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Friendship is one of the most reliable sources of predictability that exists within human interactions.
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Professor of neurobiology at Stanford University. Dr.
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Huberman launched the Huberman Lab podcast concentrating on neuroscience and other scientific topics.
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Neuroscientist, neurobiologist Andrew Huberman.
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We could say this about any organism, but humans included, we need the feeling of safety and acceptance.
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What's happening from a neuroscience perspective as our friendships are getting weaker even though our followerships and online friendships are getting bigger?
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So, at the neuroscience level, we have to remember that the brain circuitry, which of course is always linked to the body.
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We want to remember brain body are fortunately now understood to be interconnected.
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And years ago, 10 years ago, that wasn't so much an accepted idea, but the nervous system, the brain, the spinal cord, and all the connections to the body and back to the brain and spinal cord are bidirectional and highly interconnected.
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So, when we say brain, I'm more or less using it as a proxy for whole nervous system, including body.
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The circuits that are responsible for feelings of social connectedness are deeply, deeply rooted in our need for safety.
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We could say this about any organism, but humans, included, need two things, I believe.
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We need the feeling of safety and acceptance.
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And so, if we are to have a conversation about the kind of loftier, um, words like peace, contentment, fulfillment, belonging.
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I think I borrowed that list, by the way, from the incredible Martha Beck.
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So, it's not a coincidence that those rattled off uh my mind, but I feel like those four words are are so critical to what we all want and what we all need at an aspirational level.
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We can't have a discussion about those without also, I believe, having a discussion about the fact that we have hardwired aspects of our nervous system, meaning genetic programs that are written into the script of all our genomes, regardless of color, regardless of
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background, that are just scripted into our genome that allow us to breathe without thinking about it, digest food without thinking about it, keep our heart rate going without thinking about it, elevated if it needs to be, slowed down if it needs to be, etc. And then hardwired circuitry that
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And then hardwired circuitry that is there for bonding with our caretaker during early infancy and bonding with others of our species, and evaluating whether there is safety and acceptance from the other members of our species.
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Now, these brain circuits have names, and we could get into that.
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They almost all have some connectedness to an area of the brain called the hypothalamus, which sits above the roof of your mouth, which has many, many dense collections of neurons we call nuclei responsible for everything from temperature regulation to feeding to reproductive behavior, and on and on.
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All the basic kind of housekeeping things.
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But, connected to the those brain areas are brain areas that are associated with evaluating whether one is safe or not.
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So, safety and acceptance then we can break down in the following way if we look at it through this neuroscience lens.
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Safety is really about the ability to predict outcomes. Okay?
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And the brain, after being responsible for all these housekeeping functions, heart rate, etc.
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, is largely a predictive organ.
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It wants to understand what's going to happen next to the extent that it can then free up mental real estate, neural real estate to work on creative projects, or to build things, or to imagine things, right?
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There's no creativity, there's no building in the absence of safety.
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Then it just becomes survival.
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So, the the kind of older discussion, meaning in the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s, the discussion about the nervous system was we would hear about higher brain order functions and a limbic functions, right?
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We would hear about kind of primitive lizard brain and more evolved brain.
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And all of that is frankly true, it remains true, and that language is perfectly fine.
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But, I think if we are to think about safety and acceptance, we say, "What is safety about?"
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Safety is about being able to predict outcomes.
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When we are in the company of people, or we know we have people available to us should we need something, food, maybe we need a monetary loan, maybe we need a word of encouragement, maybe we need somebody to bounce ideas off of, whatever it is that constitutes safety for us, it's highly subjective, highly individual,
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well, then when those circuits can quiet down, it's as if, you know, that they can finally quiet down and say, "We have enough so safety so that then we can start to explore iterating what we have in terms of new jobs, new creative ideas, new art, new that you know, take a walk with somebody you care about, right? Those are not the sorts of things
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Those are not the sorts of things you do when you feel that you are under siege. Mhm.
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Either real siege, physical siege, or emotional siege.
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Okay, then acceptance gets a little bit trickier to sort of pinpoint in the brain.
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Acceptance likely dovetails neurologically with this these brain circuits for safety.
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Because acceptance is really about, well, given the range of expressions that we have, our range of humor, our range of political beliefs, our range of um behaviors, can I predict that these safety mechanisms will still be there, these people will still be there, these things will still be there? Will they turn on me?
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Will they honor me, right?
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Will they Will they laugh with my jokes, or will they decide they don't want to talk to me anymore because of my jokes? These kinds of things.
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Now, what I'm trying to not do here, and at the same time do, is to put a neuroscience lens onto the these two things of safety and acceptance.
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But if we were to just take a step back and say, "What do we know to absolutely be true?"
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Well, safety and acceptance, belonging, peace, contentment, etc.
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, come from a variety of sources.
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Certainly in our early relationship with our caretakers, these circuits form that are basically all about resonance with the caretaker.
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Um Alan Shore here, UCLA, has done beautiful work on this.
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I think the book's title is called Right Brain Psychotherapy.
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And it's really about how the bonding of infant, and typically mother, but how the or caretaker, the bonding of infant, and I'll just say mother as uh since that's the more typical scenario, there's actually a lot of synchronization of brain networks early on, such that one's physical and mental state reflects the other, and so on.
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And so, from the very earliest stages that we come into the world, we are resonating with other people.
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Call it energy if you want, call it emotions, it's neurochemical.
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Yes, it involves oxytocin, but a whole lot else.
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In other words, we leave infancy and childhood and adolescence, if we have a healthy upbringing with a sense of predictability, someone can be there and then not be there.
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They're accessible if we need them, etc.
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Now, that sort of relationship, that connectivity between humans and safety and acceptance in those relationships has been explored extensively.
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I think we've all seen the image of the mother and child and the and the brain imaging and seeing some sort of collaborative activation of their brain networks.
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That's been explored extensively and it's beautiful work and we could always use more of that sort of work.
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What's been explored far less is the safety and acceptance that occurs between romantic pairs.
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Although there are laboratories starting to do that, having people for instance look at the face of their significant other angry, sad, etc.
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while in brain scanners, even scanning of two individuals separately at the same time. Those sorts of things.
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Far less has been done on this notion of friendship.
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But I think in this day and age when well, it seems like everything is more complicated.
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But I'm sure they've been saying that for for for decades or if not hundreds of thousands of years.
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What do we know about friendship?
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Friendship is one of the most reliable sources of predictability there that exists within human interactions. Why?
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Because you can have many, many friends and you don't have to break up with one friend have another friend.
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When you were when we're little, they say who's your best friend and maybe then you could only have one.
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But pretty soon we realize that we can have many great friends, many best friends and I consider you one of those.
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Like we're growing our friendship.
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But there's no sense of trade-off even though of course time is always a trade-off.
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In fact, you were at a gathering at my home with many other friends, right?
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That these things can be collaborative.
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Typically in romantic relationships, while there are exceptions to this, it's typically a pairing, right?
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So there are clearly brain networks that are overlapping with the brain networks associated with parent-child or child-caretaker relationships and romantic relationships that involve the generation of safety and acceptance among friends.
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The major difference, however, is that friends throughout history, even when people lived in small villages, tended to be dispersed by greater distances.
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And so, when we hear about the loneliness crisis, are we hearing about a crisis of lack of connectivity with our parents? Maybe. With our siblings? Possible. With romantic others?
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That's a whole domain into itself.
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You cover a lot of that and the challenges associated with finding and building healthy romantic relationship.
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But what we know for sure, based on extensive research now, is that there's a real dearth of close friendships for many, many people.
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Not just in the US, but abroad as well.
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Now, we could make an argument that it's by virtue of smartphones, but I don't think we want to go there just yet.
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I think Jonathan Haidt's doing a beautiful job exploring those ideas and he's far better equipped to to kind of pinpoint the relationships, causal or otherwise, than I am.
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But here's what we know for sure.
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With friends, we can both hope for and expect safety and acceptance by virtue of having lots of different kinds of friends.
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Um, friends with whom we play sports, friends with whom we just hang out, friends with whom we don't really talk too much at all, and friends with whom we drop into deep conversation with.
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So, one of the things that I personally have found to be immensely beneficial in my own life, and for which it's clearly had an outsized positive effect relative to the time required, is a simple good morning text that comes on a reliable schedule, meaning every single morning.
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Now, this might sound almost trivial, but when I wake up in the morning, I either receive or send a good morning text to right now there about three people in that kind of collection.
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They're not talking to each other.
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But if I don't receive that text by noon, it activates something in me.
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It's not a ton of anxiety, but it activates something. Are they okay?
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What's going on with them?
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You know, it isn't why aren't they checking up on me?
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I assume something's come up.
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But, the simple receipt of of a text from somebody saying good morning, I think has both ancient and modern significance.
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Ancient in the sense that one of the first things that everyone experienced when we lived in small villages, because that's essentially how we evolved, was to see faces of other what biologists call conspecifics, other you know, and other same uh non-conspecific people, like people that could be romantic partners or family members or people we were going to work with.
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We saw faces first thing in the morning.
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And we know with certainty, because there's a ton of beautiful work, mainly from Nancy Kanwisher's laboratory at MIT, a brilliant researcher, as well as a woman named Doris Sau, who now is at Berkeley, was at Caltech, that there's an immense amount of neural real estate devoted to the processing of faces, not just facial expressions, but human faces in particular.
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Now, monkeys have the same brain area for monkey faces.
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So, this is not an area that's just designed to see eyes, nose, and mouth.
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It's a brain area that has neural real estate that responds specifically to the faces of other humans in humans.
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And there's a whole lot to talk about how it's connected with areas of the brain involved in emotion and emotion regulation, et cetera.
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But, the simple act of sending a good morning text to one person and receiving that back, perhaps exchanging a note or two about what's your plan for the day, doesn't have to be an extensive back and forth, but the same person or persons consistently, I've experienced in my own life in times both good and bad and kind of neutral, that it has this outsized positive effect.
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And I don't think that's because, you know, I was lacking social interaction. My life is very full.
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I have a very busy business life.
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I can go online and see faces.
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But, when we go online and see a familiar influencer or a familiar political figure or a familiar even family member.
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Yes, they're there and I think there's great power to that, but they aren't there specifically to see us, although as creators we know that we are there to see our audience and for them to see us.
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That's a real thing, but it's it's quite different to have this this exchange, this reciprocity.
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And I really believe that if there was one thing that we could each and all do to better our lives, no matter how busy our social schedule or our at-home environments, is to have at least one, but probably one to three, depending on your bandwidth, one to three friends that every single morning when you wake up, you text them and they text you back.
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Just a simple good morning. Why?
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Because it's the reliability.
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It's this notion of expectation being fulfilled.
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It's not a huge expectation.
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And this brings us back to safety and acceptance. Right?
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No one's going to text us good morning if they don't accept us, if they dismiss us.
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And the safety is in the predictability of the interaction.
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Now, for people that walk to the corner and they see the barista and they get their coffee or they see their neighbor, etc.
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The importance of saying hello to people on the street, this is something that's really fallen away these days.
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Depends on where you live, but people are very much in their phones, people are very much afraid, frankly, of how they will be reacted to if they were to reach out to somebody that they don't know.
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These basic human interactions take us back hundreds if not thousands, maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
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And if I were to put my money on any experiment, it would be that there is dedicated neural machinery for these sorts of practices.
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And while social media has wonderful contributions and significance to make in the well-being of our lives, I truly believe that.
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I am absolutely certain that these simple practices, just as morning sunlight can profoundly affect our daytime mood, focus, and alertness, and nighttime sleep, I think these simple practices of saying good morning by text each morning to the same person or people, and receiving a text back sets something on the shelf like, "Okay, we're good to move forward through the day."
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Yeah, two things came to mind as you were speaking.
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Your habit of the text every morning makes me feel like you're getting to write a story with someone and for someone.
