⁠Andrew Huberman's Hack To Increase Your Dopamine Levels & Boost Motivation By 60%

friendship is one of the most reliable sources of predictability that exists within human interaction professor of neurobiology at Stanford University Dr huberman launched the huberman Lab podcast concentrating on neuroscience and other scientific topics neuroscientists neurobiologists Andrew huberman we could say this about any organism but humans included we need the feeling of safety and acceptance if ever there was a practice that I wish every human being on the planet would do besides go out and view morning sunlight it would be we're thrilled to announce that we've reached 3 million subscribers we're incredibly grateful for each and

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is back to drop new findings hit subscribe to not miss any of these episodes if you think of someone who would love this episode send it to them to make their day the number one Health and Wellness podcast J sh J shett the one the only Jett what's happening from a neuroscience perspective as our friendships are getting weaker even though our followership and online friendships are getting bigger so at the Neuroscience level we have to remember that the brain circuitry which of course is always linked to the body we want to remember brain body are

fortunately now understood to be interconnected 5 years ago 10 years ago that wasn't so much an accepted idea but the nervous system the brain the spinal cord and all the connections to the body and back to the brain and spinal cord are bidirectional and highly interconnected so when we say brain I'm more or less using that as a proxy for whole nervous system including body the circuits that are responsible for feelings of social connectedness are deeply deeply rooted in our need for safety we could say this about any organism but humans included need two things

I believe we need the feeling of safety and acceptance and so if we are to have a conversation about the kind of loftier um words like peace contentment fulfillment belonging I think I borrowed that list by the way from the incredible Martha be so it's not a coincidence those rattled off of my mind but I feel like those four words are so critical to what we all want and what we all need at an aspirational level we can't have a discussion about those with without also I believe having a discussion about the fact that we

have hardwired aspects of our nervous system meaning genetic programs that are written into the script of all our genomes regardless of color regardless of background that are just scripted into our genome that allow us to breathe without thinking about it digest food without thinking about it keep our heart rate going without thinking about it elevated if it needs to be slowed down if it needs to be Etc and then hardwired circuitry that is there for bonding with our caretaker during early infancy and bonding with others of our species and evaluating whether there is safety and

acceptance from the other members of our species now these brain circuits have names and we could get into that they almost all have some connectedness to an area of the brain called the hypothalamus which sits above the roof of your mouth which has many many dense collections of neurons we call nuclei responsible for everything from temperature regulation to feeding to reproductive behavior and on and on all the basic kind of housekeeping things but connected to the those brain areas are brain areas that are associated with evaluating whether one is safe or not so safety and

acceptance then we can break down in the following way if we look at it through this Neuroscience lens safety is really about the ability to predict outcomes okay and the brain after being responsible for all these housekeeping functions heart rate Etc is largely a predictive organ it wants to understand what's going to happen next to the extent that it can then free up mental real estate neural real estate to work on Creative projects or to build things or to imagine things right there's no creativity there's no building in the absence of safety then it just

becomes survival so the the kind of older discussion meaning in the 80s 90s and early 2000s the discussion about the nervous system was we would hear about higher brain order functions and lyic functions right weird here about kind of primitive lizard brain and more evolved brain and all of that is frankly true it remains true and that language is perfectly fine but I think if we are to think about safety and acceptance we say what is safety about safety is about being able to predict outcomes when we are in the company of people or we

know we have people available to us should we need something food maybe we need a monetary loan maybe we need a word of encouragement maybe we need somebody to bounce ideas off of whatever it is that constitutes safety for us it's highly subjective highly individual well then when those circuits can quiet down it's as if you know they can finally quiet down it's like we have enough so safety so that then we can start to explore iterating what we have in terms of new jobs new creative ideas new art new you know take a walk

with somebody you care about right those are not the sorts of things you do when you feel that you are under siege either real Siege physical Siege or emotional Siege okay then acceptance gets a little bit trickier to sort of pinpoint in the brain brain acceptance likely dovetails neurologically with this these brain circuits for safety because acceptance is really about well given the range of Expressions that we have our range of humor our range of political beliefs our range of um behaviors can I predict that these safety mechanisms will still be there these people will

still be there these things will still be there will they turn on me will they honor me right will they will they laugh with my jokes or will they decide they don't want to talk to me anymore because of my jokes these kinds of things now what I'm trying to not do here and at the same time do is to put a neuroscience lens onto the these two things of safety and acceptance but if we were to just take a step back and say what do we know to absolutely be true well safety and acceptance

belonging peace contentment Etc come from a variety of sources certainly in our early relationship with our caretakers these circuits form that basically all about resonance with the caretaker um Alan Shore here at UCLA has done beautiful work on this I think the book's title is called right brain Psychotherapy and it's really about how the bonding of infant and typically mother but how the or caretaker the bonding of infant and I'll just say mother as since that's the more typical scenario there's actually a lot of synchronization of brain networks early on such that one's physical and

mental state reflects the other and so on and so from the very earliest stages that we come into the world we are resonating with other people call it energy if you want call it emotions it's neurochemical yes it involves oxytocin but a whole lot else in other words we leave infancy and childhood and Adolescence if we have a healthy upbringing with a sense of predictability someone can be there and then not be there they're accessible if we need them Etc now that sort of relationship that connectivity between humans and safety and acceptance in those relationships

has been explored extensively I think we've all seen the image of the mother and child and the and the Brain Imaging and seeing some um sort of collaborative activation of their brain networks that's been explored extensively and it's beautiful work and we could always use more of that sort of work what's been explored far less is the safety and acceptance that occurs between romantic pairs although there are Laboratories starting to do that having people for instance look at the face of their significant other angry sad Etc while in brain scanners even scanning of two individuals

separately at the same time um those sorts of things far less has been done on this notion of friendship but I think in this day and age when well it seems like everything is more complicated um but I'm sure they've been saying that for for for decades if not hundreds of thousands of years what do we know about friendship friendship is one of the most reliable sources of predictability there that exists within human interactions why because you can have many many friends and you don't have to break up with one friend to have another friend

when you were when we're little they say who's your best friend and maybe then you could only have one but pretty soon we realize that we can have many great friends many best friends and I consider you one of those like we're growing our friendship but there's no sense of tradeoff even though of course time is always a tradeoff in fact you were at a gathering at my home with many other friends right that these things can be collaborative typically in romantic relationships while there are exceptions to this is typically a pairing right so there

are clearly brain networks that are overlapping with the brain networks associated with parent child or child caretaker relationships and romantic relationships that involve the generation of safety and acceptance among friends the major difference however is that friends throughout history even when people lived in small villages tended to be dispersed by greater distances and so when we hear about the loneliness crisis are we hearing about a crisis of lack of connectivity with our parents maybe with our siblings possible with romantic others that's a whole domain into itself you cover a lot of that and the challenges

associated with finding and building healthy romantic relationship but what we know for sure based on extensive research now is that there's a real dir of close friendships for many many people not just in the US but abroad as well now we could make an argument that it's by virtue of smartphones but I don't think we want to go there just yet I think Jonathan Height's doing a beautiful job exploring those ideas and he's far better equipped to to kind of pinpoint the relationships causal or otherwise than I am but here's what we know for sure

with friends we can both hope for and expect safety and acceptance by virtue of having lots of different kinds of friends um friends with whom we play sport friends with whom we just hang out friends with whom we don't really talk too much at all and friends with whom we drop into deep conversation with so one of the things that I personally have found to be immensely beneficial in my own life and for which it's clearly had an outsized positive effect relative to the time required is a simple good morning text that comes on a

reliable schedule meaning every single morning now this might sound almost trivial but when I wake up in the morning I either receive or send a good morning text to right now there are about three people in that kind of collection they're not talking to each other but if I don't receive that text by noon it activates something in me it's not a ton of anxiety but it activates something are they okay what's going on with them you know it isn't why aren't they checking up on me I assume something's come up but the simple receival

of a text from somebody saying good morning I think has both ancient and modern significance ancient in the sense that one of the first things that everyone experienced when we lived in small villages because that's essentially how we evolved was to see faces of other what biologists call Con specifics other you know and other same uh non-conspecific people like people that could be romantic Partners or family members or people we were going to work with we saw faces first thing in the morning and we know with certainty because there's a ton of beautiful work mainly

from Nancy caner laboratory at MIT a brilliant researcher as well as a woman named Doris sa who now is at Berkeley was at Caltech that there's an immense amount of neural real estate devoted to the processing of faces not just facial expressions but human faces in particular now monkeys have the same brain area for monkey faces so this is not an area that's just designed to see eyes nose and mouth it's a brain area that has neural real estate that responds specifically to the faces of other humans in humans and there's a whole lot to

talk about how it's connected with areas of the brain involved in emotion and emotion regulation Etc but the simple Act of sending a good morning text to one person and receiving that back perhaps exchanging a note or two about what's your plan for the day doesn't have to be an extensive back and forth but the same person or persons consistently I've experienced in my own life in Times both good and bad and kind of neutral that it has this outsize positive effect and I don't think that's because you know I was lacking social interaction my

life is very full I have a very busy business life I can go online and see faces but when we go online and see a familiar influencer or a familiar political figure or a familiar even family member yes they're there and I think there's great power to that but they aren't there specifically to see us although as creators we know that we are there to see our audience and for them to see us that's a real thing but it's it's quite different to have this this exchange this reciprocity and I really believe that if there

