Dr. Andrew huberman is a professor of neurobiology at Stanford and he runs the huberman lab and he is going to break down how our brain and nervous system and all our actions work. This is an amazing conversation. I can't wait to share with y'all. This episode is brought to you by Zen solar Zen solar.com by Vivo Barefoot Vivo Barefoot.com amp and as always on it on it.com. Aw.
Free getting into this conversation with Andrew huberman was beautiful because there's all these philosophical psychological ideas that I've come to know through all of my reading all of my research everything I've experienced in my life, but he knows exactly what's happening in the brain and gives tools to go in through the nervous system to influence your mental state and emotions by actually taking care of the signals and the cues and the ways to modulate.
Lay, your body and your nervous system. So this is a phenomenal and highly pragmatic podcast and it's really one of my favorite conversations. I've had in a long time. So sit back maybe take a few notes. But otherwise just enjoy this conversation with dr. Andrew huberman, but before we get started a word from our sponsors, you've probably heard me talk about Zen solar and I think this is something that we're all aware of. Okay. I'd like to have solar in my house who wouldn't like to have
Have solar in their house. Well Zen solar makes it really easy for you to understand. Well, is this going to make sense? What's the type of money? I'm going to save what is the cost of installation versus the savings? I'm going to get from my power bill. What are all of these questions? How is this going to happen Zen solar makes that absolutely easy. You just go online go to Zen solar.com check it out and they'll guide you every step of the way. It is absolutely worth it to just check it out because you
Don't know the answers to that until you go through a process like Zen solar. So please for the Earth for your own home for your own wallet. Go to Zen solar.com. Check it out and see if solar is going to be the right solution for you. And your family are next sponsor is Vivo Barefoot, and I'm going to take a little time telling this story because I started my journey wearing shoes wearing basketball shoes and basketball shoes are designed for performance on a basketball.
All court and then of course, there's a lot of kicks that kind of resemble basketball shoes or actually were basketball shoes at some point, but now are way too uncomfortable to actually wear his basketball shoes. So that's what I spend most of my life wearing either basketball shoes or some type of cross trainer or some type of shoe that resembles a basketball shoe or resembles a cross trainer just is way more stylish and that's my whole life. Well the thing about all of those shoes, is it compresses your toe box? So if you actually look at my feet I have my big toe.
And my pinky toe pointing together like they're making a teepee and if you just extended the lines I'd have a little hat on the top of my feet pointing together and that's from all of the shoes that I've worn because the toe box is compressed. Now that gives me toe pain and that gives me toe problems and I started to notice that so I started looking around when I was writing the book on the day what are ways that we can get better shoes that actually have a much more open toe box Vivo. Barefoot.
Stood out my boy Primal swole jurat on it. He was always rocking them and they looked great. And so I got myself a pair. I got myself a pair of the boots and I got myself a pair of the flats and literally I've never worn any other shoe more those little gray boots that I have from Vivo Barefoot. I mean I'm wearing those things probably sixty percent of the time. It's just they're so comfortable. I can wear them with socks without socks and I just know that I'm actually giving my feet
Love so, this is an extremely important thing to think about if you're an athlete and you want the longevity of your feet to be able to perform or if you just want
comfort and style
because these shoes are sexy. So check it out. Go to Vivo Barefoot.com VI vo Barefoot.com - amp and you'll get a
hundred day free
trial and 20% discount code. The shoes are dope and you're going to be doing your feet and your whole body a big
service.
And lastly we have on it. Now. Everybody's heard me talk about on it. Why because I
created on it largely as a solution to everything that I've wanted to have available for my own life. So it's just expanding the toolbox of all of the tools that are available actually had somebody asked me recently the saying what do you do with all of the different supplements and bio hacking techniques and everything that you're aware of how do you fit it all in and my explanation was really look I've spent the time to get familiar.
Year with all of the different tools all of the different supplements all of the foods all of the practices and I don't do everything every single day. That would be crazy. But I know which tool to apply to which situation to bring out the total human optimization that I'm looking for in that given moment. So that's how I do it and on it is a huge indelible part of this process for me and I know it will be for you. So check out everything we have on a.com slash.
Aubrey for 10% off always once again ONN I t-dot-com Aubrey and now an uninterrupted podcast with dr. Andrew huberman. Dr. Andrew hubermann. We just had an epic conversation live on the fit for service Academy app about dragons and Bigfoot and how they're real as a sequence of neurons in the brain and we maybe we'll get back there, but that's not the way that I wanted to go. So for anybody who wants to drop in with me and my guests before the show.
Just putting that out there get on the fit for service Academy app. I'm going live every time I'm in studio and and this one was particularly special but where I wanted to go is I wanted to get people I'm going to take people on a journey with us here today, and I wanted to get people in the prime condition to receive this podcast in the best way possible. So there's obviously, you know, but from following your work there's different ways. You can prime the nervous system so that you can receive and learn information in the best way. So
So let's talk about some things that maybe some people be able to do maybe you're driving can't do all of them. But let's lead people through what we can and talk about the rest about how somebody who's wants to go into this podcast and get the most out of it. What they could start doing to actually get themselves in a prime condition to receive what we're about to share
great will force all great to be here. Thank you. This is not a long time coming and I brought a real pleasure. So I think one of the most fundamental aspects to our
Algae, not just our brain, but our body is our level of alertness or calmness, you know, you hear all this language around parasympathetic nervous system is rest and digest and sympathetic is fight and flight. I like alertness columnist because the we can just move away from a bunch bunch of fancy language. It's there for people if they want to look it up, but it's not necessary. So I think that one of the most important questions that we should all ask ourselves anytime we want to learn or we want to relax or we want to sleep or we're in a you know in a situation where we need to receive.
Eve hard information whatever it is is ask ourselves. You know, where are we on this Continuum of alertness and and sleep so when we're fast asleep, we actually can learn in sleep we could talk about that if you want. There's some really cool stuff about man, that could have saved me. Yeah, but basically we learn best when we are focused and alert, but not too stressed. And then when we cycle that with periods of depressed and not just sleep, but when we go into states of they can be shallow.
Apps they can it can be meditation. But really it's going into a state of what is most easily thought of as word. Listen asst. So I would say as people listen all the words coming through the Airways on this or they watch this once they get to a point where they feel like, okay, that's a lot of information in might be denser. I just want to consolidate that or get the most out of it. It's fine to just go into a state of word. Listen as pause it. Just let your mind drift for a little bit and then the mine likes to focus back on things. It likes to focus on and off things and so
One way to do that is we can control our level of alertness or calmness really easily and it's anchored in a really cool medical textbook finding that I think for all the people are interested in breathwork. They'll find this. I hope interesting for people that aren't I think you'll find this useful to which is that when we inhale what happens is our diaphragm moves down that creates more space in our thoracic cavity in our abdomen and our heart gets a little bit bigger physically blood flows a little bit slower through there.
It's bigger. It's just like a bigger pipe. So whatever blood is in there is moving a little slower and there's some neurons in there called the sinoatrial node. They send a signal to the brain says wait Bloods flowing slow. The brain sends a signal right back to the heart and speeds the heart up. Okay. So what that means is any time we inhale every inhale we ever take we're speeding the heart up a little bit. So it's like an accelerator. So if you want to be more alert like say you feel like you want to be more alert for whatever reason you can make your inhales longer.
Or more vigorous
so I somebody right now is like man. I'm just kind of sleepy. Maybe I'll listen to this podcast. Maybe I need a coffee. I don't know then do 10 relativizing. The inhales would be the way to go.
Yeah, do ten breaths that where the inhales are longer than the exhales and you will naturally wake up the alertness system of your brain and body and this is literally a relationship between the diaphragm the heart and the brain and back again and the opposite
is very much like Timon breathing or the Wim Hof method exactly still see what he teaches.
Deep inhale fully in right that's right. And then just let it fall
out and let it fall out and when people do it like heavy exhales they're doing their kind of balancing it in the the way that wouldn't be like classic Wim Hof or Christ. Right? Right, and
she's a mistake that I think a lot of people make when they're trying to do the Wim Hof is they'll go right
right, you know because it gives you that high when you ride off a lot of are does two things one is you blow off a lot of carbon dioxide which gives you a greater capacity for long breath holds which people kind of get
Into the competitiveness with themselves around breath holds so with off with or to mow, right 25 or 30 breasts, like you said you're supposed to inhale and then let it fall out. If you really push the exhales then on the breath holds you can go twice as long because the the impulse to breathe is controlled by a set of neurons that detect carbon dioxide. So when you exhale a lot you don't have the same impulse you can sit for a long time. There's why doing it near water in water is bad people have died doing it that way want to block out all the water blackout because you don't feel the impulse to
Breathe, so if the other thing is when you exhale it's the opposite situation, it's pretty cool. When you exhale the diaphragm moves up in your body the long scale and this whole Space kind of gets compact the heart smaller blood moves more quickly that sends a signal via neurons called the sinoatrial node up to the brain and the Brain sends a signal back really fast to slow the heart down. So this is why inhales make you more alert and exhales slow you down.
Down and calm you down in this is why things like Yoga Nidra or breathing of the like to in hold 427 out those will tend to make you sleepy and as you fall asleep, you do this naturally you start to breed longer and longer on Excel. So for people who have trouble sleeping or for people who right now are feeling a little too keyed up and they want to relax or any time people want to relax. They should just make their exhales longer than their inhales or more vigorous. So you can just go like empty your lungs. I just dumped are
You teach a very specific breath. So this is something for me. I lean towards excitability and when I'm trying to you know do a podcast I got it on 2x speed and and I'm trying to do other things while I'm on then I forget what I'm like my tendency is to try and go a million miles an hour. So actually I use some of the breasts that one of the breasts in particular that you started teaching with that which is too short inhales followed by a long sighing exhales,
right? So the physiological sigh as it's called and it is called that because it was actually discovered.
Bird in the 30s by physiologists. This is not breathwork. Actually everything I'm talking about is not breath work out. What I'm saying is inhaling is like an accelerator on a car exhaling is isn't really like a break. It's more like coming off the accelerator and then there is a break which is the physiological sigh and the physiological PSI is to inhales ideally through the nose. So it's inhale
And then you sneak in a little bit of air before you exhale and that little sneak of are does something really cool. It might feel a little sharp. What it is is as you get a little over activated your lungs are two big bags, but they have millions of little sacks. Like if we were to lay them out there about as big as a tennis court or regulation tennis court huge volume of tissue. And as you get stressed those sacks collapse, they've you flatten out like little balloons that are empty if they were blown up a balloon at a kids party or an adult party.
Are you need to sometimes blow twice? It's the double. Inhale. What that does is it inflates those sacks so that when you exhale you dumped the maximum amount of carbon dioxide. Yeah. This also works really well. So you can do this any time you're out and about you're feeling a little stressed or somebody's talking like this is stressful for whatever reason the double inhale. Exhale is the fastest way that I'm aware of to just calm down. Yeah, and so it's very useful. You can do it in real time. The other thing is if you're running like you want to hit steady Cadence
dance like Zone to cardio the double inhale exhale. This is some stuff. I'm playing with some various groups. So not all the data are in but a lot of people benefit from doing double inhale exhale double inhale exhale while they're in steady state cardio because it immediately maps to your heart rate variability the heart starts going in sync with your breathing and the other thing it does which is pretty wild is that you have a connection called the phrenic nerve that controls the diaphragm the skeletal muscle, but it has another
Branch, which goes to your liver and if you've ever been running and you felt like that stitch in your side, you feel like you're cramping that's not really a cramp that's actually liver pain. It's called it's called referred pain and sometimes there's a shoulder pain that goes with it. It's usually actually on this side and that's because all the neurons live in the same segment of the spinal cord. So if you do the double inhale, exhale when you get that side cramp, it disappears cool. And so it's not really a cramp at some like a it's a kind of like referred liver pain. So the double inhale, exhale is a very powerful
A tool and it's what dogs do right before they go down for sleep. It's what people do when they're in claustrophobic environments. If you get a bunch of people in a elevator, especially nowadays, you know, your liking La plays your master of your in the Oliver you're like and people will immediately without realizing they'll start doing this double inhale exhale to try and dump carbon
dioxide. That's this feels like basic human operating information, right and and I think one of the tragedies of the situation we're in is we aren't taught basic human
I mean, this should be kindergarten first grade second grade. Okay kids you're feeling a little excited. Okay. Try this breath. If you're feeling a little sleepy try this breath. Let's learn how to work our Machinery a little bit. I
agree. We don't in this culture. We do not teach people how to operate their mind and body and it leads to all sorts of problems stress anxiety disorder is ADD we don't guide there is no guidebook for social interactions for sexual development. It's super it.
It's a huge problem. And I think that the brain is harder to you know, identify like a user's manual right because it's always meditation Consciousness high level Concepts. What do dreams mean the really interesting stuff? Right? But I like that we're starting with physiology because what's nice about these core mechanisms of brain body is that they are real things like if we could point to the neurons, these are things in the textbooks. There's nothing mysterious. It doesn't require any learning like once you know how to do it. It works the first time it works every time you don't
Meditation is has actually unfortunate I think has taken us off track as a culture. We got so obsessed with mindfulness that we kind of had this whole thing. Let's have people meditate and whatnot. But you meditation involves some focus and sometimes people just want it like not focus. They want to get out of their head. So there should be I think tools for how do you get out of your head
when you're spinning and the meditation Arc is focus focus focus then eventually you can settle into that place that people are going for but most people don't ever get there.
