1072 Unlocking The Power of Your Mind w/Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman

“Don’t think your way out of stress, breathe your way out of stress.”Today's guest is Neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman who is a Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford University. He also runs Huberman Lab which studies brain states - such as fear, courage, anxiety, calm - and how we can better move in and out of them through practices like visual cues, breath work, movement, and supplementation. This is Part 1 of 2, so be sure to listen to Part 2 after this! In Part 1, Lewis and Huberman discuss, how to use the mind to your benefit when you experience stress, the two types of stress and how to deal with them, Huberman's thoughts on the Law of Attraction, and so much more! For more go to: www.lewishowes.com/1072Check out Huberman’s website: www.hubermanlab.com Learn more about Yoga Nidra: https://www.youtube.com/user/AmritYogaInstituteThe Wim Hof Experience: Mindset Training, Power Breathing, and Brotherhood: https://link.chtbl.com/910-podA Scientific Guide to Living Longer, Feeling Happier & Eating Healthier with Dr. Rhonda Patrick: https://link.chtbl.com/967-podThe Science of Sleep for Ultimate Success with Shawn Stevenson: https://link.chtbl.com/896-pod Get more from Lewis! Get my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Get The Greatness Mindset audiobook on SpotifyText Lewis AIYouTubeInstagramWebsiteTiktokFacebookX

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lewis Howes?

  This is episode number 1,072 with neuroscientist Dr. Andrew Huberman. Welcome to the School of Greatness. My name is Lewis Howes, a former pro athlete turned lifestyle entrepreneur. And each week, we bring you an inspiring person or message to help you discover how to unlock your inner greatness. Thanks for spending some time with me today. Now let the class begin.

• 0:31Lewis Howes?

  Robert Greene said, "The need for certainty is the greatest disease the mind faces." And Eckhart Tolle said, "Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry, all forms of fear are caused by too much future and not enough presence." My guest today is neuroscientist Andrew Huberman, who is a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford. He also runs Huberman Lab, which studies brain states such as fear, courage, anxiety, calm, and how we can better move in and out of them through practices like visual cues, breath work, movement, and supplementation. And we've had him on before, and it just blew up the internet. It blew up our podcast. It

• 1:15Lewis Howes?

  blew up on audio, on YouTube, and it's gotten millions of views and listens through our entire ecosystem. So we wanted to bring him back on for another powerful episode. And we had to break it up in two parts because it was just so much juicy, incredible conversation. So this will be part one of two. And in part one, we discuss how to use the mind to our benefit when we experience stress, fear, or trauma. This will truly support you in your life. The two types of stress that we all face, and how to deal with them practically. The different breathing techniques that you should be practicing consistently. The importance

• 1:57Lewis Howes?

  of sleep and how it affects the brainwaves that we have. Huberman's thoughts on the law of attraction. This was pretty fascinating. The neuroscience behind the law of attraction, and so much more in this. Part one, it is powerful, it is juicy. Part one's amazing and part two is gonna blow you away as well. If this is your first time here, then make sure to click the subscribe button over on Apple Podcasts or Spotify right now, as well as give us a rating and review at the end of this episode. Let us know what you enjoyed the most about this. And also, while you're listening, please share this with a friend. Just send them a copy of this link, lewishouse.com/1072, or copy and paste the link wherever you're listening and text it to a friend right now or post it on your social media and tag me and Andrew Huberman as well

• 2:43Lewis Howes?

  to let us know that you are listening. Okay, in just a moment, the one and only Dr. Andrew Huberman.

• 2:53Lewis Howes?

  Welcome back everyone to the School of Greatness. I'm so excited we've got Andrew Huberman in the house, my man. Good to see you, brother.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Great to be back.

• 3:00Lewis Howes?

  The last interview we had with you, almost a million views on YouTube, millions of views on social media, thousands of comments. People want to hear more about this because when people are dealing with extreme amounts of stress, overwhelm and anxiety, they want solutions. And you are a neuroscientist, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford. You've also got Huberman Lab up there and you're really studying the way the brain works and how we can overcome the challenges of fear, of stress and optimize these things. So I'm excited that you're back here because the last content we had really served a lot of people. And I think there's just so much more to understand about how our brains work

• 3:44Lewis Howes?

  in connection to our body and overcoming fear. How do we become more courageous? How do we deal with managing stress, all this? So I want to dive into more of it. And one of the first things I want to ask you is,

• 3:56Lewis Howes?

  when things are really tough in life, when people are really stressed out, they've had some type of traumatic event, whether it's the loss of the job, the pandemic, whatever it may be, how can people use their mind to then push past pain? Or is that not something we should be thinking about pushing past pain? But how do we use the mind under some type of traumatic experience for our benefit?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Okay, it's an excellent.

• 4:21Lewis Howes?

  Easy, easy question.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  It's an excellent question. It has a couple of different answers because there are a couple of different categories, depending on what of answer, depending on what people are dealing with.

• 4:31Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  So I think all trauma, anxiety.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Fears, they all map back to stress in some way. Now, you can have stress without trauma. You can have anxiety without trauma, but you can't really have trauma without stress and anxiety. So even though there aren't really strict definitions of the boundaries between trauma and stress and fear, I think it's fair to say that trauma is a fear and/or stress response that's happening at the wrong times. Right? It's sort of carrying over from an experience that's making life uncomfortable or in some cases exceedingly challenging.

• 5:10Lewis Howes?

  For example?

• 5:11Speaker 01

  So someone has a, you know, sexual assault. Somebody sees a car accident or is in a car accident. Veterans come back from overseas. There's kind of first-person trauma where something happens to somebody. And then there's third-person trauma where somebody sees something terrible happen. There's grief. And so there are a lot of categories. And so we don't want to complicate the landscape and the answer, but I think it's important for people to understand that the stress response is at the core of all of this. And when we talk about stress, I think it's also important that we divide that into two kinds of stress because it defines the two approaches that people can take to combat stress, fear, anxiety.

• 5:55Lewis Howes?

  What are the two types of stress?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  Okay, the two types of stress are we, the one is the one we're almost all familiar with because when we hear stress, we think pupils dilating, hands shaking, heart beating. Oh my goodness, oh my goodness, or really upset, you're stuck in traffic. Something is really bothering you, you're angry, you're having the fight or flight response that, you know, that phrase gets thrown around a lot. And in that, those circumstances, it's very important that people take control of their mind and their body in a way that allows themselves to calm down, to reduce the so-called stress response. And we can talk about tools to do that, that are very concrete and that are very reliable. There's another side of the stress response. So what would that stress be called? What's that type of stress?

