Andrew Huberman: Become Mentally Dangerous With These Daily Habits
A Stanford neuroscientist spends nearly three hours arguing that the person who can switch their brain off at night beats the person who only knows how to push.
Posted
1 weeks ago
Duration
Format
Interview
educational
Views
9M
136.4K likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
High morning cortisol and low nighttime cortisol is the rhythm that decides how much stress a person can absorb, and learning to switch the mind off is the skill that protects it.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You are one to three years into building something and you are already running on four hours of sleep to keep up.
You have tried a dozen morning routines from podcasts and abandoned all of them by Thursday.
You can push hard on demand but you cannot stop, and the cost is showing up in your sleep, skin, or mood.
You freeze at the moment of a big decision even though you have already done the planning.
You want the physiological reason behind sleep and stress advice, not just the protocol list.
SKIP IF…
You want a supplement stack or a peptide protocol. The practical advice here is behavioral and mostly free.
You are looking for clinical treatment for depression, anxiety, or a diagnosed sleep disorder. This is performance advice, not care.
You already run a disciplined sleep and light routine. The first hour restates territory you have covered.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Huberman's whole case rests on one rhythm: cortisol should spike in the first hour after waking and bottom out in the last hour before sleep. Bright light in the eyes within 30 to 60 minutes of waking can raise that morning peak by up to 50 percent, and a high peak makes stress later in the day resolve faster because it returns to a low baseline. The second half is psychological. He treats shutting the mind down as a trainable skill (Yoga Nidra, long exhales, an eye movement trick that disrupts proprioception) and pairs it with a career pacing model: go all in for years one to three, learn to regulate in years four to six, and only then expect mastery. His line on identity is blunt. Winners and losers feel the same despair. The difference is what they do with it in the next five minutes.
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A montage of the episode's biggest claims, led by the eye movement sleep trick and the bet on whoever can turn their mind off.
02:53 – 06:16
02 · Who Andrew Huberman is
Three decades as a neuroscientist, tenure at Stanford School of Medicine, and why he started publishing protocols in 2021.
06:16 – 17:37
03 · The morning cortisol protocol
The one rhythm he would give a 25 year old: high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol, driven by bright light in the first hour.
17:37 – 24:01
04 · HRV and long exhale breathing
Why extended exhales slow the heart through the vagus nerve, and why five of them a day changes sleep HRV.
24:01 – 31:02
05 · Left column, right column
Andy Stumpf's monthly sheet of paper exercise, and using every stressor as a rep for getting attention back to what you control.
31:02 – 36:46
06 · Yoga Nidra and the eye movement sleep trick
Turning off thinking and planning as a trainable skill, plus the proprioception disruption method for falling back asleep at 3am.
36:46 – 44:37
07 · Ashwagandha, nicotine and the long game
When cortisol suppressants help and when they hurt, why nicotine pouches compound, and his father's long distance runner advice.
44:37 – 54:12
08 · Know thyself, and take yourself seriously
Reading your own state before you act, why taking yourself seriously is not rigidity, and the weekly training rhythm he runs at 50.
54:12 – 1:02:30
09 · Grind, regulate, master
The three stage career framework: all gas in years one to three, dynamic regulation in years four to six, professional judgment after that.
1:02:30 – 1:11:27
10 · Follow people, not inspiration
Why he stopped chasing inspiration, how both men handle online criticism, and Raj's joint family upbringing as criticism inoculation.
1:11:27 – 1:16:44
11 · Why fame destroys performers
Attention behaving like a drug, the traumatic dip after the peak, and what keeps people intact when the role goes away.
1:16:44 – 1:24:26
12 · Built different, and the friction that drives builders
Genetic gifts versus internal agitation, why some people feel friction with their circumstances, and where that pull becomes dismay.
1:24:26 – 1:34:53
13 · Choking under pressure and the committee method
The motor cortex over recruitment behind choking, shortening the time horizon to lower the stakes, and building a committee for decisions.
1:34:53 – 1:43:19
14 · Clutch states, learning, and the wellness trap
Why clutch beats flow, how errors drive rewiring, self testing after a podcast, and the limits of doing wellness for its own sake.
1:43:19 – 1:59:19
15 · Building courage and three mental games
Cold exposure structured as walls instead of timers, plus 10 breath meditation, harder work sets, and dilating your gaze when overwhelmed.
1:59:19 – 2:06:46
16 · Feeding off other people's energy, and grief
The test of whether someone else's success feeds you or overwhelms you, and why grief is an unfulfilled expectation in the nervous system.
2:06:46 – 2:16:49
17 · Winners, losers and rock bottom
Same despair, opposite action. What to do when you cannot generate a single constructive move, and the depth of the pit as a mirror.
2:16:49 – 2:23:53
18 · Immigrant drive and self imposed friction
Why people who arrive see opportunity that locals have habituated to, and why comfort makes deliberate friction more valuable.
2:23:53 – 2:30:00
19 · Phones, AI, and consumer versus producer
Trading skills for convenience, the separate phone and the lockbox, and the single question he uses to check himself daily.
2:30:00 – 2:41:28
20 · Love, powerlessness and three losses
Where neuroscience runs out on romantic relationships, and the three periods in his life when he felt genuinely powerless.
2:41:28 – 2:46:56
21 · The cost of being Andrew Huberman
Intense emotions against a large ambition, wanting to connect with everyone and not being able to, and making peace with mortality.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
Cortisol is not primarily a stress hormone. Its main job is deploying glucose and lipids for energy, which is why it peaks to wake you up.
Bright light in your eyes within the first 30 to 60 minutes of waking can raise your morning cortisol peak by up to 50 percent.
A high morning cortisol peak makes cortisol return to baseline faster after a stressor later that day, so the morning protects the evening.
Chronic stress damage comes from afternoon and nighttime cortisol staying high, not from cortisol itself.
Give two equally hardworking people identical circumstances and the one who can turn their mind off in the last hour of the day wins over five to ten years.
Five deliberately extended exhales spread across a day teaches the nervous system to slow the heart, and shows up as higher HRV during sleep.
To fall asleep the brain has to forget where your limbs are, so moving your closed eyes side to side, then in circles, then toward your nose disrupts proprioception and triggers sleep.
Ashwagandha lowers cortisol by roughly 30 percent at high doses, which makes it useful at night and actively counterproductive in the morning.
The better you get at a skill, the more of your energy it consumes, because expertise lets you pour more focused intensity into less volume.
Choking happens when the brain over recruits motor cortex neurons after you start thinking about how much you stand to gain, not how much you stand to lose.
The fix for freezing before a big risk is shortening the time horizon. Do not go all in for three years, go all in for three days.
Flow is the expression of something you can already do, so it has nothing to do with learning. Errors are what drive rewiring.
Clutch states, not flow states, describe where high performers spend about 90 percent of their waking hours.
Winners and losers experience the same despair. The divergence is whether the next action harms someone or builds something.
You should not be making decisions about your life inside the confines of your own skull. Keep specific people for specific categories of decision.
The unhappiest people in a peer group are often the ones whose parents gave them just enough money that they never had to push.
Every technology trades a skill for convenience, so the defense is deliberately keeping the skill you outsourced.
Asking whether you are a consumer or a creator in this specific moment is a faster diagnostic than any screen time report.
Takeaway
Your capacity is set by how well you stop.
WHAT TO LEARN
Almost every protocol in this conversation is downstream of one rhythm, cortisol high in the morning and low at night, and the psychological half is the trainable skill of getting your mind out of gear on purpose.
03The morning cortisol protocol
Cortisol's primary function is deploying glucose and lipids for energy, so a high morning peak is the healthy pattern and only sustained evening levels do damage.
Get bright light into your eyes within 30 to 60 minutes of waking, ideally outdoors without sunglasses or a brimmed hat, for five to ten minutes.
Morning is defined by the first hour or two after you wake, not by a clock time, so a 10am riser and a 6:30am riser run the same protocol.
A high morning peak makes cortisol return to baseline faster after a stressor, which is why a flattened curve is what actually produces chronic stress damage.
04HRV and long exhale breathing
Extending your exhale compacts the heart and signals the vagus nerve to slow it, so five long exhales anywhere in the day raises HRV during sleep.
Dim lights, avoid caffeine in the final eight hours, and treat the last hour before sleep as the deliberate low cortisol window.
05Left column, right column
Once a month, write what concerns you in a left column and what you can actually control in a right column, then spend the month noticing which column your mind is in.
Getting present is a physical act, not a mood. Take a sip of water, notice the sound in the room, and give the brain something concrete to attach to.
Treat every stressor as a rep. The value is not avoiding agitation but practicing the return, and the reps arrive on their own all day.
06Yoga Nidra and the eye movement sleep trick
Yoga Nidra trains you to move out of thinking and planning into pure sensation, and it is a skill that improves over years of ten to thirty minute sessions.
If you are underslept, do a session first thing in the morning or in the early afternoon dip to recover mental and physical energy without a nap.
To fall back asleep, keep your eyes closed and move them side to side, then counterclockwise, then clockwise, then toward your nose, then exhale.
07Ashwagandha, nicotine and the long game
Ashwagandha can cut cortisol by roughly 30 percent, which makes it useful in the second half of the day and counterproductive in the morning.
Sleep pharmacology short circuits the skill of turning your mind off, so relying on it costs you the capability you are trying to build.
Nicotine produces an alert but calm state that is genuinely hard to reach otherwise, and it raises blood pressure and escalates in dose fast.
08Know thyself, and take yourself seriously
Read your own state before acting. When you are underslept or carrying stressors, your judgment is out of alignment and needs compensating behavior.
Taking yourself seriously is what stops you from defaulting to the average of whoever you are surrounded by.
Never do a hybrid of rest and work. Either fully relax or actually work, because a mind split between two places is the most taxing state there is.
09Grind, regulate, master
Find your ceiling once, deliberately, then work at an average safely below it rather than living at the edge.
Real focused work has a daily limit around five to ten hours depending on the task, and a ten hour day borrows from tomorrow's five.
Years one to three are for going all in. Years four to six are for learning to regulate. Only after that does judgment and fine tuning arrive.
The better you get at something, the more energy it takes, because expertise means pouring more intensity into fewer sets.
The classic burnout tell is not exhaustion. It is hair loss, skin issues and autoimmune conditions from nighttime cortisol staying high.
10Follow people, not inspiration
Stop chasing inspiration and spend time around people who are genuinely in their element, because proximity does what inspiration cannot.
Criticism online tends to say more about the sender's state than the receiver's work, which makes it easier to sort into feedback or noise.
11Why fame destroys performers
Attention behaves like an amphetamine. What breaks people is the dip after the peak, not the peak itself.
Excess is the recurring cause of collapse for people who do well, whether it takes the form of spending, substances or ego.
13Choking under pressure and the committee method
Choking comes from the brain over recruiting motor cortex neurons when you fixate on what you stand to gain.
Lower the stakes by shortening the horizon. Do not commit to three years, commit to three days, then three more.
Do not make big decisions inside your own skull. Keep specific trusted people for specific categories of decision, then decide yourself.
14Clutch states, learning, and the wellness trap
Clutch states, forcing yourself into work at the edge of friction, describe where high performers actually live most of their waking hours.
Flow expresses skill you already have and produces no learning. Errors are what open the window for rewiring.
After a podcast or a book, take a short walk and self test on what you remember. The gaps you find are the learning.
Wellness routines are supposed to raise the ceiling for everything else. When the routine becomes the work, it has stopped paying.
15Building courage and three mental games
Build courage incrementally by living at the edge of agitation rather than avoiding it.
Structure cold exposure as walls, not timers. Get in, stay past the point where you want out, repeat, and learn to ride waves of adrenaline.
Ten breaths of meditation before you get out of bed is a concrete daily test of whether you can hold attention at all.
Make work sets harder rather than easier, and treat that choice as resilience training rather than only strength training.
When you feel overwhelmed, dilate your gaze to take in the whole room. Tunnel vision is what makes the input feel like a fire hose.
Keep one memory of something that worked and return to it deliberately, acknowledging your own agency in making it happen.
16Feeding off other people's energy, and grief
The useful test of your own wiring is whether someone else's success feeds you or overwhelms you.
Grief is not a sequence of stages. It is the nervous system still expecting an action toward someone who is no longer there.
17Winners, losers and rock bottom
Winners and losers feel the same despair. The divergence is entirely in what the next action does, and the rule is never self harm or harm to others.
When you cannot produce a constructive action, doing nothing for five minutes counts as a win, and small wins teach the brain what a win looks like.
At the bottom, ask for help out loud from whatever you believe in and shorten the goal to getting through the next hour.
18Immigrant drive and self imposed friction
People who arrive somewhere new see opportunity that long term residents have habituated to, which is a general lesson about attention not immigration.
The unhappiest people in a comfortable peer group are often the ones who never had to push, which is the case for self imposed friction.
The brain learns algorithms, not just facts. Friction followed by escape teaches a different contingency than friction followed by collapse.
19Phones, AI, and consumer versus producer
Every technology trades a skill for convenience, so keep practicing the skill you outsourced rather than pretending the trade did not happen.
Recognizing that you are being controlled by a feed is what gives you the ability to fight back, because humans resist control on instinct.
Ask whether you are a consumer or a creator in this moment, and spend time as a creator every single day.
20Love, powerlessness and three losses
Slow down in romantic relationships and build the friendship first, because that is the one domain where the science does not do the work for you.
