← Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
Tom Bilyeu's Impact Theory
This Neuroscientist's Solution for Stress Will Surprise You | Andrew Huberman (Replay)
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- [00:00]
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- [01:00]
Tom Bilyeu
Hey, everybody. Welcome to Health Theory. Today's guest is Dr. Andrew Huberman. He's a lab director and professor of neuroscience at Stanford University who has won numerous awards for his work, including the Pew Biomedical Scholar award and the McKnight Neuroscience Scholar Award. He also serves on the editorial board of several prestigious journals, including Current Biology, the Journal of Comparative Neurology, Cell Reports, and many, many others. And welcome to the show, Dr. Huberman.
- [01:29]
Dr. Andrew Huberman
Thanks for having me. I'm delighted to be here, dude.
- [01:33]
Tom Bilyeu
As I was saying before we started rolling, man, the brain neuroscience is my area of absolute fascination. This was the thing that ended up taking me from sliding towards depression, feeling lost, feeling frustrated, not knowing how to make anything in my life. This is in the late 90s, so people were debating whether neuroplasticity was real. Carol Dweck had not written her seminal book on growth mindset yet, so I had to cobble a lot of this stuff together. But then once I did, it was absolutely transformative for my life. I'm super interested in something you said which is ultimately our thoughts are a choice. I'd love to start with that. I'd love to start with your sort of, I think, really insightful definition about what a growth mindset really is.
- [02:17]
Dr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah, well, first of all, Carol's a wonderful colleague and friend, and so we've been doing a bit of work on the neuroscience of growth mindset, among other states of mind. So, you know, the study of neuroscience is really about what the nervous system does, and amazingly enough, the nervous system is responsible for everything that happens to us from the time that we're born until the time we die. But that really boils down to only five things. The nervous system has the responsibility of sensation. So sensing the physical events in the environment, we have these so called receptors in the eyes, in the ears, in the nose, in the mouth, on the skin that take physical entities in the universe that are real, fixed, non negotiable things like sound waves and photons of light and chemicals in the environment traveling, that make it into our nose and things like that, and convert those into the second thing, which is perceptions. So the nervous system's responsibility is to take those sensations which are non negotiable and perceive certain ones and not others. So for instance, right now, until I say what's the sensation of your feet contacting the floor or the bottoms of your shoes, you weren't thinking about it, but those pressure receptors were being engaged the entire time. So your perception is like a window or a spotlight that's very much linked to attention. Then there are emotions, often called feelings, and those are really designed to push us down particular avenues of perception. And the next thing, which are thoughts. Okay, so we've got sensation, perception, feelings, and then there are thoughts which really have a lot to do with what we're perceiving and the way we're organizing those perceptions, what they mean, and generally that's put into the context of what we already know, or memories. And then the fifth thing is behaviors or actions. And of course, neurons are responsible for generating actions. And they're really two kinds of actions. They're the actions that you generate reflexively, like your breathing and your heart rate right now are largely reflexive. Or you could decide troll of your respiration and make it voluntary. Right. And not just reflexive. So those five things, sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts and actions, really encompass all of our life experience. And that's from the very mundane of getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth to the most awe inspiring, goal motivated pinnacle moments of your life. The nervous system, not the immune system, not the digestive system, all of which are important, but the nervous system, meaning the brain, spinal cord, and the connections with the body, and the connections from the body back to the brain and spinal cord are responsible for all of that. And as just a final point, the nervous system is also responsible for telling the immune system something that's very relevant right now in this COVID pandemic, when to be active. You know, we don't often think about the immune system as governed by anything, but it's actually governed by the nervous system.
- [05:17]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, one thing that I find really Interesting is the way that the. In fact, it'll be interesting to hear your take on this. So I think of the brain as basically creating a virtual reality environment that we're engaging in now. It's a very usable virtual environment that I can walk around without bumping into too much shit, like you said. I can translate, you know, the things that are floating around in the air into a sense of smell. And I can navigate the world based on what I see and hear and smell and taste and all of that stuff. But at the end of the day, it really is all happening in this enclosed dark skull. And the brain itself doesn't ever actually interact with light. It doesn't interact with sound waves. And it's all an interpretation of that, which I find really interesting. And I find it really interesting the way that that plays out into our lives. How do you think about that as somebody who is. Is literally lifting a brain out of somebody's, I would assume, deceased head? You know, you have such a tactile relationship with the brain.
