Speaker 1: Friendship is one of the most reliable sources of predictability
Speaker 1: that exists within human interactions.
Speaker 2: Professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, doctor Huberman, launched the
Speaker 2: Humoran Lab podcast concentrating on neuroscience and other scientific topics
Speaker 2: neuroscientists neurobiologists. Andrew Huberman.
Speaker 1: We could say this about any organism, but humans included.
Speaker 2: We need the feeling of safety and acceptance.
Speaker 1: If ever, there was a practice that I wish every
Speaker 1: human being on the planet would do besides go out
Speaker 1: in view morning sunlight, it would.
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Speaker 2: The number one health and wellness podcast.
Speaker 3: Jay Seti, Jay Sheety. Hey, everyone, welcome back to On Purpose.
Speaker 3: I'm so grateful that you decided to lend me your
Speaker 3: eyes and ears for the next few moments. Today's guest
Speaker 3: is one of your favorites. He's been on the show before.
Speaker 3: He's one of my favorite humans too. I'm speaking about
Speaker 3: the one and only doctor Andrew Huberman, neuroscientist and tenured
Speaker 3: professor in the departments of Neurobiology and by courtesy Psychiatry
Speaker 3: and Behavioral Sciences at Stama School of Medicine. Doctor Huberman
Speaker 3: has made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development,
Speaker 3: brain function, and neural plasticity. In addition to his role
Speaker 3: at Stanford, doctor Huberman is the host of the incredible
Speaker 3: podcast Huberman Lab. If you're not a subscriber already, which
Speaker 3: I'd be very surprised, make sure you do subscribe. I'm
Speaker 3: so excited to welcome my friend and incredible expert, doctor
Speaker 3: Andrew Huberman. Andrew, it's such a pleasure to have you
Speaker 3: here again. I'm so grateful that you took the time
Speaker 3: out and I can honestly say I've spent time with
Speaker 3: you offline and online, and what's been beautiful is just
Speaker 3: your humility, your sincerity and genuineness across the board. And
Speaker 3: I know we exchange texts and calls and messages frequently
Speaker 3: and I'm just loving our growing friendship. So thank you
Speaker 3: so much for what you do online but also who
Speaker 3: you are offline to me personally as a friend.
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for having me here today and for
Speaker 1: being such an amazing friend and a wonderful thing to
Speaker 1: get get to know you better. And you know, the
Speaker 1: public facing Jayshetty is an incredible person and the private
Speaker 1: world Jayshetty is equally extraordinary in overlapping but also distinct ways.
Speaker 1: So it's been a lot of fun and I look
Speaker 1: forward to growing our friendship further.
Speaker 3: Thank you, And I mean that's actually you know, I
Speaker 3: never thought about this when I was preparing for our
Speaker 3: conversation today, but maybe there's something beautiful to tap into
Speaker 3: there and to hear about the neuroscience of friendship because
Speaker 3: I feel that we keep talking about the loneliness epidemic
Speaker 3: that we're experiencing in the world right now. We keep
Speaker 3: talking about this feeling that people have of not being
Speaker 3: seen by their friends, not being understood by their colleagues,
Speaker 3: not feeling heard by their family members. People are surrounded
Speaker 3: by lots of people but feel really disconnected. We're seeing
Speaker 3: this growing rise of interconnectivity and more friends and more
Speaker 3: followers online, but then feeling really, saying what's the right word,
Speaker 3: not even isolated or disconnected because we feel like we're
Speaker 3: surrounded by people, but we feel emotionally distant from people.
Speaker 3: What's happening from a neuroscience perspective as our friendships are
Speaker 3: getting weaker even though our followerships and online friendships are
Speaker 3: getting bigger.
Speaker 1: So at the neuroscience level, we have to remember that
Speaker 1: the brain circuitry, which of course is always linked to
Speaker 1: the body. We want to remember brain body are fortunately
Speaker 1: now understood to be interconnected. Five years ago, ten years ago,
Speaker 1: that wasn't so much an accepted idea. But the nervous system,
Speaker 1: the brain, the spinal cord and all the connections to
Speaker 1: the body and back to the brain and spinal cord
Speaker 1: are bidirectional and highly interconnected. So when we say brain,
Speaker 1: I'm more or less using it as a proxy for
Speaker 1: a whole nervous system, including body. The circuits that are
Speaker 1: responsible for feelings of social connectedness are deeply, deeply rooted in.
Speaker 2: Our need for safety.
Speaker 1: We could say this about any organism, but humans included
Speaker 1: need two things. I believe we need the feeling of
Speaker 1: safety and acceptance. And so we are to have a
Speaker 1: conversation about the kind of loftier words like peace, contentment, fulfillment, belonging.
Speaker 1: I think I borrow that list, by the way, from
Speaker 1: the incredible Martha Beck. So it's not a coincidence that
Speaker 1: those rattled off my mind, But I feel like those
Speaker 1: four words are so critical to what we all want
Speaker 1: and what we all need at an aspirational level. We
Speaker 1: can't have a discussion about those without also, I believe
Speaker 1: having a discussion about the fact that we have hardwired
Speaker 1: aspects of our nervous system, meaning genetic programs that are
Speaker 1: written into the script of all our genomes, regardless of color,
Speaker 1: regardless of background, that are just scripted into our genome
Speaker 1: that allow us to breathe without thinking about it, digest
Speaker 1: food without thinking about it, keep our heart rate going
Speaker 1: without thinking about it, elevated if it needs to be,
Speaker 1: slowed down if it needs to be, etc. And then
Speaker 1: hardwired circuitry that is there for bonding with our caretaker
Speaker 1: during early infancy and bonding with others of our species,
Speaker 1: and evaluating whether there is safety and acceptance from the
Speaker 1: other members of our species. Now, these brain circuits have names,
Speaker 1: and we could get into that they almost all have
Speaker 1: some connectedness to an area of the brain called the hypothalamus,
Speaker 1: which sits above the roof of your mouth, which has many,
Speaker 1: many dense collections of neurons we call nuclei, responsible for
Speaker 1: everything from temperature regulation to feeding, to reproductive behavior and
Speaker 1: on and on, all the basic kind of housekeeping things.
Speaker 1: But connected to those brain areas are brain areas that
Speaker 1: are associated with evaluating whether one is safe or not.
Speaker 1: So safety and acceptance. Then we can break down in
Speaker 1: the following way. If we look at it through this
Speaker 1: neuroscience lens, safety is really about the ability to predict outcomes. Okay,
Speaker 1: and the brain, after being responsible for all these housekeeping
Speaker 1: functions heart rate et cetera, is largely a predictive organ
Speaker 1: It wants to understand what's going to happen next to
Speaker 1: the extent that it can then free up mental real
Speaker 1: estate neural real estate to work on creative projects or
Speaker 1: to build things, or to imagine things. Right, there's no creativity,
Speaker 1: there's no building in the absence of safety.
Speaker 2: Then it just becomes survival.
Speaker 1: So the kind of older discussion, meaning in the eighties,
Speaker 1: nineties and early two thousands, the discussion about the nervous
Speaker 1: system was we would hear about higher brain order functions
Speaker 1: and limbic functions, right, weird hear about kind of primitive
Speaker 1: lizard brain and more evolvrain and all of that is
Speaker 1: frankly true. It remains true, and that language is perfectly fine.
Speaker 1: But I think if we are to think about safety
Speaker 1: and acceptance, we say, what is safety about? Safety is
Speaker 1: about being able to predict outcomes when we are in
Speaker 1: the company of people, or we know we have people
Speaker 1: available to us. Should we need something food, maybe we
Speaker 1: need a monetary loan, Maybe we need a word of encouragement,
Speaker 1: Maybe we need somebody to bounce ideas off of whatever
Speaker 1: it is that constitutes safety for us. Subjective, highly individual well,
Speaker 1: then when those circuits can quiet down, it says, if
Speaker 1: you know, they can finally quiet down, and so we
Speaker 1: have enough safety, so that then we can start to explore,
Speaker 1: iterating what we have in terms of new jobs, new
Speaker 1: creative ideas, new art, new you know, take a walk
Speaker 1: with somebody you care about. Right, those are not the
Speaker 1: sorts of things you do when you feel that you
Speaker 1: are under siege, either real siege, physical siege, or emotional siege. Okay,
Speaker 1: then acceptance gets a little bit trickier to sort of
Speaker 1: pinpoint in the brain. Acceptance likely dovetails neurologically with this
Speaker 1: these brain circuits for safety, because acceptance is really about well,
Speaker 1: given the range of expressions that we have, our range
Speaker 1: of humor, our range of political beliefs, our range of behaviors,
Speaker 1: can I predict that these safety mechanisms will still be there,
Speaker 1: These people will still be there, These things will still
Speaker 1: be there. Will they turn on me? Will they on
Speaker 1: me right? Will they laugh with my jokes? Or will
Speaker 1: they decide they don't want to talk to me anymore
Speaker 1: because of my jokes? These kinds of things. Now, what
Speaker 1: I'm trying to not do here and at the same
Speaker 1: time do is to put a neuroscience lens onto these
Speaker 1: two things of safety and acceptance. But if we were
Speaker 1: to just take a step back and say, what do
Speaker 1: we know to absolutely be true? Well, safety and acceptance, belonging, peace, contentment, etc.
Speaker 1: Come from a variety of sources. Certainly in our early
Speaker 1: relationship with our caretakers, the circuits form that are basically
Speaker 1: all about resonance with the caretaker. Alan Shore here at
Speaker 1: UCLA has done beautiful work on this. I think the
Speaker 1: book's title is called right Brain Psychotherapy, and it's really
Speaker 1: about how the bonding of infant and typically mother, but
Speaker 1: how the word caretaker the bonding of infant and I'll
Speaker 1: just say mother since that's the more typical scenario. There's
Speaker 1: actually a lot of synchronization of brain networks early on,
Speaker 1: such that one's physical and mental state reflects the other
Speaker 1: and so on, and so from the very early stages
Speaker 1: that we come into the world, we are resonating with
Speaker 1: other people. Call it energy, if you want, call it emotions.
Speaker 1: It's neurochemical. Yes, it involves oxytocin, but a whole lot else.
Speaker 1: In other words, we leave infancy and childhood and adolescence
Speaker 1: if we have a healthy upbringing with a sense of predictability.
Speaker 1: Someone can be there and then not be there. They're
Speaker 1: accessible if we need them, etc. Now, that sort of relationship,
Speaker 1: that connectivity between humans and safety and acceptance in those
Speaker 1: relationships has been explored extensively. I think we've all seen
Speaker 1: the image of the mother and child and the brain
Speaker 1: imaging and seeing some sort of collaborative activation of their
Speaker 1: brain networks. That's been explored extensively, and it's beautiful work,
Speaker 1: and we could always use more of that sort of work.
Speaker 1: What's been explored far less is the safety and acceptance
Speaker 1: that occurs between romantic pairs, although there are laboratories starting
Speaker 1: to do that, having people, for instance, look at the
Speaker 1: face of their significant other angry, sad, et cetera, while
Speaker 1: in brain scanners, even scanning of two individuals separately at
Speaker 1: the same time, those sorts of things. Far less has
Speaker 1: been done on this notion of friendship. But I think
Speaker 1: in this day and age, when well, it seems like
Speaker 1: everything is more complicated.
Speaker 2: But I'm sure they've.
Speaker 1: Been saying that for for decades or not hundreds of
Speaker 1: thousands of years. What do we know about friendship? Friendship
Speaker 1: is one of the most reliable sources of predictability that
Speaker 1: exists within human interactions. Why because you can have many,
Speaker 1: many friends, and you don't have to break up with
Speaker 1: one friend to have another friend. When you were when
Speaker 1: we're little, they say who's your best friend? And maybe
Speaker 1: then you could only have one. But pretty soon we
Speaker 1: realize that we can have many great friends, many best friends,
Speaker 1: and I consider you one of those, Like we're growing
Speaker 1: our friendship. But there's no sense of trade off, even though,
Speaker 1: of course time is always a trade off. In fact,
Speaker 1: you were at a gathering at my home with many
Speaker 1: other friends.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: This seems can be collaborative, typically in romantic relationships. While
Speaker 1: there are exceptions to this is typically a pairing right. So,
Speaker 1: there are clearly brain networks that are overlapping with the
Speaker 1: brain networks associated with parent, child or child caretaker relationships
Speaker 1: and romantic relationships that involve the generation of safety and
Speaker 1: acceptance among friends. The major difference, however, is that friends
Speaker 1: throughout history, even when people lived in small villages, tended
Speaker 1: to be dispersed by greater distances. And so when we
Speaker 1: hear about the loneliness crisis, are we hearing about a
Speaker 1: crisis of lack of connectivity with our parents, maybe with
Speaker 1: our siblings, possible with romantic others. That's a whole domain
Speaker 1: into itself. You cover a lot of that and the
Speaker 1: challenges associated with finding and building healthy romantic relationship. But
Speaker 1: what we know for sure, based on extensive research now,
Speaker 1: is that there's a real dearth of close friendships for many,
Speaker 1: many people, not just in the US, but abroad as well.
Speaker 1: Now we could make an argument that it's by virtue
Speaker 1: of smartphones, but I don't think we want to go
Speaker 1: there just yet. I think Jonathan Heights doing a beautiful
Speaker 1: job exploiting those ideas, and he's far better equipped to
Speaker 1: to kind of pinpoint the relationships causal er otherwise than
Speaker 1: I am. But here's what we know for sure. With friends,
Speaker 1: we can both hope for and expect safety and acceptance
Speaker 1: by virtue of having lots of different kinds of friends.
Speaker 1: Friends with whom we play sport, friends with whom we
Speaker 1: just hang out, friends with whom we don't really talk
Speaker 1: too much at all, and friends with whom we drop
Speaker 1: into deep conversation with. So one of the things that
Speaker 1: I personally have found to be immensely beneficial in my
Speaker 1: own life, and for which it's clearly had an outsized
Speaker 1: positive effect relative that the time required is a simple
Speaker 1: good morning text that comes on a reliable schedule, meaning
Speaker 1: every single morning. Now this might sound almost trivial, but
Speaker 1: when I wake up in the morning, I either receive
Speaker 1: or send a good morning text to Right now, they
Speaker 1: are about three people in that kind of collection. They're
Speaker 1: not talking to each other. But if I don't receive
Speaker 1: that text by noon, it activates something in me.
Speaker 2: It's not a ton of.
Speaker 1: Anxiety, but it activates something. Are they okay? What's going
Speaker 1: on with them? You know it isn't Why aren't they
Speaker 1: checking up on me? I assume something's come up. But
Speaker 1: the simple receival of a text from somebody saying good morning,
Speaker 1: I think has both ancient and modern significance. Ancient in
Speaker 1: the sense that one of the first things that everyone
Speaker 1: experienced when we lived in small villages, because that's essentially
Speaker 1: how we evolved, was to see faces of other what
Speaker 1: biologists call conspecifics, other you know, and other same non
Speaker 1: conspecific people like people that could be romantic partners or
Speaker 1: family members or people we were going to work with.
