Control Your Mind For Extreme Motivation And Focus (4K) - Andrew Huberman

if we were to look at ourselves through the lens of an experiment like we would an animal experiment we think that animal is sick if you saw an animal digging in the corner looking looking looking looking for a bone the dog is looking looking looking looking looking you'd think that's really sad that's us right that's us i'm pointing at myself intentionally that's us dr andrew huberman welcome to the show great to be here it's been a long time coming very long time coming what do you mean when you say you cannot control the mind with

the mind yeah that statement really emerges from the fact that if we are in a pretty relaxed state or if we are happy we generally feel like we can do what we want to do we can maneuver through our environment we can make choices that are reasonable but oftentimes we're not in relaxed and happy states that's just part of the human experience obviously and there is a fundamental feature to the nervous system which is this thing they call the autonomic nervous system which is just fancy nerd speak for the components of your nervous system that

raise your levels of alertness or bring them way down sometimes we hear fight or flight rest and digest but this system governs all that but a lot more and basically what happens is when we are at the extremes of the autonomic what i call seesaw of very very alert to the point of being really stressed or panicked or concerned or if we are very close to sleep and we're drowsy and we're exhausted at those points along the autonomic nervous system our thoughts become a bit like a runaway train you know if you're very upset it's

hard to talk yourself out of it if you're stressed it's hard to think yourself out of it in fact you can start doing all sorts of third personing and rationalization you can call someone you can text somebody it's very hard to get yourself out of those states with thinking alone but the beauty of the autonomic nervous system is that it traverses the brain and the body and it connects to essentially all the organs of the body and it's a two-way street such that certain behaviors even certain patterns of breathing etc allow us to shift where

we are on the autonomic continuum between very very alert and stressed and very calm and thereby give our mind a shift also in terms of the kinds of thoughts that we can entertain the sorts of actions that we can engage in to make this concrete if you're very very stressed you're very upset two things happen one it's very hard to take your focus off whatever it is that's upsetting you and if you don't know what's upsetting you know pure anxiety but you don't know why it's very hard to take your mind off of the feelings

of anxiety in those states of mind there's another component which is that for whatever reason and no one really understands why this is it feels as if the state that you're in will go on forever now when we're in happy relaxed states rarely do we think gosh this is going to go on forever and yet when we are in these unfortunate states of mind we get the idea somehow it sort of hijacks our perception of time and we feel like this is never going to stop if we turn to the body and certain behaviors let

me talk about what those are we are able to move ourselves along the autonomic continuum and at that point when we've done that successfully it's actually quite straightforward to do we are able to think about things differently we start to get a sense that the way we feel might not be the way we're going to feel forever and it's in those shifts that we start to realize ah my mind actually is not my best friend at these extremes but there's a lot more to it you're only getting the tip of the iceberg in those states

so that's why i say if you can't control the mind with the mind look to the body to control the mind how would that be adaptive how would it be adaptive for us to focus all of our attention on to the anxiety is that something that you could see a useful absolutely so let's take stress as an example and this could be stress panic anxiety you know each one of those has a definition in medical terms psychological terms but to be fair no one really knows how to draw the line in the brain between fear

and stress and anxiety but we can say with certainty that all of those states involve high levels of alertness high levels of awareness sometimes for things in our environment and sometimes just for what's going on internally when we are stressed anxious afraid waking up in the middle of the night doesn't matter what triggered it there are a couple basic things that happen to all of us first of all our heart rate quickens that's kind of an obvious one fuel from our muscles and our liver is shuttled to particular organs of the body and away from

others in particular fuel is shuttled towards the big muscles of the body to generate large movements this is why we quake a bit when we're stressed the hands will shake it's preparing us for we are prepared for movement how does that prepare us for movement um the shaking actually is the consequence of trying to not move when we are stressed basically this is why taking a walk or a run you actually feel like you can kind of dispel the stress you're not actually dispelling the stress what's happened is it's like the arp the rpm are

getting cranked up it's like idling it right it's you know you could sit there in a parked car and do that but basically you take the thing out of park and it just wants to go and so a lot of the times when we're stressed it's in conditions in which we're trying to remain still public speaking and a tough argument you know at the doctor's office about to get an injection you know it depends on what stresses people obviously but that readiness for action is a second component so heart rate readiness for action by way

of shuttling glucose and other fuels to the muscles and then away from the reproductive organs from digestive organs etc because that is just not the right time for that another very very powerful feature of this response is that our our pupils of our eyes the dark parts of our eyes get big now you might think that that expands your visual field but actually the way the optics of the eye work that narrows the aperture of your visual field so when you are stressed you literally are seeing things through a small aperture so to straw view

of the world as they say and under those conditions you cannot see things in your periphery as well as you could prior to being stressed but you become exquisitely good at measuring small detailed changes in whatever it is that you happen to be looking at now there's a internal process too which is that the aperture on your thinking also becomes very very narrow so that if for instance well i had this happen the other day i i heard something very stressful i couldn't think about anything else right and that might just seem logical like of

course you can't think about anything that's very stressful you're concerned about this but my mind wasn't thinking about this particular incident it was thinking if this then this then if that then that and that then that and so you start you know dropping into the future you start dropping into the past like ah god why did we do that wow you know and you start doing all that kind of cycling through things and of course there are so many things that can help relax us meditation exercise a nice healthy meal social connection but the fifth

column of the stress response is that your aperture of vision your aperture of thinking gets very narrow and it becomes harder and harder to do the very things that would keep you out of stress and so this is kind of the the double-edged sword that is stress and so all the more reason why in those moments if the stress is not desired because there are moments when stress is desired you're navigating an emergency etc but if you don't want to be in that narrow aperture of thinking and vision etc then you need to find some

way to bring your level of autonomic arousal as it's called down slightly so that you can start thinking about other possibilities or you know there are instances i think everyone's been in this kind of situation where the thing that's stressing out is not going to get resolved today and you just sleep and of course you know you need to sleep and then you can't sleep and then of course that creates a compounding stress and now you're stressed about not being able to sleep and then over the course of the next few days you you know

dissolve into a puddle of tears but fortunately there are ways out of that kind of self-destruction you've done a lot of work on fear that was one of the things that you mentioned before is there something that everybody is scared of because i've heard the story the wives tale babies are born with is it fears of heights and loud noises or something is there any truth in that or is there something everyone's scared of there is i think the one that um everybody who has a healthy nervous system will react quite robustly to is if

you start increasing the amount of carbon dioxide that they're breathing and reduce the amount of oxygen that they're taking in that's terrifying am i right in thinking there's a experiment you can do where it's a single breath and that is pretty reliable at bringing on an anxiety attack yeah if you have people please don't do this because you need the right proper medical staff around but they're they're great experiments of having people breathe carbon dioxide directly and it you basically panic um it's terrifying yeah one big gulp of carbon dioxide will make make you very

afraid it turns out that there are a little group of neurons of course neurons are just nerve cells that little group of neurons in the brain stem that respond to levels of carbon dioxide in the blood turns out the reason we breathe is of course to bring in oxygen and then off low carbon dioxide but we don't have neurons that stimulate breathing for oxygen we have neurons that sense when carbon dioxide levels get too high so if you hold your breath eventually carbon dioxide levels go up and then at the moment that they reach a

certain threshold these neurons fire and trigger the gas reflux so in that moment you bring in oxygen and then of course you offload some carbon dioxide that's why it's so important to work on co2 tolerance right for breath work yeah so free divers a sport i actually don't recommend because there's only one way out of that sport as they say i have some friends who are free drivers and obviously you can do it safely with the right guide and training etc but it is a very dangerous sport because for most people when carbon dioxide levels

increase in the bloodstream and brain triggers this gas reflex what free divers train is carbon dioxide tolerance so they do that a couple of different ways and again please don't do this because you actually people have died doing this which so one way is you can do what's called cyclic hyperventilation right you do that 25 times or so and you think oh you're bringing a lot of oxygen you are but you're also offloading a lot of carbon dioxide especially if you use forceful exhales normally humans breathe through active inhales and passive exhales you just they

just sort of dump their air passively but if you do cyclic hyperventilation you're dumping a lot of carbon dioxide and then if you were to hold your breath what you would find is you could hold your breath for a lot longer why because your carbon dioxide levels are reduced so you don't have the same impulse to breathe now on land that's a more or less safe thing to do provided that you can get a good gulp of air once the gas reflex hits if you do that before going underwater cyclic hyperventilation they call air packing

and then you go under water you're going to be able to excuse me cyclic hyperventilation to air pack and then go underwater but your carbon dioxide is then lower you're going to be able to stay under longer but this is very dangerous because normally when that carbon dioxide threshold hits you would pop up to the surface you sort of panic and want to go to the top free divers learn to tolerate high levels of carbon dioxide in their bloodstream and stay very very calm the way they die is very interesting because it speaks to the

physiology the way they they die is they'll just be swimming feeling completely calm because they're very used to they've trained up this co2 tolerance carbon dioxide tolerance and when they die they don't suddenly feel like oh my goodness i'm running out of air it's just lights go black that's it they're just blackout and so they're alive and then they're gone and so this is why they use spotters they you know they have a line etc anytime you hear about somebody dying doing free diving it's rarely because they weren't comfortable at a given depth or because

it's not because their gasp reflexes kicked in it's because their gas reflex has been so desensitized that it's after the point at which they die precisely and this you know it's sort of like when you hear that um skilled parachuters die why well because they're so comfortable with so many jumps they actually forget to pull they're sometimes there are many instances in which they're they're uh videoing the first time jumpers right and they're getting the video for them and they themselves forget to pull because they're so comfortable jumping out of planes and so as people

get more and more advanced in something there's a there's a new risk that that surfaces because unless it's very reflexive and they built all all the protocols in oftentimes they can overlook the very thing that allowed them to become expert in the first place why do my palms get sweaty when i watch videos of people climbing up cranes and stuff like that you know the ones that i mean the guy's got a gopro's a dude called james kingston from the uk that's a psychopath he goes up to the highest uh towers of dubai illegally in

the middle of the night and then i watch it on a screen it's only this big and i get this visceral response yeah well two things first of all i i can relate you know i saw the free solo movie with alex honold and you know he lives and it's still scary to watch right you actually know the outcome at the beginning they sort of make it clear that he manages to do this and you're it's still terrifying and i think it's for the same reason that those youtube videos are terrifying which is that we

are so visual as animals we are so visual i mean rodents even a lot of carnivore predators are extremely olfactory smell driven humans are incredibly visual i mean more than 40 of the human brain has something to do with vision visual navigation eye movements um visual perception color perception face perception we have dedicated areas of the brain that are just for perceiving human faces and these micro expressions of human faces so so highly evolved for us when we see depth of field that's not um parallel to the ground it is terrifying with good reason because

you know what's the universal force that we all experience from the time we're born is gravity the first thing you learn is that things fall down not up right the you know it's it's like the the fundamental rule that we come into the world with it's like day one even though the baby is kind of flopping around like a potato but can't even hold its head up the eyes are often you know the ocular muscles of the eyes are often not very good so babies will kind of eyes are rolling back in their head that

generally corrects itself over the next few weeks or so but the feeling of gravity of them you know if they feel like they're being dropped even the tiniest bit right they will go wide-eyed so there's a built-in vestibulo ocular reflex so when you see depth of field in the direction of the gravitational pull you actually get a little bit of activity in your cerebellum which literally means mini brain a little area of the brain in the back that actually looks like a little mini brain if you were looking at the brain and that area of

the brain is responsible for all the reflexes associated with the falling reflex it does a lot of other things too so when you see that depth of field in the direction of gravity there you have a little micro activity in your brain that you might fall if you've ever been to a tall bridge or a dam and you go to the edge and you know people love to play with this there's that also that tower in toronto they have that big um tower well the big no the big um the big tower i forget what

it is maybe it's in calgary goodness canadians are gonna hate me okay i love canadians but for some reason i can't remember this they have one of those glass floors there where you can walk and it's terrifying and you know you're not going to fall through it right there they tell you you're not going to fall through it but it's terrifying because your body and brain are preparing for this immense fall so when you see this in video it's the same thing i always say a picture is worth a thousand words but a video is

worth 10 million pictures i mean this is the reason why we're so drawn to things like instagram scrolling it's like text text video you know or the enormous popularity of tick-tock it's video now the enormous popularity of twitter still escapes me because that's a different different sort of cultural gravitational pull but video and in particular action that gets us in a kind of a primitive mode that is an extremely alluring visual image what about emotional fears like uh fear of failure or social disapproval or something do they work in a in a similar way or

is there a different part of the brain that's using that yeah great question so um a few years ago a postdoc in my lab was now a staff scientist melissa gilman excuse me melissa dr melisse gilmez balban she has a long name um excellent researcher studies fear did a very broad scale survey of the general public thousands and thousands of entries um created this kind of uh cloud of bubbles the bigger the bubble the more the greater number of people that had that fear you saw some we saw some interesting things so heights certainly public

speaking certainly doctor's office and syringes certainly public speaking fear is very common um social isolation fear is very common but we also saw some things like dogs you know there are a number of people who are afraid of dogs which is inconceivable to me because i love dogs so exactly the same yep but people you know people form these associations whether or not through experience or through indirect experience observing others i think public speaking is one of the greatest fear of dying yeah i i don't it's not funny but figure of speech i never think

about dying and being afraid of dying i think about all the scary things that could happen while i'm living but there are many people who are just intrinsically afraid of dying and so that's that's a big one um for people that uh don't swim fear of drowning for people that swim less so um for people that have some sort of psychiatric disorder genuine psychiatric disorder like obsessive-compulsive disorder which is not just per obsessive compulsive personality but obsessive compulsive disorder fear of the sh of being discovered and the shame that they have around their obsessions and

compulsions these are true ocd is very common do they all live in the same place all of these different fears so yeah so i was rattling off and i didn't answer your question um to the the more important point so forgive me the short answer is they have a final common pathway which is increased autonomic arousal and that is funneled through a couple what we call limbic structures among others so there's certainly involvement of the of the now famous amygdala this which means almond is this almond shaped structure on the two sides of the brain

there's also area of the brain called the striatum analysis also involved in fear and then the hypothalamus this small collection of neurons just above the roof of your mouth which is really to me one of the more fascinating areas of the brain harbors neurons that create a body-wide and brain-wide response to something that the higher-order areas of the brain like the forebrain see and perceive as dangerous as threatening so the short answer is yes it all funnels through hypothalamus amygdala stria terminalis and autonomic nervous system that's a final common pathway but in terms of the

variety of different things that can stimulate fear and the ways that they can do that that is highly contextual so the forebrain this real estate in the brain right behind behind the forehead is incredible because it's sort of free real estate for you to customize for your life according to what happens to you early on so for instance you might not be at all afraid of heights and you say well why is that so well maybe when you were a kid you were one of those maniacs that like you know doing within the states we

