Dhru Purohit Show - #224: Reprogram Your Brain to Destroy Laziness and Improve Focus with Dr. Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: June 24, 2021

Reprogram Your Brain to Destroy Laziness and Improve Focus | This episode is brought to you by BLUblox. At one point or another, we’ve all felt stuck in a rut with feelings of laziness and fear. During these times it can be really hard to take a step back and wonder what’s happening in the body, as opposed to just the mind, but it’s the link between the two that can push us through it.   Neurotransmitters have some incredible power over how we function. Dopamine is responsible for craving, motivation, and pursuit. Adrenaline relates to agitation and endurance. Serotonin helps us be grateful and feel good about what we have. And acetylcholine can help us focus. This is just a snapshot of the chemical symphony happening in our bodies all the time, and we can actually leverage these inner reactions to better understand the way we react to the world around us and make positive changes.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru talks to Dr. Andrew Huberman about opening the window into our neurochemistry, training the nervous system, and confronting our inner real estate.  Dr. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured Professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neural plasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills, and cognitive functioning.    Dr. Huberman is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow and was awarded the Cogan Award in 2017, which is given to the scientist making the largest discoveries in the study of vision. His lab’s most recent work focuses on the influence of vision and respiration on human performance and brain states such as fear and courage. Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford University School of Medicine has been published in top journals including Nature, Science, and Cell and has been featured in TIME, BBC, Scientific American, Discover, and other top media outlets. In this episode, we dive into:    -The connection between fear, laziness, and motivation (4:56)  -The difference between dopamine, adrenaline, and serotonin (17:50)  -How to increase dopamine (19:12)  -How to get your mind to stop racing (31:14)  -An exercise to try if you are having a hard time falling asleep (35:47)  -The benefits of hypnosis (38:57)  -What to do if you are having trouble focusing (52:47)  -Why structure is one of the best ways to create freedom (1:01:32)  -How our phones are eroding our creativity, relationships, and more (1:05:52)  -The importance of having times of no focus each day (1:16:39)  For more on Dr. Andrew Huberman, you can follow him on Instagram @hubermanlab, and through his website http://www.hubermanlab.com/. Check out his podcast Huberman Lab at https://hubermanlab.com/category/podcast-episodes/. Also mentioned in this episode: -Episode #134: The Latest Science on Enhancing Focus and Developing a Growth Mindset with Dr. Andrew Huberman - https://drhyman.com/blog/2020/07/09/bb-ep13 -Dr. David Spiegel and Hypnosis - https://stanfordhealthcare.org/doctors/s/david-spiegel.html -Reveri Hypnosis Ap - https://www.reveri.com/ -Cal Newport - https://www.calnewport.com/ -A World Without Email by Cal Newport - https://www.calnewport.com/books/a-world-without-email/ -Oliver Sacks Documentary - https://www.oliversacksdoc.com/watch-now -Ido Portal - Movement Culture - https://www.instagram.com/portal.ido/ -The Ready State - https://thereadystate.com/ -Madefor Program - https://getmadefor.com -Guardians of Being by Ekhart Tolle and Patrick McDonnell - https://amzn.to/3vQTY7E Sign up for Dhru’s Try This Newsletter - https://dhrupurohit.com/newsletter. This episode is brought to you by BLUblox. Right now BLUblox is offering my listeners 20% off, just go to blublox.com/dhru and use code DHRU at checkout. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It is very hard to control the mind with the mind. And I think a simple rule that people can adopt is when your mind is not where you want it to be, look to your body. Use the body to shift the mind. Hi, everyone, Drew Brod here. Our guest today is Dr. Andrew Huberman, and he's here to teach us how to optimize our brain to reduce fear and laziness and increase motivation. It's a fascinating conversation.

This is Andrew's round two on the podcast. Stay tuned. Hey, everyone, it's Drew. If you haven't noticed already, I'm pretty obsessed with the topic of optimizing sleep because our past guests have talked about it being so important when it comes to every aspect of our health. So over the past few years, I've been incorporating simple, affordable techniques to guarantee a great night's sleep for myself and to recommend to others. What took me a while to understand when I was first going down this journey is that my daytime

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blue blocks.com and save up to 30%. Now let's get back to this week's episode. Welcome to the Drew Perot podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Dr. Andrew Huberman. Dr. Andrew Huberman is a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at Stanford's University School of Medicine. He has made numerous important contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neural plasticity, which is the ability of the nervous system to rewire and learn new behavior, skills, and cognitive function. On today's podcast, which is Andrew's second appearance on the Drew Pro-Proye podcast, we dive deep into the topics of fear, laziness,

lack of motivation, and how a better understanding of our brains and neuroscience can help us break through them, but not through thought, but leaning on and into the body. It's a fascinating conversation. Let's listen in. Andrew, welcome back to the podcast and honor to have you here. And also, I just prefer in-person so much. So this is a is great that this all ended up happening. It is great. Thanks for having me back. And I agree to do it in person is especially nice. I want to start off with the topic of fear. You know, your lab is known amongst many things. One of your primary areas is studying fear. And there's this topic that comes up for a lot of people. In fact, it was a big question that people had after our part one, which was

fantastic. And it was around laziness and motivation. And for somebody who's struggling with laziness and motivation, what is it that they're missing out when it comes to how fear fits into those two as drivers for good or for worse? Yeah, it's an interesting question. You know, we don't often think about motivation and fear as in the same breath or the same sentence. We are accustomed to thinking about the fact that when we're afraid of something, you know, we can freeze up. But really, motivation and fear are in the same pathway and believe or not they're in the same chemical pathway. So the only way to talk about motivation is to talk about the molecule dopamine. Dopamine is known

for its feel-good properties. We think, oh, you know, a dopamine hit or, you know, it feels so good, a rush of dopamine. But dopamine's main role in the brain and body is craving motivation and pursuit. and in the absence of dopamine, we don't feel motivated. I'll describe in a moment a classic experiment that illustrates this beautifully, but dopamine's main role is to make us feel motivated and to crave things. And the interesting thing is that dopamine is the chemical, it's the molecule from which another molecule is made called epinephrine. And epinephrine has another name, which is adrenaline.

So to untangle all that, basically craving and desire is the foundation of stress and fear. And people think, well, how could that possibly be? Well, stress and fear comes from adrenaline. So the way to think about this in a kind of real world context is that when we are afraid of something, we have one of three responses. We can either remain still. we can retreat or we can move forward. All three of those require some increase in our level of activation.

And the molecule adrenaline, also called epinephrine, probably will use those interchangeably. So it really doesn't matter, adrenaline, epinephrine. That is what's responsible for getting us moving. It's also responsible for our sense of fear and paralysis in fear. So if people are feeling that they're not motivated or as, motivated they would like to be. There's a key step that people need to take, which is to start focusing on the craving aspect and dopamine. Because if you can make enough dopamine, you can

motivate, you can actually crave moving through challenge. So we can talk about how to do that. But just to underscore how powerful this relationship is between motivation and dopamine, there was an experiment that was done. It was been done in rats, but it's also essentially been done in humans through naturally occurring things where basically if you put a rat next to a lever with some juice or or even with you know something really really good that a rat likes they will press that lever for that delicious tasting thing and they get pleasure from it if but if you take a rat and you deplete it of dopamine and you move that lever one rat length away it won't even move one length of its own body, right, a few inches to hit that lever. And people are the same way.

You can still experience pleasure without dopamine, but you won't get up off your couch. You won't challenge yourself to go talk to somebody you want to talk to. You won't apply for a job. You won't pursue the new fitness protocol, et cetera. So dopamine is about craving of pleasure. it's not pleasure itself. And fear comes from this pathway, right? This pathway of dopamine into epinephrine. And the way to think about fear is it's just one other dimension of motivation. And we can talk more about that.

But if people are living in fear, it is absolutely essential to understand that developing some sense of craving, even if it feels scary, you know, wanting something but being afraid to pursue it, that's the trigger for these molecules to start being released and to move towards it. But we've all sort of been told or conditioned that if we feel fearful, that that's a sign that we should back away or stand still. And biologically, that's just not true. So if people are feeling paralyzed in fear or they are feeling as if they, you know, are unmotivated,

it's absolutely essential that they identify some kernel, some little, bit of something that draws them forward. And if they feel that agitation, the kind of elevated heart rate, the anxiety, a little bit of sweating, this kind of thing, you know, just imagining that they want that thing. That's great. Those are the molecules that I'm talking about starting to kick into gear. But for some reason, most people start feeling those sensations and they start freezing up or backing away. I hope that was clear. It was definitely clear. So I guess the question is do you think that fear is the primary driver for people who are feeling lazy and unmotivated? I do. I mean, there are two sides to this. I mean, and you see this a lot in the kind of

psychological discussion around motivation. It's, you know, it's wonderful to think about moving towards things purely from a place of love and joy, you know, and we feel that and we experience that with a child or with a puppy or when we hear suddenly, you know, music that. that we love, we feel that these same molecules are liberated into our body and brain, and we feel that positive motivation. But I think it's, and that's beautiful and that's a wonderful dimension of life. But I think that it's a mistake to assume that that's how it's going to feel to pursue the everything. And the other side of this is that when there's fear, we can also be quite motivated. You know, I think we're, we're so, um, averse to the idea of pursuing things

out of fear. You know, should someone start running, I'll just, I'll use myself as example, I'll embarrass myself by saying, you know, I, I read recently that the guidelines for physical fitness, um, and cardiovascular health, because I'm 45, I'm like, I should probably start thinking about my heart health. I feel healthy, but it's 150 minutes per week of elevated heart rate, you know, of that cardiovascular exercise, which I haven't been doing at all. I do other things, but I just haven't been doing that at all. And I always enjoy it once I'm doing it regularly. But the first couple weeks are painful.

It's a little back thing and all the stuff crops up. But basically, I'm doing it out of fear, right? I don't want to die of a heart attack. And if you look at the numbers, if you're not getting 150 minutes a week minimum of cardiovascular exercise, your probability of having a cardiovascular incident goes way up. And you can pretend it's not going to happen because of your genetics or you can do all sorts of mental gymnastics. but the reality is that everyone should be getting that minimum, including me, and I wasn't. So fear is the motivator in that case.