• 6:38Speaker 01

  Ah, so unfortunately, there's no name for this. This is one of the important things. Maybe we'll figure it out today. Maybe your audience will figure it out. They're a smart bunch and they're living this stuff too. So unfortunately, there isn't a word for this. But. This is one type of stress. This is one type of stress, which is you're too activated, you're too alert, you're too agitated, and you want to be less alert, less activated and less agitated. The alert stress. That's right. We could call it the alert stress, hyper alert. Hyper alert. Let's just do that for sake of conversation today. And we are by no means a nomenclature committee, so we can always revise later. Yeah.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  There's another side of stress, which is when there are a lot of things happening in the world, pandemics, you can't work because they've shut, there's another shutdown, or there's strife in your life, or things are really challenging and you're feeling exhausted and you can't get mobilized and alert enough. And this has never really been cleanly laid out for people that what I call the whole process is one of limbic friction. Okay, so the limbic system are these areas deep in the brain, limbic literally means edge, they're near the edge of the brain. And when we're stressed, there's a lot of activity in these brain regions.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  And then we've got this, our forebrain, our prefrontal cortex for the aficionados. And when we're in a thinking and calm and deliberate and rational manner, when we can control our body and our mind, it's called a top-down processing, where we're controlling ourselves. But there's a lot of friction with that limbic pathway. I promise I'll get to the practices soon. So when there's this friction, we can call it limbic friction for sake of discussion. You can't control all those impulses and all that anxiety or fatigue for too long. And in fact, as you get more tired, or if someone has frontal damage, if they have brain damage to the frontal lobes, what you find is they become more impulsive.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  When they feel like sleeping, they just sleep, even if it's socially inappropriate. When they feel like yelling, or screaming, or swearing, they just do that. And so, there's two kinds of limbic friction. One is when we're too activated and we wanna calm down, and we're trying to say, "Calm down, don't say the thing that you know you shouldn't say. Don't do the thing you shouldn't do." And then there's the other kind of limbic friction, which is the world is happening really fast and we feel buried, we're overwhelmed, and we need to get more activated. We need more energy. We need more energy. We need to be able to lean into life and we're feeling overwhelmed. What's that called? Well, we should come up with a name now. So that would be exhaustion stress. Overwhelmed stress. Or overwhelmed stress.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Or, now, a lot of people start giving these names to things that sound almost like clinical syndromes, which sometimes they are, but they'll say things like adrenal burnout, which actually doesn't exist.

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Now, there is something called adrenal insufficiency syndrome, which is a real medical condition where people can't actually produce enough adrenaline. But most of us have enough adrenaline in our bodies to last 200 years, two lifetimes. So, the adrenals don't really burn out. What happens is people are so overactivated, they're in this alertness, hyper-alert stress for so long, that eventually they kind of crash into the over-fatigue stress. So one turns into the other one. Right. So the first thing for anyone trying to navigate stress, and then we'll talk about trauma, is to understand what kind of stress they're dealing with. Are you exhausted and having a hard time getting your energy up? Or is your energy too high and you're having a hard time getting your energy down?

• 10:22Speaker 01

  Because the solutions to those are often quite different. So, on the previous time we met, we talked about a tool for calming the body very quickly, which is this double inhale, long exhale. Typically, the inhales are done through the nose, the exhale through the mouth. So the physiological sigh, which was discovered by scientists in the 30s, and then Jack Feldman's group at UCLA has really identified the underlying brain circuits, and then my lab is now looking at this stuff in humans in a kind of more clinical setting. That double inhale. All by an exhale, we know is the fastest realtime tool for taking one's state of alertness down.

• 11:03Lewis Howes?

  The hyper alert stress.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  You're not going to crash into sleep, but you're going from hype, you're not feeling good, you're too agitated, you want to calm down. And what's interesting about that tool is it speaks to a principle, which is it's very hard to control the mind with the mind. So when you're stressed, just telling yourself, don't stress, don't stress, don't stress, calm down, calm down, rarely works. It also rarely works to tell someone else to calm down.

• 11:27Lewis Howes?

  To relax, hey, relax, yeah.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Usually it has the opposite effect.

• 11:30Lewis Howes?

  Don't tell me to relax.

• 11:31Speaker 01

  And it can be damaging for relationships. If you've ever, you know, someone's really stressed and you tell them to relax, sometimes it actually can create more friction and they don't feel supported.

• 11:40Lewis Howes?

  What should they do in that moment?

• 11:41Speaker 01

  They should look to the body. The nervous system includes the brain, but also all the connections to the body to act again. And so that when you can't control your mind, you want to do something purely mechanical, like the physiological sigh. Because that, you know, once you take control of the body in that way, then the mind starts to fall under the umbrella of this top down control again. Top down control is what children and puppies don't have.

• 12:08Lewis Howes?

  Impulsive.

• 12:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've got a 10 year old bulldog, his name's Costello. He barely does anything now because he's Costello. But he, but when he was a puppy, everything was a stimulus. He would walk over, pick up a cord and chew on it, then he'd drop it and he'd pivot to something else. And it's because they have, they literally have no prefrontal cortex wired into this limbic system. They don't have this suppression. So there's no friction. The limbic system just does whatever it wants. And actually in humans with frontotemporal dementia and in certain people who have frontotemporal brain damage, they become very impulsive.

• 12:38Lewis Howes?

  My dad went through, I don't know if I talked about this the last time, but my dad had a traumatic car accident 15 years ago, it was 15 years ago, a couple of months ago, where a car went on top of his car and went through the windshield and the bumper hit him in his head. Pretty much split open his head. His girlfriend at the time was holding his head together, went to the hospital, airlifted in a helicopter, was in a coma for three months. And it's been a 15-year journey where we had to teach him, reteach him how to write, how to talk, how to walk, like everything, where it was almost like he was my father in his body, but his mind was having to relearn like a child. And even today, when I see him and visit him, he'll swear just compulsively, he'll

• 13:23Lewis Howes?

  do things that maybe aren't appropriate because he probably doesn't have the, I don't know, you can probably tell me better as a neuroscientist, but what happens when someone has brain damage, especially in the frontal cortex? What happens to the brain?

• 13:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so when I say top-down control, there's literally a set of wires, we call them axons, from the prefrontal cortex that suppresses these impulsive behaviors in the limbic system. And when there's damage, it's essentially removing that brake. And in adults, older adults especially, because their behaviors aren't quite as, you know, because they're older, they aren't necessarily going to walk over and punch people or scream out expletives and these kinds of things, fortunately. Although sometimes you see that, sadly. But those circuits aren't functioning well. And in young children, if you ever go to a classroom, I guess now kids are home a lot, but in a typical kindergarten classroom,

• 14:20Speaker 01

  what you'll notice is that some of the kids can sit very still. And other kids are rocking back and forth and moving around a ton, and the teacher is constantly trying to... I was one of those kids, exactly. Trying to corral the children, and children mature at different rates. And what you're seeing there is the different maturation of their frontal cortex. When you see a child that's very deliberate and can really control their speech and their behavior, you're looking at a child that has a lot of top-down control. The frontal cortex is really engaged.

• 14:49Lewis Howes?

  Is that genetic?

• 14:51Speaker 01

  It's probably a mixture. It's probably a mixture of environmental influences and genetic, like most things. And I'm not trying to just hedge here.

• 14:58Lewis Howes?

  Sure.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  You know, but like for instance, I have a niece who is adopted and she's very deliberate and very calm. And so we, you know, we wonder, you know, what, what, you know, is this genetic? Is it nature nurture? You know, there's probably some genetic bias. And then there's probably also a lot of environmental influences. I mean, a lot of what we're taught in school and at home, because a lot of kids are homeschooled now, is about what not to do.

