#1 Neuroscientist: Truth About Laziness, Discipline, Exercise, Stress & Journaling | Andrew Huberman

is very hard to control the mind with the mind and i think a simple rule that people can adopt is when your mind is not where you want it to be look to your body use the body to shift the mind hi everyone drew road here our guest today is dr andrew huberman and he's here to teach us how to optimize our brain to reduce fear and laziness and increase motivation it's a fascinating conversation this is andrew's round two on the podcast stay tuned andrew welcome back to the podcast an honor to have you here

and also i just prefer in person so much so this is great that this all ended up happening it's great thanks for having me back and i agree to do it in person is uh especially nice i want to start off with the topic of fear you know your lab is known amongst many things one of your primary areas is studying fear and there's this topic that comes up for a lot of people in fact it was a big question that people had after our part one which was fantastic and it was around laziness and

and motivation and for somebody who's struggling with laziness and motivation what is it that they're missing out when it comes to how fear fits into those two as drivers for good or for for worse yeah it's an interesting question you know we don't often think about motivation and fear as in the same breath or the same sentence um we are accustomed to thinking about the fact that when we're afraid of something you know we can freeze up uh but really motivation and fear are in the same pathway and believe it or not they're in the

same chemical pathway so the only way to talk about motivation is to talk about the molecule dopamine dopamine is known for its feel-good properties we think oh you know a dopamine hit or you know it feels so good a rush of dopamine but dopamine's main role in the brain and body is craving motivation and pursuit okay and in the absence of dopamine we don't feel motivated i'll describe in a moment a classic experiment that illustrates this beautifully but dopamine's main role is to make us feel motivated and to crave things okay and the interesting thing

is that dopamine is the chemical it's the molecule from which another molecule is made called epinephrine and epinephrine has another name which is adrenaline so to untangle all that basically craving and desire is the foundation of stress and fear and people think well that how could that possibly be well stress and fear comes from adrenaline so the way to think about this in a in a kind of real world context is that when we are afraid of something we have one of three responses we can either remain still we can retreat or we can move

forward all three of those require some increase in our level of activation and the molecule adrenaline also called epinephrine i probably will use those interchangeably so it really doesn't matter adrenaline epinephrine that is what what's responsible for getting us moving it's also responsible for our sense of fear and paralysis in fear so if people are feeling that they're not motivated or as motivated as they would like to be there's a key step that people need to take which is to start focusing on the craving aspect and dopamine because if you can make enough dopamine you

can motivate you can actually crave moving through challenge so we can talk about how to do that but just to underscore how powerful this relationship is between motivation and dopamine there was an experiment that was done it was been done in rats but it's also essentially been done in humans through naturally occurring things where basically if you put a rat next to a lever with some juice or or even with um you know something really really good that a rat likes they will press that lever for that delicious tasting thing and they get pleasure from

it if but if you take a rat and you deplete it of dopamine and you move that lever one rat length away it won't even move one length of its own body right a few inches to hit that lever and people are the same way you can still experience pleasure without dopamine but you won't get up off your couch you won't challenge yourself to go talk to somebody you want to talk to you won't apply for a job you won't pursue the new uh you know fitness protocol etc so dopamine is about craving of pleasure

it's not pleasure itself and fear comes from this pathway right this pathway of dopamine into epinephrine and the way to think about fear is it's just one other dimension of motivation and we can talk more about that but if people are living in fear it is absolutely essential to understand that developing some sense of craving even if it feels scary you know wanting something but being afraid to pursue it that's the the trigger for these molecules to start being released and to move towards it but we've all sort of um been told or conditioned that

if we feel fearful that that's a sign that we should back away or stand still and biologically that's just not true so if people are feeling paralyzed in fear or they are feeling as if they you know are unmotivated it's absolutely essential that they identify some kernel some little bit of something that draws them forward and if they feel that agitation the kind of elevated heart rate the anxiety a little bit of sweating this kind of thing you know just imagining that they want that thing that's great those are the molecules that i'm talking about

starting to kick into gear but for some reason most people start feeling those sensations and they start freezing up or backing away i hope that was clear it was definitely clear so i guess the question is do you think that fear is the primary driver for people who are feeling lazy and unmotivated i do i mean there are two sides to this i mean and you see this a lot in the kind of psychological discussion around motivation it's you know it's wonderful to think about moving towards things purely from a place of love and joy

you know and we feel that and we experience that with a child or with a puppy or um when we hear suddenly you know music that we love we we feel that these same molecules are are liberated into our body and brain and we feel that positive motivation but i think it's and that's beautiful and that's a wonderful dimension of life but i i think that it's a mistake to assume that that's how it's going to feel to pursue the everything and the other side of this is that when there's fear where you can also

be quite motivated you know i think we we're we're so um averse to the idea of pursuing things out of fear you know should someone start running i'll just i'll use myself as an example i'll embarrass myself by saying you know i i read recently that the guidelines for physical fitness um and cardiovascular health because i'm 45 i'm like probably start thinking about my heart health i feel healthy but it's 150 minutes per week of elevated heart rate you know of that cardiovascular exercise which i haven't been doing at all i do other things but

i just haven't been doing that at all and um i always enjoy it once i'm doing it regularly but the first couple of weeks are painful it's a little back thing and you know all the stuff crops up but basically i'm doing it out of fear right i don't wanna i don't wanna die of a heart attack and if you look at the numbers if you're not getting 150 minutes a week minimum of cardiovascular exercise your probability of having a cardiovascular incident goes way up and you can pretend it's not going to happen because of

your genetics or you can do all sorts of you know mental gymnastics but the reality is that everyone should be getting that minimum including me and i wasn't so fear is the motivator in that case so fear is a is a terrific motivator and i think that we're so afraid of things like adrenal burnout or or chronic stress and those things are problematic for many people but i think that fear itself is a tremendously powerful lever and when i say a lever i mean a chemical lever this dopamine epinephrine relationship the fact that dopamine this

molecule of craving and epinephrine this molecule of motivation and agitation this kind of like stress the fact that those are such close cousins is never going to be untangled and so the the doing a lot of psychological work to try and just move towards things from a place of love and desire i think is is a terrible mistake i think that will that eventually comes and it and it's wonderful to have those aspects to one's life but i think we should all be in more appreciation for the fact that we are wired to be motivated

when afraid and we can leverage that i'm talking about living in fear all the time but i think that we can leverage that it's what can get us out the door it's what can move us through you know tremendously difficult times so i guess i'm not out to um to turn fear into something it's not it doesn't feel good to turn stress and agitation into something it's not you know it's called stress and agitation for a reason but i don't think that it's poison i think it's the way i like to think about it again

i'm calling it a lever because you know a lever you can really move things forward and then once things are going forward it's a whole different business and we could talk about that as well so it sounds like the distinction is kind of undirected fear which is what a lot of people are going through just this undirected fear their mind meandering wandering imagining worst case scenarios but not really you know to compare that to directed fear like you're really talking about you know directing your fear channeling it maybe even i don't know visualizing it would

that be an opportunity would that be a practice that somebody could use to actually use their fuel as fear in their life yeah use their fear as fuel in their life yeah i do think fear can be fuel and it's very powerful fuel i think that i like the idea actually of using it as a visualization i think that if you look at the trauma literature one of the things that we know is that trauma has a has many different aspects to it but one of the hallmarks of trauma is two things really one is

a confusion about who's responsible this is often the case the brain somehow gets confused about who was responsible for something terrible even though we know rationally that wasn't my fault we still it's like almost like the nervous system is trying to resolve something and we get this kind of reverberation of all the terrible feelings and the other thing that's been shown time and time again is that people really need to not hide from that experience they need to be able to confront the memory of the experience or the person of the ex you know or

whatever it was and of course that should be done in a clinical setting if it's something very severe but you know we we've all probably or at least in california we've heard of you know there's like love and kindness meditation where people will do a meditation specifically aimed towards cultivating a sense of gratitude which is a beautiful and wonderful practice it's actually associated with the liberation of a different molecule serotonin which is makes us feel good about what we have serotonin is sort of the molecule satiety of of feeling like we have enough in our

immediate experience dopamine and adrenaline are really about moving forward or away from things it's about not feeling comfortable where you're at either because you're craving or because you're afraid right so these uh molecules are interesting because they really do kind of separate themselves into different psychologies if you will so i could imagine taking on a practice where one sits down and focuses their mind on something that they want so craving this is not very zen sounding right you're supposed to be separate from desires but really focusing on something that you very much want or that

you very much fear but is in line with something that is probably good for you and i imagine that meditation or focus or visualization would uh liberate these molecules you know the brain visualization is powerful and the brain will make efforts to take a visualization and start creating the chemicals inside that that mimic the real experience and so that's why the kind of gratitude practices are so powerful uh that's why focusing on something that we really want it feels exciting that excitement is the liberation of these molecules trying trying i mean the these cells they