So fear is a terrific motivator. And I think that we're so afraid of things like adrenal burnout or chronic stress. And those things are problematic for many people. But I think that fear itself is a tremendously powerful lever. And when I say a lever, I mean a chemical lever. This dopamine epinephrine relationship, the fact that dopamine, this molecule of and epinephrine, this molecule of motivation and agitation, this kind of like stress, the fact that those are such close cousins is never going to be untangled. And so that

the doing a lot of psychological work to try and just move towards things from a place of love and desire, I think is a terrible mistake. I think that will, that eventually comes and it, and it's wonderful to have those aspects to one's life. But I think we should all be in more appreciation for the fact that we are wired to be motivated when afraid and that we can leverage that I'm not talking about living in fear all the time but I think that we can leverage that it's what can get us out the door it's what can move us through it you know tremendously difficult times so I guess I'm not to to turn fear into something it's not it doesn't feel good to turn stress and agitation into something it's not you know it's called stress and agitation for a reason but I don't

I don't think that it's poison. I think it's the way I like to think about it. Again, I'm calling it a lever because, you know, a lever you can really move things forward. And then once things are going forward, it's a whole different business. And we could talk about that as well. So it sounds like the distinction is kind of undirected fear,

which is what a lot of people are going through, just this undirected fear, their mind meandering, wandering, wondering, imagining worst-case scenarios, but not really, you know, to compare that to directed fear. Like you're really talking about, you know, directing your fear, your fear, channeling it, maybe even, I don't know, visualizing it? Would that be an opportunity?

Would that be a practice that somebody could use to actually use their fuel as fear in their life? Yeah, that's it. Use their fear as fuel in their life? Yeah, I do think fear can be fuel and it's very powerful fuel. I think that I like the idea actually of using it as a visualization. I think that if you look at the trauma literature, one of the things that we know is that trauma has many different aspects to it. But one of the hallmarks of trauma is two things really. One is a confusion about who's responsible.

This is often the case, the brain somehow gets confused about who is responsible for something terrible. Even though we know rationally that wasn't my fault, we still, it's almost like the nervous system is trying to resolve something and we get this kind of reverberation of all the terrible feelings.

And the other thing that's been shown time and time again is that people really need to not hide from that experience. They need to be able to confront the memory of the experience or the person of the, you know, or whatever it was. And of course, that should be done in a clinical setting if it's something very severe. But, you know, we've all probably, or at least in California, we've heard of, you know, there's like love and kindness meditation where people will do a meditation specifically aimed towards cultivating a sense of gratitude, which is a beautiful and wonderful practice.

It's actually associated with the liberation of a different molecule, serotonin, which makes us feel good about what we have. Serotonin is sort of the molecule satiety. of feeling like we have enough in our immediate experience. Dopamine and adrenaline are really about moving forward or away from things. It's about not feeling comfortable where you're at, either because you're craving or because you're afraid, right? So these molecules are interesting because they really do kind of separate themselves

into different psychologies, if you will. So I could imagine taking on a practice where one sits down and focuses their mind on something that they want. So craving. This is not very zen sounding, right? You're supposed to be separate from desires, but really focusing on something that you very much want or that you very much fear

but is in line with something that is probably good for you. And I imagine that meditation or focus or visualization would liberate these molecules. You know, the brain visualization is powerful and the brain will make, efforts to take a visualization and start creating the chemicals inside that that mimic the real experience. And so that's why the kind of gratitude practices are so powerful. That's why focusing on something that we really want, it feels exciting. That excitement is the liberation

of these molecules trying. I mean, these cells, they don't have their own mind, but it's a biological a strategy to get you to move, to literally to get you out of your chair and move. And I think that it brings up a larger theme, which is that the reason we have a brain is to move this thing that we call a body, right? Animals that like us, we are animals, that can move in lots of different ways,

run, jump, swim, pushups, dance. I mean, the variety of movements that we can do is one of the reasons we have such a big brain. And these molecules, they sound kind of complicated, but they're actually really pretty simple. Dopamine is about craving, motivation, and pursuit. Epinephrine is really about agitation and endurance to get you to persist. Serotonin is really about feeling good about what you have.

We hear so much about oxytocin and you know that these, but oxytocin serotonin are, they work together. They collaborate to make you feel good when you hold your child or when you feel like maybe if you've ever had this experience of being at a, with a group of friends or a party and you look around, you're like, I'm so blessed. You know, I'm so lucky to have these people, right? Or to have this roof over my head. Those are, those are, those are molecular events. And then there's a fourth neuromodulator, which is acetylcholine, which is really about focus.

But I would say all of these molecules are applicable. They can be plugged into a visualization practice. This is something that could be done for, you know, five minutes a day of just turn. off or flipping over the phone and thinking about something in a very directed way and just watching how that makes you feel. If it makes you feel agitated, if it makes you feel good, if it makes you feel a sense of desire. Those are, those actually would be a powerful practices because it would give you a window into what's happening neurochemically. And most people get this backwards. They sit around and they go, I don't have enough dopamine. Like, what do I need to increase my dopamine?

I get this all the time. What should I take to increase my dopamine? And there are things you can take, supplements you can take to increase dopamine. And if you do that, you will feel a lift. This is true, right? There are antidepressants and other molecules

you can take to increase your serotonin. Some people just take serotonin. You can now go, at least in the United States, it's legal to go by the precursor to serotonin. You can do that. And you will feel better about what you have temporarily. But I'm always a fan, unless there's a real clinical need,

of looking at behavioral and mental tools first, then looking at the power of supplementation and nutrition, which are real and can be leveraged. And then if there's a clinical need towards prescription drugs, for which certain people, they can be of real benefit. But I love the idea of a fear meditation. Yeah. Well, it's pretty common in the Buddhist tradition,

you know, they'll have like meditate on your death or in the stoic tradition, they'll have, you know, imagine the worst case scenario and really visualize it through. I guess I've only heard the California version. Yeah, you've only heard the California version. Which is go to Esselin and just like and really enjoy the bliss of life, which is a great practice.

But I like the actually, I think it's important. I think what you're saying is important to for people to understand that there's, there's a lot of, it sounds like there's a lot of dimensionality to meditation. It's not just about being relaxed and calm and in gratitude. It's about confronting your inner real estate. And that's really cool. And that could even be, what am I missing out on life? Or how am I not going to be able to serve people if I don't rise to the occasion?

You know, there's so many aspects where you see this online sometimes. There's the feeling of, I'm only going to, you know, I'm only living my quote unquote authentic self if it feels good. And, you know, in our first, like, I'm only going to work on stuff that feels good. And a first part of our conversation was actually a lot of stuff doesn't feel good. And you want to embrace that because that's how you get. get good at doing things. So I think in that same sense, meditating on stuff that doesn't feel good sometimes, like

one of the most motivating, reoccurring dreams I have is I'm back in high school and I did great in high school, but I really despised, you know, being there and I felt like it was very limiting and I couldn't, you know, study the stuff that I wanted to do. And I feel like I'm back in high school, but something happened and I'm my, I'm still my current age, right? I'm like 38, 38 right now. And I'm 38, but at some reason I'm back in high school and I'm like, holy shit, I had all these ambitions. I had all these dreams for stuff that I wanted to do. And for whatever reason now,

I'm like studying, studying trigonometry again, right? And I'm going through my whole day at class in high school and I'm sitting in classes and for some version of like been held back. This is a dream or this is a visualization. This is a dream. Okay. This is a dream. Yeah. And then because I'm also like into lucid dreaming, some way through I wake up and I'm like, okay, I'm in my high school. Okay, I have control. Wait, how did I get here? And I have this realization like, no, I'm living my life.

I'm a grown human being. I'm an adult male who has started businesses and written stuff and has a podcast. And I feel so fired up that day because I just went through an entire visualization of being back in what my mind would deem to be a worst case scenario, which is being back in school, being held back for some sort of reason and not being able to do all the stuff that I want to. And I feel energized the entire rest of the day when I actually get a chance to wake up. So just another example of me personally,

feeling like visualizing or whether it's a dream or meditating on your death or meditating on what you would miss out on life if you can't rise to vacation or take care of your health or be there for your family and the way that you want to can be a big motivator for things. Yeah, it's interesting. The dreams, you know, of course for centuries, people have wondered about the significance of business.

dreams, but it's very clear that in the early part of your night, your sleep and your dreaming is related mainly toward physical repair of the body and toward learning of motor skills. You know, there's a predominance of what they call slow wave sleep or non-REM sleep, non-rapid eye movement sleep. In the later half of the night toward morning, you shift over to having more REM rapid eye movement sleep. And there's a heavier emotional load to those dreams. This is well established. What's interesting is that something is written into our biology, into the genome of everybody, where these emotionally laden dreams in the second half of the night, they're happening,

but the body is incapable of releasing adrenaline. We're also paralyzed during REM sleep. We're what's called atonic or, you know, we have atonia. We're completely paralyzed, probably so that we don't act out our dreams, although no one really knows. As I always say, I wasn't consulted at the design phase and no one else I know was either. So anyone that tells you why something is the way it is, should be a little bit suspect. But you have these dreams that are very emotionally intense

and yet you don't have adrenaline released into your system. And people who are deprived of that second half of the night dreams tend to have more emotionality during their day. Little things seem heavy. This seems to be a portion of our sleep that is a bit like trauma release therapy. In a lot of trauma release therapies, the idea like EMDR or in just standard psychoanalysis and psychotherapy of various kinds, cognitive

behavioral therapy. You know, these are board certified approved treatments, at least in the U.S. and in other countries as well. It's all about recounting the event, but trying to uncouple the event from the negative emotion and the feeling of agitation. It's about really being able to get close right up, you know, in front of your face with the experience. And experiences, and experiences that, but being comfortable feeling it all without doing anything about it. And so in sleep, we experience this emotional fear. We have fear in our second half of the night dreams, but we can't act. We can't do anything about it. So talk about, you know, exposure therapy. We get that every night. Now, some people will wake up from those dreams and immediately the

adrenaline system will kick on and it'll be, and you're just like, oh my goodness, that was so scary. That actually shows you have a healthy adrenaline system, you know, that when you wake up, it's really immediately available. And a lot of people think, oh, my God, that was such a dreadful dream or troubling dream. That was your brain trying to uncouple the emotionality of previous days events and old events. And if you, again, if you deprive people of that particular stage of sleep, they go through life feeling emotionally weighed down by their previous experiences. If you've ever been sleep deprived, the littlest things can seem heavy.