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And so, there's this sense of someone knows my story.
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And now it's not like, "Oh, I speak to you once a month and we're catching up on everything that happened."
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And you're missing the nuance and the texture and the detail.
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It's like, "I'm getting to log my story in every day."
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Which means I really feel this person knows me and I know them.
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So, now when we do get together this weekend to break bread, I don't have to do that in between small talk.
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They're already aware and now we're just almost connecting all the dots.
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As opposed to I'm now using my time with you to plot all the dots.
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So, there's that sense of like story exchange, which I think is so important.
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I find that that my friends who've known me the longest, but the ones that I also consistently text every day, they're the ones that I feel understand the tapestry of my life and I know theirs.
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And so, now you're not just looking at dots on a wall.
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You're look You're connecting the dots in that meeting, which I think is I don't know.
16:37
I'd love to hear how that works out from a neuroscience perspective, but the second thing you that I was reminded by as you were speaking was I feel like writing down, I always encourage a lot of my clients to do this, to write down a list of emotions they'd like to experience with people.
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So, it could be things like adventure, discovery, comfort, humor, love, whatever it may be. Just write down a list.
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And then for each one, write down the name of a different person, ideally, that fulfills that need in your life.
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Because often I feel like we put a lot of pressure on our romantic partners or one person in our life to be all these things.
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And the truth is, no matter how phenomenal anyone is or how much they love us, they just can't be there.
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And so, if you have "Hey, I've reached out to this friend when I want some adventure because they love it, too.
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If I want to see a sports game, this is the person I reach out to."
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And then, do the same in the opposite way.
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Which one of those do you fulfill for your friends?
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What emotions do you help other people create?
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And I feel like if you look at friendship as a spectrum, as this broad set of connection points rather than like this is my best friend, as you were saying, or this is my number one friend, and we get away from hierarchy and we move more into a spectrum, I feel like that mixed in with the text today starts creating a much more healthier network of what connection means, as well.
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It's also not just the same person doing the same thing every week.
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Yeah, I love the uh the idea that by staying in contact regularly, we don't have to get caught up.
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And that then we can just drop into what's most meaningful on that particular day, and maybe even have more available to us to have a new experience. Mhm. Right?
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As opposed to just catching up.
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And then, of course, there are those friends that we catch up with and it feels like it was just yesterday. Definitely.
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But I'd be willing to bet that those were people that you spent a lot of day-to-day time activity with.
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You knew them from university or you Yeah, you spent a lot of time just in the kind of everyday shared experience for a while, and then when you see each other again, it's like being right back there.
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The neuroscience of this hasn't been explored nearly enough.
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But given that our very own Surgeon General highlighted the loneliness crisis as one of the major crises in the world today, I think that in terms of simple solutions to big, important problems, developing more connectivity with people through simple practices, and again, we're talking about a text here.
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I mean, I will be the first to say that if you can hop on a phone call or you can get on a you know, a video chat with somebody that would certainly be better, but many people just don't have time for that. For sure.
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So, in terms of spending time with people in in a deeper and richer way, you know, get getting the the drop-in time as it were.
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I love that you mentioned adventure. I'm almost 49.
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I turn 49 in just over a month.
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And um I would say that the first 49 years of my life have been marked by a real thirst for adventure, a ton of curiosity.
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Now, I really feel myself entering a completely different season of my life.
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I'm sort of hoping this would eventually happen.
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Um in part because um you know, I took some some kind of dangerous turns, you know, I took risks with my with my life at points where I didn't really intend to do that, but you know, you seek enough adventure, you're going to you're going to find adventure and you have to be quite careful.
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I have friends with whom I had tons of adventure and then now the adventures are are far more uh docile and and quiet.
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Um and of course, um the internal adventure is real as well.
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I think that friends with whom we can just be one version of ourselves are wonderful.
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Friends with whom we can be all versions of ourself is uh especially wonderful.
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That's the acceptance piece.
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Uh typically, I think we look more for that in romantic relationship.
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This notion of just like safety and acceptance being hallmarks of of healthy romantic relationship.
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I think those are also the hallmarks of healthy friendship.
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It's just that with friendship, we can be a bit more segmented in terms of the number of different aspects of self that we need um safety and acceptance with. Yeah.
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Um I think with friendship also, you know, I I found it to be the case that really knowing what's going on with people has become a little little bit more difficult.
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There's this There's this kind of odd thing, right?
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Where we're we're more interconnected in terms of availability of communication, but we're less aware of what's really going on for people.
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In fact, on the way here, I had a call with a with a friend and their headset was making a lot of noise. And so um we agreed.
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Uh they said, "Hey, how about I just turn mute mine and for the next 2 minutes I'm not kidding.
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This is how they This is what they said.
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Um they said, "Just tell me like what's what's on your heart or what's in your heart."
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Hopefully it wasn't on your heart. "What's in your heart?"
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And I I was like, "Oh, wow, that's tough. You know, that's tough. I mean, I I Okay."
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And I and I know that they're listening and then but it's very silent on the other end and I'm kind of speaking into a vacuum there um because they're not hearing anything.
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And then had maybe just 2 minutes before we curled up the hill because of the reception in uh the area that we're in, as you know, is always complicated. Um to just get feedback. It was very interesting.
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Like I I realized that I felt close to them before, but just the notion that they would ask me that. How do I feel?
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Not what's going on lately, not, you know, am I feeling good or bad, like evaluation of of feelings, but just like what's going on.
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And I stumbled a bit at first, but I can realize in in in saying it now like I'm quite moved by the fact that they would ask that of all things as opposed to like, "What's going on?
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What's your next podcast about?
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Are you coming to visit?" That sort of thing.
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And so like I'm taking a lot of cues these days from people that uh make me feel very seen and accepted.
22:32
You're one of them, I must say.
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Like I don't just say that cuz we're in front of these microphones and sitting here.
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Like you and I have been in touch a lot lately through good times and hard times and and and a lot of different things.
22:42
It's it's not um a coincidence though that that I think that we're here because I and talking about this because I think that ultimately the questions that we ask of the people we care about are just as important as reminding them that we're there.
22:55
Because when we ask a question like you know, "What's in your heart?"
23:00
What we're really saying is you know, like what's really going on for you as opposed to like what's the next podcast about?
23:07
Which is an interesting question to me, but you know, so I you know, this is more your territory than mine, but I think in the end I think it comes back to the safety and acceptance.
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Simple behaviors like a good morning check-in.
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And then asking questions that might feel a little bit challenging for the other person to answer at first, but that really show a depth of care and interest that um go beyond just kind of like narrative and and storytelling.
23:32
And I think one thing that I'm also very eager about these days is breaking down some of the um traditional stereotypes like, you know, for anyone that's listening to this and goes, "Oh, you know, I didn't you know, men don't talk that way or something."
23:46
It's like, "Actually, they do."
23:47
Um they do and if given the chance, they will open up about things that perhaps they hadn't even thought about.
23:53
And I confess I'm one of those people.
23:54
Maybe it was my Y chromosome got in the way of me thinking like, "Wait, what do you want me to talk about what's in my heart?"
23:59
Hey, actually that's a really great question. Thank you.
24:02
And so I think this brings us back to these early circuits that are all about safety and acceptance.
24:09
That are all about being able to predict things and basically to say, "Okay, I don't have to be vigilant."
24:16
That's really what safety is about.
24:18
Is about turning off the neural circuits for vigilance. Yeah.
24:21
When we turn off the neural circuits for vigilance, we can start to direct our neural circuits, vision, auditory, whatever thoughts towards an awareness of things that are both inside us and around us that keep us in that calm state.
24:35
I mean, vigilance is associated with stress.
24:37
Stress is associated with a narrowing of the visual field, a narrowing of the auditory field.
24:39
I'll just use this analogy because my sister and I last um last summer, we always go to New York for our birthdays together.
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We went and saw what the Harry Potter play. Oh, it's so good. Okay. Right.
24:52
And then I saw it in New York, too. It's so good. it's wild.
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I mean, the effects are so unbelievable.
24:57
She's a big Harry Potter fan, I'm not. But but okay.
25:01
But just just spectacular effects. It was just so wild. I couldn't believe it.
25:05
But there's this library in in the in the play where it's it's a magic library where when one of the books is taken out about a particular subject, the books around it actually morph and change to reflect the same subject material.
25:19
And when I saw that, I immediately said, "That's how the brain works."
25:20
The way the brain works is a kind of pseudo hypnosis.
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Hypnosis is about context and context setting and narrowing of context.
25:27
All of us have such a wealth of historical, present, and future thinking cognition in our brains.
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But when we get anchored to a particular emotional state or topic, what ends up happening is that the the available topics around it change in reference to how stressed we are.
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When we are stressed, all the topics, all the books on the shelf around that stress are about that thing and how to solve it.
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And actually, this is why stress enhances our memory for solving that, the things that can help us solve that particular issue.
25:58
But guess what is given up?
26:00
All the other distantly or not so distant really related topics that lend themselves to creativity, to thinking about novel combinations of things.
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This is why our friend Rick Rubin, I think, is such a spectacularly creative individual because he spends a lot of time putting his brain and body into a state in which he can remain in contact with these other related or seemingly unrelated topics.
26:28
Whereas when we're in a stressed mode, when we have to problem-solve, when we are in visual vigilance, excuse me, we absolutely narrow our cognitive fields, our visual fields, our auditory fields.
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We limit what we think is possible.
26:41
And so I think great friendships, to bring it back to it, great relationships of all kinds have enough safety and acceptance in them that we can make our way through the practical constraints of the relationship in the day, the week, and the year, but that there's also a sense of creativity, that there are new elements allowed to be brought in because there's enough safety and acceptance that we can turn down those vigilant circuits. Mhm. Absolutely.
27:06
How do we then with circuitry that's built for safety and acceptance, when you're talking about everything that you talk about on the Huberman Lab, things that we I talk about from a maybe more spiritual wisdom perspective, they're all hard things.
27:24
And safety and acceptance, generally in our current understanding of those words, feels like comfort and security and easy and simple.
27:32
And then all of a sudden, you're saying cold plunges, infrared sauna, beginning your circadian rhythm in the morning, strength workouts, like all this other stuff, which initially is discomfort, it's difficult, it's doing hard things.
27:46
And I know this was something you've been thinking about a lot.
27:49
I'm just trying to make that connection.
27:50
We're wired for safety and acceptance, but then all the stuff that's good for us seems to be hard, at least in the beginning.
27:56
Yeah, that's a great question.
27:58
So, the twist in all of this is that the nervous system loves predictability, even if the predictability is arriving through hard things. Mhm.
28:06
So, I would say the major theme of the Huberman Lab podcast has been tools, we call them protocols, to anchor one's physiology in some predictable states.
28:20
I've never actually articulated that, but that's really what it's about.
28:24
So, why you get sunlight in your eyes in the morning? Because it wakes you up.
28:28
I could tell you it increases cortisol in a good way early in the day, that it sets a timer on your melatonin secretion for later at night, it helps you sleep at night, and that's all true.
28:38
But it creates a sense of predictability.
28:40
It allows you to know that for the next series of hours you're going to feel more alert, and at night you're likely going to be able to fall asleep more easily.
28:50
Cold plunges, to my mind, people debate whether or not they're valuable for combating inflammation. They are.
28:57
Whether or not they're valuable for increasing metabolism, probably not to a huge extent.
29:03
But one thing we know for sure is that they, if done correctly, they're uncomfortable, but after you get out, you have an increase in these three neurochemicals that we call the catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine, and you feel more energized and slightly blissed out for the next two to four hours.
29:18
It's a real effect because those are real chemicals and they've served that role for hundreds of thousands of years in humans and they will continue to serve that role in humans.
