Mayim Bialik's Breakdown - Andrew Huberman: Regulate Stress in Real Time

Episode Date: August 23, 2022

Andrew Huberman, Ph.D. (neuroscientist, host of Huberman Lab Podcast) joins us to talk about the beauty and utility of biology. He provides practical tips for stress regulation and improving sleep, and explains the benefits of natural light and cold exposure. Mayim and Dr. Huberman discuss the neuroscience behind acting and mimicry, the physical symptoms of workaholism, and the correlation between dopamine, focus, and motivation. They consider the use of self-hypnosis to regulate your internal state, the negative side effects of social media on our physical bodies, and what the deprivation of healthy physical connection can lead to. They explain ways to control adrenaline to benefit us in times of crisis, the relationship between our eyes and our internal state, and the origins of EMDR and clinical hypnosis. Huberman Lab Podcast: https://hubermanlab.com/category/podcast-episodes/ BialikBreakdown.com YouTube.com/mayimbialik Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So by doing a double inhale through your nose, a big deep inhale through your nose, and then a second inhale, even if it's just sneaking in a little bit of air, what happens is you re-inflate those little sacks in the lungs, and then you do a long, full exhale to empty all the contents of you air from your lungs. So it looks something like this. Now, when you do that, you naturally activate the neural circuits in the brain and body that shift that seesaw from sympathetic, remember, alertness and stress to parasypathetic. And for most people, it takes only one so-called physiological side, double inhale through the nose,

long, full exhale through the lungs to completely return to a calm state. It's my ambiolic's breakdown. She's going to break it down for you because you know she knows a thing or two. And now she's going to break down. Hi, I'm Myambiolic and welcome to my breakdown. This is the place where we break things down so you don't have to. We're going to be talking to a very special person. today who might be the smartest human being on the planet. I think he is. He's very articulate.

But first let me introduce you to the second smartest person on the planet Jonathan Cohen. I'll take the intro, but not the title. We're having someone on who Jonathan has told me about Andrew Huberman, Ph.D. He's a neuroscientist. He's also a tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology and I believe ophthalmology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has so many impressive things about him as a scientist. He also has been published in some of the top, top, top, top, scientific journals in the field of neuroscience and biology. And he's been featured in many, many magazines. And he's that guy who has really made, you know, neuroscience and science in particular a part of his literally what he does as a service to humanity. Huberman Lab has a podcast. He

He has a podcast where he speaks to people on some of the most important, really, some of the most important topics regarding not only neuroscience, but sleep, wellness, mental health, everything from like psychedelics to, like, optimizing performance, optimizing performance, reducing your stress. What adrenaline actually does for you, why everybody's telling you to take a cold shower or a cold plunge. He covers so many things. He's incredibly well spoken. And also, we ran into each other when I was interviewing for graduate school, which is a funny story that he will tell. I just want to get right into it because we had so much to talk to him about and he was so generous with his time. And it's really an honor to have someone with such an incredible presence in the world of science communication to speak to us. So with that, let's welcome Andrew Huberman.

Break it down. Before we get started, should we play the neuroscience geography game? because we were basically in school at exactly the same time, and I almost went to Davis at the same time. We met. Where did we meet? Did we meet at a Society for Neuroscience? First of all, it's a pleasure.

I'm very happy to be here. We met at Davis. I was a year ahead, I think. Oh, okay. And you came through on interviews. Yes. And as I recall, you were studying Hebrew flashcards. That's on brand for her.

That's very on brand for me. I must, I'm trying to think. Did you try to have a conversation with her? And she was like, no, I can't do that. I'm studying my flashcards. Here's a deep cut. It was probably Yiddish because I studied Yiddish and Hebrew. I did a minor in Hebrew and Jewish studies.

So my last year before I graduated, I was probably finishing my Yiddish coursework. Yeah. Well, you know, when, as you know, when students come through for interviews, they're pretty much accepted. and at most programs, the interview is very close to acceptance. But not with my. Sorry. Well, it's unclear always in those configurations, you know, who's in the power position. And I recall seeing you with your flashcards and I figured, well, it's got to be a little bit uncomfortable to be a known person, as it were.

So I'm going to go over and say hello. And I said, hi, you know, if you have any questions about Davis, let me know. I was at Berkeley and I've left after my master's. I had the option to stay, you know, and that might be surprising to people. But I really like it here. And I loved the lab I was in. And we had a nice exchange about what you wanted to study. And at the time, I think you were interested in human imaging and maybe even neural basis of some

things on the talent spectrum. Yes. And you know what? No one was doing that then. And now everybody's doing it. And there's a center for it at UCLA. and I ended up, yeah, no one was studying what I wanted to study, but I ended up, I was going to study William's syndrome because they have very high rates, well, they have very strong musical ability, and I was interested in working William's syndrome, and I ended up reading a book on syndromes of mental retardation that the lab that I was considering, it was Elizabeth Dikins, and she wrote it. And when I came across Prater Willey syndrome, I thought, well, gosh, why has a neuroscientist not studied Prater Willey syndrome? Because they've been. studied in the genetic realm, you know, obviously human imprinting and psychiatry because they

have very high rates of just about everything. But I ended up deciding to study Prader Rilly syndrome because she had a population that we could tap into. So yeah, I ended up far from talent in the brain. And like I said, now people are talking about talent in the brain. I'm really happy for all those people. Well, from here on after, we will officially call that. The, my effect. So one of the fun things about social media that probably drives my science colleagues crazy is, like, for instance, there's this really brilliant researcher up in Scandinavia, Susanna Soberg, who's done a lot on deliberate cold exposure and deliberate heat, its effects on metabolism and a bunch of other things. And she's come up with these protocols that are in peer review journals. And if you parse these papers, you come up with a number of different things that are really useful.

And so I just start naming these things like the Soberg effect. But as soon as scientists get ruffled about this, you can just turn it back on them and say, well, in the fields of science, how is it that something actually becomes designated in effect? And it's the same way people designate. And I think as long as one isn't designating effects after themselves, that's okay. I have a lot of effect. Would you like it to be the Myam effect? Well, no. The Myam Effect is also being nominated for Emmys and not getting them because the cable becomes a thing.

Like my first nomination, I was like the only show on television. I was like, oh, am I going to get it? And then cable exploded. And I cannot win. That's a little bit harder for him to help us with. He can help me with everything. I don't have any links to Hollywood or to that landscape. But I hear out after this notion of searching for the neural basis of talent,

if you're comfortable with it, maybe even if you're not, we'll call it the Biolic effect or the Miami effect. Or both. I think the Biolic effect is perfect. Well, then we'll actually get into what we're going to talk to you about. But I was raised in the Zydell lab. So I'm a Zydelian, as we call ourselves. And I worked with some of the callosotomy patients that were done at that time in the 90s. So I actually got to work with patients who had had their corpus callosum section, for those of you who don't know what calisotomy is.

And Dr. Zidel, who passed away recently, he wanted me to study acting in the brain. Like, this was a thing. But we just, we didn't have the capability to do it in his lab. and I worked with Marco Jacoboni and went over to imaging. But the thing that I most think could actually be something that I could actually study would be people who have very, very specific mimicry ability. Because it's not only the kind of physical embodiment of people who do impersonations. And I mean people who do impersonations startlingly well.

I want that whole study. I want it done. Anyway, I've talked to several actors about this. I think it's a very interesting area. There's a guy who I'd love to see on your podcast, but we recorded an interview with him recently and it should air soon, but he needs to be heard from much more. His name is Eric Jarvis.

He's at the Rockefeller. He used to be at Duke, and he studied songbird learning and genomics of brain evolution. But it turns out that Eric actually was admitted to and declined an invitation to the Alvinalee dance. company. Grew up in Harlem, very interesting life story. But to make a long story short, because he tells his story far better than I ever could for him, what he told me because he's a real expert in the neuroscience of speech and

language is that as we read, we are, if you were to record EMG muscular activity in the larynx and pharynx and amplify that, you would find that you're actually reciting the words of what you're reading at a very low level. If you were to put that into an audio monitor and amplify it. And so people and birds that have the capacity for fine mimicry or even for coarse mimicry are able to capture that. So they can capture the voice in their head as if they're reading or hearing it. And recreate the pharynx and larynx signals. Now that's sort of a duh, but it's very, very cool in my mind.

Right. Well, and that's obviously who I should speak to. But because I'm a vegan neuroscientist, I don't work with humans. I mean, I don't work with animals. So my only way in, like this was also part of my limitation. with, you know, being a neuroscientist is that I didn't want to work with animals. But yes, go for the zebra finch, do it.

But I said... Well, he's done this in humans now. But you can't take their brains out like they can with zebra fin. No, but you can cord, but you can record from the pharynx and larynx, yeah. Anyway, it's very, very, what? No, it's fascinating. You're just excited to hear me talk neuroscience.

This is what happens when nerds get together. It's a multi-layered conversation. I'm very excited to learn from you as well today. And that's a real statement. I also want to know why there's a Canadian flag on the desk. Jonathan is Canadian. I'm Canadian. Whereabouts?

Toronto originally. Whereabouts? Yeah, Toronto originally. I've been in the U.S. for a long time. I've lived, did four years in Victoria, but originally from Toronto. Great. Okay. Jonathan and I were talking about what we wanted to discuss with you today.

And so Jonathan came up with a list. You're one of a very special group of people who has brought not only real legitimate empirical science to the public, but I happen to be kind of partial to you because you're a neuroscientist. So, you know, Jonathan and I talk about kind of all things mental health here. And a special kind of emphasis that we have is on things that a lot of people don't know impact mental wellness, which do. Meaning I'm happy to talk all day about diagnoses and the DSM 4 or 5 and whatever they're going to call it next. I discourage that.

