Welcome to the huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine. Today. We are discussing tools for mood and mental health. I will include tools and resources taken from the guest episode that I did with. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett who is a psychologist and neuroscientist who's laboratory focuses on mood and emotion.
During that episode. She mentioned several important tools that I do believe everybody should apply in that indeed. I've been applying to my
own life and have found to be extremely beneficial. I will
also highlight some of the specific research articles. Those tools are based on which were not covered
in the podcast with Lisa. I will
also discuss tools glean from the for episode series that I did on Mental Health with dr. Paul Conti who is a medical doctor specializing in Psychiatry
and that episode as some of you may already
know.
Focused on mental health and the self as well as relationships and it included a deep discussion of what is that the self we talked about the unconscious mind and the conscious mind and we also covered a lot of tools for understanding oneself both within the context of therapy. But also within the context of things that one can do alone and that require zero cost in addition. We talked about tools for improving relationships. We talked about first principles of self-care. So I will provide highlights and takeaways of those tools.
In today's episode
and thirdly I will include tools what we often refer to as protocols gleaned from some recent Publications indeed Publications that came out as recently as two weeks ago, which really emphasize specific things that we can all do that again are zero cost that have been shown in quality peer reviewed research to significantly improve mood and mental health. For instance. If you are a regular listener of this podcast, you are probably familiar with my nearly constant.
Reminder that people should view morning sunlight and afternoon sunlight and if you can't to embrace them
Alternatives like looking at bright artificial light, although sunlight is best.
Well, there was a recent paper published in the journal Nature mental health and excellent Journal focusing on not just the positive effects of viewing light at those times of day and indeed throughout the day but also the independent and positive effects of being in darkness for six to eight hours every night. That's right. Not only is light durable.
The day correlated with significantly improved mental health outcomes, but Darkness at night that is avoiding lights. Not just bright lights but lights for up to eight hours at certain periods of your 24-hour circadian cycle has been correlated with improved mental health outcomes and indeed has been shown to significantly offset certain negative mental health outcomes. This is a spectacular study again. It involved a enormous number of research subjects more than 85,000 research.
Subjects and it touches on a large number of actionable protocols that I've distilled down to just one or two things that all of us can easily do
to improve our mood and mental health on a consistent
basis before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is
separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford
it is however a part of my desire and effort to bring zero
cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in
keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the
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A trial? Okay. Let's talk about tools for improving mood and mental health. I
think it goes without saying that
these are extremely important topics for everyone not just to know about but in my opinion also for people to implement and the reason is that we are currently in
a worldwide mental health crises and while we could debate the reason why we are in a worldwide mental health crises.
It's very very clear that mood disorders and challenges with mental health abound
of course, there are many different therapies for the treatment of mood disorders and mental health
everything from talk therapy with a psychologist or psychiatrist
or social
worker prescription drug treatments, their nutritional approaches somatic approaches,
and I want to be clear that I do believe that there's value in all of these approaches what tends to matter in terms of what sorts of tools and approaches one adopts includes both access. So whether or not people have access to these
types of therapies whether or not they can afford them on it.
System basis and also of course the
severity of the mood or mental health disorder and I'd be remiss of course if I
didn't make the statement and I don't say this just to
protect me. I also say this to protect all
of you and those that you know that if you are concerned about yourself or somebody else having a serious mood or mental health disorder, please
do seek out help from a licensed clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or other health care professional who's qualified to help you in that regard
with that said we can now have a discussion about tools and protocols for enhancing mood.
And mental health that truly apply
to everybody regardless of age
to start off. I want to talk about a fundamental aspect
of mood and mental health
enhancement that was discussed both in the guest episode with
dr. Lisa Feldman
Barrett as well as in the guest series with dr. Paul Conte and that has to do with what dr. Paul Conti referred to as the first principles of
self-care or mental health
the first principles of self-care include but are not limited to taking excellent care of
one's buying.
Elegy, which of course includes both the mind and the
body and in order to make this very simple and actionable. I've distilled out what I refer to as the big six sometimes referred to these as the six major
pillars of Health both mental health and physical health as well as performance for that matter,
but if we're going to talk about tools for mood and mental health, we absolutely can't discard discussions
about our
biology. That is we need to make sure that we're taking care of our normal.
Biological function and indeed enhancing the production of
specific neurotransmitters and neuromodulators that we
are optimizing. Yes. I use the word optimizing the function of our so-called autonomic nervous system that aspect of our nervous system that's humming in the background all the time. It's operating unconsciously to regulate our
sleep/wake Cycles. It's
regulating how well or poorly we react to things. It's regulating how much dopamine serotonin epinephrine is
: we're producing all of this stuff is humming in the background and sets the stage for all the conscious work that we might put to
for instance trying to understand what our life narrative is.
What our unconscious mind is doing what sorts of defense's in my producing all of the sort of high level and directed work that we're going to talk about a little bit later exist on a background of
autonomic function of
neurotransmitter production of hormone production,
not just testosterone and estrogen but things like cortisol.
Actin and on and on
so it's important to understand that if our goal is to be in the best possible mood
given our life circumstances and to have the best possible mental
health given our life circumstances and to improve our mood and mental health consistently over time that we have to pay attention to what I'm referring to here
as the big sex or the six pillars of mental health. And those are just to list them off then I'll go into a little bit more
detail sleep sunlight. Although I'd
To modify sunlight because based on some new data that just came out a couple of weeks ago. I'd like to now make that second pillar not sunlight but light / dark so we could even just think about it as a light
when and how much light you get. But
what you'll soon learn is that how much dark you get is
also extremely important. So we've got
sleep light movement is the third nutrition social
connection and Stress Control now, these are
topics that I've spoken about extensively on previous huberman Lab podcast episodes, so I don't want to go into a deep dive of each of these six pillars right now, but I am going to just give you a few highlights of each and then of course, we will provide links in the show notes captions for which you
can go on the Deep dive if you
like and I also would like to mention that if you ever have questions about specific protocols or tools and you're seeking those out or previous episodes or specific time stamps of previous episodes of this podcast, you can go to our newly revamped huberman lab Dot
I'm website and put any topic of Interest or even several topics of Interest into the search function and it will
take you to the very specific time stamps and other resources that provide information on those topics.
So I'm going to go into a few of the key bullet points about each of the
six pillars or what. I also refer
to as the big six of self care and mental health. Again. This is a necessary list but is not sufficient again necessary to do these
things every 24 hours indeed.
Every 24 hours if you want to have the best possible mood and mental health but
it is not sufficient. That means you still need to do some of the other things that we're going to
talk about in terms of directed approaches at improving mood and mental health. If you are to quote-unquote optimize your mood and mental health or if you are let's just say trying to constantly improve your mood and mental health,
but these are the necessary but not sufficient pillars of mental health. So Under The Heading of sleep.
It's safe to say that most people need between 6 to 8
hours of sleep per night. Some people can get away with
5. Some people need as much as nine or ten. Certainly Growing Kids babies
teenagers and those that are suffering from some sort of
illness are
going to need more as much as nine ten, maybe even 12 hours of sleep per night.
However, most people do well to get somewhere
between six and eight hours of sleep per night. You're just going to have to experiment and figure out what's best for you.
Now one
thing I heard recently so I can't claim this as an original idea. But that I think is a really good way to think about sleep is that sleep much like physical fitness is something that we have to constantly be working on. It's not the sort of thing where you can get a great night's sleep one night and then the next night just kind of let all the protocols
go and expect to get a great night's
sleep. You don't have to be neurotic
about getting a great night's sleep indeed. I do believe that we
should strive to get enough quality sleep as many of the Knights of our life as possible. And if you can't do that, hopefully it's for good.
Reasons but of course things happen in life raising kids, you have
emergencies all-nighters to study so you can make sure you get that best possible grade on exams, etc. Etc. But we should all
strive to get the best quality sleep that we can and it's much
of it most nights of our
lives. So it's important to look at sleep as a process that you're going to be working on for the rest of your life just like Fitness and I don't say that to overwhelm you I say that so that if On Any Given night you get a poor night's sleep. You don't stress that too much. You
just get right back on the wagon and you
try and get the best possible night's sleep the next night and the next night and the next night much like Fitness. There's no
10-week program that's going to transform your physical fitness
forever. Okay,
just like there's no sleep program that's going to transform your
sleep forever. It's a daily or rather. I should say nightly investment. Although some of the things that are going to positively impact your sleep or perhaps damage your sleep are things that you do during the day time, right? So avoid that caffeine too late in the day get that morning sunlight and on and on but if you sleep is something that you're constantly
Investing in and it is a critical investment for your mood and mental
health the other thing that's not often discussed and I really haven't talked about terribly much on this podcast is the importance of having a fairly consistent sleep routine.
Now,
I realize that not everybody can get to sleep at the exact same time each night and wake up at the exact same time each morning and frankly,
that's not practical. I certainly don't do that.
However, what we know from the Circadian Health literature is that everybody should strive again?
Strive nobody's perfect. But strive to get to sleep at more or less
the same time each
night and wake up at more or
less the same time each morning. This turns out to
be really important for regulating mood and mental health and indeed for improving your
overall levels of sleep getting the optimal amounts of
slow-wave sleep take a deep sleep
and rapid eye movement
sleep and what we know is that ideally you're going to get to sleep within plus or minus one hour
of your regular sleep time. So if your regular to bedtime is 10:00 or
Getting in bed at 10:00 and falling asleep. Somewhere around 10:30. Well, then if the next night you
fall asleep at 9:30 great. You're still
within the plus or minus one hour and if the next night you go to sleep and you don't
fall asleep till 11:30. Don't
sweat it. In fact, you're still within that plus or minus one hour. However, if
you start getting into a
habit of going to bed at vastly different times
deviating more than or less than one hour from your normal to bedtime. Well, then you're going to start to run into issues such as waking
up feeling groggy.
Oggi, even if you got enough sleep, so even if you slept the full eight hours that you're used to getting
people who go to sleep much later than they normally do or much earlier than they normally do start getting
into kind of issues of
mood regulation energy
regulation not just in the morning but in the afternoon
likewise trying to wake up at more or
less the same time each morning plus or minus one hour. That's really going to help you anchor your overall
sleep schedule and it's really going to help lead to predictability of your overall
levels of energy mood and focus
throughout the day.
The second pillar in that big 6 is light and I used to refer to this as sunlight
right I'd say and I'm going to say it again now, although I've covered this in a lot more detail. So you can just hitting
the top Contour critical elements try to view
sunlight that is with your eyes if you sunlight
as early as possible after waking whenever I say that the most common question I get is what do I do? If I wake up before the sun comes out well, unless you have
superpowers that I'm not aware
of you can't make the sun come out any
earlier. So just flip on
artificial.
Lights as needed until the sun comes out and then get outside face East in the morning take off those sunglasses. It's perfectly safe to look at low solar angle sunlight without
sunglasses providing you're not driving into bright light and you crash this kind of thing get outside. Look at the
sunlight definitely blink to protect your eyes
as needed, but get
that sunlight in your eyes early in the day. This has Myriad positive effects on mood focus and alertness and
nighttime sleep later
that night.
