Elite Brain Training - w/ Dr. Andrew Huberman

Program Your Mind to Win!⁣ ⁣ If you’ve ever wanted to increase your CONFIDENCE, experience more HAPPINESS, and fall in love with PROGRESS, this interview is exactly what you need!⁣ ⁣ I teach A LOT about developing habits and rituals that serve you, sustaining momentum, stacking small wins, and expressing gratitude. My goal is to FIRE YOU UP and keep you on track through the day, month, and year but these things I teach are NOT just theories I randomly came up with! They are BACKED BY SCIENCE and when implemented, will have a HUGE impact on the quality of your life. ⁣ ⁣ That’s why I am SO enthusiastic about my next guest, Dr. Andrew Huberman! Dr. Huberman is an American neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. ⁣ ⁣ As a well-respected and influential thought leader, he has made numerous contributions to the fields of brain development, and he is here NOW on The Ed Mylett Show breaking down the BRAIN SCIENCE behind the #MAXOUT movement! ⁣ ⁣ Motivational messages are great for a quick spurt of energy but it’s SCIENCE and your ability to understand and optimize how your brain works that bring ultimate lasting change without the guesswork! ⁣ ⁣ Does our brain really have a choice in how we perceive the world around us or are we pre-conditioned to think, feel, and behave a certain way?⁣ ⁣ Is there a way to actually train your brain to follow through with the commitments you make to yourself? ⁣ ⁣ Is it possible to train your brain to prevent burn out and execute with URGENCY and FOCUS?⁣ ⁣ Dr. Huberman is answering ALL of these questions and so much more! We dive deep into how to establish a growth mindset and BLAST THROUGH LIMITATIONS your brain has told you before were not possible. ⁣ ⁣ You’ll learn PRACTICAL and EASY tips you can implement RIGHT NOW to increase your mental AND physical health, and reduce stress and anxiety.⁣ ⁣ Are you ready to tap into the powers of your brain? Happiness does not need to be delayed. And I’m not just talking theory... I’m talking SCIENCE!⁣ ⁣ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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

• 0:00Ed Mylett?

  I hear so many small business owners say the exact same thing. They just never have enough time in the day. Well, I measure time differently. I've compressed, condensed, heck, I've bent time. My first day is 6:00 a.m. to noon. My second day starts at noon and goes till 6:00 p.m. And my third day, 6:00 p.m. to midnight. I now get 21 days a week. Stack that up over a month, over a year, over five years, and my life's completely different than it would have been otherwise. And if you want to win as an entrepreneur, you have to compress your time too. And you definitely can't afford to waste it. Waiting weeks on a big bank for capital? Your best bet's to work with my friends at Cardiff. They know how to compress time for entrepreneurs. They get your business approved in minutes and funded the very same day. They're America's favorite small business lender, and for good reason.

• 0:45Ed Mylett?

  Over 20 years in business, over $12 billion deployed to small business across America. Stop letting bank delays slow down your momentum. Head to cardiff.co/ed. That's cardiff.co/ed. Cardiff.co. Real growth, fast funding. Cardiff. Borrow better.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company, for me, of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  On October 2nd.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:22Speaker 02

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:25Speaker 01

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 1:38Speaker 03

  This is The Ed Miler Show.

• 1:46Ed Mylett?

  Welcome back to Max Out, everybody. My guest today is Dr. Andrew Huberman. And he's a neuroscientist. His lab is at Stanford. Today's gonna be one of the more interesting shows for me that we've ever done before because I'm fascinated with this man's work. And he's unique because although he's a brilliant person, he's a neuroscientist. He speaks in terms that. People like me can understand. And so he's got a very unique ability to understand information and articulate it in a very understandable and digestible fashion. His lab, and Andrew, you can correct me if I say this and this wrong, but his lab mainly studies two things, which is really vision, literally vision, the workings of the retina. And then secondly, really different states of mind.

• 2:29Ed Mylett?

  And is that about accurate, Andrew, would you say?

• 2:32Speaker 04

  That's exactly accurate.

• 2:33Ed Mylett?

  Okay, good. And so today, we're going to stay on the ladder. We're going to talk today predominantly about states of mind, growth states, peak performance states. And so I'm really honored to welcome Dr. Andrew Huberman to the show today. Welcome to Max Out, brother.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  Thanks. So great to be here. It's an honor and a privilege to be here. So looking forward to our discussion.

• 2:52Ed Mylett?

  I am as well. And we could go so many different places and we will. If you're in your car listening to this or on the treadmills, one of these you're going to listen to twice or go over to YouTube and watch it or vice versa, because there's going to be so many nuggets in here. Let's start out, the concept of, first off, what's a neuroscientist do? And what do they study? Just for the edification of our audience.

• 3:13Speaker 04

  Sure. It's a great question. You know, the, the term neuroscientist only really emerged in the last 10 years or so. When I started my training, which was about 25 years ago, I'm 44 now, so I got into this pretty young. There were feels like neurochemistry and there was psychology. There was even a, a degree at some universities called psychobiology, which was really the merge of psychology and biology. But fortunately, they got rid of that name because that was really off putting. You know, a neuroscientist is somebody that's interested in understanding the workings of the nervous system. And the nervous system is the brain. So all the neural tissue encased in the skull, although there are two little pieces of the brain that are outside the skull that we'll talk about as well.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  The spinal cord, which is the other part of the central nervous system. And then what we call the peripheral nervous system. So all the connections between the brain and spinal cord with the organs of the body and from the organs of the body back again. So a neuroscientist wants to understand how the nervous system works, what it does. And that really encompasses everything. So memory, experience, perception.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  States of mind like fear, or stress, or sleep, or awe. Every organ in your body is governed by the nervous system. Your digestion is controlled by the nervous system. Your heartbeat is controlled by the nervous system. Your immune system is controlled by the nervous system. So a neuroscientist is sort of a catch-all for somebody that's interested in understanding how nerve cells, neurons, and some of the other cells in the nervous system, how those work together to control all the functions of the brain and body. And I'm a research neuroscientist, so I'm not a physician. I'm not a clinician. There are some clinicians and MDs in our field. So what I always say is, I'm not a medical doctor. I don't prescribe anything. I'm a research professor. I profess lots of things.

• 5:06Speaker 04

  And my daily life consists of taking the nervous systems, mainly of mice, because that's a traditional research model where we can do really invasive things, like lesion brain areas, activate brain areas if that will, and humans. My lab works on mice and humans to try and understand what are the physical structures in the brain? What brain areas? Which cells? Which molecules? How do they connect? How does that lead to behavior and states of mind, et cetera? And we also want to understand how that actually impacts, like what everyday people would think of as depression, or happiness, or motivation, or drive. And so my life is typical for a neuroscientist

• 5:50Speaker 04

  in the sense that we do experiments on humans and mice. It's unusual for a neuroscientist in the sense that my lab does work on a lot of things. And I also, we can talk about this, we don't just do experiments in my lab. Right now, for instance, we have a study going on with 125 human subjects. They're out in the world, wearing devices where we're monitoring their brain and body 24 hours a day. We're monitoring their body position 24 hours a day. And we are collecting data. Neural data on them. So we do experiments in the lab and outside the lab. It's a long answer, but you know, the neuroscientist upstairs from me, he studies gut-brain interactions. One, two doors down from me,

• 6:31Speaker 04

  studies neuroplasticity. Two doors down from that, there's a woman studying navigation systems in the brain, kind of GPS systems in the brain. So you walk around my department or another neuroscience department, any other major place in the country or out in around the world, and people are just really obsessed with trying to figure out how this nervous system thing works from a different, kind of narrower perspective.

• 6:52Ed Mylett?

  So you're leading down the road I wanted to go, which I knew this would flow like this. So take this nervous system, and it's processing feelings, thoughts, sensations, meanings, these other things. And I'm sort of well-known for saying, listen, it's not the events of your life that matter, it's the meaning you attach to those events. Yet, one of the things that the nervous system has sort of done is it's, we've all sort of agreed to some consensus of what things are. So we've agreed to what certain colors are, we've agreed to certain what words mean, language. There's a general societal belief about certain things. So if, if that's true, but I've also heard you say your thoughts are a choice. So if it's this involuntary process that's happening where we've all sort of agreed to

• 7:34Ed Mylett?

  this and we're almost pre-programmed through a series of evolution to believe certain things, how is it also that we choose our thoughts?

