Andrew Huberman: How to Increase Your Dopamine by 60% & Optimize Your Brain’s Response to Stress

to help you improve your life. Some of your favorite topics are deep science, weight loss, physical fitness, navigating breakups, habit building, and understanding toxic relationships. Upcoming episodes include one of the biggest names in health and science world, renowned relationship therapist, and your favorite manifestation expert is back to drop new findings. Hit subscribe to not miss any of

these episodes. If you think of someone who would love this episode, send it to them to make their day.

and Behavioral Sciences at Stama School of Medicine. Doctor Huberman has made numerous significant contributions to the fields of brain development, brain function, and neural plasticity. In addition to his role at Stanford, doctor Huberman is the host of the incredible podcast Huberman Lab. If you're not a subscriber already, which I'd be very surprised, make sure you do subscribe. I'm so excited to welcome my friend and incredible expert, doctor

Andrew Huberman. Andrew, it's such a pleasure to have you here again. I'm so grateful that you took the time out and I can honestly say I've spent time with you offline and online, and what's been beautiful is just your humility, your sincerity and genuineness across the board. And I know we exchange texts and calls and messages frequently and I'm just loving our growing friendship. So thank you so much for what you do online but also who you are offline to me personally as a friend.

not feeling heard by their family members. People are surrounded by lots of people but feel really disconnected. We're seeing this growing rise of interconnectivity and more friends and more followers online, but then feeling really, saying what's the right word, not even isolated or disconnected because we feel like we're surrounded by people, but we feel emotionally distant from people.

What's happening from a neuroscience perspective as our friendships are getting weaker even though our followerships and online friendships are getting bigger.

are bidirectional and highly interconnected. So when we say brain, I'm more or less using it as a proxy for a whole nervous system, including body. The circuits that are responsible for feelings of social connectedness are deeply, deeply rooted in.

and what we all need at an aspirational level. We can't have a discussion about those without also, I believe having a discussion about the fact that we have hardwired aspects of our nervous system, meaning genetic programs that are written into the script of all our genomes, regardless of color, regardless of background, that are just scripted into our genome that allow us to breathe without thinking about it, digest food without thinking about it, keep our heart rate going

without thinking about it, elevated if it needs to be, slowed down if it needs to be, etc. And then hardwired circuitry that is there for bonding with our caretaker during early infancy and bonding with others of our species, and evaluating whether there is safety and acceptance from the

other members of our species. Now, these brain circuits have names, and we could get into that they almost all have some connectedness to an area of the brain called the hypothalamus, which sits above the roof of your mouth, which has many, many dense collections of neurons we call nuclei, responsible for everything from temperature regulation to feeding, to reproductive behavior and on and on, all the basic kind of housekeeping things.

But connected to those brain areas are brain areas that are associated with evaluating whether one is safe or not. So safety and acceptance. Then we can break down in the following way. If we look at it through this

neuroscience lens, safety is really about the ability to predict outcomes. Okay, and the brain, after being responsible for all these housekeeping functions heart rate et cetera, is largely a predictive organ It wants to understand what's going to happen next to the extent that it can then free up mental real estate neural real estate to work on creative projects or to build things, or to imagine things. Right, there's no creativity, there's no building in the absence of safety.

and acceptance, we say, what is safety about? Safety is about being able to predict outcomes when we are in the company of people, or we know we have people available to us. Should we need something food, maybe we need a monetary loan, Maybe we need a word of encouragement, Maybe we need somebody to bounce ideas off of whatever

it is that constitutes safety for us. Subjective, highly individual well, then when those circuits can quiet down, it says, if you know, they can finally quiet down, and so we have enough safety, so that then we can start to explore, iterating what we have in terms of new jobs, new creative ideas, new art, new you know, take a walk with somebody you care about. Right, those are not the sorts of things you do when you feel that you

are under siege, either real siege, physical siege, or emotional siege. Okay, then acceptance gets a little bit trickier to sort of

pinpoint in the brain. Acceptance likely dovetails neurologically with this these brain circuits for safety, because acceptance is really about well, given the range of expressions that we have, our range of humor, our range of political beliefs, our range of behaviors, can I predict that these safety mechanisms will still be there, These people will still be there, These things will still be there. Will they turn on me? Will they on

me right? Will they laugh with my jokes? Or will they decide they don't want to talk to me anymore because of my jokes? These kinds of things. Now, what I'm trying to not do here and at the same time do is to put a neuroscience lens onto these two things of safety and acceptance. But if we were to just take a step back and say, what do we know to absolutely be true? Well, safety and acceptance, belonging, peace, contentment, etc.

Come from a variety of sources. Certainly in our early relationship with our caretakers, the circuits form that are basically all about resonance with the caretaker. Alan Shore here at UCLA has done beautiful work on this. I think the book's title is called right Brain Psychotherapy, and it's really about how the bonding of infant and typically mother, but how the word caretaker the bonding of infant and I'll

just say mother since that's the more typical scenario. There's actually a lot of synchronization of brain networks early on, such that one's physical and mental state reflects the other and so on, and so from the very early stages that we come into the world, we are resonating with other people. Call it energy, if you want, call it emotions. It's neurochemical. Yes, it involves oxytocin, but a whole lot else.

In other words, we leave infancy and childhood and adolescence if we have a healthy upbringing with a sense of predictability. Someone can be there and then not be there. They're accessible if we need them, etc. Now, that sort of relationship, that connectivity between humans and safety and acceptance in those relationships has been explored extensively. I think we've all seen the image of the mother and child and the brain imaging and seeing some sort of collaborative activation of their

brain networks. That's been explored extensively, and it's beautiful work, and we could always use more of that sort of work. What's been explored far less is the safety and acceptance that occurs between romantic pairs, although there are laboratories starting to do that, having people, for instance, look at the face of their significant other angry, sad, et cetera, while in brain scanners, even scanning of two individuals separately at the same time, those sorts of things. Far less has

been done on this notion of friendship. But I think in this day and age, when well, it seems like everything is more complicated.

then you could only have one. But pretty soon we realize that we can have many great friends, many best friends, and I consider you one of those, Like we're growing our friendship. But there's no sense of trade off, even though, of course time is always a trade off. In fact, you were at a gathering at my home with many other friends.

to be dispersed by greater distances. And so when we hear about the loneliness crisis, are we hearing about a crisis of lack of connectivity with our parents, maybe with our siblings, possible with romantic others. That's a whole domain into itself. You cover a lot of that and the

challenges associated with finding and building healthy romantic relationship. But what we know for sure, based on extensive research now, is that there's a real dearth of close friendships for many, many people, not just in the US, but abroad as well. Now we could make an argument that it's by virtue of smartphones, but I don't think we want to go

there just yet. I think Jonathan Heights doing a beautiful job exploiting those ideas, and he's far better equipped to to kind of pinpoint the relationships causal er otherwise than I am. But here's what we know for sure. With friends, we can both hope for and expect safety and acceptance by virtue of having lots of different kinds of friends. Friends with whom we play sport, friends with whom we just hang out, friends with whom we don't really talk too much at all, and friends with whom we drop

into deep conversation with. So one of the things that I personally have found to be immensely beneficial in my own life, and for which it's clearly had an outsized positive effect relative that the time required is a simple good morning text that comes on a reliable schedule, meaning every single morning. Now this might sound almost trivial, but when I wake up in the morning, I either receive or send a good morning text to Right now, they

are about three people in that kind of collection. They're not talking to each other. But if I don't receive that text by noon, it activates something in me.