It does so through a number of well-defined
biological and endocrine hormonal Pathways that I've discussed on many previous podcast episodes and you want to do this for about
10 minutes on non overcast days. And as long as 20 or 30
minutes on overcast days and that
highlights the second most common question I get which is what do I do? If there's no sun where I live. I live in an area where
there's no sunlight. Look if you
live on planet Earth,
there's always sunlight there might not be very much of it. That might be very overcast where you live it might seem very dark.
But trust me there's far more
photons light energy coming through that cloud cover even in the darkest mornings of winter. Then there
are at night in those dark Winters. So
get that light in your
eyes and do it as consistently as possible and also do that in the late afternoon and evening that's critical for regulating your circadian
clock for reasons that I've talked about previously, but I'll get into in a future podcast really explaining how those
clock oscillators and mechanisms work, but just to keep
it really simple since this is a
toolkit episode.
Mood in mental health
your mood and your mental health will benefit tremendously from getting morning
sunlight in your eyes. Now.
If you need to get more light in your eyes because indeed, there's just not enough
sunlight or you don't have the opportunity to get outside and view sunlight in the morning for whatever
reason you might invest in getting a
bright light source that you can plug in
you probably want one. That's as bright as 10,000 Lux. So that's pretty bright those fall under the category of so-called sad lamps sadc seasonal.
Affective disorder lamps and you can purchase those they can be somewhat expensive. You can also opt to get a 900 Lux drawing tablet. By the way. I have
no Financial relationship to any of these sorts of light
sources. You can find them pretty
easily and in the case of the 900 looks like tablet
fairly inexpensively online and you can put that on your
desk or where you have your morning coffee and try and enhance the total amount of light that you're getting in the morning, but frankly nothing is as good as sunlight. So if you can't get sunlight you might think about it.
Staying in one of those sad lamps and indeed. Those sad lamps aren't as good as sunlight but they are the next best thing. If you really can't get sunlight on a consistent basis a
few other fine points that I always get asked about. First of all, it is absolutely okay to wear eye
glasses or contact lenses
those sorts of corrective lenses are actually going to focus the light
to your retina, which is where you want it.
However, this whole process of viewing morning sunlight and afternoon light does not again does not work
through a window or windshield because windows and
windshields.
Her out the
relevant wavelengths of light that you want to get directly onto your retina. Okay. So that's the reality of it.
In addition. Please don't feel that you
have to look directly at the Sun and certainly don't stare at the Sun never force yourself to look at any light sunlight or otherwise that so bright that it's painful to look at. So if it's comfortable for you to
look directly at the Sun and just blink every once in a while and you can do that
without any pain or discomfort or watering of the eyes. Please do that. You're getting a lot of photons into your eyes and they're transmitting that to your brain and your brain to the rest of your body.
And on and on however, if
you find it uncomfortable to look directly at the sun in that case, what you'll want to do is
offset your gaze to you know, 10 or 20 degrees, which is nerd speak for just a little bit to the right or a little bit to the
left and get the sunlight into your eyes indirectly. Okay, and I often also get asked well, can I stand in the shade while I do this? What if I have an overhang in my apartment? The best thing is, of course going to be to face directly to the Sun and look
either directly added or slightly offset, but if you
can only get morning sunlight by
Going out on your balcony and your balcony doesn't face East rather. It
faces West you'll still get a lot of photons from the Sun Reaching Your Eyes there. But ideally you would find some way to look toward the sun first thing in the morning. I
realized that with kids and work and other
obligations. This can be
challenging but it is a challenge worth meeting meaning
don't lose your job or forget to take care of your kids to do this, but you can bring your kids to do this and indeed you should it sets their circadian rhythms also and people often lasc.
Does it work on dogs, you know indeed dogs and other animals have these exact same circuits and Pathways for setting their circadian rhythm. So it's great for them to
now. There are also clear and documented benefits for mood and mental health to getting bright light in your eyes ideally from sunlight
throughout the day as much as you safely can please don't get
sunburned. Don't get
cataracts by getting too much
sunlight but getting outdoors and getting sunlight in your eyes during your lunch break or a walk here and there or if
you have to remain indoors during the day
Getting the lights in that environment as bright as possible as it's safely possible. I should say is known
to improve mood and
mental health why well because there's a special so called
opsin within the cells of your eyes called melanopsin that doesn't respond to the same differences in color that are present in sunlight in the morning and the evening but rather responds to the overall brightness of light
so very bright lights either from artificial sources or ideally from
sunlight activate these cells and the cells
Project these little wires we call
axons into specific parts of the brain that improve your
mood and feelings of well-being. So I
can't give you a
specific number, you know of five minutes a day or 10 minutes a day just get as
much light in your eyes ideally from sunlight
throughout the day as is safe for you meaning where you're not getting sunburned and you're not damaging your retina. And if you want to know if you're damaging your
retina, well anytime you have to Blink or turn away from light because it's really bright. That's a signal that the
light is too bright. So while you
To place yourself into bright
environments. You don't want to place yourself
into any environment so bright that it's painful to be in. Okay. So use that as a metric and you should be just fine
and the last point about light for mood and mental health is a relatively recent theme that's emerging from the scientific literature and that really was driven home by a recent study that I mentioned a little bit earlier in the episode. This is the study published in nature mental health showing that Darkness during a particular stage
of your 24 hour cycle your so called circadian rhythm is
also
Be beneficial for mood and mental health
and it's beneficial for mood and mental health in a way that is independent from light and from sleep. Now. What do I mean by that? Okay. Well, there are a number of different ways that this can be examined. But in this particular study, which I like, oh so much entitled day and night light exposure are associated with psychiatric disorders
and objective light study in more than 85,000 people
what the researchers did is they analyzed how much light?
And or dark people were getting across the 24-hour cycle and correlated that with mental health outcomes looking at a range of different mental health challenges
including bipolar disorder schizophrenia depression PTSD and much more
and I'll go into this study in a lot of detail in a future episode because it's such
an important study with so many gems within it that we should all know
about but one of the key things from this study is that the positive effects of daytime sunlight exposure and the positive.
Of a nighttime dark exposure that means of course the absence of light
are independent of one another put differently making sure that you're in very dim to completely dark environments for a continuous 6 to 8 hours within every 24 hours. Circadian cycle is
correlated with much better mental health outcomes. In other
words. We shouldn't just think about the presence of light in the
morning and throughout the day as positive for
So Health,
that's all true. It's absolutely true. And this study further
verifies that but that's been known for some time indeed decades from the scientific research. And of course, it's been known for thousands of years intuitively and subjectively without detailed scientific
measurement. But in addition to that this study shows that people who stay in very dim to dark environments for eight hours every
24 hours or I should say approximately eight hours in every 24 hour
cycle.
They benefit from improved mood and mental health outcomes in a way that's independent of how much light there getting and independent of how much sleep they are getting the point. Is this the time when you wake up consider that
time 0 and then
about again, you don't have to
be super strict about this about
16 to 24 hours after that wake-up time. You should be in a very dim to dark environment for that 16-hour to 24-Hour
period after waking up.
Okay, what do I mean by this?
I mean if you go to sleep at 10 p.m. And you wake up
at 6 a.m. Well that 10 p.m. To 6 a.m. Phase of your circadian cycle. You should be in very dim light or entirely dark
environment. This is a great opportunity to reference
another study which was published
in the proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences, which shows that even having a small amount of light in the room, which isn't even that bright while you're sleeping with eyes closed can disrupt morning glucose levels. So in other words keep
Sleeping environment dark keep
your nighttime environment dim to the
best of your abilities,
right certainly go out to dinner every once in a while go to the movies go out and have a party. Enjoy yourself. If you have to go to the hospital God forbid or you have to tend to some emergency do that. But to the extent that you can control it within the confines of
life and its
demands keep your nighttime environment dim or dark because that independently of any sunlight and other bright light that you're viewing during the daytime and afternoon.
Is going to positively
improve your mood and mental
health now moving on to the other pillars and these I'm going to move through a bit more quickly than I have the previous two because we've done an entire series on these or I should say
series these series. Is that how you pronounce that
someone put the plural of series? He's in the show in the comments on YouTube the third pillar is movement. And when I say movement, I mean
exercise as you all know, we
should all strive to get anywhere from 180 to 220 minutes.
Zone two cardio per week that's movement that allows you to hold a conversation. But we're you to do it more
intensely or even a bit more intensely. You wouldn't be able to hold that conversation and addition we should do some
vo2max work. We should get our heart rate very high at least once a
week doing some sort of movement that safe for you so that could be running or cycling or swimming or Pilates. Whatever it is for you getting your heart rate way way
up is also important and to do that at least
once a week, but daily movement either cardiovascular training or resistance training.
It's very very clear that we need both. Maybe
not on the same days. In fact, I split them two separate days resistance
training done for anywhere from six to ten sets per muscle group, either close to or to failure. This could be with weights. It could be with bands. It could be with the machines. All of that was covered in detail in the podcast series that I did with
dr. Andy Galpin an exercise physiologist who is
expert in all those areas. I also did an episode on foundational Fitness protocol
that has been distilled into a very
Simple 3 page PDF that you can get for
completely zero cost by going huberman lab.com and just put foundational Fitness protocol PDF and you'll be taken to that
toolkit. So all of the details of a weekly exercise routine that involves daily movement, but also certainly my case includes at least one
full day of rest per week because many people do indeed need Juan maybe even two full days of rest per
week. So that highlights the third pillar movement, but we know that cardiovascular training and resistance training aren't just great for our body.
And they
also improve mood and mental health. That's so very clear from the research literature.
So we can't Overlook those
in a conversation about mood in mental health. Now, the
fourth pillar is
nutrition and nutrition is a big
topic. It's a very barbed wire topic. If you get involved in this stuff
online, you know, you've got your people who believe that you know carnivore is better than vegan. You have the people believe vegan is
better than carnivore. Most people are omnivores you ever seed oil debates and on and on and on we're not going to touch any of that now indeed.
If you want to learn more about nutrition and what works and what doesn't work for sake of aesthetic changes weight loss muscle gain Etc. I would refer you to the guest episode that we did with
dr. Lane Norton can find that again at huberman lab.com where we do a deep dive on all the
variations in different nutritional protocols, but suffice to say that regardless of whether or not you're vegan omnivore carnivore or keto or whatever everybody needs to consume sufficient amounts, but not excess amounts of quality
calories.
He's per day. Now. You may do that by intermittent fasting. You may do
that by a more traditional meal scheduling, but everybody's going to need to do that
because your body and brain and indeed the parts of your body and brain that translate to mood and mental
health require
macronutrients proteins fats and carbohydrates as well as micronutrients. So
the key takeaway with nutrition is to make it quality nutrition within the bounds of
whatever sort of nutritional program that you're
following and that means getting
Most of your food
sources from either
non-processed or minimally processed foods. So these will be food that you're
going to need to prepare or foods that would perish over time. These are not the sorts of foods that live in boxes and cans and other packages that would allow them to live on the shelves forever and ever. Okay.
And as I say that I know many people are shouting. Well, what about rice, you know rice can live on the shelf for a long time. And yes, okay. I consider rice a minimally processed food
because of course it can live on the shelf for a long period of time and he
Here. I'm just going to back out of the whole conversation about nutrition at this point because
as you can probably tell it's a deep series of rabbit holes that we can fall into and really get distracted. The point is make sure you're getting enough food don't overeat. We know
energy toxicity is a problem for not just body composition but for mental health, so you want to get enough calories but not too few calories and you'll want to make sure that you're getting them from quality sources and I say that because of course food is not just the substrate for the the cellar.