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Great question. It's, it's the question that neuroscientists think about. And just as a bit of a disclaimer, this can be a little bit abstract, but I promise to get concrete and I'll do my best to be as succinct as possible. But succinctness is not the quality that's typically associated with academics. What I, what I will promise, however, is I'll try and use as few acronyms as possible, and I'll only name things if I think it's going to be important for people to go look up more, as opposed to just raining terminology down on people, because that's not useful. So you're absolutely right. The nervous system is responsible for sensation, perception, feelings, thoughts, actions, and memories. All of that.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  Let's talk about what's non-negotiable. What's non-negotiable are the sensations. I have receptors in my eye. You have receptors in your eye. We have receptors in our skin, in our tongue, in our ears, et cetera, that take physical events in the universe, of which there are many, and can only...

• 8:47Speaker 04

  Sense some of those. So for instance, I'm not a pit viper. I can't see in the infrared. A pit viper can. I can see in the infrared if I snap on infrared goggles. But if I don't do that, my eye can't sense those. So I can't sense magnetic fields. There are people that claim that they can sense magnetic fields. If they can, it's an unusual quality. It hasn't been shown very robustly in the lab. Turtles, on the other hand, navigate extremely long distances by virtue of magnetic fields. They are magnetosensing organisms. So the things that we can pull out of the universe and into our nervous system to work with, those are fixed entities. Now, a colorblind person, 1 in 80 males is red-green colorblind.

• 9:31Speaker 04

  They can't see red as the way you and I can. My dog is red-green colorblind. So there are some unusual cases, but in the absence of any technology, the sensations that we can detect are fixed. They are non-negotiable, as much as gravity is non-negotiable. We have to develop technologies to overcome them if we want to see into the infrared or see ultraviolet light, etc. Okay. Now perceptions, feelings, thoughts, those are where it gets negotiable. Because, for instance, I can decide that the color of your shirt has meaning to me, like we're both wearing a black shirt and therefore we must have met in a previous lifetime. And pretty soon I'd start to sound like a crazy person.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  Because the definition of psychosis or crazy is assigning meaning to something for which there's none. Right? So we have to agree as groups or groups of individuals and societally, what sorts of meanings matter? And that's where it gets very subjective. You know, we place value on the fact that somebody who commits a crime before the age 18 versus after 18, we call them an adult. But developmental trajectories are from birth to death, not, there isn't some cliff that, you know, biological event. So we could go really deep down this rabbit hole, or not, and I'm, but what we know is that sensations are non-negotiable. What we know is that societies and the way that we function as families and couples

• 10:58Speaker 04

  and in the workplace. They obey certain principles or rules of engagement that, on average, are adaptive for a given culture. So, we meet, we say hello, we agree on these cultural things that because, on average, they're adaptive. Whereas if we met and we decide first we were gonna fight, first of all, we both know you're gonna win that. We're gonna physically fight. And second of all, it's just not adaptive for the evolution of cultures, most cultures. There are circumstances where that's appropriate. So, what's important for us to understand is that the human brain is very, very good at all these things. Sensation, perception, feeling, thought, and action. It's also very good at two other things.

• 11:43Speaker 04

  One is interoception, paying attention to what's going on inside me, and exteroception, paying attention to what's going on in the outside world, and balancing the weight of one or the other in order to move adaptively through life. Now, and I'll just throw this out as one more kind of conceptual thing, but I promised I would make it more concrete as opposed to abstract. When we say it's adaptive, what we mean is that this neural machinery in our heads, literally, I've opened up a lot of skulls. I've held a lot of brains in my life. I teach neuroanatomy to medical students now for 10 years. I promise you, it's just meat in there, meat and some fluid. And so the neurons of the brain take sensations,

• 12:26Speaker 04

  and the only thing neurons can do, the only language they can speak, is to be electrically active at certain times and in certain sequences, like the keys on a piano. And it's this amazing thing, like it still inspires wonder in me when I think about it, that you do this, I do this, and we agree on some common rules of engagement that are adaptive. And it's what led us out of caves, hunter-gatherer cultures, technologies, the car, the plane, the iPhone.

• 12:55Speaker 04

  It's amazing. And we are, I think the important thing to remember is that we are still in our evolution as a species. We are still trying to work out whether or not 10 hours a day with the smartphone is good or bad for us. We're still trying to figure out whether or not traveling to other planets is good or bad for us. What should we do about this COVID thing? We are still trying to work this out. And the language that we do to work that out is neural language.

• 13:21Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 13:22Speaker 04

  And so I apologize if I made things more abstract than before, but

• 13:27Ed Mylett?

  You didn't.

• 13:28Speaker 04

  We just have to agree on some rules of a game, just like if we're gonna play chess, we need to set up some constraints. And so those are the constraints in broad terms.

• 13:35Ed Mylett?

  How do those so good? So no, it's perfect because I want to now, I want to move it into like where we are in culture and also performance. Just what you just said. And so I know what I teach, but I don't know that I always know why it works the way it does. So these, this nervous system, I'd like you to speak to, maybe it makes no impact. I have an assumption that it does. Previous experience in life and does the importance of something in one's life change one's sensory acuity to it? So what I mean by that is there's this great debate right now about racial and social issues. And so I wonder, I've, I've wondered if someone has not had an experience with something, that they literally perceive sensory wise, less of it.

• 14:18Ed Mylett?

  And if they've got a history of some sort of a situation with a racial issue or sexual abuse or something like that, that they see or feel more of it because it's important to them. And perhaps that's why there are certain things in society, we can't come to a consensus on. Because importance in previous experience may change the way in which we gather this information. And on the other flip side of that, is that also then true to program yourself to win? That when something is important enough to you, you begin to see, feel and hear things that will lead you towards those particular goals that you wouldn't see if it wasn't important in terms of your sensory acuity

• 15:00Ed Mylett?

  or your nervous system picking up on it, or are they not correlated in any way? Can you speak to both of those?

• 15:06Speaker 04

  Sure. Again, a great set of questions. So

• 15:11Speaker 04

  A moment ago, I mentioned that we have this interoception, which is really just paying attention to what's going on internally. Like, I could stop now and think about how my stomach feels, or my breathing, or really go internal, or I can be externally focused. And that's what the nervous system is doing. The nervous system has some very basic jobs. It wants to... So it learns things. We're born into this world, and the organization of the nervous system when we come into this world is not a completely blank slate. It's designed to learn. It's a learning machine. The brain is amazing because it's the only organ that wires up itself, which is incredible. Yeah. So it's a self-learning, self-building machine. And for the early part of life, the goal of the brain is twofold.

• 15:56Speaker 04

  One is to maintain all the housekeeping stuff, keep the heart beating, keep digestion going, keep breathing going, at a minimum, to keep the organism alive, to keep us alive. And then it wants to learn things that are specific to its environment and learn the rules of these sensations. Objects fall down, not up, right? Mom walks in the room. She leaves the room, she comes back, on average, or doesn't, or on... Learning these rules, contingencies, and then passing those off to reflexive parts of the nervous system. So just like a baby never has to think about taking a breath or governing its heartbeat with conscious thought, the nervous system wants to learn things and then push that to reflexive action.

• 16:41Speaker 04

  It's a lot of work to do what's called serial processing. Yes. Not cereal like eat, but like cereal as in series. I know you know this, but just for those, you know, maybe second language, English second language or something. So serial processing is hard for the nervous system. It's about thinking, if A, then B, then B, then C. Oh, wait, was it C? Yes, A, B, then C. It's work, and it requires areas of the brain that are... Very metabolically costly to engage. It's why thinking hard kind of hurts. There's some strain associated with it. So the more we experience something, the more our reactions to it are going to become reflexive. For better or for worse. If it's a bad event, the nervous system, or it creates a sensation that's uncomfortable,

• 17:23Speaker 04

  the nervous system will create an association whereby we naturally start to avoid that thing, whether or not it's good for us or bad for us. If it's something that we like, we get rewarded and we want with a chemical, typically dopamine or serotonin, and we want to move toward that thing again. And that illustrates the other key feature of the nervous system that I think

• 17:45Speaker 04

  will help simplify some of this kind of overwhelming number of things that the brain can do and how it can do it, which is we have in our brain a few chemical systems that are called neuromodulators. They're not responsible for the communication between neurons. What they do is they modulate or change the likelihood that certain brain circuits will engage and other ones won't, and they fall into very specific categories. The most famous of these is the neuromodulator dopamine. Dopamine is released anytime we experience something we really, really like, but under very specific conditions, anytime we are moving towards something and we think we're on the right path, dopamine is released.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  And this is nature's way of telling whatever neurons are active during that movement down that path. So this could be exercise, it could be a relationship breakthrough, it could be a business breakthrough, it could be learning some little piece of a puzzle that you're excited to learn, you've been straining on. It tells you more of that, more of those neural symphonies or neurons being active in the way they just were, whatever you were doing just there, more of that. So it sends you down this path. And dopamine is very misunderstood. People think dopamine is about getting the reward. Dopamine is about sending you toward the reward. Think of it like a jet propulsion system. Right? It's not that just the finish line, it's a jet propulsion system. And every animal needed that.