I think has both ancient and modern significance. Ancient in the sense that one of the first things that everyone experienced when we lived in small villages, because that's essentially how we evolved, was to see faces of other what biologists call conspecifics, other you know, and other same non conspecific people like people that could be romantic partners or family members or people we were going to work with.

We saw faces first thing in the morning, and we know with certainty, because there's a ton of beautiful work, mainly from Nancy Canwisher's laboratory MIT, a brilliant researcher, as well as a woman named Doris Soo who now is at Berkeley was at Caltech, that there's an immense amount of neural real estate devoted to the processing of faces,

not just facial expressions, but human faces in particular. Now monkeys have the same brain area for monkey faces, so this is not an area that's just designed to.

and forth, but the same person or persons consistently. I've experienced in my own life, in times both good and bad and kind of neutral, that it has this outsized positive effect. And I don't think that's because you know, I was lacking social interaction. My life is very full. I have a very busy business life. I can go

online and see faces. But when we go online and see a familiar influencer, or a familiar political figure, or a familiar even family member, yes they're there, and I think there's great power to that, But they aren't there specifically to see us. Although as creators we know that we are there to see our audience and for them to see us, that's a real thing, but it's quite

different to have this exchange, this reciprocity. And I really believe that if there was one thing that we could each and all do to better our lives, no matter how busy our social schedule or are at home environments, is to have at least one, but probably one to three, depending on your bandwidth, one to three friends that every single morning, when you wake up, you text them and they text you back, just a simple good morning. Why

Because it's the reliability. It's this notion of expectation being fulfilled. It's not a huge expectation, and this brings us back to safety and acceptance. Right, No one's going to text us good morning if they don't accept us if they dismiss us, and the safety is in the predictability of the interaction. Now for people that walk to the corner and they see the barista and they get their or they see their neighbor, et cetera. The importance of saying

hello to people on the street. This is something that's really fallen away these days. Depends on where you live, but people are very much in their phones. People are very much afraid, frankly, of how they will be reacted to if they were to reach out to somebody that they don't know. These basic human interactions take us back hundreds, if not thousands, maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

and alertness in nighttime sleep. I think these simple practices of saying good morning by text each morning to the same person or people and receiving a text back sets something on the shelf like Okay, we're good to move forward to today.

cell now, Head to Jayshetty dot me and get yours today. Yeah. Two things came to mind as you were speaking. Your habit of the text every morning makes me feel like you're getting to write a story with someone and force someone. And so there's this sense of someone knows my story. And now it's not like, oh, I speak to you once a month and we're catching up on everything that happened and you're missing the nuance and the extra in

the detail. It's like I'm getting to log my story in every day which means I really feel this person knows me and I know them. So now when we do get together this weekend to break bread, I don't have to do that in between small talk. They're already aware. And now we're just almost connecting all the dots, as opposed to I'm now using my time with you to plot all the dots. So there's that sense of like

story exchange, which I think is so important. I find that that my friends you've known me the longest, but the ones that I also consistently text every day, they're the ones that I feel understand the tapestry of my life and I know theirs. And so now you're not just looking at dots on a wall. Look, you're connecting the dots in that meeting, which I think is I don't know. I'd love to hear how that works out

from a neuroscience perspective. But the second thing that I was reminded by as you were speaking was I feel like writing down. I always encourage a lot of my clients to do this, to write down a list of emotions they'd like to experience with people. So it could be things like adventure, discovery, comfort, humor, love, whatever it may be just write down the list and then for each one write down the name of a different person.

Ideally that fulfills that need in your life, because often I feel like we put a lot of pressure on our romantic partners or one person in our life to be all these things, and the truth is, no matter how phenomenal anyone is or how much they love us, they just can't be that. And so if you have, hey, I've reached out to this friend when I want some adventure because they love it too. If I want to see a sports game, this is the person I reach out to. And then do the same in the opposite way.

Which one of those do you fulfill for your friends? What emotions do you help other people create? And I feel like if you look at friendship as a spectrum, as this broad set of connection points, rather than like this is my best friend as you were saying, or this is my number one friend, and we get away from hierarchy and we move more into a spectrum, I feel like that mixed in with the text today starts creating a much more healthier network of what connection means.

As well. It's also not just the same person doing the same thing every week.

was just yesterday. Definitely, But I'd be willing to bet that those were people that you spent a lot of day to daytime activity with them from a university, or you spend a lot of time just in the kind of everyday shared experience for a while, and then when you see each other again, it's like being right back there.

The neuroscience of this hasn't been explored near but given that our very own Surgeon General highlighted the loneliness crisis as one of the major crises in the world today, I think that in terms of simple solutions to big important problems, developing more connectivity with people through simple practices,

and again we're talking about a text here. I mean I will be the first to say that if you can hop on a phone call or you can get on you know, a video chat with somebody that would certainly be better, but many people just don't have time.

I'm sort of hoping this would eventually happen, in part because you know, I took some some kind of dangerous turns. You know, I took risks with my with my life at points where I didn't really intend to do that. But you know, you seek enough adventure, you're gonna you're gonna find adventure, and you have to be quite careful. I have friends with whom I had tons of adventure, and then now the adventures are far more docile and quiet, and of course the internal adventure is real as well.

I think that friends with whom we can just be one version of ourselves are wonderful friends. With whom we can be all versions of ourself is especially wonderful. That's the acceptance piece. Typically, I think we look more for that in romantic relationship. This notion of just like safety and acceptance being hallmarks of healthy romantic relationship, I think

those are also the hallmarks of healthy friendship. It's just that with friendship we can be a bit more segmented in terms of the number of different aspects of self that we need safety and acceptance with. I think with friendship also, you know, I've found it to be the case that really knowing what's going on with people has

become a little bit more difficult. There's this there's this kind of odd thing right where we're more interconnected in terms of availability of communication, but we're less aware of what's really going on for people. In fact, on the way here, I had a call with a friend and their headset was making a lot of noise, and so.

you know, is always complicated to just get feedback. It was very interesting, like I realized that I felt close to them before, but just the notion that they would ask me that how do I feel? Not what's going on lately? Not you know, am I feeling good or bad? Like a valuation of feelings, but just like what's going on?