Pear and indeed production of tissues in your body,
but it's also the substrate for all the sorts of neurotransmitters, right
which are derived from amino acid precursors that are derived from food, right all of that
dopamine stuff and serotonin stuff is derived from amino
acids that come from food sources. So the link between nutrition and mental health should now be an obvious
one as we all know quality nutrition influences, of course our physical health, but also our mental health
and our cognitive functioning our memory our ability to learn new
things and to focus
us and we know that one of the most important features of high quality nutrition is making sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high-quality unprocessed or minimally processed sources as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically all the cellular functions in our body including the gut microbiome. Now, I like most everybody try to get
optimal nutrition from Whole Foods ideally mostly from
minimally processed or non-processed Foods. However, one of the challenges that I and so many other people
Is getting enough servings of high quality fruits and vegetables per day as well as fiber and
probiotics that often accompany those fruits and vegetables.
That's why way back in 2012 long
before I ever had a
podcast. I started drinking a G1
and so I'm delighted the ag-1 is sponsoring the huberman Lab
podcast. The reason I started taking a
G1 and the reason I still drink a
G1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs that is it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins minerals protein.
Probiotics and fiber to ensure optimal mental health physical health and performance.
If you'd like to try a G1 you can go to
drink AG one.com huberman to claim a
special offer. They're giving away 5 free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K to again. That's drink AG
one.com huberman to claim that special offer. The fifth pillar in the big six is social connection, and we're going to talk a little bit more about this later in the episode. But let's just be very brief and specific about this we
All need to strive to limit the
number of social interactions that we feel tax or even Vex us that cause us
stress. This is something
that was covered in depth in the episode with dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett where she
talked about the fact that we don't just have a nervous system that regulates itself through experience
and through our thoughts and our
actions. We are as a species
interacting with other nervous systems, both of our own species other humans as well as non-human species.
dogs and cats and if you have them or says another
animals, so we need to think about our nervous system as being both regulated from the inside and throw our own
actions and choices and thoughts, but also through interaction with other nervous systems and while we
don't always have as much control over Which social interactions or work
interactions we have to engage in
we should really strive to understand and indeed pay some serious attention to whether or not certain types of social
interactions are what she referred
to as
Net savings neutral or taxing right
certain types of social interactions with certain people or groups of people just make us feel tax. It makes us feel stressed. It leads to
negative
effect that is not good
feelings or emotions and often elevated levels of autonomic arousal that leave us ruminating and leave us having challenges with sleep. We really should
all strive to limit those interactions to the extent that we can on the reverse side of that as Lisa Feldman Barrett.
So beautifully pointed out. We also have the capability to regulate each other's nervous systems in ways that produce savings that is that allow
us to feel and indeed cause
physiological changes that make us feel not just happier. Not just relaxed not just happy because we enjoy interacting with somebody
but we're a group but that give us a savings that give us the kind of resources literally metabolic and neurochemical
resources that make us feel more
capable and give us a sense of
Elevated mood and improved mental health when we are not engaging with those people
and this is highly subjective, of course, but
you should be able to distinguish. In fact, I
encourage you to spend a little bit of
time maybe even just five or ten
minutes thinking about you know, who are the individuals and groups that I interact with that leave me feeling taxed,
you know, that really seemed to drain my energy and have me
ruminating and in a not good space when I leave
whatever interaction I had with them. This could be a real interaction or an online interaction indeed. I did this the other day based.
Lisa suggestion, I found it to be tremendously
useful. What I did is I decided to and by the way this was happening on a run where I was thinking, you know, a lot of my mind is in a conversation with people that aren't even here. I was sort of working through a conversation. I was thinking about what I would say what I did say what they said in an interaction that unfortunately was pretty unpleasant. It wasn't extremely unpleasant, but it was pretty unpleasant and I realize okay that
is a sort of interaction that I would like to avoid in the future.
Because it wasn't happening right then but it was carried forward into a portion of my day my morning run that for me is normally very pleasureful and quite sacred to me
actually. So paying some attention to how much your internal dialogue is with yourself versus with
others. And how much of that is positive or negative is extremely beneficial and I'm not talking about always just thinking about oneself and not thinking about others to the contrary. We also need to think as Lisa pointed
out about who are the people with whom we interact.
With or observe that lead us to have ongoing dialogue with them in our mind or think about those interactions in ways that give us energy that
lead to energetic savings
literally metabolic savings that we can apply not
just in those interactions, but in our work Endeavors and our solo
Endeavors, whatever that we're doing when we are
away from those people. So
while this concept of savings or neutral or taxation
of our metabolic and our neurochemical systems might seem a little bit
It squishy it is not squishy. This is a neurobiological concept. It's also a psychological
concept and it's one that I'm so glad that Lisa brought up because social connection social interaction is so vital to our mood and mental health, but oftentimes we hear social connection. We think oh that means we have to spend a lot of
time with friends. We have to organize dinner parties. Well sure that's all fine and good if you can do that and I do of course encourage people to spend time with those that they love but it's also
important to take a step back and just think a bit
Maybe even write out a bit, you know who
are the groups and sorts of individuals and interactions that really tax you who are the people you find kind of neutral and what are the individuals and groups that really provide what Lisa referred to as savings. That is they tap into the metabolic and neuro chemical
Pathways that lead us to
have improved mood and mental health not just during those interactions
but away from those interactions as well and often pervasively and extremely positively so this is no small deal. This is a really important aspect of our men
Well
health now the sixth pillar in the big six is stress control. And the reason it's included is that look stress is going to happen life is filled with
so-called stress orders. And for a good number of years. In fact,
the last 15 years has
been a lot of debate in the field of Psychology and Neuroscience as well whether or not
stress is good for us whether or not stress is bad for us whether or not we simply need to reframe stress as good or bad and to some extent all of that is true. You know, we know that chronic stress is not good for our
Our immune
system our health.
We also know that if you understand the reality, which is that stress also allows us to harness our mental and physical resources to perform better than we would otherwise
in certain circumstances
and that provided we can get to sleep each night that perhaps stress isn't so bad and
perhaps as even performance-enhancing. I talked about this in the guest episode with dr. Ali Crumb
from the psychology department at Stanford, and I've talked about this in other podcasts as well, and I'm not here to tell
Tell you that stress is
good for you. I'm not here to tell you that stress is bad for you. What I am going to tell you is that it is
extremely important that we all have readily accessible Stress Management tools
that work the first time and every time and these fall into two
categories the first category are real time tool. So tools that you can
use to reduce your level of stress in real time and the
best way that I'm aware of that's grounded in excellent physiology and Neuroscience
to reduce your stress in
real time as the so-called physiological side.
I did not invent.
This pattern of breathing. It's not
breathwork per se. This is a pattern of breathing that we all naturally do in our sleep to restore carbon dioxide and oxygen levels to their proper ratios. We also do it periodically throughout the day without noticing indeed. We have a defined or specific neural circuit in our brain that extends to our diaphragm
and communicates with aspects of our heart Etc that allow physiological size to calm us down faster
at least in my knowledge than any other directed protocol and the
physiological
all sigh
as many of you know is very simple and straightforward.
Anyone can do this. You
simply do a big inhale through your nose
try and maximize the
inflation of your lungs. And then before you exhale
sneak in another brief inhalation, even if it's just a tiny micro in relation to maximally inflate the
lungs and that has an important effect on the little sacs in
the lungs called alveoli of the lungs. It's going to open up whatever Avo Lee were collapsed in there and then you're going to do a long
extended exhale through the
mouth and typically just one although sometimes it requires two or three, but
just one physiological PSI is effective in bringing down one's level of stress significantly enough that you don't need to do it again, so this can be done essentially anywhere and by anyone I suppose I probably
couldn't do it if you were underwater or certainly don't do it if you're under
water, but otherwise, it's a very safe and very effective way to
calm down and reduce your levels of stress in real time, maybe before public speaking or in whatever circumstance you
All you need to calm down in real time. So I'll demonstrate the physiological side for you here. I've done this many times before in
previous episodes, but for those
of you that haven't heard or seen those episodes I feel obligated to do it again now. Okay, so it's a
deep inhale through the nose followed by another brief inhale through the nose and then a long exhale through the mouth. And before you start asking questions about what do I do if I have a
deviated septum can it be just through the mail do the first two through the nose do the third through the mouth? So it's like this.
And indeed I feel calmer and
indeed. If you do it, you will feel calmer. You'll notice that second inhale through the nose was
kind of sharp in the sense that I had to really push
put some physical effort into making it happen. And you know, my shoulders tilted upwards if you're just listening to this and not watching my shoulders shoulders upwards that s inhale through the nose is important for a variety of
reasons. I've talked about elsewhere.
So the physiological PSI is going to be the go-to protocol for you again not invented by me. This is not huberman breathing.
This is a pattern of breathing discovered in the 1930s by physiologist. It's hardwired into our nervous system. And that's what makes it so
great. It works the first time and it works every time so that's to my knowledge the best way to control your stress in real time. Now, why is that important
for mood and mental health? Well as we'll talk about later if you want to access your so called generative drive a theme that we're going to get into in a bit more detail. This is something that came
up during the series with. Dr. Paul Conti. You
will learn that
Stress and anger and negative
emotions while they can be very motivating very arousing. They are not going to be good for your long-term mood and mental health period so having tools to regulate your stress and your levels of anger your levels of reactivity and also to elevate your feelings of agency and
control over your life
starting with agency and control over your
physiology or internal state is going to be vital and what I love about the physiological PSI is that of course, it's completely
zero.
But also there's a dedicated circuit in your brain and body for this particular pattern of breathing. We do it spontaneously, but you can do it intentionally and it works just as well. If not better to regulate your levels of stress that is to bring them down which has outsize positive effects on your mood and mental health not just in the moment, but it
also should improve your confidence that when stress comes because the world is filled with
stressors. It's not if it's when when stress comes that you will have a
physiologically scientifically supported tool to deal with and reduce that
stress now in addition. I do believe it's important for sake of muda mental health to also have a tool or a protocol to raise your stress threshold
that is to increase your capacity to deal with life stressors without them feeling so
stressful and their number of different ways to do this, but they all center around elevating your levels
of adrenaline epinephrine and norepinephrine noradrenaline. Those are the same thing. Just they have multiple.
Forgive me I didn't give the same two things for names so don't blame me blame the other scientist that did it the point is
there are several ways that you can self-induce elevations
of noradrenaline and adrenaline and then to learn to Anchor your mind in your thinking to stay calm in those elevated adrenaline States as a practice for when stressors hit you in the outside world and your adrenaline and noradrenaline Spike. Now one of the best ways
to do this
because it works the first time and every time and is also zero cost. In fact, it will save you money is to put yourself in a cold
shower or other deliberate
cold exposure environment, but most everyone has access to a cold shower not everyone but most people and of course by turning off the heat you're going to reduce heating costs, right your water
bill, so getting into a cold shower for a minute or so to elevate your levels of adrenaline and learning to
either use your breathing you could do physiological.
