocked by. I'm being impatient. And as soon as I get impatient, I can remember, oh, this is what I'm looking. This is what I want to watch out for today. What do I need to. And I wanted to strive for being tolerant and patient so then I can, you know, use one of the tools that I might have that I've laid out. You know, it might just be if I'm in the airport, walk away, take a breath, you know, and recognize and remind myself, this is what I'm striving for today. And in this exercise, we're putting out in front of us what we might be experiencing based on what we know about ourselves and what we've learned about ourselves. And when we can do that, you know, we can start living each day a little bit better. Or at least I find this with my clients, that they can chunk it down and say, you know, they're not surprised by these emotional reactions. And, you know, like I said earlier, we want to help people. I try to help people learn how to feel bad, you know, to recognize that, okay, I'm feeling disturbed, I'm in a reaction. Let me lean into it rather than run away from it. And we run away from it in different ways. I mean, snapping at the lady at the counter or, you know, might be someone that now I just totally withdraw and don't say anything.
- [61:41]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, numbing out is very common nowadays. Yeah, I just want to repeat these different categories. A small list of gratitudes, including perhaps some things that we're grateful that challenge us or things that we've received or whatever it happens to be. A quick list of gratitudes, plan for the day, what the internal emotional weather is like. How am I feeling? Irritated, rested, whatever. It could be three or four things. What to watch for and what to strive For I do think it's an extremely useful, obviously zero cost, minimal, minimal time investment protocol, for lack of a better word, that everyone, not just people who struggle with addiction, but everyone can benefit from. Because I think we tend to be so conscious of what to look for, what to strive for, coming out of a morning journaling or a great night's sleep. But then it's Amazing how by 3pm somebody cuts us off in traffic or we're being bombarded with too many things and all of a sudden we're not necessarily unpeeled, but we're not our best self. Do you think there's value in sharing your list with somebody else?
- [62:51]
Ryan Suave
Connection with others is so important, especially when I share something like this that's vulnerable with them because it's not just about holding me accountable. But now, now I'm expressing it in a way that others see it and we can have communication with them about, you know, having them share back with you too. I have like 10 guys that I share this with every day, you know, and not that the way that I do things is the way that everybody should, but I ask other people that I give this to, to share it because, you know, you're. You're now expressing it. And expressing something kind of brings it more into existence than if I'm just doing it myself internally. And we've got to put these things in front of us because we will forget very quickly, you know, or use. Like you said, coming out of a morning journaling or meditation session feels great. I think most people decide to make a change and then, you know, on one day and then they don't think about it again in the way that they thought about it for months, like it happens every year on New Year's. They're not putting it out in front of them every day to be a reminder of what I'm going after, what's important to me.
- [63:58]
Andrew Huberman
And the brain is very different at different times of day and at night. You know, one thing that I subscribe to, that separate from this conversation but perhaps relevant, is I don't believe any thoughts that occur between 2am and 5am I just don't. Whatever comes up, if I happen to wake up in the middle of the night and have. I just don't. I've chosen to not believe those thoughts. I might write something down, I might have an insight that I'm interested in or something that terrifies me or whatever, but I just don't believe those thoughts because I've had the experience thousands of times of then going Back to sleep. Waking up in the morning being like, that's ridiculous, that doesn't hold any water anymore. I think we're so vulnerable in the middle of the night. Our forebrain shut down, we can't strategize. All our safety mechanisms are at their lowest and those thoughts just, they don't hold meaning. Now I'm not to say, that's not to say that some night owls might not have some brilliant insights in the middle of the night. So this just relates to me and my schedule. But I do think that we can make a decision to behave one way and do things at 8am and by 4pm As a neuroscientist, I can honestly say that your brain is not the same brain at 4pm that it was at 8am it's still you, but it's functioning so differently. What's important, how it orders priorities, how it interprets data. It's not like a computer, it's a dynamic machine. And at different times of day you're working with a different set of hardware. Literally certain circuits are more active than others. So I don't believe that we are capable of self regulating nearly as well as we could, certainly not perfectly if we don't have a reminder of our best self, our aspirational self that we carry forward whether or not it comes through other people or enforcement or ideally comes from inside us. But the expectation that we are going to spontaneously and impulsively be our best self is one of the biggest failures I think of education and psychology and medicine and evidenced by the fact that I have many colleagues who are scientists and physicians who have terrible addictions. Some are sober, some are not. These are brilliant people who have all the knowledge in the world about the inner workings of the mechanisms that make people addicted, et cetera. Anyway, I'm editorializing there a bit, but I feel very passionate about these zero cost tools. But I have to say these tools can make a huge difference. And what do you call this list? What is it? The plan for the day. What is this list?
- [66:37]
Ryan Suave
Just like an emotional weather forecast, you know, I mean, call it whatever you want, but I think it can be part of a daily inventory too, where at night you could look at and see how you did, you know, I mean, I think you just talked about being your best self. It's a way to kind of define what our best self is that day, you know, because what our best self is, is going to change depending on the circumstances we're in. You know, I've run into problems before where you know, in my own life where, you know, it's like the weekend and I'm really looking forward to, like, the weekend's going to be. And I don't. Let's say I don't do this actually, because it's a. It's a Saturday and it's going to be, you know, I'm home and it's going to be an amazing. I live with four other people, you know, two of three of which are children. They might have other plans, you know, and. Or someone gets sick and we can't go to the. Do the thing that we were going to do. And I can find myself, you know, really grumpy and.
- [67:30]
Andrew Huberman
Right.
- [67:30]
Ryan Suave
In those character defects or liabilities. I also think being your best self isn't never engaging in those. It's not never getting angry. Right. I remember a teacher I had was talking about. And I can't remember the. He was talking about some Indian yoga master, you know, that the student asked them, like, do the masters ever get angry? And he said, of course. But when they get angry, it's like writing on water. It's there and then it's gone. You know, they're not holding onto it. If you try to write on water, those letters are going to disappear right after you write them. You know that there's. There are emotional disturbances that we're going to have, and it's part of life. We can't ignore them. We should embrace them and lean into them. I mean, I think a real secret to having a really fulfilling life is being able to embrace all aspects of ourselves, the light and the shadow. Because we can't just try to run from the shadow and go to the light. It's just they're hand in hand. In fact, they don't exist without the other.
- [68:33]
Andrew Huberman
Well, because they're both inside of us.
- [68:35]
Ryan Suave
And they're both inside of us, and they both have their purpose.
- [68:38]
Andrew Huberman
What is the purpose of the shadow in your mind? And for folks that don't, I mean, the shadow. We're using Jungian language here, and there probably will be some folks listening that say and are thinking themselves. Well, I've never suffered from an addiction, et cetera. But what we're really talking about here with this. Can we call it an emotional weather map? Sure.
- [68:56]
Ryan Suave
That's great.
- [68:56]
Andrew Huberman
Because I like the idea of a map and the forecast component because it's not just, how do I feel right now? It's how do I feel right now, what's coming and how am I going to prepare? And there's some goal setting in it, but you're not actually writing out your specific goals. What am I striving for is, I suppose, a goal. But what we're really saying is anyone that's ever gotten anxious, anyone that's ever gotten stressed, anyone that's ever gotten angry, whether or not you yell or not, right? I mean, what you're talking about is a, is a roadmap for the being able to navigate the experience of being human, right?
- [69:30]
Ryan Suave
Because the stripe. What we're striving for is not our like specific goals. I'm not striving for like success in this meeting. I'm not striving for making this money today. I'm striving for ways of being, you know, how I'm going to be that day in the face of the stressors, whether that meeting goes well or not, whether I make the money or I don't, whether I get the answer that I wanted or I don't, that I'm striving for this way of being. There's a line that I heard from a country singer once that I think he heard in a 12 step meeting that said, you know, peace is not finding calmer seas, it's building a better boat. You know that. You know, how are we going to navigate the storm? Not how are we going to avoid the storm.
- [70:16]
Andrew Huberman
I'd like to take a quick break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Function. Last year, I became a Function member after searching for the most comprehensive approach to lab testing. Function provides over 100 advanced lab tests that give you a key snapshot of your entire bodily health. This snapshot offers you with insights on your heart health, hormone health, immune functioning, nutrient levels, and much more. They've also recently added tests for toxins such as bpa, exposure from harmful plastics, and tests for PFAS or forever chemicals. Function not only provides testing of over 100 biomarkers key to your physical and mental health, but it also analyzes these results and provides insights from top doctors who are expert in the relevant areas. For example, in one of my first tests with Function, I learned that I had elevated levels of mercury in my blood. Function not only helped me detect that, but offered insights into how best to reduce my mercury levels, which included limiting my tuna consumption. I'd been eating a lot of tuna while also making an effort to eat more leafy greens and supplementing with NAC and acetylcysteine, both of which can support glutathione production and detoxification. And I should say by taking a second function test that approach worked. Comprehensive blood testing is vitally important. There's so many things related to your mental and physical health that can only be detected in a blood test. The problem is, blood testing has always been very expensive and complicated. In contrast, I've been super impressed by function simplicity, and at the level of cost, it is very affordable. As a consequence, I decided to join their scientific advisory board, and I'm thrilled that they're sponsoring the podcast. If you'd like to try function, you can go to functionhealth.com Huberman Function currently has a wait list of over 250,000 people, but they're offering early access to Huberman podcast listeners. Again, that's functionhealth.com huberman to get early access to function. You alluded to this earlier when talking about balance as a dynamic process, not a static process. That part of peace is knowing that when distress comes, you'll be able to tolerate it. Yeah, as opposed to, there's no distress. And I know people like this that are constantly trying to move through the channels of life, create their own little estuaries around things so that there's never any disruption.
- [72:30]
Ryan Suave
Yeah, we want to be able to tolerate that distress enough to make choice and respond rather than react to whatever it is. You know, it doesn't mean that we're not going to navigate out of the storm. I think of it. I think of it like this in if we go back into the 17 or 1800s, when the only way to get from England to America was to navigate or to sail in a wooden sailboat, right? Sail ship, whatever it was called. And let's say we took the most experienced sailor with the best ship. But this time, rather than using his skills of navigation and sailing, he said, the seas are calm and the weather's good. I must be going the right way. But if the seas are rough and the weather's bad, I must be going the wrong way. And every time the seas were calm, the weather's nice. He just kept going in the direction he was. But every time he came across waves and rain, he'd turn. Is he ever going to get there? Potentially. Let's say it's calm the whole way, or he might end up navigating all the way down around the South America and then coming back up. Neither one of those is the answer. The answer is that he, when he meets the storm, he can use his skills of navigation as a sailor and understanding the weather and his experience to say, okay, this is something I navigate through, this is something I navigate around. But he doesn't Just react based on the external conditions. And we react constantly to our external conditions based on what we're perceiving is going on. You know, I'll preface this by saying, I think, I believe one of our biggest, if not our biggest challenge as human beings in our psychology is that we confuse discomfort with threat and respond to discomfort as if it's threat. And this goes back. I can use the diagnostic criteria for ptsd, not that everybody that experiences this has ptsd, but when you look at the diagnostic Criteria in the DSM 5, which is the fifth version of the. It's the most recent version of the diagnostic manual, it says that the person was exposed to. It's like exposed to death, Threaten, actual or threatened death, or actual or threatened violence or actual or threatened sexual violence. In the DSM 4, it said real or perceived. And what that means is, you know, we can have similar or exact reaction to something that is actually happening. Like you're attacking me. Hopefully you're not going to attack me, but like you were, as if you threatened to attack me. You know, if I believe that I'm in danger, then I can have the same. I'm going to have the same fight or flight response or the same reaction in my body as if I am actually in danger. It's interesting that our, I think our legal system recognizes this in that you can be arrested for assault or battery. Battery is you hit me. Assault is you threatened to hit me or threatened to kill me. We actually, in a way recognize this idea of perception in our legal system. It's actually, it's also, I believe what the. Forgive me for saying it in this way, but the quote unquote, success of terrorism is. It's not that this event happens. It's that we leave that event thinking. It's not that those buildings came down. It's that we think, we believe that all of the buildings are going to come down. Right. It's terror.
- [76:02]
Andrew Huberman
I think that because we were talking about addiction and now we're talking about perception of threat and distress, we want to make sure that we tie those things back to one another. No, I think this is a very important conversation because what we're, you know, at the heart of addiction, but also at the heart of a challenged life, challenged in the ways that life shouldn't be challenging is this lack of distress tolerance. Yeah, and I have a question about distress tolerance specifically. What can we do to increase our distress tolerance? Like what practices? Maybe we just have to experience distress to know how to navigate distress.