don't have their own mind but it's a it's a biological uh strategy to get you to move to literally to get you out of your chair and move and i think that it brings up a larger theme which is that you know the reason we have a brain is to move this thing that we call a body right animals that like us and we are animals that can move in lots of different ways run jump swim push-ups dance uh i mean the variety of movements that we can do is one of the reasons we have

such a big brain and these molecules they sound kind of complicated but they're actually really pretty simple dopamine is about craving motivation and pursuit epinephrine is really about agitation and endurance to get you to persist serotonin is really about feeling good about what you have you know that we hear so much about oxytocin and you know that these but oxytocin serotonin are they work together they collaborate to make you feel good when you hold your child or when you feel like maybe if you've ever had this experience of being at a with a group of

friends or a party and you look around you're like i'm so blessed you know i'm so lucky to have these people right or to have this roof over my head those are those are those are molecular events and then there's a fourth neuromodulator which is acetylcholine which is really about focus but um i would say all of these molecules are applicable they can be plugged into a visualization practice this is something that could be done for you know five minutes a day of just turning off or flipping over the phone um and thinking about something

in it in a very directed way and just watching how that makes you feel if it makes you feel agitated if it makes you feel good if it makes you feel a sense of desire those are those actually would be a powerful practices because it would give you a window into what's happening neurochemically and most people get this backwards they sit around and they go i don't have enough dopamine like what do i need to increase my dopamine i get this all the time what should i take to increase my dopamine and there are things

you can take supplements you can take to increase dopamine and if you do that you will feel a lift this is true right there are antidepressants and other molecules you can take to increase your serotonin some people just take serotonin you can now go at least in the united states it's legal to go buy the precursor to serotonin you can do that and you will feel better about what you have temporarily but i'm always a fan unless there's a real clinical need of looking at behavioral and mental tools first then looking at the power of

supplementation and nutrition which is which are real and and can be leveraged and then if there's a clinical need towards prescription drugs for which certain people they can be of real benefit but um i love the idea of a of a fear meditation yeah well it's pretty common in like the in the buddhist tradition you know they'll have like meditate on your death or in the stoic tradition they'll have you know imagine the worst case scenario and really i didn't know visualize it true i guess i've only heard the california version yeah which is go

to esselen and just like and then and really enjoy the bliss of life which is a great practice but i like the uh actually i think it's important i think what you're saying is important um to for people to understand that there's there's a lot of it sounds like there's a lot of dimensionality to meditation it's not just about being relaxed and calm and in gratitude it's about confronting your inner real estate and that that's really cool and that could even be what am i missing out on in life or how am i not going

to be able to serve people if i don't rise to the occasion you know there's so many aspects where you see this online sometimes there's the feeling of um i'm only gonna you know i'm only living my quote-unquote authentic self if it feels good and you know in our first like i'm i'm only going to work on stuff that feels good and a first part of our conversation was actually a lot of stuff doesn't feel good and you want to embrace that because that's how you get good at doing things so i think in that

same sense meditating on stuff that doesn't feel good sometimes like one of the most motivating reoccurring dreams i have is i'm back in high school and i did great in high school but i really despised you know being there and i felt like it was very limiting and i couldn't you know study the stuff that i wanted to do and i feel like i'm back in high school but something happened and i'm like i'm still my current age right i'm like 30 38 right now and i'm 38 but at some reason i'm back in high

school and i'm like holy [ __ ] i had all these ambitions i had all these dreams for stuff that i wanted to do and for whatever reason now i'm like struggling studying trigonometry again right and i'm going through my whole day at class in high school and i'm sitting in classes and for some version i've like been held back this is a dream or is it a visualization this is a dream okay this is a dream yeah and then because i'm also like into lucid dreaming some way through i wake up and i'm like

okay i'm in my high school okay i have control wait how did i get here and i have this realization like no i'm i'm living my life i'm a grown human being i'm an adult male who has started businesses and written stuff and as a podcast and i feel so fired up that day because i just went through an entire visualization of being back in what my mind would deem to be a worst case scenario which is being back in school being held back for some sort of reason and not being able to do all

the stuff that i want to and i feel energized the entire rest of the day when i actually get a chance to wake up so just another example of me personally feeling like visualizing or whether it's a dream or meditating on your death or meditating on what you would miss out on life if you can't rise to vacation or take care of your health or be there for the you know your family in the way that you want to can be a big motivator for things yeah it's interesting the um uh dreams you know of

course for you know centuries people have wondered about the significance of dreams but it's very clear that in the early part of your night your sleep and your dreaming is related mainly toward physical repair of the body and toward learning of motor skills you know that there's a predominance of what they call slow wave sleep or non-rem sleep non-rapid eye movement sleep in the later half of the night toward morning you shift over to having more rem rapid eye movement sleep and there's a heavier emotional load to those dreams this is well established what's interesting

is that something is written into our biology into the genome of everybody where these emotionally laden dreams in the second half of the night they're happening but the body is incapable of releasing adrenaline yeah we're also paralyzed during rem sleep we're what's called a tonic or you know we have antonio we're completely paralyzed probably so that we don't act out our dreams although no one really knows as i always say i wasn't consulted the design phase and no one else i know was either so anyone that tells you why something is the way it is

should be a little bit suspect but you have these dreams that are very emotionally intense and yet you don't have adrenaline released into your system and people who are deprived of that second half of the night dreams tend to have more emotionality during their day little things seem heavy this seems to be a portion of our sleep that is a bit like trauma release therapy in a lot of trauma released therapies the idea like emdr or in just standard psychoanalysis and psychotherapy of various kinds cognitive behavioral therapy you know these are board certified approved um

treatments at least in the us and and other countries as well it's all about recounting the event but trying to uncouple the event from the negative emotion and the feeling of agitation it's about really being able to get close right up you know in in front of your face with it with the experience and experiencing that but being comfortable feeling it all without doing anything about it and so in sleep we experience these this emotional fear we have fear in our second half of the night dreams but we can't act we can't do anything about

it so talk about you know you know exposure therapy we get that every night now some people will wake up from those dreams and immediately the adrenaline system will kick on and it would be i mean you're just like oh my goodness that was so scary that actually shows you have a healthy adrenaline system you know that when you wake up it's really immediately available and a lot of people think oh my god that was such a dreadful dream or troubling dream that was your brain trying to uncouple the emotionality of previous days events and

old events and if you again if you deprive people of that particular stage of sleep they go through life feeling emotionally weighed down by their previous experiences if you've ever been sleep deprived the littlest things can seem heavy you get two nights good sleep or three nights good sleep the whole world looks different it just looks better it feels better and so i i find it fascinating i didn't know we were gonna go down this path because we started off by talking about you know using fear as a tool to move through things and work

through things and be motivated and in your description of this dream about high school it reminded me that in the sleep we have this process ongoing and for people that are having the same dream over and over it's probably the case that the body needs multiple cycles the brain needs multiple cycles of this because it's so deeply wired into us whatever it was and for people with ptsd a big part of the exposure therapies is to really bring in a safe setting in a clinical setting obviously to bring people to the point where the very

worst thing they could possibly imagine is it's almost as if it's happening and then little by little the amount of adrenaline is turned down and turned down and turned down people never people might be upset to hear this but you never forget your traumatic experiences totally and that's for as you've shared before it's for a specific reason right our brain wants to hold them to file down right to you know protect us right but you can reframe the emotional component you can unweight the emotional load and this is why i think that sleep is so

foundational the great work of matt walker and um and the stanford folks at the stanford sleep clinic you know and and many others of course there are many great sleep scientists out there have really unpacked this incredible period of our life we call sleep what has not happened yet and what is and something that's very important to me and my lab's mission and many other labs also is we need a taxonomy a naming system for waking states you know for sleep we have rem and slow wave sleep we know what the early night is for

we know what the second half of the night is four we go through our waking life talking about things like happiness sadness depression stress anxiety and fear but it it's all pretty vague and i think one of the exciting things that's going to happen in the next 10 years or so hopefully sooner is that we're really going to start to understand what is creative work what is focus what is conversation what is pair what is bonding you know and really understand those things at a biological and psychological level to the point where we can also

um i don't really like the word hack but that we will be able to uh pull apart the different components and really understand you know maybe we should i'm making this up so please don't take this as a recommendation but maybe we should all be focused on uh activities that increase our uh you know acetylcholine early in the day and then we should gradually be turning that off you know we all here don't drink caffeine past 4 p.m you know and messes with your sleep well maybe there are things that we should be doing you

know and for our waking states and so one of the things that excites me now is that um because of the unfortunate events of 2020 most people now are tuned into the fact that they have a brain and a body they're very much connected that we're all subject to stress that we're all grappling with things and challenged and i feel like the the universe the universality you know is that a word yeah i think so i think so maybe i didn't get someone always writes to me as like you know it corrects my my speech