And I stumbled a bit at first, but I can realize in saying it now, like I'm quite moved by the fact that they would ask that of all things, as opposed to like what's going on, what's your next podcast about? And coming to visit that sort of thing.

And so like I'm taking a lot of cues these days from people that make me feel very seen and accepted, you're one of them, I must say, Like, I don't just say that because we're in front of these microphones and sitting here, like you and I have been in touch a lot lately, through good times and hard times and a lot of different things.

is more your territory than mine. But I think in the end, I think it comes back to safety and acceptance, simple behaviors like a good morning check in, and then asking questions that might feel a little bit challenging for the other person to answer at first, but that really show a depth of care and interest that go beyond

just kind of like narrative and storytelling. And I think one thing that I'm also very eager about these days is breaking down some of the traditional stereotypes, like you know, for anyone that's listening to this and goes, oh, you know, I didn't you know, men don't talk that way or something, it's like, actually they do. They do, and if given the chance, they will open up about things that perhaps

they hadn't even thought about. And I confess on one of those people, maybe it was my y chromosome and got in the way of me thinking like, wait, what do you want me to talk about? What's in my heart? Hey, actually that's a really great question, thank you. And so I think this brings us back to these early circuits that are all about safety and acceptance, that are all about being able to predict things and basically to say, okay,

I don't have to be vigilant. That's really what safety is about, is about turning off the neural circuits for vigilance. When we turn off the neural circuits for vigilance, we can start to direct our neural circuits, vision, auditory, whatever thoughts towards an awareness of things that are both inside us and around us that keep us in that calm state. I mean, vigilance is associated with stress. Stresses associated with a narrowing of the visual field and narrowing of the

auditory fields. I'll just use this analogy because my sister and I last last summer, we always go to New York for our birthdays together. We went and saw what the Harry Potter like. Oh it's so good, right, and yeah, is wild? I mean the effects are so unbelievable. She's a big Harry Potter fan. I'm not okay, but just just spectacular effects.

All of us have such a wealth of historical, present, and future thinking cognition in our brains, but when we get anchored to a particular emotional state or topic, what ends up happening is that the available topics around it change in reference to how stressed we are. When we are stressed. All the topics, all the books on the shelf around that stress, are about that thing in how to solve it. And actually, this is why stress enhances our memory for solving that the things that can help

us solve that particular issue. But guess what is given up all the other distantly or not so distant, really related topics that lend themselves to creativity, to thinking about novel combinations of things. This is why our friend Rick Rubin, I think, is such a spectacularly creative individual, because he spends a lot of time putting his brain and body into a state in which he can remain in contact

with these other related or seemingly unrelated topics. Whereas when we're in a stressed mode, when we have to problem solve, when we are in vigilance, excuse me, we absolutely narrow our cognitive fields, our visual fields, our auditory fields. We

limit what we think is possible. And so I think great friendships, to bring it back to it, great relationships of all kinds have enough safety and acceptance in them that we can make our way through the practical constraints of the relationship in the day, the week, and the year. But that there's also a sense of creativity that there are new elements allowed to be brought in because there's enough safety and acceptance that we can turn down those vigilance circuits absolutely.

And then all of a sudden you're saying cold plunges, infrared sauna, beginning of a circadian rhythm in the morning, strength workouts, like all this other stuff, which initially is discomfort. It's difficult, it's doing hard things. And I know this was something you've been thinking about a lot, but I'm just trying to make that connection. We're wired safety and acceptance, but then all the stuff that's good for us seems to be hard, at least in the beginning.

in humans. So the cold plunge is not so much about pushing yourself as it is figuring out a way that you can overcome a sense of stress and then safely overcome a sense of kind of resistance to getting in the thing, and then safely increase these neurochemicals that then predictably shift your state to be more alert and at the same time relaxed, little bit blissed out, if we want to call it that. So you know, we

could list off protocol after protocol, right. If you tend to eat meals at a consistent time plus or minus an hour, doesn't matter if you're fast or not, you'll tend to be hungry about fifteen minutes or so before those meals. This is a wonderful thing because it increases this predictability. This lends itself to safety and acceptance because it allows you to have to not have to think

about a number of other things. So, you know, I've been criticized and fairly so that, gosh, there's so many protocols. How could anyone possibly do all these protocols? And the truth is that many of the protocols are you know, it's a buffet, and many of them, like how to organize your workspace or when you travel for jet lag, it's individual as to whether or not people.

on a consistent basis. You're going to feel much better, and you're going to have more energy, and you're going to be able to think about what you might want to do in your creative life and then do that. You'll have the time and energy to think about what you might want to do relationship wise, or friendship wise,

or building out these aspects of life. So it was never the intention that people do so many things that they don't have time for friendship or kids or relationship, or that their entire family or relationship be centered around

these protocols. Rather, they're designed to be weaved into everyday life, and sometimes when people experience pain points like people are having attentional issues, or people are experiencing depression, or they have a particular creative project and they want to tap into like open monitoring meditation for instance, very different as you know, far better than I than other forms of meditation.

Then they can access those specific tools. But I don't want to romanticize ancient times, but there was a lot more predictability in some domains of life in ancient times, assuming people were living in small villages, there was a lot more predictability, but there was also a lack of predictability. Someone could take off on a hunt or a gather, and if they didn't come back, we might assume they're

never coming back. Two nights later, they might come back and say that was a close call, or they come back with a great yield.

the refrigerator. You don't know what you're gonna cook, but you have a lot more available to you as options when you have when you know that all the basic macronutrients are covered, everything's all the bases are covered, and then you can start to think about what you would cook. Whereas if you've ever arrived late in the city, you get to your airbnb or your hotel and you see like three or four things and one lousy pan and thing one. Now you have to get the other kind

of creative. We have to adapt. And we've all done the unhealthy option because that was the only thing, or fasted because that was the healthiest option. So I think what we're what we're getting to here is that the human brain, like all animals, all animals need to know where they're going to sleep that night. I mean a dog goes into a new environment and is like trying to figure out where's its spot. It's all about space. You talk to any expert dog trainer, they'll tell you,

you know, it's all about negotiating space. Can they touch you? Can they not touch you? Are they allowed to be near you? Do they have to stay afar? Can they go into every room?

