Daily Motivations - Control Your Mind

Episode Date: October 8, 2026

Speaker Andrew Huberman Andrew Huberman, Ph.D., is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Departments of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University School of Medicine. His research laboratory, the Huberman Lab, has made significant contributions to our understanding of brain development, the neuroscience of visual perception and repair from blinding diseases such as glaucoma, the neural mechanisms of stress and resilience and neural plasticity—the nervous system's ability to change and learn in response to experience.

A lot of life is about forcing yourself to be interested in things you don't really want to do. Keep in mind the friction you feel trying to learn something. That's adrenaline. Remember, how do we block learning? We block adrenaline. Being alert but calm or a little stressed. And making errors through deliberate attempts to do something, not just throw away errors. That's how you learn.

Why? If I can reach out and grab this pen, my brain doesn't change. one of the biggest lies in public education about neuroscience is that every experience changes your brain by time I'm done saying this your brain will be different no that's absolutely not true that's a bunch of hooey you know what induces neuroplasticity being a baby who's trying to learn or being an adult who's forcing yourself to try and learn and you can't do the thing the error is what stimulates the plasticity there's two kinds of practice one is practicing doing things I already know how to do there you're aiming for 100% performance, right? You're reinforcing what you already know how to do. Talk to a great

dancer and they'll tell you they drill, drill, drill, drill, the things they already know how to do. But when you're trying to learn the new language, the new emotional skill, the new physical skill, the new cognitive emotional skill, you need to make genuine temps and you need to fail some of the time and those failure signals are relayed to your cerebellum and your cerebellum propagates through networks that say change. The best way to learn is to to not forget. Meaning, if you test yourself, that's how you maintain and build knowledge over time. Self-testing. It's not about optimization, per se. It's about being a human being and learning and making meaning out of what's going on. Organizing one's thoughts sometimes in that

way can be helpful. Happy people fulfill outward roles. They fulfill roles. Father, mother, sister, brother, they look at themselves as somebody who needs to fulfill roles. Teacher, mechanic, engineer, podcaster, but you have to shut up, suit up, and show up. You need to fulfill roles. There is no human being that doesn't have to do stuff for the world. You can't freeload. But then there's this other bin, which is, if you carry on like that for 10, 20, 30 years, you can end up quite happy.

But most of the time, if people just do those things, they end up pretty miserable. The other piece is once a day, you need to get out of role fulfillment. You need to get out of preparation. Take some space for yourself and just touch in with self. Now, if you're sitting there going, okay, what do I want to be when I grew up? It should happen. It's not the way it works. Your unconscious mind speaks to you in emotions, in analogies, and it sets you up to go back into life

to be able to see connections and start navigating in new and interesting ways. Ways that are unique to your heart's desires about what you like and what you don't like. And to know that those choices are in goodness and in keeping with who you are. You need to listen to yourself. How do I find my calling? You find it while working your butt off doing something else. That's how. You've written 10 of the protocols you want to focus on sharing today. Can I ask, why did you choose those 10? They're the ones that are going to move the needle the most in terms of one's mental health, physical health, and quote-unquote performance. Your life will be so much better if you do them. And do they cost a lot of money to do the 10 that you've picked?

No. They could be done either at completely zero cost or on an existing budget. And do you do these 10 things? Every day. Protocol synergize. They ratchet together. How well you slept last night is dictating how well you feel now. These are gears in a larger system. One moves, the other one's move. Ultimately, these gears fit together based on what you do. Protocol number one is hydrate. your mind is exceedingly more sharp when you're well hydrated. When you say hydrate, do you mean electrolytes or just water? 16 to 32 ounces of good clean water is fine.

If you want to add electrolytes, great. It's like a big hug. You want to consume about 80 ounces of water throughout your day. The next thing, and this is really key, it could have gone first, but you want to view sunlight or a 10,000 luxe artificial light. I could spend three hours talking about this,

but I'll keep it really brief. When you view sunlight, there's this beautiful phenomenon it activates these melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive cells that tell your central clock, it's time to wake up. The day is beginning. You want daylight in your eyes in the first hours of your day. Go out on your balcony if that's all you can do. If you're in a car, roll down in the window. There's so much data showing that spiking your morning cortisol this way, establishes low cortisol and high sleepiness hormones, let's call them at night, buffers stress,

and moreover, kickstarts your immune system to protect you against bacteria and viruses you can encounter during the day, but try and get some daylight in your eyes in the late afternoon or evening. If you're going to be working indoors from like after lunch until nightfall, try and get near a window, do your best, go out on a balcony, take a quick walk around the building. When you get some sunlight in your eyes in the late part of your day, let's just say in the last third of your day, you buffer those cells in your eye against the negative effects of artificial light at night. And then number three, I know everyone's heard it, but if you can exercise in the first three to four hours of your day, there's a huge advantage to doing cardiovascular resistance

training in the first three hours of your day. The point being, if you do this exercise in the first three hours of your day, you're getting a big inflection in cortisol. Again, this is what you want. Now, some people can't exercise first thing in the day. They either don't want to or they can't by way of schedule. And if you're going to exercise in the later part of your day, that's fine. Your cortisol will come back down. You can do some long exhale breathing to slow your heart rate. So when you do something that you don't want to do, that you don't reflexively do, your anterior mid-singulate cortex gets bigger and more willing to engage in challenging things going forward. Yeah, so that's the key point, which is that sets you up to be able to do more challenging things in the future.