at some point right um the universality of of of our of our nervous system has really been been presented to us that um things like resilience and motivation and trauma and fear everybody struggles with these things everybody and anyone who seems like they don't or anyone that pretends like they don't is um has got a different neurologic issue that we can talk about in a different episode and i think really one of the big things that you've been trying to bring to that space as a whole is i think we've been doing a good job

of you know when i say we i mean america primarily and other you know westernized countries of putting more attention that these things are there we don't have to hide you know everybody's going through some version of it so the answer is often we need to increase access to mental health right it kind of goes about that far and anybody who's seen what happened with the pandemic knows that our system is fragile it's been fragile fragile even before there's not enough practitioners for everybody who needs mental health access insurance at least in america is a

big issue so we need other tools right and i just want to give gratitude to you because your mission from the beginning has always been free tools easily accessible that anybody can do on their own within the context of that i feel like the yes mental health access is important that's part of the equation but you're you know your through line seems to be and please jump in and correct me if i'm wrong that getting there through thoughts alone is not gonna solve maybe get help us get to the root issue right that can be

part of it but we actually need to embrace the behavior you know you have this you have this quote that i heard you uh share in another um podcast and it was uh trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab a fog and i think this is a fundamental thing to bring up for the folks who are listening is that when you are struggling with laziness you know lack of motivation you're stuck in fear a lot of times and you see this especially at night when people are trying to fall

asleep right that their mind is so active and they're trying to tackle that through more mind right and really what you would say is that look that's not wrong but it may not get you there so let's take that scenario right sure give us the example one way if your mind is super active at night and you're trying to fall asleep you're trying to invest in your sleep and get more of it or get better quality but then everybody notices that their mind is very active what would be a way of addressing that through behavior

instead of ruminating and thinking or even telling your mind like i just wish you would stop yeah so when that is very hard to control the mind with the mind and i think a simple rule that people can adopt is when your mind is not where you want it to be look to your body use the body to shift the mind it's a simple equation it's sometimes hard to do because thoughts can be so all-encompassing but when your mind is not where you want it to be if you don't feel as happy or you're obsessing

you need to go to a mechanical system in the body because if you do that you'll shift the chemicals that are released in your brain in a way that will allow you to regain control of the steering wheel so there are a couple things that can do that immediately the most basic one and the simplest one is going to be with respiration with breathing so breathing and the neurons that control breathing are so interesting because they are constantly working they work reflexively all the time they're working right now if you're live and you're listening to

this you they're working but unlike a lot of aspects of our brain body connection we can grab a hold of it immediately and and start tinkering with it like i can't say right now hey start digesting faster andrew you know or tell my intestines hey you know slow down digestion or i can't make my heart rate speed up just by telling it to but i can slow down or speed up my breathing if i want to so it lies at this bridge between the conscious and the unconscious mind and i don't say this from any

point or stance of philosophy this is physiology so if your mind is not where you want it to be whether or not you're trying to sleep or work or focus or anything i'm a big fan of this physiological sigh which was discovered by physiologists in the 1930s it's a double inhale through the nose and a long exhale that follows the exhale can be done through the mouth or through the nose if you're one of these people who can't breathe through your nose you could do this all through your mouth so it's just to inhale and

then inhale again even if you're just sneaking in a little bit more air and then long exhale the physiological size known to physiologists and neuroscientists as a way to offload a lot of what's called carbon dioxide and it immediately produces a heightened sense of calm or reduced sense of stress and alertness it's not going to put you to sleep right away but i'll just do it um just by way of example so people can see since it always looks funny to breathe and you know by example for some reason and no you don't have to

close your eyes in order to breathe you can breathe your eyes open so it's just right so it's inhale inhale long exhale this physiological side is known to re-inflate these little sacs in the lungs called the aviola the lungs and then when you exhale it offloads a lot of carbon dioxide and that immediately reduces your levels of stress now why am i recommending this well if your mind is churning on something maybe you're just obsessing maybe you're not just maybe you're not really stressed maybe you're sad but when you use respiration to kind of wedge

in between your conscious and unconscious life suddenly you realize that using something that's purely mechanical your lungs air carbon dioxide your mind shifts as well and there are a lot of studies now um the best of which i think have been done by jack feldman who's a professor at ucla who's worked his entire career basically on the physiology of breathing and the mind the brain shifts their states of mind shift the chemistry of the brain starts to shift but this physiological size more about grabbing a hold of the steering wheel again that's what it's really

about and then it's about what you do next so if you're having a hard time falling asleep there are a couple things you can do one is to do exhale emphasized breathing and not try to fall asleep just focus on doing big inhales and but even longer exhales doesn't matter if it's through the nose or the mouth exhales tend to long extended exhales tend to shift the body into more what we call parasympathetic states more relaxed states parasympathetic is just fancy language for the system of the body that controls calmness it promotes calmness think of

it like a break okay there are two ways to slow down a car one is to come off the accelerator the other is to push on the brake so long exhales are like pushing on the brake okay now it's expected and it's totally normal that the brain will continue to ruminate if you're having trouble sleeping after you've done that and really what i just described probably takes about five to thirty seconds i'm not talking about an extended breath work protocol just a physiological side to remind yourself oh wait i'm in control of this system that

seems to be taking kind of going off the rails on its own or that i can't seem to control the extended exhales tend to bring more calm to the system i'm a big fan of using a tool um to shift the body into sleep or sleep-like states insomnia is terrible people trying to sleep when they can't is absolutely maddening better to try and encourage the body to relax in in general and see if you can fall asleep later not try and force yourself into sleep so uh the two practices that work best for this as

one goes by the yoga nidra many people have probably i heard it last time yeah by the way can i interject about yoganitra i don't know if you and uh and your team have looked at it but if you look at some of the top yoga nature videos and you go down to the comments uh like some of the first comments are andrew huberman brought me here and then other people replying back and saying yep i'm here for the same reason so that's the words getting out there and a lot of people are watching these

youtube videos oh that's very gratifying to hear yeah i have no business relationship to yoga nidra has been developed you know centuries before i was even born means yoga sleep you just lie down you listen to one of these scripts they're available on youtube as free you know totally cost free um they tend to walk you through a uh a set of visualizations a set of breathing protocols that essentially turn the mind off right this is the uh it essentially accomplishes what a couple stiff alcoholic drinks will do which will also turn off your forebrain

the promise has other issues that go with it and many people who use alcohol to try and calm down have a rebound increase in anxiety i can always spot anxious people and people that have chronic anxiety by the way that they drink and the way that they need a drink anyone tells me i need a drink i i know they have they are not good at regulating their nervous system i'm not using i'm not saying that in a disparaging way but it says to me it's somebody that is sort of like saying i need a

i need an uber driver i'm like you don't really know how to drive you know or like it's it's it's a you know if you need one right right if you need a chauffeur right it's nice to have one sometimes right but if you need one there's a problem right so yoga nidra is a wonderful practice the other thing that's wonderful and that now there's a lot of good data on is hypnosis so one of the things i've become increasingly interested in is hypnosis because i have a collaborator um by the name of david spiegel

he's an md md phd he's a our associate chair of psychiatry at stanford and he's used hypnosis uh to great effect for smoking cessation pain management breast cancer outcomes are greatly improved by the sorts of hypnosis he's done with his patients and for sleep and other things and there's a wonderful resource that i'm happy to point people to it's a free resource which is an app for android and apple called reverie r-e-v-e-r-i you can go to reverie.com download that it's a hypnosis app where you can hear david's voice he has a very hypnotic voice um

and he walks you through you can pick a hypnosis for sleep or for pain management they've even got some now to improve focus for work hypnosis is a very interesting practice because it incorporates a lot of the same things we've been talking about a shift in breathing a shift in it involves a lot of stuff with the eyes which is my labs interesting when you talk about why they you know why they have you look up and try and close your eyes and all this stuff that's not that's not magician stuff it's not sorcery it

has to do with the relationship between the eyes and the so-called autonomic nervous system in any case hypnosis is a wonderful tool because it shifts the brain and body very quickly into states into desired states states of focus states of relaxation states of reduced craving etc and a lot of people are afraid of hypnosis i wish it had a different name because clinical hypnosis is nothing like stage hypnosis you are in control it's about you shifting over what's called the default mode network this kind of the idle you know a car a transmission that's screwed

up well if you get in your car and you turn it on all of a sudden it's redlining just standing still you know that the rpms are way up then there's a problem with the transmission the hypnosis is really about adjusting that idle level bringing about a sense of focus and a sense of control over your nervous system so i would say yoga first physiological side that should be people's anchor point just pull back into the control over your your nervous system and your mind once you've done that you can tell yourself because you have

that you've you've intervened with what felt like something that was out of your control your thoughts at that point some long exhales breathing for maybe you know 20 seconds or so no big deal and then i would reach to either a yoga knee just script or a hypnosis script and of course there are things that people can take you know drinking too much caffeine late in the day can make it hard to fall asleep um i personally and this is just me you know if i don't have enough starchy carbohydrates late in the day i