call them cherry drops the kids that could swing on their feet and then jump off the bar and then other kids are timidly crawling to the top of the thing don't even want to go up the ladder to the slide there's a ton of variation and that variation does not exist in the kind of deeper circuitry the final common path circuitry it exists in the learning that we experienced early in life one bad fall can do it i mean i was bitten very badly by a german shepherd when i was a kid my head almost

got my eye but you know for whatever reason i've always liked dogs anyway but there are other things that i've experienced that have left long-term negative imprints so i it's highly contextual and a lot of it has to do with what happens immediately after the bad experience this is why nowadays there's a lot of legal use of the drug ketamine after traumas you know this is all very dark stuff unfortunately but if you you know you just imagine the family member that was just in a car crash and saw their the driver their loved one

impaled onto the steering column i mean what could be more horrible than that nowadays if they come into the emergency room they will often give them an injection of ketamine which is a dissociative anesthetic to get them to dissociate from this extreme emotional state so there are ways now to treat this um and ketamine is used uh clinically at later periods too didn't you you did an experiment where you went uh diving with sharks and i think that there was a complication and you went back the next day to redo it i'm going to guess

that this is for the exact same reason to sort of conquer and um integrate the experience yeah uh to make a long story short we went two years in a row out to guadalupe island where there are a lot of great white sharks some of the more expert shark divers were cage exiting they were leaving the cage the first year i did not the second year i decided i would but the day before i did i went down into the cage just get comfortable again down there and i had an air failure and the safety

tanks were out also and obviously i experienced extreme carbon dioxide overload and panic i didn't full-blown panic i kept enough awareness that i was able to obviously i'm here um i survived doing a share error protocol etc but it was a very bad situation i don't like to say i nearly died because that's actually sort of letting the bug in my brain i like to joke that the reaper came in and um you know offered me a fist bump and i offered him a different gesture instead so i survived but the next day i woke

up very very distraught because i had this bug in this loop in my brain i you know this notion i came so close to to the end and so i did go back down and i did cage exit and i don't say that to um suggest that it was the smartest decision obviously you're safer on the boat or on land i don't say it to sound you know again tough or anything i did it deliberately because i did not want to return home with this loop of fear and so i went back into the traumatic

circumstance and obviously made it out and if you look at all the successful treatments for trauma they all involve getting close to the trauma-inducing mindset exposure therapy gradual and assisted by a clinician but rarely if ever are people with serious trauma encouraged to get as far away from the feeling of at least not in the clinical setting this has a lot of implications for things like trigger warnings uh colleagues of mine in psychiatry i've asked them directly what do you think of trigger warnings and they said you know i mean there's some logic to it

on the surface but if you really think about true trauma and we can define trauma dr paul conti was on my podcast his amazing trauma psychiatrist he said trauma is an experience is not just a bad experience trauma is an experience that changes your nervous system such that it behaves differently in the future that in a way that's maladaptive for you so if you look at all the trauma treatments they're all about learning to talk about the trauma even experiencing some of the same feelings so things like trigger warnings and all these things that buffer

us against feeling our true feelings do nothing but prolong the trauma and prolong and exacerbate fear you heard david goggins in the lab to study him for fear what did you learn from looking at that guy yeah david's david's great i always chuckle with david because you know the one thing about david is what you see on social media is actually what you get when you interact with david we worked long hours one day and i was everyone was ready to tap out this was a bunch of people in silicon valley for a day you

know doing some workshop type thing and he just he was changing into his running shorts midway he was going to run to the airport and he ran to the airport as far as i know i get his flight i believe so you know um but there was this moment of should we continue should we take a break and he was like no let's keep going keep going um everything you see and read and hear about david is exactly how he shows up it's really wonderful he came to the lab and he did you know we

have a virtual version of the shark thing um which of course is not the same it's the real experience but for people who are afraid of sharks it's quite scary for them and allows us to study fear david was he's very afraid of sharks which was sort of uh amusing to me given that as a seal he had to spend a lot of time in the water but he was first one in wanted to do the vr talked about how he didn't like it but um but that's why he did it you know constant uh

testing himself in fact i think even though david's quite successful i think and has many many options of how to spend his time i believe this is correct i think right now he's doing fire jumping he's um fighting fires in the wilderness by zip lining in or fast lining in or jumping out of planes so he's constantly pushing that uh that friction lever to create or build or further build this thing about leaning into friction and this is a term that isn't really scientific but that i decided to coin because this idea of limbic friction

that when we're very tired and we need to be in action or when we're very stressed and we need to perform in a more calm and controlled way there's friction on both sides getting out of bed when we're exhausted hard very hard often leaning into action in a calm and deliberate way when we're freaking out like going to give a public lecture if one has fear of public speaking also hard so this limbic friction and david just seems to seek what i call limbic friction in every domain of life is that like exposure therapy for

limbic friction then essentially yeah i mean what you're training and improving when you're getting better at dealing with stress is this ability to tolerate high amounts of adrenaline in your body and to think clearly and function well i mean adrenaline is epinephrine and just a little bit of physiology it's released from the adrenals obviously above the kidneys that gets your body organs amped up and energized it can't cross the so-called blood-brain barrier you have a high restriction fence that we call the blood-brain barrier around the brain keep bad molecules out adrenaline therefore is released also

within the brain from a little cluster of neurons called locus ceruleus the name doesn't matter so when you are stressed your brain and your body both wake up and that adrenaline hijacks certain systems narrows your visual focus etc etc if you look at almost all stress inoculation protocols cold water ice bath cold shower cyclic hyperventilation those all do the same thing they generate a lot of adrenaline release in the brain and a lot of adrenaline release in the body but it's different if those if the adrenaline in the brain and body is evoked by you

that you did it because under conditions under which you did the ice bath deliberately and now you're wide awake and really really alert there's this feeling that you have options it wasn't done to you but you can train up an ability to for instance think clearly and calmly um maybe even do some simple math problems in your head or maybe try and relax while there's all this adrenaline in your system and that carries over so that when you you know we've all done it you're driving along the person in front of you stop short and

you're almost in the accident right there's that moment where you could panic or that moment where you could you know road rage or that moment where you could freak out but if you are familiar with the feeling of adrenaline in your brain and body you navigate that in a in a calmer way how well because adrenaline is generic there's no adrenaline for the car crash adrenaline for the heights adrenaline for the the uh the relationship situation it's all the same so we can get better we can raise our stress threshold as i like to refer

to it and that can be done through cold water or cyclic hyperventilation ideally not at the same time but cold water you know is a universal stimulus for creating adrenaline release and there's a big range of cold not infinite but a big range of cold in which you can generate adrenaline without harming your tissue whereas with heat you get into a very hot environment or very low oxygen environment you'll also get a lot of adrenaline but you can also suffocate and burn yourself so this is why cold is used in navy seal screening and training

and this is why i think so many people really like the ice bath in cold showers has a bunch of other positive effects but it is a great trigger for adrenaline speaking about relationships one of the most uh common traumas probably that people are going to go through is heartbreak right you're going to be in a relationship that you imagine is going to continue forever maybe when you're 18 or sometimes when you're 48 and then it's going to stop have you thought about the neuroscience of what's happening during heartbreak you know we did so i've

done episodes of our podcast on love attachment and relationships which is a fascinating literature mostly from psychology but also bio biological literature and that's mostly about people's orientation toward attachment so they're just very quickly there's the so-called secure attached style this typically emerges in childhood when there's a very predictable care um caregiver carry a relationship between child and most often mother but it can be father too or other caregiver just so happens that the classic experiments were done on mothers because this was in the 1970s and there weren't as many reverse role you know homes

etc there were some but not as many as there are now so that's one style of attachment the parent leaves the child gets a little distraught but then can distract itself doing other things or just simply do other things because they have a high degree of intrinsic knowledge not the thought but intrinsic calm the autonomic nervous system doesn't feel any need to ramp up because the mom returns then there's the so-called insecure attachment styles and they're a bunch of different ones but those are the ones where it's really stressful when the parent leaves it's not

clear they're going to come back and when they come back it's not clear that there's they're going to re-establish the bond the child will feel supported etc here's what's fascinating those same neural circuits are repurposed for romantic attachment in adult life the same circuits which shouldn't surprise us i mean why would the brain throw away valuable circuitry but this whole freudian notion that you know childhood attachment styles map onto adult attachment styles that's real that's physiological now one important point it's not one for one in the sense that let's say you had a secure attachment

to your father let's say it's a young a young girl and as a baby and a young child she had a secure attachment to her father and an insecure attachment to her mother in adulthood and let's say she's heterosexual so in adulthood she prefers men as romantic partners this girl grows up and you might say well she had a good relationship to her dad so she's going to have a good secure attachment style in her adult heterosexual relationships ah often it's not the case they will transplant or superimpose the insecure attachment style to the to

the mother on to male relationships but have great relationships to female friends for instance so we have to be a little careful to not map one for one that's important so all of that is in us and then you were talking about breakups and we did an episode on grief and the way that grief works in the brain and nervous system is that there are three sort of factors that are mapped in our consciousness and our subconscious and these are space time and this notion of closeness which is attachment space and time is very simple

it's where is the person that i love and when will i see them next right i mean if you have a relative that lives overseas and you know they're alive you're not going to grieve them you might really miss them but you're not going to grieve them the same way you would if suddenly you get the note unfortunately that they passed away and then attachment is how close you are to them like how critically you rely on them for internal control and support and that doesn't mean they have to be an immediate caregiver it could

just be like a really good friend you call them mates over in the uk right like a really good friend that just your knowledge of him just makes you feel good you feel better in the world you know as a guy who mostly grew up with kind of a big pack of male friends i mean i feel strongest and happiest and most secure in life when i see something about one of my friends doing well in life it just makes me feel good if one of them dies and unfortunately i'm getting to the age where

a number of them have died then you feel like all of a sudden like goodness like there's a loss internally right okay that's all sort of obvious but what's interesting is that the grief process itself is about restructuring this map this map think of it like a tripod it's got three pieces space time and closeness when someone dies it's very confusing for the brain because where are they in space well the body is put someplace maybe it's cremated maybe it's not we have notions of a spirit and that depends on one's orientation a soul or

a spirit okay or if you don't then you don't then where do they go right and then time when will you see them again there's the never you'll never see them again and the closeness component remains and so there's an untethering of this map and so there's been brain imaging studies um beautiful work by mary frances o'connor university of arizona showing that if you look in the brain and people that are in grief from loss of a really strong attachment the state of brain and body that gets flipped on is a motivational state it's exactly

the same circuitry in the brain that one sees active if someone very hungry is put just outside the wall of some delicious food or if an animal that really wants to mate i guess mate with animals you call it copulate they really want to copulate with another animal is put just beyond the wall of that animal but they can smell them i mean these are highly motivated desiring states so grief is a motivated state to bridge the distance in time and space and yet it's impossible and so the process of grief is a gradual waning

of that motivation and a gradual shift of the memory of the person into some concept whether or not it's a soul whether or not it's just the past whether or not it's their energy and again it depends on what the forebrain of that particular person believes shifts that concept of that person into a place where the brain is comfortable there's no more autonomic arousal there's no motivation and we've all experienced this if you've had a loss and i've had a loss for instance where my graduate advisor died and i adored her and every once in

a while her daughter will call me from her cell phone and she kept the same number on that phone and the name and everything so every once in a while it'll ring barbara chapman and i'll reach for the phone and then there's this moment where i'm like oh goodness so anyway i'm going on and on just to color this with example but when there's a breakup it's exceedingly hard especially if the person is young you know if you look at suicides after breakups those are far more common in younger people than they are in older

people why because the relationship represents the whole future they have no concept that they're they know they're other people but it sort of feels like the whole world is shutting down so in breakups what's happened is the person is no longer available in time and space this is why when someone breaks up you literally have to let them go right you know constant pursuing of them is out of context is not healthy they have a name for that it's called a stalker don't do it um but it's almost as if you have to the brain

has to think that the person is gone in time and space this has become much harder with social media right because people can check up on people they can hear from people in the old days like when i was growing up you just like took the phone off the hook or you you diverted your attention now we are constantly renewing that the person is still there and so love and the loss of love and the death grief are virtually identical it's that motivational state and this is why it's so hard to not reach out to

somebody that you really miss and want back i saw a study last week that had researchers asking participants to rate emotional and physical pain of a breakup they found that women tend to be more negatively affected by breakups reporting high levels of both physical and emotional pain but while breakups hit women the hardest they tended to recover more fully men on the other hand rarely fully recovered i thought that was very interesting i wasn't too sure what that meant yeah it's interesting um it also rings true with my my experience and my observations it i

i think i mean this could relate to a number of things and here i'm painting with a broad brush right but um you know how comfortable one is feeling their feelings is male or female is going to strongly dictate how quickly one moves through grief this is the same thing as trauma the more willing someone is to feel the full depth and intensity of the feelings that they associate with that trauma the more quickly they're going to move through the trauma again i'm lifting from paul conte's word so these aren't mine but you know people

use a number of strategies they use distraction they use states like they sublimate to things like anger and avoidance of various kinds in order to not feel the traumatic feelings or not feel the breakup people will you know try and self-suit with alcohol or trying to sell soothe with multiple new partners or whatever it happens to be doesn't work just extends it because this map of space-time and closeness needs to be fractured and the only way to do that is for the brain to have to confront the reality which is that whether by death or

by by breakup they are no longer available it's like the food on the other side of that wall is gone it's just not there anymore uh or that the food that was accessible now there's a wall in between and you will not get through it and you know you can see this actually in animal studies that are kind of hard they're actually very hard to watch you'll see the animal perseverate literally damage his own body trying to get through a barrier to something it's highly motivated to see people do that post-breakup they usually do that

by talking to everybody about the breakup um which is its own form of perseverating on the motivation what did i do what did i do wrong this and that and some of that analysis is healthy some of it's not now why would one group be more of let's just say effective at dealing with breakups it's probably the ability to really feel the full intensity of how sad it is and be able to confront that and here i'm you know i'm a male i've only ever lived in a male body so all i can tell you

is that i think from a very early age um there's a an ability that at least i'm sure it transcends to women too um or extends to women too but learning to pack down feelings right and so when are we really talking about when we're talking about packed down feelings i'm not a psychologist but what we learn is top down control for brain to autonomic control it's the same thing like i don't want to jump off the high dive or i don't want to do this public speaking but i'm gonna i'm gonna kind of like

i'm just gonna force myself i'm gonna david goggins it right grief is is an autonomic state we say it has valence has negative valence but it's high levels of autonomic arousal with a negative connotation because you can be high levels of autonomic arousal with happiness right you can be very alert and aroused and happy you're very alert and aroused and sad it's very alert and arousing sad and yet we learn how to tamp that down what is tamping down it's reducing our heart rate it's going to work each day being a functional human being you