was one thing that we could each and all do to better Our Lives no matter how busy our social schedule or our atome environments is to have at least one but probably one to three depending on your bandwidth one to friends that every single morning when you wake up you text them and they text you back just a simple good morning why because it's the reliability it's this notion of expectation being fulfilled it's not a huge expectation and this get brings us back to safety and acceptance right no one's going to text us good morning

if they don't accept us if they dismiss us and the safety is in the predictability of the interaction now for people that walk to the corner and they see the Barista and they get their coffee or they see their neighbor ET the importance of saying hello to people on the street this is something that's really Fallen away these days depends on where you live but people are very much in their phones people are very much AF afraid frankly of how they will be reacted to if they were to reach out to somebody that they don't

know these basic human interactions take us back hundreds if not thousands maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands of years and if I were to put my money on any experiment it would be that there is dedicated neural machinery for these sorts of practices and while social media has wonderful contributions and significance to make in the well-being of Our Lives I truly believe that I am absolutely certain that these simple practices just as morning sunlight can profoundly affect our daytime mood focus and alertness and nighttime sleep I think these simple practices of saying good morning

by text each morning to the same person or people and receiving a text back sets something on the Shelf like okay we're good to move forward through the day yeah two things came to mind as you were speaking your habit of the text every morning makes me feel like you're getting to write a story with someone and for someone and so there's this sense of someone knows my story and now it's not like oh I speak to you once a month and we're catching up on everything that happened and you're missing the nuance and the

texture and the detail it's like I'm getting to log my story in every day which means I really feel this person knows me and I know them so now when we do get together this weekend to break bread I don't have to do that in between Small Talk they're already aware and now we're just almost connecting all the dots as opposed to I'm now using my time with you to plot all the dots so there's that sense of like story exchange which I think is so important I find that that my friends who've known me

the longest but the ones that I also consistently text every day they're the ones that I feel understand the tapestry of my life and I know theirs and so now you're not just looking at dots on a wall you're look you're connecting the dots in that meeting which I think is I don't know I'd love to hear how that works out from a neuroscience perspective but the second thing you that I was reminded by as you were speaking was I feel like writing down I always encourage a lot of my clients to do this to

write down a list of emotions they'd like to experience with people so it could be things like Adventure discovery Comfort humor love whatever it may be just write down a list and then for each one write down the name of a different person ideally that fulfills that need in your life because often I feel like we put a lot of pressure on our romantic Partners or one person in our life to be all these things and the truth is no matter how phenomenal anyone is or how much they love us they just can't be there

and so if you have hey I've reached out to this friend when I want some Adventure because they love it too if I want to see a sports game this is the person I reach out to and then do the same in the opposite way which one of those do you fulfill for your friends what emotions do you help other people create and I feel like if you look at friendship as a spectrum as this broad set of connection points rather than like this is my best friend as you were saying or this is my

number one friend and we get away from hierarchy and we move more into a spectrum I feel like that mixed in with the text today starts creating a much more healthier network of what connection means as well it's also not just the same person doing the same thing every week yeah I love the uh the idea that by staying in contact regularly we don't have to get caught up and that then we can just drop into what's most meaningful on that particular day and maybe even have more available to us to have a new experience

right as opposed to just catching up and then of course there are those friends that we catch up with and it feels like it was just yesterday definitely but I'd be willing to bet that those were people that you spent a lot of day-to-day time activity with you knew them from University or you you spent a lot of time just in the kind of everyday shared experience for a while and then when you see each other again it's like being right back there the Neuroscience of this hasn't been explored nearly enough but given that our

very own Surgeon General highlighted the loneliness crisis as one of the major crises in the world today I think that in terms of Simple Solutions to Big important problems developing more connectivity with people through simple practices and again we're talking about a text here I mean I will be the first to say that if you can hop on a phone call or you can get on a you know a video chat with somebody that would certainly be better but many people just don't have time for that for sure so in terms of spending time with

people in in a deeper and richer way you know get getting the the drop in time as it were I love that you mentioned Adventure I'm almost 49 I turned 49 in just over a month and um I would say that the first 49 years of my life have been marked by a real thirst for adventure a ton of curiosity now I really feel myself entering a completely different season of my life I'm sort of hoping this would eventually happen um in part because um you know I took some some kind of dangerous turns you

know I took risks with my with my life at points where I didn't really intend to do that but you know you seek enough Adventure you're going to you're going to find adventure and you have to be quite careful I have friends with whom I had tons of Adventure and then now the adventures are are far more docile and and quiet um and of course um the internal Adventure is real as well I think that friends with whom we can just be one version of ourselves are wonderful friends with whom we can be all versions

of of oursel is uh especially wonderful that's the acceptance piece uh typically I think we look more for that in romantic relationship this notion of just like safety and acceptance being Hallmarks of of healthy romantic relationship I think those are also the Hallmarks of healthy friendship it's just that with friendship we can be a bit more segmented in terms of the number of different aspects of self that we need um safety and acceptance with um I think with friendship also you know I I've found it to be the case that really knowing what's going on

with people has become a little little bit more difficult there's this there's this kind of odd thing right we're we're we're more interconnected in terms of availability of communication but we're less aware of what's really going on for people in fact on the way here I had a call with with a friend and their headset was making a lot of noise and so um we agreed uh they said hey how about I just turn mute mine and for the next two minutes I'm not kidding This Is How They this is what they said um they

said just tell me like what's what's on your heart or what's in your heart hopefully it wasn't on your heart what's in your heart and I I was like oh wow that's tough you know that's tough I mean I I okay and I and I know that they're listening and then but it's very silent on the other end and I'm kind of speaking into a vacuum there um because they're not hearing anything and then had maybe just two minutes before we curled up the hill because of the reception in uh the area that we're in

as you know is always complicated um to just get feedback it was very interesting like I realized that I felt close to them before but just the notion that they would ask me that how do I feel not what's going on lately not you know am I feeling good or bad like evaluation of of feelings but just like what's going on and I stumbled a bit at first but I can realize in in in saying it now like I'm quite moved by the fact that they would ask that of all things as opposed to like

what's going on what's your next podcast about are you coming to visit that sort of thing and so like I'm taking a lot of cues these days from people that U make me feel very seen and accepted you're one of them I must say like I don't just say that CU we're in front of these microphones and sitting here like you and I have been in touch a lot lately through good times and hard times and and and a lot of different things it's it's not um a coincidence though that that I think that we're

here because and talking about this because I think that ultimately the questions that we ask of the people we care about are just as important as reminding them that we're there because when we ask a question like you know what's in your heart what we're really saying is you know like what's really going on for you as opposed to like what's the next podcast about which is an interesting question to me but you know so I you know this is more your territory than mine but I think in the end I think it comes back

to safety and acceptance simple behaviors like a good morning check-in and then asking questions that might feel a little bit challenging for the other person to answer at first but that really show a depth of care and interest that um go beyond just kind of like narrative and and storytelling and I think one thing that I'm also very eager about these days is breaking down some of the um traditional stereotypes like you know for anyone that's listening to this and goes oh you know I didn't you know men don't talk that way or something it's

like actually they do um they do and if given the chance they will open up about things that perhaps they hadn't even thought about and I confess I'm one of those people maybe it was my why chromosome got in the way of me thinking like wait what do you want me talking about what's in my heart hey actually that's a really great question thank you and so I think this brings us back to these early circuits that are all about safety and acceptance that are all about being able to predict things and basically to say

okay I don't have to be vigilant that's really what safety is about is about turning off the neural circuits for vigilance when we turn off the neural circuits for vigilance we can start to direct our neural circuits Vision auditory whatever thoughts towards an awareness of things that are both inside us and around us that keep us in that calm State I mean vigilance is associated with stress stress is associated with a narrowing of the visual field a narrowing of the auditory Fields I'll just use this analogy because my sister and I last um last summer

we always go to New York for our birthdays together we went and saw what the Harry Potter play oh it's so good right I swear New York too is wild I mean the effects are so unbelievable a big Harry Potter fan I'm not but but okay but just just spectacular effects it was just so wild I I couldn't believe it but there's this library in in the in the play where it's it's a magic Library where when one of the books is taken out about a particular subject the books around it actually morph and change

to reflect the same subject material and when I saw that I immediately said that's how the brain works the way the brain works is a kind of pseudo hypnosis hypnosis is about context and context setting and narrowing of context all of us have such a wealth of historical present and future thinking cognition in our brains but when we get anchor to a particular emotional state or topic what ends up happening is that the the available topics around it change in reference to how stressed we are when we are stressed all the topics all the books

on the Shelf around that stress are about that thing and how to solve it and actually this is why stress enhances our memory for solving that the things that can help us solve that particular issue but guess what is given up all the other distantly or not so distantly related topics that led themselves to creativity to thinking about novel combinations of things this is why our friend Rick Rubin I think is such a a spectacularly creative individual because he spends a lot of time putting his brain and body into a state in which he can

remain in contact with these other related or seemingly unrelated topics whereas when we're in a stressed mode when we have to problem solve when we are in Vigil vigilance excuse me we absolutely narrow our cognitive Fields our visual Fields our auditory fields we limit what we think is possible and so I think great friendships to bring it back to it great relationships of all kinds have enough safety and acceptance in them that we can make our way through the Practical constraints of the relationship in the day the week and the year but that there's also