• 19:10Ed Mylett?

  I gotta jump on you. I just gotta jump on you. I'm gonna give it back to you. I just said something. I think it's one of the most significant things ever said on the show, honestly, and it explains my own life experience or my relationships. I want you to hear what he just said, everybody. That you're getting more dopamine on average in the pursuit of your dream and your goal than you actually do with the attainment of it. And that maybe there's a little key here to, if dopamine is sort of a happiness drug, right? If you want to call it that, could it not possibly be true that one of the keys of happiness in life is the pursuit of something great, the pursuit of growth? And, and that that's the key, that it's that you don't have to achieve

• 19:52Ed Mylett?

  everything in order to give yourself the gift of happiness. I didn't mean to interrupt you, just, that's so freaking significant. Because I think a lot of people sort of cheat themselves from just the pursuit, because they think, well, I'll only be happy when I get there. I'm not qualified. I haven't read enough. I don't know enough people. I don't have enough context. And they're, they stand still and they're not happy. And what they're missing is the science that tells us, actually, if you just begin to pursue this, and show some progress towards it, that you're going to get that happiness you're seeking that you think you will only get when you get there, correct?

• 20:26Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and I'm, I'm so glad you bring this up, because, you know, there are some concepts from psychology that we can start to weave into this. You know, I can give examples from evolutionary biology, you know, an animal that's thirsty goes out looking for water, and when it's finds that first drop of clean water, dopamine is released. But maybe that's not the, the big lake that it needs. But that's going to tell it, it's on the right path. And it's, and dopamine naturally causes neuroplasticity of whatever brain circuits were active previously. So it says, hey, whatever I did to get to this point, this milestone, not the finish line, that is something that I might want to repeat reflexively in the future. I might not want to have to work so hard to do that. Now, the cool thing about dopamine,

• 21:10Speaker 04

  many cool things about dopamine, and then it has a dark side. And we should talk about the dark side, because even if, and I'm not, and of course, the dark side can be associated with drugs of abuse like cocaine and things, but actually, there's a, there's a more, even more sinister dark side, that I think a lot of people fall into this trap. So, the great things about dopamine is It rewards us and it gives us energy. And when I say energy, I don't mean glycogen, I don't mean glucose, I mean neural energy. And the reason is effort of all kinds, whether or not you're writing with a pen, whether or not you're racing uphill with a weight vest, or whether or not you're, you know, slogging it out through any discomfort is generally

• 21:51Speaker 04

  associated with the neuromodulator adrenaline, also called epinephrine. Okay, so adrenaline in the body is, it's called adrenaline in the body, it's released from the adrenals. And then epinephrine in the brain is released from a couple of places, but there's one particular place for the aficionados, it's called the locus ceruleus, it's in the brainstem. It wakes us up, it gives us a sense of urgency, and it's about effort, and it doesn't care if you're doing something out of love, or out of hate, out of revenge, it does not care. These are neurochemicals, and they don't care about you or your life experience, but they are in your brain, and they are the engines. Okay? Wow. Now, the cool thing is, it gets you going, and it's the effort molecule. But the problem

• 22:34Speaker 04

  is, too much epinephrine or adrenaline eventually triggers literally a quitting circuit. There was a study published in 2019, which showed that for every bout of effort, a bit of adrenaline or epinephrine is released. And once that was accumulate enough times, it's like spending money on an account, a set of cells in the brain, they're called glial cells, activate, and they turn off voluntary control. This is the reason why if you're running, you eventually might just say, that's it, I give up. It's the despair moment. And it's a chemical moment. Now, what's, we could go deep into that, but the important thing for now to understand

• 23:16Speaker 04

  is that dopamine allows the brain and the body to tolerate higher levels of epinephrine, and to continue in effort, as well as pushing down that level of epinephrine. You've experienced this before, Ed, if you've been working really, really hard, and it's just, or something's just terrible, and you feel like you can't continue, and someone cracks a joke, instantaneously, you have more levity, more energy. That couldn't have been liver glycogen, or anything kind of in the body, that was neural energy, that was dopamine. Likewise, if you suddenly have the moment where you think you're at a breakthrough. Not a falsely created belief like, "Oh, I'm performing well when I'm not performing well." But you have a breakthrough like, "Oh, my goodness, I think I'm on to something."

• 24:00Speaker 04

  You feel that more energy and that's dopamine in action. And the beauty of dopamine is it's very subjective. There are chemicals that will release dopamine in the body, but it is very subjective. And so, I always like to give the example, you know, people always say, "A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step." How do you eat the elephant? One bite at a time. But what's missing in those, kind of, those common phrases is that the key is to reward each bite, subjectively. Or let's say, you're full, so to speak, metaphorically speaking, and you can't put it in more effort. If you subjectively reward and you say, "I'm on the right path," effort is the path. And you start to tap into these systems, you develop what my colleague at Stanford, Carol

• 24:45Speaker 04

  Dweck, coined, "Growth mindset."

• 24:47Ed Mylett?

  Yes.

• 24:47Speaker 04

  Which is, not just the belief that you can be better, but growth mindset at its core is about deriving dopamine release from the effort and strain process. It's about enjoying friction. And this is what people like you, what, you know, David Goggins is a famous and shining example of this, and there are others as well, of course. So dopamine is your best friend in mitigating or making sure that the effort process is not self-limiting. And you have to regularly dose your behaviors and your thoughts with this dopamine association. And people get very hung up on this. They're like, "Wait, how do I know if I'm doing it right?"

• 25:29Speaker 04

  Well, it's a skill you have to learn in your mind, because thoughts are spontaneous. They are like pop-ups on a poorly-filtered internet. But thoughts can also be deliberate. I can decide to tell myself, "Look, I'm straining, but I'm gonna reward this. I'm gonna tell myself I'm on the right path." And the brain and the body don't know the difference. And this is not lying to yourself. This is not saying, "Oh, you know, I'm really back on my heels, I'm performing poorly." It's not telling yourself you're performing well. It's telling yourself that performing itself, the verb, effort, the verb of performing, is what you want to reward, not the noun.

• 26:08Ed Mylett?

  Gigantic, I gotta jump in again, gigantic, gigantic. Because- One of the things that I teach the athletes I work with are the business people, and I love understanding why even more. But one of the things that I've noticed is people that continue to make an effort are intentional about acknowledging that effort to themselves. And you call it giving self-credit or celebrating. So this is really critical, guys. If you've heard me say this before, Andrew's telling you why it works. The bottom line is, is that as you're making these effort deposits, it's being intentional and aware that you're doing it. Giving yourself credit for a real thing you're doing gives you this dopamine reward, and you continue to move forward. I, I, I want to go like 11 hours with you, bro. But I think, I always want to pull out, like unpack,

• 26:53Ed Mylett?

  how's this application to the performance piece? And again, you athletes that are out there listening to this, that are doing this one more that I teach, when you do the one more, it's reminding yourself, I just did one more. Maybe you didn't lift more weight today. Maybe you didn't run faster. Maybe you missed 35 putts. But that effort deposit and that intentional acknowledgement of the effort reward is so critical in confidence, in happiness, in progress, as he's told you. Can I unpack another piece and ask a question about that?

• 27:24Speaker 04

  Please. No, and, and, and I love your synthesis of it because, um, yes, please.

• 27:29Ed Mylett?

  Okay. So you said something earlier, but I don't want to move past because you hear people talk all the time about habits and rituals and, you know, and every, that's like this vogue thing to talk about, right? But you said something earlier, but I want you to, if you would just explain again. One of the things I've learned from your work is this concept that you said earlier, but I, it was in the middle of so many gems, is that the brain would like to preserve energy, and I'll use it, say it my way, and move to default reflexive mode. So as many things as it can process and just default to reflexive mode, rather than effort mode with critical thinking and adjustment, it will do. So your brain is constantly trying to find ways and situations and circumstances you're in to default to what you do reflexively. Okay.

• 28:15Ed Mylett?

  So would that not mean then, Andrew, that those things you do reflectively, called habits and rituals, better serve you? Or you'll default continuously to the reflexive mode of drinking, or laziness, or the video game, or Instagram? That's a reflective default mode. Some people for stress. They encounter stress. The brain reflects to a default reflexive mode of whatever they do to cope with that stress. True?