know there's a lot of that rather than allowing ourselves to you know sob uncontrollably into a pillow um some people are better at this i mean the late steve jobs was a big proponent of scream therapies he used to go up into the hills behind stanford he actually owned some still owns the property back there he was really into you know catharsis cathartic release of internal state that he felt would allow him to like return a happier nicer person he was also kind of well known for screaming at people in the office so he obviously

had a lot pent up inside so i think the better that we can lean into the emotional states that we fear the most but in a controlled way where we're not harming ourselves or other people the better the more that we try and avoid that and we try and sublimate or just you know i've done this so i'm speaking from experience you know i would use the anger or the sadness from an experience to just work 10 10 times longer ten times harder to just get that much more focus you're taking that autonomic arousal that

narrow aperture and that energy and you're putting it onto something that moves your life forward so in some cases that's good because you still need to function and give but it can give you the here i'll just say it gave me the illusion that i was working through something because you get all the accoutrements and rewards of hard work but what you don't do is remap that space-time closeness map and then you find i guarantee you find yourself five or ten years later wondering why you're so exhausted or why certain things in life aren't going

well and it's because when they say you haven't dealt with the loss you never actually allowed yourself to feel the feelings but once you do it's like a valve it releases you hear musicians say that the most recent album was [ __ ] because i didn't have any heartbreak to work through right and it is strange how people it's a difficult thing to pass because a little bit of it is kind of like alchemy right a little bit of it is kind of like turning something that's terrible into something that's useful and beautiful it's fuel

but you're right it is a it's a hiding away from what it is that you actually need to do from the work that you need to do and in a world which is a meritocracy where people want success and status and accolade and fame and you go well enemies and revenge and bitterness resentment pretty good motivators maybe i could use some of that maybe i should go out of my way to try and put myself into positions where this motivates me and working out where that falls on the ledger is is a difficult one it

is and i think it depends on life stage and it depends on how one is going to work it out i mean the the narrative around the shark dive i mean even as i say it now several that was 2017 was the second dive when i think about all that i think that was crazy i was out there studying fear and i almost was the professor who died studying fears it would have been a terrible end to the story um what was i doing don't do this don't do this but you know there are times

in our life where we feel compelled to take on certain challenges for whatever reason there's a phrase that doesn't exist in the scientific literature but it captures two components of physiology that are absolutely factual earlier we talked about limbic friction as it relates to creative process and sublimation of anger and sadness and creating things from bad events books music etc um the words that come to mind are limbic resonance the human beings resonate with these extreme states you know there aren't many great albums written about a good day walking on a sunday in the park

like it's kind of boring i mean there's the beautiful painting sunday in the park with george but i'll be honest it's beautiful but it's also kind of boring you can look at the details of it for a while people like intensity the scream is that you know people look at that for a long time and it speaks to the psychosis of the artist etc you know people don't generally bond through passive relaxed states unless they've also been through a lot together right i mean even think about uh the we could talk about this separately if

you want but all of us are here because of the autonomic seesawing that is the reproductive act it goes from highly aroused how you refer to it in your lab scientist autonomic see-saw it is it's very interesting that the arousal process is one of increase in autonomic arousal in order to get true arousal but then not so much that it inhibits arousal then mating behavior and then the the orgasm response in males and females is highly what we call sympathetic not emotionally some it can be i suppose emotionally sympathetic but from a pure physiology standpoint

it's a activation hyperactivation of the stress system even though it has positive valence and then there's a very quick rebound to the so-called parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system this deep relaxation which we don't really know why i wasn't consulted the design phase but we think that that postcoital bliss and is and the kind of relaxing the desire to not run around a bunch more for most people was to exchange odorant molecules to increase pair bonding and even if people aren't trying to pair bond because people don't always just make to reproduce but that

some of the molecules that are released in each of the two individuals oxytocin being the main one give people a sense of kind of post-coital bliss and and it's a very calm one that creates opportunity for bonding and discussion is all called like pillow talk there are other forms of pill clarity but for women it might be something different right of course a different different name i only speak in the language of physiology but for both men and women this happens it creates this little orb of closeness that is both physiological and but neurochemical too

so what we can say for sure is that whether or not it was in vivo or in a dish we are all here because two parents right a male and a female unless you're a condor where two females can produce a baby this has now been shown right but as far as we know where a male and a female reproduce because they each went through this arc of arousal not too high arousal extreme stress relaxation that happened separately or together because in vitro it could be fertilization could be separate so the test of whether or

not we get to reproduce is actually the ability to to assuming that people are doing this together and not through in vitro fertilization is a test of whether or not people can coordinate their autonomic nervous systems now there are ways around that and to override it but by and large that's the way humans evolved in the way all other animals evolved now limbic resonance is a good way i think to describe that process but that carries over to other things too an album about an extreme loss a song or a poem about extreme loss brings

the reader the listener into a limbic state that's very similar or approximates what the creator experienced right the person who created that art or that poetry and in the same way if something's about a lot of anger you know if you like loud fast music or something like that it's an extreme state it has a gravitational pull to it there's again i'm using this language limbic resonance rarely if ever do human beings bond through nothing they bond through shared experience and you think of what makes people feel close well there are a couple things and

this has everything to do with time perception typically when there's a high degree of limbic resonance it means that the molecule dopamine was increased substantially over baseline at some point dopamine is almost always discussed in terms of pleasure but it's the molecule of motivation drive and to some extent reward it tends to narrow our visual focus and believe it or not dopamine is the molecule from which adrenaline is manufactured biochemically you get adrenaline from dopamine so these two act as close cousins to put us into these states of motivation and have energy to pursue things

when dopamine is very present in our system or if you're in the company of someone else and there's a lot of dopamine two things happen first of all you're very motivated narrowing a focus that's one the other is that the way that you perceive time is quite a bit different for instance if you ever had an amazingly exciting day just tons of things maybe meet someone new you're having the best time i mean just think falling in love and the most incredible date that you can imagine how it begins and how it ends it just

feels incredible it all feels like it went by very very fast and yet when you look back on that day it seems like so much happened now think about it opposite situation you go to the doctor's office and you're sitting in the doctor's lobby and you're waiting and you're waiting and there's no phone reception so you can't scroll instagram you're waiting and you're waiting it's incredibly boring it's a very low dopamine state it feels like it goes on forever and yet when you look back nothing really happened so dopamine changes our perception of time and

in terms of developing human bonds this has been well established that if two people for instance go three different places in a given day they tend to feel like they know each other far better than if they stayed in one place even for a longer period of time did you know that pickup artists were weaponizing this about 15 years ago no it doesn't surprise me but i'm i'm sorry to hear it it was common held wisdom in the pick apart this community that you were supposed to have a three location date to manipulate precisely this

to make the girl feel like you had progressed further down the maturation process of of spending time together surely there have to be female pick up artists too uh yeah hello i feel like that job's probably easier i can't comment i i don't know i've never been one going back to dopamine how just how triggering are our phones when it comes to dopamine okay great question we often hear that you know the social media getting dopamine hit after dopamine hit when we first get on social media after a wall for the first time or after

a long period of time the amount of dopamine that's released we think is quite substantial it's novel remember dopamine is about novelty surprise and the sense that we are on some exciting track that's what dopamine is really about it puts us into states of readiness anticipation looking seeking etc almost always for things outside the confines of our skin just to contrast it maybe for a bit more of a future discussion serotonin does the opposite when there's a lot of serotonin in our brain and body typically it makes us feel satisfied stated more quiescent comfortable with

what we have in our own immediate sphere and within us right the comfort of a good meal the food you have dopamine is about go go go if you look at somebody who's high on cocaine or methamphetamine it's all about pursuit because that's a very dopaminergic drug you look at somebody who's taken a drug and i'm not suggesting people do this but it really ramps up serotonin let's say a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor prozag zoloft etc the side effects of those drugs if the dosages are too high lack of appetite lack of libido kind of

meh about life you know then so they'll adjust the dose down that's because those are serotonergic drugs so in in general when we are in pursuit of things dopamine is is quite high so now you have to remind me your question because i've set up the dopamine serotonin smartphones cell phones yes um forgive me so the thing about cell phones is when you first get on there and you haven't let's say you're no wi-fi on the flight or something and you land it can actually be quite stimulating you get a lot of dopamine oh there's

this oh there's that but very quickly when you're scrolling on social media you're no longer getting the novelty but you're continuing to do it you almost don't know why you're doing it at that point it shifts over to something that's a bit more like an obsessive compulsive behavior where that we can define an obsessive-compulsive behavior where the obsession leads to a compulsion so the obsession is a thought the compulsion is a behavior but the acting out of the compulsion merely serves to increase the obsession right this is very different than being obsessed with food or

obsessed with cleanliness there's no payoff right exactly there's no anxiety relief by carrying out the compulsion with ocd behaviors like scrolling social media the dopamine quickly wanes and then you find that you're just sort of and we've all been there you're scrolling like why am i doing this this isn't that interesting that is this isn't that interesting now the algorithms for social media are very clever and i don't want to demonize it i you know provide a lot of a lot of my life is spent on you know on social media now but in the

algorithms that they've incorporated function on the the most powerful way to keep people doing a behavior or an animal for that matter is intermittent random reward a random intermittent reward that you don't know when you're going to hit the jackpot so you're scrolling you're scrolling and then you see something typically it's very high what you know in nerd speak we'd say signal to noise so if you're reading some interesting things this came out in the news this came out and then it's all of a sudden a riot or a person that is jumped base jumping

off a building or um you know for people that are are scrolling looking at bodies or something like that live bodies hopefully people aren't looking at dead bodies but look if something's very tragic then that has this gravitational pull and then you what happens is you start getting the system working for that next dopamine hit that you don't know when it's going to come it's just like gambling so i look at social media as initially being very dopaminergic driving reward surprise and excitement but very quickly transitioning to something more like ocd and the kinds of

behaviors where it looks if you if we were to look at ourselves through the lens of an experiment like we would an animal experiment we think that animal is sick if you saw an animal digging in the corner looking looking looking looking for a bone the dog is looking looking looking looking looking looking looking looking you'd think that's really sad that's us right that's us i'm pointing at myself intentionally that's us so we have to learn to self-regulate the amount of time but that doesn't have to be a process of you know scruffing ourselves and

saying don't do it don't do it think about it in terms of the positive the more time away from something the more positively reinforcing it will be when you return and that just to sort of superimpose this onto the relationship conversation you know many of us are fortunate to have partners that we love spending a lot of time with it's also good to miss that person every once in a while now that might be an hour for some people apart of no communication it might be a week everyone varies on this on the spectrum but

the idea of missing someone is that positive anticipation that kind of pain right it's a motivational state and then when you see them it's all the richer so you can imagine that these dopamine circuits can be used to more successfully navigate a number of different things and you know a lot of couples completely quash the excitement and the pleasure of being together not just physical pleasure but just pleasure of being together because they just spend too much damn time familiarity or they're texting that all the time right or they're you know and this whole thing

around texting has become a really interesting test of dopamine expectation there's this thing called dopamine reward prediction error if you think the reward is coming and it doesn't you drop below baseline levels of dopamine that's why you should never tell someone that this restaurant is going to be the best restaurant you've ever been to in your life exactly i made the mistake of telling my girlfriend on the way here i want her to read this book i'm like this is an amazing book you should read it and i caught myself and i thought damn it

i'm actually detracting from how good she's going to experience the book tell her it was terrible oh yeah it's really good though this is the problem it's hard to do so um i think the key is to uh to leverage dopamine reward prediction error in the best way it's the surprise that you know if you take kids you're driving home from school and suddenly you pull into the ice cream shop they're going to be so ecstatic but if you tell them you're going to go the ice cream shop and it's closed huge drop below baseline

does that mean if you tell them that you're going to the ice cream shop and it's open that's less than not telling them that you're going to the ice cream shop and it's surprised correct it's it's they literally tear out into maxim surprise is the maximum dopamine release then successful completion of the missions as it were is the next and then unsuccessful is there not an argument to be made that you would be able to drag out the amount of time that dopamine is released for because of the anticipation yeah so well and people do

this in relationship quite a lot right anticipation is the kind of ultimate fuel of the courting dance right i mean this is also but one has to be very careful because whether or not it's from the male side or the female side or whatever variation thereof there's a you only get so many reward prediction errors before people start to predict or associate low dopamine with somebody or some experience in other words if you you know i'll use an example uh not from my own life but if you say you know we're going to costa rica

on vacation and then you say listen i have to work they might understand but that's a letdown it's a dopamine reward prediction error in the direction of lower dopamine they might recover from it they might not but most people recover from it if you do that two or three times what ends up happening you can model this beautifully and they've seen this experimentally in animals and humans then you say okay we're really going to costa rica this time and you think well the surprise is going to be that you actually go the amount of dopamine

that's released for positive for successful completion of the initial goal is far lower than it ever would have been so you can only cry wolf i suppose that's not the right way to put it you can only create positive anticipation so many times and then create a letdown before completion that the pro delivery of the promise has very little impact and so you have to be very careful with one's words better to say nothing than to let somebody down for sure in the context of human relationship and you know this plays out in some less

perhaps uh amusing ways where you know you look at people who are successful in life and you always hear success build success and it's absolutely true like when students come to my lab and they do a phd thesis it's very important for me to get them onto a research track quickly that they're going to experience some success because if they spend four years and then it fails that's devastating and then they have to start over again same thing with kids i mean getting some success early on even if it's low bar success really does build

up one's positive anticipation and ability to perform well in the future because dopamine gives energy remembers the precursor to adrenaline and the sense that the world is predictable now this can go a wrong way too and i see this a lot with the idea that everyone gets a blue ribbon this is terrible too because if everyone is rewarded every child is rewarded regardless of how well they performed if they're all rewarded to the same level you actually flatten the dopamine curve and so in that sense yes everyone might feel you know celebrated but you actually

are lowering motivation for the given activity uh this has a whole landscape of research in back of it related to intrinsic versus extrinsic reward the strongest motivation is always going to be intrinsic motivation if you reward kids or adults for something too many times even if they like that activity the propensity to do that activity will be reduced but if you reward without effort or without success that is devastating for a nervous system in fact i've gone on record and i'll say it again and again and again which is that dopamine that arrives without prior

effort destroys people this is this is drugs this is uh you know this is things like cocaine and amphetamine it's high levels of dopamine with no effort okay they had to buy it they had to find it they did whatever it but that's no there's no physical effort or mental effort involved in getting the dopamine peak this is why hard work followed by reward great working hard on a relationship and then it gets better there's a breakthrough or whatever it is that is powerfully positive dopamine that just arrives because you say oh you're here so

you get reward terrible and this is why rewarding every little positive thing that a child does with you know their favorite thing eventually diminishes the value of that thing and diminishes their ability to get motivated on their own it's a very very powerful system one has to be very very careful how one leverages it what are your thoughts on dopamine detoxing is that legit does it work well up until about six months ago i would have said no um but my colleague anna lemke she's been on the show fantastic um i have such admiration and

