Mental Health Toolkit: Tools to Bolster Your Mood & Mental Health

welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday [Music] life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine today we are discussing tools for mood and mental health I will include tools and resources taken from the guest episode that I did with Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett who is a psychologist and neuroscientist whose laboratory focuses on mood and emotion during that episode she mentioned several important tools that I do believe everybody should apply and that indeed I've been applying to my own life

and have found to be extremely beneficial I will also highlight some of the specific research articles those tools are based on which were not covered in the podcast with Lisa I will also discuss tools glean from the four episode series that I did on Mental Health with Dr Paul kti who is a medical doctor specializing in Psychiatry and that episode as some of you may already know focused on mental health and the self as well as relationships and it included a deep discussion of what is the self we talked about the unconscious mind and the

conscious mind and we also covered a lot of tools for understanding oneself both within the context of therapy but also within the context of things that one can do alone and that require zero cost in addition we talked about tools for improving relationships we talked about first principles of self-care so I will provide highlights and takeaways of those tools during today's episode and thirdly I will include tools what we often refer to as protocols gleaned from some recent Publications indeed Publications that came out as recently as two weeks ago which really emphasize specific things that

we can all do that again are zero cost that have been shown in quality peer-reviewed research to significantly improve mood and mental health for instance if you're a regular listener of this podcast you are probably familiar with my nearly constant reminder that people should view morning sunlight and afternoon sunlight and if you can't to embrace some Alternatives like looking at bright artificial light although sunlight is best well there was a recent paper published in the journal Nature mental health an excellent Journal focusing on not just the positive effects of viewing light at those times of

day and indeed throughout the day but also the independent and positive effects of being in darkness for 6 to 8 hours every night that's right not only is light during the day correlated with significantly improved mental health outcomes but Darkness at night that is avoiding lights not just bright lights but lights for up to eight hours at certain periods of your 24-hour circadian cycle has been correlated with improved mental health outcomes and indeed has been shown to significantly offset certain negative mental health outcomes this is a spectacular study again it involved a enormous number of

research subjects more than 85,000 research subjects and it touches on a large number of actionable protocols that I've distilled down to just one or two things that all of us can easily do to improve our mood and mental health on a consistent basis before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme I'd like to thank

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brought To Us by eight sleep eight sleep makes Smart mattress covers with cooling Heating and sleep tracking capacity I've spoken many times before in this podcast about the fact that sleep that is getting enough quality sleep on a consistent basis is the foundation of mental health physical health and performance now one of the key things to getting the best possible night sleep is to control the temperature of your sleeping environment and that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep your body temperature needs to drop by about 1 to 3° and in order to

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the exact parameters so you can get the best possible night sleep I've been sleeping on an eight sleep mattress cover for well over 2 years now and it has significantly improved my sleep and therefore my daytime mood focus and alertness if you'd like to try eight sleep you can go to eights sleep.com huberman and save up to $150 off their pod three covers eight sleep currently ships in the USA Canada UK select countries in the EU and Australia again that's 8sleep.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by waking up waking up is a

meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs mindfulness trainings yoga NRA sessions and nsdr non-sleep deep rest protocols I started using the waking up app a few years ago because even though I've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I started doing Yoga Nidra about a decade ago my dad mentioned to me that he had found an app turned out to be the waking up app which could teach you meditations of different durations and that had a lot of different types of meditations to play place the brain and body into different states and that

he liked it very much so I gave the waking up app a try and I too found it to be extremely useful because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate other times I have longer to meditate and indeed I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different levels of understanding about Consciousness but also to place my brain and body into lots of different kinds of States depending on which meditation I do I also love that the waking up app has lots of different types of Yoga Nidra

sessions for those of you don't know Yoga Nidra is a process of lying very still but keeping an active mind it's very different than most meditations and there's excellent scientific data to show that yoganidra and something similar to it called non-sleep deep rest or nstr can greatly restore levels of cognitive and physical energy even with just a short 10minute session if you'd like to try the waking up app you can go to waking up.com huberman and access a free 30-day trial again that's waking up.com huberman to access a free 30-day trial okay let's talk about

tools for improving mood and mental health I think it goes without saying that these are extremely important topics for everyone not just to know about but in my opinion also for people to implement and the reason is that we are currently in a worldwide Mental Health crisis and while we could debate the reason why we are in a worldwide Mental Health crisis it's very very clear that mood disorders and challenges with mental health about found and of course there are many different therapies for the treatment of mood disorders and mental health everything from talk therapy

with a psychologist or psychiatrist or social worker prescription drug treatments there nutritional approaches sematic approaches and I want to be clear that I do believe that there's value in all of these approaches what tends to matter in terms of what sorts of tools and approaches one adopts includes both access so whether or not people have access to these type of therapies whether or not they can afford them on a consistent basis and also of course the severity of the mood or mental health disorder and I'd be remiss of course if I didn't make the statement

and I don't say this just to protect me I also say this to protect all of you and those that you know that if you are concerned about yourself or somebody else having a serious mood or mental health disorder please do seek out help from a licensed clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or other healthc care professional who's qualified to help you in that regard with that said we can now have a discussion about tools and protocols for enhancing mood and mental health that truly appli to everybody regardless of age to start off I want to talk

about a fundamental aspect of mood and mental health enhancement that was discussed both in the guest episode with Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett as well as in the guest series with Dr Paul Ki and that has to do with what Dr Paul Ki referred to as the first principles of self-care or mental health the first principles of self-care include but are not limited to taking excellent care of one's biology which of course includes both the mind and the body and in order to make this very simple and actionable I've distilled out what I refer to as

the big six I've sometimes refer to these as the six major pillars of Health both mental health and physical health as well as performance for that matter but if we're going to talk about tools for mood and mental health we absolutely can't discard discussions about our biology that is we need to make sure that we're taking care of our normal biological function and indeed enhancing the production of specific neurotransmitters and neuromodulators that we are optimizing yes I use the word optimizing the function of our so-called autonomic nervous system that aspect of our nervous system that's

humming in the background all the time it's operating unconsciously to regulate our sleep wake Cycles it's regulating how well or poorly we react to things it's regulating how much dopamine serotonin epinephrine acetylcholine we were producing all of this stuff is humming in the background and sets the stage for all the conscious work that we might put to for instance trying to understand what our life narrative is what our unconscious mind is doing what sorts of defenses it might producing all of the sort of high level and directed work that we're going to talk about a

little bit later exists on a background of autonomic function of neurotransmitter production of hormone production not just testosterone and estrogen but things like cortisol prolactin and on and on so it's important to understand that if our goal is to be in the best possible mood given our life circumstances and to have the best possible mental health given our life circumstances and to improve our mood and mental health consistently over time that we have to pay attention to what I'm referring to here as the big six or the six pillars of mental health and those are

just to list them off then I'll go into a little bit more detail sleep Sun sunlight although I'd like to modify sunlight because based on some new data that just came out a couple of weeks ago I'd like to now make that second pillar not sunlight but light SL dark so we could even just think about it as light when and how much light you get but what you'll soon learn is that how much dark you get is also extremely important so we've got sleep light movement is the third nutrition social connection and Stress Control

now these are topics that I've spoken about extensively on previous huin Lab podcast episodes so I don't want to go into a deep dive of each of these six pillars right now but I am going to just give you a few highlights of each and then of course we will provide links in the show note captions for which you can go on the Deep dive if you like and I also would like to mention that if you ever have questions about specific protocols or tools and you're seeking those out or previous episodes or specific timestamps

of previous episodes of this podcast you can go to our newly revamped hubman lab.com webbsite and put any topic of Interest or even several topics of Interest into the search function and it will take you to the very specific timestamps and other resources that provide information on those topics so I'm going to go into a few of the key bullet points about each of the six pillars or what I also refer to as the big six of self-care and mental health again this is a necessary list but is not sufficient again necessary to do these

things every 24 hours hours indeed every 24 hours if you want to have the best possible mood and mental health but it is not sufficient that means you still need to do some of the other things that we're going to talk about in terms of directed approaches at improving mood and mental health if you are to quote unquote optimize your mood and mental health or if you are let's just say trying to constantly improve your mood and mental health but these are the necessary but not sufficient pillars of mental health so Under The Heading of

sleep it's safe to say that most people need between 6 to 8 hours of sleep per night some people can get away with five some people need as much as nine or 10 certainly Growing Kids babies teenagers and those that are suffering from some sort of illness are going to need more as much as 9 10 maybe even 12 hours of sleep per night however most people do well to get somewhere between six and8 hours of sleep per night you're just going to have to experiment and figure out what's best for you now one thing

I heard recently so I can't claim this as an original idea but that I think is a really good way to think about sleep is that sleep much like physical fitness is something that we have to constantly be working on it's not the sort of thing where you can get a great night's sleep one night and then the next night just kind of let all the protocols go and expect to get a great night's sleep you don't have to be neurotic about getting a great night's sleep indeed I do believe that we should strive to

get enough quality sleep as many of the nights of our life as possible and if you can't do do that hopefully it's for good reasons but of course things happen in life raising kids you have emergencies all nighters to study so you can make sure you get that best possible grade on exam etc etc but we should all strive to get the best quality sleep that we can and as much of it most nights of our lives so it's important to look at sleep as a process that you're going to be working on for the

rest of your life just like Fitness and I don't say that to overwhelm you I say that so that if On Any Given night you get a poor night's sleep you don't stress that too much you just get back on the wagon and you try and get the best possible night sleep the next night and the next night and the next night much like Fitness there's no 10-week program that's going to transform your physical fitness forever okay just like there's no sleep program that's going to transform your sleep forever it's a daily or rather I

should say nightly investment although some of the things that are going to positively impact your sleep or perhaps damage your sleep are things that you do during the daytime right so avoid that caffeine too late in the day get that morning sunlight and on and on but if you sleep sleep is something that you're constantly investing in and it is a critical investment for your mood and mental health the other thing that's not often discussed and I really haven't talked about terribly much on this podcast is the importance of having a fairly consistent sleep routine

now I realize that not everybody can get to sleep at the exact same time each night and wake up at the exact same time each morning and frankly that's not practical I certainly don't do that however what we know from the Circadian Health literature is that everybody strive again that strive nobody's perfect but strive to get to sleep at more or less the same time each night and wake up at more or less the same time each morning this turns out to be really important for regulating mood and mental health and indeed for improving your

overall levels of sleep getting the optimal amounts of slow wave sleep AK deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep and what we know is that ideally you're going to get to sleep within plus or minus 1 hour of your regular sleep time so if your regular to bed time is 10:00 you're used to getting in bed at 10:00 and falling asleep somewhere around 10:30 well then if the next night you fall asleep at 9:30 great you're still within the plus or minus one hour and if the next night you go to sleep and you don't