have a hard time falling asleep because they are precursors to tryptophan and serotonin so i'm not a big some people on very low carbohydrate diets struggle to fall asleep so i push my carbohydrates toward later in the day for instance and then there are supplements that many people find beneficial i'm personally not a big fan of melatonin because people tend to take far too much of it relative to the normal physiological levels and it has some other issues but things like magnesium by glycinate or magnesium 3na theanine apogenin which is chamomile tea but if you

don't want to do the supplement thing and i fully respect if people are averse to that you know pills and that sort of thing you know chamomile tea is great it has something called apogenin which turns on for you aficionados out there it turns on chloride channel system in the in the forebrain it basically helps shut down thinking to go to sleep it mellows you out it's a real effect and so there are a number of things that that people can do and um and sleeping is a skill you get good at it do you

need blackout curtains well some people you know some people have thin eyelids some people have thick eyelids you know i have thin eyelids i mean i you know light goes on even with my eyes closed and it like wakes me up some people nope no problem so sleep masks blackout curtains i don't think people should become obsessive about sleep what you want to do is develop some sleep practices and the core ones are recognizing early in the evening that you're shifting towards sleep and starting to prepare for it the same way you would prepare for

school or work or a workout and not thinking that you can just go go go go and then have a perfect night's sleep and um you know so there those are the things always behaviors first then in my opinion then look to nutrition supplementation and then if someone has a real clinical need and they they should see a sleep specialist and there are drugs that will help you know help people sleep but i i think the vast majority of people that are taking prescription drugs to sleep are don't need them or put differently could achieve

different if not better effects doing other things well well said you know we didn't chat at all about sort of origin story for you last time when you're on the podcast we went right into things and i have a question that kind of relates a little bit to your origin story which i had the chance to prepare and you know listen to a little bit before this podcast so you were talking about the body as one of the vehicles to focus the mind now i know you've shared in the past that you're you know uh

you grew up in a household um and and i won't go into everything but at one point in time you know parents split and the household was a little bit unstructured yeah right you were kind of like there was no structure there was no structure there was no one there there was no one there like the truth is there was no one there and i look i love my parents and they did you know an amazing job it would under trying circumstances doing the best they could with what they had and but yeah there were

periods of time in which i was completely feral which was fun and scary and you know and uh if nothing else taught me that you know i have uh some internal resources i can always rely on totally and so i want to talk about a little bit of that internal resources you know you from what i understand school is like there was not really a lot of interest i think you eventually got kicked out of high school i had to leave two high schools yeah i did graduate eventually yep you know thank you wrote ashley

i mean there were other students that helped me learn like there were a few i just mentioned somebody who like would sit with me and like help me try and understand my homework just enough to i mean i was a dreadful student this is not a look high school students work hard it's so much easier to leverage your plasticity early in life you have this gift of plasticity use it i don't you definitely do not want to try and come back from the back of the pack you know it's not no fun being the caboose

yeah it's tough and not everybody ends up making it through statistically you know people who are in the back of the pack tend to stay there and life becomes tougher and stereotypes against them and stuff but again going to this idea of working through the body to kind of focus the mind um it sounds like from what i've read from your story there's a couple sort of key moments you saw you started seeing a therapist and that therapist was i think the one who gave you the book by john cabot zen and i want to

come back to that in a second but another one was it seems like there was i don't know if it was the same guy or somebody else that really got you into fitness right fitness working out and that seems to have been from the way that i was understanding your story one of the things that got you to start to focus in and channel a little bit of this energy that was there is that an accurate way to it's very accurate um yeah the guy's name was bob peters um he was a uh a absolute

hulk of a human being he was just a scene he was our football coach i didn't play football um i was pretty skeins dude yeah i was pretty skinny kid um i was real skinny kid skateboarder i was fragile i kept breaking my bones this kind of thing so i initially went to him uh because i want to get stronger i couldn't do a pull-up i was just i was just weak and also i was interested in a girl and like i heard her previous boyfriend to play football or something i think it was that

kind of like high school you know young male insecurity thing i was like sit-ups and my push-ups and things like that um and you know he taught me that basically the body has this amazing response system that if you give it the proper stimulus it will respond and i think so i started doing some weight training and running i for me at first it was running cross-country and then i started weight training and those two things really taught me that there there wasn't always a direct and linear relationship between effort and reward effort and outcome

but with physical fitness it's about as good as it gets right i you know it's very hard i i could under you know i could sympathize with a student who's you know getting grades in school and you don't really see how that's setting you up for something later and if you're somebody who's challenged in academics it can be very hard to think you know why should i even fight for a c plus why should i just you know absolutely destroy myself for you know an a minus on this subject that i have no interest in

and um the reason to do it is because you're training the mind to learn and yes you're developing skills but you're really training the mind to learn and i don't think that has to be done in the context of academics although i do believe that cultivating the mind and the body is is good and i wish i'd done more of it when i was younger but what bob peters taught me was that if i was consistent with my training that my body would respond and it did you know over time i got stronger and i

learned how to take care of my body i learned how to push myself through pain you know physical pain i i guess i've always had a sort of weird relationship to pain i've i wouldn't say i have a high pain threshold i feel like i'm the guy that stubs his toe and i'm like i scream but then it goes flat i have this very like steep inflection of pain and then it disappears and i learned that so for me pain is like a big wall of fire but it's a very thin wall and i and

that for me has been very helpful because everything that's been challenging for me i try and imagine as that kind of thin wall of very very intense fire it just doesn't last but it's very intense and so i'm just i expect it so physical pursuits i think are wonderful and i do believe that everyone should have some relationship to the physical world and their physical body regardless of abilities and so that was the entry point i'm very grateful to him he was also he was an amazing guy i give this picture of this football coach

but he also um he was an incredible classical pianist he taught himself how to play the piano he also um he was a stay-at-home dad for a while on a bet with his wife um he actually wrote the he wrote that's the television thing which eventually became the screenplay to mr mom i know i have mentioned that before and people said no it wasn't bob peters look it up it was bob peters it eventually got sold to john hughes but he lost a bet with his wife she said you couldn't do what i do and

he was like you know so they did the swap in the 70s which was rare raised three kids i mean he's an amazing human being did a lot of work with at-risk kids and so i think having an example of somebody that was physically like physically very robust who also was cultivating his mind um was a great example for me and so you know i think oftentimes it just takes the right role model and um and i'm a big believer that especially nowadays with everything being online that we can internalize role models you know we

don't need to know the person or have a coach or somebody like that i mean that's what's so wonderful about these people like david goggins and rich roll and joe rogan and and you know and and mark and you and all these people that are out there that are sharing is that you don't have to have a football coach or a friend or a neighbor that's going to point you to something you can really latch on to an ethos and make it work for you and no and you know in fairness and in reality no

one person is uh you know has all the answers you look to people as a i've always imagined a committee in my life there's like a table in my mind and i have very i have a committee and i take advice from those people some of them have no idea who i am i've never met them but i try and internalize their ethos around certain things in a way that serve me and um the relationship to the physical to just bring it back to that is wonderful because what you start to realize is that the

mind follows the body very readily and i you know the mind is weak i know people are out there saying the mind is strong it can do it you can force the body to do it the mind is very labile the brain would be much happier or perfectly happy digesting nonsense all day long than doing nothing try sit doing nothing for five minutes try scrolling instagram for five minutes it's it's night and day right the body is powerful in its ability to shift the mind where you want it to go and that's why i'm such

a fan of getting into into action forward action that's why i'm such a fan of using respiration as this bridge between the conscious and the unconscious and i i believe in thought and thinking and hard problem solving too i mean i i define an intellectual as somebody that can really appreciate and understand something at multiple levels of detail not you know um so but i think it's all intellectualism on its own you know just being in your head is a terrible terrible place to live you should try i believe each day or every few days

to get into a state of wordlessness outside of sleep i'm a big believer in this that running not listening to audiobooks or anything but just letting your mind drift is the substrate that allows it's the precursor i should say that allows you to then sit down and do very focused work if you're having trouble focusing chances are you're you're focusing too much you know that's basically what's happening if you're having trouble focusing chances are you're you're focusing too much in a distributed way it's like an appetite if you're just snacking all the time it's just

the meal doesn't taste quite as good so running um any form of turning the brain conscious thought deliberate thought off will allow you to do incredibly deep work after that it's but the mistake is just constantly digesting information and so i think we need to be more structured about our um waking states but the body in my opinion should be the entry point it sounds like in addition to the body directing the mind there was also this deep connection with that you learned from this mentor who got you into into working out and fitness there

was also a true relationship with effort and reward right you you work out even with a successful workout you know you're not going to start to see yourself putting on maybe muscle right away but just the joy that comes from putting in a good workout whereas previously and i think a lot of parents you know who are listening to this podcast sometimes try to figure out you know how can i create drives or intrinsic motivation for my my child and a lot of school at least back you know when when you and i were in