29:29
So, the cold plunge is not so much about pushing yourself as it is figuring out a way that you can overcome a sense of of stress and then safely overcome a sense of of kind of resistance to getting in the thing and then safely increase these neurochemicals that then predictably shift your state to be more alert and at the same time relaxed and a little bit blissed out, if we if we want to call it that.
29:52
So, you know, we could list out protocol after protocol, right?
29:56
If you tend to eat meals at a consistent time, plus or minus an hour, doesn't matter if you fast or not, you'll tend to be hungry about 15 minutes or so before those meals.
30:06
This is a wonderful thing because it increases this predictability.
30:08
This lends itself to safety and acceptance because it allows you to have to not have to think about a number of other things.
30:15
So, you know, I've been criticized, and fairly so, that gosh, there's so many protocols.
30:21
How could anyone possibly do all these protocols?
30:23
And the truth is that many of the protocols are, you know, it's a buffet and many of them, like how to organize your workspace or when you travel for jet lag, it's individual as to whether or not people want to do them.
30:34
And of course, they're all optional.
30:35
Um, you know, this isn't law.
30:37
Um, so, the idea, however, is that through some simple basic behaviors, viewing sunlight, a little bit of a walk after a meal, um a little bit of sunlight in the evening, um dimming the lights in the evening.
30:50
You know, these are the the basics.
30:51
Eating at more or less consistent meal times and more mostly unprocessed or minimally processed foods for the majority of your food intake.
30:57
It doesn't matter if you're vegan, vegetarian, or otherwise.
31:01
You're going to feel much, much better.
31:03
And part of the much, much better is feeling more alert and more vitality during the waking hours and better sleep at night, which just kind of seesaw back and forth into feeling better overall and thereby free up energy for things like sending the morning text.
31:17
You know, so I think I'm very glad you brought this up because I think people hear, "Oh goodness, another thing to do."
31:21
But if you think about it that way, it's going to be self-limiting.
31:25
But if you think about it as each one of these things takes a minimum amount of time and you can do the walk and sunlight thing in the morning combined.
31:32
And maybe if you miss a day, no big deal. No big deal.
31:36
These are slow integrative systems.
31:36
Your system will recover just fine.
31:38
But on a consistent basis, you're going to feel much better and you're going to have more energy.
31:45
And you're going to be able to think about what you might want to do in your creative life and then do that.
31:51
You'll have the time and energy to think about what you might want to do relationship-wise or friendship-wise or building out these these aspects of life.
31:58
So, it was never the intention that people do so many things that they don't have time for friendship or kids or relationship or that their entire family or relationship be centered around these protocols.
32:10
Rather, they're designed to be weaved into everyday life.
32:12
And sometimes when people experience pain points, like people are having attentional issues or people are experiencing depression or they they have a particular creative project and they want to tap into like open monitoring meditation, for instance.
32:23
Very different, as you you know far better than I, than other forms of meditation.
32:27
Then they can access those specific tools.
32:28
But I don't want to romanticize ancient times, but there was a lot more predictability in some domains of life in ancient times.
32:38
Assuming people were living in small villages, there was a lot more predictability, but there was also a lack of predictability.
32:42
Someone could take off on a hunt or a gather, and they if they didn't come back, we might assume they're never coming back.
32:49
And then two nights later they might come back and say, "That was a close call."
32:54
Or they come back with a great yield.
32:54
We don't know You know, we don't know what it was like, but you can be sure that the same neural circuits that were responsible for stress and lack of safety and therefore vigilance back then are very much alive in our brains now.
33:11
So, again, the protocols are designed to Think about it like putting ingredients in the refrigerator.
33:17
You don't know what you're going to cook, but you have a lot more available to you as options when you have when you know that all the basic macronutrients are covered.
33:26
Everything's All the bases are covered.
33:29
And then you can start to think about what you would cook.
33:30
Whereas, if you've ever arrived late in the city, you get to your Airbnb or your hotel and you see like three or four things and one lousy pan.
33:36
I think well, that Now you have to get the other kind of creative where you have to adapt.
33:39
And that We've all done the the unhealthy option cuz that was the only thing.
33:43
Or fasted cuz that was the the healthiest option.
33:45
So, I think what we're what we're getting to here is that the human brain, like all animals, all animals, need to know where they're going to sleep that night.
33:56
I mean, a dog goes into a new environment and is like trying to figure out where's its spot. It's all about space.
34:02
You talk to any expert dog trainer, they'll tell you, you know, it's all about negotiating space. Can they touch you? Can they not touch you?
34:08
Are they allowed to be near you?
34:08
Do they have to stay a afar?
34:10
Can they go into every room?
34:12
You know, you look at small children foraging in environment.
34:15
However rambunctious or calm, they're they're trying to figure out like, "What am I allowed to do here?
34:19
What am I not allowed to do here?" Sometimes by testing us.
34:22
As as adults, we do the exact same thing.
34:24
We need to know where we are.
34:27
We need to orient in space and in time.
34:29
And then we need to know like what what's available to me.
34:32
Where am I going to stay tonight?
34:35
Is one of the most fundamental questions that we ask ourselves every single day except if you know where you're going to stay tonight, you don't ask yourself that and you have mental real estate to devote to other things.
34:43
So what we're really talking about here is is kind of bookending the extremely basic fundamental drives of the human brain for safety and acceptance.
34:51
And then at the very other end is these aspirational things that we all seek, right?
34:56
These notions of connectedness, of of purpose, of of fulfillment, of of peace.
35:01
Again, I'm borrowing from Martha's beautiful list because I think it's so fundamental.
35:06
And and it captures most if not all of what we all seek.
35:08
But I think that you know, we get very much caught up in the how to reach goal A or B, how to write the book, how to make the money, how to grow a social media account, and we forget that at the core of everything is our relationship to our surroundings, to our inner landscape, and to each other, and it always comes back to safety and acceptance.
35:30
And where we feel uncomfortable, um where we feel like we didn't do things right or others didn't do them right for us or to us, it always boils down to those two things.
35:44
Yeah, you reminded me of a question I often ask people is what's your most repeated thought?
35:48
Because when I was looking at the research on thinking, the idea was that not only were we having a lot of thoughts every day, but a lot of the thoughts we have are repetitive.
35:57
And going back to your point on protocols, I feel like the reason we have repeated thoughts is because we haven't yet built a protocol to help that thought go away.
36:06
So if you built a protocol like I know where I'm sleeping tonight, you're now no longer having that thought of where am I sleeping tonight.
36:12
And we may be asking ourselves a very different thing today because we figured out where to sleep, but we might be thinking like how am I going to pay that bill?
36:21
How am I going to deal with that issue at home?
36:23
What should I say to my kid?
36:26
You know, whatever it is, right?
36:27
We all have different challenges.
36:28
Everyone has a different set of issues that they're struggling with or dealing with.
36:32
And because we haven't created a protocol, we keep asking that question.
36:36
And that question then creates panic and creates anxiety and creates stress and eventually could lead to burnout if someone just keeps propelling that thought and doesn't create a protocol.
36:49
So, I love the idea that people should build the protocol that links with their most repeated repeated thought rather than having to think, "Oh god, I've got to do 25 things." It's like, "Well, no.
37:00
What is the thing that is keeping you up at night?
37:02
Or what is the thing that's causing you the greatest anxiety?"
37:04
And try and solve for that.
37:06
It's like if you're out of milk, you go and buy milk.
37:10
You don't say, "I've got to buy 25 other things."
37:12
You just go fill the part of the refrigerator that's empty.
37:14
Does that align with Yeah, absolutely.
37:16
I love um what we're bridging over and over uh here is the the the very practical foundational elements of safety with these aspirational things.
37:27
You know, I I'm a big big believer in physiology driving mental states.
37:33
They go the other way, too.
37:36
Emotional states drive physiology.
37:37
It's bidirectional, of course.
37:39
One of the reasons why I've been so emphatic about respiration protocols is A, my lab published a clinical trial on this in collaboration with David Spiegel in our Department of Psychiatry, which basically could be summarized the following way.
37:53
If you emphasize exhales, you tend to calm down.
37:56
Meaning you make them longer, more and intentional.
38:00
Normally, we inhale actively and we passively exhale.
38:02
Other species do it the other way around, some other species.
38:05
If you deliberately emphasize your exhales, the duration, the intensity, or just even control the exhale actively, your heart rate slows.
38:16
When we emphasize inhales, we don't necessarily have to do hyperventilation or Tummo breathing or anything like that.
38:22
We could, but those forms of breathing tend to bring up our activation state and they emphasize inhales both by virtue of vigor, duration, or just putting more conscious attention to them.
38:33
And there's a reason for this.
38:35
It's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia.
38:36
It's a it's an actual phenomenon that links the the heart and the vagus nerve and our diaphragm and our lungs.
38:43
It's a beautiful mechanism.
38:45
When I'm overthinking at night and I want to fall asleep, I start doing long exhale breathing through my mouth. Now, sometimes I'm out. I just fall asleep.
38:51
I know that because I wake up sometime later realize it worked again.
38:55
Other times it doesn't work so well, right?
38:57
And one of the most common questions I get is how to turn off repetitive thoughts.
39:03
Now, there it's a bit of a skill because you know, frankly, repetitive thoughts oftentimes are serving an adaptive purpose, but we can get stuck on them, right?
39:14
Or they can get stuck in us.
39:14
I don't know which one it is, but one of the reasons why I'm such a strong believer in people doing a practice like yoga nidra, which you know, and I must say I I I know I've upset to some extent some people by coining something very similar, non-sleep deep rest or NSDR.
39:32
I want to make very clear that I have the utmost respect for yoga nidra as an ancient practice.
39:40
Neither yoga nidra, of course, nor NSDR were anything I developed.
39:43
It's just that NSDR it's a little bit different in that it removes intentions and it tends to involve a little bit less of some of the linking of chakras and things like that that yoga nidra does.
39:53
With no specific purpose in mind behind designing that way except to be able to adapt it to the laboratory context.
40:01
Okay, what do we know about Let's just call it its its original name, yoga nidra.
40:05
The goal is to stay awake, to be conscious while deliberately relaxing the body.
40:12
That's a very useful practice.
40:14
Feels similar to meditation in a way.
40:17
Could be called a meditation.
40:20
But it has some distinct benefits.
40:20
First of all, a beautiful study that was done in Denmark at a medical school in Copenhagen showed that people that do a Yoga Nidra practice get a 60% increase in baseline dopamine levels in the basal ganglia, a brain area that's associated with the preparation for movement and the withholding of movement.
40:38
For So, it essentially can be looked at as a practice that changes neurochemicals in the brain that restore mental and physical vigor.
40:47
That's how I think of Yoga Nidra. It's sort of like sleep.
40:51
There are some studies emerging, including some that I'm planning with Dr.
40:53
Matt Walker at Berkeley, one of the preeminent sleep researchers in the world, that are going to explore whether or not little pockets of the brain are actually sleeping or in rapid eye movement sleep-like states during Yoga Nidra.
41:04
If you think about rapid eye movement sleep, just as a very relevant aside, it's a state in which the brain is very active and the body is completely still, much like Yoga Nidra.
41:14
Okay, brain active, body still.
41:14
Now, what's unique about Yoga Nidra is that there's this instruction in the Nidra, if it's a traditional one, that talks about going from thinking and doing to being and feeling.
41:26
Okay, so let's step back as neuroscientists and we say, "Okay, thinking is a lot about anticipating future.
41:32
It could be about thinking about the past.
41:34
It could be thinking about things that are happening now.
41:37
But it's a very forebrain dependent process.
41:39
Doing is basal ganglia action generation, withholding action, and forebrain circuitry as well.
41:46
You know, I should say prefrontal cortical circuitry as well.
41:51
Now, being and feeling, now this is starting to sound a little bit like quote-unquote softer language, but there's nothing soft about this language.
41:58
Because if we just put a neuroscience lens on it, we say, "Okay, what is that really about?"