It's right. So they just get into the adding more Focus to the thing and getting frustrated and saying nah screw this anyways, right, you know, this like people are talking about the payoff. But until you understand the state that you're going until you have a basic understanding of the human operating system like much better to just learn these basic nervous system cues, like the fact that somebody can know the date of the Treaty of Versailles before they know that increasing your inhales will increase alertness and emphasizing your exhales will help out with calmness. That's and
Saying yeah, it's criminal. Really. I mean it really is. I mean, I think that and also we give people driver's licenses and yeah all sorts of things that sure you know, that was an exciting part of my Youth Development and finally got the the driver's license, but I didn't know how to drive my my body and my brain and work with it, you know to work with your physiology. I mean everybody has a kind of on this Continuum. It's more like a seesaw of alertness and calmness everybody and we're kind of like this little body running along that seesaw, you know, and at night is when we just kind of
lay down next to the Seesaw and just kind of let that all be and dreams let the Seesaw do its thing but we don't learn how to do this and you know as a kid growing up. I mean you see the huge range. I saw the huge range. I tend to be a little bit more on the activated side. People are probably picking up on that, you know, even with caffeine I tend to talk a little fast. Some people are little mellower the like my Bulldog or you know, or our friend Kyle, right? Yeah. He's got a huge energy output physical energy output that's clear. I've never trained with him, but that's clear he can he can you know get after it, but he's you
Some people are more like that. You seem very calm a lot of times how we feel inside isn't how people perceive us on the outside. But I think just that ability to move the Seesaw a little bit to make ourselves feel more comfortable or to be more accessible to what people are saying because we know that when we are over activated, it's great for Focus. It's great for taking what we already have stored in the memory bank in terms of what we know how to do and it's terrible for receiving new information. We need to be in that sweet spot of like a little bit on the calmer more relaxed side.
To be open and I mean, I don't want to over inflate the value of these tools but a lot of what I see today in terms of problems of like in-group out-group or us against them or them against us kind of stuff is because people are just too keyed up right? They're not in a position to hear anything except their own thoughts and deeds are not in that in
that what you would classically archetypical e call the feminine state of receiving which requires a state of to be in receiving or listening unit for any of us who know when we get too amped up into I've we just can't wait to talk.
Not even here and we're just waiting for the paws were detecting the pause in the dialogue get somebody else's spewing at us like yes, yes. Yes. Yes now let me tell you about me and then sin that cute Upstate but that's a nervous system function and I think that's it's such a key lesson and then you know for our sake for the start of this I think you summed it up there what we want when we're here to learn and we're here we want to find that sweet spot, you know of enough and of enough attention to really focus but not so much that we're going to
Be so excited. We're going to be thinking about a bunch of other things, but drop into that equilibrium that you would in any state right there in the middle. So and then using these breaths wherever you are at home now or listening that go for it, you know, like do whatever do whatever couple of it doesn't even take that much. I mean I talked about it in my book on the day. There's a Japanese study six deep breaths without even the folks that just deep breaths change blood pressure change brings. Ya like it doesn't take forever. You know, maybe it's not
One breath, but by 600 and you're making changes and people
can you know, repeat this two or three times to get to get into that clear common Focus state, right and everyone's going to that's going to differ by what's going on in people's lives is going to differ by way of what they're doing in the moment, you know, and you know, there's been so much focus on breath work for the kind of peak experience stuff. Like Wim Hof to mow Kundalini, which is really a value. I mean it takes you that's the opposite of that's more like training your own stress threshold. It's
more like the ice bath. It's like throw yourself into a state and then try and calm yourself with all that adrenaline in your body because when you breathe really fast and deep adrenaline is released in the body and there's that impulse to move and when you sit there and you deliberately, you know, dilate your gaze and calm yourself down what you're doing is a form of stress inoculation. It's just that as my colleague at Stanford David Spiegel says, he's a medically trained serious scientist hypnotist uses it for pain management and breast cancer and all this stuff.
He says it's not just about the state you're in but how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it. That's the other thing kids don't learn to direct their own State. They don't know they can do it. And so didn't see
autonomy sovereignty of our own emotional state rather than the world constantly doing something to us. We can say Okay world. I see you and I meet you. Oh, you're going to push these chips in I call and I raise you with my breath is actually control the situation and I'll win the pot of the moment that I'm trying to accomplish.
See navigate
and it's absolutely and we give people all these mantras about resilience and mindfulness and these are powerful terms what we we tell people just do it. But what we don't do is give them tools to access these states more readily and for people that are lucky enough to have the time or the or come into contact with people that help guide them down a path like they get some Crucible experience early in life where they go. Wow. I felt like I was very close to death or close to panic and I recovered myself.
It's powerful but you know, you don't want to have to die. You don't want people putting themselves into Harm's Way in order to achieve these things and it's really quite simple and I also sometimes like to play with the idea that other animals may actually do this and we don't I mean, I don't know whether or not mother Eagles like asked the Little Eagles like hey, you feel like jumping out of the nest right now. I'm pretty sure that levels of fear are really high. So they like push them out and those thing and they so they have to do it in the experience.
Sure, there's something kind of interesting about Reaper sex and reproduction itself just from a purely biological standpoint is it goes through this full Arc of this seesaw? And I think this is also just textbook physiology, which is that the arousal response regardless of what someone's chromosomes are XX XY doesn't matter the arousal response involves being in a state of calm to Common alert not to alert right because the so-called
A parasympathetic nervous system actually creates the arousal response that makes males and females able and receptive to have sex to reproduce of all
species. That's why if you're really nervous about your sexual encounter in your adrenaline's high and your heart rates at about a hundred especially if you're you know, if your mail if you have a phallus and you're actually trying to get engorged that's a difficult spot to be in. Yeah, and if we can spot to be in with your bpms at 120, if you're trying to actually operate in the better, you can ramp up to that. It's a certain point
but
This is why people who take drugs like amphetamine and cocaine there are a bunch of sexual side effects associated with with those with that right because they're just into high levels of autonomic Activation. So so like the most fundamental thing of any species is to make more of itself. Okay, I mean an age-appropriate consensual ways, but that's the I mean every species from a moth to a human that's there's more biological Machinery devoted to that than anything else because that's what biological
Organisms want to do even bacteria. That's what they want to do viruses don't have a mind but that's what they're trying to do is reproduce. So they infect things and they reproduce inside the genomes of those things. So the it's so interesting that in every species from a mouse to a human. There's this process of reproduction that's almost like a test for being able to maneuver along this seesaw. The arousal response is dependent on a certain level of relaxation, but also alertness you can't be completely asleep. Okay then.
Is the actual physical act of sex involves some motor control and output there actually neurons in the spinal cord that control all that and then it's very interesting that orgasm is actually a heightened stress response. It's on its controlled by neurons in the sympathetic nervous system. Meaning neurons that are the same neurons are associated with the stress response. And then there's a rebound relaxation response afterwards, which is set by this hormone prolactin now, why am I going through look at this kind of like biology of reproduction 101 the reason is
Is it's interesting? It's a test of a of two organisms to be able to coordinate their levels of arousal meaning low to moderate levels arousal then high levels of arousal and then low-level arousal again, and that low level of arousal afterwards the kind of like calm and sleepiness that and mellowness that occurs after that is thought to be I don't know because I wasn't here at the design phase but the no one consulted me. I was involved in designing these circuits is just how they work, but that calm afterwards is thought to be
In order to exchange pheromones and two and four pair bonding. Yeah, because in some species like very
publisher oxytocin is that as flooded? It's a
flooded in males and females prolactin and oxytocin. So all this is to say that that are most core the most core feature of our biology is to make more of ourselves and I'm not saying everyone should run out and have children. I don't have children. So I how could I say that by practicing has virtue practicing as virtue practicing his virtue and every time taking from them every
These you know sex has been associated with with circuitry of touch and somatosensation that is pleasureful, right and dopamine and serotonin all the kind of feel good type neurochemicals. And so it's almost a test of the autonomic system to be able to reproduce and so again, it's like these are these mechanisms are there not as simple as digestion because digestion you don't have to do anything a baby just drinks, but, you know milk from mom or milk from a from formula and it
Sit right same thing with breathing babies just start breathing. Some of these things are certainly learned and that social dynamics of how to interact with others, you know kids playing you have to be able to get hurt and still play in the game or see that another kid is hurt and slow down and help them out. So all of these very basic functions are the kind of test bed for how to be a functional adult and and I'm not saying that people should be having sex earlier than is healthy for them. There's a whole psychosocial development component here.
In fact, I'm not telling people do anything. I'm just saying that there's our biology is primarily for taking us through these Adventures of arousal and relaxation waking up in the morning is in exercising or in autonomic arousal cortisol hits when you wake up boom, can you do that without losing your mind and thought and Obsession? Yeah. Can you put your head down at night and fall asleep without losing your mind in the previous day's events. These are skills that we have to cultivate.
It seems like while you're not
Mending anything specifically you can recommend recommend the genre of putting yourself through stressful situations to cause an adaptation and build the resilience towards right? Right, so welcome non-destructive exactly. So it's right and there is a line that you can cross any hormesis. So sure that you're trying to Target can become injury
there is such a thing as water. That's too cold or Asana. That's too hot. Yeah, right. Yeah. It does exist hurt yourself. Yeah, you can die workout. That's
too hard. Yeah, you know where you get rhabdo or something else happens. It's
this is not helpful. This dress is too strong. But if you follow like those principles of hormesis of putting yourself in challenging situations that you have sufficient resources to recover from and isn't such an acute stressor that you get hurt that is going to benefit you on every different level from the physical body to the nervous system to the psyche to even you know, although it's a different mechanism. Absolutely even in your own spiritual practice, you know, these challenging spiritual experiences these dark nights of the Soul talking to anybody who's in that
Dark Night of the Soul which obviously has a lot of physiological and mental aspects as well but it feels like a spiritual crisis. These are what Propel the greatest spiritual growth in many cases so that principle of learning these different mechanisms both how to modulate but also training yourself to be stronger to be more resilient to know that I got this whatever the world is going to throw at me because the world is full of chaos and mystery and Challenge and it's going to come at you with the left hook you didn't.
See always always and so to know that you're resilient and that you can handle it. You can modulate in the moment. You've been through challenging things. This is a Core lesson that I think all of us can really adopt and embrace if we want to navigate this life to the best degree
possible. Yeah, I think that we you know, we've spent as a culture. We spent a lot of time thinking about kind of the core things like get a good night's sleep because obviously the way I think about sleep and rest is when you're not getting enough or and it's different from everybody.
For everybody but if you're not getting enough sleep on a regular basis or you're just too stressed out. It's like the hinge on that seesaw is loose so it's like yeah, you're up. You're down you're all over the place. And so there's some foundational practices of sleep hydration exercise Social connection good nutrition, whatever that means for the individual that put you in a place to be able to manage things really well, but what we've been talking about up until now are these what I call real time tools, you know, I love the ice bath I done to my breathing. I still do it. I really
leave it in its virtues. There's some good science about how it helps activate the immune system all these other great things. But the ability to adjust in real-time is what it's about because that's I think we're real confidence comes from like you do a lot of public speaking. I do a lot of public speaking and there's still days where I'll show up and I'm you know, all of a sudden like I'll feel my cheeks getting flush and like what's going on. I have to be able to adjust in real time. Yeah. It's not sufficient to be like, oh, you know, I'm going to go meditate for an hour or what did I do wrong the day before and this is what it's is a
Like driving a car or reaching for an exotic substance, which you can also when you're when you're replete of the tools that you have endogenous lie. It'd be like fuck I need caffeine or maybe I need some. Well, I need some Cava and you have his whole tincture and it's fine to have a medicine bag. I got a medicine bag to you. It's got one right over there on the table has some hot babe has some different Tools in there and I'd like these exoticness tools but combine those with the endogenous tools because I'm not always going to be able to say hold on. I need to clear my energy and reset here on
Stage if you wouldn't mind sit with me for 10 minutes in silence while I go through this Hopper a ritual like that's not going to work.
Well and I think and I'm not certainly not going to recommend people take anything I or not take anything. That's not my place. I always say I'm not a doctor I'm prescribing. I'm a professor. So I just like profess a bunch of things and I can certainly talk about what I do or don't do but the point is that's very individual to me. So I don't know how interesting it is to people but I do think that everyone should know how to manage their internal real estate their mind and their body with
Do's and don'ts of physical practices of just you know practices with that don't involve ingesting anything. It also puts you in a position to better navigate those extreme states, right? I mean the person who decides to dabble with nicotine like not by smoking but taking nicotine for Focus. If you can't handle and manage your mind in a very Alert state, it's just going to make things worse. You'll think that you're in a tunnel of focus, but you actually are in a tunnel of high stress and
Nothing good comes out of that. Whereas if you've already mastered what it is to be really alert and focused and you want to take that to the next level and you're an adult and it's you know appropriate for you and your health status. Then you're going to get that much more out of it. And whereas I think a lot of people look first to like, what's the thing I can take it's like well the thing you can take is Master your sleep-wake cycle master your moment to moment kind of autonomic regulation this calm down a little get more alert and do it with some.
Thing or if you like the ice bath do that or if you if you wanted, you know run up a steep hill and then see how quickly you can calm yourself down using double inhale. Exhale type sign. That's cool. There's a huge play space that you don't need to take anything. And then once you feel like you're working well there well, then sure maybe it's the appropriate to go down the Avenue of you know, supplementation or other
thing which is ideal for learning. This is kids. Once again, yeah because you're not going to you know, nicotine is superb.
Add
developmentally before it's going to screw up neural circuits because neural circuits are so plastic the kids are going to end up totally dependent. There's actually a phenomenon when you take nicotine a lot at a young age The receptors for nicotine internalized and then you can't get them back. It's hard to get them activated. I was a thought came to my mind. I'm sorry. I hear I interrupted I did nothing wrong, but I was I didn't grow up riding motorcycles. I don't ride motorcycles. But if you ever see these kids that ride Motocross you ever see these like I'll see you Instagram post these little tiny kids riding these little mini bikes when they're little and then they get older and
Like Supercross riders, right? Whatever is going on there. I grew up in pesky boarding culture that many Motocross world seems to understand a principle, which is you don't give a little kid a big bike. They can't manage it that you teach them to manage. Oh bike a larger bike a larger bike a larger bike and then eventually they're doing all this incredible stuff and we needed I think we need to adopt the same kind of view of our bodies. Yeah, and and I know you've talked about this before I'm previous podcasts and and a bit
You're booked another teachings. But you know in these small tribal cultures where humans evolved there was a passage down we knew more or less what was appropriate for exposure at a given developmental stage and we were able to hand that down and now it's just kind of like it all comes in at once through this fire hose of the internet and I love the internet but there no filters on it. So you get it. All kids are seeing, you know porn really young and so that's a fire hose of information, you know.