a sense of Crea ity that there are new elements allowed to be brought in because there's enough safety and acceptance that we can turn down those vigilance circuits absolutely how do we then with circuitry that's built for safety and acceptance when you're talking about everything that you talk about on the hubman lab things that we I talk about from a maybe more spiritual wisdom perspective they're all hard things and safety and acceptance generally in our understanding of those words feels like comfort and security and easy and simple and then all of a sudden you're saying

cold plunges infrared sauna beginning of circadium Rhythm in the morning strength workouts like all this other stuff which initially is discomfort it's difficult it's doing hard things and I know this was something you've been thinking about a lot but I'm just trying to make that connection we're wired for safety and acceptance but then all the stuff that's good for us seems to be hard at least in the beginning yeah it's a great question so the twist in all of this is that the nervous system loves predictability even if the predictability is arriving through hard things

so I would say the major theme of The hubman Lab podcast has been tools we call them protocols to Anchor one's physiology in some predictable States I've never actually articulated that but that's really what it's about so why get sunlight in your your eyes in the morning because it wakes you up I could tell you it increases cortisol in a good way early in the day that it sets a timer on your melatonin secretion for later at night it helps you sleep at night and that's all true but it creates a sense of predictability it

allows you to know that for the next series of hours you're going to feel more alert and at night you're likely going to be able to fall asleep more easily cold plunges to my mind people debate whether or not they're valuable for combating inflammation they are whether or not they're valuable for increasing metabolism probably not to a huge extent but one thing we know for sure is that they if done correctly they're uncomfortable but after you get out you have an increase in these three neurochemicals that we call the catac colomines dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine and

you feel more energized and slightly Bliss out for the next two to four hours it's a real effect because those are real chemicals and they've served that role for hundreds of thousands of years in humans and they will continue to serve that role in humans so the cold plunge is not so much about pushing yourself as it is figuring out a way that you can overcome a sense of of stress and then safely overcome a sense of of kind of resistance to getting in the thing and then safely increase these neurochemicals that then predictably shift

your state to be more alert and at the same time relaxed and a little bit blist out if we if we want to call it that so you know we could list out protocol after protocol right if you tend to eat meals at a consistent time plus or minus an hour doesn't matter if you fast or not you'll tend to be hungry about 15 minutes or so before those meals this is a wonderful thing because it increases this predictability This lends itself to safety and acceptance because it allows you to have to not have to

think about a number of other things so you know I've been criticized and fairly so that gosh there's so many protocols how could anyone possibly do all these protocols and the truth is that many of the protocols are you know it's a buffet and many of them like how to organize your workspace or when you travel for jet lag it's individual as to whether or not people want to do them and of course they're all optional um you know this isn't law um so the idea however is that through some simple basic behaviors viewing sunlight

a little bit of a walk after a meal um a little bit of sunlight in the evening um dimming the lights in the evening you know these are the the basics eating at more or less consistent meal times and mo mostly unprocessed or minimally processed foods for the majority of your food intake doesn't matter if you're vegan vegetarian or otherwise you're going to feel much much better and part of the much much better is feeling more alert and more Vitality during the waking hours and better sleep at night which just kind of seesaw back and

forth into feeling better overall and thereby free up energy for things like sending the morning text you know so I think I'm very glad you brought this up because I think people hear oh goodness another thing to do but if you think about it that way it's going to be self-limited but if you think about is each one of these things takes a minimum amount of time and you can do the walk and sunlight thing in the morning combined and maybe if you miss a day no big deal no big deal these are slow integrative

systems your system will recover just fine but done on a consistent basis you're going to feel much better and you're going to have more energy and you're going to be able to think about what you might want to do in your creative life and then do that you'll have the time and energy to think about what you might want to do relationship wise or friendship wise or build building out these these aspects of life so it was never the intention that people do so many things that they don't have time for friendship or kids or

relationship or that their entire family or relationship be centered around these protocols rather they're designed to be weaved into everyday life and sometimes when people experience pain points like people are having attentional issues or people are experiencing depression or they they have a particular creative project and they want to tap into like open monitoring meditation for instance very different as you you know far better than I than other forms of meditation then they can access those specific tools but I don't want to romanticize ancient times but there was a lot more predictability in some domains

of life in ancient times assuming people were living in small villages there was a lot more predictability but there was also a lack of predictability someone could take off on a hunt or a gather and they if they didn't come back we might assume they're never coming back and then two nights later they might come back and say that was a close call or they come back with a great yield we don't know you know we don't know what it was like but you can be sure that the same neural circuits that were responsible for

stress and lack of safety and therefore vigilance back then are very much alive in our brains now so again the protocols are designed to um think about it like putting um ingredients in the refrigerator you don't know what you're going to cook but you have a lot more available to you as options when you have when you know that all the basic macronutrients are covered um everything's all the Bas are covered and then you can start to think about what you would cook whereas if you've ever arrived late in the city you get to your

Airbnb or your hotel and you see like three or four things and one lousy pan and thing one that now you have to get the other kind of creative where you have to adapt and we've all done the the unhealthy option because that was the only thing or fasted because that was the the healthiest option so I think what we're what we're getting to here is that the human brain like all animals all animals need to know where they're going to sleep that night I mean a dog goes into to a new environment is like

trying to figure out where's its spot it's all about space you talk to any expert dog trainer they'll tell you you know it's all about negotiating space can they touch you can they not touch you are they allowed to be near you do they have to stay a afar can they go into every room you know you look at small children foraging an environment however rambunctious or calm they're they're trying to figure out like what am I allowed to do here what am I not allowed to do here sometimes by testing us as as adults

we do the exact same thing we need to know where we are we need to orient in space and in time and then we need to know like what what's available to me where where am I going to stay tonight is one of the most fundamental questions that we ask ourselves every single day except if you know where you're going to stay tonight you don't ask yourself that and you have mental real estate to devote to other things so what we're really talking about here is is kind of bookending the extremely basic fundamental drives of

the human brain for safety and acceptance and then at the very other end is these aspirational things that we all seek right these Notions of connectedness of of purpose of of fulfillment of of Peace again I'm borrowing from Martha's beautiful list because I think it's so fundamental and and it captures most if not all of what we all seek but I think that you know we get very much caught up in the how to reach goal A or B how to write the book how to make the money how to grow a social media account

and we forget that at the core of everything is our relationship to our surroundings to our inner landscape and to each other and it always comes back to safety and acceptance and where we feel uncomfortable um where we feel like we didn't do things right or others didn't do them right for us or to us it always boils down to those two things yeah you reminded me of a question I often ask people is what's your most repeated thought because when I was looking at the research on thinking the idea was that not only well

we having a lot of thoughts every day but a lot of the thoughts we have are repetitive and going back to your point on protocols I feel like the reason we have repeated thoughts is because we haven't yet built a protocol to help that thought go away so if you built a protocol like I know where I'm sleeping tonight you're now no longer having that thought of where am I sleeping tonight and we may be asking oursel a very different thing today because we figured out where to sleep but we might be thinking like how

am I going to pay that bill how am I going to deal with that uh issue at home what should I say to my kid you know whatever it is right we all have different challenges everyone has a different set of issues that they're struggling with or dealing with and because we haven't created a protocol we keep asking that question and that question then creates panic and creates anxiety and creates stress and eventually could lead to burnout if someone just keeps propelling that thought and doesn't create a protocol so I love the idea that people

should build the protocol that links with their most rep repeated th rather than having to think oh I've got to do 25 things it's like well no what is the thing that is keeping you up at night or what is the thing that's causing you the greatest anxiety and try and solve for that it's like if you're out of milk you go and buy milk you don't say I've got to buy 25 other things you just go filled the part of the refrigerator that's empty does that align yeah absolutely I I love um what we're

bridging over and over uh here is the the the very practical foundational elements of safety with these aspirational things you know I I'm a b big believer in physiology driving mental States they go the other way too emotional states strive physiology it's bidirectional of course one of the reasons why I've been so emphatic about respiration protocols as a my lab published a clinical trial on this in collaboration with David Spiegel in our department of Psychiatry which basically could be summarized the following way if you emphasize exhales you tend to calm down down meaning you make

them longer more and intentional normally we inhale actively and we passively exhale other species do it the other way around some other species if you deliberately emphasize your exhales the duration the intensity or just even control the exhale actively your heart rate slows when we emphasize inhales we don't necessarily have to do hyperventilation or Tumo breathing or anything like that we could but those forms of breathing tend to bring up our activation State and and they emphasize inhales both by virtue of vigor duration or just putting more conscious attention to them and there's a reason

for this it's called respiratory sinus arhythmia it's a it's an actual phenomenon that links the the heart and the vagus nerve and our diaphragm and our lungs it's a beautiful mechanism when I'm overthinking at night and I want to fall asleep I start doing long exhale breathing through my mouth now sometimes I'm out I just fall asleep I know that because I wake up sometime later realize it worked again other times it doesn't work so well right and one of the most common questions I get is how to turn off repetitive thoughts now there it's

a bit of a skill because you know frankly repetitive thoughts oftentimes are serving an Adaptive purpose but we can get stuck on them right or they can get stuck in us I don't know which one it is but one of the reasons why I'm such a strong believer in people doing a practice like Yoga Nidra which you know and I must say I I I know I've upset to some extent some people by coining something very similar non-sleep deep rest or nsdr I want to make very clear that I have the utmost respect for Yoga