Jonathan discourages me talking about diagnoses and medication. But we do. But you kind of have found a way to tackle so many aspects of the human experience in a way that people want to and can hear about. And that's very, very special. What do you sort of see? You also still have a lab. Like you are a research professor type. and that's what you do.

But what do you kind of see as your role as, you know, this sort of science communicator that you are? Yeah. Well, first of all, yeah, I do still run a lab. We've mainly shut down our animal program. So for years, we worked on mice and other species. And I say that from a somewhat conflicted stance, to be honest. We could have a whole discussion about that. I'm not a vegan, but I love animals.

And I always wanted to work on humans. Now we work almost exclusively on humans. We run clinical trials exploring stress and stress modulation. Now I have an appointment in psychiatry. So I work with a lot of clinicians. I'm very interested in mental health and physical health as well. But in terms of science communication, I'm not big on mission statements, but if I had to cast one out for sake of simplicity, my real interest is in sharing what I see and feel

as the beauty of biology and also the utility of biology. I think that what's unfortunate is that we go through school and young adulthood and adulthood and we never really get a handbook or an operating system for our physiology. Now, of course, we don't understand everything about our physiology, far from it. But I think we know enough about how the nervous system and other systems of the body and brain work that we ought to inform each other or be informed about how to, for instance, regulate stress in real time. I think everyone knows meditation, vacation, exercises, community, good nutrition, sleep, et cetera, are important. But how do you regulate stress when it inevitably hits in real time?

Things of that sort. We all know now, thanks to the beautiful work of Matt Walker and others, that sleep is really important. but how do you get better at sleeping if you're no good at it? And so a big part of my public education effort is to excite people about science. And sometimes I try and do that by getting them excited about health topics and then teaching science in that process. And sometimes I teach them about health through the process of teaching science. So I sort of pivot back and forth. And these are topics that I've long enjoyed, obviously, because I selected a career in it.

But in terms of the health aspect, I think that one of the more exciting things that I really emphasize is the relationship between brain and body. And as you know, that the nervous system is not just the brain. It's the brain body connections in both directions. And that the brain body connection is no longer this new agey, mystical, Wu science, Northern California, Esselin bathing, staring at the sunset. All things that I love, by the way. And Esselin is wonderful. Don't give you wrong. But very few people are going to get the opportunity to ever go there, unfortunately.

Right. And even those who do have to return to the real world, hopefully with tools and things they can use in their daily life. So I would bullet point that as the beauty and utility of biology is important to me. The mind-body connection as a real concrete physiological thing that's very useful to understand and use is secondary. And then the third one is I somewhat joke about it, although I am sympathetic to those that actually suffer from Tourette's. I have a bit of a scientific Tourette's. When I find something I really am excited about, I can't help but tell people about it. And so that's an impulse control issue for me. I got a pill for you.

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I want to touch on the beauty and utility of biology. Because based on a lot of what I've learned from you and others in the space, what I've shared with Miami and the people that have listened to us is that there is a handbook, an owner's manual for our bodies that almost none of us have. And it's growing and expanding, but there are cause and effect relationships to our behavior. And we have our experience, which is often very difficult and challenged and we're, you know, experiencing different emotions and thoughts and we're struggling and we're suffering, but we have no concept that the actions or that we're taking or not taking are having a direct

impact on what we're experiencing and there's this massive disconnect. So if like we all are given more of the owner's manual and the ability to read and understand it, then we'll have the tools to be able to help suffer less. I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think for instance, something that was very powerful for me to learn in my textbooks long ago and then to revisit in my own laboratory and that I keep trying to tell the world about in some form or another is that adrenaline comes in waves. So stress comes in waves that kind of compound one another and grow and grow. And there are two ways to modulate the stress response. One is in real time. You can literally push back on stress in real time by leveraging the certain tools that are part of our physiology.

And then there are also ways to increase your so-called stress threshold. Yes. You know, we've heard so much in the last 10, 15 years, so many wonderful books and TED talks about grit, resilience and mental toughness. these have been rather elusive psychological attributes, right? So the question then becomes, how do you become gritty? How do you become mentally strong? What is that about? Can I go back and be born to a different family? Well, well, that's an interesting question because I think what we're really talking about is this notion of an autonomic set point, right? The autonomic nervous system, as you both know, is this system inside us that regulates our baseline level of

alertness or calmness. And that's, of course, impacted by sleep and food and life events. But we all kind of idle at a different level, right? As some people's resting RPM is higher. And a lot of that is genetic. Some of it is life circumstance. Sure, a childhood trauma can do that. But we know, for instance, that a childhood trauma can make somebody very exhausted all the time. Childhood trauma and another individual can make that person hypervigilant. So, you know, when you start as you know, when you start looking at the landscape of these things, the power is in understanding how to control these systems because, of course, picking your parents is not possible yet.

We're working on it. He's working on. That's what he's really working on. Chrisper. Well, we could talk about CRISPR, but maybe for another time. This is an area also that Jonathan and I have a strong interest in, both because we are, we happen to be people that rev really high. I would say we have a very kind of similar way of sort of functioning and coping and surviving in that we can be really, really, really, really productive, often to the exclusion of self-care and, you know, other things.

And, you know, so you can kind of get into that sort of like hyper-efficiency, which is very exhilarating. It's very thrilling. And on the other hand, I really crave peace. I crave quiet. You know, I've learned as an adult to learn that it's okay to be alone sometimes, you know? And these, you know, these things also, for me, it is very kind of addiction-based, meaning I will work like it's my drug. And I will do it, you know, I mean, I did it for many, many years on a real treading. and what happened was like my body started breaking down from the inside out. And, you know, I think

Jonathan and I have both had these kind of experiences. And I went, I went to a Western doctor and didn't tell them anything. And I was like, what's wrong with me? They ran every test. Does she have, God forbid, cancer. Like they ran, I gave them all my symptoms. Like my gums are bleeding. Like crazy variety of symptoms. And the diagnosis was there's nothing wrong with you. You're a workaholic. and it was one of the first, and this is like as a grown-up with children, meaning this wasn't like in my 20s, I started figuring it out. Like I was a grown-ass woman still like what? And a scientist, like what's going on?

So maybe you can speak a little bit to some of this kind of tension between, you know, the kind of productivity that is often, you know, it's very, it's very motivational. Like it's very, it can make you feel so alive. and also that's not going to make your whole life work. Is that general enough? Too specific. No, it's a great framework because I think it's one that a lot of people struggle with one way or the other. If I were to identify four points that most people need to work on in order to improve their mental and physical health, I would say these are the following four.

everyone should strive to get sufficient amount of quality sleep 85% of the nights of their life. Him with the sleep. All ready with the sleep. Wait, so I just wanted, wait, but I'm not going to go into sleep right away. There are tools for that. There are many useful tools that I'm happy to share that are research tested and people drive immense benefit from.

Why? Well, because in sleep, we reestablish our ability to be calm when we want to be calm and alert when we want to be alert in our waking hours. That's just the nature of the sleep-wake balance. And that brings up point number two, which is, I think, the second most essential thing for mental and physical health and performance, which is regulation of this thing that we call the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system can be best thought of as a seesaw. It has different components, the sympathetic and parasympathetic, rest and digest, fight and flight, etc. They get these names. But just think of this as sort of a seesaw in your body of nervous system connections that can either ramp up your alertness all the way to a full-blown panic attack or the seesaw can swing to the other way and make you very calm and peaceful and make you want to fall asleep.

Most people don't learn how to regulate that seesaw. And many people have a seesaw, if you will, of an autonomic nervous system where the hinge on that seesaw is locked to one side or the other. or they have a hard time budging it from one side to the other. Can I interrupt just so you can clarify for people? When we talk about the autonomic nervous system, it's not like one place. It's not a, like, I think it's important for people to realize. It's not like, oh, there's like these different parts of the brain, and then there's the autonomic nervous system. So can you just explain so people understand what that means?

Sure. So I'm going to hit people with a little bit of nomenclature, but I'll try and make it clear for the non-scientists. Nomenclature means words that name things. Sorry. Yeah. So there's a system in your body, meaning a collection of neurons. Neurons are just nerve cells that is called a sympathetic nervous system. It has nothing to do with emotional sympathy, nothing whatsoever.

Simpa means together. And there's a stretch of neurons, nerve cells along your spinal cord that goes from about your clavicles down to about your navel, a little bit lower, called the sympathetic chain ganglia. These neurons get activated together very quickly when something is alert. or alerts you, excuse me, when something alerts your nervous system. And they cause the massive and very fast release of things like adrenaline, also called epinephrine, into your body, and the release of adrenaline also within your brain, for those that want to know from a little compact set of neurons called the locus serulius,

which essentially sprinkler the rest of the brain with norepinephrine and wake up your brain. If ever you've been sleepy and suddenly you look at your phone and there's an emergency, you go, oh my goodness, and you're wide awake. Well, there was no coffee involved. There was no breathing technique. That is your sympathetic nervous system amplifying your level of alertness in milliseconds, thousands of seconds. That's just how Lyme wakes up.

That's just how I wake up every day. But okay. Well, and indeed, I'm glad you brought that up. When you wake up in the morning, it's from an increase in body temperature that triggers activation of the sympathetic nervous system, but not to the point of panic attack. If you ever wake up from a troubling dream,

that's because of the symptoms of, I wake up all the ways and also empowered by the Lord. So I just wake up ready to do God's work. Okay, go ahead. Sorry. No, it's an excellent point. We wake up and that jolt or even if we wake up slowly, that means a slower activation of the system. And actually the waking up in the morning will return to this is largely the consequence of the release of cortisol, so-called stress hormone,

but there's a healthy release of cortisol that occurs when our body heats up in the morning. Now, just to return to sleep briefly, just to frame that. Proper amounts of deep sleep allow the sympathetic nervous system to be engaged when it needs to, but not to be engaged when it doesn't need to be. You may have heard also that you can have so-called adrenal burnout. Well, guess what? There is no such thing as adrenal burnout. You have enough adrenaline in your adrenal glands, these little glands that ride atop your kidneys,

for two lifetimes. Now, there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome where people actually don't make enough adrenaline. But that's a distinct thing. No, and adrenal burnout also. It's kind of a colloquial holistic term for basically you're way too stressed out. And there are different pressure points and things that they test those things from. But yes. That's going back to the seesaw.

