Andrew Huberman ON: Learning Effectively & How to Train Your Brain For Optimal Performance

You can order my new book 8 RULES OF LOVE at 8rulesoflove.com or at a retail store near you. You can also get the chance to see me live on my first ever world tour. This is a 90 minute interactive show where I will take you on a journey of finding, keeping and even letting go of love. Head to jayshettytour.com and find out if I'll be in a city near you. Thank you so much for all your support - I hope to see you soon. Do you want to meditate daily with me? Go to go.calm.com/onpurpose to get 40% off a Calm Premium Membership. Experience the Daily Jay. Only on Calm Jay Shetty sits down with Andrew Huberman to talk about the beauty and power of the human mind. We are all wired to feel emotions based on our experience, on our perception of what is happening around us, and on what we anticipate to happen in the future. And the most fascinating thing is that our mind perceives time differently and is dependent on how we feel. Dr. Andrew Huberman is a tenured Professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. His laboratory studies neural regeneration and neuroplasticity, and brain states such as stress, focus, fear, and optimal performance. His podcast, The Huberman Lab, discusses neuroscience and science-based tools, including how our brain and its connections with the organs of our body control our perceptions, our behaviors, and our health, as well as existing and emerging tools for measuring and changing how our nervous system works. Want to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcast/ What We Discuss: 00:00 Intro 03:05 The beauty and utility of Biology 07:13 How has our relationship with learning been formed over time? 12:24 The best way people can approach learning 21:14 What happens while we sleep 31:05 Are there healthy symbols for the brain? 42:57 Self-training in healthy amounts of dopamine 44:41 The dopamine reward prediction error 49:35 Dopamine can distort our perception of time 52:56 How do we become comfortable in the discomfort of change? 01:03:45 There’s one trial learning of negative experiences 01:14:00 In some relationships, there is a need to bring in dopamine 01:20:59 Tattoos and symbols 01:27:14 Andrew on Final Five Episode Resources Andrew Huberman | Instagram Andrew Huberman | Facebook Andrew Huberman | Twitter Andrew Huberman | YouTube Andrew Huberman | LinkedIn Huberman Lab Podcast Dr. Andrew Huberman is hosting two live events: Seattle WA, May 17 and Portland, OR May 18. They're almost sold out so be sure to visit https://hubermanlab.com/tour to get your tickets. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Jay Shetty?

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• 0:44Jay Shetty?

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• 1:27Jay Shetty?

  and has won more 2026 IIHS Top Safety Pick+ Awards than any other car brand as of July 2026. Visit www.iihs.org to learn more. A lot can happen when an accident doesn't. Visit MazdaUSA.com to learn more. Consumer Reports does not endorse products or services. This episode is brought to you by Vinted. Value can be found anywhere, even in the clothes sitting untouched in our closets. That's where Vinted comes in. Vinted is a secondhand marketplace app where you can sell clothes you no longer want and get more value out of them. Whether you're running out of space, moving, or simply updating your wardrobe. Listing items is a quick and simple process, and once something sells,

• 2:12Jay Shetty?

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• 2:35Speaker 01

  When we positively associate with a song, a person, a face, an object, we don't just benefit from those activities based on the effects of those activities. It's also what we believe about those activities combined. And the release of dopamine makes you more capable of then leaning into life and going and doing other things. The effect of a small, even you know, half a percent increase in dopamine transmission in the brain is the difference between feeling like your life is bleak and you can completely attack the day in the positive sense.

• 3:11Jay Shetty?

  Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose. I'm so grateful that you come back every single week to listen, learn and grow. And I am so excited to be talking to you today. I can't believe it. My new book, Eight Rules of Love is out and I cannot wait to share it with you. I am so, so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book. I read the audiobook. If you haven't got it already, make sure you go to eightrulesoflove.com. It's dedicated to anyone who's trying to find, keep or let go of love. So if you've got friends that are dating, broken up or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book. And I'd love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour, Love Rules.

• 3:56Jay Shetty?

  Go to jayshettytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences and more. I can't wait to see you this year. And you know that the podcast for me is just an opportunity to reach out to people that I'm inspired by, people that I feel are changing the world, people that I feel have amazing insights that I can learn from and want to share with you. And today's guest is someone that I've been connected with for a while, but I'm so excited to finally have him in the studio because not only is his insights having a huge impact on how we live, how we think, just the energy that I felt from him in the first couple of moments that I've met him, I can already tell that it's all And his heart too. And so to meet someone who's super strategic, super scientific, has an incredible mind,

• 4:42Jay Shetty?

  but has a beautiful heart in person. That's my kind of person. And today's guest is none other than Andrew Huberman. He's a neuroscientist and tenured professor in the Department of Neurobiology at the Stanford University School of Medicine. He has made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function and neuroplasticity, which is the ability of our nervous system to rewire and learn new behaviors, skills and cognitive functioning. He also is a McKnight Foundation and Pew Foundation Fellow and was awarded the Kogan Award in 2017. Work from the Huberman Laboratory at Stanford School of Medicine has been published in top journals,

• 5:23Jay Shetty?

  including Nature Science and Cell, and has been featured in Time, BBC, Scientific American, Discover, and other top media outlets. In 2021, Dr. Huberman launched the Huberman Lab Podcast, which I'm a huge fan of, and I know you are too. The podcast is frequently ranked in the top 25 of all podcasts globally and is often ranked as the number one in the categories of science, education, health and fitness. Please welcome my new friend and someone that I'm a huge fan of and admire, Andrew Huberman. Andrew, thank you for doing this. Thanks so much for having me. Being here. And honestly, thank you for what you do in the world. I think it's been brilliant to see someone bring so much heart.

• 6:07Jay Shetty?

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• 6:50Jay Shetty?

  That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.

• 6:58Jay Shetty?

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• 7:39Jay Shetty?

  Orange Theory Fitness provides a one-hour workout to build strength, burn fat, and build muscle, with an expert coach guiding you every step of the way. Head to orangetheory.com/onpurpose to learn more and get your first class free. Orange Theory Fitness, helping people live longer, more vibrant lives. Terms and conditions apply. See webpage in studio for details. Into science and science into heart. And I know that people who listen to you and hear from you and communicate with you and even, I really meant it, a few moments we just spent right now. I love that combination and I wonder how you, whether you even see it that way, whether you don't. But I'm fascinated by, is that how you've always lived?

• 8:24Jay Shetty?

  Have you been fascinated by the heart and science for a while?

• 8:27Speaker 01

  First of all, I just want to say thank you for having me here. We've known each other through some mutual contacts for a while and it's a delight to be here. I'm an admirer and a fan of all you do and the way you approach it. So heartfelt thanks for having me here. In terms of how things have evolved to where they are now, you know,

• 8:49Speaker 01

  I don't have much of a mission statement, but I suppose if I had to pick one, it's to share the beauty and the utility of biology. Since I was very young, I've been obsessed with learning and I've also had a compulsion to share what I've learned, especially when I think that the information can be of use to people. So the little six and eight-year-old and 10-year-old version of me wouldn't shut up. I was just constantly talking about all the stuff I had been reading about on the weekends. And over time, it just made sense to become an academic for that reason. And then nowadays, with the advent of podcasting, I have this wonderful opportunity to share things that I think are useful. In terms of the heart and the mind, you know, I can only frame it by saying that, you know, our

• 9:31Speaker 01

  nervous system is our brain, our spinal cord, but of course, all their connections with the organs of the body and back again. And so we really can't divorce any of the organs of the body from our thinking and feeling and action, and vice versa, as you very well know. And then from a more personal standpoint, you know, I had the great benefit of training with mentors in science who really lived and breathed their science, but also had a deep sense of humanity. Each one of them had an eye or an ear toward things that were relevant to them. In one case, one with a particular interest in mental health and the struggles around mental health and mental illness, the other just a person who just

• 10:13Speaker 01

  loved animals and the natural kingdom. And then my other advisor was a very strong advocate for scientists of all kinds and backgrounds. And so I was so blessed to be weaned by people who really instilled in me a love and a desire for learning and sharing and doing research, but also understood that how one shows up to the conversation means everything. And so, you know, I just feel very blessed to have had that. And I'm just trying to do right by them.

• 10:40Jay Shetty?

  I love hearing that. Like, I had no idea that that was a part of how you were mentored and guided. And, I mean, I'm sure they feel very proud and seeing that you continue on and pass that legacy on so beautifully, but... I think what I find even more intriguing about that is so many of our early learning experiences are not necessarily that way. And you said that you loved learning and you love sharing. I think most people that I know, or at least that I talk to, or I hear from in comments or podcasts, would say school was not an exciting place for them. Maybe they went to college or didn't go to college, but they necessarily didn't have a positive experience.

• 11:21Jay Shetty?

  Maybe it was filled with fear, or doubt, or judgment, or criticism, or maybe there was a lack of confidence. That could have been not only from teachers and the school system, it could have been from friends, or bullies, or people in that environment. So what I'm fascinated by is our relationship with learning. Because when I look at my relationship with learning too, I remember starting off having that buzz and spark, then almost feeling like I was forced to believe there are only certain ways you could learn. I grew up believing I didn't like reading, because we were only encouraged to read fiction books.

• 12:04Jay Shetty?

  And even till this day, I don't like reading fiction books. I have no interest in reading fiction books. I love reading nonfiction. And today, I can read nonfiction books every day, every week, every month, every year, and I'm fully engrossed and immersed. That's why I'm excited for your book one day. And I think that is something that I learned, that I do love reading, I do love learning. But I was never introduced to that form until my father gave me a biography when I was 14 years old. And so, how do you think our relationship with learning has been formed over time, hearing from your own as well?