Speaker 1: We saw faces first thing in the morning, and we
Speaker 1: know with certainty, because there's a ton of beautiful work,
Speaker 1: mainly from Nancy Canwisher's laboratory MIT, a brilliant researcher, as
Speaker 1: well as a woman named Doris Soo who now is
Speaker 1: at Berkeley was at Caltech, that there's an immense amount
Speaker 1: of neural real estate devoted to the processing of faces,
Speaker 1: not just facial expressions, but human faces in particular. Now
Speaker 1: monkeys have the same brain area for monkey faces, so
Speaker 1: this is not an area that's just designed to.
Speaker 2: See eyes, nose, and mouth.
Speaker 1: It's a brain area that has neural real estate that
Speaker 1: responds specifically to the faces of other humans in humans,
Speaker 1: And there's a whole lot to talk about how it's
Speaker 1: connected with areas of the brain involved in emotion and
Speaker 1: emotion regulation, et cetera. But the simple act of sending
Speaker 1: a good morning text to one person and receiving that back,
Speaker 1: perhaps exchanging a note or two about what's your plan
Speaker 1: for the day, doesn't have to be an extensive back
Speaker 1: and forth, but the same person or persons consistently. I've
Speaker 1: experienced in my own life, in times both good and
Speaker 1: bad and kind of neutral, that it has this outsized
Speaker 1: positive effect. And I don't think that's because you know,
Speaker 1: I was lacking social interaction. My life is very full.
Speaker 1: I have a very busy business life. I can go
Speaker 1: online and see faces. But when we go online and
Speaker 1: see a familiar influencer, or a familiar political figure, or
Speaker 1: a familiar even family member, yes they're there, and I
Speaker 1: think there's great power to that, But they aren't there
Speaker 1: specifically to see us. Although as creators we know that
Speaker 1: we are there to see our audience and for them
Speaker 1: to see us, that's a real thing, but it's quite
Speaker 1: different to have this exchange, this reciprocity. And I really
Speaker 1: believe that if there was one thing that we could
Speaker 1: each and all do to better our lives, no matter
Speaker 1: how busy our social schedule or are at home environments,
Speaker 1: is to have at least one, but probably one to three,
Speaker 1: depending on your bandwidth, one to three friends that every
Speaker 1: single morning, when you wake up, you text them and
Speaker 1: they text you back, just a simple good morning. Why
Speaker 1: Because it's the reliability. It's this notion of expectation being fulfilled.
Speaker 1: It's not a huge expectation, and this brings us back
Speaker 1: to safety and acceptance. Right, No one's going to text
Speaker 1: us good morning if they don't accept us if they
Speaker 1: dismiss us, and the safety is in the predictability of
Speaker 1: the interaction. Now for people that walk to the corner
Speaker 1: and they see the barista and they get their or
Speaker 1: they see their neighbor, et cetera. The importance of saying
Speaker 1: hello to people on the street. This is something that's
Speaker 1: really fallen away these days. Depends on where you live,
Speaker 1: but people are very much in their phones. People are
Speaker 1: very much afraid, frankly, of how they will be reacted
Speaker 1: to if they were to reach out to somebody that
Speaker 1: they don't know. These basic human interactions take us back hundreds,
Speaker 1: if not thousands, maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of years.
Speaker 2: And if I were to put.
Speaker 1: My money on any experiment, it would be that there
Speaker 1: is dedicated neural machinery for these sorts of practices. And
Speaker 1: while social media has wonderful contributions and significance to make
Speaker 1: in the well being of our lives, I truly believe
Speaker 1: that I am absolutely certain that these simple practices, just
Speaker 1: as morning sunlight can profoundly affect our daytime mood, focus
Speaker 1: and alertness in nighttime sleep. I think these simple practices
Speaker 1: of saying good morning by text each morning to the
Speaker 1: same person or people and receiving a text back sets
Speaker 1: something on the shelf like Okay, we're good to move
Speaker 1: forward to today.
Speaker 3: Hey everyone, it's Jay Schetty and I'm thrilled to announce
Speaker 3: my podcast tour. For the first time ever, you can
Speaker 3: see my on Purpose podcast live and in person. Join
Speaker 3: me in a city near you for meaningful, insightful conversations
Speaker 3: with surprise guests. It could be a celebrity, top wellness expert,
Speaker 3: or a CEO or business leader. We'll dive into experiences
Speaker 3: designed to inspire growth, spark learning, and build real connections.
Speaker 3: I can't wait to see you there. Tickets are on
Speaker 3: cell now, Head to Jayshetty dot me and get yours today. Yeah.
Speaker 3: Two things came to mind as you were speaking. Your
Speaker 3: habit of the text every morning makes me feel like
Speaker 3: you're getting to write a story with someone and force someone.
Speaker 3: And so there's this sense of someone knows my story.
Speaker 3: And now it's not like, oh, I speak to you
Speaker 3: once a month and we're catching up on everything that
Speaker 3: happened and you're missing the nuance and the extra in
Speaker 3: the detail. It's like I'm getting to log my story
Speaker 3: in every day which means I really feel this person
Speaker 3: knows me and I know them. So now when we
Speaker 3: do get together this weekend to break bread, I don't
Speaker 3: have to do that in between small talk. They're already aware.
Speaker 3: And now we're just almost connecting all the dots, as
Speaker 3: opposed to I'm now using my time with you to
Speaker 3: plot all the dots. So there's that sense of like
Speaker 3: story exchange, which I think is so important. I find
Speaker 3: that that my friends you've known me the longest, but
Speaker 3: the ones that I also consistently text every day, they're
Speaker 3: the ones that I feel understand the tapestry of my
Speaker 3: life and I know theirs. And so now you're not
Speaker 3: just looking at dots on a wall. Look, you're connecting
Speaker 3: the dots in that meeting, which I think is I
Speaker 3: don't know. I'd love to hear how that works out
Speaker 3: from a neuroscience perspective. But the second thing that I
Speaker 3: was reminded by as you were speaking was I feel
Speaker 3: like writing down. I always encourage a lot of my
Speaker 3: clients to do this, to write down a list of
Speaker 3: emotions they'd like to experience with people. So it could
Speaker 3: be things like adventure, discovery, comfort, humor, love, whatever it
Speaker 3: may be just write down the list and then for
Speaker 3: each one write down the name of a different person.
Speaker 3: Ideally that fulfills that need in your life, because often
Speaker 3: I feel like we put a lot of pressure on
Speaker 3: our romantic partners or one person in our life to
Speaker 3: be all these things, and the truth is, no matter
Speaker 3: how phenomenal anyone is or how much they love us,
Speaker 3: they just can't be that. And so if you have, hey,
Speaker 3: I've reached out to this friend when I want some
Speaker 3: adventure because they love it too. If I want to
Speaker 3: see a sports game, this is the person I reach
Speaker 3: out to. And then do the same in the opposite way.
Speaker 3: Which one of those do you fulfill for your friends?
Speaker 3: What emotions do you help other people create? And I
Speaker 3: feel like if you look at friendship as a spectrum,
Speaker 3: as this broad set of connection points, rather than like
Speaker 3: this is my best friend as you were saying, or
Speaker 3: this is my number one friend, and we get away
Speaker 3: from hierarchy and we move more into a spectrum, I
Speaker 3: feel like that mixed in with the text today starts
Speaker 3: creating a much more healthier network of what connection means.
Speaker 3: As well. It's also not just the same person doing
Speaker 3: the same thing every week.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I love the idea that by staying in contact regularly
Speaker 1: we don't have to get caught up, and that then
Speaker 1: we can just drop into what's most meaningful on that
Speaker 1: particular day and maybe even have more available to us
Speaker 1: to have a new experience, right as opposed to just
Speaker 1: catching up. And then, of course there are those friends
Speaker 1: that we catch up with and it feels like it
Speaker 1: was just yesterday. Definitely, But I'd be willing to bet
Speaker 1: that those were people that you spent a lot of
Speaker 1: day to daytime activity with them from a university, or
Speaker 1: you spend a lot of time just in the kind
Speaker 1: of everyday shared experience for a while, and then when
Speaker 1: you see each other again, it's like being right back there.
Speaker 1: The neuroscience of this hasn't been explored near but given
Speaker 1: that our very own Surgeon General highlighted the loneliness crisis
Speaker 1: as one of the major crises in the world today,
Speaker 1: I think that in terms of simple solutions to big
Speaker 1: important problems, developing more connectivity with people through simple practices,
Speaker 1: and again we're talking about a text here. I mean
Speaker 1: I will be the first to say that if you
Speaker 1: can hop on a phone call or you can get
Speaker 1: on you know, a video chat with somebody that would
Speaker 1: certainly be better, but many people just don't have time.
Speaker 3: For that show.
Speaker 1: So in terms of spending time with people in a
Speaker 1: deeper and richer way, you know, getting the drop in time,
Speaker 1: as it were. I love that you mentioned adventure. I'm
Speaker 1: almost forty nine. I turned forty nine in just over
Speaker 1: a month, and I would say that the first forty
Speaker 1: nine years of my life have been marked by a
Speaker 1: real thirst for adventure, a ton of curiosity. Now I
Speaker 1: really feel myself entering a completely different season of my life.
Speaker 1: I'm sort of hoping this would eventually happen, in part
Speaker 1: because you know, I took some some kind of dangerous turns.
Speaker 1: You know, I took risks with my with my life
Speaker 1: at points where I didn't really intend to do that.
Speaker 1: But you know, you seek enough adventure, you're gonna you're
Speaker 1: gonna find adventure, and you have to be quite careful.
Speaker 1: I have friends with whom I had tons of adventure,
Speaker 1: and then now the adventures are far more docile and quiet,
Speaker 1: and of course the internal adventure is real as well.
Speaker 1: I think that friends with whom we can just be
Speaker 1: one version of ourselves are wonderful friends. With whom we
Speaker 1: can be all versions of ourself is especially wonderful. That's
Speaker 1: the acceptance piece. Typically, I think we look more for
Speaker 1: that in romantic relationship. This notion of just like safety
Speaker 1: and acceptance being hallmarks of healthy romantic relationship, I think
Speaker 1: those are also the hallmarks of healthy friendship. It's just
Speaker 1: that with friendship we can be a bit more segmented
Speaker 1: in terms of the number of different aspects of self
Speaker 1: that we need safety and acceptance with. I think with
Speaker 1: friendship also, you know, I've found it to be the
Speaker 1: case that really knowing what's going on with people has
Speaker 1: become a little bit more difficult. There's this there's this
Speaker 1: kind of odd thing right where we're more interconnected in
Speaker 1: terms of availability of communication, but we're less aware of
Speaker 1: what's really going on for people. In fact, on the
Speaker 1: way here, I had a call with a friend and
Speaker 1: their headset was making a lot of noise, and so.
Speaker 2: We agreed.
Speaker 1: They said, Hey, how about I just turned mute mine
Speaker 1: and for the next two minutes. I'm not kidding. This
Speaker 1: is how they this is what they said.
Speaker 2: They said, just tell me, like what's on your heart
Speaker 2: or what's in your heart.
Speaker 1: Hopefully it wasn't on your heart? What's in your heart?
Speaker 1: And I was like, oh, wow, that's tough. You know,
Speaker 1: that's tough. I mean, I okay, and I know that
Speaker 1: they're listening, and then but it's very silent on the
Speaker 1: other end, and I'm kind of speaking into a vacuum
Speaker 1: there because they're not hearing anything. And then had maybe
Speaker 1: just two minutes before we curled up the hill because
Speaker 1: of the reception in the area that we're in, as
Speaker 1: you know, is always complicated to just get feedback. It
Speaker 1: was very interesting, like I realized that I felt close
Speaker 1: to them before, but just the notion that they would
Speaker 1: ask me that how do I feel? Not what's going
Speaker 1: on lately? Not you know, am I feeling good or bad?
Speaker 1: Like a valuation of feelings, but just like what's going on?
Speaker 1: And I stumbled a bit at first, but I can
Speaker 1: realize in saying it now, like I'm quite moved by
Speaker 1: the fact that they would ask that of all things,
Speaker 1: as opposed to like what's going on, what's your next
Speaker 1: podcast about? And coming to visit that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: And so like I'm taking a lot of cues these
Speaker 1: days from people that make me feel very seen and accepted,
Speaker 1: you're one of them, I must say, Like, I don't
Speaker 1: just say that because we're in front of these microphones
Speaker 1: and sitting here, like you and I have been in
Speaker 1: touch a lot lately, through good times and hard times
Speaker 1: and a lot of different things.
Speaker 2: It's not.
Speaker 1: A coincidence, though, that I think that we're here because
Speaker 1: and talking about this, because I think that ultimately the
Speaker 1: questions that we ask of the people we care about
Speaker 1: are just as important as reminding them that we're there.
Speaker 1: Because when we ask a question like you know, what's
Speaker 1: in your heart, what we're really saying is you know,
Speaker 1: like what's really going on for you, as opposed to
Speaker 1: like what's the next podcast about? Which is an interesting
Speaker 1: question to me, but you know, so you know, this
Speaker 1: is more your territory than mine. But I think in
Speaker 1: the end, I think it comes back to safety and acceptance,
Speaker 1: simple behaviors like a good morning check in, and then
Speaker 1: asking questions that might feel a little bit challenging for
Speaker 1: the other person to answer at first, but that really
Speaker 1: show a depth of care and interest that go beyond
Speaker 1: just kind of like narrative and storytelling. And I think
Speaker 1: one thing that I'm also very eager about these days
Speaker 1: is breaking down some of the traditional stereotypes, like you know,
Speaker 1: for anyone that's listening to this and goes, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: I didn't you know, men don't talk that way or something,
Speaker 1: it's like, actually they do. They do, and if given
Speaker 1: the chance, they will open up about things that perhaps
Speaker 1: they hadn't even thought about. And I confess on one
Speaker 1: of those people, maybe it was my y chromosome and
Speaker 1: got in the way of me thinking like, wait, what
Speaker 1: do you want me to talk about? What's in my heart? Hey,
Speaker 1: actually that's a really great question, thank you. And so
Speaker 1: I think this brings us back to these early circuits
Speaker 1: that are all about safety and acceptance, that are all
Speaker 1: about being able to predict things and basically to say, okay,
Speaker 1: I don't have to be vigilant. That's really what safety
Speaker 1: is about, is about turning off the neural circuits for vigilance.
Speaker 1: When we turn off the neural circuits for vigilance, we
Speaker 1: can start to direct our neural circuits, vision, auditory, whatever
Speaker 1: thoughts towards an awareness of things that are both inside
Speaker 1: us and around us that keep us in that calm state.
Speaker 1: I mean, vigilance is associated with stress. Stresses associated with
Speaker 1: a narrowing of the visual field and narrowing of the
Speaker 1: auditory fields. I'll just use this analogy because my sister
Speaker 1: and I last last summer, we always go to New
Speaker 1: York for our birthdays together. We went and saw what
Speaker 1: the Harry Potter like. Oh it's so good, right, and yeah,
Speaker 1: is wild? I mean the effects are so unbelievable. She's
Speaker 1: a big Harry Potter fan. I'm not okay, but just
Speaker 1: just spectacular effects.