• 15:26Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  You know, sit still, don't say this, don't say that, you know, we get the say please and thank you, you know, sit up straight, you know, do your dishes kind of stuff. But a lot of the, the don't language is designed to, around these things of top down control. We've set up a lot of important social constraints. And we've all felt this as adults too. In two ways, it becomes really extreme when we can't control that limbic system. One is when we're, when we're very fatigued. When we're fatigued, or we're sick, or we're in pain, physical pain, chances are, when something bothers us, we're closer to that threshold of saying the thing that we wish we would have said.

• 16:02Lewis Howes?

  With no patience.

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:03Lewis Howes?

  No patience.

• 16:04Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 16:04Lewis Howes?

  So how do we learn to have patience when we are hyper alert or overwhelmed exhaustion stress?

• 16:10Speaker 01

  Okay. So when we are in hyper alert, there's a mechanism associated with that that makes our internal world measure time differently. What happens under those conditions is you feel like the external world is moving very slowly. I think I might have mentioned this in our previous meeting, but when you're really stressed on the hyper alert side, it seems like the world is going very slowly. You're gonna, just knowing that and knowing that it's likely that you're gonna feel impatient and if the world is moving much too slow. Sort of like if you're, if you're trying to get someplace on time and the person in front of you doesn't know where you're going.

• 16:43Lewis Howes?

  You're like, no.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  I was the guy not knowing where I was going this morning. And so, and we can't see each other in cars. You think, what is this person doing? Oh my goodness. And they're just looking for the right turn.

• 16:51Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there's that. And then when we are fatigued, it seems like the world is going really fast. Okay. And so for people who are exhausted, everything feels overwhelming. Now, of course, the rate that things are actually moving in the world is the same, but the perception is That it's just too much and we can't cope. So, we talked about a tool to calm oneself. The reason I like the physiological sigh is we are all equipped with the pathway. If people want to know if there are some medically oriented folks out there, if you want to teach this to other folks, there's a nerve called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C, that goes from the brain down to the diaphragm that controls that and then controls the lungs.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  And so, when you decide, okay, I'm going to use the sigh, the physiological sigh, to calm myself, in a way you're engaging top-down control because you're taking control of your internal landscape, rather than trying to take control of your thinking, which is very hard. You can't fix your mind with your mind sometimes. Trying to control the mind with the mind is like trying to grab fog. It's just going to keep moving, right? If you've ever tried to grab or smoke, it just moves. It vapors, you're never going to grab it. The key is to take control of the system by taking control of a real physical entity, this phrenic nerve. And the reason I describe this stuff is not to put a lot of unnecessary detail, but I think when people realize that this isn't something that you build up over time

• 18:17Speaker 01

  and then are able to do, that you literally have a wire, a set of wires, that goes down to your diaphragm, this muscle in your abdomen that can move your lungs. And then, as you blow off carbon dioxide, when you do that exhale, your brain starts to calm down and then your mind, the top-down control of the cortex, can start taking control of the limbic system again. It's like, it's almost like you're losing control of the automobile and you're trying to steer, but really there's another lever that if you just pull it, then the steering wheel will stabilize for you. So that's the way to think about the physiological sigh. On the other side of things, when you're feeling overwhelmed and fatigued, there are two ways to approach that.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  First is the kind of foundation of fatigue, which is almost always poor sleep and scheduling of sleep. This is something that doesn't get discussed a lot, and I don't think I've discussed this on any podcast previously. But... You know, getting better at sleeping is a whole set of practices. But sleep is a slow tool. It's not a real time tool. Cause if you're feeling exhausted and you have to get up and have your day, deal with children, deal with work, deal with life. We can talk about how to get better at sleeping, but in real time, what you wanna do is you want to bring more alertness into the system.

• 19:31Lewis Howes?

  Focus.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Focus and alertness. The way to do that is to take advantage of a very well-established medical fact. All medical students learn this. All MBs know this, which is that there's a direct relationship between how you breathe and your heart rate. And so I'll give a little bit of the background and then I'll give the specific practice. Just so that people understand where this is coming from. When we inhale, when we inhale, it almost feels like everything's moving up. But actually what happens is our diaphragm moves down. Okay, so when we inhale, our diaphragm moves down. When that happens, our heart literally gets a little bit bigger. The volume of the heart gets a little bit bigger,

• 20:11Speaker 01

  which means that whatever blood in there is moving per unit time a little bit slower. And there's a set of neurons in the heart called the sinoatrial node that sends a signal to the brain and says, hey, blood flow is slowing down. And the brain sends a signal back to the heart and says, okay, let's speed up and speeds up the heart rate. So the short concise way to put it is when you inhale more vigorously or longer, you're speeding up your heart rate. This is, this actually, there's a name for it in the medical community. But the important thing to understand is as you inhale, you're sending a neural signal to your heart to speed up. And when you exhale, the diaphragm moves up.

• 20:53Speaker 01

  The heart gets a little bit smaller, literally, because there's less space there. Then there's a signal sent to the brain and the brain sends a signal back and says, slow down the heart rate. And so.

• 21:05Lewis Howes?

  So this is happening quickly. So if you inhale, it's speeding up.

• 21:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 21:09Lewis Howes?

  If you exhale, it's slowing it down.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  That's right. So if you wanna become more alert, you actually can just simply make your inhales a little bit more vigorous or a little bit longer than your exhale. So let's say you get up in the morning.

• 21:22Lewis Howes?

  Our longer inhale, shorter exhale.

• 21:25Speaker 01

  That's right. To speed up your heart rate and to be more alert.

• 21:28Lewis Howes?

  Not longer exhale, double intake.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Right. So, so longer or more vigorous inhales will speed up your heart rate and make you more alert. Longer or more vigorous exhales will slow down your heart rate and make you less alert. Wow. And this has a name, which is, you know, it's a certain kind of arrhythmia, but that makes it sound bad. This is actually what's happening all the time. This is the basis of heart rate variability. When people talk about heart rate variability is good, you know, that you don't want your heart rate to be one level all day, high or low. A lot of people don't realize that. They think, oh, I got a nice, slow heart rate. All day long. While you're asleep there. That's right. Well, slow heart rate is better than high artificially, you know,

• 22:14Speaker 01

  sorry, excessively high heart rate. But you don't want your heart rate to be like this. You want your heart rate to go through these fluctuations. Heart rate variability is good. Why? Because heart rate variability reflects the activation of what's typically called the parasympathetic nervous system, which is the brain's ability to slow down and calm the nervous system. So when your heart rate is going like this, it means that your heart rate is speeding up and then your brain is slowing it down. Your heart rate is speeding it up and your brain is slowing it down. And that's what's happening all day long as you're moving through things in a kind of calm, alert way. But when you get that troubling text message, or you see a post, or a comment, and you go, and all of a sudden, your heart rate just goes, and you feel like you immediately want to respond, or you're going to say the

• 22:57Speaker 01

  thing that maybe you shouldn't say, or you're going to do the thing that maybe you shouldn't do, or you just want to be more thoughtful and more targeted in your response. The key is to slow down the heart rate by making your exhales longer or more vigorous. So it could simply be, and then shorter inhales, longer exhales, or do the physiological sigh. Or if you wake up in the morning and you're experiencing the other kind of stress, which is you look at your phone and the news, like, the world is overwhelming me. My life is overwhelming. I don't know what I'm going to do. I don't even know what sequence I'm going to do things in. You're just discombobulated. And a lot of people struggle with this. The key is to do a few breaths, even while you're getting out of bed and preparing your morning

• 23:41Speaker 01

  coffee or water, or whatever it is, and just start breathing in a way that's inhale emphasized.