fall asleep till 11:30 don't sweat it in fact you're still within that plus or minus one hour however if you start getting into a habit of going to bed at vastly different times deviating more than or less than one hour from your normal to bedtime well then you're going to start to run into issues such as as waking up feeling groggy even if you got enough sleep so even if you slept the full eight hours that you're used to getting people who go to sleep much later than they normally do or much earlier than they

normally do start getting into kind of issues of mood regulation energy regulation not just in the morning but in the afternoon likewise try and wake up at more or less the same time each morning plus or minus one hour that's really going to help you anchor your overall sleep schedule and it's really going to help lead to predictability of your overall levels of energy mood and focus throughout the day the second pillar in that big six is light and I used to refer to this as sunlight right I'd say and I'm going to say it

again now although I've covered this in a lot more detail so again just hitting the top Contour critical elements try to view sunlight that is with your eyes view sunlight as early as possible after waking whenever I say that the most common question I get is what do I do if I wake up before the sun comes out well unless you have superpowers that I'm not aware of you can't make the sun come out any earlier so just flip on artificial lights as needed until the sun comes out and then get outside face East in

the morning take off those sunglasses it's perfectly safe to look at low solar angle sunlight without sunglasses providing you're not you know driving into bright light and you crash this kind of thing get outside look at the sunlight definitely blink to protect your eyes as needed but get that sunlight in your eyes early in the day this has Myriad positive effects on mood focus and alertness and nighttime sleep later that night and it does so through a number of well-defined biological and endocrine hormonal Pathways that I've discussed on many previous podcast episodes and you want

to do this for about 10 minutes on non- overcast days and as long as 20 or 30 minutes on overcast days and that highlights the second most common question I get which is what do I do if there's no sun where I live I live in an area where there's no sunlight look if you live on planet Earth there's always sunlight there might not be very much of it it might be very overcast where you live it might seem very dark but trust me there's far more photons light energy coming through that cloud cover even

in the darkest mornings of winter than there are at night in those dark Winters so get that light in your eyes and do it as consistently as possible and also do that in the late afternoon and evening that's critical for regulating your circadian clock for reasons that I've talked about previously but I'll get into in a future podcast really explaining how those clock oscillators and mechanisms work but just to keep it really simple since this this is a toolkit episode for mood and mental health your mood and your mental health will benefit tremendously from getting

morning sunlight in your eyes now if you need to get more light in your eyes because indeed there's just not enough sunlight or you don't have the opportunity to get outside and view sunlight in the morning for whatever reason you might invest in getting a bright light source that you can plug in you probably want one that's as bright as 10,000 lucks so that's pretty bright those fall under the category of so-called sad lamps sad Seasonal effective disorder lamps and you can purchase those they can be somewhat expensive you can also opt to get a

900 Lu drawing tablet by the way I have no Financial relationship to any of these sorts of light sources but you can find them pretty easily and in the case of the 900 Lux light tablet um fairly inexpensively online and you can put that on your desk or where you have your morning coffee and try and enhance the total amount of light that you're getting in the morning but frankly nothing is as good as sunlight so if you can't get sunlight you might think about investing in one of those sad lamps and indeed those sad

lamps aren't as good as sunlight but they are the next best thing if you really can't get sunlight on a consistent basis a few other fine points that I always get asked about first of all it is absolutely okay to wear eyeglasses or contact lenses those sorts of corrective lenses are actually going to focus the light to your retina which is where you want it however this whole process of viewing morning sunlight and afternoon light does not again does not work through a window or windshield because windows and windshields filter out the relevant wavelengths of

light that you want to get directly onto your retina okay so that's the reality of it in addition please don't feel that you have to look directly at the Sun and certainly don't stare at the Sun never force yourself to look at any light sunlight or otherwise that's so bright that it's painful to look at so if it's comfortable for you to look directly at the Sun and just blink every once in a while and you can do that without any pain or discomfort or watering of the eyes please do that you're getting a lot

of photons into your eyes and they're transmitting that to your brein brain and your brain to the rest of your body and on and on however if you find it uncomfortable to look directly at the sun in that case what you'll want to do is offset your gaze to you know 10 or 20 degrees which is nerd speak for just a little bit to the right or a little bit to the left and get the sunlight into your eyes indirectly okay and I often also get asked well can I stand in the shade while I

do this what if I have an overhang in my apartment the best thing is of course going to be to face directly to the Sun and look either directly at it or slightly offset but if you can only get morning sunlight by going out onto your balcony and your balcony doesn't face East rather it faces West you'll still get a lot of photons from the Sun Reaching Your Eyes there but ideally you would find some way to look toward the sun first thing in the morning I realize that with kids and work and other obligations

this can be challenging but it is a challenge worth meeting meaning don't lose your job or forget to take care of your kids to do this but you can bring your kids to do this and indeed you should it sets their circadian rhythms also so and people often will ask well does it work on dogs you know and indeed dogs and other animals have these exact same circuits and Pathways for setting their circadian rhythm so it's great for them too now there are also clear and documented benefits for mood and mental health to getting bright

light in your eyes ideally from sunlight throughout the day as much as you safely can please don't get sunburned don't get cataracts by getting too much sunlight but getting outdoors and getting sunlight in your eyes during your lunch break or a walk here and there or if you have to remain indoors during the day getting the lights in that environment as bright as possible as safely possible I should say is known to improve mood and mental health why well because there's a special so-called opsin within the cells of your eyes it's called melanopsin that doesn't

respond to the same differences in color that are present in sunlight in the morning and the evening but rather responds to the overall brightness of light so very bright lights either from artificial sources or ideally from sunlight activate these cells and these cells project these little wires we call axons into specific parts of the brain that improve your mood and feelings of well-being so I can't give you a specific number you know of five minutes a day or 10 minutes a day just get as much light in your eyes ideally from sunlight throughout the day

as is safe for you meaning where you're not getting sunburned and you're not damaging your retina and if you want to know if you're damaging your retina well anytime you have to Blink or turn away from light because it's really bright that's a signal that the light is too bright so while you want to place yourself into bright environments you don't want to place yourself into any environment so bright that it's painful to be in okay so use that as a metric and you should be just fine and the last point about light for mood

and mental health is a relatively recent theme that's emerging from the scientific literature and that really was driven home by a recent study that I mentioned a little bit earlier in the episode this is the study publish in nature mental health showing that Darkness during a particular stage of your 24-hour cycle your so-called circadian rhythm is also very beneficial for mood and mental health and it's beneficial for mood and mental health in a way that is independent from light and from sleep now what do I mean by that okay well there are a number of

different ways that this can be examined but in this particular study which I like oh so much entitled day and night light exposure are associated with psychiatric disorders an objective light study in more than 85,000 people what the researchers did is they analyzed how much light and or dark people were getting across the 24-hour cycle and correlated that with mental health outcomes looking at a range of different mental health challenges including bipolar disorder schizophrenia depression PTSD and much more and I'll go into this study in a lot of detail in a future episode because it's

such an important study with so many gems withinin it that we should all know about but one of the key things from this study is that the positive effects of daytime sunlight exposure and the positive effects of nighttime dark exposure that means of course the absence of light are independent of one another put differently making sure that you are in very dim to completely dark environments for a continuous 6 to8 hours within every 24-hour circadian cycle is correlated with much better mental health outcomes in other words we shouldn't just think about the presence of light

in the morning and throughout the day as positive for mental health that's all true it's absolutely true and this study further verifies that but that's been known for some time indeed decades from the scientific research and of course it's been known for thousands of years intuitively and subjectively without detailed scientific measurement but in addition to that this study shows that people who stay in very dim to dark environments for eight hours every 24 hours or I should say approximately eight hours in every 24-hour cycle they benefit from improved mood and mental health outcomes in a

way that's independent of how much light they're getting and independent of how much sleep they are getting the point is this the time when you wake up consider that time zero and then about again you don't have to be super strict about this about 16 to 24 hours after that wakeup time you should be in a very dim to dark environment for that 16-hour to 24-Hour period after wake up okay what do I mean by this I mean if you go to sleep at 10: p.m. and you wake up at 6:00 a.m. well that 10:

p.m. to 6:00 a.m. phase of your circadian cycle you should be in very dim light or entirely dark environment this is a great opportunity to reference another study which is published in the proceeds of the National Academy of Sciences which shows that even having a small amount of light in the room which isn't even that bright while you're sleeping with eyes closed can disrupt morning glucose levels so in other words keep your sleeping environment dark keep your nighttime environment dim to the best of your abilities right certainly go out to dinner every once in a

while go to the movies go out and have a party enjoy yourself if you have to go to the hospital God forbid or you have to tend to some emergency do that but to the extent that you can control it within the confines of life and its demands keep your nighttime environment dim or dark because that independently of any sunlight and other bright light that you're viewing during the daytime and afternoon is going to positively improve your mood and mental health now moving on to the other pillars and these I'm going to move through a

bit more quickly than I have the previous two because we've done entire series on these or I should say serieses serieses is that how you pronounce it someone put the plural of serieses in the show in the comments on YouTube the third pillar is movement and when I say movement I mean exercise as you all know we should all strive to get anywhere from 180 to 220 minutes of Zone 2 cardio per week that's movement that allows you to hold a conversation but where you to do it more intensely or even a bit more intensely

you wouldn't be able to hold that conversation in addition we should do some V2 Max work we should get our heart rate very high at least once a week doing some sort of movement that's safe for you so that could be running or cycling or swimming or Pilates whatever it is for you getting your heart rate way way up is also important and to do that at least once a week but daily movement either cardiovascular training or resistance training and it's very very clear that we need both maybe not on the same days in fact

I split them to separate days resistance training done for anywhere from six to 10 sets per muscle group either close to or to failure this could be with weights it could be with bands it could be with machines all of that was covered in detail in the podcast series that I did with Dr Andy Galpin an exercise physiologist who's expert in all those areas I also did an episode on a foundational Fitness protocol that has been distilled into a very simple three-page PDF that you can get for completely zero cost by going to hu lab.com

and just put foundational Fitness protocol PDF and you'll be taken to that toolkit so all of the details of a weekly exercise routine that involves daily movement but also certainly in my case includes at least one full day of rest per week because many people do indeed need one maybe even two full days of rest per week so that highlights the third pillar movement but we know that cardiovascular training and resistance training aren't just great for our body they also improve mood and mental health that's so very clear from the research literature so we can't

