The Science of Emotions & Relationships | Huberman Lab Essentials

welcome to hubman lab Essentials where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health physical health and [Music] performance my name is Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford school of medicine so let's talk about emotions emotions are a fascinating and vital aspect of our life experience it's fair to say that emotions make up most of what we think of as our experence of life even the things we do our behaviors and the places we go and the people we end up encountering in our

life all of that really funnels into our emotional perception of what those things mean whether or not they made us happy or sad or depressed or lonely or we awe inspiring now one thing that is absolutely true is that everyone's perception of emotion is slightly different meaning your idea of happy is very likely different than my idea of what a state of happiness is and we know this also for color vision for instance even though the cells in your eye and my eye that perceive the color red are identical right down to the genes that

they express we can be certain based on experimental evidence and what are called psychophysical studies that your idea of the most intense red is going to be very different than my idea of the most intense red if we were given a selection of 10 different Reds and asked which one is most intense which one looks most red and that seems crazy you would think that something as simple as color would be Universal and yet it's not and so we need to agree at the outset that emotions are complicated and yet they are tractable they can

be understood and today we're going to talk about a lot of tools to understand what emotions are for you to understand what your emotional states mean and what they don't mean and in doing that that will allow you to place value on whether or not you should hold an emotional state as true or not true whether or not it has meaning or it doesn't as well as whether or not the emotions of others are important to you in a given context we're going to talk a lot about development in fact we're going to center a

lot of our discussion today around infancy and puberty we're also going to talk about tools for enhancing one's emotional range and for navigating difficult emotional situations I'm not a clinical psychologist I'm not a therapist but I do have some background in Psychology and today I'm going to be drawing from the psychology greats not me but from the greats of psychology who studied emotion who studied emotional development and linking that to the Neuroscience of emotion because nowadays we understand a lot about the chemicals and the hormones and the neural circuits in the brain and body that

underly emotion so while there's no one single universally true theory of emotion at the intersection of many of the existing theories there are really some ground truths if we want to understand emotions we have to look at where emotions first develop and the rule that every good neuroanatomist knows is that if you want to understand what a part of the brain does you have to address two questions you have to know what connections does that brain area make and you need to know what's called the developmental origin of that structure what are the brain areas

for emotion and nowadays there's a lot of debate about this for years it was thought that there might be circuit meaning Connections in the brain that generate the feeling of being happy or circuits that generate the feeling of being sad Etc that's been challenged and yet I think there's good evidence for circuits in the brain such as lyic circuits and other circuits that shift our overall States or our overall level of alertness or calmness or whether or not they bias us toward viewing the outside world or paying more attention to what's going on inside our

bodies but the important thing to understand is that emot do arise in the brain and body and if we want to understand how emotions work we have to look how emotions are built and they are built during infancy adolescence and puberty and then it continues into adulthood but the groundwork is laid down early in development when we are small children you were born into this world without really any understanding of the things around you now there are two ways that you can interact with the world and you're always doing them more or less to some

degree at the same time those are interoception paying attention to what's going on inside you what you feel internally and exteroception paying attention to what's going on outside you hold that in mind please because the fact that you're both intercepting and exter accepting is true for your entire life and it sets the foundation for understanding emotions it's absolutely critical as an infant you didn't have any knowledge of what you needed you didn't understand hunger you didn't understand cold or heat or any of that when you needed something you experience that as anxiety you would feel

an increase in alertness if you had to use the bathroom you would feel an increase in alertness if you were hungry and you would vocalize you would cry out you would act agitated you might coup you might do a number of different things and then your caregiver whoever that might have been would respond to that so this is actually really important to understand that a baby when you were a baby and when I was a baby we didn't have any sense of the outside world except that it responded to our acts of anxiety essentially all

developmental psychologists agree that babies lack the ability to make cognitive sense of the outside world but in this feeling of anxiety and registering one's own internal State and then crying out to the outside world either through crying or subtle vocalizations or even just cing making some noise we start to develop a relationship with the outside world in which our internal States our shifts and anxiety start to drive requests and people come and respond to those requests and this gets to the basis of what emotions are about which are emotions are really about forming bonds and