Speaker 2: It was just so wild. I couldn't believe it.
Speaker 1: But there's this library in the play where it's a
Speaker 1: magic library, where when one of the books is taken
Speaker 1: out about a particular subject, the books around it actually
Speaker 1: morph and change to reflect the same subject material. And
Speaker 1: when I saw that, I immediately said, that's how the brain works.
Speaker 1: The way the brain works is a kind of pseudo hypnosis.
Speaker 1: Hypnosis is about context and context setting and narrowing of context.
Speaker 1: All of us have such a wealth of historical, present,
Speaker 1: and future thinking cognition in our brains, but when we
Speaker 1: get anchored to a particular emotional state or topic, what
Speaker 1: ends up happening is that the available topics around it
Speaker 1: change in reference to how stressed we are. When we
Speaker 1: are stressed. All the topics, all the books on the
Speaker 1: shelf around that stress, are about that thing in how
Speaker 1: to solve it. And actually, this is why stress enhances
Speaker 1: our memory for solving that the things that can help
Speaker 1: us solve that particular issue. But guess what is given
Speaker 1: up all the other distantly or not so distant, really
Speaker 1: related topics that lend themselves to creativity, to thinking about
Speaker 1: novel combinations of things. This is why our friend Rick Rubin,
Speaker 1: I think, is such a spectacularly creative individual, because he
Speaker 1: spends a lot of time putting his brain and body
Speaker 1: into a state in which he can remain in contact
Speaker 1: with these other related or seemingly unrelated topics. Whereas when
Speaker 1: we're in a stressed mode, when we have to problem solve,
Speaker 1: when we are in vigilance, excuse me, we absolutely narrow
Speaker 1: our cognitive fields, our visual fields, our auditory fields. We
Speaker 1: limit what we think is possible. And so I think
Speaker 1: great friendships, to bring it back to it, great relationships
Speaker 1: of all kinds have enough safety and acceptance in them
Speaker 1: that we can make our way through the practical constraints
Speaker 1: of the relationship in the day, the week, and the year.
Speaker 1: But that there's also a sense of creativity that there
Speaker 1: are new elements allowed to be brought in because there's
Speaker 1: enough safety and acceptance that we can turn down those
Speaker 1: vigilance circuits absolutely.
Speaker 3: How do we then with circuitry that's built for safety
Speaker 3: and acceptance When you're talking about everything that you talk
Speaker 3: about on the Hoopoman Lab, things that I talk about
Speaker 3: from a maybe more spiritual wisdom perspective, they're all hard things,
Speaker 3: and safety and acceptance generally in our current understanding of
Speaker 3: those words, feels like comfort and security and easy and simple.
Speaker 3: And then all of a sudden you're saying cold plunges,
Speaker 3: infrared sauna, beginning of a circadian rhythm in the morning,
Speaker 3: strength workouts, like all this other stuff, which initially is discomfort.
Speaker 3: It's difficult, it's doing hard things. And I know this
Speaker 3: was something you've been thinking about a lot, but I'm
Speaker 3: just trying to make that connection. We're wired safety and acceptance,
Speaker 3: but then all the stuff that's good for us seems
Speaker 3: to be hard, at least in the beginning.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker 1: So the twist in all of this is that the
Speaker 1: nervous system loves predictability, even if the predictability is arriving
Speaker 1: through hard things. So I would say the major theme
Speaker 1: of the Huberman Lab podcast has been tools we call
Speaker 1: them protocols to anchor one's physiology in some predictable states.
Speaker 1: I've never actually articulated that, but that's really what it's about.
Speaker 1: So why you get sunlight in your eyes in the
Speaker 1: morning because.
Speaker 2: It wakes you up. I could tell you it increases.
Speaker 1: Cortisol in a good way early in the day, that
Speaker 1: it sets the time around your melatonin secretion for later
Speaker 1: at night.
Speaker 2: It helps you sleep at night.
Speaker 1: And that's all true, but it creates a sense of predictability.
Speaker 1: It allows you to know that for the next series
Speaker 1: of hours, you're going to feel more alert, and at
Speaker 1: night you're likely going to be able to fall asleep
Speaker 1: more easily. Cold plunges, to my mind, people debate whether
Speaker 1: or not they're valuable.
Speaker 2: For combating inflammation.
Speaker 1: They are, whether or not they're valuable for increasing metabolism,
Speaker 1: probably not to a huge extent. But one thing we
Speaker 1: know for sure is that they if done correctly, they're uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: But after you get out, you have an increase in
Speaker 1: these three neurochemicals that we call the catacholamines, dopamineupen effort
Speaker 1: nor epinifferent and you feel more energized and slightly blissed.
Speaker 2: Out for the next two to four hours.
Speaker 1: It's a real effect because those are real chemicals, and
Speaker 1: they've served that role for hundreds of thousands of years
Speaker 1: in humans, and they will continue to serve that role
Speaker 1: in humans. So the cold plunge is not so much
Speaker 1: about pushing yourself as it is figuring out a way
Speaker 1: that you can overcome a sense of stress and then
Speaker 1: safely overcome a sense of kind of resistance to getting
Speaker 1: in the thing, and then safely increase these neurochemicals that
Speaker 1: then predictably shift your state to be more alert and
Speaker 1: at the same time relaxed, little bit blissed out, if
Speaker 1: we want to call it that. So you know, we
Speaker 1: could list off protocol after protocol, right. If you tend
Speaker 1: to eat meals at a consistent time plus or minus
Speaker 1: an hour, doesn't matter if you're fast or not, you'll
Speaker 1: tend to be hungry about fifteen minutes or so before
Speaker 1: those meals. This is a wonderful thing because it increases
Speaker 1: this predictability. This lends itself to safety and acceptance because
Speaker 1: it allows you to have to not have to think
Speaker 1: about a number of other things. So, you know, I've
Speaker 1: been criticized and fairly so that, gosh, there's so many protocols.
Speaker 1: How could anyone possibly do all these protocols? And the
Speaker 1: truth is that many of the protocols are you know,
Speaker 1: it's a buffet, and many of them, like how to
Speaker 1: organize your workspace or when you travel for jet lag,
Speaker 1: it's individual as to whether or not people.
Speaker 2: Want to do them, and of course they're all optional.
Speaker 2: You know, this isn't law.
Speaker 1: So the idea, however, is that through some simple basic
Speaker 1: behaviors viewing sunlight, a little bit of a walk after
Speaker 1: a meal, a little bit of sunlight in the evening,
Speaker 1: dimming the lights in the evening.
Speaker 2: You know, these are the base.
Speaker 1: Eating it more or less consistent meal times and mostly
Speaker 1: unprocessed or minimally processed foods for the majority of your
Speaker 1: food intake. Doesn't matter if you're vegan, vegetarian, or otherwise,
Speaker 1: you're going to feel much much better. And part of
Speaker 1: the much much better is feeling more alert and more
Speaker 1: vitality during the waking hours and better sleep at night,
Speaker 1: which just kind of seesaw back and forth into feeling
Speaker 1: better overall, and thereby free up energy for things like
Speaker 1: sending the morning text.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: So I think I'm very glad you brought this up
Speaker 1: because I think people hear, oh goodness, another thing to do.
Speaker 1: But if you think about it that way, it's going
Speaker 1: to be self limiting. But if you think about it
Speaker 1: as each one of these things takes a minimum amount
Speaker 1: of time, and you can do the walk and sunlight
Speaker 1: thing in the morning combined, and may if you miss
Speaker 1: a day, no big deal, No big deal. These are slow,
Speaker 1: integrative systems. Your system will recover just flying, but down
Speaker 1: on a consistent basis. You're going to feel much better,
Speaker 1: and you're going to have more energy, and you're going
Speaker 1: to be able to think about what you might want
Speaker 1: to do in your creative life and then do that.
Speaker 1: You'll have the time and energy to think about what
Speaker 1: you might want to do relationship wise, or friendship wise,
Speaker 1: or building out these aspects of life. So it was
Speaker 1: never the intention that people do so many things that
Speaker 1: they don't have time for friendship or kids or relationship,
Speaker 1: or that their entire family or relationship be centered around
Speaker 1: these protocols. Rather, they're designed to be weaved into everyday life,
Speaker 1: and sometimes when people experience pain points like people are
Speaker 1: having attentional issues, or people are experiencing depression, or they
Speaker 1: have a particular creative project and they want to tap
Speaker 1: into like open monitoring meditation for instance, very different as
Speaker 1: you know, far better than I than other forms of meditation.
Speaker 1: Then they can access those specific tools. But I don't
Speaker 1: want to romanticize ancient times, but there was a lot
Speaker 1: more predictability in some domains of life in ancient times,
Speaker 1: assuming people were living in small villages, there was a
Speaker 1: lot more predictability, but there was also a lack of predictability.
Speaker 1: Someone could take off on a hunt or a gather,
Speaker 1: and if they didn't come back, we might assume they're
Speaker 1: never coming back. Two nights later, they might come back
Speaker 1: and say that was a close call, or they come
Speaker 1: back with a great yield.
Speaker 2: We don't know, you know, we don't know.
Speaker 1: What it was like, but you can be sure that
Speaker 1: the same neural circuits that were responsible for stress and
Speaker 1: lack of safety and therefore vigilance back then are very
Speaker 1: much alive in our brains now. So again, the protocols
Speaker 1: are designed to think about it like putting ingredients in
Speaker 1: the refrigerator. You don't know what you're gonna cook, but
Speaker 1: you have a lot more available to you as options
Speaker 1: when you have when you know that all the basic
Speaker 1: macronutrients are covered, everything's all the bases are covered, and
Speaker 1: then you can start to think about what you would cook.
Speaker 1: Whereas if you've ever arrived late in the city, you
Speaker 1: get to your airbnb or your hotel and you see
Speaker 1: like three or four things and one lousy pan and
Speaker 1: thing one. Now you have to get the other kind
Speaker 1: of creative. We have to adapt. And we've all done
Speaker 1: the unhealthy option because that was the only thing, or
Speaker 1: fasted because that was the healthiest option. So I think
Speaker 1: what we're what we're getting to here is that the
Speaker 1: human brain, like all animals, all animals need to know
Speaker 1: where they're going to sleep that night. I mean a
Speaker 1: dog goes into a new environment and is like trying
Speaker 1: to figure out where's its spot. It's all about space.
Speaker 1: You talk to any expert dog trainer, they'll tell you,
Speaker 1: you know, it's all about negotiating space. Can they touch you?
Speaker 1: Can they not touch you? Are they allowed to be
Speaker 1: near you? Do they have to stay afar? Can they
Speaker 1: go into every room?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: You look at small children foraging an environment, however rambunctious
Speaker 1: or calm, they're trying to figure out, like, what am
Speaker 1: I allowed to do here? What am I not allowed
Speaker 1: to do here? Sometimes by testing us as adults, we
Speaker 1: do the exact same thing. We need to know where
Speaker 1: we are, We need to orient in space and in time,
Speaker 1: and then we need to know, like what's available to me?
Speaker 1: Where am I going to stay tonight? Is one of
Speaker 1: the most fundamental questions that we ask ourselves every single day,
Speaker 1: except if you know where you're going to stay to night,
Speaker 1: you don't ask yourself that, and you have mental real
Speaker 1: estate to devote to other things. So what we're really
Speaker 1: talking about here is is bookending the extremely basic fundamental
Speaker 1: drives of the human brain for safety and acceptance. And
Speaker 1: then at the very other end is these aspirational things
Speaker 1: that we all seek, right, these notions of connectedness, of purpose,
Speaker 1: of fulfillment of peace. Again, I'm borrowing from Martha's beautiful
Speaker 1: list because I think it's so fundamental and it captures most,
Speaker 1: if not all, of what we all seek. But I
Speaker 1: think that we get very much caught up in the
Speaker 1: how to reach goal A or be how to write
Speaker 1: the book how to make the money, how to grow
Speaker 1: a social media account, and we forget that at the
Speaker 1: core of everything is our relationship to our surroundings, to
Speaker 1: our inner landscape, into each other. And it always comes
Speaker 1: back to safety and acceptance and where we feel uncomfortable,
Speaker 1: where we feel like we didn't do things right or
Speaker 1: others didn't do them right for us or to us.
Speaker 2: It always boils down to those two things.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you reminded me of a question I have to
Speaker 3: ask people, is what's your most repeated door? Because when
Speaker 3: I was looking at the research on thinking, the idea
Speaker 3: was that not only well, we're having a lot of
Speaker 3: thoughts every day, but a lot of the thoughts we
Speaker 3: have are repetitive. And going back to your point on protocols,
Speaker 3: I feel like the reason we have repeated thoughts is
Speaker 3: because we haven't yet built a protocol to help that
Speaker 3: thought go away. So if you built a protocol, like
Speaker 3: I know where I'm sleeping tonight, you're now no longer
Speaker 3: having that thought of where am I sleeping tonight? And
Speaker 3: we may be asking ourselves a very different thing today
Speaker 3: because we figured out where to sleep, but we might
Speaker 3: be thinking like how I'm going to pay that bill.
Speaker 3: How am I gonna deal with that issue at home?
Speaker 3: What should I say to my kid?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 3: Whatever? It is, right, We all have different challenges. Everyone
Speaker 3: has a different set of issues that they're struggling with
Speaker 3: or dealing with. And because we haven't created a protocol,
Speaker 3: we keep asking that question, and that question then creates
Speaker 3: panic and creates anxiety and create stress and eventually could
Speaker 3: lead to burnout if someone just keeps propelling that thought
Speaker 3: and doesn't create a protocol. So I love the idea
Speaker 3: that people shou build the protocol that links with their
Speaker 3: most repeated thor rather than having to think, oh god,
Speaker 3: I've got to do twenty five things, it's like, well, no,
Speaker 3: what is the thing that is keeping you up at
Speaker 3: night or what is the thing that's causing you the
Speaker 3: greatest anxiety and try and solve for that. It's like,
Speaker 3: if you're out of milk, you go and buy milk.
Speaker 3: You don't say I've got to buy twenty five other things.
Speaker 3: You just go filled a part of the refrigerator that's empty.
Speaker 3: Does that align on Yeah?
Speaker 2: Absolutely?
Speaker 1: I love what we're bridging over and over here is
Speaker 1: the very practical foundational elements of safety with these aspirational things.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm a big believer in physiology driving mental states.
Speaker 1: They go the other way to emotional states drive physiology.
Speaker 1: It's bidirectional. Of course. One of the reasons why I've
Speaker 1: been so emphatic about respiration protocols is a my lab
Speaker 1: published a clinical trial on this in collaboration with David
Speaker 1: Spiegel in our department of psychiatry, which basically could be
Speaker 1: summarized the following way. If you emphasize exhales, you tend
Speaker 1: to calm down, meaning you make them longer, more and intentional. Normally,
Speaker 1: we inhale actively and we passively exhale. Other species do
Speaker 1: it the other way around some other species. If you
Speaker 1: deliberately emphasize your exhales, the duration, the intensity, or just
Speaker 1: even control the exhale actively, your heart rate slows. When
Speaker 1: we emphasize inhales, we don't necessarily have to do hyperventilation
Speaker 1: or tumo breathing or anything like that. We could, but
Speaker 1: those forms of breathing tend to bring up our activation state,
Speaker 1: and they emphasize inhales, both by virtue of vigor duration
Speaker 1: or just putting more conscious attention to them. And there's
Speaker 1: a reason for this, it's called respiratory sinus a rhythmia.