Being misunderstood is harder to carry than being criticized, and it is worth naming the difference when you are deciding what actually hurt.
21The cost of being Andrew Huberman
Ambition and intense feeling pull against each other, and the cost of a big mission is that you cannot give everyone the attention you want to give them.
Writing your will is a practical exercise in deciding what you want people to know now rather than later.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Cortisol awakening response
The sharp natural rise in cortisol during the final third of sleep that is the actual mechanism of waking up. It is a normal, healthy spike rather than a sign of stress.
Melatonin
A hormone released in darkness that helps you fall and stay asleep. Light exposure suppresses it, and high cortisol indirectly inhibits it, so the two hormones run on opposite cycles.
Heart rate variability (HRV)
The natural variation in time between heartbeats. Higher variability reflects the parasympathetic nervous system actively braking the heart rate, which is why it is used as a recovery marker.
Respiratory sinus arrhythmia
The mechanism by which breathing changes heart rate. Inhaling expands the heart's volume and speeds the rate up, while exhaling compacts it and signals the vagus nerve to slow it down.
Yoga Nidra
A practice of lying still with long exhale breathing while shifting attention out of thinking and planning and into pure sensation. Huberman relabeled it non-sleep deep rest to get past resistance to the word yoga.
Non-sleep deep rest (NSDR)
Huberman's name for Yoga Nidra style self directed relaxation. Research shows pockets of the brain entering deep sleep during it, which is why a short session can restore mental and physical energy.
Proprioception
The brain's ongoing knowledge of where your limbs are in space. It has to go quiet before you can fall asleep, which is why disrupting it induces sleepiness.
Melanopsin retinal ganglion cells
Specialized light sensing neurons in the eye that connect directly to the brain's circadian clock. They are the pathway by which morning sunlight sets your daily hormone rhythm.
Default mode network
The brain network active when you are not focused on a task. Idling in it is restorative, though sustained overactivity is associated with depression.
Clutch state
A term from high performance research for deliberately forcing yourself into work at the edge of friction and effort. It is contrasted with flow, which requires skill you already have.
Neuroplasticity
The nervous system's ability to rewire itself. It is triggered by the gap between desired and current performance, which means errors are the signal that opens the window.
VO2 max training
Short, very high intensity intervals that push heart rate to its ceiling. Huberman uses roughly six rounds of 20 to 30 seconds hard with 20 seconds rest, once a week.
Deliberate cold exposure
Voluntarily entering cold water to trigger a controlled adrenaline release. The training effect comes from riding out the first 20 to 30 seconds when the prefrontal cortex goes quiet.
Resources
Things they pointed at.
40:02bookProtocols: An Operating Manual for the Human Body (Andrew Huberman)
27:00bookDrown Proof (Andy Stumpf)
26:43channelClearing Hot podcast (Andy Stumpf)
21:50product10,000 lux artificial light panel
19:40productOura, Whoop and Eight Sleep as HRV tracking devices
41:10productAshwagandha for evening cortisol reduction
41:50productMagnesium, theanine and apigenin as sleep supports
42:40productPinealon peptide for REM sleep
43:20productAlpha-GPC and caffeine as early day stimulants
41:10linkFree Yoga Nidra and NSDR scripts on YouTube and the Huberman Lab site
1:37:30channelTommy Wood, University of Washington, on clutch states
1:12:50channelJocko Willink on how real friends criticize you to your face
2:29:50toolChatGPT used to generate self tests on material you just learned
1:37:50channelRick Rubin on non-competitive creative work
2:36:52channelTim Ferriss podcast as the thing he listened to in the lab
Quotables
Lines you could clip.
10:54
“If I only had five minutes to talk to somebody, I would say, look, this is the best thing you can do for your health and wellbeing and performance. High morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol.”
He frames it himself as the single highest value thing he knows, and says he has never covered it on his own show.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
14:58
“Cortisol's main job is not to deal with stress. That's just one of its jobs. Its main job is to deploy glucose and lipids from areas in your body that give you energy. It's an energy deploying hormone.”
Corrects the most common misconception about cortisol in one sentence, no setup needed.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
23:35
“The person that can turn their mind off in the final hour of their day and get the better, deeper sleep, I'm going to put all my money on that person within five to ten years, far surpassing the other.”
The thesis of the whole episode, already used as the cold open by the producers.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
26:43
“You write down in the left column all the things that concern you. In the right column, you put all the things that you can actually control.”
A complete, do it tonight exercise in two sentences.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
34:22
“Keeping your eyes closed, slowly move your eyes to one side, then to the other side. Then you're going to move your eyes counterclockwise. Then clockwise. Then kind of look towards the tip of your nose. And then exhale.”
A physical instruction the viewer can test in bed the same night.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
39:23
“I'm going to pass up the next person by what I don't do as much as what I do.”
Tight, contrarian, and lands without any of the surrounding story about scientific conferences.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
49:47
“If you don't take these things seriously, what ends up happening is you default to the mean, the dominant culture that you're surrounded with.”
One line explanation of why environment beats intention.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:27:16
“I think when people get to that place where they could do something and they freeze, they're imagining how great it could go. We think they're imagining how terrible it could go.”
Reverses the standard explanation of fear, and the reversal is the hook.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
1:37:30
“The clutch state is where you have to take our energy and our anxiety and funnel ourselves into it.”
Introduces a term almost nobody has heard, which he says he learned the day before.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
1:40:04
“The flow state thing is the expression of something that you can already do. It has nothing to do with learning.”
Directly contradicts the most popular idea in performance content.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
2:06:46
“Losers take things that happen to them, and they ruminate on it and they turn those thoughts and those emotions into things that harm themselves or others.”
Sets up the paired winners line, which is the strongest two clip sequence in the episode.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
2:07:16
“Winners take the things that happen to them, good or bad, and they transmute that, sometimes through very hard work, and they turn them into actions that are supportive and indeed generative.”
The payoff half of the winners and losers pair.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
2:16:03
“The depth of that pit oftentimes is the mirror image of the height of the thing that you're going to accomplish.”
Vivid image, quotable on its own, and lands on the episode's emotional core.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
2:20:40
“It's good to have your head held underwater for a short while so you can appreciate oxygen when you come up.”
Blunt metaphor for self imposed friction, immediately followed by him clarifying he is not being literal.→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
2:28:04
“The simple question you should ask yourself, am I a consumer or a creator in this moment?”
One question, no context needed, works as a caption on its own.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
2:29:02
“Become the producer of the thing that you consume the most.”
Raj Shamani's own line, and the guest immediately endorses it on camera.→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
2:42:53
“I experience emotions very intensely. And I'm also very ambitious. And I have a vision of the world that I want to help contribute to creating. And holding those two things inside can be challenging.”
The most personal answer in the episode, given to the show's signature closing question.→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
Topic Map
Where the conversation goes.
06:16 – 24:01denseCircadian physiology and the cortisol curve
24:01 – 36:46denseShutting the mind off as a trainable skill
36:46 – 41:40steadySupplements, stimulants and sleep aids
44:37 – 1:02:30denseSelf knowledge, work capacity and career pacing
1:02:30 – 1:24:26steadySuccess, fame and what breaks people
1:24:26 – 1:34:53denseRisk, choking and decision making
1:34:53 – 1:43:19denseLearning, clutch states and neuroplasticity
1:43:19 – 1:59:19denseResilience training protocols
1:59:19 – 2:16:49denseGrief, identity and rock bottom
2:23:53 – 2:30:00steadyTechnology, attention and creation
2:30:00 – 2:46:56steadyRelationships, loss and mortality
The Script
Word for word.
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metaphoranalogystory
The person that can turn their mind off in the final hour of their day and get the better, deeper sleep. I'm going to put all my money on that person. How to turn off.
The next time you have trouble asleep or getting back to sleep, keeping your eyes closed, slowly move your eyes to one side, then to the other side. Then you're going to move your eyes counterclockwise, then clockwise. Then kind of look towards the tip of your nose.
You're not crossing your eyes. And then exhale. Now, when you do that, you disrupt the proprioceptive circuits.
Proprioception is the knowledge of where your limbs are in space. To fall asleep, you need to forget your body position. This is the first critical step in falling asleep that nobody talks about.
It really works. It really works. Andrew Huberman, professor and neuroscientist at Stanford and host of Huberman Lab, one of the biggest and most influential science podcasts in the world.
This is a masterclass in training your brain to become sharper, stronger and harder to stop. If I give you a 25 year old someone, how can they have this unbreakable, unshakable mindset, like an elite performer mindset that they will never collapse under pressure? We've never really discussed this on the podcast.
If I only had... five minutes to talk to somebody. i would say this is the best thing you can do for your health and well -being and performance high morning cortisol low nighttime cortisol cortisol's main job is to deploy glucose and lipids from areas in your body that give you energy it's an energy deploying hormone so how do we do this the best way to spike that morning cortisol is to get bright light in your eyes within the first 30 to 60 minutes of your day let's keep in mind you can drink some water during this time you can drink your morning tea or coffee if you like if you can exercise in that first hour great but this simple behavior is going to boost your morning cortisol levels.
This is the key to long -term resilience and becoming, as you call it, dangerous. If there are two people, one sees that risk and jumps, the another thinks about it but then freezes, what happens in the brain of that person who's freezing and not taking the risk? They're imagining how great it could go.
We think they're imagining how terrible it could go. But what causes us to choke is so much is at stake. If I can't do this, I can't do anything.
Can you build courage? Absolutely. Absolutely.
Incremental. You get people to their edge of agitation and you let them just live there. When have you felt the most powerless in your life?
Well, that's a great question. You ask hard questions, my friend.
I have a small favor to ask you. I need you to subscribe to our channel. The more subscribers we have, the better and bigger guests we can bring and provide you more value through these conversations.
And also the full audio experience of the show is available on Spotify where you can follow us and stream and listen to all our episodes.
Welcome on our show, Andrew Hooperman. Thank you for having me. Thank you.
It's an honor to have you here. Oh, well, thank you. Well, delighted to be here.
So tell me if someone's watching you for the first time and they have never heard or seen you or they have no clue who you are, how would you explain them what you do and why they should watch this podcast? Okay. Two sentences of history, just to orient people.
I'm 50 years old. I spent nearly three decades as a neuroscientist. I'm still a tenured professor at Stanford School of Medicine.
I now teach neuroscience to medical students and do some other teaching as well. Until very recently, I ran a research laboratory. So that was really my life from about age 19 until fairly recently.
So studying how the brain wires up during development, how it can change so -called neuroplasticity and learning, also some interest in neural regeneration and diseases of the eye and of the nervous system. So that's my academic grounding and my hands -on experience. I've had a longstanding interest in health and fitness.
both running, resistance training, a bit of martial arts, a number of different things that I've been very consistent with for the last 35 years. So while I'm not a certified expert trainer or anything of that sort, I like to think I've tried many of the things that do and don't work. And I have thoughts both about the science around those and what I've found works best for me and that I think could be of value to people.
In 2021, I decided to start a podcast called Huberman Lab. Turns out I also had Huberman Lab at Stanford School of Medicine, but Huberman Lab podcast, which is myself and a few other guys who put cameras in front of me. And I started talking about how the brain wires up, how you can change it, how sleep works, how you can optimize it, mental health.
modern treatments for mental health issues, everything from depression to OCD to anorexia, covering the scientific literature and offering what I call protocols, which are scripted ways to improve something or optimize something or reduce a pain point using behavioral tools, some things you do, behavioral tools, some things you avoid.
we do talk about nutrition supplementation and prescription drugs as well so i cover all of it so i'm happy to talk about peptides both of the conventional and unconventional kind i'm happy to talk about hormone therapies i'm happy to talk about behavioral tools so the podcast encompasses all of that and i've largely done solos where i talk about these things sort of university lecture style but i also host expert guests in these areas because my network of science and medical doctor scientists excuse me and medical doctors is pretty vast and i know some of the the best in the world i don't know all of them but i i'm very blessed to know many of them and they have incredible knowledge that i feel the world should have so i think that's probably how you found me that's why i'm here and and my real love in life is learning and teaching Things that I believe can be useful to people.
Perfect. That makes two of us. Yeah, we share a kinship in that.
Absolutely. Based on everything that you have learned, experimented, watched it fail, you know, acquired knowledge from other people and your own experiments and everything, right? I want to know if I give you a 25 -year -old someone, okay, right now today, and your only job is to make them...
mentally dangerous in next 10 years. Mentally dangerous? Dangerous.
Could you define dangerous? How can they have this unbreakable, unshakable mindset, like an elite performer mindset that they can, they will never collapse under pressure. Like someone who can handle everything in their life and they can choose and pinpoint what to do and then be able to do that.
Because here's the problem, what I feel. A lot of young people like me, we watch people like you, we understand and learn everything from you. And then half of the things we are like, Monday, we're excited when we watch you.
And then by Thursday, we're done. Nothing works out. We don't change our lives very easily, right?
A lot of people don't do that. So if I give you someone like this, 20 year old right now, and your job is to make them mentally extraordinary or mentally dangerous in next 10 years, where would you begin? It's a great question.
So my answer is at first going to sound a little basic, but I think it's very important to understand the principles behind what I'm going to say, as opposed to just the specifics. In fact, this is a broader theme I believe people should take to any discussion about health or performance, which is there are going to be many, many protocols.
Do this, do it this way, do it then, don't do it that way, don't do it then. But the real question is, what are the principles that are anchoring those statements? Why do I say this?