• 12:36Speaker 01

  I think it was the great physicist Max Del Brook, who said that, you know, "When teaching, assume zero knowledge and infinite intelligence." I try and keep that in mind. I think that we are all innate learners by virtue of the fact that this thing, this nervous system, as it's called, is really a map of our experience. And it's there to form itself. It's unusual among the organs in that it shapes itself, right? Unlike the kidney or the liver, which doesn't constantly update its own form and function the same way. The nervous system is there essentially to educate itself so that it can operate better in a given environment. And once one understands that, you start to realize that the forms of learning are many. So for instance,

• 13:19Speaker 01

  You know, math, or I suppose in, in the UK it's maths. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Maths, you know, could be learned by way of, of, of different, using different types of examples, right? Movement of trains, or bartering systems, or on paper, just simple long division and multiplication. But in the end, what you're really trying to find, anytime you're teaching or learning, is you're trying to find a universal algorithm of how the brain works. And what I mean by that is that, you know, all these nerve cells, they only can communicate through chemicals and electricity. You know, it's really just meat in there, believe it or not. But there are algorithms that are universal. So whether or not one learns better verbally, or visually, or whether one has a propensity for math, or for verbal subjects,

• 14:04Speaker 01

  what is true for all of us is that the brain is there always asking questions, and trying to make predictions about its environment. And I think what happens is when we're children, we are learning passively all the time. As we get older, and especially as we get to our mid and late twenties, it takes an immense amount of focus and energy in order to learn. But of course, the nervous system can still shape itself well into adulthood, almost certainly for the entire lifespan. But that focus and energy feels almost like an agitation. And I think that as children, we don't necessarily experience that agitation, because we can, for better or for worse, we can experience and change passively. Neuroplasticity just happens by way of pure experience. As we get older, mid twenties, early thirties, and so on,

• 14:49Speaker 01

  that, that threshold of agitation for people feels like it's something to back away from. But if we can learn to approach that and understand that that agitation is actually the circulation of chemicals, which is the, the brain and nervous system telling itself, aha, now I need to pay attention and change, we can start to actually modify the way that system works. So it's a bit of a convoluted answer to your question, but I think that at the heart of our nervous system is this ability, these algorithms by which it can change its themselves. And it's on all of us to understand that that bit of agitation and discomfort need not be interpreted as discomfort. That's the edge where learning.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Is a beginning. So confusion, being perplexed, feeling somewhat overwhelmed by the amount of information. That's actually the stir of chemicals that are cueing the nervous system to change. Because if it can do something easily, there's no reason for the nervous system to change. Now, in terms of different styles of teaching and learning, I think that many of us experienced that agitation early on. And we, for reasons that are understandable, we backed away from learning anymore. So for instance, I'm musically, I can't, I'm musically deficient. I love music, but I can't play music to save my life. And I think that's entirely because as a kid, every time I would try and play music, it just sounded terrible. Everyone cringed, the dogs, dogs literally howled. So I stopped, right?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  But knowing what I know now, that would be the cue to that, the agitation, the stress, the embarrassment is actually the cue to the nervous system that it's about to rewire itself. So I think if people just understood that, children and adults would lean into learning more regularly and hopefully with more ease overall.

• 16:31Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, even now, when, what sparks from that answer, which I actually really appreciated, is the idea that as we get older, as you said, it has to become more conscious. It has that tension. It's almost like you have to start figuring out how you learn best and how you process ideas. So for me, I know that I love to first dive deep and immerse myself in something. And then I like to create a structured approach to get there if I enjoy it. So if I want to learn a new skill, I'll get obsessed with it for a weekend. I'll go on the course, I'll read the book, I'll watch every video.

• 17:12Jay Shetty?

  I just want to dive in to really see if I genuinely care or whether it's me thinking I care and to try and separate that ego and that true desire for me at least. And if I do a weekend of something and I realize, oh, my ego liked that, but I didn't really like that. I'm gonna step away. Or actually, wow, this is fascinating. Then I'll go and build a step-by-step plan with small steps and incremental steps. That I've learned over a long time of learning different things.

• 17:42Jay Shetty?

  How can people think about the best way they can learn? What are different styles? What are different methods that you think people can think? If someone's listening right now and they're like, Andrew, well, I want to learn a new instrument. Or I want to learn a new language. Or maybe it's, I want to learn how to start a podcast, or I want to learn how to play a sport, or whatever it may be. How can someone start thinking about how they should approach learning?

• 18:05Speaker 01

  Terrific question. And fortunately nowadays, we can look to studies done in humans that define some very key principles. The first principle is that the whole process of neuroplasticity and learning is really a two-stage process. First, there must be focus and alertness. That focus and alertness is associated with the release of neurochemicals, so-called neuromodulators, things like acetylcholine in particular, which sort of acts as a highlighter pen, if you will, for certain connections in the brain to later be reinforced. And the neurochemical adrenaline, which is also called epinephrine, also depending on if you're in the UK or elsewhere. A long, interesting story, not for this time, about why it has multiple names. Epinephrine, also called adrenaline,

• 18:50Speaker 01

  is associated with an increase in agitation and alertness. Acetylcholine, think of it as a spotlight or a highlighter pen for certain connections in the brain. So you need alertness and focus. And then the second stage is that it is only during periods of deep rest, in particular, sleep, and something that I call non-sleep deep rest, which I've given an acronym because scientists like acronyms, NSDR, non-sleep deep rest. Things like yoga nidra, things like shallow naps, things like forms of meditation that don't involve a lot of focused concentration. You're far more the experienced meditator than I, so I'm outside my wheelhouse when talking about meditation. But it is only periods of intense focus and alertness, followed by periods of deep rest, that allow the nervous system to change. And there is an abundance of evidence for that.

• 19:35Speaker 01

  So that's the first thing to understand. The brain actually rewires during deep sleep and rest because during deep sleep and rest, naps, yoga nidra, deep sleep, there's a replay of the very same cells in the brain that were active during learning, oftentimes in reverse for reasons that are still not understood. But at a much higher repetition rate. So you're actually getting repetitions while you sleep. This is why one will strain to learn a language or a motor skill or maths or something like that over and over and over. It doesn't happen. You take a couple of nights' sleep, take a break from it. All of a sudden, it's there. It's because it happens in rest. Now, there's some other things that one can do to enhance this process further that are arrived to us from good data. First of all, there's a so-called ultradian rhythm,

• 20:18Speaker 01

  which is the 90-minute cycles during which we can focus pretty well for a duration of about 90 minutes. Of course, flickering in and out of focus. Nobody really focuses for 90 minutes straight unless they've built up that capacity or they are very interested in what they're learning, right? They're just rapt with attention. Usually, people flicker in and out. And of course, nowadays, there's a lot of literature and ideas about ways to maintain focus. Put the phone away, limit noise. Some people like background noise. Some people like music, some don't. It's very contextual, highly individualized. But 90 minutes is sort of the batch of time that the brain can focus really hard on one thing before it needs a true rest of an hour or two before you can go back to learning or working very hard.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  The other thing is that there's some very interesting data showing that shallow naps or NSDR, non-sleep deep rest, done within four hours of one of these 90-minute learning bouts can be very beneficial for accelerating learning. And then there are these incredible data on so-called gap effects. So there have been studies now of skills that are physical skills, mental skills, where people will, for instance, try to learn scales on the piano or a math problem or a spatial problem or a physical skill. And then at random, every so often, a buzzer will go off and the person will just be told to do nothing. Sit there, eyes closed or eyes open and do nothing. Just stop the learning process for about 10 seconds and then return to doing what they're doing. These are these little micro rests. It turns out that during those micro rests,

• 21:45Speaker 01

  the hippocampus, a brain areas, you know, that's associated with learning and memory, and the neocortex, also associated with learning and memory. undergoes replay of the thing that the individual is trying to learn at 20 times the speed, also in reverse, just as in sleep, and that has can lead and has been shown to lead to accelerations in learning. So there are these ways, I wouldn't even think of them as hacks, because the word hack is a little tricky, because when I think of the word hack, it seems like doing something with an object or a tool that wasn't designed for that purpose, right? The nervous system already harbors these mechanisms, and one can access them through these little micro rests. So whether or not you're a child or an adult, every so often, when trying to learn something, just pause for 10 seconds or so, do your best to

• 22:28Speaker 01

  just clear your mind. Of course, it's very hard to clear the mind, but do your best to clear the mind, and then go back to the learning task, as it were. And that has been shown to significantly accelerate the learning process and the retention of newly learned information. And then the last thing you touched on earlier, which is this notion of incremental learning. You said you like to throw yourself into something as kind of a litmus test of whether or not you enjoy it or not. Turns out that from beautiful work done by my colleague at Stanford School of Medicine, Eric Knudsen, has shown that, yes, it's true that early in development, in humans, this would be up until the mid 20s, we can learn things in larger batches and much more easily than we can later in life. However, if one batches

• 23:10Speaker 01

  that work into smaller increments, and so for instance, deciding, maybe set a timer, turning the phone off otherwise, and saying, I'm going to spend three minutes, just three minutes, in trying to intensely learn this thing, even if I feel like I'm failing. If one does that repeatedly, those little increments of learning can lead to an outsized amount of learning overall. And so the nervous system loves incremental learning. It loves to batch things into focused little bouts. And, you know, if that's already the tools that you've built up, which it sounds like you have, wonderful. But if somebody is out there trying, struggling to learn, Really trying to break things down into very brief periods of intense focus. That is the cue by which during sleep, the nervous system will change itself.

• 23:54Speaker 01

  And this has been shown over and over and over again, even in very late life. Individuals and people in their, you know, we like to think life could go on further than this, but people in their eighties and nineties still have neuroplasticity. There's even evidence that new neurons can be produced in the hippocampus of people in their late eighties and nineties. So the capacity is there.

• 24:14Jay Shetty?

  This is why I love what you do because you would never consider that the answer to learning is deep rest. More sleep.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  Provided the focus comes first.

• 24:23Jay Shetty?

  Of course, yeah, of course, the focus and the attention, as you said.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  But of course, sleep deprivation makes it very hard to learn. And there's something else important that happens in sleep. Nowadays, we, I think most people, thanks to the beautiful work of Matthew Walker at Berkeley and others, really understand the value of sleep for health, immune system function, et cetera. There is a stage of sleep, rapid eye movement sleep that we're all familiar with, of course, and where literally the eyes are moving. That tends to come later in the night, during the second half of sleep, where there's a, there's a tendency to have very emotional dreams, or at least dreams that are laden with a lot of emotional content of some kind. During rapid eye movement sleep, there's an inability to move the body. We call this atonia. It's literally a sleep induced paralysis that's healthy.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  And a complete failure of the nervous system to release adrenaline, epinephrine. This is sort of like a trauma therapy in some sense. If you think about it, it's a replay of an emotional event minus the neurochemical that makes us feel tense and agitated. So in our mind, those dreams can often feel very distressing. It's been shown that if you deprive people of rapid eye movement sleep, they fail to dump the negative emotions of things that happened the day before and the day before. And I think all of us have experienced the shift in emotionality that happens when we are sleep deprived. What ends up happening is that the little things seem like big things. But after a few nights' sleep, we're okay. And there's no mystery to why that is anymore. I think almost every sleep scientist believes it has something to do with this built in

• 25:53Speaker 01

  kind of trauma release therapy where you get to experience the thing in your sleep, minus the neurochemicals that make your body feel terrible. And somehow that dissociation allows people to then step back into life with a, with a clean slate.

• 26:05Jay Shetty?

  Wow, yeah, no, I've I've heard those ideas before, but the way you just wove it all together is is really special. What I'm intrigued by then is what's the latest science on dreams? Because there are so many spiritual wisdom-based approaches to dreams. I've never really dived deep enough, I think, from a scientific perspective into dreams, apart from some particular aspects. But let's let's go there. Yeah, where is? So I love the idea that sleep, of course, is acting as somewhat of a dishwasher, cleansing, healing agent, so that while we're sleeping, we're actually being able to release these ideas. Hence, we have... Where do dreams fit into that picture?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I'm glad you said dishwasher, because from a pure physiological standpoint, this is separate from dreams, but from a pure physiological standpoint, it's now well appreciated that during sleep, there's a rinsing out of the debris that accumulate in the the brain. The brain is the most metabolically demanding organ that we have. It consumes tons of energy. Most of the energy that we burn in terms of calories is from our brain, not our muscles, even if people don't feel like they're thinking very hard. And thinking very hard, as we know, can feel very taxing. We can feel exhausted after a hard conversation.