respect she's great yeah yeah just a brief anecdote i was i directed neuroanatomy course for the medical students at stanford i should have known who anna was and then one day she came in to give a lecture on dopamine and addiction and my first thought was oh my goodness you know have to get her on the podcast and have to i want her talking to the world because it's such powerful knowledge so if people haven't heard that episode all right go listen to chris talking to dr anna lemke i'm going to listen to it i've

listened to all her podcasts that i was aware of but again we were talking about it's hard sometimes hard to find podcasts so i'm going to listen to that um cannot listen to her enough times you know the the dopamine you asked earlier about the arc of dopamine and how long it lasts that the one of the key takeaways from that book dopamine nation that i've incorporated in my own life is that there are certain activities like cold water that create long-lasting arcs of dopamine those can be very useful for putting us into long-lasting motivational

states so these are not big peaks and troughs these are the pain of the cold water followed by this long long arc of dopamine wonderful it's kind of an antidepressant positive motivator natural stimulus i always say if you don't have access to an ice bath cold showers yes will work if you have a shower that doesn't get cold enough keep in mind that the original studies showing this dopamine increase had people get into 60 degree water which is not that cold 60 degrees fahrenheit for 45 minutes to an hour so your water bill might go

up but you could just draw a kind of cool bath and get in that up to the neck so because i realize there are sometimes some cost barriers to people that not everyone has an ice bath no dopamine detoxing yeah so dopamine detoxing is something that apparently today my uh short-term working memory is off i i swear i can't yoga mata get that i can't think of any i'm caffeinated i can't think of any um pharmacologic reason for it but uh no excuses um so dopamine detox i would have thought was not something real um

it seemed kind of silly to me actually um and i'll tell you why it seems silly and why it still seems silly but why it may have some utility but then anna dr onolemki told me that it actually can be quite useful to take some time and space away from social media certainly from any addictive drugs that's the treatment for addiction and restore those dopamine levels to baseline now the way that dopamine detoxing was initially described in the bay area where it seemed a lot of tech types were talking about it was in terms of

i heard something like oh people aren't even looking at other people's faces you know they're really kind of living this like monkish lifestyle like no food of that they really enjoy no anything that to me seems kind of crazy and kind of extreme i mean i can understand not ingesting a lot of highly palatable foods you know eating some blander foods i can understand not um certainly not doing any prescription drugs or taking some time off from caffeine caffeine increases dopamine receptors which makes the calf the dopamine that's available more powerful at evoking the dopamine

response i can understand avoiding certain substances and behaviors but the idea that you weren't going to look people in the eye because there's going to be too much dopamine i mean i guess it depends on who you're looking in the eye and how much their look positively arouses you but the fact of the matter is that that's not that's not a very rational way to think about dopamine detox but staying out of you know high intensity highly rewarding activities i think could be useful in terms of reestablishing that dopamine balance and everything we know from

ana's work is that dopamine you know if you drive those dopaminergic states too long addictive drugs etc people can do this with sex food drugs gambling social media all sorts of things pornography you know what ends up happening is the amount of dopamine that's released over time goes down and down and down and down and pretty much is traversing into the territory of pain and then people again are back to this thing where you know they're scrolling internet porn eight nine ten times or hours a day and then they're wondering like why this isn't effective

for them anymore whereas it was before and there's additional issue with pornography which is not often discussed which is that remember guys in particular the brain is a learning prediction machine and if i'm not trying to say that all pornography is bad but there are good data to support the idea that if your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex it is not necessarily going to carry over to the ability to get aroused when you're one-on-one with somebody else right especially young kids who are consuming a lot of pornography the brain

is learning sexual arousal to other people having so you're going to program yourself into being a voyager or yeah or just create challenges in in sexual interactions with you know with with peers with a with a real partner mary harrington has the three laws of porno dynamics and the second law of porno dynamics is the law of fap entropy and it says that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more intense over time and i think that this is sort of speaking to that ever ever sort of escalating amount of the wildness that

you need to watch in order to get an ever decreasing stimulus that comes back yeah and you know here i'm i'm approaching this only through the lens of biology right i'm not a you know i'm not a psychologist and i'm certainly not um political in it in any way at least not i have ideas about politics but i just don't discuss them publicly but the but the idea here is that you know i'm not saying pornography as a stimulus is bad or good what i'm saying is it in its availability and it's extreme forms it's

a very potent stimulus and very potent stimuli of any kind extremely palatable food extreme pornography extreme experiences like bungee cord jumping those set a threshold for dopamine release and ana will tell you that and i'm sure she did that the higher the dopamine peak the bigger the drop afterwards and it's not that you drop to baseline you drop below baseline so again it's not these things aren't good or bad they just have to be controlled in a way because when people are pursuing dopamine peaks over and over and over and they aren't getting them typically

it's because they've been pursuing that activity far too often and you're saying perhaps take a break from that and then maybe a an ability for yourself your system to reset right yeah yeah i mean in theory all the things that we're talking about with pornography could be superimposed onto food or could be super posed onto real sex right um that one also has to be cautious there right but the cycling back and forth between dopamine and low dopamine states dopamine fasting as it were but maybe just low dopamine states these are natural rhythms that exist

in the nervous system we have to remember what the dopaminergic system is there for i'll say it again i wasn't consulted the design phase but we know as a as a generic form of motivation in pursuit you can imagine the human or the animal that's hungry or thirsty it needs energy to go pursue the thing so the idea that you have to eat in order to get energy that's true but you need energy in order to get the thing to eat so our nervous system has energy also that's dopamine and epinephrine yes we use glucose

and glycogen etc when we're pursuing things but the idea here is you're pursuing something and then either by smell or by sight you think you're on the right track so you go down that track and then ah there it is you know you get some berries or you get you know let's get prehistoric about this or you get to kill the prey and eat it and then it gives you energy to continue this pursuit or to reproduce i mean there's a reason why humans and other animals seek out reproduction is that every every species but

certainly humans have two innate desires built into them whether or not they decide to actualize this or not is the desire to protect young and make more of its own species every successful species does that even if people don't have children in general people care about children that because they of what they represent very few people dislike children i mean there are a few mutants out there that dislike children but you always worry about those kinds of people yeah you were talking earlier on about the fact that dopamine can be released when you set yourself

a little goal and then achieve it and one of the ways that you encourage your grad students is to give them a little bit of reward earlier on so that it keeps them motivated is this the same mentality that works during an endurance event when you want to say i'm just going to get myself to the next lamppost i've got to get myself to that hill over there is that the same dynamic yeah um we can call it milestoning you just set some milestone and the key thing here is that and this is the beauty

of the dopamine system just like the stress system is generic the fear system is generic it's designed for a bunch of different scenarios the motivation system is also generic it can be to achieve the next lamp post as a milestone or it can be five miles as the next milestone you get to control that and it so it's completely arbitrary right i mean that one of the most brilliant things that was ever said to me by an extremely skilled psychoanalyst is so simple and yet i do think it's the most fundamental thing to understanding oneself

is that it's all internal right if you finish a marathon in first place no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear you self-generate that it's all internal it's all about your internal representation now that doesn't mean that there aren't good and bad events in life but the fact of the matter is that if you set the next milestone as just outside the distance of what you're comfortable with and you make it there if you allow yourself a moment to register that win you get energy to do to then set the next milestone and

achieve it that energy is dopamine converted into epinephrine into adrenaline and this is why you hear these incredible heroic stories like i mean i think the movie sorry i i hate to say it but the movie was less good than the book but like lone survivor the marcus latrell story and the actually i think today or yesterday might be the anniversary of operation redwing so all those guys sadly died except marcus and you know he in the movie he sort of it's like fast forward to where he i don't want to give it away but

where he basically is the lone survivor but in the book it's crazy i mean the guy dragged himself on elbows and knees for miles and miles and miles right you know that kind of ability where you hear about people walking on stubs to you know these incredible feats of human endurance and willingness to persist those people were able to do that not because of glycogen or they drank their goo or whatever the triathletes are always using it's because of nervous system energy the ability to continue to manufacture adrenaline and keep going and the and the

extent to which that can continue is no one will ever know i do believe that humans have a tremendous capacity to endure and persist but that few human beings actually know how to tap into that system except under conditions of extreme survival and you also hear from really good physicians ones that aren't into woo biology or woo psychology at all that to some extent yes there are people that unfortunately die in their battle against cancer no matter what but that the the desire to continue living is a powerful force in of itself there may be

spiritual components there may be that's not the business i'm in you know so and how i don't know the experiment i would do to test it but almost certainly setting of milestones and the ability to generate dopamine and adrenaline is what allows people to persist and live longer there's no question about that one of the best books that i've read this year is the expectation effect by david robson so he is a science writer from the uk and he looked at a whole bunch of studies the placebo effect which everybody's familiar with right there is

a particular expectation that an outcome is going to come from some sort of medication and lo and behold that outcome manifests he found this across pretty much every area of anything that you care to care about so my two favorite studies from this so so interesting he realized that uh gluten intolerance self-report gluten intolerance has increased from three percent to thirty percent in ten years so this is the why there's so many gluten-free options on the menu they've got thirty percent of the population to serve yeah so people need it and he was wondering well

what is it human biology hasn't changed that much is it maybe that the foods have changed and people are responding to that or is it maybe some sort of expectation because the type of news stories they're hearing about gluten and about how bad it is for us and inflammation and all this sort of stuff maybe it's that and people are expecting it so they brought people into a lab they sit them down these people do and do not have self-reported gluten intolerances and they give everybody the same meal they tell everybody in the room that

it's got gluten in it it's got no gluten in it after a while people who don't have a gluten intolerance biologically who haven't eaten gluten have diarrhea they have hives they're breaking out in inflammation they're having to run at the bathroom okay well that's kind of interesting they did another another story that you spoke about vo2 max tests that they were looking at apparently there's a particular genetic mutation that allows people to blow off co2 and upregulate oxygen in a better way they brought people in even numbers of people that didn't did not have this

genetic trait split them into two random groups so there was a mix of both do and do not have the trait in each first group was told you've got the right genetic trait you should be really really good at this second group was told sorry you don't have it you shouldn't be too good no surprise perhaps at the group that was told that they did they ended up performing better but when they actually looked at what was happening in the physiology of these people they found that the people who didn't have the genetic mutation but

were told that they did had a lower overall lactate threshold they had a lower overall heart rate they were blowing off co2 more effectively and upregulating oxygen better than the people who did have the genetic mutation but were told that they didn't so he coined this term that said your expectations are even more powerful than your genes i love that i'm going to read the book i that's a remarkable example and i think that you know a lot these days is being made of epigenetic effects and things but this is almost in the different direction

this is a psychophysiological response i find this kind of thing to be honest among the more fascinating and interesting aspects of neuroscience if not the most interesting lately those examples are tremendous so i can't counter those at all with anything more spectacular but the the work of dr aliyah crumb at stanford she runs the stanford mind body lab and she's done simple experiments but they're really elegant um instructing people one group all about the terrible effects of stress destroys your immune system etc etc other people telling them also true things but all the positive effects

of stress it sharpens your ability of function you can remember things better etc etc you see exactly what you are told basically now you can't lie to people you can't tell them things that aren't true it's just about the subset of information that you get dictates the response you get and perhaps the most traumatic was they gave two different groups of people and then they actually each got the opposite condition too a milkshake one group is told this milkshake is very high calorie it contains a lot of fat and sugar etc another group is told

uh the milkshake they're getting is very low calorie it's very nutrient sparse etc then they measure hunger so how long it takes for them to get hungry again after ingesting it they also look at insulin and they also look at ghrelin this hormone that is secreted um as you get essentially makes you hungry it's associated with hunger there are other things too but you see exactly what you would expect which is that people that get the nutrient-dense milkshake are satisfied for longer their ghrelin is suppressed and their insulin is higher you see the opposite in

the group that had the the so-called low calorie shake turns out it's the exact same milkshake this is remarkable right because this is not simply the placebo effect i think it's the placebo effect plus the expectation effect plus a real physiological effect because that's what you describe as well and the way that ali dr ali krum as she she goes by the way she describes it is that any event causes a real physiological response but that real physiological response is braided in with our expectation and our understanding of what the response ought to be to

create the actual response so it's sort of real plus perceived equals your reality right exactly and so um i love this kind of thing as you can tell i'm i'm eating up the example that uh that you gave i think it's spectacular because what it means is that no we can't lie to ourselves we can't tell ourselves that you know drinking water is going to sustain us just as food would for uh for five days we're not going to be hungry but to some extent if one understands that well you can survive a long time

on just water yeah you don't need to eat then you might experience less hunger that's the way the nervous system works well you can definitely survive longer on just water if you believe that you can survive longer on just water there is no reason not to believe this so i was really really averse to the whole ronda burn the secret woo sending out messages to the universe and david uh positions himself very anti that as well in the book but you can't deny the fact that the positive thinking has a real physiological impact on what

you do he was talking about um they did a study with older people uh that were past retirement and they asked them to use what sort of words do you associate with getting older and they split these people into two different groups and the sort of words that people used perfectly mapped onto how long they were going to live so the people that used the sort of words alone frail fragile injury death they were the ones that lived the shortest the people that said um happiness freedom liberty connection uh maturity th those sorts of words

were the ones that lived the longest so your expectations can literally impact your longevity there's i i'm yet to read the book in detail but i've talked to a guy named ethan cross who wrote a book called being on the show oh fantastic okay i think that internal chatter world is a very interesting one that neuroscience will eventually have something to to say uh about i think the most powerful mindset at least to me is one that again i learned from ali crum this is a mindset that in her peer-reviewed studies of different populations it's

clear exists universally in people in the seal teams but less so or is perhaps even absent from the general population sadly [Music] the idea that stress grows you that challenge grows you but isn't the only way that you can grow i think is a very powerful mindset so what do you mean by that so they she what they did is she surveyed a bunch of different um people different professions and asked you know what's your view of stress do you think it grows you it diminishes your ability etc so this isn't giving people information this

is asking them for information and the only group that said stress grows you the more challenge the better you get etc the more stress you experience the more likely you are to to succeed was the this group from the seal teams i don't know if they were new recruits or if they had been in a long time but that was the the group i would add to that that yes if you adopt the mindset that stress grows you you're going to be much better off but also that stress is not the only way to grow

in life right there's this id you know we have this and again there's sort of a gravitational pull of this side like stress grows yes you know forward center of mass or you know always be in friction limbic friction limit friction how about a more expansive or nuanced version of that might be stress grows you so if you're under stress you're back on your heels from something you think okay how can i get flat-footed or even forward center of mass you tell yourself stress grows me stress grows me stress grows me but that doesn't mean

stress is the only thing that will grow you right learning to cycle between periods of hard work and deep what i call non-destructive uh deliberate reset right that's what really works over time i can attest to that you know i people who just really go out and tie one on in order to to recover you can only get away with that for a few years before your body and mind start to give out right so find non-destructive ways to reset and also adopt the mindset that stress grows you and adopt the mindset that you know