Eyes or to distract yourself
or whatever tools and approaches you need to be able to stay calm while you
have elevated levels of adrenaline in your body. And the
reason deliberate cold exposure works. So well to do this is that it is pretty non-negotiable. Even if you really love cold showers or cold plunges or things of that sort. You're still going to get that
elevated adrenaline and noradrenaline. It's pretty much non negotiable, you know for the first 10 or 15 seconds that you get into a
A plunger cold shower, you should fully expect yourself to feel stressed and for your breathing to accelerate and then your goal is to try and anchor control your breathing in that stressful environment. The reason for doing this is that it's a practice. It's a
practice that's going to translate to a better
ability to manage your internal State and therefore your thinking your
cognition and your ability to make good decisions under stress. It's not about coming Untouched
by stress. It's about being able to better navigate stress
indeed I think of this.
Analogous to driving in fog something that I had to learn to do because I grew up in the Bay Area and it can be very foggy there sometimes and of course you don't learn to drive in fog the first day you learn how to drive. But the first time you hit heavy fog driving where you can only see one reflector in front of you at a time. It is truly stressful, right? You don't know if you're going to come up on another vehicle in an instant which of course can
happen. So you have to adjust a number of things you
have to learn how to do that and while I would never elect to drive in fog learning to drive in fog
It teaches you how to be comfortable driving in different weather environment same thing with driving in a rainstorm or for you East Coasters from the Northeast learning how to drive in a snowstorm. You would never elect to do
that. But once you do it a few times you feel more comfortable in those extreme
conditions. So that's really what raising your stress threshold is all about. Of course do it safely do it under conditions in which you're not going to get hurt or anyone else will get hurt but learning how to do this can be extremely beneficial and
of course deliberate cold exposure isn't the only way but frankly, it's the most reliable way.
It's the
most versatile way to do that because you can do it in your shower or in a cold Plunge at home. So you can practice these things again Safety First always make sure you're not exposing yourself to cold to the extent that you're going to damage yourself mentally or physically,
but it's a great practice and
you can probably think of other ways to spike your adrenaline that was safe. And of course life will spike your adrenaline. So you can also use real life as your you know, your stress inoculation tool and we all have to do that. Anyway, what I'm suggesting is
is that you adopt a real time
tool physiological size
and that you adopt at least one off line
tool that you do anywhere from one
to three maybe seven days a
week. But at least one day a week that you put yourself into a cold
shower deliberate cold exposure now for sake of increasing
metabolism or anything else, but really just to
learn how to calm yourself and maintain clear cognition when stress hits because indeed stress is going to hit so that's the big
64 improving mood
and mental health and the big six Supply that is
Are the Cornerstone for mood and mental health
regardless of who you are regardless of your age regardless of whether or not you're dealing with an acute or a severe mood or mental health disorder or you find yourself to be
reasonably healthy with respect to mood and mental health and you simply want your mood and mental health to be stable and or improve over time.
Now the reason why the big six those six pillars are so important for
mood and mental health and
indeed form a critical component of what dr. Paul Conti referred to.
To as the first principles of self-care is that those six pillars establish a milieu? That is an environment of neuro
chemicals including neuromodulators such as dopamine serotonin epinephrine norepinephrine
acetylcholine and other neurochemicals as well as well as hormones,
testosterone, estrogen prolactin cortisol
and immune molecules and on and on that lead to a high degree of predictability
in your
Dean and nervous system now, what do
I mean by that? Why would predictability be
such a key component of mood and mental health. Is it really just about knowing that you're going to feel energized in the early part of the day and tired at the end of
the day now that might be part of it, but that's
not the major takeaway the major takeaway. Is that
as dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, so aptly pointed out your brain and indeed your entire nervous system has a couple of
major jobs has the job of regulating your breathing and your heart rate etcetera. It also has the job of
of regulating your thinking in your
planning and your memory. Those are the jobs of the brain and nervous system that we normally hear about but if we think about the
more macro jobs that the brain has
the key function of the brain certainly the parts of the brain that are more
recently evolved the ones involved in thinking and planning Etc are really involved in generating
predictions predictions about what's going to happen next
and whether or not you're going to be prepared for what's going to happen next and indeed. Dr. Lisa
Feldman Barrett.
Also, beautifully Illustrated this model of the brain as
regulating a brain body
budget and moods and in a related topic
which called effect. Okay, I'll explain what effect is in a moment
setting the stage for being able to better predict. What's going to happen next and therefore regulating your mood in the moment. Let's just take a moment and explore that statement in a little bit more detail essentially what she
was saying and what I'm now again saying
is that
your brain and body go through different states your state at a given moment can be labeled as your affect your
effort includes a lot of
different things including levels of autonomic arousal levels of hormones levels of transmitters all of that stuff, but it falls under the umbrella of
affect
affect essentially sets the stage for particular emotions to be
more likely or less likely to emerge. So emotion and affect
aren't the same thing effect is a bit more General and sort of undergirds.
The possibility of
having certain moods like feeling elated happy or sad or
depressed. It really sets the general stage four different types
of specific emotions, even highly specific emotions.
So in that way when you're taking care of the big six, when you're tending to these
six pillars on a regular basis and I should point
out that we really want to tend to those six pillars every single day or
every single 24 hours. We really need to make those irregular investment to the
Extent that we can
when we do that we create a neurochemical and a neural milieu that allows the brain to be in a better predictive state. It allows the brain to give rise to a certain effects
spelled a FF e CTS. So FX that
lead to certain emotions being more or less likely to occur put very simply when we're tending to those six pillars on a regular basis. We feel better more.
Early and therefore the emotions that we tend to have under different conditions even conditions of a difficult interaction with a co-worker or with a family member tend to be more positive than if we are not tending to those six pillars now in some sense that
sort of a duh statement for instance if you're sleep-deprived if you're not fed, well like you haven't eaten in a few hours. Of
course, you're going to be more irritable you're
going to be more reactive you are going to be more emotionally labile,
but sleep and nutrition are just two of those six.
Core pillars when we talk about those core pillars and the necessity for tending to them on a
regular every 24-hour basis. What
we're really talking about is creating a milieu within our brain and nervous system that allows the nervous
system to do what it does best. And in fact what its main job is to do which is to predict what's going to happen next
because as Lisa Feldman Barrett pointed out emotions are really context-dependent states that allow us to navigate not just our present circumstances, but they are are
Our nervous system and brain and best guess about the circumstances that
we are soon going to encounter
now, I don't offer you all of that as kind
of a bunch of you know, Tangled mess of nerd speak to confuse
you what I'm saying? Is that by tending to those six core pillars you are shifting that likely effects that you will experience and therefore the likely emotions that you experience. So your biasing your whole system towards
more positive effect and more positive emotions regardless of what your life circumstances.
Happened to be and the stressors that you encounter and indeed you also are including that six pillar of stress control. So when those stressors arrive you will be better able to navigate them.
Now this view of emotion regulation of mood and mental health is certainly not a novel concept people have talked about the physiological
regulation of mood from the time of William James and even earlier, you know, it's been a long-standing question for instance or debate in Psychology and philosophy, you know, do we
feel anxiety in our body and then label it as anxiety?
Or do we feel anxiety in our mind and then our body
follows that's been a
long-standing debate and frankly, there's evidence on both sides which leads me to the conclusion. I think most neurobiologists and psychologists at the conclusion that those things are interrelated in a way that we can't really dissociate them completely at any level right when your heart rate goes up and you start breathing faster, you know, if I were to induce that state in you you'd probably interpret that as feeling anxious in addition to that something can make you anxious before your heart rate and breathing increases and then your heart rate and breathing increase.
Issa so no need to tease those apart. But if you think about the brain in large part as a
prediction machine and your brain
as a metabolic regulator, it's trying to decide which organs need resources how much resource can I dedicate to thinking to creativity to enjoying social interaction to paying attention to what somebody else is saying
as opposed to what's going on inside my body all of those major functions of the brain as they relate to affect and emotions are going
to be best supported that is biased toward
positive.
Positive mood positive effect
positive emotions and therefore
positive mental health
outcomes when we're tending to those six pillars.
Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett referred to that whole process as the brain regulating a brain body
budget and she had beautiful analogies for that budget. And that's what led to the description of social interactions as either generating savings or being neutral or generating a taxed feeling literally taxing that brain body budget and I
love that concept and it's one that you can keep in mind and
indeed we can inject a lot of specificity into this whole process
of improving mood and mental health through specific
protocols. If you simply remember if you make a daily investment in the six core pillars, you are building up
that brain body budget you will
have more energetic resources to spend on
whatever life circumstances come your way. Now before we move into a
discussion about protocols
for how to better understand your life narrative to enhance your sense of self and
It's and things of that theme I briefly want to mention that of course, there are known tools
out there in the medical community and psychological Community for improving mood and mental
health. And while there are a variety of tools one of the main tools of the
psychiatrist is prescription drugs that Target specific neuromodulator systems in the brain and body for instance SSRI selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors, or
A typical antidepressants that Target the dopamine and epinephrine system such as
Wellbutrin proprietor own or other types of antidepressants or for instance nowadays. There's a lot of growing excitement about clinical trials using relatively High dosages of psilocybin which by the way closely mimics the
chemical serotonin. That's right psilocybin, which is converted to psilocin
in the brain. If you look at it chemically it looks
very much like serotonin.
And although it has distinct effects from serotonin. I
talked about psilocybin and what's being done in terms of the clinical trials safety considerations.
I talked about the potential Hazard considerations and where the legality and all of that is going in that episode if you want to check that out, but the
reason I'm taking a moment to mention these
drugs things like ssris Prozac Zoloft Citalopram Wellbutrin psilocybin and so on
is that all of them Target specific neuromodulator systems in the brain and body and at the same time,
Time it's fairly clear
that mood disorder such as major
depression are not necessarily deficits
in things like serotonin or dopamine they can be
but most often they are
not so why are such drugs prescribed for mood disorders and for mental health disorders? Well, because if
specific neuromodulators like
serotonin dopamine norepinephrine are dramatically increased above Baseline
that affords the brain the ability to rewire itself, really
Me to think about ssris or atypical antidepressants or psilocybin for the treatment of major depression is really to think about them as chemical tools to open or access neural plasticity. And that's why it's so so important that those drugs be combined with talk
therapy where people are actively working through the sources the real-life sources and the historical sources, maybe even the trauma based sources of their depression
and I mention this because you know, there's a lot of
Debate nowadays
as to whether or not you know, these drugs are useful whether or not the side effect profiles justify their use whether or not you know, they are applicable
to Young populations, you know, there's a lot of debate about this
and certainly in the case of the psychedelics. There's a lot a lot of debate because this is newly emerging area and they're still not a lot of data, although it's starting to you know increase over
time but the key Point here is that all of these drugs have the potential to work in
some people
Others some people, you know, they simply don't work for and they cause more problems than solutions they solve
but they tend to work by increasing the propensity for neuroplasticity by
changing the neuromodulator milieu in the brain and
this is an important point when thinking about tools for enhancing mood and mental health that when we think about tools for enhancing mood and mental health
and next. Of course, we are going
to talk about the tools that are specifically designed to
Target a specific aspect of one's life story or concept of self all of that is always
operating on a backdrop of two things
that overall neurochemical milieu and autonomic function that the six pillars relate to and support if we're tending to those
but any Improvement in mood and mental health it's going to be significant. It's going to be noticeable and it's going to be stable. It's going to be pervasive over
time is going to require that some degree of neural plasticity some degree
of neural rewiring occur.