• 28:39Speaker 04

  Absolutely. You know, I think I'm not alone in the noticing that occasionally I pick up my phone and I log into an app and I didn't make the conscious decision to do it. I just do it reflexively. I might even go into a sub-window within that app. And the reason is that the brain and the nervous system are constantly seeking rewards and novelty. And if we're not deliberate about how we're doing that, we will do it entirely reflexively. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. I enjoy social media, teaching neuroscience on Instagram. I enjoy doing that and I enjoy the feedback of most of it.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  You know, I'm human. Right. So, but I think the brain and nervous system wants to make things reflexive. And habits are very powerful because they are, they set us on trajectories. Now, some people, they are uncomfortable with the fact that effort is the first gate that you have to go through in order to build this pathway that involves norepinephrine and adrenaline and epinephrine. And I, sometimes people will jump on me about using norepinephrine and epinephrine interchangeably. I know that they're not the same thing, but today we're just gonna broadly describe them as systems in the brain and body, not get too down in the weeds. But the idea is you've got effort, you can associate that with adrenaline, epinephrine. You've got dopamine, which is your internal

• 30:03Speaker 04

  reward system. And it can be externally rewarded. So this is very important. There are intrinsic rewards and extrinsic rewards. There's a beautiful study that was done at Bing Nursery School at Stanford. I had nothing to do with this study in the mid 70s where they took kids that liked to draw. And they then rewarded some of those kids with just a little star, like kids like, you know, the shiny star makes them special for drawing. Then they took away the star next day or the next day. And the kids that liked drawing just for the intrinsic pleasure of it, they drew less. So that, so these reward systems can attach to external things or internal things. I have a good buddy.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  He's, he's friends and co, co-founders of this company made for that you talked to Blake Mycoskie about. His name is Pat Nase, he's a former Navy SEAL. And he and I were giving a talk once to a bunch of people. And we were talking about reward processes in the brain and how SEALs do it and what neuroscience thinks. And someone asked us a really good question. They said, how do I continue to tap into this dopamine system? And our answer was be very careful with extrinsic rewards. Make sure that your dopamine system is attached more to the effort process than it ever is to any external reward. And it's because of a very important principle of dopamine rewards. It's what neuroscientists call dopamine reward prediction error.

• 31:27Speaker 04

  It is the reward prediction error is the reason why people that work, work, work, work, work in pursuit of a goal and then reach that goal, become miserable and don't know what to do with themselves. Reward prediction error says you always need the dopamine at the final stage to exceed all the, the little bits of dopamine you got en route to that reward, or you will actually be disappointed. You'll experience a sort of postpartum depression of sorts. So the key is learn to attach reward to the effort process. You know, I'm not David Goggins psychologist and, but I do know David and he's come out to my lab before. We've had some conversations. I don't know what his process is, except as he's described it.

• 32:10Speaker 04

  But I have the sense, based on what I know about neuroscience and knowing a little bit about his story and having read his book, that he's learned to attach some sort of internal reward mechanism to the pursuit and friction process. It's not about feeling good about some external milestone. It's about learning how to tap into this, this engine that we have. And I actually do believe to, that in knowing some people from the special operations community, that this is actually one of the things that they are selected for. Is not just grit or resilience. It's actually this ability to reward oneself internally in their mind as a way to buffer the effort process.

• 32:54Speaker 04

  It gives them more gas, more of an engine. And it's not just special operations. People that make it through cancer treatment, people that raise a special needs child or make it through a tough stage of, you know, economics in their life. You know, many people are probably in that situation right now. It's about learning how to take that strain, the feeling that you're being something or some force or some life force is trying to push you back on your heels and learning how to use self-reward, not delusional thinking, but self-reward as a means to get more energy to continue to plow forward. It's a, it's a real thing.

• 33:26Ed Mylett?

  Wow, so good. By the way, it's interesting you say that. When I interviewed David, we've become real good friends. We've done a lot of things together since then. He said something when I interviewed him that's along those lines and it surprised me. It's, I sort of stared at him for a minute. We were talking about the, uh, the endurance races that he does. And he goes, and I don't care if I win.

• 33:44Ed Mylett?

  And I just stared at him. He goes, I'm, I'm more concerned with the fact that I'm making the effort and that I finish. And I thought, wow, that's exactly along the lines. It was one of the, it was actually the thing that stood out to me, uh, when we were having that conversation. And if you just said-

• 33:56Speaker 04

  That's it in a nutshell. Yeah.

• 33:58Ed Mylett?

  Yeah, that's it.

• 33:58Speaker 04

  That's the real growth mindset. You know, a lot of people, hashtag growth mindset is one of the most popular hashtags in social media, but most people don't actually know what it means. And then again, this is Carol Dweck's discovery, not mine. It was discovered in a group of kids that were doing math problems or other kinds of puzzles that they knew they couldn't get right, but they enjoyed doing them and they perform exceedingly well on lots of sorts of tests of that sort, when there is the right answer, of course. And so what they do is they've somehow they're wired for effort. They're wired for the puzzle, not for the solution. And when I say puzzle, I don't mean the noun puzzle. I mean the verb for being puzzled. It for them feels good.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  And so we need to think, if we're talking about the nervous system and we want to make it actionable for high performance, whether or not it's in business or sport or otherwise, we want to think in terms of processes, not events and verbs, not nouns. So growth mindset as a verb, as an action item. You know, reward as a verb, not just as a, oh, you're gonna just pat yourself on the back. Like it's, no, it's what you internalize. It's a process. That's how the neural circuits that underlie reward get stronger. And the beauty of, of the brain is that you have this thing of neuroplasticity, which is its ability to change itself throughout the whole lifespan. And the more you practice this, the better you get at it.

• 35:23Speaker 04

  And it does not mean you're walking around talking delusionally about how great life is when everything is terrible. It means you might even be very stoic. You might be, hopefully you're very rational, but you have the energy to continue to push forward. Whereas other people are gonna be dropping out. Because everybody shows up gritty and resilient and they watch their inspirational, aspirational story. One of the big motivations for me being here today and in general of my lab is to try and make these concepts from psychology and personal development and high achievement to make them what we call operational, meaning give them definitions that people can grab onto and apply. And not just have to watch, you know, 50, you know, everyone loves the Rocky movie.

• 36:05Speaker 04

  I mean, it's super, it makes you feel really good. It makes you feel like anything's possible. But you don't always have access to that.

• 36:11Ed Mylett?

  By the way, it's amazing that you just said that because I was reflecting, God, brother, I love when energy's prevalent, even on Zoom. While you were talking, I was thinking about David and I talking again. We're both, as kids, these crazy Rocky fans. We both watched Rocky one and two, literally thousands of times. And what we were both struck by in the movie is exactly what you're describing. It wasn't Rocky winning. It's this time where Apollo Creed knocks him down. He puts his arms up and he thinks he's won the fight. I get emotional even saying it. And it's a movie and Sly's a buddy of mine and I know he's an actor, you know? And you turn back and Apollo Creed looks at Rocky and he starts to get back up again. And Creed's just like, what?

• 36:50Ed Mylett?

  And the inspirational aspect of that, Rocky wasn't winning, was the effort deposit, was the pursuit, right? And so, guys, if you've ever heard about this before, like this is scientific proof that you've gotta be giving yourself the reward for the effort deposit. Now, one of these things about neuroplasticity that I wanna talk about, about changing, like I think there's a lot of people listening to this, brother, go, look, man, I've just not had any winning streaks. You know, I've not learned to win. One of the reasons that what Andrew's saying is so important is I think we're conditioned as young people. That the dopamine only comes when we hit the home run, when we bring home the A. That's when mom and dad are proud of us. That's when we got the dopamine hit.

• 37:30Ed Mylett?

  And there was not a lot in the raising of children, and those of you that have children should be thinking through this. If what Andrew's saying is true. How critical it is that you begin to show rewards for effort with your children rather than just the recital, rather than just the performance. I think of Tiger Woods, the greatest winner in the history of golf. And what does he usually say? I'm just trusting the process. Even when he was going through swing changes, he got the hit from the process. He doesn't even talk about winning, even though he's been the greatest winner. What does he always say? I want to put myself in a position on Sunday on the back nine where I've got a shot. That's what he says. So if you're looking for.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  He's a great example. Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt.

• 38:08Ed Mylett?

  No, no, go ahead, please.

• 38:10Speaker 04

  You know, Tiger was at Stanford, right? I think it was interesting to see, because I grew up in this area. I used to go watch him, watch him drive. And I'm not a golf player, but it's super impressive. What's interesting, and I think this, we could validate this. I, I don't want to put out things that aren't true. But what I heard was that, you know, there was discussion about him collecting an honorary degree and he actually declined it.