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Dr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah, so you said something really important, which is that, you know, we're essentially just this collection of cells, and yet everything is organized in this almost video game, virtual reality like version of the world. So the way that neuroscientists think about these sorts of things nowadays is in the following way that you're absolutely right, Tom. Everything about life experience is an abstraction. And the brain as a language, it's creating an abstract representation of everything that's out there in the world. Everything. And that might seem sort of obvious to some of your listeners, but when you think about it, that's perhaps one of the most interesting and profound features of life in general. The galaxies, any organism. Because somehow your abstractions and my abstractions and the abstractions of the brains of all your listeners are able to converge on some common meaning, at least in many cases, about what these words mean or what different events in the natural world mean. Now, objects fall down. They don't generally fall up. So there are some rules that we learned very early on that are obvious. Right. But there are some other rules that are less obvious that come about when we start thinking about things like growth, mindset, and what's rewarding, what is punishing, what it means to lean in hard to a problem, or what creativity is. But I want to just mention there's one exception to all this which is very interesting, and it happens to be the one that my lab works on, so I am biased in this regard. But there's one piece of your brain that is Outside your skull, in fact, you have two. The rest of your central nervous system is inside your skull and spinal cord. Except lining the back of your eye is the neural retina, which is three cell layers thick, meaning it's about as thick as a credit card. And the neural retina is not attached to the brain. It is brain. The cells in the neural retina were deliberately placed during development. They got pushed out of the skull and. And deliberately to sense light events in the environment, and not just the shapes of things and what's moving around out there, but fundamentally to tell the rest of the brain and nervous system when to be alert and when to be asleep, based on how much light is in the environment and the quality of that light. So viewing morning sunlight around the time of sunrise as well as evening sunlight around the time of sunset, not just at sunset rise and sunset, but near those times, a couple hours on either side, is fundamental for instructing the brain. A special collection of neurons right above the roof of the mouth, which then instructs all the cells of the body when to be active. It's sort of like you're a factory, and you need your digestion to work on a particular schedule, and you need your spleen to work on another schedule. And it's morning light and evening light in particular. And the cells that do this, they pay attention not to blue light. Everyone's kind of obsessed with blue light as it relates to this stuff. Wrong. That's only half the equation. It's the contrast between yellow light and blue light. So in the morning and at sunset, yellows are getting brighter. Watch a sunrise or sometime or a sunset, and blues are getting darker. And that contrast is relayed to the brain. You don't perceive it. Even blind people can transmit this information into the brain. And it says, make a cortisol pulse early in the day to give you active, you know, energy and agitate your body to go be active. And then it times the onset of the melatonin pulse in the evening, which is going to put you to sleep. And so when we think about the brain and the nervous system being isolated, it is isolated, but it's as much as it's a machine and a collection of cells, they need to work together and they need to know when to be active. And so it's viewing of morning sunlight in particular and evening sunlight in particular, that anchors everything that goes on from the top of your skull to the bottom of your feet in terms of this basic thing of when to be alert and when to be asleep. And screens but not just screens and not just blue light making their way into the hours of say 11pm to 4am do just the opposite. There was a paper published in Cell of an excellent journal showing that bright light activation between 11pm and 4am sends a signal from the eye to a brain structure called the habenula. The name doesn't matter, but it kicks off a disappointment circuit. It starts suppressing dopamine and the habenula is linked to the pancreas. Right. The brain body connection and starts dysregulating blood sugar.
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Tom Bilyeu
So the key points, why does it trigger disappointment?
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Dr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah, so this is very interesting. So every circuit in the brain has a push and a pull. So we have a reward system for viewing light at the particular times of day, which are morning and evening and during the day, and avoiding bright lights in the middle of the night. But there's a punishment signal, literally a chemical punishment signal whereby dopamine, which is this feel good molecule that's essential for things like growth mindset and pursuit of goals and well being of all sorts, is suppressed when human beings or animals view bright light in the middle of this dark phase of their circadian cycle, which is between 11pm and 4am approximately. And so nature does this. It creates rewards for doing the right things that move you in the direction of general adaptation and wellness. And it punishes you. Mother Nature is kind of a double edged sword. She's very benevolent when she wants to be, but if you don't obey her rules, she punishes you too. And so you have circuits in the brain that are pro depressive. And this light viewing from 10pm to 4am kicks off a pro depressive circuit. And there are real interesting.
- [12:01]
Tom Bilyeu
I want to get into some of the other things that are pro depressive as well. But before we do that, one thing that I really want to anchor us to is what you were saying. You're saying that people have an oversimplified view of what a growth mindset is. You were just talking about that in relationship to dopamine. Give us your sort of brief nutshell version of what, what a growth mindset really is.
- [12:21]
Dr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah, so Carol and I have had a lot of discussions about this idea of yet I'm not there yet, but that I can get there. That's the whole principle behind growth mindset. However, when you the, the discovery of growth mindset is worth thinking about. So Carol's discovery was these kids that for whatever reason, you know, like doing math problems even though they knew they couldn't get the answers right, these were sure, fail problems. So it's the same kind of people that like doing puzzles. And these kids, not surprisingly, go on to do phenomenally well in a number of different areas of academic pursuit. But what's interesting about growth mindset is that it seems like there's some attachment of the reward systems of the brain to the action or the pursuit of a goal, not just achieving a goal. And when we step back and we look at what that really entails at a neurochemical level, we have reward systems in the brain. They generally fall into two categories. They're the reward systems that make you feel really good with kind of the here and now and everything that's within the confines of your skin and the things you already have, you know, love of your dog, love of your spouse, gratitude for all the things you happen to have and that. And those are generally governed by the release of molecules like serotonin and oxytocin. Okay, but then there's another reward system which is the one that drove a lot of human evolution, which is the dopamine reward system. Now, dopamine is a very misunderstood molecule. It's often talked about only in the context of reward, like, I'm going to work to this goal, I'm going to build my company, I'm going to get tenure as a professor, whatever it is, and you reach it and you get this dopamine reward. And indeed that's true. But what's often not discussed is that dopamine is secreted en route to rewards while you pursue rewards. Now, the