That's right. I talk about nutrition in there and it's one of the cards. I actually cover everything from the all-meat diet to vegan diets to really go into the literature so people can choose. But really, if you look at what most people could benefit from doing, And you could do this with vegan or vegetarian. It's a little harder, but the best diet is going to be the following, right? Not too many calories, not too few. So this is the factor that's kind of obvious, but no one ever talks about.

So you want to eat some high complete protein to calorie ratio proteins. So, you know, eggs, lean meat, fish. And then everyone knows you need fiber, right? So vegetables and fruits. And then starches are great for fueling muscles and glycogen and brain. but you don't want to overdo them. That will take us to number five, you can use any time of day,

which is use physiological size to reduce stress fast. If you're not alert enough, you can't do what you need to do. If you're too alert, you can't do what you need to do or learn. And a lot of what learning is about, and a lot of what the anterior mid-singulate cortex is about,

is getting from, I don't want to do it, up to the top of that you. Then it's usually about not getting too stressed. I want to find real-time tools for mitigating stress. Now, I learned the best, trick for this how well you can control an exhale will tell you a little bit about how stressed you are when you're stressed you tend to blow off carbon dioxide very quickly and when you're less stressed it tends to shift towards long exhales become

easier okay you're feeling stressed you're going on stage you're waiting for a diagnosis you're you don't feel you feel you feel too alert relative to how you want to feel for whatever reason good or bad you just until your lungs are empty and it's immediate I thought real-time tools for stress are what We all need. You really want to do these two things. These actually go very well together. You need to do a bout of work of 90 minutes to two hours. You like you got to strive and try and learn something. Do something hard every day mentally. This is critical for your ability to focus. So there's a set of conditions in the chapter on plasticity that say you need to be alert. So I talk

about all the ways you can get alert, including pharmacology supplements and behavioral tools. Then you need to be focused. I talk about all the tools for focus, which you can devote to anything, not just learning. And then I talk about the conditions for plasticity. And you need to get this friction and these errors. And then you need to stop. You need to come back a day or two later. Do it again.

The last chapter of my book is on personal development. And here's the key question set up at the beginning. I look out on the landscape of all the personal, psychological, and relationship development stuff out there, online, in books, in papers, etc. And it looks like there's sort of two bins. One is how to find what's important to you, do what's best for you,

and be the person you're supposed to be. And then there's this other bin, which is that we need to be very careful about pursuing things and fulfilling roles because we can get very far off track from our core, like what Martha Beck would call our essential self. There's three things you've got to do every day. First, shut up, is there's always somebody suffering more than you. Suit up. you're not going to be able to do well in anything in life unless you prepare and show up exiting the stimulus response mode of being which could be sitting quietly in meditation it could be drawing listening to music you're not trying to accomplish anything and you're just letting your unconscious mind feed you information about your deepest heart's desires but everyone can afford to take a look at what they're doing now and try and move the needle toward more vigor well-being happy

peace by doing certain things. Why do we have fears? Why do we have trauma? Why do we have shame? Here's the stinger. It was all set up for you in your youth. I don't want to focus on the bad, but most of this stuff when you're young,

you're just a passive learning machine. It's all coming in. Little kids are learning three languages with no accents flexibly. They're not even thinking about they're learning instruments. Someone asked a great question the other day at the workshop. Wait, now I know I want all that stuff.

How come it's so much tougher? And there's a lot of biology that I'd be happy to tell you about that explains why that all shuts down after these so-called critical periods during development. So what happens when you're an adult and you want to change your brain? So now I'm going to get into the stuff that hopefully is useful to you. But this power of emotion, the ability to couple really strong emotions with things,

is so useful if you want to change your brain for the better. And the way you do that is clear in the physical space. We all know this story. There are many news cases like this. Woman's child stuck under car, superhuman strength. We heard a lot of amazing stories about desperation. JJ's story was one of desperation. No, I'm not going to accept failure, because failure in the case she was describing was

potentially the death of her child. So desperation is a strong one and it's motivated by fear. But what if you're not in a desperate state and you really want to do something? In that case, there's something remarkable. And we should ask ourselves, why are children such great passive learners? They're not trying. They're just learning. They're coming home with all sorts of things. Sometimes things you don't want them to come home with. Right? It's because they have this element of play. And what is play? Play isn't just movement, although it includes movement. It's giving things, everything you've got, but keeping it in perspective. It's that sweet spot of enjoying life and trying really, really hard at it at the same time. It's essentially what we all