Well, because ultimately new protocols will come along, new peptides will come along, new podcasters will come along. And the most important thing, the most important thing is to be able to place what you hear into a framework of, okay, that makes sense. There's a mechanism to support that.
Or look, we don't have any knowledge of how that would work, but I'll try it and see if it works, provided it's safe and so on. The most important thing for this 25 -year -old hypothetical person to do is to understand that there are a few non -negotiables in their physiology and psychology that are directly linked that they have to obey as often as possible.
Notice I didn't say every single day, but as often as possible in order to get the most out of their life. What are those? Well, as weird as it may sound, the most important thing to do is to...
ensure and there are ways to do that we can talk about in a moment to ensure that you have high morning cortisol levels the so -called stress hormone which is not a stress hormone we'll talk about why it's involved in stress but cortisol is involved in much much more you want to take steps simple steps that i'll describe to amplify your morning cortisol in the first hour or two of your day And to make sure that in the last hour or so of your day, most days, your cortisol is low.
Now, why? What? What in the world?
Like, okay, but if you were going to build a human machine, okay, and I'm not talking about psychology now, but you wanted to build a human machine. Actually, let's make it a happy, quote unquote, dangerous machine. You would say, get that morning cortisol peak as high as you can.
Get your nighttime last hour before sleep cortisol level as low as you can. Why? When you do that, It sets this person up to have vastly higher levels of daytime energy, focus, ability to learn, resilience to stress when stress comes along, and ease in falling to sleep, deep sleep, rapid eye movement sleep.
These are the things of repair of the body, repair of the mind, consolidating learning, removing the emotional load of previous day experiences that might have been, you know, difficult or stressful, taking off the emotional load so they can go into the next day and they can continue to show up for their family, their work, their health, and so on and so forth.
It also turns out this pattern of high morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol is the pattern that men, women, people of all ages should have to optimize their immune system function. So we're talking about getting sick less and on and on and on. In fact, I've never really discussed this on the podcast, but If I only had five minutes to talk to somebody, I would say, look, this is the best thing you can do for your health and wellbeing and performance.
High morning cortisol, low nighttime cortisol. So how do we do this? People are probably immediately wondering.
Before I answer, I'll just add one additional fact. Most people have heard of melatonin, this hormone that we secrete at night in darkness that light suppresses. It helps us fall and stay asleep.
sufficient melatonin release you need limited light exposure to your eyes so that's why it's good to dim the lights you also want your body temperature cooling your core body temperature going down is what brings melatonin up cortisol and melatonin are on opposite cycles high cortisol inhibits melatonin indirectly but it does it so if your morning cortisol is high your morning melatonin from the night before will be lower more alertness If your nighttime cortisol is low, your melatonin peak can go higher.
Many issues relate to falling and staying asleep become trivial under those conditions. They just kind of disappear. So we should ask ourselves, what are the things to do to boost our morning cortisol levels?
And notice I'm saying morning, I'm not saying 6 a .m. Because one thing that is very important is given the flexibility, some people really do best waking up between 8 and 10 a .m. and going to sleep later some people do best waking up between 5 and 7 a .m and going to bed earlier and some people are kind of someplace in the middle like for you for instance what is your if you could control everything about your sleep wake schedule what time would you go to sleep like two right yeah like one or two and what time would you wake up nine ten Great.
So let's call 10 a .m. is your morning. 6 .30 a .m.
is my morning. That doesn't make me a better or worse person. Doesn't make you a better or worse person.
We're just different. But when I say morning, I'm not giving a clock time. I'm giving a within the first hour or two of waking.
Okay. All right. How do you boost your morning cortisol?
We're building this ultra dangerous person. Okay. Great.
But before we actually build this, why did you start with morning and not the night before? It's a good question. The answer is that this peak in cortisol, because it's on what's called a negative feedback loop, it actually inhibits itself so that once you create that peak, it ensures that the afternoon and evening cortisol is low.
And I'll explain why that is in a few minutes, if that's okay. So getting that morning peak going, it's like a wave front that starts the 24 -hour cycle. Okay.
Okay. So let's assume you go to sleep. anywhere from six to eight hours the night before okay um when you are in your deep deep sleep so two or three hours into your sleep your cortisol is at its very lowest just naturally okay your cortisol intrinsically with no input from the world starts to climb in the hours afterwards slowly slowly and then faster and faster and faster so that in the third phase of your sleep If we just divide your sleep into three blocks in that last third, your cortisol is rising very fast.
And so is your body temperature. And then at some point you wake up. Now it could be because of an alarm clock.
It could be because you wake up naturally. That is literally called the cortisol awakening response. And it is the reason you wake up.
So when people say cortisol is a stress hormone, you don't want your cortisol too high. That's true for the evening and nighttime. It's not true for your morning.
You want your cortisol. basically spiking first thing in the morning. So you get up, cortisol is now elevated.
Cortisol's main job is not to deal with stress. That's just one of its jobs. Its main job is to deploy glucose and lipids from areas in your body that give you energy.
It's an energy deploying hormone. Okay. Okay.
So that cortisol peak is rising very, very fast. The best way to spike that morning cortisol is to get bright light in your eyes within the first 30 to 60 minutes of your day. In fact, you have a unique opportunity at that time to spike your cortisol up to 50%, 5 -0.
Now there's two ways to do it. The best way to do it is to go outside, take off any brimmed hat you might have or sunglasses. Eyeglasses and contacts are fine.
Look in the direction of the sun. Now you wake up later than I do. So when I wake up, the sun is just coming across the horizon.
That's great. If it's higher in the sky, that's fine too. Never look at the sun in any way that makes it too bright to look out.
Blink, in other words, to protect your eyes. But you can squint, you can look a little bit off and away from the sun. But that bright light from the sun is full spectrum.
It includes the short wavelength, medium wavelengths, and long wavelengths that are optimal for getting this cortisol peak. In fact, if you do that, you'll get a big peak in cortisol within five to 10 minutes. On cloudy days, on overcast days, it's especially important to do that because you're going to likely be spending more time indoors on overcast days.
Okay, ideally five minutes or 10 minutes. Keep in mind, you can drink some water during this time. You can drink your morning tea or coffee if you like.
You can do other things that, believe it or not, hydration boosts cortisol, caffeine further boosts cortisol. If you can exercise in that first hour, great. Most people don't jump right into exercise.
But this simple behavior is going to boost your morning cortisol levels. That essentially establishes the relationship between cortisol, melatonin, and your circadian clock. So the next day, your morning cortisol...
will start to rise in anticipation of this peak. It becomes what we call entrained. So I'm listing off some protocols, morning sunlight, but it takes five, 10 minutes and you hydrate and you drink some caffeine.
Maybe you move your body a little bit, take a walk, some jumping jacks or something light like that. You can bring your spouse or your kids or whatever, and you can just enjoy that time. Try not to look at your phone during this time.
Do not stay in bed and look at your phone, okay? This has also a forcing function on not doing certain things. Now, If you are able to get some physical exercise in this hypothetical situation, I'd take this 25 year old and I'd say, listen, I know you don't like to work out first thing in the morning, but you're going to either do some cardiovascular training or some resistance training one or the other for six days a week, one day a week, you can get complete rest.
Okay. And I can explain later what the optimal protocol for, for, excuse me, for exercise, I believe is for the typical person wanting to be strong and have endurance and build resilience as well. brain plasticity and so on okay the long and short of this is if somebody were to do that in the first hour to two hours of the day the cortisol then starts to drop gradually around let's say about four or five hours after they've been awake drops drop just naturally just drops now let's say you get a disturbing text ah you've got a deadline you're stressed cortisol will get deployed but the peak in cortisol will be very brief okay now as that person heads into the evening probably still working we'll talk about this maybe some bright lights you can't control the environment you you are now buffered against some of that you're protected and then at night in the final hour before sleep it's dim the lights obviously avoid caffeine in the final eight hours before sleep most days i'm drinking a little caffeine now because i got up very early today and it's late in the day now but i can have a little bit
That's me. Some people might not be able to. You want to really emphasize lowering your cortisol.
Long exhale breathing is great if you find yourself too stressed and you're kind of getting ready for bed. Why long exhale breathing? There's so much that's been made of breathwork and meditation.
But just to encapsulate all of breathwork, which, you know, long before it came to the United States in scientific form. People in India have been doing breath work of various forms. So I want to acknowledge that.
But there's something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which is just a fancy term for when you inhale with vigor and you extend your inhales, it speeds your heart rate up. Why? Because the diaphragm moves down, the heart gets a little bit bigger in volume, blood within the heart moves a little more slowly, and the nervous system sends a signal to speed the heart rate up every inhale.
When you exhale, especially if you deliberately extend the exhale, because the diaphragm moves up, the heart gets a little bit more compact or smaller in volume. Blood in there moves more quickly in that smaller volume and the vagus nerve, which connects the body and brain in both directions, sends a signal to the heart to slow your heart rate down.
This is the basis of so -called HRV, heart rate variability, for people wearing an aura or a whoop or using an eight sleep or any other device. You say high HRV is good, right? What is high HRV?
High HRV is your parasympathetic nervous system, this relaxing arm of your autonomic nervous system, hitting the brakes on your heart rate. If you want a higher HRV, you can exercise. You know another great way to increase your HRV?
Do five extended exhales during your day. Just any time. You're slowing your heart rate down.
In your sleep, your HRV will be higher. Most people don't realize it's significantly higher. You're teaching your nervous system to slow your heart rate down.
Just by five exhales in a day. Or three. Or one long one before sleep.
When you do an extended deliberate exhale, you slow your heart rate down, you lower your cortisol levels, takes a few minutes to lower your cortisol levels, and you calm yourself down. When you hold your breath or you move about your day and you're inhaling a lot and you're on average, you're inhaling more vigorously than your exhales.
Your heart rate's going to be climbing up. So throughout the day, your heart rate's doing this, it's doing this. HRV, if you think, well, that's weird.
Why would we want our heart rate variable? Shouldn't we want it nice and even? No, no, no, no.
Because the HRV reflects the pumping of the brake on your stress system. Okay. So in that final hour, you are...
Ideally, you're not drinking too many fluids because you'll wake up, but if you're a little thirsty, drink some fluids, no big deal. You're avoiding caffeine, you're dimming the lights. Why dimming the lights?
Because light hits a specialized set of neurons in the eye called the intrinsically photosensitive melanopsin retinal ganglion cells. Those cells connect directly to a little region over your hypothalamus, which is your circadian clock, which then connects to another nucleus in your hypothalamus. hypothalamus and so on and so forth and then inhibits the release of melatonin from your pineal gland all this can be made very simple viewing bright light ideally from sunlight in the first hour of the day spikes your cortisol through a similar mechanism circuit with a little twist and in the evening bright light will inhibit melatonin so bright mornings and days dim nights or dark nights that's the ideal situation and we can really flesh this out even more but i should say if you don't have access to sunlight for some reason you would do well to um most people do well to purchase a 10 000 lux artificial light i have one when i travel that's about the size of a tablet it looks a bit like the lights in this room
that very bright light is sufficient to boost your morning cortisol. Sunlight is better because it's full spectrum, but sometimes I don't have access to one, but I'm the guy on the plane looking at that light for a few minutes each morning. I have one in my home, even though I do go outside.
So when I wake up and use the bathroom, I have one in my bathroom. I have one in the kitchen. So I'm making my morning coffee or tea.
I have it there. And so I'm getting blasted with bright light early in the day. And then at night I'm either in dim light or I generally don't use candlelight because I worry about burning things down.
You know, if I fall asleep with the candles down, but everything's dimmed way, way down. Okay. Now this sounds extreme, but we're really talking about five to 10 minutes in the morning.
Things you would do anyway, right? Hydrate, caffeine, most likely. Exercise, ideally, that takes a bit longer.
And then at night, things that you need to turn off the lights at some point, you need to bring your level of activation down, learning to turn your mind off. This is the key to long -term resilience and becoming, as you call it, dangerous. If you are somebody who can push, push, push on the gas pedal, but you don't know how to turn your mind off, let's make it competitive.
This will get people going. Give me two people, both can work very, very hard, both extremely committed to their goals and both have perfect circumstances in terms of access to food and exercise and all the things. The person that can turn their mind off in the final hour of their day and get the better, deeper sleep, I'm going to put all my money on that person within five to 10 years.
far surpassing the other now to turn off if someone super competitive is already feeling like they've lost in some way because the internet has made them believe that they've lost it already right so they're in the hyper competitive mode they just don't know how to turn off how can somebody turn off and be and feel less restless yeah this is a great question and and it's going to take us a little bit in the in the uh direction of psychology um So I just want to make sure before we move on that I've closed the hatch on.
Yes. Boost your morning cortisol by sunlight or 10 ,000 lux artificial light. Hydrate.
Listen, do this every morning. But if you wake up on a plane and you don't happen to have this 10 ,000 lux light, open the window. If you can't do that, you're going to be fine.
You'll live a day. You'll live a day. So do the other things.
Hydrate. Drink some caffeine. I don't.
You don't want to burn extra energy on the neuroticism of trying to get everything right. That's making you weak, right? And I look at every opportunity.
to build resilience this like we were saying before we started recording i you know yesterday i had far less sleep than i normally get i feel great today i have a practice for that which i can talk about recovering mental and physical vigor but i really want to see my best childhood friend who's a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist do a neurosurgery and be there and also i recorded yesterday and i very much wanted to be here and it meant flying yesterday and the flight was delayed so instead of getting angry about the flight being delayed I always ask myself one of two questions.