ability to tap into that system, to subjectively amplify that pathway of reward in pursuit of goals, is an absolute game changer when it comes to things like anything challenging, of long duration or uncertainty, or getting through this COVID pandemic situation. But the amazing thing is, remember, the brain only does five things, and we get to decide which of those sensations and perceptions have relevance and which ones don't, or which ones are attached to a goal and which ones aren't. So growth mindset in its purest form is the attachment of these reward systems to the effort process, to the friction process, and not just to obtaining a reward. And just as a kind of final point to that, there's a very well known body of literature in neuroscience, at least among neuroscientists, that talks about something called reward prediction error. And it says if you can dose the dopamine subjectively as you go through the pursuit of something, and then have a lot of dopamine, when you reach that thing, it's Very likely that you're going to reinforce that circuit. There will be neural plasticity, and that circuit will become stronger. So the next time you will revisit those sets of behaviors. The opposite can happen, too, where you're in real anticipation of something. This is going to be great. This is going to be great. This is going to be great. And then you reach that goal, and it's kind of underwhelming. And that generally triggers this circuit that I referred to earlier, this kind of disappointment or pro depressive circuit. So dopamine is involved in reward, but it's also involved in the pursuit of rewards. And so as you reach a milestone or as you tell yourself I'm on the right track, this friction I'm feeling, this late night, this early morning, this hard conversation with somebody that doesn't feel good, I'm going to tell myself this is for a larger purpose. That's that subjective insertion, that abstraction that we were talking about earlier. And when you start releasing dopamine to those kinds of things, there's essentially no limit on the number of things you can do or the energy to do them. So just as a last, last point about dopamine, when we're in effort, we're always secreting adrenaline, we're always in pursuit, and it's draining, it's tiring. Dopamine has this beautiful capacity to buffer adrenaline. And you know this. You've experienced this before. Because if you've ever been working really, really hard, maybe your team is depleted and everything's just a mess and somebody cracks a joke, and all of a sudden, in an instant, it's like everything's reframed. That couldn't have been hormonal. Hormones work on the schedule of, like, hours to days to weeks. It had to be neurochemical. It absolutely had to be neurochemical. And that neurochemical is dopamine.
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Tom Bilyeu
Dude. What you just described is literally the scientific breakdown of how you turn your life around. I would just tell people that that subjective insertion is one of the most powerful concepts I have ever heard in neuroscience. You're the only one I've ever heard articulate it that succinctly. Now, you talk a lot about meaning. Walk me through how we assign meaning, how we leverage the reward and punishment to really get us in a situation where we can push through something other people might not be able to push through.
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Dr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah, so when you start thinking about things like growth, mindset, in terms of how they convert to neurochemical signatures, it leads us to this place of, okay, if it's all subjective. Then if I just say, look, I'm going to stand up out of my chair and that's going to feel amazing. Is that going to work? Well, no, it depends on the meaning that I attach to something. And this subjective part can be a little tricky and a little bit hard for people. So I want to try and lay it out in a concrete way so that if they want to apply this, they can incidentally or not. So incidentally, I should say, when you look at communities of very high performers, and I'm fortunate enough to do some consulting with some people from special forces communities and so forth, they're very good, as are you, at attaching a reward to specific behaviors in subjective ways. So growth, mindset, and these dopamine rewards that we subjectively apply are not about saying, oh, you know, I had a terrible day, I performed poorly, but you know what? It's great. I just feel great. Anyway, it's not about that. It's not about attaching your sense of reward to the ultimate goal. It's about attaching your sense of reward to the fact that you're making action steps that are generally in the right direction. The more you can reward the effort process, the better off you are at building these kinds of neural circuits and these kind of tendencies to be able to lean into anything challenging over essentially any duration. So how does this work? Like, how would somebody do this? Right. Well, keeping in mind that adrenaline and epinephrine are all great for getting us into action. This is mother nature's way of chemically making us feel kind of agitated. Remember, stress was designed to agitate us, to move us away from things and toward things. But realizing that that's a limited resource, that eventually that same chemical is what makes you have a negative mindset. It feels painful. It's the burn in your body. It's uncomfortable. And realizing that dopamine can push back on that neurochemically, it can suppress those sensations of wanting to quit, you say, well, then how do I get this dopamine to work for me before I hit a goal? Because not every day is going to be a real win. There's some days, I mean, I know from my science career, there were days that were really hard, Experiments didn't work, papers got rejected, and yet, you know, I've spent two decades or more just drilling on and drilling on. And it's been a sheer pleasure at times, but there's been, you know, some pain points along the way. So what is this process really about? And how would somebody implement These dopamine and epinephrine type neurochemical events in their own life. Well, we all know the example of like wanting to run a marathon. I've never run a marathon, but that'd be a nice goal to have. Let's say tomorrow morning I set my shoes near the door. Now a lot of people have talked about this. Day one, you set your shoes near the door. Day two, you go out the door. Day three, you run around the block. Day four. But the key thing is not just to go through the actions, but when you hit each one of those self designated milestones, the milestones that you're setting out for yourself, you have to pause for a moment and tell yourself, I'm heading in the right direction. I haven't run the marathon yet, but this is the foundation upon which I'm going to lay another foundation, upon which I'm going to lay another foundation. And those little pulses of dopamine allow you to get that action step without the depletion that it would normally bring otherwise. It's like you're spending money. This is like replenishing this bank account that you have. And it's a neural bank account. And so dopamine is the, is the thing that you can control the dosing of. And so if you say today it's my shoes at the door, but tomorrow it's around the block and that's it, but that's in the direction I want to go. What you do is you now get those two events plus the next day, the mile long runners and so forth without it depleting you. It actually builds this capacity to build more reward. And this is what you've done. This is what people from elite special forces can do. They know how to make small, simple physical steps in the real world that allow them to build on these reward circuitries. But they don't get delusional about how they're doing. They keep the end in mind, but they get very micro, they move the horizon in very close. And so if you can move the horizon to something you know you can complete and you reward that, you essentially are where you were before. You're just as strong, if not stronger, but you're heading in the direction you need to go. You're not depleting, you're not spending out anything. And it feels a little weird because none of us like to reward things that aren't external. But the ability to control these internal reward schedules is everything.