• 23:49Speaker 01

  Which sounds weird, but basically what you're doing is you're speeding up your heart rate at some point, usually within only two or three of those breaths, you're gonna feel more alert and then you can just go back to breathing normally. So you don't have to do this for hours, you do this for a few moments or minutes? That's right. And while I'm a fan of breath work as its own thing, because breath work can teach you how to operate these levers in your brain and body, so to speak, breath work is a dedicated practice that you do away from these stressful events. Whereas, learning to control your heart rate and thereby your mind, using your breathing. So it goes breathing, heart, rate, mind, in that sequence. So if your mind isn't where you want it to

• 24:33Speaker 01

  be, don't start with the mind. Start with your breathing, then, which will control your heart rate, which will then allow you to control your mind. So don't think your way out of a moment of stress. Feel, breathe your way out of this moment of stress. That's right. And one of the things, and I'm certain there are gonna be people out there listening to this saying, wait a second, the yogis and the yoga community has been talking about this for centuries. What are you doing? You know, this is just a recasting of what we already know. I agree. I agree. Within the science community, these things have been given crazy names like arrhythmias and heart rate variability and the diaphragm and the phrenic nerve. And so the language of science has known all about this for many

• 25:16Speaker 01

  centuries also, but it's been shrouded by language. And the yoga community has known about this for a long time, but it's been shrouded by language. So by bringing this discussion forth, I just want to be clear that I'm not trying to reinvent the wheel or pretend that I invented the wheel by any stretch. I'm trying to say that we all have these circuits, these levers in our body that we can, that we can pull and push. And people learn how to do this intuitively, but we're never really taught the underlying mechanisms. And I do believe that once, and yoga's not big on mechanisms. They're very good on naming and on, you know, yogis in different areas of the world, when they say something, they usually know what the other one is talking about. Scientists do as well. But

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Mechanism, if people can just understand a little bit about why the heart slows down when you exhale more than you inhale, or why the heart speeds up when you inhale more than you exhale. I do believe that having that knowledge in the mind allows people in a moment of stress to say, "Oh, I understand what's happening to me, and therefore I should go to this particular tool." You know, I do understand that one doesn't need to understand how an engine works in order to drive a car, but you do need to know how the control panels work.

• 26:30Lewis Howes?

  Right, right.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  This is why we send people to driving school, and why we don't let ten-year-olds drive. Although I'm sure there's some out there.

• 26:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah, on a farm somewhere, yeah.

• 26:38Speaker 01

  Well, actually, there was this one news thing, I don't know if you've seen this, where a state trooper pulls, or a CHP or somebody pulls over a car that's kind of weaving through the lanes, and they pull over, and I think the kid was six years old.

• 26:49Lewis Howes?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  He actually managed to get onto the freeway.

• 26:52Lewis Howes?

  How?

• 26:53Speaker 01

  And he was driving the left-hand lane, and his driving was pretty bad, but he was below the...

• 26:57Lewis Howes?

  That's crazy.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Well, that just tells you that the young mind is eager to steer things and press pedals and things of that sort.

• 27:04Lewis Howes?

  And explore.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  We are definitely not recommending that. But this is very different than driving a car in the sense that all the panels and all the controls are there. We have, we're all, most people are taught how to drive a car. Most people are not taught how to drive their nervous system. And so a lot of what I'm talking about here is just one language, one version of the language of how to drive and control your nervous system.

• 27:26Lewis Howes?

  And you can't drive your nervous system with thoughts and controlling your mind alone. You have to connect the whole vehicle is what I'm hearing. You can't just steer thoughts, you need to also use the brakes, or also use different levers, which is the entire car.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  That's right. It's very hard to control the mind with the mind. It can be done, there are people that are, get better at that.

• 27:47Lewis Howes?

  Right, maybe it's a practice over time.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  But using, I say, when in moments of stress, either excessively alert stress, or excessively fatigue stress, look to the body, because there are mechanisms that have been built into the body for hundreds of, thousands of years, designed to do this. Now, the reason I can say that is that the physiological side, the double inhale-exhale, is controlled by a specific set of neurons in the brainstem that Jack Feldman's lab discovered. When children or adults have been sobbing very hard, or when they're out of air in a claustrophobic environment, they naturally do that to reopen these little sacs in their lungs. Now... Inhale emphasized breathing can be practiced in a way sort of away from stress in a kind

• 28:31Speaker 01

  of offline approach that can be beneficial for raising what we call stress threshold. So there's a whole other way to look at stress, which is to say, how do I get calmer in the mind when my body is freaking out? There you go. And I think people will recognize some of what I'm about to describe as kind of Wim Hof like breathing. It is also traditionally been called tummo breathing. Some people call it super oxygenation breathing, although then there are other people like Patrick McKeon and company that will say, well, you're actually blowing off more carbon dioxide than you are bringing in oxygen. And so the naming again now is a mess. Yoganidra. So Yoganidra is exhale emphasized. But tummo breathing, Wim Hof breathing, and what sometimes is called super oxygenation

• 29:16Speaker 01

  breathing involves doing a lot of inhale exhale, inhale exhale. It's hyperventilating. It's deliberate hyperventilating, followed by exhales and breath holds, followed by inhales and breath holds. Now, the repetitive breathing more quickly and deeply, this kind of thing, or some variant of that, all through the mouth or all through the nose, brings up the heart rate and causes the adrenal glands, which sit right above the kidneys, to secrete adrenaline. They make you more alert. And we know this, my lab's been looking at this with a number of different measures, exploring the nervous system and the periphery, like the heart rate, and you see these big inflections in heart rate when people do this.

• 29:58Speaker 01

  Typically, it makes people feel agitated at first, they feel a little bit agitated. And then when you exhale and hold your breath for 15 seconds or so, or longer in some cases, if somebody's skilled at this, what you're doing essentially is you're learning to be calm as your body is flooded with all this adrenaline and the heart rate is going. You're learning to calm your mind. That's right. So you're learning actually to separate the mind body. Your body might be shaking, vibrating. And you're learning to suppress that. And you're just... And that is 100% top-down control. What you're doing in those moments is you're learning to take your forebrain and say, "Fight the temptation to move. Fight the temptation to breathe." Now, I don't want to suggest anyone do this to the point where it's unsafe. You should never do this anywhere near water, even in a puddle,

• 30:44Speaker 01

  because people have drowned, people have died doing high oxygenation, breath packing.

• 30:49Lewis Howes?