Do I completely relax or do I continue to work? What I don't do is any in between. I am perfectly fine just sitting there completely relaxing.
Yes, let yourself scroll social media for a short period of time. Let yourself watch a movie, socialize, text with friends, call your mother. You know, my mother, sorry, call me more.
But don't do a hybrid of the two or really focus in and get some work done. At the airport yesterday, I decided I'd had a long day. I knew that today was going to be a long but exciting one.
Decided to just get complete rest. On the flight into San Francisco, I took a brief nap, got to my hotel, got things settled. And I could feel my mind going towards, ah, I'm going to be tomorrow.
What good does that do? And you always should be asking the question, is this... in the left column or the right column.
And I'll explain what that means. A guy named Andy Stumpf, he's a former, what we call tier one SEAL team operator. He has a podcast called Clearing Hot.
He's a super impressive guy from his work in the SEAL teams. And he went on to break two world records doing other difficult, dangerous things. But he has this exercise that he shared with me, which I do, which is you take out a sheet of paper.
You do this about once a month and you write down in the left column all the things that concern you. What people think of me, what I see, worries, everything. You put all that in the left column.
In the right column, you put all the things that you can actually control. What can you do? Exercise, hydrate, sleep.
practice turning your brain off, call your mother, all the things that, and what you realize is that you really don't have any control over the things in the left column. And we all know this, but this exercise, it's so valuable. I'm so glad Andy taught it to me.
I read it about it first in his book, Drown Proof, which is an excellent book, but then he described it to me directly. For the month afterwards, you notice when things are in the left column or the right column. So last night I was thinking, And I even thought, because this is the way the mind goes, someone sets off a fire alarm or someone's loud in the hotel, I'm going to get even.
I'm like, can I control that? No, I can't control it. You notice how crazy the mind is with all these concerns and how few of those concerns you can actually impact.
So that's the main way you do it. And every opportunity to stress is an opportunity to practice. Stress resilience, every opportunity to stress is an opportunity to let go of some component.
These opportunities come all day long. You know, you don't have to be David Goggins to be in the pressure test all day long. We are all in the pressure test and even just keeping your mind in that right column.
So I actually around our podcast studio and with my friends, we were. sort of have this saying now like that's a left column issue like don't like and and so it becomes this question i think it varies culturally do you talk about it or does that build it maybe talking about things allows you to expunge it to delete it i think it builds it stay in the right column and when your mind starts drifting into the left column great that's a great opportunity to practice getting your mind back over into the right hand column how do you do that you think about literal actions.
You get extremely present. I can take a sip of water. It might sound trivial.
I can smell what the air is like in here. It feels good. It's so quiet in here.
I really like the background quiet of this place. I've enjoyed meeting you. I learned about some new neurotech already based on the devices on your temple.
You can really get present. And suddenly, because this comes from my training as a neuroscientist, the brain works in what are called dynamic attractor states, which is not a way of trying to sound academic or fancy. Think of your thoughts and your emotions as a ball bearing on a flat surface.
But as you think more about something, that surface starts to become concave. And as you learn more about it and you go into it and you think about it, it becomes a trench. And now that ball bearing is locked in that trench.
And typically it takes something very robust, like calling a friend and them saying, what are you doing? Or getting a good night's sleep or exercise or some great event to knock that ball bearing back onto its flat surface again.
But you are in charge of your mind. And at 50 years old, I finally realized that it's possible to control one's thoughts. It really is.
You can learn to steer your thoughts. You can't eliminate thoughts, but you can take your mind to where it needs to go. opportunities all day long to practice this.
Right before I came in here, I went in the bathroom. Yes, I use the bathroom and I have a practice of prayer right before I do or go on any podcast. I ask for clarity.
I ask for the opportunity to share knowledge that I hope will be useful to people. I offer up the opportunity for new unexpected things to come through. I did that.
I do it every single time because I take you and I take this very seriously, right? People are giving us their time. I'm not a person who neurotically controls every aspect of my life, but I take every opportunity I can to make my life better because in this case, I like to think that us having a richer conversation will benefit people more.
So learn to turn it off. That comes from practice and you're getting micro reps all day long. The more stress, the more opportunity, the more stress, the more opportunity.
Now, in order to learn to fall asleep at night, high morning cortisol, don't drink caffeine too late in the day, get exercise at some point, ideally in the first half of your day. But if you have to do it in the evening, do it in the evening. But I am a huge, huge believer, practitioner and fan of a practice that originated in India, which is called Yoga Nidra.
In addition to the morning high and nighttime low cortisol is in my mind, the most powerful tool that we can cultivate because it teaches you to turn off thinking and planning. and allows you to learn how to get into pure sensation. It sounds so squishy, but I'll tell you, no drug will do this, at least not in a healthy way.
Any drug that takes you out of thinking and planning and just into pure sensation, that drug is going to rebound you into a rough place when you come out of it. Yoga Nidra, and in fairness, a few years back, I started calling it non -sleep deep rest. That was not, this is a great opportunity to talk to your audience who, May know that you know, some people were critical of that decision the reason for that is I wanted people to understand the real value of this practice and I always make the effort to credit yoga nidra as the the origin of it I take no credit for this practice, but in Quote -unquote the West such a silly term, right?
But in the West that there's there's this assumption people hear yoga and they think movement and then a lot of people who they think I don't want to do yoga I don't know which is just their own limitation. But yoga nidra involves what?
It involves lying or sitting down. You know this, I'm sure. Long exhale breathing, slowing the heart rate down, deliberately noticing my mind is in a mode of thinking and doing and planning.
I'm going to move it into pure sensation. Just focus on what I hear, what I feel. This is so critical.
This is the first and most basic step in what I call turning your mind off. It's turning off planning and thinking and doing. And it's a skill.
You do this for 10, 20 or 30 minutes, one, three or seven days a week. And across a couple of years, you get very good at it. So I started in 2017 and I thought to myself, this is remarkable.
I can fall asleep more easily if I wake up in the middle of the night. I know how to turn my mind off. Do that again.
I do it again for 10 minutes. There's also an eye movement trick that you can do. You want to hear something really wacky.
There's a paper published a few years ago where they developed this giant bed that rocks back and forth and people fall asleep very quickly. Hmm. Okay.
Well, I don't have a rocking bed. You don't have a rocking bed. It's not very practical.
There's also a paper published in a really fine journal showing that there's a particular rate of walking and swaying that parents naturally find that puts their baby to sleep. And it matches the same rocking speed, right? It's a very slow back and forth rock.
Say, okay, this is age old wisdom. But what does this do? You would think it was the physical sensation.
And in some sense it is. But turns out, and this is the basis of some new technologies that I'm not a part of, but I've had the opportunity to try, of eye masks that can induce sleep. The next time you have trouble falling asleep or getting back to sleep, keeping your eyes closed, slowly move your eyes to one side, then to the other side.
Then you're going to move your eyes counterclockwise. I told you it would be kind of crazy. Then clockwise.
Then kind of look towards the tip of your nose. You're not crossing your eyes. And then exhale.
Now, when you do that, because there is a relationship between the eyes and your cerebellum, this area of your brain that is a primitive area of your brain that controls balance, you disrupt what we call proprioceptive circuits. Proprioception is the knowledge of where your limbs are in space. To fall asleep, you need to forget your body position.
This is the first critical step in falling asleep that nobody talks about. And so now there's some really interesting technology stimulating and inhibiting certain brain areas that control proprioception and it makes people sleepy and they fall asleep. So as crazy as this sounds, This really works.
It really works. It really works. Now, if you drink four cups of coffee and you're ruminating over something, it's not going to override that.
But if you wake up in the middle of the night, you go to the restroom, for instance, you know, I woke up, I can go back. Maybe it's noisy. Someone made a noise.
Close your eyes. And with your eyes closed, you're going to move your eyes. It doesn't matter to left or right.
First, you go one side and the other side. Maybe do it again if you want. Then counterclockwise, clockwise.
Then you kind of point your eyes toward your midline or your nose. And then you exhale. And you forget body position.
Many, many people who I've taught this to write to me and say, I can't believe it. But I then wake up the next morning. It's wild.
I did it on the plane ride here. I was out. Also, these circuits that we access in yoga nidra.
of self -directed relaxation or of turning off proprioception their knowledge of our body position they are amenable to plasticity which is simply to say that they get stronger in response to these behaviors over time the plasticity of these behaviors is really critical you get better at it the same way that i'm sure you know you sit down and you're really excited about something you're in immediate focus but i'm guessing at some point in your school career your career career You have something, you're like, I don't want to do this.
But you know how to get in gear. You think, okay, what do I have to do? Maybe you watch a YouTube video.
Maybe you don't. You turn on some music. You tell yourself, what's wrong with me?
Like, all right, let's get this. You call someone, let's do it. And you're in.
You know how to ramp up. But do you know how to turn it off? Do you know how to ramp down?
And, you know, the best athletes know how to do this. That's a skill you learn. And so this 25 -year -old person, I would say, great.
You are in the... peak of the opportunity to still rewire your brain in the right ways that includes get after it culture but how are you going to turn off your brain to restore reset dump the data that's not significant from the day before the the conflict you had was on the thing you saw online is an attempt to steal your focus and energy and sleep yeah when i go on x i'm literally it's warfare i'm a benevolent player there but you're not going to take my energy I think about this.
I have a shield up. You're not going to take my energy. If somebody says something about me, I know what they're trying to do.
They're losing energy, but I'm not going to let them take it. It's a video game. And you win by taking as many of those attentional resources and putting them into your health, your well -being.
This includes how you treat other people. You think you're a high, can you be like a high focus driven person and switch it off? That's a mental, career, financial, whatever you want to call it, physical athlete.
That's the dangerous person. I don't worry about the person who can just get after it and drink 12 cups of coffee, pop an Adderall and just outwork everybody. So the next morning they're outworking everybody.
Okay, see you on Thursday. I'm going to blast past you. And I actually learned this when I was first starting off in neuroscience, I would go to meetings.
I never liked drinking alcohol. First of all, I don't like the way people act when they drink alcohol. I never felt like I, there might've been a few weddings or parties in my life where like I'm with friends I really know and we have a few drinks and like there's that bonding feeling.
It's great. Let's be honest. It was great.
But most of the time at scientific meetings, I just noticed people being sloppy and stupid, saying dumb things, getting themselves in trouble. Also, I was there to build my career. So I thought, well, maybe in 20 years when I'm a tenured professor, I'll do that.
But now I'm going to bed early on night one. And on night two. Those guys who are really established, like they're kind of dragging.
By day three, they're falling asleep. And like with their mouth open and drooling in the meetings, and a bunch of students do too. These were athletes.
I'd be like, this is too easy. I'm still there, front row, taking notes, getting my workouts in. And on the last night, I might have a good time.
So it's not that I don't have a good time, but from day one, I'm going to. pass you, not you, but you get the idea. I'm going to pass up the next person by what I don't do as much as what I do.
And we don't hear about this because it's a little bit hard to put all this into a 90 second clip on social media. So a lot of get after it stuff, take this peptide, take this stimulant. And listen, I love caffeine.
And I think there's a place for these tools, but it's much easier to get in gear. How do you do that? Day in, day out, consistently have a reset day.
One day per week, I don't exercise. I try and spend as much time in fresh air, sunshine and relaxation as I can. But if I can't, I might just veg all day.
Like do nothing. Half a day. Watch a movie with my girlfriend, relax, just kick back, hang out.
I call it, I sort of joke, it's our zero cortisol day. No such thing as a zero cortisol. I still get the sunlight in the morning, get that cortisol peak.
You know, I didn't emphasize this enough before, but I'll just return to the, if you have a high morning cortisol peak, any stress that comes, you'll be able to deal with it. There's actually really good data on this. I'm not here to plug my book, but I have this book, Protocols, which discusses this, the return to baseline.
of cortisol after a stressor is much faster if you had high morning cortisol the worst situation is a what's called flattening of the morning of the cortisol curve across the day where it's not a big peak in the morning it's kind of high middish baseline into the evening any stress that comes is riding on a higher baseline now it's carrying into the evening it disrupts it's shown to disrupt all sorts of things blood glucose regulation all the negative effects of cortisol so -called chronic stress are really about afternoon and nighttime high cortisol we're never told this also if you're somebody who uses for instance ashwagandha to suppress cortisol that should definitely be done in the final hours of the day not in the morning small amounts in the early part of the day fine later in the day not so good i don't recommend people take ashwagandha for long periods of time maybe for two for well it potently reduces cortisol you know by one study depending on the amount but 600 milligrams you know twice you know but or so um can reduce
cortisol significantly by about 30 you want high morning cortisol so you want in the afternoon i would say if you're going to reduce the cortisol using ashwagandha at high doses you want to limit that to about two weeks without taking and then take two weeks off in moderate doses you know 300 up to 600 milligrams it's probably fine to take consistently but in the second half of the day um some people take things to fall asleep i i think things like magnesium theanine apigenin which is chamomile tea or things like ashwagandha can help but if you're not doing all the right behaviors it's going to make a trivial impact and i have been somewhat um you know bullish on experimenting with things like pinealon which is a peptide that can help increase rem sleep but only every once in a while i don't think it's good to rely on pharmacology to induce sleep too often also because you're short -circuiting your ability to turn your mind on But I do like stimulants early in the day, in particular caffeine.