• 38:33Ed Mylett?

  Heard this.

• 38:33Speaker 04

  Um, you know, and that's really interesting. It speaks exactly to what you're saying. So. The reward process, again, I know I said this earlier, but the reward process is critical. We need to reward our efforts. But we need to make sure that our internal rewards, the ones that are milestones and put us on our path, the ones that are associated with effort. Are greater than the external rewards that we ever give ourselves. This isn't, this could be about going out and buying yourself. You know, I bought myself the truck I always wanted when I got tenure. You know, I did. But, but really, we have to be careful with external rewards because. If you want to continue to perform well, you have to foster this internal reward mechanism. That's what's going to allow you to continue to perform well.

• 39:16Ed Mylett?

  Okay.

• 39:17Speaker 04

  And so no external reward.

• 39:19Ed Mylett?

  That may now have become my favorite thing we said on the show too. Because this external thing, reward is an element of the social media world that I do think has some danger to it. I just want to say on one point, I know I interrupted you again, I'm sorry, because we're on Zoom guys, so we, there's a tendency to do this a little bit more. But the question comes up, can I learn to win? And I've looked for evidence that somebody, a being, can actually be reprogrammed to win. And I think I kind of found it in something you talked about. Which was, would you mind sharing with them the story of the two mice in the tube? And how one of, I'll just let you tell it, but if you ever, if your listeners going, can I ever learn to win? Can I change my current way I am? Because neuroplasticity is a fact.

• 40:04Ed Mylett?

  It's a complicated word, but for, just for the sake of your belief, everybody. This story, I think will give you some hope. Ironically, I'm, I'm using the story in a different way than you've told it before, but I think you know where I'm going. Tell them about these two mice in the tube and how one was changed by just winning once.

• 40:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, so there's a classic experiment in bio, in behavioral biology called the tube test, where you take two mice. You put them in a tube. And they try and push each other out, they fight for that tube. And one mouse inevitably pushes out the other mouse. The one that stays in the tube is the winner, the one that got pushed out is called the loser. What's interesting is that if you take those sing mice and give them new competitors, the one that won has a much higher than chance probability of being a winner the subsequent battle. It's called a battle. The loser has a much higher probability of losing. Now, that's the first experiment. And you go, okay, well, winners become winners, losers become losers. But it's actually far more interesting than that.

• 41:04Speaker 04

  Because if you take the loser and you put him against even a known winner, and you push the loser from behind. The loser becomes the winner and the winner becomes the loser. And even if the effort that the loser that became the winner exerted wasn't their own, right? You've got a human pushing with a stick on this little mouse. So the important thing is the third experiment, which only arrived a few years ago. This is an experiment that was published in the journal Science. Science and Nature are our Super Bowl and NBA championships of science. Very 99% rejection rates, very stringent, thoroughly peer reviewed, not just any publications.

• 41:45Speaker 04

  A laboratory, not mine unfortunately, did the experiment where they monitored the brains of these mice while they were doing, engaging in this tube test battle. And they found that there was one brain area, it's a subregion of the prefrontal cortex, not the whole prefrontal cortex, that's more active in the winner and less active in the loser. So much so that if you chemically or electrically activate this brain area in the loser, that loser becomes the winner. If you quiet this brain area in the winner, or an animal that's about to win, it suddenly becomes the loser. So you say, what in the world is this brain area doing to the body and to the psychology of these mice? Now, we don't know the psychology of the mice, but they did do some important controls.

• 42:30Speaker 04

  And it's not testosterone, although there's a testosterone increase associated with winning. It is not testosterone in the moment. It's not cortisol, it's not any of the other normal things that you might think to look to. It's not muscle strength. It turns out that stimulation of this brain area that causes winning is associated with increased anxiety, effort and adrenaline. And all it does is it converts that anxiety into more steps forward per unit time. Literally just steps forward. So if you take this brain area and you quiet it for a given level of stress, the animal backs up a little bit more or pauses a little bit more.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  If you stimulate this brain area for the same amount of stress, the animal advances a little bit more as opposed to pauses or backs up. And the thing that's really key to take away from this for everyone's individual lives and goals is that if you really think about it, you always have only three options. You can either be stationary, you can back up, you can retreat, or you can go forward. And you want to do, you want to move forward in an adaptive way. You don't want to walk off a cliff or do something stupid financially or physically. But anxiety and stress and what we call autonomic arousal were designed to move us. They create a sense of agitation and discomfort for a reason.

• 43:58Speaker 04

  But it wasn't just designed to move us to run and hide. It was also designed to move us forward. And a lot of people take the agitation, the fear, the anxiety about starting something new. And they try and work with that and push down on it. There's just so much in our culture that's about trying to get homeostasis, a word that I really despise. That homeostasis and trying to get back to this place of calm or flow so that they can move forward. And what they don't appreciate, what people haven't been told, because the science is very new, is that all forms of adaptive behavior in the animal kingdom and in humans, whether or not it's with the mind or the body or both,

• 44:38Speaker 04

  involve a fairly high level of stress and anxiety that was designed to move us forward. And it doesn't have to be just competition and battle. This could be writing your book. This could be finding the mate that you, you know, that you want to find, a life mate. It could be any number of different things that you're going to pursue. There's always anxiety associated with that. And trying to bypass that could actually represent the failure of our species. I actually worry that if humans keep seeking for these comfort zones at the outset of effort, we could actually devolve as opposed to evolve. And, and if we, I don't want to get geopolitical, but if we look at countries right now

• 45:19Speaker 04

  that are hard charging toward higher status in the world, like China, they are, they embody this in their psych, in their social psychology. The United States, and I'm a patriot, so I'm going to just speak from the heart here, was founded on the idea that we do this as a culture, as individuals. And it's not about being ruthless or being unethical. It's about taking the notion that it's not supposed to feel good at the beginning, folks. It doesn't feel good for any animal. It's not supposed to feel good for you and me. And I will balance this with something about restoration and recovery of this process. But it's so vital, and I think it's why the movie Rocky, why cancer survivors,

• 46:01Speaker 04

  why the Rosa Parks story, why David Goggins, why these stories evoke such a deep sense of of inspiration in us is because it's as tapping into something as vital and primitive, primitively important as thirst or hunger or the desire to mate. It's at the core of how we got to where we are, and it's at the core of how we're going to move forward. And there, forgive me for getting a little soapboxy, but I do believe this at that these are fundamentals of biology and we need to respect them if we if we're going to evolve.

• 46:33Ed Mylett?

  The validation is unbelievable. No, I've always thought, you know, you watch an athlete do something heroic and it brings you to tears almost. And I've always felt like there's this part of us intuitively that seeks it and also that knows we have the capacity to do likewise in our own way. And we seek that. What a beautiful sense. Is that part of the brain, the thalamus, or am I on a completely different path in the brain?

• 46:52Speaker 04

  No, so the prefrontal cortex is just a kind of frontal real estate. We have a lot more of it than mice do. It's the area of the brain that actually causes humans a lot of neurotic discomfort because it's so good at thinking and multi-tracking. Just a little fun tidbit, we can multi-track, we can multitask. Anyone says that you can't multitask has never picked up a neuroscience textbook. There's something called covert attention. We can split our attention between two things very easily. I can look at you, for instance, and I can monitor the periphery of the room at the same time if I wanted to. I can also bring my full attention to just our conversation, which is what I'm doing. So we can split our attention, we can multitask. What we need to do is when we want to get better at something, we need to bring our full attention to that thing.

• 47:38Speaker 04

  And we need to start to engage to this internal reward process. I just want to briefly say about internal versus external rewards. The car you've always wanted, the watch you've always wanted, the piece of jewelry you've always wanted. The reward is still internal. You don't take that watch and cram it in your ear and dopamine gets, you know, released. The dopamine release is always internal. The key is to learn how to attach some internal process of thinking and self-reward to the release of dopamine. And the brain wants to do that. It wants to learn how to do that. But as long as we're backing away from anxiety, stress, and trying to get super calm at the front end of the, you know,

• 48:20Speaker 04

  the pursuit, then there's no way you can get there. You're in a pause mode or retreat mode. You are the losing mouse. You want to be the winning mouse. You want to take more steps forward per unit time. That's all it is.

• 48:32Ed Mylett?

  So good. All right. I gotta go through some random things I get to ask you about and my audience gets to listen. Okay. So not rapid fire, but like I got a few things I want to ask you about. Their efficiency, do they work? Can we improve when we use these things? What do you think of acetylcholine?