  And passing out.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  Passing out, it is, it can be quite dangerous. So people need to take the appropriate precautions before they do it. If people have pulmonary issues, it can, there are, you know, it can be problematic. If people get trained in how to do it properly, it can be relatively safe. Okay, and my lab's been doing experiments on, now we have more than 100 people doing different types of breathing and exploring how it affects the mind and the body. This particular pattern of breathing,

• 31:16Speaker 01

  25 or 30 times, followed by an exhale and a hold, and then a big inhale and a hold, sometimes doing more inhaling and exhaling type repetitive breathing. That is really somebody training themselves how to self-induce stress. And we know from some good literature and some emerging science that's still ongoing, that it is possible to get comfortable in these agitated states, so that your mind is okay, feels okay, when the body is feeling like it wants to tremble or move, that you can learn to suppress that activity. The ice bath is another good example of this. Some people go straight to the ice bath because cold water will almost always induce a low level of stress in people.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  You have to, you have to kind of fight it, even if you learn to love it.

• 32:03Lewis Howes?

  You still have to every time, jumping in there, "Okay, I gotta control the mind essentially to calm."

• 32:08Speaker 01

  Exactly. So the body is saying, "This is really cold." This is really cold.

• 32:13Lewis Howes?

  Get out now.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  And you're pushing back on that, and it's top-down control. It's pure top-down control. And you could do this any number of ways. There's actually a, something called the hour of pain, which is, before you jump to conclusions, the hour of pain was actually described to me by a friend of mine, former military special operations guy, who said that you, they place you, this wasn't through military, but this is a kind of... Outside the military.

• 32:36Lewis Howes?

  Extracurricular.

• 32:37Speaker 01

  Extracurricular activities of placing you into one position on the floor and you have to stay there for an hour, which can be excruciating. There's so much limbic friction where you want to move so badly because the stabilizing muscles of the body and the feedback in our muscular skeletal system says, move, move, move. I just want to move the tiniest bit. And so all that practice is, it's just a different version of the ice bath.

• 33:02Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  It's you're learning top-down control. So, you know, we started off with a question about trauma.

• 33:10Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 33:10Speaker 01

  And we'll get there, but I think it's very important, just to kind of summarize that people understand, to just ask themselves the question, if I, am I feeling too much agitation or am I feeling too much exhaustion? If it's too much agitation, emphasize exhales and do the physiological sigh. Yoganidra is also a wonderful practice that is kind of the mirror image of superoxygenation breathing. It involves long exhale breathing, lying down on your back, completely relaxing your body and learning to completely turn off thinking, which sounds hard, but you can learn how to do it very quickly if you do that practice for about 10 minutes a day.

• 33:48Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  It literally means yoga sleep.

• 33:50Lewis Howes?

  And probably the most commented thing we have on the previous interview is where are the links for this yoga nidra stuff? So we're going to get that this time.

• 33:57Speaker 01

  Before I leave today, I'll send, there are several, but people can go on YouTube. Some of the better ones out there, these are all cost-free. Komeni Desai has a really wonderful one that she, I also just happen to like her voice. So it works for me. There's a guy named Liam Gillan who has one. If you like a male Irish voice, there's that. They're all, you have to pick a voice that works for you.

• 34:19Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 34:20Speaker 01

  So I'll make some suggestions, but if people don't like the particular voice that's walking them through the yoga nidra.

• 34:24Lewis Howes?

  Find a different one.

• 34:25Speaker 01

  Find a different voice.

• 34:26Lewis Howes?

  Yeah. That's cool.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  So that's a practice that you can do offline, meaning not in the moment of stress, that will allow you to learn how to relax more. Then on the fatigue side, if you're in motion in the morning or in the afternoon and you need to keep going, you need to keep studying, you need to drive to the airport to pick someone up and you're exhausted, the, please don't drive if you're really, really exhausted. But inhale, emphasize breathing, making your inhales just a little bit longer or more vigorous than your exhales will speed up your heart rate and will make you more alert.

• 34:56Lewis Howes?

  So deeper inhale, shorter exhale.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it looks something like.

• 35:06Lewis Howes?

  It'll speed it up.

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and even two or three of those and you'll notice your heart rate will pick up because there's a neural signal from the brainstem sent to the heart to speed up the amount of blood flow.

• 35:16Lewis Howes?

  But at the end of the day, what I'm hearing you say is you can control the body or the mind with the mind to an extent for moments or even extended periods of time, hours maybe, but really we need to be thinking the mind and the body connection at all times.

• 35:33Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 35:34Lewis Howes?

  Because if you stop breathing, if you're only doing short breaths the whole time for a whole day, it's going to affect the body.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:40Lewis Howes?

  And the mind. And if you're, so it's using the body, using the breath, using it where it's connected to the brain to constantly support you throughout the day. But if you're just like all day, it'll help you get to a certain point, but then it'll be detrimental to your health.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Right. So these breathing practices are about shifting the gears, but they're not something that you continue doing throughout your day.

• 36:03Lewis Howes?

  All day, yeah.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Really what I've described here are hardwired, meaning we were all born with these neurons and connections in our body. We were all born with these organs to be able to do these things. There's not a lot of learning involved. Once you know how to do it, it works the first time, it works every time.

• 36:16Lewis Howes?

  Yes.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  But it's sort of like shifting gears. There aren't too many manual transmissions these days, but let's say you're driving downhill and it's going too fast. You would, if, this is like taking it into a lower gear, so then you slow down, you're not going to constantly be riding the clutch, right? You're not going to constantly be in the shifting motor, riding the brake. Some people do that, but that's not good.

• 36:36Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Right? You don't want to have to do that. Just like if you're going uphill, you might have to hit on the gas a little bit, otherwise you're not going to get up that hill. But at some point, you switch gears and then you're just cruising up.

• 36:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  So it's a transmission system rather than you're supposed to breathe this way all day or breathe that way all day.

• 36:52Lewis Howes?

  This is smart.

• 36:53Speaker 01

  And the fast breathing followed by exhales and breath holds, the superoxygenation Tummo Wim Hof type breathing. I look at that as learning how to drive. On a slick pavement, you know, it's self-induced stress. It's like taking your car to a parking lot. You know, when you're a kid's learning to drive. I was teaching a kid to drive recently. You teach him to drive, you go through the neighborhood, you do things. But when you really want to learn how to, for instance, drive through puddles or drive in fog or drive in heavy rain, you kind of want to be in a parking lot or a

• 37:28Lewis Howes?

  Safe environment.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  Safe environment for that. You don't want to be on a, you know, on the autobahn, right? So you, these are ways in which you can teach yourself how to navigate the bad weather of the nervous system.

• 37:42Lewis Howes?

  So you're prepared for when it comes.

• 37:43Speaker 01

  That's right. And I, and I have to say from personal experience and from some emerging data. When I say emerging data, I mean studies in my lab and other labs that are still ongoing. It does appear that when people self-induced this stress, it can be beneficial for, I'm going to quote a colleague of mine. My colleague, David Spiegel, who's our associate chair of psychiatry says, it's not just about the state that you're in, the state of mind that you're in. It's how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it. So when you self-induced stress and then you say, oh, I can calm my mind even though my body is feeling agitated. That's a very positive experience for many people. Whereas when someone else is causing your stress and you're trying to calm down, it feels like you're battling 25 different things.

• 38:27Speaker 01

  So these are skills that anyone can develop. And they are skills that essentially require information of what to do, but zero training. I mean, it's like, I'm sure you played football. I didn't, you can probably, I'm certain you can throw a football way better than I can. That took some, some learning.