The
first time in human history every
firstborn you should see like if you're going to follow this like it should be a Playboy Magazine with Pages. You know, like if you're going to follow this same idea and kids now are excite. That's that's and that's the way it was when I was a kid like oh shit Johnny got a Playboy and is like damn. Okay, you keep it this week, you know, it's like the secret Library secret
Library some kids ride on your
bikes and you're like bring it to you to bring the thing. You're like no, I want to like another two days of call. Come on man.
Yeah this
This is bring that memories because there would be a kid who would like stash there's always been the secret libraries and and in Suburbia where kids would stash things for other kids to go see nowadays. It's all coming in through the internet and there's no filter and so they're able to there also were no other people to kind of digest this information with the it's like, I mean, it's a real problem. I mean, that's what the porn thing is. So it's such a concern because of what it means at a sensory level at a chemical.
Ville
and I'm not you know, I'm I'm not here to regulate other people's behavior, but it's just it seems to me that it's like the and here I don't ride motorcycles. So I'll get this wrong but it's probably like it's like a 350 cc bike, you know for someone that doesn't know any role for a little kid, right and it's just it's a hundred percent. It's not only inappropriate
dangerous. It's hard enough to ride the porn bike as a grown-ass man. It's is it's intense you can take a corner too fast and you're spinning out into some weird territory.
Where it's just gravel, you know, and like all wow. Everybody's home mind to write short of their own place where like that analogy where you can I go like this is it's intense and I think it's an unaddressed issue like it's this is the reality. This is the playing field that we're in but the fact that nobody everybody just kind of like la la la let's let's just either say porn is bad and pretend that people aren't doing it or it's just we have these blanket responses. I think largely because we just don't really know.
To do with it and the filters that are trying to block people don't work because it'll always find the kid who doesn't have a filter on his phone and but ultimately coming up with Solutions collectively as a Humanity involving intelligent people like yourself and involving experts who can be like, all right, let's take a look at this issue from a developmental standpoint from a moral standpoint from all of the different standpoints that we can look at. What is this causing? What can we do to help educate people on how to deal with this whether it's already happened or whether it's about
out to happen whether you're a parent like this is the future that I Envision and I think we're going to have to take control of that because it's not going to come from our El Nino Elementary Middle School principal. They're going to not even want to touch this with a million foot pole right nor a high school in this is going to come from awakened people who are like, alright, let's look at these things. It's not shy away. Let's have the courage to stare straight at this problem and then not look away until we have a solution and we've brought in the experts to really deal with it.
And it's just one of myriad different things that all of us need to collectively come together and say alright, this is whether the basics for teaching somebody how to be a human like how to human effectively here are the challenges. We no longer have, you know different animals that are going to eat as coming from the bushes but we have these things online bullying that's going to come and look at the suicide rate and how it's gone in for. This is a real tiger There's real tigers out there on social media platforms both
Sexual predators and you know peer bullies and then there's these different exposures that are far more extreme than what people should be looking at. Whether it's images of people dying or whether it's images of you know, sexual material these things like alright, these are the tigers now. So let's prepare our Our Generation and ourselves shit and ourselves. It's not say that we're all good because
growing up now. I mean, I can't even imagine what it's like when the young brain is so plastic. It's also better equipped to handle things. Like I
Ever 14 year old niece and she was saying, you know everyone talks to us about the phone and how the phone so terrible but they grew up with the phone. So I'm 45. So I had we you know, I was able to adopt it but it's part of their being actually there's there's actually some reason to believe that we always know where our phone is that the phone actually we might actually have brain space devoted specifically to the map of where our phone is which is just crazy to think about but also the phone is almost like another brain
neriah and that it's a Memory store. It has a lot of information about us and I don't look at it all as being terrible in bad. I think of it as the way you're laying it out is exactly the way I think about it, which is this is the reality we can't hide we need to it's not even about Shining Light into dark Corners these this stuff is out in the open now and we can't keep the blinders on. Yeah and It's Tricky I think because no one wants to take the high moral ground stance and say look, I'm going to restrict access to everything.
You know and because then people get upset about personal rights and freedoms, which I can understand. So I don't like my personal rights and freedoms restricted, but then no one there's no there's a real lack of conceptual leadership. Like what should a sixteen-year-old know more or less. What should they know about themselves and about other people but we can't even agree on that. You know, what should any adult know about 16 year olds at this stage and it's we're in a tricky, but I think
An exciting space. I mean, I'm an optimist. I think I get the sense that maybe you feel this way too that I look at this as a huge realm of possibility sure. It's just it's risky, right even me as an academic and a big institution, you know, I try and anchored a physiology because I want to remind people I'm a scientist first and foremost, but I care about culture and people and animals, that's what I care about most and it's It's tricky to just distict ones neck out there and say hey like this
An issue, we should probably be paying attention to this dopamine saying it's not just about amphetamines cocaine and and you know, all the all the bad Sinister stuff. I mean that to right destructive drugs and heroin and all this is you know, that's bad and so is violence and of course and all these terrible things that we all agree are terrible, but there are a lot of other monsters and animals that are being allowed to roam around freely to stay with your analogy that are roaming around freely and then we're kind of shocked that people are getting clogged up and eaten not to be 220.
Overly dramatic about it, but it's time to have the conversation. Yeah, you know,
yeah, I think that's I think that's the that's the key here and it is an exciting time. I mean we look at we have all these movies about the wild west and there's people rolling around with guns that they were trained in an argument over a card game could result in your death, you know, like we're not in that world anymore times were tough unto times were tough
time dysentery and times were
always tough.
I mean viruses and bacteria
They love to infect things and sexual reproduction has been one way that they have hijacked human behavior. In order to continue to propagate themselves again to they don't have a mind viruses and bacteria don't have a mind. So sexually transmitted diseases were were far worse around the turn of the last not in the last century. But you know in the early nineteen and far worse people syphilis all the stuff. I mean fortunately the rates of those kinds of things are going down. Yeah, so that's death in childbirth, but now we have to have changed the monsters have
Changed but there's been a gap. There's been a long lag and I'm it's interesting. We're bringing this up because I didn't know that we were going to end up on this but I'm it's such an important issue to just be able to look at the hard stuff. We think about his Darkness but it's just kind of the it's the reality. It's what we've it's what human beings have created. Yeah, you know, we can't look to the atmosphere or to you know, some alien species that came down and you know bestowed this on us we made this.
Yeah, talking about hijacking the dopamine system and we veered a little bit from our story. So of people getting ready to digest this information was a holy not already where I hope nobody defense right Edie Fed. So I was listening to Daniel's Mach number actually talking to him on the phone and Incredibly intelligent guy and he was talking about how IBM created deep blue to face off against Garry Kasparov, the world's great chess master and it was based on an algorithm and I'll
a rhythm to pay to play chess and I don't know how many Ryan if you want to look up. When what year that was but whatever it was a while ago and they created that and Kasparov won the first games. They tweak the algorithm and then deep blue came back and beat Kasparov and it was never going to be beaten Again by another human being in a certain point. He was talking about how the social media networks have algorithms that are more sophisticated than the algorithms that beat Garry Kasparov at chess master at chess and those algorithms.
Designed to keep us engaged by hijacking systems like the dopamine system and keeping our attention, right? 97. Okay. So now in 2021, you know, these algorithms are more advanced as technology goes and require far less Hardware to actually Implement any was saying Casper have knew that he was facing a computer and he was trying to beat it and he failed then and the algorithms now are more advanced and we don't even know.
Know that we're up against them because they're sliding in you know behind the scenes and we think we're just doing something so I don't necessarily want to go into commentary on social media because I think it's a beautiful tool but it is just one of those challenging things. It's like a big wave that we all have our surfboards on some of us think we're surfing when we're really getting chunder in the Whitewater. Some of us are surfing some of us are some combination of both because we're not really aware of what's happening. But when you're talking about these algorithms hijacking the dopamine system, let's
I've into that because there's so much that's been talked about with that. So what is actually happening? What is the dopamine system? And how are you know, how is the social medias really tapping into that incredibly powerful system within the body.
Yes. It's super important issue in super interesting and very misunderstood aspect of our biology. So dopamine is what's called a neuromodulator and I mention that only because neuromodulators modulate the brain they make it more.
More likely that certain things are going to happen and less likely that others are going to happen. So think of them kind of like a playlist and I like to think about the kind of for playlists as neuromodulators just to really simplify things but make them clearer serotonin does a lot of things but in general serotonin makes us feel pretty relaxed Blissful and good with what we have what we all the relationships. We already have the food our state of mind and body that were already in okay if you ramp up Sarah,
And really high people tend to lose their appetite lose their libido and feel really blissed-out but kind of flat. It's it kind of kills desire because why would you go after everything anything if you already have everything you need satiation? It's satiation exactly.
The other one will be acetylcholine, which is released from a couple sites in the brain, but it really creates Focus. It's kind of like in this huge array of things that are happening around me pictures on the wall and our conversation words and Sensations and the weight of the clothes on my body. What am I going to pay attention to? It? Just kind of creates a spotlight in the brain and then dopamine is really can be thought of as the molecule not of pleasure but really of motivation and desire dopamine is about wanting things mainly wanting things.
That are outside you so if we ramp dopamine up with a drug, let's just take the extreme example Like Cocaine will do that or amphetamine will do that
where you can actually take exoticness l-dopa.
Yeah, you could take mucuna purines the velvet bean that's l-dopa gets converted to that will make generally make people more alert and in pursuit of things and externalize they'll talk a lot. They'll think about things they want it. It's the molecule of motivation and in healthy levels, you know, well, let's
Stay at extreme levels, it creates Mania where people feel like they can buy anything do anything. It's all about
other stem. Dr. Manhattan.
Exactly delusional, right? They delusional thinking
right. I'm sending my avatar to make sweet love to you right now exactly like
a girl's dream externalization and it does have a feel-good component, but it's not quite the like
shot ionic kind of take that much dopamine to be doctor.
Schizophrenic who are very paranoid delusional. Yeah. They respond pretty well to drugs that suppress dopamine, but too much suppression of dopamine has Parkinson's it's depression. It's that the movie Awakenings. It's this like catatonic thing. It's also involved in movement. So when your dopamine levels are high you feel motivated and I mean nature and biology are so beautiful. They created a simple playlist where when you're motivated in the mind. It also makes it easier to move because you're motivated for external things.
And with serotonin when you're satiated in your mind, it also makes your body more still like there's this mind/body relationship that nature is so efficient. She doesn't come along and say let's build this circuit for this and that for that bill 20 different chemicals. It's like let's just keep this really simple. So even though I'm pushing away a lot of the details of how these molecules work. It's like they buy us towards action and so dopamine biases us to want more of something and it has this interesting pain pleasure.
Relationship so it's fascinating. I always thought that you know, I'm not really into chocolate, but for people that are they'll eat a piece of chocolate and if they really like chocolate, they'll get a little surge of dopamine you would think that that surge of dopamine because it if it were just pleasure then you wouldn't want any more but that surge of dopamine makes you want more chocolate and if you don't eat
chocolate right at wait, is it the is it the actually them getting the piece of chocolate which is something that they want which is the reward that they want. That's
Actually increasing the dopamine or is it there some compound in the chocolate itself that has dopamine, you know compounds in it.
It's both it's both and but dopamine doesn't care about chocolate per se so some compounds like for the cocaine addicted person like this really tragic situation where someone wants cocaine they take cocaine and they get more dopamine it becomes this vicious Loop and I you know, and that's what creates addiction where as with most things that are wired into US sex food when we're
Angry water when we are thirsty dopamine is going to drive our motivation. If you ever been really thirsty that water tastes amazing. It's just it's like it's like this Elixir from the earth. It's incredible. You feel like you're being flooded with it. And generally it makes us want more of that thing now eventually the serotonin system kicks in and we have satiation. The reason why drugs of abuse it's kind of a broad sweeping term, but let's just say an addicted individual it that the real tragedy in that situation. Is that if the do
Dopamine system is too active for too long. It creates this Progressive narrowing of the things that bring us pleasure. That's how I Define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring us pleasure and so on the phone when we forage for things on the phone, it has certain components of addiction, but the more that we look at what's going on there certainly dopamine release which makes you want more of it, but we're getting less and less pleasure from it as we do it more and more and that's the Hallmark of addiction.
It also the phone also has a chasing the dragon. It's chasing the dragon because there's this the way that this chemical circuitry works is the neurons in the brain that control dopamine release is when you expect to get something and you don't get it two things happen. There's literally a disappointment circuit you get a drop in dopamine and then you need more to get back up. This is sounds just like drug-seeking Behavior because that's what it is. But also then when you do get that thing, it doesn't take you up to the level that you need in order to feel really really good.
Good. And so the phone thing I think when I look at the biology of it of dopamine and I look at phone Behavior, I think early on it mimics addiction. It's like whoa, this is really cool. There's so much information. I
even sent a message from my friends. There's a compliment on my post. There's some validation that I'm getting from some source
and sometimes it's also just the cool things you find. I'll find a podcast only where I found a lecture the other day that I is amazing and I was like, I can't believe that there are gems in this little device.
There's no way I could access this information. Absolutely. I was like this is fascinating and I was taking tons of notes. So that's dopamine. But then what happens is it starts to take on the form of obsessive-compulsive disorder and I don't think this has been talked about enough is it starts becoming like if our phones were out and we weren't being good about it and we didn't have some sort of contract or you didn't say. Yeah, I put away my phone during conversations. We if you pick up your phone I pick up my phone the moment we'd wrap. We wrote our phones, you know, and there's nothing criminal or bad or rude about that nowadays.