school too it was much more common it's changing a little bit now was you kind of have to take the authority's word for the fact that the reward is going to come down the rhine yeah and it doesn't always work and it doesn't always work no and you know and growing up where i grew up you know i also saw a lot of people who went after that carrot and then they you know for extrinsic reasons and did very well and then later in life were very resentful very unhappy i think they still did quote

unquote better in life because they they position themselves to have options so um we can't deny that that it buys you options you know i i guess i'm revealing some of my kind of hokey little secrets here but for me they've been very powerful so i have a white board in my gym at home and um but i used to just keep this in my notebook in the days when i went went to places to work out so i i write down before every workout i write enjoy training hard because i had another mentor later

while i was in college who he said you know he didn't say enjoy your training he said enjoy training hard so i've developed this relationship where i just love training hard i i love the feeling of failure i actually really like failed repetitions i like failing i like finding out where i'm limited um because i know that that's the the road to the next you know next segment of progress and so do you think that came from like early skateboard board culture you know doing tricks and trying it and knowing that you you know you

expect that you're gonna fall did that come then or did that come later on in life yeah i'm trying to think about you know to be in full disclosure skateboarding was a really important part of my upbringing and that was my that was my family basically i basically just was part of this big pack of kids and uh there were no parents and we were all feral and uh we had a lot of fun and unfortunately you know a lot of them met kind of a you know sad fate some of them did incredibly well

but i've great rep some people might see skateboarding as just those like clicky clackety things going down the sidewalk but there's a there's a whole world of that that's self-regulated um that i have deep respect for but uh in full disclosure i wasn't one of the good skateboarders my body wasn't strong i just that's why i started working out because i was getting hurt all the time and but skateboarding is a good example of where it's effort effort effort fail fail fail like you know you're you're getting beat up you're basically beating yourself up until

you get the successful you know right away and that is incredible i don't think i cultivate it there for me it was really in college starting in my second year because i i also had to leave college for poor performance and other reasons none of which i'm proud of at all but when i finally decided to just bite down and really do it i mean i experienced so much physical agitation um and i just but i realized that the information was in the books like it was there so it's not like i had to go

it was complicated sometimes to understand or remember but that there's nothing simpler than it something being presented to you it doesn't get any easier than that and that was hard so but i just got good at restricting my desire to get up um from my chair i got good at um just pushing through i also have to say that a big part of working through stress and agitation is giving up on the immediate rewards of some of the social stuff you know those were pretty isolated years for me i had to not go to as

many parties as i would have liked i wasn't one of the cool kids you know because i was studying all the time i was working out all the time so you have to be good at dealing with peer pressure i mean if you want to be successful in life you definitely either want to surround yourself with people who are also ambitious in the things that you enjoy and love and want to be good at sports or school that really helps i did not have those friends around me at that time or you have to be

very good at pushing off peer pressure and that will isolate you i guess you know they call that the empty elevator syndrome you know if you hang around with people that don't care about something and you're doing a lot of it they're going to give you a lot of flack about that i guess i'm sort of orienting this towards young people but at any stage of life if you're taking steps to better yourself you're going to find yourself pretty lonely for a little while so i got i would spend all day saturday at this park

near where i um was in college i would get myself a couple of hamburgers because i liked them i would go to in-n-out burger get a couple double doubles and i'd sit under this tree and study all day long then i'd sleep wake up study some more sleep i go back and you know that's saturday night in college you're supposed to be out having fun and then sunday morning i'd do a 12 mile run so there's a sicko you know and i slow run i want to be clear so that's it occasionally i would go

to parties and i'd enjoy myself but i started to find that um i could predict that if i kept these behaviors up that i was going to pass a lot of my peers and competition is something that's interesting i'm not an inherently competitive person i'm not one of these people at the party like if you play ping pong with me i'd sooner let you win than try and beat you like why let's just like rally let's just play i have friends that are really competitive i've never been an inherently competitive person with anybody else but

um if you start cultivating a sense that you you have a goal and you nothing's going to prevent you from getting to that because you are willing to put in the hours that's a powerful feeling and um it can be taken too far i've been told my college girlfriend said you know i created a monster that's what she said you know because she was always encouraging me to work harder and then when i finally did it it went pretty extreme but look it's always easier to throttle back than to try and you know make it

from behind and if you're somebody who hasn't invested a lot in any of these domains like academics or in health or in fitness the important thing is to is to just get started and get consistent you know i i think that even if somebody is just walking five days a week consistently just walking right it's the cons consistency is what what pays off and i think it pays off for a different reason than we think sometimes we want to see the physical or the financial results right away but i think a big part of it

is that you're training your nervous system we have these things called central pattern generators these are neurons that are in our spinal cord and brain stem that generate repetitive movements and the brain loves to load central pattern generators with work because then the mind can think about other things and so a lot of the the challenge of studying or taking on a fitness program or something like that it's because it requires so much deliberate forebrain activity do i drink the coffee then do i do it then do i do a workout at this time do

i study this am i doing it right all that constant rumination right but once you just do if you just decide i'm gonna do it regularly that's a non-negotiable part then a lot of that gets handed over to central pattern generators and it frees up a lot of energy it frees up neural energy and it frees up your ability to think about other things while you walk if that's what you want to do i want to just like highlight something you said because i think this is going to be a big aha moment for people

is that you know we're constantly seeking freedom in our life but actually you can get like structure is one of the best ways to create that freedom like think about it you know you make the joke and say that you guys are a bunch of like frail animals you had all the freedom in the world you could do anything at that time but that wasn't necessarily getting you maybe the results that you wanted and through creating structure there was another type of freedom that you opened up in in life and i think that in anything

that people want to pursue health focus as we talked about a bunch in your last podcast episode a business goal whatever you want to do what does that structure look like that you can bring to your world and not only to create results but to open up freedom into not having to having to think about it in a way yeah no absolutely and i've to this day i struggle with structure especially as more if if people out there think that the moment you start achieving some success that things are going to get easier it gets

worse it there are more opportunities and therefore your structure gets disrupted more email more texts come in more amazing possible relationships and places to eat and things to do it actually starts to undermine the whole process if you're not careful and and that's coming from somebody who you know i'm fortunate to not have substance abuse tendencies and things that sort but i still have to i have a list and now i make it every day because when i just put it next to me and i didn't write it out it didn't work but like it

literally starts dog walk number one get sun i mean like really basic stuff i mean i basically have to hand hold myself in the same way that um i talk about protocols on podcasts and that we're talking about here i i talk to myself that way as well um you know get sunlight then i do a 90 minute work block which means i use the program freedom on the computer no internet no phone i turn off the phone i put it in my car sometimes it's really bad i mean the phone is it's a it's

such a pull asked me for some code to get into something and then i think i need the phone next thing i'm doing something else so 90 minute work block but what's beautiful is that the nervous system and i don't know the underlying basis of this but the nervous system has this feature to it where when we take the chaos of choice and we restrict ourselves to one of those choices you get a neurochemical payoff and it comes in the form of dopamine and acetylcholine acetylcholine is really about a spotlight of focus and here i

i want in fairness i i'm a big fan i've been reading a lot of cal newport's work deep work a world without email um i've never met him but i love his books and he talks some people call it flow but what um you know and people are familiar with flow being engaged in an activity that's challenging but there's something about activities that are forced restriction to one particular focus right so i'm gonna write for 90 minutes or i'm going to um think for 90 minutes or i'm just gonna walk the dog i live in

an area now where i don't get reception on my dog walks at first it was excruciating i love it now it's like i just walked the dog and there's morning sorry i have a bulldog he does not like to walk so i'm like i gotta get back and i'm frustrated and i know and it's hilarious right because i noticed myself and the way that my my um tripwire to agitation is so slight i'm like one of these people i can just in a second i'm aggravated because it's not happening as quickly and so i've learned

to make the whole walk a process of me just like recognizing these features of myself and my bulldog costello just plods a lot he could care less right so the walk is very it's only about walking the dog and the the email if it's email is only about checking email right and there's something valuable to this and i think the brain loves this when we give it this and the brain unfortunately is also happy to just take a smorgasbord of you know pseudorandom thoughts and actions all day every day but there's something so deeply satisfying

about focus and um i think we could all uh benefit from doing more of that it's just so hard to do and i'm not an anti-phone guy i'm from silicon valley i use the phone i'm addicted to my phone i admit it i'm addicted to my phone but i'm trying really hard to cultivate a different relationship to it because i think that in now that that's 2021 i think looking back phones we've had them for about 10 years there are so many examples of ways in which they erode our best relationship to life so many

ways that i don't think we should get rid of them but i think we really need to start being conscious of of the ways in which they are eroding our productivity our creativity our relationships and i don't have any obvious answers to this i just have tools that i use um and that i've found to be of benefit but i think in the next five years we are going to see a shift toward people really moving away from from phones in um as much as we use them now yeah it almost seems like in our