• 27:19Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 27:20Speaker 01

  The this washout, as it's called, is a so-called glymphatic rinse-out. The brain wasn't thought to have a lymphatic system, but it does. Cerebrospinal fluid starts to reverse, basically, its pattern of flow during sleep. All these incredible ways of washing out the brain during sleep. Now, during the first half of one's night, the 90-minute cycle still persists, that we were talking about earlier, these old trading cycles. And those 90-minute cycles are mostly made up of a so-called slow-wave sleep. So we see big amplitude, brainwaves, this kind of thing. Dreams tend to be pretty boring early in the night. They tend to be more associated with motor function and movement. And it's actually the case that growth hormone is released in the early part of the night

• 28:04Speaker 01

  and that most of the repair of the body and tissues is occurring during that first half of sleep. As the night goes on, dreams become more intense and more emotionally laden, regardless of what's been going on in someone's waking life. And in fact, toward morning, almost all of those 90-minute cycles that occur back-to-back is going to be comprised of this rapid eye movement sleep. So the sleep toward morning is going to be much more emotional. Now, the interesting thing is that if you look at the data on dreaming in humans and you look at it purely through the lens of neuroscience, you get a bunch of language back about, okay, not much epinephrine happening, so you're dissociating the emotion from the neurochemical state. If you look to the psychology literature, which I do,

• 28:48Speaker 01

  or you read a book like Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Jung, or you start to look at some of the kind of hybrid work, which is psychiatry, which of course are M.D.s that are grounded in physiology but also think psychoanalytically. They, I think they're really on to something with this idea that dreams are basically a time in which the ordinary sequence of life events is converted into heuristics, shorthand symbols. And the brain loves symbols in the daytime, too, right? We don't walk around parsing every angle of every object. The way the visual system works is that the recognition of your face, for instance, there's a brain area that I've seen you many, many, millions of times, billions of times, probably, and I recognize you immediately as Jay Shetty, because there literally is a neuron in my brain that's a Jay Shetty neuron.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  We know this, right, from recording, from brains of people that recognize people, right? If I met some of your staff today, lovely people, for the first time, now those neurons exist for them. But that representation of you was built up through basic representation of just the orientations of lines, all right? Just like one would sketch your face and then build in more elaborate representation.

• 29:56Speaker 01

  The brain represents things in symbols in a very abstract way. So without going down too far of a rabbit hole, if I were to, for instance, say, you know what? Jay, I'm gonna play artist today, of which I'm not, and I'm gonna draw your face. And I did my best to draw your face and I showed it to you. You'd probably say, oh, that's not great, but you'd probably recognize some of the features. But for instance, if I decided that I was going to put your eyes in a different location, eliminate your teeth, put a bunch of tattoos on your face for fun and show you this. And I'd say, you'd say, that doesn't look anything like me. And I'd say, ah, but that's my abstract representation of you. It turns out that the brain represents everything in the external world as a shorthand abstract representation.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  And in dreams, the reason that we tend to, for instance, replace people with animals or objects with different objects is because the brain is thinking more in terms of the relationships between objects than it is the objects themselves. And so this is where dream analysis gets a little bit tricky. So the analyst would say, you know, for instance, I had a dream not that long ago where I was being chased by two animals. It was a bear and a wolf, a very salient dream for me. And turns out that that bear and that wolf, I realized only later that day I was walking around. I'd gone for a swim in the ocean, got out of the ocean. And I turned to someone and I said, oh, my goodness, I know what that was about. That was about these two children that are now in my life.

• 31:19Speaker 01

  And I thought they're chasing me like they need something from me. And it opened up an entire conscious discussion about that. So in my mind, these children were represented as animals, not because children are always represented as animals, but probably because it was the feeling that they were impinging on me and they're lovely children, but nonetheless that they're impinging on me. So the point is not my dream. The point is that dream analysis always has to take into account that the brain operates in symbols where objects are replaceable. And there are only relationships between objects. And so if one has a very scary dream about a person or sees a monster, it's really in the early waking state of the day that we are in a position to best understand those relationships.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  So here's a tool I recommend that's actually supported by sleep science, which is when waking.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  And in the first thirty minutes or so around waking, you're in this liminal state, even if you're somebody who wakes up and feels very alert, you're in this liminal state where that symbolism is still quite fluid. I highly recommend that people try and not bring in too much new sensory experience if they want to understand their dream. Stay lying down with your eyes closed. Maybe tell your partner or if someone else you live with, if you live with somebody, that you just need a few moments and just try and move about your day in a way where you're not trying to solve the dream, but you're also not bringing in a lot of new sensory experience because in that moment, you actually stand a chance of parsing what that relationship is. And this is something that psychoanalysts understand. This is something that, believe it or not, clinical hypnotists understand.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  Bring people into a state of deep relaxation and be able to capture that transition between the sleep and waking state. Forgive me for the excessively long answer, but...

• 33:04Jay Shetty?

  Not excessively long at all. Fascinating. Honestly, not excessively long. Please carry on.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Well, so there's physiology that we know. And then there's the psychology of this. And just to make it very clear, the brain thinks in symbols in the daytime and in dreams, in waking states and in dreams. It's all symbols. Everything is symbolic representation because we can't parse all the information coming into our nervous system. But because the nervous system's main job is to make really good predictions, to basically do statistics, like when, for instance, as a child, one of the first things you learn is that objects fall down, not up. So the first time they see a helium balloon, it's like awe and excitement. The awe and excitement is the release of neurochemicals that teach the brain, sometimes objects fall up, so to speak. So, once one starts to recognize that the brain is always trying to make these predictions,

• 33:51Speaker 01

  you can start to look at your dreams as symbolic representations and how those relate to one another. The action functions are far more interesting and important than, ah, it was a vase. And you know, when I was a kid, there was a vase in my grandmother's home and that vase represented something. Maybe, but more likely, you would want to think about the shape of it or what it was, where that vase was in relationship to other things. Because that's how the brain works. It makes predictions based on... Context.

• 34:21Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  I hope that's helpful to people. If there's, if there are other theories of dreams, and I'm certain that there are that extend past this, I apologize for not addressing them. But I think for most people, just thinking about the relationship between objects in their dreams is going to be more useful than thinking about what exactly the dream was about, quote unquote.

• 34:40Jay Shetty?

  Yes, and I want to just say, please do not apologize. That was a brilliant answer and it was so useful even for me because I, I think you're so right that so often even people will ask me, they'll be like, hey, I had this dream, what does it mean?

• 34:52Speaker 01

  One thing we have not solved as neuroscientists is two things. One, why it is that people need to tell other people their dreams? Because other people, unless it's a trained therapist,

• 35:00Jay Shetty?

  Totally.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  Are useless.

• 35:02Jay Shetty?

  Of course.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  For helping, unless they have intense knowledge of the symbolic representations in your life. We should all be doing this ourselves. And the other one is a kind of peculiar one, which there seems to be a need among many people that if they wake up in the middle of the night and they can't sleep, to wake up other people who are sleeping. But I haven't solved that one.

• 35:18Jay Shetty?

  No, I love that and I completely agree with you. I think, when I think about that though, what really struck me was this idea of the brain-loving symbols. And I think of what are healthy symbols throughout the day? Because I think we forget, I mean, you came into this room earlier. We came into the studio and you were looking around at all my symbols that I surround myself with. Do they count as symbols? Do they not count as symbols?

• 35:41Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 35:41Jay Shetty?

  Right.

• 35:42Speaker 01

  One thing I noticed immediately on walking in here is these, many things are beautiful and they have a lot of depth to them. And I have this obsession with, anytime I'm in a new environment, provided that it's appropriate, I just have to sniff around and look at everything.

• 35:57Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  To kind of know where I am in relationship to things.

• 36:00Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely, and I saw you do that and I didn't want to bore you with the history of everything. I can say it to you, but the idea that I find as well, this environment has been sculpted with symbols that allow me to be present with someone and what I hope will help others be present as well. Or at least spark their curiosity and intrigue so that we can have that in our conversation. I wonder what are healthy symbols, are there certain healthy symbols for the brain to connect with on a daily basis before? Before sleep, after sleep, that allow us to program ourselves more effectively. Because I feel like most of the symbols that we're seeing are unconscious or unintentional

• 36:42Jay Shetty?

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• 37:23Jay Shetty?

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• 38:05Jay Shetty?

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• 38:50Jay Shetty?

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• 39:00Speaker 01

  Symbols. Yeah, I love that you asked this question because for years, you know, we hear these things like, you know, you are the sum of the five people you spend the most time with. But nowadays, we spend more time with symbols and people on social media than we do oftentimes with other individuals, or at least equal amounts of time in the room, right? Rarely is it just the physical bodies in the room. It's all the people in our phone, which I don't see as a bad thing. Right. Actually, for years, when I was working more or less in isolation in my lab, I had this little list. I don't think I've ever shared this before. I had this little list of people who I love and admire, many of whom I've never met. And I just would read that list over and over again. I didn't realize at the time, but I was developing what,

• 39:43Speaker 01

  I believe the analysts call this a, an interject or an introject, perhaps. Someone should look that up. Forget which one it is. Which is actually a subconscious representation of somebody else's ideas and approach to things. That if we, for instance, listen to you over and over again, the nervous system starts to ask questions like, what would Jay do in this circumstance? That's a very real thing and we're not always consciously aware of it. Now, physical symbols are also very important because the brain likes to make predictions. It loves symbols because symbols are a shorthand way of eliminating a lot of useless information. But much of the way that we operate and feel

• 40:26Speaker 01

  really does impact us at a subconscious level. And this has been shown over and over again. I mean, it's, and it's always cast in the context of subconscious bias, which has kind of a negative slant anytime we hear bias, of course. But there are positive biases as well. So I think that for some people, having order among symbols is very important. Equal spacing, everything very aligned. I'm sort of one of those, but you know, I'm kind of in the middle. Other people, they aren't so.

• 40:53Speaker 01

  Consumed with the with the relationships between how they arrange things physically, but they enjoy great depth and emotional relationship to things. It could be a pendant. It could be nowadays, you know, people like tattoos are kind of interesting.

• 41:04Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  They're much more prominent than when I was growing up. They are an externalization of how people feel on the inside.