42:01
That's about bringing ourselves from exteroception, monitoring of the external world beyond the confines of our skin, to monitoring of the internal world within the confines of our skin.
42:10
And there's something magical about shifting our perception to interoception from our skin inward in that it takes us out of thinking. Mhm.
42:20
Whereas when we're monitoring the external world for reasons that are sort of logical but a little bit harder to articulate then it's more about anticipating things, trying to figure out what goes with what, what's separate from what.
42:32
The moment we get to the level of our skin and inward, we know what's what and what's separate from what. It's just us inward.
42:40
It's sort of there's one thing.
42:42
Rarely do we think, "Oh, here's my brain and here's my leg."
42:43
Yoga Nidra then steps us through that.
42:46
And so what it does is it brings all of our cognition into this interoceptive mode and then boom we are in this mode of being and feeling.
42:55
So I don't think of being and feeling as turning off thinking.
42:59
I think of it as bringing thinking to the level of our sensation, of our body. Mhm.
43:04
Yoga Nidra, I think, is perhaps the most powerful practice for learning how to turn off one's thoughts.
43:12
And so when one steps back from the research literature and says, "Okay, what do we know for sure about Yoga Nidra and SDR?"
43:17
We know that this can be done for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, 30 minutes, or an hour.
43:22
We know that it can very reliably improve levels of wakefulness, cognition, and vigor post Nidra.
43:33
We know that it restores dopamine levels to a marked extent in the basal ganglia.
43:38
We know that the brain goes into little pockets of sleep-like states.
43:41
This needs to be explored further.
43:42
And we know that it mimics rapid eye movement sleep.
43:47
And we know that people who do it find it easier to make themselves fall back asleep should they need to.
43:50
And they develop much stronger powers of autonomic regulation, their ability to take themselves out of stress if they need to.
43:57
I mean, if ever there was a powerful practice Yoga Nidra is that practice.
44:01
And so when I step back from the landscape of practices that can help us turn off thinking or etc.
44:07
This is probably a good time to just, you know, mention that, you know, meditation I view as an exploration of one's own consciousness.
44:18
I also view it as a perceptual exercise, shifting one's perception to a particular location as opposed to just wherever the mind may take it. Mhm. Put it simply.
44:25
Now, it's far more profound than that, as you know, and as many know, but meditation has been shown to, right, reduce stress, improve focus, improve memory.
44:34
I'm thinking mainly of the studies by Wendy Suzuki's lab at NYU.
44:37
I'm thinking of the studies that were done out of the University of Wisconsin that are talked about in Altered States, um, uh, which is a wonderful book and the work that you've talked about in your books.
44:50
When I think about Yoga Nidra, non-sleep depressed, it's really about restoring mental and physical vigor and getting better at regulating one's own autonomic internal kind of hinge, going back and forth between sympathetic and parasympathetic, that, you know, kind of fight or flight and rest and digest, alert and calm, learning how to adjust that in a in a conscious way.
45:11
Then when I think of practices like breathwork, well, depends on the breathwork, and then we can simplify it by saying, when inhales are more vigorous and made longer deliberately than exhales, heart rate goes up, alertness goes up.
45:21
When exhales are made longer and more vigorous and done deliberately, well, then heart rate tends to go down and we tend to shift more towards the state of calm.
45:30
And then, of course, there's hypnosis, and hypnosis to me is self-hypnosis, which is a clinical tool that David Spiegel and others around the world, but mainly David Spiegel and his father popularized within the formal field of psychiatry.
45:44
And hypnosis is a combination of alertness and calm that we know lends itself to neuroplasticity.
45:52
What is hypnosis really for? It's not meditation. It's not to calm down.
45:54
It's to solve a specific problem, to quit smoking, to learn how to regulate pain, to, um, you know, any number of different things that hypnosis has been shown in peer-review studies to do.
46:04
So, when I step back, I say, okay, meditation, non-sleep deep rest, aka yoga nidra, or I should say yoga nidra, aka non-sleep deep rest, breathwork, and hypnosis, well, now we have a kit of tools that are available to us to kind of adjust our internal state.
46:20
And any one of those could be used to turn off thinking, but the most powerful one in my opinion, and by way of experience and sort of how I'm viewing the research literature, I'm sure there are others out there that would disagree with me, and that's fine, is yoga nidra.
46:33
If ever there was a practice that I wish every human being on the planet would do besides go out and view morning sunlight, it would be yoga nidra.
46:41
And of course, this has been available for thousands of years, and unfortunately, it has not gotten the traction worldwide that I think it deserves.
46:49
And especially at this time in human history when the world seems so um tense with friction of all sorts of kinds, but also internal friction for people.
46:59
I think it's just a um you know, it's something that I really really want to shine a light on as as a tremendously beneficial tool Yeah.
47:07
for turning off thoughts Yeah.
47:09
um when it's necessary, and for accessing, you know, some people call these atypical states, but most people go from sleep to waking, and sleep to waking without really an exploration of what those different states are like.
47:23
So, in any event, forgive me for being long-winded, but those are those are the tools that when I step back and I say, where is there great neuroscience and physiology to support their use? Yeah.
47:33
What are the specific uses that seem especially valuable for one practice versus another, and how do these practices differ?
47:41
Because they often get conflated. Yes.
47:42
Somebody starts breathwork, and we think, oh, it's this type of breathwork or that type of without thinking about what's being emphasized and where the heart rate is going, and or we think meditation, and of course, there are many different kinds of meditation.
47:53
Actually, I'd love to know from you, I know of kind of third traditional third eye meditation and I'm aware of open monitoring meditation.
48:01
What what are other sorts of meditation do you do?
48:05
As you mentioned is breath work, there's visualization, and there's mantra or sound.
48:09
So the meditation on the repeat repetition of sound whether that be natural sounds, whether it be instruments, or whether it be the repetition of mantra in your own voice, or the collective chanting which it's done through ancient times of the collective chance of sacred sounds.
48:29
It's considered one of the forms of meditation.
48:31
And it almost feels like a humming kind of cocoon effect of being kind of surrounded by this sound that's repeated again and again and again.
48:43
So it can kind of get you into that kind of submerged immersive drowning feeling.
48:50
That I think most people if they've done a sound ball meditation have experienced some form of what that could feel like.
48:58
And again, you're getting into that atypical state.
48:59
But going back to what you were saying, what what really resonated for me and what I've always appreciated about your work Andrew, I said this last time you came on the show, is this connection between these ancient practices and the modern neuroscience to back it up.
49:14
Like when you've talked about many many times about sunlight in the morning, I mean Surya Namaskar which I mentioned last time is sun salutations.
49:22
That is the practice that you would do when you wake up in the morning and you salute the sun and it was this idea of allowing the sunlight to enter in through your eyes.
49:33
And now you're talking about Yoga Nidra at the end of the day to go to sleep.
49:36
Again, to me it's you've found this way of not only broadcasting and helping people come to these practices, but helping them be translated into modern day language which I think is so needed with a scientific backing.
49:49
And going back to Yoga Nidra, I can personally say just from a personal practice point of view, I had a surgery 2 years ago and I was in so much physical pain during that first month of recovery, the only way I could go to sleep was through Yoga Nidra because the thoughts of pain and of stress and of potential re-damage or whatever it may have been was so high that that state could only be lowered through Yoga Nidra.
50:13
And when I'm jet-lagged and I'm traveling across the world, Yoga Nidra is my go-to to be able to switch off in a new country when I'm like, "Gosh, I'm going to be up all night.
50:24
Will I make it to my work thing tomorrow?"
50:25
Yoga Nidra completely allows me to remove those thoughts and allow myself to fall asleep.
50:30
So, I use it all the time.
50:32
And I I couldn't encourage it.
50:35
I'm so glad that you're broadcasting and helping people understand the science behind it because yeah, these ancient practices make sense, but they need a new language and a new uh translation today.
50:44
Yeah, Yoga Nidra has such similarity to rapid eye movement sleep.
50:50
As far as we know, it's not the exact same brain state, but the similarity again is mind alert, body still.
50:54
Which is exactly what happens during rapid eye movement sleep.
50:59
And we know rapid eye movement sleep is essential for formation of memories, for um uncoupling of a you know, negative emotions from previous day experiences.
51:09
It tends to be more enriched in the later parts of the night and so on.
51:14
For me, Yoga Nidra is the practice to do when I wake up in the morning, but I don't feel completely rested.
51:17
I'll do anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes of that.
51:22
And then in the afternoon, instead of a nap, I'll do Nidra and sometimes I'll fall asleep, admittedly.
51:28
And then if I wake up in the middle of the night, Nidra is my solution.
51:29
I think that mind active, body still is such an interesting and frankly unusual state unless we're in rapid eye movement sleep that most people, until they try it, can't really appreciate the immense value that it brings, but the beautiful thing is it works the first time and it works every time.
51:49
Our mutual friend Rick Rubin, uh we're both lucky enough to know him and to spend a little bit of time with him, and and Rick has a practice that he does.
51:59
I know because I went and visited him last summer, and he would just sit there with his eyes closed and his body very still.
52:05
And at some point I asked him, "What are you doing?"
52:07
And he said, "Well, I'm thinking."
52:10
And I said, "What's the benefit of doing this, you know?"
52:12
And he said, "Well, I come up with ideas this way."
52:17
And I thought, "Oh, that's interesting."
52:18
And it immediately rung a bell.
52:18
I had a guest on my podcast.
52:19
It was actually the first guest ever on my podcast, professor by the name of Dr. Karl Deisseroth. He's an MD and a PhD.
52:27
He's the world's, arguably, top bioengineer in the field of neuroscience.
52:33
He's also a psychiatrist, so he sees patients.
52:37
And he also has raised five children.
52:38
He's one of these phenoms.
52:38
His wife's a neurologist at Stanford.
52:39
That, you know, he's a remarkable person, very deep thinker.
52:44
And I was talking to him on the podcast, and he said that he has a practice whereby, at night, after his kids go to sleep, he sits at the table or on the couch, stills his body completely, and forces himself to think in complete sentences for about an hour.
53:00
And I thought to myself, "Whoa, that's a wildly unusual practice."
53:02
And I said, "What what is it about?"
53:05
And he said, "Well, that's how I structure my ideas.
53:08
That's where new ideas come to me."
53:08
So, Karl's doing that, Rick's doing that.
53:12
You start looking back through history, you find out that Einstein had a walking practice that then he would My father's a theoretical physicist, so this is where I learned this, but presumably this is verifiable.
53:21
I'm sure someone will tell me it's not true, but enough people have told me it is that I'm inclined to at least describe it.
53:29
Where he would walk, then stop, and allow his thoughts to continue as if in motion.
53:37
Mind active, body still, and then repeat.
53:39
So, this is a very unusual state of mind that I think has real value and we know in sleep rapid eye movement sleep and the associated dreams are where we work out a lot of novel solutions to hard daytime problems.
53:49
And I can confidently say that the field of neuroscience can say so much more about the different states of the mind in sleep than we can about the states of the mind in waking. It's kind of amazing. It's 2024.
54:02
We know all this information about different brain areas.
54:06
What happens when you stimulate this these neurochemicals and that and yet we have words stage one two three four rapid eye movement sleep slow wave sleep.
54:14
We have real mechanistic understanding of the states of the mind and body in sleep and very very little language to describe like the state of mind that we happen to be in right now.
54:25
So we can talk about hypnosis which is a narrowed context calm but alert in which neuroplasticity brain changes are more available to us.
54:34
This is supported by clinical and research data.
54:38
We can talk about being attentive.
54:40
We can talk about being stressed but but if you think about like it's not like very crude understanding and so when I think about practices like body still mind active or even you know something that I found immensely beneficial.
54:52
Every Sunday I try and take a long hike or walk and I try and just let my mind spool out whatever ideas it happens to have.
55:02
Um you know I like to think it's accessing some subconscious that's been you know kind of packed with ideas and experiences during the week.