Speaker 1: It's an actual phenomenon that links the heart and the
Speaker 1: vagus nerve and our diaphragm and our lungs.
Speaker 2: It's a beautiful mechanism.
Speaker 1: When I'm overthinking at night and I want to fall asleep,
Speaker 1: I start doing long axhale breathing through my mouth. Now,
Speaker 1: sometimes I'm out, I just fall asleep. I know that
Speaker 1: because I wake up sometime later I realize it worked again.
Speaker 1: Other times it doesn't work so well right. And one
Speaker 1: of the most common questions I get is how to
Speaker 1: turn off repetitive thoughts. Now there, it's a bit of
Speaker 1: a skill because you know, frankly, repetitive thoughts oftentimes are
Speaker 1: serving an adaptive purpose. But we can get stuck on them, right,
Speaker 1: or they can get stuck in us. I don't know
Speaker 1: which one it is. But one of the reasons why
Speaker 1: I'm such a strong believer in people doing a practice
Speaker 1: like yoga nidra, which you know, and I must say,
Speaker 1: I know I've upset to some extent some people by
Speaker 1: coining something very similar non sleep deep rest or NSDR.
Speaker 1: I want to make very clear that I have the
Speaker 1: utmost respect for yoga nidra as an ancient practice. Neither
Speaker 1: Yoga nidra, of course, nor NSDR or anything I developed.
Speaker 2: It's just that NSDR.
Speaker 1: It's a little bit different in that it removes intentions
Speaker 1: and it tends to involve a little bit less of
Speaker 1: some of the linking of chakras and things like that
Speaker 1: that yoga nidra does. With no specific purpose in mind
Speaker 1: behind designing that way except to be able to adapt
Speaker 1: it to the laboratory context. Okay, what do we know
Speaker 1: about Let's just call it it's original named yoga nidra.
Speaker 1: The goal is to stay awake, to be conscious while
Speaker 1: deliberately relaxing the body. That's a very useful practice feel
Speaker 1: similar to meditation in a way, could be called a meditation,
Speaker 1: but it has some distinct benefits. First of all, a
Speaker 1: beautiful study that was done in Denmark I had a
Speaker 1: medical school in Copenhagen showed that people that do a
Speaker 1: yoga nidra practice get a sixty percent increase in baseline
Speaker 1: dopamine levels in the basal ganglia brain area that's associated
Speaker 1: with the preparation for movement and the withholding of movement.
Speaker 1: So it essentially can be looked at as a practice
Speaker 1: that changes neurochemicals in the brain that restore mental and
Speaker 1: physical vigor. That's how I think of yoga nidra. It's
Speaker 1: sort of like sleep. There are some stuff that he's emerging,
Speaker 1: including some that I'm planning with doctor Matt Walker at Berkeley,
Speaker 1: one of the pre eminent sleep researchers in the world,
Speaker 1: that are going to explore whether or not little pockets
Speaker 1: of the brain are actually sleeping or in rapid eye
Speaker 1: movement sleep like states during yoga nidra.
Speaker 2: If you think about rapid.
Speaker 1: Eye movement sleep just as a very relevant aside, it's
Speaker 1: a state in which the brain is very active and
Speaker 1: the body is completely still, much like yoga nidra. Okay,
Speaker 1: brain active, body still. Now, what's unique about yoga nidra
Speaker 1: is that there's this instruction in the nidra if it's
Speaker 1: a traditional one that talks about going from thinking and
Speaker 1: doing to being and feeling. Okay, So let's step back
Speaker 1: as neuroscientists when we say thinking is a lot about
Speaker 1: anticipating future. It could be about thinking about the past,
Speaker 1: it could be thinking about things that are happening now.
Speaker 1: But it's a very four brain dependent process doing is
Speaker 1: basal ganglia action generation withholding action and four brain circuitry
Speaker 1: as well, you know, I should say prefrontal cortical circuitry
Speaker 1: as well.
Speaker 2: Now being and feeling.
Speaker 1: Now, this is starting to sound a little bit like
Speaker 1: quote unquote softer language, but there's nothing soft about this language,
Speaker 1: because if we just put a neuroscience lens on it,
Speaker 1: we say, okay, what is that really about. That's about
Speaker 1: bringing ourselves from exterroception monitoring of the external world beyond
Speaker 1: the confines of our skin, to monitoring of the internal
Speaker 1: world within the confines of our skin. And there's something
Speaker 1: magical about shifting our perception to inter reception from our
Speaker 1: skin inward in that it takes us out of thinking.
Speaker 1: Whereas when we're monitoring the external world for reasons that
Speaker 1: are sort of logical but a little bit harder to articulate,
Speaker 1: then it's more about anticipating things, trying to figure out
Speaker 1: what goes with what, what's separate from what. The moment
Speaker 1: we get to the level of our skin and inward
Speaker 1: we know what's what and what's separate from what.
Speaker 2: It's just us inward. So there's one thing. Rarely do we.
Speaker 1: Think, oh, here's my brain and here's my leg now
Speaker 1: Ndra then steps us through that. And so what it
Speaker 1: does is it brings all of our cognition into this
Speaker 1: internal receptive mode and then boom, we are in this
Speaker 1: mode of being and feeling. So I don't think of
Speaker 1: being and feeling as turning off thinking. I think of
Speaker 1: it as bringing thinking to the level of our sensation
Speaker 1: of our body. Yoga nidra, I think, is perhaps the
Speaker 1: most powerful practice for learning how to turn off one's thoughts.
Speaker 1: And so when one steps back from the research literature
Speaker 1: and says, Okay, what do we know for sure about
Speaker 1: yoga nidra and SDR. We know that this can be
Speaker 1: done for ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, or an hour.
Speaker 1: We know that it can very reliably improve levels of wakefulness, cognition,
Speaker 1: and vigor post nidra. We know that it restores dopamine
Speaker 1: levels to a market extent in the basal ganglia.
Speaker 2: We know that the brain goes.
Speaker 1: Into little pockets of sleep like states. This needs to
Speaker 1: be explored further. And we know that it mimics rapid
Speaker 1: eye movements sleep. And we know that people who do
Speaker 1: it find it easier to make themselves fall back asleep
Speaker 1: should they need, and they develop much stronger powers of
Speaker 1: autonomic regulation, their ability to take themselves out of stress
Speaker 1: if they need to. I mean, if ever, there was
Speaker 1: a powerful practice, Yoga Nidra is that practice.
Speaker 2: And so when I step back.
Speaker 1: From the landscape of practices that can help us turn
Speaker 1: off thinking or etc.
Speaker 2: This is probably a good time to just, you know,
Speaker 2: mention that you know.
Speaker 1: Meditation I view as an exploration of one's own consciousness.
Speaker 1: I also view it as a perceptual exercise, shifting one's
Speaker 1: perception to a particular location as opposed to just wherever
Speaker 1: the mind may take it. Put simply, it's far more
Speaker 1: profound than that, as you know and as many know.
Speaker 1: But meditation has been shown to reduce stress, improve focus,
Speaker 1: improve memory. I'm thinking mainly of the studies by Wennie
Speaker 1: Suzuki's lab at NYU. I'm thinking of the studies that
Speaker 1: were done out of the University of Wisconsin that are
Speaker 1: talked about in Altered States, which is a wonderful book,
Speaker 1: and the work that you've talked about in your books.
Speaker 1: When I think about Yogan Non Sleep, Deep Breast, it's
Speaker 1: really about restoring mental and physical vigor and getting better
Speaker 1: at regulating one's own autonomic internal kind of hinge, going
Speaker 1: back and forth between sympathetic and parasympathetic, that you know,
Speaker 1: kind of fight or flight and rest and digest, alert
Speaker 1: and calm, learning how to adjust that in a conscious way.
Speaker 1: And then when I think of practices like breath work,
Speaker 1: well depends on the breath work. And then we can
Speaker 1: simplify it by saying, when inhales are more vigorous and
Speaker 1: made longer deliberately than exhales, heart rate goes up.
Speaker 2: Alertness goes up.
Speaker 1: When ex sales are made longer and more vigorous and
Speaker 1: done deliberately, well, then heart rate tends to go down,
Speaker 1: and we tend to shift more towards the state of calm.
Speaker 1: And then, of course there's hypnosis, and hypnosis to me
Speaker 1: is self hypnosis, which is a clinical tool that David
Speaker 1: Spiegel and others around the world, but mainly David Spiegel
Speaker 1: and his father popularized within the formal field of psychiatry,
Speaker 1: and hypnosis is a combination of alertness and calm that
Speaker 1: we know lends itself to neuroplaticity. What is hypnosis really for.
Speaker 1: It's not meditation, it's not to calm down, is to
Speaker 1: solve a specific problem, to quit smoking, to learn how
Speaker 1: to regulate pain, to you know, any number of different
Speaker 1: things that hypnosis has been shown in peer reviewed studies
Speaker 1: to do. So when I step back, I say, okay, meditation,
Speaker 1: non sleep, deep breast aka yoga nidra, I should say
Speaker 1: yoga nidra aka non non sleep, deep breast breath work
Speaker 1: and hypnosis. Well, now we have a kit of tools
Speaker 1: that are available to us to adjust our internal state,
Speaker 1: and any one of those could be used to turn
Speaker 1: off thinking. But the most powerful one, in my opinion,
Speaker 1: and by way of experience and sort of how I'm
Speaker 1: viewing the research literature, I'm sure there are others out
Speaker 1: there that would disagree with me, and that's fine, is
Speaker 1: yoga nidra. If ever, there was a practice that I
Speaker 1: wish every human being on the planet would do besides
Speaker 1: go out in view morning sunlight, it would be yoga nidra.
Speaker 1: And of course this has been available for thousands of years,
Speaker 1: and unfortunately it has not gotten the traction worldwide that
Speaker 1: I think it deserves, and especially at this time I'm
Speaker 1: in human history, when the world seems so tense with
Speaker 1: friction of all sorts of kinds, but also internal friction
Speaker 1: for people, I think it's just, you know, it's something
Speaker 1: that I really really want to shine a light on
Speaker 1: as a tremendously beneficial tool for turning off thoughts when
Speaker 1: it's necessary and for accessing you know, some people call
Speaker 1: these atypical states, but most people go from sleep to
Speaker 1: waking and sleep to waking without really an exploration of
Speaker 1: what those different states are like. So, in any event,
Speaker 1: forgive me for being long winded, but are those are
Speaker 1: the tools that when I step back and I say,
Speaker 1: where is there great neuroscience and physiology to support their use?
Speaker 1: What are the specific uses that seem especially valuable for
Speaker 1: one practice versus another? And how do these practices differ
Speaker 1: because they often get conflated. Somebody starts breathwork and we think, oh,
Speaker 1: it's this type of breath work or that type of
Speaker 1: without thinking about what's being emphasized and where the heart
Speaker 1: rate is going. Or you think meditation, and of course
Speaker 1: there are many different kinds of meditation. Actually, I'd love
Speaker 1: to know from you. I know of kind of traditional
Speaker 1: third eye meditation, and I'm aware of open monitoring meditation.
Speaker 1: What other sorts of meditation do you do.
Speaker 3: As you mentioned this breath work, there's visualization and there's
Speaker 3: mantra or sound. So the meditation on the repetition of sound,
Speaker 3: whether that be natural sounds, whether it be instruments, or
Speaker 3: whether it be the repetition of mantra in your own voice,
Speaker 3: or the collective chanting, which it's done through ancient times,
Speaker 3: of the collective chance of sacred sounds. It is considered
Speaker 3: one of the forms of meditation. And it almost feels
Speaker 3: like a humming, kind of cocoon effect of being kind
Speaker 3: of surrounded by this sound that's repeated again and again
Speaker 3: and again. So it can kind of get you into
Speaker 3: that kind of submerged, immersive, drowning feeling that I think
Speaker 3: most if they've done a sound bowl meditation, have experienced
Speaker 3: some form of what that could feel like. And again
Speaker 3: you're getting into that atypical state. But going back to
Speaker 3: what you were saying, what really resonated for me and
Speaker 3: what I've always appreciated about your work, Andrew, I said
Speaker 3: this last time you came on the show, is this
Speaker 3: connection between these ancient practices and the modern euroscience. To
Speaker 3: back it up, like when you've talked about many many
Speaker 3: times about sunlight in the morning. I mean Suria numashkara,
Speaker 3: which I mentioned last time is sun salutations. That is
Speaker 3: the practice that you would do when you wake up
Speaker 3: in the morning and you salute the sun. And it
Speaker 3: was this idea of allowing the sunlight to enter it
Speaker 3: through your eyes. And now you're talking about yoga nedra
Speaker 3: at the end of the day to go to sleep again.
Speaker 2: To me, it's you've found.
Speaker 3: This way of not only broadcasting and helping people come
Speaker 3: to these practices, but helping them be translated into modern
Speaker 3: day language, which I think is so needed with a
Speaker 3: scientific backing and going back to yoga, I can personally say,
Speaker 3: just from a personal practice point of view, I had
Speaker 3: a surgery two years ago, and I was in so
Speaker 3: much physical pain during that first month of recovery. The
Speaker 3: only way I could go to sleep was through yoga
Speaker 3: nidra because the thoughts of pain and of stress and
Speaker 3: of potential redamage or whatever it may have been, were
Speaker 3: so high that that state could only be lowered through
Speaker 3: yoga nidra. And when I'm jet lagged and I'm traveling
Speaker 3: across the world, yoga nedras might go to to be
Speaker 3: able to switch off in a new country when I'm like, gosh,
Speaker 3: I'm going to be up all night, will I make
Speaker 3: it to my work thing tomorrow. Yoga nidra completely allows
Speaker 3: me to remove those thoughts and allow myself to fall asleep.
Speaker 3: So I use it all the time, and I couldn't
Speaker 3: encourage it. I'm so glad that you're broadcasting and helping
Speaker 3: people understand the science behind it, because, yeah, these ancient
Speaker 3: practices make sense, but they need a new language and
Speaker 3: a new translation today.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Yoga nidra has such similarity to rapid eye movement
Speaker 1: sleep as far as we know, it's not the exact
Speaker 1: same brain state, but the similarity again is mind alert,
Speaker 1: body still, which is exactly what happens during rapid I
Speaker 1: movement sleep. And we know rapid eye movement sleep is
Speaker 1: essential for formation of memories, for uncoupling of negative emotions
Speaker 1: from previous day experiences. It tends to be more enriched
Speaker 1: in the later parts of the night and so on.