• 41:10Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 41:10Speaker 01

  Right? So those are very powerful symbols. And there's something about the process of stamping it into one's skin, et cetera. The slight or intense pain involved, depending on where and who does it and who and the person's pain threshold. So symbols are a way in which we create an external reflection of who we are to ourselves. But also, they are operating at a subconscious level to keep us, for instance, in a place of order, like to be able to organize one's thoughts in a world filled with statistical information. Every ray of sunshine is statistical information. We can't pay attention to all of it. So I think that to directly answer your question, there are a couple of things that I think from morning till night make an outsized positive effect on our nervous system,

• 41:52Speaker 01

  both in terms of its ability to feel, think and act, and its ability to learn. The first one isn't so much a symbol unless you adopt it as one, and I certainly have, which is there are now thousands of quality studies showing that we should all try and get some bright light, ideally sunlight, in our eyes with within the early hours of waking. This doesn't necessarily meaning waking with the sunrise, although if you can do that, that's great. Some people wake up before the sun comes out. Getting a lot of bright sunlight in one's eyes early in the day puts a number of neurochemicals and hormones into a state of, let's just call it what it is, positivity. Mood is enhanced, immune system function is enhanced, sleep is enhanced 16 to, you know, 20 hours later and so on.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  Also in the evening. So the sun as a symbol is very important, but it's also anchoring our subconscious physiology, because every cell in our body has a 24 hour clock. We need to time it to the rise and fall of the sun each day. When human beings become Misaligned with that rising and falling of the sun, bad things happens to the nervous system. Now fortunately, it's very easy to fix. There's a study done at University of Colorado taking college students camping. I wish I'd been a subject in this experiment. What they found is that melatonin rhythms, cortisol rhythms, which can be a healthy thing. We all have cortisol, protects us, energizes us, dopamine, epinephrine, all these rhythms of the body could be reinstated to their proper timing by waking up and seeing

• 43:15Speaker 01

  the sun and going to sleep not too long after sunset, depending on time of year, for two nights and two mornings. Wow. And this lasted at least two weeks, even though people were getting artificial light. So I would say the symbol of the sun is not just, you know, it's not a trivial thing at all. It's the anchor by which our biology is designed and our psychology follows, of course. That's a brilliant one, by the way. Thank you. I think, you know, many people who have trouble sleeping, many people who have mood issues, this enhances metabolism. I mean, I could list it on and on and on. People will ask, so I'll just put it out there. Try and do this without sunglasses if you safely can. You don't stare directly at the sun. Never look at any light so bright that it's painful to look at. You can, of course, blink. Only takes a few minutes on a cloudless day.

• 43:59Speaker 01

  If you're in the UK in the depths of winter, you're still going to get more light coming through cloud cover by going outside than you would indoors with bright lights on. And it can take anywhere from two minutes to 30 minutes, depending on how dark or bright it is outside. Sunglasses and, excuse me, eyeglasses and contacts perfectly fine, if you think about it, if anything that just focuses light onto the retina. Don't try and do this through a window or a windshield, because it filters out a lot of the light that you want. So the sun is a key symbol. I think if people could adopt that, I'm certain their physiology and psychology will benefit. Then in terms of physical symbols, I find it very useful and that they're good data. If a, you know, if a picture is worth a thousand

• 44:40Speaker 01

  words, a movie is worth a bazillion pictures. So having an image of something that makes you feel good and seeing that early in the day, tremendously powerful. Having a mental image of something in your mind is equally powerful, because you also carry that with you. Yeah. And then if you do have a meditative practice, or even if you don't, being able to try and bring the mind and the body into that experience. So taking a moment to look at a photo of someone that you love or appreciate. And or the actual person, right? And being able to actually sense that and feel it at a complete nervous system level. It might sound like kind of woo science, but it's not. The nervous system extends through the whole body.

• 45:19Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  So the extent that you can make that a truly whole body somatic experience.

• 45:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  That leads to an outsized effect on the, just the ability of the nervous system to function. And then, of course, we are bombarded all day with negative symbols. There's just no way around that. But we can buffer ourselves against those negative symbols by very strongly associating with certain things. And here I'll just defer that great neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks had this obsession with minerals and stones. He felt they had personalities. And he used to say that he had developed such a strong relationship to them, their touch, especially as he started to lose his vision later in life, that the way they felt. And they made him feel safe. They made him feel good. So these could be inanimate objects.

• 46:04Speaker 01

  So find things that you love and associate with them on a regular basis. And you are literally shifting your nervous system towards this place of buffering yourself against negativity. And you're reinforcing the very circuits that trigger the release of neurochemicals that make you feel better. And some people might say, well, then you're just kind of doping yourself up with your own chemicals. But as a last point here, the neurochemical dopamine is a very important and very misunderstood molecule. First of all, it is the substrate by which epinephrine neural energy is created. And people think of it as dopamine is just feeling good, but dopamine is not about feeling good.

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Dopamine is the molecule of motivation and the desire to pursue additional things in a particular line of life. So when we positively associate with a song, a person, a face, an object, the sunrise, we don't just benefit from those activities based on the effects of those activities. It's also what we believe about those activities combined. And the release of dopamine makes you more capable of then leaning into life and going and doing other things. And so it, and this is not small effects, right? The effect of a small, even, you know, half a percent increase in dopamine transmission. In the brain is the difference between feeling like your life is bleak. And you can completely attack the day in the positive sense.

• 47:26Speaker 01

  So fill your life with symbols. You get what's wonderful is that you get to curate what those are. If you don't have access to them in your physical environment, they can be entirely internal.

• 47:36Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  And when I think about the great stories of the Viktor Frankl's and the.

• 47:40Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 47:41Speaker 01

  You know, and people who have just overcome tremendous challenge. They've internalized symbols such that the tiniest of things can actually evoke this. This dopamine release system. And dopamine is just a generic neuromodulator. It doesn't know anything about your experience. It only knows what you believe about your experience. And it's deployed according to what you believe about your experience. So in theory, I could train my dopamine system to release dopamine every time I raised my right hand. If I genuinely thought that that had, if that has meaning for me. And this is the art also of superstitions, right? This is why, uh, you know, people will engage in superstitions because they've built positive associations with outcomes. According to a certain behavior.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  So what you start to realize is that the brain is making predictions about the external world. Who's Jay, when's he coming back? You know, what objects are going to be in the room this time versus next time? If I suddenly walk out in that painting over there, which I happen to love, is now on a different wall. My nervous system would notice that because it's, but it's also making predictions about internal state. And a lot of depression and anxiety is about people feeling like, oh, when they feel lousy, that that. Lousy feeling is going to go on forever.

• 48:53Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 48:53Speaker 01

  The way to rewire this is to understand that making. And controlling predictions about how you feel internally gives you a sense of agency. And that sense of agency at the end of the day is just purely neurochemical. So these are pretty straightforward things to master.

• 49:08Jay Shetty?

  I mean, that's mind blowing to me because I've never heard dopamine be explained that way.

• 49:13Speaker 01

  Well, dopamine, everything about dopamine release is learned.

• 49:15Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  There are a few things like. All the adapt, all the ones that evolved for us to be here. Okay. So associated with reproduction, food, sugar, there's a very powerful dopamine pathway in the brain and in the gut to, because sugar has a nutritive value, right? We should all probably be ingesting less of it, but you know, it's a hardwired system. Food when we're hungry, warmth when we're cold, those are hardwired. But the dopamine system is designed to be trained up to associate with anything.

• 49:45Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 49:46Speaker 01

  And this is how a guy like, you can meditate for long periods of time and feel, I'm guessing there were times in which it felt brutal and there were times in which it felt incredible.

• 49:56Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  This is how a guy like David Goggins can, you know, punish himself with running it, you know, over and over and over, and yet somehow he's inverted that dopamine circuit so that it feels like something he either wants to do or that by overcoming the, the resistance to doing it, he, he gets a dopamine

• 50:16Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  release. So dopamine is entirely a learned release system. There are a few things that trigger its release no matter what, but, and I should highlight drugs of abuse.

• 50:27Jay Shetty?

  I was just about to say, which is why anything can become an addiction.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Cocaine, amphetamine, excess, you know, pornography, excessive dopamine release. And the diabolical thing about dopamine under those conditions is that the higher the dopamine release, the big amplitude dopamine, the bigger the crash, always. It's the way the circuits are designed.

• 50:45Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 50:45Speaker 01

  Now here we're talking about self-training in healthy amounts of dopamine release. Non-addictive amounts of dopamine release, or you could say mildly addictive patterns of behavior that serve us and the people around us well. And in that case, I think of that as kind of an adaptive addiction compulsion.

• 51:01Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 51:01Speaker 01

  And not one that we should necessarily avoid.

• 51:04Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely. I think that for me, the way I differentiate that, and I think that's such a good distinction that you're raising there because what you're basically saying is we could convince ourselves through the release of dopamine that anything is good for us. And hence it can lead to addiction or it can be these aspirational, positive habits for us. And I think the way I've been able to at least differentiate is that which is good for me after, that which makes me feel good after I do it. Because that's that release of dopamine that I'm experiencing after I do it is more important than that which makes me feel good before I do it.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 51:41Jay Shetty?

  So I don't feel good before I go to the gym, or maybe before I meditate, or before I eat a healthy bowl of protein and food that's good for me. But I always feel good after it.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 51:53Jay Shetty?

  And when I I feel good before I stay up late at night and hope that we're gonna have a great time. Or I feel good before I eat a pizza. I feel good before I have loads of sugar because I have a massive sweet tooth. But then afterwards, I feel the pangs of it.

• 52:07Speaker 01

  I I love that, and it proves that in your heart, you're a neuroscientist, because there's something called dopamine reward prediction error. This was defined by, again, in rule from Schultz and others, and it's an incredible thing. And it can be made very simple, which is when we positively anticipate something, there is dopamine release. I mean, just tell kids that you're going for ice cream and you're seeing what is, I'll now explain as reward prediction error. Now you get to the ice cream shop and it's closed. What happens is their dopamine drops below baseline before they were told they were going for ice cream. If they're going to the ice cream shop and they have ice cream, you might think then they get even more dopamine. But guess what? If the ice cream isn't as good, or if one kid, the the ice cream cone falls,

• 52:48Speaker 01

  and they don't get another one, what ends up happening is that dopamine is relative to where they were just feeling. It doesn't feel that great.

• 52:56Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  And so this is the the the diabolical nature of addictive drugs. People get a dopamine surge in anticipation of using, and over time, they get less and less of a dopamine surge. But the punishment signal, as we say, that comes afterwards, the trough afterwards, goes lower and lower and lower. So it's like a asymmetric seesaw. It's not just back and forth. It goes dopamine, but then it goes punishment signal. Now you've figured it out, because dopamine reward prediction error says that if you have less dopamine heading into something than you do afterward. That tells the synapses, the brain connections that were involved to reinforce themselves and to engage in that behavior again. And this is also what happens with surprise. If you go someplace, you're not expecting, you know what, like, let's, let's go to this place for dinner. I don't know, looks good and it's amazing.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  You create a much bigger dopamine signal than if I tell you, Jay, I gotta take you to this place. This is the best sushi in Los Angeles. It's incredible. That actually sets you up to not enjoy the meal as much.