evolutionary history we have to be more of a student of focus now whereas life's circumstances would naturally pull us towards lifting that weight of focus a little bit on our own you still had to apply effort but it's almost like trying to get good sleep now with a lot of sounds going in the background or somebody every so often coming and waking you up and saying hey are you okay and you're like i'm sleeping like i just you know that's tons of interference so it's almost like if you're not a student of focus today i

mean most of my friends that have created you know pretty large companies always tell me and you know we have this men's group that we meet up regularly and we we chat they say you know it is definitely feels tougher to start a business today than even 10 years ago with the amount of distractions that that are fighting for our attention yeah and there are different categories of people out there and i want to be respectful the fact that not everyone's trying to you know build and create but i would say if you're a creator

if you if you want to build something business or write or music or sport or anything i'll tell you i know i'm fortunate to know a good number of very successful people if you're a creator you're you have to always ask yourself are you playing offense are you playing defense are you just bench warming and most of the activities on the phone not all of them are in the defense or bench warming category if you're a content creator you want to be a content creator you absolutely have to take the effort to create space in

order to produce content and that's going to require agitation and loneliness and frustration for brief periods of time i'm not saying about for years of your life i mean for ten minutes while you're not tending to the voices and the things that need you and yeah they need you and they will have anxiety and you will have yours and but people if you're going to produce content you need that to create that space the other thing is that the the phone is wonderful right you can turn on a reverie hypnosis script and you know just

because it's there and you can use it so i want to acknowledge its utility it's a wonderful tool but the other the other thing is that young people have integrated the phone into their nervous system in their lives in ways that other people haven't so i would say that for people that are listening to this now in 2021 and they are 20 years or younger chances are the phone isn't going to feel as intrusive as it will for somebody who's older than that just because of the way that when the nervous system wires up like

i've had a 14 year old niece and the phone is just wired into her relationships so if you take away her phone she suffers in a way that maybe doesn't justify taking away the phone so this is going to be an interesting kind of generational conversation but if you have a hard time not turning off your phone for an hour to do focused work or 90 minutes if that's a real challenge that's a great invitation to start working through some of the neural circuits for what we call no go so i do this now i

i'm revealing all my little weird uh quirks but they're grounded in neuroscience so um we have circuits that are called go circuits these are if you want to know that if you want to look them up there's circuits of the basal ganglia and they're involved anytime we make a decision to make a behavior like reach out i just picked up the bottle put it down deliberately and then we have no go circuits these are ones that suppress behavior and they've done a lot of beautiful experiments where you can create a a video game or something

where people have the impulse to make a choice in order to score points in a certain amount of time and sometimes you have to go and sometimes you have to no go you have to avoid movement and suppressing movement takes effort right and all you have to do is uh experience a social gathering and see one person pull out their phone and you just notice everyone start pulls out their phone that tells you it's been handed over to central pattern generators i don't think it's conscious i don't think people are like oh exciting i'm gonna

look at my phone it's literally just now it's socially cued so it's sort of like someone wipes the side of their nose like maybe they got something and then the other then you know people will just start doing this is like human behavior we mimic each other subconsciously subconscious so we do it with the phone so i have this thing where every i don't believe that we have as much attention deficit as people think there's about 10 percent of the population that probably has legitimate attention deficit it's getting worse and the numbers are creeping towards

12 15 and 20 in adults as well because of the phone just to be totally honest so this morning i experienced this i went for a run i was listening to music and i i wanted to see if i had reception and check something on my phone and so i will i have a rule i do 25 times a day this is just my order sense of order 25 times a day i try and suppress a desire to take an action and i'll tell you it's excruciating i wanted to do it so badly i don't

even know why it's just i'm trying to override some circuitry that to just look when i have reception to just look at my phone see where text messages or whatever direct messages so i get to the car i was like whoa i made it do i look now and i thought don't do it don't do it and i'm thinking i should do it i should do it i sit there for about a minute this is crazy i'm a grown man 45 years old right i should drive home it's not but i didn't do it and

i was like this feels really good so what i'm trying to do now is train myself to not be reflexive about the phone and i think that requires a conscious effort eventually it'll become more automatic in the same way that reaching for it became automatic so these no-go circuits are require a lot of energy a lot of work but we can train them up and that's what's cool and that's neuroplasticity the brain's nervous system's ability to change in response to deliberate focus and experience we're the only species as far as we know that can rewire

our nervous system deliberately in this way if other animals do it like my dog costello if he tries to do this he doesn't do it very well but humans can do this but the agitation of you know the no go effort is i wanna bold face and underline twice the word effort it is supposed to feel challenging so you know i don't know that it's necessary for some people might be very good at this i think people who are older 50 60 they're probably better at this because their nervous system didn't incorporate the phone into

the their world quite as much but you know again i don't want to demonize the phone but i think learning to control one's behavior with the phone is going to be the the distinction between those that are successful i really believe this and those that are not and there will be a range there it's not black and white right it's not a stark contrast there'll be a number of shades of gray in between but the better you are at controlling your relationship to distraction and to these impulses that draw you off track the more you're

going to be able to produce things also the better you will be for relationships of all kinds you know there are certain people they're more clued into this than others but everybody appreciates like someone who's very present i have a friend that's why you introduce them to any of my girlfriends in the past and you know that they walk away i was always he's a really good friend but i was always a little envious of him because they always go he has the best presence and you know what it is is his phone never comes

out of his pocket and when you're with him he's actually just talking to you it's not that complicated or he's not even thinking about their phone you know some people don't have their phone out but you can tell that they're exactly thinking or they're waiting for the next moment exactly and i think what you said is it's so beautiful because it's not just present on the micro our own individual relationships our relationship with our work but it's also present on the macro you know there was this really great harvard business review article we'll link to

it in the show notes where it said you know what's the difference between people that people and companies right so personal brands and companies that get a little bit successful why are people who get a little bit successful why don't they go on to become uber successful like extremely successful when they already had that momentum and a big part of it for both people and organizations so anybody who's running teams is distractions as you get more successful as you mentioned earlier more opportunities come more reasons to not focus as a human level in our relationships

but also as a company level you take on every opportunity instead of doing what got you there in the first place which was doubling down on that focus so whether you run a team whether this is in your household whether it's just your own mind for your relationships for your own mental health focus is deeply linked with your own sense of contentment joy and success however you define it right i absolutely agree account i'm still not through it all the way but cal newport's book a world without email talks about this i think he uses

the phrase a hyperactive hive mind in companies this was adopted in the last 20 years or so where it just seems like the more is better mentality more interactions being better and and it's been shown and he you know gives data to support this that over and over again the ability to just drop into focused work or work in small teams you know i'm very blessed now you know my podcast team is a wonderful group of four people more or less um having a small team is really beneficial if you look in military special operations

they're very aware of limiting team size in terms of you know operators that work in groups of you know four to six to eight you can do incredible outsized things when a small group like that when things get too big it just uh it just wicks out in and that's also when problems start arising that's that's when people start making mistakes uh oversight is a is one source of that fatigue is another and you know i guess it is all to say that learning to cultivate a a life of focus and i should say it

should be produ the way to support that is to have components of your day of wordlessness and defocus i do want to emphasize that because it's not about waking up and from morning till till night being ultra focused right i don't i don't i don't do the make my bed first thing i admit it i sometimes like it happens midday okay all right i wouldn't make it in the military but we knew that already anyway so the you know that it's about being in in recognition of where you're at and focused and dropping in deeply

for certain portions of the day but i also have a deliberate decompress time of my day right i take 30 minutes a day and i either take a nap or i do a yoga nidra or i just let my mind go but that does mean not mindless scrolling although i do some mindless scrolling too i allow myself that but having periods of the day where you let the mind defocus and just kind of drift in the same way that your mind drifts a bit during sleep that is what allows you to focus so it very

intensely afterward or on a consistent basis so it's not about being in a total animal from morning till night and then just expecting to switch you know switch off the thinking and go right to sleep it's about for me if they're really two blocks two 90-minute blocks one early in the day and one later in the day where i commit to doing really focused work twice a day and i have to fight tooth and nail to create the space for those and to make sure it happens and if i and i fail a lot you

know if something gets in the way and i don't do that i um i just try and get back on track as quickly as possible i don't bring my phone i put my phone on airplane mode when i'm training and doing any kind of physical work now because it's just too distracting i want to go back to something you shared earlier which was this idea of a committee you know you have these people in your life whether you know them and some people you don't know that are kind of uh seth godin sometimes says like

you don't always need a mentor but you can have heroes in your life right people that you look up to who would be some other people that are on that uh that committee of yours you know people that you kind of like look to even if you don't know them personally for uh guidance uh inspiration or a reminder of sort of that intrinsic quality inside of you that you've seen in them yeah so the um someone i keep in mind a lot is my my graduate advisor a woman by the name of barbara chapman she's