• 38:46Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  It would take me a long, long time, maybe forever, to be able to try and approximate that skill level. But these are things that we can all do right.

• 38:52Lewis Howes?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:53Speaker 01

  And so. Now, I think we've kind of spelled out a, two tools on either side. Physiological sighs for calming down in real time. Exhale emphasized breathing of the yoga nidra sort, maybe even doing yoga nidra 10 to 20 or 30 minutes, a couple of times a week, daily if you want, to teach your nervous system to calm down. And then also having tools that emphasize inhales, so longer, more vigorous inhales, or doing an offline practice of, at some point during your day, you decide, I'm gonna do five or 10 minutes of this more rapid breathing, followed by some breath holds.

• 39:30Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  And provided those are designated safe for you, the super oxygenated breathing you decide is safe for you. I'm not aware of any dangers of the exhale emphasized breathing at all, but people should always approach any new thing with caution, of course. But, once you have those four tools in hand, you've really learned how to press on the accelerator, so that's inhaling more than your exhale. You've learned how to drive faster, be comfortable at higher speeds, that's kind of like the Wim Hof type breathing, comfortable at high speeds. It's like, oh, I can drive 65 and feel calm, I'm good here. Whereas, previously you couldn't. As well as, learning how to slow down by, with the physiological sigh, that's sort of a break. And then the yoga nidra is sort of like coming off the accelerator to slow down.

• 40:14Lewis Howes?

  Yeah.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  You're just turning off your system. The beauty of having these different tools, and practicing them now and again, is that there's this other phenomenon, which is neuroplasticity, which is that then you start doing it reflexively without even realizing it. You start doing physiological sighs when you're too stressed.

• 40:30Lewis Howes?

  Automatically.

• 40:31Speaker 01

  Automatically, and even before you start to hit the alertness threshold.

• 40:36Lewis Howes?

  Interesting.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. People just start to engage these things. And so...

• 40:39Lewis Howes?

  It's kind of like when you see a dog who's just tired, it automatically does this sigh, when it's like panting, it'll do like a big sigh, and then it's like, almost like it's relaxed.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:47Lewis Howes?

  And it's just like, it goes to sleep.

• 40:49Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 40:49Lewis Howes?

  I see this with my dog all the time, it's like, running around panting, and then it's just like...

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Exactly. And that little extra inhale, I know we've talked a lot about this before, but I don't think we can overemphasize the power of the physiological sigh because that little extra inhale is what opens up those little sacs in the lungs just a little bit more. And that, when you exhale, it pulls a lot more carbon dioxide out of the system.

• 41:12Lewis Howes?

  Which, when you pull carbon dioxide out of the system, what does that do?

• 41:15Speaker 01

  You feel calm.

• 41:17Lewis Howes?

  Wow, there you go.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  You feel calm. In fact-

• 41:19Lewis Howes?

  This is a physiological mechanism to make you calm.

• 41:22Speaker 01

  That's right. And in fact, you know, in claustrophobic environments, or God forbid, if you're, you know, you're drowning, the reason you're stressed is because you have neurons in your brainstem that sense carbon dioxide in the bloodstream. And as that goes up, it says you need to find air, you need to offload this carbon dioxide.

• 41:38Lewis Howes?

  Oh, man.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  So, it's, it's a, these are all real physiological mechanisms that are really about balancing the oxygen and carbon dioxide in your system. And when we see these really extreme feats of breath holds and people doing all these really wild things, usually it's because they're learning to manipulate the oxygen-carbon dioxide packing, or ratios, or how they manage them. Freedivers get very good at this. There's air packing. There's all sorts of dangerous stuff that should only really be done by highly trained, highly skilled people. But, you know, once people have these tools in hand, they can start coupling to the, to the tools that involve the mind. I mean, it's fine to do a physiological

• 42:19Speaker 01

  sigh and to tell yourself to calm down. We're not saying don't think, or be mindless, but what we're saying is, it's, it's powerful to look to these mechanics of the body-mind relationship. And you said the body and the mind are connected. It's really a two-way street.

• 42:34Lewis Howes?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:35Speaker 01

  You know, the mind controls the body, the body controls the mind. It's a loop. I just think of it like a loop. I don't even think of it as one controlling the other. It's just if one of those things is out of whack, you, you need to control the other one. You're not gonna try and, just think about trying to control your mind, again, is like grabbing at fog or at smoke. It's, it just moves away. So, that, most of the time.

• 42:56Lewis Howes?

  I want to ask you a question. I want to shift gears in a, in a, in a strategic way. And I love to have practitioners, scientists, doctors, researchers who are into the practicality of things. But I also love to have philosophers, spiritual leaders, and manifestors, like I call, people that are talking about the law of attraction. And the way we think and how our thoughts allow us to attract the things we want in our life, whether it be a positive thing or something they don't want, but our thoughts really start to attract. And I want to understand the science of the law of attraction.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Oh my, okay.

• 43:36Lewis Howes?

  Because I recently had the author of The Secret, which has kind of made the law of attraction more mainstream and popularized. This is something that's been around for a long time. The manifesting your thoughts and the law of attraction is not a new thing, but she popularized it with The Secret, Rhonda Byrne. And as I was interviewing her, and I've interviewed a lot of different experts who talk about the law of attraction. It's always been fascinating to hear the results they get in their life based on using this principle called the law of attraction or thinking of certain things that you want, desiring certain things that you want as if it's already happened, imagining as if you already have it, visualizing it, and also acting.

• 44:19Lewis Howes?

  It's not just thinking and it comes to you, but thinking, manifesting, attracting the people you need in your life for it to manifest, taking the actions necessary, learning the skills. But as opposed to having a mind of chaos, it's hard to manifest what we want under a mind of chaos. But when we're clear, we start to manifest those things with a process. Can you break down the science of the law of attraction?

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Oh my.

• 44:45Lewis Howes?

  And why this idea of thinking a certain thing will manifest? Why that is accurate or not?

• 44:54Speaker 01

  So I confess I'm not super familiar with it, although I've heard about it.

• 44:59Lewis Howes?

  So the law of attraction essentially just being what you think you become, what you think you create, what you think about consistently, you'll start to attract in your life. It's kind of the baseline principle. There's more to it, but I'm simplifying it.

• 45:14Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 45:14Lewis Howes?

  So when we think about something consistently in our minds, is there science around this that validates or doesn't validate that we start to, in the physical world, attract our thoughts? Whether it be a negative thought about what I don't want. Or a thought around what I do want. It's almost like saying, okay, when you think about a pink elephant, you see it everywhere. Is this, is there science to this?

• 45:41Speaker 01

  So, um, well, I can't give a intelligent answer about the law of attraction specifically. But what I can perhaps do is shed some light on what we think we know, what neuroscientists think we know about how thoughts and thinking actually work and how those relate to behaviors. And then I'll give a little anecdote that

• 46:04Lewis Howes?

  Sweet.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  That I think people might appreciate because it's something that I keep in mind a lot in thinking about goal setting and focus and this kind of thing. So thoughts are, let me back up one second. And I know I've covered this before, so I'm going to cover it very quickly because we talked about this last time, but in case someone didn't hear that discussion or forgets. Senses are these cells within our body, our eye, our skin, our nose, our mouth that are taking physical entities in the universe, like wavelengths of light, physical touch, and translating that into nerve signals, into electrical signals in the body.