there are other ways to grow that don't involve stress and i think you're set up to have a pretty fantastic life that's my you know simple view of of the way these things work speaking of endurance and suffering what have you learned from lex friedman since you've been friends with him the guy works a lot you can text him or call him at pretty much any hour except the early morning hours that he happens to be in because he's likely to be asleep you know lexus is a really interesting one um because you know like

a lot of scientists and engineers yet he has that ability to really drop into the trench which is certainly not unique to scientists and engineers but is really helpful i think lex comes at things from a from at once a very engineering physics perspective which you know obviously computer science robots and all ai and all that he loves that stuff but you know there's a phrase that he's used over and over again in our conversations and he's talked about this publicly that i've started to pay a bit more attention to because he says it so

many times which is you know approach life with love in your heart you know which is weird right you think about an engineer who's thinking like this goes there and this is what it's going to predict the best outcome and then anything like approach things with love in your heart and i think he's right because and i think that is very powerful because there are so many pitfalls and by pitfalls what i mean are energy sinks that you know across the day from the time you wake up until you go to sleep at night there's

so many places for you to put your energy can go into online battles it can go into uh you know texting five different people it can be investing in one person it can be there's so many things and so much of success in any domain is about yes maintaining focus we hear about that a lot focus focus focus but what is focus focus is really about not allowing energy to dissipate into these kind of meaningless trails so i think about lex and i as i do for all people i think you know what animal does

he best represent or what animal best represents him i think of all people like this i have this kind of weird process where after i spend some time with somebody it just pops to mind like i can't tell you what animal comes to mind yet you might see that after the ice bath later on you'll see how long it is you might be you might be a polar bear um super comfortable in the water um the cold water but i think that you know at some point i realized that that lexus gets very fixated on

things very very fixated but he also knows how to disengage and he really avoids energy sinks through this and losses through this kind of love thing that he's really into um because anger is very energetically demanding it's great fuel but it's not efficient fuel overall right it's like having a gas tank full of fuel but there are a lot of leaks in it whereas i do think that doing things out of genuine desire there's a calm sort of energized balance that comes with that and you feel like you can go forever so this is starting

to sound a little bit woo it sounds like oh you know the heart is more powerful than the adrenals and like they're both powerful the adrenals can keep you alive and enduring for a long long time but if you do things out of anger and friction for too long your immune system will crash we know this but it is essentially infinite how much energy you can derive out of genuine desire to engage with something or somebody well anonymously then you know lex well his hair makes me think some spiky thing he's sort of like he's

some he sort of has the like the persistence of the porcupine but he has he's definitely has i think he as much as i don't want to admit it because i wish it were me and not him but i think the animal that best captures lex because he's also a bit of a loner is the wolverine i've spent a lot of time thinking about actual wolverines not the hugh jackman version of wolverines but the actual wolverines they're very solo animals unless they pair up to mate they are incredibly strong he is freakishly strong i've done

jiu jitsu with him i'm not good at jiu-jitsu he is he's a black belt jiu jitsu but he is freakishly strong so if i had to pick an animal i'd say probably um the wolverine what's interesting about him i went to thanksgiving with him last year which was my first time of enjoying that holiday here which is a fantastic holiday i actually think we don't have something in the uk where people sit back and do that gratitude reflection period except for christmas you know people do that end of year review but i really think and

especially the time of year it's in it's perfect so we were talking and he was talking about the fact that he was working hard but he feels this gap between where he is and where he could be which i i sounds like sense is a common uh pattern yeah and he was saying that a lot of the friends that he speaks to will say you know you're doing well you're working hard and he looked me in the eyes and he's like i don't want them to say that i want them to tell me to suck

it up i want them to tell me that i need to stop being such a [ __ ] and keep going i was like it takes an unbelievably singular person to work as hard as he does i don't think that the internet whatever people know about how hard he works is only a small sliver of just how obsessive and and committed he is and for him to say that he wants to be around more people that push him in that way it made me realize that perhaps uh i could be offering more to my friends

as well that offering them just sort of support in the form of acceptance and and presence and i'm hearing you and dude you're doing great or whatever reassurance in that way maybe isn't always the best way to go about things so yeah that was it's just something that stuck in my mind it's something it's a little model that i've kept with me where i'm thinking look does my friend need me to tell him that he's doing good or does he need me to tell him to suck it up and get his nose down because i

know that he can do it sounds very much like lex i'm learning about your your internal workings a bit too there are three kinds of reward two of them are often discussed one is rarely discussed but is pretty powerful and i think it's useful to think about toggling between these different rewards whether or not for ourselves or whether or not in trying to stimulate and motivate other people one of course is reward you did great congratulations that was awesome loved that podcast great that you got an a plus on your report card or b plus

because last year you got to see whatever it is reward then there's punishment right this is obvious you screwed up like you take something away or you take the anticipation of reward away whatever it is you screwed up you're punished you're grounded etc you're not watching tv for a month or whatever it is no screens for a month then there's the third kind of reward which is the reward that you hang out in front of somebody at a distance like a carrot on a stick out in front of them which is not reward for what

they've accomplished but reward that they can anticipate if they accomplish something i think this could be very effective in the context that we're talking about it which is how would i do this with lex i'd say you know i really loved this particular interview if only the next time you have that person on you also ask them this right that's not a punishment you're not saying it sucked because it didn't include this you're not saying it wasn't great you're saying if next time you were to do that i think it would be even better so

you're hanging a potential reward out in front and i think that can be a very powerful motivator so you can you know we could build up a number of different examples around this but this is not often talked about in sort of reward punishment schedules and motivation we always think reward and punishment but we think immediate reward immediate punishment now in terms of building habits and goal setting and goal seeking we know that visualizing failure is for better for worse is a far better motivator than visualizing success if you want to get people motivated to

start right to start now getting people to continue involves regular rewards for reaching milestones however and i should have said this earlier i want to make sure that we do emphasize that the best schedule really is random intermittent reinforcement so if you're setting milestones on this run or in your intellectual pursuits or business pursuits or relationship pursuits if you set a milestone and you get there you do want to have a little bit of an internal celebration remember it's all internal so internal celebration not extrinsic celebration and reward but every once in a while it's

good to just not reward yourself now at what ratio should you do that well the the computer modeling data say that the optimal ratio of success successful trials and uh unsuccessful trials for learning and motivation is going to be about 85 of the time to reward yourself and about 15 of the time to not reward yourself so random intermittent lack of reward is another way to think about it and i talked about this with jocko a little bit and he thought oh yeah probably what we should do is have workouts where it's a big uh

fishbowl full of ping pong balls and about 15 of them are marked with reward but the other ones is you do something and you get to go take a ping pong ball out and if you take that out then you get some reward if it's marked and if it's not then you don't and rather than every time you accomplish something you go reward yourself so here we're talking we're getting kind of into the weeds of reward schedules but i think if you really want to support a friend punishment you should use very judiciously although if

they really screw up a good friend as they say will put um the friendship ahead of the friend or the friend ahead of the friendship excuse me um the friend like you're gonna tell them what they really need to hear even if it compromises the friendship if you really believe they need to hear that other times reward like that was awesome congratulations and then occasionally if it's warranted that was great ish but it would be so much better if the next time you did this or that was great but you know honestly i think it

was a mixture of good and not so good so i think those are three powerful ways to reward and they can be mixed up and toggled back and forth according to whatever schedule allows that person to continue what does your morning routine look like at the moment morning routine is wake up if i run about what time uh i'm waking up these days around 6 a.m 6 30 a.m i'm trying to go to sleep by about 10 30 p.m sometimes it's 11 sometimes it's 10. i wake up um and i have to be careful here

because whenever i've described my routine in a little bit of detail people always say i can't believe you don't go to the bathroom and it's like well of course i so i wanted my pants exactly right foot left so i want to be clear i yeah i take care of my basic functions um but when i wake up i make a beeline for sunlight uh so i'm gonna get sunlight in my eyes for the you know i'll probably go into the grave saying this so forgive me if people heard me say this before but the

single best thing you can do for your sleep your energy your mood your wakefulness your metabolism is to get natural light in your eyes early in the day don't wear sunglasses to do it takes about 10 minutes or so if you live in a cloudy area if you're in the uk in the winter yes or the summer or the summer maybe you resort to some artificial light as a replacement but as much as one can get bright natural and if not natural artificial light in your eyes early in the day without sunglasses contacts and eyeglasses

are fine don't try and do it through a window or windshield it's going to take far too long this sets in motion a huge number of different neurobiological and hormonal cascades that are good for you reduces stress late at night offsets cortisol a million different things really that are good for you so i get that and yes somebody does that walk doing a little walk ideally that would be a walk but sometimes we'll just go into the yard and have some coffee and and you know soak into whatever sunlight through through the clouds if it's

a cloudy overcast day it might be 20 30 minutes if it's a um it's a very bright day it might just be a few minutes but really the the quality studies on humans that have looked at this say try and get as much natural light as you can in the morning hours whenever it is that that is for you especially the first three hours after waking if you can work outside great if you can get in your window because as opposed to just in a dark conference room that's better but if you can get outside

that would be fantastic so i i get sunlight i hydrate i drink water and then yerba mate is my favorite form of coffee excuse me caffeine are you waiting how long are you waiting for 90 to 120 minutes are you doing any salts during that time are you taking any electrolytes in i am a fan of water with element before i had element packets i would just take a little bit of sea salt or or pink sauce your favorite element flavor i like them all there's one i don't like i'm not a fan of the

chocolate one but i like that yeah some people love it my podcast producer his wife loves that so i give it to her the chocolate mint one but um i like the raspberry the um the citrus one i love that stuff mango chili is if you open the mango chili and breathed in shortly afterwards it's like being pepper sprayed it's absolutely insane it's like it's like being blasted in the face but yeah i mean that's that's just the best way that cold glass of water and that first thing in the morning and i mean it

was you who uh reassured me of the what i thought was bro science about your adenosine system not being active for the first 90 minutes and if you're going to pump caffeine onto that you're not really actually acting on that your adrenal system is the one that you need to be looking at optimal you hydration all that sort of stuff it's just such a good way to start the day so okay we've got um 90 minutes deep what have you been doing in that you've had your light in the eyes what have you been doing

between that and the yerba mata in 90 minutes i do everything i can to not do email not do social media and to take care of a few critical tasks these days i'm i have this obsession with trying to do one cognitively hard thing a day one and one physically hard thing a day now does not extreme physical not david goggins level workouts or anything but um in that 90 minutes i'll typically try and read a research article start to finish or i'll work on a document that i might be doing a grant or research

paper or planning a podcast or researching a podcast i try and get my brain into kind of a linear mode i try and narrow that aperture so if i don't the distraction that's created by social media and interactions with others can kind of wick out into the rest of the day so i'm not necessarily trying to finish something in that time but i try and do something challenging i experience great pleasure from battling through something mentally challenging but that's something that i built up since my university years when i was about 19 or so got

serious about school and really started to experience the the deep pleasure of like ah i figured that out or like that was really tough i don't always succeed but that's what i'm doing in that hour to 90 minutes but i confess sometimes we'll take a walk during that time and maybe talk through some things that are that are challenging you know or sometimes i get lazy and and i'll miss a day of that cognitive challenge then i do caffeine about 90 to 120 minutes after waking and even though i prefer to work out earlier i

generally will then do some sort of physical workout i have a very consistent routine i've done over 30 years where i weight train for 45 or minutes to an hour every other day and occasionally i take an extra day off and occasionally due to travel or other commitments i'll occasionally double up two days and then take two days off yep so it's really boring you know talk about workout schedules but it's really simple it's like you know i'll do a uh kind of pushing day rest pulling day upper body push up rest upper body pull

rest and then legs take two days off something like that are you doing on the off days are you doing some sort of zone three always jogging or skipping rope those are my favorite forms of cardio sometimes swimming but typically i'll go running for 30 to 45 minutes or if i'm feeling a little bit lazier because i always find the high intensity stuff to be easier than the long drawn out stuff i'll sometimes throw on a weight vest a 30 or 50 pound weight vest and i'll go out for a shorter run or i'll i'm

a big fan of knees over toes ben patrick i know you had him oh yeah we were down in costa rica with him and his wife who had the best time and learned so much um i'll occasionally um do a backwards you know he'll walk um or throw on the weight vest for that we sometimes will get bands and we'll so there's a great way to combine this we will sometimes get two people in one of these thick bands do hill walks in the morning while getting our sunlight yeah but that i don't really consider

a workout i consider that just kind of rehabilitating as a movement so on the off days i'm doing cardio and sometimes that's the morning sometimes that's in the evening i do not like to wait train on the second half of the day because i like to be really caffeinated when i train i like to listen to loud fast music most of the time not always i keep my phone out or off of for most workouts podcasts maybe if i'm running but i really try hard when i'm working out to just focus on the workout and

those workouts the weight training workouts are always 10 minutes or so of warm up and then no more than 40 to 50 minutes of really hard work if i do train hard any longer i don't recover enough to be able to come in a few days later and when i train that way i generally make pretty consistent progress and you're taking yourself up until what's that probably maybe 10 30 11 a.m something like that yeah and then i'll eat my first real meal now occasionally i'll wake up really hungry if i didn't eat that well

the night before but typically the after i train i yeah i'll eat i like oatmeal after i train oatmeal fruit some fish oil protein drink and then maybe 90 to 120 minutes after that i'll have a real lunch my lunch is pretty much the biggest meal of the day if i have my way it'll be a steak a salad maybe a little more starch although i sort of got it earlier um brazil nuts and that meal sometimes can extend long-term i love being a feeding person i love to eat yeah so i'll eat and then

i confess i usually will work a little bit more for about 30 minutes or an hour typically email and then i'll take a um 10 to 30 minute yoga nidra nap or a nap and then come back refreshed um i really struggled with the naps man i come back after that and my emotions are all over the place i'm disoriented maybe it's because i struggle to fall asleep super quickly and therefore i'm extending that period out for a little bit longer than i need i probably need to try the yoga nidra thing but for me

it's it i'm absolutely all over if i do that i wake up and i don't know what day it is and my emotions always feel a little bit out of whack as well i wake up grumpy from naps sometimes i'm told okay there are a few times when i've woken up just really angry i have no idea what that's about i don't know any of the neurochemistry associated with that sometimes i wake up from naps it's really pleasant i'll occasionally d if the nap is early enough in the day afterwards i'll have a you know

a nice double espresso get back into work that's the hardest part of the day actually if i was well structured in the early part of the day it's that 2 or 3 p.m the key is then to try and get something really useful done cognitively again so some people might look at this and say wait you're working for an hour in the morning and 30 minutes here and an hour in the afternoon when are you actually working but it's really about the depth of the trench when you're working and so if i'm going to drop

into something again for a few hours in the afternoon i'm really going to drop into it and that's typically phone off and out of the room and my goal is to get to the evening time so that i can do the things that i want in the evening i can enjoy like i'm always setting a goal of the next time block so this is something i've been doing for a long time but even more so lately i don't think my goal in the next hour is to do blank i think this is dopamine reward predictions