Absolutely. Well, and then as long as we're talking about the sympathetic part of the autonomic nervous system, autonomic just means automatic, but it's a misnomer because I'll teach you tools that we know from our lab and other labs can allow you to regulate the system voluntarily. And then the parasympathetic nervous system is a collection of neurons in your neck, more or less, base of your brain and neck. And from your navel down, they actually control sexual arousal, the genitals. It controls defecation, urination. All the good stuff. So the relaxation response, rest and digest it sometimes is it.

Now, why is it called para? Because it's on either side of those sympathetic chain ganglilus. This is getting down into the nuts and bolts of neuranatomy. Okay, that's really, that's very, that's very, that's very, that's very, that's very, that's very, that's very, helpful just so people understand. It's not one place. That's right. It's not one place. And for every bit that I described in the spinal cord, there are collections of neurons in the brain that are more associated with calm states versus alert states. And they're always operating in parallel. The reason I mention a seesaw is that the seesaw is either level or that's more alert or more calm,

but it's not that one side is eliminated. It's always in a balance, even when you're in deep sleep. In fact, in certain stages of sleep, your sympathetic nervous system is cranking out activity. This is why some dreams can seem very stressful. Now, there are mechanisms to make sure that your body doesn't move in those states. But again, the seesaw is always going back and forth and back and forth. So I'll bridge to points three and four by saying that understanding that you have an autonomic nervous system that has this seesaw-like architecture conceptually anyway, and that you have the ability to control it, open up the opportunity to control,

points three and four, which are the other major pain points for most people. So we have sleep, autonomic regulation, then focus. People nowadays are obsessed with ADHD and focus and challenges and focusing. And then the fourth point is motivation. People sometimes lump focus and motivation together, but those are distinct neurobiological and psychological phenomena. They overlap in time, so sometimes we think they're the same thing, kind of like grief and depression, kind of feel like the same thing, but it turns out they are not. They're distinct phenomenon. So if you can get better at sleeping, you will get better

autonomic regulation. If you get better autonomic regulation, you'll get better at sleeping. If you get better at autonomic regulation, you will get better at focus. And if you get better at focus, you will better understand and be able to access long, sustained motivation in healthy ways that don't deplete

you. Because your question, mine, was about go, go, go, go, go, and then the consequences of that. We know, that the molecule dopamine so often associated with reward, dopamine hits as they're called, is not associated with pleasure in a direct sense. It is the molecule of motivation, pursuit, and craving. Which sometimes leads to pleasure, but not always. Which sometimes leads to pleasure, but it has an architecture and a sort of a characteristic pattern, and that pattern can be best

summarized as what we called reward prediction error, which is when something really wonderful happens that you didn't expect, you get a big release of dopamine. When you anticipate something great, dopamine is released in anticipation of reaching that goal, but when you reach that goal, you actually start to diminish the amount of dopamine that's available. And if you do not reach that goal, your dopamine drops below baseline. The key thing for people to understand is that dopamine is regulated by all sorts of things. It's not unique to sex or to social media or to food or to any one thing. It's a generic molecule. It's a very redundant. It's a redundant molecule molecule.

Very redundant. It's like a currency, right? It's like a cryptocurrency. No, I'm not sure if I'm going to get into that. It's a neurocurrency. We should start a cryptocurrency because there seem to be 25,000 other cryptocurrencies. I don't know what that means, but yes. Maybe I was spending too much time on Twitter.

And the key thing to understand about dopamine is that it is a non-infinite yet renewable resource. So if you go, go, go, go, go. In fact, I always like to think at any moment you should ask, yourself first are you back on your heels flat-footed or forward center of mass with respect to work with respect to relationships with respect to stress always forward if you're always forward center of mass what think about dopamine as kind of a wave pool so if you're always forward center of mass you're getting waves in this wave pool if those dopamine highs go too high the water will splash out in that reservoir

of dopamine will drop if you keep pursuing things dopamine will eventually be depleted to near zero right However, if you get good at modulating pursuit, so pursue, pursue, pursue, rest, pursue, pursue, pursue, pursue, pursue, pursue, pursue, rest. Then what happens is you're able to generate large amplitude releases of dopamine, which is a good thing for pursuit without getting into a mode of burnout. And of course, large amplitude dopamine is also what happens when people, for instance, take methamphetamine, 2,000 X increase in baseline dopamine. But for every increase in dopamine, but for every increase in dopamine, there is a mirror symmetric, sometimes even more dramatic drop in dopamine after. This is the pleasure and pain are balanced, also like a seesaw in the nervous system. And there I'm referring to the beautiful work of two colleagues of mine, mainly. Rob Malenka, Stanford has done the animal work. He's a psychiatrist and Dr. Ana Lemke, who wrote Dopamine Nation, a truly important book for everyone to read

because it really illustrates how sex, porn, love. food. She even describes a patient that gets addicted to water. I mean, anything can drive these systems. Gambling, work, success, praise. Once you start to understand that the postpartum depression, the post-honeymoon depression, the Monday morning after a great weekend, that it's supposed to feel low because of the weekend was so great, you stop trying to pursue things on Monday, and Wednesday in the same kind of way, so to speak. There's two things that I wanted to kind of highlight. The first was when you were listing, you know, the things that, you know, are kind of these key things, right?

Sleep, regulation of the autonomic nervous system, focus and motivation. Many people want to skip over that second one because what they hear is like, I don't know those words. Those words are not for me. I'm going to do the other ones. But what's important is that even the smallest amount of information, and awareness that this exists in your body and you have some sort of, I don't even want to use the word control, you have access to regulation just because you exist. That in and of itself is an empowering and very significant piece of information that really has been left out of

all medical progress for all of history. And it's what Dr. Sarno realized when he started doing his what is now called like mind-body syndrome work or TMS, not transcranial magnetic stimulation, which people always think that's what I'm talking about when I say TMS. The notion that once you have the awareness that things start shifting because you understand that it's not happening to you, it's happening through you, that is hugely important. So even the basics of what Dr. Huberman just described to understand that there are cells in your body and they're lined up in ways that are coded to help you ramp up and ramp down, those things can be regulated. And for thousands of years, Eastern philosophy, Eastern practice has used breath to essentially regulate in a way that we

needed thousands of years of time and research and doctors to tell us about. The other thing I wanted to say about those four things that you highlighted, those things are critically important. I mean, I would say for every mammal. I mean, I don't want to, like, exclude non-mammalian things, but the things that Dr. Huberman is talking about, these are just things that are important because you're a mammal. Those things are true for a raccoon. They're true for mice. They're true for your cat, your dog. Like, those are the principles of how we perpetuate the species. That's how we exist on this planet. And it's really powerful to me that what we as, you know, homo sapiens get to do is articulated. We get to have guys like this who can talk about it and spread it to millions of

people. It's really very exciting to me. This goes back to the handbook. Most of us have forgotten that relationship and, you know, not consciously, but we've fallen into the trap that we are users of computers and electronics with no connection to our animal selves. I really want, like, what are your top four things that are preventing us from honing these things? Like, if you had to tell us what you think those things are. So one brief point about the autonomic nervous system, so I don't forget, because I have a feeling you can keep more things in working memory than I can. In fact, I'm certain. if people are put off by the notion of autonomic nervous system what I will tell you is point number

to autonomic nervous system and controlling your autonomic nervous system first of all is easy once you understand how and I'll be sure to tell you how you can it works the first time and it works every time which is pretty cool and that's not because of any program that I developed it's really about anchoring and using anchoring to and using your innate rights as your innate genomic map and basically leveraging a system of your body. This is very distinct from what people call biohacking. Biohacking to me, I hate the word. I'd love to see it disappear because a hack is taking an object or a thing that's designed

for one purpose and using it for another. Rather, I'll just give one example so that we depart the abstract a little bit. If you want to calm down very quickly, there is a way to do that. everyone can do it. And in fact, you mentioned other animals, Miami, and I'm glad you did, because dogs do this, and you'll know exactly the pattern of breathing I'm talking about. Now, this is a pattern of breathing that was discovered in the 1930s. Discovered, yes. Yeah, right, unearthed in the 1930s.

And then the underlying neural mechanisms were really detailed by your former colleague at UCLA, the great Jack Feldman, who has pioneered the study of breathing and the neural underpinnings. when you are low in oxygen and or stressed, claustrophobic, or in apnea, which is a lack of oxygen, basically, you're breathing poorly. We'll just leave it at that. In sleep or in waking, the tendency is to do a very big inhale and maybe even a second inhale prior to doing a long exhale. Dogs do this before they go down for a nap. Yes. And here's the reason.

we actually are triggered to breathe by the buildup of a gas in the bloodstream called carbon dioxide and as a consequence we bring in oxygen and then offload carbon dioxide now why two breaths in and then one long breath out well a couple things the sort of breathing 101 humans unlike other species we actively inhale we put effort into the inhale but we generally passively exhale unless we're in a yoga class or someone's telling us to put effort in the exhale we generally and then just to let the air fall out of us passively. Okay. Now, as a consequence of that, when we read or we're emailing or texting, there's something

actually called text email apnea where people hold their breath. Oh, my God. Once every one to three minutes, people will do a deep sigh. This is not an eye roll teenage sigh. It is a, this kind of thing. Now, your lungs are two big bags of air, but you have millions, hundreds of millions, actually have little sacks in there called avioli of the lungs. Those avioli of the lungs, when you underbreath, they collapse.