So I'm not bringing up the topic of these particular drug tools to say that they are the best way to improve mood in mental health. I'm certainly not saying that they
are but one way to potentially
improve mood and mental health
and if they are going to work, they
always work best when done in concert with talk
therapy because they are opening the opportunity for neural
plasticity, but then that neuroplasticity has to be directed toward a particular end point. There has to be specific work that's being done by the individual or ideally the individual with
an expert train clinically certified therapist or psychologist or
psychiatrist in order to make sure that the neuroplastic changes that occur lead to long-standing improvements in mood and mental
health over time
indeed the drugs that I just described were originally designed as tools to allow people to access
changes within their brain that would
then allow them to enhance mood and mental health, but not have to
rely on the drugs themselves for improved mood and
mental health and
Those lines I'm sure some of you out there are thinking about the
supplement based or nutrition based approaches to enhancing these neuromodulators
and indeed while they don't have the same potency as
things like Wellbutrin and ssris at increasing things like dopamine and serotonin respectively.
There is a growing number of people out there that are relying on daily supplementation with anywhere from one to three grams with of
l-tyrosine, you know, amino acid precursor to dopamine
combined with often, you know, 300 or 600 milligrams of alpha GPC.
As a way to enhance dopamine and acetylcholine and to set the stage for
elevated levels of neuroplasticity, but
it's very important to point out that the amino acid precursors to the various
neuromodulators, like l-tyrosine like L-tryptophan. So l-tyrosine
precursor to dopamine, I'll tryptophan precursor to serotonin and so on that those don't have the
same degree of potency that is ability to enhance those neuromodulators. And
so the extent to which they enrich
the
Ability for neuroplasticity Still Remains somewhat obscure there haven't been clinical trials on that yet at least not clinical trials that I am aware
of. So I mention all of that stuff
about drugs whether or not it's psychedelics or whether or not it's prescription antidepressant or
whether or not people are using a supplement based amino acid based protocol
for increasing certain neuromodulators feel is
important to mention all that because well, first of
all, it's quite prominent out there certainly in the case of prescription antidepressants, and there's growing prominence.
And use of relatively high dose psilocybin again always in done with support talk therapy. This
is done in the legal setting. I said legal not
illegal a legal setting
with a board certified therapist. This is being done on University campuses within research labs. And of course, I acknowledge that there are people who are using these compounds outside the realm of the University clinical study environment. So I mentioned these chemicals not because I'm pointing to them as the path to
Moved to mood and mental health they can be but they aren't always and as I mentioned before they can sometimes cause problems that lead people to wish that they hadn't taken them or to decide to not take them. Any further decision that absolutely has to be made with a healthcare professional who's well certified to do that. But I'm
mentioning these tools because I want you to understand if they work why they work and one key point. That was really emphasized by dr. Paul Conte. Who as I
mentioned before is a psychiatrist. So he uses pharmacology and his
Yes, although he uses other nonpharmacologic tools
as well is that these pharmacologic tools are never to be viewed as the be-all end-all
of enhancing muda mental health they are but one path to improving mood and mental health and indeed should be viewed as a
path to getting people who are otherwise unable to engage in those six core pillars those first
principles of mental health to be able to do those things on a regular basis and then perhaps
based on a discussion with their clinician these people could
come off.
Those pharmacologic agents, maybe yes, maybe. No, it
depends on the individual. It
depends on the circumstances, but those core six pillars those
first principles of mental health that include but are not limited to those core six pillars are
absolutely essential. There's no drug that can replace those course six pillars.
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hubermann. Okay, so setting aside the core six pillars, let's now talk about other
tools for mood and mental health
that center around really what we more typically think of
Of when we think of muda mental health which is emotions.
When dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett was
a guest on the podcast.
She said something that was really
incredible and it's something that's
strongly grounded
in excellent scientific data, which is
the more
specificity that we can put to labeling our emotions the better off. We're going to be in terms of our overall mental health. Let me restate that the more specific language that we can put to our own internal investigation.
Oceans even if that language is just to ourselves in our own internal narrative. We don't even have to speak out what those labels are the better that we're going to feel over time and indeed this effect can be quite rapid and indeed. Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett has done research on this very
specific topic. It's something that's referred to
as emotional
granularity. So while some of us move through life with a sort of what I call
Emoji fication of emotions, you know, you got
Happy face happy or sad face. Sad you're angry depressed
anxious. Those are
labels for emotional states, or you could think of them as affects our emotions. I think of them as emotions,
but they're not very specific. They're
pretty broad bins. We say sad or depressed or super depressed or super sad anxious panic and we think of that as nuanced but it's not very nuanced
and Lisa's laboratory and other Laboratories have explored two things first if people are asked to or
Courage to put more
granularity more specificity on what they're
feeling then it seems that their levels of emotional processing are better
overall. How does that translate to emotions? Well, it translates to
better overall feelings of well-being when one is placing more
specificity on positive emotions,
and the flip side is also true. So this is important to know if one places more specificity on negative emotions. It also can
enhance
One's kind of experience of those negative emotions.
Now, that means that this is a two
sided blade. All right. This isn't
always a good thing. And if one is thinking about
protocols for improving mood and
mental health the data make very clear
that
adding more specificity
to our positive emotions in terms of the language we use but also just the depth with which we process and think about those positive experiences can be very beneficial for us. So there are two studies that I'd like to highlight that relate to this the first
is in
Old effective self monitoring through
experience sampling On Emotion differentiation in depression and the second study is entitled
emotional granularity increases
with intensive ambulatory assessment
methodological and
individual factors influence how
much now each of these studies focus on something slightly different the first study was mainly
focused on people who have depression and they work you'd
several if not many times per day to just think about and report
on their emotional state.
Eight
and that was done in order to get people to place more granularity more specificity on what they're feeling but also simply to tap into
how they're feeling on a more regular basis throughout the
day the second study which is one that included. Dr. Lisa
Feldman bear as an
author was slightly different because it focused on non-depressed individuals and accused them to touch into their emotions more times per day and it also included some
physiological measurements and one in particular that we're going to talk about in some detail
now, I don't have time to go.
To all the details of these studies. I may do that in a future podcast episode, but the key takeaways are
very important for all of us to know which are first of all,
The more often that you can ask yourself, you know, what
am I really feeling right now? How do I
feel and and this is so critical the more that you force yourself to not use a broad labels or simply valence labels valence labels
are good or okay or bad
and instead understand that
good is not an emotion. Okay is not an emotion bad is not an emotion, but
rather saying, you know, I feel
Curious but a little anxious
if that happens to be the case or
I feel you know board but you know also a little bit
in positive anticipation about what's going to happen
tomorrow things of that sort, putting more
nuanced and specificity on your emotions, but also touching into our thinking about your own emotional states more times per day clearly has positive outcomes for mood and mental health and the reasons for that are incredibly interesting and this is something everybody should.
Stand
why would it be that putting more specificity
on what we're feeling? So perhaps just in our own heads like thinking. Okay. How do I feel right now? Like if I were to do that right now, I'd say I feel energized and happy I do. I really enjoy doing what I'm doing. So I wouldn't say I'm like off the charts in awe or relation, but I'm very happy and I feel energized, you know earlier today. I was feeling a little bit fatigued
and a little bit confused because I was trying to sort
out some
That wasn't making sense to me so assessments like that which can be told to somebody else or that we just hold
internally done repeatedly throughout the day anywhere from three to six times throughout the day just periodically pinging ourselves. Maybe you set an alarm or
maybe you just decide to every once in awhile, you know, maybe every time you go into an elevator every time you go up a flight of stairs. You just ask yourself. Yeah. How do I feel right now and thinking about that for a moment
and you don't have to write it down, although I suppose you could but turns out that
Just that practice
can really enhance our so-called emotional granularity that can enhance our positive emotions and effect. And in addition it provides us a better sensitivity to
better
understand those negative
emotions, which sounds like it might be a bad thing. But those negative
emotions have information in them, right? This is
one thing that's often lost in those broad
categorizations of anxious or sad or depressed and keep in mind, of course that some people are genuinely clinically depressed and that needs to
taken extremely seriously, just like some people are genuinely clinically anxious and that needs to be taken seriously, but
most of us when we throw out the words depressed angry sad, we're not using enough nuance and it doesn't really
apply to our internal States or the circumstances that we're in and as a consequence we suffer it's not just about communicating our emotions we suffer because the data say that the more nuanced the more emotional granularity that we have
the richer is our experience of the
Native aspects of
life and the more
effectively we can navigate the
negative aspects of life, right again, negative emotions. Perhaps
isn't the best way to even describe negative emotions because that label negative implies that we should avoid it. And in fact those negative emotions provide a lot of information about perhaps social interactions that we should seek to avoid in the future and so on and so
forth. Now one of the most interesting things about this whole process of
increasing
Regularity and touching in several times per day into how we feel
something that's completely zero cost takes
just a moment to do that. We
can get much better at overtime that was clearly seen in these studies that people get much better at doing this. It becomes more facile for them very
quickly is that it correlates with improvements in physiological metrics that relate to overall
improvements in mood and mental health and the specific
physiological metric that I'm referring to is so-called vagal tone some of you have
Perhaps heard of the vagus nerve. It's the tenth cranial nerve. It's an extensive peripheral nerve that it goes out of the
brain got at the level of the neck. It's one of the cranial nerves that extends to
essentially all the organs of the body the heart the lungs Etc, but it's a two-way street. It's a superhighway of nerves out of the brain and into the body and it's a superhighway of
nerves back from the bodily organs to the brain and it's
involved in regulating a lot of
so-called autonomic functions.
How fast our heart rate is how fast our breathing is rates of digestion and all of that weaves together to create those things that we call affect our internal States.
So without going into a ton of detail about the vagus nerve. There's something that's called cardiac vagal control cardiac vagal control is the extent to which that vagus nerve can impact your heart rate and your overall feelings of calm or alertness. Now the simple way to think about this is
More commonly referred to as heart rate variability heart rate variability
is simply the distance between your heartbeats or rather the time between your heartbeats
which we know if those timings between your heartbeats are somewhat variable that is correlated with positive physical and mental health
outcomes. One of the ways that you can increase heart rate variability is to get regular cardiovascular exercise as well
as doing resistance exercise and no surprise getting
sufficient amounts of quality sleep.
each
night is also going to be very beneficial for heart rate variability now exercise and
sleep, of course a wonderful but it turns out that there's also a very rapid way to
increase heart rate variability by
activating the vagal
innervation of the heart and the way that the heart and some other circuits within the so-called brainstem interact and that's through something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia
respiratory sinus arrhythmia can be summarized very
simply by saying
so when you inhale you speed your heart rate up and when you exhale you slow your heart rate down and it's that
exhale slowing your heart rate down that's mediated
by the vagus nerve. Now. There's a more thorough description of that which I'll just give you now and it's not that lengthy. So here's how it goes when you inhale your diaphragm actually moves down
and as a consequence your
heart actually gets a little bigger as a little
more space.