Overlook those in a conversation about mood and mental health now the fourth pillar is nutrition and nutrition is a big topic it's a very barbed wire topic if you get involved in this stuff online you know you you've got your people who believe that you know carnivore is better than vegan you have the people who believe vegan is better than carnivore most people are omnivores you have your seed oil debates and on and on and on we're not going to touch any of that now indeed if you want to learn more about nutrition and what

works and what doesn't work for sake of aesthetic changes weight loss muscle gain Etc I would refer you to the guest episode that we did with Dr Lane Norton you can find that again at huberman lab.com where we do a deep dive on all the variations in different nutritional protocols but suffice to say that regardless of whether or not you're vegan omnivore carnivore or keto or whatever everybody needs to consume sufficient amounts but not excess amounts of quality calories per day now you may do that by intermittent fasting you may do that by a more

traditional meal scheduling but everybody's going to need to do that because your body and brain and indeed the parts of your body and brain that translate to mood and mental health require macronutrients proteins fats and carbohydrates as well as micronutrients so the key takeaway with nutrition is to make it quality nutrition within the bounds of whatever sort of nutritional program that you're following and that means getting most of your food sources from either nonprocessed or minimally processed foods so these would be foods that you're going to need to prepare or foods that would perish um

over time these are not the sorts of foods that live in boxes and cans and other uh packages that would allow them to live on the shelves forever and ever okay and as I say that I know many people are shouting well what about rice you know rice can live on the shelf for a long time and yes okay I consider rice a minimally processed food because of course it can live on the shelf for a long period of time and here I'm just going to back out of the whole conversation about nutrition at this

point because as you can probably tell it's a deep series of rabbit holes that we can fall into and really get distracted the point is make sure you're getting enough food don't overeat we know energy toxicity is a problem for not just body composition but for mental health so you want to get enough calories but not too few calories and you want to make sure that you're getting them from quality sources and I say that because of course food is not just the substrate for the cellular repair and indeed production of tissues in your body

but it's also the substrate for all the sorts of neurotransmitters right which are derived from amino acid precursors that are derived from food right all of that dopamine stuff and serotonin stuff is derived from amino acids that come from food sources so the link between nutrition and mental health should now be an obvious one as we all know quality nutrition influences of course our physical health but also our mental health and our cognitive functioning our memory our ability to learn new things and to focus and we know that one of the most important features of

highquality nutrition is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high quality unprocessed or minimally processed sources as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically all the cellular functions in our body including the gut microbiome now I like most everybody try to get optimal nutrition from Whole Foods ideally mostly from minimally processed or non-processed Foods however one of the challenges that I and so many other people face is getting enough servings of high quality fruits and vegetables per day as well as fiber and probiotics that often accompany those fruits

and vegetables that's why way back in 2012 long before I ever had a podcast I started drinking ag1 and so I'm delighted that ag1 is sponsoring the huberman Lab podcast the reason I started taking ag1 and the reason I still drink ag1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs that is it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins minerals probiotics and fiber to ensure optimal mental health physical health and performance if you'd like to try ag1 you can go to drink a1.com huberman to

claim a special offer they're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2 again that's drink a1.com huberman to claim that special offer the fifth pillar in the big six is social connection and we're going to talk a little bit more about this later in the episode but let's let's just be very brief and specific about this we all need to strive to limit the number of social interactions that we feel tax or even Vex us that cause us stress this is something that was covered in depth in the episode

with Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett where she talked about the fact that we don't just have a nervous system that regulates itself through experience and through our thoughts and our actions we are as a species interacting with other nervous systems both of our own species other humans as well as non-human species dogs and cats and if you have them horses and other animals so we need to think about our nervous system as being both regulated from the inside and through our own actions and choices and thoughts but also through interaction with other nervous systems and while

we don't always have as much control over Which social interactions or work interactions we have to engage in we should really strive to understand and indeed pay some serious attention to whether or not certain types of social interactions are what she referred to as net savings neutral or taxing right certain types of social interactions with certain people or groups of people just make us feel taxed it makes us feel stressed it leads to negative affect that is not good feelings or emotions and often elevated levels of autonomic arousal that leave us ruminating and leave us

having challenges with sleep we really should all strive to limit those interactions to the extent that we can on the reverse side of that as Lisa Felman Barrett so beautifully pointed out we also have the capability to regulate each other's nervous systems in ways that produce savings that is that allow us to feel and indeed cause physiological changes that make us feel not just happier not just relaxed not just happy because we enjoy interacting with somebody but or a group but that give us a savings that give us the kind of resources literally metabolic and

neurochemical resources that make us feel more capable and give us a sense of elevated mood and improved mental health when we are not engaging with those people and this is highly subjective of course but you should be able to distinguish in fact I encourage you to spend a little bit of time maybe even just five or 10 minutes thinking about you know who are the individuals and groups that I interact with that leave me feeling taxed you know that really seem to drain my energy and have me ruminating and in a not good space when

I leave whatever interaction I had with them this could be a real interaction or online interaction indeed I did this the other day based on Lisa's suggestion I found it to be tremendously useful what I did is I decided to and by the way this was happening on a run where I was thinking you know a lot of my mind is in a conversation with people that aren't even here I was sort of working through a conversation I was thinking about what I would say what I did say what they said in an interaction that

unfortunately was pretty unpleasant it wasn't extremely unpleasant but it was pretty unpleasant and I realized okay that that is a sort of interaction that I would like to avoid in the future because it wasn't happening right then but it was carried forward into a portion of my day my morning run that for me is normally very pleasureful and quite sacred to me actually so paying some attention to how much of your internal dialogue is with yourself versus with others and how much of that is positive or negative is extremely beneficial and I'm not talking about

always just thinking about oneself and not thinking about others to the contrary we also need to think as Lisa pointed out about who are the people with whom we interact with or observe that lead us to have ongoing dialogue with them in our mind or think about those interactions in ways that give us energy that lead to energetic savings literally metabolic savings that we can apply not just in those interactions but in our work Endeavors and our solo Endeavors whatever that we're doing when we are away from those people so while this concept of savings

or neutral or taxation of our metabolic and our neurochemical systems might seem a little bit squishy it is not squishy this is a neurobiological concept it's also a psychological concept and it's one that I'm so glad that Lisa brought up because social connection social interaction is so vital to our mood and mental health but oftentimes we hear social connection we think oh that means we have to spend a lot of time with friends we have to organize dinner parties well sure that's all fine and good if you can do that and I do of course

encourage people to spend time with those that they love but it's also important to take a step back and just think a bit maybe even write out a bit you know who are the groups and sorts of individuals and interactions that really tax you who are the people you find kind of neutral and what are the individuals and groups that really provide what Lisa referred to as savings that is they tap into the metabolic and neurochemical Pathways that lead us to have improved mood and mental health not just during those interactions but away from those

interactions as well and often pervasively and extremely positively so so it this is no small de this is a really important aspect of our mental health now the sixth pillar in the big six is stress control and the reason it's included is that look stress is going to happen life is filled with so-called stressors and for a good number of years in fact the last 15 years there's been a lot of debate in the field of Psychology and Neuroscience as well whether or not stress is good for us whether or not stress is bad for

us whether or not we simply need to reframe stress as good or bad and to some extent all of that is true you know we know that chronic stress is not good for our memory our immune system or our health we also know that if you understand the reality which is that stress also allows us to harness our mental and physical resources to perform better than we would otherwise in certain circumstances and that provided we can get to sleep each night that perhaps stress isn't so bad and perhaps is even performance enhancing I talked about

this in the guest episode with Dr Ali Crumb from the psychology department at Stanford and I've talked about this in other podcasts as well and I'm not here to tell you that stress is good for you I'm not here to tell you that stress is bad for you what I am going to tell you is that it is extremely important that we all have readily accessible Stress Management tools that work the first time and every time and these fall into two categories the first category are realtime tools so tools that you can use to reduce

your level of stress in real time and the best way that I'm aware of that's grounded in excellent physiology and Neuroscience to reduce your stress in real time is the so-called physiological side I did not invent this pattern of breathing it's not breath work per se this is a pattern of breathing that we all naturally do in our sleep to restore carbon dioxide and oxygen levels to their proper ratios we also do it periodically throughout the day without noticing indeed we have a defined or specific neural circuit in our brain that extends to our diaphragm

and communicates with aspects of our heart Etc that allow physiological size to calm us down faster at least in my knowledge than any other directed protocol and the physiological sigh as many of you know is very simple and straightforward anyone can do this you simply do a big inhale through your nose try and maximize the inflation of your lungs and then before you exhale sneak in another brief inhalation even if it's just a tiny micro inhalation to maximally inflate the lungs and that has an important effect on the little Sachs in the lungs called the

avioli of the lungs it's going to open up whatever avioli we collapsed in there and then you're going to do a long extended exhale through the mouth and typically just one although sometimes it requires two or three but just one physiological sigh is effective in bringing down one's level of stress significantly enough that you don't need to do it again so this can be done essentially anywhere and by anyone I suppose probably couldn't do it if you were underwater or certainly don't do it if you're underwater but otherwise it's a very safe and very effective

way to calm down and reduce your levels of stress in real time maybe before public speaking or in whatever circumstance you feel you need to calm down in real time so I'll demonstrate the physiological side for you here I've done this many times before in previous episodes but for those of you that haven't heard or seen those episodes I feel obligated to do it again now okay so it's a deep inhale through the nose followed by another brief inhale through the nose and then a long exhale through the mouth and before you start asking questions

about what do I do if I have a deviated septum can it be just through the mouth do the first two through the nose do the third through the mouth so it's like this and indeed I feel calmer and indeed if you do it you will feel calmer you'll notice that second inhale through the nose was kind of sharp in the sense that I had to really push um put some physical effort into making it happen and you know my shoulders jolted upwards if you just listening to this and not watching my shoulders jolted upwards

that second inhale through the nose is important for a variety of reasons I've talked about elsewhere so the physiological sigh is going to be the go-to protocol for you again not invented by me this is not huberman breathing this is a pattern of breathing discovered in the 1930s by physiologists it's hardwired into our nervous system and that's what makes it so great it works the first time and it works every time so that's to my knowledge the best way to control your stress in real time now why is that important for mood and mental health

well as we'll talk about later if you want to access your so-called generative drive a theme that we're going to get into in a bit more detail this is something that came up during the series with Dr Paul kti you will learn that stress and anger and negative emotions while they can be very motivating very arousing they are not going to be good for your long-term mood and mental health period so having tools to regulate your stress and your levels of anger your levels of reactivity and also to elevate your feelings of agency and control

over your life starting with agency and control over your physiology your internal state is going to be vital and what I love about the physiological sigh is that of course it's completely zero cost but also there's a dedicated circuit in your brain and body for this particular pattern of breathing we do it spontaneously but you can do it intentionally and it works just as well if not better to regulate your levels of stress that is to bring them down which has outsize positive effects on your mood and mental health not just in the moment but

also should improve your confidence that when stress comes because the world is filled with stressors it's not if it's when when stress comes that you will have a physiologically scientifically supported tool to deal with and reduce that stress now in addition I do believe it's important for sake of mood and mental health to also have a tool or a protocol to raise your stress threshold that is to increase your capacity to deal with life stressors without them feeling so stressful and there are a number of different ways to do this but they all center around