Speaker 1: For me, yoga nidra is the practice to do when
Speaker 1: I wake up in the morning but I don't feel
Speaker 1: completely rested. I'll do anywhere from ten minutes to thirty
Speaker 1: minutes of that and then in the afternoon instead of
Speaker 1: a nap, I'll do Nidra and sometimes I'll fall asleep, admittedly,
Speaker 1: and then if I wake up in the middle of
Speaker 1: the night, Nidra is my solution. I think that mind
Speaker 1: active body still is such an interesting and frankly unusual
Speaker 1: state unless we're in rapid movement sleep that most people,
Speaker 1: until they try it, can't really appreciate the immense value
Speaker 1: that it brings. But the beautiful thing is it works
Speaker 1: the first time, and it works every time. Our mutual
Speaker 1: friend Krubin, we're both lucky enough to know him and
Speaker 1: to spend a little bit of time with him. And
Speaker 1: Rick has a practice that he does. I know because
Speaker 1: I went and visited him last summer and he would
Speaker 1: just sit there with his eyes closed, in his body
Speaker 1: very still. And at some point I asked him what
Speaker 1: are you doing and he said, well, I'm thinking. And
Speaker 1: I said, what's the benefit of doing this, you know?
Speaker 1: And he said, well, I come up with ideas this way,
Speaker 1: and I thought, oh, that's interesting, and it immediately rung
Speaker 1: A bell I had a guest on my podcast. It
Speaker 1: was actually the first guest ever on my podcast. Professor
Speaker 1: by the name of doctor carldis Roth. He's an MDN
Speaker 1: a PhD. He's the world's arguably top bioengineer in the
Speaker 1: field of neuroscience. He's also a psychiatrist, so he sees patients,
Speaker 1: and he also has raised five children. He's one of
Speaker 1: these feetoms. His wife's centurologists at Stanford that you know.
Speaker 1: He is a remarkable person, very deep thinker. And I
Speaker 1: was talking to him on the podcast and he said
Speaker 1: that he has a practice whereby at night, after his
Speaker 1: kids go to sleep, he sits at the table or
Speaker 1: on the couch, stills his body completely and forces himself
Speaker 1: to think in complete sentences for about an hour. And
Speaker 1: I thought to myself, WHOA, that's a wildly unusual practice.
Speaker 1: And I said, what is it about? And he said, well,
Speaker 1: that's how I structure my ideas. That's where new ideas
Speaker 1: come to me. So Carl's doing that, Rick's doing that.
Speaker 1: You start looking back through history, you find out that
Speaker 1: Einstein had a walk in practice.
Speaker 2: That then he would.
Speaker 1: My father's a theoretical physicist, so this is where I
Speaker 1: learned this.
Speaker 2: But presumably this is verifiable.
Speaker 1: I'm sure someone will tell me it's not true, but
Speaker 1: enough people have told me it is that I'm inclined
Speaker 1: to at least describe it where he would walk, then
Speaker 1: stop and allow his thoughts to continue as if emotion,
Speaker 1: mind active, body still, and then repeat. So this is
Speaker 1: a very unusual state of mind that I think has
Speaker 1: real value. And we know in sleep rap an eye movement,
Speaker 1: sleep in the associated dreams, or where we work out
Speaker 1: a lot of novel solutions to hard daytime problems. And
Speaker 1: I can confidently say that the field of neuroscience can
Speaker 1: say so much more about the different states of the
Speaker 1: mind in sleep than we can about the states of
Speaker 1: the mind in waken.
Speaker 2: It's kind of amazing. It's twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: We know all this information about different brain areas, what
Speaker 1: happens when you stimulate this, these neurochemicals in that, and
Speaker 1: yet we have words stage one, two, three, four, rapidi
Speaker 1: movement sleep, slow wave sleep. We have real mechanistic understanding
Speaker 1: of the states of the mind and body in sleep,
Speaker 1: and very very little language to describe like the state
Speaker 1: of mind that we happen to be in right now.
Speaker 1: So we can talk about hypnosis, which is a narrowed
Speaker 1: context calm but alert, in which neuroplasticity brain changes are
Speaker 1: more available to us. This is supported by clinical and
Speaker 1: research data. We can talk about being attentive, we can
Speaker 1: talk about being stressed, but if you think about a
Speaker 1: it's not like very crude understanding. And so when I
Speaker 1: think about practices like body still, mind active, or even
Speaker 1: you know, something that I found immensely beneficial. Every Sunday,
Speaker 1: I try and take a long hiker walk, and I
Speaker 1: try and just let my mind spool out whatever ideas
Speaker 1: it happens to have. You know, I like to think
Speaker 1: it's accessing some subconscious that's been you know, kind of
Speaker 1: packed with ideas and experiences during the week.
Speaker 2: But what do we call that? I call it a
Speaker 2: walk or a run or a hike.
Speaker 1: But I think that the different states of mind that
Speaker 1: we can go into during the day need more attention,
Speaker 1: not just from neuroscience researchers, but from people in the
Speaker 1: fields of meditation, people in the fields of health and wellness.
Speaker 1: You know, what are the different states of mind? And
Speaker 1: so I would say that the last you know, really forty,
Speaker 1: but you know, thirty mainly, But five or six years
Speaker 1: of my life I've been a public educator in the
Speaker 1: realm of trying to teach people ways to harness their
Speaker 1: physiology in ways that serve them best for mental health
Speaker 1: and physical health and performance. But I'm now starting to
Speaker 1: get very, very curious about how to evolve this thing
Speaker 1: that we call brain states, and our understanding of not
Speaker 1: just through language, but really understanding how to bring our
Speaker 1: mind into sharp focus, how to be in the best
Speaker 1: state of mind for connectedness, when to turn off empathy,
Speaker 1: when to turn on empathy. I mean, these are all
Speaker 1: circuitries within us that are possible, and of course we
Speaker 1: have variation among us as a species as to whether
Speaker 1: or not we lean more towards logical thinking or empathic
Speaker 1: you know, affiliative thinking, these kinds of things. But you know,
Speaker 1: I really believe that you know, people like you Jay
Speaker 1: have an important role to play, and that the conversation
Speaker 1: between neuroscientists, people who have knowledge of meditative practices like yourself,
Speaker 1: there's real value in the overlap. And you said, you
Speaker 1: know that you were grateful that we're talking about these things,
Speaker 1: ancient practices and what they might mean if I've learned anything,
Speaker 1: And I think I'm finally old enough that I can
Speaker 1: make that statement if I've learned anything in my life, right, hopefully,
Speaker 1: my life will continue, but if it, you know, should
Speaker 1: I go someplace else before I anticipate. I think it's
Speaker 1: become very clear to me that whether or not you're
Speaker 1: talking about yoga tradition, or you're talking about neuroscience, or
Speaker 1: you're talking about traditional medicine or some of the more
Speaker 1: alternative medicines, the overlap in those Venn diagrams is where
Speaker 1: the real money is. And I don't necessarily mean financial gain.
Speaker 1: I mean that's where the great ideas are. So I'm
Speaker 1: perfectly happy to talk about yoga, NIDRA, NSDR, brain circuits,
Speaker 1: associated dopamine, basal ganglia, because ultimately, if I'm here to
Speaker 1: do anything, it's to try and bridge these silos and
Speaker 1: bring people's awareness to the fact that we've all been
Speaker 1: talking about the same thing, and we're all seeking the
Speaker 1: same things. Safety, acceptance, creativity, you know, these connectedness, purpose fulfillment.
Speaker 1: These loftier ideals start with having our physiology in a
Speaker 1: place where we can.
Speaker 2: Reliably move forward not have to worry about.
Speaker 1: Certain things, and then a little space opens up and
Speaker 1: so on and so forth. But I think there's a
Speaker 1: real calling now for anyone that's interested in the brain,
Speaker 1: anyone that's interested in health and anyone that's interested in
Speaker 1: humanity to really start paying attention to the overlap in
Speaker 1: the ven diagrams between rem sleep and waking states, between
Speaker 1: ancient practices and modern practices. And I should warn that
Speaker 1: that person or those people, You're going to take some heat,
Speaker 1: you know. But ultimately, the ability to go between these
Speaker 1: silos and to bridge them, as we're trying to do
Speaker 1: now and hopefully making some ground in this I believe
Speaker 1: we are is going to serve humanity very very well,
Speaker 1: because it's just been too long whereby people are holding
Speaker 1: back knowledge. The secret of some chemical, the secret of
Speaker 1: some practice, there's no secret. The secret is they all
Speaker 1: work to some extent. The question is what are the commonalities,
Speaker 1: what are the mechanisms, and what are the practices that
Speaker 1: allow people to bring their brain and body into the
Speaker 1: state that best serves them and other people. And it's accessible.
Speaker 1: But we have to have a slightly open mind about
Speaker 1: the language. We have to give up the ego saying oh,
Speaker 1: that's my practice, that that breathwork is the domain of
Speaker 1: my school or my thing. And frankly those arguments aren't
Speaker 1: working anymore anyway, because information is so freely available on
Speaker 1: the Internet. So in any case, there's a little bit
Speaker 1: of editorializing there, I realize, but it's also a calling
Speaker 1: to anyone that's interested in the mind and in the
Speaker 1: brain that you know, neuroscience is no longer the unique
Speaker 1: domain of neuroscientists, and I know that some of my
Speaker 1: neuroscience colleagues are like, oh boy, you know here he is,
Speaker 1: just as if it's accessible to anybody. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: you can be a neurosurgeon if you aren't trained in neurosurgery, right,
Speaker 1: but I'm not saying that you can be an advanced
Speaker 1: meditative practitioner without putting in the hours. What I am
Speaker 1: saying is that there's overlap in the ven diagrams of
Speaker 1: these different fields. Sure, and the more collegiality, the faster
Speaker 1: and further we're going to go as a species.
Speaker 3: Well, I think it goes back to what you were
Speaker 3: just saying a few moments ago that we only have
Speaker 3: a language for and I'm going to an umbrella term here,
Speaker 3: but we only have language for the extremes of experience.
Speaker 3: So what you were saying is when you're on a
Speaker 3: hiker a walk, you don't have a term for what
Speaker 3: that feels like, because it's not an extreme of being
Speaker 3: asleep or being awake. It's kind of like this in
Speaker 3: between cerebral state that we don't have a language for.
Speaker 3: And I think that on a micro level makes sense
Speaker 3: to all of us, where we have words like I'm
Speaker 3: angry or I'm sad or I'm upset, but our word
Speaker 3: for is okay, right, Like our word for okay is okay,
Speaker 3: which isn't a great descriptor of how we actually feel.
Speaker 3: And so we're only good at describing things in extremes
Speaker 3: on a micro level. And then if you zoom out
Speaker 3: and take that on a macro level, that translates as well,
Speaker 3: where we're only good at dealing with these extremes. And
Speaker 3: when you're saying ven diagram, it's saying, well, get away
Speaker 3: from the extremes and look at the overlaps. But I
Speaker 3: think we as a society on a micro level and
Speaker 3: at a macro level, have only learned how to deal
Speaker 3: with the pendulum swing on either side, all the extremes
Speaker 3: on either side, and therefore anything in the middle or
Speaker 3: the gray starts to feel uncomfortable, starts to feel It's
Speaker 3: not easy to say whether it's right or wrong, and
Speaker 3: therefore it's like, well, we're not even going to go there.
Speaker 3: And I think anyone that I've spoken to at the
Speaker 3: top of their field, you being one of them, anyone
Speaker 3: we've ever had on the show, is far more interested
Speaker 3: in the gray, is far more in the gray, and
Speaker 3: is spending far more time exploring thought that is unclear, uncomfortable,
Speaker 3: and uncertain, because that's where life really has lived, in
Speaker 3: the unpredictable. That's the adventure, that is the adventure, that
Speaker 3: is the adventure. And I feel that that's why humans
Speaker 3: want to go to space, Like why is everyone fascinated
Speaker 3: by space? Because it's not clear as to what it
Speaker 3: is and what's out there and where it is. And
Speaker 3: of course not many people will get to go to space,
Speaker 3: at least for now, but the idea being the same,
Speaker 3: that there has to be that curiosity from all of
Speaker 3: us to say, oh, where where are we in the
Speaker 3: same place? Like where are we connected on our idea?
Speaker 3: And where are there things that aren't similar but maybe
Speaker 3: they're connected in a different way. And I think being
Speaker 3: able to oscillate between connectivity and disconnectedness is a need
Speaker 3: for the brain and the mind as opposed to this
Speaker 3: feeling of again, it goes back to what we started
Speaker 3: with safety and acceptance makes us feel today that you
Speaker 3: can't allow yourself to engage in an idea that doesn't
Speaker 3: fully connect with yours because that feels unsafe.
Speaker 1: Right, especially right now, right things feel very polarized.
Speaker 3: Correct.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm putting in a very strong vote for
Speaker 1: the League of Reasonable People, which is hopefully everybody, right, Like,
Speaker 1: I don't want to sound overly sentimental, but like I
Speaker 1: and maybe I'm just too emotional lately, but I am
Speaker 1: so pained by the amount of fighting that I see
Speaker 1: that I know will not result in any anything. It's
Speaker 1: not going to solve the problem for either side, right.
Speaker 1: I guess at forty nine, I feel old enough to
Speaker 1: say this, Like, I still have hope, but that's obviously
Speaker 1: not a solution. I think that when we really get
Speaker 1: down to the neuroscience of self understanding, when people really
Speaker 1: start to understand that the human brain is a magnificent
Speaker 1: machine and organ but that it has limitations, and we
Speaker 1: can start to understand our own limitations, you know that
Speaker 1: it can take us just up to this point, but
Speaker 1: not further, and that we can rely on healthy collective
Speaker 1: thinking healthy collective thinking to get us over these divides.
Speaker 1: I think that's when we're finally going to evolve as
Speaker 1: a species. I really do, when we start being able
Speaker 1: to exit our own brain and our group think to
Speaker 1: be able to really come to solutions, because often we
Speaker 1: just think in terms of compromise and conflict, which are
Speaker 1: essential things to think about, But ultimately, understanding the limits
Speaker 1: of our cognit and how emotion drives cognition is really
Speaker 1: how we're going to be able to evolve our beliefs
Speaker 1: about what's possible. And by the way, that's not meant
Speaker 1: to just be a bunch of aspirational word salad. That's
Speaker 1: like a real possibility if we can just have the
Speaker 1: self reflection to understand we know certain things, we believe
Speaker 1: certain things, but that this neural architecture that we call
Speaker 1: our brain is limited in the extent to which it
Speaker 1: can see into the future and make the best decisions
Speaker 1: for everybody. We operate thinking that, but that's not how
Speaker 1: it works. And of course we can't look to any
Speaker 1: one individual to solve the problem for everybody, now, will
Speaker 1: it be AI?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: That involves a lot of trust in AI and these
Speaker 1: large language models are trained in many ways the same
Speaker 1: way that a neural network. It trains itself up how
Speaker 1: a young brain develops and makes sense of the world.
Speaker 1: So I don't have any immediate solutions. What I do
Speaker 1: have is a piece of neuroscience knowledge that was at
Speaker 1: least new to me that most neuroscientists aren't aware of.