uh in action i think okay if i get this workout done then i'll be able to eat at more or less the same time which i enjoy and then something else will happen so i'm very focused on what i'm doing but i'm doing it for the purposes of like opening up the next door to the next thing so if i can get that afternoon work block done i'm thinking if i can just really get this podcast recorded yeah which i enjoy is that your usual time to record middle of the afternoon it used to be

in the morning but i'm getting i'm putting more and more preparation into them all the time my poor podcast producer he's like you know i always joke that the one thing these podcasts probably will succeed in doing meaning my podcast is they're going to cure insomnia because some of them are so damn long but i experienced so much pleasure from spending a week or two researching something and then putting some structure on and as you know i mean podcasting is its own its own sort of natural drug uh it just feels good if you enjoy

doing this sort of thing um so typically we're starting late in the day now and going until pretty late for me the problem that i have so i'm fasted right now we're what one minute to four p.m you haven't eaten anything today no not this gracious so but that's the only way if i eat i've my thoughts become slower i'm not as verbally articulate i'm nowhere near as agile now i could push this super super light i'm sure and it would be probably a pretty bad idea maybe i could avoid maybe i could go protein

and fat or just mostly protein earlier on and that would have avoid but i just find that my thoughts and my verbal articulation just goes through the toilet it's adrenaline if you i mean i think that sorry to interrupt you but if you ingest a bunch of glucose or you know i think you're getting that i mean you've got to have a nice i'm guessing if we were to tap your vein right now if we could do micro dialysis on your brain that you have a nice low but steady level of adrenaline and listen this

adrenaline thing this dopamine thing is no joke this is the stuff of human evolution right this is the these are the same neurochemicals this is this is the energy drink of human evolution this is not the rock star red bull etc that stuff just hijacks this very system i'm not saying it's bad it's just feeding this very same system so if you find an eating schedule or a fasting schedule that allows you to tap into that as a resource i don't care what anyone says about whether or not fasting will make you live longer or

not who knows right if you're in the control group you know what's going to happen so but everyone presumably everyone dies eventually so pick your pick your mode of eating be my guest but if you figured out a way to tap into this in a way that works for you by all means leverage that because until somebody comes along and says that intermittent fasting is unhealthy well then to me it seems at least for me eating between 11 p.m excuse me 11 a.m ish and 8 p.m ish is great and what i can also tell

you is that having a consistent meal schedule meaning a feeding window we absolutely know i don't know why this isn't discussed more we absolutely know that that helps anchor your sleep schedule and having a anchored sleep schedule helps anchor your light viewing schedule and a light viewing so it all starts to to piece together i think that what's lost in the discussion about nutrition except for the fact that most online discussions about nutrition are carried out by the religious well they're religious but they also seem to be carried out by people that have like i

don't know like like real feelings of powerlessness in themselves like it comes through like because they're quibbling over like whether or not you should eat a cracker or not or whether or not you know um inhaling oxygen you know westward is going to break your fast or not i'm sorry i'm i'm obviously i want you so i once said david sinclair came on my show twice and he's he's a fantastic human i know you're friends with him and um he talked about the fact that his resveratrol goes into a small amount of fatty yoghurt i

think because it's like breakfast right so you need to mix it in and it's homemade yogurt and something else and something else and it's like it's it's a shot of yoghurt right it's enough for him to put his little capsule of resveratrol in and the comments were alight with people oh yeah saying right that's not a real fast this is hilarious because you've got it's so sad uh you know it's so sad that we can't have a nuanced conversation about nutrition online that well let's let's be fair calories in calories out applies right i don't

think the laws of thermodynamics have disappeared um and yet you have people who would argue that it doesn't and okay like we'll let them have their their arguments i think that the key thing is when you find an eating schedule that works for the other things that you need to do in life it's really beautiful because then you really start to exert some control over these energy systems what we're talking about is focus and defocus we're talking about focus and deliberate decompression when not it's yoganidra or a nap or simply a walk and food as

you point out is a wonderful source of caloric energy we need it at some point but it also can create this parasympathetic response where we feel very tired especially if you don't eat for long periods of time and then you eat substantial amount of starches you will feel like calmer and more relaxed and so and maybe sleepy or maybe brain foggy so i i've been you know of course assaulted by this for this online i do tend to eat some more starches in the evenings and fewer proteins and sure you can show me 20 double-blind

placebo-controlled or randomized control trials saying that if you're going to eat starches you should eat them in the early part of the day well i do that too after i train but ultimately what i'm interested in doing is maintaining the kind of bodily health and aesthetic that i'm looking for my blood lip is that i'm looking for but i want to accomplish things in life so i think if one gets too distracted by what's possible with nutrition it can be it can really take somebody off target no one ever succeeded in creating anything useful in

terms of work or relationships by overly focusing on changing their dietary intake but so once it works so what once something works for you i say just lean into it just lean into it and that can change over time so that can really change over time do you know alex hormozy you familiar with him sounds familiar really hot [ __ ] on the internet at the moment this sort of jim bro who has founded this company and is now moving on to bigger and better things he's eaten i'm pretty sure he's eaten the same lunch

for 10 years or something he always has the same lunch and he's got the exact same thought process around this that you do if you were going back to the morning routine thing if you were to design or if you were to instruct someone to do the worst possible things in the morning to set their day up for failure what would they be uh wake up and stay in bed uh well wait there are good reasons to stay in bed in the morning but once those are completed then staying in bed is curtin's throne yeah

curtains drawn just using your passively scrolling on social media um that there are there are neurobiological data showing that when you are upright you actually are stimulating this area of the brain called locus ceruleus whereas when you recline you actually are less alert literally the position of your body dictates some of your levels of alertness that's why you suggest uh people to not sit like this uh at their work desk right yes and if you're look and if you're looking down while working you're actually less alert than you could be if your eyes are averted

slightly overnight most people that are on their phone including me and the postural stuff is really bad too i mean i'm getting i'm trying to really combat that internal rotation you know that the c-shaped human kind of thing you know um it's really not good i'm really trying in fact one this is so common now the c-shaped human thing that um it almost feels strange to be upright you know like people think exactly the open uh the the uh sort of external rotation is good for us we know this but in bed i would say

in bed so people are on their phone they're in bed they're not getting enough light or they just artificial light or they're trying to get the sunlight through the window terrible um they are then going and sitting and getting into like hip you know hip flexor contraction um they're drinking coffee too early in the day uh they aren't getting into any kind of movement but it's mostly about the sort of randomization of activities sort of making a cup of coffee while texting um not getting sunlight you know then they're scattering that in with like a

little bit of work but then something hits that's stressful and they're diverting their attention they're building in this eight attention deficit like disorder through these they're doing they're not single tasking they're not monotone and they're not being deliberate or intentional with the things that they're doing they're just allowing the morning to kind of come and take them wherever the wind blows that's right and i have to say even though i describe my routine accurate my morning routine accurately if i were to really optimize it and i've done this from time to time i would get

up i would hydrate and i would immediately exercise i would use that early you know peaking of the cortisol response that comes with waking to get the body into action sort of jocko willing style right 430 i always see his posts but i see them at 7 00 am yeah yeah yeah precisely so you know so chuckles up performing again today yeah yeah oh he seems to always uh beat me by a few minutes unless i wake up in the middle of the night for a moment but uh to really get into action because that's

going to generate its own dopamine and adrenaline response anytime i've worked out really early like if i have a flight and then you know and then moved into the other components of my day i find that i feel better all day long i i also will say if i work out really early maybe between seven and eight am well then my first meal might land at nine a.m so you know you need to be flexible with some of these things but the general principles apply i notice that you haven't put cold exposure on your morning

routine i'm going to guess you must have a cold tub of some kind of you have a cold tub and a sauna i've been less good about that lately the best time to do that for me is on my cardio days i do it after because you don't want to do it post hypertrophy because you're going to blunt some of the responses that are actually you're trying to get by the the workout itself that's right and i have one i should say i have one rest day per week where i don't do any cardio or

weight training i really like doing having a complete rest day but on that complete rest day if i can i'll do 20 minutes of sauna and then cold for three minutes 20 minutes of sauna and then cold i'll make the rest day reparative and generally we make that social where we're talking about things and and we're very social in our working out like we we talk my partner and i talk while we work out i you know when it's set when it's time to do a set i become a little bit of like the drill

sergeant so let's do your set do your set but then occasionally i'm the guy doing a set and i'm like all right so this afternoon we're gonna you know but i try and i try and really focus and i enjoy training by myself too but generally we train together and then and then typically if we're doing ice bath or something we try and coordinate those things so i've seen a bunch of research about sauna i've seen a bunch of research about cold exposure contrast therapy which is huge here in austin going from sauna to cold

and it seems like 20 and three three rounds is very typical is there something that we're gaining or something that we're losing by doing that cycle rather than doing a block of heat and a block of cold separately not that i'm aware of but you know that we finally have some good science to put to this and unfortunately it wasn't from my lab this is the beautiful work of susannah soberg who's over in scandinavia published a paper in sell reports medicine showing that the threshold you're trying to hit each week is at least you can

do more but at least 11 minutes of uncomfortable but safe cold exposure per week total so that could be three minutes monday three minutes wednesday so yeah so on to 11 minutes and 57 minutes per week minimum size that's what they found what did they find increases brown fat thermogenesis thereby metabolism thereby comfort being you know in cold etc um clearly there's a resilience effect clearly there's a dopamine increasing effect and clearly you can do more you could do all that in one day or you could spread it out throughout the week or you could

do more it kind of depends on what you're shooting for how cold people always say how cold how hot well for heat is generally uh between 187 degrees fahrenheit and 212 degrees fahrenheit somewhere in that range and for cold it's cold enough that you really want to get the hell out but that you can stay in safely because i don't want anyone to kill themselves but doing this stuff did i see you say that um evening time heat exposure increases growth hormone release by 16 times or something insane but subsequent sessions of the same only

increase it by a very small margin yes am i talking about my asset no you're absolutely right so we can we can delineate some protocols if you want to get better more resilient cold exposure is going to be great anytime post cold exposure your body is going to heat up think of your body heating up as waking up so if you are concerned about not being able to sleep then i would suggest you do your cold exposure earlier in the day right heat does the opposite so i'm laying out some parameters here heat does the

opposite you're going to heat up while you're in the deliberate heat exposure but afterwards there's a post heating dip in temperature we talked this was all covered in an episode with dr craig heller on thermogenesis gets a little bit down in the weeds but take my word for it if you want to get the science you can go there to find the science behind this so sauna at night is great as well now let's think about how to combine these things so let's say you you know you're on it's a tuesday you've done your weight

training on monday and you want to do your heat and cold you don't have time to optimize everything perfectly you could say okay i'm going to do my heat and cold at 10 a.m or 8 a.m you get in the sauna for 20 minutes or so and then you get into the cold for three minutes and then you might get into the sauna again for 10 minutes and you get in the cold for another minute or so you end on cold yes why because it'll wake you up and presumably you're not you want to be

woken up for the day that also means don't then if you're doing it in a facility don't then go and have a warm shower right once you've finished right coolest shower is fine because you want to clean off often i mean the ice bath is cleanish but it's you know depends where you're going in laboratories you're absolutely right in laboratories if we want to preserve something in particular a virus we put in the freezer if you want to kill a virus you heat it up just as i have as dirty of a sauna as you

want but the cold tub well yeah the sauna sort of its own autoclave if it gets hot enough right and the cold cold stuff needs to be cleaned out now and again you get mold growing in a in a freezer which is kind of freaky to think about but you really can't it's never going to grow in a sauna never going to grow if it if it gets hot enough now there is what i call the soberg principle which is if you are using deliberate cold exposure to increase metabolism end on cold so finish on

the cold not just because it wakes you up more but because then you have to heat your body up naturally which is a thermogenic metabolic response so end with cold and if you really want to push it you can do things like don't use a towel use evaporation spread out your limbs and don't huddle so that you have to shiver more etc i mean a lot of little games you can play but let's say you want to reduce post exercise inflammation you're not concerned with hypertrophy gains of muscle size gains or strength gains well then

get in the cold after your your workout do that for one to some people can do 10 minutes reduce inflammation let's say you really want to hit growth hormone which is what you asked the biggest effects of sauna on growth hormone and they are big effects are when the sauna is only done once per week but it's done in four cycles or sets we could say of 30 minutes each so that means 30 minutes in the sauna at the temperatures i described before then a five minute break just air cooling off or 10 minute break

then back into the sauna for 30 minutes this is brutal then again in the afternoon 30 minutes in the sauna then 10 minutes just air cooling off and then back into the sauna for 30 minutes so that's two hours at 187 to 212 degrees one day in one day with a maximum of what less than sort of 20 minutes of rest in between those little sessions than the big rest in between so you have to be very careful right heat can kill you you got to hydrate you need to make sure you get enough salt

like it i mean this is this is work right um but you get you see in these human studies up to 16-fold increases in growth hormone so you can imagine this could exert some very strong reparative effect if you're training for a big event or endurance event or maybe you're just really wiped out from the week this is a stressor but it's a stressor that delivers a potent growth hormone response now if you do sauna more often than that you're not going to want to do two hours a day in the sauna because presumably you're

doing other things you have a life you have a life and in addition to that the growth hormone effect starts to diminish if you become too heat adapted and that raises a more interesting question perhaps which is why is it that this two-hour protocol really works if you do it once a week to increase growth hormone it's because it's a stressor and certain stressors increase growth hormone does it have to be heat no you probably also do four really long rounds of ice bath and i'm guessing you'd probably see a similar effect no one's ever

really looked you'd probably see a similar effect because it's all about the stress stimulus now those that work on exercise science and weight training would probably say yeah you could also do a this has been shown you know a 90 minute 10 sets of 10 multiple exercises for 10 sets of 10 high volume german volume training work out and get the same growth hormone effects there's so many studies like this i personally like to do the sauna two or three days a week and if i'm traveling off and don't get the opportunity if i'm in

austin it's great because there are all these sauna places but if i'm traveling abroad i don't have the time then i might do i might take a day i'm thinking wow i did three podcasts i'm exhausted when i'm in new york i like to go to a place i have no relation to them but i think it's called spa 88 it's a russian banya and i'll just go for the whole day if i've been working really really hard they serve food there they sort of borscht and all this other kind of like pickled vegetables and

um they must think that you're russian you they must you must walk through the doors and they go hello brother sometimes i usually just don't the best way to to appear russian lex i hope you're listening is just not saying anything just just that's the most russian thing that you can say is nothing exactly very stoic um that place is great and they have different saunas steam sauna they have cold dunk and sometimes i'll just spend three four hours there there's one in san francisco called archimedes banya so sometimes that's an occasional thing now most