elevating your levels of adrenaline epinephrine and norepinephrine nor adrenaline those are the same thing just they have multiple names forgive me I didn't give the same two things four names so don't blame me blame the other scientists that did it the point is there are several ways that you can self-induce elevations of noradrenaline and adrenaline and then to learn to Anchor your mind and your thinking to stay calm in the elevated adrenaline States as a practice for when stressors hit you in the outside world and your adrenaline and noradrenaline Spike now one of the best

ways to do this because it works the first time and every time and is also zero cost in fact it will save you money is to put yourself in a cold shower or other deliberate cold exposure environment but most everyone has access to a cold shower not everyone but most people and of course by turning off the heat you're going to reduce Heating cost right your water bill so getting into a cold shower for a minute or so to elevate your levels of adrenaline and learning to either use your breathing you could do physiological size

or to distract yourself or whatever tools and approaches you need to be able to stay calm while you have elevated levels of adrenaline in your body and the reason deliberate cold exposure works so well to do this is that it is pretty non-negotiable even if you really love cold showers or cold plunges or things that sort you're still going to get that elevated adrenaline and noradrenaline it's pretty much non-negotiable you know for the first 10 or 15 seconds that you get into a cold plunge or a cold shower you should fully expect yourself to feel

stress and for your breathing to accelerate and then your goal is to try and anchor or control your breathing in that stressful environment the reason for doing this is that it's a practice it's a practice that's going to translate to a better ability to manage your internal State and therefore your thinking your cognition and your ability to make good decisions under stress it's not about becoming Untouched by stress it's about being able to better navigate stress indeed I think of this as analogous to driving in fog something that I had to learn to do because

I grew up in the Bay Area and it can be very foggy there sometimes and of course you don't learn to drive in fog the first day you learn how to drive but the first time you hit heavy fog driving where you can only see one reflector in front of you at a time it is truly stressful right you don't know if you're going to come up on another vehicle in an instant which of course can happen so you have to adjust a number of things you have to learn how to do that and while

I would never elect to drive in fog learning to drive in fog teaches you how to be comfortable driving in different weather environments same thing with driving in a rain Stormer for you East Coasters from the Northeast learning how to drive in a snowstorm you would never elect to do that but once you do it a few times you feel more comfortable in those extreme conditions so that's really what raising your stress threshold is all about of course do it safely do it under conditions in which you're not going to get hurt or anyone else

will get hurt but learning how to do this can be extremely beneficial and of course deliberate cold exposure isn't the only way but frankly it's the most reliable way and it's the most versatile way to do that because you can do it in your shower or in a cold Plunge at home so you can practice these things again Safety First always make sure you're not exposing yourself to cold to the extent that you're going to damage yourself mentally or physically but it's a great practice and you could probably think of other ways to spike your

adrenaline that was safe and of course life will spike your adrenaline so you can also use real life as your uh you know your stress inoculation tool and we all have to do that anyway what I'm suggesting is that you adopt a real-time tool physiological size and that you adopt at least one offline tool that you do anywhere from one to three maybe seven days a week but at least one day a week that you put yourself into a cold shower deliberate cold exposure not for sake of increasing metabolism or anything else but really just

to learn how to calm yourself and maintain clear cognition when stress hits because indeed stress is going to hit so that's the big six for improving mood and mental health and the big six apply that is they are the Cornerstone for mood and mental health regardless of who you are regardless of your age regardless of whether or not you're dealing with an acute or a severe mood or mental health disorder or you find yourself to be reasonably healthy with respect to mood and mental health and you simply want your mood and mental health to be

stable and or improve over time time now the reason why the big six those six pillars are so important for mood and mental health and indeed form a critical component of what Dr Paul kti referred to as the first principles of self-care is that those six pillars establish a millu that is an environment of neurochemicals including neuromodulators such as dopamine serotonin epinephrine norepinephrine acetylcholine and other neurochemicals as well as well as hormones to testosterone estrogen prolactin cortisol and immune molecules and on and on that lead to a high degree of predictability in your brain and

nervous system now what do I mean by that why would predictability be such a key component of mood and mental health is it really just about knowing that you're going to feel energized in the early part of the day and tired at the end of the day now that might be part of it but that's not the major takeaway the major takeaway is that as Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett so aptly point pointed out your brain and indeed your entire nervous system has a couple of major jobs you know it has the job of regulating your

breathing and your heart rate Etc it also has the job of regulating your thinking and your planning and your memory those are the jobs of the brain and nervous system that we normally hear about but if we think about the more macro jobs that the brain has the key function of the brain certainly the parts of the brain that are more recently evolved the ones involved in thinking and planning Etc are really involved involved in generating predictions predictions about what's going to happen next and whether or not you're going to be prepared for what's going

to happen next and indeed Dr Lisa Felman Barrett also beautifully Illustrated this model of the brain as regulating a brain body budget and moods and a related topic which she called affect okay I'll explain what affect is in a moment setting the stage for being able to better predict what's going to happen next and therefore regulating your mood in the moment let's just take a moment and explore that statement in a little bit more detail essentially what she was saying and what I'm now again saying is that your brain and body go through different states

your state at a given moment can be labeled as your affect your affect includes a lot of different things including levels of autonomic arousal levels of hormones levels of transmitters all of that stuff but it falls under the umbrella of affect affect essentially sets the stage for particular emotions to be more likely or less likely to emerge so emotion and affect aren't the same thing affect is a bit more General and sort of undergirds the possibility of having certain moods like feeling elated happy or sad or depressed it really sets the general stage for different

types of specific emotions even highly specific emotions so in that way when you're taking care of the big six when you're tending to these six pillars on a regular basis and I should point out that we really want to tend to those six pillars every single day or every single 24 hours we really need to make those a regular investment to the extent that we can when we do that we create a neurochemical and a neural milu that allows the brain to be in a better predictive state it allows the brain to give rise to

a certain aex spelled a CS so affex that lead to certain emotions being more or less likely to occur put very simply when we're tending to those six pillars on a regular basis we feel better more generally and therefore the emotions that we tend to have under different conditions even conditions of a difficult interaction with a cooworker or with a family member tend to be more positive than if we are not tending to those six pillars now in some sense that's sort of a duh statement for instance if you're sleep deprived if you're not fed

well like you haven't eaten in a few hours of course you're going to be more irritable you're going to be more reactive you are going to be more emotionally labile but sleep and nutrition are just two of those six core pillars when we talk about those core pillars and the necessity for tending to them on a regular every 24-hour basis what we're really talking about is creating a millu within our brain and nervous system that allows the nervous system to do what it does best and in fact what its main job is to do which

is to predict what's going to happen next because as Lisa Feldman Barrett pointed out emotions are really context dependent states that allow us to navigate not just our present circumstances but they are our nervous system and brain's best guess about the circumstances that we are soon going to encounter now I don't offer you all of that as kind of a a bunch of you know Tangled mess of nerd speak to confuse you what I'm saying is that by tending to those six core pillars you are shifting the likely aects that you will EXP exp erience

and therefore the likely emotions that you'll experience so you're biasing your whole system towards more positive affect and more positive emotions regardless of what your life circumstances happen to be and the stressors that you encounter and indeed you also are including that six pillar of stress control so when those stressors arrive you will be better able to navigate them now this view of emotion regulation of mood and mental health is certainly not a novel concept people have talked about the physiological regulation of mood from the time of William James and even earlier you know it's

been a long-standing question for instance or debate in Psychology and philosophy you know do we feel anxiety in our body and then label it as anxiety or do we feel anxiety in our mind and then our body follows that's been a long-standing debate and frankly there's evidence on both sides which leads me to the conclusion I think most neurobiologists and psychologists to the conclusion that those things are interrelated in a way that we can't really dissociate them completely at any level right when your heart rate goes up and you start breathing thing faster you know

if I were to induce that state in you you'd probably interpret that as feeling anxious in addition to that something can make you anxious before your heart rate and breathing increases and then your heart rate and breathing increases so no need to tease those apart but if you think about the brain in large part as a prediction machine and your brain as a metabolic regulator it's trying to decide which organs need resources how much resource can I dedicate to thinking to creativity to enjoying social interaction to paying attention to what somebody else is is saying

as opposed to what's going on inside my body all of those major functions of the brain as they relate to affect and emotions are going to be best supported that is biased toward positive mood positive affect positive emotions and therefore positive mental health outcomes when we're tending to those six pillars Dr Lisa feldin Barrett referred to that whole process as the brain regulating a brain body budget and she had beautiful analogies for that budget and that's what led to the description of social interactions is either generating savings or being neutral or generating a taxed feeling

literally taxing that brain body budget and I love that concept and it's one that you can keep in mind and indeed we can inject a lot of specificity into this whole process of improving mood and mental health through specific protocols if you simply remember if you make a daily investment in the six core pillars you are building up that brain body budget you will have more energetic resources to spend on whatever life circumstances come your way now before we move into a discussion about protocols for how to better understand your life narrative to enhance your

sense of self and confidence and things of that theme I briefly want to mention that of course there are known tools out there in the medical community and psychological Community for improving mood and mental health and while there are a variety of tools one of the main tools of the psychiatrist is prescription drugs that Target specific neuromodulator systems in the brain and body for instance SSR selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors or atypical anti-depressants that Target the dopamine and epinephrine system such as well Butrin bryone or other types of anti-depressants or for instance nowadays there's a lot

of growing excitement about clinical trials using relatively High dosages of psilocybin which by the way way closely mimics the chemical serotonin that's right psilocybin which is converted to salicin in the brain if you look at it chemically it looks very much like serotonin although it has distinct effects from serotonin I talked about psilocybin and what's being done in terms of the clinical trials safety considerations I talked about the potential Hazard considerations and where the legality and all of that is going in that episode if you want to check that out but the reason I'm taking

a moment to mention these drugs things like ssris prox lat talopram Wellbutrin cybin and so on is that all of them Target specific neuromodulator systems in the brain and body and at the same time it's fairly clear that mood disorders such as major depression are not necessarily deficits in things like serotonin or dopamine they can be but most often they are not so why are such drugs prescribed for mood disorders and for mental health disorders well because if specific neuromodulators like serotonin dopamine or epinephrine are dramatically increased above Baseline that affords the brain the ability

to rewire itself really the way to think about ssris or atypical anti-depressants or psilocybin for the treatment of major depression is really to think about them as chemical tools to open or access neuroplasticity and that's why it's oh so important that those drugs be combined with talk therapy where people are actively working through the sources the real life sources and the historical sources maybe even the trauma based sources of their depression and I mention this because you know there's a lot of debate nowadays as to whether or not you know these drugs are useful whether