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- [22:05]
Tom Bilyeu
One thing that you've talked about that I think is along these lines. Be interesting to see if they feel as related to you when you know so much about it. But for me, at a high level, these feel very related. Talked about, somebody gets in a car accident, acetylcholine, if I'm not mistaken, is released. It says, fucking pay attention to this. Pay attention right now, now. And it basically responds to peaks and valleys. So something really bad happens or something really good happens. It's present. You begin to hardwire the association of whatever emotion is with that thing. And so if you have something, a traumatic event or whatever, and you now see something is very negative, you can actually flip that by getting in a state where you're secreting acetylcholine again and now in a positive, right. So that you can feel good about that thing. So how do people take that, take control of that process? So if you've been in a car accident and you now have this negative association with driving, how do you grab ahold of the production of acetylcholine? How do you reframe?
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Dr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah, so it's great you're mentioning acetylcholine. So acetylcholine is the neurochemical that we want to think about anytime we're talking about neural plasticity and in particular attention, high attentional states. So everyone knows that the brain is very plastic early in life. So from birth until about age 25, you can learn so much for better or for worse. I always say the downside is that early in life you have less control over your life circumstances, but your brain is very plastic. So there's a dark and light to that. Later in life, you have a lot more control generally over your life circumstances, but the brain becomes less plastic. However, we know, based on Nobel prize winning work and in recent work in addition to that, that the neuromodulator acetylcholine is secreted. When we pay attention to something very specific, it acts as sort of a spotlight in the brain, making certain synapses, the connections between neurons, more active and more likely to be active again than others. So when you hear that song that you Love so much, and it moves you. And you feel dopamine being pulsed into your body. That's a real thing. You're actually getting dopamine secretion. You've formed that deep association with that. And acetylcholine draws your attention to that. And that song is essentially wired in a very indelible way into your nervous system at multiple. You can, probably even with certain songs, you can feel your body start to energize. Because, of course, the brain, through connections with your muscles, controls your body. So for things that are traumatic or negative, what we're really talking about is neuroplasticity that's focused on unlearning. And most of the therapies for this, whether or not it's emdr, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, or it's traditional psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, or it's somatic embodied release, big Kundalini breathing type, almost all of those are designed to do something which is to bring the person, or you bring yourself into a state of heightened alertness, right? You can't do this stuff when you're sort of half asleep. Heightened alertness and then focusing your attention on the traumatic or negative event. This is the way that works. And then pairing that with something new. You know, traditionally this was done with things like NLP or in talk therapy, where people would feel the positive relationship with the therapist. That was kind of the main rationale in association with this very traumatic, sometimes even, you know, shameful type events. And the idea is that you would simultaneously have those two experiences, the negative one and the feeling of safety, and you would rewire those circuitries. I actually believe that can work, but it can take one a lot of times. It can take a lot of visits to the therapist, which is not to say it's bad. It's just not everyone has access to those resources. Things like eye movement desensitization, reprocessing, simply moving the eyes laterally while recounting these negative events. The woman who devised this figured out that somehow when people recount these traumatic experiences, when they're doing these lateralized eye movements, not vertical eye movements, they somehow separate out the negative emotions. And I thought for years people would ask me about this stuff, Tom, and I thought, this is ridiculous. First of all, I'm a vision scientist and I work on stress. It's like, there's no way. And then I really ate my words, because four papers, two in humans, two in mice, and then a fifth paper published in Nature, which is kind of our super bowl of Scientific publishing showed that these lateralized eye movements quiet the amygdala. They actually suppress activation of this threat detection center in the amygdala.
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Tom Bilyeu
Why would that be true?
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Dr. Andrew Huberman
Ah, so this is really where it gets cool. Turns out because of when the way that we view the visual world, when we move through space, when our head moves or when we walk and things flow past us, that these lateralized eye movements are what happens when you move forward in space, when you're walking, when you're moving forward towards something. And that suppresses activation of the amygdala. Now you say why? Well, okay, so then, 2018, my laboratory did an experiment. There was actually a graduate student in my laboratory where we're looking at fear. In this case, we were looking at fear to big looming objects that either trigger freezing or running and hiding. There's a brain area that's in your brain and my brain that mice also have that triggers a third option. Not run and hide, not freeze, but forward confrontation. This is the, no, I'm going to fight. I'm going to move forward in the face of adversity. This is the growth mindset. I'm going to lean into friction. And it turns out that this circuit is linked to the dopamine reward pathway. When we move forward in the face of a threat, and obviously we want to do this in healthy, adaptive ways, we suppress activity of the amygdala through physical action of moving forward. And there's a signal sent to the areas of the brain that control dopamine reward. Those reward centers then trigger the release of dopamine to reward forward effort in the face of stress or threat. So when you hear about people saying, look, take some physical action when you're feeling exhausted, take some forward physical action when you're feeling overwhelmed by this traumatic experience. Now, that could be in the form of a walk. Now, this therapist, she figured out with emdr, because you can't take people walking around for therapy sessions, she figured out that these lateralized eye movements are what triggers suppression of the amygdala. And it makes perfect sense because the amygdala, this threat detection center in our brain, it doesn't connect to the limbs. So how does it know if you're moving forward? Well, because the eyes are moving, you have these reflexive mind movements that move anytime you're moving through space. So to make this a little more succinct, it's really forward movement action. Pushing yourself across that threshold not only rewards you, but it suppresses activity of the fear centers in the brain. And these are ancient, hardwired mechanisms. These aren't hacks. These are things that Mother Nature installed in us.