Nidra as an ancient practice neither Yoga Nidra of course nor nscr with anything I developed it's just that nsdr it's a little bit different in that it removes intentions and it tends to involve a little bit less of some of the linking of chakras and things like that that yoga NRA does with no specific purpose in mind behind this designing that way except to be able to adapt it to the laboratory context okay what do we know about let's just call it it's its original name yoga NRA the goal is to stay awake to be

conscious while deliberately relaxing the body that's a very useful practice feels similar to meditation in a way could be called a meditation but it has some distinct benefits first of all a beautiful study that was done in Denmark at a medical school in Copenhagen showed that people that do a Yoga Nidra practice get a 60% increase in Baseline dopamine levels in the basil gangle a brain area that's associated with the preparation for movement and the withholding of movement for so it essentially can be looked at as a practice that changes neurochemicals in the brain that

restore mental and physical Vigor that's how I think of yoganidra it's sort of like sleep there are some studies emerging including some that I'm planning with Dr Matt Walker at Berkeley one of the preeminent sleep researchers in the world that are going to explore whether or not little pockets of the brain are actually sleeping or in rapid eye movement sleep like States during yoga Nitra if you think about rapid eye movement sleep just as a very relevant aside it's a state in which the brain is very active and the body is completely still much like

Yoga Nidra okay brain Active Body still now what's unique about Yoga Nidra is that there's this instruction in the Nidra if it's a traditional one that talks about going from thinking and doing to being and feeling okay so let's step back as neuroscientists when we say thinking is a lot about anticipating future it could be about thinking about the past you could be thinking about things that are happening now but it's a very forbrain dependent process doing is basil ganglia action generation withholding action and forbrain circuitry as well you I should say prefrontal cortical circuitry

as well now being and feeling now this is starting to sound a little bit like quote unquote softer language but there's nothing soft about this language because if we just put a neuroscience lens on it we say okay what is that really about that's about bringing ourselves from exception monitoring of the external World beyond the confines of our skin to monitoring of the internal world within the confines of our skin and there's something magical about shifting our perception to interception from our skin inward in that it takes us out of thinking whereas when we're monitoring

the external world for reasons that are sort of logical but a little bit harder to articulate then it's more about anticipating things trying to figure out what goes with what what's separate from what the moment we get to the level of our skin and inward we know what's what and what's separate from what it's just us inward it's so there's one thing rarely do we think okay here's my brain and here's my leg now Nidra then steps us through that and so what it does is it brings all of our con cognition into this inter

receptive mode and then boom we are in this mode of being and feeling so I don't think of being and feeling as turning off thinking I think of it as bringing thinking to the level of our sensation of our body Yoga Nidra I think is perhaps the most powerful practice for learning how to turn off one's thoughts and so when one steps back from the research literature and says okay what do we know for sure about Yoga Nidra and SDR we know that this can be done for 10 minutes 20 minutes 30 minutes or an

hour we know that it can very reliably improve improve levels of wakefulness cognition and vigor post Nidra we know that it restores dopamine levels to a marked extent in the basil ganglia we know that the brain goes into little pockets of sleep-like States this needs to be explored further and we know that it mimics rapid eye movement sleep and we know that people who do it find it easier to make themselves fall back asleep should they need to and they develop much stronger powers of autonomic regulation their ability to take themselves out of Str rest

if they need to I mean if ever there was a powerful practice Yoga Nidra is that practice and so when I step back from the landscape of practices that can help us turn off thinking or Etc this is probably a good time to just you know mention that you know meditation I view as an exploration of One's Own Consciousness I also view it as a perceptual exercise shifting one's perception to a particular location as opposed to just wherever the Mind may take it put simply yeah it's far more profound than that as you know and

as many know but meditation has been shown to right reduce stress improve focus improve memory I'm thinking mainly of the studies by Wendy Suzuki's Lab at at NYU I'm thinking of the studies that were done out of the University of Wisconsin that are talked about in Altered States um uh which is a wonderful book and the work that you've talked about in your books when I think about yoganidra non-sleep deep rest it's really about restoring mental and physical Vigor and getting better at regulating one's own autonomic internal kind of hinge going back and forth between

sympathetic and parasympathetic that you know kind of fight ORF flight and rest and digest alert and calm learning how to adjust that in a in a conscious way then when I think of practices like breath work well it depends on the breath work and then we can simplify it by saying when inhales are more vigorous and made longer deliberately than exhales heart rate goes up alertness goes up when exhales are made longer and more vigorous and done deliberately well then heart rate tends to go down and we tend to shift more towards the state of

calm and then of course there's hypnosis and hypnosis to me is self hypnosis which is a clinical tool that David Spiegel and others around the world but mainly David Spiegel and his father popularized within the formal field of Psychiatry and hypnosis is a combination of alertness and calm that we know lends itself to neuroplasticity what is hypnosis really for it's not meditation it's not to calm down it's to solve a specific problem to quit smoking to learn how to regulate pain to um you know any number of different things that hypnosis has been shown in

P review studies to do so when I step back I say okay meditation nonsleep deep rest AK Yoga Nidra or I should say Yoga Nidra AK non nonsleep deep rest breath work and hypnosis well now we have a kit of tools that are available to us to kind of adjust our internal State and any one of those could be used to turn off thinking but the most powerful one in my opinion and by way of experience and sort of how I'm viewing the research literature I'm sure there are others out there that would disagree with

me and that's fine is yoga netra if ever there was a practice that I wish every human being on the planet would do besides go out and view morning sunlight it would be Yoga Nidra and of course this has been available for thousands of years and unfortunately it has not gotten the traction worldwide that I think it deserves and especially at this time in human history when the world seems so um tense with friction of all sorts of con but also internal friction for people I think it's just um you know it's something that I

really really want to shine a light on as as a tremendously beneficial tool yeah for turning off thoughts yeah uh when it's necessary and for accessing you know some people call these atypical States but most people go from sleep to waking and sleep to waking without really an exploration of what those different states are like so in any event uh forgive me for being long but those are those are the tools that when I step back and I say where is their great neuroscience and Physiology to support their use where what are the specific uses

that seem especially valuable for one practice versus another and how do these practices differ because they often get conflated yes somebody starts breath work and we think oh it's this type of breath work or that type of without thinking about what's being emphasized and where the heart rate is going and or we think meditation and of course there are many different kinds of meditation actually I'd love to know from you I I know of kind of third traditional thirde eyye meditation and I'm aware of open monitoring meditation what what other sorts of meditation do you

do as you mentioned there's breath work there's visualization and there's Mantra or sound so the meditation on the rep repetition of sound whether that be natural sounds whether it be instruments or whether it be the repetition of Mantra in your own voice or the collective chanting which it's done through ancient times of the collective chants of sacred sounds is considered one of the forms of meditation and it almost feels like a humming kind of cocoon effect of being kind of surrounded by this sound that's repeated again and again and again so it can kind of

get you into that kind of submerged immersive drowning feeling that I think most people if they've done a sound ball meditation have experienced some form of what that could feel like and again you're getting into that atypical state but going back to what you were saying what what really resonated for me and what I've always appreciate about your work Andrew I said this last time you came on the show is this connection between these ancient practices and the modern Neuroscience to back it up like when you've talked about many many times about sunlight in the

morning I mean sua namashkar which I mentioned last time is son salutations that is the practice that you would do when you wake up in the morning and you salute the sun and it was this idea of allowing the sunlight to enter in through your eyes and now you're talking about Yoga Nidra at the end of the day to go to sleep again to me it's you've found this way of not only broadcasting and helping people come to these practices but helping them be translated into modern day language which I think is so needed with

a scientific backing and going back to Yoga Nidra I can personally say just from a personal practice point of view I had a surgery two years go and I was in so much physical pain during that first month of recovery the only way I could go to sleep was through Yoga Nidra because the thoughts of pain and of stress and of potential red damage or whatever it may have been were so high that that state could only be lowered through Yoga Nidra and when I'm jetlagged and I'm traveling across the world Yoga Nidra is my

go-to to be able to switch off in a new country when I'm like gosh I'm gonna be up all night will I make it to my work thing tomorrow Yoga Nidra completely allows me to remove those thoughts and allow myself to fall asleep so I use it all the time and couldn't encourage it I'm so glad that you're broadcasting and helping people understand the science behind it because yeah these ancient practices make sense but they need a new language and a new uh translation today yeah Yoga Nidra has such similarity to rapid eye movement sleep

as far as we know it's not the exact same brain state but the similarity again is mind alert body still which is exactly what happens during rapid eye movement sleep and we know rapid eye movement sleep is essential for formation of memories for um uncoupling of you know negative emotions from previous day experiences it tends to be more enriched in the later parts of the night and so on for me Yoga Nidra is the practice to do when I wake up in the morning but I don't feel completely rested I'll do anywhere from 10 minutes

to 30 minutes of that and then in the afternoon instead of a nap I'll do Nidra and sometimes I'll fall asleep admittedly and then if I wake up in the middle of the night Nidra is my solution I think that mind Active Body still is such an interesting and frankly unusual State unless we're in rap and I movement sleep that most people until they try it can't really appreciate the immense value that it brings but the beautiful thing is it works the first time and it works every time yeah our mutual friend Rick Rubin uh

we're both lucky enough to know him and to spend a little bit of time with him and and Rick has a practice that he does I know because I went and visited him last summer and he would just sit there with his eyes closed and his body very still and at some point I asked him like what are you doing and he said well I'm thinking and I said what's the benefit of doing this you know and he said well I come up with ideas this way and I thought oh that's interesting and it immediately