being able to predict things in the world and at this point I actually just want to pause and mention a really interesting tool that is trying to address this question of what are emotions and what do they consist of that you can use if you like this is an app I didn't develop it I don't have any relationship to them but the app was developed by people at Yale and it's called mood meter what they're trying to do is put more Nuance more subtlety on our words and our language for for emotions and be able

to to allow you to predict how you're going to feel in the future I'm on the app right now and I know you can't see this but it's called mood meter you know it says to me hi Andrew how are you right now and I click the little tab that says I feel and I can either pick high energy and unpleasant high energy and pleasant low energy unpleasant or low energy Pleasant and I would say right now I feel high energy Pleasant so I just revealed to you how I feel so I click on that

and then it gives you a gallery of colors and you just move your finger to the location where you think it matches most and as you do that little words pop up so say motivated cheerful inspired I would say I'm feeling right now cheerful so you click that and then you just go to the next window and it just says what are you doing and I this feels like play to me but I'm going to call it work and then that's it and then um what it does is it basically starts to collect data on

you you're giving it information and it starts to link that to other features that you allow it access to if you like and it starts helping you be able to predict how you're going to feel at different times a day and it points to a couple really interesting features which is that we don't really have enough language to describe all the emotional states and yet there's some core truths to what makes up an emotion this can really help people kids and adults understand better what they're feeling and why and when best to engage in certain

activities and thankfully when best to avoid certain activities too so the way this works is the following you need to ask yourself at any point you could do this right now if you like what's your level of autonomic arousal autonomic arousal is just the Continuum the range of alert to calm so if you're in a panic right now you are like 10 out of 10 on the arousal scale if you're asleep you're probably not comprehending what I'm saying although maybe a little bit but let's say you're very drowsy you might be at a one or

a two and then there's this other axis this other question which is what we call veilance now veilance is a value do you feel good or bad I would say I feel pretty good right now on a scale of 1 to 10 I'm like a I don't know I feel like a seven so I'm alert and I feel pretty good and then there's a third thing which is how much we are intercepting and how much we are excepting all right so how much our attention is focused internally on what we're feeling and how much it's

focused exter internally and this is always going to be in a dynamic balance so for instance if you're really really stressed often times that puts you in a position to be really in touch with what's going on in your body if you start having a lot of somatic a lot of bodily Sensations like your heart is beating so fast that you can't ignore it then you're really strongly interceptive so there these three things how alert or sleepy you are that's one how good or bad you feel that's two and then whether or not most of

your attention is directed outward or whether or not it's directed Inward and much of what we call emotions are made up by those three things let's return to the infant there's the baby in the crib it's mostly intercepting as caregivers bring it what it needs you hope milk diaper changes Etc a warm blanket if it's cold pull off the blanket when the baby's fussing and it's too warm because babies get too warm also it starts to exter roep the baby starts to look into the outside world and start making predictions it starts wondering how much

it needs to cry or predicting well if I cry like a little bit then Mom comes over and I get my milk babies are starting to evaluate and do all this but they're not doing it consciously they're doing this in order to relieve anxiety as a young creature an infant and young toddler you were mainly focused Inward and you started to understand what was going on outward as a way of predicting what would bring you relief what would remove your anxiety and that's where the fundamental rules of your experience your emotional experience were laid down

so now let's talk about what kind of baby you were because that actually informs your emotionality now these are classic they're actually famous experiments done by bulby and answorth this is this classic experiment of the what was called The Strange situation task in which and I'm describing it very coarsely here I realize but a mother and child come into the laboratory the baby and the mother or father play together for a bit and then the mother leaves the mother leaves for some period of time and then comes back and the research is devoted to understanding

the response of the child when the caretaker the mother or the father returns Balby and answorth and many of their scientific Offspring and colleagues identified at least four patterns that babies display when their caretaker returns and they group these into group a b c d so much so that the kids were referred to as a babies B babies C bab or D babies the first babies are the a babies when their caretaker would return the infant would respond with happiness with what looked like Delight they would go to the caretaker they seemed happy these are