- [28:58]
Tom Bilyeu
So I love this more than you could possibly imagine. This is so interesting. One of the things that I've heard talked about, I think is really powerful is that overcoming a fear isn't about diminishing the fear response. It's about making more robust a sense of being brave in the face of that fear. So moving forward to translate it to, you know, like you say, if your brain is meant to interpret stimuli, what at a stimulus level, what is that thing that's going to trigger the response? Talk about the. I don't know if it was mice or rats. I think it was rats where you force them to fight and they're like in a tube. And that study, to me, tied with what you just said, is insanely powerful, especially for people who've allowed themselves to become paralyzed by fear or whatever.
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Dr. Andrew Huberman
Forward movement, provided it doesn't endanger you or kill you, is absolutely the remedy for fear, stress, and at least in the clinical literature, to these sort of trauma events that people carry with them for many years. Of course, trauma needs to be dealt with, hopefully with a professional, but we can all apply these mechanisms and these neurochemical reward schedules. So the, the study that you're referring to is a beautiful one. There's a classic study where researchers, not my lab, put two rats, or you could do this with mice into a tube, and the tendency is for them to try and push one or the other one out. One always wins and pushes the other one out. We call the one that got pushed out the loser, the one that pushed them out the winner. Here are the interesting things about this. First of all, the winner will tend to win with other in other battles, even though these are just pushing battles more because it simply won the time before the loser, by losing, will tend to lose. And so people say, oh, well, that explains a lot about society, et cetera. Well, here's where it gets really interesting. You can even take a mouse or a rat and push it from behind and make it the winner. And then on subsequent trials where you're not pushing it, it will tend to win more often. So the win doesn't even have to come from itself. So last year there was a very important paper published about this where a set of researchers just said, well, what is it like? What is this winning circuit and this losing circuit? Enough with the demonstration that this happens. What's happening on what's under the hood? And so they went into the brain and they identified a brain area which is part of the frontal cortex, the area that we typically think about planning, action, executive function, all the kind of high level stuff. And what they discovered was this brain area is more active in the winner than in the loser. In fact, they could take the loser and overstimulate this area and turn the losers into winners. Now, it gets even more ridiculous than that. If you quiet this brain area, winners become losers. Okay? And if you take a winner and let's say at this tube battle, and you put them into, say, a cold environment with a bunch of other mice, and you have just a warm corner, mice don't like to be cold. And you say, who gets the warm corner? Right. Who gets the luxury spot? It's always the winner. So it even breaks down at the level of social interactions. And so you say, okay, all right, now we know that's this brain area, it's this one area of the frontal cortex. But what's it actually doing? Right, okay, what's it actually, how can we translate this? Turns out this brain area that's responsible and required for winning in this series of experiments is actually driving up the level of activation, what you and I would call agitation or stress, to the point where that animal is more likely to move forward. It's simply taking stress, which is wired into us in order to make us feel agitated instead of suppressing us. You know, instead of saying, you know, I'm just going to sit here, I'm overwhelmed, I'm not going to do it, I'm just going to move into action. So there's a circuit for winning. The same circuit when it's hypoactive, not active enough is what causes losing in these competitive scenarios. And similarly, there's a circuit for quitting. There's a norepinephrine circuit in the brainstem. This was published in the last couple years, showing that when animals or people are in constant effort, eventually that level of norepinephrine gets so high that it triggers a circuit that shuts down the motor control over the limbs. And you just say, that's it, I give up, I'm done. So these mechanisms were hardwired into us. We all have them. Whether or not it's from evolution, Mother Nature, God, the universe is. It's irrelevant to the discussion that these circuits exist in everybody. And I think it's a select few people who really understand that forward action is what drives these circuits. It's the ability to take that agitation, stress, agitation increase our focus and they bias us for movement and Nature wanted that. They want us to move forward in the face of challenge, not to be quiescent. We weren't sitting around battling tigers and saber toothed tigers all the time. More likely we were in caves and we were getting hungry and we had to go out and search for things. Agitation and stress were designed to get us up and move us. And when we try and fight that too much and we try and quiet that stress, that actually can be problematic. You have to decide, are you going to try and quiet stress or are you going to actually lean into action? That's a critical choice point for everybody who's experienced anything negative or positive for that matter.