You get two nights good sleep or three nights good sleep. The whole world looks different. It just looks better. It feels better. And so I find it fascinating. I didn't know we were going to go down this path because we started off by talking about, you know, using fear as a tool to move through things and work through things and be motivated. And in your description of this dream about high school, it reminded me that in sleep, we have this process ongoing. And for people that are having the same dream over and over,

it's probably the case that the body needs multiple cycles, the brain needs multiple cycles of this because it's so deeply wired into us, whatever it was. And for people with PTSD, a big part of the exposure therapies is to really bring, in a safe setting and in a clinical setting, obviously, to bring people to the point where the very worst thing they could possibly imagine is it's almost as if it's happening.

And then little by little, the amount of adrenaline is turned down and turned down and turned down. People might be upset to hear this, but you never forget your traumatic experiences. Totally. And that's for, as you've shared before, it's for a specific reason, right? Our brain wants to hold on to them to, you know, protect us. Right. But you can reframe the emotional component. You can unweight the emotional load. And this is why I think that sleep is so foundational, the great work of Matt Walker and the Stanford folks at the Stanford Sleep Clinic, you know, and many others.

others, of course, there are many great sleep scientists out there. We've really unpacked this incredible period of our life we call sleep. What has not happened yet and what is in something that's very important to me and my lab's mission and many other labs also is we need a taxonomy, a naming system for waking states. You know, for sleep, we have REM and slow wave sleep. We know what the early night is for. We know what the second half of the night is for. We go through our waking life talking about things like happiness, sadness, depression, stress, anxiety, and fear. But it's all pretty vague. And I think one of the exciting things that's going to happen in the next 10 years or so, hopefully sooner, is that we're really going to start to understand

what is creative work? What is focus? What is conversation? What is bonding? You know, and really understand those things at a biological and psychological level to the point where we can also I don't really like the word hack, but that we will be able to pull apart the different components and really understand, you know, maybe we should, I'm making this up, so please don't take this as a recommendation, but maybe we should all be focused on activities that increase our, you know, acetylcholine early in the day, and then we should gradually be turning that off, you know, we all hear don't drink caffeine past 4 p.m., you know, and messes with your sleep. Well, maybe there are things that we should be doing, you know, for our waking states. And so one of the

things that excites me now is that because of the unfortunate events of 2020, most people now are tuned into the fact that they have a brain and a body. They're very much connected, that we're all subject to stress, that we're all grappling with things and challenged. And I feel like the universe, the universality, you know, is that a word? Yeah. I think so. I think so. Maybe I didn't get, someone always writes to me as like, you know, corrects my my speech at some way. Right. The universality of, of, of, of our, of our nervous system has really been presented to us, that things like resilience and motivation and trauma and fear,

everybody struggles with these things. Everybody. And anyone who seems like they don't or anyone that pretends like they don't has got a different neurologic issue that we can talk about in a different episode. And I think really one of the big things that you've been trying to bring to that space as a whole

is I think we've been doing a good job of you know when I say we I mean America primarily in other you know westernized countries of putting more attention that these things are there we don't have to hide you know everybody's going through some version of it so the answer is often we need to increase access to mental health right it kind of goes about that far and anybody who's seen what happened with the pandemic knows that our system is fragile it's been fragile fragile even before there's not enough practitioners for everybody who needs mental health access insurance

at least in America is a big issue. So we need other tools, right? And I just want to give gratitude to you because your mission from the beginning has always been free tools, easily accessible that anybody can do on their own. Within the context of that, I feel like, yes, mental health access is important.

That's part of the equation. But your through line seems to be, and please jump in and correct me if I'm wrong, that getting there through thoughts alone is not going to solve maybe help us get to the root issue right that can be part of it but we actually need to embrace the behavior you know you have this you have this quote that I heard you share in another um podcast and it was uh trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab it fog yeah and I think this is a fundamental thing to bring up for the folks who are listening

is that when you are struggling with laziness you know lack of motivation you're stuck in fear A lot of times, and you see this especially at night when people are trying to fall asleep, right, that their mind is so active and they're trying to tackle that through more mind. Right. And really what you would say is that, look, that's not wrong, but it may not get you there. So let's take that scenario, right? Sure. Give us the example.

One way, if your mind is super active at night and you're trying to fall asleep, you're trying to invest in your sleep and get more of it or get better quality, but then everybody notices that their mind is very active. What would be a way of addressing that through behavior instead of ruminating and thinking or even telling your mind like, I just wish you would stop? Yeah. So when it is very hard to control the mind with the mind. And I think a simple rule that people can adopt is when your mind is not where you want it to be, look to your body. Use the body to shift the mind.

It's a simple equation. It's sometimes hard to do because thoughts can be so all encompassing. But when your mind is not where you want it to be, if you don't feel as happy or you're obsessing, you need to go to a mechanical system in the body because if you do that, you'll shift the chemicals that are released in your brain in a way that will allow you to regain control the steering wheel. So there are a couple things that can do that immediately. The most basic one and the simplest one is going to be with respiration, with breathing. So breathing and the neurons that control breathing are so,

interesting because they are constantly working. They work reflexively all the time. They're working right now. If you're alive and you're listening to this, they're working. But unlike a lot of aspects of our brain-body connection, we can grab a hold of it immediately and start tinkering with it. Like I can't say right now, hey, start digesting faster, Andrew, you know, or tell my intestines, hey, you know, slow down digestion or I can't make my heart rate speed up just by telling it to, but I can slow down or speed up my breathing if I want to. So it lies at this bridge between the conscious and the unconscious mind. And I don't say this from any point or stance of philosophy. This is physiology. So if your mind is not where you want it to be, whether or not you're trying

to sleep or work or focus or anything, I'm a big fan of this physiological sigh, which was discovered by physiologists in the 1930s. It's a double inhale through the nose and a long exhale that follows. The exhale can be done through the mouth or through the nose. If you're one of these people who can't breathe through your nose, you could do this all through your mouth. So it's just to inhale and then inhale again, even if you're just sneaking in a little bit more air, and then long exhale. The physiological size known to physiologists and neuroscientists as a way to offload a lot of what's called carbon dioxide and it immediately produces a heightened sense of calm or a reduced sense of stress and alertness. It's not going to put you to sleep right away,

but I'll just do it just by way of example so people can see it since it always looks funny to breathe than, you know, by example, for some reason. And no, you don't have to close your eyes in order to breathe. You can breathe your eyes open. So it's just, right? So it's inhale, inhale, long exhale. This physiological sigh is known to reinflate these little sacks in the lungs, called the avioli of the lungs.

And then when you exhale, it offloads a lot of carbon dioxide. And that immediately reduces your levels of stress. Now, why am I recommending this? Well, if your mind is churning on something, maybe you're just obsessing, maybe you're not just, maybe you're not really stressed, maybe you're sad. But when you use respiration to kind of wedge in between your conscious and unconscious life, suddenly you realize that using something that's purely mechanical, your lungs, air, carbon dioxide, your mind shifts as well. And there are a lot of studies now, the best of which

I think have been done by Jack Feldman, who's a professor at UCLA, who's worked his entire career basically on the physiology of breathing and the mind. The brain shifts. There are states of mind shift. The chemistry of the brain starts to shift. But this physiological size is more about grabbing a hold of the steering wheel again. That's what it's really about. And then it's about what you do next.

So if you're having a hard time falling asleep, there are a couple things you can do. One is to do exhale emphasized breathing and not try to fall asleep. Just focus on doing big inhales and but even longer. exhales. Doesn't matter if it's through the nose or the mouth. Extended exhales tend to shift the body into more what we call parasympathetic states, more relaxed states. Parasympathetic is just fancy language for the system of the body that controls calmness. It promotes calmness. Think of it like a break. There are two ways to slow down a car. One is to come off the accelerator. The other is to

push on the brake. So long exhales are like pushing on the brake. Okay. Now it's expected and it's totally normal that the brain will continue to ruminate if you're having trouble sleeping. After you've done that and really what I just described probably takes about five to 30 seconds. I'm not talking about an extended breathwork protocol, just a physiological side to remind yourself, oh wait, I'm in control of this system that seems to be taking, kind of going off the rails on its own or that I can't seem to control. The extended exhales tend to bring more calm to the system. I'm a big fan of using a tool to shift the body. into sleep or sleep-like states.

Insomnia is terrible. People trying to sleep when they can't is absolutely maddening. Better to try and encourage the body to relax in general and see if you can fall asleep later, not try and force yourself into sleep. So the two practices that work best for this is one that goes by the Yoga Nidra, many people have probably heard of it. Yeah. By the way, can I interject about Yogan Nidra?

I don't know if you and your team have looked at it, but if you look at some of the top Yoga Nidra videos and you go down to the comments. Like some of the first comments are Andrew Huberman brought me here. And other people replying back and saying, yep, I'm here for the same reason. So the words getting out there and a lot of people are watching these YouTube videos.

Oh, that's very gratifying to hear. Yeah, I have no business relationship to Yoga Nidra has been developed, you know, centuries before I was even born. It means yoga sleep. You just lie down. You listen to one of these scripts. They're available on YouTube as free, you know, totally cost free. They tend to walk you through a

a set of visualizations and a set of breathing protocols that essentially turn the mind off. All right. This is the, it essentially accomplishes what a couple stiff alcoholic drinks will do, which will also turn off your forebrain. The problem is that has other issues that go with it. And many people who use alcohol to try and calm down have a rebound increase in anxiety. I can always spot anxious people and people that have chronic anxiety by the way that they drink and the way that they need a drink.