referred to as secure attached kids the B babies as they're called were less likely to seek comfort from their caregiver when the caregiver would return so they would sometimes continue to play with their toys or they would uh be with the they had an adult in the room while the parent was gone they would stay with them these were referred to as avoidant babies the ca babies would respond to the return of the caregiver with acts of annoyance they seemed kind of angry and those were referred to as ambivalent babies and then the third category

the D babies were the disorganized babies the child avoided interactions with everyone and their behavior didn't really change whether or not the caregiver was there or not this work this classic work opened up a huge set of important questions that relate to what is the reestablishment of the bond really about I mean what's actually being figured out here is not whether or not there are four categories of babies that's interesting but it presumably is more interesting to focus on what is it that defines a really good Bond a secure attachment or an insecure attachment or

an avoidant attachment and the four things are Gaye literally eye contact VOC vocalizations so what we say how we say it affect or emotion so the way that we express you know crying smiling Etc and touch but gaze vocalization affect and touch are really the core of this thing that we call social bonds and emotionality and it's clear from most all of the theories of emotional health that an ability to recognize when your own internal state is being driven primarily by external events as important for being able to emotionally regulate right people who are constantly

being yanked around by the external happenings in the world you would say are emotionally labile they are not in control of their emotions even if they're calm all the time if that calmness only arrives because they're in a Placid environment and then you put you know a cracker in that environment and they freak out well then they're not really calm so how much your the outside environment disrupts your internal internal environment has everything to do with this balance of interception and exter reception and it very likely has roots in whether or not you were secure

attached or insecure attached disorganized or ambivalent as a baby so while we can't travel back in time there is an exercise that you can do to address at least in this moment whether or not you have a bias for exteroception or a bias for interoception if you close your eyes right now and concentrate on the contact of any portion of your body and trying to bring as much of your attention to that point of contact as possible and then from there you're going to move your attention even more deeply into say the sensation of what's

going on in your gut Are You full are you empty are you hungry are you not uh is your heart beating at what rate what's the Cadence of your breathing basically bringing your focus and attention to everything at the surface of your skin and inward so I I'm going to do a rare thing on the hubman Lab podcast I'm going to introduce about 5 to eight seconds of Silence um in order to allow you to do that a little bit now try and do something that for most people actually is a little bit harder which

is to purely extero put put your eyes or your ears or both on anything in your immediate space I would say look across the room pick a panel on the wall or a you know a leg of a table or something and try and bring as much of your attention to that as possible and again I'll take about 5 Seconds of Silence to allow you to exospeed it's hard to place 100% of your attention on something externally unless it's really exciting really novel if you've ever watched a really great movie presumably you're exter accepting more

than you're intercepting until something exciting happens and then and then you feel something you're actually tethering your emotional experience to something external and now you can also do this dynamically you can decide to focus internally and then externally you can decide to split it 50% 50% or 70 30 one can develop you can develop a heightened ability to do this and the power of doing that is actually that when you are in environments where you feel like you're focused too much internally and you'd like to be focused more externally you can actually do that deliberately

but as you notice it takes work these exercises are really what are at the core of these development of emotional bonds because as we mentioned before these four things the gaze vocalization touch and affect those are happening very dynamically so if somebody Winks at you you're paying attention to their wink but then you also notice how you feel this is very Dynamic so if it seems overwhelming to try and intercept and exter and then shift the balance you do that all the time your brain and nervous system are fantastic at doing this now some people

have a very hard time breaking out of a very strongly interceptive mode some people have a harder time breaking out of their extra receptive mode it's very interesting to note the the extent to which we have biases in how interceptive or exter receptive we are remember those three axes that we talked about earlier you have veilance good or bad you have alertness alert or calm and you have interceptive or EXT receptive bias early in development you start off with this interceptive bias you are starting to develop expectations predictions about how the outside world is going