people are trying to incorporate this into their daily life and just like as we said for ice bath if you don't have access to ice or ice bath or cold tub you do cold shower or longer cool baths with heat i realize not everyone has access to a sauna hot baths do work now one thing about hot baths and hot sauna is they will nuke your sperm that is not nuke a nuke is a you know slang they will reduce viable sperm count so for males that are trying to reproduce you know trying to create

children you want to be careful about hot baths and hot sauna too often some people will bring a cold pack in and put in their groin you can't do that in a bath but i mean sperm are maintained outside the body the testicles are maintained outside the body um you're right the scrotum has varying elasticity in order to maintain temperature of the sperm that's why that that's the the various effects that have been described are there on purpose um so why human evolution design this way i don't know someone will say but in any case

unless you're trying to you know and again the ice pack approach is interesting um some people do that actually there's a kind of interesting relationship between cold and testosterone and thermogen and spermatogenesis there is a little cottage industry out there i think on amazon people will buy these gel pack underwear of cool i think they're called snowballs this is cooling the scrotum in order to try and increase spermatogenesis okay now i'm not aware of any data on this but people report anika data and have shown their blood work and stuff that it it actually works

to increase testosterone levels i am not aware of any periodic studies i am not i'm not i would not be sitting as comfortably as i am right now but but i find this sort of amusing on the one hand and then on the other hand i think what we're arriving at is some general principles of physiology which are that light exercise temperature both heat and cold are all very powerful stimuli for creating hormonal and neuromodulator dopamine epinephrine effects and when you start to dig beneath the surface of all these protocols wim hof breathing ice baths

sauna snowballs what you are finding is that these are all different stimuli to tap into these different neuromodulator systems right you know sunlight on our skin and on and into our eyes organizes all these hormone cycles there's a beautiful study out of israel just this last year peer-reviewed study showing that if men and women are told to go outside and get a lot of sunlight exposure on their skin for 20 minutes a day three times a week testosterone and estrogen levels go up substantially feelings of desire and sexual passion go up you know there's a

real effect of the summer months for people and it's hormonal and that's because the skin is an endocrine organ um these effects shouldn't surprise us and some people hear these and they go oh so basically you're just telling us to like get sunlight and exercise and eat well and you know and avoid bright lights at night so that you can sleep yeah that's basically what we're saying we're saying that because there's now substantial physiology to support that there's nothing new in terms of the mechanisms the mechanisms haven't evolved in we believe hundreds of thousands of

years if not more the ways to tap into these systems are many high intensity interval training you're going to get increase in adrenaline yoga nidra meditation a nap you're getting increases in serotonin so it's not trivial though i want to be really clear these sorts of things are not trivial they are exceedingly powerful because they tap into systems that we all harbor so the beautiful thing is they work the first time and they work every time and there are very few things you can say that about they work the first time and they work every

time and the reasons they work are now becoming clear to us through these more high quality studies there's a lot of conversations at the moment around concerns for the average amount of testosterone that men have got estrogens in the water and stuff like that should we be worried how worried should it be so um i just recently came back from copenhagen i was there to give a talk for the lunbeck foundation and there was another talk that the lundbeck foundation put on they do a great popular science series um called coffee and cocktails i'm not

a drinker but people it's so european it's it's so different than over here is everybody's smoking outside no one was smoking but people would bring were allowed to bring in real glasses with ice in them and yet the auditorium was silent this was a big con it's in the concert hall and copenhagen it's very beautiful venue and you couldn't hear an ice cube [ __ ] the entire night no clean clink clink no no drinking of the ice cubes people were in there with their cocktails and enjoying enjoying science and earlier that week there was

a talk by dr shayna swann she wrote a book called countdown she went on joe rogan's podcast i believe earlier last year she talked about the decline of sperm counts from the 1930s until now and ties it in a very she's a serious researcher with national institutes of health grants etc ties this to um the increasing presence of phthalates the most difficult word to pronounce in the english language besides ophthalmology phthalates that are present mainly present mainly in pesticides if you look at sperm counts and testosterone levels in males in different areas of the united

states they are significantly lower in areas where there's a lot of pesticide use in rural areas where there's a lot of farming and pesticides very serious issue and in the offspring of mothers that ingest phthalates there's this the anogenital distance is what they study in the lab the anode general distance literally the distance between the base of the scrotum and the um and the anus in males is much greater than it is in females there's a word for that females don't have a scrotum obviously so they measure from the base of the genitals to the

base of the vagina to the to the anus in males they go from the base of the scrotum depends on the study sometimes it's the top of the scrotum um you know i always say you know you always have to be careful when people are measuring anything related to genitalia because somebody's going to cheat in the measurement so so in any event i don't know how they controlled for that but she shows these remarkable pictures in mice and in humans of people that are exposed or mice that are exposed to phthalates and basically males are

showing the more female-like pattern of of inner general distance when they're exposed to the phthalate in utero okay this is not post birth this is in utero the mother's being exposed it crosses the blood placental barrier what's happening well this is reducing sperm counts now what can people do about this well first of all there's this question of whether or not phthalates are having a similar effect after a child is brought into the world one doesn't know but we do know and this is goes back to my early graduate work was on the effects of

androgens like testosterone and dht on different traits of brain and body we know that for instance it just very briefly that during pregnancy the brain is organized male by way of believe it or not testosterone converted to estrogen through a process called aromatization but the growth of the penis the fact that there even will be a penis etc is set by a testosterone called dht dihydrotestosterone testosterone converted dht through 5 alpha ductase and no no not that's an organizing effect on the system as they call it but then there's an activating effect where during puberty

the testes just start producing testosterone some is converted to dht and the dht is what creates the growth of the penis okay in people that inject phthalates during puberty and in the post-puberty years it's conceivable that those phthalates could inhibit the activating effects of androgens not just what we call the organizing effects of androgens early in life okay why is this interesting and important well sperm counts are definitely going down are they going down so much so that people are incapable of reproducing probably not because you know as they told us in school it just

takes one and indeed it just takes one sperm but it is a probability it's a numbers game right the reason you know i people that take anabolic steroids unless they do things to offset the effect on their own testosterone and sperm production sperm counts are down so the probability of of successful insemination is of of the egg is reduced also it's a numbers game so it just takes one but having many improves the probability that the one will be able to fertilize so the short answer is yes i think it is very concerning now which

things should we be concerned about my understanding of the literature and here i'm not an i'm now venturing into territory for which i am certainly not an expert is that things like plastics that have bpas may be a concern drinking water may be a concern but the most serious or enriched source of bpas are things like printed receipts yeah i was out for dinner the other night it was probably about a month and a half ago and the server came over and i reached for the receipt and as i was going for it like this

one of the girls who had never met before she's a creator online hit my hand away are you really going to touch that and this is the first time i've ever heard about this this is legit yeah printed receipts are a a rich source of bpas and topically that could come through this yeah it could go trends terminally i mean now you'd probably have to handle a lot of receipts i mean i don't think you're going to hear a check out cashier perhaps this check out the thing definitely check out cashiers and listen it's going

to vary some people are operating with a testosterone level and sperm count that's already back on its heels so to speak some people have abundant testosterone and sperm so it's really going to depend on the individual i don't think people should get paranoid or delusional about any of this but just don't start sleeping in a bed of receipts don't start sleeping in a better receipt that's an interesting and there are all sorts of jokes that could be made about that one that i won't make but there are also some other things like you know do

a little bit of online research about phthalates and don't go to fringe sites go to dr shaina swan's website right i believe she's at mount sinai or one of the other larger medical schools in new york go to her website she's a legitimate researcher and see what's there see what the sources of phthalates are pesticides does that mean you should only eat organic fruits and vegetables maybe i don't know which pesticides people are using on which fruits and vegetables right so there's some research that needs to be done but the moment we start talking this

way and people start saying oh wow this is really like hippie science this isn't hippie science this is serious nih-funded researcher saying phthalates before birth can dramatically alter the trajectory of of the male stability and make sperm and testosterone phthalates in puberty may be able to do that but we know that that androgens in particular dht and testosterone converted to estrogen have a powerful role in masculinizing the brain and body during those years why wouldn't people be you know do half an hour of research online or for instance the abundant data that melatonin suppresses pregnant

excuse me suppresses puberty and yet people will take melatonin like it was you know insane physiological levels yeah am i saying melatonin is going to suppress your puberty if you took it as a kid you're messed up no and yet it's very easy to replace it with some of the healthier alternatives that are out there so i think that one can have a thoughtfulness about this stuff and some and it's action oriented without having to really freak out about it how do you think that creators like derek from more plates more dates or greg ducette

are someone who's changed the way that the internet understands um hormonal profiles and supplementation because since watching a lot of derrick's stuff since he's become big on youtube i have been much more considering the balance that's inside of my body but i don't think that that was super common before guys like him were around yeah i look derek's not a scientist by training but he's done an immense service to the world because no one was talking about this stuff it was talked about in bodybuilding circles where they talk very openly it was starting to emerge

in testosterone replacement therapy clinics and then mostly guys were doing this stuff and lying about it right they're doing it but then they don't want to talk about actually kudos to joe rogan who years ago came out and said yeah he decided to start doing trt and a low dose of testosterone he's already successfully reproduced and so he you know he brought it up and and you know it's clear that this is becoming more common here are some of the general principles that i think forgive me derek if i get this wrong in terms of

what you believe because i never want to speak for anybody else but my read of the science and the actual protocols speak to the idea that many people do not need testosterone replacement young guys should really avoid doing anabolic steroids it can really mess up their system not just physically not just for the ability to have kids later but lead to all sorts of sexual issues and sexual performance issues like there needs to be some medical incentive right hypogonadism for instance but at the point where someone either has bank sperm or decides they don't want

any more kids or is willing to do something like take hcg to maintain testicular and function and spermatogenesis it's very clear that going with the lowest you know doctor described right i'm not talking about illicit use that the lowest possible dosage of testosterone therapy is going to be better than for instance taking 200 milligrams in a one mil injection every two weeks right because you get these huge increases and then these troughs so people say something that you've learned from derek yes and in talking with other people and i i'm no longer doing this um

but i i did a run of it from 45 to 46 years old and nothing before that um and i did it because i'm working on a on a book really that has a whole section on hormone therapies i wanted to see what it was like i'll tell you basically testosterone gives you more energy to work more um if it's done appropriately right maybe that's the the secret for lex maybe maybe it's just brimming maze brimming and i'll say when i went into it my levels were mid-range they were fine high to mid-range they were

kind of like sevens eight but i was doing some supplementation to support that i've since gone back to that it was funny when you say something on the internet people think that means it's forever right it is possible to start and come off right so so what i've done and and so here's what's what's relevant here people are now spacing out you know 30 milligrams on monday 30 milligrams on wednesday 30 milligrams on fridays like i have a low reasonable dose again talk to your doctor these aren't recommended dosages that's more typical another thing that's

really important is that people have traditionally blocked estrogen by increases while doing this by taking an aromatase inhibitor novodax arimidex these kinds of things that almost often is a bad idea almost often because having enough estrogen around allows you to maintain cognitive function and libido a lot of guys think it's just you know and it is true if estrogen is very high and testosterone is very low libido can suffer but if testosterone is very high and estrogen is very low libido can really suffer so a lot of people who are crushing their estrogen realize that

by coming off some of those drugs they feel far better far more interesting far better so most people i know that are doing this are taking low doses of testosterone semi-frequently throughout the week 20 to 30 milligrams every other day or so there's a lot of variation around this and then not doing anything to reduce aromatase or if they are taking very low doses not one milligram of arimidex but maybe something like 0.1 milligrams of arimidex every third day or so again not a recommendation talk to your doctor the smarter clinics are starting to think

about this and actually i don't have any financial relationship to derek or to merrick health which is his clinic but from what i understand they do a very good job i did help them design a herbal mostly herbal supplement for testosterone support for people who are not on trt as things like tonga ali fadoja but unbeknownst to most people i i've not made one penny on that that was just based on a conversation of the research with him and dr kyle gillette and a few other people so estrogen can help maintain libido also can increase

libido now here's something i learned that's really interesting from peter atiyah recently women as we know make both testosterone and estrogen and of course a bunch of other hormones too if they get their blood work back and you were to adjust the units that those hormones are measured in nanograms per deciliter in some cases picograms per deciliter in other cases if you normalize them all to the same nanograms per deciliter you would find that a healthy woman has more testosterone than she does estrogen that's right i asked him this three times i'm like you're telling

me that women have more testosterone circulating in them than estrogen he said absolutely now this maybe there's a there's a caveat to that during some phase of the menstrual cycle but that does not mean that their testosterone levels are higher than that of men but this is remarkable right this means that these androgens testosterone and are doing interesting things in men and in women and estrogen as we just described are doing really interesting things certainly in women and in men so this idea of more testosterone less estrogen good is always the case that's simply false

you have to think about whether or not it's a man whether it's a woman whether or not the goal is more or less typically people aren't going for less libido but i suppose it's possible some people out there with that some people might be highly distracted by an excessive libido right that's a different story but and then of course dht so i think one of the things that derek has really contributed to the world and i think is important for people know that a lot of the drugs that are used to treat hair loss finasteride

propecia things like that block dht receptors dihydrotestosterone dhc is responsible for beard growth in the face and for balding male pattern baldness people because they want their hair will take these drugs if they take it in pill form they're blocking dht everywhere and they can experience severe defects in libido and sexual performance now before that choice between your hair and your erection for a lot of people it is right i mean for now there are now topical things and derek talks about all this kind of thing they're talking really really deep he goes really deep

into all this and what's interesting is you know we also can take a step back and say like what's the landscape of health information that created this opportunity for a kid in his 20s by the way no one knows his last name very clever no one knows his last name um i'll play derek he's kind of an avatar of a human right although he's real um what created this landscape for this guy to be able to get this information out there even though he's not a physician he's not a scientist and i think what it

is is that he saw that there was all this information nested in these very niche communities that most people don't want to look like a bodybuilder right and yet what he did was he sort of normalized the discussion about hormones he normalized the discussion about other things like dopamine and cortisol etc and what's interesting is that science now is kind of following suit you know 10 years ago a discussion about hormone therapies would never come up in the hallways of discussions with my colleagues since doing it an episode of the podcast on optimizing testosterone and

estrogen no fewer than 10 of i'm not going to name names but these are serious scientists and it's a mixture of men and women have approached me like hey like what can one do in order to adjust testosterone or estrogen levels is um estrogen therapy for menopause a useful thing when should one start no i'm not an endocrinologist so all i can do is point them in the way of information but this is an important area and here's why hormones control neuromodulators like dopamine estrogen and so on and those neuromodulators powerfully influence our states of

mind so if your hormones are out of whack your neuromodulator is going to be out of whack typically the treatment for depression would be to go in and just give a serotonin reuptake inhibitor or wellbutrin type dopamine thing and that has its use but i love this trend now not towards hormone therapy necessarily but just toward a thinking a mindset of how deep in the layers of my biology can i go to create these sort of waves of health that rise up to the level of ability to focus and etc for so many years it's