Where am I going to stay tonight? Is one of the most fundamental questions that we ask ourselves every single day, except if you know where you're going to stay to night, you don't ask yourself that, and you have mental real estate to devote to other things. So what we're really talking about here is is bookending the extremely basic fundamental

drives of the human brain for safety and acceptance. And then at the very other end is these aspirational things that we all seek, right, these notions of connectedness, of purpose, of fulfillment of peace. Again, I'm borrowing from Martha's beautiful list because I think it's so fundamental and it captures most,

if not all, of what we all seek. But I think that we get very much caught up in the how to reach goal A or be how to write the book how to make the money, how to grow a social media account, and we forget that at the core of everything is our relationship to our surroundings, to our inner landscape, into each other. And it always comes back to safety and acceptance and where we feel uncomfortable, where we feel like we didn't do things right or others didn't do them right for us or to us.

thought go away. So if you built a protocol, like I know where I'm sleeping tonight, you're now no longer having that thought of where am I sleeping tonight? And we may be asking ourselves a very different thing today because we figured out where to sleep, but we might be thinking like how I'm going to pay that bill. How am I gonna deal with that issue at home? What should I say to my kid?

and doesn't create a protocol. So I love the idea that people shou build the protocol that links with their most repeated thor rather than having to think, oh god, I've got to do twenty five things, it's like, well, no, what is the thing that is keeping you up at night or what is the thing that's causing you the greatest anxiety and try and solve for that. It's like, if you're out of milk, you go and buy milk. You don't say I've got to buy twenty five other things.

You just go filled a part of the refrigerator that's empty. Does that align on Yeah?

It's bidirectional. Of course. One of the reasons why I've been so emphatic about respiration protocols is a my lab published a clinical trial on this in collaboration with David Spiegel in our department of psychiatry, which basically could be summarized the following way. If you emphasize exhales, you tend to calm down, meaning you make them longer, more and intentional. Normally, we inhale actively and we passively exhale. Other species do

it the other way around some other species. If you deliberately emphasize your exhales, the duration, the intensity, or just even control the exhale actively, your heart rate slows. When we emphasize inhales, we don't necessarily have to do hyperventilation or tumo breathing or anything like that. We could, but those forms of breathing tend to bring up our activation state, and they emphasize inhales, both by virtue of vigor duration

or just putting more conscious attention to them. And there's a reason for this, it's called respiratory sinus a rhythmia. It's an actual phenomenon that links the heart and the vagus nerve and our diaphragm and our lungs.

serving an adaptive purpose. But we can get stuck on them, right, or they can get stuck in us. I don't know which one it is. But one of the reasons why I'm such a strong believer in people doing a practice like yoga nidra, which you know, and I must say, I know I've upset to some extent some people by coining something very similar non sleep deep rest or NSDR. I want to make very clear that I have the

utmost respect for yoga nidra as an ancient practice. Neither Yoga nidra, of course, nor NSDR or anything I developed.

deliberately relaxing the body. That's a very useful practice feel similar to meditation in a way, could be called a meditation, but it has some distinct benefits. First of all, a beautiful study that was done in Denmark I had a medical school in Copenhagen showed that people that do a yoga nidra practice get a sixty percent increase in baseline dopamine levels in the basal ganglia brain area that's associated with the preparation for movement and the withholding of movement.

So it essentially can be looked at as a practice that changes neurochemicals in the brain that restore mental and physical vigor. That's how I think of yoga nidra. It's

sort of like sleep. There are some stuff that he's emerging, including some that I'm planning with doctor Matt Walker at Berkeley, one of the pre eminent sleep researchers in the world, that are going to explore whether or not little pockets of the brain are actually sleeping or in rapid eye movement sleep like states during yoga nidra.

anticipating future. It could be about thinking about the past, it could be thinking about things that are happening now. But it's a very four brain dependent process doing is basal ganglia action generation withholding action and four brain circuitry as well, you know, I should say prefrontal cortical circuitry as well.

world within the confines of our skin. And there's something magical about shifting our perception to inter reception from our skin inward in that it takes us out of thinking. Whereas when we're monitoring the external world for reasons that are sort of logical but a little bit harder to articulate, then it's more about anticipating things, trying to figure out

what goes with what, what's separate from what. The moment we get to the level of our skin and inward we know what's what and what's separate from what.

And so when one steps back from the research literature and says, Okay, what do we know for sure about yoga nidra and SDR. We know that this can be done for ten minutes, twenty minutes, thirty minutes, or an hour. We know that it can very reliably improve levels of wakefulness, cognition, and vigor post nidra. We know that it restores dopamine levels to a market extent in the basal ganglia.

Suzuki's lab at NYU. I'm thinking of the studies that were done out of the University of Wisconsin that are talked about in Altered States, which is a wonderful book, and the work that you've talked about in your books.

When I think about Yogan Non Sleep, Deep Breast, it's really about restoring mental and physical vigor and getting better at regulating one's own autonomic internal kind of hinge, going back and forth between sympathetic and parasympathetic, that you know, kind of fight or flight and rest and digest, alert and calm, learning how to adjust that in a conscious way. And then when I think of practices like breath work,

well depends on the breath work. And then we can simplify it by saying, when inhales are more vigorous and made longer deliberately than exhales, heart rate goes up.

we know lends itself to neuroplaticity. What is hypnosis really for. It's not meditation, it's not to calm down, is to solve a specific problem, to quit smoking, to learn how to regulate pain, to you know, any number of different things that hypnosis has been shown in peer reviewed studies to do. So when I step back, I say, okay, meditation, non sleep, deep breast aka yoga nidra, I should say yoga nidra aka non non sleep, deep breast breath work

and hypnosis. Well, now we have a kit of tools that are available to us to adjust our internal state, and any one of those could be used to turn off thinking. But the most powerful one, in my opinion, and by way of experience and sort of how I'm viewing the research literature, I'm sure there are others out there that would disagree with me, and that's fine, is

yoga nidra. If ever, there was a practice that I wish every human being on the planet would do besides go out in view morning sunlight, it would be yoga nidra.

And of course this has been available for thousands of years, and unfortunately it has not gotten the traction worldwide that I think it deserves, and especially at this time I'm in human history, when the world seems so tense with friction of all sorts of kinds, but also internal friction for people, I think it's just, you know, it's something that I really really want to shine a light on as a tremendously beneficial tool for turning off thoughts when

it's necessary and for accessing you know, some people call these atypical states, but most people go from sleep to waking and sleep to waking without really an exploration of what those different states are like. So, in any event, forgive me for being long winded, but are those are the tools that when I step back and I say, where is there great neuroscience and physiology to support their use? What are the specific uses that seem especially valuable for

one practice versus another? And how do these practices differ because they often get conflated. Somebody starts breathwork and we think, oh, it's this type of breath work or that type of without thinking about what's being emphasized and where the heart rate is going. Or you think meditation, and of course there are many different kinds of meditation. Actually, I'd love to know from you. I know of kind of traditional third eye meditation, and I'm aware of open monitoring meditation.