rung a bell I had a guest on my podcast it was actually the first guest ever on my podcast Professor by the name of Dr Carl diero he's an mdn PhD he's the world's arguably top bioengineer in the field of Neuroscience he's also a psychiatrist so he sees patients and he also has raised five children he's one of these phenoms his wife's a neurologist at Stanford that you know is a remarkable person very deep thinker and I was talking to him on the podcast and he said that he has a practice whereby at night after

his kids go to sleep he sits at the table or on the couch Stills his body completely and forces himself to think in complete sentences for about an hour and I thought to myself whoa that's a a wildly unusual practice and I said what what is it about and he said well that's how I structure my ideas that's where new ideas come to me so Carl's doing that Rick's doing that you start looking back through history you find out that Einstein had a walking practice that then he would my father's a theoretical physicist so this

is where I learn this but presumably this is uh verifiable I'm sure someone will tell me it's not true but enough people have told me it is that I'm inclined to at least describe it where he would walk then stop and allow his thoughts to continue as if in motion mind Active Body still and then repeat so this is a very unusual state of mind that I think has real value and we know in sleep rap and eye movement sleep and the associated dreams are where we work out a lot of Novel solutions to hard

daytime problems and I can confidently say that the field of Neuroscience can say so much more about the different states of the Mind in sleep than we can about the states of the Mind in waking it's kind of amazing it's 2024 we know all this information about different brain areas what happens when you stimulate this these neurochemicals and that and yet we have words stage one two three four rapid eye movement sleep slow wave sleep we have real mechanistic understanding of the states of the Mind and Body in sleep and very very little language to

describe like the state of mind that we happen to be in right now so we can talk about hypnosis which is a narrowed context calm but Alert in which neuroplasticity brain changes are more available to us this is supported by clinical and research data we can talk about being attentive we can talk about being stressed but but if you think about like it's not like very crude understanding and so when I think about practices like body still mind active or even you know something that I found immensely beneficial every Sunday I try and take a

long hike or walk and I try and just let my mind spool out whatever ideas it happens to have um you know I like to think it's accessing some subconscious that's been you know kind of packed with ideas and experiences during the week but what do we call that I call it a walk or a run or a hike but I think that the the different states of mind that we can go into during the day need more attention not just from Neuroscience researchers but from people in the fields of meditation people in the fields

of Health and wellness you know what are the different states of mind and so I would say that the last you know really 40 but um you know 30 mainly but five or six years of my life I've been a public educator in the realm of trying to teach people ways to harness their physiology in ways that serve them best for mental health and physical health and performance but I'm now starting to get very very curious about how to evolve this thing that we call Brain States and our understanding of not just through language but

really understanding how to bring our mind into sharp Focus how to be in the best state of mind for connectedness when to turn off empathy when to turn on empathy I mean these are all circuitries within us that are possible and of course we have variation among us as a species as to whether or not we lean more towards logical thinking or empathic you know affiliative thinking these kinds of things but you know I really believe that you know people like you Jay have an important role to play and that the conversation between neuroscientists people

who have knowledge of meditative practices like yourself There's real value in the overlap and you said you know that you were grateful that we're talking about these things ancient practices and what they might mean if I've learned anything and I think I'm finally old enough that I can make that statement if I've learned anything in my life right hopefully my life will continue but if it you know should I go someplace else before I I anticipate I think it's become very clear to me that whether or not you're talking about yoga tradition or you're talking

talking about Neuroscience or you're talking about traditional medicine or some of the more alternative medicines the overlap in those Vin diagrams is where the real money is and I don't necessarily mean financial gain I mean that's where the great ideas are agree so I'm perfectly happy to talk about yoga Nedra nsdr brain circuits Associated dopamine basil ganglia because ultimately if I'm here to do anything is to try and Bridge these silos and bring people's awareness to the fact that we've all been talking about the same thing and we're all seeking the same things safety acceptance

creativity you know these connectedness purpose fulfillment these loftier ideals start with having our physiology in a place where we can reliably move forward not have to worry about certain things and then a little space opens up and so on and so forth but I think there's a real calling now for anyone that's interested in the brain anyone that's interested in health and anyone that's interested in humanity to really start paying attention to the overlap in the ven diagrams between REM sleep and waking States between ancient practices and modern practices and um I should warn that

that person or those people you're going to take some heat you know but ultimately the ability to go between these silos and to bridge them as we're trying to do now and hopefully are are making some ground in this I believe we are is going to serve Humanity very very well because it's just been too long whereby people are holding back knowledge the secret of some chemical The Secret of some practice there's no secret the secret is they all work to some extent the question is what are the commonalities what are the mechanisms and what

are the practices that allow people to bring their brain and body into the state that best serves them and other people yeah and it's accessible but we have to have a slightly open mind about the language we have to give up the EGO saying oh that's my practice that that work is the domain of my school or my thing and frankly those arguments aren't working anymore anyway because information is so freely available in the internet so in any case there's a little bit of editorializing there I realize but it's also a calling to anyone that's

interested in the mind and in the brain that you know Neuroscience is no longer the unique domain of neuroscientists and I know that some of my Neuroscience colleagues are going be like oh boy you know here he is just as if it's accessible to anybody I'm not saying you can be a neurosurgeon if you aren't trained in neurosurgery right but I'm not saying that you can be an advanced meditative practitioner without putting in the hours what I am saying is that there's overlap in the ven diagrams of these different fields sure and the more collegiality

the faster and further we're going to go as a species well I think it goes back to what you were just saying a few moments ago that we only have a language for and I'm going to put a umbrella term here but we only have language for the extremes of experience so what you were saying is when you're on a hike or a walk you don't have a term for what that feels like because it's not an extreme of being asleep or being awake it's kind of like this in between cerebral state that we don't

have a language for and I think that on a micro level makes sense to all of us where we have words like I'm angry or I'm sad or I'm upset but our word for is okay right like our word for okay is okay which isn't a great descriptor of how we feel and so we're only good at describing things in extremes on a micro level and then if you zoom out and take that on a macro level that translates as well where we're only good at dealing with these extremes and when you're saying ven diagram

it's saying well get away from the extremes and look at the overlaps but I think we as a society on a micro level and at a macro level have only learned how to deal with the pendulum swing on either side all the extremes on either side and therefore anything in the middle or the gray starts to feel uncomfortable starts to feel it's not easy to say whether it's right or wrong and therefore it's like well we're not even going to go there and I think anyone that I've spoken to at the top of their field

you being one of them anyone we've ever had on the show is far more interested in the gray is far more in the gray and is spending far more time exploring thought that is unclear uncomfortable and uncertain because that's where life really is lived in the unpredictable that's the adventure that is the adventure that is the adventure and I feel that that's why humans want to go to space like why is everyone fascinated by space because it's not clear as to what it is and what's out there and where it is and of course not

many people will get to go to space at least for now but the idea being the same that there has to be that Curiosity from all of us to say oh where where are we in the same place like where are we connected on our ideas and where are there things that aren't similar but maybe they're connected in a different way and I I think being able to oscillate between connectivity and disconnectedness is a need for the brain and the mind as opposed to this feeling of again it goes back to what we started with

safety and acceptance makes us feel today that you can't allow yourself to engage in an idea that doesn't fully connect with yours because that feels un safe right especially right now right we things are feel very polarized correct you know I'm putting in a very strong vote for uh the league of reasonable people which is hopefully everybody right like I I don't want to sound overly sentimental but like I and maybe I'm just too emotional lately but I am so pained by the amount of fighting that I see that I know will not result in

any anything it's not going to solve the problem for either side right I guess at 49 I feel old enough to say this like I I have um I still have hope but that's obviously not a solution I think that when we really get down to the Neuroscience of self-standing when people really start to understand that the human brain is a magnificent machine and organ but that it has limitations and we can start to understand our own limitations you know that it can take us just up to this point but not further and that we

can rely on uh healthy Collective thinking healthy Collective thinking to get us over these divides I think that's when we're finally going to evolve as a species I really do when we when we start being able to exit our our our own brain and our group think to be able to really come to Solutions because often we just think in terms of compromise and conflict which are essential things to think about but ultimately understanding the limits of our cognition and how emotion drives cognition is really how we're going to be able to evolve our beliefs

about what's possible and by the way that's not meant to just be a bunch of aspirational word salad that's like a real possibility if we can just have the self-reflection to understand we know certain things we believe certain things but that this neural architecture that we call our brain is limited in the extent to which it can see into the future and make the best decisions for everybody we operate thinking that but that's not how it works and of course we can't look to any one individual to solve the problem for everybody now will it

be AI I don't know that involves a lot of trust in Ai and these large language models are trained in many ways the same way that a neural network it trains itself up how a young brain develops and makes sense of the world so I don't have any Immediate Solutions what I do have is uh a piece of Neuroscience knowledge that was at least new to me that most neuroscientists aren't aware of but I think this is one of the most important discoveries in the last 100 years of Neuroscience it's a collection of studies on

an area of the brain called the anterior mid singulate cortex most people have never heard of this brain area including many neuroscientists Dr neurosurgeon they know where it is he talked to a neuroscientists unless they teach neuroanatomy which I happen to most don't know where it is in the brain and most didn't know what it did because it hadn't been explored and then a colleague of mine at Stanford School of Medicine named Joe parvey did an incredible study where he was doing neurosurgery and stimulating different brain areas as a means to try and find the