- [34:27]
Tom Bilyeu
Dude, that is so useful in terms of getting people to understand how to get themselves out of it. And this goes back to this notion that your thoughts are ultimately a choice. You get to decide what, what you think about. And when you understand that you're living in this VR environment and that there are things like simply moving forward is going to make you feel entirely different, that you're being essentially manipulated by evolution, by nature, or however you want to think about it to get you agitated enough to go out and do the things you need to do. But that it has this just feedback loop of how it makes you feel about yourself, that winning begets winning and losing begets losing. But it's, it isn't like at some sort of grand untangible level that it's happening at the level of neurochemistry, that there are regions of the brain that are designed, designed for this. So how can somebody begin to turn things around in their life? Because I know one thing that people really struggle with is they have this negative voice in their head that's just playing this loop. And so even if they understand the mechanisms, some part of them is going to discount it, right? Because it's like, well, you're just trying to say that because you think you can manipulate neurochemistry, but you, you're a loser. Like, you just fall. And that's what's playing in their head. How do people go in and really take the reins of that process so that they can start winning?
- [35:47]
Dr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah, great question. So, you know, I'm never going to argue that we can subjectively control all of our experience because there are some things that just genuinely suck, right? And when they, and it's important to, and it's important to register those, those not so great events or terrible events because they can drive us also, you know, we can be driven from a place of anger, frustration and, you know, revenge or we can be driven from a place of, you know, you know, love, gratitude, and et cetera. I'm not here to judge which one is better or worse, but the nervous system doesn't distinguish between them. So if you're the kind of person that needs to, you know, kind of budge yourself into something great, if you're the kind of person that wants to do things from more of a warm, fuzzy feeling, that's fine too. What I will say is this. The ability to tap into this dopamine reward system, which is activated anytime you're in pursuit of something that's outside the boundaries of your skin and literally the boundaries of your body, as well as the reward system, the serotonin, oxytocin system, which is really about the things that are contained within your own body and immediate experience. Things like gratitude and touch and comfort and things like that with loved ones. The ability to tap into both is crucial. Now, you said something really important which was, well, negative thoughts. Negative thoughts, what to do. I don't believe that it's very easy to suppress negative thoughts. However, when. When you realize that thoughts can be deliberately introduced, you can start replacing negative thoughts with new types of thoughts. So you can always add something in. But when people start to realize that thoughts are very much like physical actions of reaching and picking up a glass of water, or taking a jog around the block, or typing an email perfectly, this is something I sometimes do because I struggle to do a perfect email. Not all my emails are perfect, but when I do one, I make sure that I complete it. And I think, okay, it's possible. It's not because the email being perfect is so important. It's because I want to remind myself that my thoughts and my actions are essentially the same. The nervous system can organize thoughts. So for somebody that's struggling, you know, we have these examples like, oh, they were really back on their heels, or they were so depleted, no money, and all this stuff. What are they going to. We have so many examples like that. But in trying to make it actionable, it's really about saying, yep, that's all true. But I'm gonna introduce a thought which is, I made it through today. I made it through today. And that's actually worth celebrating at a micro level. So if you can give yourself dopamine rewards in small increments, right, you're not trying to celebrate that you made it through one day. Sometimes that's a huge feat, but most of the time you just wanna dose yourself with a little bit of that internal release of dopamine you start rewarding incremental steps. And if there's anything that your listeners could take away from this whole thing about dopamine and reward schedules and being in movement, it's reward incremental steps in particular, incremental steps that are about forward action. So maybe that's writing an email, maybe that's that run around the block. Maybe that's something much grander for you as you get better at things, right, the stairs get further and further away from one another because you achieve more success. And, and so they tend to be. You have to take the rungs on the ladder further apart, so to speak. That's a time when you really need to implement not only the dopamine rewards, but also those serotonin and oxytocin rewards, et cetera. So to make it actionable, I would say, remember, don't spend so much time trying to suppress negative thoughts. If you need trauma therapy, pursue that with a professional. But if you have negative thoughts, just remember, I can also introduce positive thoughts the same way I can control running around the block. Positive thoughts are the equivalent of forward physical action. And if you reward them internally, you buffer yourself against the quitting circuit. This norepinephrine circuit we were talking about before. You are building a stronger version of yourself completely between your own ears. And some people say, well, that's silly. It's like you're saying, oh, I'm going to jump up and down, reward myself for doing nothing. No, you're building the neural circuits that you can control self reward. And in doing that, you can push through days and weeks of effort consistently. I don't mean necessarily all nighters, but you can push and push and push. You know, my career is one that was made over two decades. It wasn't. We had our big peaks and we had a lot of valleys. But learning to control these rewards is absolutely key. And I know you've done this too, Tom. It's like the huge wins are great, but it's really about rewarding these increments. So you can keep going another 30, another 40 years, 50 years, 100 years if that's how long. If David Sinclair has his way, we'll live 100 more years, all of us. So booking a VRBO vacation rental means you get Verbo Care and 24. 7 life support. Verified reviews from real guests and top rated homes with the Love by Guest filter.
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- [41:05]
Tom Bilyeu
Yeah, if people learn to tie things to the process, then they've got a real shot and the success is not guaranteed. But the struggle is, right? So if you are able to get to the point where you get excited about the learning process, you get excited about trying something even if you fail that, if you can associate in your own mind that I feel better about who I am because I tried this thing, then it begins to stack because even the failures become something that you learn. And so you actually have made some progress because you took action because you tried something. And now understanding, you know, some of the brain mechanisms around it, it really gets super powerful now for people to make use of every tool that they have at their at their disposal. Something that you've talked about that I've always been really interested in at the periphery but never have doven into it enough is hypnosis.