Anyone tells me I need a drink. I know they are not good at regulating their nervous system. I'm not saying that in a disparaging way, but it says to me, it's somebody that, it's sort of like saying, I need an Uber driver. I'm like, you don't really know how to drive, you know? Or like, it's, it's, you know, if you need one, right? If you need a chauffeur, right?

It's nice to have one sometimes, right? But if you need one, there's a problem. Right. So, Yoganidra is a wonderful. practice. The other thing that's wonderful and that now there's a lot of good data on is hypnosis. So one of the things I've become increasingly interested in is hypnosis because I have a collaborator by the name of David Spiegel. He's an MD, MD PhD, he's our associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford. And he's used hypnosis to great effect for smoking cessation, pain

management, breast cancer outcomes are greatly improved by the sorts of hypnosis. He's done with his patients and for sleep and other things. And there's a wonderful resource that I'm happy to point people to. It's a free resource, which is an app for Android and Apple called Reverie, R-E-V-E-R-I. You can go to reverie.com and download that. It's a hypnosis app where you can hear David's voice. He has a very hypnotic voice. And he walks you through, you can pick a hypnosis for sleep or for pain management. They've even got some now to improve focus for work. Hypnosis is a very interesting practice because it incorporates a lot of the same things we've been talking about, a shift in breathing, a shift in, it involves a lot of stuff with the eyes, which is my lab's interest.

And when you talk about why they, you know, why they have you look up and try and close your eyes and all this stuff. That's not, that's not a magician stuff. It's not sorcery. It has to do with the relationship between the eyes and the so-called autonomic nervous system. In any case, hypnosis is a wonderful tool because it shifts the brain and body very quickly into states, into desired states, states of focus, states of relaxation, states of reduced craving, etc. And a lot of people are afraid of hypnosis. I wish it had a different name because clinical hypnosis is nothing like stage hypnosis. You are in control. It's about you shifting over what's called the default mode network, this kind of the idle, you know, a car, a transmission that's

screwed up. Well, if you get in your car and you turn it on, all of a sudden it's redlining, just standing still, you know, that the RPMs are way up. Then, there's a problem with the transmission. The hypnosis is really about adjusting that idle level, bringing about a sense of focus and a sense of control over your nervous system. So I would say yoga need first physiological side. That should be people's anchor point. Just pull back into the control over your nervous system and your mind.

Once you've done that, you can tell yourself because you have that you've, you've intervened with what felt like something that was out of your control, your thoughts. at that point some long exhales breathing for maybe you know 20 seconds or so no big deal and then I would reach to either a yoga nidra script or a hypnosis script and of course there are things that people can take you know drinking too much caffeine late in the day can make it hard to fall asleep um i personally and this is just me you know if i don't have enough starchy carbohydrates late in the day i have a hard time falling asleep because they are precursors to triptophan with serotonin so i'm not a big big

Some people on very low carbohydrate diet struggle to fall asleep. So I push my carbohydrates toward later in the day, for instance. And then there are supplements that many people find beneficial. I'm personally not a big fan of melatonin because people tend to take far too much of it relative to the normal physiological levels. And it has some other issues. But things like magnesium bioglycinate or magnesium thionate, thionineine, apigenin, which is chamomile tea.

But if you don't want to do the supplement, thing and I fully respect if people are averse to that, you know, pills and that's the sort of thing. You know, camomile tea is great. It has something called apigenin, which turns on for you officinados out there. It turns on a chloride channel system in the in the forebrain. It basically helps shut down thinking to go to sleep. It mellows you out. That's a real effect. And so there are a number of things that people can do. And sleeping is a skill. You get good at it. Do you need blackout curtains? Well, some people, you know, some people have thin eyelids. Some people have thick eyelids. You know, I have thin eyelids. I mean, you know, light goes on even with my eyes closed and it like wakes me up. Some people no problem. So sleep masks, you know, blackout curtains. I don't think people should become obsessive about sleep. What you want to do is develop some sleep practices. And the core ones are recognizing early in the evening that you're shifting towards sleep and starting to prepare for it the same way you would prepare for school or work or a work. out and not thinking that you can just go, go, go, go, go and then have a perfect night's sleep.

And, you know, so there, those are the things, always behaviors first, then in my opinion, then look to nutrition supplementation. And then if someone has a real clinical need and they should see a sleep specialist. And there are drugs that will help, you know, help people sleep. But I think the vast majority of people that are taking prescription drugs to sleep are don't need them or put differently, could achieve different if not better effects doing other things. Well, well said. You know, we didn't chat at all about sort of origin story for you.

Last time when you're on the podcast, we went right into things. And I have a question that kind of relates a little bit to your origin story, which I had a chance to prepare and, you know, listen to a little bit before this podcast. So you were talking about the body as one of the vehicles to focus the mind. Now, I know you've shared in the past that you're, you know, grew up in a household and I won't go into everything but at one point in time you know parents split and the household was a little bit unstructured yeah you kind of like it was there there was no

structure there was no one there there was no one there like the truth is there was no one there and I look I love my parents and they did you know an amazing job it would under trying circumstances doing the best they could with what they had and but yeah there were periods of time in which I was completely feral which was fun and scary and you know and uh if nothing else taught me that you know i have uh some internal resources i can always rely on totally and so i want to talk one about a little bit of that internal resources you know you from what i understand school is like there was not really a lot of interest i think you eventually got kicked out of high school i had to leave two high schools yeah i did

graduate eventually yep you know thank you wrote it actually i mean there were other students that helped me learn like there were a few i just mentioned somebody who like would sit with me and like help me try and understand my homework just enough to I mean I was a dreadful student this is not a look high school students work hard it's so much easier to leverage your plasticity early in life you have this gift of plasticity use it I don't you definitely do not want to try and come back from the back of the pack you know it's not no fun being the caboose yeah it's tough and not everybody ends up making it through statistically you know people who are in the back of the pack tend to stay there and life becomes tougher and stereotypes against them and stuff.

But again, going to this idea of working through the body to kind of focus the mind, it sounds like from what I've read from your story, there's a couple sort of key moments. You started seeing a therapist and that therapist was, I think, the one who gave you the book by John Cabot-Zen. And I want to come back to that in a second. But another one was, it seems like there was, I don't know if it was the same guy or somebody else that really got you into fitness right fitness working out and that seems to have been from the way that I was understanding your story one of the things that got you to start to focus in

and channel a little bit of this energy that was there is that an accurate way to it's very accurate yeah the guy's name was Bob Peters he was a uh a absolute Hulk of a human being he was just He was our football coach. I didn't play football. I was pretty skinny student. I was pretty skinny kid. I was real skinny kid. Skateboarder.

I was fragile. I kept breaking my bones, this kind of thing. So I initially went to him because I want to get stronger. I couldn't do a pull up. I was just, I was just weak. And also I was interested in a girl and like I heard her previous boyfriend to play football

or something. I think it was that guy like high school, you know, young male insecurity thing. I was like, I started my sit ups and my pushups and things like that. And, you know, he taught me that basically the body has this amazing response system, that if you give it the proper stimulus, it will respond. And I think, so I started doing some weight training and running.

For me, at first, it was running cross country and then I started weight training. And those two things really taught me that there wasn't always a direct and linear relationship between effort and reward, effort and outcome. But with physical fitness, it's about as good as it gets, right? I, you know, it's very hard. I could, you know, I could sympathize with a student who's, you know, getting grades in school and you don't really see how that's setting you up for something later. And if you're somebody who's challenged in academics, you can be very hard to think, you know, why should I even fight for a C plus?

Why should I just, you know, absolutely destroy myself for, you know, an A minus on this subject that I have no interest in. And the reason to do it is because you're training the mind to learn. And yes, you're developing skills, but you're really training the mind to learn. And I don't think that has to be done in the context of academics, although I do believe that cultivating the mind and the body is good. And I wish I'd done more of it when I was younger. But what Bob Peters taught me was that if I was consistent with my training, that my body would

respond. And it did. You know, over time, I got stronger. And I learned how to take care of my body. I learned how to push myself through pain, you know, physical pain. I guess I've always had a sort of weird relationship to pain. I wouldn't say I have a high pain threshold. I feel like, I'm the guy that stubs his toe and I'm like, I scream.

But then it goes flat. I have this very like steep inflection of pain and then it disappears. And I learned that so for me pain is like a big wall of fire, but it's a very thin wall. And that for me has been very helpful because every. Everything that's been challenging for me, I try and imagine as that kind of thin wall of very, very intense fire. It just doesn't last, but it's very intense. And so I'm just, I expect it.

So physical pursuits, I think are wonderful. And I do believe that everyone should have some relationship to the physical world and their physical body, regardless of abilities. And so that was the entry point. I'm very grateful to him. He was also, he was an amazing guy. I give this picture of this football coach, but he also, he was an incredible classical pianist. He taught himself how to play the piano. He also, he was a stay at home dad for a

while on a bet with his wife. He actually wrote the, he wrote the television thing, which eventually became the screenplay to Mr. Mom. I know I had mentioned that before and people said, no, it wasn't Bob Peters. Look it up. It was Bob Peters. It eventually got sold to John Hughes. But he lost a bet with his wife. She said, you couldn't do what I do. And he was like, you know, so they did the swap in the 70s, which was rare, raised three kids. I mean, it's an amazing human being did a lot of work with at-risk kids. And so I think having an example of somebody that was physically, like physically very robust, who also was cultivating his mind was a great example for me. And so, you know, I think oftentimes it just takes the right role model. And, and I'm a big believer that,

especially nowadays with everything being online, that we can internalize role models. You know, we don't need to know the person or have a coach or somebody like that. I mean, that's what's so wonderful about these people like David Goggins and Rich Roll and Joe Rogan and, and, you know, and Mark and you and all these people that are out there that are sharing is that you don't have to have a football coach or a friend or a neighbor that's going to point you to something. You can really latch on to an ethos and make it work for you. And, and, you know, in fairness and in reality, no one person is, you know, has all. the answers. You look to people as a, I've always imagined a committee in my life. There's like a table in my mind and I have very, I have a committee and I take advice from those people. Some of them have no idea who I am. I've never met them, but I try and internalize their ethos around certain things in a way that served me. And the relationship to the physical, to just bring it back to that,

is wonderful because what you start to realize is that the mind follows the body very readily. And I, you know, the mind is weak. I know people who are out there saying the mind is strong. You can do it. You can force the body to do it. The mind is very labile. The brain would be much happier, we're perfectly happy, digesting nonsense all day long than doing nothing.