- [76:41]
Ryan Suave
Well, we're going to experience distress. We experience it all the time. And I think it's. And you may be able to articulate this even better than I can, but, you know, I think we need to look at stress. Right? Not all stress is bad. We need stress. I need stress to move around in this chair. I need to. I need to be able to walk around. My muscles need to tense and I need that stress. Was it Hans Selye's work around eustress and distress? We're going to experience distress. And it's not about avoiding distress. It's how are we gonna walk through that distress. And so I like to break practices down into a couple different ways. So proactive and reactive. Proactive are gonna be things that we schedule. I'm gonna do. You talked about yoga, Nidra. We can talk about that a little bit more. You call it the non sleep, deep rest, other forms of mindfulness and meditation that actually allow us to raise capacity in our nervous system. Going to therapy, coaching, being involved in a community, doing physical exercise. These are things that we're going to schedule. Going into the cold plunge, which does allow us to experience something and stay a little bit longer. And it gives us, you know, it's so. It's. We have one at home and when friends come over, use it. It's so funny because, like the first time they're going to do it. And I know you've had a lot of people. We actually. I was at your home a couple years ago and there was a guy who's doing it for the first time and he's like a big. I don't remember this, but he was like a big athletic guy and he. He was freaking out, getting into terrified. Right. And it's just cold water. There's. It can't. I mean, it could hurt you if you're in there for however long to get hypothermia, but it's not going to hurt you. So having practices like that that allow us to move through that level of fear can translate to fear or distress can translate when it comes in real time for something that we. That I know I can walk through this.
- [78:29]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Because adrenaline is ubiquitous in stressful circumstances, which is just a bunch of science nerd speak for the stress response is always an increase in autonomic arousal or alertness, a shrinking of the visual field, an increase in heart rate, a tendency to move. People will say, but I freeze. Actually, the freezing response. This is kind of interesting. My lab studied this. Lindsey Soleil published a paper in Nature about this in 2018. She was a graduate student in my lab. The freezing response is an active behavior.
- [79:01]
Ryan Suave
Oh, yeah.
- [79:02]
Andrew Huberman
Trying to hide from an intruder in your home, in the closet. You're trying not to move. So people think, oh, you know, people freeze under stress. No, the freezing response is an active response. You know, the adrenaline dump, as it's sometimes called, is what essentially creates the freeze response. It's why people can't remember things when they get up on stage. If they have a fear of public speaking. And I was gonna. I forgot to mention, in the cold plunge, cold water is a highly reliable way to elicit an adrenaline response. It's just a great training for this. Feels uncomfortable. I want to get out, but I'm going to learn to control my thinking in this uncomfortable circumstance.
- [79:42]
Ryan Suave
Yeah. So that would fit into the proactive.
- [79:44]
Andrew Huberman
Right.
- [79:44]
Ryan Suave
So that's something that you can proactively start to be able to manage that adrenaline as you're, as you're telling me, in the body. Right. We're able to manage those feelings because what does it come down to is it's these sensations in our body that we're experiencing that feel really uncomfortable and.
- [80:01]
Andrew Huberman
We might be able to sense them a little earlier.
- [80:03]
Ryan Suave
Right.
- [80:03]
Andrew Huberman
If we have some training. I just want to throw in one little science tidbit. As long as we're talking about using cold as a way to manage distress tolerance, is that the first 15 to 20 seconds after the adrenaline response hits, and it hits very fast, your forebrain, which is involved in all your contextual decision making and clean, clear strategies of what best to do, is essentially shut down for about 20 seconds. If you can make it 20 seconds, you have a far better chance of not doing something really stupid and doing something that's very adaptive. Right now, there may be circumstances where you don't have 20 seconds, but if under stress and riding out that 20 seconds is generally going to be a very adaptive approach, because then your forebrain comes back, quote, unquote, online, and you could really start to make strategic decisions based on those particular circumstances.
- [80:58]
Ryan Suave
And so that's what's happening when we get experienced. Some people say, get triggered by something that's uncomfortable for us. Right. You really, you get a text message from your boss or your partner that says, we need to talk later. Right. A lot of people, I don't know about you, but when I get, we need to talk later, it's not my favorite text in the world to get. Right. So someone might get that text and then they immediately go into, like, their perception or their beliefs or Their kind of narrative about what that means. I'm going to be rejected. This is going to be disappointing. It's going to be really hard. And those perceptions or beliefs are coming out of their past. So now sitting there looking at a text message, which is really just a neutral. All events are neutral. We bring the meaning to them and we want to bring meaning to them, but it's just words on a screen and we don't even know what it means yet. You're looking at those and you're not even in the present. That more you're in the past and we're never really out of the present. People say get present. That's the only place we live. It's what. Where are we oriented? Past, present or future in this moment? Now that I'm going into this narrative from all the other times that I was, let's say I'm making up that I'm being rejected or I'm not going to get what I want now I'm oriented to the past. So we could say I'm disoriented in that moment or to the future.
- [82:18]
Andrew Huberman
You're anticipating what might be said, what's going to happen. You're out of the moment.
- [82:22]
Ryan Suave
But I would say that the anticipation is still something that's coming out of what we've experienced before. Right. And then from there we go into an automatic reaction and it's like a fight or flight response. It might not seem like that because we might not be thinking I'm gonna die from this. But if, you know, we might be thinking I'm not gonna be okay and what is I'm not gonna be okay, that gets carried out and it's triggered in the body. I would say in the same way as I'm at threat, I'm in danger. And this is where we're confusing discomfort. Cause even if I am gonna be not gonna get the answer I want or I'm gonna be abandoned, it's not life threatening, it's not actually threatening. It's the. It's perceived threat. But I respond to that perceived threat as if it's actual threat. And I might respond by kind of going after the person like I need to know right now, being obsessive about it. I might respond by withdrawing completely and hiding from it. But it creates this cycle of kind of an automatic reaction to things that doesn't allow me to build tolerance for that. That stressor. Right. The solution to that is first be aware that that's happening. And once you're aware that that happens and it happens to us all the time. Once I recognize that I'm in this cycle below to find a way to stop, to intervene on that, to take a break from it, it might be just those 20 seconds. It might be something that. It might be taking a few breaths, it might be walking away from it.
- [83:55]
Andrew Huberman
Can I interject something there? Because one thing that stemmed out of a prior conversation we had is I think these aspirational responses of, okay, like the stressor hits, I'm going to take a pause. I'm going to create the gap between stimulus and response. That was it Viktor Frankl or something referred to, sounds wonderful. But in real time, everything's very hard, everything's different. And so what can we do to prepare? What are the things? I like this notion of proactive tools that we can schedule. Cold plunge being one of them. We'll talk about yoga, Nidra, and some other things. But one of the things that I've learned is that there are sensations in the body that come about and it will be different for different people. But there are sensations in my body that come about very fast because the adrenaline response is fast. And the more that I pay attention to those, the more I'm able to pick up on them at earlier stages of the stress response. Kind of like seeing a big wave coming from further out. And the yogis talked about this. I learned about this also from you, that in meditation we can start to see the quote, it's mystical language, but the subtle ripples of our perception. Whereas when we're going through life and we're just kind of around, it's like being on a train and we're just seeing stuff go by all the time.
- [85:16]
Ryan Suave
The concept is stilling leads to seeing. I love that the more that we can still the mind, the easier we can see what's actually happening versus what we perceive as happening. So what you say is so true that it is hard if the first step is to. After we recognize that this is something that's happening, is to stop when we're in the middle of response. How do we stop something that I work with the people and I actually heard you talk about in a different way that I really appreciated in one of your essentials podcasts, where, you know, in that moment when we're in that reaction, you know, the sympathetic nervous system has been activated. The solution, though, is not to deactivate the sympathetic, it's to activate the parasympathetic. So our practices and tools that I think are the most beneficial is how do we activate the parasympathetic A great question to ask ourselves once we recognize that we're in some sort of stress response. I like to tell people to ask is, am I or is anybody around me in immediate physical danger? And if the answer is no, first off, if I can ask that question, it's probably the answer is no. But most of the things that we experience every day are not life threatening. Actually, probably the thing that we experience every day that's most life threatening, that doesn't bother most of us, is driving in a car. Right. I mean, we're hurtling down the road and just trusting that someone's not going to cross over that other line. But that won't scare us. But, you know, getting someone that you're in a committed relationship with or that you're emotionally attached to, that says something you don't like, might throw you into a. A spiral.
- [87:05]
Andrew Huberman
I mean, it speaks to the unbelievably powerful aspect of human connection.
- [87:10]
Ryan Suave
Yeah.
- [87:10]
Andrew Huberman
I mean, likewise with the earlier example of the kid in video games. We think about this kid and the video game as like the only players in the interaction. But to take a video game away from a kid is to also remove him from his social context. We know that social isolation is one of the most potent stressors for any mammal, especially humans.
- [87:34]
Ryan Suave
I mean, from what I've read, and, you know, tribes would basically shame someone out of it if they did something really terrible. You know, they would send them out of the tribe, and that was like death. You know, they only survived together. Now we can live alone because of, you know, technology and human advancement, but, like, live physically alone. But we're not at the top of the food chain, really. If we were out in the jungle or back when we were nomadic, and we still have that within us that we need that connection. We need that.
- [88:09]
Andrew Huberman
So we're talking about distress tolerance. We have an emotional weather map tool that can prepare us. There are things that are proactive, like cold plunge or meditation in the moment, we can hopefully create more of a gap. And of course, we were talking about this in the context of addiction, but as you were saying, with the behavior or the substance is the medicine against discomfort. Can you go back to that theme just a little bit to really hammer that home? That when somebody comes to you, initially you're saying, okay, like, what are you using? How often are you using? How's this impacting your life? Trying to get them to see all that, but once they move past that, are you trying to get them to see, like, what they're really Afraid of. Let me frame this a little differently. Many years ago you said, it's kind of incredible. We're having an academic discussion. And you said, it's kind of incredible. If we can tolerate discomfort for one second, then we can tolerate it for two seconds. If we can take discomfort for two seconds, we can do it for five seconds. Once you start to realize that all you have to do is experience discomfort as a series of moments, suddenly you realize that you have an immense capacity to manage discomfort. And I was like, I sat with that for a long time. Why do you think it's so hard for us to do that? Even though in theory that's exactly how it works.
- [89:30]
Ryan Suave
I think this is where we get hijacked by the part of our nervous system that is kind of binary and looking at its life or death. You know, if we perceive this as danger, it's going to respond as danger. We don't want that part of the nervous system and we don't want it having discernment. We want it really, when we're actually faced with, you know, I say, if you and I are walking across the road here and a car's about to hit us and you see it, I don't want you to stop, breathe, meditate, you know, have compassion for the driver. I want you to, you know, react immediately, push me out of the way. Even if we get hurt and break a leg, I want to. We need to live. You know, the problem happens when I, you know, go home and I say something, my wife, and she disagrees with me and I react to her like she's a car about to hit me. You know, it becomes an appropriate response at an inappropriate time. We don't want to lose that. And so it becomes so hard because we're in this kind of, I believe, this fight in our, in our nervous system to say one part of it saying, you need to act or you're not going to be okay, and the other part saying, I don't want to keep doing this in your mind. You know, I know that I'm in this room or in your lab with virtual reality goggles on, but that one part of my body thinks I'm falling when really I'm watching a video game.
- [90:56]
Andrew Huberman
So maybe the best we can do is prepare. These proactive tools seem increasingly important to me. Can we talk about Yoga Nidra? I talked about Non Sleep Deep Rest a lot on this podcast. Yes, I decided to take Yoga Nidra, which is a thousands of years old practice, and rename it Non Sleep Deep Rest because I wanted more people to.
- [91:20]
Ryan Suave
Thank you for doing that.
- [91:20]
Andrew Huberman
I mean, I've taken some heat, but I wanted more people to do it. And it's a zero cost tool that I think is very valuable. I learned it from you. I went out to where you work and observed that this is the first thing that people do every morning when trying to get sober. This is the first thing that people do every, that you have them do every morning when they're trying to identify and overcome their traumas, including full blown ptsd. And I don't want to share some of the stories that people shared out there, but a couple of them were very intense. I mean, when I'm talking about ptsd, I'm not talking about like had a bad semester in school. I'm talking about people who were co sleeping with their kid and the kid died. And it was like, it was a very intense thing to hear those stories. And it was also a beautiful thing to see people's transition through their traumas, in some cases their addictions or both. And every day started with an hour of nidra. What is it about nidra? How did you discover NIDRA and how did this come about? Because I think it's an extremely, extremely important tool for a number of reasons. But how did you start incorporating this into trauma and addiction treatment?