That's my main stimulant. Alpha -GPC and things of that sort, energy drinks. Do you use nicotine?
It seems like everyone uses nicotine now. Oh, good for you. You might be the one male under 40 I've met that doesn't take nicotine.
You know, nicotine. creates an alert, but calm state, which is a very coveted state. It's hard to get that state, but it does increase blood pressure.
And it's a very, very habit forming. I mean, you see these guys who they'd start with one, three milligram pouch, six milligram pouch, pretty soon it's five pouches a day. I love competing with those guys because in a few years, they're going to have other issues.
So like. My dad, who's a scientist, taught me this long ago. He said, listen, you got to learn to be a long distance runner.
This is a long game. You want to win the long game. You want to win the short and the medium game too, but you want to win the long game.
And anyone can push hard in the short term, but they're just, and you're going to see, you're just going to see people start dropping out. Take care of those final hours of the day. Learn to turn it off.
You can also practice yoga nidra with a 10, 20, or 30 -minute script. There are tons of them on YouTube. We have some on our webpage.
They're all zero cost. It just depends on what you like. You could practice that in the day.
If you don't get enough sleep, for instance, I highly recommend doing it first thing when you wake up in the morning to recover the sleep you didn't get. It's very potent at recovering mental and physical vigor. If you can't do it then, in the afternoon, I always have a little bit of a dip around 2 p .m.
If I didn't sleep enough the night before, I religiously do a yoga nidra between 2 and 3 p .m., maybe even 10 minutes, ideally 20 or 30. Come out of that, hydrate, maybe a little bit of caffeine, boom, you're right back. There's now data showing that pockets of your brain go into deep sleep.
and maybe even REM sleep while you do Nidra. So it's very restorative. There is no pill that will do this.
There's no pill that will do this. And you don't do that at night? Yoga Nidra.
Before sleeping? I generally don't because I don't have trouble falling asleep. The challenge I've had over the years is falling asleep and then waking up at two or three or four in the morning and not being able to go back to sleep.
The eye movement trick, plus doing Nidra during the daytime. has i have the ability to turn my mind off and go back to sleep well the real key to becoming what you call dangerous and ultra resilient or anti -fragile whatever language you want to use is you learn to recognize what state you're in this is this is the piece actually that sits even deeper than all the rest you know the oracle said it first but know thyself you have to know where you're at Am I in a good state?
Am I in a vulnerable state? If I go on social media now and I see something that upsets me, am I just going to go down that rabbit hole? We all like to think we can just blaze through life, but knowing where you're at is like checking the engine, checking the machine.
Is the steering aligned? When I don't sleep as much as I need to or I have stressors in my life, my steering's not aligned. So I have to do other things to keep myself in check.
Yeah, so it's about building in a resilience that includes flexibility. And I think people here, like they think rigidity, but it's not that. You know, I'm working really hard on having a turn off button.
That's the hard one, right? It's really, really hard. And there was about like three years ago, there was a phase of my life where I was just like pushing through, pushing through really like - Yeah, I get the sense you're that kind of guy.
Three hours, four hours sleep. And that's when I discovered NSDR Yoga Nidra from you. They were like audios, 10 minute, 20 minute.
And I was doing like three podcasts a day, like, you know, just three, three hours. And then what I started doing, my team started noticing, like in middle of one guest would leave and then I would have like a 30 minute break before the next guest comes, right? And I would put in the NSDR audio by you and I would just lay down and I would fall asleep.
like a baby and they were like, where did Raj go? Like, where is he? And I'm like under the table sleeping.
But those 10 minutes, 15 minutes gave me so much energy, which probably even a coffee didn't give me. That was like so good. Like those 10, 20 minutes.
Your mind needs to turn off. You need to go into this. Some people call it default mode network, which is associated, people get confused because the default mode network is associated with depression if it's too high, but you need to go into idle.
You can't just push this engine that is your brain and nervous system all the time. I mean, you can do it. The problem is you can do it for a while.
But what I love about what you just described is, and this is another piece, so I'd say know thyself, learn how to turn your... mind off meaning learn how to turn off thinking and planning i'm not saying turn thoughts off you can still learn how to go into pure sensation and relax boost your morning cortisol keep it low at night which allow your melatonin to be high so these are we're sort of building out a framework here and then the other one is take yourself seriously and taking yourself seriously is both hitting the gas pedal and knowing how to do that and knowing how to come off the gas pedal so that you can come back and do it again.
You gave a really great example. What I heard, what I thought as you told me that story is awesome. You're taking yourself seriously.
You're the equivalent of a professional athlete or somebody who's studying for their boards for neurosurgery, for medical school. Whatever somebody's doing, 15 years old, 20 years old, 25 years old, take yourself seriously. Now people hear that and they think, oh.
more rigidity, no fun, no laughter. No, laughter is great. Having a great time with your team is great.
But the people who become leaders, the people who win in their fields, the people that do it consistently over time and enjoy the process and have healthy lives internally and externally, they know how to switch it off and they take themselves seriously. And, you know, it was, I think it probably comes from my dad's side, you know, that I I would go to these scientific meetings and I was like, how could these people be like so serious about their careers?
But then they sort of like are like parting through the meeting. And I realized, oh, many of them are actually just really brilliant. So they can do this.
None of those people are around anymore. They're not in the field anymore. Like natural proclivities and genetic gifts, they'll carry you pretty far.
But the people with genetic gifts and natural proclivities and circumstantial gifts. that take themselves really seriously. They, we know they, they excel.
Okay. Most of us have some opportunities and advantages afforded to us. Some people have none.
The only way for all these people, all three categories of people to excel in the longterm is you have to take yourself seriously. And people will hear this and they'll think, oh, like Huberman, he's just like, take it. Yeah.
Take it. You've been gifted this life. right?
It doesn't mean you don't smile, experience joy, take a day and just completely relax. You want to be present to people. But if you don't take these things seriously, what ends up happening is you default to the mean, the dominant culture that you're surrounded with.
So if you're around people that like to work hard, play hard, okay, cool. But pretty soon you're playing as hard as you're working and that doesn't look so good over time. Okay.
Or you're around people that have given up or they're getting depressed. And now you're not the person that can be there to really support them. You're one of them.
So nobody is made of steel, right? We're not robots, but take yourself seriously, take your life seriously. And I know your listeners do that, but I think that perhaps they've been taught.
Where they've convinced themselves that to take oneself seriously is to never come off the gas pedal. You know, a Formula One driver knows to like, it's not just pit stops. The car needs care.
It needs love. It needs rest. But when you rest and how you rest is absolutely key.
And the other piece of it is, you know, that becomes tricky is, you know, which people belong in your life, which people don't. And that's a tough one because it starts to sound rigid. You know, when I hear about people's like, I eliminate all toxicity from my life.
There's no such thing. Toxicity comes through the phone. There's no such thing.
They're going to be people who have challenges and they're not handling them well. Are you going to be in a position where you can help lead them and guide them and be the calm in their storm so that they can hopefully, if you need it, be the calm in your storm. That's how it works.
So I love that you do Nidra in between. And if, listen, if one day you decide. you know every once in a while you just scroll instagram instead cool if you reset what you don't want to do is scroll instagram thinking i should be doing yoga nidra or i should be doing the other thing when our mind is split between two places that's the most taxing thing when we're trying to focus but we can't when we're trying to sleep but we can't the mind thrives on kind of unitary states but those are hard to get into we need to train ourselves to get into them and sadly the mind defaults to unitary states like anger and frustration very easily and most of the algorithmic stuff that not all of it but a lot of it's designed to get you into those states very quickly so you're not doing anything else yeah so You know, this used to be one of the biggest lies that I used to believe in, that you don't need an off button.
I've been this hustle, hustle, hustle, work, work, work, be obsessed. I've been like a kind of a poster boy for a lot of my life, just like that in my family and friends. And I've been there and I've realized in last couple of years.
like not even a couple of it, like very recently that you need to take a break. You need to actually have an off button. And now I'm very consciously practicing that, trying to take an off, right?
What has been, what do you think? Like what's the biggest lie you know, which we hear in the world about mental toughness or about elite performance? Yeah, great question.
I think put simply, it's that the goal is to just build a bigger and bigger capacity. What we don't, acknowledge and people need to understand is that the better you get at something this is a it's a weird one the better you get at something the more of an inroad into your energy it creates now this is weird right because when you're first learning something it takes a lot of energy then you get you get fluid with it you can sit down and podcast i can sit down and podcast under most any conditions right as long as there's enough oxygen in the room and maybe even if there's not you and i can have a great podcast we just know how to do it but to really drop into your craft and i don't care if it's podcasting or finance or sport or medicine it creates an inroad into your energy and it is greater than when you're not very skilled at something because you're you're engaging more and more and more focus so i think there's two things the early part of any career you have to find your edge okay so this runs a little bit counter current to everything i've said but you're trying to figure out yeah how little sleep can i exist on okay i break at two nights no sleep i break i can do one night in fact i did it last week 30 hour work stretch with my business partner
I haven't done that in a long time. We did it. It hurt.
We did it. We carried each other. I was like, I could tell when my mind was getting wobbly, he would step in, we would do things and we did it.
We had to do it. It feels good. I don't really want to do that again for a long while.
But I built that capacity over many years. Okay. You build that capacity by finding your edge.
Now you don't want to die or injure yourself or become mentally sick, but you get to that edge and then you stay away from that edge. And then, so I would say, in the first year or two of doing something go for it just go all in reset only as needed to just keep coming back keep coming back keep coming back but at some point you're going to hit a wall you want that wall to be a non -lethal wall okay you want that wall to be i'm exhausted i need a week off i can't afford a week off Okay.
I hit my wall. That's my limit. What can I do every day at this point consistently over time and work around that average?
It's going to balance around that average plus or minus two hours or so. So for me, I like you, I have a pretty large capacity. If I do the right things in between on the way here, I cleared my mind on the flight in, I slept.
I know how to clear my mind and reset, but I can probably do anywhere from depends on the work. anywhere from five to 10 hours of real work per day, real work. Okay.
That's not including the lunch break. It's not including the walks. Like five is doable.
Six to seven is doable. Hurts a bit more. 10 hurts.
The next day I'm not doing 10. I'm borrowing from the next day where I can only do five, right? Okay.
And you know this, but I had to find that. I had to establish that. You build that up the same way you build up strength.
You know, there's a beautiful parallel to resistance training. Everyone knows, okay, you do your sets and reps. You take the reps to failure or close to failure.
You allow some period of time, the muscle gets stronger, you come back. An old principle from resistance training that's still very true is as you get better at it, you know how to really cramp the muscle hard. You know how to really push.
You know when the harder reps are coming. You get better at inducing the stimulus, the stress stimulus that causes the adaptation of growth and strength increase. You need fewer sets.
after resistance training for 10, 15 years, people say, oh no, no, you need to do more. No, you need to pour more into fewer sets. You have the ability to do that.
Now, when somebody first starts resistance training, they can't generate that kind of focused intensity. So the more focused intensity you can bring to something, the more volume and focused intensity, the more rest you need to offset that. So what ends up happening is at your stage, when you're, you know, I would say like the first year one, two, and three, I think you can go on all gas pedal in anything.
Just all gas, but work, work, work, learn, learn, learn, learn, learn, do it. Don't die. The goal is just don't die, but just go all in.
Okay. Then in years four or five or so, you're learning how to create some balance and be more effective. You're trying to stay out of chronic illness.
You're trying to stay out of autoimmune conditions. You're, you know, this is typically if people don't do this is when their hair starts falling out, they start getting skin issues. The nervous system is, is under stress.
It's just your, that nighttime cortisol is too high. If we really want to break it down, that's what's happening. The rhythm is off.
The nighttime cortisol is too high. You're not resetting the nervous system and therefore the endocrine system and therefore all the immune system and so on. And some people break at that point.
You know, I do think that there's variability. People who are very driven, who are kind of high wired, I'm of that sort. You might be of that sort.
They tend to have a certain physical stature. They're kind of go, go, go. They're kind of electric and they know that electric and it feels really good, right?
They tend to veer more towards autoimmune conditions because they can push, push, push, push, push. And the cortisol just keeps coming and they can keep going. Some people just go into like a chronic fatigue.
Boom. They just crash. They just crash.
My problem, your problem is we don't crash. We keep going, but our baseline is dropping. So the key is around years, I would say four, five, six, you're learning to bring the balance in.
Now by years six, seven, there's some overlap there, obviously six, seven, eight, nine, 10, you're a pro. Now you're a pro. You know, when you're stressed, you know, when you're feeling extra good, you know, when you need to nidra, you know, when you need to get off your phone and go do this thing and you know what to go do.
So it doesn't mean you need 10 years to get good at something. You can get real far, real fast in three years, but you can't keep that pace up. You have to learn to dynamically regulate it.
And the unit of analysis, like the unit of time to focus on is the day. What can I do today? This is another big part of shutting your brain off.
I'm not thinking about tomorrow as its own thing. I know it's coming. I know I've got stuff to do, but what can I do today to get the most done, but know that I'm coming back tomorrow and I got to do it again.
I want to do it again. So here's one, two, and three. Go for it.
Ears, four, five, six, learn to dynamically regulate it. Beyond that, you're a pro. And now you, you really can start to integrate the principles of what you're, and you'll, and that's when you also can start guiding your team better.