• 48:46Speaker 04

  Acetylcholine is the neuromodulator associated with attention. It is vital to the neuroplasticity process. Neuroplasticity just being the brain changing adaptively. Typically, we mean adaptively in response to experience. Brain injuries, neuroplasticity too, but I think adaptive plasticity. Acetylcholine is released from multiple places in the brain and there's a little place in the base of the brain called nucleus basalis, which means base, that releases acetylcholine when we are paying a lot of attention to something and we subjectively tell ourselves it's super important. Like, I need to do this in order to eat tomorrow, or I need to do this for whatever reason, whatever meaning you attach to it. That acetylcholine

• 49:29Speaker 04

  marks those neurons for getting stronger later so that they reflexively engage. You could, in theory, increase levels of acetylcholine in your brain and get more neuroplasticity. There's a very famous Nobel Prize winning neuroscientist who chose Nicorette specifically for this purpose because Nicorette stimulates the nicotinic acetylcholine receptors. I don't recommend smoking. Some people smoke to accomplish this. It's a double edged sword, though. Because you want to increase in acetylcholine primarily through thoughts and behaviors and bringing focus. And I can explain how to do that. You actually want to bring more visual focus if you're sighted or auditory focus if you're non-sighted, blind individual.

• 50:11Speaker 04

  But you want to bring more visual focus to what you're doing, which will bring more acetylcholine to the particular synapses that and brain connections that you want to change. And that doesn't require ingesting anything. Now, if you ramp up the levels of acetylcholine in the system using a supplement Yeah. like Alpha T C or a choline donor of some sort, there's some breakdown in the gut. But there are increases in acetylcholine and activation of these nicotinic receptors that can enhance the plasticity process. That's a real thing. And you know, the nootropic space is kind of an emerging space about smart drugs and things like that. I think learning to, I always say, start with behaviors and thoughts.

• 50:55Speaker 04

  Because those are in your power. That's where the real power is. Then nutrition, there are ways to increase acetylcholine. Typically, meat and nuts in particular can increase acetylcholine. Doesn't mean eat three ribeyes because then you'll just pass out from fatigue, too much blood in your gut. But then supplementation can be a positive force in this. Then if you, there's a clinical need or if it's in your, I'm not a doctor, so you know, drugs, right? There are prescription drugs that can do this and people do that for treatment of clinical disorders and Alzheimer's in particular to bring more focus and memory. So acetylcholine is really the molecule of focus and you want to have focus when you are trying to engage plasticity or learn anything. You need alertness. And you need focus. You need urgency and focus together.

• 51:40Speaker 04

  And if you're too stressed, you won't be able to focus. You need to bring that urgency level up. But then you just dial it in. And if you want to get better at focusing. Do what the experts do. Put a little crosshatch on a piece of paper across the room and gradually extend the amount of time that you can focus your visual attention on it. And as you get up to higher and higher levels, you can bring that same level of visual focus to any kind of other thing that you're doing.

• 52:05Ed Mylett?

  That's how much expands visual focus. I thought you were gonna say, I thought you meant, so I thought you meant visualization of something specific that you want.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  Visualization tends to be very hard to keep in mind for some people. Some people are very good at visualization. There's a guy in the eighties named Roger Shepard, also at Stanford. It sounds like I'm shamelessly plugging. We have a lot of good people, what can I say, my colleagues are amazing, I'm always humbled by them, who did studies of mental visualization. And some people are very good at mental visualization, other people really struggle to stay focused in the visualization. So, start with the visual system. There are only two pieces of your brain outside your skull, and those are your eyes. These are literally two pieces of central nervous system. And if you don't believe me, come to my neuroanatomy class, I'll show you. They are connected to the brain, they guide the alertness of the brain or the sleepiness of the brain.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  There's a reason why your eyes flutter and close when you're getting sleepy, folks, is because open eyes is alertness, it tends to, you know, and visual focus brings cognitive focus. And look at any sports event and look at the eyes of like Michael Jordan in this recent documentary on Netflix, he's just totally dialed in visually, right? Now, he can expand his gaze when he needs to, to pass the ball, but visual focused drives cognitive focus.

• 53:23Ed Mylett?

  So good. Okay, so staying on that topic, you're going down my list here. Blue and yellow light, would you talk about that a minute when you're talking about, you know, getting eyes closed and getting to sleep? The impacts, I mean, this is awesome, right here, everybody. The real impact of blue and yellow light and its origins, too.

• 53:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, so let's start with the don'ts. So, here's why you don't want to view lights of any color, blue or otherwise, that are too bright between the hours of 11:00 PM and 4:00 AM. The reason is, there's a study published by my good friend Samer Hatar, who's head of the chronobiology unit at the National Institutes of Mental Health, so he's a heavy hitter. He found that blue light and bright lights of all kinds in the middle of the night, if you look at them too often, there's a neuron in your eye that signals to a brain area called the habenula, H-A-B-E-N-U-L-A, that literally suppresses the amount of dopamine in the brain and gives depressive-like symptoms and impairments in learning and memory for

• 54:26Speaker 04

  about two days that follow. Now, if you look at some light once in a while in the middle of the night, you go to the bathroom, no big deal, but if you're up in the middle of the night and looking at lights of any color, not just blue light, and those lights are bright enough, you're going to suppress your dopamine levels and it can lead to bad places. Wow. So, on average, try not to do that. If you're a night shift worker, you might want to use blue blockers. Blue blockers, for some people, can be helpful in just reducing the overall brightness of light in the evening, but lowering the, you know, dimming the lights in the evening and actually setting lights low in your environment, not having overhead lights, is good because the cells that read this stuff out are in the, and signal the brain are in the lower half of the retina, which we use in the upper visual field. So, that I suggest to almost everybody.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  The flip side of that is during the daytime, in particular within the first hour of waking, you want to get as much bright light stimulation of the eyes as you possibly can. You don't want it to ever be painful, okay? So, if you're, if it's painful, you're injuring the retina and you don't want that. But, bright light, ideally you get outside. Through a window, you're only going to get about a thousand, what's called about a thousand lux, which is a measure of intensity of light. Outside, it's about 50,000. Even on a cloudy day in Boston in winter, you're getting more light through those clouds outside than you are with a bright light inside. And it's very important because early in the day, your brain needs to wake up. Your whole system, your biology needs to wake up, and it does that by releasing cortisol

• 55:56Speaker 04

  in a bump early in the day. It's a good cortisol release. And it sets a timer so that melatonin, which is the sleepy hormone, comes on about 16 hours later. We know from a lot of studies that if you don't get that bright light during the early part of the day, you get a second cortisol bump at 9:00 PM, and that second cortisol bump... Is very closely associated with anxiety, depression, feelings of kind of low, low affect later. So the things I'm talking about right now are slow. They're slow acting. They work over the course of days or weeks. And so a lot of times it's like people will stay up late watching a movie till two or three in the morning. Fine. Do that. Enjoy life. Go out dancing. Well, you know, now no one does that. But when it's, when it's safe to do

• 56:40Speaker 04

  it, or whatever your protocol is, enjoy life. But if you're chronically getting a lot of light in the middle of the night, and you're not getting a lot of bright light in your eyes, early in the day, you're wearing dark sunglasses all day, you're coming inside, and you're not getting that bright light stimulation from sunlight, you're setting yourself up for low affect and mental health issues and worse, perhaps, or at least just as bad, the hybena, this brain area, has connections to the pancreas. You start disrupting blood sugar rhythms. And people start getting hungry in the middle of the night. It's, it's associated with type 2 diabetes. There's a paper published in the journal Nature last year. So, but these two pieces of brain were designed to see objects, but their first

• 57:24Speaker 04

  job was to tell the rest of the brain and nervous system and body, when to be alert, when to be awake, how to run its digestive system, its immune system, get that bright light early in the day for just, you know, five, 10 minutes, just go outside and get that bright light, drag your kids out there. You don't have to do it at sunrise. You don't have to see the sun crossing the horizon. But there's so much data to support this, these behaviors that I'm talking about. We're talking dozens, if not hundreds of studies supporting this stuff. So, totally cost free, right? None of this, none of this involves buying anything, but it does require some discipline.

• 57:59Ed Mylett?

  Yeah. I gotta tell you, I'm a hover buddy. I told you, and we're gonna go longer than I normally go because it's too good. So can I keep you for a few more minutes here? Because it's

• 58:07Speaker 04

  You bet. We'll go as long as

• 58:09Ed Mylett?