They flatten out like empty balloons. And as a consequence, you're not getting enough oxygen and carbon dioxide is building up in your bloodstream. If you're very stressed, this happens even more. Now, the way the lungs work is that as you bring air in, it's actually able to pass from the lungs into the bloodstream, as incredible as that seems. So when you do a big inhale and then a second inhale, snuck in, I'm talking, but if I were to go two inhales. You know, and ideally you do this both through the nose. And for those of you think you can't breathe through your nose, the problem is you're not breathing through your nose enough.

You don't have a deviated septum, people. You do not have a deviated septum. I know the ENTs are going to come after me with pitchforks or whatever it is that they use to clear noses. But most people are not breathing enough through their nose, their mouth breathers, which is a terrible thing for other reasons. But so by doing a double inhale through your nose, a big deep inhale through your nose,

and then a second inhale, even if it's just sneaking in a little bit of air, happens is you re-inflate those little sacks in the lungs and then you do a long full exhale to empty all the contents of air from your lungs so it looks something like this now when you do that you naturally activate the neural circuits in the brain and body that shift that seesaw from sympathetic total alertness and stress to parasympathetic and for most people it takes only one so-called physiological side double inhale through the nose long full exhale through through the lungs to completely return to a calm state.

This is, as far as I know, the fastest way to shift yourself from stressed to calm. You can do this in real time, unless you're underwater. You can do this generally anywhere. If you have to do it through your mouth because you don't have a nose or because there's something up your nose, you can. But in general, if you have trouble breathing through your nose, it's because you are too much of a mouth breather to begin with. And there's a beautiful book about this called Jaws, a hidden epidemic, which was written

by Sandra Kahn and Paul Ehrlich at Stanford and with a forward by Robert Sapolsky and an introduction from Jared Diamond. So there's like every heavy hitter in human biology and evolution is in there, living one anyway. And they talk about the problems with mouth breathing. You want to be a nose breather most of the time unless you're speaking or you're eating. You should probably even tape your mouth shut while you sleep. I should take my mouth shut all that time.

many people should take their mouth shut while they do their extended cardio to learn how to breathe through their nose their real benefits to this it's hard for the first week or so and then what you find is you actually tap into a whole other level of aerobic capacity you didn't realize you had but the point is if you want to calm down quickly and you want to do that in real time right you're not going to run off and meditate in the middle of a doctor's exam or as you're stepping out onto stage you do public speaking or as you suddenly find yourself becoming flushed because you have a social anxiety, or you drank too much coffee, or you're about to have a hard conversation or ask for a raise.

You're stressing me out listing all the stressful things. Exactly. Stressful things, right? My lab studies this, and we love stressing people out with various tools, and we love giving them tools that can teach them to modulate in real time. The double inhale through the nose and long extended exhale is by far the best way, and it's not a hack. This is what you do when you are in a claustrophobic environment, and you do it every one to three

minutes during sleep. And the last thing I'll just sneak in. this is becoming one long exhale sentence, I confess, is if somebody is stressed or if you are stressed, taking a deep breath is not the best solution. The best solution is to take two deep breaths than one long, full extended exhale. If you just take a deep breath, actually you will increase your heart rate through a process called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Yeah. Okay. I do want you to, I do still want your list of things that are essentially ruining the world, but I do want to say one thing

I remember I wanted you to give me like so I'll get back to that like what are the things that are most basically eroding our ability to sleep regulate our autonomic nervous system be focused and motivated but first I wanted to say a little tidbit I've had two children

and how did I have them Jonathan we play a drinking game on this show every time she mentions her natural birth but okay I had two children I had two children with no drugs and one of those children was born, where was he born, Jonathan? Just a few feet from here.

And I was alone until... The very end. You did everything yourself. I did everything by myself. But what I wanted to say is I did not... I am not a superhero to have children with no drugs. What I did is I underwent a process of... They call it self-hypnosis,

but it is literally regulated. your autonomic nervous system. And literally, you do not have to have any experience. You don't have to believe in God. You don't have to believe in chakras. You can teach yourself to completely trans. It's not even that, I promise, it's not even that hard to completely shift your perception of sensation,

pain, which we call sensation in labor. And during incredibly physiological, stressful situations. Like the cervix has to go from zero to 10 centimeters. That happened. You can do that without experiencing pain, fear, frustration, and stress. There are a lot of things you do experience, but it is so much exactly what we're talking about. You have that ability. I mean, I don't know about men, but they don't have to practice that. Well, I mean, I've never given birth, But the, you could do it. I think you could.

I have a colleague at Stanford, our associate chair of psychiatry. He's a close collaborator in mind. His name is David Spiegel. He and his father founded the fields of clinical hypnosis. This is not stage hypnosis. Stage hypnosis is where someone else gets you to do things. Clinical hypnosis is where you get yourself to be able to do things. And hypnosis is the state, very unusual brain state that involves a convergence of alertness and calm.

So it's a kind of, it's like twisting the C-C-C-Cat. saw in a very unique way. And actually, if people want to try self-hypnosis, there's a zero-cost app. I mean, so I think you can try it out. They may have now put some of it behind a paywall. Anyway, it's called reverie, r-e-v-e-e-r-r-I-com. Reverie was developed by David and others at Stanford. It's based on clinical trials and brain imaging, et cetera. And a lot of meditative practices where people close their eyes but try and maintain focus on breathing is that, that's a lot of meditative practices. That itself is a form of hypnosis in the sense that usually when we close our eyes, when these little shutters go down on our eyes, we actually enter a state of more parasympathetic, calm mode,

state. Whereas when our eyes are really open, wide-eyed, et cetera, that's usually associated with an alert state. So hypnosis and certain forms of meditation involve being alert and calm. And what you described for childbirth is interesting because David's lab has done a lot of work using pain as a way to modulate outcomes in breast cancer treatment, chemotherapy, and in controlling pain, in particular chronic pain, to great clinical success, actually. So you've obviously taught yourself how to do this naturally. Did you take a Lamaz class? No, so no, Lamas is, you took a Yiddish class. I took a lot of Yiddish. Definitely. No, so Lamaz, you know, which was revolutionary, you know, when it, when it came out because it was, you know, kind of the first time women were again,

being empowered to sort of be part of their birth experience after, you know, decades and decades of women being effectively anesthetized and put to sleep while the baby was removed. Is that right? They were completely... Oh, yes. I have spoken to many women who were, like, knocked out.

And when they woke up, they had a baby. And this was in the late 60s. I mean, this was still kind of, you know, and I'm sure that there were reasons. But anyway, meaning reasons that they were given why this was the way to do it. But Lamaz has fallen a little bit out of favor because of the kind of forced breathing aspect. The notion being you don't want someone standing over you telling you to poop, like poop, poop, poop, poop.

And Lamaz can feel a little bit like breathe, breathe, breathe. So Bradley Method is more also the partner facilitated way that a lot of people are choosing to do natural birth and home birth in particular. But I used a hypnosis program that was on CDs because it was in the year one. and it was produced by a doula, nurse practitioner, midwife, and there are now classes and organizations, but I literally kind of did it myself. I did have a doula for my first labor, and my second, as I said, I was alone.

But, yeah, it was, it's, you know, one of the most not only transformative experience is just as a human being who, you know, who is a female, but also as a scientist to get to experience that was, you know, it's really, it was very special and I'll stop talking about it. So can you... It's a beautiful example of the autonomic, meaning automatic nervous system being a misnomer. It's not actually autonomic.

We can control the balance of sympathetic and parasympathetic activity. I have a genuine question that just popped to mind as you were describing that. And this is a real question. You mentioned that women have been knocked out under general anesthesia for childbirth. I have to assume that the term knocked up. is unrelated to the term knocked. No, really, where does that term come from? I don't know.

Where does, I know it was a movie. I think it was a term before. I mean, Jonathan can look, I do not know. Where does that term come from? Was it like knocked up then knocked out? I mean, the thing about putting people in, and Ascetia seems terrible. I mean, that just seems like a terrible idea.

Well, many, many of the euphemisms regarding kind of sex do involve often sports metaphors and conquering, and that's just sort of like patriarchy. Jonathan, what did you find? It first appeared in print in 1830. Okay. What did it say? An 1860 slang dictionary defined the term knocked up.

So it's been around a minute. Well, I'm going to look. Well, the reason I ask this is I have a interest in, you know, one of the things that we don't learn or teach because it's tricky. but their real biological systems obviously is sexual health, right? I mean, this is, you know, and in doing more science and health education, most of the questions I get through DMs and back channels where people aren't putting things in comments, but even in the comments are questions about sexual health. I mean, I think most of the world is pretty clueless about sexual health.

I think that's something, I don't think I'm the person to lead the charge, but I think that there's a real desperate need for, people of all backgrounds to better understand this system. This relates to the autonomic nervous system, if I may just briefly, because earlier you said this system is in all of us, other animals, and in the large part, it's why we're here. And I'm not trying to make this discussion about sexual health, but one thing that I think people might find interesting

is that it is actually a prerequisite for you being here that your parents, one way or another, by dish or by in vivo conception, managed to regulate their autonomic nervous system in the following way. And I'm not trying to be, you know, move the topic. But here goes. The initial finding of a mate and sort of desire, if you will, is very strongly regulated by dopamine. Remember, pursuit, motivation, reward, etc.

Unless someone just sort of falls on you or you fall on them. You have to go out and find someone and meet someone. And there's usually some sort of courting process of varying duration. It involves motivation and motivation. focus is what involves. It certainly does. And there's a psychological component, but it's very strongly regulated by dopamine, that whole system. That's a sympathetic, dominated set of interactions. It actually requires movement of animals, right? You actually have to get to the other to your mate. You have to find them motivate. You actually have to mobilize to get there. Now, sexual arousal itself,

and here I'm presuming all the important things, age appropriate, context appropriate, consensual and species appropriate behavior. So here, as we frame that up in that context, the sexual arousal itself is strongly parasympathetic. If people are too aroused, if they're too alert, there actually isn't an arousal response in the male or the female. Right. Okay. And males or females, I should say, right?