Days, but it's that kind of behavior is a lot more like OCD and OCD Taps into these brain circuits called the basal ganglia if people want to look them up, but what's really interesting about these brain circuits is there involved into decisions that you make subconsciously one is called go which is to reach the other is no go which is to not do something else. So every time we do something like reach its like flexor extensor, when you do bicep curl, your your triceps are unless you can actively engaging with your mind. You're really not engaging.
Tricep in the verse is true for a tricep extension the bicep releases stretch its extensive flexor every time we do a behavior. We are inhibiting other behaviors. And so what's happened is the in OCD these circuits get totally whacked out basically where dopamine starts to activate them in the wrong sequence and certain behaviors to start to become like reflexes. The phone has become like walking now people I wake up. I know exactly where my phone is about. I tell myself don't look at that thing.
And I reach over and I'm looking at that thing. I'm like, this is a waste don't open that app and then 20 minutes later. I'm like I spent 20 minutes looking at that a yeah, I'm here. Yeah, I just talked about
this story. This is a great example of this. I'm in the middle of ceremony three and Ayahuasca down in Costa Rica. It's otara blasted and the in the toilet on the bathroom going in there. I'm puking into a purge bucket. I'm shitting into the toilet full / John Ayahuasca vicious all of these incredibly deep and challenging visions and things are going on.
But I'm sitting on the toilet and I've trained myself every time I sit on the toilet I get on Instagram. And so what did I do? I go reach down into my pants because my phone's always in my pocket down around my ankles and I go for my phone and I have this flood of realization. Like what the hell is going on? I don't even have my phone obviously is I'm in ceremony, but it was so deeply ingrained that even in this radically different state of consciousness.
Is that addictive pattern was that deeply ingrained that I was still reaching for my
phone and that's and that's not an I would say that that's OCD like because OCD is obsessive thoughts and it's these compulsive behaviors. The sea is the compulsive and part and and that's so I think what's one of the things that hopefully this conversation will open up. I don't think I've ever heard this discussed publicly for the so hopefully people will start to think about this is that yes, the phone is addicting but you weren't reaching
To your phone thinking. Oh, I'm really excited to see what's on Instagram. You did it as if it were a compulsion it's still dopamine. But once we start to treat the phone thing as a compulsive disorder as opposed to and the word disorder is a little loaded. I want to be clear like sure because as the moment I say that you know, and this is actually coming from somebody who had I had a tick when I was a kid. I had a grunt when I was little and no one knew what that was back then and then over time I learned to kind of suppress it, but if I get really tired I find myself doing it. So I
Sensitive to the fact that I was never Medicaid, I just kind of dealt with it. But some sense of the fact that disorder brings up all sorts of feelings, but now say that to be politically correct. I just want to acknowledge that when I say disorder in this case, I mean everybody's Behavior to me if we were to take an image of how humans are behaving you'd say, they all have OCD. They're like animals in a zoo cage that are like the parrot that's plucking its feathers. That's not a diction. And so it's no longer about feeling good. There are times on
Social media I go. This is pretty cool. This is amazing interaction. I teach on social media I learn on social media. That's beautiful. That's a mixture of like dopamine and serotonin is beautiful that I can go on there and learn from people. I never met and benefit from that and I think OCD is the problem. We need to break obsessive compulsive disorder in billions of people or else we're going to end up so far down the tunnel of this thing that I mean already people are avoiding other adaptive behaviors. They're not working on Social Development.
They don't know how to interact face-to-face. They're not taking care of their physical bodies. They're starting to look like a you know, like a poorly drawn letter C, you know, I mean, it's it's it's terrible and I'm not a doom and gloom guy but I think the first nature of solving a problem is identifying what the problem is and I to me it's yes, it's dopamine. Yes, it starts out as kind of addictive and exciting but pretty soon. It's obsessive compulsive
disorder. Yeah. I mean that makes a lot of sense and what you're saying about
Sure, I think is it's actually an important conversation itself. There's a there's a magical line that the DSM or whatever kind of authorities come up with say Okay across this line is a disorder and a pathology and has a pharmaceutical that you need to take in before this line. Okay, it's normal, but that's not all that's not real. Everything is on correct, right. That's an e-book. Yeah, that's just like yes a bunch of Beats literally a bunch of people like the Council of Nicea that made the Bible like a bunch of people around like what do you think about this line and they're like
who also out there has had a problem.
Sure, right. It's like let's put the line here and then all of a sudden so just understand everything is a spectrum. And so when you're saying this, we all have a certain disorder to a certain degree, we all have trauma to a certain degree. We all have it's as full full spectrum into recognized. Okay, here I am and that was clearly a compulsion. It was a thoughtless compulsion. I didn't have any aim for my phone. I went to it's the same thing I do in the morning just like you said I wake up and I have a compulsion to reach to my phone. It stimulates something that actually brings me to a state of Awakening Sigh No.
No, I know better and I can regulate myself if I wake up at like 7:30 and I want to sleep till 9:30. That's my objective. I know for damn sure not to get on my phone because the moment I got on my phone it's fucking game over. Right right, so I can regulate that behavior then but the moment that I do know that I am getting up for the day. The first thing I'll do is reach for that phone and I wrote about how that's not the way to own the day in the room, but it's become such a compulsive thing and it's not severe enough same when I go to the bathroom even after my Ayahuasca Enlightenment experience.
It's where I realized how I was driven to this thing. I haven't changed the behavior because it hasn't reached a point where I feel like okay. This is a problem. This is a detrimental thing, but for someone who has crossed that line, we're like fuck like I just I kind of need some help with this. What do you think are some of the ways without going out and seeking professional help that they can become their own self healer and start to work on these compulsions with their own circuitry. Yeah. Well the
extreme version works, but it's too painful.
Painful for most people including myself, which would be a hundred days. And the thing is locked in a safer given to somebody else hundred-day hundred days because what's happening is once you reach that OCD level once your reflexively reaching for your phone and not really enjoying the process of being on there. That means that you're obsessive you're not obsessing consciously, but you're subconsciously reaching for this thing just to get to Baseline. You're just trying to you're no longer getting the pleasure. You're just trying to maintain and this looks exactly like drug-seeking.
Savior, right, you know unlike nutrition where we actually do need to ingest nutrients every once in a while in order to keep living. We don't need to use drugs in order to survive. Right? It's a personal choice of people decide to do that, but we don't need them in order to survive that we are engaging with the phone in these compulsive scenarios at a level where it seems essential to survival and it does seem to be about a hundred days before that pleasure pain circuitry adjust itself so that the phone can be pleasureful again, so that
You can enjoy it again and people have always says it 21 days for a habit or is it seven days is a 10,000 hours about a hundred days seems to be what it takes for the neural circuits to rearrange themselves, but most people aren't going to do that. So I think it's really about designating periods of time throughout the day maybe for me. It's really the mid-morning phases when I can get real work done. So Cal Newport deep work, you know to steal his phraseology really is a wonderful book by the way. He's very I don't think he's on social media at all. I think.
Social media is great for my purposes and goals. So blocking out 90 minute or two hour periods throughout the day where the phone is off and in my case, I confess I have to sometimes put it in the car or toss it up on the roof. I mean, I just find myself. Yeah, I hear you and then you'd get the rationalization Behavior like oh but wait maybe my dog. So this is part
of my business right because part of what's right rich people. Yeah, there's an
anxiety. I think everyone needs to know that there's an anxiety associated with not being connected to the phone.
And that's normal and healthy, but being able to that's a great stress inoculation autonomic arousal adjustment practice. If you're you know, I
think it's actually called nomophobia. What is that? That's that's the anxiety of not being with your cell phone. Like if you leave your cell phone in the how they actually came up with the term. I wrote about it in my book. I'm pretty sure it's nomophobia. Can you look at it brought with him? You know, I wouldn't like no mobile phone, you know phoned advice phobia a couple year nomophobia
homophobia. I need to learn these acronyms.
There's a I was gonna make a bad joke about some of the things happening in politics right now, but I'll make it later because I anyway, how did yeah, but the it's interesting a couple years ago. I gave a talk down at Santa Clara University to some undergraduates and just chatting with them and we talked about the phone and I said, yeah, you know, the phone is addictive that's how I was thinking about it then and all this stuff and afterwards this kid really nice kid in is probably in his 1920 came up to me and he said, you know, your generation doesn't get it.
What he said this is this thing that you adopted and that you use and you look at it as this kind of inconvenience. He said when my phone he was speaking about himself. He said when my phone is out of charge, I feel like the life has been depleted out of me and when it comes back on I feel a surge of energy in my body and mind I'm ready again, and I was like, I didn't know whether or not to worry laugh cry. Like I didn't I still don't even know how to interpret
that it's like that it's like they've become an Android. It's the
In has led to a complete enmeshment
complete. There's no separation.
There's no separation at all. And this is now part of the organism itself. Which yeah like you said, is that is that good for you? I can tell that is that holy shit. This is a nightmare
can tell I have a colleague. She's a physician an MD and Lemke at Stanford medicine. She was in the social dilemma and she works on addiction and I asked her, you know to does the phone meet the criteria for addiction.
And she just said absolutely and not only that but we're going to look back in 20 years and realize that this was like nicotine cigarettes that you know would we won't be able to imagine a time in which so many people were using this thing. So openly now, I don't know. I mean, I don't have a crystal ball and neither does she but it's an interesting observation. I think that's kind of where it's at. So for that kid, I'm not going to tell them a hundred days. I would say if you can do 90 minutes during the especially during that.
Got that peek portion of their day. You read about this in your book where you can really do something meaningful for your life. Not just in that moment when you can really do some deep thinking or deep writing or whatever it is that you're into creativity mathematics all these things that 90 minutes at one portion of the day most days of the week is really what sets your life on a great trajectory, right? And that would be the time to resist every urge even if it's absolutely excruciating and learn to master that the same way that you might
Avoid having the phone on in the middle of your set in a workout. You wouldn't be literally moving the bar or you know you and
I've done it. I've been on my phone during work. It's the worst fucking work out of my life. Right? It's terrible because your context is is into place and I'm in it and I'm not I don't get the relief and the joy of actually moving my body simplifying my life but to go back to that 90-minute thing. This is an interesting concept which you know, you talked about a bit that of course we know about
Circadian rhythms which kind of regulate the entirety of the day the kind of the restfulness and the wakefulness of the day and it's regulated by hormones releases, but there's smaller chunks called The ultradian rhythms, right? And what one of the significance is of you saying that 90-minute you're basically saying there's going to be at least one but you know oftentimes one. Ultradian 90-minute cycle that's super precious and super important. So just like me who knows that that sleep.
Time if I wake up early at 7:30 with the dry mouth and I need a sip of water. It's precious enough for me to get that, you know, hour and a half more to nine o'clock that I won't look at my phone same thing with that cycle that ultradian cycle throughout the day just like sleep cycles are about 90 minutes. It's precious enough that have that kind of like regulation internal resistance towards that just to preserve that thing because it's it fucking matters
right and if you don't respect it,
Because it really deserves a certain amount of respect. It's baked into our biology these 90-minute Cycles. No one can escape these 90-minute Cycles you go through them during sleep you go through them repetitively during wakefulness. Most of us have this circadian 24-hour cycle that is matched beautifully to the spin of the earth that is not a coincidence again, I wasn't consulted that design phase but it is we are I mean for all the world every Gene in our body every cell every organ is orchestrated around this 24-hour and 90-minute cycle. And so
You know, I think we could even be slightly up spiritual about this 90-minute cycle at least one per day. Everyone is endowed with this ability to focus deeply on something that matters to them and to put maximum input and focus and meaning into that experience. You don't always get the result you want out of that 90 minutes, but it's like this gifts that were given and to this the way I think about anyway, I just try not to squander it. Yeah because if you do there's
Penalty right away. Nobody comes along and gives you an electric shock. But if you if you kind of Honor that 90-minute cycle whenever some people it's in the afternoon some people it's early in the morning some people it's mid-morning. But that 90-minute cycle is when you can drop into non distraction, you can cultivate a relationship between yourself which brings forward like all your history your family history your memory all that you're not thinking about all that but it gets funneled into something that feels meaningful and I don't have any
A scientific language to place on this but there's something beautiful that emerges from that and then I can say with certainty that if you repeat that over time about five to seven days a week writing poetry music math. I don't care what it is. Just thinking deeply amazing things will come back to you. It's just the way that the Universe works. And so that's how I have to set it up in this coma. It's almost like a like a Holy Experience for me.
But what it starts with is completely mundane normal and and anxious. It's like I need to do this thing. I need to do that. I got the email I do this thing but I shut down the internet. I take the phone. I do indeed sometimes Throw It Up on the Roof. I I tell my Bulldog Costello I'm going in and I just and I truly feel like a nuclear bomb could go off and I'm not gonna go off task. So I wanted I
want and it's hard it's hard
and I don't always succeed. I don't want to give the impression that
that I'm like, you know, like the David Goggins of focus like I'm just that's not but there's something that happens when you start at first, it's anxious. It doesn't feel good. You drop into it. You wonder constantly you're always going to be a ejected from this. Am I doing it? Right? Am I doing it? Right? I want to go in and then you get I
mean, let me set this up because this is this is super important and I definitely want to go deep here, but first of all setting this setting this block of time up, so just take before we dive into the resistance that comes inevitably at the start of this. What do you say for somebody who's like
Shit, man. I don't know if mines in the morning or mines in the afternoon or mines in the evening or mine varies throughout the day. Do you think that all of us if we got still enough could kind of figure that out or is it sometimes we just have to decide when it is? Well,
you can control it. You can time it a little bit with caffeine and when you view light and we could go really deep on all that but the thing to pay attention to is what is the period of your day when you feel most alert without the fatigue it's not like a
Grinding alertness like I'm wired and tired not that but when do you feel that you have a little bit of underlying agitation? Like I actually it's weird. I tend to some out a size things a little bit. I always feel this as kind of like a movement in my left arm. Like I feel like I'm almost like got a little bit of a Tremor. It means I need to do work in the same way that it sometimes I don't work out for long enough for run. I'm like, I need to move my body. I start to feel a little bit of it anxiety. That's you know, adrenaline epinephrine same thing in the body and mind active.