• 53:52Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 53:52Speaker 01

  So we all should learn to kind of control this dopamine knob. You've done it beautifully by simplifying it into making sure that you get enough happiness, thrill, excitement in retrospect. That's the way to wire in healthy behaviors. And I, I've never actually heard it put as succinctly as you because academics are not trained to be succinct, as you can tell. But I think if everyone kept that in mind, they would do themselves a great service, which is try and ask whether or not the, you had as much or more pleasure in the aftermath of something as you did during. And you will, you, you get two benefits. One is you can avoid addictive type behaviors. And the other, because you avoid that crash, if there's a dopamine release after, there's no crash.

• 54:35Speaker 01

  And the other is that you'll have a tendency to return to that behavior over and over again. There's also why I think a lot of people enter new relationships.

• 54:43Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  And there is a well-established dopamine surge with the early phase. Everything feels possible. People feel like, people go out and make purchases. They're kind of manic, right?

• 54:51Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  And it's a very exciting kind of mental illness that we all enjoy from time to time. But then people start to enter the phase of real challenge, or oftentimes real challenge. And if they can't make that transition seamlessly and they constantly focus back on how great things were and they look at the differential, it can be a kind of a dark picture. And then people have to start working on trying to reignite, so to speak. But the bigger the dopamine surge at the beginning, the, the bigger the crash. So I think that a wonderful model for relationship is also to temper that dopamine release. Spread it out over time. Try and spread it out over 50 years and you're, and you're home free. Now, I'm not an expert in relationship, but it is absolutely clear that dopamine is the hallmark of human bonding.

• 55:37Speaker 01

  Then, you know, early on, anyway, then come the oxytocin and all the, the feel-good warmth molecules. Because dopamine fundamentally is about accessing things that are outside your immediate experience. It's reaching for things beyond the confines of your skin, a degree. Money, a relationship that you're working, that's developing and that you're working on. Whereas the serotonin and oxytocin system, which I think most people have heard of, are feel-good molecules. They're associated with things we already have. Knowledge of how wonderful our partner is, knowledge of how much we love something or how much we appreciate the meal that we had. So neither, it's not that dopamine is bad and serotonin is good. These are molecules that have built up in our system over time

• 56:21Speaker 01

  to allow us to establish new relationships of all kinds, to things and people and to ourselves, and then to sustain them. But that, those big dopamine peaks early on are very, very dangerous. And we need to learn to temper them and just spread that out over time. It's a resource and we need to learn to calibrate that resource.

• 56:39Jay Shetty?

  Andrew, you, honestly, you just blow my mind again and again and again because there are so many long-held beliefs that I have or techniques or tools that I've built or mindsets that I've created and that I share and, and, and coach and, and pass on from the studies that I've done. But I get so much joy out of seeing deep study support those ideas. I think, I want to unpack a lot of the things you said. The first thing I want to say is my new claim to fame is that you said I'm an honorary neuroscientist now.

• 57:11Speaker 01

  No, I, you, you think like a neuroscientist because to be able to batch things in time that way is a unique skill. I'm not saying this for flattery, but it makes you feel good even better. Like, but the fact of the matter is-

• 57:23Jay Shetty?

  I was being funny, but I'm grateful.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  But most people think about experiences as one thing. Yeah. We, you know, we went to Costa Rica. It was amazing. Ah, but, and I'm sure it was. And when dopamine's flooding through your system, there's also something really cool is it distorts your perception of time. It feels like time goes by very, very fast, but in looking back, it seems like a lot happened. Yeah. Think about when you're bored in the doctor's office waiting room. It feels like it goes on forever and you look back, guess what happened? Nothing. It's low dopamine state. So dopamine actually acts as a, it's like shooting a film at high frame rate.

• 57:55Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  Okay? So- Feels like a lot's happening. You look back and it goes by very fast, but you look back, a lot happened. So you batch things in time, and this is fundamentally important to how we work. If we look at experiences only in terms of how we experience them and not the aftermath, we miss a huge portion of life. And more importantly, we miss the opportunity to access the right behaviors and thoughts.

• 58:26Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 01

  We can be very misled by things like dopamine. It's a, it's really a tricky molecule to work with, and we're all working with it. No one is immune from this.

• 58:36Jay Shetty?

  Of course.

• 58:37Speaker 01

  Right? But yes, you are absolutely a neuroscientist.

• 58:40Jay Shetty?

  That's my new, that's my new tagline wherever I go. No, I have such a fascination with neuroscience, and I hope that at one point in my life, I create the time and space to deeply study and study alongside.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  We should do it, we should do it in an experiment.

• 58:52Jay Shetty?

  It's genuine a desire in my life, so I'm not just.

• 58:54Speaker 01

  Stanford has a mind-body lab, Ali Crumb's lab, which is all about beliefs and how beliefs shape our physiology. My colleague, David Spiegel, in psychiatry, studies hypnosis and brain states and beliefs and mind-body. So Stanford, of course, does all the hardcore, rigorous stuff around molecular biology, genetics, et cetera, deep sequencing. But we also have a collection of people there that are very interested in mind-body, so we should design an experiment.

• 59:17Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, definitely. I'd love to. That would, that's music to my ears. Unpacking more of what you said. What I find so interesting is that you said, obviously, this painting that you like behind me, and then you said if it was in another place, then it takes a bit of time to reconfigure and recalibrate, you know, what's going on here? And when you look at our lives today, so much of the anxiety that we experience is based on change or the lack of being able to predict, as we talked about, or unpredictability. And we've long known, kind of like what you were saying before, we've long known that, you know, things do not always stay the same. We realize that change is the only constant, that uncertainty is the only certainty.

• 1:00:00Jay Shetty?

  Like, we know these truths, yet we love holding on to predict. Even for me, like, when I walk into this room, I do predict that these things will remain on the wall and the mics will be here and Homer will have set up the lights and there's some predictability there which creates security. But as we all know, shifting and being good with change is so integral.

• 1:00:24Jay Shetty?

  What do we do with that? Like, how do we start opening up and being more comfortable in the discomfort of change, not just growth, but just change and shifts that we don't expect and predict?

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think two ways. One, I'll just go back to this fundamental feature of the nervous system, which is it's trying to make predictions. So the reason why change is stressful, even positive change, believe it or not, is quote unquote stressful.

• 1:00:49Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:00:50Speaker 01

  Is because of this, then the release of adrenaline and associated molecules with any time things change. I mean, if you look, the psychologists have worked this out, there's a hierarchy of stressors. And of course, at the, at the top of that hierarchy are awful things that we don't, you know, I think at the top, to be honest, I think death of a child is, is perhaps the, the greatest stressor. Divorce, death of a loved one. These kinds of horrible things that we wouldn't wish on anyone. Then, as one goes down, not too far below, you see things like moving to a new home or apartment.

• 1:01:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:25Speaker 01

  You think, well, that could be a great event, right? Birth of a new child. And you think, wait a second, I thought that's supposed to be one of the greatest choices in life, and indeed it is. But it's stressful to the nervous system because so many things have to be reconfigured, not to say anything about the lack of sleep with a newborn and this kind of thing. So change is always going to force our brain to make more assessments of our environment. One of the things that we can say about the brain for sure is that once it learns something, it likes to not have to think about it. When you walk, because you already know how to walk, you don't think right, left, right, left, right, left. But when you learn how to dance, a new step or something of that sort, or a new skill, sports skill, you have to think about it, and it's work. And anytime we have to think about

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  behaviors and they aren't simply reflexive, that work, as we call it, isn't, it's a combination of the release of things like adrenaline, epinephrine, in the brain and body, I should say, from the adrenals in the body, but also in the brain, from a little brain area called locus ceruleus, that is, acts as kind of a sprinkler system for the brain to kind of wake up all brain areas, saying, okay, let's pay attention to a lot of stuff here. Very basic system, but, but very fundamental system. It's literally a wake up system for the brain. Works in parallel with the release of adrenaline into our body. Now, One way to deal with change is to simply know this, right? To understand that if one feels stressed or agitated around a new move, or you have a partner who's really stressed about a new move, even though it's exciting, it should be exciting,

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  that that's perfectly normal because what they're experiencing is this increase in agitation and alertness. And it also makes it harder to enter deep, really relaxed states because the brain is in a mode of predictions, making predictions, what's happening next? Thinking, thinking, thinking. And one of the things that's key to falling asleep each night and replenishing our ability to think and make predictions is the ability to turn off thinking. This is why I'm such a fan of what traditionally was called yoga nidra, which literally means yoga sleep, lying down. It's a form of meditation, as you know, and with breathing, et cetera. I certainly, I want to point out that I have no desire to rename any of these ancient practices. These are beautiful practices that have been built up over thousands of years. The reason I call, sometimes batch yoga nidra

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  with so-called NSDR, non-sleep deep rest, is that unfortunately, both in science and in traditional cultures around some of these behaviors, the language has become a barrier for people to try them. Fully agree. I'm not trying to wash away any of the wonderful culture and tradition around these. I want to be very clear about that. But ultimately, it's about accessing a state of mind as for anyone that's listened to a yoga nidra script. And I should say, I do nidra every day. I have for almost a decade now. It's without question, along with viewing morning light, sunlight, the most powerful practice I think I can recommend to anyone.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  It is about, as you always hear in a classic nidra script, you move away from thinking and doing to being and feeling. Now, what is that? If we take a neuroscience lens, what is this? Thinking and doing, being and feeling? It's about shutting down of the prefrontal cortex, which is making predictions. What's happening next, right? As we move into sleep, you enter that kind of liminal state where things become disjointed, right? A cat flies through the room and then you might jerk yourself awake and it's kind of odd, but that's the state of not thinking and doing and just being and feeling, being in one pure somatic experience. So I would say, In order to move through change, designate 20 to 30 minutes each day to put the brain into

• 1:04:55Speaker 01

  a state of non-thinking, non-doing, and into a state of quote-unquote "being and feeling", so not making predictions. Now, the tricky thing is, when one is stressed, that's especially hard to do. And this is why I think, what is it, Thich Nhat Hanh said, you know, what is that, who said, you know, when stressed, you know, meditate every day, but when stressed, meditate twice as long, or something like that, right?

• 1:05:19Jay Shetty?

  Yes, when I don't think I have time, like, that is almost when I need to make the time.