- [42:03]
Dr. Andrew Huberman
Hypnosis.
- [42:05]
Tom Bilyeu
When people think of hypnosis, I think they think of stage hypnosis. What's the real deal? Why is it useful and how do people actually use it?
- [42:12]
Dr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah, so I'm really glad you asked about this. So I have a colleague, his name is David Spiegel in our Department of Psychiatry at Stanford. And he and I have a collaboration going now looking at how respiration or breathing can be used to shift the brain into different states. And I've talked to David about this and so I'm sort of borrowing from his words here. So I want to be fair that these are from those conversations. So hypnosis inevitably involves relaxing the nervous system, taking the nervous system into states that are more like sleep. Now what I mean by that is in high alert states where you're talking and planning and inaction and stress in particular, the brain is very linear. It's saying, okay, if this, then this, if, then that and that. This is why we tend to be forward thinking when we're stressed. We tend to be not in our immediate experience, but really kind of forward thinking. So clinical hypnosis involves going into a state of deeper relaxation so that our analysis of space and time, meaning the way that the brain is perceiving events is slightly dismantled so that it's a little bit dreamlike. And then the hypnotist, and this could be by listening to a script or listening to a hypnotherapist, starts to narrow our context, take our thoughts, if you will, down a particular path. And that path could be one of the stress reduction or smoking cessation. Hypnosis, incidentally, is very good for treatment of smoking cessation or for feelings of well being or confronting traumas. So what it is, is it's really opening up the window for neural plasticity, which is, of course, the brain's ability to change in response to experience. To trigger neuroplasticity, you have to have focus, especially as an adult. You need acetylcholine released, but high levels of attention. Acetylcholine and norepinephrine together. Norepinephrine to create that sense of urgency, and acetylcholine to bring that spotlight of focus in really, really tight. That triggers plasticity. But the actual. It marks certain synapses in the brain for change. But the actual changes in the synapses, the rewiring, okay, that happens during states of sleep and deep rest. So this is why when you're trying to learn a motor skill, you go and you go in your tennis serve, it's not happening. It's not happening. You take a break, you come back and you nail it. You're like, wait, what happened? Well, you need time to set those circuits in motion and allow them to do the rewiring. The sort of adaptation hypnosis seems to capture both the high attentional state and the deep relaxation at the same time. It's this very unusual state of mind where you're neither asleep nor awake and in tight focus or narrow focus. And it's very clear that it leads to these rapid changes in behavior because you're rewiring the brain. And the reason you're able to rewire the brain so quickly is because you're getting the trigger event, the focus, and you're also getting the relaxation event simultaneously. And so it's much faster than separating out the learning trigger from the actual rewiring of the brain. My lab has a deep interest and David Spiegel's lab has a deep interest now in using respiration or breathing to shift our state to either heighten states of focus and alertness to open up neuroplasticity. Right. There are going to be lots of ways to access.
- [45:24]
Tom Bilyeu
Can you give Me some examples, like what are we doing? Very specifically, breath work, I find incredibly interesting. Changed my life through meditation. Just shifting my breathing to diaphragmatic breathing was no joke. It changed my life, it changed my relationship to anxiety, my feeling of being able to control my state as it started to spiral. So I'd be very curious to know, what type of breathing are we talking about here?
- [45:49]
Dr. Andrew Huberman
Yeah. So I'm really glad you mentioned the diaphragm. Diaphragm, of course, being this muscle inside of all of us, at least all mammals that works all the time to move our lungs because all the cells in our body need oxygen. Of course, we gotta get rid of carbon dioxide. It does that, but it's done reflexively. But we can also take voluntary control over it. I want to just mention about the diaphragm, why it's so important for what we're. These state changes is that a lot of people talk about the vagus nerve and all this stuff. The vagus and these connections between the brain and this vagus nerve or the gut, it's what gets activated when you're really full and you eat a big meal and you feel relaxed. Those are great, but it's very slow. The diaphragm is skeletal muscle, just like your bicep, just like your tricep, just like your quadricep. It is the only internal organ except maybe a couple muscles in your throat that are actually skeletal muscle, meaning it was designed to be voluntarily moved. And the diaphragm isn't just designed to move your lungs. It also sends a signal through the so called phrenic nerve back to the brain to inform your brain about the status of your body. So when you breathe fast, deliberately, the reason you feel kind of an elevated sense of alertness is because, yeah, there are chemicals secreted, but mostly because the phrenic nerve is firing off, it's telling you, hey, the body's moving, we're really running now. Even though you're stationary in a chair, if you're doing breathing or if you're breathing very slowly and rhythmically, right, box type breathing or slow breathing, your diaphragm is telling your brain, hey, we're calm, we're good. And you calm down very quickly on the order of seconds. And so once you start tapping into this, you start realizing, okay, movement of the body was designed to inform the brain of where to be, not just the brain telling the body. And how does the body communicate with the brain? Through the phrenic nerve from the diaphragm. So my Lab is really pursuing two questions and this is still being worked out, so I just want to highlight that it's still in progress. But certain patterns of breathing will calm you very much, like entering a hypnotic state. And so you have a subset of neurons in your brain stem that are responsible for sighing. You have a subset of neurons in your brain stem responsible for coughing, subset of neurons responsible for laughter, and a subset of neurons in your brainstem for sighing. This was a paper published in Nature. This is a real thing. These neurons are every so often. And your dog does this too. You inhale twice and then you exhale long. Now that double inhale, best done through the nose on the inhales and then long