or not the side effect profiles justify their use whether or not you know they are applicable to Young populations you know there's a lot of debate about this and certainly in the case of the psychedelics there's a lot a lot of debate because this is newly emerging area and there's still not a lot of data although it's starting to you know increase over time but the key Point here is that all of these drugs have the potential to work in some people not others some people you know they simply don't work for and they cause

more problems than solutions they solve but they tend to work by increasing the propensity for neuroplasticity by changing the neuromodulator milu in the brain and this is an important point when thinking about tool tools for enhancing mood and mental health that when we think about tools for enhancing mood and mental health and next of course we are going to talk about the tools that are specifically designed to Target a specific aspect of one's life story or concept of self all of that is always operating on a backdrop of two things that overall neurochemical millu and

autonomic function that the six pillars relate to and support if we're tending to those but any Improvement in mood and mental health that's it's going to be significant it's going to be noticeable and it's going to be stable it's going to be pervasive over time is going to require that some degree of neural plasticity some degree of neural rewiring occur so I'm not bringing up the topic of these particular drug tools to say that they are the best way to improve mood and mental health I'm certainly not saying that they are but one way to

potentially improve mood and mental health and if they are going to work they always work best when done in concert with talk therapy because they are opening the opportunity for neuroplastic icity but then that neuroplasticity has to be directed toward a particular endpoint there has to be specific work that's being done by the individual or ideally the individual with an expert trained clinically certified therapist or psychologist or psychiatrist in order to make sure that the neuroplastic changes that occur lead to long-standing improvements in mood and mental health over time indeed the drugs that I just

described were originally designed as tools to to allow people to access changes within their brain that would then allow them to enhance mood and mental health but not have to rely on the drugs themselves for improved mood and mental health and along those lines I'm sure some of you out there are thinking about the supplement based or nutrition-based approaches to enhancing these neuromodulators and indeed while they don't have the same potency as things like well Butrin and ssris at increasing things like dopamine and serotonin respectively there is a growing number of people out there that

are relying on say daily supplementation with anywhere from 1 to three grams with of el tyrosine you know amino acid precursor to dopamine combined with often you know 300 to 600 milligrams of alpha GPC as a way to enhance dopamine and acetylcholine and to set the stage for elevated levels of neuroplasticity but it's very important to point out that the amino acid precursors to the various neuromodulators like El tyrosine like El tryptophan so El tyrosine precursor to dopamine ELP toan precursor to serotonin and so on that those don't have the same degree of potency that

is ability to enhance those neuromodulators and so the extent to which they enrich the possibility for neuroplasticity Still Remains somewhat obscure there haven't been clinical trials on that yet at least not clinical trials that I am aware of so I mention all of that stuff about drugs whether or not it's psychedelics or whether or not it's prescription anti-depressants or whether or not people are using a supplement based amino acid based protocol for increasing certain neurom modulators I feel was important to mention all of that because well first of all it's quite prominent out there certainly

in the case of prescription anti-depressants and there's growing prominence and use of relatively high do psilocybin again always in done with support talk therapy this is done in the legal setting I said legal not illegal a legal setting with a board certified therapist this is being done on University campuses within research lab and of course I acknowledge that there are people who are using these compounds outside the realm of the University clinical study environment so I mention these chemicals not because I'm pointing to them as the path to improved mood and mental health they can

be but they aren't always and as I mentioned before they can sometimes cause problems that lead people to wish that they hadn't taken them or to decide to not take them any further a decision that absolutely has to be made with a healthc care professional who's well certified to do that but I'm mentioning these tools because I want to understand if they work why they work and one key point that was really emphasized by Dr Paul kti who as I mentioned before is a psychiatrist so he uses pharmacology in his practice although he uses other

non-pharmacologic tools as well is that these pharmacologic tools are never to be viewed as the Beall endall of enhancing mood and mental health they are but one path to improving mood and mental health and indeed should be viewed as a path to getting people who are otherwise unable to engage in those six core pillars those first principles of mental health to be able to do those things on a regular basis and then perhaps based on a discussion with their clinician these people could come off those pharmacologic agents maybe yes maybe no it depends on the

individual it depends on the circumstances but those core six pillars those first principles of mental health that include but are not limited to those core six pillars are absolutely essential there's no drug that can replace those Cor six pillars I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor insid tracker insid tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health goals I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many

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nutrition behavioral modifications supplements Etc that can help you bring those numbers into the ranges that are optimal for you if you'd like to try inside tracker you can go to insidetracker docomo to get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans again that's inside s tracker.com huberman okay so setting aside the core six pillars let's now talk about other tools for mood and mental health that center around really what we more typically think of when we think of mood and mental health which is emotions when Dr Lisa Felman Barrett was a guest on the podcast she

said something that was really incredible and it's something that's strongly grounded in excellent scientific data which is the more specificity that we can put to labeling our emotions the better off we're going to be in terms of our overall mental health let me restate that the more specific language that we can put to our own internal emotions even if that language is just to ourselves in our own internal narrative we don't even have to speak out what those labels are the better that we're going to feel over time and indeed this effect can be quite

rapid and indeed Dr Lisa Felman Barrett has done research on this very specific topic topic it's something that's referred to as emotional granularity so while some of us move through life with a sort of what I call emogif of emotions you know you got your happy face happy your sad face sad you you're angry depressed anxious you know those are labels for emotional states or you could think of them as AFF effects or emotions I think of them as emotions but they're not very specific they're pretty broad bins we say sad or depressed or super

depressed or super sad anxious panic and we think of that as Nuance but it's not very nuanced and Lisa's laboratory and other Laboratories have explored two things first if people are asked to or encouraged to put more granularity more specificity on what they're feeling then it seems that their levels of emotional processing are better overall how does that translate to emotions well it translates to better overall feelings of well-being when one is placing more specificity on positive emotions and the flip side is also true so this is important to know if one places more specificity

on negative emotions it also can enhance one's kind of experience of those negative emotions now that means that this is a two-sided blade all right this isn't always a good thing and if one is thinking about protocols for improving mood and mental health the data make very clear that adding more specificity to our positive emotion in terms of the language we use but also just the depth with which we process and think about those positive experiences can be very beneficial for us so there are two studies that I'd like to highlight that relate to this

the first is entitled effective self-monitoring through experience sampling On Emotion differentiation in depression and the second study is entitled emotional granularity increases with intensive ambulatory assessment methodological and individual factors influence how much now each of these studies focus on something slightly different the first study was mainly focused on people who have depression and they were cued several if not many times per day to just think about and report on their emotional state and that was done in order to get people to place more granularity more specificity on what they're feeling but also simply to tap

into how they're feeling on a more regular basis throughout the day the second study which is one that included Dr Lisa Felman bear as an author was slightly different because it focused on non- depressed individuals and it cued them to touch into their emotions more times per day and it also included some physiological measurements and one in particular that we're going to talk about in some detail now I don't have time to go into all the details of these studies I may do that in a future podcast episode but the key takeaways are very important

for all of us to know which are first of all the more often that you can ask yourself you know what am I really feeling right now how do I feel and and this is so critical the more that you force yourself to not use broad labels or simply veilance labels veilance labels are good or okay or bad and instead understand that good is not an emotion okay is not an emotion bad is not an emotion but rather saying you know I feel you know curious but a little anxious if that happens to be the

case or I feel you know bored um but you know also a little bit in positive anticipation about what's going to happen tomorrow things of that sort putting more nuance and specificity on your emotions but also touching into or thinking about your own emotional states more times per day clearly has positive outcomes for mood and mental health and the reasons for that are incredibly interesting and this is something everybody should understand why would it be that putting more specificity on what we're feeling so perhaps just in our own heads like thinking okay how do I

feel right now like if I were to do that right now I'd say I feel energized and happy I do I really enjoy doing what I'm doing so I wouldn't say I'm like off the chart in awe or Elation but I'm very happy and I feel energized you know earlier today I was feeling a little bit fatigued and a little bit confused because I was trying to sort out something and it wasn't making sense to me um so assessments like that which can be told to somebody else or that we just hold internally done repeatedly

throughout the day anywhere from three to six times throughout the day just periodically pinging ourselves maybe you set an alarm or maybe you just decide to every once in a while you know maybe every time you you go into an elevator or every time you go up a flight of stairs you just ask yourself yeah how do I feel right now and thinking about that for a moment and you don't have to write it down although I suppose you could it turns out that just that practice can really enhance our so-called emotional granularity that can

enhance our positive emotions and affect and in addition it provides us a better sensitivity to better understand those negative emotions which sounds like it might be a bad thing but those negative emotions have information in them right this is one thing that's often lost in those broad categorizations of anxious or sad or depressed and keep in mind of course that some people are genuinely clinically depressed and that needs to be taken extremely seriously just like some people are genuinely clinically anxious and that needs to be taken seriously but most of us when we throw out

the words depressed angry sad we're not using enough nuance and it doesn't really apply to our internal States or the circumstances that we're in and as a consequence we suffer it's not just about communicating our emotions we suffer because the data say that the more Nuance the more emotional granularity that we have the richer is our experience of the positive aspects of life and the more effectively we can navigate the negative aspects of life right again negative emotions perhaps isn't the best way to even describe negative emotions because that label negative implies that we should

avoid it and in fact those negative emotions provide a lot of information about perhaps social interactions that we should seek to avoid in the future and so on and so forth now one of the most interesting things about this whole process of increasing emotional granularity and touching in several times per day into how we feel something that's completely zero cost takes just a moment to do that we can get much better at over over time that was clearly seen in these studies that people get much better at doing this it becomes more fasile for them

very quickly is that it correlates with improvements in physiological metrics that relate to overall improvements in mood and mental health and the specific physiological metric that I'm referring to is so-called vagal tone some of you have perhaps heard of the vagus nerve it's the tenth cranial nerve it's an extensive peripheral nerve that it goes out of the brain kind at the level of the the neck uh it's one of the cranial nerves that extends um to essentially all the organs of the body the heart the lungs Etc but it's a two-way street it's a super

highway of nerves out of the brain and into the body and it's a super highway of nerves back from the bodily organs to the brain and it's involved in regulating a lot of so-call autonomic function so how fast our heart rate is how fast our breathing is rates of digestion and all of that weaves together to create those things that we call aect our internal States so without going into a ton of detail about the Vagas nerve there's something that's called cardiac vagal control cardiac vagal control is the extent to which that vagus nerve can

impact your heart rate and your overall feelings of calm or alertness now the simple way to think about this is more commonly referred to as heart rate variability heart rate variability is simply the distance between your heartbeats or rather the time between your Heartbeats which we know if those timings between your heartbeats are somewhat variable that is correlated with positive physical and mental health outcomes one of the ways that you can increase heart rate variability is to get regular cardiovascular exercise as well as doing resistance exercise and no surprise getting sufficient amounts of quality sleep

