Motivation Daily by Motiversity - NEUROSCIENTIST: You Will NEVER Lack Focus Again! | Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: August 23, 2023

Dr. Andrew Huberman is a distinguished American Neuroscientist and Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine. With groundbreaking research and a passion for empowering individuals, he shares tools and advice for focusing and overcoming stress.“We learn best when we are focused and alert, but not too stressed. And then we need to cycle that focus time with deep rest. Not necessarily naps, it can be meditation, but I call it a state of wordlessness. Let your mind drift for a while.” ― Dr. Andrew HubermanSpecial thanks to our partners:Mindvalley Talks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qksd7aHGAUQ&t=0sAubrey Marcus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFh6YWSviWI&t=0sSpeaker:Andrew Huberman: https://hubermanlab.com/Music licensed from Epidemic Sound, Audiojungle▶Subscribe for New Motivational Videos Every Week:http://bit.ly/MotivationVids▶DOWNLOAD our Top 100 Quotes of All Time:https://bit.ly/topquotesfreepdf▶JOIN our Newsletter for Exclusive Updates, Discounts, and Deals: https://bit.ly/Motiversitynewsletter▶READ our Weekly Blog -https://bit.ly/motiversityblog▶SHOP Official Motivational Canvases and Apparel -https://bit.ly/motiversityshop▶BECOME A MEMBER of our loyal community!https://bit.ly/motiversitymembers Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello listeners, Motivosity is excited to share that we have launched a new podcast called Morning Motivation by Motivore. If you are looking to start your day with positivity and the most uplifting motivational audio, this is the show for you. For today's episode of Motivation Daily by Motivority Podcast, we are sharing a recent episode from the Morning Motivation Podcasts. If you like it, go follow the show. New episodes are being released every week. The link is in the description. Why do we have fears? Why do we have trauma?

Why do we have shame? Here's the stinger. It was all set up for you in your youth. I don't want to focus on the bad. But most of this stuff, when you're young, you're just a passive learning machine. It's all coming in. Little kids are learning three languages with no accents flexibly. They're not even thinking about.

They're learning instruments. Someone asked a great question the other day at the workshop. Wait, now I know. all that stuff, how come it's so much tougher? And there's a lot of biology that I'd be happy to tell you about. It explains why that all shuts down after these so-called critical periods during development. So what happens when you're an adult and you want to change your brain?

So now I'm going to get into the stuff that hopefully is useful to you. But this power of emotion, the ability to couple really strong emotions with things, is so useful if you want to change your brain for the better. And the way you do that is clear in the physical space. We all know this story. There are many news cases like this. Woman's child stuck under car. Superhuman strength.

We heard a lot of amazing stories about desperation. JJ's story was one of desperation. No, I'm not going to accept failure, because failure in the case she was describing was potentially the death of her child. So desperation is a strong one, and it's motivated by fear. But what if you're not in a desperate state and you really want to do something?

In that case, there's something remarkable. And we should ask ourselves, why are children such great passive learners? They're not trying. They're just learning. They're coming home with all sorts of things. Sometimes things you don't want them to come home. with. It's because they have this element of play. And what is play? Play isn't just movement,

although it includes movement. It's giving things, everything you've got, but keeping it in perspective. It's that sweet spot of enjoying life and trying really, really hard at it at the same time. It's essentially what we all strive for. And there are these incredible cases throughout history. Famous scientists like Richard Feynman, Nobel Prize winner. He's most famous for bongo drumming naked on the roof of Caltech. And he became an amazing artist in his 60s. and he developed all sorts of other skills. And he always had this childlike way of looking at the world. He never let himself get stuck in his ways, never became a curmudgeon,

and a remarkable man. And that's something that I, but if you come away with nothing else, I encourage you to do that. You want your brain to change, stay light, stay loose, but give it everything you've got. So I think that one of the most important questions that we should all ask ourselves anytime we want to learn or we want to relax or we want to sleep or we're in a, you know, in a situation where we need to receive hard information,

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

Pause it. Just let your mind drift for a little bit. And then the mind likes to focus back on things. It likes to focus on and off things. In this culture, we do not teach people how to operate their mind and body. And it leads to all sorts of problems, stress, anxiety disorders, ADD. There is no guidebook for social interactions, for sexual development. It's a huge problem.

And I think that the brain is harder to, you know, identify like a user's manual, right? Because it's always meditation, consciousness, high-level concepts, what do dreams mean? The really interesting stuff. Right. But I like that we're starting with physiology because what's nice about these. core mechanisms of brain body is that they are real things. Like if we could point to the neurons, these are things in the textbooks. There's nothing mysterious. It doesn't require any learning. Like, once you know how to do it, it works the first time it works every time. And that's the other thing.

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

and their life is a cycle of ups and downs, but really people who are on that upward trajectory consistently, those people attach dopamine to the effort process on the discovery of growth mindset was these kids that love doing math problems that they knew they couldn't get right. So it's like the people love puzzles, but in this case they knew they couldn't get it right,

but they love doing it. And incidentally or not so incidental, identally, these kids are fantastic at math when there is a right answer because they feel some sense of reward from the effort process. Now the cool thing about dopamine is that it's very subjectively controlled. We can all learn to secrete dopamine in our brain in response to things that are in a purely subjective way. But it has to be attached to reality. So, you know, if you're thinking about the effort you're expending. So let's say somebody right now is financially back on their heels

and they're setting up a new business, for instance. And it's hard. If they can take a few moments or minutes each day to reflect on the fact that the effort process is allowing them to climb out of their hole potentially, that it's giving them an opportunity, that it's somehow they are on the right path or if they're not in movement along that path

or at least oriented on the right path. They're not lying in bed all day. If they can reward that process internally, two things happen. First of all, the brain circuits that are associated with building subjective rewards and dopamine get stronger. So you get better at that process. And second, and most importantly, dopamine has an amazing ability to buffer adrenaline and buffer epinephrine.

And so then you're expending effort, but you're doing it from a place of feeling like you have energy for it. Everything works best on a backdrop of good sleep. Unless you need to be nocturnal, avoid bright light exposure from 10 p.m. to 4 a.m. It's not the end of the world if you get up and use the bathroom or you briefly turn on the lights. But there are studies showing that bright light exposure in the middle of the night, it punishes you by suppressing dopamine the next day and the next day. So try and get good night's, you know, master your sleep. And that's a whole other discussion, but that basically means getting as much bright light as as safely possible in your eyes in the morning and daytime and as little in your eyes after about 10 p.m. And don't give up the

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

And that resistance is expected. It's normal. It's healthy. And you should almost see it as like a friend along the way with you. It's like an irritating friend that's poking you and trying to distract you, pushing back on you, and you can make it playful. But there is a time to be serious about work. It's like, this is yours and you don't want to.

to squander it. So I say lean into that work and understand that if it goes pretty well today, it's going to go even better the next day because these are, I think what people forget about neural plasticity, the brain's ability to change itself in response to experience is that the circuits for focus also are subject to neural plasticity. So the more you feel that discomfort in focus, the more easily focus comes the next day and the next day. And pretty soon, if something interrupts you for even a minute, it's going to feel irritating. But do yourself a favor and look back and realize that in a short period of time, this won't take 100 days. We're talking about three, four days. You're going to be creating and working at a level that's

far more efficient and productive than before.