What other sorts of meditation do you do.

one of the forms of meditation. And it almost feels like a humming, kind of cocoon effect of being kind of surrounded by this sound that's repeated again and again and again. So it can kind of get you into that kind of submerged, immersive, drowning feeling that I think most if they've done a sound bowl meditation, have experienced some form of what that could feel like. And again

you're getting into that atypical state. But going back to what you were saying, what really resonated for me and what I've always appreciated about your work, Andrew, I said this last time you came on the show, is this connection between these ancient practices and the modern euroscience. To back it up, like when you've talked about many many times about sunlight in the morning. I mean Suria numashkara,

which I mentioned last time is sun salutations. That is the practice that you would do when you wake up in the morning and you salute the sun. And it was this idea of allowing the sunlight to enter it through your eyes. And now you're talking about yoga nedra at the end of the day to go to sleep again.

much physical pain during that first month of recovery. The only way I could go to sleep was through yoga nidra because the thoughts of pain and of stress and of potential redamage or whatever it may have been, were so high that that state could only be lowered through yoga nidra. And when I'm jet lagged and I'm traveling across the world, yoga nedras might go to to be able to switch off in a new country when I'm like, gosh, I'm going to be up all night, will I make

it to my work thing tomorrow. Yoga nidra completely allows me to remove those thoughts and allow myself to fall asleep. So I use it all the time, and I couldn't encourage it. I'm so glad that you're broadcasting and helping people understand the science behind it, because, yeah, these ancient practices make sense, but they need a new language and a new translation today.

For me, yoga nidra is the practice to do when I wake up in the morning but I don't feel completely rested. I'll do anywhere from ten minutes to thirty minutes of that and then in the afternoon instead of a nap, I'll do Nidra and sometimes I'll fall asleep, admittedly, and then if I wake up in the middle of

the night, Nidra is my solution. I think that mind active body still is such an interesting and frankly unusual state unless we're in rapid movement sleep that most people, until they try it, can't really appreciate the immense value that it brings. But the beautiful thing is it works the first time, and it works every time. Our mutual friend Krubin, we're both lucky enough to know him and to spend a little bit of time with him. And

Rick has a practice that he does. I know because I went and visited him last summer and he would just sit there with his eyes closed, in his body very still. And at some point I asked him what are you doing and he said, well, I'm thinking. And I said, what's the benefit of doing this, you know? And he said, well, I come up with ideas this way, and I thought, oh, that's interesting, and it immediately rung A bell I had a guest on my podcast. It

was actually the first guest ever on my podcast. Professor by the name of doctor carldis Roth. He's an MDN a PhD. He's the world's arguably top bioengineer in the field of neuroscience. He's also a psychiatrist, so he sees patients, and he also has raised five children. He's one of these feetoms. His wife's centurologists at Stanford that you know.

He is a remarkable person, very deep thinker. And I was talking to him on the podcast and he said that he has a practice whereby at night, after his kids go to sleep, he sits at the table or on the couch, stills his body completely and forces himself to think in complete sentences for about an hour. And I thought to myself, WHOA, that's a wildly unusual practice. And I said, what is it about? And he said, well, that's how I structure my ideas. That's where new ideas

come to me. So Carl's doing that, Rick's doing that. You start looking back through history, you find out that Einstein had a walk in practice.

a lot of novel solutions to hard daytime problems. And I can confidently say that the field of neuroscience can say so much more about the different states of the mind in sleep than we can about the states of the mind in waken.

So we can talk about hypnosis, which is a narrowed context calm but alert, in which neuroplasticity brain changes are more available to us. This is supported by clinical and research data. We can talk about being attentive, we can talk about being stressed, but if you think about a it's not like very crude understanding. And so when I think about practices like body still, mind active, or even

you know, something that I found immensely beneficial. Every Sunday, I try and take a long hiker walk, and I try and just let my mind spool out whatever ideas it happens to have. You know, I like to think it's accessing some subconscious that's been you know, kind of packed with ideas and experiences during the week.

You know, what are the different states of mind? And so I would say that the last you know, really forty, but you know, thirty mainly, But five or six years of my life I've been a public educator in the realm of trying to teach people ways to harness their physiology in ways that serve them best for mental health

and physical health and performance. But I'm now starting to get very, very curious about how to evolve this thing that we call brain states, and our understanding of not just through language, but really understanding how to bring our mind into sharp focus, how to be in the best state of mind for connectedness, when to turn off empathy,

when to turn on empathy. I mean, these are all circuitries within us that are possible, and of course we have variation among us as a species as to whether or not we lean more towards logical thinking or empathic you know, affiliative thinking, these kinds of things. But you know, I really believe that you know, people like you Jay have an important role to play, and that the conversation between neuroscientists, people who have knowledge of meditative practices like yourself,

there's real value in the overlap. And you said, you know that you were grateful that we're talking about these things, ancient practices and what they might mean if I've learned anything, And I think I'm finally old enough that I can make that statement if I've learned anything in my life, right, hopefully, my life will continue, but if it, you know, should

I go someplace else before I anticipate. I think it's become very clear to me that whether or not you're talking about yoga tradition, or you're talking about neuroscience, or you're talking about traditional medicine or some of the more alternative medicines, the overlap in those Venn diagrams is where the real money is. And I don't necessarily mean financial gain.

I mean that's where the great ideas are. So I'm perfectly happy to talk about yoga, NIDRA, NSDR, brain circuits, associated dopamine, basal ganglia, because ultimately, if I'm here to do anything, it's to try and bridge these silos and bring people's awareness to the fact that we've all been talking about the same thing, and we're all seeking the same things. Safety, acceptance, creativity, you know, these connectedness, purpose fulfillment.

These loftier ideals start with having our physiology in a place where we can.

you know. But ultimately, the ability to go between these silos and to bridge them, as we're trying to do now and hopefully making some ground in this I believe we are is going to serve humanity very very well, because it's just been too long whereby people are holding back knowledge. The secret of some chemical, the secret of some practice, there's no secret. The secret is they all

work to some extent. The question is what are the commonalities, what are the mechanisms, and what are the practices that allow people to bring their brain and body into the state that best serves them and other people. And it's accessible. But we have to have a slightly open mind about the language. We have to give up the ego saying oh, that's my practice, that that breathwork is the domain of

my school or my thing. And frankly those arguments aren't working anymore anyway, because information is so freely available on the Internet. So in any case, there's a little bit of editorializing there, I realize, but it's also a calling to anyone that's interested in the mind and in the brain that you know, neuroscience is no longer the unique domain of neuroscientists, and I know that some of my neuroscience colleagues are like, oh boy, you know here he is,

just as if it's accessible to anybody. I'm not saying you can be a neurosurgeon if you aren't trained in neurosurgery, right, but I'm not saying that you can be an advanced meditative practitioner without putting in the hours. What I am saying is that there's overlap in the ven diagrams of these different fields. Sure, and the more collegiality, the faster and further we're going to go as a species.

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

where we're only good at dealing with these extremes. And when you're saying ven diagram, it's saying, well, get away

from the extremes and look at the overlaps. But I think we as a society on a micro level and at a macro level, have only learned how to deal with the pendulum swing on either side, all the extremes on either side, and therefore anything in the middle or the gray starts to feel uncomfortable, starts to feel It's not easy to say whether it's right or wrong, and therefore it's like, well, we're not even going to go there.