- [92:31]
Ryan Suave
I was working at a place in central Florida, and near there it was a treatment center. And not far from there there happened to be an ashram started by old Indian guy who had come over from India in the 50s or 60s. He's in his 90s now and is kind of credited as one of the people to bring yoga to the west, one of many. It was the Amrit Yoga Institute. And they were running some workshops. And I ended up doing a training there that opened a door for me to start doing some other things. I'd been practicing breath work and this was all part of my own journey. And then got introduced to yoga nidra. And it was just a very powerful tool. And in these workshops that I was in, I saw some pretty amazing things happen for the people that were taking trainings. We were there, you know, for. I remember we were there for. It was a 10 day training. And you could take it as 10 days or you could take five days and then come back for five days. And there was a woman who had been there for a five day and was. Was coming back. And when she was there at the first part, she, she was a single mom, she had two boys, they were probably under 12. And she was completely stressed by Them like completely stressed. She was, could not almost handle being a mom. And she practiced this, she decided to come to this training and then she went home and it was several months in between. And when she came back, I remember in the opening group she shared that she'd gone home and had not changed anything. The only thing she did was practice yoga. Nidra, I think twice a day in the morning and the evening. And she's like, my boys changed. And I actually don't think the boys probably changed at all. But she was someone who was filled with anxiety and stress and the kids were picking up on that. And she wasn't able to tolerate the, the discomfort or distress of her children or boys just being boys. I don't even think they were really probably behaving more than, you know, an 8 and 10 year old does differently. But she couldn't handle it. And now she was able to kind of build this distress tolerance by practicing this meditation, you know. And Nidra means sleep. So it's a sleep based meditation.
- [94:59]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Do you want to just briefly describe what it looks like?
- [95:02]
Ryan Suave
Generally what it looks like is first a person lays down and ideally they'd be laying on their back, unless they can't lay on their back, but you lay on your back and get in a very comfortable position. It's a guided practice. And one of the reasons it's guided is it kind of becomes a technique that disappears. The technique and what I mean by that is if you're sitting, doing meditation and you're doing something where you have to focus on a mantra or which is not. This is not an exclusion of that, I mean people so. But when you're doing that, you kind of have to focus on that mantra. So sometimes having to focus on something can, can bring you out of it. And in those practices, bringing you out of it is beneficial too because you want to be brought out of it. And then you can find ways to get back into it, it being the meditative experience. So you're laying down and there's generally a series of kind of, I'll say, physical movements. It's not like yoga doing stretching. It might be something like tensing and relaxing your muscles. It might be something like massaging your face as you're being guided through this to kind of just relax the body. And after a certain point and in a lot of the teachings that when I do it or I've been taught, there's a certain point at which all movement stops and you just want to follow the, you just, you're just instructed to follow the person's voice. In Yoga Nidra we or nidra we set an intention like an intention might be like I'm at peace with myself as I am in the world as it is something like that, something that you want to bring in or a state that you want to experience. I know that you distinguish, I believe you distinguish non sleep deep breaths as like yoga nidra, without intention, generally without.
- [96:48]
Andrew Huberman
Intentions or mystical language. It involves the, I think the most critical part of non sleep deep rest and yoga nidra. To me, the overlap in the Venn diagram includes self directed relaxation, the ability to do that, which of course the incorporation of long exhale breathing will facilitate that because it pushes down on that side of the seesaw that is the parasympathetic nervous system and really gets it engaged regardless of how stressed you are. As you pointed out, getting that parasympathetic nervous system, that the idea that people's mind can be active but their body is still I think is a very powerful state. You're not trying to fall asleep, so the end goal is in reach for everyone. It isn't like you're going to fall asleep, it's like actually you're going to not fall asleep. If you fall asleep, it's okay.
- [97:39]
Ryan Suave
And actually sometimes people think they're asleep, but when I'm guiding them and I'll give a direction like you know, to roll over on their, on their side at the end and they do it. But they thought they were asleep so they were they. What we believe is happening in that is they're in this, the, the brain states of sleep while still being awake. Once they're in that relaxed space after doing some movement in the beginning or the space to be relaxed and still, I should say still versus relaxed still physically is through breath, different breath exercises, specifically ones that have long exhales. Right. That's like you said, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system and then guiding them through their body in some way. So it might be there's one called 61 points where you identify all these different points in the body, starting with the forehead down to the pit of the throat and then at all different parts from your shoulder down to your fingers and then all the way down to your toes. And people being able to kind of move their awareness in their body kind of gets them away from that thinking and doing into the more feeling and being. They're putting their awareness on their body rather than everything external.
- [98:54]
Andrew Huberman
One of the great strengths of doing NIDRA or NSDR as it Were is that we take ourselves out of the prediction mode and we can experience life unfold in real time moments. It sounds so mystical, but actually it was Josh Waitzkin who was on this podcast. The former chess prodigy, martial arts champion, et cetera. On the Joe Rogan podcast, he said something that I wanted to share with you, which felt appropriate now, which was. He said there are two ways to go through life. One is, metaphorically speaking, as a passenger in the dining car on a train that's going 80 miles per hour and you're experiencing what's in that train and you're seeing things go by. That's the non conscious, lower way to experience life. Lesser way to experience life. Where you want to be is strapped to the front of that train, safely experiencing space and time as they're happening, flowing by you and through you as a series of moments. And I really think I credit NIDRA and NSDR with an ability to see life unfold as an observer and still have the ability to participate. So you're not like dissociated, you're not stepped back, you're not ahead of yourself. You're like, right where you need to be.
- [100:15]
Ryan Suave
Right.
- [100:15]
Andrew Huberman
Does that capture it?
- [100:16]
Ryan Suave
I believe so. I might take that, the train example a little bit different direction. Where I always will say, it's like, you know, you're either on the back of the bus and you're being driven around or you're driving the bus. You know, it's not that you're just on. And he may not have been saying this, but just not on these rails experiencing it like this. That you have control, autonomy and have the ability to be authentic and authentic in a way not authenticity gets kind of thrown around. And people like, I just. I just am who I am. Well, most times when people are doing that and they're just acting however they're feeling in the moment. They're not who they are, they're who they were or they're, you know, they're. They're acting out their past experiences. Authenticity in the way that I'm talking is more like, like auth is the same in author, right? It's like authorship that you become the author of your life. You know, that you're able to write the story going forward. Because a lot of what we're doing before that is just plagiarizing from our past. Stuck in the cycles of our kind of programmed reactive patterns that came out of the ways that we were shaped. And things like Nidra, where we can start to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, again distinct from deactivating the sympathetic and be able to pause and be able to look at kind of choice. You know, in that cycle I was talking about earlier, where we're being reactive, the first thing is to stop. Well, how do we stop? It's by building these. These abilities to have this distress tolerance, even if it's for a few seconds, and take a moment to be able to get present and look. And what I mean by that is get, look, look at what's actually happening. This isn't every time someone sent me a text message and. Or every time someone's ever abandoned me or disappointed me, or every time I've been afraid, it's just this one moment where I get a text that says, we need to talk later. And from that now, that can break the cycle enough that I, instead of automatic reaction, I'm in choice and I'm making a choice out of kind of all options of how I'm going to handle this. Now, it might still mean that I go, could we talk about it now? In a text response? But that would be very distinct from kind of sending 20 text messages in rapid succession saying, what do you need? Why are you doing this? Am I in trouble? You know, whatever it is we're saying. But you've been able to move to the front of the bus and now you're driving it, right? You're moving kind of out of. You're being. Instead of being at the effect of life, you're being at.
- [102:50]
Andrew Huberman
Cause I feel like most people learn how to control their body, but most people don't know how to control their mind. Meaning they don't know how to control their thinking.
- [102:59]
Ryan Suave
Yeah, and there's a great line in a Indian text, it's called the Atma Gita, I think it is, where it says something like the end of this. It's like man thinks his enemy is out there, but really the man's uncontrolled mind is his only true foe. I don't know if we need to garner complete control over the mind. I think the way to do that is to be able to kind of find ways to relax back from what the mind is doing and saying. And like you said, ignoring the thoughts between two and five. You know, I think there's a lot of thoughts that we have that we can ignore. You know, our thoughts are not fact. It's this input or that I'm getting. And we tend to grab onto the thoughts that I think that we've had before that have helped us survive situations. Even if the way that we've survived those situations is to cause destruction, you know, we know how to live. You know, example would be someone who's in an abusive relationship again and again, right? That person, I've never met that person that said, I can't wait to get in the next relationship. So it's abusive. You know, it could be a man or a woman. In this case, let's say it's a woman. You know, maybe the only men that she was around growing up were controlling or abusive, and she had some experiences with men who were very similar. And then that's the environment or the waters that she started to swim in. She knows how to survive, that kind of man. Or if you're a man, that kind of woman. And when they. They would find, even if they want that relationship that's loving, caring, kind and patient, no conflict or not that type of conflict, even though they want that, when they get into it, it doesn't make sense because they've never done it before, they're still going to be potentially relating to that person with these past reactive patterns. You know, I always say this when my wife and I have, you know, if you're in a relationship, we have a great marriage. And great marriage also includes disagreement and argument, Right? It also includes love and connection and all of that stuff. And when we're in an argument, it's almost like I'm not talking to her and she's not talking to me. It's like my past is talking to her past and her past is talking to my past. When we can stop and get out of that cycle for just a moment, then we can make a choice that will move us toward the direction that we want to move. And that choice can seem risky because if we haven't done it before, it goes against every. Or let's say that that choice might go against everything that we've developed in order to survive the situations that we've come out of. So now, instead of arguing, I'm going to be vulnerable, that's going to feel very scary.
- [105:45]
Andrew Huberman
Lori Gottlieb, a psychologist, was on this podcast and saying, and I totally subscribe to this, that people are more willing to stay in a bad situation, often something that's not adaptive for them because it's familiar, versus stepping into something that could be better for them, clearly better for them. And they can understand that cognitively, but they somehow cling to what's familiar. I think that's just the way our nervous system is wired. Like you said, you know, staying in the battles, repeating the battles that are familiar to us, that we know how to win.
- [106:22]
Ryan Suave
We just, instead of authoring something new, we're plagiarizing from our past, just again and again.
- [106:27]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I love that phrase, plagiarizing from the past, even though it's something to avoid. How often should people do NIDRA or NSDR and when, what time of day?
- [106:37]
Ryan Suave
I think, I think I've told you this before, right? The first, probably the best time is to do something in the morning and in the late afternoon. Second best time would be in the evening, and third best time would be anytime you. You can. So it's not easy. You know, it could be anywhere from 20 to 35 minutes. Right. So it's not easy for people to find that based on. Find that time based on the schedules they have. But, you know, set a, set a time that you're going to do it. You know, when we schedule and have proactive tools, we don't know if we're going to need them in that moment. What it means is, regardless of whether I need it or not, I'm going to do it. You know, it's kind of like I tell people with therapy about therapy and coaching all the time. If the second best time to get therapy is when you're in crisis, the best time is when you're not. That's when you can, we can grow. So scheduling proactively will allow us to either maybe solve a crisis that we're in or help us have the tolerance in that moment. Like, I wake up stressed and I'm able to then do this, this practice, and then I'm not stressed or I wa stressed and I'm able to do this. And it helps to build the ability for me to kind of drop back into that state, because that's what I think. As we practice things like yoga, Nidra, we're able to more quickly move from a dysregulated state to a regulated state. I don't know if you've had that experience.
- [108:00]
Andrew Huberman
Definitely. I think of stress and alertness and calm, all of it as the autonomic nervous system parasympathetic, being calmer states, sympathetic, being more activated states. And I think of it like a seesaw. And I think, you know, when we're asleep, we're mostly parasympathetic. When we're very stressed, we're mostly, mostly sympathetic. So it's the balance. But the way I think about things like Nidra is as a person on that seesaw, you are that person and you're Learning to press on one side. And when you're stressed, the hinge of that seesaw is very tight. So it's hard to activate the parasympathetic much more than when like you come out of sleep, you're still a little bit relaxed perhaps, and then it's easier to push on that. So you might find that learning Nidra is easier. Then there's always value to learning how to work both sides of the seesaw. And actually sometimes we need to know how to ramp up the level of stress. As in the case with the cold plunge. We're deliberately activating the sympathetic nervous system and we're saying aha. But I'm doing it as this kind of person, surfing on the seesaw. And so I know how to balance here so that when I'm there again, I recognize this place. So that's kind of how I think about it.
