Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The Fastest Way to Reduce Stress and Anxiety | Dr Andrew Huberman #367

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today's Bite Size episode is brought to you by AG1, a science-driven daily health drink with over 70 essential nutrients to support your overall health. It includes vitamin C and zinc, which helps support a healthy immune system, something that is really important at this time of year. It also contains prebiotics and digestive enzymes that help support your gut health. It's really tasty and has been in my own life for over five years. Until the end of January, AG1 are giving a limited time offer. Usually they offer my listeners a one-year supply of vitamin D and K2 and five free travel packs with their first order. But until the end of January, they are doubling the five free travel packs to

Starting point is 00:00:51 10. And these packs are perfect for keeping in your backpack, office, or car. If you want to take advantage of this limited time offer, all you have to do is go to drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bite Size, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 227 of the podcast with Dr. Andrew Huberman, a professor of neuroscience at Stanford University School of Medicine. In this clip, he explains why being able to control our autonomic nervous system is so important for our health and happiness and shares a powerful tool to immediately reduce stress and anxiety. One of the things I've heard you talk about before, Andrew, which has always

Starting point is 00:01:55 struck in my mind, probably because I subscribe to this view as well, is you've said this, almost all of the unfortunate things that happen to us in life is down to a poorly regulated nervous system. I wonder if you could speak to that initially, because I think that really helps set some context for why breathing or whatever it might be, why it's so beneficial. Learning to control your nervous system will indeed change everything. Your whole life gets better and mentally and physically. We've heard so much about mindfulness, which is a wonderful concept. We hear about mental health, we hear about physical health, but it's never actually been defined what is a mentally healthy person, right? Usually when we're

Starting point is 00:02:41 talking about mental health, we're talking about mental illness. So to me, a mentally healthy person and a physically healthy person is somebody that can be in action when they need to be in action, can relax when they need to relax, can focus when they need to focus and can sleep when they need to sleep. That's a pretty darn good life. And you can go, you can get a lot done and you can have very effective relationship to yourself and others with that kind of ability. And that ability is anchored in the nervous system. I also believe, and I've had a lot of experience with the fact that there are times when things can feel so overwhelming and we are so back on our heels that we have to get outside of our head. And the best way to do that is to get into physical practices. The imagery I like to use is that any moment we are either flat footed, forward center of mass, which is kind of leaning into life and feeling strong, or we're back on our heels.

Starting point is 00:04:05 Many people feel back on their heels a lot of the time. So the question is, how do you go from mentally and physically back on your heels to flat foot on one end is our ability to get into states of alertness and focus. And on the other end is the ability to relax and get into states of calm or sleep or deep rest or focused, but relaxed. Maybe the even seesaw would be focused, but relaxed. And so much of being functional is the ability to move from alert to asleep because sleep is so key for our health, of course, or from sleep to getting up and getting outside and exercising. But a lot of people get trapped at one end of the seesaw or the other, chronically activated or chronically exhausted. And the notion of the seesaw is important here because it's not so much about your ability to be on either end. It's about the tightness of the hinge of that seesaw. What I'm talking about are tools that allow the seesaw to be calibrated so that it's very easy to go from sleep to alert, from alert to relax, from relaxed

Starting point is 00:04:57 back to work, as opposed to getting locked in one position. Being a functional human and a functional human on any kind of budget means that you need to be able to turn on and off focus and relaxation and stress and so forth in a way that you are in control of that. And so when you start learning how to control your nervous system, it's tremendously empowering. The ability to control your nervous system in a dynamic way in short timescales, on the timescale of seconds, on the timescale of days, on the timescale of weeks, that's what leads to really terrific work and school and relationship and sleep and exercise practices. I just simply can't think of any other route to it. There's no

Starting point is 00:05:41 one tool or pill or potion or practice that's going to allow the whole system that is you to fall into place. Whereas if you learn to control your nervous system from the standpoint of attention, focus, relaxation, and sleep, and you use the appropriate tools to access those, then you find that everything else works better. That idea, learning to control your nervous system, I think is one that we should just pause on because, you know, sometimes in life we'll want to up-regulate our nervous system to, I guess, perform a certain task. Other times in life, we'll want to down-regulate it. In my experience, and I'm sort of, my bias is as a clinician, what I have seen is that at least the people who come in to see me are usually struggling to down-regulate. They've taken on too much. We know

Starting point is 00:06:34 that it's a big problem. Chronic, unmanaged stress, burnout, taking on too many things, not actively prioritising relaxation. That's a big problem. So first of all, would you agree that actually that's a key skill and one that actually is potentially not as hard as we think to teach people? And then what are some of those practical tools that we can use to down-regulate our nervous system? Yeah, well, first of all, I completely agree. And I think that chronic stress is a major issue. And stress makes everything worse when it's chronic. And stress, when you can take advantage of the mechanisms of stress and leverage them, it's tremendously empowering. There's a truth, which is that we are generally compensated in life for the degree to which we can lean into