55:07
You know but what do we call that?
55:08
I call it a walk or run or a hike but I think that the the different states of mind that we can go into during the day need more attention.
55:17
Not just from neuroscience researchers but from people in the fields of meditation people in the fields of health and wellness.
55:26
You know what are the different states of mind?
55:28
And so I would say that the last you know really 40 but um you know 30 mainly but five or six years of my life I've been a public educator in the realm of trying to teach people ways to harness their physiology in ways that serve them best for mental health and physical health and performance.
55:47
But I'm now starting to get very, very curious about how to evolve this thing that we call brain states and our understanding of, not just through language, but really understanding how to bring our mind into sharp focus, how to be in the best state of mind for connectedness, when to turn off empathy, mhm, when to turn on empathy.
56:05
I mean, these are all circuitries within us that are possible, and of course we have variation among us as a species as to whether or not we lean more towards logical thinking or empathic, you know, affiliative thinking, these kinds of things.
56:18
But, you know, I really believe that, you know, people like you, Jay, have an important role to play, and that the conversation between neuroscientists, people who have knowledge of meditative practices like yourself, there's real value in the overlap.
56:31
And you said, you know, that you were grateful that we're talking about these things, ancient practices and what they might mean.
56:37
might mean. If I've learned anything, and I think I'm finally old enough that I can make that statement, if I've learned anything in my life, right, hopefully my life will continue, but if it, you know, should I go someplace else before I anticipate, I think it's become very
56:52
clear to me that whether or not you're talking about yoga tradition or you're talking about neuroscience or you're talking about traditional medicine or some of the more alternative medicines, the overlap in those Venn diagrams is where the real money is. And I don't necessarily mean
57:05
And I don't necessarily mean financial gain, I mean, that's where the great ideas are.
57:12
So, I'm perfectly happy to talk about yoga nidra, NSDR, brain circuits associated, dopamine, basal ganglia, because ultimately, if I'm here to do anything, it's to try and bridge these silos and bring people's awareness to the fact that we've all been talking about the same thing, and we're all seeking the same things, safety, acceptance, creativity, you know, these connectedness, purpose, fulfillment.
57:38
These loftier ideals start with having our physiology in a place where we can reliably move forward, not have to worry about certain things.
57:47
And then a little space opens up and so on and so forth.
57:49
But I think there's a real calling now for anyone that's interested in the brain, anyone that's interested in health, and anyone that's interested in humanity to really start paying attention to the overlap in the Venn diagrams between REM sleep and waking states, between ancient practices and modern practices.
58:05
And I should warn that that person or those people you're going to take some heat, you know, but ultimately the ability to go between these silos and to bridge them, as we're trying to do now and hopefully are making some ground in this, I believe we are, is going to serve humanity very, very well because it's just been too long whereby people are holding back knowledge, the secret of some chemical, the secret of some practice. There's no secret.
58:34
The secret is they all work to some extent.
58:36
The question is, what are the commonalities, what are the mechanisms, and what are the practices that allow people to bring their brain and body into the state that best serves them and other people? Yeah.
58:47
And it's accessible, but we have to have a slightly open mind about the language.
58:51
We have to give up the ego saying, "Oh, that's my practice, that that breath work is the domain of my school or my thing."
58:58
And frankly, those arguments aren't working anymore anyway because information is so freely available on the internet. Mhm.
59:05
So, in any case, there's a little bit of editorializing there, I realize, but it's also a calling to anyone that's interested in the mind and in the brain that, you know, neuroscience is no longer the unique domain of neuroscientists.
59:16
And I know that some of my neuroscience colleagues are going to like, "Oh boy, you know, here he is just as if it's accessible to anybody."
59:21
I'm not saying you can be a neurosurgeon if you aren't trained in neurosurgery, right?
59:26
But I'm not saying that you can be an advanced meditative practitioner without putting in the hours.
59:30
What I am saying is that there's overlap in the Venn diagrams of these different fields. For sure.
59:37
And the more collegiality, the faster and further we're going to go as a species.
59:43
Well, I think it goes back to what you were just saying a few moments ago that we only have a language for and I'm going to put a umbrella term here, but we only have language for the extremes of experience.
59:54
So, what you were saying is when you're on a hike or a walk, you don't have a term for what that feels like because it's not an extreme of being asleep or being awake.
1:00:04
It's kind of like this in between cerebral state that we don't have a language for.
1:00:08
And I think that on a micro level makes sense to all of us, where we have words like I'm angry or I'm sad or I'm upset, but our word for is okay. All right?
1:00:20
Like our word for okay is okay, which isn't a great descriptor of how we actually feel.
1:00:24
And so, we're only good at describing things in extremes on a micro level.
1:00:29
And then if you zoom out and take that on a macro level, that translates as well, where we're only good at dealing with these extremes.
1:00:38
And when you're saying Venn diagram, it's saying, "Well, get away from the extremes and look at the overlaps."
1:00:42
But, I think we as a society on a micro level and at a macro level have only learned how to deal with the pendulum swing on either side or the extremes on either side.
1:00:52
And therefore, anything in the middle or the gray starts to feel uncomfortable, starts to feel it's not easy to say whether it's right or wrong, and therefore, it's like, "Well, we're not even going to go there."
1:01:05
And I think anyone that I've spoken to at the top of their field, you being one of them, anyone we've ever had on the show, is far more interested in the gray, is far more in the gray, and is spending far more time exploring thought that is unclear, uncomfortable, and uncertain because that's where life really is lived, in the unpredictable.
1:01:28
Yeah, that's the adventure. That is the adventure.
1:01:30
That is the adventure, and I feel that that's why humans want to go to space.
1:01:34
Like, why is everyone fascinated by space?
1:01:35
Because it's not clear as to what it is and what's out there and where it is.
1:01:40
And of course, not many people will get to go to space, at least for now.
1:01:44
But the idea being the same that there has to be that curiosity from all of us to say, "Oh, where where are we in the same place?
1:01:52
Like, where are we connected on our idea?"
1:01:54
And where are there things that aren't similar, but maybe they're connected in a different way.
1:02:01
And I I think being able to oscillate between connectivity and disconnectedness is a need for the brain and the mind as opposed to this feeling of, again, it goes back to what we started with.
1:02:12
Safety and acceptance makes us feel today that you can't allow yourself to engage in an idea that doesn't fully connect with yours because that feels unsafe.
1:02:25
Right, especially right now, right?
1:02:27
We things are feel very polarized. Correct.
1:02:31
You know, I'm putting in a very strong vote for the League of Reasonable People, which is hopefully everybody, right?
1:02:37
Like, I I don't want to sound overly sentimental, but like I And maybe I'm just too emotional lately, but I am so pained by the amount of fighting that I see that I know will not result in any anything.
1:02:50
It's not going to solve the problem for either side, right?
1:02:52
I guess at 49, I feel old enough to say this.
1:02:57
Like, I I have um I still have hope.
1:03:01
But that's obviously not a solution.
1:03:01
I think that when we really get down to the neuroscience of self-understanding, when people really start to understand that the human brain is a magnificent machine and organ, but that it has limitations and we can start to understand our own limitations.
1:03:17
You know, that it can take us just up to this point but not further and that we can rely on uh healthy collective thinking, healthy collective thinking, to get us over these divides.
1:03:29
I think that's when we're finally going to evolve as a species. I really do.
1:03:34
When we when we start being able to exit our our our own brain and our group think to be able to really come to solutions because often we just think in terms of compromise and conflict, which are essential things to think about, but ultimately understanding the limits of our cognition and how emotion drives cognition is really how we're going to be able to evolve our beliefs about what's possible.
1:03:57
And by the way, that's not meant to just be a bunch of aspirational word salad.
1:04:00
That's like a real possibility.
1:04:02
If we can just have the self-reflection and understand we know certain things, we believe certain things, but that this neural architecture that we call our brain is limited in the extent to which it can see into the future and make the best decisions for everybody.
1:04:16
We operate thinking that, but that's not how it works.
1:04:20
And of course, we can't look to any one individual to solve the problem for everybody. Now, will it be AI? I don't know.
1:04:27
That involves a lot of trust in AI.
1:04:28
And these large language models are trained in many ways the same way that a neural network it trains itself up, how a young brain develops and makes sense of the world.
1:04:36
So, I don't have any immediate solutions.
1:04:38
What I do have is a piece of neuroscience knowledge that was at least new to me that most neuroscientists aren't aware of, but I think this is one of the most important discoveries in the last 100 years of neuroscience.
1:04:51
It's a collection of studies on an area of the brain called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex.
1:04:58
Most people have never heard of this brain area, including many neuroscientists.
1:05:01
Talk to a neurosurgeon, they know where it is.
1:05:03
You talk to a neuroscientist, unless they teach neuroanatomy, which I happen to, most don't know where it is in the brain.
1:05:08
And most didn't know what it did because it hadn't been explored.
1:05:11
And then a colleague of mine at Stanford School of Medicine named Joe Parvizi did an incredible study where he was doing neurosurgery and stimulating different brain areas as a means to try and find the location where he needed to do the surgery.
1:05:23
And he stumbled upon an area called the anterior mid-cingulate cortex where if he stimulated with an electrode, people, because they were awake during the neurosurgery, would report feeling as if there was some conflict pressing on them.
1:05:37
Some One even described it as I feel like I'm driving into a storm, but I feel ready. I can I can do this.
1:05:46
Others reported a different set of words, but the words essentially converged around the same set of subjective experiences, which are I'm I feel challenged, but I can do it.
1:05:57
It's kind of forward center of mass.
1:05:57
And then other studies, separate laboratories, discovered that people that take on a new practice that's challenging for them, their anterior mid-cingulate cortex grows in volume.
1:06:07
Other people who fail to successfully engage in a regular challenging activity, the anterior mid-cingulate cortex didn't increase in volume in the same way.
1:06:16
So, very interesting brain structure, and there's I would say about a dozen or so really quality studies in humans, a bunch in animal models, but there bunch in humans that point to the anterior mid-cingulate cortex as a site in the brain associated with the feeling of tenacity and willpower to push through.
1:06:33
It's heavily interconnected with the dopamine reward system, heavily connected, frankly, with a lot of different brain areas.
1:06:38
It's a hub for a lot of inputs and outputs.
1:06:40
So, what do we know about the anterior mid-cingulate cortex?
1:06:43
Perhaps most interesting of all is that this is the brain area that seems to preserve its size and even grow in size in what are called super-agers.
1:06:52
Super-agers are people that maintain their cognition later into life.
1:06:54
These are people that don't undergo the normal age-related decline in cognition, separate from Alzheimer's type dementia.
1:07:04
You know, everybody as they get older develops less working memory, the ability to keep ideas in mind in in the short-term.
1:07:09
Super agers seem to overcome all that. And they live longer.
1:07:14
So, you could say, "Well, this is a case of reverse causality.
1:07:18
They live longer, so they have a bigger brain area called the anterior midcingulate cortex."
1:07:21
We don't really know what the direction of of causality is.
1:07:25
Could just be correlation.
1:07:25
But, it all gets ultra interesting when you start to tack together willpower, the taking on of new things, learning things, and neuroplasticity, and lifespan.
1:07:37
And it may be that that quadfecta represents what we think of as the will to live is associated with an intense curiosity and desire to bring in new ideas and modes of thinking.
1:07:47
And new ideas and modes of thinking then feed back on our feelings of how we could gain reward, internal reward, of course dopamine being the universal currency of reward, as a means to move forward. What does this mean?
1:08:00
This means that everybody, I believe, can become a better human being by taking on challenges.
1:08:05
What is a challenge that can grow the anterior midcingulate cortex?
1:08:09
Well, unfortunately, it's a challenge that you don't want to engage in.
1:08:13
So, if you love running, this isn't it's not going to do it.