• 46:45Lewis Howes?

  Senses meaning taste, feel, sight, hearing, the five senses.

• 46:49Speaker 01

  The five senses. And people always say, what about intuition? That's different. That's not a sense. That's a, that's actually a sense of your internal world. It's called interoception as opposed to exteroception, sense of the outside world. So the five senses. And we are very, whether or not people like it or not, we are heavily constrained by those senses. For instance, a mantis shrimp, of all things, can see like 64 different shades of color that we can only see one shade of, for instance, because they have receptors that can pick out those things. Some animals can see ultraviolet emissions, others can see infrared. A pit viper can see your heat emissions. You know, humans sometimes think they can see heat emissions, but they can't see heat

• 47:34Speaker 01

  emissions unless they put infrared goggles on, then they can't. So the senses constrain our experience of the world. And I don't doubt That there are some people that have a little quarter of a percent more UV detection. Or there's even some evidence for weak magneto-reception in humans from good labs.

• 47:51Lewis Howes?

  Really?

• 47:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and turtles have very strong magneto-reception.

• 47:54Lewis Howes?

  What does that mean, magneto?

• 47:55Speaker 01

  They can sense magnetic fields, so they sense them as, you know, like that's magnetically. Humans have, there's some evidence written up in Science Magazine, if people want to look, look it up, which is a quality journal, for weak magnetic sensing in humans, some humans.

• 48:10Lewis Howes?

  Not strong.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  But it's not strong, okay? And it's not in most, strong in most people by any stretch. Whereas turtles can navigate long distances based on magnetic fields in the, in the ocean.

• 48:20Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 48:20Speaker 01

  It's very cool.

• 48:20Lewis Howes?

  That's cool.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  It's very cool.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  So our experience of the world, all humans' experience of the world is kind of tunneled by these, what we can see and what we can't see. There's a lot happening that we can't see, it's just that reality. That's why, that's why people need night vision goggles in supposed to just looking at things in the night without them. So that's key. So there's sensation and then there's perception, which is simply to say, which of those things are we paying attention to? So I can see that this water bottle is, you know, a mixture of blue and glass and, you know, because I decided to look at it. But I was sensing it out of the corner of my eye the whole time, but I was focused on something.

• 48:58Lewis Howes?

  Right, I can sense the air touching my skin.

• 49:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 49:01Lewis Howes?

  Because I'm deciding to focus on that feeling.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  That's right, that's right. So that's perception. And you want to just make sure that we close the hatch on interoception. Perception of what's going on, like I don't think about my heart rate too much, but if I stop and think about it, I'm thinking about my heart rate and then I'm just sensing my heart rate. It's, but it's still just pressure. It's, you know, it's a physical phenomenon. Okay. Then there's thinking, which we'll get to. Then there's emotions slash feelings. And those are complicated, but they are tractable, as we say, we can, we can figure it out. And then there's behaviors, like you're writing right now. It's a measurable thing, it's a real thing. Okay, so what about thoughts? What in the world is thinking? Well, in many ways, thinking is a lot like perception.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Perception, again, being which sensations I'm focusing on. Except that thinking incorporates sensations from the past, sensations from the present, and can include sensations from the future that we haven't even had yet. Interesting. So this, I think, speaks to your question about law of attraction, which is, you know, never really been formalized for the scientific community, so I'm trying to take it and cram it through a neuroscience filter here, see what comes out the other side. But the interesting thing about thinking is it's very hard to control our spontaneous thoughts. So, for instance, I can't prevent myself from thinking something. However, I can deliberately introduce a thought.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  People forget this, that one of our enormous powers as human beings is another form of top-down control, which is to say, "I'm gonna write out my name, I am Andrew," or "I can think, I am Andrew." Now, it takes a little bit of work, you kind of notice, to think something specific, like you would write it out in your head, just as you would write it out on paper. It feels like a little bit of work, because it is work. You're taking that spontaneous thought process and you're inserting a thought on top of it. And we know that you can't hold too many thoughts in mind at once. So, what I will say is that it's hard to suppress thoughts, but it's actually quite easy to introduce thoughts.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  And it sounds to me like this law is basically a process of introducing thoughts. And when you start introducing thoughts, and you start thinking of thoughts as a form of perception... The way you view the world. They're gonna shape the way you... They're gonna shape what you see. Wow. They're very gonna heavily constrain what you see. Now, this has a dark side and a light side. And, you know, the dark side is, is that beliefs are essentially thoughts that are recurring thoughts, or things that are kind of like books on a shelf that you can reach to anytime. If I say, "Hey, what about that book out there, you know, Jay Shetty's book?" You can go grab it, because it's on the shelf right there, and you can show it to me, right?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  It's there all the time, you know where it is, and it's very accessible. So beliefs are reoccurring thought? Right. So you said? Yeah. Whereas if you have never thought about something in particular, like if I, you know, we start having a discussion about something that you're not very familiar with, or you tell me about something I'm not very familiar with... Then it's gonna take some work, it feels like work, so.

• 52:18Lewis Howes?

  To understand it, to perceive it, to experience it, to take it in, to question your previous beliefs about something.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  That's right. And there's some interesting data that were published in the journal Neuron this last year, not from my group, that show that beliefs actually have their own rewarding quality, that there's actually dopamine release associated with beliefs.

• 52:41Lewis Howes?

  Having a belief.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Yes. So when you believe something, there are chemical reward systems in your mind that are associated with just repeating that belief. Now, again, this has a dark side and a light side. The dark side is it means that people can be very fixed in their beliefs and they're actually being chemically rewarded for having the same belief.

• 53:01Lewis Howes?

  The world is flat. I believe the world is flat and just saying it over and over again.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Or in-group, out-group type thinking of any kind, or.

• 53:09Lewis Howes?

  What do you mean in-group, out-group?

• 53:10Speaker 01

  Well, when people think, oh, I believe that that group of people over there is this way and/or good or bad, right? There's a self-reward mechanism that's getting engaged there.

• 53:19Lewis Howes?

  I'm greater than this group.

• 53:20Speaker 01

  Could be greater than or less than. So, you know, the beliefs are attached to a set of rewards. So, now, the dopamine system is exceedingly powerful because dopamine is a kind of a dumb molecule. It has no brain of its own. It's just a molecule, right? It's just a chemical. But when dopamine is released in our brain, we, first of all, it tends to orient us towards goals in the outside environment. It's the molecule not just of reward but of motivation. And when we release dopamine, we tend to see the world in terms of external goals.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  And so you can imagine now, if there's a process built up inside us where our thoughts are causing dopamine release and dopamine is shaping what we see as rewards, what we perceive as rewards, that can be wonderful or terrible, depending on how that's harnessed.

• 54:17Lewis Howes?

  Let me understand this. When we have dopamine triggered in our body, it's attached to, because it's attached to some type of belief, we're gonna continue to say, this feels good.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 54:30Lewis Howes?

  So let me keep thinking this way.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  And viewing the world this way.

• 54:34Lewis Howes?

  In this way, because it's gonna keep making me feel good.