- [109:13]
Ryan Suave
Yeah. And also I have found in practicing yoga, Nidra non sleep Deep rest, that it makes other practices easier that like when I want to do a five minute meditation, you know. And one of the things that I think is super valuable for people is to set aside, you know, proactively schedule these times that you're going to do longer periods of, of rest or a practice. But also recognize that you don't, you know, there might be things that you can do for a minute or two minutes.
- [109:41]
Andrew Huberman
This is what Pavel Satsulin, who is a world class strength coach who was on this podcast talks about, greasing the groove. You know, you want to get good at pull ups. Do two pull ups every time you walk through the doorway from a pull up bar. I think metaphorically speaking that, you know, like the workout in the gym, people think of that as the end point. But actually, you know, we used to do physical labor as a species. Right. So I look at the workout in the gym as the ability to lift boxes on moving day, to move furniture without getting hurt.
- [110:10]
Ryan Suave
Right.
- [110:10]
Andrew Huberman
I love going to the gym, but it's not an end in of itself. Same thing like a long run is the ability to go hiking with friends without having to train for it and not worrying about, you know, gassing out half, you know, halfway through. So I think that these practices are preparation for real life stressors.
- [110:25]
Ryan Suave
They're the gym for your mind, they're.
- [110:26]
Andrew Huberman
The gym for your mind. And we don't talk enough about emotional fitness. And the world is clearly metabolically ill with obesity, diabetes, et cetera. But we are also dealing with a massive mental health crisis that I do believe stems primarily from an inability to regulate this autonomic nervous system thing because we can say, well, sleep's the foundation of mental health, which it is, and physical health. A lot of people have trouble sleeping. How to get better at sleeping, get better at relaxing. How to get better at relaxing. Yoga NIDRA NSDR and then, you know, so I feel like the tools exist. And I'm so grateful that you pointed me in the directions of these tools.
- [111:00]
Ryan Suave
And can be very simple. You know, one of my teachers, you say that the, the breath is the mind made visible. And if you want to change your mind, change your breath. I mean, of course, do a yoga Nidra might take 30 minutes, right? But if you're in a moment where you're feeling really activated, change your breath specifically, like a long, deep, a long exhale.
- [111:23]
Andrew Huberman
I love that. Breath is the mind made visible. It's beautiful and so true.
- [111:28]
Ryan Suave
That was Amrit Desai. I should give him credit.
- [111:30]
Andrew Huberman
Okay, wonderful.
- [111:31]
Ryan Suave
It's the quickest way to move us to create an activation of the parasympathetic nervous system. Quickest way, you know, and this is where, you know, people will think meditation is so hard. Breath work, which there's many different forms of breath work, are hard, which they can be, I suppose, you know, pardon in the way that we've got to find the time and it can be uncomfortable. But you know, I'll tell people, take a minute and breathe. And if you, if even a minute sounds long, take seven breaths. Like, who can't take seven breaths at any point in the day? You're going to do it anyway, right? We never aren't breathing. But if we can bring our attention to that and you can schedule that like, you know, I'm going to do that before I get out of the car to go to the office. I'm going to do it before I go to lunch, after a meeting. Before a meeting. Or you can just say, anytime that I'm feeling like this, I can take seven breaths. It might be end up being two minutes like a TV commercial. And those things add up and they build on each other. And the more that we practice those, the more that we do raise that capacity to experience distress first. It helps us activate that part of the system and teaches us like your analogy in the gym. But we also start building a habit around doing something like this so that we can weather whatever storm's coming and we start to orient toward it.
- [112:54]
Andrew Huberman
I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge one of our sponsors, Waking Up. Waking up is a meditation app that offers hundreds of guided meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga, NIDRA sessions, and more. I started practicing meditation when I was about 15 years old and it made a profound impact on my life. And by now there are thousands of quality peer reviewed studies that emphasize how useful mindfulness meditation can be for improving our focus, managing stress and anxiety, improving our mood, and much more. In recent years, I started using the Waking up app for my meditations because I find it to be a terrific resource for allowing me to really be consistent with my meditation practice. Many people start a meditation practice and experience some benefits, but many people also have challenges keeping up with that practice. What I and so many other people love about the Waking up app is that it has a lot of different meditations to choose from and those meditations are of different durations. So it makes it very easy to keep up with your meditation practice both from the perspective of novelty. You never get tired of those meditations. There's always something new to explore and to learn about yourself and about the effectiveness of meditation. And you can always fit meditation into your schedule, even if you only have two or three minutes per day in which to meditate. I also really like doing yoga nidra, or what is sometimes called non sleep deep rest for about 10 or 20 minutes because it is a great way to restore mental and physical vigor without the tiredness that some people experience when they wake up from a conventional nap. If you'd like to try the Waking up app, please go to wakingup.comhuberman where you can access a free 30 day trial. Again, that's wakingup.comhuberman to access a free 30 day trial. People are probably starting to realize that overcoming addiction is about more than just white knuckling it. It's about more than just going to meetings, although that can be very useful. It's about having a roadmap of the day, having a plan, knowing what weather patterns to look out for internally and externally. It's about having a way to deal with distress, having a way to calm down. So let's talk a little bit more about specific addictions. Maybe I'll mention a couple different categories of addiction and maybe you could reflect on some of the unique features of that in your experience. Not necessarily neurobiologically, but in terms of strategies for confronting in oneself those things. Right, like strategies for trying to overcome. Because I hear from thousands of people really about different addictions in themselves and people close to them. So let's start with alcohol. What is unique about alcohol addiction that people should know? And these could be extensive Answers, they don't have to be, but that could be helpful to them.
- [115:44]
Ryan Suave
Alcohol is an interesting one. I think alcohol and most drugs have a lot of similarities, although alcohol tends to be the one that is the most, like, socially acceptable. I mean, drinking is part of our.
- [115:59]
Andrew Huberman
Culture, and if you don't do it, you catch some flack sometimes.
- [116:03]
Ryan Suave
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think some of that's been changing and some of it thanks to you. I mean, I can't tell you how many people that have ended up. I've ended up talking to because they listen to your podcast on alcohol, you know, just from a health standpoint. So people are starting to look at that. It's. It's become, you know, it's less like the Mad Men 50s, people drinking at lunch, but it's still very much part of the culture and everything. Happy hour, happy day, you know, I mean, look at the Sunday. Ever been in one of these retirement communities, like, in. Where people are retired and just drinking all the time or really? Oh, yeah. There's a real stigma to not being able to drink for people. You know, I, you know, I don't mind sharing. I've been sober for quite some time, and that was a. That was a challenging thing. Like the first wedding I went to or the first, you know, work event that I went to. I didn't know how to talk about it with people. Now I. It's no big deal. I don't. It doesn't bother me at all. And if it does, you know, sometimes I don't like to be around people who are just getting wasted, but I, you know, so I'll leave the wedding at 10 instead of 2. You know, most of the people thought I was there till 2, but I left it. I left at 10 because they're. They're doing whatever they're doing, but it's. It's very challenging because, you know, having a glass of wine at dinner or, you know, a beer after work, or, you know, thinking about, you know, people, you know, like a. It was always a thing, like the first time a dad and a son share the. Share a beer. Like, there's a lot of romanticizing around it and alcohol. I don't think alcohol is evil. I mean, I think listening to what you've talked about, it is poison. But I don't like anything else in moderation. I don't think it's gonna. It's a terrible problem. I'm not anti alcohol, but, you know, what is it doing to you and what are you using it for? So I Think what the good side of that being part of the culture is. When people can find a community like a 12 step community or some other sort of peer community where people aren't drinking, it can. You know, that is really what helps them a lot. They're not alone in this. And I think the movies and TV do a terrible job representing what 12 step meetings are like. You know, it's usually like they show a circle in a church basement, and everybody's talking about how they can't drink that day. I'm sure you've seen that in television, right? And in reality, of course, that happens sometimes, but most people are there really trying to use their. That program as a design for living and to build really amazing lives. When you look at the 12 steps, when it comes to alcohol, alcohol is only mentioned in the first one. Everything else is about how you live your life. You know, that first step is about admitting we were powerless and that our lives have become unmanageable. And powerlessness is actually an awesome concept. I mean, people will look at powerlessness and think, that means I'm weak. That means I can't control my life. But really, defining where you're powerless is the first step in finding great power. Because if I just keep going out every day and I start fighting a battle that I'm going to lose every single day. And even if it wasn't addiction, like, every day I just go out and I am, you know, taking on the five biggest guys on the block when I'm a kid, right? I'm going to lose that every day. I'm not going to start winning until I realize I can't beat them in the way that I'm doing it. So go do something else. You know, powerless, where we identify where we're powerless, then we can go find great power. And that's where the concept of higher power comes in. And higher power to a lot of people is God. And whatever their concept of it, sometimes higher power is just the group of people and the community. You know, I will see that anywhere from the relationship with God to like, me and you talking is a. Is a higher power. Two heads are better than one. You know, I'm going to be able to reflect to you, and you're going to be able to reflect back, or I'm going to share with you, and you can reflect back to me and help me see things differently and shift a perspective. Because a lot of our healing is just a perception change. Like, I'm just going to see things a little bit differently than I did before. So that community and the ability for them to be in service to each other and help each other is. Is a. I think that's the antithesis of. I'm part of this drinking culture. And that's not only unique to alcohol, but because there's such that, you know, there's not usually like a socially acceptable. Like, you don't see crack advertised on television. Right. You see alcohol, and it's in everything now. We do see gambling on television quite a bit, which is.
- [120:55]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, let's talk about gambling. I like the way, by the way that you frame.
- [121:01]
Ryan Suave
Alcohol.
- [121:02]
Andrew Huberman
It's being offered to us all the time after a certain age. And so it, you know, it's. It's a challenging one for people that are challenged with alcohol addiction or alcohol use disorder. And 12 step, I think is.
- [121:16]
Ryan Suave
Right.
- [121:16]
Andrew Huberman
It's free, it's in every city. It's powerful program. Certainly there are data. I should just mention this. You know, I think people will hear, oh, it's a cult, et cetera. There was a study actually that run at Stanford some years ago. We'll provide a link to the coverage of that study in the study, which took a very Objective look at 12 step for the treatment of alcoholism and other substance addictions. And actually, the investigators, the people that ran the study, were very skeptical going into it, and the results were pretty remarkable. And they changed their initial perception coming out of it that it can be very, very effective for people, especially given that you can do it when you travel, you can go to meetings in other cities. And as you mentioned, it's not. It's not the depressing picture that people think of a bunch of people whose lives are destitute in a basement. Sometimes people are coming in with some hard stuff, but there's often a lot of humor. Yeah, there's a lot of common challenge that it's. It's very. It's very. There's a. There's a lightness there that a lot of people might not anticipate.
- [122:20]
Ryan Suave
People taking on life, not hiding from it.
- [122:22]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, Love that gambling.
- [122:26]
Ryan Suave
Not everybody that gambling says a gambling problem, just like everything else, but when it does become problematic, it's a. It's a very challenging disorder to treat. I mean, it's. I don't know where the study came out of it. At one point, I had seen some research that said that the highest rates of suicide were among gambling addicts. And what I've seen with that is it's like their whole world starts to get really small. You know, it's Weird, because in the way that I look at it, it's really the only addiction, if it's an addiction for that person. Right. Not everybody that gambles is gaming part. But for the ones that are addicted, it seems to me to be the only addiction that the next hit can solve all your problems. So you're down $300,000. You could bet that and win it. I don't think anybody thinks, like, really thinks. I mean, in the moment, they're probably out of their mind, but they don't think. You know, if I shoot this next, if I take. If I. If I shoot heroin, my life is going to get better in the long run. They might be thinking it's going to get better right now because I'm not going to get sick. I'm going to feel good, whatever it is for them. But they don't. They're not thinking that this is going to solve their problems. They know it's not. And so it fortifies. What you were talking. We were talking about before is continuing to go after the hot fudge Sunday. Except they can. They can get it, you know, and it's interesting because I've talked to different people, and sometimes the hit isn't in the winning. Sometimes the hit is in the losing for them, really. I've had people tell me that. I don't really understand that, but I think then they have to go back after it again.
- [124:04]
Andrew Huberman
I mean, I believe them. You know, they're the ones suffering from it, but. Wow.