to work and you are trying to figure out the reliability of outside events and people and where things are reliable when people are reliable we are able to give up more of our interoception there's literally trust that our interceptive needs our internal needs will be met through bonds and actions of others this starts to Veer toward the discussion about neglect and Trauma we are going to devote entire episodes probably an entire month to trauma and PTSD but these those have roots in what we're talking about now and it's important to internalize and understand what we're

talking about now in order to get the most out of those future conversations so now I want to just pause just shove the discussion about interception exter reception for a moment and I want to talk about what is arguably the second most if not equally important aspect of your development as it relates to emotionality and as it relates to this what I called trust but this ability to predict whether or not things in the outside world are reliable or not Rel reliable in terms of their ability to help you meet your interceptive needs and that

period is puberty so up until now we've been talking mainly about psychology not a lot of biology not a lot of mechanism and now we're going to transition into talking about mechanism hormones receptors Etc puberty is a absolute biolog iCal event it has a beginning and it has a specific definition which is the transition into reproductive maturity so there are a lot of hormonal changes yes there are also a lot of brain changes and most people don't realize it but the brain changes occur first the brain turns on the hormone systems that allow puberty to

occur one of the more interesting molecules that triggers puberty in all individuals is something called kisspeptin k i SS p p e p t i n kisspeptin kisspeptin is made by the brain and it stimulates large amounts of a different hormone called GnRH gonadotropin releasing hormone to be released gonadotropin releasing hormone then causes the release of another hormone something like called luteinizing hormone or LH which travels in the bloodstream and stimulates the ovaries of females to produce estrogen and the testes of males to produce testosterone now this is interesting because at this point the testes

in M start churning out tons of testosterone in order to trigger the development of secondary sexual characteristics body hair and all the others deepening of voice Etc and in female's estrogen is doing various other things breast development Etc so that's how puberty happens at the biological level gets triggered by leptin and kisspeptin and then this young child is now a different creature to some to some extent not just because they're reproductively competent of course but because there's a shift in a number of the things that underly these social bonds there are there's a market shift

in a number of the things that allow children and adults to engage in predictive Behavior about each other and most of what consumes the minds and waking hours of adolescence and children who have gone through puberty and going through puberty is questions about how they relate to social structures who they can rely on and how they can make reliable predictions in the world now that they have more agency that they are physically changed in fact you could argue that puberty is the fastest rate of maturation that you'll go through at any point in your life

it's the largest change that you'll go through at any point in your life in terms of who you are because your biology has fundamentally changed at the level of your brain and your your bodily organs all your organs from the skin inward so I want to visit a little bit of the research about some of the core needs that occur during puberty and Adolescence so there's a terrific review article that was published in the journal Nature about the biology of adolescence and puberty as well as some of the core needs and demands that have to

be met for successful emotional maturation during that time we we will provide a link to that but I'm I just want to highlight a few of the things that they place in the final table I don't want to go through all the results right now because you could do that on your own if you like they mainly highlight a lot of the changes in neurons and neural circuits for instance I'll just highlight one there's a connection between the dopamine centers in the brain and an area of the brain that's involved in emotion and dispersal dispersal

is very interesting What You observe in animals and humans is that around the end of adolescence and during the transition to puberty both because of changes in the brain and changes in hormones there's an intense desire on the part of the child to get further and further away from primary caregivers mostly there's a desire to start spending more time with friends more time with peers and less time with adults so there's something about these hormones that don't just allow sexual reproduction they don't just change the brain and bodily organs in the shape of of us

they also bias us towards dispersal getting further and further away from primary caregivers in particular and what's interesting is during puberty there's increased con connection connectivity as we call it between the prefrontal cortex which is involved in motivation and decision- making being able to suppress action for making long-term uh goals possible uh as well as dopamine centers and the amydala so there's this really broad integration and testing I think this is the key element here testing of circuits for emotions and reward as they relate to decisions and I think that's useful because when you look

at the behavior of Adolescent and teens they are testing social interactions they are testing physical interactions with the world often times they're engaging in unsafe behavior and you can't um just I I would never try and justify that with with the underlying neurology but the Neuroscience points to increased connectivity between areas of the brain that are related to emotionality and uh to threat detection like the amydala but also reward so it's a time of testing behaviorally how different behaviors lead to success or not it's how different behaviors lead to fear States or not you can