each night is also going to be very beneficial for heart rate variability now exercise and sleep of course are wonderful but it turns out that there's also a very rapid way to increase heart rate variability by activating the vagal innervation of the heart and the way that the heart and some other circuits within the so-called brain stem interact and that's through something called respiratory sinus arhythmia respiratory sinus arhythmia can be summarized very simply by saying when you inhale you speed your heart rate up and when you exhale you slow your heart rate down and it's

that exhale slowing your heart rate down that's mediated by the vagus nerve now there's a more thorough description of that which I'll just give you now and it's not that lengthy so here's how it goes when you inhale your diaphragm actually moves down and as a consequence your heart actually gets a little bigger it has a little more space as a consequence the fluid in your heart moves a little more slowly per unit volume and there's a neural signal to speed the heart up conversely when you exhale the diaphragm moves up that means there's a

little less space for the heart in the general area where it's sitting so the heart gets a little bit smaller a little more compact that means that the fluid in your heart is moving more quickly through that smaller space and there's a neural signal mediated by the Vagas to slow the heart down so that's why inhal speed your heart up and exhales slow your heart down that is the basis of so-called RSA or respiratory sinus arhythmia now what does any of that have to do with the granularity of language that we place on our emotions

turns out there's several studies showing that when people place more descriptive granularity on their emotions that is correlated with okay it's not causal but it's correlated with improvements in respiratory sinus arhythmia which we know correlate with improvements in heart rate variability indeed it's one of the major bases for heart rate variability which we know is correlated with not just positive physical health outcomes but positive mental health outcomes including lower levels of anxiety improved sleep and overall levels of mood this is a topic that I'm very familiar with because last year my laboratory at Stanford University

School of Medicine in collaboration with a colleague of mine Dr David Spiegel our associate chair of Psychiatry also at Stanford University School of Medicine published a clinical trial and cell reports medicine showing that there's a particular pattern of breathing that people can do for just 5 minutes per day that is effective in significantly improving various metrics related to mood and reducing anxiety and also improving sleep although I should say the protocol I'm about to describe didn't uniformly improve all of those metrics it had a bigger effect on some versus others I'll provide a link to

that study in the show note captions but if you're wondering what this protocol is that people did for 5 minutes a day that allowed them to by the way pervasively improve their mood so it wasn't just their mood while they were doing this five minute a day protocol it was improvements in mood Around the Clock essentially as well as improvements in other physiological metrics and other aspects of those six core pillars it was that physiological sigh that we talked about earlier although in this case we didn't have people do just one physiological sigh we had

people set aside five minutes per day so set a timer for 5 minutes they could sit or lie down they could do it anytime of day and we just had them repeat that physiological sigh for a duration of 5 minutes total so that they would do two inhales through the nose and then a full exhale to lungs empty through the mouth then they would do it again and then they would do it again and again until those five minutes were completed again the outcome of that clinical trial was that that particular pattern of breathing which

we called cyclic physiological sighing for five minutes per day again done any time of day had the most positive outcomes in terms of improving mood and mental health and autonomic function those things related to sleep and heart rate variability so that's a very simple very minimal time investment zero cost tool that anyone can use that again improves various metrics of physical health but also improves metrics of mental health and it ties right back in with what was observed in the work by Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett exploring how putting more word label emotional granularity on one's

emotional states positively impact our physiological State and the fact that thinking about our emotions more frequently throughout the day and deliberately putting more label granularity on those emotions frequently throughout the day is correlated with this Improvement in respiratory sinus arhythmia and heart rate variability the fact that these things all relate to one another should not surprise us because indeed there's a previous paper this is a quite extensive review actually it's a very nice review it's one that I encourage anyone who's interested in these topics to explore especially psychologists who might have a interest in physiology

or psychiatrists or simply people who are interested in mindbody stuff this is a review published in 2017 in the journal biological psychology entitled cardiac vagal control as a marker of emotion regulation in healthy adults a review and again it's a really wonderful literature review of the peer-reviewed primary research which really establishes that this thing vagal tone our ability to kind of put the brakes on our autonomic nervous system and slow our heart rate down deliberately through our breathing and perhaps even just by stopping and reflecting on what our emotional states are is really beneficial for

our overall mood and mental health and I want to highlight bold and underline that word overall because it's not just the case that people experience elevated mood and mental health in the moments where they stop and go oh how am I feeling oh you know am I feeling you know bored or agitated do I feel particularly excited sure that can have some impact on physiological metrics and mood and mental health but in all of these studies the outcome seems to be that people's overall levels of mood and mental health are enhanced not just while they're

thinking about their emotions or doing this five minute a day cyclic sighing but Around the Clock which is really terrific because I think that's what most all of us want which is improve mood and mental health not just in the moments when we do a practice or in the few minutes afterwards but 24 hours a day I suppose we might segment out sleep during which you know hopefully we're having great dreams as opposed to other kinds of dreams but the point is everyone I have to imagine would like to feel better and have elevated mood

and mental health during the times when they're awake and indeed these sorts of protocols have been shown to do that or so say the scientific data now we are going to discuss the tools for enhancing mood and mental health gleaned from the four episode guest series with Dr Paul Ki who is a medical doctor specializing in Psychiatry he also has particular expertise in trauma however the four episode guest series that we did with Dr kti was really about exploring the self as well as tools and protocols for not just gaining a better understanding of oneself

but also for gaining a better understanding and tools for relating to others AKA relationships thread through the series was a model of the mind and how it works to create everything from feelings thoughts to behaviors that Dr Paul Conti described as an iceberg model and I perhaps should refer you to the fact that he actually Drew out this model and we provided it as a zeroc cost PDF in the show note captions for every single one of those episodes in that four episode series we also provide a link to this model in the show note

captions for this tools episode the model is called the iceberg model and as the name suggests it resembles an iceberg in which the vast majority of our mind's processing occurs below our conscious awareness in our unconscious mind so that's the portion of the iceberg that resides below the surface whereas the portion of our mental processing that we are aware of resides above the water surface the so-called conscious mind so a key aspect of the iceberg model is that the unconscious mind is responsible for the vast majority of our feelings thoughts and behaviors but that we

are not aware of how this unconscious mind is doing that and by extension the tool and protocols that Dr Ki described largely deal with going into the unconscious and figuring out how the unconscious processing is influencing our conscious processing both in healthy and in unhealthy ways and when we say in healthy and unhealthy ways we're largely referring to the presence of defenses so some of you have perhaps heard of defenses before some defenses can indeed be healthy and others are unhealthy there are defenses such as projection sublimation denial and during the course of that four

episode series Dr kti explains how projections are not always bad for us indeed they can protect us from Panic from severe trauma but they also can create difficulties in processing our own understanding of self and of our life experiences in ways that can actually be damaging to us so a key takeaway from that four episode series is to understand and acknowledge that your unconscious mind is driving much of what you feel think and do however by doing structured exploration of the self and we'll talk about how to do that one can gain better understanding of

how that unconscious processing is influencing what you think feel believe and do so once you accept the important role of the unconscious mind and you make the decision that you want to better understand how your unconscious mind and conscious mind are in this constant dialogue and how you can have that dialogue better serve you there are a series of actionable tools that you can do that will allow you to better understand yourself and how you relate to others and the first of these tools is to really understand your self-concept now of course most all of

us know our own name rarely do we ever forget that name we have some concept of where we're from who our parents are what our present and future goals might be where we've succeeded where we failed in life and on and on but the self-concept goes far beyond that sort of CV list or our biography of self indeed the self-concept has a lot to do with our self-confidence our feeling ings of ability both to overcome challenges but also our ability to serve the world that we're in and our ability to change ourselves over time now

of course the degree to which somebody might have confidence or less confidence or the degree to which somebody feels that they can exert influence on their environment and their goals is of course going to vary based on their personal history but as Dr kti explained even independent of all that if one puts in some work to better understand their self-concept to to really get a clear picture of oneself from that one can develop more agency with which to pursue one's aspirations and to reach their goals and the key concept here is one that's particularly powerful

for both exploring and building up one's concept of self and that's to consciously and deliberately build a life narrative now a simple way to do this that can be very effective is to create a series of folders or documents it could even be a stack of papers I prefer to do this in electronic form and I confess that even before learning about this tool from Dr Ki I had initiated doing this tool starting back in 2015 and it's fairly straightforward but as I mentioned before it can be very powerful and it simply consists of building

out separate folders or pieces of paper and this could be done electronically or on real world paper with paper and pen or paper and pencil and essentially what you do is you're going to divide your life history into some regular increments so for for me the way that I did this is I created a folder on my laptop that I actually called lifetime so that's the title of the main folder and then within that folder I have a series of folders Each of which spans a particular phase of my life so 0 to 5 years

of age 6 to 10 years of age 11 to 15 years of age and so on and so forth now I'm 48 years old so I have folders that extend to age 50 currently although I will add folders going forward very soon and the idea here is that for each of those folders you're going to place a single word document into that folder and then on that word document you're not going to journal you're not going to do any sort of extensive writing rather You're simply going to put down bullet points with titles it could

be one or two sentences but typically it's just a few words describing some of the key Milestone events that you remember from that particular phase of your life so just for sake of example I'll read off some of the things that are included in the folders for my particular lifetime narrative but of course this relates to my lifetime narrative you should of course put the milestones and key bullet points that relate to your lifetime narrative but again just to give you a sense of the sorts of things that made it into this folder in my

six years old to 11 year-old folder um on that document I put where I was living at that time the city I was living the school that I went to I put a couple of teachers names uh teachers that had a particular influence on me um a particular summer camp experience um that was not a traumatic experience by the way it was a happy experience but for me it turned out to be a very transformative one and then there are a couple other things in there that are just Recollections of childhood's friends names okay so

seemingly mundane information perhaps but it looks more or less like a biography and yet other folders so for instance uh the folder that spans from 25 to 30 years of age is the time that I was in graduate school so it includes a note about graduate school a note about particular hobbies that I was interested in in addition to my scientific search at the time a couple of key relationships a couple of key relationship challenges as well as some things that at that time I was processing about prior years in particular my teen years in

high school now the key thing here is that whatever goes into these folders is what's important to you it could be positive events it could be negative events it could be events that for whatever reason you remember and keep surfacing in your mind that you think might be interesting or important at some later time or that you're concerned you might forget in fact that might be a really good me for whether or not you include something in these folders or not if there's something that you want to make sure that you never forget but that

you think you might forget I would encourage you to put it onto that word document and put it into that particular folder again this isn't about creating a coherent life story this is about creating a series of segments of small collections of key life events positive negative neutral inspiring basically anything that was Salient for you at that particular time and of course if you want to put Reflections about those particular events into that word document you're more than welcome to do that but the basis of this self-concept developing exercise is just that it's to develop