- [124:09]
Ryan Suave
And, you know, it's becoming a real problem with kids. You know, there's a lot of sites to gamble on now. You know, a lot of. They can bet on a lot of crypto sites. You can bet on anything. There's kids are playing in these online casinos that are probably operated overseas, that are not regulated at all. And, you know, casinos that are regulated become very wealthy, winning on a very small margin. I'm sure these casinos don't ever lose. Right. They're making it up. It's in our face all the time. It was. I was reading. Willie Mays died recently as a baseball player, San Francisco Giant, before we were around. But he was banned from baseball for life. I think they ended up letting him back in because he took a contract from. I think it was Bally's. He wasn't betting on sports. So this is in the 80s. He took a contract because he would go there and meet with their high rollers once a year for like a week, just play golf with them, hang out with them. He wasn't Betting on baseball and he got banned from baseball. Now you watch a baseball game or go to a baseball stadium and different betting sites are. Different betting sites are mentioned all over the place. You watch any sporting event and it's out there and, and that's not the only thing people are gambling on. But I don't know if you watch sports right now with the basketball on or the super bowl was on. I mean it showing people with a phone showing that they're winning, you know, 100. There's a celebrity on there winning $186,000, I think the number was. You know, and then couple that with kids that are pretty susceptible already. Looking at those unicorn type people that are making millions on YouTube playing video games or professional players. Yeah, professional poker players or even ones that aren't gambling that, you know, they're out there and they became a creator and they're making millions of dollars a year by having people follow them like that. This, this there's a way to make a, you know, that their significance is going to come from making a lot of money really fast, you know, and then they see this way to do it without having to work or anything like that. And it's, it's rigged to lose. I mean they're going to lose dopamine without effort.
- [126:32]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, that's the danger. I was, you know, I've said many times on this podcast elsewhere too, it's like any high rapid inflection in dopamine that doesn't require effort. Aside from being a kid and your parents get you an ice cream or it's your birthday, all you did is you were born. It's. And to get those presents and you deserve that. It's your birthday. Great. But in life, like dopamine, that doesn't require effort to obtain is the slipperiest slope.
- [127:02]
Ryan Suave
Yeah. And the gambling's not for the kids. Isn't just. And adults. But it's not just on betting on like what we think we might traditionally think of betting on a sporting event or something like that. It's, you know, we see it in cryptocurrencies, not that there's nothing against cryptocurrencies, but people going into it without any knowledge or any sort of sophistication and just putting all their money in it. And you know, up and down we see it, we see more sophisticated people doing it as adults on, in real estate investments or stock market. Stock market or owners of company taking big bets on things. And it doesn't mean that there's aren't people that are taking calculated risks. I'm talking about people who are like day trading when they, you know, and there are people that day trade and do great, but then there's a lot of people that see this person day trading great. And then they. They do it and don't do so great. Right. Their lives collapse.
- [127:53]
Andrew Huberman
So are you seeing more people coming to you with gambling addiction?
- [127:57]
Ryan Suave
Yes. It's not always then the primary thing though. There's a lot of people that are coming in with substance abuse or substance use or alcohol, you know, alcoholism, and we find out that they're also doing that. The thing is, people addicted to gambling aren't always seeking treatment. You know, by the time that they are ready to, they might not have the money for it. You know, they might not have the job with the insurance. And. And you know, if we are talking about insurance and treatment centers, there's not really a benefit for long term gambling treatment. You know, you have to kind of look at the anxiety and depression around it. And sometimes they get put in with people who are just. Who are suffering from anxiety and depression. And we're not really focusing on the specific gambling issue. We also see people that, you know, they stop drinking and they're able to stay sober that way. And they haven't really organized and ordered their life in a way that they're building towards something. And that energy from the addiction of alcohol or drugs goes to gambling.
- [128:58]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. We'll talk about a few other patterns of addiction and types of addiction. Excuse me, but this idea that when you remove the quote unquote medicine, there's a lot of distress and discomfort that comes up for people. And some people are able to white knuckle it, as it's called. Some people can develop tools to try and work with that distress, become more distress tolerant. Some people will transmute distress sometimes. Yeah, it goes into running ultramarathons, which doesn't necessarily mean that it's an addiction, But I've seen, and we know some people who got sober and stayed sober basically by running.
- [129:43]
Ryan Suave
A lot.
- [129:44]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, a lot, A lot. You know, do you think that that.
- [129:48]
Ryan Suave
Increased like VO2 max allows for ability to handle distress better?
- [129:53]
Andrew Huberman
Sure. I think that running can calm the mind over time. Runners who run a lot, most of them are pretty tired or a little bit tired. Right. And maybe that's part of the solution. You know, if you have a dog that needs a lot of physical movement, you put into a small space and it doesn't get that chance to run around I mean, you see this in zoos and animals develop these, what are called stereotypies, like where you see the lion that's cutting literally a trench in the dirt. It's really sad to see, you know, that animal is designed to roam and you give an animal the opportunity to expend this energy that's stored up in its mitochondria. And it does, and it can relax and it can sleep. I mean, they still have to do the work of getting sober, these people. But, you know, moving your body through space is a way of transmuting energy out of the body. So you come home, you like, relax, eat a meal. It's like there's a calming effect to endurance activities.
- [130:47]
Ryan Suave
For me, nothing changes my mind, my mood and nervous system better than even a 20 minute run. I mean, I think they're also getting the benefits. If you're walking or running, you're getting the benefits or similar benefits what people get from emdr, I mean, just the natural movements of the eye. In fact, emdr, which is eye movement desensitization and reprocessing, was the woman who discovered it, discovered it by going for a walk and realizing when she put something that she was distressed by in her mind, at the end of the walk, she felt better.
- [131:14]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, Francine Shapiro, she was in Palo Alto walking behind Stanford when she made that discovery. There's a. As long as we're talking about this, it's funny that this is coming up because online behavior, gambling, looking for somebody to get drugs from. You know, those are. The foraging is where the dopamine is released. We were talking about this earlier. And foraging mentally is the same from the perspective of the dopamine system as foraging physically through space. Think about what the dopamine system evolved for. It's like any animal, including us, searching for water, searching for food, searching for mates. We rest at night. But it's the movement forward through space that satisfies that dopaminergic system. And in fact, the major. I don't want to go off on too much of a tangent here, but the major system for movement in the body, not just reward and motivation, is dopamine. That's why people with Parkinson's lose dopaminergic neurons and they can't generate smooth behavior anymore. And it's interesting that NIDRA and nsdr, the most impressive study in my mind is the one that shows these big increases in dopamine from resting. So I feel like physical movement, 65%.
- [132:25]
Ryan Suave
Increase in endogenous dopamine or something like that it's incredible.
- [132:28]
Andrew Huberman
There's something about still, still body, active mind that ramps up our dopamine stores and then prepares us for.
- [132:35]
Ryan Suave
Does the dopamine store get ramped up when we're sleeping?
- [132:37]
Andrew Huberman
Yes.
- [132:38]
Ryan Suave
So I mean, I think that's the, I mean the yoga, the anecdotally they'll say that, you know, a 30 minute yoga nidra is equal to about three hours of REM sleep. I don't know that that's true or not, but it's hard to equate. Yeah, of course. But I'm just saying anecdotally, you know.
- [132:54]
Andrew Huberman
But it makes sense. And I think, yeah, there's a, there's some truth to that basic statement or basic truth to that statement. I think that transmuting just the energy that would otherwise become distress or that starts as distress, like when we're stressed, we need to get that out of our body. And I think that drugs like cocaine and amphetamine, big increases in dopamine and then crashes. You're essentially dispelling the energy. I'm not so sure that it's always about pursuit. That, that, that's kind of like you said, it's like the, the gambling addict that actually wants to lose.
- [133:27]
Ryan Suave
They want to lose, but they, they recognize that they felt that that was the, that was the hit or they felt won there. I'm sure they felt it when they won as well. But.
- [133:36]
Andrew Huberman
Well, when you're really low, the only place you can go up. Go from there is up. You know, when you're really high, the only place you can go from there is down.
- [133:45]
Ryan Suave
Yeah. This is so important because I think, you know, what is discomfort? What is the distress we're experiencing? It's not our thoughts. We don't feel our thoughts. We feel our feelings. They call them feelings, right. Because we feel them. What are we feeling? We're feeling some sort of sensation in our body.
- [134:05]
Andrew Huberman
It's energy.
- [134:06]
Ryan Suave
It's energy, which is energy. And when we're feeling that energy in an appropriate situation, like I'm feeling intense adrenaline and excitement when I'm going on a roller coaster that I like, you know, and I'll pay and money and stand in line to do that. If you wake up on a Tuesday morning in your bed and you start feeling that, it's anxiety, fear, desperation, you know, it's still just energy in our body and everybody will experience things differently. I could probably ask you because you've got insight, you know, if you're experiencing anger, where it is, if somebody asks me, you know, I can experience that in a hot belly, like heat between my eyes. My shoulders feel really tense. You know, if I'm scared, where do I feel that? You know, I feel like an emptiness in my stomach and a kind of tension in my body. You know, people can name it and sometimes just naming it, you know what it is, versus kind of running through, like, I'm anxious, I'm afraid. Instead of saying I'm anxious or afraid, being able to go, my heart's racing. I'm feeling tension in my shoulders.
- [135:10]
Andrew Huberman
Talking about the experience.
- [135:12]
Ryan Suave
And the goal isn't always just to dissipate it, but we can be with it. Because the idea that I'm anxious and I can't get out of it then causes more anxiety.
- [135:21]
Andrew Huberman
That's right.
- [135:21]
Ryan Suave
And so these practices that we can. Anything that we can build, or we just kind of lean into the discomfort a little bit and then lean out, we start to build capacity. We pendulate through kind of activation and resource until we have a larger range of motion.
- [135:41]
Andrew Huberman
What about. And I'll bundle these things that really hit the dopamine system hard, like in your observation, cocaine, amphetamine being the most salient ones. Adderall and other stimulants. Is there something unique to those addictions that you see in people that come in that give them kind of special requirements for how to overcome those addictions?
- [136:01]
Ryan Suave
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. I think in the. Up until sometime in the 80s, and I'm not gonna have this right, they didn't even. I think they didn't really see cocaine as addictive because you didn't become dependent on it like you would heroin or alcohol.
- [136:20]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah.
- [136:20]
Ryan Suave
Somebody wrote a book called. I think it was a Dr. Gold Gold 1-800-Cocaine where they were starting to see that we could classify addiction as a psychological addiction. I might have that a little bit off, but I think it's somewhere in that neighborhood. There's not a physical detox from stimulants like amphetamines or cocaine. Like there is from heroin, opioids or alcohol and benzodiazepines coming off stimulants is really hard. It's really hard.
- [136:54]
Andrew Huberman
It's really hard.
- [136:55]
Ryan Suave
Right. But it's. There's a obsession of the mind that gets triggered, and it's this. It's this psychological addiction that they can't seem to get out of. I would imagine that you could probably describe it what's happening with the huge surge in dopamine and then drop. Dropping off of it. I'm not sure exactly where it falls in that. But, you know, there's. They used to think that people couldn't, you know, recover from crack cocaine.
- [137:23]
Andrew Huberman
That's what we were told. You do it once and you're addicted. I don't want to say that's not true, but there was no real evidence for that. It's just smoking crack, aside from shooting cocaine, like, intravenously, leads to the fastest increase in dopamine. It's. The rate of increase is just as important as the.
- [137:40]
Ryan Suave
The peak in working with those. I mean, there's a lot of energy that goes into just having them kind of still. I mean, I think a lot of, you know, stimulants kind of. I see it as. They help the physical body kind of match with the internal state of the nervous system. I mean, I think that's one of the reasons we see stimulants work for adhd. I mean, you probably understand the biological reasons of it. It seems to me that it kind of levels out their experience. I mean, I've seen people that when they take stimulants, they get really calm.
- [138:15]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. Having a mismatch between your brain level of activity and your bodily level of activity is really rough. So let's talk about some process addictions. These days, I hear a ton of really desperate stories, mostly from young guys. I've heard from maybe four or five women on this, but literally thousands of young men about porn addiction. Every time I hear about it, I feel so fortunate that I grew up in a time where. Or maybe I just don't have the wiring for it. And if I did, I would be. I'm pretty open on this podcast. It's never been an issue for me. And they're telling me that they can't stop watching porn. I get the sense that they're not enjoying this experience anymore because they're reaching out to me, saying, how in the world can I quit? And what do I tell them?
- [139:12]
Ryan Suave
I remember. And again, I don't know this study, but I remember somebody referencing many years ago, when I was first getting in the field, that porn addiction at the time specifically related to video pornography, which is what it all is now. Right. It was having the same impact on the brain in young men as crack cocaine. I mean, it's extremely powerful, has a lot of other effects in that it sets up a very unrealistic idea and perspective of what sex and intimacy is. You know, it also can help or can lead to kind of setting their sexual template. You know, they can quickly escalate, just like you would escalate kind of back to the, the hot fudge sundae where it doesn't work anymore. From, you know, something that might seem like normal sex to violent sex to really out there. Things that can bring a lot of shame that they're even watching and it can escalate quickly and then have an impact on their own lives and relationships because they're playing out those relationships or that amount of intimacy depending on what they're doing. Also if there's masturbation along with it in, in a fantasy.