1:08:17
If you love resistance training, it's not going to do it.
1:08:19
If you don't want to meditate in the morning and you do 5 minutes or 10 minutes of meditation, then you just enhance the activation of your anterior midcingulate cortex.
1:08:29
So, it's about it's not just about doing hard things, it's about really pushing through resistance.
1:08:32
And the reason I bring this up now as opposed to in a discussion about like how to get more tenacious or have a stronger willpower, it will do that.
1:08:41
Okay, we know that when the anterior midcingulate cortex gets bigger, it translates to a lot of different areas of challenge, not just the area in which you challenged it.
1:08:49
The reason is, I believe that this lofty notion of humans evolving to more collective thinking, to embracing new ways to bridge divides that harm human beings at scale or even just locally is going to emerge through only through the willingness to embrace the internal friction that is hearing things and seeing things that we don't like and being able to take a stance of adaptive response. Whatever that is.
1:09:21
Now of course there are things that we hear and see and don't like that activate enough of a sense of injustice in us that that's all it does.
1:09:28
It just brings us to the point of like wanting to impart justice.
1:09:32
But what I'm talking about here are differences in opinion, strongly polarized views that lead to all sorts of things as we know, good and bad and everything in between.
1:09:42
And if people had the capacity to feel that friction and to stay in a mode of some open cognition, I think we would come up with novel solutions.
1:09:53
I really think the next iteration of human beings is collective consciousness.
1:09:59
You know, it sounds lofty, sounds woo, but it's basically lots of minds working together, even minds that oppose one another in ideology as a means to find out novel solutions to hard problems that vex us all and that in some cases really harm us all.
1:10:19
It's I It's It's a real thing with real possibility, but it's going to require that we all get not necessarily tougher, but that we get more resilient at the level of being able to tolerate internal states that normally would impede adaptive thinking. Yes. Yes.
1:10:33
And And the ability to engage in uncomfortable thinking.
1:10:40
And I love that definition that you gave.
1:10:42
I saw this brilliant quote the other day on social media and it was it was from a Christian page or post and it said uh the the essence of Christianity is not learning to love Jesus, but learning to love Judas.
1:10:58
And and I was thinking how brilliant that was because it goes back to that point of what's uncomfortable.
1:11:03
Like it's it's easy to love the good person.
1:11:06
It's it's learning to love or understand at least the person who may have done, you know, uh something that you you didn't recognize or didn't understand or didn't fully connect with.
1:11:18
And I think often we we see that and we think, "Oh, but then there's no accountability. There's no this. There's no that."
1:11:23
But really what we're saying is, are we willing to do, as you said, the most challenging thing, which is something you don't enjoy doing?
1:11:29
It's not something you're excited by.
1:11:31
If you're enjoying the challenge, it's no longer the challenge, right?
1:11:35
If you're it's always like I remember a training and conditioning coach used to tell me like, "Jay, if you're sitting in the cold plunge just to get your minutes up so you can tell someone how long you sat in there."
1:11:46
He goes, "Then that means it wasn't hard beyond that certain point."
1:11:49
He was like, "You should get out once it's easy cuz it's not having the effect you want it to have." That's right.
1:11:53
It's no longer an adaptive stimulus. Correct. Yeah.
1:11:57
Can can I offer an alternative protocol?
1:11:59
People always ask me how cold should the cold plunge be or the cold shower and how long should I stay in?
1:12:03
And it's so variable depending on the person, the time of day.
1:12:07
Obviously, only do what's safe, right?
1:12:09
So, don't go so cold that you can, you know, you can get a cardiovascular effect. That's not good.
1:12:15
But it's very simple, actually.
1:12:15
If you want it to translate into the real world in the best way, you ask yourself right before you get in, on a scale of 1 to 10, how badly do I not want to get in?
1:12:24
And I would say that if it's five to 10, well, that's a wall.
1:12:29
If it's anywhere in the five that that's one wall you have to get over. So, you then you get in.
1:12:34
And then at some point there will be the desire to get out. That's the second wall.
1:12:37
Maybe it comes within five seconds.
1:12:39
Maybe it comes within 20 seconds. That's the second wall.
1:12:43
So, what I would do is count walls.
1:12:44
What are the, quote unquote, walls?
1:12:46
The walls are are waves of adrenaline being released into your body.
1:12:50
And sometimes they are very close together.
1:12:52
Those waves and sometimes they're more distantly spaced apart.
1:12:56
Now, of course, at some point you go numb and then you don't feel them anymore. We don't suggest that.
1:12:58
But if you think to yourself, "Gosh, today I really don't want to get in.
1:13:02
That wall is a really tall wall."
1:13:05
Well, just getting in for 15-20 seconds is going to accomplish something meaningful Yes.
1:13:08
for this anterior mid cingulate cortex.
1:13:10
It's going to accomplish something meaningful for the adrenaline release that you're going to experience.
1:13:17
So, it's less about the temperature.
1:13:17
I mean, obviously the temperature plays a role than it is your subjective relationship to the whole thing.
1:13:24
For instance, if you do cold exposure at night when you're tired, it's a far and away different experience than in the morning after going for a run and you're too warm.
1:13:32
So, I can't say 45° F for 90 seconds.
1:13:36
Although, if you want to start there, that's fine provided it's safe for you.
1:13:39
But as you watch these walls of adrenaline come at you, as it were, pay attention to what they feel like.
1:13:47
That's what you'll recognize outside the ice bath, Yeah. hard conversation. That's what I'm Yeah.
1:13:51
That it's not that you can make yourself so resilient that your adrenaline system doesn't work. Correct.
1:13:57
It's that you learn to recognize the state of having adrenaline in your system and staying calm.
1:13:59
And then, I actually had this happen the other day.
1:14:03
I was in a really hard yesterday, in a hard conversation, something first thing in the morning.
1:14:08
It was like, "Wait, what? Seriously?"
1:14:10
Misunderstanding, hard conversation, and I remember, here we are, our voices are going up.
1:14:14
We weren't yelling, but like it was a it was a peaceful morning until that moment.
1:14:18
And we're You could kind of feel the energy in the room going up and I was saying to myself, "Okay, how am I" And I thought, "Oh, this is like a wall in the in the thing."
1:14:26
And I said and I said, because we have this this language at home, I said, "Um I feel like there's a wall of adrenaline hitting us."
1:14:33
Well, then we both kind of started laughing.
1:14:37
And then we kind of reverted to what we were doing and then we calmed down.
1:14:41
And you know, we talk about taking breaks and that's wonderful.
1:14:42
It's a wonderful tool that you talked about in your book on relationships.
1:14:44
There's so many valuable tools in there, by the way.
1:14:47
I just like thank you for writing that book. So valuable. Everyone should read it.
1:14:52
Should be standard curriculum.
1:14:53
Standard curriculum in every school and in every home. I I really mean that.
1:14:58
Jay doesn't tell me to say this. I really mean this. I really truly mean it. You too kind.
1:15:02
The uh well, it's it's entirely appropriate because it's true.
1:15:07
But noticing those walls of adrenaline and realizing that when we're in those uh adrenaline-filled states, our cognition is shifted.
1:15:15
We don't have solutions that we had 5 minutes ago.
1:15:17
So, learning to watch those pass in the cold plunge, in the cold shower, on a hard run, or whatever it is, but the cold seems to be the universal stressful stimulus for everybody, is so valuable.
1:15:30
More than marking off, you know, 15 minutes or 5 minutes in the cold plunge.
1:15:35
And some days it's 15 seconds, sometimes it's 30.
1:15:38
And for somebody learning the cold plunge, it's like, "Hey, can you just even get near the thing or in it?"
1:15:43
And I think there's real value there. Yeah.
1:15:45
So, in any event, know I love that translation into real life because I think what's happened is we're dealing with a lot of everyday things with so much pain that that pain is then creating more pain for us, for uh for others, and we never end this or we create this never-ending cycle and loop for ourselves and others where we stay in the pain.
1:16:10
And what we're all saying is what does it take, just as we have to learn to sit in that cold and regulate ourselves and adapt, what does it take to sit in the pain outside of the tub, regulate ourselves, rise to a place of peace, and then respond, and then get together, and as you said, the league of reasonable people.
1:16:30
The league of reasonable people.
1:16:31
Like, I think we'd all aspire towards that.
1:16:35
I think when I hear that, I think we all go, "I think I'm a reasonable person."
1:16:38
I think most of us would say that.
1:16:41
it lives in all of us, and it's a brain state that takes certain things to get to on a regular basis.
1:16:46
I mean, there are some people that are perhaps are outside the the margins for which participation in the League of Reasonable People is impossible.
1:16:55
But even as I say that, you know, one thing that I've tried to do as I get older is to limit cynicism.
1:16:59
You know, in my home growing up that there were many beautiful emotions and concepts and things I was exposed to by virtue of the wonderful people that my parents were.
1:17:10
They had flaws like everybody else, but one of the things that I really tried to discard as I've gotten older is cynicism.
1:17:15
It's one of the things that my sister and I talk a lot about.
1:17:18
Like, it never served anyone well to be cynical.
1:17:21
You can be critical and discerning, but cynical doesn't accomplish anything except to separate us from people. Mhm. That That's my belief.
1:17:30
And And I'm not trying to encourage people to be um soft in a way that's unsafe for them.
1:17:35
Like I said, be be discerning.
1:17:37
Uh you know, safety is important.
1:17:39
Uh but cynicism, I don't know what it is.
1:17:42
It's like an ego-fed um negativity that that sort of implies one is better than other people, but it actually is usually the opposite.
1:17:50
It usually comes from a place of deep insecurity, right?
1:17:53
It's a very dismissive stance.
1:17:56
And so, I almost caught myself a second ago saying, "Oh, you know, making a kind of joke about" What's a cynical joke about Well, there are probably people who can't I actually believe that we are all capable of having access to this uh reasonable feature within ourselves. Yeah.
1:18:13
But it involves a state of calm, a feeling of safety, and um you know, I guess, you know, laced into everything I'm saying today is is a is a kind of a hope and an aspiration. Yeah.
1:18:24
You know, I I've kind of gotten to the point now where I feel like if I don't say it now, when am I going to say it?
1:18:30
And And how old do you have to be?
1:18:32
I used to think you had to be 40 years old to write a book. I thought that.
1:18:34
I thought I had to be 40 years old to write a book.
1:18:36
Then I realized that's ridiculous.
1:18:37
People much younger than 40 write amazing books.
1:18:41
Amazing and important books.
1:18:43
And then I thought, well, how long how old do you have to be in order to have had enough life experience to be able to say things that are aspirational about how you'd like to see the world change or people change for the better.
1:18:54
And, you know, I've decided that the the age on that is is one day, you know? Like like one day.
1:18:59
So, this is a bit of an encouragement for people out there.
1:19:04
If if you have ideas about um ways that you and others can be better, to to really like write them down and evolve them, right?
1:19:12
They they often need some evolution to be able to be received in the right way, and but then share those.
1:19:19
I was thinking a moment ago I I wanted your opinion on this.
1:19:21
So, in thinking about emotional interaction and the ways in which the world can be beautiful or challenging depending on the energy that's around us.
1:19:32
I I once read, I forget his name, so forget me. He's an investor.
1:19:34
I think he was on the Tim Ferriss podcast, a very um successful investor, young guy.
1:19:40
I think he he lived in Truckee, of all places.
1:19:43
He once said, you know, "Email is a public post to-do list."
1:19:47
And it completely changed in that one moment the way that I thought about email.
1:19:51
Cuz the emails are useful, but then I realized, "Oh, yeah, I'm like going in there and it's like all these things I need to do."
1:19:55
And when I started my laboratory, I knew I had two major challenges.
1:19:59
One, get grants so I could do the the work.
1:20:01
You need money to do research. Publish great papers.
1:20:03
And that meant had to interact with my lab and do a bunch of other things.