all been attacked at the surface kind of the waves on the surface of the ocean and yet there's this like we're now talking about the deep tectonic plates movements that are affecting all that in any case around about 30 years ago you took a real hard turn in life it seemed like you drastically altered the trajectory that you were moving on for quite a while and i'm very interested in how anybody manages to make severe life changes like that i think that many people can they believe that they have control over maybe their daily habits

and little things here and there but they don't have huge global control over their life direction certainly not in the way that they want reflecting on that now does it almost surprise you sort of the ability that you have to be able to change that direction it seems so unbelievably rare uh right so it um i don't know um i like to think everybody harbors it inside themselves i i can say without going into the whole backstory because i've done it before i mean at 19 i basically just looked at myself and decided that i

was a loser right i mean i was able-bodied which was helpful i had a mind that could remember things which was helpful i was interested in a few things but none of those things were setting me up for career or ongoing progress and i had a lot of maladaptive behaviors right at the time i was getting involved in fighting i just i just didn't i wasn't completing my schoolwork i was just really in a bad place and it was really fear and desperation um mostly fear that inspired the the switch along the way i i

haven't talked about this publicly you know to any great extent but along the way i hit numerous roadblocks again and again sometimes they were situational like people close to me dying and the grief that came with that sometimes it was my own kind of um feeling like i was getting pulled back toward a state of mind that wasn't healthy for me uh and so on but i think what i've been good at at least good at not great at but at least good at is finding really good mentors that would allow me to get to

the next node of the next milestone and i should say that some of those mentors were real people that i i didn't say can you be my mentor um not that that would be a bad thing but really tried to model my behavior after people that i respected and sometimes those mentors were people that i didn't know at all i mean i'll just say this right now i mean i'm going to embarrass him by saying it but you know i was a junior professor meaning before i got tenure running a lab i had a bulldog

puppy a laboratory and a home for the first time in my life and feeling very very overwhelmed and distraught and i made many of the things that i heard tim ferriss say sort of central to my way of doing things i didn't go four hours of work a week but i did start to get extreme about organizing my schedule so he was a big influence on you tim huge huge and i know tim a little bit we have some common friends and i feel very fortunate that now we're in touch because gone on his podcast

and gotten to know one another but just huge i mean like there were no organizational forces in my life for me at that time that could help me navigate through this landscape of you know i'd never been a professor before i had taught it now it was many years ago now but um i knew how to do science i felt confident in my ability to take an empty room and a budget and create buy the right equipment and do the experiments hire the people i had no problem with that but how to regulate my time

and my energy and how to um communicate with people i mean he had these like little things that i don't like the word hacks i hate it because hacks are implies that you're using something for a purpose that it wasn't intended for that's a hack but he had things like instead of asking people um you know like what's up when they come in your office asking them you know what specifically you know what what can i do for you like what do you need really cutting to the chase because time became a valuable resource little

things like that tiny things on the f on the surface that translate into huge conversion in terms of time and energy um and even just setting aside some savings and things i it's not that i'm not dumb about money but i wasn't i've never really taken the time to think about how i was going to invest money or do anything so tim did a tremendous service for for me uh without realizing it and i've thanked him now a million times i'm gonna thank him a million times i'm thank you thank you tim i'm thanking you

again things like that so selecting mentors then eventually when it came time to start podcasting i mean lex whether or not he knows or not you know just thinking oh here's another guy who's a he's a scientist he's mit the fact he always wore that suit and i'm gonna copy him and just always wear the same thing because i don't have to take guesswork i can take the guesswork out of it there were little things that were super deliberate that just saved me time and energy and i think that that's helped me along the way

and then the other thing is i have really tried to adopt this idea that when it's inevitable and it will inevitably arrive that stress grows us that it really sharpens decision making it really sharpens decision making and you know if you have a very stressful event and then you recover from it the worst thing to do is just go and keep going you need to take some time and reflect about what led into that so i've i think i'm very good at leveraging fear into positive change if i really think about most of the major

shifts in my life it was i'm scared as hell to remain in this situation and i'm very good at broadcasting fear into my future uh you know if i've ever been in a bad relationship it was clearly if i stayed in it couldn't have been so bad that i felt like i had to leave so i would broadcast and project you know how horrible it would be for my future children and i might even build that up a little bit my system now one could say well maybe you could have navigated successfully i'm better at

projecting fear into my future and that has led me to make i think better and better decisions over time that's it how much of the old andrew still rises to the surface today i know that the music that you tend to listen to when you're training is still pretty punky and when i work yeah i mean i have two very polarized versions of music i do love you know i love bob dylan i love joe strummer acoustic i like i like you know i like melodic music too but yeah i'm listening to rance's different fingers

i mean i'm i mean i was the first ever gig i went to little fingers i'm jealous i've never actually seen them play live i'm a huge stiff little fingers fan a huge difficult finger fan um huge against me fan huge rancid fan i mean you know for people that um of my generation they probably remember it people who are younger probably think oh that's all 90s stuff but a lot to me i mean i have huge collections of like 80s and 90s music 70s music second wave punk third wave punk i collect a ton

of that stuff i love it i mean how much of me still exists i believe that we are all born fundamentally with some gift and it's our job to reveal that gift to ourselves and you know here i'm i want to thoroughly acknowledge someone else who's been a great mentor without ever meeting him because robert greene i think is a is a wonderful fantastic guy fantastic i've never met you robert but i'd love to meet i mean it's one of these things where i just put you in touch she's been on the show twice amazing

i used to suggest the book mastery to to graduate students and to undergraduates like you know learn the this process of finding a mentor um and in science we have natural mentors graduate advisors and postdoc advisors and i i made sure i will say this i should have said this earlier when a mentor has sort of arrived in my life either virtually or in reality i make the most of that relationship i really nurture those relationships i mean i still go to visit the children of my dead graduates advisor kids you know because i care

so i mean these are like these people are like family to me how much of it still exists well the energy has always been the same the energy is i have an absolute obsession from day one this maybe was what i was kind of born with to i like to learn things and share them with the world i was six years old giving lectures on monday after reading about medieval weapons or you know goldfish biology in class i mean my parents thought it was crazy and they took me a psychiatrist and i'm like no he

just really likes learning he really likes telling people about that about what he learns so and i had a little bit of an underlying tourette's when i was younger i had a grunting tic i had a when i'm tired it sometimes emerges a little bit and for me learning and kind of seeking kind of calms that somehow as does training um as a skateboarding i did boxing of course head damage isn't good so i stopped boxing but that's always been in me that's how i'm that's how my nervous system kind of tilts left in that

way the energy i would say i'm able to turn the dial i'm able to tap into kind of some old hurts and angers as fuel but i really try and orient towards things in a very lex friedman-ish way from a place of light show them love show them show do things from a place of love because it's a more continual resource i really believe it's this dopamine epinephrine cycle positive feedback cycle i really do and so that's all there um you know i have pretty much eaten the same way i have since college i've really

i haven't really changed the way i eat that much i mean i probably ate more junk every once in a while ice cream and pizza and stuff and now i have less of an appetite for but i still am the same i still train every other day i um i love music i love movies i love nature i love the flora and fauna of life i mean i have this kind of obsession with fish tanks freshwater fish tanks i love um and listen i i my ex-girlfriend is a uh she's a florist i i i

developed a love of flowers you know in those years um i love you know i i'm probably the one guy who was like wandering around in college i would go to these like orchid festivals and some of them look like aliens and i just i just love learning and i love digesting novel information and um and now you know i have to say i'm in a place where the people that i'm closest to i mean thankfully really kind of support that and i can indulge it through podcasting it's so lovely now that the environment of

curiosity i think that podcasts and and youtube and creators have engendered it's so cool you know the fact that you get to find out about something that you really care that you would have done right you would have done it for free without anybody else knowing about it right and then somehow telling other people the thing that you found out in this version of the simulation is called a job or a pursuit or something it's it's wild uh another thing that has carried over from your youth are your tattoos which i've heard you talk about

but never seen what's your relationship with your tattoos and why has no one ever seen them yeah um yeah actually it was tim ferriss that outed me on this one he was like i found a picture on the internet with you in full sleeves um yeah you know i believe that you know tattoos are i mean this has come as no surprise or a literal expression of what we feel on the inside and you know i and i'm not recommending this kids don't do this i started getting tattooed really young how again about 14 i

got my first tattoo no way we did them ourselves within your first one please don't know please no one do this india inc and a needle and um we used to do these it's really bad they're called knick-knack tattoos or we kind of would do this at home don't do it it's really bad you get bad infections they're ugly they they blur they bleed that's not good um yeah i started getting tattooed i when i was a kid and growing up skateboarding in the punk rock scene there were these guys in the town where i

lived they called themselves the yahtzee guys i don't know why i don't know what that was about but they all had full sleeves and they were super nice guys and they were all into skateboarding and you know and vehicles and i just looked up to these guys i thought ah like someday i want full sleeves i yeah i've i've got full sleeves i'm basically like neck to neck to wrist some chest piece as well yeah but yeah back's covered yeah nothing on my legs nothing on my stomach ribs yeah tops of my tops of my

shoulders and um i got a big picture of costello my dog back there i've got a picture of his paw back there i've got a picture of another dog he used to have um there's still some space for a few things there's some things very personal to me um is that the reason that you prefer not to show them yeah you know i think that there are a couple reasons i'll just be clear as to why first of all um when i show up to podcast it's the same way i show up to lecture in

the classroom auditorium and i swear in my life this is my mindset and this is my mantra when i do it i'm there to teach it's not about me it's about the student it's about the people learning i don't want it ever to be about me i don't want the focus to be on me i mean obviously i'm the voice and the person talking but i really want people to internalize the information and i do think that the tattoos because they have nothing to do with the information are a distraction they're just a distraction i

i don't know it would sort of like be wearing like a bright yellow shirt or something it's not my style i prefer to kind of make myself disappear as much as i can um and let the information come forward that's you know even when i gave scientific lectures which i still do of course for my my professor job i generally liked the room to be pretty dark and i wanted the light to be on the data on the slides i was happy to do the voice but i want people thinking about the data so podcasting

is a little different you come through as a voice not or on youtube a voice in an image but i really prefer that it not be about me now there's a human element too and i think things have changed a lot when i was growing up tattoos were not accepted there are many work environments where if you have for instance where people prefer that their surgeon or their doctor not have tattoos some people might prefer their surgeon or doctor have tattoos when i was growing up if you had a i never had one but if

someone had a nose ring they had to cover it up with a band-aid or take it out if they worked at the coffee shop remember that you probably don't you're probably young enough no or that or eyebrow ring think trends have changed right things have changed and i'm kind of old school because i'm kind of old now 46. um and the etiquette for me has always been to you know and this is lex does this too is i i personally find that if i can just show up as formal and consistent as possible that people

at least know that i'm taking them seriously so i don't really do it for me i pretty much do it for the audience um and also none of the tattoos are like that interesting it's my dog i've i really like raptors i've got a bunch of birds i've got i mean i have all sorts of different things raptors like the dinosaur no raptors like um red tail hawks and blue you know i like birds i had either dinosaurs or trucks yeah like yo you really need to love ford raptors no no no ford raptor i

drive a toyota forerunner and i love it i got one truck and i love that thing um although with gas right now i mean it's you kind of gotta wonder about having a gas driven vehicle like a forerunner in any case yeah the tattoo thing i would say for for younger people coming up just be aware that you can't control other people's perceptions either and so you know i always made it a point that i didn't want things on my knuckles i didn't want them on my hands i didn't want them on my neck i

didn't want them on my face do i judge people when they have them no but do i want them for me no i also think that this is very neurosciencey as neuroscience is that we have dedicated brain areas called fusiform gyrus it's a face area that's dedicated to the processing of faces even if i just put two dots and a line in between them on a piece of paper you see that as a face when one puts a tattoo on their throat or on their face it actually changes the way that the face is perceived

right i mean it almost looks like another mouth there right it's a very different look it's it can be a little bit jarring i'm not saying one shouldn't have it but it can be a little bit jarring it's it changes the look of the person forever it's not just that it's above the neckline is that it kind of competes with the processing of their face in its normal way and so for me whenever i see somebody with a throat tattoo or a face tattoo sort of like it's hard to orient around that and i think

there's some biology to uh to that relates to that but like when it comes down to it i mean people need to be individuals and live their life the way they want to live their life i've also never been that much of an iconoclast i'm not you know i'm i grew up in the punk rock thing um you know i hate in group out group stuff i always had friends from a lot of different you know friends that are jocks and hippies and punk rockers and you know straight and gay like i don't care as

long as people are living in their best life and they're not harming anybody like i'm like great go for it i i'm very laid back in that way of course if people are harming other people then i believe that like liberty and independent freedom i mean liberty is you know one of the highest things so you know for me so but i don't tend to i don't consider myself a very judgmental person but you can't always control the perceptions of others so i just think people should be thoughtful about what they want to accomplish in

life in terms of a life mission and just ask whether or not some of the permanent cosmetic changes they might make might might align with compete with or be neutral for those life missions my life mission is very simple i want to teach people the beauty and the utility of biology i'm going to do that today i'm going to do that until i take my last breath in one form or another because that's what excites me and that's like what keeps the dopamine cranking dudes let's bring this one home look i really really appreciate you

uh the work that you've done the fact that i feel like i have a lot more agency over my life because i understand that my internal processes are something that i can influence you know the first time that i heard you say that you cannot control the mind with the mind a lot of different things clicked for me so i'm very glad that lex bullied you or convinced you to start doing your show and uh yeah i'm looking forward to hearing a lot more of what you've got to do in the future well thanks so

much and thanks for bringing me on today obviously uh we've been in touch and i uh align with you and i feel resonance along the life as podcaster right but also we've had a chance to interact a few times i'm looking forward to more because i think what you're doing bringing knowledge to the world is is so important and i so appreciate your your questions and learning from you i'm also going to get these resources about the expectation effect and the rest i've been taking notes here because i i'm obsessed with learning so why should

people go people want to make sure that they they listen to more watch more follow more of your stuff where should they go thanks for asking yeah it's uh very straightforward huberman lab is the podcast and it's all the standard places youtube apple spotify et cetera huberman lab on twitter huber and lab on instagram and the twitter and instagram mainly are short content i used to do a lot more hand drawings and i think you're doing instagram pretty much as well as any science communicator that i've seen i don't think there's anyone else that's optimized

it better than that thanks right now thanks yeah i try and answer comments and respond to things and um any of those three places and we have a website which is hubermanlab.com that where all the podcast episodes are links to all things in all formats we have a newsletter and you know people can peruse that if they want it's all i should say zero cost to access so that's been a major goal that we've stuck to which is to just we don't put anything behind a paywall the information that's there is the information that anyone

can access dude i appreciate you let's go and get hot and cold let's do it what's happening people thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode then press here for a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last few weeks and don't forget to subscribe peace