- [140:32]
Andrew Huberman
Well, what I'm also hearing is that anytime they are in a real life intimate scenario, which seems to be fewer and fewer times nowadays in the younger generation, that they're having sexual anxiety, sexual performance issues. Which makes sense if they're, if their brain and nervous system is getting wired by porn to observe sexual behavior as opposed to being in the experience of, of. Of intimate sex behavior.
- [140:59]
Ryan Suave
Right.
- [140:59]
Andrew Huberman
Two different things to be in the experience versus watching someone else's experience of it, which is what pornography is.
- [141:04]
Ryan Suave
Yeah. This was probably 10, 15 years ago where we're treating some, but we treating a lot of soldiers that had come back from Afghanistan or Iraq and you know, they had access. This was like the first wars where they had access to the Internet. I mean there's a lot of other things. So there was a lot of kind of combining of sex and violence. Right. They're around a lot of violence and then they're watching sex and then that kind of sexual template would set around. Like in order for them to get pleasure out of sex, it would need to be aggressive or even, even violent or risk very risky. You know, so there's all these things that kind of collapse together. There were other things going on. It was like the first time that they had also really had access to video, video chats. To be able to like be on a battlefield and then come back and be talking to their spouse about something that's going on with the kids, it was very confusing environment for those guys and men and women. You know, the, the porn addiction is a, is a tough one, you know, because it, it's everywhere. I mean now you can find it on any social media almost not, maybe not anyone, but it's not really limited, you know, and even if it's not, you know, I know certain states have just put in where you have to put in your ID to get it, but there's tons of ways around that and other sites that people can go to. And I've run into that with a lot of. It does seem to be Young men, you know, and it's a way for them to play out some sort of fantasy around connection and relationship. And it's. It makes their world really small. I don't think it's the same as gambling, but it can make it. It can make their world very, very small in that they're. Instead of finding relationships out in the world, and it's not necessarily a relationship, but they're what they believe they're getting out of a relationship. They're then getting out of watching porn.
- [143:09]
Andrew Huberman
It seems like basically stopping completely is the answer. And people say, and I'm not trying to moralize here, right? I'm not telling people what's moral about this. I just know that any behavior or substance that leads to quick, repeated inflections in dopamine is going to create a groove in the nervous system where you're going to crave that thing. And it's going to give you a lower and lower sense of satisfaction over time. And the only way to reset that circuit is to stop and do something else in its place. Ideally, that's adaptive.
- [143:41]
Ryan Suave
These are people that are asking you how they can stop. They're telling you, I can't stop. How do I do it? So it can be similar to other addictions. You know, I mean, first the admission part that it's a problem or awareness. It is. And then being able to start to talk to somebody and start to take some accountability around it. Not accountability like you're doing something wrong, but to be able to have some sort of identify the behaviors that start leading to that. You know, I mean, there. That can be done in therapy. There's other 12 step groups that can help people with that to identify what, what their sobriety would look like. If you want to call it sobriety, what it looks like, and if it does involve not watching any porn, then that's the rule set that they have. And then they figure out, either with their therapist or in their treatment center or with their sponsor or community in 12 step, like, how am I going to be held accountable to that? And that might be doing the things like we talked about laying out, looking at your day ahead at the beginning. They might need to look at things like, you know, there's ways and software out there to not be able to look at that on your phone or have an accountability partner that can, you know, you have to. They have to approve websites you go to. And that's not to say that they have to do that forever, but it's something that's available, right? You know, 50 years ago or 30 years ago, someone had to, like, find their dad's porno mag somewhere and then look at it, you know, now it's on their phones or computers.
- [145:10]
Andrew Huberman
Well, we know that accessibility. Increasing accessibility increases addiction, right? This has been studied over and over again. And people say, well, what about red light districts and things? And there's some caveats that have to do with when you create areas within cities where certain things are allowed. But, you know, this has been tested many, many times. It's also true, and it's kind of a duh. But to quote Anna Lemke, it's impossible to get addicted to a substance or a behavior that you've never taken or engaged in, right? So some things are best avoided entirely. Are there specific 12 step programs for porn addiction that are separate from, say, sex addiction?
- [145:45]
Ryan Suave
If people look it up, I'm sure there's meetings out there that are specific to that. There are some treatment centers that have tracks that deal specifically with that. There's therapists that work very closely with that. And I believe that there are some 12 step. I mean, there's pretty much 12 step programs for any sort of. Within things like SA or SLA, there'll be subsets of meetings for people that are with a very specific condition.
- [146:07]
Andrew Huberman
And one of the reasons I wanted to discuss this today is because I hear about it so much, is unlike alcohol or drugs, there's a kind of extra layer of shame associated with pornography addiction for people. So many times we've heard, oh, like this celebrity was an alcoholic or drug addict, wrapped their car around a pole, was arrested this and that, then they get sober, and everyone still loves them, loves them more, Right? If we knew that a given celebrity was like a porn addict or something, we look at that person differently, especially if they're male, we just look at them differently. And so reducing some of the shame around it, I think is key to helping them recover. Because I can tell you, the questions initially came in kind of like, as is often the case with men, when they're trying to talk about issues that they were kind of cloaked in, like, what are your thoughts about NoFap, which is this thing where guys withhold ejaculation, does increase testosterone. Turns out in the short run, it does. In the long term, it's probably not good for the prostate, etc. But then it turned out they were really asking about masturbation, they were really asking about pornography. And then all of a sudden, I don't know what changed out there, but there's been this deluge of. Of questions from young guys of how they can stop engaging in online porn.
- [147:25]
Ryan Suave
A key to that is what you said about we look at them differently. You know, they're going to keep it secret. You know, and there's a saying, secrets keep us sick. But I believe there's like a real, almost a biology to that in that, you know, if you're holding it in, not sharing it, you know, there's no really place for it to go. But shame and shame separates us and separate, we're not connected and not connected. We're alone. And alone we're, you know, we keep carrying that forward. Alone, we're dead. You know, maybe not in that sense anymore like we talked about earlier, but like, we're not really living. And so they're, you know, these guys are hearing you on a podcast and then dming you, right? They're probably not in a personal close relationship with you, right? It's. It's easier to send it there than maybe go ask for help with somebody in their area or go to a meeting or something like that because of the stigma. So it's good that you've opened up the ability for people to do that, but to continue to direct them back to, let's try to treat this like we would any other addiction, at least from the standpoint of you've got to talk about it, you've got to have some sort of admission, you've got to be able to find a community around it. You want to be able to do work, most likely with a therapist or a team of therapists that can help you understand what's driving that behavior. And you and I have had long discussions about trauma before. That's something I've worked with for many years or most of my career. As I came into being a therapist in trauma therapy, we're often going back to seeing find we do a history and really kind of understand where the patterns started, you know, and it's really helpful, you know, for me as a therapist when I can see where it is, because I can start making sense of how people are behaving this way as adults when I can see all of the experiences they had and especially the more negative impactful ones which tend to impact the brain. Like you always say, fastest way to plasticity is through a traumatic event.
- [149:36]
Andrew Huberman
I believe that's how you say one trial learning. It just takes once. Yeah, unfortunately. But luckily there's plasticity in the other direction.
- [149:44]
Ryan Suave
It takes a little bit longer. Longer. I think that's where addiction comes in too. Because, you know, you can kind of feel a sense of plasticity, you know, if I'm. If I'm drinking or if I'm doing drugs. Right. I don't know if that's the actual term for it, but I'm not feeling like my brain is so stuck in that direction. You know, I can. I can act a little bit differently.
- [150:03]
Andrew Huberman
What comes to mind for. To kind of encapsulate all of it, because it gets to the underlying mechanisms, I think, is beware the things that come easily and quickly. Like, really beware those things. If it's pornography and you can get to experience of. It's not the experience of sex, but the illusion of pseudo sex. Right. If it's easily available, beware of that thing. If it's a feeling of relaxation from a drink, beware of alcohol.
- [150:34]
Ryan Suave
Yeah. If it's fast money.
- [150:36]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah. If it's you, you are very proficient at, you know, you find you. You know, you lift a weight, you build muscle, you get attention for it. Beware that thing. Because there are all these positive reward signals that are masking what soon will happen, which is that that thing is going to make you kind of lopsided internally and make you crave it more. And so I think that there's something about this. Things that come easy. It's a problem. And I think I kind of like that in the sense that because many people are struggling and we don't often glorify the struggle, we're all trying to struggle our way out of struggle, but struggle is distressed. And as long as we're struggling, we're in the distress tolerance. I'm not saying people shouldn't aim to succeed, but. And forgive me for going a little long on this reflection, but I remember in graduate school, I had a paper that got accepted by the journal Science, which is like one of the three apex journals, Nature, Science, and Cell. And I was like, over the moon. I was like, oh, my God, this is amazing. First author paper in science. Some people never do that in their career. I was doing it as a graduate student, and my dad, who's a scientist, said, prepare for the week afterward when you wonder if you'll ever do it again. I was like, okay. Kind of a postpartum crash. And then my graduate advisor, I said, do we get to celebrate? Like, do we get to, like, throw a meal or a party? And she goes, no. Like, I suppose I could buy you a pizza, but that would be stupid. And this is perfect, Chapman. And very blunt. And she said, no, the pleasure was the work of doing the paper, and I was like, I got it. And that's what taught me to repeat that process. Didn't always publish in science, but certainly in other great journals again and again. It's like that the reward is in the process. Like, the effort is the reward.
- [152:36]
Ryan Suave
And if there's no process or no effort, I mean, and we don't struggle in one way, we're struggling with so much, and in other ways, we don't struggle, you know, with the stuff that we probably need to struggle with to move the energy out of our body. You know, I mean, Michael Easter's book Comfort Crisis is great. You know, it's. It's like, you know, we used to walk like 10 miles a day, and, you know, we're not burning that energy, so we're just sitting there with this energy that used to just get disseminated. We'd, like, wake up in the morning, move through the stressors of the day. Good, bad, and different. You know, even good things are stressful. If you have to go to three birthday parties on a weekend, even if they're fun, you're tired at the end.
- [153:10]
Andrew Huberman
Sounds like a dad.
- [153:11]
Ryan Suave
Yeah, it is a dad. I go to a lot of birthday parties and try not to get sick because of, you know, at them, Especially when they're at these little indoor.
- [153:17]
Andrew Huberman
What's more rewarding than amazing kids? But what's interesting, Michael Easter, you know, with the comfort crisis, I mean, doing these hard misogy challenges, he calls them, you know, I mean, think about, like, self imposing discomfort so that you don't get pulled into the illusion of. Of comfort by these other things. I mean, I think it's coming clear to me now that the things that come easy are the traps. Yeah, they're the traps. So, folks, if you're really good at something, doesn't mean don't lean into it. But if something comes really easily for you, you have to be very mindful of that thing and other things around it sounds like you created discomfort for yourself. Maybe there's like a discomfort appetite that if we don't satisfy through healthy things, we will satisfy through unhealthy things.
- [154:03]
Ryan Suave
That's a very interesting concept.
- [154:04]
Andrew Huberman
I mean, I don't know where that would exist in the nervous system, but because you hear, oh, we're trying to avoid pain and go toward pleasure. But those models are. That's true, but those models are too simple. So I like the idea of a ration of discomfort to experience every day.
- [154:18]
Ryan Suave
Isn't it that we're kind of built to expend energy and then sleep and then wake up the next day and expend energy and sleep. And if we're not expending the energy, how can we sleep and then we wake up with more and we just carry the stressors from the day before rather than just breaking it down. I mean, that's one of the beauties of, you know, recovery where they talk about one day at a time.
- [154:38]
Andrew Huberman
But one of the, you know, this last couple of weeks. There's always something each year that really pops, that gets kind of viral overnight. Last year it was the Hoktua girl. This year it's the morning routine guy. The guy that he shows his morning routine and it got millions and millions of hits. And this guy does like cold water on the face. He's working, he's praying, he's doing all these things. He's. He's wearing no shirt. He's super jacked. Like he was getting attention for different reasons. Anyway, huge following. And the best comment ever was, oh, man, this guy's going to come after me. He seems like. Like a. Like he's got his life organized. Someone put a comment. This guy spends all day preparing for the next day, which is, you know, the worst thing about optimization. The whole purpose of tools like sleep or Nidger and all these things that you can. And you taught me this really good protocols let you lean into life more, not less. It's not about withdrawing and getting into a wellness loop where you're just preparing for the next day. It's about being able to lean into the third birthday party where you're like, oh, and the kids are sick and, you know, you're being exposed to all this stuff, but you're there because your daughter needs to be there and she's elated to be there.