strive for. And there are these incredible cases throughout history. Famous scientists like Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner. He's most famous for bongo drumming naked on the roof of Caltech. And he became an amazing artist in his 60s. And he developed all sorts of other skills. And he always had this childlike way of looking at the world. He never let himself get stuck in his ways, never became a curmudgeon and a remarkable man. And that's something that I, if you come away with nothing else, I encourage you to do that. You want your brain to change, stay light, stay loose, but give it everything you've got. So I think that one of the most important questions that we should all ask ourselves anytime we want to learn or we want to

relax or we want to sleep or we're in a, you know, in a situation where we need to receive hard information, whatever it is, is ask ourselves, you know, where are we on this continuum of alertness and sleep? So when we're fast asleep, we actually can learn in sleep. But basically, we learn best when we are focused and alert, but not too stressed. And then when we cycle that with periods of deep rest and not just sleep, but when we go into states of they can be shallow naps. It can be meditation, but really it's going into a state of what is most easily thought of as wordlessness. So I would say as people listen to all the words coming through the airways on this where they watch this, once they get to a point where they feel like, okay, there's a lot of

information. It might be dense or I just want to consolidate that or get the most out of it. It's fine to just go into a state of wordlessness. Pause it. Just let your mind drift for a little bit. And then the mind likes to focus back on things. It likes to focus on and off things. In this culture, we do not teach people how to operate their mind and body, and it leads to all sorts of problems, stress, anxiety disorders, ADD. There is no guidebook for social interactions, for sexual development. It's a huge problem. And I think that the brain is harder to, you know, identify like a user's manual, right?

Because it's always meditation, consciousness, high-level concepts, what do dreams mean? The really interesting stuff. Right. But I like that we're starting with physiology, because what's nice about these core mechanisms, of brain body is that they are real things. Like if we could point to the neurons,

these are things in the textbooks. There's nothing mysterious. It doesn't require any learning. Like once you know how to do it, it works the first time it works every time. And that's the other thing. Kids don't learn to direct their own state. They don't know they can do it.

And we give people all these mantras about resilience and mindfulness. And these are powerful terms. What we tell people would just do it. But what we don't do is give them tools to access these states more readily. And for people that are lucky, enough to have the time or the or come into contact with people that help guide them down a path like they get some crucible experience early in life where they go wow I felt like I was very close to death or close to panic and I recovered myself it's powerful the hallmark of growth mindset is really two things one is I'm not where I want to be now but I I'm capable of getting there eventually the other is to attach a sense of reward to the effort process itself and if you look at true high performers people that are consistent

They're consistently good at what they do. They don't peek and go through the postpartum depression and crash and come back and their life is a cycle of ups and downs, but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently, those people attach dopamine to the effort process on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that love doing math problems

that they knew they couldn't get right. So it's like the people love puzzles, but in this case, they knew they couldn't get it right, but they loved doing it. And incidentally or not so incidentally, kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they feel some sense of reward from the effort process. Yeah.

Now the cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled. We can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way. But it has to be attached to reality. So if you're thinking about the effort you're expending, so let's say somebody right. now is financially back on their heels and they're setting up a new business for instance and it's hard if they can take a few moments or or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of

their hole potentially that it's giving them an opportunity that it's somehow they are on the right path or they're or if they're not in movement along that path or at least oriented on the right path they're not lying in bed all day if can reward that process internally, two things happen. First of all, the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger. So you get better at that process. And second, and most importantly, dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine. And so then you're expending effort, but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it. Everything works best on a backdrop of good sleep. Unless you need

to be nocturnal. Avoid bright light exposure from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. It's not the end of the world if you get up and use the bathroom or you, you know, briefly turn on the lights. But there are studies showing that bright light exposure in the middle of the night, it punishes you by suppressing dopamine the next day and the next day. So try and get good night's, you know, master your sleep. And that's a whole other discussion.

But that basically means getting as much bright light as as as safely possible in your eyes in the morning and daytime and as little in your eyes after about, 10 p.m. And don't give up the great party. I would say, you know, great things happen between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. in life. So you don't want to live like a monk, you know, but you wake up in the morning. And I think it's, you know, some people wake up more slowly than others. Bright light exposure, hydration is going to help. A lot of this stuff is in your book. These are, because they get right to core physiology. If morning time is the time when you start to feel some agitation, meaning you're alert. And then it's time to do your work, right? It's, it's the press field thing.

it's time to do the work. And that resistance is expected. It's normal. It's healthy. And you should almost see it as like a friend along the way with you. It's like an irritating friend that's poking you and trying to distract you, pushing back on you. And you can make it playful. But there is a time to be serious about work.

It's like this is yours and you don't want to squander it. So I say lean into that work and understand that if it goes pretty well today, it's going to go even better the next day. because these are, I think what people forget about neural plasticity, the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience, is that the circuits for focus also are subject to neural plasticity. So the more you feel that discomfort in focus, the more easily focus comes the next day and the next day. And pretty soon, if something interrupts you for even a minute,

it's going to feel irritating. But do yourself a favor and look back and realize that in a short period of time, this won't take 100 days. We're talking about three, four days. You're going to be creating and working at a level. that's far more efficient and productive than before.