start to map the neurology onto some of this emotion exploration I do realize that this episode is about emotions puberty is a time in which the internal state of the person or the animal is being sampled and tested against different extra receptive events only now they are able to guide those events with more agency the child or the Adolescent is now able the teen really is able to Now sample many many more extra receptive events through behavior and so ad Ence and puberty is really seen as the period of development in which one self- samples

for these two elements that we talked about at the beginning which are how do I form bonds and how do I make predictions about what will make me feel good at a level of interoception but in terms of the biology it's clear that there's this stage of development where more autonomy more physical capability is triggered by these hormone changes in the brain and these peptide changes in the brain and body and that nonetheless brings us back to the exact same model that we started with an infancy of alert or calm feel good or feel bad

primarily exter accepting primarily intercepting so I keep going back to this I'm sort of like a repeating record on that because the same core algorithm the same core function is at play throughout the lifespan and that's a useful framework in my opinion because it allows you to sort through through all the data and information that's out there about well this area the stat terminalis is active or the basolateral amydala is active or gry matter thickening or this hormone or that hormone and return to a kind of Kernel of certainly not exhaustive truth it doesn't cover

all aspects of emotionality but at least establishes some groundwork from which you can start to evaluate how different behaviors might or might not make sense how certain emotional responses might or might not make sense regardless of the age of the person or the organism there's a theory of emotional development that I find particularly interesting which is from Allan Shore at UCLA that talks about how most of our testing of bonds and relationships is this seawing back and forth between very dopaminergic so driven by dopamine or serotonergic driven by serotonin States and this starts with infant

and mother or infant and father healthy emotional development clearly begins with an ability for the caretaker and child to be in calm peaceful soothing touch oriented eye gazing type of behaviors those really Drive serotonin the endogenous opioid system uh oxytocin things that are very calming and are centered around pleasure with the here and now as well as excited states of what we're going to do next there's actually a a kind of characteristic sign of the dopaminergic interaction where both car AK and child have are wide-eyed the pupils dilate that's signature of arousal they get really

excited often times the baby will look away if it gets really excited that those are signatures of dopamine release in the body and in adolescence these same things carry forward where their good bonds are achieved through hanging around watching TV just kind of being or you know playing video games or texting together or talking whatever it is that the the soothing local activity happens to be as well as Adventure and things that are exciting and so this kind of seawing back and forth between the different reward systems seems to be the basis from which healthy

emotional bonds are created we can't have a complete conversation about emotions and bonds and social connection without talking about oxytocin oxytocin has come to such prominence in the last decade or so and seems to be everywhere anytime you hear a discussion about neuros signs in the brain or hormones in the brain oxytocin is released in response to lactation in females it is released in response to sexual interactions it is released in response to nonsexual touch it's released in males and females and indeed it's involved in pair bonding and the establishment of social bonds in general

how it does that seems to be by matching internal state it seems to both increase synchrony of internal State somehow maybe it sets a level of calmness or alertness that seems like a reasonable hypothesis as well as raising people's awareness for the emotional state of their partner and again this brings us back to this alertness calmness axis and this inter receptive extra receptive axis in order to form good bonds we can't just be thinking about how we feel we also need to be paying attention to how others feel and we're evaluating a match we're trying

to see whether or not there seems to be some sort of synchrony between states and oxytocin both seems to increase that synchrony and increase the awareness for the emotional state of others so here are some experiments that involve the administration of of intranasal oxytocin what's been reported is increase positive communic unication among couples that study just if you for those of you like was published in biological Psychiatry which my Psychiatry colleagues tell me is a fine journal and the title is intranasal oxytocin increases positive communication and reduces the stress hormone cortisol levels during couple conflict

they have them fight with and without oxytocin so interesting very much in line with the idea that oxytocin is the quote unquote trust hormone the other molecule that we make that's extremely important for social bonds in emotionality is one that we're going to talk about more in the month on hormones and that's vasopressin vasopressin has effects on the brain directly it actually creates feelings of giddy love it also has very interesting effects on monogamous or non- monogamous Behavior this again we will revisit in the future but there's a beautiful set of experiments that have been