- [155:50]
Ryan Suave
Yeah.
- [155:50]
Andrew Huberman
Can we put on the shelf that perhaps we have an appetite for discomfort that we can either satisfy through healthy things or unhealthy?
- [155:59]
Ryan Suave
I think that's a good way to put it.
- [156:02]
Andrew Huberman
Can we call it the Suave Huberman?
- [156:04]
Ryan Suave
We can call it the we'll go Huber. It's fine.
- [156:07]
Andrew Huberman
Addiction means that somebody's already in the pit. Like, they haven't done the okay, I have an appetite for discomfort. I need to satisfy with adaptive things. They're in the pit. So if you would. If people out there listening are in a place where they're like, they know something's got them as opposed to them having it where they're wondering or someone they know, and especially if it's somebody that they know what, what do you suggest? I mean, this isn't kind of like call the suicide hotline. I mean, unless they're suicidal, obviously. I mean a lot of people don't have means to like start therapy with a world class addiction therapist, trauma specialist. Some do, some don't. What do people do?
- [156:59]
Ryan Suave
Well, there are a lot of, you know, options for people out there. You know, sometimes they don't think that they have them because they don't have means. But, but in our centers we strive to create access and I know a lot of others do too. So it's not just people that pay out of pocket. There's insurance and we build some quality treatment centers for people with Medicaid in different states. We don't know what's happening with that at the moment, but currently they can get treatment for that. So if they're in a state where they needed like detox or, you know, they're in a place where if they try to stop drinking or using, it gets pretty significant. There's services out there for them. Another great thing though is to just go straight into a 12 step meeting. They're everywhere.
- [157:50]
Andrew Huberman
How do people find those meetings?
- [157:52]
Ryan Suave
They go online. Google 12 step in your area. If it's, you know, there's Narcotics Anonymous, there's Alcoholics Anonymous, there's Cocaine Anonymous, there's, there's Overeaters Anonymous, there's Gambling Anonymous. I mean if you, every one of them has a central office. The organizational structure especially of like Alcoholics Anonymous is really incredible. We could do a whole episode on it. There's no, there's no leaders. It's a very flat organization.
- [158:14]
Andrew Huberman
Politically unaffiliated.
- [158:15]
Ryan Suave
Politically unaffiliated. They have a vow of poverty. If somebody died and donated a million dollars, they can't take more than 10,000.
- [158:22]
Andrew Huberman
Really?
- [158:22]
Ryan Suave
Yeah. There's only trusted servants. There's no leaders. The, the, there, there are people who are employed that do administrative work, but everything else, and it's been like this for 80 some years. It's, it's really quite incredible.
- [158:36]
Andrew Huberman
And there are online meetings.
- [158:37]
Ryan Suave
There's online meetings. They're all over the world. You know, you can find them at any time. That's one of The Beauties of 12 Step Meetings is that, you know, I, obviously I'm a therapist, we have treatment centers. I. It's nice to get people to come to those and it's great for people to be able to step out, but there's things that we can do that they can't. I mean, they're not gonna medically Detox them. They can't keep them out of, like, you know, in a safe environment for a period of time.
- [159:04]
Andrew Huberman
But a kid with a porn addiction, somebody who's abusing alcohol or addicted to food, shopping, gambling, they can find a meeting.
- [159:13]
Ryan Suave
They can find a meeting. Yep, they can find a meeting. And, you know, I always tell people to try six different ones. They're free. You know, you're gonna find your group. I mean, listen, they're run by peers. So this is like something that was developed as it would be like if somebody developed a therapeutic modality 80 years ago and then passed it on to everybody that they gave every client they had. And then they, they ran it. I mean, it's not, it's not run by professional counselors, although there are professional counselors and then there's every walk of life from. I've, you know, been around people who are anything from priests to rabbis to doctors. There's no prejudiced in the disease. But you can build a community where people are willing to help and be in service to each other. And you can't call a therapist anytime during the night. You can't just look up and find a meeting and go. And at this point, with things online, you could find a meeting 24 hours a day, anywhere. And the meeting's not going to solve it necessarily. But the fact that you're moving in that direction, you know, you're spending an hour. If you're spending an hour thinking and reflecting and talking about it, even if you're not like in silent meditation, it's almost like a meditation. If you're spending an hour hearing people talk about how they recovered and helping you, it's an hour that you're not doing the other thing. And in the beginning, that might be the white knuckling of it, right? But the idea is to get out of white knuckling, you know. And so the Beauty of the 12 step programs, which was founded by the guys that started Alcoholics Anonymous and then Dr. Bob Smith and Bill Wilson, and the way they discovered it was by helping each other. Bill Wilson had been trying to get sober for a long time. He'd been introduced to something called the Oxford Group, which was more of a religious group based in Christianity. And they had like a four. I think it was a four step process, which the 12 steps are just kind of really expanded on. But there's a. In the literature, there's this beautiful moment where Bill Wilson had been trying to stay sober for a while, and he was. But he was really white knuckling. It. And he had been at his home in New York. He'd been going into the hospital and helping others. And he found by trying to help others, he stayed sober. And he's a guy that had struggled for a very long time, and none of those guys were staying sober, but he was, which was kind of. He first kind of conceptualized this, and then he was on a business trip in Akron, Ohio, which is where this Dr. Bob Smith lived. And he. He was staying at this hotel, I think it was called the Mayflower Hotel in the. In the history. And he had come out of a business meeting. I think it didn't go the way he wanted. And he walked in, and in the story he's describing, hearing the bar and the kind of clinking of the glasses over here and the kind of the call of the bar, and he had some change in his pocket. And it was in the 1930s, early 1930s, maybe 34, 35. And then there was a bank of phones over here. And so he was kind of pulled between the bar and the phones, and for whatever reason, he went to the phones. He paused and he went there, and he called. I forget who he called, maybe the hospital. And he asked if there was. I think he basically asked if there was any drunks in the town he could help. And they directed him to. In some way, to this doctor who was like the local town, Dr. Bob Smith. And. And he was also an alcoholic who had struggled for a long time. And they met, and I think he went to his house, or he might have been in the hospital at the time. I could have the history a little bit wrong, but they met and started talking, and I think Bob relapsed one more time, but they started talking and helping each other, and then they went and helped another guy, and then they went and helped another guy. And there's a whole history to, like, how it. It developed and then how they wrote a book together. The book was really meant to send. It was written, like four years later, send the information about alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous to everywhere in the country where they didn't have meetings. They started having these meetings and helping each other through this step process that they. They. They developed. And it's really interesting because this was one man's decision. You know, instead of going to the bar or going to the phone, instead of going to the bar, he made one phone call. And that transformed millions of lives. I mean, there's millions of members around the world. You know, he was like. I think he was called either Time magazine or Life Magazine's Hundred most Influential People of the. Of the 20th century. And there's still people who find recovery. And then they gifted those steps to all of the other things like Cocaine Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous. And, you know, it's not for everybody. And they'll even say that in other literature. That's why I wouldn't consider it a cult, because they'll say, we don't have a monopoly, you know, and of course you're going to meet personalities in there. But the organization itself is agnostic to religion, to ideas, to politics. And it's a place that people can come with a common problem and find a common solution. And these meetings can be the place that hold people as a container. You know, I always see our treatment centers as like a container of space and time where people can come in and really kind of let themselves fall apart and we can start helping them build their life back. But these 12 step meetings are like a container. And they have a, you know, people will. People are, you know, excited in there to reach out and connect with you. And it's in those moments of connection that we can really find healing. I mean, look at what happened to him. Instead of going into the bar and connecting with the people in there and drinking and, you know, he had enough evidence to show that drinking would, you know, it didn't take him in the right direction. He was able to make a phone call, connect with somebody else, and it created all these connections later on, you know, and it's not a place that people go just to white knuckle it. I mean, that's why they might get in there. Nobody usually comes there because they, you know, had one bad night of drinking. It's usually, as some people say, no one comes in here a winner. They've been on a losing streak, and that's okay. But to be able to admit that and really discover who you are and share that with others and find frivolity and joy in the depths of people's pain, and they can really understand that there's hope, there's promise, and there's a way out. And these people who are struggling aren't gonna necessarily find that in their first meeting, but they might get the hope and the connection with others, and so they're available out there. And if you don't like the 12 step and the spirituality, there's other recovery programs out there or other peer support groups out there like Smart Recovery or Refuge Recovery, and they'll talk about things in a different way. So it's not about, like, finding A specific dogma, go out and try different things. You know, even the act of trying different things is going to help them move out of being stuck in. If it's like the porn addiction, right? And then people do reach a certain point in acuity, especially with drugs and alcohol, that they need to be in a facility, you know, and that might be a hospital, it might be a treatment center, and you know, you can. There are resources for that. I think it's a good place for people to start if they don't have the resources to be able to attend a treatment center or work in therapy.
- [166:27]
Andrew Huberman
Thanks for sharing that avenue. For people with all sorts of addictions, not just alcohol.
- [166:33]
Ryan Suave
And for the families, Al Anon for the people is for the families. There's Codependents Anonymous, there's Families Anonymous, there's adult children of Alcoholics Anonymous or adult children of Alcoholics is really about dysfunctional family systems that people might have grown up even if their parents weren't alcoholics. So there's. There's stuff out there for. For everyone.
- [166:54]
Andrew Huberman
Prior to this conversation, I solicited for questions from the Internet about addiction, broadly speaking, and got some great questions. The first question is, is addiction the problem? They put the in quotes. Or is addiction an attempted solution to a different but less obvious problem?
- [167:19]
Ryan Suave
The short answer to that is both. The addiction is really the solution to some sort of discomfort or stress that they're experiencing, but then the addiction itself becomes problematic. I would say that addiction is the solution in the sense that it's the person's attempt to solve or to find relief from whatever stressor they're experiencing. But it's a solution that becomes problematic. So it takes on a life of its own. It becomes its own trauma itself. Drinking alcoholically and blacking out is a trauma to your body, to your brain. The things that people do in addiction become more traumatic. I think there's this cycle that I always use in the background called it's trauma, Stress and addiction. And expanding the definition of trauma to wound. It starts with a wound, and then stress is the relationship to that wound, much like a limp after a broken leg. And when stress gets big enough, people look for relief. And so they look to behaviors or substances which then can, if the stress is big enough and repeated, can become alcoholic. So that stress is not really the wound, it's the relationship to it. Like I said, the limp after the broken leg. But that limp, while it's not the broken leg, informs how we walk or don't walk, how we run or don't Run how we view ourselves, how we view the other people in the world view us, and all of those things together can lead to a level of stress where people find relief. And since it's chronic, then they keep. They keep using. But then the behaviors and things that they do while they're using or drinking create a trauma itself, which then leads to more stress, which then leads to more addiction. So it becomes kind of this perpetual motion machine, if you will.
- [169:02]
Andrew Huberman
So the medicine becomes the source of stress?
- [169:05]
Ryan Suave
Yeah.
- [169:05]
Andrew Huberman
Are GLP1 agonists, things like Ozempic, WeGovy, et cetera, being used for addiction outside the context of weight loss? Interesting question. And will this happen in an official capacity or remain off label use? They're asking your opinion. Are GLP1s being used to treat addiction to food? And do you think it can be useful for treating addiction to other things?
- [169:30]
Ryan Suave
I believe that there's some initial research going on that it can help with cravings and addiction in general. It makes sense to me. I mean, I've heard that anecdotally over the years that people that were diabetic and also alcoholic, but the diabetics that maintained their blood sugar properly had less chance of relapse. I mean, there's this very simple kind of an acronym called halt. You may have heard of Hungry, Angry, Lonely, tired, which seems so simple. It used to drive me crazy. But it's so true that people tend to be at higher risk for relapse or using when they're either hungry, they're angry, they're lonely, or they're tired. And sometimes those things are all together. And those are times in which I would imagine their system is looking for something to. I mean, if you're hungry, you're looking to elevate your blood sugar. And if you can maintain that, I would imagine that it would have some interesting effects. I was just at a meeting with some of the executives of the major insurance companies, our company, and has a private meeting with them and they were talking about that some of the things that they're looking for, I don't know that I'm sure it's been used off label, but I don't know of anybody that's using it yet on label for any of that.