Hey, listen, that's a left column issue. Clip it, you know, here, go do yoga. Like you're, you're inhaling too much oxygen for this problem.
Go turn it off. You know, I have a lockbox for my phone that I still sometimes use, but I don't need it quite as much these days. But I needed that at some point because there was just too much incoming.
And this is what you're really becoming a mental athlete, right? And then in terms of physical wellbeing, I do think that there's certain physical activities that can help reset the nervous system. People are different, but for me, once a week, I need to go on a long jog or run or cycle or swim.
So it's an hour, slow. really slow i do that typically on sundays i like to do it out of doors i might do it socially with someone else or other people but it's a it's an endurance thing i'll listen to podcasts or books and i'll just like go this last sunday i just went for a slow jog you know out and back 45 minutes the whole work of the thing is to not go for any faster and just do it that takes me into the week i start my week with a hard leg workout that's how i like to do it but it's brief it's only about an hour a couple of warmup sets and a couple of hard work sets for each muscle group.
So that means some belt squats or some leg presses or some, you know, and some hamstring curls and take into failure two or three sets. This is important. You want to keep the body strong, especially the lower body.
You get that out of the way early in the week, but I don't push to exhaustion because it's Monday and I have a long week ahead. Next day, rest. I didn't do any exercise today.
I try and walk in the morning. I get my sunlight. I do these things, but take that day off after the leg day.
A day later, depending on how I feel, I might do some resistance training again, but typically I will do some sort of easier cardio, only about 30 minutes. Just keep the cardiovascular system going, blood flow to the brain. These things really help improve brain function, blood flow, improve sleep and so on, but nothing excessive.
The next day I'll do some sort of pushing and pulling. So some pressing movements for the chest, some pressing movements overhead, some chin up type movement and some rowing type movement, some abdominals. So it's just kind of like general torso stuff.
Same principle, a couple of warmup sets, a couple of hard work sets to failure of each exercise you're done in an hour. And then the next day I do some sort of. cardio, very brief to get my heart rate way, way up VO2 max type training.
Just once a week, get on the airdyne bike, warm up for a minute and then pedal hard, hard, hard for 20, 30 seconds, rest 20 seconds, and then repeat hard, hard, hard. Something like that for six rounds. By the end, your heart rate is maxed out.
You feel like you want to die, but then the rest of the day is pretty easy. This rhythm works very well because you'll get strong. You'll have endurance.
You'll have the ability to sprint and go fast. You're not going to be the fastest or the best runner. You're not going to be the strongest, but you're going to have all around fitness.
Your posture will be good. I'm 50 years old. I've been training this way for 35 years.
And I can tell you, anyone can do this, male, female, whatever age or hormone status, you can do this. You need to find your walls. You need to find your limits.
And then you need to decide if you're going to push past them. And I think for me, the real joy is in trying to share tools with people, like the morning cortisol stuff, the low nighttime cortisol stuff, and the many other protocols we cover, so that they can set themselves up to be in the best position to succeed over time.
Because if you don't get that right, you're not going to succeed over time. There are many things you can take to give you energy. There are many books you can read for inspiration.
I don't even think about inspiration anymore. What? I just don't.
I think I try and look for themes in the world where I like to interact with people like you, like my friend Eddie that I saw do neurosurgery this morning who are like really in their element because there's a vibe that comes from that. And over time you just... find that you're just surrounded by people like that agreed it's just right you just it's like it's like a it's like a bunch of tributaries come together and then like i'll encounter people during the day that are struggling and they'll say hey do you have any advice and of course i'll stop and give them my time but as you continue to do well and and take care of yourself you just notice your whole world is made up of people that are like really positive and then you don't have to worry so much about all the like the the downer stuff it's also important to keep in mind that when you go online you're in the you're in the open waters of of everything from very healthy to really just like mentally ill like we have to remember that on the internet a lot of people are not well and they're stressed and they're tired and they're um
any of that erode your well -being you cannot i mean you're a public figure uh i i became a public figure at 45 and i'm 50 now um i like what do you do i mean that's it takes a lot of strength of mind in order to not because i'm sure people say many many kind things but occasionally people try and puncture your balloon by just being unkind because they're they're They're kind of semi -broken people.
So how do you deal with that? What is your tool? It doesn't affect me.
I don't know why. Well, yeah, healthy upbringing. Your parents must have done something well.
I absolutely thank them, yes. For sure. It doesn't affect me at all.
Like things, and I have a similar thing, which - And we're not just saying that for the cameras. No. It really doesn't.
Like you can ask my team or like they will tell you and I can tell you anything. That's cool. Yeah.
I mean, it's my show. I can cut the wrong stuff. Yeah, sure, sure, sure.
I can be honest with you. No, but I really, I think it's interesting that, because I think a lot of public figures and non -public figures, they struggle with that. Like I don't, I've never, I've never, I don't doubt myself at all.
Great. Just say what you want to. Yeah.
I know what I'm going to do. I see every hate or every negative comment that I get, I see it either it's a constructive feedback, which I probably have missed, and it's a blind spot, and I see it as - Perhaps. Perhaps.
Not always. Some of them I see it as a constructive feedback, or maybe I missed this. And some I'm like - I don't care.
That's your opinion. Like it doesn't even affect me. I just laugh it off.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's great. I mean, it's interesting because I think it all starts with knowing that you're a fun, that one talking about themselves is, is a fundamentally good person.
You know, I think good parenting starts with children feeling loved and that they are, you know, born into and are of goodness. Right. Because I think that people who don't feel that way.
are very susceptible to criticism, right? Because it gets at this question like, am I bad? It gets to those things.
If you know that fundamentally you have a good heart, you're human, you make mistakes, but you have a good heart, you're 90 % of the way there, right? So keeping that in mind. And then there's this peculiarity of human nature that humans like, I mean, think about what it takes.
Just think for a second of what it takes to go on the internet. And take the time to send or post a cruel comment about somebody. Just think of like how broken somebody has to be inside.
And they're probably hearing this and thinking, no, you're the one that's, you know. But no, like just think about that. And I don't say this with any smugness or pleasure.
It's like, wow. Like I wouldn't in a million years think to do that. For amusement, for pleasure, for like it's net negative for everybody.
You're down wired that way. What's that? You're not wired that way.
I don't get it. I don't get it. I really don't get it.
And so if people are feeling aggravated by content they see online about themselves or others, they should really keep in mind what it takes to kind of like how broken and sad somebody must be inside in order to do that. So if I see something online, I try and I send them love. I just try and send them love, good luck, love, but it's great that you don't suffer from that.
I think we don't talk about it often, but my parents and my brother, like my family in particular, they did an incredible job. I grew up in a joint family and one thing which they gave me - Sorry, what is joint family? It's like - We were 10 people in one house.
So joint family is when you, like your mom and dad, you, your brother, my uncle, aunt, my grandma, grandfather, everybody lived in one house. Oh, how cool. We don't typically have that here.
That's awesome. So we call it joint family and nuclear family. Nuclear is when the way you guys live here, like mom, dad, kids.
Yeah. Well, that's the best of circumstances. Typically nowadays there's...
I mean, divorce is rampant here, right? My parents divorced, they both got remarried. I was very young.
It was very disruptive, very disruptive to my whole psychology, but it worked out and I love them all. But we certainly didn't all live under one roof. So that's cool.
So you would wake up in the morning, how many people would you see in your kitchen? 10 people. Amazing.
And every weekend I would have like cousins over. So we would be like 30 people in one house. I've born and brought up in that.
And I think one incredible thing, it's like, A, they did a great job because they gave me so much self -belief, which I'm just grateful. I don't know why they did that and how they did that, but they did that very beautifully. Even today, my brother, my cousins, my everybody just believes so much.
So that's an incredible thing. The other is also when you're born with... so many people all around, you get immune to criticism.
Because since childhood, you've been constantly compared. You're compared to your cousin, you're compared to your brother, you're compared to the five people in the family. And you've been shouted at, you've been abused just verbally about certain things.
So you get so immune that by the time you're an adult, The outside world doesn't affect you at all. That's so interesting.
I didn't know this existed, by the way. And I think most Americans won't. No, this joint family structure.
But I have to say, you know, early on in life, I joined some sports and some other things where I was in just a big pack of young guys. And you take a lot of, we call it here ribbing, right? You take a lot of like joking or hazing.
And I mean, people are rough on each other verbally and you learn that it's an expression of love. Sometimes it's an expression of real criticism, but it makes you resilient. And when I went into science, listen, in science, you are constantly being told that's not good enough.
Change the paper. That's not good enough for you. I mean, it's nonstop.
No, no, no, not good enough. Finally. Okay.
Okay. Do it again. So.
I've never, I assume criticism is part of the process. So similarly, so different, it came from my friendship and my work community, but it was constant barrage of critique, critique, critique, critique, including some, like you make some embarrassing mistakes and you have to live with that shame and recover from it and know that you're still loved or that you love yourself.
So there are some parallels, but I think the fact that you had that at home. from such a young age and now when you go home how like when you visit is it it's a huge group oh yeah it's beautiful now they're very proud of course they don't criticize me anymore but but you're you're now you're becoming a leader of the family right an example yeah yeah yeah yeah and you're and you're fine with that pressure it's not i i get the sense that you feel calm in that pressure That's great.
Yeah, I'm okay with that. Yeah, it's wonderful. No, I think it's wonderful.
I'm learning from you. I don't think you see that mindset in American households that much. But you know, my current state of reality has not changed their attitude towards me at all.
Like, does it make sense? That helps, yeah. It keeps you humble.
They're the same people and they would put me to the ground and they would leave no opportunity to trash me whenever they get. Well, that's good too, yeah. It's a way of love.
Yeah, absolutely. No, I think this is very, very important. I mean, I'm relieved to hear it because I worry about people that become very successful very young.
You know, I was reasonably, well, I was a very aspiring kid. Then I had some rough years. Then I would have been, you know, the scientific, my scientific career went very well.
I had to work very, very hard, but it went very, very well. But I was surrounded, you know, at Stanford School of Medicine, you look to your left, you look to your right, everybody's doing awesome stuff. And some of them are doing, I mean, I've got colleagues that will win Nobel prizes, have won Nobel prizes.
That wasn't me. I knew that. good scientist i think i am a good scientist but i also know knew my level my place um i do feel i deserved and deserve to be there but when you're surrounded by people that are like the michael jordans of your field the lebrons of their of you go like eddie chang my i mean like he's on a whole other level a whole other level and he'll be like no no no like yes completely different as a clinician as a scientist so it raises you your standard is very high but i think that one thing that's great is that i became public facing at a time when i was 45 years old so my personality and my you know for better or worse was already crystallized i was not going to change that much um but my friends still treat me the same and i think that the the encouragement i heard a good one this was actually uh i think it was jocko willing that said this he said um you know your really good friends will and this is very like male oriented really good male friends they'll give you the hardest time to your face but they will never talk badly about you behind your back
bang on yeah so that's like that's the critical test like they should be able to say anything and they will give you a really hard time to your face but if you're out of the room they're not getting into any kind of gossipy stuff about you when you're out of the room and you about them that's kind of like you know 30 of like how to be a dude know that rule know that rule take and give some some flack you know when when your friend is in the room when you're in the room together but when you're out of the room like there's just no there's no bad talking when people are out of the room i think that's it's like a family of sorts so anyway i i appreciate you sharing a bit because um i get a sense of that your confidence is is very is very real um and that doesn't arrive on accident so yeah you said it worries you when somebody young gets super successful yeah why what worries you the most i mean what have you seen personally goodness so i've known people who got very popular famous and rich from athletics who really soared in their business pursuits everything from tech to people in the you know world of you know
culinary and things like that and so many crash and burn i mean attention is a drug if it's misused attention recycled into creative pursuit into intellectual pursuit and then giving back more that's a beautiful thing but you look at all these performing artists you know musicians and so forth that like they they implode um and i think it's because um like amphetamines, like opioids, but especially like amphetamines.
Some people, if they don't have that solid family grounding, that solid internal structure in psychology, hopefully they have the family too, but if they don't have that, they experience these peaks of attention and money where they're the focus. Most people don't go through life where they're the focus. And then they experience this traumatic dip afterwards.
They need to get back. And if they can't, they start using substances or they start spending money in ways that they think that's going to be the quote unquote salvation. You know, I mean, I think there's a reason why, at least in the United States, so many famous people eventually turn to some notion of God, right?
Is because they realize that that's a loving relationship that. will never leave them if they don't leave it and and and in principle it never leaves them anyway because when people realize oh you know people love them only because of the position they're in that's that's a scary thing there are certain things that are immune to this but if you think about it like um there's certain roles that like they're only when they're in when somebody's in the role everyone like treats them a certain way and does something.
The moment they're out, like no one cares about the ex -president, right? They kind of do, but they're no longer the person. People treat, well, now it's complicated because it's so politically divided, but you get the idea.
But I think we've come up with something today that I didn't intend to sort of arrive at, but I do strongly believe. Here's one, two, and three. Gas pedal.
Gas pedal. Just do it. Don't damage your health to the extreme.
Like don't do any crazy. anything crazy don't die but like just gas pedal four five six learn to dynamically regulate it seven eight nine and forward all right now you're now the good stuff now you can really just fine tune and really and savor it you know like savor it like really sit back every once in a while and be like You know, like in your case, you can be like, man, I did that.
You built something real because you took the risk. And that's what we want. I know I can tell even though we don't know each other very well, like that's what you want for your audience.