location where he needed to do the surgery and he stumbled on an area called the anterior mid singulate cortex where if he stimulated with an electrode people because they were awake during the neurosurgery would report feeling as if there was some conflict pressing on them some one even described as I feel like I'm driving into a storm but I feel ready I can I can do this others reported a different set of words but the words essentially converged around the same set of subjective experiences which are I'm I feel challenged but I can do it

it's kind of forward Center of mass and then other studies separate Laboratories discovered that people that take on a new practice that's challenging for them their anterior M singulate cortex grows in volume other people who fail to um successfully engage in a regular challenging activity the anid singulate cortex didn't increase in volume in the same way so very interesting brain structure and there's I would say about a dozen or so really quality studies in humans a bunch in animal models but they're a bunch in humans that point to the anter mid singulate cortex as a

sight in the brain associated with the feeling of tenacity and willpower to push through it's heavily interconnected with the dopamine reward system heavily connected frankly with a lot of different brain areas it's a hub for a lot of inputs and outputs so what do we know about the anter mid singulate cortex perhaps most interesting of all is that this is the brain area that seems to preserve its size and even grow in size in what are called superagers superagers are people that maintain their cognition later to life These are people that don't undergo the normal

age related decline in cognition separate from Alzheimer's type dementia you know everybody as they get older develops less working memory the ability to keep ideas in mind in in the short term superagers seem to overcome all that and they live longer so you could say well this is a case of reverse causality they live longer so they have a bigger brain area called the inter mid singulate cortex we don't really know what the direction of of causality is could just be correlation but it all gets Ultra interesting when you start to tack together willpower the

taking on of new things learning things in neuroplasticity and lifespan and it may be that that quadfecta represents what we think of as the will to live is associated with an intense curiosity and desire to bring in new ideas and modes of thinking and new ideas and modes of thinking then feed back on our feelings of how we could gain reward internal reward of course dopamine being the universal currency of reward as a means to move forward what does this mean this means that everybody I believe can become a better human being by taking on

challenges what is a challenge that can grow the anterior mid singulate cortex well unfortunately it's a challenge that you don't want to engage in so if you love running this is not it's not going to do it if you love resistance R it's not going to do it if you don't want to meditate in the morning and you do five minutes or 10 minutes of meditation then you just enhanced the activation of your an mid singulate cortex so it's about it's not just about doing hard things it's about really pushing through resistance and the reason

I bring this up now as opposed to in a discussion about like how to get more tenacious or have stronger willpower it will do that okay we know that when the anent mid singulate cortex gets bigger it translates to a lot of different areas of challenge not just the area in which you challenged it the reason is I believe that this lofty notion of humans evolving to more more Collective thinking to embracing new ways to bridge divides that harm human beings at scale or even just locally is going to emerge through only through the willingness

to embrace the internal friction that is hearing things and seeing things that we don't like and being able to take a stance of adaptive response whatever that is now of course there are things that we hear and see and don't like that activate enough of a sense of Injustice in us that that's all it does it just brings us to the point of like wanting to impart justice but what I'm talking about here are differences in opinion strongly polarized views that lead to all sorts of things as we know good and bad and everything in

between and if people had the capacity to feel that friction and to stay in a mode of some open cognition I think we would come up with novel Solutions I really think the next iteration of human beings is collective Consciousness you know it sounds lofty sounds woo but it's basically lots of Minds working together even Minds that oppose one another in ideology as a means to find out Noel solutions to hard problems that Vex us all and that in some cases really harm us all it's I it's it's a real thing with real possibility but

it's going to require that we all get not necessarily tougher but that we get more resilient at the level of being able to tolerate internal states that normally would impede adaptive thinking yes yes and and the ability to engage in uncomfortable thinking and I love that definition that you gave I saw this brilliant quote the other day on social media and it was it was from a Christian page or post and it said uh the the essence of Christianity is not learning to love Jesus but learning to love Judas and and I was thinking how

brilliant that was because it goes back to that point of what's uncomfortable like it's it's easy to love the good person it's it's learning to love or understand at least the person who may have done you know uh something that you you didn't recognize or didn't understand or didn't fully connect with and I think often we we see that and we think oh but then there's no accountability there's no this there's no that but really what we're saying is are we willing to do as you said the most challenging thing which is something you don't

enjoy doing it's not something you're excited by if you're enjoying the challenge it's no longer the challenge right if you're it's always like I remember a training and conditioning coach used to tell me like Jay if you're sitting in the C plunge just to get your minutes up so you can tell someone how long you sat in there he goes then that means it wasn't hard beyond that certain point it was like you should get out once it's easy cuz it's not having the effect you want it to have that's right it's no longer adaptive

stimulus correct can can I offer an alternative protocol people always ask me how cold should the cold plunge be or the cold shower and how long should I stay in and it's so variable depending on the person the time of day obviously only do what's safe right so don't go so cold that you can you know you can get a cardiovascular effect that's not good but it's very simple actually if you want it to translate into the real world in the best way you ask yourself right before you get in on a scale of 1

to 10 how badly do I not want to get in and I would say that if it's five to 10 well that's a wall if it's anywhere in the five that that's one wall you have to get over so then you get in and then at some point there will be the desire to get out that's the second wall maybe it comes within 5 seconds maybe it comes within 20 seconds that's the second wall so what I would do is Count walls what are the quote unquote walls the walls are are waves of adrenaline being

released into your body and sometimes they are very close together those waves and sometimes they're more distantly spaced apart now of course at some point you go numb and then you don't feel them anymore we don't suggest that but if you think to yourself gosh today I really don't want to get in that wall is a really tall wall well just getting in for 15 20 seconds is going to accomplish something meaningful for this anterior mid singulate cortex it's going to accomplish something meaningful for the adrenaline release that you're going to experience so it's less

about the temperature I mean obviously the temperature plays a role than it is your of subjective relationship to the whole thing for instance if you do cold exposure at night when you're tired it's a Far and Away different experience than in the morning after going for a run and you're too warm so I can't say 45 degrees Fahrenheit for 90 seconds although if you want to start there that's fine provided it's safe for you but as you watch these walls of adrenaline come at you as it were pay attention to what they feel like that's

what you'll recognize outside the ice bath in a hard conversation that's what yeah that it's not that you can make yourself so resilient that you're adrenaline system doesn't work correct it's that you learn to recognize the state of having adrenaline in your system and staying calm and then I actually had this happen the other day I was in a really hard yesterday in a hard conversation something first thing in the morning it was like wait what seriously misunderstanding hard conversation and I remember here we are our voices are going up we weren't yelling but like

it was it was a peaceful morning until that moment and we you could kind of feel the energy in the room going up and I was thinking to myself okay how am I and I thought this is like a wall in in the thing and I said and I said because we have this this language at home I said um I feel like there's a wall of adrenaline hitting us whether we both kind of started laughing and then we kind of reverted to what we were doing and then we calm down and you know we

talk about taking breaks and that's wonderful It's a Wonderful tool that you talked about in your book on relationships there's so many valuable Tools in there by the way just like thank you for writing that book so valuable everyone should read it should be standard curriculum stand curriculum in every school in in every home I I really mean that Jay doesn't tell me to say this I really mean this I really truly mean it it too kind the uh well it's entirely appropriate because it's true but noticing those walls of adrenaline and realizing that when

we're in those uh adrenaline filled States our cognition is shifted we don't have solutions that we had five minutes ago so learning to watch those pass in the cold Plunge in the cold shower on a hard run or whatever it is but the cold seems to be the universal stressful stimulus for everybody is so valuable more than marking off you know 15 minutes or five minutes in the cold plunge and some days it's 15 seconds sometimes it's 30 and for somebody learning the cold plunge it's like hey can you just even get near the thing

or in it and I think there's real value there yeah so in any event I know I love that translation into real life because I think what's happened is we're dealing with a lot of every every day things with so much pain that that pain is then creating more pain for us for for others and we never end this or we create this never ending cycle and loop for ourselves and others where we stay in the pain and what we're all saying is what does it take just as we have to learn to sit in

that cold and regulate ourselves and adapt what does it take to sit in the pain outside of the tub regulate ourselves rise to a place of peace and then respond and then get together and as you said the league of reasonable people the re League of reasonable people like I think we'd all Aspire towards that I think when I hear that I think we all go I think I'm a reasonable person I think most of us would say that I think it lives in all of us and it's a brain state that takes certain things

to get to on a regular basis I mean there's some people that perhaps are outside the the margins for which participation in the league of reasonable people is impossible but even even as I say that you know one thing that I've tried to do as I get older is to limit cynicism you know in my home growing up that there were many beautiful emotions and Concepts and things I was exposed to by virtue of the wonderful people that my parents were they had flaws like everybody else but one of the things that I've really tried

to discard as I've gotten older is cynicism it's one of the things that my sister and I talk a lot about like it never served anyone well to be cynical you can be critical and discerning but cynical doesn't accomplish anything except to separate us from people that's my belief and and I'm not trying to encourage people to be um soft in a way that's unsafe for them like I said be be Discerning uh you know safety is important uh but cynicism I don't know what it is it's like an ego fed um negativity that that

sort of implies one is better than other people but it actually is usually the opposite it usually comes from a place of deep insecurity right it's a very dismissive stance and so I almost caught myself a second ago saying oh you know making a kind of joke about what a cynical joke about well there are probably people who can't I actually believe that we are all capable of having access to this uh reasonable feature within ourselves but it involves a state of calm a feeling of safety and um you know I guess you know laced