• 1:05:22Speaker 01

  Exactly. It's a skill. And so this ability to turn off thinking enhances one's ability to enter sleep, which is vital for mental and physical health, obviously, learning, et cetera, for reasons we discussed. So, develop the ability to deliberately disengage from thinking and doing, and do that during periods of low stress, right? 20 to 30 minutes a day, even 10 minutes a day, of just learning, teaching oneself, and practicing the art of turning off prediction, is an incredibly valuable skill. And then the other one is to just understand that we're being bombarded with contextual change all the time. You know, I love Instagram, I teach science on Instagram, I see you there daily. And so scrolling on Instagram is an interesting experience, because in five minutes, you can look at a thousand

• 1:06:07Speaker 01

  different contexts. The human brain has never dealt with that kind of change before. Even when television, when I was growing up, there were three or four good channels, then it went to cable, and then now you get onto an airplane or something, you've got 240 channels. That's, that's a drop in the bucket compared to what we can get in a social media feed. So I think we just need to be aware that the brain can work with that, but then what you're turning on is an ability to walk into a new context and, and figure it out the statistics. Imagine if, if an Instagram feed... And I'm not demonizing Instagram. I think they're wonderful. I think they provide a wonderful resource, truly. But imagine if we walked out of this room and it was a completely different landscape. It was a jungle. Then we turn the corner and go into what I would think was the

• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  kitchen. And it was the kitchen of the some, you know, some Thomas Keller restaurant in New York. Turn the corner and all of a sudden we're underwater. That's social media. And we can cope with that. So if I think about it that way, then I think if we can cope with that, then we can cope with transitions in so-called real life with with ease. Now, some people have more situational awareness than others. They walk into an environment and they're sensing all the things. Other people walk into an environment and they're very good at narrowing their attentional spotlight. The latter group actually has a bit of an advantage. They probably wouldn't be so good as a special operator in the military that has to develop situational advantage, or a police officer, or a teacher. But they're going to be immensely good at one-on-one

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  interactions because they can make the room disappear. And so we need both kinds of people. And we all need to learn how to sort of brighten and broaden these attentional spotlights and narrow them as well. And I'll just briefly say, we are old world primates, as it turns out, and we have the capacity to do what's called covert attention. I can pay attention to you, but I can also notice that in my periphery, there's something else going on. So I've got two spotlights now. But I am dividing my attention. We can't do three simultaneously. But what I can also do is decide to merge those two spotlights and intensify them and narrow the aperture of my visual window and my auditory window. So we should always think of our as our attention as two spotlights that can be very broad, or it can be very narrowly

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  focused, and that we can overlap them. And I think that I think we should all know how to do both. We should learn how to narrow the aperture of our focus, deeply engage, but also deliberately disengage. And the process of falling asleep that we were talking about before is the practice of learning how to take that attentional spotlight, move those two apart, and then Not dim them, but extend the same luminosity out more broadly, more broadly, and then we're off to sleep.

• 1:08:48Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  So it's about deliberate control of the nervous system. And unfortunately, we all know how to focus on something if we're very stressed or excited by it. Most people don't learn how to turn off this focus and learn how to deliberately disengage. And one of my great hopes for humanity is that children and adults will learn how to deliberately disengage.

• 1:09:09Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:09Speaker 01

  Because it benefits sleep, which benefits mental and physical health. And also, if you think about it, most of the bad things that we do to ourselves and others, and that people do to one another, most, not all, but most are from a heightened state of reactivity.

• 1:09:23Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Speaker 01

  Where we're just not conscious.

• 1:09:25Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  And that's because our aperture, our window of attention is too narrow. We're not taking into account the full space and time of what we're thinking about.

• 1:09:34Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  And as a last point, space and time are linked in the brain. If you have a narrow visual focus, you tend to have a narrow time slicing, right? Which makes sense if you think about like a little kid watching ants on the ground, and then gets called into dinner and all of a sudden, the way you batch time is different. When you're sleepy, you tend to batch things in big blocks, okay? Or when you're bored, big blocks of time. When you're very excited, stressed or happily excited, you're in that fast frame rate. You've gone from 60 frames per second, which I think is a typical smartphone, to 1,000 frames per second.

• 1:10:08Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:10:09Speaker 01

  So you're catching all the micro nuances, but you're missing everything else.

• 1:10:13Jay Shetty?

  Hmm, and what I find most interesting about that, though, is, and I read a study a few years ago, and I don't know if it, I don't know, I can't remember where it's from, but it said something along the lines of that, "Today in 24 hours, we're exposed to more tragedy through the news, or pain, or stress, whatever word we want to label that as, than we were in our entire lifetime 25 years ago."

• 1:10:40Speaker 01

  I believe it sadly.

• 1:10:41Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  I think I have to agree.

• 1:10:43Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, and what I found also was that what you're saying, and I love this idea of we have these two points of focus and putting it together or bringing it out, which I think is fantastic as a visual, too. There's an element, though, that really draws us in of judgment and criticism. Like, I find judgment, I'm using judgment as the overall word. Criticism is a very specific word, but what really makes something harder, like when we're processing thousand posts on Instagram, the most difficult part is when judgment comes in, whether it's positive or negative, because that's what draws you in. And I find that we have more things to judge. And to make that many judgments in a day is quite exhausting. And then to be exhausted by the number of tragic

• 1:11:27Jay Shetty?

  or stressful moments that we experience. And like you said, that, you know, it's okay if we're on Instagram, we're seeing multiple things, or we're seeing this kitchen into this animation, into this world. But when a lot of it is painful, to deliberately disengage but remain connected to reality, I feel like that's somewhere where people feel like they're in no man's land.

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, you know, it's a particular challenge now with the number of images and movies that can come at us. And, you know, I think that here, I'm not one to usually talk like this, but I think much of building a good life is about both honoring and challenging the asymmetries of our nervous system. What I mean by that is, you know, everything we've talked about up until now are wired into us from birth. We have dopamine, epinephrine, these circuitries, we get an attentional spotlight. That all, we show up in the world with that and we have to work with them. We also need to acknowledge that there is an asymmetry to learning. You know, before we talked about the gap effects and the two-stage process of neuroplasticity, there are exceptions.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  The exception is learning of negative things. You only have to touch the hot stove once, or the metaphorically speaking, the hot stove only has to touch you once before it changes you. So there's one trial learning of negative experiences. Now, once we understand that asymmetry, and once we understand that negativity actually has a bit of a stronghold on our nervous system, then we accept, I would hope we'd accept the idea that then we have to work a little harder to counter that, or maybe a lot harder, in the same way that So called highly palatable foods, which is now because it's kind of science geek speak for unhealthy, highly processed foods. Cause there's some, you know, I do love fruits and vegetables and there's some wonderful baked goods.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  Let's face it. I mean, I love croissants, so I don't want to demonize. I love chocolate. Yeah, highly palatable foods, but, but I think we could all do well to eat healthier foods. And they are not as rewarding in the short term as some of these highly palatable foods. Right. And especially to the young nervous system, you know, there's, you know, a milkshake or, or candy just tastes better to these kids than vegetables. Yeah. For reasons that are hardwired into the nervous system, but we know that kids need their fruits and vegetables probably more than they need candy. Yeah. So we have to all learn to counter these built in asymmetries in our nervous system. And as adults, we probably thought we had it made, but then now we're bombarded with all this

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  negative imagery. And so the key is really the symbols that we were talking about earlier, to really build in positive symbols and internal symbolic representations. What I mean by that, not just physical things in our environment and people, but also how we hold those things inside is so important. And I think this is what comes to this notion of intentions. It's work, right? Right life and right action and all these things that we hear about. It's work. It's, it's working against the tide that is pulling us toward negativity. That's, in fact, there's a study that was done in the sixties. It was published in the journal Science. It was an excellent journal, the Apex Journals. They had people with stimulating electrodes in their brain for reasons related to neurosurgery. These people could stimulate

• 1:14:40Speaker 01

  multiple areas of their brain, one at a time. And then they reported how they felt. So that the, the human would stimulate and they'd feel drunk, or they'd stimulate another area and they'd feel happy. They'd stimulate another area, they'd feel sad. The fascinating, we learned a lot about the human brain from these studies. The brain area that people preferred to stimulate the most, this is really going to upset a few people, was the one that led to anger and frustration. And you think to yourself, well, that's just terrible. Are we just doomed? Right? Yeah. No. What turns out that anger and frustration is a signal to the brain and body that you need to do something in response to that. Usually move away or move forward and, and sort of enter an aggressive state.

• 1:15:22Jay Shetty?

  And that's trained, right? That's like habit.

• 1:15:26Speaker 01

  That probably comes through in habit. I think this is why people, I spend more time on Instagram than I do on other social media platforms. But listen, I'm not embarrassed to say you go on Twitter and it's a more combative zone.

• 1:15:38Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:38Speaker 01

  It's just the nature of the beast there. It's a more combative zone, in part because there are a lot of academics on there. It's more combative. So I notice if I log on to Twitter, I already get a little bit of an adrenaline surge. It's like, all right, you're ready to fight. And just knowing that we have this innate bias towards frustration and anger and that kind of friction. Hopefully, my wish is that it will allow people to relax around that and to realize, ah, this is sort of like the food that I immediately want to reach for. That's the kind of dopamine signal that you were talking about early on, but how am I going to feel afterward?

• 1:16:12Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:16:13Speaker 01

  How am I going to feel afterwards? And I would say that 99% of online interactions where people end up in these ridiculous battles later, both parties probably think, well, how did I get wrapped up in that?

• 1:16:23Jay Shetty?

  Totally.

• 1:16:23Speaker 01

  That's absolutely crazy. You know, you think you're scoring slam dunks on each other at the time, but it's ridiculous.

• 1:16:28Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:29Speaker 01

  So I think the thing to understand is that we have these asymmetries, but that we can learn to work with them. The way that a really, I think a really incredible psychiatrist, he's done a lot of work on trauma. Paul Conti describes it in a different context is that, and but, and he's like, to my mind, the expert on trauma and just has done beautiful work. Is that it's like those little kids' toys where there's a little ball bearing moving around in a maze. He described this to me. So this is all Paul Conti. He's an M D. And this is his work, not mine, his words. You know, there are times in which we are like that game where just a slight shift and all of a sudden the ball bearing goes down.

• 1:17:05Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05Speaker 01

  Shoot. And what we should all be striving for is for, you know, slightly concave and for it to kind of maybe move around a bit with the, with the, with the events of life and what we hear and see. That's what we should be striving toward. And that takes work. Some people are naturally there, but very few people are naturally there. But this is the power of meditation. This is the power of non-sleep deep rest. This is the power of good sleep or most nights. This is the power of excellent social relationships. This is the power of mindsets and intentions. That stuff gratitude practices. None of that stuff is weak. All of that stuff acts as a kind of a foundation from which we can approach things and go, yeah, the impulse is to get pretty upset about that, but I'm going to lean away from that. Very hard to do when we're not tending to that,

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  those foundational elements. Actually quite easy to do over time because it gives us the perspective. And I think that if we understand that we're being bombarded with this, it's like being at a buffet of junk food.