Try sit doing nothing for five minutes. Try scrolling Instagram for five minutes. It's night and day, right? The body is powerful in its ability to shift the mind where you want it to go. And that's why I'm such a fan of getting into action, forward action. That's why I'm such a fan of using respiration as this bridge between the conscious and the unconscious.

And I believe in thought and thinking and hard problem solving too. I mean, I define an intellectual as somebody that can really appreciate and understand something at multiple levels of detail, not, you know. So, but I think it's all intellectualism on its own, you know,

just being in your head. This is a terrible, terrible place to live. You should try, I believe, each day, or every few days to get into a state of wordlessness outside of sleep. I'm a big believer in this, that running, not listening to audiobooks or anything, but just letting your mind drift is the substrate that allows, it's the precursor, I should say,

that allows you to then sit down and do very focused work. If you're having trouble focusing, chances are you're focusing too much, you know, that's basically what's happening. If you're having trouble focusing, chances are you're you're focusing too much in a distributed way it's like an appetite if you're just snacking all the time it's just the meal doesn't taste quite as good so running um any form of turning the brain conscious thought deliberate thought off will allow you to do incredibly deep work

after that it's but the mistake is just constantly digesting information and so i think we need to be more structured about our um waking states but the mistake is just constantly digesting information and so i think we need to be more structured about our waking states, but the body, in my opinion, should be the entry point. It sounds like in addition to the body directing the mind, there was also this deep connection with that you learned from this mentor who got you into working out and fitness. There was also a true relationship with effort and reward, right? You work out, even with a successful workout, you're not going to start to see yourself putting on maybe muscle right away, but just the joy that comes from putting in a good workout.

Whereas previously, and I think a lot of parents who are listening to this podcast, sometimes try to figure out, you know, how can I create drives or intrinsic motivation for my child? And a lot of school, at least back, you know, when you and I were in school too, it was much more common. It's changing a little bit now was you kind of have to take the authority's word for the fact that the reward is going to come down the rime. Yeah, and it doesn't always work.

And it doesn't always work. No. And, you know, and growing up where I grew up, you know, I also saw a lot of people who went after that carrot and then they, you know, for extrinsic reasons and did very well. And then later in life, we're very resentful, very unhappy. I think they still did quote unquote better in life because they, they positioned themselves to have options. So we can't deny that. That it buys you. options. You know, I, I guess I'm revealing some of my kind of hokey little secrets here, but for me, they've been very powerful. So I have a whiteboard in my gym at home, but I used to just

keep this in my notebook in the days when I went to places to work out. So I write down before every workout. I write, enjoy training hard. Because I had another mentor later while I was in college who he said, you know, he didn't say enjoy your training. He said, enjoy training hard. So I've developed this relationship where I just love training hard. I love the feeling of failure. I actually really like failed repetitions. I like failing. I like finding out where I'm limited because I know that that's the road to the next,

you know, next segment of progress. And so do you think that came from like early skateboard culture, you know, doing tricks and trying it? and knowing that you, you know, you expect that you're going to fall. Did that come then or did that come later on in life? Yeah, I'm trying to think about, you know, to be in full disclosure, skateboarding was a really important part of my upbringing in it. That was my family, basically. I basically just was part of this big pack of kids and there were no parents and we were all feral and we had a lot of fun. And unfortunately, you know, a lot of them met kind of a, you know, sad fate.

Some of them did incredibly well. But I've great, some people might see skateboarding as just those like clickety clackety things going to. on the sidewalk. There's a whole world of that that's self-regulated that I have deep respect for. But in full disclosure, I wasn't one of the good skateboarders. My body wasn't strong. I just, that's why I started working out because I was getting hurt all the time. And, but skateboarding is a good example of where it's effort, effort, effort,

fail, fail, like, you know, you're getting beat up. You're basically beating yourself up until you get the successful, you know, ride away. And that is incredible. I don't think I cultivate it there. For me, it was really in college, starting in my second year. Because I also had to leave college for poor performance and other reasons, none of which I'm proud of at all. But when I finally decided to just bite down and really do it,

I mean, I experienced so much physical agitation. And I just, but I realized that the information was in the books. Like, it was there. So it's not like I had to go, it was complicated sometimes to understand or remember, but that there's nothing simpler than something being presented to you. It doesn't get any easier than that, and that was hard. So, but I just got good at restricting my desire to get up from my chair. I got good at just pushing through.

I also have to say that a big part of working through stress and agitation is giving up on the immediate rewards of some of the social stuff. You know, those were pretty isolated years for me. I had to not go to as many parties as I would have liked. I wasn't one of the cool kids, you know, because I was studying all the time. I was working out all the time. So you have to be good at dealing with peer pressure.

I mean, if you want to be successful in life, you definitely either want to surround yourself with people who are also ambitious in the things that you enjoy and love and want to be good at, sports or school. That really helps. I did not have those friends around me at that time. or you have to be very good at pushing off peer pressure. And that will isolate you.

I guess, you know, they call that the empty elevator syndrome. You know, if you hang around with people that don't care about something and you're doing a lot of it, they're going to give you a lot of flack about that. I guess I'm sort of orienting this towards young people, but at any stage of life, if you're taking steps to better yourself, you're going to find yourself pretty lonely for a little while. So I got, I would spend all day Saturday at this park near where I, um, was in college, I would get myself a couple of hamburgers,

because I liked them. I would go to In-N-Out Burger, get a couple double doubles, and I'd sit under this tree and study all day long. I'd sleep, wake up, I study some more, sleep, I go back, and, you know, that's Saturday night in college, you're supposed to be out having fun, and then Sunday morning I'd do a 12-mile run. It was a sicko, you know, and slow run, I want to be clear.

So that's, occasionally I would go to parties, and I'd enjoy myself. But I started to find that I could predict that if I kept these behaviors up, that I was going to pass a lot of my peers. And competition is something that's interesting. I'm not an inherently competitive person. I'm not one of these people at the party. Like, if you play ping pong with me, I'd sooner let you win than try and beat you. Like, why? Let's just like rally.

Let's just play. I have friends that are really competitive. I've never been an inherently competitive person with anybody else. but if you start cultivating a sense that you have a goal and nothing's going to prevent you from getting to that because you are willing to put in the hours, that's a powerful feeling. And it can be taken too far. I've been told my college girlfriend said, you know, I created a monster. That's what she said, you know, because she was always encouraging me to work harder.

And then when I finally did, it went pretty extreme. But look, it's always easier to throttle back than to try and, you know, make a lot of it from behind. And if you're somebody who hasn't invested a lot in any of these domains like academics or in health or in fitness, the important thing is to just get started and get consistent. You know, I think that even if somebody is just walking five days a week consistently, just walking, right? It's the consistency is what pays off. And I think it pays off for a different reason than we think. Sometimes we want to see the physical or the financial results right away. But I think a big part of it is that you're training your nervous system. We have these things called central

pattern generators. These are neurons that are in our spinal cord in brainstem that generate repetitive movements. And the brain loves to load central pattern generators with work because then the mind can think about other things. And so a lot of the challenge of studying or taking on a fitness program or something like that, it's because it requires so much deliberate for brain activity. Do I drink the coffee then? Do I do it then? Do I do it work out at this time? Do I study this? Am I doing it right? All that constant rumination, right?

But once you just do, if you just decide I'm going to do it regularly, that's a non-negotiable part. Then a lot of that gets handed over to central pattern generators and it frees up a lot of energy. It frees up neural energy. And it frees up your ability to think about other things while you walk if that's what you want to do. I want to just like highlight something you said because I think this is going to be a big

aha moment for people is that, you know, we're constantly seeking freedom in our life. but actually you can get like structure is one of the best ways to create that freedom. Like think about it. You know, you make the joke and say that you guys are a bunch of like frail animals. You had all the freedom in the world. You could do anything at that time. But that wasn't necessarily getting you maybe the results that you wanted.

And through creating structure, there was another type of freedom that you opened up in life. And I think that anything that people want to pursue, health, focus, as we talked about a bunch in your last podcast, episode, a business goal, whatever you want to do, what does that structure look like that you can bring to your world and not only to create results, but to open up freedom into not having to having to think about it in a way. Yeah. No, absolutely. And I've, to this day, I struggle with structure, especially as more, if people out there think that the moment you start achieving some success, that things are going to get easier, it gets worse. It, there are more opportunities and therefore your structure gets disrupted, more email, more texts come in, more.

amazing possible relationships and places to eat and things to do it it actually starts to undermine the whole process if you're not careful and and that's coming from somebody who you know i'm fortunate to not have substance abuse tendencies and things that sort but i still have to i have a list and now i make it every day because when i just put it next to me and i didn't write it out it didn't work but like it literally starts dog walk number one get sun i mean like really basic stuff i mean i basically have to handhold myself in the same way that I talk about protocols on podcasts and that we're talking about here. I talk to myself that way as well. You know, get sunlight.

Then I do a 90 minute work block, which means I use the program freedom on the computer. No internet, no phone. I turn off the phone. I put in my car. Sometimes it's really bad. I mean, the phone is it's such a pull. Ask me for some code to get into something and then I think I need the phone. Next thing I'm doing something else.

So 90 minute work block. But what's beautiful is that the nervous system, and I don't know the underlying basis of this, but the nervous system has this feature to it where when we take the chaos of choice and we restrict ourselves to one of those choices, you get a neurochemical payoff. And it comes in the form of dopamine and acetycholine. Acetalcoline is really about a spotlight of focus. And here I want, in fairness, I'm a big fan. I've been reading a lot of Cal Newport's work, deep work, a world without email.