And I think anyone that I've spoken to at the top of their field, you being one of them, anyone we've ever had on the show, is far more interested in the gray, is far more in the gray, and is spending far more time exploring thought that is unclear, uncomfortable, and uncertain, because that's where life really has lived, in the unpredictable. That's the adventure, that is the adventure, that is the adventure. And I feel that that's why humans want to go to space, Like why is everyone fascinated

by space? Because it's not clear as to what it is and what's out there and where it is. And of course not many people will get to go to space, at least for now, but the idea being the same, that there has to be that curiosity from all of us to say, oh, where where are we in the same place? Like where are we connected on our idea? And where are there things that aren't similar but maybe

they're connected in a different way. And I think being able to oscillate between connectivity and disconnectedness is a need for the brain and the mind as opposed to this feeling of again, it goes back to what we started with safety and acceptance makes us feel today that you can't allow yourself to engage in an idea that doesn't fully connect with yours because that feels unsafe.

not a solution. I think that when we really get down to the neuroscience of self understanding, when people really start to understand that the human brain is a magnificent machine and organ but that it has limitations, and we can start to understand our own limitations, you know that it can take us just up to this point, but not further, and that we can rely on healthy collective thinking healthy collective thinking to get us over these divides.

I think that's when we're finally going to evolve as a species. I really do, when we start being able to exit our own brain and our group think to be able to really come to solutions, because often we just think in terms of compromise and conflict, which are essential things to think about, But ultimately, understanding the limits of our cognit and how emotion drives cognition is really how we're going to be able to evolve our beliefs about what's possible. And by the way, that's not meant

to just be a bunch of aspirational word salad. That's like a real possibility if we can just have the self reflection to understand we know certain things, we believe certain things, but that this neural architecture that we call our brain is limited in the extent to which it can see into the future and make the best decisions for everybody. We operate thinking that, but that's not how

it works. And of course we can't look to any one individual to solve the problem for everybody, now, will it be AI?

discoveries in the last one hundred years of neuroscience. It's a collection of studies on an area of the brain called the anterior mid singulate cortex. Most people have never heard of this brain area, including many neuroscientists, doctor neurosurgeon. They know where it is talktor a neuroscientists unless they teach neuroanatomy, which I happened to. Most don't know where it is in the brain, and most didn't know what

it did because it hadn't been explored. And then a colleague of mine at Stamford School of Medicine named Joe Parvezi did an incredible study where he was doing neurosurgery and stimulating different brain areas as a means to try and find the location where he needed to do the surgery, and he stumbled upon an area called the anterior mid singulate cortex, where if he stimulated with an electrode, people because they were awake during the neurosurgery, would report feeling

as if there was some conflict pressing on them. Some one't even described as I feel like I'm driving into a storm, but I feel ready.

grows in volume. Other people who fail to successfully engage in a regular challenging activity, the anterior mid singulate cortex didn't increase in volume in the same way.

maintain their cognition later into life. These are people that don't undergo the normal age related decline in cognition separate from Alzheimer's type dementia. You know, everybody as they get older develops less working memory, the ability to keep ideas in mind in the short term. Superagers seem to overcome all that and they live longer. So you could say, well, this is a case of reverse causality. They live longer, so they have a bigger brain area called the interim

and singular cortex. We don't really know what the direction of causality is. Could just be correlation, but it all gets ultra interesting when you start to tack together willpower the taking on of new things, learning things in neuroplasticity and life span. And it may be that that quad fecta represents what we think of as the will to live is associated with an intense curiosity and desire to

bring in new ideas and modes of thinking. And new ideas and modes of thinking then feedback on our feelings of how we could gain reward internal reward of course, dopamine being the universal currency of reward as a means to move forward.

If you don't want to meditate in the morning, and you do five minutes or ten minutes of meditation, then you just enhanced the activation of your inter amid singulate cortex. So it's about it's not just about doing hard things, it's about really pushing through resistance. And the reason I bring this up now as opposed to a discussion about like how to get more tenacious or have stronger willpower.

The reason is, I believe that this lofty notion of humans evolving to more collective thinking, to embracing new ways to bridge divides that harm human beings at scale or just locally, is going to emerge through only through the willingness to embrace the internal friction that is hearing things and seeing things that we don't like and being able

to take a stance of adaptive response whatever that is. Now, of course, there are things that we hear and see and don't like that activate enough of a sense of injustice in us that that's all it does. It just brings us to the point of wanting to impart justice. But what I'm talking about here differences in opinion, strongly polarized views that lead to all sorts of things, as we know, good and bad and everything in between. And if people had the capacity to feel that friction and

to stay in a mode of some open cognition. I think we would come up with novel solutions. I really think the next iteration of human beings is collective consciousness. You know, it sounds lofty, sounds woo, but it's basically lots of minds working together, even minds that oppose one another. In ideology, as a means to find out novel solutions to hard problems that vex us all and that in some cases really harm us all.

but learning to love Judas. And I was thinking how brilliant that was because it goes back to that point of what's uncomfortable, like it's easy to love the good person it's learning to love or understand, at least the person who may have done, you know, something that you didn't recognize or didn't understand or didn't fully connect with. And I think often we see that and we think, oh, but then there's no accountability, there's not this, there's no that.

But really, what we're saying is are we willing to do as you said, the most challenging thing, which is something you don't enjoy doing. It's not something you're excited by. If you're enjoying the challenge, it's no longer the challenge right if you're it's always like I remember a training and conditioning coach used to tell me, like Jay, if you're sitting in the cold plunge, just to get your minutes up so you can tell someone how long you sat in there. He goes, then that means it wasn't

hard beyond that certain point. It was like, you should get out once it's easy because it's not having the effect you wanted to have.

badly do I not want to get in? And I would say that if it's five to ten, well that's a wall. If it's anywhere in the fire, that that's one wall you have to get over. So then you get in, and then at some point there will be the desire to get out. That's the second wall. Maybe it comes within five seconds, maybe it comes within twenty seconds, that's the second wall. So what I would do is count walls. What are the quote unquote walls. The walls

are waves of adrenaline being released into your body. And sometimes they are very close together, those waves, and sometimes they're more distantly spaced apart. Now, of course, at some point you go numb and then you don't feel them anymore. We don't suggest that, but if you think to yourself, gosh, today, I really don't want to get in.

is your subjective relationship to the whole thing. For instance, if you do cold exposure at night when you're tired, it's a far and away different experience than in the morning after going for a run and you're too warm. So I can't say forty five degrees fahrenheit for ninety seconds, although if you want to start there, that's fine, provided it.

this happen the other day. I was in a really hard yesterday, a hard conversation something first thing in the morning. It was like, wait, what seriously misunderstanding hard conversation? And I remember, here we are, our voices are going up. We weren't yelling, but like it was a peaceful morning until that moment, and you could kind of feel the energy in the room going up. And I was thinking to myself, Okay, how am I And I thought, Oh,

this is like a wall in the thing. And I said, and I said, because we have this language at home. I said, I feel like there's a wall of adrenaline hitting us. Whether we both started laughing, and then we kind of reverted to what we were doing and then we calmed down, and you know, we talk about taking breaks, and that's wonderful. It's a wonderful tool that you talked about in your book on relationships. There's so many valuable

tools in there. By the way, it's like, thank you for writing that book, so valuable.