• 54:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 54:36Lewis Howes?

  Physically.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 54:37Lewis Howes?

  Wow. Even if it's. Fact or not fact scientifically true or not true.

• 54:44Speaker 01

  Or harmful to other people or harmful to yourself.

• 54:46Lewis Howes?

  If it makes you feel good, you might stick to that belief.

• 54:49Speaker 01

  That's right. So a good example of dopamine is with anytime thinking about science and neuroscience in particular, thinking at the extremes can be kind of useful. So people who are very depressed, who see no possibility in the world, who if you talk to a depressed person, every response they give is going to be, but it's not going to work out.

• 55:09Lewis Howes?

  It doesn't work for me.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  They are absolutely certain that things are going to turn out bad.

• 55:12Lewis Howes?

  And there's a benefit for having that belief, right?

• 55:15Speaker 01

  And they're entrenched in it. They may actually be rewarding that somewhat, although typically depressed states have very low dopamine. At the opposite extreme is mania. When people are in a manic phase, dopamine is very high, we know this, and they see possibility everywhere and there are certain things that are going to work out. They will spend money they don't have, they'll create relationships they don't have time and energy for, they will overdo everything. And so somewhere in the middle is this healthy range where we're where we realize that how we view the world is shaping the release of these chemicals. And I do believe this happens when we have positive thoughts, we get a lift. If we if we can get a lift from our positive thoughts and then dopamine itself puts us in relationship

• 56:00Speaker 01

  with the outside world such that we view the outside world as having more possibility, that is going to put us into forward momentum. There are good, there are a lot of studies to support that. When dopamine is low, we tend to see very little possibility in the world.

• 56:16Lewis Howes?

  So a positive thought triggers forward movement potentially?

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah.

• 56:22Lewis Howes?

  So positive thinking, which a lot of people will say, well, that's just positive thinking, it doesn't work. Some people say, be positive, think positive, others say, well, it doesn't work. But with science, I'm hearing you say it gives you a little bit of a lift.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  Absolutely. The key with positive thinking is that it has to be. Honest. It can't be, I've already won, you know, I don't have Olympic gold medal. If I could tell myself I'm gonna get one tomorrow, but I just don't have the skills. So that's not gonna release dopamine in my system.

• 56:50Lewis Howes?

  How do you know it's honest if you're in a depressed state and you don't believe that you're actually better off than where you're at?

• 56:58Speaker 01

  The key is to attach that. So one thing to understand is that dopamine release in the brain is always subjective. There's no experience that that says, that has unique domain over dopamine release that will only allow dopamine release. So if it's very subjective, so if I say to myself, I'm going to get into the process of doing something. We have a new year coming up, so there are gonna be a lot of resolutions soon. The, it's not, if you attach the dopamine release to the process of effort or goal setting itself, you'll have more energy to be in effort. And then if you can attach dopamine release to the belief that you're at least heading in the right direction, you'll have more energy to keep going in the right direction.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  People make the mistake of thinking that the positive thought process should be attached to the finish line. It's not about thinking you've already won. It's not about being delusional. It's about thinking that your training is gonna take you to the finish line. And so it's about moving that mental horizon in more close, more closely, and then triggering some sort of positive internal representation of what you're doing, meaning thinking positive. And people, this is usually where I get stopped and people say, wait, but it sounds so subjective. Tell me exactly how to do it. But here's the key point. It's supposed to be subjective.

• 58:20Lewis Howes?

  For you, right?

• 58:22Speaker 01

  Everyone needs to figure out what allows them to continue to be in forward momentum. What allows them to constrain the world of possibilities? And to go after goals and how often to self reward. Because but the key is the self word. Because if you start only pursuing external rewards, that's when you are no longer in control of your dopamine system.

• 58:44Lewis Howes?

  Because you're reliant on actually something physically happening in the physical world, not internal.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  That's right. And let's be really, really honest and burst the the bubble that I feel like should have been burst a long time ago, which is, yes, everybody, including me, it is possible that you can do everything and still fail. No one wants to say that. But the way that you ensure against that is to attach reward to the effort process. Because the dopamine molecule creates a sense of certainty. And you're not trying to create certainty about the final outcome. You're trying to create certainty only about the next outcome that's en route to the final outcome.

• 59:24Lewis Howes?

  The next action.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  The next, so you want to think about milestones. And so people set out with, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write the great American novel or I'm going to, you know, get the IPO. And of course, that's an important, you need to have a sense of what the finish line would actually look like. But the more that one can attach this subjective release of dopamine process to the intermediate steps through positive thinking and action, positive thinking and action, the the higher that probability goes toward, in science, we say there's a probability of zero to one, the higher that probability goes to one, which is certainty. Now, everyone knows in the back of their mind that there is no absolute certainty. When I hear about, you know, athletes or fighters, I was certain I was gonna win.

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  We all know that there's a point 00000 doubt in everybody.

• 1:00:14Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  Point 00, whatever that is. Now, for some people, they might be able to push that number way, way out. But certainty about outcome is actually a form of delusion. Certainty about.

• 1:00:26Lewis Howes?

  Like mania, yeah.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  That's right. That's right. You see this in mania. And that's why people start engaging in behaviors that aren't good.

• 1:00:32Lewis Howes?

  Fixated on like, this is going to happen.

• 1:00:33Speaker 01

  That's right. The silver lining in this is that when you create certainty about outcomes you know you can control, you take over this neurobiological system and you create almost certainty that you will complete the process to the end goal perfectly.

• 1:00:50Lewis Howes?

  Right.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  And by perfectly, I don't mean that you won't have to re steer orient differently along the way. What I mean is that you're you're learning to engage a process.

• 1:01:00Lewis Howes?

  My friend, thank you so much for listening to this episode. I told you it would be a powerful one. If you enjoyed it and you got value out of this, then please pay it forward. If you want to see someone else continue to improve their life and expand their awareness and use these tools to help them grow, then make sure to just copy and paste the link or just share lewishouse.com/1072 and tell a friend to check it out, listen, and then give you notes back. Hey, what did you learn? What did you like about this? And share this with someone that you think would find it very interesting. Again, if this is your first time here, please click the subscribe button right now on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and check us out on YouTube. We've got over a million subscribers over there, some incredible videos with millions of views.

• 1:01:44Lewis Howes?

  So make sure to check that out for more content and extended videos over there. And leave us a rating and review. Every time we get a subscriber, a rating or review, it helps us improve the quality of this show, but also it helps us spread the message of greatness to more people. So every time you share it, every time you listen, you rate or review, you are helping us reach more lives and change and impact more people around the world. And that's what I'm all about, reaching and impacting more lives. So thank you for all your support on the School of Greatness. And if you want inspirational messages every single week, then I want you to text the word PODCAST right now to 614-350-3960. And let's stay connected over text messaging

• 1:02:25Lewis Howes?

  there. And I want to leave you with this quote from Mr. Fred Rogers, who said, "In times of stress, the best thing we can do for each other is to listen with our ears and our hearts and to be assured that our questions are just as important as our answers." And I want to remind you, if no one's told you lately, that you are loved, you are worthy, and you matter. And I'm so grateful for your time today. And you know what time it is. It's time to go out there and do something great.