1:20:09
Other things were important, teaching included, but those were the main ones.
1:20:12
Email was a public post to-do list, so I need to be very careful in terms of my interaction with email.
1:20:17
Nowadays, I feel like social media is a public, not necessarily projection, but uh evacuation of of emotion.
1:20:23
So, when I go on to social media in the morning, if I'm not careful, like really careful and thoughtful about what I look at.
1:20:31
I'm basically getting the emotional energy of all these people.
1:20:36
And some of them, like you, are trying to help people.
1:20:38
And some of them are just in evacuative expression of their pain.
1:20:43
Others are in evacuative expression of cynicism.
1:20:45
And I don't think I'm alone in this.
1:20:47
Like I'm a pretty sensitive person.
1:20:49
I Or maybe I'm getting more sensitive.
1:20:51
But I'm very sensitive to this stuff.
1:20:54
Like it's not like it can throw off my whole day, but I can quickly get drawn down a rabbit hole of something.
1:20:59
And then We talk about dopamine hits or the addictive properties of social media, and that would be a fine conversation, but that one's been had.
1:21:06
But what about all the like energetic bombardment and the the need for for discernment and filtering of all this stuff.
1:21:13
I wish I you know, I could label up like a positivity score.
1:21:17
And it's not to avoid the realities of the world.
1:21:20
But I think I don't know.
1:21:23
Are Are does this stuff affect you?
1:21:25
Because I do my work so that it doesn't permeate me. Yeah.
1:21:27
But you know, just like if someone wakes up in a bad mood, you can take care of them, but if they wake up in a bad mood every single day, it's pretty draining on your home environment.
1:21:37
So Yeah, what do you do in order to keep emotional boundaries, especially online?
1:21:43
And the funny thing is the predictability of negativity doesn't reduce its effect.
1:21:47
Well, it also has a gravitational pull. Yeah.
1:21:50
I mean, I'm on X and Instagram.
1:21:52
And the other, you know, Threads and Facebook and all of them, you know.
1:21:57
But I noticed that on some of the platforms in particular, that like there's a gravitational pull.
1:22:05
Like people are there to fight.
1:22:05
And now when I look at that, I think you know, some of them are saying highly intelligent things. Some of them are not.
1:22:14
But like they got to have a lot of like pain inside.
1:22:18
I think that's what I was going to touch on.
1:22:20
I think it's that to me, the thing that has been most helpful in all of it is a genuine sense of deeper empathy and compassion for the energetic state of the world.
1:22:36
The systems that have let people down and truly made them feel that they can't rely on them.
1:22:47
And the systems that have done a disservice and injustice, which has now led to this emotional evacuation, as you called it.
1:22:58
And to me using it as a way of having deeper empathy, deeper compassion, a genuine sense of recognition that although everyone does have choice and does have agency, definitely, there is an overarching energetic system that is almost keeping people imprisoned in this space.
1:23:20
And that prison is now addictive to stay in. I I feel for that.
1:23:26
I I I deeply feel for that.
1:23:29
And it And it affects me because I recognize that people haven't been set up for success.
1:23:37
By the education system, by the way the economy set up, by the way anything set up.
1:23:43
Like it's it's not set people up for success.
1:23:45
And not truly for people in their home.
1:23:46
They weren't A lot of people weren't set up for success.
1:23:48
And so we have to zoom out and look at the context.
1:23:52
Because if I zoom in and just look at that one tweet or that one comment, God, it's like a bullet to the chest, you know?
1:23:59
And it's like I've I've always had this vision and I've kind of done it mentally sometimes because I can't do it physically.
1:24:05
And for every person that feels that way, I've always wanted I was like, I wish I could sit down with every person individually who felt a certain way and have a contextually relevant, honest, authentic conversation with each person.
1:24:20
And bear my soul, and be vulnerable, and open my heart, but we can't.
1:24:25
And I also know that one person can't do that for everyone.
1:24:28
Like, it's not possible for one quote, one image, one message, one podcast episode that will speak to everyone to make everyone feel seen, heard, and understood.
1:24:38
I could just about do do that on a one-to-one level, let alone a one-to- 100 million level.
1:24:44
How are you going to do that?
1:24:46
And so, I also have empathy for myself, and I and I extend that compassion back to myself, and recognize I'm a limited human being who just as that individual is limited by their systems and their setup and their energy, so am I.
1:24:57
And there's no way in which I could respond to this individual and satisfy this exchange with 140 to 180 characters.
1:25:08
Like, how's that even possible?
1:25:08
And so, I think to me, deepening my compassion and empathy externally and internally have been the only relevant tools, as woo-woo or as spiritual as they may sound, because there is no practical habit-based solution that I can give you some tactics and ideas, but I know as well that at one point they're just logical and theoretical and practical, but they're not Yeah, they don't feel they don't hit me there.
1:25:41
And so, to me, I've seen it all as a simulation and an experiment to deepen human emotion, deepen human empathy, deepen human compassion, and a reminder of my fallibility, so that I can embrace my own insignificance, so that I can therefore take shelter in the source and the universe and God, and to allow for space for that.
1:26:06
If I was able to control every one of these things and make it work perfectly, I may, in a very crude sense, you may under false pretenses start believing you're the controller to some degree.
1:26:18
And I think anyone who's experienced success in certain domains starts to feel like the controller in their relevant fields.
1:26:28
And I think all of these things are expedited in order just to encourage you to have an ego death and pulverize the the arrogance of of whatever kind, by the way.
1:26:38
I don't mean in a sense of that I feel I'm important, but we all have a sense of I'm the controller. I can make things work. I know what's right. I'm I'm this, I'm that.
1:26:48
And this is all reminding us of we're not the controller.
1:26:51
We have to ultimately take shelter.
1:26:53
We have to ultimately give up the reins, and I ultimately have to surrender and accept that there is a greater source, there is a greater power, and that when I'm in connection with that and I'm in service of that, then I'm happy and I'm joyful.
1:27:07
But if I'm trying to be that or extrapolate energy from that to control and navigate, then I'm forever going to be unhappy.
1:27:17
So, to me that's a quick version of the stuff that I try and work on. Not to be helpless.
1:27:21
I don't feel helpless in that. I feel I feel at home.
1:27:26
It's almost like, you know, when you're taking shelter of a greater source to take care of things you can't take care of, it's not because you're helpless or because you're weak.
1:27:37
It's actually the greatest sign of strength to know I can call up a friend to help me.
1:27:42
You know, am I more strong because I can move home myself and not ask anyone for help, or am I stronger because three of my friends came and helped me out and carried the load?
1:27:51
I'm stronger for asking for help.
1:27:51
I have a better community and network.
1:27:52
You'd say that person's smarter and healthier.
1:27:57
And so, I think of that same way on a universal level. At least I try to. I'm working on it. I love that.
1:28:02
And I realized from what you said that you know, the greatest sense of safety seems to arrive from not trying to control everything.
1:28:10
And it it's counterintuitive, right?
1:28:13
You know, we we think, "Okay, well, how do you get safety?"
1:28:17
Well, you have to get rid of vigilance.
1:28:19
How do you get rid of vigilance?
1:28:20
Well, you decide what you do and don't have to pay attention to.
1:28:24
And at some point if one decides, "I can't control all of this."
1:28:27
You have one of two options.
1:28:29
Either that means you're just waiting for that wave to come demolish you. Wave of whatever. Or you trust.
1:28:39
Like you you trust in something to make everything okay, even if that wave comes.
1:28:48
You know, and I've talked before on podcast. I I believe in God. I do.
1:28:50
You know, and and of course I believe in everyone's right to believe or not believe what they believe in.
1:28:58
I think that the notion of of giving up trying to control everything and giving over control to more universal forces or a universal force, whatever one's mode of thinking happens to be, I believe they're entitled to.
1:29:14
Is probably the most peace-inducing step I've ever taken.
1:29:22
And I thought it would be, you know, matched with a little sneaking, you know, voice in the back, "Yeah, but but it's not."
1:29:29
And and I don't know how that works at the level of neuroscience.
1:29:32
I know there are neuroscientists who are trying to explore this.
1:29:36
And as the data evolve, I I'll certainly pay attention to it.
1:29:41
Not with the intention of trying to undermine any kind of um larger sense of of anything.
1:29:48
Um but just out of interest, right?
1:29:50
I mean, it's just far too far too interesting.
1:29:52
There's actually a woman at at Stanford.
1:29:54
I haven't yet to talk to her.
1:29:55
We should both talk to her.
1:29:55
She said, I forget her name at the moment um because I just learned about her work in the Department of Anthropology who has spent her entire career studying um people's inner voices.
1:30:05
People who hear voices, people hear the voices of others.
1:30:10
And sure, this sometimes goes into the domain of people who have auditory hallucinations and so forth, but also just these different scripts that people have in their in their mind that include their own voices and other voices, voices we've internalized from childhood.
1:30:22
This resonates with me a lot because when I was a kid, after my parents would put me to sleep, I used to arrange dialogues between people I had heard that day and I could hear their voices in very clear ways in my head.
1:30:35
And I would remember things I said and I could create these dialogues.
1:30:37
And so I've also always had a very like strong audiographic memory.
1:30:41
It's not as if everything I hear I remember verbatim.
1:30:45
That actually would be a super skill.
1:30:46
Would have saved me in a lot of arguments.
1:30:48
Um but in all seriousness, I I think what you describe about essentially a letting go or a giving over of the the need for that control that we all experience, the desire for control, is really where the solution lies, I think.
1:31:04
I I know this because many people have said it and it's very hard to do, but that once one does it once, you know, you can do it again. And it's a practice.
1:31:14
It's it's not it's not a you write it down and it's done. It's a practice.
1:31:17
And you know, I also I'm thinking about the the kind of uh counterintuitive nature of the fact that you know, we're talking at once about letting go and not trying to control everything, but also pushing oneself to be more resilient and tenacious and things of that sort.
1:31:33
And so I I feel like all of life is like that.
1:31:35
All of life is about Yes, you need to take care of your physiology, you need to get your sleep at night, but it's also okay to get a bad night's sleep every once in a while.
1:31:44
It's okay to not do every protocol.
1:31:47
In fact, it's encouraged to not do every protocol.
1:31:48
The expectation on us is not perfection, right?
1:31:51
It's it's I think being able to toggle between these different states.
1:31:55
I think that one of the best things about social media, one of the best things about podcasts is that you know, speaking and listening is the human narrative.
1:32:06
Certainly writing, certainly plays, poetry, and music as well.
1:32:10
Dance, there are other forms of communication.
1:32:14
Certainly sculpture and here we go, on and on.
1:32:17
But as a a great podcaster, David Senra, who hosts the Founders podcast.
1:32:20
It's kind of a a like a nerd's podcast if of if someone is interested in founders, like a founders of companies.
1:32:29
He He sort of does for that what I do for science and health and what you do for health and spirituality and and so many more topics, psychology and and so on.
1:32:40
David does for founders and company founders.
1:32:42
And he said, you know, that podcasting and to some extent social media, but really podcasting is the human narrative. A recorded radio.
1:32:53
Radio used to be live, sometimes it was recorded and then played, but there wasn't an archive that you could go access and where there was, it was a fairly sparse archive.
1:33:01
I think we're going to look back 100 years from now and whether it's in AI form or in its traditional form as it is now, I think people speaking onto the internet is our, you know, this is our stone tablets.
1:33:13
Uh these are cave drawings. Really? It's wild. It's wild. It's wild. Yeah.
1:33:20
And and I like to think it's serving the evolution of our species Mhm. at some level.
1:33:26
Certainly it's creating a historical record. Mhm.
1:33:27
I often think about this, like so many thoughts, so many emotions that people have don't get transmuted into useful tools that others could benefit from. Mhm.
1:33:38
I think this is why we love music and poetry and things that capture an essence.