As a consequence the fluid in your heart moves a little more slowly per unit volume and there's a neural signal to speed the
heart up conversely when you exhale the diaphragm moves up that means there's a little
less space for the heart in the general area where it's sitting so the heart gets a little bit smaller a little more compact. That means that the fluid in your heart is moving more quickly through that smaller space and there's a neural signal mediated by the Vegas
to slow the heart down. So that's why inhale speed your heart up and exhales slow your heartbeat.
Down that is the basis of so called RSA or respiratory sinus arrhythmia. Now, what does
any of that have to do with the
granularity of
language that we place
on our emotions
turns out there are several studies showing that when people place more descriptive granularity on
their emotions that is correlated with
okay. It's not causal but it's correlated with
improvements in respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which we know correlate with improvements in
Heart rate variability indeed. It's one of the major bases for heart rate variability, which we know is correlated with
not just positive
physical health outcomes, but positive mental health outcomes, including lower levels of anxiety improves sleep and overall levels of mood. This is a
topic that I'm very familiar with because last year my laboratory at Stanford University
School of Medicine in collaboration with a colleague of mine, dr. David Spiegel our associate chair of Psychiatry also at Stanford University
School of Medicine.
Published a clinical trial and sell reports medicine showing that there's a particular pattern of breathing that people can do for just five minutes per day that is effective in significantly improving various metrics related to
mood and reducing anxiety and
also improving sleep. Although I should say the protocol. I'm about to describe didn't uniformly
improve all of those metrics. It had a bigger effect on some versus others, I'll provide
Link to that study in the show no captions.
But if you're wondering what this protocol is that people did 45 minutes a day that allowed them to by the way pervasively
improve their mood. So it wasn't just their mood while they were doing this five-minute a protocol. It was improvements in mood Around the Clock essentially as well as improvements and other physiological metrics and other aspects of those six core pillars. It
was that physiological side that we talked about earlier. Although in this case. We didn't have people do just
one physiological side.
Side, we had people set aside five minutes per day. So set a timer for 5 minutes, they could sit or lie down. They could do it any time of day and we just had them
repeat that physiological
PSI for a duration of 5 minutes total so that they would do to inhale through the nose and
then a full exhale to
lungs empty through the mouth. Then they would do it again and they would do it again. And again until those five minutes were completed
again the outcome of that
clinical trial was that that
particular pattern
Breathing which we called cyclic physiological sighing 45 minutes per day again done anytime of day
had the most positive outcomes in terms
of improving mood and mental health and autonomic function those things related to sleep and heart rate variability. So that's a
very simple very minimal time investment
zero cost tool that anyone can use
that again improves various metrics of physical health, but
also improves metrics of mental health and it ties right back in with what
was observed in the work by dr. Lisa
Feldman Barrett exploring how putting more word label emotional granularity
on one's emotional states positively impact our physiological State and the fact
that thinking about our emotions more frequently throughout the day and deliberately putting more label granularity on those emotions frequently throughout the day is correlated with this Improvement in respiratory sinus arrhythmia.
At heart rate variability the fact that these things all relate to one another should not surprise us because indeed there's a previous paper. This is quite
extensive review. Actually. It's a very nice review. It's one that I encourage anyone who is interested in these topics to explore especially psychologists who by Abba interest in physiology or psychiatrist or simply people who are interested in mind body
stuff. This is a review published in 2017 in the journal biological psychology entitled cardiac vagal control as a
marker of emotion regulation.
In in healthy adults a review and again,
it's a really wonderful literature review of the peer-reviewed primary research which really establishes that this thing vagal tone our ability to kind of
put the brakes on our autonomic nervous system and slower heart rate down deliberately through our breathing and perhaps even just by stopping and reflecting on what our emotional states are
is really beneficial
for our overall mood and mental health and I want to
highlight bold and underline that word.
Overall
because it's not just the case that people experience elevated mood and mental health in the moments where they stop and go how am I feeling? Oh, you know my feeling bored or
agitated. Do I feel particularly excited sure that
can have some impact on physiological metrics and muda
mental health, but in all of these studies the outcome seems to be that people's overall
levels of mood and mental health are enhanced not just while they're thinking about their emotions or doing this five minute add a cyclic sighing but
but Around the Clock which is really terrific because I think that's what most all of us want which is improved mood and mental health not just in the moments when we do a practice or in the few minutes afterwards, but 24 hours a day. I suppose we might segment out sleep during which you know, hopefully we're having great dreams as opposed to other
kinds of dreams. But the point is everyone
I have to imagine would like to feel better and have elevated mood and mental health during the times when they're awake and indeed these sorts of protocols have been
To do that or so say the scientific data.
Now we are going to discuss the tools for enhancing mood and mental health gleaned from the for episode guest series with dr. Paul
Conti who is a medical doctor specializing in Psychiatry. He also has particular expertise in trauma.
However, the for episode guest series that we did with dr. Conte was really about exploring the self as well as tools and protocols for not just gaining a better understanding of oneself, but also for gaining a better understanding and tools for
Relating to others
AKA relationships thread through the
series was a model of the mind and how it works
to create everything from feelings
thoughts to behaviors that dr. Paul Conti described as an iceberg model
and I perhaps should refer you to the fact that he actually Drew
out this model and we provided it as a zero
cost PDF in the show no captions for every single one of those episodes in that for episode series.
We also provide a link to this model
in the show no captions for this.
Tools episode the model is
called the iceberg model and as the
name suggests it resembles an
iceberg in which the vast majority of our minds processing occurs below our
conscious awareness in our unconscious mind. So that's the portion of the iceberg that resides below the surface.
Whereas the portion of our mental processing that we are aware of resides
above the water surface the so called conscious
mind. So a key aspect of the iceberg model is that the unconscious mind is responsible for the vast majority.
Of our feelings thoughts and behaviors, but that we are not aware
of how this unconscious mind is doing
that and by extension the tools and protocols that dr. Conte described largely deal with going into the unconscious and figuring out how the unconscious processing is influencing our conscious processing
both in healthy and in unhealthy ways and when we say in healthy and unhealthy
ways were largely referring to the presence of Defense has some of you have perhaps heard of defenses before some defenses can indeed be
Healthy and others are unhealthy. There are defenses such as projection sublimation denial and during the course of that for episode series. Dr. Conte explains how projections are not always bad for us indeed. They can protect us
from Panic from severe
trauma, but they also can create difficulties in processing our own understanding of self and of our life
experiences in ways that can actually be damaging to us.
So a key takeaway from that for episode series is to understand and acknowledge.
acknowledge that your unconscious mind is driving much of what
you feel think and
do however by doing structured exploration of the self and we'll
talk about how to do that
one can gain better understanding of how that unconscious processing is influencing what you
think feel believe and do
so, once you accept the important role of
the unconscious mind
and you make the decision that you want to better understand how your unconscious mind and conscious
mind are in this constant dialogue and how you can have that dialogue better serve you
There are series of actionable tools that you can do that will allow you to better understand yourself and
how you relate to others. And the
first of these tools is to really understand your self
concept. Now, of course most all of us know our own name rarely do we ever forget that name? We have some concept of where we're from who are parents are What
are present and future
goals might be where we've succeeded where we failed in life and on and on
but the self-concept goes far beyond that sort of CV.
E
list or are
biography of self indeed the self concept has a lot to do with our self-confidence our feelings of ability both to overcome challenges, but also our ability
to serve the world that we're
in and our ability to change
ourselves over time. Now, of
course the degree to which somebody
might have confidence or less confidence or the degree to which somebody feels that they can exert
influence on their environment and their goals is of course going to vary based on their personal history, but as dr.
Conte explained even independent of all that if one puts in some work to better understand their self-concept to really get a clear picture of oneself from that one can develop more agency with which to pursue ones
aspirations and to reach their
goals and the key concept here is one that is particularly powerful for both exploring and building up one's concept of self and that's the consciously and deliberately build a life narrative. Now a simple way to do this that can be
very effective is to create a series of folders or
documents. It could even be a stack of papers. I prefer to do this in
electronic form and I confess that even before learning about this tool from dr. Conte. I had initiated doing this tool starting back in
2015, and it's
fairly straightforward. But as I mentioned before it can be very powerful and it simply consists of building out separate folders or pieces of paper and this could be done electronically or
on real-world paper with paper and pen or paper.
Pencil and essentially what you do is you're going to divide your life history into some regular increments. So for me the way that I did this is I created a folder on my laptop that I actually called lifetime. So that's the title of the main folder and then within that folder. I have a series of folders Each of which spans a particular phase of my life.
So 0 to 5 years of age 6 to 10 years of age
11 to 15 years of age and so on and so forth now, I'm 48 years old, so I have folders that extend to age
50 currently, although I will add folders going forward very
soon. And the idea here is that for each of those folders you're going to place a single word document into that folder. And then on that word document you're not going to journal you're not going to do any sort of extensive writing rather You're simply going to put down bullet points with titles. It could be one or two sentences, but typically it's just a few words describing some of the key Milestone events that you remember
from that particular phase of your life.
So just for sake of example, I'll read off some of the
things that are included in the folders for my particular lifetime narrative. But of course this relates to my lifetime narrative, you should of course put the milestones and key bullet points that relate to your lifetime narrative. But again just to give you a sense of the sorts of things that made it into
this folder in my six years old to 11 year old folder on that document I put where I was living at that time the city I was living the school that I went to I put
a couple of teachers names.
Teachers
that had a particular influence on me a particular summer camp
experience that was not a traumatic experience. By the way, it was a happy experience. But for me, it turned out to be a very
transformative one and then there are a couple other things in there that are just Recollections of
childhood friends names. Okay,
so seemingly mundane information perhaps but it looks more or less like a biography and yet other folders. So for instance the folder that spans from
25 to 30 years of
age is the time that
I was in graduate school. So it includes a note about graduate school and note about particular
hobbies that I was interested in in addition
to my scientific research at the time a couple of
key relationships a couple of key relationship challenges as well as some things that at that time I was processing
about prior years in particular my teen years and high school. Now the key
thing here is that whatever goes into these folders is what's important to you.
It could be positive
events. It could be negative events. It could be events that for whatever reason you remember
and keep surfacing in.
In your
mind that you think might be
interesting or important at some later time or that you're concerned. You might forget. In
fact, that might be a really good metric for whether or not you include something these folders are not if there's something that you want to make
sure that you never
forget but that you think you might forget I would encourage you to put it
onto that word document and put it into that particular folder
again. This isn't about creating a coherent life story. This is about creating a series of segments of small collections of key life events positive negative neutral.