Who knows what the architecture of this interaction looks like? And then what's very surprising to people is that orgazes, is actually 100% controlled by the sympathetic nervous system. It is very much like the stress response, except that it doesn't involve the stress molecules it's associated with a lot of these molecules associated with pleasure. And then what follows that?

A very strong parasympathetic dominance of calm and relaxation at some point. Thought to be because it encourages exchange of pheromones or at least scents of some kind, maybe pheromones, maybe not pheromones, but at least odors and pair bonding, opportunity for... You've also just described birth. Right. So the seesaw, so we are all here because one or both of your parents,

presumably both, but there's also in vitro conception, et cetera, but one or both of your parents was able to regulate this seesaw, at least well enough, to bring egg and sperm together, which as far as I know is still the only way that humans can conceive. It turns out that there was a paper this last summer in Proceedings of the National Academy that turkey vultures, two females can conceive. But absolutely, I think you can look this up. Condors, excuse me, condors. Two females can conceive by transdifferentiation of the egg into a different cell type.

But in humans, as far as we know, this can only happen by sperm-to-egg meeting in body or in dish. And so the autonomic nervous system going back and forth, the seesaw swimming back and forth, is the architecture of the events leading up to your conception. all of our conception. If you had to say the things that you feel are kind of most impeding our ability to access these kind of big four, what are they? And you can feel free to say like the patriarchy. You can like just go for it.

That's always the answer, by the way. There's always the patriarchy. But what are those things? You know, Jonathan and I have our kind of list of things that we both love and hate, you know, like our cell phones, right? but what is it in your opinion like kind of on a larger level yeah i think if i were to list them off in order of importance it would be degraded relationship to our interactions with light and i don't just mean too much screen time right i'll explain what that means um so not getting adequate

sunlight at the right times of day and getting too much artificial light at the wrong times of day and happy to flesh that statement out with more studies than you ever want to hear about, but also some tools and practices that evolve from that. In particular, some of the work, because I have an appointment in ophthalmology, some of the work showing that myopia, near-sightedness is at almost epidemic levels now, in part because kids and adults are spending too much time just looking at things up close. My parents said, your eyes are not going to work if you said that close to the television. Right. So the classic work of Huble and Wiesel and others who won a Nobel Prize, I mean, the and others have shown, if you look at things up close,

actually during development and even an adult with the eyeball lengthens, that the term nearsightedness in part is because of where the image is focused to in front of the neural retina, et cetera. There are ways to remedy this. Basically, in short, if you don't make it to the end of this podcast, although I hope you would, because I'll give more protocols, but kids that spend or adults that spend two hours a day outside, even just getting sunlight through cloud cover.

So you do not need to live in California. I don't care if you're in Minnesota. If it's cloudy out, you're still getting a lot more photons, light energy through the clouds than you would if you were indoors with a lot of bright lights on, they see great relief from some of these visual deficits, getting a lot of sunlight in your eyes early in the day, even if it's not very bright, if you wake up before the sun comes out, turn on bright lights in your house, but then go outside when you can, even if it's cloudy, take off sunglasses, et cetera.

Okay, so deficits in relationship to sunlight and overuse of artificial light late in the evening. That's a huge one from the mental health and physical health. metabolic health perspective. We can talk about that. Even lights, too many lights in your room while you're asleep, some people have thinner eyelids. This actually can create metabolic dysfunctions upon waking. Oh, new paper just out in PNAS.

Oh, kids that sleep, and I'm talking just 10 or 20 lux, very dim light in your room. You don't have to be in a cave, but if you have too much light, even though you're sleeping through the night, it's disrupting. But I'm scared of the dark, Dr. Huberman. There's a way to deal with this. There's a way, and I'll be happy to share.

So disrupted, disrupted relationship to light is one big one. Two is, look, I use social media. I love social media. One of the issues with social media, however, is, first of all, let's think about the format it arrives in. Let's forget the content, violent, political, happy, sad, bullying, non-bullying. Let's just forget the content and just pretend that we were looking into a box about this big for more than an hour a day, that bringing together of our eyes, we call a

virgin's eye movement and restricting into a narrow region and having the image scroll as opposed to our eyes scanning and reading, like with a book where our eyes are actually doing the scanning, but when you're scrolling actually the image itself, the content is what's going by. That is very demanding on the sympathetic nervous system. So where the seesaw is being pushed into one side and that here. hinge is getting locked, so to speak, in the more active state and we're not getting as much modulation of the autonomic nervous system. Remember when you used to walk to your car and you weren't looking into a little box, you just walked to your car? Remember when you used to go for a

jog or a walk or would have dinner and you were actually looking around the room and at people's faces and not into a little box? Waiting in line. I always point out you would wait in line and people watch. Just look at things. That's right. That's right. So narrowly restricting our vision. focus to a particular small target for too much of the day, very serious. So light, narrow restriction of visual angle, as we call it in geek speak ophthalmology type thing. Then there's, of course, the content and the speed of turnover of content. So if a picture is worth a thousand words, you know, a movie is worth 10 million pictures. And this is the first time in human evolution, first of all, that people have written with their thumbs, at least as far as we know. It's also

the first time in human evolution that you can context switch your brain can flip to different locations different people through the viewing of movies in a matter of minutes so in two minutes on instagram i can look at 200 movies crazy and tick tock is a whole other order of magnitude worse and um i i'm not going to beat up on tic talk but it has there are number of things about ticot including issues of national security that concern me very much in addition to the content and the format. So there's that where there's a lot of context switching. So you're basically teaching the brain, adult or child brain, to defocus or to not be able to focus well. You're saying context switch, context switch, context switch. And that's why it's hard to read two pages of text. That's why it's hard to leave the phone out of the room. Now,

with that said, you know, I've been doing a lot of research into the grief and attachment and healthy social attachment literature and knowing where people are, knowing that you care about, knowing where they are in space and time is one of the most fundamental ways in which we build and maintain attachments. So it makes sense why the phone is so critical. You really want to be able to know where people are in space and time and it's a wonderful tether to that, but it also brings with it a number of other things. And then I think the last category is there are two areas which our healthy social connection and physical touch that we are really struggling with right now. I was waiting for this. I thought that would be number one. Okay, it's number four.

You know, physical touch, obviously, there's romantic touch. There's also child to parent. Again, always age appropriate, consensual, context, appropriate, species appropriate touch. But you know that, I just want to just be clear. You have to cover all your bases when you work at Stanford, don't you? Well, I do. Well, it's not just for being at Stanford. It's also because, as you know, in doing anything public facing, the gaps you leave are the gaps that people fill with assumptions. And I take this, and, you know, I like to be somewhat lighthearted about some of these discussions. But for some people, I'm not trying to be politically correct.

It's just what I've come to realize is that if I don't put those points out there, then sometimes a statement about, you know, people are feeling deprived of touch. Does that mean when you run around hugging people that don't want to be hugged? Like there's the close talker people, they're the bad breath people. they're the people who touch too much but I think many people nowadays are feeling deprived

of healthy social connection and there are all these molecules as you know David Anderson's lab at Caltech has just been doing beautiful work on Tachykinen and these molecules that exist in flies,

mice and humans that when we are deprived of social contact are aggressive and irritable tendencies increase and you know whenever I hear like this horrible incident in New York of this guy

this kind of loner guy who basically started shooting at people on the subway and you know these and then they do the forensics on this and they go who was this guy and they go you know he's been alone in his room for for two years and now I'm not giving him an excuse he's obviously responsible he needs to pay for what he did it's terrible but when you deprive animals of any species of social contact they either turn against themselves or they turn against others or both and I think that we're in a real social deficit right now where people are craving healthy social interaction. And the pandemic, for all its, you know, problems and controversies, I mean, the one thing you can't argue is people have been more stressed, sleeping less well. Right. And social connection has been greatly diminished.

I want to ask you a few questions just, I mean, I literally, I mean, could talk to you forever. but I wanted to ask you a few things that I'm just kind of curious about. Are you a partnered person? I am. Are you a parent? I'm not. Okay. So you're a partnered person.

Is your partner also in science? No. A normal person. And what do you like to do for fun? I'm just curious about you. For what? No, I'm just kidding. My guy.

You look like we can do jujitsu together. Do you do jiu-jitsu? I don't do jiu-jitsu. I did one jiu-jitsu class with Lex Friedman, also a podcaster. All I can tell you are the things that I enjoy. So I define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure, and I define a good life as a progressive broadening of the things that give you pleasure. And I consider myself lucky in that I think I've put some effort into making sure that my dopamine

system is very responsive to the little things, the big things. and everything in between. So I'm having fun right now. I know that seems, you know, but I will, no, really. No, but so my days are very straightforward. I wake up and I get sunlight in my eyes. And I take a walk and I really enjoy that. I do that with my partner if we're,

it happen to be in the same city at that moment. I love exercise. I'm fortunate that way, I guess. I like to either run or do some sort of gym workout for about an hour every morning, one or the other and just kind of alternate. and then I love to read and learn and so I spend time reading and spend time I'm trying to learn

and then I try and tell people about it on podcast and social media. You're a nonfiction person or like do you? Mostly a nonfiction. Are you like a romance novel fan? Like I just want something. Not a romance. So I have some hobbies and some addictions

healthy addictions besides what I just described. I love to eat by the way. I love food. I'm very lucky that I generally like good food like healthy food but I love to eat. But I have to eat. I have a couple of weird hobbies.

Go for it. First of all, I'm obsessed with what's called aquascaping, there's a guy named Takashi Amano who developed this thing called aquascaping. These are freshwater fish tanks with no metal on them. They're just glass boxes and the lighting's very important. And I have freshwater discus for a long time, and I love the plants and I love that. It's a Japanese craft. You can look at Takashi Omano.