an excellent scientist she passed away unfortunately too young breast cancer 50. but i think about barbara a lot because her relationship to work was really special she really understood what it was to be what we call a serious scientist there's a there's a phrase that scientists use like are they a serious scientist which is really about trying to seek truth you know there's always an element of getting the paper published getting the grant funded packaging things in a way that's digestible that that's an important and vital part of the scientific process of any process really

but she had this um way in which she held the like the pursuit of facts of truth as holy above everything else so i definitely keep barbara in mind because there is a way in which we can start to delude ourselves into thinking um you know that our ideas are are strong when you know have we really thought through all the alternatives here have we really done that but also just the purity of it you know just in in a life of of inquiry or of any kind just to really try and get close to

why i started doing it i started doing science because i was curious about how we work in the mind and body it was just genuine curiosity and so i keep her in mind a lot i keep um i have a good friend uh pat dossett who was uh in the seal teams and then got out and um he and blake mykoski who started tom's shoes right had this company made for that i'm on the advisory for uh and pat i think of a lot he's a close i'm fortunate to have him as a close friend

because his um he the way he does the little things is really impressive he's always five minutes early always five minutes early i struggle with punctuality he's always five minutes early he also is very good about the the presence thing like um about what he's doing he's doing he's also very good he's probably always five minutes early because he always leaves when he needs to leave this is something i actually learned from him um when it's time to go you just say thanks i'm i'm out like not like none of the long trailing goodbyes that's

which is something i'm guilty of but also i i really appreciate his ethics and he's somebody who thinks very deeply about why one started something and staying on that so those two and if i and of course there are so many amazing examples out there of impressive people but they're the ones i think about a lot lately in terms of really trying to um stay close to the the central cord of why i you know why i'm here and what i'm trying to do which is trying to discover and share knowledge in ways that are

useful to people um and you know i'd be remiss i i'm sort of laughing in advance this i'm chuckling but i i think about my bulldog costello way too much i talk about him all the time now on my podcast another podcast but i think about him a lot because and the way he approaches life because you know dogs are incredible because you see tremendous variation in one species dogs of different temperaments and body sizes and behaviors and his temperament is unique it's it's stubborn and joyful and all but like there's something about stubbornness he's

so stubborn and it's teaching me actually to be more stubborn about like i know what i like and i know why i'm here and what i'm doing it took me a long time to find that but i'm starting to become more i'm trying to internalize costello more so he definitely has a spot at the committee table um and and bulldogs are hedonists too he loves sleep and the way he eats food is in it's insane he can devour like a huge bowl of food so he's that so i'm actually trying to cultivate a little bit

more of his like like love for food and love for sleep and like really enjoy what it is i'm doing and i'm also starting to become more and more stubborn but maybe that's just aging there's a there's a short little book by eckhart tolle author power of now and stuff and um it's called guardians of being and it's basically about animals beautiful title it's about animals man is it i'm gonna read i'm gonna get this book today dogs cats primarily but it's basically how as human beings you know we we struggle so much with our

mind pulling us in so many different directions and for some people they're it's a lifelong battle they feel it really shouldn't be a battle but it's a lifelong battle with their mind and not getting space and sort of awareness and inside of there it's like really talking about how pets can be one of the greatest reminders about presence in our lives and reflecting back upon us the things that we might need or or benefit from oh my god and i just thought of that no i brought it up thank you uh i'm a huge and

i mean i'm obsessed with animals and um i've heard of eckhart tolle i know a little bit of his stuff my sister who's a therapist is obsessed with his work and really loves it i um i'm definitely going to get this book and check it out because i think animals have a lot to teach us about how we work because their nervous systems i've looked at a lot of them admittedly their nervous systems are simpler and what you find in simpler nervous systems is that a couple core sets of operations are extremely well honed so

the bulldog is the bulldog because their brain is organized that way a cent hound or retriever behaves that way because of the way their nervous system is organized and human beings are gifted with this potential to have so many different behaviors or learn music or not learn basketball or not other animals don't get that set of choices and i think it leads to a confusion about who we are and what we're about we are about variety and choice and optionality and that's wonderful on the one hand but i think if we want to understand what

the extreme version of any kind of expression would be of of stubbornness of um glee of uh creativity i think animals can reveal that to us because they are the more focused honed down example of the way a nervous system could be built and so i i'm excited to read this book you know you just uh that reminds me that i've heard you share in other interviews that you were kind of obsessed with animals and animal movement growing up and also just recently you did a whole series on on kind of movement and in one

of them movement muscle growth you know giving a lot of different you know tips you talk about posture right what's important for people to understand when it comes to exactly this topic that we're chatting about which is movement function the body controlling the brain what's important for people to understand when it comes to this topic of posture yeah um and always when the word posture is spoken then everyone starts noting their posture i have a friend um kelly starrett who does a lot of work in the um is a company called the ready state they've

done a lot of work in like physical rehabilitation sports performance and this kind of thing um he's a tremendous athlete he and his wife julia are both really amazing athletes and he always says they're big on the standing desk thing they've got kids they've been putting doing a bunch of work get standing desks into schools but he also makes this comment that you know we weren't meant to sit all day but we also weren't meant to stand all day so you know the idea is that we should be able to move in a lot of

different dimensions and feel comfortable doing that um i mean the movement is a huge discussion but um there are a couple things that relate to posture that that are interesting one thing that i've learned from kelly and that's certainly been true for me and in terms of longevity and in sport and just making me feel better all around is that usually when we have pain someplace that the solution lies in doing some work and strengthening the the musculature above and below that pain so we tend to focus like on the knee when it's really like

like you know maybe you need to do a lot of like tibialis work or you know hip work because the knee injury is a reflection of the way that the body moves or fails to move on the whole so one of the things that i've become conscious of is in looking at the literature is that you know things that generate asymmetries are create problems they really do and so trying to really cultivate symmetry in terms of um a lot of unilateral movements for weight training for instance so like unilateral leg movements or needle arm movements

they bring about balance because we just we develop these asymmetries the same way we become right-handed and left-handed where most of us aren't ambidextrous the phone again is terrible we're all starting to look like a folded-over accordion or a semi-melted candle right included if i'm not conscious of it it is very clear and the yogis will will attest to this but for i don't do a lot of yoga admittedly that we are in internal rotation too much so a simple test people can do is if they just relax and they push pulling it out they're

standing relaxed and they put out their thumbs if your thumbs are pointed in chances are your shoulder is internally rotated right and that some strengthening of the upper back muscles and and rear neck muscles should be done so that we're not in external rotation like the fonzie thing half the people listening to this won't know who fonzie is but like the like thumbs pointing out in both directions but that doing movements of that sort can then allow us to be neutral right shoulder neutral again so you know i've got a friend any texts i'm if

you're if you're listening to this not watching a video he texts with his phone up near his face even on the street which is hilarious but his posture is amazing great posture is is such a a boon to life and um so these little things like internal whether or not we're overly internally rotated trying to be a little bit more externally rotated the other thing is with respect to exercise that has been fun for me to learn about is you know not everybody including myself has time or interest in doing a lot of different kinds

of like animal movement i mean i'm a huge fan of mobility i mean that stuff is beautiful like the stuff like edo portals movement culture stuff if people haven't everyone knows who he is presumably but if you don't check out his his instagram he's a he's just been doing this for so long but just incredible suppleness of movement and balance and sure strength and all that but huge range of movement um so-called movement culture is the phrase that he coined but one of the things that's been fun to incorporate is um you know we can

do what are called open and closed chain movements closed chain movement would be where like our hands and feet are in contact with the ground so i think down dog is closed chain right think jumping that's open chain right shooting a free throw is open chain you're actually pushing through the nervous system actually it there's a interesting literature on this the scientific literature that closed chain movement tends to build and it's to sound very eastern philosophy but very build energy in the system we tend to come away from it feeling kind of invigorated and x

and and um charged and that's because of the way that we have these chains of what are called ganglia neurons along the spinal cord and when we engage in movement that's closed chain where we're in contact with things at both sides the way they fire is kind of in sequence and when we come away from that movement or those types of movements we tend to feel kind of like like energized kind of like jacked up you know and like we have energy whereas jumping movements or throwing movements like if you were to physically throw a

medicine ball or you were to um some people can do this don't hurt yourself folks but like you do a chin up but you actually blast through the chin up and let go of the bar for a second those are incredibly taxing but they are very good for dumping excess energy so a lot of people are stressed and then they're going to work out but they're coming out of the workouts with more energy neural energy than they went in and when i say neural energy just so in case there's some neuroscientists out there i don't

want you to think i've you know completely lost my mind what i'm talking about is what you're creating is a potential for the nerve cells to fire like a readiness to fire so things like martial arts are they cultivate these practices um both open chain and closed chain kind of intuitively um so and there's a practice a lot of like exhale emphasize breathing on ballistic movements like the like like that's actually expelling energy which is a wonderful thing if you tend to carry too much stress whereas going and just lifting weights close chain movements barbell