Eight us and it's not just for stress. It's for That Sweet Spot of alert and calm it's priming us for action. And so that means you're starting one of these 90-minute cycles. And so the key then is to clear away the Clutter try and create what I call a sparse asteroid field. It's never going to be open space where it's just you and your and your and your activity that happens once you're in the activity, right, but you want to create a very sparse asteroid field and then you settle into the work and at some point you'll kind of fatigue.
That's the end of the 90 minute
cycle. So for me I can now that you've explained that a little more clearly. There's this there's a cycle that's available to me after I have a usually have like a blended drink in the morning some hot cacao with some, you know, MCT cashew butter some butter some different things and I have that as my breakfast thing and you know kind of have a little social moment with wife and but then there's that blares a block right there in the morning. It's and before lunch and so there is a
Productive block there's usually another one available sometime in the evening. Sometimes actually later at night. I'll get another one that's really valuable. But all right beautiful. So I have that and that now I'm thinking you know and Ian who manages my schedule with me along? He's in the back there. I'm thinking. All right. I'm going to come out of this and I'll be like, hey man, like from 10:30 to 12:00 clear in the asteroids. There's nothin I'm on full DND and and that I'm going to give myself that
space. That's right. That's when you get to evolve. This is the way I would think about it and
Every animal whether or not to ferret a cat a monkey or a bat has a period of time each day when it's like Now's the Time to forage for food Now's the Time to keep our species going now is the time to interact with, you know, they have social times and sleep times just like us but every species but especially humans, you know, we have this time when we can evolve ourselves. And so I think in all the personal development and wellness stuff, which I have great respect for frankly. I mean what better question than for people to ask themselves, how can I be better than I was yesterday.
He would that's a beauty of our of our neuroses if you will need to ask ourselves that but that 90-minute cycle is Holy time for that. That's when you get to invest in your own Evolution. And to me I've set it up in this almost like kind of spiritual way because the day is going to offer plenty of other stuff email text messages stuff. You didn't do taxes that you had that's all going to be there. So you really have to carve space around this and make it almost like a
Like a religious or spiritual practice and when one does that regularly what starts to happen is, it's just starts to feel so good because you can know what to expect. There you go. There's the interference the resistance that you know, Steven pressfield talks about that. There's the frustration and that brings up something I just feel obligated to say which is neural plasticity the brain learning and getting better and changing errors and frustration. That's how the brain knows.
Cause this is something to pay attention to and make changes around if it we've centered so much around the concept of flow that we're going to just drop into this amazing State and everything is going to work the errors in frustration are our brain saying wait what's not working here so that it can work the next time and so you can expect friction and you can also expect periods
of like having to hack your way through some dense brush to get to the waterfall that you're going to go slimy and maybe you're going to get to flow. That's the goal of this. Ultradian Cycles. You're going to get into that flow state of writing.
And you do a great job breaking this down. So now I want to get into this resistance point because even if you've marked this time out, even as I do it and I'm going to do this tomorrow morning, you know, and it's going to be my 1032 noon block. Well, I might have a podcast but we'll start as soon as I started sure. So I'm going to block that out. Even me who's gonna, you know, written a book and accomplished a lot in his work through a lot of this it still comes at the start when I go to start open. I open that file and it says master your mind master your life.
And I'm like shit and I start to like I start to get antsy and I started to fidget around and I started to think about excuses of why I shouldn't do it. But if I just sit through it and endure it something else happened. So talk to us about what Steven pressfield would call this capital r resistance. What's happening in the brain? What's happening in the body and what happens when you push through and actually turn that cycle
over? Yeah, so that kind of rumination or the feeling like I don't know where to start which is kind of the entry point for so, you know half the what used to be bookshelves and
Amazon book Department of like how to chunk and how to break things down in the Pomodoro Technique. All of that is trying to manage and cope with the fact that what you're experiencing in that moment is a release of norepinephrine from it's actually really cool the name of the neurons in the brain stem. It's a beautiful name is Locus coeruleus. It's actually the neurons actually look blue like a Roman general. Yeah. I think it means something I'm going to get this wrong, but maybe someone will look it up and then correct me in the comments someplace. It's I think it means blue and the neurons are actually have this dark blue like
Thing I think because of the chemical they make and it's this wake up signal for the brain. It's like this is important. Here we go. Like you open that file and that file goes the symbolism. We talked about earlier that symbol is this is me. This is my work. This is like, oh my goodness. This is a lot and I'm just here in my living room and my cats and there's a huge gap in time and space between where you're at and where you want to be and the brain recognizes that it's like if foraging for food and there's this huge jungle and you like I think there's a
On the other side with you know food and mates and all this like, oh my gosh, how do you do it? Well, the key is just like with the John you just start hacking. The reason is you want to take not hacking bio hacking hacking like I meant hacking down science or gently moving them aside, whatever is required. But the but the idea is that that release of norepinephrine and adrenaline in the brain and body. It's priming you for action, and if you don't take some action some physical action it starts
To feel overwhelming and confusing and so we you know, we evolved to do intellectual things and have intellectual Pursuits, but this system was designed for physical Pursuits to just start moving away brush and just start going. Oh, no, that's a that's a wall. That's a bunch of rocks. Okay this way. Oh wait, there's an opening that that's actually when dopamine is released. So I'll explain dopamine weaves into this in a healthy way when you just start some action. So maybe right out maybe you're having a really foggy morning and your head and you just say, you know, I'm just
To write my name 20 times like Bart Simpson, right? You know repeat repeat repeat repeat that action actually lowers the kind of act the threshold and this it Bridges this Gap with epinephrine. It allows you to get closer to channels that restlessness taking it someplace. Yeah.
Exactly. It's interesting. I had a IG live with Steven pressfield yesterday or the day before and he was talking about a lot of the writers that he know and he actually adopts us as well. He'll just force himself to start writing.
And he knows that he's going to you know, delete most of this almost 90% of the time but so the trick that a rider will have to leave themselves and he's I think he said Hemingway did this he would stop in the middle of a sentence. So because he knew that like, oh if I oh I know how to finish that sentence. So he leaves himself a clear place like you're clear landing spot. I see and also stop where he was excited. So you don't run yourself out of ideas and run yourself out of dialogue. It's like and then he said to the man, don't you?
Stop beautiful. And then in the next in the next morning, he goes right in there starting his new cycle knowing that he's going to face resistance and he goes ever do that to me again and all of a sudden he started and he's back in his thing. So
I think you identified. I think you actually just solved a long-lasting mystery about a resistance. I really mean that in all sincerity. It's like laying down the machete right at the patch of grass or jungle plants that you know, you need to cut down what that allows you
To do the way that you I'm rephrasing what you said, but I want to give I'm an academic and we give attribution and I want to give credit where credit's due Aubrey late. I'd never thought about this by doing that the story had always been that they leave this thing on answered. So that during the night their subconscious would work it out this very beautiful romantic notion may be okay fine, but the way you described it actually makes much more sense in terms of how the Neuroscience Works which it means that at the beginning of that next day cycle. It's a 90-minute cycle you get there the agitation you
Eel has a place that you know is adaptive you're going to finish this thing. It's like I I'm almost to the end of mowing the lawn by Miley this patch of grass. So the next morning instead of feeling the agitation what to do next because you made the whole lawn and you now have to you know plant tomatoes you are saying I'm just going to finish chopping down the hedges. I'm going to mow the lawn. I'm going to finish the sentence and the completion of a motor task of some physical task takes advantage of this system. Where as we release that.
Epinephrine and we complete something we get a little pulse of dopamine and most people don't know this. There's no reason why they should but dopamine which is made from l-dopa l-tyrosine from food becomes l-dopa eventually becomes dopamine, but dopamine is actually what epinephrine and adrenaline are made from when you make dopamine you can go longer harder and with more intensity, I guess that's harder longer and with more intensity and more Focus.
Then you could if you didn't get that dopamine head so starting work from the standpoint of a brick wall is very hard. Mmm. So what you're saying is and I love this because it means leave it a little bit unfinished of the next day. You can channel that agitation into something meaningful pick up the dopamine hit and then turn into the next day's that day's work. And so I actually I want to thank you because I'm a lot of what I do these days is trying to take what we know for sure about the about biology and apply it to real world scenarios and it
Always work and there has always been this thing about leaving this thing unfinished that the ellipse the dot-dot-dot but I think in a really practical way the way you described it makes really good sense and I'm going to start to adopt that practice
I me to and this is these are things that from listening to you. And then that's why I kind of steered it that way with Steven pressfield. So really you also deserve credit for this and then Stephen of course deserves credit for his exploration of resistance and Hemingway for doing what he did or if that's where it came from. I recall that being it.
But ultimately like this idea is really it's really revolutionary for someone and it doesn't you don't have to be a writer if you're just going to maybe you're making a course or you're making an online thing or you doing your piece of art and it's a painting and you know exactly there's this one flower that you know how to finish and you know where to finish it in some ways you're almost delaying the gratification they'll because there is probably some dopamine modulated satisfaction of finishing the easy thing and say
Throwing your hands saying haha done for the
day. These are the list makers, right? You know, I think in I read those books growing up that I love children's books because they did and I love poetry because they just still like all these elements of the brain and and subconscious in neural circuits into just such simple stories and terms and they carry so much and I do think adult stories are great too. But there was this kids book Frog and Toad are friends and I'll never forget that as a kid. There's one where he says well, you know first thing of the day make lists and then like crosses.
And it's like it's so brilliant because like they like frog or toad. I don't remember which one it was. I think they were a couple or something in the book. Anyway, they didn't tell the kids that but frog or toad crosses that off and it's that process of Leaning into something and feeling like you can pick up that first carrot along the way and that carrot as I'm referring to it is indeed that dopamine. It's also really important. I think in any discussion around dopamine if that if we create external rewards for what
Doing that are can actually get in our way. So for instance if we're to folks like being focused on the end goal is great. But if we're only driven because of the money we're going to make over the praise. We're going to get it actually can inhibit the process and the way the works has been described really nicely by a friend of mine who's a cardiologist at UCSF and he says, you know, so many people will come to him and say I'm going to write a book like, oh great. You should write a book on whatever the gut brain Axis or neuroscience and then they never do and what he eventually
I came to realize as he would give them so much positive feedback like oh, yeah, you'd write a great book. It's going to be terrific that they got all the dopamine they needed and it just stops right there. It was like the reward was in The Knowing they could and they can't get past that when you talk to a lot of accomplished writers or people who've already had one great success. They have a hard time with the next thing because they're not really into it far enough yet. They just had this big dopamine hit from the previous thing in the like can I ever exceed that preview previous performance and it's a neurological
Thing and good writers good creatives. They just know to get right back where they started on the first one, which is you don't it's kind of cool because the the nature and the universe don't really allow us any, you know, jump to level 9 shortcuts. It changes as we go but there's always some friction and I think the friction is always internal it's rarely that we can't move our hand. We can't type on the keyboard that we can't walk.
Talk to the desk. It's all in our heads and that boggles my mind that we create so many barriers but those barriers are chemical. And so when we learn to kind of dance with them a little bit better the way we're talking about. It really can make the process a lot
and what's beautiful is that you can talk to someone and it reminds me of another aspect of the conversation I had with pressfield you talk to someone like pressfield who is the consummate professional writer and you talk to someone like Goggins who's mastered the ability to push through his own physical discomfort in certain fear responses and
And they don't know why and how they're doing it. They don't know why it works. That's where someone like you comes in and figures out all of these things. But what you're just describing is probably why Steven pressfield says, he's always thirty percent done with the next book before he finishes the book that he's on he never wants to leave a gap because he says if he goes and finishes one entirely and has to start a new one from scratch after that one is finished. He's afraid he may never started
again and he and he very well may never stop.
And another one again. Yeah, we're he to do that. He knows himself. Well, I mean the there's so many great quotes out there now and they're so accessible but you know, if there's one that I think is, you know, at least among the very best ones is the Oracle right know thyself is so simple and it's like if you if you know your own internal weaknesses you can work with them and I think he's clearly he does really deserve the kind of praise and credit for having identified this thing giving it a name writing an entire book about
about the challenge of writing books from a standpoint that people could really relate to I've never met him but I'm very impressed by what my what he's done. You should make that happen for sure.
There's a lot of other areas that I want to get in that a really interesting, but I want to start talking about how so we've talked about a lot of how the nervous system interacts with the brain when you start exploring the idea of Consciousness, particularly Consciousness, and we've actually started talking about this before the podcast Consciousness as
It's seems to be in my own experience with exploring my own Consciousness, it seems to be inexorably connected to a collective Consciousness and how that interacts with the individual self interacts with the brain interacts with the physiology but cannot be fully separated from something that's also infinite and in many ways Universal or at least if not Universal collectivize to a much larger degree when you start to look at consciousness
As you know for you personally, what what kind of comes up when you start to try to explain it or try to Fathom it in one of your deep thinking Cycles?
Yeah. Well, I these are the big important questions and I'm glad and I appreciate that you said personally because I think the first thing that leaps to mind is, you know that discussion around Consciousness in the field of Neuroscience has been a bit of a trap there have been a couple of very well known scientist.
Kind of heading into the end of their careers retirement where it you know, they said a lot of stuff that sounded great, but I'm not sure that it really solved anything. There are theories about specific brain centers that control Consciousness one in particular is called the claustrum. I don't think that's ever really been tested there. A lot of people will tell you a lot of things about Consciousness and I just want to be clear that I can only draw from my memory bank of what I know about neuroscience and my own experience.