Speaker 1: But I think this is one of the most important
Speaker 1: discoveries in the last one hundred years of neuroscience. It's
Speaker 1: a collection of studies on an area of the brain
Speaker 1: called the anterior mid singulate cortex. Most people have never
Speaker 1: heard of this brain area, including many neuroscientists, doctor neurosurgeon.
Speaker 1: They know where it is talktor a neuroscientists unless they
Speaker 1: teach neuroanatomy, which I happened to. Most don't know where
Speaker 1: it is in the brain, and most didn't know what
Speaker 1: it did because it hadn't been explored. And then a
Speaker 1: colleague of mine at Stamford School of Medicine named Joe
Speaker 1: Parvezi did an incredible study where he was doing neurosurgery
Speaker 1: and stimulating different brain areas as a means to try
Speaker 1: and find the location where he needed to do the surgery,
Speaker 1: and he stumbled upon an area called the anterior mid
Speaker 1: singulate cortex, where if he stimulated with an electrode, people
Speaker 1: because they were awake during the neurosurgery, would report feeling
Speaker 1: as if there was some conflict pressing on them. Some
Speaker 1: one't even described as I feel like I'm driving into
Speaker 1: a storm, but I feel ready.
Speaker 2: I can do this.
Speaker 1: Others reported a different set of words, but the words
Speaker 1: essentially converged around the same set of subjective experiences, which
Speaker 1: are I feel challenged, but I can do it. It's
Speaker 1: kind of forward center of mass. And then other studies
Speaker 1: separate laboratories discovered that people that take on a new
Speaker 1: practice that's challenging for them, their anterior mid singulate cortex
Speaker 1: grows in volume. Other people who fail to successfully engage
Speaker 1: in a regular challenging activity, the anterior mid singulate cortex
Speaker 1: didn't increase in volume in the same way.
Speaker 2: So very interesting brain structure.
Speaker 1: And there's I would say about a dozen or so
Speaker 1: really quality studies in humans, a bunch of animal models,
Speaker 1: but they're a bunch in humans that point to the
Speaker 1: intermid singulate cortex as a site in the brain associated
Speaker 1: with the feeling of tenacity and will power.
Speaker 2: To push through.
Speaker 1: It's heavily interconnected with the dopamine reward system, heavily connected
Speaker 1: frankly with a lot of different brain areas. It's a
Speaker 1: hub for a lot of inputs and outputs. So what
Speaker 1: do we know about the interimid singulate cortex. Perhaps most
Speaker 1: interesting of all is that this is the brain area
Speaker 1: that seems to preserve its size and even grow in
Speaker 1: size in what are called superagers. Superagers are people that
Speaker 1: maintain their cognition later into life. These are people that
Speaker 1: don't undergo the normal age related decline in cognition separate
Speaker 1: from Alzheimer's type dementia. You know, everybody as they get
Speaker 1: older develops less working memory, the ability to keep ideas
Speaker 1: in mind in the short term. Superagers seem to overcome
Speaker 1: all that and they live longer. So you could say, well,
Speaker 1: this is a case of reverse causality. They live longer,
Speaker 1: so they have a bigger brain area called the interim
Speaker 1: and singular cortex. We don't really know what the direction
Speaker 1: of causality is. Could just be correlation, but it all
Speaker 1: gets ultra interesting when you start to tack together willpower
Speaker 1: the taking on of new things, learning things in neuroplasticity
Speaker 1: and life span. And it may be that that quad
Speaker 1: fecta represents what we think of as the will to
Speaker 1: live is associated with an intense curiosity and desire to
Speaker 1: bring in new ideas and modes of thinking. And new
Speaker 1: ideas and modes of thinking then feedback on our feelings
Speaker 1: of how we could gain reward internal reward of course,
Speaker 1: dopamine being the universal currency of reward as a means
Speaker 1: to move forward.
Speaker 2: What does this mean?
Speaker 1: This means that everybody I believe can become a better
Speaker 1: human being by taking on challenges. What is a challenge
Speaker 1: that can grow the inter amid singulate cortex. Well, unfortunately,
Speaker 1: it's a challenge that you don't want to engage in.
Speaker 1: So if you love running, it's not going to do it.
Speaker 1: If you love resistance ring, it's not going to do it.
Speaker 1: If you don't want to meditate in the morning, and
Speaker 1: you do five minutes or ten minutes of meditation, then
Speaker 1: you just enhanced the activation of your inter amid singulate cortex.
Speaker 1: So it's about it's not just about doing hard things,
Speaker 1: it's about really pushing through resistance. And the reason I
Speaker 1: bring this up now as opposed to a discussion about
Speaker 1: like how to get more tenacious or have stronger willpower.
Speaker 2: It will do that.
Speaker 1: Okay, we know that when the inter amid singulate cortex
Speaker 1: gets bigger, it translates to a lot of different areas
Speaker 1: of challenge, not just the area in which you challenged it.
Speaker 1: The reason is, I believe that this lofty notion of
Speaker 1: humans evolving to more collective thinking, to embracing new ways
Speaker 1: to bridge divides that harm human beings at scale or
Speaker 1: just locally, is going to emerge through only through the
Speaker 1: willingness to embrace the internal friction that is hearing things
Speaker 1: and seeing things that we don't like and being able
Speaker 1: to take a stance of adaptive response whatever that is. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, there are things that we hear and see
Speaker 1: and don't like that activate enough of a sense of
Speaker 1: injustice in us that that's all it does. It just
Speaker 1: brings us to the point of wanting to impart justice.
Speaker 1: But what I'm talking about here differences in opinion, strongly
Speaker 1: polarized views that lead to all sorts of things, as
Speaker 1: we know, good and bad and everything in between. And
Speaker 1: if people had the capacity to feel that friction and
Speaker 1: to stay in a mode of some open cognition. I
Speaker 1: think we would come up with novel solutions. I really
Speaker 1: think the next iteration of human beings is collective consciousness.
Speaker 1: You know, it sounds lofty, sounds woo, but it's basically
Speaker 1: lots of minds working together, even minds that oppose one another.
Speaker 1: In ideology, as a means to find out novel solutions
Speaker 1: to hard problems that vex us all and that in
Speaker 1: some cases really harm us all.
Speaker 2: It's it's a.
Speaker 1: Real thing with real possibility. But it's going to require
Speaker 1: that we all get not necessarily tougher, but that we
Speaker 1: get more resilient at the level of being able to tolerate
Speaker 1: internal states that normally would impede adaptive thinking.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, and and the ability to engage in uncomfortable thinking.
Speaker 3: And I love that definition that you gave. I saw
Speaker 3: this brilliant quote the other day on social media, and
Speaker 3: it is from a Christian page or post, and it
Speaker 3: said the essence of Christianity is not learning to love Jesus,
Speaker 3: but learning to love Judas. And I was thinking how
Speaker 3: brilliant that was because it goes back to that point
Speaker 3: of what's uncomfortable, like it's easy to love the good
Speaker 3: person it's learning to love or understand, at least the
Speaker 3: person who may have done, you know, something that you
Speaker 3: didn't recognize or didn't understand or didn't fully connect with.
Speaker 3: And I think often we see that and we think, oh,
Speaker 3: but then there's no accountability, there's not this, there's no that.
Speaker 3: But really, what we're saying is are we willing to
Speaker 3: do as you said, the most challenging thing, which is
Speaker 3: something you don't enjoy doing. It's not something you're excited by.
Speaker 3: If you're enjoying the challenge, it's no longer the challenge
Speaker 3: right if you're it's always like I remember a training
Speaker 3: and conditioning coach used to tell me, like Jay, if
Speaker 3: you're sitting in the cold plunge, just to get your
Speaker 3: minutes up so you can tell someone how long you
Speaker 3: sat in there. He goes, then that means it wasn't
Speaker 3: hard beyond that certain point. It was like, you should
Speaker 3: get out once it's easy because it's not having the
Speaker 3: effect you wanted to have.
Speaker 2: That's right, and no longer an adaptive stimulus.
Speaker 3: Correct?
Speaker 2: Can I offer an alternative protocol?
Speaker 3: Please?
Speaker 1: People always ask me how cold should the cold plunge
Speaker 1: be or the cold shower and how long should I
Speaker 1: stay in? And it's so variable depending on the person,
Speaker 1: the time of day. Obviously, only do what's safe, right,
Speaker 1: So don't go so cool that you can you can
Speaker 1: get a cardiovascular effect that's not good. But it's very simple. Actually,
Speaker 1: if you want it to translate into the real world
Speaker 1: in the best way, you ask yourself right before you
Speaker 1: get in, on a scale of one to ten, how
Speaker 1: badly do I not want to get in? And I
Speaker 1: would say that if it's five to ten, well that's
Speaker 1: a wall. If it's anywhere in the fire, that that's
Speaker 1: one wall you have to get over. So then you
Speaker 1: get in, and then at some point there will be
Speaker 1: the desire to get out. That's the second wall. Maybe
Speaker 1: it comes within five seconds, maybe it comes within twenty seconds,
Speaker 1: that's the second wall. So what I would do is
Speaker 1: count walls. What are the quote unquote walls. The walls
Speaker 1: are waves of adrenaline being released into your body. And
Speaker 1: sometimes they are very close together, those waves, and sometimes
Speaker 1: they're more distantly spaced apart. Now, of course, at some
Speaker 1: point you go numb and then you don't feel them anymore.
Speaker 1: We don't suggest that, but if you think to yourself, gosh, today,
Speaker 1: I really don't want to get in.
Speaker 2: That wall is a really tall wall.
Speaker 1: Well, just getting in for fifteen twenty seconds is going
Speaker 1: to accomplish something meaningful for this anterimid singulate cortex. It's
Speaker 1: going to accomplish something meaningful for the adrenaline release that
Speaker 1: you're going to experience. So it's less about the temperature.
Speaker 1: I mean, obviously the temperature plays a role than it
Speaker 1: is your subjective relationship to the whole thing. For instance,
Speaker 1: if you do cold exposure at night when you're tired,
Speaker 1: it's a far and away different experience than in the
Speaker 1: morning after going for a run and you're too warm.
Speaker 1: So I can't say forty five degrees fahrenheit for ninety seconds,
Speaker 1: although if you want to start there, that's fine, provided it.
Speaker 2: Safe for you.
Speaker 1: But as you watch these walls of adrenaline come at you,
Speaker 1: as it were, pay attention to what they feel like.
Speaker 1: That's what you'll recognize outside the ice bath. Yeah, in
Speaker 1: a hard conversation, it's not that you can make yourself
Speaker 1: so resilient that your adrenaline system doesn't work. It's that
Speaker 1: you learn to recognize the state of having adrenaline in
Speaker 1: your system and staying calm. And then I actually had
Speaker 1: this happen the other day. I was in a really
Speaker 1: hard yesterday, a hard conversation something first thing in the morning.
Speaker 1: It was like, wait, what seriously misunderstanding hard conversation? And
Speaker 1: I remember, here we are, our voices are going up.
Speaker 1: We weren't yelling, but like it was a peaceful morning
Speaker 1: until that moment, and you could kind of feel the
Speaker 1: energy in the room going up. And I was thinking
Speaker 1: to myself, Okay, how am I And I thought, Oh,
Speaker 1: this is like a wall in the thing. And I said,
Speaker 1: and I said, because we have this language at home.
Speaker 1: I said, I feel like there's a wall of adrenaline
Speaker 1: hitting us. Whether we both started laughing, and then we
Speaker 1: kind of reverted to what we were doing and then
Speaker 1: we calmed down, and you know, we talk about taking breaks,
Speaker 1: and that's wonderful. It's a wonderful tool that you talked
Speaker 1: about in your book on relationships. There's so many valuable
Speaker 1: tools in there. By the way, it's like, thank you
Speaker 1: for writing that book, so valuable.
Speaker 2: Everyone should read.
Speaker 1: It should be standard curriculum, standard curriculum in every school,
Speaker 1: in every home. I really mean that Jay doesn't tell
Speaker 1: me to say this, I really mean this, I really
Speaker 1: truly mean it. Well, it's entirely appropriate because it's true.
Speaker 1: But noticing those walls of adrenaline and realizing that when
Speaker 1: we're in those adrenaline filled states, our cognition is shifted.
Speaker 1: We don't have solutions that we had five minutes ago.
Speaker 1: So learning to watch those pass in the cold plunge,
Speaker 1: in the cold shower, on a hard run or whatever
Speaker 1: it is, but the cold seems to be the universal
Speaker 1: stressful stimulus for everybody is so valuable more than marking off,
Speaker 1: you know, fifteen minutes or five minutes in the cold plunge,
Speaker 1: and some days it's fifteen seconds, sometimes it's thirty. And
Speaker 1: for somebody learning the cold plunge, it's like, hey, can
Speaker 1: you just even get near the thing or in it?
Speaker 1: And I think there's real value there. Yeah, So in
Speaker 1: any event, But.
Speaker 3: I know, I love that translation into real life because
Speaker 3: I think what's happened is we're dealing with a lot
Speaker 3: of everyday things with so much pain that that pain
Speaker 3: is then creating more pain for us for others, and
Speaker 3: we never end this, or we create this never ending
Speaker 3: cycle and loop for ourselves and others where we stay
Speaker 3: in the pain. And what we're all saying is what
Speaker 3: does it take. Just as we have to learn to
Speaker 3: sit in that cold and regulate ourselves and adapt, what
Speaker 3: does it take to sit in the pain outside of
Speaker 3: the tub, regulate ourselves, rise to a place of peace,
Speaker 3: and then respond and then get together. And as you said,
Speaker 3: the League of reasonable the real league of reasonable people,
Speaker 3: Like I think we'd all aspire towards that. I think
Speaker 3: when I hear that, I think we all go. I
Speaker 3: think I'm a reasonable person. I think most of us
Speaker 3: would say that.
Speaker 2: I think it lives in all of us.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and it's a brain state that takes certain things
Speaker 1: to get to on a regular basis. I mean, there's
Speaker 1: some people that perhaps are outside the margins for which
Speaker 1: participation in the League of Reasonable People is impossible. But
Speaker 1: even as I say that, you know, one thing that
Speaker 1: I've tried to do as I get older is to
Speaker 1: limit cynicism. You know, in my home growing up that
Speaker 1: there were many beautiful emotions and concepts and things I
Speaker 1: was exposed to by virtue of the wonderful people that
Speaker 1: my parents were. They had flaws like everybody else. But
Speaker 1: one of the things that I've really tried to discard
Speaker 1: as I've gotten older, is cynicism. It's one of the
Speaker 1: things that my sister and I talk a lot about,
Speaker 1: like it never served anyone well to be cynical. You
Speaker 1: can be critical and discerning, but cynical doesn't accomplish anything
Speaker 1: except to separate us from people. That's my belief. And
Speaker 1: I'm not trying to encourage people to be soft in
Speaker 1: a way that's unsafe for them. Like I said, be discerning.
Speaker 1: You know, safety is important. But cynicism, I don't know.
Speaker 2: What it is.