curls bench presses and thing you're actually creating more tension in the neural readiness in the system so it makes sense absolutely so this is kind of a i rather than get too scientific about this it would take hours what i think was kind of fun for people perhaps to explore is the extent to which different kinds of movements like with continuous tension will kind of create energy so you can come out of those workouts feeling really focused and like energized whereas if you're somebody who tends to just feel like you're carrying tons of tension inside

you want to dump energy then throwing things ballistic movements like where you're just literally like dumping all your energy these so-called open chain movements if you can handle it like jumping and ballistic stuff those can be very beneficial and all these have roots in the way that motor neurons of the nervous system work um and again it's kind of fun to just look to animals and just see they a lot of them they look different because they do different types of movements right a kangaroo doesn't look like a tiger for a reason it's because of

you think it's because of its body but its body is a reflection of the way the nervous system works not the other way around in addition to this through line where we were started off talking about movement being able to focus the mind you also have been very open that you were recommended to go see a therapist when you were really young and what did you feel that you got out of therapy in addition to this fitness training and the working out that you were doing what was the real sort of distinction that came from

you for you at an early age that maybe wasn't a way that you saw either yourself or or the world yeah well and to to be honest you know you earlier you asked you know who's at the at my committee you know so i believe it or not somehow i figured out a way to make this work uh even in tough financial times um and i know not everyone can do that but i've been one way or another i figure so i've been seeing that same therapist for gosh i think it's now been 35 years

incredible we have a very close relationship obviously i think it's a healthily bound boundaried relationship um uh actually until i learned oliver sacks who passed away the neurologist man who mistook a white for a hat i have very few heroes in life oliver sachs is is absolutely one of them incredible if you haven't seen the movie uh about the documentary movie about him it's incredible about the field of neurology um he had a therapist i think for 42 years so um and then i felt kind of vindicated because what did i learn from therapy well

as a young person i didn't have a choice but to go i had to go if i want to be admitted back in school and stay in school but what i learned pretty quickly was that therapy has multiple levels of support one is somebody who's just going to hear you a lot of people just don't have the opportunity to share what's going on with themselves a lot of people sometimes they may not even know what they think because they haven't said it out loud yeah most of us barely can understand what we're thinking and feeling

much less what anyone else is feeling so the next time you think that you understand what someone is thinking and feeling remember most of us don't even understand what we are thinking and feeling but i was look i got lucky he's somebody who's extremely smart and encouraged me to take on physical practices and use those as a portal not just you know lie on the couch and and talk about problems in fact these days we don't even really talk about problems per se the way therapy works that there are multiple aspects to this um but

one is you're trying to create a place where you can explore your own mind that's really what good therapy is about it might start with a problem or a conflict but it it's really about being able to explore your own mind and you're constantly asking the question what's driving this behavior or this pattern of thought why am i anxious and the immediate answer is never the answer you know if you think oh i'm anxious because i've got too much work or i've got these things you know sure that's true but but what you're really starting

to do is peel back the layers and what you're trying to do is create through the relationship with the therapist you're trying to create a what a process a reflective process the goal of the therapist is to make themselves obsolete that's very clear i've asked this numerous times throughout the years like when are we done you know and and we're done when we know we're done because you you i was told because you internalize a reflective process an ability to see a problem or see a circumstance and take a stance of where am i in

this situation where are they and to start parsing out the pieces and it sounds very abstract but and some people might just think like this is terrible when i'm feel stressed i go for a run and i i agree i think a an exploration of thinking of the mind is not for everybody i do think that somatic therapies are now becoming more more popular because many people just think like why would i want to talk about a problem it just makes the problem worse it heightens my focus on the problem i absolutely agree i absolutely

agree i just personally have found great depth of experience in realizing how crazy my mind is and how it will come up with these theories about why i feel a certain way and how through a reflective process i can now not certainly not in the past but now i can sort of get distance from things very quickly and i think that can only come about through really being able to sit with your thinking sit with your feelings i'm sure over the years there have been events in my life that have you know where it was

like crisis management for sure it's like how are we going to manage this personal crisis but i think therapy is is a if the relationship is right i think it can be a beautiful experience and it it can change the way that you view the mind and it for me therapy nowadays it's not so much about me getting anything out of it it's just making sure that i can show up as as well as i can to the other things and people in my life but um and for people that can't aff fortunately therapies become

more accepted and more um hopefully more affordable but for people that can't afford therapy there is a version of this that's gonna sound um ridiculously simple but being able to journal in full honesty with oneself is very powerful journaling is i would say and writing is the way that human beings have worked out a lot of their internal conflicts and discovered incredible depth of of meaning and excitement and creativity over the you know for centuries thousands of years so if people can't get access to a therapist i would encourage them to journal with the full

understanding that no one is going to read those journals a lot of people start third personing they start thinking they're writing their life book or their memoir um really journaling in full honesty is powerful some people look at this as a data dump like just a way to kind of get all the mess out early in the day that's powerful as is sitting down and deciding to write in full honesty about something that's extremely challenging or that one is extremely ashamed of or afraid that people will ever find out or these kinds of things because

there's something about the way if the mind sees truth like it sees it's internal externalized it immediately looks crazy and in that recognition that so much of what goes on in our heads is crazy there's this weird thing i don't really understand it where beauty like other amazing things crop up as surprises let me give a different example nowadays the words gas lighting comes up a lot people like your gas lighting your gas lighting i'm very averse to people using clinical terms in the context of you know you know online psychology it just doesn't seem

to you know it doesn't work for me but the the reality is that most people when they feel something they don't want to feel they use what's called evacuative projection they try and project it out they try and evacuate the feeling this is something so learning to just be able to sit with that and and journaling is one way to do that it it overcomes this need to evacuate anger frustration etc so the the mind's natural reflex is when it doesn't feel something it likes to look for something external to solve the problem or to

evacuate the problem right and you've talked about how that can create like even dopamine that's inside of the brain yeah some people are just projecting to projecting yeah projection is a good one and the simplest example of projection is physical aggression i'm angry with you i come over and hit you i've evacuated the feeling right and it's it's an example unless it's in the context of like sanctioned martial arts where it's consensual or something like that it is always an example of weakness always well unless it's warfare or something like that where there's a purpose

right you know the military or whatever it is but where there's a contract of people in battle so the so we started off talking about sort of like the therapy model but the but journaling and and learning to deliberately evacuate thoughts and feelings onto paper there's something about the way that the the mind recognizes its own self because you're basically taking your mind and you're putting it to paper when you read and hear those words when you see that happening it has this amazing ability to untangle what seems like a mess and so and i

i feel like it's important that people understand that they there doesn't need to be another person there although if it's the right person that can be a real accelerator to the whole process right if you can afford it amazing and there's a lot of really great you know more accessible options that are there but even journaling just finding some outlet to get a sense of where is my mind andrew this has been great i feel like a great part too we could easily be going i feel like we just got started we had a nice

little chit chat before we were recording i feel like we could keep on going here but i know you got a couple other podcasts coming up and i want to be respectful of your time and i want to say thank you for coming back on the podcast and doing i think the origin story especially as your profile starts to become a little bit bigger it's nice for people to hear because you are uh you have all the accolades academically and with the research and other stuff and i think it's very hopeful especially for young people

to hear wow he wasn't good in school he wasn't you know had challenges and you know these were the things he struggled with it just makes us more of a human to the people that might look up to us and i know a lot of people look up to you so i appreciate you just opening up a little bit more about your story and continuing down the path pathway of providing actionable free tools that people could uh use so i just wanted to say thank you so much for coming back on the podcast and i

appreciate you brother oh well thanks for having me and thanks for opening up the conversation to those things it's not things i readily share but i'm always happy too if people are curious and thanks for doing what you do uh just so people have it since the last time that you came on you launched a podcast it's doing fantastic it's i always see it in the top 10 up there and can we give it a little shout out and where people can continue to find you through that podcast as well as the social media channels

sure yeah so the podcast is huberman lab for lack of a better name hubert lab podcast and that's on all the standard platforms you can find on you know we do a youtube version of it and apple spotify etc and then i have an instagram where uh i teach neuroscience and neuroscience related themes and that's also huberman lab and sometimes those are the little short tidbits you know 15 seconds sometimes they're minute long sometimes they're five minutes long and they're designed to be accessible to anybody so you don't need any scientific background it's really just

focus on neuroscience neuroscience related themes and tools things that people can use in various contexts physical mental et cetera and a lot of good animal videos too and some animal videos and my bulldog costello makes the occasional cameo yeah this good dog well thank you again brother really appreciate you coming back thank you hey youtube if you liked this interview you're going to love this one all on the topic of hacking your circadian biology for better sleep losing weight and better focus if you ever have the experience of being very very busy and then you

stop and you finally rest and then you get sick that's because when your nervous system is activated and is in