He built a number of museums. I love that. I also, in a very disparate way from all that, or disparate axis, I collect a lot of, and I'm sort of obsessed with a certain music-related memorabilia. And I have an obsession with Oliver Sacks and his life, and I've been collecting a number of his things. Wait, what's your music thing? Can we know?

I mean, I'm, I have a lot of kind of like second wave, third wave, rare punk stuff. Oh. I'm a huge Joe Strummer fan. I happen to, I'm not trying to name drop here, but I happen to be close friends with Rick Rubin. So one of my favorite things to do is hang out with Rick and ask him to tell me stories about dead second wave, third wave punk guy. So we share a lot of stories back and forth. And I've learned a lot from Rick about that world, even though I have no musical talent whatsoever. Zilp, zero, nada.

I was terrible. I can memorize lyrics very easily, but I have no, I can't keep a tune. I can't keep a beat. You'll be my control subject for my study. There you go. And I love movies. Oh, what do you like? I mean, I love the, not the documentary, but I loved Basquia.

That movie I've seen with everyone's in it, right? Dennis Hopper, Parker Posey, Benicio del Toro, who I think plays the young Vincent Gallo. So I have this obsession with New York in the 80s. And when I'm in New York, I spend a lot of time kind of hunting down. I have a lot of friends from the New York City punk rock community. People like Toby Moors, who has this amazing podcast, One Life, One Chance. He's from band H-2O. Guys, like, I'm obsessed with that whole world of culture as it relates to kind of punk rock and skateboarding because I grew up in the skateboarding culture.

So I have a lot of friends in the skateboarding world. So anyway, I mean, I could go down these deep dives. No, no, I just, no, that's very. interesting. I'm kind of obsessive about these things and I collect a lot of them and I spend a lot of time on those things. I also like to sit in the sauna and do cold dunks and all that kinds. I do that stuff and I've done it for a long time. And yeah, and I love Wendell Berry poetry. What can I tell you? Go ahead, John.

Well, this is purely for my benefit. Can you give Maim the like 20 second version of why she should try cold plunge? I mean, you make it very clear that this doesn't have to be done with cold plunge. It could also be cold shower. It could also be done with what's called cyclic hyperventilation. Some people call it Wimhoff breathing. Some people call it Tumel breathing. Oh, I know the Wimov breathing.

Yes. We call it cyclic hyperventilation, which is if you do that for 25 breaths, inhale, in-hout, or you get into a cold shower, or you get into a cold water bath up to your neck, guess what? The effect is exactly the same. adrenaline is released in your brain and body. Now, I'm robbing the words of David Spiegel here. It's not just about the state that you're in. It's about how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it. Deliberate cold exposure through cold shower, ice bath, deliberate adrenaline release through cyclic hyperventilation are a way of deliberately increasing adrenaline.

And adrenaline does several things. of all, it makes you very alert. If you breathe like that, you're going to be very alert. You're going to heat up. That's adrenaline. Right. You're going to be in a panic mode if you're in an ice bath, but your ability to learn to calm your mind while it having a lot of adrenaline circulating in your system is a very useful tool to have in your kit because when you get into a car accident, this happened to me. I was hit driving in Los Angeles. We were rear-ended and actually there was a pregnant woman, not by me, but pregnant in the passenger seat in front of me and her husband in the drivers, you know, and I remember getting out and running after the car because the car tried to

take off and make, we made sure she was okay first. Of course, I'm not a particularly gritty or calm person, but you do enough deliberate cold exposure or if you're familiar with having a lot of adrenaline in your system, when it hits, you feel alert and calm and you're able to function in that state. And so this is something that you can use to increase your stress threshold. So a lot of people talk about cold showers as a way to increase metabolism or to blah, blah, blah, and it's true it will increase dopamine for up to two hours afterwards by a significant amount. It increases focus, et cetera. But that's by way of adrenaline. And last point is that adrenaline that's chronically high is bad. That's chronic stress. But adrenaline that spikes for a bit,

you know, the beautiful work of James McGaugh and Larry Cahill from UC Irvine and University of Arizona, the spikes in adrenaline, they enhance your memory. They enhance your focus. They enhance your feelings of well-being. They deploy your immune system. He's so smug right now. This is also Kundalini Yoga, the breath, the fire breath. That's what they do.

That's the thing. Absolutely. So what I'm a big fan of is finding the way to trigger adrenaline release in a way that you can titrate it. You can control it. Right. The problem with cyclic hyperventilation is a lot of people feel so uncomfortable and agitated, that they don't know, should I have done 10 breaths or 15. Adrenaline comes in these big peaks and waves.

I think taking a cold shower for a minute each morning, then I like to go back to the hot shower, frankly, afterward, is a great practice because if you learn how to stay calm in there, if you get into the ice bath or a cold water, learning to calm your mind while your body is very activated is a great tool so that when you get a text message, like, hey, your kid didn't show up today. I actually had a friend this happened. The kid was missing. And we were all at the house looking for this then nine-year-old child.

I mean, think about the stress of that, right? But what's required in that moment is to be able to think clearly. So there are tools you can use to learn to train your nervous system, kind of uncouple that brain body reflex. And cold showers are great, if anything, you save on the heating bill. I've done it. Like, I've gone to, like, hot natural baths and then I will go in the cold. but sometimes it makes you feel like you're going to pass up. You definitely don't want to jump into 30 or 40 degree water if you're not trained up to do that.

I mean, you know, warning. I mean, you can't stop your heart if you jump into like an icy lake. I'm never doing it again. This was going really well until that. We're down here. No, just here. The biggest effects on dopamine actually have been observed in a study where they had people get into 60 degree water for a prolonged period of time up to their neck. Whereas if you get into really cold water, 40 degree Fahrenheit.

water at for 20 seconds, you can get this effect. But, you know, I'm a big believer in people doing something they can do consistently. And you could do the cold shower three times a week. Yeah. So that's, that's a reason to do it. Wait, what do you do for fun, mine? Because I'm not about to let you off the hook that easily. I collect small things. I like very tiny things. So like I have a collection of like tiny little vases or like really anything miniature I like. I grew up with a strong appreciation for Japanese art and architecture and also I like poetry.

I do, I exercise. I do taekwondo. I'm testing for my black belt candidacy belt, which is called a poom belt. Amazing. I'm impressed. I'm very, I actually, I thought after having children I might never lift my body off the ground again because there's a heaviness to you

after you have kids. But yeah, I did jujitsu in college and then I took up taekwondo. I, I, what else do I like to do? I, I like documentaries. I like crime documentaries. I'm not allowed to watch. Can you share a few that are particularly good? Well, so it's interesting because for, I've been, I've been for eight months, I've not watched the kind of documentaries that I really like because Jonathan said they were upsetting my sleep.

She was watching them right before bed and then having intense nightmares. I mean, she has intense nightmares other times. I have, yeah. But we were trying to work on those. I don't do a lot of things for fun. I like cleaning a lot. Like I like cleaning and organizing. Jonathan likes to say I organize my closet every night and it looks the same.

But it doesn't to me. So I like things really in order. I mean music. I love music. I love music. I have a deep, deep passion and appreciation for music. Yeah, I play some instruments and I love music. I play piano since I'm four.

And then I can play. I was a trumpet player in middle school. I play bass guitar, but not, like, actively. I had to learn harp for the Big Bang Theory. But mostly I love piano. I'm very Jewishly aligned. I like studying Jewish text and philosophy. And I also do liturgical, like, Jewish quartet stuff.

Yeah. I mean, about music, if you sit with her in the car and you're just listening to the radio, she knows every lyric to every song that comes on. Pretty much that I've ever heard. But I'm a huge album. I'm a little bit of the music that you probably are a fan of. My bulldog, unfortunately he passed away, but I had a bulldog mastiff with a giant head, and his name was Costello because I got him from a guy named Elvis.

Oh, wow. I confess I'm not an Elvis Costello thing. You don't have to be. A lot of people are not. But I don't dislike it. No, but it's an era. It's a, well, look, I mean, also the early Elvis was much closer to a lot of the music scene that was very important and critical at that time.

We wanted to ask you briefly, before we let you go,ish, we wanted to ask you about EMDR, and if you can speak to it a little bit, because we talk about it a lot here, and, you know, not exclusively because of your optical connections that you have in terms of research and knowledge. But, you know, this is one of those things that I'm, you know, kind of nervous to talk about because while it's not super out there, it is one of those things that. that is hard to describe or necessarily quantify. And yet, people do have a lot of success. I put success in quotes because it's kind of weird to talk about sort of working on trauma in particular as success, but movement and progress. And in many cases, it does more than traditional psychoanalysis would do or even more modular kind of CBT stuff. So can you explain a little bit just for people who might not really understand how moving

your eyes can help you process trauma. Can you explain a little bit in your terms? Sure. And if I may, I'm just going to briefly describe some of the general relationship between your eyes and internal states and offer some tools along the way. When you focus your eyes on a narrow location, phone, as I'm doing right now, into the Zoom screen, talking to somebody and paying very close attention to their eyes looking at them, you know, like this, especially if you don't blink, is actually, you know, every time you blink, you reset your time referencing system. This idea that people who don't blink are sociopaths, there's absolutely no truth to it. Zero, zip, nada.

Guess when we blink more? When we're tired, think about it. As you get tired, you start shutting down the sensory input to your brain. The neurons that control closing of the eyelids and actually pushing the eyes down is part of the parasympathetic nervous system. The neurons that control opening of the eyelids and eyes up are, part of the sympathetic nervous system. I just thought about dead bodies and how you have to close the eyes.