Speaker 1: It's like an ego fed negativity that sort of implies
Speaker 1: one is better than other people, but it actually is
Speaker 1: usually the opposite. It usually comes from a place of
Speaker 1: deep insecurity, right. It's a very dismissive stance. And so
Speaker 1: I almost caught myself a second ago saying, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: making a kind of joke about what's a cynical joke about? Well,
Speaker 1: there are probably people who can't. I actually believe that
Speaker 1: we are all capable of having access to this reasonable
Speaker 1: feature within ourselves. But it involves a state of calm,
Speaker 1: a feeling of safety, and you know, I guess you know,
Speaker 1: laced into everything I'm saying today is is it is a.
Speaker 2: Kind of a hope and an aspiration.
Speaker 1: You know, I've kind of gotten to the point now
Speaker 1: where I feel like, if I don't say it now,
Speaker 1: what am I going to say it? And how old
Speaker 1: do you have to be? I used to think you
Speaker 1: had to be forty years old to write a book.
Speaker 1: I thought that, I thought I have to be forty
Speaker 1: years old to write a book, and I realized that's ridiculous.
Speaker 1: People much younger than forty write amazing books, amazing and
Speaker 1: important books. And then I thought, well, how old do
Speaker 1: you have to be in order to have had enough
Speaker 1: life experience to be able to say things that are
Speaker 1: aspirational about how you'd like to see the world where
Speaker 1: people change for the better. And you know, I've decided
Speaker 1: that the age on that is is one day, you know,
Speaker 1: like one day. So this is a bit of an
Speaker 1: encouragement for people out there. If you have ideas about
Speaker 1: ways that you and others can be better to really
Speaker 1: like write them down and evolve them right that they
Speaker 1: often need some evolution to be able to be received
Speaker 1: in the right way, But then share those I was
Speaker 1: thinking a moment ago, I wanted your opinion on this
Speaker 1: so in thinking about emotional interaction and the ways in
Speaker 1: which the world can be beautiful or challenging depending on
Speaker 1: the energy that's around us. I once read, I forget
Speaker 1: his name, so forgive me. He's an investor. I think
Speaker 1: it was on the Tim Ferriss podcast, A very successful investor,
Speaker 1: young guy. I think he lived in Trucky, of all places.
Speaker 1: He once said, you know, email is a public post
Speaker 1: to do list. And it completely changed in that one
Speaker 1: moment the way that I thought about email, because the
Speaker 1: emails are useful, but then I realized, oh yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: like going in there. It's like all these things I
Speaker 1: need to do. And when I started my laboratory, I
Speaker 1: knew I had two major challenges. One, get grants so
Speaker 1: I could do the work you need money to do research,
Speaker 1: publish great papers. And that meant had to interact with
Speaker 1: my lab into a bunch of other things. Other things
Speaker 1: were important, teaching included, but those were the main ones.
Speaker 1: Email was a public post to do list, so I
Speaker 1: needed to be very careful in terms of my interaction
Speaker 1: with email. Nowadays, I feel like social media is a
Speaker 1: public not necessarily projection, but evacuation of emotion. So when
Speaker 1: I go on to social media in the morning. If
Speaker 1: I'm not careful, they really careful and thoughtful about what
Speaker 1: I look at. I'm basically getting the emotional energy of
Speaker 1: all these people. And some of them, like you, are
Speaker 1: trying to help people, and some of them are just
Speaker 1: in evacuative expression of their pain. Others are in evacuative
Speaker 1: expression of cynicism. And I don't think I'm alone in this.
Speaker 1: Like I'm a pretty sensitive person, or maybe I'm getting
Speaker 1: more sensitive, but I'm very sensitive to this stuff.
Speaker 2: Like it's not like.
Speaker 1: It can throw off my whole day, but I can
Speaker 1: quickly get drawn down a rabbit hole of something. And
Speaker 1: then we talk about dopamine hits or the addictive properties
Speaker 1: of social media, and that would be a fine conversation,
Speaker 1: but that one's been had.
Speaker 2: But what about all the energetic bombardment and that the
Speaker 2: need for discernment and filtering of all this stuff.
Speaker 1: I wish, you know, I could label up like a
Speaker 1: positivity score, And it's not to avoid the realities of
Speaker 1: the world. But I think, I don't know, does this
Speaker 1: stuff affect you? Because I do my work so that
Speaker 1: it doesn't permeate me. But you know, just like if
Speaker 1: someone wakes up in a bad mood, you can take
Speaker 1: care of them. But if they wake up in a
Speaker 1: bad mood every single day, it's pretty draining on your
Speaker 1: home environment. So what do you do in order to
Speaker 1: keep emotional boundaries? Especially online?
Speaker 3: And the funny thing is the predictability of negativity doesn't
Speaker 3: reduce its effect.
Speaker 1: Well, it also has a gravitational pull. I mean, I'm
Speaker 1: on X and Instagram and the other you know, threads
Speaker 1: and Facebook and all of them, you know, but I
Speaker 1: noticed that on some of the platforms in particular, like
Speaker 1: there's a gravitational pull, like people are there to fight.
Speaker 1: And now when I look at that, I think, you know,
Speaker 1: some of them are saying highly intelligent things, some of
Speaker 1: them are not, but like they gotta have a lot
Speaker 1: of like pain inside.
Speaker 3: I think that's what I was going to touch on.
Speaker 3: I think it's that. To me, the thing that has
Speaker 3: been most helpful in all of it is a genuine
Speaker 3: sense of deeper empathy and compassion for the energetic state
Speaker 3: of the world. The systems that have let people down
Speaker 3: and truly made them feel that they can't rely on them,
Speaker 3: and the systems that have done a disservice in justice,
Speaker 3: which has now led to this emotional evacuation as you
Speaker 3: called it, and to me using it as a way
Speaker 3: of having deeper empathy, deeper compassion, a genuine sense of
Speaker 3: recognition that although everyone does have choice and does have agency,
Speaker 3: definitely there is an overarching energetic system that is almost
Speaker 3: keeping people imprisoned in this space, and that prison is
Speaker 3: now addictive to stay in. I feel for that. I
Speaker 3: deeply feel for that, and it affects me because I
Speaker 3: recognize that people haven't been set up for success by
Speaker 3: the education system, by the way the economy is set up,
Speaker 3: by the way anything's set up, like, it's not set
Speaker 3: people up for success. And naturally for people in their
Speaker 3: home they went a lot of people went set up
Speaker 3: for success. And so we have to zoom our and
Speaker 3: look at the context because if I zoom in and
Speaker 3: just look at that one tweet or that one comment,
Speaker 3: oh god, it's like a bullet to the chest, you know.
Speaker 3: And it's like I've always had this vision and I've
Speaker 3: kind of done it mentally sometimes because I can't do
Speaker 3: it physically. And for every person that feels that way,
Speaker 3: I've always wanted I was like I wish I could
Speaker 3: sit down with every person individually who felt a certain
Speaker 3: way and have a contextually relevant, honest, authentic conversation with
Speaker 3: each person and beare my soul and be vulnerable and
Speaker 3: open my heart. But we can't. And I also know
Speaker 3: that one post can't do that for everyone, Like it's
Speaker 3: not possible for one quote, one image, one message, one
Speaker 3: podcast episode that will speak to everyone to make everyone
Speaker 3: feel seen, heard and understood. I could just about do
Speaker 3: that on a one to one level, let alone a
Speaker 3: one to one hundred million level. How are you going
Speaker 3: to do that? And so I also have empathy for myself,
Speaker 3: and I extend that compassion back to myself and recognize
Speaker 3: I'm a limited human being who, just as that individual
Speaker 3: is limited by their systems and their setup and their energy,
Speaker 3: so am I. And there's no way in which I
Speaker 3: could respond to this individual and satisfy this exchange with
Speaker 3: one hundred and forty two hundred and eighty characters, like,
Speaker 3: how's that even possible? And so I think, to me,
Speaker 3: deepening my compassion and empathy externally and internally have been
Speaker 3: the only relevant tools, as woo wo or as spiritual
Speaker 3: as they may sound, because there is no practical habit
Speaker 3: based solution that I can give you some tactics and ideas,
Speaker 3: but I know as well that at one point they're
Speaker 3: just logical and theoretical and practical, but they're not. Yeah,
Speaker 3: they don't feel. They don't hit me there, and so
Speaker 3: to me, I've seen it all as a simulation and
Speaker 3: an experiment to deepen human emotion, deep in human empathy,
Speaker 3: deep in human compassion, and a reminder of my fallibility,
Speaker 3: so that I can embrace my own insignificance, so that
Speaker 3: I can therefore take shelter in the Source and the
Speaker 3: universe and God, and to allow for space for that.
Speaker 3: If I was able to control every one of these
Speaker 3: things and make it work perfectly, I may, in a
Speaker 3: very crude sense, you may, under false pretenses, stop believing
Speaker 3: you're the controller to some degree. And I think anyone
Speaker 3: who's experienced success in certain domains starts to feel like
Speaker 3: the controller in their relevant fields. And I think all
Speaker 3: of these things are expedited in order just to encourage
Speaker 3: you to have an ego death and pulverize the arrogance
Speaker 3: of whatever kind. By the way, I don't mean in
Speaker 3: a sense of that I feel I'm important, but we
Speaker 3: all have a sense of I'm the controller. I can
Speaker 3: make things work, I know what's right, I'm this, I'm that,
Speaker 3: And this is all reminding us of we're not the controller.
Speaker 3: We have to ultimately take shelter. We have to ultimately
Speaker 3: give up the reins, and I ultimately have to surrender
Speaker 3: and accept that there is a greater source, there is
Speaker 3: a greater power, and that when I'm in connection with
Speaker 3: that and I'm in service of that, then I'm happy
Speaker 3: and I'm joyful. But if I'm trying to be that
Speaker 3: or extrapolate energy from that to control and navigate, then
Speaker 3: I'm forever going to be unhappy. So to me, that's
Speaker 3: a quick version of the stuff that I try and
Speaker 3: work on not to be helpless. I don't feel helpless
Speaker 3: in that I feel at home. It's almost like, you know,
Speaker 3: when you're taking shelter of a greater source to take
Speaker 3: care of things you can't take care of. It's not
Speaker 3: because you're helpless or because you're weak. It's actually the
Speaker 3: greatest sign of strength to know I can call up
Speaker 3: a friend to help me. You know, Am I more
Speaker 3: strong because I can move home myself and not ask
Speaker 3: anyone for help? Or am I stronger because three of
Speaker 3: my friends came and helped me out and carry the load.
Speaker 3: I'm stronger asking for help. I have a bad community
Speaker 3: and network. You'd say that person smarter in healthier, and
Speaker 3: so I think of that same way on a universal level,
Speaker 3: at least I tried to. I'm working on it.
Speaker 1: I love that, and I realized from what you said that,
Speaker 1: you know, the greatest sense of safety seems to arrive
Speaker 1: from not trying to control everything. And it's counterintuitive, right,
Speaker 1: you know, we think, okay, well, how do you get safety, Well,
Speaker 1: you have to get rid of vigilance.
Speaker 2: How do you get rid of vigilance?
Speaker 1: Well, you decide what you do and don't have to
Speaker 1: pay attention to And at some point, if one decides
Speaker 1: I can't control all of this, you have one of
Speaker 1: two options. Either that means you're just waiting for that
Speaker 1: wave to come demolish you wave of whatever, or you
Speaker 1: trust like you trust in something. Two, make everything okay
Speaker 1: even if that wave comes. You know, and I've talked
Speaker 1: before on podcasts. I believe in God, I do, you know,
Speaker 1: And of course I believe in everyone's right to believe
Speaker 1: or not believe what they believe in. I think that
Speaker 1: the notion of giving up trying to control everything and
Speaker 1: giving over control two more universal forces or a universal force,
Speaker 1: whatever one's mode of thinking happens to be I believe
Speaker 1: they're entitled to is probably the most peace inducing step
Speaker 1: I've ever taken.
Speaker 2: And I thought it.
Speaker 1: Would be, you know, matched with a little sneaking, you know,
Speaker 1: voice in the back.
Speaker 2: Yeah, But but it's not.
Speaker 1: And I don't know how that works at the level
Speaker 1: of neuroscience. I know there are neuroscientists who are trying
Speaker 1: to explore this, and as the data evolve, I'll certainly
Speaker 1: pay attention to it, not with the intention of trying
Speaker 1: to undermine any kind of larger sense of anything, but
Speaker 1: just out of interest.
Speaker 2: Far far, too interesting.
Speaker 1: There's actually a woman at Stanford. I haven't yet to
Speaker 1: talk to her. We should both talk to her, she said.
Speaker 1: I forget her name at the moment, because I just
Speaker 1: learned about her work in the Department of Anthropology, who
Speaker 1: has spent her entire career studying people's inner voices, people
Speaker 1: who hear voices, people hear the voices of others, and
Speaker 1: sure this sometimes goes into the domain of people who
Speaker 1: have auditory hallucinations and so forth, but also just these
Speaker 1: different scripts that people have in their mind that include
Speaker 1: their own voices and other voices, voices we've internalized from childhood.
Speaker 1: This resonates with me a lot because when I was
Speaker 1: a kid, after my parents who put me to sleep,
Speaker 1: I used to arrange dialogues between people I had heard
Speaker 1: that day, and I could hear their voices in very
Speaker 1: clear ways in my head, and I would remember things
Speaker 1: they said, and I could create these dialogues. And so
Speaker 1: I've also always had a very strong audiographic memory. It's
Speaker 1: not as if everything I hear I remember a verbatim.
Speaker 1: That actually would be a super skill would have saved
Speaker 1: me in a lot of arguments. But in all seriousness,
Speaker 1: I think what you describe about essentially a letting go
Speaker 1: or a giving over of the need for the control
Speaker 1: that we all experience. The desire for control is really
Speaker 1: where the solution wise. I think I know this because
Speaker 1: many people have said it, and it's very hard to do,
Speaker 1: but that once one does it.
Speaker 2: Once, you know you can do it again.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's a practice, a practice.
Speaker 1: It's not you write it down and it's done. It's
Speaker 1: a practice. And you know, I also am thinking about
Speaker 1: the kind of counterintuitive nature of the fact that we're
Speaker 1: talking at once about letting go and not trying to
Speaker 1: control everything, but also pushing oneself to be more resilient
Speaker 1: and tenacious and things of that sort.
Speaker 2: And so I feel like all of life is like that.
Speaker 1: All of life is about, Yes, you need to take
Speaker 1: care of your physiology, you need to get your sleep
Speaker 1: at night, but it's also okay to get a bad
Speaker 1: night's sleep every.
Speaker 2: Once in a while.
Speaker 1: It's okay to not do every protocol. In fact, it's
Speaker 1: encouraged to not do every protocol. The expectation on us
Speaker 1: is not perfection rights, it's I think being able to
Speaker 1: toggle between these different states. I think that one of
Speaker 1: the best things about social media. One of the best
Speaker 1: things about podcasts is that you know, speaking and listening
Speaker 1: is the human narrative. Certainly writing certainly plays poetry and
Speaker 1: music as well dance. There are other forms of communication,
Speaker 1: certainly sculpture and I hear we go on and on.