  Some of Andrew's work that impacted me was about a year ago, guys, I'm always looking for, what's my little millimeter edge that could improve my wellness, my happiness, my performance? And just, I'm addicted to understanding me, like many of you are that are listening to this. That's the most fascinating part of talking to Andrew is I feel like I understand me more. And whether that helps me perform better, which it does, is a byproduct. So, one of the things that I learned from you, and then I've sort of become obsessed with is breathing. And how it's really impacted, one, my energy, my performance, my, I think my cognitive abilities. And I don't think, everyone says, "Yeah, you gotta make sure you breathe."

• 58:52Ed Mylett?

  I don't think most people truly understand how critical it is to understand your diaphragm and understand breathing correctly and the impact and change that it can make for you. Could you talk a little bit about that?

• 59:04Speaker 04

  Sure. Yeah, my labs, I'm really actively involved now in studies of respiration and how it impacts brain states. I'd be remiss if I didn't tip my hat to my colleague, his name is David Spiegel. He's our associate chair of psychiatry at Stanford. Extremely smart and really creative, brilliant guy. One of the world's experts in clinical hypnosis. And he and I are very interested in brain states and states of mind. And you can't talk about states of mind without talking about respiration. I'm stealing David's words now, so David, forgive me. But what he said, and I, is I know to be true, is that the neurons in the brainstem, deep in the brain that control respiration or breathing,

• 59:44Speaker 04

  sit right at the boundary between conscious control of the nervous system and unconscious control. So, we're always breathing, but I can immediately take hold of my breathing and breathe deliberately. And that's because we have a very special connection involving a nerve called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C, the phrenic nerve that runs from the brainstem to this muscle we call the diaphragm. Mammals, not other types of animals, have a diaphragm and it allows us to move our lungs deliberately, voluntarily, by decision. And it's made of skeletal muscle. Unlike your heart, your spleen, or other organs, it's just like a bicep, a tricep, a quadricep, or a calf.

• 1:00:27Speaker 04

  It can be, it can work involuntarily, rhythmically in the backdrop, or I can decide to take control of my limbs, right? I don't think about walking anymore because I know how, or I can think about walking. The beauty of the phrenic nerve is that it sends signals, not just to the diaphragm, but it sends signals back to the brain and informs the brain about the status of the body. And so if I breathe slowly and rhythmically, and in particular through my nose, my brain thinks I'm calm. If I'm breathing fast, my brain thinks that I should be alert. Now, there's a little bit of important nuance to this if you're gonna get into this. I know a lot of people are into kind of Wim Hof breathing and all this kind of stuff, and that's really cool. But there are kind of two ways to think about applying respiration practices for your life.

• 1:01:12Speaker 04

  I believe everyone should have what I call a real-time tool that can allow them to adjust their level of alertness. You know, there are times when we're feeling too amped up and we wanna calm down. And I worked hard to try and find a tool that didn't require running off and meditating or doing daily breath work, because a lot of people just won't do that. And the tool is anchored on the discovery made by several labs. One in particular is a guy named Jack Feldman at UCLA discovered these neurons in the brainstem that control sighing. These neurons are activated anytime you inhale twice and then exhale. That's what we call a physiological or proper sigh. Your dog does this before it lays down to take a nap. You do this anytime

• 1:01:55Speaker 04

  carbon dioxide in your bloodstream gets too high. A double inhale followed by an exhale does something really special. You have all these little sacs of air in your lungs. If we were to splay out your, all these sacs, they would fill about a half a tennis court. That's how much surface area you have in your lungs. You have these little tiny sacs. And as you breathe throughout the day, they collapse. They get flat like a balloon. The double inhale is how you snap them open, which pulls carbon dioxide out of your bloodstream. And then when you exhale, you offload it. So put simply, if you wanna calm down fast in real time, inhale twice followed by an exhale. So it's two or three of those, sometimes even one, is the fastest way that I'm aware of to calm down.

• 1:02:39Speaker 04

  And actually, you can do this between sets at the gym. You can do this while running if you're feeling like you're too amped up. You can do this in a hard conversation, kind of sneak those two breaths and then a long exhale. You can do it through the nose or through the mouth. The most important thing is it's double inhale followed by an exhale. So that's a real time tool. It's not breath work. It's designed to give you a lever to control your level of stress, which is a good thing to do because you don't want stress through the roof. So if you're ever feeling too stressed, I always say, don't try and control your mind with your mind. Don't try and, don't tell someone or tell yourself to calm down. Go to your physiology. Double inhale, fall back and exhale. The other thing that you can do with respiration that's really powerful is if you're somebody who has anxiety or you find that you're just burning too much energy,

• 1:03:24Speaker 04

  you're finishing your days grinding or depleted. That's where a, what sometimes is called super oxygenation, but really should be called carbon dioxide offloading breath practice should come into play. It's very simple. You sit down, never do it near water. Don't do it like, you don't do driving. We can sit down or lie down. You inhale and exhale 25 times.

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  Be a little forceful about it, excuse me. And after the 25th one, or 30th, it doesn't matter so much. Exhale all your air and hold your breath for 15 seconds. And stay calm while you experience that heightened level of activation. What you're doing with those 25 or 30 breaths is you're triggering the release of adrenaline into your system. You're creating a little mild form of stress. You might say, well, why would you want to do that? Well, when you exhale and you remain calm, you're now teaching the brain to be calm when you have a shot of adrenaline in your system. You can accomplish the same thing through an ice bath or a cold shower and learning to relax in that kind of confrontational situation. But there's nothing quite like breathing because,

• 1:04:32Speaker 04

  and here I'm quoting David Spiegel again. He always says, it's not just about the state you're in, but whether or not you had anything to do with getting there. Right? When you self-induced these states, you're teaching your brain how to drive and kind of maneuver within these different states of mind. It's different than like driving along and all of a sudden you're skidding on ice or you're in a blanket of fog. It's sort of like you're turning on and off the fog. You're learning how to drive in fog by turning on and off fog, where you're going black ice and then on to nice dry concrete. So. It's a process that you can learn to play with. Now, if you really want to get good at it and kind of push it, you can do these 25 breaths. Exhale, hold your breath for 5 to 15 seconds, then inhale and hold. But you have to be careful.

• 1:05:17Speaker 04

  If you have cardio pulmonary issues or heart issues, you definitely want to talk to a doctor first because it does build up a lot of pressure in your system. But that will ramp up the intensity more. And so what this is really doing is it's increasing your threshold for what you consider stressful. It's self-induced stress inoculation. So you can also sit in an ice bath and learn how to stay calm in an ice bath. You can also get into an argument with your spouse and learn how to stay calm, but I don't recommend that one. You know, so these are ways of teaching our nervous system using physiology, how to calm down and how to tolerate discomfort from a place of calm and clarity, both of which are powerful. So I'm not saying just do the physiological side. I'm not saying just do the breath work.

• 1:06:00Speaker 04

  I'm saying if you're willing to invest the time and energy, do both. You want a couple of different things in your kit. You want different caliber bullets, right? For different, you need different weapons for different things. Or if you prefer, you need different paint brushes to paint different pictures if you want a more, you know, docile example.

• 1:06:16Ed Mylett?

  Brother, so damn good. I almost want to move that to the front so no one missed it because it's so usable. And that, you guys, so that was more learning for me. But that's made a huge, huge impact in my life is my taking control intentionally of my breathing. And the two breaths and exhale is a new one for me. So thank you for that. So my last.

• 1:06:38Speaker 04

  You can try that one after you finish like a really hard set.

• 1:06:42Ed Mylett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:43Speaker 04

  In the gym and you want to recover for your next set. I always make the last rep of any set that I don't do it while I'm lifting. I'll set the weight down, but that's not my last rep. My last rep is a double inhale followed by an exhale because my goal is to bring my. You know, they talk nowadays about heart rate variability. You want a lot of variability in your heart rate throughout the day. You want, in many ways, you want to keep your nervous system tuned up for high levels of stress and low levels of stress. I'll just take the liberty of saying earlier, I said, I don't like the word homeostasis. The word that needs to get more airtime is allostasis. Homeostasis is the idea that there's this perfect sweet spot that we're always trying to be, a perfect temperature, a perfect breathing cadence,

• 1:07:24Speaker 04

  a perfect state of mind, and it just ain't so. The real physiologist will tell you it's allostasis. Allostasis is the ability to steer into pressures. When you're running, you don't want your heart rate to be low if you're trying to increase cardiovascular fitness. When you're in, you know, when you're sick, you might want a mild fever to, you know, this is, we've become so attached to this idea of a perfect plane of existence that we're forgetting that we need to be at max effort during that set, but then we want to be at max relaxation in between those sets so we can lean back into max effort sooner.