exhale through the mouth activates these sign neurons that trigger the so called calming reflex, the parasympathetic arm of the nervous system. So we have a hardwired mechanism, a set of neurons, connection to the diaphragm and back again from the diaphragm to the brain. That was designed to activate calm. And when people ask me, how should I breathe to calm myself down, I always say double inhale through the nose followed by exhales. Two or three of those will reset your autonomic nervous system faster than any other mechanism we're aware of, because it's really capitalizing on a set of neural circuits. Now, once you're calm, you say, well, how do I get into plasticity states there? You want to go the other direction. That's going to be inhaling a lot more than you exhale. You're going to be driving in more oxygen than you are breathing out, generally carbon dioxide. And that will lead to states that are kind of more elevated. This is typical of things like Tummo breathing, Wim Hof breathing, Kundalini breathing. And when people enter those states, their whole world changes because it shuts off the frontal cortex. It really. This is why sometimes people pass out or they feel like they want to get up and move. You know, you get some odd behavior when you're doing this kind of thing. So the key is, if you want to access states of heightened plasticity, let's say you want to learn faster or you want to bring more out of some physical training that you're doing. The key is to apply those principles. First, you need to focus. You need to bring yourself to that heightened state of alertness. You can breathe to do that. So this would be super oxygenated breathing. Then you want to drop into a state of calm, and you do that by these, a couple, maybe two or three Rounds of inhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, inhale, exhale, exhale. And then now your brain is in a state. We believe this is still, again, being worked out in labs like mine and David's, that then you're in a state for heightened learning because you're in a state where neurochemicals like acetylcholine are going to be at levels that are higher than they typically would be. Things like noradrenaline slightly higher than they typically would be, but not in a discombobulated way, in a very regulated way. And the cool thing is, you're regulating them. So you could argue earlier, we were talking about subjective emotions and thoughts and all these things, but one thing that's absolutely concrete is breathing. I always think of physical exercise, movement, writing, whatever, singing, dancing, talking. Those are physical actions in the universe. Then you have thoughts, and somewhere in between those is controlling your respiration. Once you can control everything that's within the confines of your skull and skin, once you can really control that relationship, that brain, body relationship, you start to realize that relationship is a lot like any other relationship to forward action. It's just all happening within the confines of my body. So it's heightened states of focus followed by states of relaxation that are going to prime your nervous system for learning and plasticity. Just like hypnosis. Sorry for the long winded discussion.
- [51:10]
Tom Bilyeu
Don't you dare apologize. That is some of the most powerful and useful information literally ever. I can't tell you how much I love what you're studying, what you're talking about. This was so incredible, dude. Thank you so much. Where can people engage with you? Where can they learn more? I think this is so important and so powerful. I want people to really connect with you.
- [51:35]
Dr. Andrew Huberman
Well, thanks so much. So I teach Instagram in little short bits and sometimes in longer bits on Instagram, and that's Huberman Lab. H U B E R M A N L A B so that's where I teach neuroscience and offer up things about plasticity and sleep and also some tools. And we talk about things like autism and et cetera, lots of things. Anytime I see a paper, it's interesting, I try and discuss it. My lab is hubermanlab.com, there. We put our papers and our research that we publish, and we are always recruiting subjects for experiments where we pay you to participate in these different kinds of things. We're launching a big respiration breathwork study soon. So if you reach out by Instagram or I'll probably announce it there as well. Be wonderful. We were looking to recruit people. We're teaming up with some tech companies that will arm people with some really terrific at home tech so we can get their data and really get a clear sense of how these tools and practices aren't just landing subjectively, but really what's happening at a concrete level, even things like cortisol measures and stuff. So if you're interested, you can reach out through either venue, the Huberman Lab or the Instagram Huberman Lab. And I generally try and respond to everybody's requests. Sometimes I'm a little slow, but I really aim to do that as much as possible.
- [52:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Nice, man. I love it, dude. So, last question. If you were going to have people make one change that would have the biggest impact on their health, what change would you have them make?
- [52:57]
Dr. Andrew Huberman
Oh, that is a great question. I think the fundamental step that everybody should be taking every day for many aspects of their health, mental, physical, digestive, immune, all of that, is to get two to 10 minutes of bright light first thing in the morning on waking. Ideally, it's sunlight. You could do it through a window if you wear it. You probably shouldn't wear sunglasses while you do it. Don't stare at the sun until you burn your retinas out or something and make it painful. Please don't do that. But just getting bright light exposure first thing in the morning organizes the nervous system and the rest of the organs of the body in such a powerful way that I feel like if you do that most days, if you miss a day, no big deal. But if you do that most days, you're setting yourself on the path to do all the other sorts of things correctly. And your biology will thank you for it.
- [53:48]
Tom Bilyeu
Love that. Dude, this was amazing. Thank you so much. I definitely, when the quarantine is lifted, we've got to get together in the same room. I think that would be so much fun. I could easily go on for another hour or two or three hours talking about this with you, so you have an open invitation to come back in the very near future. So thank you so much. Definitely.
- [54:09]
Dr. Andrew Huberman
Thank you.
- [54:09]
Tom Bilyeu
Absolutely, man. Thank you for coming on. Now, Audible gives you audiobooks, podcasts, Audible
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Dr. Andrew Huberman
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