That's what I want for people. I want people to realize, yes, you may have an autoimmune condition. You may be suffering from a mental health issue.
You need to tend to those things in very direct ways, but get these basic things right. You will be amazed how much better your life is. Are some people built different?
In what sense? in any sense like you know when you look at somebody who's like just on a winning streak you look at them and be like you know that beast is built different well certainly um while there are exceptions of people who are very genetically disadvantaged overcoming that and doing tremendously well in sport the example that's always given is like spud webb won the slam dunk competition he's not a tall guy kind of thing okay but Hang around some NBA players, you realize most of them are very, very tall, right?
It's a genetic thing. This amount of IGF -1 and growth hormone pumped out of their pituitary. So, you know, largely inherited.
But from a mindset perspective. From a mindset. This is a fascinating issue to me.
I do believe that some people have more energy. And it's not necessarily physical or mental energy, although it often... is it's more a sense of self.
Like some people report this. They believe when they're born that they're like fated to do something, something. It's like they have this kind of like level of vibration in their nervous system that they need to like take it someplace and be like, do something with this.
And when you give them something to bite down on and they just go. And hopefully they bite down into something that's generative and healthy. You know, humans are a unique animal, but I spend a lot of time thinking about, the nervous systems of other animals too for reasons related to my scientific career some species of of animals have a lot of energy and others are very like loafed and then they occasionally do something right people are kind of like that too you know i do think that some people are just more relaxed they're not as driven i think they are still fundamentally important to society and i don't say that just to you know be politically correct i think that they we need people who are just going to tend to certain things day in day out on a very um consistent level and they're not trying to break out of their current circumstances they're not they don't feel this friction with their current circuit they're not i do think that this is strongly related to the dopamine system i think some people they feel the friction of where they're at it's never enough which is tricky because you want people to savor what they have and continue to strive you don't want people to be
always dismayed it's not enough that's not good right and you see that when people start to think oh more cars more money more marriages in some cases more children you know like it's interesting on x you know i i spend a fair amount of time on x it's interesting you can learn things there but there seems to be this sort of like competitiveness that you can observe and certain people like about kids great children are wonderful they're joyful i love kids right but When people are attached to any one thing as being the answer, it's very clear where that's headed.
They're headed for dismay. They're headed for trouble, whether it's money or it's fame or anything else. But I do think that having a little bit of internal friction and agitation, or a lot.
I mean, let's be fair.
kind of disagreeable uh people go on to do great things because they look at the world and they say it can be so much better we just have to build this you know trillion dollar company or it can be so much better we just have to talk about all these things we know that nobody's willing to talk about like in my case i really believe that there's deep value in people understanding some basic science of how they work and also some interesting things from health and wellness and things from ancient really ancient practices like yoga nidra that if we can just tell it to them in the form of physiology like maybe they'll get it like that most people just i would say a lot of people look at the world and they go like i'm just trying to get by um are they lazy no are they worse no it's just i do think that people who like to build things have to build things But when I was in high school and I was involved in certain things, I was talking to my friends about like, let's get a wholesale license and build this company.
We probably should have done it. It would have done very well. We didn't.
I listened too much and we didn't do it. But then I went in the direction of another thing. And then when I was running my lab, I'm tenured.
I'm at Stanford. Everything's going great. We're publishing articles in Nature.
It was a premier journal. I told my dad I'm going to start a podcast. And he was like, to his credit, he's great about it now.
He's been a guest on my podcast. But he's like, I don't know that Stanford's going to like that. Like, how are you going to?
And I'm like, I don't care. i'm doing this it's like you're on you have this feeling this landscape of health science wellness whatever it is it you just know it could be so much better for everybody i'm going and i think that's a unique trait and i think it involves a certain amount of of um no other option type feeling in your body it's like you you feel pulled towards it and i think the hard part for people who are in this category or when they feel these valleys of i'm not as driven or like things are not going as well and i can tell you having been in a long scientific career now podcasting for you know six years or so how long have you been podcasting this 50th great so we're colleagues peers and colleagues you know there's natural cycles you know the youtube algorithm changes a little bit the pause spotify now is video like things change experts like And part of being a pro is being able to tolerate those dips in one area where other areas are going great.
And then all of a sudden you're on a rocket ship again. And that just comes with maturity. But quitting was never an option.
Never an option. But see, you don't get that quitting as an option because you're wired that way, right? Same as with me.
But there are some people who quit. And I would ask them with kindness, do you really want it? Or is this, or are you in the wrong domain?
Maybe you want it, but you need to think about what it is like. And it's tough because in years that years one, two, and three, it does take an extreme output to see how far you can go. But until you've given something, you know, three years of really solid effort.
bordering on extreme effort, you don't know where it can go. You don't really know. And it's tough because not everyone can do that.
You know, suddenly they find themselves with a new child at home and then the certain, although many people have made it work anyway. Let me be specific and you explain me what's going on in the brain because you used a while ago, you used the word risk -taking. Some people are like that.
They just go at it. And then we were talking about another situation where. A lot of people have dreams to do certain things, right?
So let me be very specific that if there are two people and they want to do something risky in their life, one sees that risk and jumps and then goes and does it anyway. The another thinks about it, plans about it and just about to take a jump, but then freezes and does not take the risk. what happens in the brain of that person who's freezing and not taking the risk yeah it's a great question well we can put science to it um there's a really nice paper about the neuroscience of choking but not choking choking um meaning when the stakes get really high and you blow it and it's a beautiful experiment and it shows that when You have the opportunity to do something and get a little reward.
You rarely choke. When the rewards go up and up and up and you start thinking about what you stand to gain, not what you stand to lose, the brain over recruits neurons in motor cortex and very skilled people miss. It's fascinating.
And this carries over to people in the world of finance and all sorts of things. So it's not that they're... So at a neurological level, maybe even at a cognitive level, the freezing comes from thinking too much about how good it could go, how well it could turn out.
It becomes overwhelming. The stakes are so high. So lower the stakes, lower the stakes in your mind.
This is why, you know, I love, you know, some of these phrases are just cliches, but there've been times in my career, like I, my podcast is doing very well, but then I had this book I need to finish. It's a long book.
It's almost 650 pages. It's like seven books collapsed into one. Yeah.
So that people could read a hundred pages on sleep and have their sleep worked out or stress or exercise, but they don't, I don't expect anyone to read it all the way through, right? You'd fall asleep. So cure insomnia, but, but doing that in parallel with the podcast was a lot.
And so the mindset in my mind was, chop wood, carry water, which is a phrase, which just means some days you don't think about why you just chop wood, carry water. This is how you keep a village going, right?
Chop wood, carry water. And I said, I'm doing this simply because I said I would chop wood, carry water. Resentments would come up.
Why'd I do this? I can get out of this. Push that aside.
Chop wood, carry water. Took time. Took much longer than I thought, but you get there.
What was I doing? It was just lowering the stakes. Just do it today.
Just today, one more day, one more day. I think when people get to that place where they could do something and they freeze, they're imagining how great it could go. We think they're imagining how terrible it could go.
But what causes us to choke is, oh my goodness, like so much is at stake. If I can't do this, I can't do anything. So they're psyching themselves out.
So lower the stakes. Give it. Go all in instead of for three years, go all in for three days and then quit.
Talk to me after three days. If you survive three days, you can survive three more days. You survive those three days, you can have another three days and just keep going lower.
Like bring the horizon in, bring the time horizon in. That's the way to do it. Now, the person who just jumps, we love and admire those people.
You did it. I did it. The timing has to be right too.
You can't be reckless. You can't be haphazard. We know this, right?
That's how you get yourself killed in the physical endeavors. And that's how you lose everything in financial endeavors, right? You know, what is it?
I think it's like the Warren Buffett saying, like, you know, three things kill men in finance. Like it's like a liquor, you know, ladies, if they, you know, they're not faithful, they pick, you know, they have crazy. you know, dating life and this kind of thing.
And leverage, they over leverage. Like, I mean, you can be, take on too much risk and lose, right? And the other two, the first two there, it's worth mentioning.
I've studied many stories of success in the creative arts, in science, and to some extent, even in podcasting now, the excesses that people bring about when they start to do really well are often what take them down. overspending, drugs, you know, I mean, like we've watched this recent Conor McGregor thing. This guy was at the pinnacle, right?
And I don't know what his specific issues were, but too much money, too many resources. not enough people around you to keep you in check and somebody can collapse it's very easy to see and to recognize when somebody has a substance abuse issue or if they have a behavioral regulation issue and they're like getting in fights in bars or things like that you know which sadly um happen to a number of people who are like pro athletes but the excesses are also excesses of ego where people think oh like i won the last i built 10 companies i can build 10 more.
How about one more better than all the other 10, right? This is where I do think like him or hate him, I think Elon is particularly impressive because he goes for big things, but he knows himself. He can manage all this stuff.
You know, you said about people who get it, it's about their ego and then power and then they kind of, because they have all excessive things, they start losing it. And attention. And attention.
So I was reading a research very recently. and I'm courtly paraphrasing it, it is about power. Like people who get so much power, what power does to your brain is equivalent to somewhat of trauma.
Like 20 years of research they did, I can't remember the specifics, but if you are given power, your brain literally changes as if it changes in trauma. Interesting. Like you get more impulsive, you start losing sense of reality.
All of these things starting to happen, your decisions start getting worse and worse. And the more and more powerful you get, all of these things start happening to you. Yeah.
Well, the world enforces us. It makes me think, you know, when kids are young and especially with adolescents, like many years ago, I was like a camp counselor. And you see this thing with adolescents is they're constantly taking things to the, they're like testing the edges, right?
But deep down, they want you and you need to keep them safe. And small kids are like this. They'll sort of go to an edge of a thing and they'll look to their parents like, are you looking out for me, right?
I mean, as we get more power, more freedom, we sometimes like we test it. But yeah, life has its own way of correcting these things. It's tricky because I don't want people to feel like as they gain success that they should just sit in their chair and keep working.
For some people, the reward is the work. And I think it is important to make the work. a significant fraction of the reward otherwise you can't keep it up you can't just do something just for money unless you listen i know some investors they will say it they love money why do they why do they love money i don't know maybe they grew up poor maybe they just love money they like investing they like winning but they like earning it they don't like They like earning it more than they like spending it.
It's so cool. It's like a game. It's like a video game for them.
For me, I love learning and I love teaching. So for me, learning and teaching, learning and teaching, that's the process. And anything that comes of that, whether or not it's recognition or any financial returns are just icing.
But people. naturally start to focus on oh well if i do this thing that's a good business decision this will be good for me and my family i mean we can have multiple incentives and motivations but as but we have to stay attached to the core thing the core thing like the the work of it the essence the learning and the teaching for me like i'm constantly looking for new information i think can be of use this conversation is stimulating thought i mean i i am Very intrigued by this family model.
I think it's really beautiful, but it has, I'm going to think about that more, what it means, what could be adopted for people who don't have the access to that, what components might be useful or replicable. And other things you said, like I think, because for me, learning and thinking and teaching is what it's about. I do think if somebody is doing really well, you would hate for them to think, oh, well, now it's all going to just, you know, like come crashing down.
No, you can make really good decisions. And one of the best ways to do that is to have a committee of people. You should not be making all the decisions about your life in the confines of your skull.
You need people that you respect, not for every decision, but certain people for certain decisions that you can bounce things off of. And you don't let them make the decisions, but you need to pressure test because we can delude ourselves, right? But there also comes a time when you just say, I'm going to ignore everybody.
I'm going to do this. And if it doesn't work out, you got your lesson. And if it does work out, which often it does, you go, okay, now you're what we call leader.
You have knowledge and experience that they don't have. And that's a great place to find yourself. And as I describe this, I'm thinking there's probably some people who are not even started to build their business or build their life.
Everything we're talking about is accessible. It truly is accessible. You take care of your physical body and your biological rhythms.
If you can't get all the exercise every week, you get some. You lean into some mission, some adventure that stands to have a payoff. You avoid the excesses.
You don't get into extremes of work and partying. You don't get into extremes of anything except maybe in that first three years, you go all in. I've never seen it fail.
that's true across cultures now there are some areas of the world that are very like be where people just cannot move because of like very oppressive regimes and things like that but that's not what we're talking about and I think people should spend a bit of time thinking about what's really true for them and what they want to pursue it's also just good to go after something in the short term just get really good at something and then it allows you to pivot into the next thing because the process is the same But do you think we have to try doing this constantly in order to achieve something?
Like all these protocols, trying to win, trying to do something. Because isn't our brain designed to just keep us alive, not make us thrive in life? I think humans are different.
I think humans were afforded all the areas of the brain for survival. But we have this expanded prefrontal cortex that allows us to set strategy and build things, imagine technologies. Take our experiences that are hard for people with traumas, build something beautiful out of that.
Take our experiences that were loving and supportive and afforded us incredible opportunities, build something beautiful out of that. I mean, this is the story of human history. We are different.
We are not just about survival. The moment our basic needs are met, we have two options. We either can get anxious and dissolve into a puddle of our own anxious thoughts, or we can take those anxieties and funnel them into doing something which advances us this is a binary choice there is no in between most people bounce back and forth a little bit naturally at two or three in the morning when they wake up everyone does it but on average you want to be veering into that right lane of doing something the anxiety oftentimes not always but oftentimes i would even say the majority of the time is not because we have this impending thing that's bad that's going to happen it's because we're fed we're We're rested.