Exactly. Not coincidentally, the test as to whether or not someone is hypnotizable or not, it's a one to four clinical scale called the Spiegel Eyeroll test involves having people look up but then close their eyes while maintaining upward gaze. Now, why would a clinician develop such a test? The reason is that people that can do that look up and close their eyelids at the same time, are highly hypnotizable compared to those that can't do those two things simultaneously. This is like the seesaw going in both directions at the same time.

Look up. We can do it now, but we'll have to get you close to the camera to do this properly. But let me just, the state of hypnosis is a state of, remember, alertness but calm. And this might sound like quackery or craziness. This is keep in mind when clinicians, neurologists look for concussion. What do they do? shine light into one eye and they're looking for the so-called consensual pupil reflex in the other eye that it also constricts. It should be called non-consensual because if its system's working,

it doesn't have a choice. But non-consensual gets people uncomfortable. So the consensual pupil reflex. So the idea that the eyes are a window into deeper brain function is not crazy. That's actually a neurologist's main tool unless you're going to crack open the skull or put somebody into a scanner. So we can actually assess, and again, this is developed by David Spiegel and his father. The extent to which somebody can be hypnotized, the Spiegel eye roll test, you can look this up. Again, this isn't for stage hypnosis, but clinical hypnosis. So someone can get close to the camera.

And what you're going to do, or you could do this to each other. What you're going to do, maybe I could demonstrate. I'm very hypnotizable, or you could come forward. I'd rather do it on one of you. Okay. You go over there, Jonathan? I'm going to make a joke about Canadians being more hypnotizable, but actually there's no such. There are no such data.

They're just so nice. They just want to make you happy. If you want to hypnotize me, I will be hypnotized. Okay, here comes Jonathan. Here you come with Jonathan. So, Jonathan, can you kind of go down in the screen? Great. So you don't have to take off your hat, but if you could look up, there you go.

And now while maintaining upward gaze, this is a little bit challenging for something, you're going to slowly close your eyes. And what I'm looking for is whether or not I can, there you go, you are very hypnotized. Yeah, he is. Because I can still see the whites of it. your eyes. So let me do it both ways. I don't know if you can see this, but if you can, your eyes roll back, right? Now this is, now some people can't do this when they close their eyes, the eyes roll forward and they just go shut. Remember, there are two sets of cranial nerve

nuclei that are like a push and a pull on alertness and calmness. And people who can maintain upward gaze with eyes closed can very easily enter these hypnotic states because what is the hypnotic state? It is a very deep, deep, state of calm while being very focused on a narrow context. And then the narrow context is fed to you either through an audio script or through a trained hypnotist. Now, inside of hypnosis, your brain is able to access neuroplasticity more readily. Why? Should he get off his knees, Dr. Huberman? Oh, yeah. Sorry about this. He's so obedient. He's so obedient. No, no. It's always the ones that are obedient in public that are very defiant in private.

it. And often vice versa. And often vice versa. Not always, but, you know, hence the, well, we'll stop there. So, right. Yeah, we get, we could talk about it. But that's a whole other dimension of autonomic control. That's the spinoff podcast we'd like to pitch to you actually is the sex podcast. Well, I actually, yeah, I think, well, I mean, some of the most interesting topics in all of the landscape of human experience are, right, sex relationships, power dynamics. I mean, and it's, I actually think it's because we are unwilling to have the conversation that there's so many problems in the world around the four things I was saying before, right, around consent, context appropriate, species appropriate. I do say somewhat facetiously, although, you know,

I am an animal lover, so I like the idea that they're protected too. But so here's the the idea, your eyes and how you position your eyes and move your eyes have a profound influence on the state of your brain. So it's not just how you breathe, it's not just how you exercise or slept the night before, it's all that, but it's also the fact, for instance, that getting sunlight in the morning wakes up your brain. Why? Because the neurons in your eye communicate to your hypothalamus that send a bodywide signal, including the increase of cortisol, to wake you up. The eyes are not a window to the soul. The eyes are the two pieces of brain that are outside. the cranial vault. These are two pieces of central nervous system.

I was just talking about that the other day. Sorry. Yes. So EMDR. EMDR is eye movement desensitization reprocessing. It was discovered and characterized by Francine Shapiro, who actually worked not far from Stanford campus. She was a psychologist who figured out or intude that when she had problems, if she took a walk, she was a therapist, but if she took a walk, somehow that made it easier to parse the issue. Now, she worked in a clinic where people had to sit down, and so she somehow, and I don't know how she made the bridge to this, unfortunately she's passed away, so we can't ask her, that if she had people move their eyes from side to side, but not up and down, and they did that with eyes open, that they were able to better recollect painful experiences verbally

and could somehow dissociate the emotional state they experienced during those painful experiences with their current bodily state. Now, what this led to over time, she reported, was that the emotional trauma or anxiety-provoking event would have less of an emotional effect on the body. So an uncoupling of the emotion to the troubling experience. Hence EMDR. Trained EMDR therapists will have you move your eyes from side to side, sometimes tracking a light, sometimes tracking a pen, and you report the painful thing. Now, I've talked to David

Spiegel about this. He's, again, the MDs works in this area of trauma and hypnosis, and again, our associate chair of psychiatry, he's a serious scientist and clinician, right? And David said EMDR tends to work best for single trauma or single type of trauma issues. So an entire childhood might not be amenable to, entire painful childhood might not be amenable to EMDR. We're done here, Dr. Huberman. That's what I need.

I need my whole childhood fixed with eight sessions. No, you need the men in black swipe. He also speculated to me, and again, I'm paraphrasing, so forgive me, David, if I'm getting any of this wrong. He also speculates that some of the effect

of EMDR might be a kind of hypnotic effect induced during the therapy. Keep in mind that clinical, hypnosis was discovered when a patient was focusing on a mole in the center of their psychiatrist's face and somehow then went into kind of a trance-like state where they could report experiences with much more ease than they could if they were just kind of not focusing on that. So again, the eyes are anchoring a brain state that are allowing for more report, et cetera. Now, this does relate to sleep in the following way.

Oh, excuse me, EMDR, I should just kind of wrap up by saying this is a potentially powerful tool for certain kinds of trauma. And you really do want to work with somebody expert in this if you're going to explore it. I just wanted to add, and with all due respect to David, obviously, and this entire field that is not my field, there are many people who do use EMDR for larger trauma and for compounded trauma. What I think happens to many people who have experienced trauma, is that we set aside most of our trauma, and then something happens when we're adults or whatever, and we realize we're having a tremendous difficulty

or what might be considered an exaggerated reaction or why can't you get over it? And what often happens is that we've, you know, been taught to compartmentalize what many of us also may not have even called trauma. It was just life, right? And so what happens is if you have a system that has had this compounded trauma, this one incident can be sort of a trigger point

for awareness and starting to work on it, but often it's because you have a system that essentially has been primed for your entire life. So I just wanted to say that also that it does and can work for other things. The reason that people are such sticklers, people like Dr. Huberman and myself, the reason we are such sticklers

for people who are certified is not because we're trying to promote an elitist form of, psychiatric or psychological care. It's not because we think degrees are more important than not having a degree. But the potential for an EMDR experience becoming exploitative or becoming not helpful and possibly harmful is not completely able to be prevented. However, when people have been trained in a certain way, they are also taught a certain amount

of liability protection for how to handle things that may come up. That doesn't mean they're perfect. It doesn't mean there's not problems. But that's the reason, especially that I don't like when internists start prescribing psychiatric medication is because they're often not asking full questions about people's profile that people who are trained to work in those fields are trained to know and field. Anyway, sorry, go ahead. Excellent points. And I'm grateful you made them. You know, for many years, people would ask me about EMDR and what I thought about it because my lab works on stress and we work on vision. And I quite honestly, I said, this is ridiculous. I thought it was absolutely crazy. And then what happened was I was asked to review a number of papers, a couple of papers on mouse,

a couple of papers on monkey and then some papers on humans. These were brain imaging papers that were mainly focused on eye movements, not on emotionality and what they discovered in these manuscripts. This was from the sort of 2016 to 2020 span was that when the eye movements, was that when the eyes move from side to side, again, with eyes open, up and down movements of the eyes don't do this, there is a dramatic reduction in the activity of certain components of what we call the limbic system, including the amygdala, which is an area of the brain commonly associated with threat detection and sometimes even with full-blown fear, although it does other things too. So at that point, I thought, wow, there's really something to this.

Why would that be? And it turns out that forward ambulation, walking forward, actually evokes the same kind of eye movements and the same suppression of amygdala activity. So this is interesting and important when you start to think about sleep, okay? Just very briefly, sleep has two major phases, deep sleep and slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement, REM sleep. There's more REM sleep towards morning. These are happening all night long in 90-minute ultradian cycles and so on and so forth.

And you dream every night, even if you don't remember them. You do. And your dreams at the beginning of the night tend to be less emotionally laden and your dreams towards morning, which are associated with mostly with REM sleep, tend to be more emotionally intense. Now, what's interesting about dreams during REM sleep is that they can often be very emotionally intense, but in REM sleep, you are unable to release epinephrine, adrenaline into your body. You are also paralyzed. It's sleep-induced atonia, as it's called. This is important. It's almost like what we're talking about in terms of EMDR or some other form of trauma therapy

where you are creating a calm bodily state while you are recalling a very intense emotional experience. So the late phase of sleep actually turns out to be a bit of a trauma release or trauma therapy, whereas EMDR is a waking state designed to suppress the amygdala. It wasn't designed for that, but we now know suppresses amygdala activity. Hence, it makes you less alert and vigilant and in a state of fear, if you will. So interesting. I love that.

So you're uncoupling the event. from the emotion. And, you know, I think most people would be upset to learn that you never actually forget the traumatic experience, but they should be reassured by the fact that the goal of trauma therapy is always to move something from a very troubling, almost, you know, can't think about that, can't think about that. All trauma therapies involve getting closer and closer and closer to the precise recollection of that thing, to the point where it just becomes a boring, somewhat sad, unfortunate story. But at least it doesn't overwhelm your bodily state. or your bodily state doesn't overwhelm you.