Inspiring basically anything that was
Salient for you at that particular time. And of course
if you want to put Reflections about those particular events into that word document, you're more than welcome to do that. But the basis of this self-concept developing exercise is just that as to develop a historical sense of yourself, of course it bringing you up to
present day where you will continue to add things to whatever Word document goes into that particular folder for the age you happen to be now now for some of you
This
kind of autobiographical bullet pointing might seem like it's just that some attempt to build or
write an autobiography, but
it's very important to remember that these folders are for you these folders are not about writing a book
about your life history. Although if you decide to do that with these folders at some point down the line, that sounds
great, but that's not the goal here. The goal is for you to build a structured narrative
representation of events that were key in your
life and as described in the series
Dr. Conte this goes Way
Beyond just understanding your past. This is really about understanding past. It's about understanding yourself at
present and indeed it threads
into your goals and aspirations for the future
an important thing to understand about this tool or protocol is that it also has a incredible ability to Anchor you in your perception of the passage of
time, you know, some of us track the passage of time better than others both within the day and across the days and years and so forth,
but this
Exercise in particular is very good at allowing you to see you know, how much time you
devoted at a given stage of your life to a given Endeavor whether or not you're
stuck in patterns, whereby you're still engaging in certain types of things professionally or relationship-wise or in any other number of different ways that have you in a pattern that may or may not be serving you well, I want to emphasize again that this exercise is not about goal-setting. It's about your ability to build a
structured.
Third
if pattern from which you can
look at it and then make a determination as to whether or not you know, you feel that you're
currently on the right path for you, but it's not about projecting forward as to what your goals are will soon talk about that will talk about goals and aspirations in a moment.
This is really about better understanding what led you up to the place that you are now and it really helps you pinpoint the key work that you need to do in terms of exploring
your unconscious and conscious mind using some tools that we're going to get into subsequently.
So there's really no strict rules about how to do this.
Exactly except that I do encourage you to make those
increments across your lifespan manageable. I wouldn't suggest doing it one for every year. I wouldn't suggest a folder one for every 10 years. I think three to five year increments seemed like a more reasonable and trackable way to go about
this. So that's one of the sorts of tools that dr. Conte referred to as to how to build up one's self concept which directly relates to
things such as our confidence our ability to
track our own.
Understand some of our motivations both conscious and unconscious. But of course that practice is
mainly a conscious exercise. It's really not tapping directly into the unconscious in any kind of direct way as far as we know now, we can contrast
that with the tools and protocols that are designed to tap into the unconscious mind. And of course, there are a number of different ways to do this
that were discussed in that for episode series with dr.
Conte but one of the most powerful ways to do this is by thinking about and indeed sometimes writing about or even analyzing
in
one's dreams now
dream analysis is something for
which you can find a lot of books out there. There are a lot of theories. There's also a lot of argument that perhaps dream analysis which has roots in Freudian psychology as well. As other
Traditions is perhaps not accurate. I don't think we want to consider whether or not dream analysis is accurate rather. I think we should just acknowledge that when we are dreaming in particular
the dreams that we have toward the later part of our night which are the dreams associated with rapid eye movement. Sleep that tend to be very
He laid in dreams as compared to the dreams that we
have earlier in the night. Well, when we consider the content of those dreams, even if we're not trying to interpret them, it's very clear that those dreams reflect the unconscious mind controlling more of our
internal dialogue or what we are experiencing at that time.
Whereas when we are awake our conscious mind tends to take over more of the
narrative the internal narrative and the control of our feelings thoughts and behaviors.
But as I mentioned before the
unconscious mind is always exerting an influence regardless.
Of whether or not we are asleep or awake
with that said one way to explore the
unconscious mind and begin to get a better understanding about how it might be influencing our waking States and behaviors
is to actually
record and think about ones dreams.
Now, of course some people remember
their dreams on a regular basis other people don't some people actually believe that they don't dream studies out of sleep Laboratories at Stanford University of Pennsylvania Harvard and elsewhere all
generally agree that
everybody dreams but not
He remembers their dreams. So if
you're interested in tapping into an understanding of what your
dreams are telling you which is basically a way of saying what your unconscious mind or dialogue consists of
I highly recommend putting a journal.
So this would be any kind of paper and pen or paper and pencil type journal and the idea is this if
you wake up
and you can remember your dream write down a few key bullet points from that dream.
Dream, if you feel you can write out the dream in a very linear narrative this happened and that happened this happened and that happened great. But most people find that their memory of their dream is rather fragmentary
other people can't remember their dream or at least they wake up they feel like
they were having a dream but they can't remember all of it or key components of it and for that I suggest that you try keeping your body completely still and closing your eyes. Once again,
we don't quite understand why this is but when you look at the
Archer on dream recollection,
it seems that by keeping one's body completely still
with eyes closed. We have better access to whatever the contents of the dream that just occurred were. Okay. So if you wake up and you can't remember your dreams try lying still for a few minutes and keeping your eyes closed and seeing whether or not that helps surface the content of that dream other people find that they get up they get out of bed and then sometime in the
middle of the morning maybe even later in the day the contents of a
A dream will just
come to them. Well, if that happens great. I also highly recommend that you have a way to write down the contents of the of that dream. Now what you're looking for. When you do this sort of tool or protocol. I encourage you to be wary of any immediate interpretation of for instance. Okay
animals in a dream mean children, although they could you know, there's not a lot of science that
really supports that as a firm statement and of course their books out there and podcasts and a ton of information trying to
help you interpret your dreams and while some of that can be fun and not all of it is entitled.
Early useless the goal here is not to interpret your dreams. The goal here is to start recording some of the key takeaways maybe even the entire Narrative of the dreams that you have just prior to waking as a way to try and understand some of the themes that are
occurring and recurring
in the dialog
that exist within your unconscious mind.
So a key aspect of this tool is that you're not going to take any one dream as an enormously
informative dream. It might be but more
important in this particular tool.
Cool is to write down the themes of a particular dream and then see whether or not those particular themes resurfaced again and again
across different nights or across different
dreams. The idea here is that things that are repeating he matically will show up as different components in different dreams, but that by keeping a dream journal you can start to identify some of these patterns that are occurring from one dream
to the next as opposed to having the same dream over and over but the point here is that you can
Floor the contents and the
themes that's really the most important word here. The themes of your unconscious mind that is
occurring if you start thinking about
what's recurring during your dreams because dreams are a time when your unconscious mind is dominating The Narrative within your mind and brain
now for those of you that dream a lot and
remember your dreams as well as for those of you that do not I would also
encourage you to
explore the contents of your thinking that is thinking about your thinking
during
Old liminal States and the liminal State during which this can be particularly useful is Right upon waking. So this is different than thinking about what you were dreaming about. This is about keeping your eyes closed and body still
we do think that that's important for doing this. Well because once you start moving your body you open your eyes and you start bringing in sensory experience for that day your mind dramatically shifts towards conscious processing,
but in that liminal State
between sleeping and awake when you wake up and you're a little sleepy maybe don't want to get out of bed, and this happens to me all too.
Then
try closing your eyes and remaining
perfectly still for maybe one to three minutes maybe five minutes and just pay attention to where your mind goes. Now, you might fall back asleep be mindful of that depending on what you need to do that morning. But
a lot of people will find that their mind goes into this place. That's neither
sleep nor awake, right? This is a state that very much resembles the state people achieve in things like Yoga Nidra yoga sleep or non sleep deep rest, although it
tends to be more.
dominated by the unconscious mind a little bit more sleep, like
now some people find this practice to be difficult because they're the
sort of people that wake up in there just immediately ready to go most people however myself included find that when they wake up,
you know, the mind isn't completely alert yet and you can use
that period again, just
maybe two or three minutes maybe five minutes to start to pay attention to the contents
of your thinking see whether or not you're thinking migrates from, you know something related to
Work or to relationship or to self or to something you want to do or something that you're anxious about and so on and so on
and here to you'll want to write this down. So this is very much like the dream journaling we just talked about but it's slightly easier for most people to access especially
people who have a hard time remembering their
dreams. And again, it's an opportunity to access some of the contents of your unconscious mind to learn to look at and see what's going on in your unconscious mind.
And in a way that's very difficult, if not
impossible to do unless you're working with somebody who's very good at accessing the unconscious such as a skilled psychiatrist or psychoanalyst.
And in that way allowing you to do introspective work, which is not structured in terms of thinking trying to think
about like, what do I want? What's going on? You know, why do they do that? Why did I react that way? Nothing like that? You're simply observing your mind and seeing what's geysering up from the unconscious. That is you're getting
A portal into that portion of the iceberg that resides below the surface of the
water the next set of tools for exploring the self self concept Etc from that for episode series with dr. Conte is journaling. I'm going to do an entire episode of The huberman Lab podcast
about journaling and there are a lot of different kinds of
journaling and fortunately there are a lot of great peer reviewed studies
about the power of journaling for processing all sorts of things like emotional states trauma Etc.
They're basically two categories of journaling that
That are very useful to carry out on a consistent basis. And when I say consistent basis that
could mean every day or it could mean three
times a week. It could even be once a week the really no hard and fast rules about this. But when we think about journaling, they're really two main styles of journaling one is going to be free associate of journaling. Sometimes people talk
about this as a data dump, right
typically people will talk about the data dump as the morning notes, which is when you wake up in the morning, you know, you got a lot on your mind. You can't organize your mind people who have a hard time structure.
Their thinking and behavior often find this very useful which is to you know,
take out a journal or a piece of paper. Again. This is just for you. It's
important that you realize and really make sure that you're the only person that's going to see these notes because a lot of people get into
self-monitoring when they're doing their journaling they're thinking about well, how's this going to look as my handwriting? Okay. How's my punctuation? What are people going to think is this going to be a
good book or not to go? But listen, none of this journaling that we referring to is about your book or your autobiography this
This is really
just for you. This is an exploration of yourself that's designed to help you enhance your concept that is your understanding of self and indeed translates to better confidence better understanding of your goals and aspirations better understanding of your unhealthy patterns and defenses and on and on
and so again, the two styles of journaling are free associations, but you literally just write down any thing that comes to mind or that you feel like writing down within a given period of time for most people 10 minutes.
Is ample time to do that for some people five will be enough and for some who have the time maybe 30 minutes, but for me and I think for most people out there anywhere from five to ten minutes of this data dump free
association, you know, it could be your anxieties what you're thinking about what you're anxious
about really could be about anything that comes to mind and this free association process can be very useful for clearing out the Clutter. So to speak the other style of journaling that's equally useful, but for different reasons is
Structured journaling to have a goal for a given entry
on a given day. And again this could be done
in the morning afternoon or night and the idea would be that you would set an intention and by intention. I mean a specific topic that
you're going to restrict your writing
to and that writing should be about self
in particular goals and aspirations
what you've wanted in the
past. Yes,
but also what you want at
present what you might want in the future for yourself these
could.
Of course be material things but in general this is more about aspirations of things that you would
like to accomplish or generate and the key word. There is generate and if you listen to the
four episode series with dr. Conte he talked about three drives that exists in all of us. These
three drives are the aggressive
Drive the pleasure
drive and the generative drive and we don't need to go into a lengthy description about these drives right now if
you're curious about them and what they represent and how
they can be in balance or out of balance and how that serves us or doesn't serve us. Please
check out that for episode series with dr. Conte because he goes into that in a fair amount of detail and also in an actionable way,
but the key thing here is that we're generative, you know, one of the things that I asked dr. Conte at the outset and throughout the entire series was you know, what is mental health,
you know, we talk about physical health and we have some idea of what that represents, you know, healthy blood pressure the ability to do certain forms of physical movement cognitive
abilities.
No, I asked him. How can we
Define mental
health and his answer was very straightforward and very powerful. He said what we all need to Aspire to is to be in states that is in the verb
actions of agency and gratitude for as much of our Waking Life as possible. Now, that sounds great right a sense of agency the ability to exert influence over our
internal State and affect the world around us
in positive ways positive relationships reach our goals as well as gratitude being grateful for the opportunities that we've been afforded.