I've never met him, but I love his books. And he talks, some people call it flow, but what, you know, and people are familiar with flow, being engaged in an activity that's challenging. But there's something about activities that are forced restriction to one particular focus, right? So I'm going to write for 90 minutes or I'm going to think for 90 minutes or I'm just going to walk the dog. I live in an area now where I don't get reception on my dog walks and at first it was excruciating. I love it now.

It's like I just walk the dog. And there's mornings. So I have a bulldog. He does not like to walk. So I'm like, I got to get back and I'm frustrated. And it's hilarious, right? Because I notice myself and the way that my trip wire to agitation is so. slight. I'm like one of these people I can just in a second I'm aggravated because it's not

happening as quickly. And so I've learned to make the whole walk a process of me just like recognizing these features of myself and my bulldog Costello just plods a lot. He can care less, right? So the walk is very it's only about walking the dog. And the email, if it's email is only about checking email. Right. And there's something valuable to this. And I think the brain loves this when we give it this. And the brain, unfortunately, is also happy to just take a schmorgasbord of,

you know, pseudo-random thoughts and actions all day, every day. But there's something so deeply satisfying about focus. And I think we could all benefit from doing more of that. It's just so hard to do.

And I'm not an anti-phone guy. I'm from Silicon Valley. I use the phone. I'm addicted to my phone. I admit it. I'm addicted to. to my phone, but I'm trying really hard to cultivate a different relationship to it because I think that now that it's 2021, I think looking back, phones, we've had them for about 10 years.

There are so many examples of ways in which they erode our best relationship to life, so many ways that I don't think we should get rid of them, but I think we really need to start being conscious of the ways in which they are eroding our productivity, our creativity, our relationships. And I don't have any obvious answers to this. I just have tools that I use and that I've found to be a benefit. But I think in the next five years, we are going to see a shift toward people really moving away from phones as much as we use them now. Yeah, it almost seems like in our evolutionary history, we have to be more of a student of focus now, whereas life's circumstances would naturally pull us towards lifting that weight of focus a little bit

on our own. You still had to apply effort, but it's almost like trying to get good sleep now with a lot of sounds going in the background or somebody every so often coming and waking you up and saying, hey, are you okay? And you're like, I'm sleeping. Right. I just, you know, that's- Tons of interference.

So it's almost like if you're not a student of focus today, I mean, most of my friends that have created, you know, pretty large companies always tell me, and, you know, we have this men's group that we meet up regularly and we chat. They say, you know, it is definitely feels tougher to start a business today than even 10 years ago with amount of distractions that are fighting for our attention. Yeah. And there are different categories of people out there. And I want to be respectful of the fact that not everyone's trying to, you know, build and create. But I would say if you're a creator, if you want to build something, business or write or music or sport or anything, I'll tell you, I know I'm fortunate to know a good number of very successful people.

If you're a creator, you're, you have to always ask yourself, are you playing offense? Are you playing defense or you just benchwarming? And most of the activities on the phone, not all of them are in the defense or benchwarming category. If you're a content creator, you want to be a content creator, you absolutely have to take the effort to create space in order to produce content. And that's going to require agitation and loneliness and frustration for brief periods of time. I'm not saying about for years of your life.

I mean, for five, 10 minutes while you're not tending to the voices and the things that need you. And yeah, they need you and they will have anxiety and you will have yours. But if you're going to produce content, you need to create that space. The other thing is that the phone is wonderful, right? you can turn on a reverie hypnosis script and, you know, just because it's there and you can use it. So I want to acknowledge its utility. It's a wonderful tool. But the other thing is that young people have integrated the phone into their nervous system in their lives in ways that other people haven't. So I would say that for people that are listening to this now in 2021 and they are 20 years or younger,

chances are the phone isn't going to feel as intrusive as it will for somebody who's older than that. just because of the way that when the nervous system wires up. Like I had a 14 year old niece and the phone is just wired into her relationships. So if you take away her phone, she suffers in a way that maybe doesn't justify taking away the phone. So this is going to be an interesting kind of generational conversation. But if you have a hard time not turning off your phone for an hour to do focused work or 90 minutes if that's a real challenge that that's a great invitation to start working through some of

the neural circuits for what we call no go so I do this now I'm revealing all my little weird quirks but they're grounded in neuroscience so we have circuits that are called go circuits these are are if you want to know that if you want to look them up there's circuits of the basal ganglia and they're involved in any time we make a decision to make a behavior like reach out I just picked up the bottle put it down deliberately and then we have no go circuits these are ones that suppress behavior and they've done a lot of beautiful experiments where you can create a video game or something where people have the impulse to make a choice in order to score points in a certain amount of time and sometimes you have to go and sometimes you have to no go. You have to avoid

movement. And suppressing movement takes effort, right? And all you have to do is experience a social gathering and see one person pull out their phone and you just notice everyone pulls out their phone. That tells you it's been handed over to central pattern generators. I don't think it's conscious. I don't think people are like, oh, exciting. I'm going to look at my phone. It's literally just now it's socially queued. So it's sort of like someone wipes the side of their nose. Like maybe they got something.

And then you know, people will just start doing this. It's like human behavior. We mimic each other. Subconsciously. So we do it with the phone. So I have this thing where every, I don't believe that we have as much attention deficit as people think. There's about 10% of the population that probably has legitimate attention deficit.

It's getting worse and the numbers are creeping towards 12% 15 and 20 in adults as well because of the phone, just to be totally honest. So this morning, I experienced this. I went for a run. I was listening to music and I wanted to see if I had reception and check something on my phone. And so I have a rule. I do 25 times a day. This is just my order, sense of order. 25 times a day, I try and suppress a desire to take an action. And I'll tell you, it was excruciating. I wanted to do it so badly. I don't even know why. It's just I'm trying to override some circuitry to just look when I have reception, to just look at my phone, see where text messages or whatever direct messages. So I get to the car and I was like, whoa, I made it.

Do I look now? And I thought, don't do it. Don't do it. I don't think I should do it. I should do it. And I sit there for about a minute. This is crazy. I'm a grown man, 45 years old, right? I should drive home. It's not, but I didn't do it. And I was like, this feels really good. So what I'm trying to do now is train myself to not be. reflexive about the phone. And I think that requires a conscious effort. Eventually it'll become more automatic. And the same way that reaching for it became automatic. So these no-go circuits require a lot of energy, a lot of work. But we can train them up. And that's what's cool. And that's neuroplasticity, the brain's nervous system's ability to change in response to deliberate focus and experience. We're the only species, as far as we know, that can rewire our

nervous system deliberately in this way. If other animals do it, like my dog Costello, if he tries to do this, he doesn't do it very well. But humans can do this. But the agitation of, you know, the no-go effort is, I want to boldface and underline twice the word effort. It is supposed to feel challenging. So, you know, I don't know that it's necessary for some people might be very good at this. I think people who are older, 50, 60, they are probably better at this because their nervous system didn't incorporate the phone into their world quite as much. But, you know, again, I don't want to demonize the phone, but I think learning to control one's behavior with the phone

is going to be the distinction between those that are successful, I really believe this, and those that are not. And there will be a range there. It's not black and white, right? It's not a stark contrast. There'll be a number of shades of gray in between. but the better you are at controlling your relationship to distraction and to these impulses that draw you off track, the more you're going to be able to produce things. Also, the better you will be

for relationships of all kinds. There are certain people that are more clued into this than others, but everybody appreciates someone who's very present. I have a friend. It's why you introduce him to any of my girlfriends in the past and, you know, they walk away. I was always, he's a really good friend, but I was always a little envious of him because they always go, he has the best presence. And you know what it is? His phone never comes out of his pocket. And when you're with him, he's actually just talking to you.

It's not that complicated. Or he's not even thinking about their phone. You know, some people don't have their phone out, but you can tell that they're kind of thinking or they're waiting for that next moment. Exactly. And I think what you said is, it's so beautiful because it's not just present on the micro,

our own individual relationships, our relationship with our work, but it's also present on the macro. You know, there was this really great Harvard Business Review article. We'll link to it in the show, notes where it said, you know, what's the difference between people that people and companies, right? So personal brands and companies that get a little bit successful. Why are people who get a little bit successful? Why don't they go on to become Uber successful, like extremely

successful when they already had that momentum. And a big part of it for both people and organizations, so anybody who's running teams is distractions. As you get more successful, as you mentioned earlier, more opportunities come. more reasons to not focus as a human level in our relationships, but also as a company level. You take on every opportunity instead of doing what got you to do there in the first place, which was doubling down on that focus. So whether you run a team,

whether this is in your household, whether it's just your own mind for your relationships, for your own mental health, focus is deeply linked with your own sense of contentment, joy, and success, however you define it. Right. I absolutely agree. I'm still not through it all the way, but Cal Newport's book, A World Without Email, talks

about this. I think he uses the phrase, a hyperactive hive mind in companies. This was adopted in the last 20 years or so, where it just seems like the more is better mentality, more interactions being better. And it's been shown, and he gives data to support this, that over and over again, the ability to just drop into focused work or work in small teams. You know, I'm very blessed now. You know, my podcast team is a wonderful group of four people, more or less.

Having a small team is really beneficial. If you look in military special operations, they're very aware of limiting team size in terms of, you know, operators that work in groups of, you know, four to six to eight. You can do incredible outsized things when a small group like that. When things get too big, it just, it just wicks out. And that's also when problems started rising. That's when people start making mistakes. Oversight is one source of that.