And so if you, that's the, this current state of technologies, that's what we can do. There is no erasing of the trauma. There's the unloading of the emotional load of the previously traumatic experience. So that's EMDR. And the last thing I'll say about this is that when you bring your eyes to a common vergence point on your phone or in conversation, even if it's a good conversation, even if you're looking at something on your phone that you like, you are increasing the activity of that. sympathetic nervous system. The seesaw is tilting. Conversely, when you allow your vision to expand in what we call panoramic vision, so without

moving your eyes or your head, I'm not doing this, but I can actually expand my field of view. So right now I can see the screen, but I can also see the periphery of the room. I can also see the floor. And now I can see myself in the environment I'm in. That's like taking your foot off the accelerator a bit, right? Before I was talking about seesaw, you could also think about sympathetic as like an accelerator and parasympathetic is like a break.

physiological size, the double inhale, exhale, that's like slamming on the break of alertness. But there's another way to become more calm, which is to come off the accelerator. And when you expand your field of view, you're coming off the accelerator. You asked what is the major problem nowadays. And I said, and I still believe that one of them is the fact that we are on the accelerator all the time. We're looking into a little box. We're doing zooms.

Then we go to lunch. And we're, while on the way to lunch, we're looking into a small location to say nothing of the content that's coming through. Now, the political shifts, the legislative shifts, the fact that everyone seems to hate each other nowadays, you know, I'm only sort of half joking, I guess, you know, I, it's amazing how tense things have become. And sometimes I wonder if part of that tension, certainly not all of it, but part of that tension is the consequence not just of what we are learning and seeing and hearing, but the venue, the format, the visual format through which we're receiving and hearing that. information. Well, there's also benefit to having sensory perception on multiple planes of field, right? So, like, for example, if you're going through the forest and you're having to do process things that are close to you and then further away, I've heard that that's also, you know, it's not, it's opening your field of vision, but then also like having a diverse environment that

you're having to process. Immensely beneficial and probably beyond the scope of today's conversation, but the one thing I'm obsessed with is time perception. Actually, your former colleague at UCLA Dean Bornemano, I can never pronounce his name. Beautiful book. The brain is a time machine, a wonderful book. You know, when you are in a focused mode, you are essentially with eyes focused on a narrow location, you are fine slicing space, duh, but you are also fine slicing time. It's like taking increasing the frame rate on a camera. So you're getting microslices. When you are in panoramic vision, you are taking larger time bins. Now, what does this mean?

Well, the simplest way you think about this is the focus mode is more associated with the adrenaline dopamine pursuit system and the panoramic vision, relaxation, staring up at the clouds, not looking at your phone while you're doing it, walking with someone and just talking and having a good time but not really focusing anywhere in particular with your eyes. Well, that's more of this, if you will, the serotonergic kind of parasympathetic system. Broad strokes here, I realize. But what does this mean? well, if you've ever had the experience of having a really exciting day, it feels like it went

by really, really fast. And yet when you look back, it seems like a lot happened. Whereas if you ever went to the doctor's office and had to wait for three hours, it feels like it takes forever, we have this visual aperture that can contract and expand. And that controls obviously how we parse physical space. But then that visual aperture also changes the way in which we parse to use nerd speak. the time domain, right? You start slicing time differently.

Right. And this is really important because what makes the human brain so remarkable is that we can orient our thinking to past, present, or future, and we can also think about the past and present, the present and the future. And we are able to, in theory, we're able to control those switches of where our thinking is in time, using the prefrontal cortex that, you know, top down as it's called modulation, but when we become reflexively slaves to all the things around us and we're just locked in that mode,

you know, here what I'm trying to keep painting is a picture where most people, they wake up and that seesaw is tilted towards activation states all the time. And that's either going to make you exhausted or locked into modes of thinking about pursuit, thinking that the thing that you need lies outside of you. And if you engage in this way for too long, what ends up, you know you've been using your visual system incorrectly if the following you. happens. Have you ever find yourself doing something, like scrolling social media and it doesn't feel good? Well, guess what? You're not getting dopamine hits. Everyone's like, oh, social media is dopamine. Maybe the first time you used it, but that's not a dopamine hit. What's happening is your dopamine is, at least as it relates to that activity, is depleted. You are effectively like a rat pressing a lever,

just hoping that things, and you don't even enjoy it anymore. Dopamine is about motivation. It's not about pleasure. And so I really encourage people to do what I call deliberate decompression, which is take a walk with in panoramic vision. You don't even have to focus on it too much. Do it with somebody else or really try and get your visual field out of that narrow box for some portion of the day. I realize it's hard. And of course you can go back to enjoying it an hour later or something. Look off into the distance. That will help your vision as correct itself over time. Get outside and get sunlight. The correct. Corrective power of these things is immense. So if you start getting some sunlight in your eyes for 10 minutes each morning, even through cloud cover, no sunglasses, eyeglasses and contacts are fine, even if they have UV protection, don't do it through a window, don't through a car windshield. It doesn't work. It takes too long. If you start doing that, you will feel better all day and you will sleep better. And it's a nice practice. You just go outside and you don't stare at the sun, obviously. You just get indirect sunlight. These are simple things, but many people are doing all of this backwards. wrong or not at all.

In other words, everyone gets an F. Backward wrong or not at all. That's the title of my memoir. Dr. Huberman just named it for me. I mean, look, I really, I don't even have much to say. He said all the things. That was one of our longest conversations. It was super awesome.

And, you know, people should check out his podcast. Like all the things. Yeah, his Huberman Labs podcast, all the things. He talks to incredible people. He obviously is such an amazing. communicator and I really, I don't feel the need to say anything else. It's incredible. I want to talk to him about all the things. But like, he's the guy who needs to teach all of us how to live our lives. That's it. We figured it out. It's him. What did you think about the light conversation?

I was surprised that when, you know, I sort of asked like what's the best thing to kind of like optimize, you know, whatever. I thought the first thing he'd, well, I was hoping the first thing he'd say it was like connection to other humans and he's like, our connection and relationship with light. It's like, what? Light. I mean, it's. He got there at the end and number four. No, yes. But he said, I think they were in order of importance. You know, light is like a huge one.

I mean, I need to and want to know more about it. You know, we are creatures that are supposed to live outside. And we are, you know, animals that are supposed to be in tune with the rhythms of nature. And but a lot of people live in places, you know, where they like. We didn't talk about focus. He had focus as number four. I wanted to talk to him about ADHD. I was like, maybe I don't have ADHD.

I just need more light. You don't know how to control your autonomic nervous system. Well, that's clear. If anyone out there has tried morning light, has integrated that into their routine. You have. You've been taking these morning walks. I listened to, so I got it from him, and I listened to some of how he described the impact of light on the brain and what that does for us. You take your morning walk.

I try as much as I can to get outside right when I wake up. Even when it's raining, I'll throw my raincoat on. I'll go out. It's like just 10 minutes. I literally wake up 10 minutes before I need to leave the house. So now I have to have a new system of waking up 20 minutes before I need to leave the house. Just get outside for a little bit. And it's interesting, like the moment you step outside or the moment I should say I step outside and the light hits my eyes, there is a noticeable.

It's like, oh, wait a second, that my body is clearly processed. You know, I try not to. But then I call you and I wonder where you are. Sometimes I'll listen to a podcast. I think it's better to let your brain, you know, just kind of wander a little bit. But I think about my kid. I think about my kid who carries his phone around everywhere. And I'm like, you know, I get a visceral annoyance.

I think it's a protective mechanism because I see him just staring at his phone. And what I liked to hear and was slightly reassured is that. that the up scrolling is actually worse. It puts us in that revved up state where he described it like putting your foot on the gas because that down scroll where your eyes are going up and down is so bad for us. Or it's not bad, but it is exerting energy

and processing information. Here's the thing. And this is sort of like what I've come to as I'm doing a lot of examining and observing my kids and trying not to have conflict about it. Their dad has started just instituting like tech-free days. I think he's doing it like one day

every other week, like in the middle, you know, like a Thursday or whatever. I don't think whatever I'm supposed to be hoping that they can regulate for themselves,

they just can't. And the only thing... 100%. The only thing that I think is the solution is to be like, we don't use phones. Like, you know, from this time,

like, it's too much. And sometimes when I take him places, he tries to bring his phone and I'm like, and we'll be sitting at a restaurant, like, outside of a restaurant waiting for pickup or take out food. And he's like, but I'm not doing anything.

And I'm like, just sit and watch people. They don't get it. Because that's the thing. We did it because there's nothing else to do. Yeah. Anyway, this was really, I have so many more things I would love to discuss with him. And I want to have him on every day. I'll just add that we should be cautious of our progress that we're making

because it's separating us from the systems that are. are sort of biologically inherent to us. Oh, I thought you meant the progress we're making individually. I was like, but I want to be proud of myself when I take a cold shower. You mean the, yeah, but we just sound like 90-year-olds when we talk like that. Like, be careful, young children, right? Scott, be careful of all your scrolling. Beware, you'll never find a partner if you're scrolling on your phone all the time.

As we say this, we're like, hit us up on the Instagram channel and tell us about your scrolling. out like breakdown. Use it wisely. You know, use it wisely. And I hope that we are all starting to become more aware of when it's too much, when everything's too much. When it's too much interacting with people that are not healthy for us, when it's too

much not getting help, when it's too much scrolling, when it's too much overwhelm, when it's too much trying to be all things to all people. What I'm hoping is we're all gaining better awareness. Get some natural light in your eyes. Look at it on the horizon. From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have.

We'll see you next time. It's My Ambiolyx Breakdown. She's going to break it down for you. She's got a neuroscience Ph.D. or two. One fiction. And now she's going to break.