• 1:08:00Ed Mylett?

  Wow. So you kind of answered my last question there, but I want to still ask you. I'll give you a different one. Thank you, by the way. I want to say this before the last question. I want to thank you for the day because you changed lives. And in a dialogue like this today, it's impossible for someone to have spent the last hour or so with you and me along for the ride as well. And their life not got better. And that's why I do this, man. Like, you're the reason I do this. And I, we're going to do more together. We talked about that off camera. I just have this sense that this is the beginning of you and I doing more and more together. I enjoy you personally also, brother. So, thank you.

• 1:08:38Speaker 04

  Likewise. I would really, it's very gratifying to hear that these things could be of value to people because, you know, I was walled up in my lab for 20 years in science. And, you know, science is, look, you paid for it. You already bought, the taxpayers pay for science, right? Foundations as well, philanthropy as well. But, but science was designed to be put into society and it's, and it's opportunities like this that allow that to happen. You know, I can, you know, read my own papers or my colleagues, we can read each other's papers. But it's, I'm, I'm very grateful to you for the opportunity to share. And so, thank you.

• 1:09:11Ed Mylett?

  You were talking about, here's what's unique about you. I said it in the beginning, and everyone's thinking about this. You just listened to a neuroscientist for the last hour and 10 minutes, and he didn't lose you. And that's what makes you special, right? You were talking about my friend David Sinclair, who was on the show, is another brilliant man. You both have something really beautiful in common, which is you're the smartest guy in the room, and you don't have any need to prove it. And you elevate other people by doing it. And that's just really special. It's unique and it's special, which is why there aren't thousands of guys in your profession doing what we're doing right now. Last question, it's kind of a science question, but it's more like a human question. There's a lot of people at the time they're going to see this or hear this. But if it's right now, it's during COVID and high unemployment and stress in society.

• 1:09:55Ed Mylett?

  And I, I just say overall, it feels to me recently like consciousness is a little down. You know? And then maybe someone will watch this two years from now, and we just find them at a tough time in their lives. Right? And so this is really a science question. I'm probably catching you off guard, but maybe science applies. Is there a hack, a thought, a message you might have for somebody who says like, I just like to start changing either how I feel or my conditions currently? Is there some recommendation, whether it be, you know, change my physical state or something along those lines that you might add that we've not covered today? Anything?

• 1:10:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, um, thanks for asking that. I, I, you know, everyone goes through periods of challenge and, um, and it's so hard to know what the perfect tool is going to be. But, uh, I do think that you want to attack the foundation first. You want to build the foundation first, I think is the better way to put it. The reason you want to go at the foundation first is because it has the capacity to change everything else. And so here, here's what I, this is going to be more of a synthesis than, um, than a specific new tool. But the most important thing is to get into action and start implementing tools. The ones I talked about today, hopefully, but others as well.

• 1:11:13Speaker 04

  One of the things I really enjoy about doing work with the military and special operations community is they're very action oriented. They do the stuff. They don't always decide to stay with it. If they find it doesn't work for them, they, they move on to something else. They keep searching, but they're very action oriented. So. There's, we have to lead with action. And, you know, I said, you know, nervous system, sensation, perception, feeling, thoughts and behaviors. That's what it does. Memory and other stuff as well, but you can't sit around waiting to feel ready or feel the perception shift. Behaviors are the way that you shift your perceptions and the rest of it will follow. And so, because for some people, that feels like a mountain and they're way down at the bottom or even down in a pit.

• 1:11:58Speaker 04

  The key is to take very small behaviors like one minute of sunlight or getting outside, even if there isn't sunlight, first thing in the morning. Reward that process. Tell yourself, great, I, I, I'm in control of my nervous system. We have to remind ourselves sometimes that our nervous system is under our control. Now, the rational person will say, well, external circumstances haven't changed. Ah, but internal circumstances that the chemical level have, which have then placed you into a position to lean into external circumstances with a bit more resources, just a bit more. People will, are desperately trying to find the inspiration, the source of love, the meaning to do it. That's great, but there are times to just be action oriented

• 1:12:42Speaker 04

  and to just build layer upon layer of action and action. And it starts with waking up and getting some sunlight. Then it's about deeply embedding the reward process. Just rewarding the verb of having gotten up and moved toward sunlight. Then coming back inside, you have to learn to build up these circuits and it takes a little bit of time, but they do work. They work in every species and they absolutely work best in humans because you have this power of subjectivity. You can tell yourself, even though I'm not obtaining the results I want just yet, the action steps are putting me on the right path. And, and so it's really a synthesis of what we've said before. The other thing that I'll just add to it is that there's no way anyone can do these things consistently

• 1:13:26Speaker 04

  without proper rest and rewards associated with the other reward system. There's the dopamine system and adrenaline and all that we talked about before, but there's also the serotonin and oxytocin system. Hard driving people that don't know how to obtain reward from things that are completely contained within the confines of their skin with no action are also going to lose out. And so this is the key thing. If you want to be able to lean into effort, you have to also tap into the reward systems that nature designed are fully contained within you. This would be gratitude. I always say gratitude is not complacency. It's not going to make you a navel gazer. It's not about saying you have enough. It's about saying something

• 1:14:07Speaker 04

  you have is of value and you are grateful for it. That allows you to then have a more positive outlook and lean into those dopamine pursuits and rewards. So gratitude, for some people, it's prayer. For some people, it's just the conscious thought of one thing that you're breathing, that you're alive. I mean, really bring it down to a foundational level. So learn how to access that reward system too, because that was a mother nature built reward system that was designed to make you feel good about what you've got so that you can feel safe, so that you can continue to lean into more unsafe challenges. And so those systems are like, kind of like a seesaw, dopamine and serotonin. And when I see people that have been hard driving their whole life, going after things, pursuing, pursuing, pursuing,

• 1:14:50Speaker 04

  and they don't, haven't built the capacity for gratitude, or appreciation, or relationships where you have, you know, we shouldn't just pray before a meal, or say grace before a meal, or thank whoever, whatever. I'm not here to instill any kind of, you know, philosophy on people. But we should also, when we're full, we should be grateful that we're full. Like this is what allows us then to wake up the next day feeling more capable of leaning into effort. And these are, it sounds subjective, it sounds psychological. The serotonin side always sounds a little softer, a little wishy washy, but believe me, the super high performers that I know, and I know you fall into this category, Ed, they know how to work both these systems. They know that this is the system that's going to allow them to pursue

• 1:15:34Speaker 04

  things forever, their entire lifespan. And if we think it's just about dopamine, the watch, the car, the external stuff, it's a fail. And it's also a fail to just be content with what you have. We were designed to be in pursuit, but not all the time. So that's, that's what I'll offer.

• 1:15:52Ed Mylett?

  I loved, loved, loved today, bro. I loved it and I'm grateful. Guys, this is Dr. Andrew Huberman. Man, this is going to blow up, just so you know. So, thank you, brother. Is there somewhere we can send them to find you?

• 1:16:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, well, so I teach neuroscience on Instagram at Huberman Lab, H U B E R M A N L A B. I don't do it every day, but I try and put out some tidbits about neuroscience, many of which are actionable. I sometimes announce studies there where we look at people's physiology out in the real world who are doing breathing stuff, and we actually pay you to do that. The subjects in those studies, I announce those on Instagram from time to time. We'll have more on that soon. And in general, you know, if people want to learn more about the science, like really go down in the weeds of the papers we publish, they can look at hubermanlab.com. But really, the Instagram is where I'm updating things. And I also, I want to say thank you for having me on today. I really enjoyed the conversation.

• 1:16:50Speaker 04

  I realized I was doing most of the talking, and so forgive me. Hopefully, we'll get the opportunity to sit down sometime, and I can learn more about you and your practices and your philosophies, because I'm always eager to learn.

• 1:17:01Ed Mylett?

  Thank you. I wish it would be reciprocal and equal, but it won't be. So you guys also can find me on Instagram as well, and you know, every day, follow me there and participate. When I make a post, I make a post every day at 7:30 Pacific time, 10:30 Eastern, and then something commences called the two-minute drill. You've got two minutes. If you make a comment, I pick a winner every day. If you miss the first two minutes, just make a comment on my five posts a week every day at some point, doesn't matter what time, and comment to other people's comments. I pick people to get coached by me, they meet my guests, copy of my book, Max Out Gears. I've had people fly on the jet with me, come see me speak. It's just really cool stuff. It's called the Max Out Two-Minute Drill. Bottom line, comment on my posts on Instagram. Okay, everybody. Andrew, thank you for today. God bless everybody. Continue to max out your life. Share the show.