Even grateful
perhaps for some of the challenges
that we've been afforded or that were selected for us and we had no control
over and carrying that agency and gratitude forward because it gives rise to a sense of Peace contentment and Delight. So all of that sounds wonderful
right be an agency and gratitude as a verb States experience peace contentment and Delight, but dr. Conte acknowledged
and we spent a good amount of time discussing the fact that doesn't happen
just because we decide we want to in fact
agency and gratitude.
Peace contentment and Delight guys are up from a whole set of other
processes that we have to engage in on a regular basis and that really gets us back to those three drives you talked about how people tend to have more or less aggressive drive not just aggression in terms of violence. Although some people do have that
but in terms of their determination and their sort of leaning in to friction even seeking out a friction people are on a Continuum
with respect to the aggressive drive. You also talked about the
pleasure drive and the fact that people are on the continuum
Ooh, mmm of the desire for
pleasure to either be a hedonist or somebody who really avoids pleasure and kind of restricts pleasure from oneself. And again that these things can slide around depending on our life circumstances our age Etc, but that
it's very important that we have a sense of
where we are on that Continuum of an aggressive drive and a pleasure drive and that and here's the most important thing that are aggressive Drive in pleasure Drive never outsize our
They've dried and that engaging our generative Drive is really the Hallmark of mental health that leads to that sense of agency and gratitude peace contentment and
delight and he defined the generative Drive in the following way. He said the gender of Drive is our desire to create build and contribute to the
world in meaningful ways and appreciate the process to get there. It is the core feature of our mental health. So if you want to learn more about the various drives and how they interact and how to access more generative drive again, that's
all contained in the four episode series with dr.
Conte but taking us back to the tools and takeaways from that for episode series the process of journaling and free
association mode or the
process of journaling in a
conscious structured way
is really about trying
to access the generative drive and to build up that generative drive
and one of the key things about conscious journaling is that it affords us the opportunity in a way that's not going to be seen by anybody else
to really think about what our goals
And aspirations are now you might say, you know, I can't even think about my goals and aspirations. I don't I
don't know what I want. Well, that's fine. Then you should Journal about that. However, most people have some sense of what they would like but most people are simply not comfortable with writing those things out or even thinking about them. And if you reflect on that how could it ever
be that you would achieve those goals and aspirations if you're
not even feeling comfortable enough to
think about them or write about them and
so the process of thinking about
About
and writing about your goals and aspirations is perhaps
one of the key first steps towards being able to actualize those
goals and aspirations. And for some people this might be very easy to do you can simply write down say I want to you know be married by this age and I want to make x
amount of money and I want to live here or there and certainly those sorts of goals and
aspirations are perfectly valid for this type of exercise,
but so are the sorts of goals and aspirations that relate to feeling States like yeah, I would like to feel part of a community.
I would like to feel like an
active contributor to a community and then the essential thing is to really flesh out the
detail around those goals and aspirations. You know, what size Community where do you see yourself fitting into this community? Are you doing this alongside other people or by yourself? In other
words to really get comfortable thinking about
what your goals and aspirations are
again completely from the perspective of self and
that you were going to be the only person to see this particular document
now, I will be the first to admit that the exercise that I just
Bribed not the free association journaling but the structure journaling of goals and aspirations. I and many people find to be
difficult to
initiate difficult to initiate because there seems to be a bit of
internal anxiety and friction around doing it there
seems to be something that keeps many not all but many people from feeling as if they are even
allowed to think about their goals and aspirations because many people default to well then, you know, I'll just be disappointed because it's not going to work out. I don't want to think about
I want because then I'll just be more disappointed and that particular frame of mind was actually discussed in the series with dr. Conte and
he convinced me and he's the expert that the opposite is actually
true when we are able
to overcome some of our anxiety and really think about in a dedicated way what we would like to create
for ourselves in our lives both present and future and keeping in mind our events have passed because we always carry that life narrative
forward then we are in a far better
place to actualize those go
goals and aspirations and he
explained a variety of reasons why that's the case and his clinical
observations and some of the other observations that really support that statement. So I highly
encourage you to think about embracing a process of journaling again, you don't have to do this every day the journaling and the dream analysis take a little bit more time, but they are oh so valuable
for better understanding
oneself concept and they really thread forward
into real everyday actions that can positively enrich your mood and mental health
now any description of science-based tools,
Mood and mental health would be incomplete without including some tools related
to processing of traumas. Now, the
processing of traumas is something that especially in the case of
major traumas
or repeated traumas really should be carried out in concert with a
expert trained clinician that is a psychologist or psychiatrist who's
trained in helping people work through traumas. However, even if you're working with
somebody who's expert in processing
trauma, there are specific tools that you can use on your own.
Roan to accelerate that process and for people who are working through that are
sometimes called more minor traumas. These are sometimes called Big T big traumas and little T little traumas. However, you know that nomenclature doesn't take into account the fact that you know, most of us
can probably tell what the big traumas are for ourselves and for others, but sometimes
it's hard to tell whether or not those
small traumas the little T traumas actually are Big T trauma. So, you know, this is one of the
major reasons why working with a licensed professional is really going to
Advantageous and in many cases necessary to work through trauma
that said the
self-directed protocols for working through trauma
have a lot to do with how we think about but more importantly at times how we talk about those
traumas and dr. Paul Conte talked about this not
so much in the for episode series with us, but in a particular podcast episode that he did with, dr.
Peter Atia who some of you are perhaps familiar with for his incredible podcast the drive but also for his
Excellent book outlive which deals with health span and lifespan or longevity now in that particular conversation with dr. Conte and dr. Atia, dr.
Conte emphasized the fact that one of the ways that we hold
ourselves back and he can exacerbate the negative consequences of trauma are the ways in which we modify our language to describe those traumas and what he said, which is so important is that
often times? We don't allow ourselves to use language.
H that's as big as is necessary to explain that trauma and the impact of that trauma on us and on others.
In fact many people start to you know,
relegate their language to more possible in a given sentence or passable in a given conversation.
Now what we're not talking about
here is the idea that okay, you know screaming at somebody else about your trauma or using a lot of four-letter words is necessarily the best way to process that trauma verbally, however, we are
talking about allowing.
In oneself either in
spoken form or in written form
to really allow the
magnitude of a given trauma to be
expressed with a fair degree of intensity
and language that can capture at least some of what that trauma represented for us or for others. Now as dr. Conte pointed
out all too often, we do the opposite what ends up happening is people will experience some sort of trauma
either major or minor may be single or repeated trauma
and
Then being comfortable talking about it rather than using language that captures at least some of the magnitude of that
trauma for
them people start to talk about that trauma less frequently.
They start to distract themselves to think about other things instead of talking about her thinking about that trauma.
And what happens is that trauma routes into our
unconscious mind and starts to impact Us in negative ways. Now those negative ways include increases in anxiety disruptions in
Eep in fact one of the common ways in which trauma manifests in disruptions and sleep by way of rooting into our
unconscious is that people wake up at 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning.
Let's just say after several hours of being
asleep and immediately there thinking about that thing that
happened and they're upset about it.
The idea is that when we push those
traumas down when we don't talk about them with people that we trust when we don't have a way to consciously process those traumas using language that at least partially
Is the magnitude of the impact of those traumas for us?
Well, then those traumas impact our unconscious
mind in ways that lead our unconscious mind to literally
wake us up and Mill the night and remind us of that thing. It's as if it's being
thrown back in our face over and over
also sometimes traumas will route their way down into our
unconscious and then they will resurface in the mode
of compulsive or obsessive
thinking about that thing or perhaps other things again, the unconscious mind has a in
Interesting and complicated number of different ways that it defends us
in ways that it, you know can create denial distraction that we might get hyper focused on work as a way to not think about the trauma or hyper focused on some details in our environment and just really trying to focus on that because it's much easier to process and handle that than these traumas,
you know, again, the processing of trauma is a whole landscape into
itself that actually was
beautifully described in terms of how it arises
Within.
Us and how to process traumas in a really structured way
in a just fabulous book that was written by dr. Conte called The Invisible epidemic how trauma works and how we can heal from it
and in that book, dr. Conte explains a number of different ways
that we can do self-directed work as well as work
with licensed professionals to
process traumas and help us move through those traumas so that they are not negatively impacting us going forward so I really encourage anyone that's trying to process traumas from the past and our present to check out dr. Conte's
Book because it's a spectacular resource. But in terms of the
tools related to processing trauma that we're talking about right now. I think this point about really making sure that we allow ourselves to verbally process and emotionally process that trauma in a way that there's room for using language that
capture some of the magnitude of that trauma and how it impacted us and others is going to be very important
because otherwise
what ends up happening is that we tend to
opt
feelings of guilt and shame around those traumas simply by not talking about them by having them go Inward and then they start to negatively impact our unconscious mind and then our unconscious mind
tries to throw them up to the surface for our conscious
mind to recognize by waking us up from
sleep and some cases
by leveraging those unhealthy defenses things like denial things like, you know, the overindulgence in alcohol over indulgence of drugs ways to distract ourselves as well as projection and sublimation and
the other types of defense's the dr. Conte talked about in the for episode series
again, those defenses are not
necessarily good or bad. It depends on the circumstances.
The unconscious mind is not trying
to harm us. Your unconscious mind is part of you it is
you but of course it is you acting in
concert with your conscious mind and so
really the tools and protocols from the four episode series with dr. Conte are aimed at helping you feel and access more sense of agency and
gratitude.
On a regular basis more peace contentment and delight and doing so by
touching into those different drives
understanding what they are the aggressive Drive the pleasure drive and really making sure that your generative drive again. I love this description of the generative drive so much so that I'm going to read it again because this is
really what it means to be mentally healthy. Again. The generative Drive is our desire to create build and contribute to the world in a meaningful way and
appreciate the process to get there. It is the core.
Our of our mental
health so being able to access that
generative drive on a regular basis is really what this thing that we call mental health is all about
and the tools that I just described of course can be combined with in
any number of different ways with the tools that are described gleaned largely from the episode with dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. And so what you
now have is a kit of tools and
protocols for improving mood and mental health some of which are grounded in that core six the you know,
first principles of
self-care are
Is going to be getting your physiology right so that your psychology can be right as well. Of course, you want to emphasize tools and protocols that build up your psychological processes and concept of self. That's what the tools from the Conte series that we just described are all about
and then the tools from the episode with dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett sort of bridge the two because she talked about both the physiological and the
psychological tools that really represent ways to enhance our mood and mental health and so by threading these three
three things
together believe it really arms us with the greatest degree of optimism and capacity to take control of this thing that we
call our mood and emotions and
to course allow
ourselves to feel the negative things. We need to feel but then process them in healthy ways and to exist as much as reasonably possible in generally optimistic upbeat states that allow us to engage our generative drive and although we
covered a lot of tools during this episode again. I want to emphasize that the idea isn't
Necessarily
do all of them all at
once maybe just pick one or two and start to
implement them on a regular basis and
by implementing those there's no reason to think that you
would be significantly eating into your other demands on your time because ultimately the whole purpose of having elevated mood and mental health so that you can have better relationship to yourself and better relationship to others and to the world around you
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