Fatigue is another. And, you know, I guess it is all to say that learning to cultivate a life of focus, and I should say it should be produced. The way to support that is to have components of your day of wordlessness and de-focus. I do want to emphasize that because it's not about waking up and from morning till night being ultra-focused, right? I don't I don't make I don't do the make my bed first thing I admit it I sometimes like it happens midday okay right I wouldn't make it in the military but we knew that already anyway so the you know that it's about being in in recognition of where you're at and focused and dropping in deeply for certain portions of the day but I also have a deliberate decompress time of my day right I take 30 minutes a day and I either take a nap or I do a yoga nidra or I just let my mind go but that does. does mean not mindless scrolling,

although I do some mindless scrolling too. I allow myself that, but having periods of the day where you let the mind defocus and just kind of drift in the same way that your mind drifts a bit during sleep. That is what allows you to focus. So it very intensely afterward

or on a consistent basis. So it's not about being a total animal from morning till night and then just expecting to switch off the thing and go right to sleep. It's about, for me, there are really two blocks, two 90-minute blocks, one early in the day and one later in the day,

where I commit to doing really focused work twice a day. And I have to fight tooth and nail to create the space for those and to make sure it happens. And if I fail a lot, you know, if something gets in the way and I don't do that, I just try and get back on track as quickly as possible. I don't bring my phone, I put my phone on airplane mode when I'm training

and doing any kind of physical work. now because it's just too distracting. I want to go back to something you shared earlier, which was this idea of a committee. You know, you have these people in your life, whether you know them and some people you don't know that are kind of, uh, Seth Godin sometimes says like, you don't always need a mentor, but you can have heroes in your life, right? People that you look up to. Who would be some other people that are on that, uh, that committee of yours?

You know, people that you kind of like look to, even if you don't know them personally, for, uh, guidance, uh, um, you know, um, inspiration or a reminder of sort of that intrinsic quality inside of you that you see in them. Yeah. So the, um, someone I keep in mind a lot is my, my graduate advisor, a woman by the name of Barbara Chapman. She's an excellent scientist. Uh, she passed away, unfortunately, too young, breast cancer 50. But I think about Barbara a lot because her relationship to work was really special. She really understood what it was to be what we call a serious scientist. There's a, there's a phrase that scientists use, like, are they a serious scientist?

Which is really about trying to seek truth. You know, there's always an element of getting the paper published, getting the grant funded, packaging things in a way that's digestible. That's an important and vital part of the scientific process, of any process, really. But she had this way in which she held the, like the pursuit of facts of truth as wholly above everything else. So I definitely keep Barbara in mind because there is a way in which we can start to dilute ourselves in the thinking, you know, that our ideas are strong when, you know, have we really thought through all the alternatives here? Have we really done that? But also just the

purity of it, you know, just in a life of inquiry or of any kind, just to really try and get close to why I started doing it. I started doing science because I was curious about how we work in the mind and body. It was just genuine curiosity. And so I keep her in mind a lot. I keep, I have a good friend, Pat Dossett, who was in the SEAL teams,

and then got out, and he and Blake Mikoski, who started Tom's shoes, right, had this company made for them on the advisory for. And Pat, I think of a lot, he's a close, I'm fortunate to have him as a close friend because his, he,

the way he does the little things, is really impressive. He's always five minutes early. Always five minutes early. I struggle with punctuality. He's always five minutes early. He also is very good about the presence thing, like he,

about what he's doing he's doing. He's also very good. He's probably always five minutes early because he always leaves when he needs to leave. This is something I actually learned from him. When it's time to go, you just say, thanks, I'm out. Like none of the long trailing goodbyes, which is something I'm guilty of.

But also I really appreciate his ethics. And he's somebody who thinks very deeply about why one started something and staying on that. So those two. And of course there are so many amazing examples out there of impressive people. But they're the ones I think about a lot lately in terms of really trying to stay close to the central chord of why I, you know, why I'm here and what I'm trying to do, which is trying to discover and share knowledge. in ways that are useful to people. And, you know, I'd be remiss. I'm sort of laughing in advance to this.

I'm chuckling. But I think about my bulldog Costello way too much. I talk about him all the time now on my podcast and other podcasts. But I think about him a lot because, and the way he approaches life. Because, you know, dogs are incredible because you see tremendous variation in one species, dogs of different temperaments and body sizes and behaviors. and his temperament is unique. It's stubborn and joyful and all.

But like there's something about stubbornness. He's so stubborn. And it's teaching me actually to be more stubborn about like, I know what I like and I know why I'm here and what I'm doing. It took me a long time to find that. But I'm starting to become more. I'm trying to internalize Costello more. So he definitely has a spot at the committee table.

And, And bulldogs are hedonists too. He loves sleep. And the way he eats food is in, it's insane. He can devour like a huge bowl of food. So he's that, so I'm actually trying to cultivate a little bit more of his like, like love for food and love for sleep and like really enjoy what it is I'm doing. And I'm also starting to become more and more stubborn, but maybe that's just aging.

There's a, there's a short little book by Eckart Tolley, author of Power of Now and stuff. And it's called Guardians of Being. And it's basically about animals. Beautiful title. It's about animals. Oh, man. Is it? I'm going to read.

I'm going to get this book today. Dogs, cats primarily. But it's basically how as human beings, you know, we struggle so much with our mind, pulling us in so many different directions. And for some people, it's a lifelong battle. They feel it really shouldn't be a battle, but it's a lifelong battle with their mind. And not getting space and sort of awareness. And inside of there, it's like really talking about how pets can be one of the greatest

reminders about presence in our lives and reflecting back upon us the things that we might need or benefit from. I just thought of that. No, I brought it up. Thank you. I'm a huge and I mean, I'm obsessed with animals and I've heard of Eckhart Tolle. I know a little bit of his stuff. My sister who's a therapist is obsessed with his work and really loves it. I'm definitely going to get this book and check it out because I think animals have a lot to teach us about how we work because their nervous systems, I've looked at a lot of them, admittedly, their nervous systems are simpler. And what you find in simpler nervous systems is that a couple core sets of operations are extremely well honed. So the bulldog is the bulldog because their brain is organized that way.

A centhound or a retriever behaves that way because of the way their nervous system is organized. And human beings are gifted with this potential to have so many different behaviors or learn music or not, learn basketball or not. Other animals don't get that set of choices. And I think it leads to a confusion about who we are and what we're about. We are about variety and choice and optionality. And that's wonderful on the one hand. But I think if we want to understand what the extreme version of any kind of expression

would be of stubbornness, of glee, of creativity, I think animals can reveal that to us because they are the more focused honed down example of the way a nervous system could be built. And so I'm excited to read this book. You know, you just, that reminds me that I've heard you share in other interviews that you were kind of obsessed with animals and animal movement growing up.

And also just recently you did a whole series on kind of movement. And one of them, movement, muscle growth, you know, giving a lot of different, you know, tips. You talk about posture, right? What's important for people to understand when it comes to exactly this topic that we're chatting about, which is movement, function, the body controlling the brain. What's important for people to understand when it comes to this topic of posture? Yeah.

And always when the word posture is spoken, then everyone starts noting their posture. I have a friend Kelly Starrett, who does a lot of work in the, is a company called the Ready State. They've done a lot of work in like physical rehabilitation, sports performance, and kind of thing. It's a tremendous athlete. He and his wife, Julia, are both really amazing athletes. And he always says, they're big on the standing desk thing. They've got kids. They've been doing a bunch of work out, get standing desks into schools. But he also makes this comment that, you know, we weren't meant to sit all day, but we also weren't meant to stand all day.

So, you know, the idea is that we should be able to move in a lot of different dimensions and feel comfortable doing that. I mean, movement is a huge discussion, but there are a couple things that relate to posture that are interesting. One thing that I've learned from Kelly, and that's certainly been true for me in terms of longevity and in sport and just making me feel better all around is that usually when we have pain someplace, that the solution lies in doing some work in strengthening the musculature above and below that pain. So we tend to focus on the knee when it's really like, like, you know, maybe you need to do a lot of like to be alice work or you know hip work because the knee injury is a reflection of the way that

the body moves or fails to move on the whole so one of the things that i've become conscious of is um in looking at the literature is that you know things that generate asymmetries are create problems they really do and so trying to really cultivate symmetry in terms of um a lot of unilateral movements for weight training for instance so like unilateral leg movements or and you lateral arm movements. They bring about balance because we develop these asymmetries the same way we become right-handed

and left-handed. Most of us aren't ambidextrous. The phone, again, is terrible. We're all starting to look like a folded over accordion or a semi-melted candle, right? You include it if I'm not conscious of it. It is very clear, and the yogis will attest to this, but I don't do a lot of yoga, admittedly,

that we are in internal rotation too much. So a simple test people can do is if they just relax and they push, putting it out their standing, relax, and they put out their thumbs. If your thumbs are pointed in, chances are your shoulder is internally rotated, right? And that some strengthening of the upper back muscles

and rear neck muscles should be done so that we're not in external rotation, like the Fonzie thing. Half of the people listening to this won't know who Fonzie is, but like the like thumbs pointing out in both directions, but that doing movements of that sort can then allow us to be neutral, right? Shoulder neutral again.

So, you know, I've got a friend and he texts. If you're listening to this, not watching a video, he texts with his phone up near his face, even on the street, which is hilarious. But his posture is amazing. Great posture is such a boon to life. And so these little things like internal, whether or not we're overly internally rotated, trying to be a little bit more externally rotated. The other thing is with respect to exercise that has been fun for me to learn about is,

you know, not everybody, including myself, has time. or interest in doing a lot of different kinds of like animal movement. I mean, I'm a huge animal mobility. I mean, that stuff is beautiful. Like the stuff like Ido Portals movement culture stuff. If people haven't, everyone knows who he is, presumably. But if you don't, check out his, his Instagram. He's a, he's just been doing this for so long, but just incredible suppleness of movement and

balance and sure strength and all that. But huge range of movement, um, so-called movement culture is the phrase that he coined. But one of the things that's been fun to incorporate, is, you know, we can do what are called open and closed chain movements. Closed chain movement would be where like our hands and feet are in contact with the ground. So think down dog is closed chain, right? Think jumping. That's open chain.