into everything I'm saying today is is is a kind of a hope and an aspiration you know I I've kind of gotten to the point now where I feel like if I don't say it now when am I going to say it and and how old do you have to be I used to think you had to be 40 years old to write a book I thought that I thought I have to be 40 years old to write a book and I realized that's ridiculous people much younger than 40 write amazing books amazing and important

books and then I thought well how how old do you have to be in order to have had enough life experience to be able to say things that are aspirational about how you'd like to see the world change or people change for the better and you know I've decided that the the age on that is is one day you know like like one day so this is a bit of an encouragement for people out there if if you have ideas about um ways that you and others can be better to to really like write them

down and evolve them right they often need some Evolution to be able to be received in the right way and but then share those I was thinking a moment ago I I wanted your opinion on this so in thinking about emotional interaction and the ways in which the world can be beautiful or challenging depending on the energy that's around us I I once read I forget his name so forgive me he's an investor I think it was on the Tim Ferris podcast a very um successful investor young guy I think he he lived in trucky

of all places he once said you know email is a public post to-do list and it completely changed in that one moment the way that I thought about email because the emails were useful but I realized oh yeah I'm like going in there it's like all these things I need to do and when I started my laboratory I knew I had two major challenges one get grants so I could do the the work you need money and do research publish great papers and that meant had to interact with my lab and do a bunch of

other things other things were important teaching included but those were the main ones email was a public post to-do list so I needed to be very careful in terms of my interaction with email nowadays I feel like social media is a public not necessarily projection but uh evacu ation of of emotion so when I go on to social media in the morning if I'm not careful like really careful and thoughtful about what I look at I'm basically getting the emotional energy of all these people and some of them like you are trying to help people

and some of them are just in evacuative expression of their pain others are in evacuative expression of cynicism and I don't think I'm alone in this like I'm a pretty sensitive person I or maybe I'm getting more sensitive but I'm very sensitive to this stuff like it's not like it can throw off my whole day but I can quickly get drawn down a rabbit hole of something and then we talk about dopamine hits or the addictive properties of social media and that would be a fine conversation but that one's been had but what about all

the like energetic bombardment and that the need for for discernment and filtering of all this stuff I wish you know I could label up like a positivity score and it's not to avoid the realities of the world but I think I don't know did this stuff affect you because I do my work so that it doesn't permeate me yeah but you know just like if someone wakes up in a bad mood you can take care of them but if they wake up in a bad mood every single day it's pretty draining on your home environment

for sure so yeah what do you do in order to keep emotional boundaries especially online and the funny thing is the predictability of negativity doesn't reduce its effect well it also has a gravitational pull yeah I mean I'm on X and inst and the other you know threads in Facebook and all of them you know but I noticed that on some of the Platforms in particular that like there's a gravitational pull like people are there to fight and now when I look at that I think you know some of them are saying highly intelligent things

some of them are not but like they got have a lot of like pain inside I think that's what I was going to touch on I think it's that to me the thing that has been most helpful in all of it is a genuine sense of deeper empathy and compassion for the energetic state of the world the systems that have let people down and truly made them feel that they can't rely on them and the systems that have done a disservice and Injustice which has now led to this emotional evacuation as you called it and

to me using it as a way of having deeper empathy deeper compassion a genuine sense of recognition that although everyone does have choice and does have agency definitely there is an overarching energetic system that is almost keeping people imprisoned in this space and that prison is now adct to stay in I I feel for that I I I deeply feel for that and it and it affects me because I recognize that people haven't been set up for success by the education system by the way the economy set up by the way anything's set up like

it's it's not set people up for success and naturally for people in their home they weren't a lot of people wenten set up for success and so we have to zoom out and look at the context because if I zoom in and just look at that that one tweet or that one comment God it's like a bullet to the chest you know and it's like I've I've always had this vision and I've kind of done it mentally sometimes because I can't do it physically and for every person that feels that way I've always wanted I

was like I wish I could sit down with every person individually who felt a certain way and have a contextually relevant honest authentic conversation with each person and bear my soul and be vulnerable and open my heart but we can't and I also know that one post can't do that for everyone like it's not possible for one quote one image one message one podcast episode that will speak to everyone to make everyone feel seen heard and understood I could just about do that on a one to one level let alone a one to 100 million

level how are you going to do that and so I also have empathy for myself and I and I extend that compassion back to myself and recognize I'm a limited human being who just as that individual is limited by their systems and their setup and their energy so am I and there's no way in which I could respond to this individual and satisfy this exchange with 140 280 characters like how's that even possible and so I think to me deepening my compassion and empathy externally and internally have been the only relevant tools as woooo or

as spiritual as they may sound because there is no practical habit based solution that I can give you some tactics and ideas but I know as well that at one point they're just logical and theoretical and practical but they're not yeah they don't feel they don't hit me there and so to me I've seen it all as a simulation and an experiment to deepen human emotion deep in human empathy deep in human compassion and a reminder of my fallibility so that I can embrace my own insignificance so that I can therefore take shelter in the

source and the universe and God and to allow for space for that if I was able to control every one of these things and make it work perfectly I may in a very crude sense you may under false pretenses Stop Believing you're the controller to some degree and I think anyone who's experienced success in certain domains starts to feel like the controller in their relevant fields and I think all of these things are expedited in order just to encourage you to have an ego death and pulverize the the arrogance of of whatever kind by the

way I don't mean in a sense of that I feel I'm important but we all have a sense of I'm the controller I can make things work I know what's right I'm I'm this I'm that and this is all reminding us of we're not the controller we have to ultimately take shelter we have to ultimately give up the Reigns and I ultimately have to surrender and accept that there is a greater Source there is a greater power and that when I'm in connection with that and I'm in service of that then I'm happy and I'm

joyful but if I'm trying to be that or extrapolate energy from that to control and navigate then I'm forever going to be unhappy so to me that's a quick version of the stuff that I try and work on not to be helpless I don't feel helpless that I feel I feel at home it's almost like you know when you're taking shelter of a greater source to take care of things you can't take care of it's not because you're helpless or because you're weak it's actually the greatest sign of strength to know I can call up

a friend to help me you know am I more strong because I can move home myself and not ask anyone for help or am I stronger because three of my friends came and helped me out and Carri the load I'm stronger for asking for help I have a better community and Network You' say that person's smarter and healthier and so I think of that same way on a universal level at least I tried to I'm working on it I love that and I realize from what you said that you know the greatest sense of safety

seems to arrive from not trying to control everything and it it's counterintuitive right you know we think okay well how do you get safety well you have to get rid of vigilance how do you get rid of vigilance well you decide what you do and don't have to pay attention to and at some point if one decides I I can't control all of this you have one of two options either that means you're just waiting for that wave to come demolish you wave of whatever or you trust like you you trust in something to make

everything okay even if that wave comes you know and I've talked before on podcast I I believe in God I do you know and and of of course I believe in everyone's right to believe or not believe what they believe in I think that the notion of of giving up trying to control everything and giving Over Control to more Universal forces or a universal Force whatever one's mode of thinking happens to be I believe they're entitled to is probably the most peace inducing step I've ever taken and I thought it would be you know matched

with a little sneaking you know voice in the back yeah but but it's not and and I don't know how that works at the level of Neuroscience I know there are neuroscientists who are trying to explore this and as the data evolve I I'll certainly pay attention to it not with the intention of trying to undermine any kind of um larger sense of of anything um but just out of interest it's far far too interesting there's actually a woman at Stanford I am yet to talk to her we should both talk to her she said

uh I forget her name at the moment because I just learned about her work in the department of anthropology who has spent her entire career studying um people's inner voices people who Hear Voices people hear the voices of others and sure this sometimes goes into the domain of people who have auditory hallucinations and so forth but also just these different scripts that people have in their in their mind that include their own voices and other voices voices we've internalized from childhood this resonates with me a lot because when I was a kid after my parents

would put me to sleep I used to arrange dialogues between people I had heard that day and I could hear their voices in very clear ways in my head and I would remember things they said and I could create these dialogues and so I've Al always had a very like strong audiographic memory it's not as if everything I hear I remember verbatim that actually would be a super skill would have saved me in a lot of arguments um but in all seriousness I I think what you describe about essentially a letting go or a giving

over of the the need for that control that we all experience the desire for control is really where the solution lies I think I I know this because many people have said it and it's very hard to do but that once one does it once you know you can do it again and it's a practice it's a practice it's not it's not a you write it down and it's done it's a practice and you know I also am thinking about the the kind of uh counterintuitive nature of the fact that you know we're talking at

once about letting go and not trying to control everything but also pushing oneself to be more resilient and tenacious and things of that sort and so I I feel like all of life is like that all of life is about yes you need to take care of your physiology you need to get your sleep at night but it's also okay to get a bad night's sleep every once in a while it's okay to not do every protocol in fact it's encouraged to not do every protocol the expectation on us is not Perfection right it's it's