Right, the science of Consciousness is remarkably week. I mean, there's no experiment that says this is consciousness. In fact, it's just hard to look at in a reductionist way. So that's good though. I think because for now because we can put that aside as you know, what's the lab experiment that would reveal Consciousness because there isn't one least not yet. We can be philosophers and we can be philosophers a bit and so
so with all that said
You know our brain in particular our neocortex this piece on the outside that contains a map of our experience. It's a map of everything that happened to you from probably when you were in the womb until just a moment ago. It's a map of the external World merged with your internal world. So you have some sense of who you are what your name is the shape of your body where your limbs are how quick your breathing or how slowly your breathing but that's all you're what we call interest.
It's our experience of our inner world and then there's everything we see right now and those are perceptions and stations and perceptions so light and sound and all that stuff impinging on us. Okay fine, but then we have these things like thoughts and memories and those are really interesting because thoughts and memories include not just what we're experiencing right now but things from the past and things from the future so our experience of life is actually split into three different.
regimes past present and future right there may be other dimensions, but they're just hard to conceive of and I'm not smart enough to be able to articulate them or even really conceived of them at least not in this state so not to say a Texas, you know that but in this state of mind, so I think we're all on the same page but the but space and time is what the brain tries to use and make sense of so as I'm saying this I'm drawing from previous experience and I'm drawing from the present and maybe even the future my ideas of
It happened next but I think the really important to think thing to think about when it comes to a discussion about Consciousness is that my map of understanding is not just mine and what I do and what I think because that map was created from external sources. So other people's maps of experience in particular primary caregivers early on whoever that happen to be in social interactions early on I carry a map of some of the kids that I grew up with skateboarding when I was like 14 15 in fact
Fact it goes right back to this symbolism. I'll just think of one. There's a guy he think he runs the team for Adidas cape-wearing like the nicest guy ever met when I was a young kid just kind of pharaoh was his kit car Watson. He's great skateboarder Carl's amazing anyone from the skateboarding Community. This kid, he's just got the eye men for the first time he an amazing spirit and energy great skateboarder super died dad all the stuff nowadays. So I internalized some concept of him. He's safe. He's my friend. I trust him. I like him. I carry that with me even though I didn't think about
Autumn again until about a year ago when I ran into him in Oakland and now I see him on social media so I could say well my map of experience in Consciousness and this one individual that I'm selecting Carl they are that's my world my experience but I internalized some concept some symbol of him. So like we're connected through neurology, even though I have no idea what he's doing right now. We're connected because I carry a concept and a way of being that includes him.
Right and I'll end the like jerk kid that you know, like said something to me that I'm like still ruminating about 40 years later, right? That's really my issue. Right? So we carry everything with us and you know, I think the Deep work for all of us is to be in order to be sane healthy individuals. We have to be able to separate out past present and future if we can't do that. It's important to merge them, but we have to know if we
Are pulling from the past pulling from the future or fully present or some combination because it's often a combination. But we also I think have to acknowledge that the way that we see things the way that we view the world and what we believe is not just our own experience that it's that and we're impacting other people's experience. And so if this is sounding really abstract what I mean is that we are walking around in these casings of bodies and brains in this hard thing. We call a skull but those things are modulating each other.
and people love to ask me that like the kind of new agey questions about like energy and spirituality and I often don't go there but this is something that we know my maps of experience are partially what I wanted to be and decide but other people embedded things in me and I think the work of being a human being is in part because you can't spend all your time on this but is in part sorting out what's mine, and I really love and adore and hate and how much of it is really
Self-created how much of it is because I'm not doing the Deep work of flying through space and time and sorting it out and or some cases people are spending too much time doing that and they're not getting back into the world and affecting the other members of their species. So, you know, it's hard work being a human because you got to do the 90-minute Cycles the breathing the Sleep the nutrition the exercise and the Deep work and so I acknowledge that it's a it's a beast of a thing to try and tackle it all but
that's a very long worded way of saying, you know our brain and our maps of the world were created by us, but they got tremendous input from other people which means that we are creating inputs for other people,
right? So we're all far more connected and I've looked at some studies recently and there's been some animal studies and I think there's some human corollaries where they actually show an epigenetic transmission of a fear response based on a certain trigger. And are you familiar with the
essential? This is why
So for the longest time this was in the literature and psychology textbook. They would take these little nematode worms. This was the original experiment and they would you can cut a nematode worm in half. Please don't do that kids. It's like unnecessary roughness, but they did this they regrow right they'll regrow so they would do this thing where they would take these nematode worms put them into a tank of water and then they'd shock them and then they would like cut them in half put them in a new tank and then look at The Offspring of either half. Okay, and then why would you do that then they
Would see that the offspring would react to the shock or would they would do it kind of pavlovian things. Sorry, the description I just did was terrible. They tell you take a worm you put in a tank you would flash a light and then shock them and then next time you just flash the light and they and the animal would contract as if it was going to get shocked classic pavlovian learning then they looked at the offspring that never were shocked and they played the light and the the worms would contract and so I was like, wow, it's transgenerational passage of this experience.
Are all sorts of problems of like how you could sort that out. So they did experiments with they would cut the worms in half. Same worm. Give them two different conditions. So same worm grown to two different worms two different conditions one. They get the shot one came down some same gene or genes and everything. Yeah. Sorry has to be that's right. That's right, and I described it very poorly before so forgive me and this other experiment showed that indeed it's its passage of the memory to the to the baby worms. You know now then everyone said it was
Eat garbage, they came along. Someone said look the experiments weren't done properly. It's not right, but recently there's a lab in Israel. And then guys Name Escapes me and a couple in the u.s. That have shown that this transgenerational passage of memory does and can occur which is seems kind of eerie, but it could be epigenetic. It could be modifications of the genomes of The Offspring. So they're hyper reactive to external stimuli but there's some things about the experiments that actually make it seem as if it can't be just that
That there might be some passage of a memory, but of course mother and child are past the mother and the child are in this really interesting interplay of hormonal communication across the placental barrier. There's all sorts of cool reproductive biology. We could talk about some other time. Like if two twins are in separate sacks as it were the same monochorionic die chorionic how they're communicating. I mean, it's it there is immense possibility for communication through chemical signals across Generations. There's no question about that.
Yeah,
and then the farther you get though from the mother, you know, if you continue down this line and you still have the flash of light creating the responses if they're about to get shocked that's where it gets really interesting and then it gets interesting to think about a human now someone like Rupert sheldrake has no problem with this. He says, of course you upload it to the morphic resonance field, which is the collective consciousness of the organism and then the organism through remembers a but why only that's particular organism if it's the more it gets kind of confusing and there's a lot of different theories whether
Epigenetic whether it's chemical or whether it's more spiritual consciousness something that as a psychedelic Explorer. I absolutely have no personal doubt exists because I've interacted with the spiritual consciousness is of many different types of organisms in different beings on a pier spiritual level. So I believe that personally obviously I can't prove any of it is all you know, and of one and my own experiences of it, but if we think about that at the very least there's a likelihood that things are being transmitted down to us from
Um, however long through our history our genetic history. We have this kind of Consciousness that's already shaped in a certain way based upon life experiences of our ancestors that we've all seen. So when if we've never seen a snake never heard about a snake never read about a snake have no idea but we see something slithering we're going to run we're going to step back and we're going to have that natural response Carl Jung talks about these kind of archetypes that create this visceral response.
Someone sees an archetypal image of even a dragon which is you know something we talked about before the show, they'll feel kind of what that is based upon what seems like there's these patterns that exist in the Consciousness even beyond what the specific conditioning of our own lives right have contributed.
Well at a very low level like my lab Studies have visual threat and you know small objects getting darker and bigger.
Folks a an alertness response. I don't suggest you do this any babies but a newborn baby you can lean into and their eyes will widen their pupils will dilate. It's an arousal response. Something's getting closer to you. It's hardwired. It doesn't require any learning but in terms of transgenerational Passage, you could imagine that a culture of people that suffered quite a bit that there would be a kind of underlying level of vigilance that could be passed on in the form of like we talked about pre-poll Sparta land in Pre pulse.
Bishan, it's a very simple, you know, those people you can walk up behind them and they're and they're typing and you hey, and they go yeah, what's up? And then there are other people you walk by and you hey, and they go what's going on. That's that's hardwired right there. They're anxious or they're not they're like, whoa, and a lot of that is has a lot to do with upbringing but a lot of it also has to do with the thresholds in those circuits for movement how much adrenaline they release in a you know in a pulse and some of that will be learned and some of it and it can be modified through the, you know, cognitive behavioral therapy and other
Other tools, but some of it could be transgenerational right, you know, there are people on the planet right. Now whose ancestors have been put through a hell of a lot and there and you know, and they carry that and you see it in their faces, right? I mean, I think you almost have to be a robot to not see that that like people there A lot of people that are stricken they're not snowflakes there those two but there are their stricken right and there and what they carry isn't just their immediate experience like
See, that's why I think like great photographers great artist. They can capture these kind of like this thing is about the weight of things. Right and so it gets you know, and it's sad like as I'm saying it like it. There's also the great joy that you know has is transgenerational so to balance out the dark and the light but I think that there's a way in which like we're all impacting each other all the time and whether or not embedded at the level of genomes or nervous systems.
Clear, but we know one thing jeans don't control Behavior nervous systems control Behavior genes. Don't program Behavior. They program nervous systems and hormones and bodies and stuff. So that behavior Can Happen the nervous system the perhaps the greatest gift that we got as human beings is that we know that our nervous system is modifiable and we know that we can direct those modifications and I rarely get into conversations about like higher spirituality because I just don't Frank I just don't know that much about it sure, but if ever there,
Is like a calling it sort of like humans have this need and desire to try and sort through their own experience and try and make it better for themselves and hopefully for others too. And so there does seem to be something embedded in the way that we're built that makes us want to understand ourselves understand other people and I don't know I every I figure I'm
about how so yeah, this is a spiritual impulse it that's right. Where is does that come from and you can say that could come from are endless.
Search for meaning are more ways to make a story that makes sense because of the mystery that exists. Oh, why is the world floating? Well, there's a turtle that has the world on its back. Well, what's under the turtle turtles all the way down, you know like a
hardship grab some of the best quotes ever. Yeah, never ever still. Nobody knows exactly what it means. But that's what makes it so Junius
so that it could be that or it could be that there's a knowing there's a knowing of that there. Is that something more because we are connected to it and there's no way to prove it either way, but there is
Is a deep spiritual impulse we can ignore it. It's created a lot of religions which have been manipulations of that impulse off. Now often
often not always, you know, it's interesting that the human mind has this incredible capacity to adjust it space-time referencing scheme and I don't say that to sound like a theoretical physicist what I mean is that we are gays can dilate to like the soda straw view of the world and we can I mean you and I could spend a couple of hours talking about the patterns on this table if we wanted to and what it's made of
Reed Aldous Huxley.
Eon is mescaline Journeys. That's what he's talking about gives me that sure. He looks at like the patterns of his of the wood grain on his wall and he's just describing it
endlessly and he's linking it to something or we can or we can imagine that we're just in this room in Texas on the planet in the universe, you know, so we can scale our space in time we can think about Generations past or we can think about just the people we interacted with today. So the human brain is really good at Contracting and dilating. It its focus visual Focus.
Yes, but also conceptual focus and at some point I think that practice of dialogue of Contracting and dilating leads us to the place of realize. Whoa, we could get stuck at any of these stations if we stayed that, you know, we stayed there long enough we can find meaning anywhere at the level of a grain of sand at the level of the entire galaxy. And so that starts to feel kind of overwhelming and so then there's this other impulse I think kicks in like what are the larger organizational forces the things like Collective Consciousness the things
Religion, where are the you know, what who's the real? Is there a real Observer of observers and it can start to feel overwhelming. It can wrap back on itself people have lost their minds trying to solve this stuff for themselves. And for others people have claimed to have solved it, which that's I've never read a concise explanation that made sense to me. I think what it is is that it's this journey up in from highly contracted to dilate it is that it's a process. It's not like there's one station where it all
Sets its you have to be able to visit all those stations
and I think that mmm and that's I think that's an important thing to say is like if you really I think sometimes it will have somebody with a very myopic gays who will try to explain something like a 5 m EO bufo experience, you know, but have never having done it. What's bufo. So that's a bufo. Alvarius. It's a it's a toad that produces five Meo DMT excreted from its
I think I read about this in the times is this the this is
not call it the god Molech. This is not
Combo, no combos different that's like a very purgative. It's more of a poison and it doesn't really create a hallucinogenic effect. It can be you know, they treat it as medicine vastly different though one gives you reliably the most potent psychedelic experience on the planet period and they call it the god molecule for a reason because it creates this typically every user experience is unique, but it creates a state of radical University Oneness of felt sensation of being as God
With God Inseparable from God no subject-object separation. It's not me having an experience. Which even in the most intense Ayahuasca. This is me purging me seeing this meat in the five Meo experience. There's just I and I is everything everything that ever was and everything that ever would be and it could be and will be all at the same time and you feel it. And I when I have that experience, I don't see anything. I don't hear anything it is just
Just because it's everything there's no differentiation to see something there has to be a distinction of Separation in the pattern to hear something that has to go from Silence to noise that has to be no separation. It's just University. So that experience you can't you can't talk about that experience and then say oh, well, we measured the brain and we know and so I understand that experience. This is what this is in some ways. I think the
Is where I this is I love the work that's being done by all the amazing scientists of the world. However commenting on this specifically I think there's some things that have to be felt and studied. You can't do one or the other you can't just do five Meo and say I know everything about the brain and or you can't just be a scientist never having done it and say I know everything is absolute and even if you do both you still don't
know everything but I totally agree. I mean, I think that from time to time people from the yogic
Immunity have said hey, you know these breathing prep the things you talked about or their circadian rhythm. I'm big on you know light and circadian rhythms that that's been known about for thousands of years. And my response is always the same which is yes and it's been shrouded in language that's prevented it from getting to a lot of people who could really benefit from it and the stuff of scientific papers has been shrouded in language that has prevented from getting to a lot of people who could benefit from it, which is why I'm here and
so high to very important role. You're the shock Aruna as they call it in the medicine like you're the
bridge.