• 1:18:04Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:04Speaker 01

  But understanding that somewhere in that buffet is really nutritious food and that's what we should be aiming for. And learning to kind of override the the natural signals of, oh, I really want that and I really want that by thinking about exactly what you said earlier, which is how am I going to feel afterward? And what's that? That's dilating our perception of time. We're getting out of that slave to dopamine mode and we're starting to think about, no, I'm not going to let dopamine control me. I'm going to control dopamine. And that's powerful.

• 1:18:34Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I, I, I, what that sparks for me is also this idea that I've been in love with for a while is fragility and strength and how not being exposed to something doesn't protect you, but it makes you weaker.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  It absolutely does. And you know, nowadays, there's a big interest in so-called dopamine fasts. I, I think they have their place. You know, if people have been engaging in things that are high dopamine evoking behaviors, there is a place for this. This is one of the routes to sobriety. Beautiful work by my colleague at Stanford, Dr. Anna Lemke. She wrote Dopamine Nation, incredible book about dopamine in the context of addiction, but all kinds of addiction. She talks about this. There is a role for dopamine fasts. Really moving away from intensely pleasurable activities for about 30 days is necessary for some people to reset.

• 1:19:24Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  But it's naive for any of us to think that then you go back into the world and you're not being bombarded with temptation of different kinds. I've been, the whole idea is to bring the system back into balance so that you can notice the subtle inflections. Right? I guess the, the meditators and yogis, I always loved the language they use would be that. The kind of subtle, after meditation, you can notice the kind of subtle ripples in life, right? Whereas if you're just hard charging all the time, you miss so much.

• 1:19:49Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:19:50Speaker 01

  Again, I'm using the wrong language here.

• 1:19:52Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, beautiful.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  But I think that, so dopamine fasts have their place, but better to have your hands on the steering wheel, accelerator and brake of all these mechanisms and to go through. It's only when, you know, the car has been wrecked that it needs to go into the repair shop. Most of us don't need a dopamine fast. We need to understand how dopamine works. We need to do exactly what you described earlier, which is to extend the time domain. So that we think about, am I getting dopamine later also? Or is this just a quick up and down kind of event? Then I think we can move through life in a much more adaptive way.

• 1:20:23Jay Shetty?

  And then you mentioned, obviously, when you're talking about relationships, you know, we talked about how dopamine is there at the beginning, but then we're talking about serotonin and oxytocin, these inner feelings, which I love that description also of like how dopamine is this pursuit of external things. And oxytocin and serotonin are more about how we feel what we have. I think that was a, another great visual. And I love how you speak in symbols more than you know, like the, you know, it's, I really, everything you've been sharing today, I can visualize it and I really enjoy visual learning. And so when you were speaking earlier about how you can visualize a symbol, even if you don't have it physically. And even when you said that to me, I'm like, oh, that's really fascinating that dopamine is that oxytocin and serotonin is this.

• 1:21:06Jay Shetty?

  With oxytocin and serotonin, we know that a lot of the habits you just mentioned, they are what create this balance, right? So the reason why people are talking about decreasing dopamine, I guess, is because we've noticed that dopamine is shooting through the roof. And often what we do for oxytocin and serotonin are not really that balanced across the board. Uh, what are, let's look at relationships and go, is there a need to have dopamine in long-term relationships? Or are serotonin and oxytocin enough? And not just relationships, that applies to career. It applies, applies to everything, I feel.

• 1:21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. There's a wonderful book about this, written by a psychoanalyst in a slightly different context. The book, um, the title of the book is Can Love Last? And, and it's an interesting book. It's, it operates on the premise that when we first meet somebody and we want, this is in the context of romantic relationship, and we desire a romantic relationship with them. It's very much about objectification of the other person. And I don't mean objectification in the traditional sense, but we don't rely on them yet. Yeah. Right? We only rely on the ability to pursue and get them, right? Or for them to, for us to pursue them. Or them to like us. Exactly. Yeah. But we don't rely on them for safety at all. If that evolves to become a romantic relationship, right? With trust, then what happens is there's a true dependency there.

• 1:22:26Speaker 01

  If one person were to leave for any reason, die, or leave, or cheat, or break up, it is truly devastating to the safety mechanisms of the brain and body, right? It's a reactivation, actually, of a lot of the machinery that was designed for attachment between infant and parent. Right? Is it just as an important aside, the, the, all the work on attachment that was done by Bowlby and Maine and others in psychology of taking, deliberately taking babies away from their mothers and then reuniting them and evaluating the responses, batching them into different, all that circuitry isn't lost as we grow up. It's repurposed for a romantic attachment. There's no question about that. Absolutely. I couldn't agree more. No question about that. We just operate in the different domains of anxiety becomes about waiting for a text message

• 1:23:08Speaker 01

  as opposed to, you know, mother to come back in the room or, or nursing, et cetera. So same circuitry reapplied. As we advance into relationships, we become more dependent on people. But the idea, and that it's touched on quite a lot in this book, Can Love Last? Is that there is a need from time to time in some relationships to bring the dopamine element back in. Now, certain cultures have actually built this in in a very strategic way of actually having men and women not physically contact one another for several weeks out of each month in order to maintain the kind of quote unquote excitement of a relationship. Wow. Nowadays, we tend to have this model of lover and best friend, and sometimes even business partner, right? Literally.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Which for some people can work and for other people can quash all the excitement, right? It really depends. And especially nowadays where people are working a lot more from home, there isn't a tendency for people to spend much time apart and to miss one another. Missing one another, the yearning for the other person is a beautiful thing. Yeah. It's a painful but beautiful thing. What is that yearning? That yearning is the pain of the lack of dopamine and serotonin. I actually just came back from a trip and we were visiting a couple of friends. And they said it was very beautiful. They said they've been together a long time. They said they've had three nights apart in their entire relationship.

• 1:24:24Jay Shetty?

  Wow.

• 1:24:25Speaker 01

  And one of them got sick during that time apart. And I thought, that's beautiful. Now, for some people, that's a beautiful model. For other people, that would be excessive and it actually could eliminate a number of the positive neurochemical features of the relationship.

• 1:24:38Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:39Speaker 01

  And there's a lot of variation around this. So dopamine is required to quote unquote re-up the excitement in a relationship. How is that achieved? Well, dopamine is the molecule, as you recall, of reward prediction error, of novelty. So doing things that are not expected is great. Routine is great for serotonin and oxytocin. Predictability, routine predictability, same thing. Safety, routine predictability. Serotonin oxytocin system, no question about it. Dopamine is the neurochemical of novelty and pursuing new things. So for couples that are very set in their ways and feel very safe and homey together, wonderful, but creating ways in which they miss one another or creating new experiences for them to kind of re-up the dopamine in the relationship

• 1:25:24Speaker 01

  can have a tremendously positive effect. And I look forward to a day where neuroscience is actually incorporated into relationship design in an intelligent and respectful way that there are respectful, meaning that there are differences.

• 1:25:37Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  But we see a lot that people will just go out and get a new relationship, right? I'm of the mind that unless, you know, it's a dangerous situation, better to probably avoid divorce, right? Certainly for sake of children. I've heard, of course, that divorces can rescue relationships too. I understand there's a lot of nuance. But I think everyone would prefer emotionally, financially, et cetera, to be able to be in a great relationship for a long period of time.

• 1:26:02Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:02Speaker 01

  And so I think that understanding that the push-pull between dopamine and serotonin is key. And just to remember that missing someone, yearning for someone, is the anticipation of how great it's going to feel when together.

• 1:26:15Jay Shetty?

  Absolutely.

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  I think that that could go a long way. And also for people that get very, very, very excited about the new person, the new thing. Just be wary that not everyone's dopamine system works the same way.

• 1:26:29Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  And with dopamine, it's great to have increases in dopamine, but where it passes a threshold and it's very big peaks, where there's a peak, there's a crash and the crash is always asymmetrically deeper than the peak. There is no way around this. And so learn to temper the excitement.

• 1:26:45Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:45Speaker 01

  If you're an excitable person.

• 1:26:47Jay Shetty?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  And, uh, and I would say, learn to ramp up the excitement a little bit if you're somebody who's not so easily overwhelmed.

• 1:26:54Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, me and my wife, we've been married for six years and nearly together for 10.

• 1:26:59Speaker 01

  You seem to have an amazing, from the ex, from the outside.

• 1:27:02Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, as in, I would say, I always like to clarify that I don't think, you know, I grew up wanting a Hollywood romance and I, my views of love were defined by movies and music. And I realized that is not what love looks like at all. And my wife has been a great teacher to me in that space of showing me what a beautiful relationship can look like, but it doesn't look like how we think it is. And I think often when people see me and my wife, they may think we have that one version too. And I would just, I'm very careful about the idea that we have a fantastic relationship, but it isn't fantastic for the reasons that TV or movies has convinced us that relationships are good. But we spend around three months apart every single year, not by design or choice, just by work and

• 1:27:45Jay Shetty?

  life. And I haven't seen my wife for the last three months. So it will be one more month before I see her.

• 1:27:49Speaker 01

  So the yearning is real.

• 1:27:50Jay Shetty?

  I cannot wait to see her, but at the same time, I get too focused on myself. I get to have alone time. I get to refill and refuel myself. I get to discover new parts of my identity. I get to learn a new skill, like so many healthy, and of course we don't have children yet, so we don't have that responsibility. Um, but, but going to what you said, I, I see so much value in, in how we can be open to these ideas. I think that's the point, that it's not about there's one size fits all or one right way. But I want to shift, Andrew, with, uh, our conversation to something you brought up earlier because, um, and, and if you don't feel comfortable talking about it, we don't, but I, I heard and I, I've become aware that you are, you have tattoos. You have symbols.

• 1:28:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Tim Ferriss outed me on his podcast. Thanks, Tim. Yeah, I do. I, you know, I grew up a child of an academic and but then when I was a teenager, I got involved in skateboarding, punk rock music. I still have a lot of friends in that world. So the photographer for our podcast is from DC and Nike Skateboarding, Mike Blayback. I have good friends in that world. I've become friendly with guys like Danny Way and, you know, it's amazing. One of the greatest skateboarders of all time, by the way. I mean, he and I aren't close friends, but we've become friendly. And for me, that's, you know, I grew up in that. And yeah, those were cultures that made a lot of sense to me, given where I was at the time, and that have always felt to me like my first non-biological family.

• 1:29:13Speaker 01

  So I started getting tattooed pretty young, too young. And I will say to all of those out there that are thinking about it, think carefully. They are permanent. Things have changed around this. I always cover up my tattoos for the following reason, when doing public facing work, which is that generally when I'm trying to teach neuroscience, I'm trying to download ideas and transmit them. So I just want to avoid any distractions about the symbols that are meaningful to me because they just aren't relevant in that context. I have a good friend who explained it this way. He said, "Well, you know, maybe tattoos should be an important part of the hiring process because rather than covering them up, if you have a lot of tattoos, it is evidence that you can sit still for a long period of time while in intense pain."

• 1:29:58Jay Shetty?

  That's brilliant.