Speaker 2: But as a great.
Speaker 1: Podcaster David Cenra, who hosts The Founder's Podcast, it's kind
Speaker 1: of a like a nerds podcast of if so many
Speaker 1: interesting founders, like a founders of companies that he sort
Speaker 1: of does for that what I do for science and health,
Speaker 1: and what you do for health and spirituality and so
Speaker 1: many more topics, psychology and so on.
Speaker 2: David does for founders and company founders.
Speaker 1: And he said, you know that podcasting and to some extent,
Speaker 1: social media, but really podcasting is the human narrative record.
Speaker 1: Did radio Radio used to be live, Sometimes it was
Speaker 1: recorded and then played, but there wasn't an archive that
Speaker 1: you could go access, and where there was, it was
Speaker 1: a fairly sparse archive. I think we're going to look
Speaker 1: back one hundred years from now, and whether it's in
Speaker 1: AI form or in its traditional form as it is now.
Speaker 1: I think people speaking onto the internet is our you know,
Speaker 1: this is our stone tablets, these our cave drawings.
Speaker 2: It's wild, it's wild, and.
Speaker 1: I like to think it's serving the evolution of our
Speaker 1: species at some level. Certainly it's creating a historical record.
Speaker 1: I often think about this, like so many thoughts, so
Speaker 1: many emotions that people have don't get transmuted into useful
Speaker 1: tools that others could benefit from. I think this is
Speaker 1: why we love music and poetry and things that capture
Speaker 1: an essence. Actually, I recall now, this is what I
Speaker 1: wanted to ask you about please. Lately, I try I
Speaker 1: spend real time trying to feel experiences more than just
Speaker 1: think about them.
Speaker 2: I have a very.
Speaker 1: Like you know, kind of dominant analytic mind. I'm trying
Speaker 1: to think, strategize, understand, makes sense of always been like that,
Speaker 1: but in recent years, and especially this last year, I've
Speaker 1: just tried to like sense what's going on outside me
Speaker 1: and in me. And this form of intelligence is something
Speaker 1: that people have talked about for hundreds of thousands of years.
Speaker 1: It's a different form of intelligence. It's the one that
Speaker 1: I think has access to our unconscious mind in a
Speaker 1: way that thinking doesn't always have access to.
Speaker 2: It's not necessarily linked to emotion.
Speaker 1: It's just more of a are we drawn toward away
Speaker 1: from where we kind of neutral about a given person
Speaker 1: or experience, and it draws on a different set of
Speaker 1: neural circuits.
Speaker 2: And I started.
Speaker 1: Thinking about this in large part because of my love
Speaker 1: of dog. You know, my dog Costello I put down
Speaker 1: in July of twenty twenty one, and I always loved
Speaker 1: the bulldog because the first time I ever went to
Speaker 1: a dog show, which everybody should do.
Speaker 2: By the way, have you ever been to a dog show?
Speaker 3: Now we should go.
Speaker 1: So I was taken to a dog show by my
Speaker 1: then girlfriend when I was a post doc, and she said,
Speaker 1: you gotta go to a dog show, and it was
Speaker 1: and so we went to the dog show, but we
Speaker 1: didn't attend the show in front is the show where
Speaker 1: they're going over things and walking around and getting preyed around,
Speaker 1: and that part's cool. But the really cool part is
Speaker 1: you go in the back where you have all the
Speaker 1: dog breeders, with all the different breeds of dogs, usually
Speaker 1: five or six of each breed, and you can see
Speaker 1: the immense variation both in the structure but also the
Speaker 1: temperaments and therefore the nervous systems of these different animals
Speaker 1: all the same species also dogs, by the way, you
Speaker 1: have little ones and you have giants in Chihuahuas and
Speaker 1: great Danes in the same species. As far as I know,
Speaker 1: it's the greatest variation and brain and body size of
Speaker 1: any species. There's probably a you know, another species out
Speaker 1: there that someone will point doubt that you know makes
Speaker 1: me wrong, but it's at least the far end of
Speaker 1: the continuum in that sense. So I'm back there and
Speaker 1: I'm thinking I really want a dog. At some point
Speaker 1: I'm thinking I want a Rhodesian ridgeback, or I really
Speaker 1: like the you know, the wolf founds. I really love
Speaker 1: the Afghans. They look like people in dog suits, the
Speaker 1: way they want to move around and so so bright eyed.
Speaker 1: And then I looked over in the corner and there's
Speaker 1: this row of bulldogs snoring like a xylophone. And I
Speaker 1: went over and I asked the woman there, I said,
Speaker 1: an interesting breed of dog and said, oh, they're the best.
Speaker 1: And I said, well, everyone here says that about their
Speaker 1: breed of dog and said, yeah, but they're really the
Speaker 1: sweetest and they are the essence of efficiency. And so
Speaker 1: I woke one up and I started playing with it,
Speaker 1: and you realize that they don't react unless they need to.
Speaker 1: Some have more energy than others, but when they need to,
Speaker 1: they have a lot of energy available to them. But
Speaker 1: they have very little spontaneous movement. Now I'm not like this.
Speaker 1: I think I'm probably becoming more like this as the
Speaker 1: years go by, through some effort. But other breeds of
Speaker 1: dogs are constantly moving. They're like peripatetic. They're constantly moving.
Speaker 1: They're constantly moving, and it makes me a little nervous.
Speaker 1: Whereas the bulldog just made me feel very calm. So
Speaker 1: I got Costello not that day. I got him elsewhere,
Speaker 1: and I found that his presence, even his loud snoring,
Speaker 1: made me very calm. And he was not reactive to
Speaker 1: things that did not require reactivity to He was reactive
Speaker 1: when appropriate. And I'm not saying the bulldog is the
Speaker 1: perfect breed. In fact, I discourage people from getting them
Speaker 1: unless they have the means to take care of them,
Speaker 1: because they tend to have a lot of health issues.
Speaker 2: They're very inbred.
Speaker 1: It's kind of a cruel breed, especially in its modern iterations.
Speaker 1: But every dog has a different energy. So pay attention
Speaker 1: to how much spontaneous movement there is. Pay attention to
Speaker 1: where they put their eyes, how readily they just go
Speaker 1: to sleep or or not, how quickly they stand up
Speaker 1: and move, and then start to look at people, and
Speaker 1: you start to realize there's tremendous variation there. There's a
Speaker 1: bright eyed inness to certain people you're one of them,
Speaker 1: other like really at the level of their eyes that
Speaker 1: are there with you, and that also exude a feeling
Speaker 1: of calm. And so I've started paying more attention to
Speaker 1: how things make me feel. And I think This is
Speaker 1: why going on social media now, I feel like I'm
Speaker 1: eating twenty fifty five different cuisines at once, which would
Speaker 1: be disgusting, Whereas if I just kind of focus on
Speaker 1: one or two things, like I love different cuisine, different types.
Speaker 2: Of food, but I don't want them all at once.
Speaker 1: And so I think as humans, we are meant to
Speaker 1: experience a huge array of what life has to offer,
Speaker 1: and people have to offer not all of it, but
Speaker 1: a lot of it. And I feel like being able
Speaker 1: to sense into kind of the essence of music, or
Speaker 1: the essence of a person's presence, or the essence of
Speaker 1: a group, for me, has been very informative toward just
Speaker 1: kind of like realizing they're these different ways of interacting
Speaker 1: with the world. I don't want to sound too abstract here.
Speaker 1: I think what we're really talking about here is turning
Speaker 1: off traditional modes of thinking, which tend to be single
Speaker 1: track or dual track, and sensing energy, I think is
Speaker 1: more about taking a broader band analysis of what's going on,
Speaker 1: more visual field, more sensory field, and bringing it all
Speaker 1: in at once. And this is what we at least
Speaker 1: understand other animals to do, because they lack language at
Speaker 1: least in our form, and so they have to make
Speaker 1: decisions about moving toward, away from, or staying in a
Speaker 1: neutral position based on a kind of gestalt, like a
Speaker 1: whole picture of something. And I think it can be
Speaker 1: a very useful rudder with which to navigate. Now, of course,
Speaker 1: we also have to sharpen our attention and sharpen our
Speaker 1: intellect around certain things. But I think as time goes on,
Speaker 1: I'm I don't know, I'm trying to become more bulldog
Speaker 1: like for myself and for the people in my life.
Speaker 1: Because Costello made me feel safe, certainly made me feel accepted.
Speaker 1: He was very stubborn, but he also he took great
Speaker 1: delight in things, and he also could be quite the
Speaker 1: protector if he needed to be. And so I really thought, like, wow,
Speaker 1: if ever there was some energy is to embody, it
Speaker 1: would be the bulldog energy. And maybe for other people
Speaker 1: they need to embody a different energy. I think we
Speaker 1: can learn a lot by paying attention to animals, you know,
Speaker 1: Like I said, I spend some time with Rick Rubin,
Speaker 1: and I won't compare him to a bulldog. He's not
Speaker 1: like a bulldog like he's like a wolfhound. He's extremely
Speaker 1: still but then when he opens his mouth, that mind
Speaker 1: is it's like it's a force. And I know Rick
Speaker 1: well enough to know that he has this amazing ability
Speaker 1: to get very close to the energy of music and
Speaker 1: other people, but he doesn't get absorbed by it. It
Speaker 1: doesn't change him in a way that changes your experience
Speaker 1: of him. He's having experiences, but like there's a stability
Speaker 1: to him.
Speaker 2: He's like this cord of reliability, and I.
Speaker 1: Think that's one of the reasons why people gravitate towards him.
Speaker 1: It's also that beard is pretty often and your energy too,
Speaker 1: my friend. I haven't figured out what animal you are
Speaker 1: I'm looking for. I haven't figured it out, but it's
Speaker 1: You're very loving, but you're also very discerning. I think
Speaker 1: this is something that people probably don't realize about you.
Speaker 1: I'm not your psychologist, but you know, but you know
Speaker 1: you have a gift. You have a gift, and you
Speaker 1: give your gift in such plentiful ways and so many
Speaker 1: people benefit. And so you've also clearly learned to surround
Speaker 1: yourself with people that allow you to give and to receive.
Speaker 2: I say this with great admiration.
Speaker 1: I think I know you well enough now to like
Speaker 1: I know your heart like and yeah, yeah, I can
Speaker 1: feel it, like I can feel your love for what
Speaker 1: you do and how badly you want people to get it,
Speaker 1: but you know better than to do anything but just
Speaker 1: create an offering, and as a consequence, people flock to it.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 1: I love it, and I've grown tremendously from your books,
Speaker 1: from your teaching. I tell you this offline, so I'm
Speaker 1: now saying it. I'm now saying it recorded because I
Speaker 1: think it's really important that people understand that the podcasters,
Speaker 1: especially like whether or not it's you or Rick or
Speaker 1: Lex or and there's so many others, right or Joe
Speaker 1: or Tim or Whitney or whoever, Like, there's so many,
Speaker 1: too many to list, Like, we're all just being ourselves.
Speaker 1: That's the beauty of it. It's like Costello being Costello.
Speaker 1: And to some extent, sure there's you know edits and
Speaker 1: production all that kind of stuff, but it's just you
Speaker 1: being you. And to me, that's the most beautiful thing.
Speaker 1: It's what really works and it's what really matters, and
Speaker 1: I think it's what people should do even when there's
Speaker 1: no recording. You certainly do you know you're the same
Speaker 1: am mic and off Mike. It's one of the things
Speaker 1: I love about you, and I think it's what people
Speaker 1: we need to do. We all need to like also
Speaker 1: embrace that unique wiring that we each have.
Speaker 3: So absolutely well, Andrew, thank you for those kind words,
Speaker 3: and I don't take them lightly. I know you mean them.
Speaker 3: And what I've really share today is you've also shared
Speaker 3: the part of you that comes out naturally when we're together,
Speaker 3: and same with me, the part of me that's fascinated
Speaker 3: by neuroscience and everything you teach and and I think
Speaker 3: that's the beauty of it too. It's that I hope
Speaker 3: that everyone has been listening and watching today knows and
Speaker 3: loves you for what you do on a daily basis,
Speaker 3: but then can accept that there are different facets to you,
Speaker 3: There are different elements to you. There are different things
Speaker 3: that you're curious about, and you've shown them all today
Speaker 3: and laid them out. When they come to Huberman Lab,
Speaker 3: they're getting something very specific and they're getting that part.
Speaker 3: But you allow yourself to showcase different parts of your
Speaker 3: personality and I'm grateful that you shared that with me,
Speaker 3: you share that with my community. I want to thank
Speaker 3: you for joining me today and being so open and
Speaker 3: vulnerable and giving with your space and energy. And I'm
Speaker 3: glad that you feel confident and open enough to be
Speaker 3: able to do that, because it goes back to everything
Speaker 3: we've discussed today. We all want to feel safe and accepted,
Speaker 3: but in order to do that, we want all parts
Speaker 3: of ourselves to be accepted. Otherwise we can't truly feel safe.
Speaker 3: And so if I'm only accepted for one part of me,
Speaker 3: then I don't feel safe, and I feel safe only
Speaker 3: sharing one part of myself, then I'm not truly accepted.
Speaker 3: And so I think everything we've talked about today comes
Speaker 3: around beautifully full circle. And thank you for making me
Speaker 3: feel safe and accepted. Thank you for being safe and accepted.
Speaker 3: And I hope everyone who's listening and watching today focuses
Speaker 3: on doing that for themselves and the people they love.
Speaker 3: That would be a beautiful ripple effect from this show,
Speaker 3: that people go off and create that space for the
Speaker 3: people in their lives.
Speaker 2: So thank you, my friend, Well, thank you so much,
Speaker 2: thanks for having me. And as I said, I'm such.
Speaker 1: A huge fan of what you do and who you are,
Speaker 1: and you know and thank you for the kind words
Speaker 1: you know. I confess I have a bit of low
Speaker 1: level anxiety and sharing parts of myself I haven't shared
Speaker 1: publicly before, but since I was a kid, I always
Speaker 1: want to venture out a little bit further than the rest,
Speaker 1: usually with a pack, but sometimes alone. And you know,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to embrace positive change in myself by example.
Speaker 2: I mean, I am fallible and flawed like everybody.
Speaker 1: I have areas that still need work, certainly, and I'm
Speaker 1: going to keep working away and sharing what I learn.
Speaker 2: And I'm grateful for all of it. And I'm especially
Speaker 2: grateful to you right now, So thank you, my thank you,
Speaker 2: and I appreciate you.
Speaker 3: If this is the year that you're trying to get creative,
Speaker 3: you're trying to build more, I need you to listen
Speaker 3: to this episode with Rick Rubin on how to break
Speaker 3: into your most creative self, how to use unconventional methods
Speaker 3: that lead to success, and the secret to genuinely loving
Speaker 3: what you do. If you're trying to find your passion
Speaker 3: and your lane, Rick Rubin's episode is the one for you.
Speaker 2: Just because I like it, that doesn't give it any value,
Speaker 2: Like as an artist, if you like it, that's all
Speaker 2: of the value. That's the success comes when you say
Speaker 2: I like this enough for other people to see it.