I've been that I think in the short life my goal is to take a neuroscience lens and we can cast any number of different things through it Consciousness relationship breathing stress learning we can put anything through that lens but I acknowledge is just one lens and you know, there are other lenses I look through but that I'm I don't feel qualified to you know, I can comment on but I don't have any kind of rigor organized language to put around it and I will say that religion isn't something that I
Know much about but our director of the National Institutes of Health Francis Collins. Our current director of the National Institutes of Health has written not extensively but he's put some articles out there. I mean he himself is a religious person which I think most people don't know that they think oh he's a physician and a scientist and scientists are all like divorced from religion and spirituality. He's quite religious and he's been open about that and why he made that decision and he arrived at it fairly late in life. It's a fascinating read if anyone wants to check it out and there are
Scientists who don't seem to believe in anything that they can't observe down the microscope and there are colleagues of mine who have strong religious leanings and a few is spiritual leanings. I think the world of it's just were in such an interesting time. I mean one of my favorite things in in life is that growing up I was fortunate enough to I was not one of them, but I was able to see some kids get really good at skateboarding or music and then and see the evolution of something and I even though I left that community.
You pretty early. I always carry that with me because I realize what's happening. Now. That's the evolution that we're going to look back on in 10 years. So be aware of how you fit into that process when you're doing this you're teaching and guiding and you know, 20 years from now, we're gonna look back and be like that was part of this Evolution and I think the one of the really important and exciting discussions that's happening right now is all this stuff around psychiatric health and psychedelic medicine. I Look to a couple Pioneers in particular and I also want to acknowledge that
This whole thing was attempted in the 60s and when unfortunately badly wrong we got some great quotes and great stories, but we also ended up with like a lot of people who lost their minds others who had great insights that were marginalized by academic communities by for all sorts of reasons. So this time around it's happening differently. You've got the group at Johns Hopkins Matthew Johnson and a few others that are doing rigorous science of psychedelic medicine. I'm not
involved in this work, but it's like it's happening again 40 50 years later, but it's now happening inside of universities where not only are they not at risk for losing their jobs. They've actually been given job specifically for this because people forget their like Huxley ramadasa know that they lost their jobs. Yeah, right. I mean Ken Kesey those guys that was the VA hospital and in Menlo Park, I think these people were not kept in the business and it's interesting history and its own right so Matt is there doing his thing which I really admire.
Had funding from external sources the private sources. Mainly now the National Institutes of Health is paying attention this their colleagues of mine who are working on MDMA. My lab isn't working on these things. So we are at the front edge of what could be the this bridge between discussions about Mental Health First first, it'll be about mental health and then it will be what why do these things work the way they do and let's just say I know enough about how they work to understand.
That they clearly alter the perception of space and time in some way that at least in the clinical studies done correctly and safely allow people to repackage their experience in a way that doesn't carry such a burden and I do want to be clear because I have to be careful about this. I'm not a proponent nor am I saying these is bad I'm saying it's interesting. This is happening in Laboratories now and in clinics around the world now, and it's
It's one of the it's not the only but it's one of the kind of next generation of psychic of treatments for psychiatric illness that's
clear and it's so exciting because I think we've adopted this kind of broken brain hypothesis. Where as if something is going wrong with your Consciousness. Don't worry about your nervous system. We got a chemical for you will insert this chemical you take it forever and we'll fix you right up like you have a machine that has a screw loose and you screw it in right and it's not working out, you know, it's like people it can help people.
Well in the short term and I know it would be beneficial. I'm not saying for everybody to get off their meds and whatever they have their place. They have their
purpose save save save save lives and they've taken lives. No doubt.
Yeah, no doubt, but what we're seeing with these other psychedelic medicine treatments is you in the mdma-assisted Psychotherapy. It's three sessions three encounters with MDMA and people are healing their post-traumatic stress two out of every three in the phase 2 is at least and it's getting better over time. They're not having to continually take MDMA so
Some Transcendent experience. It's creating that same with the psilocybin, you know, mediated experiences that are being studied. It's not like a continual micro dose of psilocybin altering a brain chemistry adding a chemical. It's the Transcendent experience itself that's rewiring or in whatever way maybe rewiring is the wrong word. You would know if that's the
right place. I think it is opening plasticity mean if we look at MDMA just from a strictly chemical standpoint like what is it doing?
When you take MDMA, what is the chemical effect the effect is a very unusual one, which is high levels of dopamine. We know that based on its chemical structure high levels of dopamine a lot of arousal alertness, but also high levels of Serotonin simultaneously and that's a very unusual state. I'm not saying people couldn't achieve that state through other means but that's very unusual most compounds that are being tested right now or more on the purely serotonergic or mostly serotonergic or mostly dopaminergic.
So it's somehow creates this opportunity for plasticity. I think a lot of people don't realize is that the plasticity isn't just while they're under feeling the effects of it that it has a long tail that the plasticity is a process that opens and it's not like it shuts down the moment that the drug is cleared from the system that plasticity is a process in which neurons are searching for new connections, and they are more or less allowed to make new associations. Now that makes it a very vulnerable time to wear a certain set of
Is have to take place. I mean you the wiring could go good or could go bad. It sounds like from these Clinton early stage clinical trials or now late-stage clinical trials. It's going well for the treatment of PTSD. Yep, which is remarkable and vital and but it means that the experience that someone has when they walk out of the clinic and the next day and the next day is going to be very important also, yeah and
integration underclass
tourism and I think that a friend of mine who's an MD
Knows a lot about this space. He always says You Know Better Living Through Chemistry still requires Better Living, you know, and and for a lot of people there so back on their heels that they can't engage in the Better Living part that was always the goal of antidepressants. Let people be normal enough again feel healthy enough that they can start to engage normally and then disengage from the drug, but sometimes that works out and sometimes it doesn't and it is incredible. What's happening. I mean, I guess I am not really saying anything of substance accept that
I'm watching the space very carefully and it does seem like unlike in the 60s the late 60s and 70s this time around it's being done at Big highly reputable institutions in addition to the various, you know homegrown clinics are out there and it does seem like things are changing. I
mean it I think this is the I think we're at the precipice of a revolution at a time when we really need it a revolution of understanding our physiology our biology our meant you no harm
mental health are psychology all of these different things as we start to interact with these compounds these mystical compounds and then bridging science and spirituality bridging having new tools that all of these psychiatrists and psychologists have been doing the best with the tools. They have trying to make you know, sculptures fine sculptures with heavy chisels and heavy hammers like fuck. I'm trying my hardest, you know, and they're getting access to these tools which are like laser at yours and they're able to get in and even what you're talking about with the high levels of
No plasticity that's being created there. Actually, that's why it's it's mediated Psychotherapy. It's psilocybin mediated Psychotherapy. It's psilocybin mediated MDMA mediated Psychotherapy. You're getting skilled technicians at the point where there's the highest degree of neuroplasticity able to move through there and actually start to help people repattern these things and the amount of healing that were on the precipice of the amount of understanding the way that we're able to kind of bring all these things together. It's like all the monsters.
Emerged from the woods and we were really getting our ass kicked even though we solved the other monsters, but now I think solutions to these monsters are starting to come online to bring it all the way back around what we were talking about earlier and I really see this, you know psychedelic medicine Revolution and also the, you know kind of the religious use the spiritual use of these medicines is the Peyote Way Church gains more acceptance and there's other traditional ways that I don't think it has to only be medicinal. I lean more towards the
No ways rather than the medicinal though. The medicinal has been incredibly valuable when I've had the ability to kind of adopt that framework as well what it's really fucking exciting to see so many of these things starting to
blend it is I mean, I think that, you know, three years ago four years ago. I would have wouldn't have thought that this was going to be the discussion that people are having now and it's clear. There's a huge need. I mean the the work on PTSD alone is incredible. There's girls up.
At UC Davis that are developing non hallucinogenic variations on some of some of these for certain populations that are not going to want that or have that the tap into kind of the thought processes, but without visual hallucinations, so there's like serious science being done. I'm sure that from the standpoint of traditional spirituality and and plant medicine. There are people who are concerned wait. It's going to be just so stripped-down of its of its Essence. I think the way these things tend to go is that
I don't have a crystal ball, but
The fact that the discussion is happening and that more people are going to be able to access resources of various kinds is really the key thing. I think we have to hold that greater Gulf and what's a both in? Yeah. I love that. I have heard recently and I don't know anything about this but I've been seeing some Rumblings about concerns about patents like ifs pharmaceutical companies come in and patent psilocybin or patent MDMA then it's going to create a mess. I need to learn more about that. I guess I'm mentioning it because I think it's if I'm hearing about
this. Yeah, I mean people are worried about patenting them.
Use cases but use cases in specific thing. And I think that's the only thing that you can actually patent. You can't patent a compound that's already existed. It's already past its ex Berea. Right? So but I think people are trying it is a bit of a land grab to say, okay. Alright. Well, if you're going to use psilocybin for smoking cessation, which has some very good early clinical evidence that it's helpful for we can try and apply for a patent for the utilization of this for this specific disease condition. And you know, it's just the way the world is, you know, it's just like
This is the landscape. This is what our patent law looks like and I get it. I think like I understand both sides of that and I obviously would never want to work with a company that was trying to do that and trying to capture the essence. It's like capturing the Genies tail and saying this aspect of the genie. Yeah. I own it. Regina's like fuck you. I'm a fuckin Genie like get them get off me bro, you know like and that's kind of how I feel about it. So I understand that but it's also you're not going to be able to actually capture the genie. The genie is every where the magic is.
Is there you're just going to be able to profit off of and license off of if you're selling it for in this specific case like a smoking cessation, you know nicotine addiction drug and using it in that application. Ok, then this company get some it's going to be okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's I like
that standpoint. I mean, I feel like any really cool or really powerful positive thing tool activity eventually gets discovered and and popularized it just you can't
Hold a good thing down and that's how I feel about like when I was growing up there was actually like an indie music section. There was like there was great music that eventually became really popular and then the people who had been part of that scene a long long time like, oh, it's lame now. It's all but it eventually evolves in the Next Generation. That's that goes through adolescence and teen years when it's the way it is they evolved into something new. This is the this is the one of the Pains of of becoming an adult is understanding that none of us know what it's like to be 15 years old in 2021, unless we're
15 of course. So I think that it it's an it's really interesting. I know you've followed the space for a long time. I've been cautiously keeping an eye on it and talking to people about it and when Matt Johnson I think I mean I'll just say it having heard him. I've never met him. I've heard him speak a few times. I mean, he's been this incredible Bridge from Hopkins to these outside communities in and I think he's going about it right from what I can tell and I think we're going to look back in 10 or 20 years and I predict that Matt Johnson and colleagues will win a Nobel Prize and
Deserve it not the Nobel prizes matter. It's much except to scientists and they get some notoriety. But if ever there was an opportunity to do huge things for psychiatric medicine. I think he's he's right there and I need people on the inside you got to have people on the inside got to have people on the outside. It's like government's never going to change into if people don't like it. Then they should run for
Works work with the system that we have, you know, instead of trying and that was a big thing with the 60s. It was pushing against rather than saying,
Co-opting and writing with
those like it when we're out on neck tie and jacket, you're like whatever
and that all of that energy is the antithesis of what the true true spirituality is, which is recognized recognition than everybody is you living a different life anyways, so whether they're in a certain sign that way that's it. They boil it down boil it down boil it down. Like that's it. That's that's where it all comes from. And I think a lot of people forget that I want to link you up. I don't know if you're familiar with John Dean and his work out of University of Michigan on
EMT. Oh no, potentially hypothesizing that DMT it acts as a neurotransmitter in certain ways the endogenous cerebral spinal fluid release of it. It's a little bit beyond me. It's interesting. But I think you guys would have a an interesting conversation. I'm hopefully going to get him on the
podcast. I'd love to chat with him. I mean, I've followed Matt's work. I'd love to learn I've never done DMT. I've never I'm a lot of people ask me about it. And I know it is made endogenous lie, although I don't think it comes from the pineal, but that's that's a kind of a me.
I'm like it seemed like what John Dean's work was showing was that it's somehow in the cerebral spinal fluid. Like that's where the that's where he actually was able to measure it and measure the fluctuation but I'll learn more when we get on the podcast, but I think that would be like a cool way for you to kind of merge some of your wisdom with some of his wisdom that he's and he published these studies in 2019 Allah. I'll share some of that. But I want to go I want to go back and just give people you know, who've
And then and give them because there's so many actionable probably as much as any podcast. I've done like really actionable things that people can people can adopt. And so if we could just go through and kind of give people a little bit of a summary from where we started, you know, imagining that person. Let's just take the story of that person who's, you know, trying to work on a project, you know, and let's go through and we'll work together to just give that kind of
Alright, here. You are you got a project you want to get something cool done. You want to get your art your gift your medicine your work. You want to get this out in the world and right way you want it you're going to start tomorrow. All right. So let's talk about just some of the like the the bullet points of what we talked about to give people a summation of these of these action
steps. Yeah. Well, I think everything works best on a backdrop of good sleep and we could have a whole other discussion about that, but I would say unless you need to be nocturnal avoid bright light exposure from 10.
A.m. To 4 a.m. It's not the end of the world if you get up and use the bathroom or you know, briefly turn on the lights, but there are studies showing that bright light exposure in the middle of the night. It punishes You by it's depressing dopamine the next day and the next day so try and get good night sleep, you know master your sleep and that's a whole other discussion, but that basically means getting as much bright light as as safely possible in your eyes in the morning and a time and as a little in your eyes after about 10 p.m. And don't give up the great party. I would say
You know great things happen between 10 p.m. And 2 a.m. In life. So you don't want to live like a monk, you know, but they accept my 40th birthday exactly so despairingly, but you wake up in the morning and I think it's you know, some people wake up more slowly than others bright light exposure hydration is going to help a lot of stuff is in your book. These are because they get right to core physiology.