So learning to watch those pass in the cold plunge, in the cold shower, on a hard run or whatever it is, but the cold seems to be the universal stressful stimulus for everybody is so valuable more than marking off, you know, fifteen minutes or five minutes in the cold plunge, and some days it's fifteen seconds, sometimes it's thirty. And for somebody learning the cold plunge, it's like, hey, can you just even get near the thing or in it?

And I think there's real value there. Yeah, So in any event, But.

does it take. Just as we have to learn to sit in that cold and regulate ourselves and adapt, what does it take to sit in the pain outside of the tub, regulate ourselves, rise to a place of peace, and then respond and then get together. And as you said, the League of reasonable the real league of reasonable people, Like I think we'd all aspire towards that. I think when I hear that, I think we all go. I think I'm a reasonable person. I think most of us would say that.

my parents were. They had flaws like everybody else. But one of the things that I've really tried to discard as I've gotten older, is cynicism. It's one of the things that my sister and I talk a lot about, like it never served anyone well to be cynical. You can be critical and discerning, but cynical doesn't accomplish anything except to separate us from people. That's my belief. And I'm not trying to encourage people to be soft in a way that's unsafe for them. Like I said, be discerning.

You know, safety is important. But cynicism, I don't know.

feature within ourselves. But it involves a state of calm, a feeling of safety, and you know, I guess you know, laced into everything I'm saying today is is it is a.

important books. And then I thought, well, how old do you have to be in order to have had enough life experience to be able to say things that are aspirational about how you'd like to see the world where people change for the better. And you know, I've decided that the age on that is is one day, you know, like one day. So this is a bit of an

encouragement for people out there. If you have ideas about ways that you and others can be better to really like write them down and evolve them right that they often need some evolution to be able to be received in the right way, But then share those I was thinking a moment ago, I wanted your opinion on this so in thinking about emotional interaction and the ways in which the world can be beautiful or challenging depending on the energy that's around us. I once read, I forget

his name, so forgive me. He's an investor. I think it was on the Tim Ferriss podcast, A very successful investor, young guy. I think he lived in Trucky, of all places. He once said, you know, email is a public post to do list. And it completely changed in that one moment the way that I thought about email, because the emails are useful, but then I realized, oh yeah, I'm like going in there. It's like all these things I need to do. And when I started my laboratory, I

knew I had two major challenges. One, get grants so I could do the work you need money to do research, publish great papers. And that meant had to interact with my lab into a bunch of other things. Other things were important, teaching included, but those were the main ones. Email was a public post to do list, so I needed to be very careful in terms of my interaction with email. Nowadays, I feel like social media is a public not necessarily projection, but evacuation of emotion. So when

I go on to social media in the morning. If I'm not careful, they really careful and thoughtful about what I look at. I'm basically getting the emotional energy of all these people. And some of them, like you, are trying to help people, and some of them are just in evacuative expression of their pain. Others are in evacuative expression of cynicism. And I don't think I'm alone in this. Like I'm a pretty sensitive person, or maybe I'm getting more sensitive, but I'm very sensitive to this stuff.

of the world. The systems that have let people down and truly made them feel that they can't rely on them, and the systems that have done a disservice in justice, which has now led to this emotional evacuation as you called it, and to me using it as a way of having deeper empathy, deeper compassion, a genuine sense of recognition that although everyone does have choice and does have agency, definitely there is an overarching energetic system that is almost

keeping people imprisoned in this space, and that prison is now addictive to stay in. I feel for that. I deeply feel for that, and it affects me because I recognize that people haven't been set up for success by the education system, by the way the economy is set up, by the way anything's set up, like, it's not set people up for success. And naturally for people in their home they went a lot of people went set up

for success. And so we have to zoom our and look at the context because if I zoom in and just look at that one tweet or that one comment, oh god, it's like a bullet to the chest, you know. And it's like I've always had this vision and I've kind of done it mentally sometimes because I can't do

it physically. And for every person that feels that way, I've always wanted I was like I wish I could sit down with every person individually who felt a certain way and have a contextually relevant, honest, authentic conversation with each person and beare my soul and be vulnerable and open my heart. But we can't. And I also know that one post can't do that for everyone, Like it's not possible for one quote, one image, one message, one podcast episode that will speak to everyone to make everyone

feel seen, heard and understood. I could just about do that on a one to one level, let alone a one to one hundred million level. How are you going

to do that? And so I also have empathy for myself, and I extend that compassion back to myself and recognize I'm a limited human being who, just as that individual is limited by their systems and their setup and their energy, so am I. And there's no way in which I could respond to this individual and satisfy this exchange with one hundred and forty two hundred and eighty characters, like,

how's that even possible? And so I think, to me, deepening my compassion and empathy externally and internally have been the only relevant tools, as woo wo or as spiritual as they may sound, because there is no practical habit based solution that I can give you some tactics and ideas, but I know as well that at one point they're just logical and theoretical and practical, but they're not. Yeah,

they don't feel. They don't hit me there, and so to me, I've seen it all as a simulation and an experiment to deepen human emotion, deep in human empathy, deep in human compassion, and a reminder of my fallibility, so that I can embrace my own insignificance, so that I can therefore take shelter in the Source and the universe and God, and to allow for space for that.

If I was able to control every one of these things and make it work perfectly, I may, in a very crude sense, you may, under false pretenses, stop believing you're the controller to some degree. And I think anyone who's experienced success in certain domains starts to feel like the controller in their relevant fields. And I think all of these things are expedited in order just to encourage you to have an ego death and pulverize the arrogance

of whatever kind. By the way, I don't mean in a sense of that I feel I'm important, but we all have a sense of I'm the controller. I can make things work, I know what's right, I'm this, I'm that, And this is all reminding us of we're not the controller.

We have to ultimately take shelter. We have to ultimately give up the reins, and I ultimately have to surrender and accept that there is a greater source, there is a greater power, and that when I'm in connection with that and I'm in service of that, then I'm happy and I'm joyful. But if I'm trying to be that or extrapolate energy from that to control and navigate, then I'm forever going to be unhappy. So to me, that's a quick version of the stuff that I try and

work on not to be helpless. I don't feel helpless in that I feel at home. It's almost like, you know, when you're taking shelter of a greater source to take care of things you can't take care of. It's not because you're helpless or because you're weak. It's actually the greatest sign of strength to know I can call up a friend to help me. You know, Am I more strong because I can move home myself and not ask

anyone for help? Or am I stronger because three of my friends came and helped me out and carry the load. I'm stronger asking for help. I have a bad community and network. You'd say that person smarter in healthier, and so I think of that same way on a universal level, at least I tried to. I'm working on it.

or not believe what they believe in. I think that the notion of giving up trying to control everything and giving over control two more universal forces or a universal force, whatever one's mode of thinking happens to be I believe they're entitled to is probably the most peace inducing step I've ever taken.