a historical sense of yourself of course bringing you up to present day where you will continue to add things to whatever Word document goes into that particular folder for the age you happen to be now now for some of you this kind of autobiographical bullet pointing might seem like it's just that some attempt to build or write an autobiography but it's very important to remember that these folders are for you these folders are not about writing a book about your life history although if you decide to do that with these folders at some point down

the line you know that sounds great but that's not the goal here the goal is for you to build a structured narrative representation of events that were key in your life and as described in the series with Dr kti this goes Way Beyond just understanding your past this is really about understanding past it's about understanding yourself at present and indeed it threads into your goals and aspirations for the future an important thing to understand about this tool or protocol is that it also has a incredible ability to Anchor you in your perception of the passage

of time you know some of us track the passage of time better than others both within the day and across days and years and so forth but this exercise in particular is very good at allowing you to see you know how much time you devoted at a given stage of your life to a given Endeavor whether or not you're stuck in patterns whereby you're still engaging in certain types of things professionally or relationship wise or in any other number of different ways that have you in a pattern that may or may not be serving you

well I want to emphasize again that this exercise is not about goal setting it's about your ability to build a structured narrative pattern from which you can look at it and then make a determination as to whether or not you know you feel that you're currently on the right path for you but it's not about projecting forward as to what your goals are we'll soon talk about that we'll talk about goals and aspirations in a moment this is really about better understanding what led you up to the place that you are now and it really

helps you pinpoint the keyw work that you need to do in terms of exploring your unconscious and conscious mind using some tools that we're going to get into subsequently so there's really no strict rules about how to do this exactly except that I do encourage you to make those increments across your lifespan manageable I wouldn't suggest doing it one for every year I wouldn't suggest a folder one for every 10 years I think a 3 to 5 year increments seem like a more reasonable and tractable way to go about this so that's one of the

sorts of tools that Dr Ki referred to as to how to build up one's self-concept which directly relates to things such as our confidence our ability to track our own behavior understand some of our motivations both conscious and unconscious but of course that practice is mainly a conscious exercise it's it's really not tapping directly into the unconscious in any kind of direct way as far as we know now we can contrast that with the tools and protocols that are designed to tap into the unconscious mind and of course there are a number of different ways

to do this that were discussed in that four episode series with Dr Ki but one of the most powerful ways to do this is by thinking about and indeed sometimes writing about or even analyzing one's dreams now dream analysis is something for which you can find a lot of books out there there are a lot of theories there's also a lot of AR arent that perhaps dream analysis which has roots in fraudi and psychology as well as other Traditions is perhaps not accurate I don't think we want to consider whether or not dream analysis is

accurate rather I think we should just acknowledge that when we are dreaming in particular the dreams that we have toward the later part of our night which are the dreams associated with rapid eye movement sleep that tend to be very emotionally Laden dreams as compared to the dreams that we have earlier in the night well when we consider the content of those dreams even even if we're not trying to interpret them it's very clear that those dreams reflect the unconscious mind controlling more of our internal dialogue or what we are experiencing at that time whereas

when we are awake our conscious mind tends to take over more of the narrative the internal narrative and the control of our feelings thoughts and behaviors but as I mentioned before the unconscious mind is always exerting an influence regardless of whether or not we are sleep or awake with that said one way to explore the unconscious mind and to begin to get a better understand about how it might be influencing our waking States and behaviors is to actually record and think about one's dreams now of course some people remember their dreams on a regular basis

other people don't some people actually believe that they don't dream studies out of sleep Laboratories at Stanford University of Pennsylvania Harvard and elsewhere all generally agree that everybody dreams but not everybody remembers their dreams so if you're interested in tapping into an understanding of what your dreams are telling you which is basically a way of saying what your unconscious mind or dialogue consists of I highly recommend putting a journal so this would be any kind of paper and pen or paper and pencil type journal and the idea is this if you wake up and you

can remember your dream write down a few key bullet points from that dream if you feel you can write out the dream in a very kind of linear narrative this happened then that happened then this happened then that happened great but most most people find that their memory of their dream is rather fragmentary other people can't remember their dream or at least they wake up they feel like they were having a dream but they can't remember all of it or key components of it and for that I suggest that you try keeping your body completely

still and closing your eyes once again we don't quite understand why this is but when you look at the literature on dream recollection it seems that by keeping one's body completely still with eyes closed we have better access to whatever the contents of the dream that just occurred were okay so if you wake up and you can't remember your dreams try lying still for a few minutes and keeping your eyes closed and seeing whether or not that helps surface the content of that dream other people find that they get up they get out of bed

and then sometime in the middle of the morning maybe even later in the day the contents of a dream will just come to them well if that happens great I also highly recommend that you have a way to write down the contents of the of that dream now what you're looking for when you do this sort of tool or protocol I encourage you to be wary of any immediate interpretation of for instance okay animals in a dream mean children although they could you know there's not a lot of science that really supports that as a

firm statement and of course there are books out there and podcasts and a ton of information trying to help you interpret your dreams and while some of that can be fun and not all of it is entirely useless the goal here is not to interpret your dreams the goal here is to start recording some of the key takeaways Maybe maybe even the entire Narrative of the dreams that you have just prior to waking as a way to try and understand some of the themes that are occurring and recurring in the dialogue that exists within your

unconscious mind so a key aspect of this tool is that you're not going to take any one dream as an enormously informative dream it might be but more important in this particular tool is to write down the themes of a particular dream and then see whether or not those particular themes resurface again and again across different nights or across different dreams the idea here is that things that are repeating thematically will show up as different components in different dreams but that by keeping a dream journal you can start to identify some of these patterns that

are occurring from one dream to the next as opposed to having the same dream over and over but the point here is that you can explore the contents and the themes that's really the most important word here the themes of your unconscious mind that is a occurring if you start thinking about what's recurring during your dreams because dreams are a time when your unconscious mind is dominating The Narrative within your mind and brain now for those of you that dream a lot and remember your dreams as well as for those of you that do not

I would also encourage you to explore the contents of your thinking that is thinking about your thinking during so-called Lial States and the Lial State during which this can be particularly useful is Right upon waking so this is different than thinking about what you were dreaming about this is about keeping your eyes closed and body still we do think that that's important for doing this well because once you start moving your body you open your eyes and you start bringing in sensory experience for that day your mind dramatically shifts towards conscious processing but in that

Lial State between sleeping and awake when you wake up and you're a little sleepy maybe you don't want to get out of bed this happens to me all too often try closing your eyes and remaining perfectly still for maybe one to three minutes maybe five minutes and just pay attention to where your mind goes now you might fall back asleep be mindful of that depending on what you need to do that morning but a lot of people will find that their mind goes into this place that's neither sleep nor awake right this is a state

that very much resembles the state people achieve in things like Yoga Nidra yoga sleep or in non-sleep deep rest although it tends to be more dominated by the unconscious mind a little bit more sleep-like now some people find this practice to be difficult because they're the sort of people that wake up and they're just immediately ready to go most people however myself included find that when they wake up you know the mind isn't completely alert yet and you can use that period again just maybe two or three minutes maybe five minutes to start to pay

attention to the contents of your thinking see whether or not your thinking migrates from you know something related to work or to relationship or to self or to something you want to do or something that you're anxious about and so on and so on and here too you'll want to write this down so this is very much like the dream journaling we just talked about but it's slightly easier for most people to access especially people who have a hard time remembering their dreams and again it's an opportunity to access some of the contents of your

unconscious mind to learn to look at and see what's going on in your unconscious mind in a way that's very difficult if not impossible to do unless you're working with somebody who's very good at accessing unconscious such as a skilled psychiatrist or psychoanalyst and in that way allowing you to do introspective work which is not structured in terms of thinking trying to think about like what do I want what's going on you know why did they do that why did I react that way nothing like that you're simply observing your mind and seeing what's geysering

up from the unconscious that is you're getting a portal into that portion of the iceberg that resides below the surface of the water the next set of tools for exploring the self self-concept Etc from that four episode series with Dr Ki is journaling I'm going to do an entire episode of The hubman Lab podcast about journaling and there are a lot of different kinds of journaling and fortunately there are a lot of great peer-reviewed studies about the power of journaling for processing all sorts of things like emotional states trauma Etc they're basically two categories of

journaling that are very useful to carry out on a consistent basis and when I say consistent basis that could mean every day or it could mean three times a week it could even be once a week there really no hard and fast rules about this but when we think about journaling there really two main styles of journaling one is going to be free associative journaling sometimes people talk about this as a data dump right typically people will talk about the data dump as the morning notes which is when you wake up in the morning you

know you got a lot on your mind you can't organize your mind people who have a hard time structuring their thinking and behavior often find this very useful which is to you know take out a journal or a piece of paper again this is is just for you it's important that you realize and really make sure that you're the only person that's going to see these notes because a lot of people get into self-monitoring when they're doing their journaling they're thinking about well how's this going to look is my handwriting okay how's my punctuation what

are people going to think is this going to be a good book or not a good book listen none of this journaling that we're referring to is about your book or your autobiography this is really just for you this is an exploration of yourself that's designed to help you enhance your concept that is your understanding of self and indeed translates to better confidence better understanding of your goals and aspirations better understanding of your unhealthy patterns and defenses and on and on and so again the two styles of journaling are free association so where you literally

just write down any that comes to mind or that you feel like writing down within a given period of time for most people 10 minutes is ample time to do that for some people five will be enough and for some who have the time maybe 30 30 minutes but for me and I think for most people out there anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes of this data dump free association you know it could be your anxieties what you're thinking about what you're anxious about really could be about anything that comes to mind and this free

association process can be very useful for clearing out the Clutter so to speak the other style of journaling that's equally useful but for different reasons is structure journaling to have a goal for a given entry on a given day and again this could be done in the morning afternoon or night and the idea would be that you would set an intention and by intention I mean a specific topic that you're going to restrict your writing to and that writing should be about self in particular goals and aspirations what you've wanted in the past yes but

also what you want at present what you might want in the future for yourself these could of course be material things but in general this is more about aspirations of things that you would like like to accomplish or generate and the key word there is generate and if you listen to the four episode series with Dr kti he talked about three drives that exist in all of us these three drives are the aggressive Drive the pleasure drive and the generative drive and we don't need to go into a lengthy description about these drives right now

if you're curious about them and what they represent and uh how they can be in balance or out of balance and how that serves us or doesn't serve us please check out that four episode series with Dr because he goes into that in a fair amount of detail and also in an actionable way but the key thing here is that we're generative you know one of the things that I asked Dr kti at the outset and throughout the entire series was you know what is mental health you know we talk about physical health and we