Right. Shooting a free throw is open chain. You're actually pushing through. The nervous system actually, it, there's an interesting literature on this, the scientific literature, that closed chain movement tends to build, that it's going to sound very Eastern philosophy, but very build energy. in the system, we tend to come away from it feeling kind of invigorated and charged. And that's because of the way that we have these chains of what are called ganglia neurons along

the spinal cord. And when we engage in movement that's closed chain where we're in contact with things at both sides, the way they fire is kind of in sequence. And when we come away from that movement or those types of movements, we tend to feel kind of like energized, kind of like jacked up, you know, and like we have energy. Whereas jumping movements or throwing movements, like if you were to physically throw a medicine ball, or you were to, some people can do this, don't hurt yourself folks, but like you do a chin up,

but you actually blast through the chin up and let go over the bar for a second. Those are incredibly taxing, but they are very good for dumping excess energy. So a lot of people are stressed and then they're going to work out, but they're coming out of the workouts with more energy, neural energy,

then they went in. And when I say neural energy, just so in case there's some neuroscientists out there, I don't want you to think I've, you know, completely lost my mind. What I'm talking about is what you're creating is a potential for the nerve cells to fire,

like a readiness to fire. So things like martial arts are, they cultivate these practices, um, both open chain and closed chain kind of intuitively. Um, so, and there's a practice a lot of like exhale emphasize breathing on ballistic

movements like the, like the, like the, like that's actually expelling energy, which is a wonderful thing if you tend to carry too much stress. Whereas going and just lifting weights, close chain movements, barbell curls,

bench presses and thing, you're actually creating more tension in the neural readiness in the system. So that makes sense? Absolutely. So this kind of a, rather than get too scientific about this, it would take hours. What I think was kind of fun for people perhaps to explore

is the extent to which different kinds of movements like with continuous tension will kind of create energy so you can come out of those workouts feeling really focused and like energized. Whereas if you're somebody who tends to just feel like you're carrying tons of tension inside, you want to dump energy, then throwing things, ballistic movements, like where you're just literally like dumping all your energy, these so-called open chain movements, if you can handle it like jumping and ballistic stuff, those can be very beneficial. And all these have roots in the way that motor neurons of the nervous system work. And again, it's kind of fun to

just look to animals and just see they a lot of them they look different because they do different types of movements right a kangaroo doesn't look like a tiger for a reason it's because of it you think it's because of its body but its body is a reflection of the way the nervous system works not the other way around in addition to this through line where we were started off talking about movement being able to focus the mind you also have been very open that you were recommended to go see a therapist when you were really young and What did you feel that you got out of therapy in addition to this fitness training and the working out that you were doing? What was the real sort of distinction that came from you for you at an early age that maybe wasn't a way that you saw either yourself or the world?

Yeah. Well, and to be honest, you know, earlier you asked, you know, who's at my committee. So I, believe or not, somehow I figured out a way to make this work, even in tough financial times. And I know not everyone can do that, but I've been one way or another, I figure, so I've been seeing that same therapist for, gosh, I think it's now been 35 years. Incredible. We have a very close relationship, obviously. I think it's a healthily bound, boundary to relationship.

Actually, until I learned Oliver Sacks, who passed away, the neurologist, a man who mistook a white fur hat, I have very few heroes in life. Oliver Sacks is absolutely one of them. incredible. If you haven't seen the movie about the documentary movie about him, it's incredible about the field of neurology. He had a therapist, I think, for 42 years. And then I felt kind of indicated because what did I learn from therapy? Well, as a young person, I didn't have a choice but to go. I had to go if I want to be admitted back in school and stay in school. But what I learned pretty quickly was that therapy has multiple levels of support. One is somebody who's just going to

hear you. A lot of people just don't have the opportunity to share what's going on with themselves. A lot of people sometimes they may not even know what they think because they haven't said it out loud. Yeah. Most of us barely can understand what we're thinking and feeling, much less what anyone else is feeling. So the next time you think that you understand what someone is thinking and feeling, remember, most of us don't even understand what we are thinking and feeling. But I was, look, I got lucky. He's somebody who's extremely smart and encouraged me to take on physical practices and use those as a portal, not just, you know, lie on the couch and talk about problems. In fact, these days we don't even really talk about problems per se. The way therapy works,

there are multiple aspects to this. But one is you're trying to create a place where you can explore your own mind. That's really what good therapy is about. It might start with a problem or a conflict, but it's really about being able to explore your own mind. And you're constantly asking the question, what's driving this behavior or this pattern of thought? Why am I anxious? And the immediate answer is never the answer. You know, if you think, oh, I'm anxious because I've got too much work or I've got these things, you know, sure, that's true. But what you're really starting to do is peel back the layers. And what you're trying to do is create through the relationship with the therapist. You're trying to create a process, a reflective process.

The goal of the therapist is to make themselves obsolete. That's very clear. I've asked this numerous times throughout the years. Like, when are we done? You know? And we're done when we know we're done because you, I was told, because you internalize a reflective process, an ability to see a problem or see a circumstance

and take a stance of where am I in this situation? Where are they? And to start parsing out the pieces. And it sounds very abstract, but, and some people might just think, This is terrible when I feel stressed. I go for a run. And I agree.

I think an exploration of thinking of the mind is not for everybody. I do think that somatic therapies are now becoming more and more popular because many people just think like, why would I want to talk about a problem? It just makes the problem worse. It heightens my focus on the problem.

I absolutely agree. I absolutely agree. I just personally have found great depth of experience in realizing how crazy my mind is and how it will come up with these theories about why I feel a certain way and how through a reflective process I can now, certainly not in the past, but now I can sort of get distance from things very quickly. And I think that can only come about through really being able to sit with your thinking, sit with your feelings.

And sure, over the years there have been events in my life that have, you know, where it was like crisis management for sure it's like how are we going to manage this personal crisis but i think therapy is is a if the relationship is right i think it can be a beautiful experience and it it can change the way that you view the mind and it for me therapy nowadays it's not so much about me getting anything out of it it's just making sure that i can show up as as well as i can to the other things and people in my life. But, and for people that can't, fortunately, therapies become more accepted and more, hopefully more affordable.

But for people that can't afford therapy, there is a version of this that's going to sound ridiculously simple. But being able to journal in full honesty with oneself is very powerful. Journaling is, I would say, and writing is the way that human beings have worked out a lot of their internal conflicts and discovered incredible depth of meaning and excitement and creativity over the you know for centuries thousands of years so if people can't get access to a therapist I would encourage them to journal with the full understanding that no one is going to read those journals a lot of people start third personing they start thinking they're writing their life book

or their memoir um really journaling in full honesty is powerful some people look at this as a data dump like just a way to kind of get all the mess out early in the day. That's powerful. As is sitting down and deciding to write in full honesty about something that's extremely challenging or that one is extremely ashamed of or afraid that people will ever find out or these kinds of things. Because there's something about the way if the mind sees truth, like it sees its internal externalized, it immediately looks crazy.

crazy. And in that recognition that so much of what goes on in our heads is crazy, there's this weird thing. I don't really understand it where other amazing things crop up as surprises. Let me give a different example. Nowadays the words gaslighting comes out a lot. People are like, you're gas lighting, you're gas lighting. I'm very averse to people using clinical terms in the context of, you know, you know online psychology it just doesn't seem to you know it doesn't work for me but the the reality is that most people when they feel something they don't want to feel they use what's called evacutive projection they try and project it out they try and evacuate the feeling this is something so learning to just be able to sit with that and and journaling is one way to do that it it overcomes

this need to evacuate anger frustration etc so that The mind's natural reflex is when it doesn't feel something it likes to look for something external to solve the problem or to evacuate the problem. Right. And you've talked about how that can create like even dopamine inside of the brain. Yeah. Frustration. Projection. Projection is a good one.

And the simplest example of projection is physical aggression. I'm angry with you. I come over and hit you. I've evacuated the feeling, right? And it's an example unless it's in the context of like sanctioned martial arts where it's consensual or something like that. It is always an example of weakness, always, unless it's warfare or something like that where there's a purpose, right?

You know, the military or whatever it is, but where there's a contract of people in battle. So we started off talking about sort of like the therapy model, but journaling and learning to deliberately evacuate thoughts and feelings onto paper, there's something about the way that the mind recognizes its own self, because you're basically taking it. your mind and you're putting it to paper. When you read and hear those words, when you see that happening, it has this amazing ability

to untangle what seems like a mess. And so, and I feel like it's important that people understand that there doesn't need to be another person there. Although if it's the right person, that can be a real accelerator to the whole process. Right.

If you can afford it, amazing, and there's a lot of really great, you know, more accessible options that are there, but even journaling, just finding some outlet to get a sense of where is my mind. Andrew, this has been great. I feel like a great part too.

We could easily be going. I feel like we just got started. We had a nice little chit-chat before we were recording. I feel like we could keep on going here, but I know you got a couple of the podcasts coming up, and I want to be respectful of your time. And I want to say thank you for coming back on the podcast and doing, I think the origin story,

especially as your profile starts to become a little bit bigger. It's nice for people to hear because you have all the, you have all the accolades academically and with the research and other stuff. And I think it's very hopeful, especially for young people to hear, wow, he wasn't good in school. He wasn't, you know, had challenges. And, you know, these were the things he struggled with. It just makes us more of a human to the people that might look up to us. And I know a lot of people look up to you.

So I appreciate you just opening up a little bit more about your story and continuing down the pathway of providing actionable, free tools that people could use. So I just wanted to say thank you so much for coming back on the podcast. And I appreciate your brother. Oh, well, thanks for having me. And thanks for opening up the conversation to those things. It's not things I readily share, but I'm always happy to if people are curious. And thanks for doing what you do. Just so people have it, since the last time that you came on, you launched a podcast.

It's doing fantastic. I always see it in the top 10 up there. And can we give it a little shout out and where people can continue to find you through that podcast, as well as the social media channels? Sure, yeah. So the podcast is Huberman Lab, for lack of a better name, Huberin Lab podcast. And that's on all the standard platforms.

You can find on, you know, we do a YouTube version of it and Apple, Spotify, et cetera. And then I have an Instagram where I teach neuroscience and neuroscience-related themes. And that's also Huberman Lab. And sometimes those are a little short tidbits, you know, 15 seconds. Sometimes they're minute long.

Sometimes they're five minutes long. And they're designed to be accessible to anybody. So you don't need any scientific background. It's really just focus on neuroscience, neuroscience related themes and tools, things that people can use in various contexts, physical, mental, et cetera. And a lot of good animal videos too. And some animal videos. And my bulldog Costello makes the occasional cameo on. Yeah.

This is a cute dog. Well, thank you again, brother. Really appreciate you coming back. Thank you.