- [170:53]
Andrew Huberman
Can somebody be addicted to stress? Meaning are habits, addictions. Those are sort of two questions. Clever. This person snuck in two questions. First question, can somebody be addicted to stress?
- [171:05]
Ryan Suave
I think that people can be set, have their nervous system set in a way that they need that level of stress or activation in order just to kind of get to baseline in order to kind of feel alive. You know, I've seen that a lot when I worked with, when I've worked with especially special forces combat veterans, you know, coming home, like a lot of the mundane stuff almost didn't feel like they felt alive, you know, and of course, this isn't everybody. This is the ones that were coming to me, but that they needed to be involved in, like really risky behaviors or really high adrenaline behaviors. Kind of. It felt like they were just getting to kind of baseline of being normal. It wasn't even like taking them to another edge. And, you know, that makes sense to me because a lot of like what basic training or the training that they do later on for more Special Forces is. While it's skills training, it's really nervous system training. Right? It's. It's the ability you could. It's the ability to do those skills under an extreme amount of stress or lack of sleep and everything like that. So if they're kind of oriented in that way, then when they come home or they're in environments where it doesn't, it takes a lot to bring them up just to that level of like, what might feel normal for them. Their. Their kind of system is set up much higher than here, and they've got to get up to that to just, just feel alive. So I don't know if addicted. Maybe it is addicted. I feel like they have a need. You know, it's a drive.
- [172:36]
Andrew Huberman
It's a drive intensity addiction. That's a you. And I know some people with that.
- [172:43]
Ryan Suave
Yes.
- [172:43]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, I'd like to know about social behavior addictions, social media, coffee, sugar, even work addiction. And as always, thank you for tackling hard topics. I guess that was directed toward me, but you're the one who's about to try and tackle this topic. So are those things really addictions? Are people addicted to sugar, addicted to coffee? Do they meet the classic definition of addiction?
- [173:10]
Ryan Suave
Well, they're not going to meet a diagnostic criteria.
- [173:14]
Andrew Huberman
Progressive, et cetera. Yeah, but what is the diagnostic. It's always this progressive.
- [173:19]
Ryan Suave
I don't know if it was. Was it on your podcast or did I read about this somewhere else? Where. When they took, you know, there's the classic study about taking rats with cocaine and they'll, they'll add water and, and cocaine and they would like press that lever thousands of times to get the cocaine. Somebody else repeated that, but added one that had sugar in it. And their cocaine use went significantly down when sugar was also present.
- [173:46]
Andrew Huberman
Well, meth addicts will Consume sugar and meth more readily than either one alone.
- [173:51]
Ryan Suave
I mean, I.
- [173:51]
Andrew Huberman
We see this different drug.
- [173:53]
Ryan Suave
We see this when people get sober, you know, that, you know, there's people that will get very heavy. You know, they'll engage in what looks like a food addiction. And when we peel that back, I can't tell you how many times I've heard of, you know, people recognizing their first addictive behavior is going to the sugar bowl and, you know, taking spoonfuls of it, that I've actually heard people say that food addiction, and probably specifically around sugar, is often the primary addiction for people. It's kind of like how they get in, get in, get in there. I don't. I'm sure that's not true for everybody, but I think if we broaden the term of addiction beyond what a use disorder is in the DSM and move towards. Do you have it or does it have you? Absolutely. I mean, I don't think we can become sugar dependent in a way that if we stop it, we're going to go into some sort of major withdrawal. But I would imagine there'd be some sort of withdrawal. Same with caffeine. I've seen people go into psychosis with caffeine.
- [174:49]
Andrew Huberman
I never want to find out what happens if I quit caffeine.
- [174:52]
Ryan Suave
You might just always be in psychosis. Caffeine psychosis.
- [174:55]
Andrew Huberman
Thanks for that.
- [174:56]
Ryan Suave
No, not you. I meant all.
- [174:57]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I love caffeine, but I.
- [174:59]
Ryan Suave
Keep taking that out.
- [175:00]
Andrew Huberman
I can sleep well. No, no, that's fine.
- [175:01]
Ryan Suave
I actually can sleep on it too.
- [175:03]
Andrew Huberman
Well, I don't. I don't. I don't drink caffeine past 2pm Occasionally.
- [175:06]
Ryan Suave
I don't either, but once in a while I do, and it doesn't.
- [175:10]
Andrew Huberman
You're definitely getting less REM sleep in there. I'm sure I am, but you look rested.
- [175:13]
Ryan Suave
So not last night.
- [175:15]
Andrew Huberman
A lot of questions about ibogaine, probably because the incredible work of my colleague Nolan Williams at Stanford with these single ibogaine trials for people getting over alcoholism, meaning one, taking out the game once or twice, and mostly in veterans, was covered on the Rogan podcast and Nolan's been on here. What are your thoughts on the use of ibogaine and other psychedelics? Let's leave MDMA out of it because that's more for the treatment of trauma. And it's not actually a classic psychedelic, but things like psilocybin, ibogaine for people seeking relief from alcohol and drugs specifically. But maybe other addictions.
- [175:54]
Ryan Suave
You know, I've seen some Pretty incredible things happen with people. And I'm glad that the studies have been going on specifically around psilocybin in the US I'm not really aware of any around ibogaine. So anybody that is doing ibogaine treatments are either, you know, I don't know if they're finding it in the US or they're going to Mexico or wherever.
- [176:14]
Andrew Huberman
Which has to be done in Mexico. They're doing the brain scans at Stanford before and after.
- [176:18]
Ryan Suave
Okay.
- [176:19]
Andrew Huberman
It's not currently in the new administration.
- [176:21]
Ryan Suave
So they are doing some studies around it.
- [176:23]
Andrew Huberman
The rates of remission from alcohol use disorder and other substance use disorders is somewhere. There's a range, but 40 to, in some cases, 80% with one or two ibogaine trials. But this is with therapeutic support. There are a bunch of other things happening there. And then there's evidence of brain plasticity in a number of brain areas.
- [176:44]
Ryan Suave
So I don't know enough about the studies happening before like they were doing this where Stanford was doing a study and taking people down to Mexico or people going down there to do it. It was kind of a lot of. I don't know how else to say it, but renegade folks doing it outside wasn't always run by medical teams and people making sure that everybody is safe, at least from my experience, although then I've seen some amazing things around it. My general take on psychedelics, if I look at ptsd, post traumatic stress disorder, I really see that as you could almost substitute state disorder in there for stress because people get stuck in a certain state and let's call it the survival state. And you know, that's. As I've said, one of our biggest challenges is that we go into survival mode and we don't need to go into survival mode. An appropriate response at an inappropriate time. And so things like psychedelics or we actually can see this with breathwork and can help people have an experience where they recognize another state, you know, that they can be in another state, not another state of the US but like they have access to something other than survival. And those touchstone experiences can really give them something to build on. I think like any other approach to medicine that seems miraculous at times, there's a lot out there of this worked for me. So everybody should try it. There's what I'm most concerned. I'm not concerned about the effectiveness of overall of psychedelics because I think there's definitely a place for them, but I'm really most concerned about the ethics that we develop around them, who's delivering it, what Are the rule outs? You know, I know we weren't. We were going to leave MDMA out, but I know some of the MAP studies, it was like three sessions. I think it was over. And I don't think that the world that kind of sees those is then taking that, especially in the personal development world, and going, we're going to do three sessions that can kind of come be something that we do all the time, you know, or microdosing all the time. I don't know enough about it to see if that's going to have an impact. And, you know, there are people with psychological and psychiatric disorders that it can really impact in another way. You know, definitely schizophrenic, bipolar, and, you know, you know, I look at it like, you know, antibiotics, like penicillin saved a lot of people, but then there's people that it kills, right? I can eat peanuts and get protein out of them, and I know people that eat peanuts and they can. They can die.
- [179:14]
Andrew Huberman
So lousy source of protein, by the way.
- [179:16]
Ryan Suave
Lousy source of protein. Eggs, let's say. But there's a real. We need to really understand the ethics around it and the time frame and then make sure that people are following that up with something. Because I think you've used this example before of like kind of being on a trampoline and you can jump up and see the top of the building, you know, and you can see where you want to be, but you haven't built the staircase or the elevator yet. We got to go out and build the staircase in the elevator. So I think they're a great window into how we can be in an experience of. Of this person that I can be. But I don't think that there's going to be like some immediate structural change that's going to last. And the danger in that is then people start using that over and over again and can lean on that as a crutch.
- [179:56]
Andrew Huberman
Last question. If we know somebody or are close to somebody that's clearly suffering from addiction or struggling with addiction, what can and should we do? This sounds like somebody who is aware of the all too common scenario of this kid, this parent, this co worker, this significant other, is clearly an alcoholic, clearly a drug addict, clearly addicted to fill in the blank, what can people reasonably do, assuming that person is not in a medical crisis yet?
- [180:31]
Ryan Suave
I think one of the biggest things we can do is talk to them, but also without shaming them, you know, and if you don't know how to talk to them, reach out for some. Help yourself. You know, there's, like I said, there's family support meetings like Al Anon that you can go to. If you reach out to a treatment center like ours, you can, we're happy to talk to the families and help point them in the right direction. But having an open conversation without shaming them and understanding that this is a, you know, approaching it with the idea that this is a disease and a, like we're talking to a sick friend, not that we're talking to a bad person.
- [181:12]
Andrew Huberman
Can I ask offer one which is. If a 12 step meeting is an open meeting, as they call it, like an open AA meeting, you could offer to go with them when they do the round the circle thing. If you go and you don't want to say anything, you just say pass no one.
- [181:31]
Ryan Suave
In a lot of places they don't even do around the circle. So you could go with them to, you could take them to a meeting.
- [181:35]
Andrew Huberman
Yeah, as long as it's what's called an open meeting. You don't have to be an alcoholic or an addict to go to that meeting. And so you could take them. You could even go and just observe. Believe it or not, some non alcoholics have come to 12 step meetings that were open meetings to learn more about it, to then be able to go help somebody that they know and reach.
- [181:54]
Ryan Suave
Out and find a therapist that can do an assessment. In our mission to create access, we have been really doing some kind of innovative stuff around virtual care and in home care. So when there are people that are resistant and maybe if they even it is true that they need to go to a residential treatment center, that we can offer this different service that's much lower cost and covered by insurance that we can come in and kind of build a relationship with them. And you know, in some ways sometimes it works for them and they're able to, to move through it and other times we're able to help them witness their failures and then having done complete assessments with them, get them to the correct level of care and make sure that the family has everything they need. So those options are out there as well.
- [182:36]
Andrew Huberman
I've seen the work you do help so many people. So, so many people. And so I just very feel very lucky you come on here and share with a lot more people.
- [182:48]
Ryan Suave
Yeah.
- [182:48]
Andrew Huberman
And I'm sure you'll get some outreach. We'll put links to where people can find you and some of the resources and things like that you're up to and the papers and other things mentioned. But yeah, on behalf of myself and everyone Listening and watching. I just want to say thank you. You're doing incredible work.
- [183:05]
Ryan Suave
I was reflecting on this a lot before coming out here, but, you know, I really appreciate what you do in the world and especially knowing you and knowing how and why you started it. And there wasn't this grand vision at the end. It was like, I'm just going to help people today. I mean, you literally was like, I'm going to help people today. I'm going to write, do these little diagrams and these little things and I'm going to help them today. And helping people today and the next day and the next day, you know, has led to you having such an impact in the world. You know, I. I was telling someone on your team earlier, your work makes my work easier. I've had men, specifically, mostly men that come to me more open because of what they've heard you talk about. And conversely, I've had men that we're working with that are very closed off and then I'll have them listen to something that you've done and it opens them up. My wife wanted me to tell you she's a therapist too, and she was running a group this morning with a group of kind of more mentally ill folks and they were doing a group on stress management and she used a video of the physiological. So she wanted to say thank you for that. But I know lots of therapists that are using that and it's just you make our jobs easier by bringing awareness to the challenges and problems that are out there. So I really, really appreciate that. Plus, I just appreciate you as a human being and very much value our friendship.
- [184:33]
Andrew Huberman
Thank you for that. That's extremely gratifying to hear and I'd be remiss if I didn't say that we're not for you and your support and the many things you've taught me and our friendship. I definitely wouldn't be doing this and maybe wouldn't even be here today at all in the biggest sense. So thanks for everything. I appreciate you.
- [184:57]
Ryan Suave
Thank you.
- [184:59]
Andrew Huberman
Thank you for joining me for today's discussion with Ryan Suave. To learn more about Ryan's work and to find links to the various resources discussed during today's episode, please see 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 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 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 Protocols 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 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 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 Ryan Suave. And last but certainly not least, thank you for your interest in science.