1:33:43
Actually, I I recall now, this is what I wanted to um ask you about. Please.
1:33:48
Lately I try, I spend real time trying to feel experiences more than just think about them.
1:33:56
I have a very like, you know, kind of dominant analytic mind.
1:34:01
I'm trying to think, strategize, understand, make sense of.
1:34:05
I've always been like that.
1:34:05
But, in recent years, and especially this last year, I've just tried to like sense what's going on outside me and in me.
1:34:13
And this form of intelligence is something that people have talked about for hundreds of thousands of years.
1:34:19
It's a different form of intelligence.
1:34:21
It's the one that I think has access to our unconscious mind in a way that thinking doesn't always have access to. Mhm.
1:34:30
Um it's not necessarily linked to emotion.
1:34:33
It's just more of a are we drawn toward, away from, or are we kind of neutral about a given person or experience?
1:34:42
And it draws on a different set of neural circuits.
1:34:46
Um and I started thinking about this in large part because of my love of dogs.
1:34:52
You know, my dog Costello I put down in July of 2021.
1:34:53
And I always loved the bulldog because the first time I ever went to a dog show, which everybody should do by the way.
1:35:01
Have you ever been to a dog show?
1:35:03
never been to a dog show.
1:35:03
So, I was taken to a dog show um by my then girlfriend when I was a post-doc.
1:35:06
And she said, "You got to go to dog show."
1:35:09
And it was And so, we went to the dog show, but we didn't attend the show.
1:35:11
In front is the show where they're going over things and walking around and getting paraded around. That part's cool.
1:35:17
But, the really cool part is you go in the back where you have all the dog breeders with all the different breeds of dogs.
1:35:25
Usually five or six of each breed.
1:35:25
And you can see the immense variation both in the structure, but also the temperaments and therefore the nervous systems of these different animals, all the same species.
1:35:35
Also, dogs, by the way, you have little ones and you have giant ones.
1:35:38
You have Chihuahuas and Great Danes in the same species.
1:35:40
I As far as I know, it's the greatest variation in brain and body size of any species.
1:35:46
There's probably uh an you know, another species out there that someone will point out that, you know, makes me wrong, but it's at least the far end of the continuum in that sense.
1:35:57
So, I'm back there and I'm thinking I really want a dog at some point and I'm thinking I want a Rhodesian Ridgeback or I really like the, you know, the wolfhounds.
1:36:03
I really love the Afghans.
1:36:04
They look like people in dog suits, the way they they would move around and so so bright-eyed.
1:36:09
And then, I looked over in the corner and there's this row of bulldogs snoring like a xylophone.
1:36:17
And I went over and I asked the woman there, I said, "An interesting breed of dog."
1:36:21
And she said, "Oh, they're the best."
1:36:23
And I said, "Well, everyone here says that about their breed of dog."
1:36:24
And she said, "Yeah, but they're really the sweetest and they are the essence of efficiency."
1:36:29
And so, I woke one up and I started playing with it and you realize that they don't react unless they need to.
1:36:36
Some have more energy than others, but when they need to, they have a lot of energy available to them.
1:36:41
But, they have very little spontaneous movement. Now, I'm not like this.
1:36:44
I I think I'm probably becoming more like this as the years go by through some effort.
1:36:49
But, other breeds of dogs are constantly moving.
1:36:53
They're like peripatetic.
1:36:54
They're constantly moving.
1:36:54
They're constantly moving and it makes me a little nervous.
1:36:56
Whereas, the bulldog just made me feel very calm.
1:36:58
So, I got Costello not that day, I got him elsewhere and I found that his presence, even his loud snoring, made me very calm.
1:37:08
And he was not reactive to things that did not require reactivity to.
1:37:11
He was reactive when appropriate.
1:37:13
And I'm not saying the bulldog is the perfect breed.
1:37:17
In fact, I discourage people from getting them unless they have the means to take care of them because they tend to have a lot of health issues. They're very inbred.
1:37:23
It's kind of a cruel breed, especially in its modern iterations.
1:37:26
But, ev- every dog has a different energy.
1:37:32
So, pay attention to how much spontaneous movement there is.
1:37:33
Pay attention to where they put their eyes, how readily they just go to sleep or or not, how quickly they stand up and move.
1:37:40
And then, start to look at people and you start to realize there's tremendous variation there.
1:37:43
There's a bright-eyedness to certain people. You're one of them.
1:37:47
Other the like really at the level of their eyes that are there with you.
1:37:52
And that also exude a feeling of of calm.
1:37:55
And so I started paying more attention to how things make me feel.
1:37:59
And I think this is why going on social media now, I feel like I'm eating 25 five different cuisines at once, which would be disgusting.
1:38:05
Whereas if I just kind of focus on one or two things, like I love different cuisine, different different types of food, but I don't want them all at once.
1:38:14
And so I think as humans were we are meant to experience a huge array of what life has to offer and people have to offer.
1:38:20
Not all of it, but a lot of it.
1:38:23
And I feel like being able to sense into kind of the essence of music or the essence of a person's presence or the essence of a group for me has been very informative toward just kind of like realizing there these different ways of interacting and with the world.
1:38:38
I don't want to sound, you know, too abstract here.
1:38:40
I think what we're really talking about here is turning off traditional modes of thinking which tend to be single track or dual track.
1:38:48
And sensing energy I think is more about taking a broader band analysis of what's going on.
1:38:53
More visual field, more sensory field and bringing it all in at once.
1:39:00
And this is what we at least understand other animals to do because they lack language at least in our form.
1:39:04
And so they have to make decisions about moving toward, away from, or staying in a neutral position based on a kind of gestalt, a kind of like a whole picture of something.
1:39:16
And I think it can be a very useful rudder with which to navigate.
1:39:20
Now, of course, we also have to sharpen our attention and sharpen our intellect around certain things, but I think as time goes on I'm I don't know, I'm trying to become more bulldog-like.
1:39:32
For myself and for the people in my life. Yeah.
1:39:33
Cuz Costello made me feel safe. Mhm.
1:39:35
Certainly made me feel accepted.
1:39:37
He was very stubborn, but he also he took great delight in in things and he also could be quite the protector if he needed to be.
1:39:48
And so I really thought like, "Wow, if ever there were some energies to embody, it would be the bulldog energy."
1:39:52
And maybe for other people they need to embody a different energy.
1:39:55
I think we can learn a lot by paying attention to animals.
1:40:00
You know, like I said, I spent some time with Rick Rubin and I won't compare him to a bulldog. He's not like a bulldog.
1:40:05
He's like he's like a wolfhound.
1:40:08
He's extremely still but then when he opens his mouth, that mind is it's like it's a force.
1:40:17
And I know Rick well enough to know that he has this amazing ability to get very close to the energy of music and other people, but he doesn't get absorbed by it.
1:40:25
It doesn't change him in a way that changes your experience of him.
1:40:28
He's having experiences, but like there's a stability to him.
1:40:34
He's like this chord of of reliability and I think that's one of the reasons why people gravitate towards him.
1:40:40
It's also that beard is And your energy, too, my friend.
1:40:43
I haven't figured out what animal you are.
1:40:47
I'm I'm looking forward to hearing about it.
1:40:48
I haven't figured it out, but it's you're very loving, but you're also very discerning.
1:40:53
I think this is something that people um probably don't realize about you.
1:40:57
I'm not your psychologist, but you know, but you know, you you you you have a gift.
1:41:04
You have a gift and you give your gift in such plentiful ways and so many people benefit.
1:41:11
And so you've also clearly learned to surround yourself with people that allow you to give and to receive.
1:41:16
I I say this with great admiration.
1:41:20
I think I know you well enough now to like I know your heart. Like I and I'd hope so.
1:41:26
Yeah, yeah, I I can feel it.
1:41:28
Like I can feel your love for what you do and how badly you want people to get it, but you know better than to do anything but just create an offering.
1:41:41
And as a consequence, people flock to it. Mhm. I love it. I love it.
1:41:43
And and I've grown tremendously from your books, from your teaching.
1:41:48
I I I tell you this offline, so I'm I'm now saying it uh I'm now saying it recorded because I think it's really important that people understand that the podcasters especially Mhm.
1:41:59
like whether or not it's you or Rick or Lex or and there's so many others, right?
1:42:04
Or Joe or Tim or Whitney or whoever like there's so many, too many to list.
1:42:08
Like we're all just being ourselves. Mhm. That's the beauty of it.
1:42:15
It's like Costello being Costello.
1:42:15
And to some extent, sure there's, you know, edits and production and all that kind of stuff, but it's just you being you.
1:42:23
And to me, that's the most beautiful thing. Yeah.
1:42:25
It's what really works, and it's what really matters, and I think it's what people should do even when there's no recording. You certainly do.
1:42:30
You know, you're the same on mic and off mic.
1:42:35
It's one of the things I love about you.
1:42:37
And I think it's what people we need to do.
1:42:40
We all need to like also embrace that unique wiring that we each have. So. Absolutely.
1:42:45
Well, Andrew, thank you for those kind words, and and I don't take them lightly.
1:42:48
I know you mean them, and what I really appreciate today is you've also shared the part of you that comes out naturally when we're together.
1:42:56
And same with me, my the part of me that's fascinated by neuroscience and everything you teach, and and I think that's the beauty of it, too.
1:43:03
It's that I hope that everyone who's been listening and watching today knows and loves you for what you do on a daily basis, but then can accept that there are different facets to you.
1:43:12
There are different elements to you.
1:43:14
There are different things that you're curious about, and you've shown them all today and laid them out.
1:43:19
When they come to Huberman Lab, they they're getting something very specific, and they're getting that part, but you allow yourself to showcase different parts of your personality, and I'm I'm that you shared that with me, you shared that with my community.
1:43:31
I want to thank you for joining me today Uh uh and being so open and vulnerable and giving with your space and energy and I'm glad that you feel confident and open enough to be able to do that because it goes back to everything we've discussed today.
1:43:47
We all want to feel safe and accepted, but in order to do that, we want all parts of ourself to be accepted, otherwise we can't truly feel safe.
1:43:58
And so if I'm only accepted for one part of me, then I don't feel safe.
1:44:03
And if I feel safe only sharing one part of myself, then I'm not truly accepted.
1:44:07
And so I think everything we've talked about today comes around beautifully full circle.
1:44:12
And uh thank you for making me feel safe and accepted.
1:44:14
Thank you for being safe and accepted and and I hope everyone who's listening and watching today focuses on doing that for themselves and the people they love.
1:44:22
That would be a beautiful ripple effect from this show that people go off and create that space for the people in their lives.
1:44:29
So, thank you, my friend. Well, thank you so much.
1:44:31
Thanks for having me and as I said, I'm such a huge fan of what you do and and who you are.
1:44:37
And you know, and thank you for the kind words.
1:44:42
You know, I I confess I have a bit of low-level anxiety in sharing parts of myself I haven't shared publicly before.
1:44:50
Um but since I was a kid, I was one to venture out a little bit further than the rest, usually with a with a pack, but sometimes alone.
1:44:58
And you know, I'm trying to embrace positive change in myself by example.
1:45:04
I I am fallible and flawed like everybody.
1:45:07
I have areas that still need work certainly and um I'm going to keep working away and sharing what I learn.
1:45:14
And I'm grateful for all of it and I'm especially grateful to you right now, so. I love it. Thank you, my friend. Thank you, Andrew. Appreciate you.
1:45:22
If this is the year that you're trying to get creative, you're trying to build more, I need you to listen to this episode with Rick Rubin on how to break into your most creative self, how to use unconventional methods that lead to success, and the secret to genuinely loving what you do.
1:45:39
If you're trying to find your passion and your lane, Rick Rubin's episode is the one for you.
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Just because I like it, that doesn't give it any value.
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Like, as an artist, if you like it, that's all of the value.
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That's the success comes when you say, "I like this enough for other people to see it."