I think being able to toggle between these different states I think that one of the best things about social media one of the best things about podcast is that you know speaking and listening is the human narrative certainly writing certainly plays poetry and music as well dance there are other forms of communication certainly sculpture and here we on and on but as a a great podcaster David senro who hosts the founders podcast it's kind of a like like a nerds podcast of if somebody's interested in Founders like a founders of companies he sort of does

for that what I do for science and health and what you do for health and spirituality and and so many more topics psychology and and so on David does for Founders and Company Founders and he said you know that podcasting and to some extent social media but really podcasting is the human narrative recorded radio radio used to be live sometimes it was recorded and then played but there wasn't an archive that you could go access and where there was it was a fairly sparse archive I think we're going to look back a 100 years from

now and whether it's in AI form or in its traditional form as it is now I think people speaking onto the internet is our you know this is our stone tablets uh these our cave drawings really it's wild it's wild it's wild and and I like to think it's serving the evolution of our species at at some level certainly it's creating a historical record I often think about this like so many thoughts so many emotions that people have don't get transmuted into useful tools that others could benefit from I think this is why we love

music and poetry and things that capture in essence actually I I recall now this is what I wanted to um ask you about please lately I try I spend real time trying to feel experiences more than just think about them I have a very like you know kind of dominant analytic mind I'm trying to think strategize understand make sense of always been like that but in recent years and especially this last year I've just tried to like sense what's going on outside me and in me and this form of intelligence is something that people have

talked about for hundreds of thousands of years it's a different form of intelligence it's the one one that I think has access to our unconscious mind in a way that thinking doesn't always have access to um it's not necessarily linked to emotion it's just more of a are we drawn toward away from or we kind of neutral about a given person or experience and it draws on a different set of neural circuits um and I started thinking about this in large part because of my love of dogs you know my dog Costello I put down

in July of 2021 and I always loved the Bulldog because the first time I ever went to a dog show which everybody should do by the way you ever been to a dog show we should go so I was taken to a dog show by my then girlfriend when I was a postto and she said you got to go to a dog show and it was and so we went to the dog show but we didn't attend the show in front is the show where they're going over things and walking around getting paraded around that

part is cool but the really cool part is you go in the back where you have all the dog breeders with all the different breeds of dogs usually five or six of each breed and you can see the immense variation both in the structure but also the temperaments and therefore the nervous systems of these different animals all the same species also dogs by the way you have little ones and you have giant ones Chihuahua and great Dans in the same species as far as I know it's the greatest variation in brain and body size of

any species there's probably an you know another species out there that someone will point out that you know makes me wrong but it's at least the far end of the Continuum in that sense so I'm back there and I'm thinking I really want a dog at some point and I'm thinking I want a Rhodesian Ridge back or I really like the you know the wolf hounds I really love the Afghans they look like people in dog suits the way they they would move around and so so bright eyed and then I looked over in the

corner and there's this row of Bulldogs snoring like a xylophone and I went over and I asked the woman there I said what an interesting breed of dog and she said oh they're the best and I said well everyone here says that about their breed of dog and she said yeah but they're really the sweetest and they are the essence of efficiency and so I woke one up and I started playing with it and you realize that they don't react unless they need to some have more energy than others but when they need to they

have a lot of energy available to them but they have very little spontaneous movement now I'm not like this I I think I'm probably becoming more like this as the years go by through some effort but other breeds of dogs are constantly moving they like peretic they're constantly moving they're constantly moving and it makes me a little nervous whereas the Bulldog just made me feel very calm so I got Costello not that day I got him elsewhere and I found that his presence even his loud snoring made me very calm and he was not reactive

to things that did not require reactivity to he was reactive when appropriate and I'm not saying the Bulldog is the perfect breed in fact I discourage people from getting them unless they have the means to take care of them because they tend to have a lot of health issues they're very bread it's kind of a cruel breed especially in its modern iterations but EV every dog has a different energy so pay attention to how much spontaneous movement there is pay attention to where they put their eyes how readily they just go to sleep or or

not how quickly they stand up and move and then start to look at people and you start to realize there's tremendous variation there there's a brigh eyedness to certain people you're one of them other they're like really at the level of their eyes that are there with you and that also exude a feeling of of calm and so I've started paying more attention to how things make me feel and I think this is why going on social media now I feel like I'm eating 2 five different Cuisines at once which would be disgusting whereas if

I just kind of focus on one or two things like I love different Cuisine different different types of food but I don't want them all at once to and so I think as humans we we are meant to experience a huge array of what life has to offer and people have to offer not all of it but a lot of it and I feel like being able to sense into kind of the essence of music or the essence of a person's presence or the essence of a group for me has been very informative toward just

kind of like realizing there are these different ways of interacting in with the world I don't want to sound you know too abstract here I think what we're really talking about here is turning off traditional modes of thinking which tend to be single track or dual track and sensing energy I think is more about taking a broader band analysis of what's going on more visual field more sensory field and bringing it all in at once and this is what we at least understand other animals to do because they lack language at least in our form

and so they have to make decisions about moving toward away from or staying in a neutral position based on a kind of Gestalt a kind of like a whole picture of something and I think it can be a very useful Rudder with which to navigate now of course we also have to sharpen our int ention and sharpen our intellect around certain things but I think as time goes on I'm I don't know I'm trying to become more Bulldog like for myself and for the people in my life yeah because Costello made me feel safe certainly

made me feel accepted he was very stubborn but he also he took great Delight in in things and he also could be quite the protector if he needed to be and so I really thought like wow if ever there were some energies to embody it would be the bu energy and maybe for other people they need to embody a different energy I think we can learn a lot by paying attention to animals you know like I said I spend sometime with Rick Rubin and I won't compare him to a bulldog he's not like a bulldog

he's like he's like a wolf hound he's extremely still but then when he opens his mouth that mind is it's like it's a force and I know Rick well enough to know that he has this amazing ability to get very close to the energy of music and other people but he doesn't get absorbed by it it doesn't change him in a way that changes your experience of him he's having experiences but like there's a stability to him he's like this cord of of reliability and I think that's one of the reasons why people gravitate towards

them it's also that beard is pretty iconic so and your energy too my friend I haven't figured out what animal you are I'm I'm looking forward to hearing about I haven't figured it out but it's you're very loving but you're also very just erning I think this is something that people um probably don't realize about you I'm not you're psychologist but you know but you know you you you have a gift you have a gift and you give your gift in such plentiful ways and so many people benefit and so you've also clearly learned to

surround yourself with people that allow you to give and to receive I I say this with great admiration I think I know you well enough now to like I know you're heart like and I hope so yeah yeah I I can feel it like I can feel your love for what you do and how badly you want people to get it but you know better than to do anything but just create an offering and as a consequence people flock to it I love it I love it and and I've grown tremendously from your books from

your teaching I I I tell you this offline so I'm I'm now saying it uh I'm now saying it recorded because I think it's really important that people understand that the podcasters especially like whether or not it's you or Rick or Lex or and there's so many others right or Joe or Tim or Whitney or whoever like there's so many too many to list like we're all just being ourselves that's the beauty of it it's like Costello being Costello and to some extent sure there's you know edits and production all that kind of stuff but

it's just you being you M and to me that's the most beautiful thing it's what really works and it's what really matters and I think it's what people should do even when there's no recording you certainly do you know you're the same on mic and off mic it's one of the things I love about you and I think it's what people we need to do we all need to like also Embrace that unique wiring that we each have so absolutely well Andrew thank you for those kind words and and I don't take them lightly I

know you mean them and what I really appreciate today is you've also shared the part of you that comes out naturally when we're together and same with me my the part of me that's fascinated by Neuroscience and everything you teach and and I think that's the beauty of it too it's that I hope that everyone who's been listening and watching today knows and loves you for what you do on a daily basis but then can accept that there are different facets to you there are different elements to you there different things that you're curious about

and you've shown them all today and laid them out when they come to hubman lab they they're getting something very specific and they're getting that part but you allow yourself to Showcase different parts of your personality and I'm grateful that you shared that with me you share that with my community I want to thank you for joining me today uh and being so open and vulnerable and giving with your space and energy and I'm glad that you feel confident and open enough to be able to do that because it goes back to everything we've discussed

today we all want to feel safe and accepted but in order to do that we want all parts of ourself to be accepted otherwise we can't truly feel safe and so if I'm only accepted for one part of me then I don't feel safe and I feel safe only sharing one part of myself that I'm not truly accepted and so I think everything we've talked about today comes around beautifully full circle and uh thank you for making me feel safe and accepted thank you for being safe and accepted and and I hope everyone who's listening

and watching today focuses on doing that for themselves and the people that love that would be a beautiful ripple effect from this show that people go off and create that space for the people in their Liv so thank you my friend well thank you so much thanks for having me and uh as I said I'm such a huge fan of what you do and and who you are and you know and thank you for the kind words um you know I I confess I have a bit of uh lowlevel anxiety and sharing parts of myself

I haven't shared publicly before um but since I was a kid I was was one to venture out a little bit further than the rest uh usually with a with a pack but sometimes alone and you know I'm trying to um Embrace positive change in myself by example I mean I am fallible and flawed like everybody I have areas that still need work certainly and um I'm going to keep working away and sharing what I learn and I'm grateful for all of it and I'm especially grateful to you right now so I love it thank

you my friend Andre appreciate thank you so much if this is the year that you're trying to get creative you're trying to build more I need you to listen to this episode with Rick Rubin on how to break into your most creative self how to use unconventional methods that lead to success and the secret to genuinely loving what you do if you're trying to find your passion and your lane Rick rubin's episode is the one for you just because I like it that doesn't give it any value like as an artist if you like it

that's all of the value that's the success comes when you say I like this enough for other people to see it