have some idea of what that represents you know healthy blood pressure the ability to do certain forms of physical movement cognitive abilities you know I asked him how can we Define mental health and his answer was very straightforward and very powerful he said said what we all need to Aspire to is to be in states that is in the verb actions of agency and gratitude for as much of our Waking Life as possible now that sounds great right a sense of agency the ability to exert influence over our internal State and affect the world around

us in positive ways positive relationships reach our goals as well as gratitude being grateful for the opportunities that we've been afforded even grateful perhaps for some of the challenges that we've been afforded or that uh were selected for us that we had no control over and carrying that agency and gratitude forward because it gives rise to a sense of Peace contentment and Delight so all of that sounds wonderful right be in agency and gratitude as a verb States experience peace contentment and Delight but Dr kti acknowledged and we spent a good amount of time discussing

the fact that doesn't happen just because we decide we want to in fact agency and gratitude peace contentment and Delight geyser up from a whole set of other processes that we have to engage in on a regular basis and that really gets us back to those three drives he talked about how people tend to have more or less aggressive drive not just aggression in terms of violence although some people do have that but in terms of their determination and their sort of Leaning into friction even seeking out a friction people are on a Continuum with

respect to the aggressive drive he also talked about the pleasure drive and the fact that people are on a Continuum of the desire for pleasure to either be a hedonist or somebody who really avoids pleasure and kind of restricts pleasure from oneself and again that these things can slide around depending on our life circumstances our age Etc but that it's very important that we have a sense of where we are on that Continuum of an aggressive drive and a pleasure drive and that and here's the most important thing that our aggressive drive and pleasure Drive

never outsize our generative drive and that engaging our generative Drive is really the Hallmark of mental health that leads to that sense of agency and gratitude peace contentment and delight and he defined the generative Drive in the following way he said the generative Drive is our desire to create build and contribute to the world in meaningful ways and appreciate the process to get there it is the core feature of our mental health so if you want to learn more about the various drives and how they interact and how to access more generative drive again that's

all contained in the four episode series with Dr Ki but taking us back to the tools and takeaways from that four episode series the process of journaling in free association mode or the process of journaling in a conscious structured way is really about trying to access the generative drive and to build up that generative drive and one of the key things about conscious journaling is that it affords us the opportunity in a way that's not going to be seen by anybody else to really think about what our goals and aspirations are now you might say

you know I can't even think about my goals and aspirations I don't I don't know know what I want well that's fine then you should Journal about that however most people have some sense of what they would like but most people are simply not comfortable with writing those things out or even thinking about them and if you reflect on that how could it ever be that you would achieve those goals and aspirations if you're not even feeling comfortable enough to think about them or write about them and so the process of thinking about and writing

about your goals and aspirations is perhaps one of the key first steps towards being able to actualize those goals and aspirations and for some people this might be very easy to do you can simply write down say I want to you know be married by this age and I want to you know make x amount of money and I want to live here or there and certainly those sorts of goals and aspirations are perfectly valid for this type of exercise but so are the sorts of goals and aspirations that relate to feeling States like yeah

I would like to feel part of a community I would like to feel like an active contributor to a community and then the essential thing is to really flesh out out the detail around those goals and aspirations you know what size Community uh where do you see yourself fitting into this community are you doing this alongside other people or by yourself in other words to really get comfortable thinking about what your goals and aspirations are again completely from the perspective of self and that you are going to be the only person to see this particular

document now I will be the first to admit that the exercise that I just described not the free association journaling but the structured journaling of goals and aspirations I and many people find to be difficult to initiate difficult to initiate because there seems to be a bit of internal anxiety and friction around doing it there seems to be something that keeps many not all but many people from feeling as if they are even allowed to think about their goals and aspirations because many people default to well then you know I'll just be disappointed because it's

not going to work out I don't want to think about what I want because then I'll just be more disappointed and that particular frame of mind was actually discussed in the series with Dr Cony and he convinced me and he's the expert that the opposite is actually true when we are able to overcome some of our anxiety and really think about in a dedicated way what we would like to create for ourselves in our lives both present and future and keeping in mind our events of past because we always carry that life narrative forward then

we are in a far better place to actualize those goals and aspirations and he explained a variety of reasons why that's the case and his clinical observations and some of the are observations that really support that statement so I highly encourage you to think about embracing a process of journaling again you don't have to do this every day the journaling and the dream analysis take a little bit more time but they are oh so valuable for better understanding one's self-concept and they really thread forward into real everyday actions that can positively enrich your mood and

mental health now any description of science-based tools for mood and mental health would be incomplete without including some tools related to processing of traumas now the processing of traumas is something that especially in the case of major traumas or repeated traumas really should be carried out in concert with a expert trained clinician that is a psychologist or psychiatrist who's trained in helping people work through traumas however even if you're working with somebody who's expert in processing trauma there are specific tools that you can use on your own to accelerate that process and for people who

are working through what are sometimes called more minor traumas these are sometimes called Big tea big traumas and little te little traumas however you know that nomenclature doesn't take into account the fact that you know most of us can probably tell what the big traumas are for ourselves and for others but sometimes it's hard to tell whether or not those small traumas the little tea traumas actually are big te traumas so you know this is one of the major reasons why working with a licensed professional is really going to be advantageous and in many cases

necessary to work through trauma that said the self directed protocols for working through trauma have a lot to do with how we think about but more importantly at times how we talk about those traumas and Dr Paul kti talked about this not so much in the four episode series with us but in a particular podcast episode that he did with Dr Peter Atia who some of you are perhaps familiar with for his incredible podcast the drive but also for his excellent book outlive which deals with health span and lifespan or longevity now in that particular

conversation with Dr Ki and Dr AA Dr kti emphasized the fact that one of the ways that we hold ourselves back and indeed can exacerbate the negative consequences of trauma are the ways in which we modify our language to describe those traumas and what he said which is so important is that often times we don't allow ourselves to use language that's as big as is necessary to explain that trauma and the impact of that that trauma on us and on others in fact many people start to you know relegate their language to more passible in

a given sentence or passible in a given conversation now what we're not talking about here is the idea that okay you know screaming at somebody else about your trauma or using a lot of four-letter words is necessarily the best way to process that trauma verbally however we are talking about allowing oneself either in spoken form or in written form to really allow the magnitude of a given trauma to be expressed with a fair degree of intensity and language that can capture at least some of what that trauma represented for us or for others now as

Dr kti pointed out all too often we do the opposite what ends up happening is people will experience some sort of trauma either major or minor maybe single or repeated trauma and rather than being comfortable talking about it rather than using language that captures at least some of the magnitude of that trauma for them people start to talk about that trauma less frequently they start to distract themselves to think about other things instead of talking about or thinking about that trauma and what happens is that trauma Roots into our unconscious mind and starts to impact

Us in negative ways now those negative ways include increases in anxiety disruptions in sleep in fact one of the common ways in which trauma manifests in disruptions in sleep by way of rooting our unconscious is that people will wake up at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning let's just say after several hours of being asleep and immediately they're thinking about that thing that happened and they're upset about it the idea is that when we push those traumas down when we don't talk about them with people that we trust when we don't have a way to

consciously process those traumas using language that at least partially matches the magnitude of the impact of those traumas for us well then those traumas impact our unconscious mind in ways that lead our unconscious mind to literally wake us up in the middle of the night and remind us of that thing it's as if it's being thrown back in our face over and over also sometimes traumas will root their way down into our unconscious and then they will resurface in the mode of compulsive or obsessive thinking about that thing or perhaps other things again the unconscious

mind has a interesting and complicated number of different ways that it defends us the ways that it you know can create denial distraction that we might get hyperfocused on work as a way to not think about the trauma or hyper focused on some details in our environment and just really trying to focus on that because it's much easier to process and handle that than these traumas you know again the processing of trauma is a whole landscape into itself that actually was um beautifully described in terms of how it arises within us and how to process

traumas in a really structured way in a just fabulous book that was written by Dr Ki called The Invisible epidemic how trauma works and how we can heal from it and in that book Dr Ki explains a number of different ways that we can do self-directed work as well as work with licensed professionals to process traumas and help us move through those traumas so that they are not negatively impacting us going forward so I really encourage anyone that's trying to process traumas from the past and or present to check out Dr kti's book because it's

a spectacular resource but in terms of the tools related to processing trauma that we're talking about right now I think this point about really making sure that we allow ourselves to verbally process and emotionally process that trauma in a way that there's room for using language that captures some of the magnitude of that trauma and how it impacted us and others is going to be very important because otherwise what ends up happening is that we tend to adopt feelings of guilt and shame around those traumas simply by not talking about them by having them go

Inward and then they start to negatively impact our unconscious mind and then our unconscious mind tries to throw them up to the surface for our conscious mind to recognize by waking us up from sleep and in some cases by leveraging those unhealthy defenses things like denial things like you know the overindulgence in alcohol overindulgence of drugs ways to distract ourselves as well as projection and sublimation and the other types of defenses that Dr kti talked about in the four episode series again those defenses are not necessarily good or bad it depends on the circumstances the

unconscious mind is not trying to harm us your unconscious mind is part of you it is you but of course it is you acting in concert with your conscious mind and so really the tools and protocols from the four episode series with Dr Ki are aimed at helping you feel and access more sense of agency and gratitude on a regular basis more peace contentment and delight and doing so by touching into those different drives understanding what they are the aggressive Drive the pleasure drive and really making sure that your generative drive again I love this

description of the generative drive so much so that I'm going to read it again because this is really what it means to be mentally healthy again the generative Drive is our desire to create build and contribute to the world in a meaningful way and appreciate the process to get there it is the core feature of our mental health so being able to access that generative drive on a regular basis is is really what this thing that we call mental health is all about and the tools that I just described of course can be combined with

in any number of different ways with the tools that I described glean largely from the episode with Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett and so what you now have is a kit of tools and protocols for improving mood and mental health some of which are grounded in that core six the you know first principles of self-care are always going to be getting your physiology right so that your psychology can be right as well well of course you want to emphasize tools and protocols that build up your psychological processes and concept of self that's what the tools from

the Conti series that we just described are all about and then the tools from the episode with Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett sort of bridge the two because she talked about both the physiological and the psychological tools that really represent ways to enhance our mood and mental health and so by threading these three things together I believe it really arms us with the greatest degree of optimism and capacity to take control of this thing that we call our mood and emotions and to of course allow ourselves to feel the negative things we need to feel but

then process them in healthy ways and to exist as much as is reasonably possible in generally optimistic upbeat states that allow us to engage our generative drive and although we covered a lot of tools during this episode again I want to emphasize that the idea isn't to necessarily do all of them all at once maybe just pick one or two and start to implement them on a regular basis basis and by implementing those there's no reason to think that you would be significantly eating into your other demands on your time because ultimately the whole purpose

of having elevated mood and mental health is so that you can have better relationship to yourself and better relationship to others and to the world around you if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on both Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a festar review please check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and throughout today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast

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