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  I'll also say this. I was fortunate to know good tattooers. A good tattoo, there are, there's a range out there.

• 1:30:04Jay Shetty?

  Yes.

• 1:30:05Speaker 01

  And along the lines of them being permanent, I will also say that black and gray last longer, doesn't fade than color. So I'll say all that.

• 1:30:13Jay Shetty?

  What's your most, what's the symbol on your body? And I'm sure you have many, but if you were to pick one, not your favorite, but one that feels really meaningful right now in your life?

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, first of all, it's funny because people often will say, what are you going to do when you're like sixty or sixty five? You got all these tattoos. And I just think, okay, well, first of all, now I have incentive to stay in shape. And second of all, um, you know, I actually worry about them disappearing because then I have to have them all redone. And they were pretty painful. It took a long time. I got a lot of them. So, uh, it took a long time. It's been twenty five years or more of getting tattooed. So, um, I can't pick just one, but I do have a picture of my, uh, Bulldog Mastiff Costello and a paw print of his life size or actual size.

• 1:30:58Jay Shetty?

  I love that.

• 1:30:58Speaker 01

  And I loved that dog. I had to put him down, um, a while. Yeah. And it was just, you know, the last line in the contract of good dog ownership is that you're going to put him down before they're in suffering. And it was a, it actually turned out to be a beautiful transition. I, I did it, you know, in a beautiful location. He went easy and I don't want to talk about too long because I'll cry out of love. I notice I, I still cry when I think about him, but it's not sadness. It took me like three months to realize. I was like, I always cry when I talk about Costello or I want to cry. And I realized it's because I love him. The feeling isn't sadness. He just, he had such an incredible.

• 1:31:31Jay Shetty?

  But that's that symbol that creates a physical response.

• 1:31:33Speaker 01

  I feel it in my heart right now. And anyone that knows me, I, I, I loved that dog like crazy. So there's that one. And then, um, and I don't want to focus on negative things, but again, it's a feeling of love. I talked about these three advisors that I had earlier. I was blessed with amazing advisors. And sadly, uh, first one died of suicide, second one cancer, who I was very close to, my third one cancer. So the, the, the morbid joke among people that know me is you don't want me to work for you. Now I can make that joke because all three of them had an incredible spirit about life. So I actually have all of their initials or symbols of them tattooed on my body and I miss them every day. But I also, you know, I think there is something powerful to embedding something in your body.

• 1:32:14Speaker 01

  Some people wear pendants. Um, obviously some people decided to get tattoos. Um, and you know, I've been encouraged at times. People are like, you know, just show your tattoos, be out there with them. I want to be very clear. I'm not ashamed of them at all. I'm proud of them.

• 1:32:28Jay Shetty?

  Oh, yeah. I didn't think that at all.

• 1:32:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. But for me, if I'm teaching or I'm trying to be an educator, I really want to emphasize the information. I also think, listen, the world's a complicated place and we can't always control people's interpretations of why we do things. So for the young people out there thinking about getting tattoos, um, just understand that's the world we live in. Although I think nowadays people are more accepting, so.

• 1:32:50Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, thank you for sharing both of those.

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, thank you.

• 1:32:52Jay Shetty?

  I wanted that more. I just appreciate hearing about, because we spoke about symbols and

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:32:58Jay Shetty?

  And that, for that reason, I really wanted to understand the symbols that, you know.

• 1:33:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, something about having, you know, having experiences that I've externalized to the surface of my body feels right. It's weird. They feel like my skin now.

• 1:33:11Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, of course they do.

• 1:33:12Speaker 01

  I never look at, I know when I get up in the morning, look in the mirror and go like, there's a tattoo and there's a tattoo. Normally, I just think like, oh, yeah, like, it's just, it just kind of becomes part of you, as you know, because obviously you.

• 1:33:25Jay Shetty?

  Yes, I only have three. I had a plan to have.

• 1:33:27Speaker 01

  It's not the number, it's the.

• 1:33:28Jay Shetty?

  I had a plan to have my whole upper body tattooed when I was younger, and then I became a monk. So I haven't had any since.

• 1:33:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:35Jay Shetty?

  Uh, but up until, I got my first one when I was 16, second one when I was 18, and the last one when I was like 21.

• 1:33:41Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:33:41Jay Shetty?

  And I did them all, and then I became a monk, and then I haven't had any since.

• 1:33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Jay Shetty?

  And my wife's been the other way around. Like, since we've been married, she's had like, she had one before we married, and I should have like seven more, so she's.

• 1:33:50Speaker 01

  That's great. Well, it's like, I don't wear any jewelry except a watch, but yeah, tattoos for me have been, um, it's been a fun journey and I, I'm 46 years old now, so I plan to keep going, you know.

• 1:34:00Jay Shetty?

  I love that.

• 1:34:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's, there's, at this point, it's, um, it's, I suppose it's neuroplasticity. It's built into me.

• 1:34:06Jay Shetty?

  Andrew, you've been so kind, gracious with your time. Uh, I am, you know, I, I've always known how phenomenally intelligent and smart and sharp and deeply studied you are, but I'm really grateful I got to experience your heart today in so many ways. And, uh, to me, that, that beautiful synergy you have is, is, is really meaningful to me to experience. I'm so grateful to you for being here, for taking the time for, for me, we've been in touch for a couple of years, maybe even it's been, or, you know, through messaging, but to really experience you in full today has been, been a treat for me. Uh, we end every On Purpose episode with a final five. These have to be answered in one word to one sentence maximum.

• 1:34:51Speaker 01

  Which for this academic might be a bit of a challenge.

• 1:34:54Jay Shetty?

  But we will try. So Andrew Huberman, these are your final five. Uh, the first question is, what is the best advice you've ever received in any area of life?

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  Know thyself, right? The Oracle said that, and it's absolutely true. We have to be good scientists of ourselves and understand where we have.

• 1:35:14Speaker 01

  Talents, competency and or challenges and then work with those.

• 1:35:18Jay Shetty?

  Beautiful. All right. Second question. What is the worst advice you've ever received or had?

• 1:35:24Speaker 01

  That everything is just experience. You know, the idea that all experiences are equivalent. Um, I would love to think that um, all our steps lead us to enlightenment kind of thing. But we have, I do believe that we, or at least I, need to be far more intentional than that and that we can be.

• 1:35:43Jay Shetty?

  Beautiful. Uh, question number three. What is something that you didn't value before, but you've learned to value now?

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  Almost embarrassed to say it, but um, family. You know, I've relied very heavily on friendship as a deep source of of uh, reinforcement in my life. I've leaned hard into that for many, many decades.

• 1:36:05Speaker 01

  I think in recently I've become quite moved by the the supports within my family that I hadn't realized that uh, really set me up so well to um, to do what I want to do in life.

• 1:36:16Jay Shetty?

  Beautiful. Love hearing that. Uh, question number four. What's the first thing you do in the morning and the last thing you do at night?

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  First thing I do in the morning is get outside and get sunlight. And if the sun isn't up, I flip on all the lights and then I go get sunlight. I also drink a glass of water before I go to sleep at night.

• 1:36:34Jay Shetty?

  Yoganidra? You're not doing that at night?

• 1:36:35Speaker 01

  No, I I actually, I think about those three people I was talking about before. I do every night. I just think about them. I don't know. It's been a long time now that accumulated over several decades and um, yeah, I think about them every night.

• 1:36:49Jay Shetty?

  Love that.

• 1:36:50Speaker 01

  I don't even think to do it. I just do it. I just try to.

• 1:36:53Jay Shetty?

  Yeah, I've I've a, I lost one of mine mentors. The others are still alive right now. One of them stayed for brain cancer and just a couple of years ago. And I I, when you said that, I was like, yeah, I I know. Yeah, know that feels like. So, yeah. All right. Fifth and final question. If you could create one law or set one habit that everyone had to do every day for the rest of their life, what would it be? I think I know what it's gonna be, but I'll have to ask you.

• 1:37:19Speaker 01

  Well, since most people assume it's sunlight viewing and I'll just, I'll just assume they're doing that anyway.

• 1:37:25Speaker 01

  I would die a happy person if people would adopt a practice of learning to deliberately calm down. Whether or not through non-sleep deep rest or a couple of deep breaths, find a tool because I really believe that much of the misfortune and pain of life could be avoided if people learn to calm down. I also know that there's a lot more joy to access when we do.

• 1:37:55Jay Shetty?

  Andrew, you're phenomenal. You blew my mind multiple times today. I hope this is not going to be the only time that we hang out. We agreed the first time we spoke that the podcast was an excuse to build our friendship.

• 1:38:06Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 1:38:07Jay Shetty?

  I feel like there is, this is a podcast episode that I would highly recommend that everyone listens to again, takes notes. When you make those notes, try and find those elements that you want to put into practice. I would highly recommend that everyone who's listened to this episode, go and subscribe to and listen to Andrew's podcast, which is a wealth of wisdom in everything we've discussed today. Today, we've tipped the tip of the iceberg. We've dived into so many different areas. You'll find episodes on every single aspect of what we've discussed on his podcast. Highly recommend that you go and check it out for the episodes that really connect. We didn't even dive into your incredible work deeply on vision or on sugar and diet.

• 1:38:49Jay Shetty?

  And you know, we haven't even, we didn't even get a go there and we'll do that hopefully another time. But please make sure that you tag Andrew and I on Twitter, maybe on Instagram to let us know what connected with you, what resonated with you, what is something that you're going to try this week because of this episode? How those habits are going? I love seeing you put these ideas and insights into practice. That is the whole goal of living a life that's on purpose. Andrew, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. Express my deepest gratitude for doing this. And yeah, any final words, anything you want to share that's on your mind or heart that you want to put out there in the world, over to you.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  Thank you. I want to genuinely say thank you. Again, we've known each other somewhat at a distance for a long time now. It's been a tremendous pleasure. You know, I, I look to social media and a lot and science and a lot of different landscapes for inspiration. It's been a remarkable thing to see what you've done. And, and it's so great to meet in person because I knew you were the real deal. But there, but you know, I'll just say this, I know many people already feel this, but I just want to say that to meet you in person is, is a real honor for me. And I just so admire what you're doing and I know the intent behind it is real and the way you show up to it is incredible.

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  And so I'm just, I'm floating on the, on the gratitude of, of being able to be here today, face to face. Thank you so much.

• 1:40:16Jay Shetty?

  Andrew, thank you so much. Everyone, make sure you share this episode, pass it along to a friend who needs to hear it. As I said, you can obviously go and subscribe and listen to Andrew's podcast, which is called Huberman Lab, which you will find on all podcast platforms. So make sure you do that. And of course, follow him on Instagram, as you can tell, he loves to be there too. Highly active, very present. Make sure you follow him for more insights and more intelligence. Thank you so much for watching this episode. Please do share it and I'll see you next time.

• 1:40:53Speaker 02

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