I forget her name at the moment, because I just learned about her work in the Department of Anthropology, who has spent her entire career studying people's inner voices, people who hear voices, people hear the voices of others, and sure this sometimes goes into the domain of people who have auditory hallucinations and so forth, but also just these different scripts that people have in their mind that include their own voices and other voices, voices we've internalized from childhood.

This resonates with me a lot because when I was a kid, after my parents who put me to sleep, I used to arrange dialogues between people I had heard that day, and I could hear their voices in very clear ways in my head, and I would remember things they said, and I could create these dialogues. And so I've also always had a very strong audiographic memory. It's not as if everything I hear I remember a verbatim. That actually would be a super skill would have saved

me in a lot of arguments. But in all seriousness, I think what you describe about essentially a letting go or a giving over of the need for the control that we all experience. The desire for control is really where the solution wise. I think I know this because many people have said it, and it's very hard to do, but that once one does it.

music as well dance. There are other forms of communication, certainly sculpture and I hear we go on and on.

I think people speaking onto the internet is our you know, this is our stone tablets, these our cave drawings.

wanted to ask you about please. Lately, I try I spend real time trying to feel experiences more than just think about them.

It's a different form of intelligence. It's the one that I think has access to our unconscious mind in a way that thinking doesn't always have access to.

and that part's cool. But the really cool part is you go in the back where you have all the dog breeders, with all the different breeds of dogs, usually five or six of each breed, and you can see the immense variation both in the structure but also the temperaments and therefore the nervous systems of these different animals all the same species also dogs, by the way, you have little ones and you have giants in Chihuahuas and

great Danes in the same species. As far as I know, it's the greatest variation and brain and body size of any species. There's probably a you know, another species out there that someone will point doubt that you know makes me wrong, but it's at least the far end of the continuum in that sense. So I'm back there and I'm thinking I really want a dog. At some point I'm thinking I want a Rhodesian ridgeback, or I really like the you know, the wolf founds. I really love

the Afghans. They look like people in dog suits, the way they want to move around and so so bright eyed. And then I looked over in the corner and there's this row of bulldogs snoring like a xylophone. And I went over and I asked the woman there, I said, an interesting breed of dog and said, oh, they're the best. And I said, well, everyone here says that about their breed of dog and said, yeah, but they're really the

sweetest and they are the essence of efficiency. And so I woke one up and I started playing with it, and you realize that they don't react unless they need to. Some have more energy than others, but when they need to, they have a lot of energy available to them. But they have very little spontaneous movement. Now I'm not like this. I think I'm probably becoming more like this as the years go by, through some effort. But other breeds of

dogs are constantly moving. They're like peripatetic. They're constantly moving. They're constantly moving, and it makes me a little nervous. Whereas the bulldog just made me feel very calm. So I got Costello not that day. I got him elsewhere, and I found that his presence, even his loud snoring, made me very calm. And he was not reactive to things that did not require reactivity to He was reactive when appropriate. And I'm not saying the bulldog is the

perfect breed. In fact, I discourage people from getting them unless they have the means to take care of them, because they tend to have a lot of health issues.

you start to realize there's tremendous variation there. There's a bright eyed inness to certain people you're one of them, other like really at the level of their eyes that are there with you, and that also exude a feeling of calm. And so I've started paying more attention to

how things make me feel. And I think This is why going on social media now, I feel like I'm eating twenty fifty five different cuisines at once, which would be disgusting, Whereas if I just kind of focus on one or two things, like I love different cuisine, different types.

I think what we're really talking about here is turning off traditional modes of thinking, which tend to be single track or dual track, and sensing energy, I think is more about taking a broader band analysis of what's going on, more visual field, more sensory field, and bringing it all

in at once. And this is what we at least understand other animals to do, because they lack language at least in our form, and so they have to make decisions about moving toward, away from, or staying in a neutral position based on a kind of gestalt, like a whole picture of something. And I think it can be a very useful rudder with which to navigate. Now, of course, we also have to sharpen our attention and sharpen our

intellect around certain things. But I think as time goes on, I'm I don't know, I'm trying to become more bulldog like for myself and for the people in my life. Because Costello made me feel safe, certainly made me feel accepted. He was very stubborn, but he also he took great delight in things, and he also could be quite the protector if he needed to be. And so I really thought, like, wow, if ever there was some energy is to embody, it would be the bulldog energy. And maybe for other people

they need to embody a different energy. I think we can learn a lot by paying attention to animals, you know, Like I said, I spend some time with Rick Rubin, and I won't compare him to a bulldog. He's not like a bulldog like he's like a wolfhound. He's extremely still but then when he opens his mouth, that mind is it's like it's a force. And I know Rick well enough to know that he has this amazing ability to get very close to the energy of music and

other people, but he doesn't get absorbed by it. It doesn't change him in a way that changes your experience of him. He's having experiences, but like there's a stability to him.

people benefit. And so you've also clearly learned to surround yourself with people that allow you to give and to receive.

And to some extent, sure there's you know edits and production all that kind of stuff, but it's just you being you. And to me, that's the most beautiful thing. It's what really works and it's what really matters, and I think it's what people should do even when there's no recording. You certainly do you know you're the same am mic and off Mike. It's one of the things I love about you, and I think it's what people

we need to do. We all need to like also embrace that unique wiring that we each have.

that's the beauty of it too. It's that I hope that everyone has been listening and watching today knows and loves you for what you do on a daily basis, but then can accept that there are different facets to you, There are different elements to you. There are different things that you're curious about, and you've shown them all today and laid them out. When they come to Huberman Lab, they're getting something very specific and they're getting that part.

But you allow yourself to showcase different parts of your personality and I'm grateful that you shared that with me, you share that with my community. I want to thank you for joining me today and being so open and vulnerable and giving with your space and energy. And I'm glad that you feel confident and open enough to be able to do that, because it goes back to everything we've discussed today. We all want to feel safe and accepted, but in order to do that, we want all parts

of ourselves to be accepted. Otherwise we can't truly feel safe. And so if I'm only accepted for one part of me, then I don't feel safe, and I feel safe only sharing one part of myself, then I'm not truly accepted. And so I think everything we've talked about today comes around beautifully full circle. And thank you for making me feel safe and accepted. Thank you for being safe and accepted.

And I hope everyone who's listening and watching today focuses on doing that for themselves and the people they love. That would be a beautiful ripple effect from this show, that people go off and create that space for the people in their lives.