If morning time is the time when you start to feel some agitation meaning your alert and you're feeling now people talk about feeling a calling. I like to rephrase that as because it's a little bit abstract. In this case. We're talking about feeling like a the shoulds, you know, we've demonized the word should but there's some internal shoulds that we should like we should get some work done. We've been gifted this opportunity to evolve ourselves evolved the world 90 minutes.
People can do this, but it's hard. So create some space like clear the asteroid field turn off Wi-Fi use the program freedom. I think it's a free download if you can't turn it off and keep it off. Just get your computer. You get locked you out of your Wi-Fi get the phone off put in the other room put on the roof. If you have to if you live in an apartment, I don't know give it to your neighbor and a thousand dollar check that you're going to ask for back unless you ask for it back before I've done this actually. I'm that bad. We'll talk. Yeah real talk.
Then dropping into work. I think we learned from you today. I love this. I'm going to use this. I don't like the word hack because of that implies that you're cheating the system. I think you're you're leveraging the system properly which is ideally you've shown up to the work with something done before. So in this case, it might be get your materials out get that agitation. Turn it into action get the materials out start putting pen to paper or notes to the instrument or whatever it is. And
and also if you show up to that and
And you need to modulate your nervous system. Remember the breaths we talked about that's right emphasis on inhales increasing more alertness emphasis on exhales dropping your kind of dropping that hyperactivity down a little bit so you can be in that that sweet spot that middle Zone.
Yep, and they're a bunch of other things like relaxing your joints and face and stuff. But those tend to follow the deeper core relaxation and the physiological side of the double inhale. Exhale is the fastest way. I know to kind of bring your level of activation down in doing like 10 quick deep inhale breaths with
Exhales will wake you up. If you're not feeling alert enough caffeine hydration sure, if you like caffeine gray, if you don't don't use it, I drink mate because it's like it actually has a lot of electrolytes in it. So it doesn't feel that like kind of harsh Edge that you off. He has although I do like coffee as well and then it's time to do your work right? It's the pressfield thing it's time to do the work and that resistance is expected. It's normal. It's healthy and you should own almost see it as like a
Friend along the way with you. It's like a irritating friend that's poking you and trying to distract you pushing back on you and you can make it playful but there is a time to be serious about work. It's like this is yours and to and you don't want to squander it. So I saline into that work and understand that if it goes pretty well today. It's going to go even better the next day because these are I think what people forget about neuroplasticity. The brain's ability to change itself in response to experience is that the circuits for Focus also are subject to
Plasticity so the more you feel that discomfort and focus the more easily Focus comes the next day and the next day and pretty soon if something interrupts you for even a minute it's going to feel irritating but do yourself a favor and look back and realize that in a short period of time this won't take a hundred days. We're talking about three four days. You're going to be creating and working at a level. That's far more efficient and productive than before and then as you exit, I think we should take the tool that you provide which is don't take things to the
- line that day leave something undone. So the next day you have something very deliberate and very adaptive to focus your
energy on. Yeah. Let me add one more thing to that. I don't think we actually got to talk about quite as much so the the chemicals that you're going to be experiencing the create that agitation nor epinephrine or adrenaline. That's right both of those and dopamine actually operates in a way to suppress those. So, you know,
so when you hit a like let's say you're working and you're like, oh my goodness. I'm actually working that.
Since the dopamine is very subjective, which is cool. Like if you hear a song that you really like you will release dopamine, but I might not like the same song a funny joke to one person is not a funny joke to the other. So but that's great because it means that when you hit a point where you see yourself heading along the trajectory that's good for you that you like you should register that I'm headed in the right direction that dopamine actually allows for the production of more norepinephrine and acetylcholine dopamine is actually the molecule from which epinephrine is
has made which is incredible which means that it's giving you more gas more mileage. I can't talk about Goggins thought process because I've never been in his head all he's been in my lab and went and and I know him and we've done some work together, but he clearly has a process where he can renew himself. He's talked about some people do it by seeing other people fail. He talked about that process when you see other people going down here, like I must be do still alive. That's a competitive scenario. It's appropriate for certain things like buds or competitive scenarios, but when you're alone with your work,
You don't have that benefit. So what you have to do is find things in the work itself that you see as milestones and when you hit one of those Milestones you need to say, wow. I'm in control of my behavior. I'm on the path. I'm I'm far far away from the ultimate destination, but I'm on the path
and that could be even facing the resistance and this is a project made in another one of the things that I loved. Like if you give yourself that love and credit and respect you're starting to trigger that dopamine modulated response of saying like I'm doing a good job.
Just by sitting in here and enduring the resistance. So you may not have done shit yet. Hopefully with our you know theory that we talked about today. You will have knocked out some of the easy stuff. But as you're sitting in the resistance a good job bud way to sit in the resistance and then all of a sudden the dopamine system is activated and that's going to kind of Grease the groove a little
bit exactly you but said it better than I ever could I mean what you just described is the mechanistic subscription what my colleague Carol dweck calls the growth mindset a lot of people think of positive self-talk is
Out saying I'm winning. I'm winning in Rel in reference to the end goal. And usually that's not true because you're not at the end goal positive self-talk can take you down the wrong path. What you're talking about is the essence of real growth mindset and Carol, I think would agree which is when you invite the resistance and your ability to lean into resistance when you reward yourself for that then essentially there's nothing that you can't create or work through because you are now enjoying hard work you are
creating your re you're kind of doing a like Jiu-Jitsu on the on the resistance. You're now making it your your guide and your propeller as opposed to it, like instead of a for wind. It's a when you know when behind you so that's the really the that's the Holy Grail of this process. Mmm. And then as you lean into it and you're knocking down the pins in accomplishing things and recognizing there's constantly going to be distraction your consoling to be wondering about your phone and the thing you didn't do and I try and keep in mind at that point.
I was taught to me when I was a graduation. I used to cut these brains. I used to slice these brains very thin. It takes about seven or eight hours of slice through a whole brain and mount them on slides and it's a very meditative process, but the rule is when you start to move the blade across the brain because if you stop it leaves this ugly Groove when you start to move the blade a nuclear bomb could go off the building could be on fire and you are not going to move your arm because you have to pull it very slowly to do this correctly. What's called the microphone and you want to do that you want to
Lathe through the material as if the now if the building is actually on fire, you might you should leave but a metaphor a metaphor, but that should be your mindset. And then when you get to the end, I promise you it is you'll kind of emerge from this like a tunnel it'll kind of flicker either. That's probably at the end of one of these 90-minute Cycles. There is nothing there are some things but there's nothing quite as satisfying it's among the most satisfying experiences to have self-driven and regulated this process and it will feel
Like a lot and so the other thing that we know is extremely powerful for neural plasticity to build up this capacity for focus and work is or in or neural plasticity of any kind is what's called non sleep deep rest. I call it an SDR to just distinguish it from meditation and other things there's a now pretty extensive literature showing that a 20 or 30 minute shallow nap or if you can't nap just put your feet up and relax and do something. That's kind of wordless. Probably not watch probably not scroll.
Instagram but maybe listen to music or just go for a walk or just zone out or take a nap or Yoga Nidra is a really great thing. You can find scripts for those. I'll be putting some in SDR protocols out there on the web for free of charge that people can access but in the meantime, those are the other ones I recommend that we know can accelerate neuroplasticity. There's a paper published this last year in a really great Journal so report
so people are listening to this podcast now and they're like man, that's a lot of good information. I want to retain as much of it as
possible eat some lunch and then take a nap. Yeah.
Right. Well, we just know that you come out of those non sleep deep rest or shallow sleep things that these would be anywhere from 10 minutes to 90 minutes not longer than 90 minutes because then you can get kind of groggy you don't have to do the nap immediately after the learning or the activity some time that day would be ideal but we know that it accelerates neural plasticity because neural plasticity and all the great changes in the brain and nervous system are triggered during the activity, but they actually take place away from the activity. It's just like working out in the gym. Yeah.
The gym is a little misleading because blood rushes to the muscles. And so you get a glimpse of what it might look like, but then it which is what we're about to do. Okay trying today. That's right. I'm trying to psyche so the go easy on
me. Yeah. I'm a biology for looking at you over here. I think vice versa. No no
Professor, but the but the but those periods of deep rest allow you to consolidate the material much more quickly and more deeply and then you mentioned that there's sometimes also a period in the
Afternoon, so definitely nourish take care of your email. Take care of your Social connections. These are important things to be able to continue to work. But a lot of people if you have a high alertness phase in the morning, a lot of people have a second phase in the afternoon or late evening, it could be about 90 minutes as well. We're because you're a little bit sleepy or just a little bit calmer there. There's a tendency to have a greater ability to creative work and creative work is really about
Taking existing things and rearranging them in new ways and feeling comfortable and relaxed enough to do to be to do that. Now creative work, of course also has a very rigid implementation phase because it can't all be just, you know, throwing paint on the wall and seeing what sticks it's also about saying. Oh, that's the thing and then starting to funnel it down that pathway but it does
seem like I've never I've almost never now looking back at all the Poetry I've written I can't recall writing poetry in the day.
It's always I'm always writing my poems and night. It's not a some not a poet is a pro, you know, it's not my profession but I love writing poetry. Alright, it quite frequently and all the poems. I can think of it's always me in the evening or at
night. Yeah, the adjusting the scientists and computer scientists and Engineers would say something and I say sometimes this way that you know, that creativity is in the nonlinearities. It's about breaking the space-time rules and kind of interesting ways and what we see as really exciting and creative from the from the
Active of the Observer tends to be really it tends to be focused on some kind of Greater rule emerging from it. So like a Roth go to some people is just a bunch of paint blocks on a canvas. But for those that that appreciate art what was so incredible about Roth goes is that he captured something in what they call color space. He was able to use the absence of white on the canvas as a way to make colors pop out and interact in different ways. Now, he doesn't say that right but
There's there's something about a rothko that makes it important work and I'll be willing to bet that he didn't do that by thinking I'm gonna eliminate all the white and then I'm going to do this and I'm gonna do that. He probably dabbled and he you know, he tinkered and they always say, you know evolution in nature, you know, she's a tinkerer she Tinkers and then sees what works and and so that's why I think having a period of time each day, which I look at is the kind of the gift time. It's not so much an obligation. It's more of a gift. It's like you have a an opportunity.
Create something totally new based on your experience. And I guess we should include the collective that's wired into your apps. And that tends to come at night under conditions where you're really relaxed where your mom we're not imposing these rigid rules about the game is played like this. We therefore Innings. They last this long there's a half time. You're sort of like, yeah, maybe we throw the ball. Maybe we kick the ball, you know, maybe we maybe the ball talks, you know these kinds of things and now you can see why sir.
Certain states of Mind lend themselves really well to creativity because they break space-time rules. And so I think having a second phase where you allow yourself to break space-time rules and not expect too much from it because we know that great creative Works come from some degree of play and looseness or I think if people were interested in impose imposing there's a imposing in allowing themselves a second 90-minute block to do creative work it also it's a lot of fun.
And you can an amazing things
get said from the you get to yeah, you get
to I always think of it like the creative stuff. I have to earn it in the morning, but I tend to be a little bit like, you know a little bit masochistic in this way. So and I'm aware that you know from having done some from some teaching and stuff that every once in a while some will come to me and say, you know all the like the examples you give of like hard-driving stuff. That's great. But some of us feel like we're really doing that to ourselves all the time and we're looking for some peace and I would
I'd say Okay channel the agitation but also allow yourself these periods of Peace because I think they're they are where great works
come from. I've been flow. I've been flow. This has been beautiful man. I want to do I want to plan put it out there that I'd love to do another show on fear hypnosis some of these other different things. I have all these notes we got to add a good amount of those but I definitely want to go I want to go to the lab and I went. Oh, yeah, I want to figure out what freaks me out. Oh, yeah, we've got it was for me it was
Is alien abduction so I don't know if you got that in the VR we can probably get it. If you can dial that one in will find your pain
point my parents will find your favorites will find your pain points the you know the lab fortunately, you know, we're still able to run human subjects. It's it's a place where we can really evaluate how people manage under fear but also cognitive load like some people are just can manage their internal real estate. It's not a test. That's the other thing is we really
I like it to be something where people are able to discover and people are able to discover a bit about how we manage. Yeah sensory experience and but there are some some scary things in there at least to some
people. I'm looking forward to it brother. Also, you have a new podcast that you launched recently, which is you just really doing an amazing job exploring these Topics in detail so I can absolutely recommend that so where can people find
that thanks. Yeah, so it's called the huberman lab not very it.
Creative name but it's huberman Lab podcast. It's in all the typical places and on YouTube and I teach Neuroscience there. It does run sequentially. So like if you start at the beginning you can learn all about sleep for a month and the next month is about plasticity. I'd stay on topic for four or five episodes and then shift to the next. Yeah and the comment section or where we actually get input so that we can respond to what people want to learn more about or clear up any misunderstandings. So that's that's where I spent a lot of my time and energy these days
beautiful man.
And just so grateful that you're operating as you do and and that the function as a bridge is so important and you're doing such a great job of bridging these Concepts and language and your persona and your relatability that people can actually have access to it and see a little bit of themselves in you and see, you know, obviously your Mastery in your work, but have it translated. So that's a huge gift. I would tell you to keep going, but I know you are already so
compulsively at times, but but thank you and I also want to acknowledge that.
Thanks for bringing me on today. I've been a fan for a very long time and paid attention what you've done and are doing and you know, you've been a real Pioneer in the space of raising interesting and hard topics hard for some but and you know cracking open and Shining some light on things and like let's have this conversation. And so I really appreciate the time and having me on
here to absolutely brother. Absolutely. Thank you so much fam will see you next week. Thanks for tuning in to this podcast with Andrew huberman. Please check out his
cast and
also look into what's going on at the huberman lab. He's on The Cutting Edge of so many things it was a pleasure to share this conversation with you and I will see you next
week.