Starting point is 00:07:25 hard work and effort. But a lot of people learn how to hit the accelerator. And as you said, they never learn how to decompress. So a big part of my lab's work has been to develop zero cost tools that people can use in real time to adjust their levels of stress and calm down quickly. And then we've also been developing tools that people can do as short practices separate from real life, meaning like a five minute a day practice that will, what we call raise their stress threshold so that their trigger point to become stressed is further away. And the first practice, which is based on work that goes back to the 1930s, actually, it's what's called the physiological sigh. Physiological sighs are something that we all

Starting point is 00:08:12 actually do about once every five minutes. So in sleep or in wakefulness, every five minutes or so, we take a big, deep breath. We don't realize it, but we do this and dogs will do this right before they go down to sleep. Humans do this. The physiological side that I recommend that people do when they're feeling stressed anytime or any place, I suppose, unless you're underwater is to do two inhales through the nose back to back. The first one is a big, long inhale. And then the second inhale, you're only going to be able to sneak in a tiny bit of air and then a long, complete exhale through the mouth. So it's, so it's a very sharp little second inhale after the first one. You almost feel like you couldn't get any more air in doing that just once, sometimes two or three times, but just once we know from data in our laboratory and other laboratories will immediately reduce your levels of stress and anxiety immediately.

Starting point is 00:09:09 It's the fastest approach that I'm aware of to de-stress far faster than trying to tell yourself not to worry. Certainly far faster than telling you or somebody else to take a deep breath. It's this, this double inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth is a very efficient way to bring in oxygen, dump carbon dioxide and reinflate the alveoli of the lungs so that in the immediate moments afterward, you're breathing more naturally and more calmly. So it's a, you know, I don't like to use the phrase of like power tools and this kind of thing because that's not the business I come from. But I think if there were one tool I'd love for people to have in their kit is this physiological sigh so big inhale second inhale through the nose just squeeze in a little bit more and then long exhale through the mouth and that one has saved me and I from the feedback I've gotten it saved many many people

Starting point is 00:10:00 many many times and it can be done essentially anywhere. It's almost a reset for your nervous system. Things are getting out of control, tension, pressure's building up, and you instantaneously can sort of reset it back to baseline. Is that a way that we can think about it? Yeah, think about it as a break on the adrenaline system. Now, I think that there's, there's another aspect to this, which is that when our minds are racing out of control, it's very hard to stabilize our thinking with thinking. I always say, you know, trying to control your thoughts with thoughts is like trying to grab fog. It's very, very difficult. So when your brain and your mind and your thinking aren't where you want them to be, you need to look to your body to recalibrate your state of mind

Starting point is 00:10:46 so that then you get a new vantage point to view whatever it is that you're happening to be contending with mentally. You do a couple of these physiological sighs and then what happens is you're able to still parse those thoughts, but from a different perspective. It's much easier to look to the body,

Starting point is 00:11:02 readjust your state of mind to a calmer place and then be able to analyze something cognitively than it is to try and prevent yourself from thinking about something, which is very hard. And in many cases, we do need to think about what's stressful. I mean, this is something we don't often acknowledge. People think, okay, we're going to go meditate or we're going to take a vacation. We're just going to step away. We're just going to take a deep breath. All sounds wonderful, right?

Starting point is 00:11:24 But many times, the thing that we're stressing about is critical to our well-being. It's important that we be able to think about this stuff. So use the body to control the mind and place the mind in a better vantage point. That's the idea. Yeah, I really like that. I think it's so powerful for people. And I think so many people will hear that, Andrew, and go, yeah, you know, when I feel anxious and I do some yoga or I go for a walk around the block, you know, I just don't feel the same when I come back. You know, you are literally changing the way you experience life through that action. Just to finish off, the podcast is called Feel Better Live More. When we feel better in ourselves, we get more out of life. Could you maybe share some of your sort of final words and thoughts with my audience?

Starting point is 00:12:12 Sure. I think that the thing to remember is that ultimately, if we start in close with our nervous system and start thinking about adding one practice, some morning light viewing, having that physiological side. You can practice it once or twice, but it's ready to go. It was installed in you with everything you need. Realizing that you have control

Starting point is 00:12:36 over your response system and your nervous system. I think that's a start. I think without getting into the science of it, I am a believer in doing a little bit of journaling each day. It's amazing how our anxieties and stresses when placed onto paper can actually expunge some of those anxieties and stresses. Even if your handwriting is as poor as mine, even if you're not writing in complete sentences, even if you tear up the sheet of paper afterward, or even if it's just a walk where you're thinking about this stuff, that can be very powerful. You know, I think that we, as we get healthier physically, we become healthier mentally. And as we become healthier mentally, we don't have to rely so much on these

Starting point is 00:13:20 physical support systems. But it's good to know, I think, that they're always there and that they work the first time and every time. Hope you enjoyed that bite-sized clip. Hope you have a wonderful weekend. And I'll be back next week with my long-form conversational Wednesday and the latest episode of Bite Science next Friday.

Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee - BITESIZE | The Fastest Way to Reduce Stress and Anxiety | Dr Andrew Huberman #367

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.