done in a little rodent species called a prairie V it turns out there are two different populations of prairie some are monogamous they always mate with the same other Prairie V and some are very robustly non- monogamous they mate with as many other Prairie vs as they can and turns out that levels of vasopressin Andor vasopressin receptor dictate whether or not they're monogamous or not there's actually some interesting evidence in humans when you when people report their behavior assuming they're reporting it accurately that vasopressin and vasopressin levels um can relate to monogamy or non- monogamy

in humans as well we're going to talk about this in the month on hormones if we're talking about the Neuroscience of emotions we have to talk about the vagus nerve I described what the vagus nerve is in a previous episode that's these connections between the body and the viscera including the gut the heart the lungs and the immune system and the brain and that the brain is also controlling these organs so it's a two-way street there's this big myth out there that I mentioned before that stimulating the Vegas in various ways leads to calmness that

it's always going to calm you down and that is is false now this is interesting in light of emotionality because of work that's been done by many groups but in particular I'm going to focus on the work of a colleague of mine Carl daero at Stanford who's a psychiatrist but has also developed a lot of tools to adjust the activity of neurons in real time using light and electrical stimulation and so forth I'll refer you to an article in the New Yorker that was published about this a few years ago I'm going to read a

brief excerpt but I'll put the the link in the caption as well he's talking to an extremely depressed suicidally uh depressed patient who has a small device implanted that allows her to adjust her vagus nerve activity they're in his office and they're talking and he asks her how she's doing and she she describes how she's been doing as um previously as quote unquote going pancake which for her just means totally laid out flat not much going on she talks about how she doesn't want to pursue a job but she's really depressed um and he says

in you know typical good psychiatrist fashion you know well that's a lot to think about that's actually the quote um uh and they talk about her blood pressure Etc and then she says you know mood's been down just spiraling down talks about insomnia bad dreams low appetite so this is severe depression this is what we call major depression and then she requests can we please go up to 1.5 on Vegas stimulation she'd been receiving 1.2 milliamps of stimulation every 5 minutes to 30 seconds but was no longer able to feel the effects so he says

okay I think we can go up a little you're tolerating things well they start the stimulation and quote in the course of the next few minutes her name was Sally underwent a remarkable change her frown disappeared she became cheerful describing the pleasure she had had during the Christmas holiday and recounting how she'd recently watched some YouTube videos of D she was still smiling and talking when the session ended and they walked out to the reception area so this is just by stimulating and activating the Vegas now why am I bringing this up well for several

reasons one is the Vegas is fascinating in terms of the brain Body Connection two I'd like to uh keep trying to dispel the myth that Vegas stimulation is all about being calm it's really about being alert I don't know how that originally got going backwards but it's about being alert and once again level of alertness or level of calmness is impacting emotion that this access of alertness and calmness is one primary axis in Emotion it's not the only one because there's also this veilance component of good or bad and it's those two aren't the only

ones because there's also this component of inter receptive exter receptive that we talked about earlier and there will be others too again it's not exhaustive but I find it fascinating and it really brings us back to where we started which is what are the core elements of emotion and what can you do about them this business of how you conceptualize emotions is really the most powerful tool you can ever have in terms of understanding and regulating your emotional state if you're willing to try and wrap your head around it I realize it's not the simplest

thing to do but rather than think of emotions as just these labels happy sad awe depressed thinking them thinking about emotions excuse me as elements of the brain embody that Encompass levels of alertness that include a dynamic with the outside world and your perception of your internal State and starting to really think about emotions in a structured way can not only allow you to understand some of the pathology of when you know you might feel depressed or anxious or others are depressed and anxious but also to develop a richer emotional experience to anything so I

offer it to you as a as a source of knowledge from which you can start to think about your emotional life differently I hope as well as others in a way that builds more richness into that experience not that detracts from it I want to thank you for your time and attention and thank you for your interest in science [Music]