We're watered. We have enough social connection. And now we need to do something with this additional energy.
And so we have to grab a hold of our mind, grab a hold of our bodies and take it someplace regimented. And it's hard. You know, yesterday I had a conversation with someone on the podcast.
We were talking about flow states. Such a compelling thing, go into flow. And he said, no, no, no.
In the world of high performance, we now talk about clutch states. I'd never heard of this. I said, what's clutch state?
I'm a neuroscientist. I've heard of flow states. To clutch states are the states of forcing oneself to do something at that kind of edge of friction and effort that most athletes, investors.
high performers business people live in 90 of their waking hours and i was like finally someone described my life right now right now in this i'm enjoying this but i you know i can tell a little bit the way that your mind works is like you're also trying to enforce certain things like we're not just like having a meandering conversation right this is not philosophy okay the the clutch state is where you have to take our energy and our anxiety and funnel ourselves into it And I think that it's such a beautiful concept because flow is like, okay, that comes every once in a while in years seven, eight, nine and beyond when you already achieved mastery because you can be unskilled, skilled, mastery and virtuosity.
The virtuosity, everyone wants that. Everyone wants that. But it's built on years upon years of basics of clutch state, clutch state, clutch state.
That's the state to get yourself into. and then turn your mind off and relax and just keep going. So I do think the purpose of humans, well, there are many, but one of our major purposes is to take this extra mental real estate that we have, the extra neural real estate, which is our prefrontal cortex, which can think and plan and come up with ideas and error correct and try things and listen to podcasts and books and then go and implement.
think about what we regret take the lesson move forward try and cut with our losses all of that that's what brought us out of mud huts and you know and where we were the prey and now we're the curators of the earth and we're building rocket ships to take us potentially to other planets and we've got ai and we've got podcasts and like i think we're here for a lot more than than just to get by and if people just want to get by okay well in certain societies they can do that and you work you handle your stuff great like that's fine but hum humanity is all our species has always advanced on largely on the shoulders of i mean everyone's important clearly everyone's a value but has it the big advancements have always come through people who are like i've got a lot of internal agitation and i'm going to funnel it into something and so now we have this concept of clutch states beautiful concept true not relaxed i love it yeah i love it too when i heard it i was like thank you you've given me a new phrase so you and i and this guy his name is tommy wood he's a mdphc up at university of washington he studies high performance and neuroplasticity uh we're probably the the
among the like 10 people on the planet who've heard this term. So now many more people will hear about it. Thanks to your podcast.
So, and, you know, no one owns that term. Send it far and wide. Like this, I don't own it.
He doesn't own it. Send it far and wide. This is get yourself into a clutch state, folks, and build something.
And this one's so much better than flow state. Yeah, the flow state thing is the expression of something that you can already do. It has nothing to do with learning.
It has nothing to do with learning. Learning is when you're making errors. You know, a fundamental principle of neuroplasticity is that if your nervous system can do something, there's no plasticity, there's no rewiring.
It's the gap between your desired performance and your current performance that creates adrenaline. It creates in your body norepinephrine in your brain and some other neurochemicals. It creates an internal chemical milieu that allows neural circuits to rewire.
But the errors are what drive that. Your nervous system goes, oh, I can't do it. I can't do it.
I can't do it. You go to sleep. A few days later, you're doing it a bit more.
And then pretty soon you've got it. And by the way, the best way to reinforce anything that you've learned is to self -test. We know this from neuroscience and psychology experiments.
Reading, once you listen to a podcast, once you listen to a book, the best thing that you can do is to take a walk or just a few moments and just think, what did I learn? Okay, clutch state. Do I know what that is?
Just a few things here and there. And where you go, I don't remember. Great.
Go look it up. You'll never forget it. The learning process is about recognizing what you do and don't know.
It's those errors that are so key. True. Yeah.
So I've never talked about those before because I just learned about them yesterday and I love the concept. Nice. I love it that we are learning something new now.
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Clutch states are new.
I think that the, and this whole framework of like zero to three years, you know, four to six years, the seven and beyond, because I don't think it's really been broken down. I think a lot of people are like, oh, you get up and you run like David Goggins and then you do it at 4 .30 in the morning like Jocko and then you...
You do 50 ,000 protocols. No, no, no, no, no, no. That's not how it works.
I love it. Because I've only heard a few things from you and you always seem like you're this 50 ,000 protocol kind of guy. Well, my day is pretty regimented.
I take my supplements. I get my sunlight. I do my hydration.
I do my workouts. I do my yoga nidra. I dim the lights.
I do my journaling. I did my 10 breath meditation. I do them.
I do the... the big ones every single day, every single night, unless I can't, in which case I do as many as I can. But I also have, you know, I think sometimes people forget that I like them have large periods of my day where I have to be in laser focus to podcast.
I have to prepare podcasts for guests and solo podcasts. You know, some of the solo podcasts are a hundred hours or more preparation. It's like doing like a master's thesis.
And that's. it's tough and and i you know and i have to tend to the rest of my life too so it's um i do the stuff i do all the stuff but i'm not a robot and none of this is a is a closed loop i don't do the wellness stuff to just keep doing the wellness stuff.
It's always been a way to support the rest of my life. I'm fortunate that I like exercise. I like yoga, Nidra.
I like morning sunlight, but I do all those things to raise up the level that I can do all the other things and I integrate them. Um, you know, and I think this notion of health influencers has become a little bit of a, a thing where that's all people do. But that's not realistic for most people.
Yeah. Yeah. Coming back to a previous discussion, I had this question.
Can you build courage? Can you build courage? Absolutely.
How? Absolutely. Incremental.
You get people to their edge of agitation and you let them just live there. Like someone who's not courageous. can they do something today or maybe start doing something from today which will help them become courageous if they want to if they want to become courageous i mean as cliche as it sounds the cold water thing is it builds mental resilience and the reason is that it is a very reliable and provided you don't make it too cold you just do cold shower it really does consistently reliably cause a fast release of adrenaline and all of anxiety and stress involves this like deployment of adrenaline in the body that makes us feel agitated our prefrontal cortex is lowered in activity for the first 20 or 30 seconds it's harder to strategize we just want to go anywhere except where we're at and the goal that the resilience training is to learn to just ride out that first 20 30 seconds then adrenaline starts to subside but the way that i suggest people do deliberate cold exposure is different than most
I think people should pick a certain number of what I call walls. So maybe like five walls. And maybe the first wall to go over is just getting in the cold shower.
Then instead of counting or going for time, you sense when you really want to get out. That's another wall. You stay in just one more.
Then you can kind of get comfortable. Then you wait until you really want to get out again. You go over that wall again.
And what you'll notice is those are waves of adrenaline. Which is much more realistic. It's much more like the real world where you're doing public speaking where you're not going for time You're not trying to relax for three minutes.
You're trying to deal with whatever comes your way and so you can learn to be resilient to your own physiology and Again, provided it's not an ice cold bath and you don't want to become hypothermic. Don't stay in longer than three minutes.
Cold shower is fine. But you can build in a lot of resilience. Earlier, we were talking about workouts, but you could do this with anything.
Like the other day, I was doing a workout in my gym and it was really warm. And I was about to walk over and turn on the AC and I'm like, no, let's make it hotter. Turn on the heat.
Do two more sets. Best sets I had in ages. A little resilience training.
I'm not a masochist. Let's just make it. Let's not always go for comfort.
Let's just make it a little harder, not easier. And then I showered. I swear the rest of my day was so much better.
Some days it's the opposite. I'm just like, I need air conditioning. Some days it depends.
I mean, I know it can get very hot and humid in certain parts of India. So I don't always do that. But occasionally during the workout, I'll warm up.
I'll listen to music I'm working out or listening to, and then I go, you know what? Silence. I just want to focus as much as humanly possible on every repetition.
But after three, four sets of that, I want to go back to listening to some music. And then I know that in the tail end of a workout is typically when people get hurt, front end and tail end, because you're kind of distracted. So I turned off the music and I'm just going to go for just really focus.
It's like, great. That was like a, there's an art of doing a great workout. And some days you just.
drink your energy drink and just go go all out but it was good it was a it was a the same way you know i was in a difficult conversation the other day and i thought i'm gonna just resist the urge to say anything i'm just gonna like be the guy that just nods it's so hard yeah so hard because i i have a lot of thoughts and opinions especially about what was being said and i just got to the end i was like okay And then I said what I need to say, and I'm so glad I did it.
Right. But it was, it was work. Yeah.
It was work. And it wasn't because I was being personally attacked. I just fighting that impulse.
So I think learning to fight our impulsivity, listen, this is this stuff of great leadership that I don't, you know, I'm not super skilled at, but I'm trying to build up. Right. Because when you're the main guy, this is one thing that comes with success.
When you're the main guy, most things fall in around you. You know, like you're dialed, everything, you know, it's about you being dialed in, you know, and it can make us, it can make people in positions of leadership, we can become impatient. We're used to things happening on a certain pace, you know, it can make us impatient.
So, you know, next time something's slow, it's like, all right. I'm going to like, this is a good practice, but it's hard to stay there. You know, we're not, not, no, no one's striving for perfection.
I think pick a short timescale and try and get something better out of it, you know, and I would have to be very, very clear about that. Have some mindless ways to reset. I have them.
I like watching documentaries. Um, I love hanging out with, uh, my girlfriend and the dog. And we just like, we, you know, we call it a, you know, like we cave to love.
Like there's these moments where we're just like no more work, no more dishes, no more doing anything. We're just going to like that. We're just going to relax the three.
We're just going to completely relax. And after 10, 15 minutes, we moved back into our time, like learning how to just completely and I had to cover it. I'm like, Oh, I'm exhausted.
And then you get back in business. Let's go. and i that and it's a very that's one of the most powerful things i think um to just give yourself permission to just in a healthy way be a child every once in a while just kind of exhausted and then back in it let's go posture up and like let's get serious again you know because otherwise if you're grinding the gears all the time it's just no fun yeah also there's a once you and you You're there now, right?
But people can anticipate this soon if they're not and they're staying in this trajectory. The real top layer, and I know this from observing people in other fields, tech and medicine and the arts and then in podcasting too and finances, that the top, top layer is the ultra -discipline, super -focused. but an element of playfulness.
Because they're just so secure. They can now just like have that fun. And they're not, they just, because they won.
They won the game. And so now they can just have fun. And all this incredible stuff comes out of that.
And so that's the thing that like, you know, that. we should all aspire to. That's the peace, the joy that comes with it.
But don't expect that in the first couple of years. No way, no chance. Wins, you're going after wins and you're building your confidence.
That's how you do it. But that's there for you. You mentioned a couple of games right now, like what you do to turn on the heat and do certain things in order to build resilience.
Let's make it more... something that people can follow immediately. Give me like top three mental games that people can play to build resilience.
All right. I woke up this morning. I did not want to get out of bed.
I was super tired and did not get enough sleep. And I do, before I get out of bed, I do this every morning. I do 10 breath meditation.
If I can't concentrate, I tell myself, if I can't concentrate for 10 breaths, how in the world am I going to go about my day? Sometimes I have to get to number six, you drift, you have to set an alarm because you can easily go back to sleep, especially with long exhales.
10 breath meditation before you let yourself get out of bed in the morning, especially on the mornings where you really have to get up and use the bathroom, even harder. Okay. In your workouts, not in your warmups, but in your work sets, your goal is to make those as hard as possible, not as easy as possible.
So as focused as you can possibly be, when it really is tough, you're going to do everything you can to make it even harder. You're going to try and contract the muscle even harder using that weight.
That's another one. With respect to any challenging interaction, whether it's with the internet or with someone else, or it's like too many texts incoming, you're feeling overwhelmed. The whole business of it is to just, it's this detached thing that is about taking your gaze and getting it extended into the entire room.
or space that you're in because we get very narrow focus this is a real neuroscience to this we get this tunnel vision and something feels overwhelming because it's almost like drinking from a fire hose then you kind of like dial it out and you go and that's where you get the your autonomic nervous system adjusts and you're like, I can do this.
And now you just start picking things off one by one. This is actually a tool that Jocko Willink and I talked about him and from his military career that we arrived at independently, but I'll occasionally do it while podcasting where I feel like we're really in the tunnel. We're there.
And I just sort of like dial out. And I just, in my mind, I think let's invite in some novelty here. I don't know what it is, but just kind of like.
Let's make sure that we're not too far down some road, right? So that's a good one. But if you're feeling overwhelmed, this is very good.
You just simply, you wouldn't even detect it. You just start viewing the ceiling and the floor and the things that you see ourselves in this context. Kind of takes you out of it.
It releases some of the stress in your mind that allows you to come up with novel ways. New abilities come from that. I have a friend, he's a coach for a professional basketball team.
He's not the head coach, he's a performance coach. And oftentimes when guys are moving down court, they're so focused that they don't see opportunities and they don't see defenders that can, you know, thwart their efforts. And so what they need to do is dilate their gaze and they start seeing things in new ways and you can see new opportunities.
So it's the same thing. The brain, you afford more resource, more brain resources when you do that. And then the last one.
is i think there's a very useful way to use memory that normally people their memory of the past is about things that didn't work out i think everyone should have something that worked out and you return to that you survived the hard thing you're still here you're still breathing sometimes it's that basic or you know your case or someone else like you built that you built that Which simply means you can build another thing and you can build on this.
Like you have that in you. It was you that did that. And to really acknowledge your own agency in that, you didn't do it alone, but that you did that.
You took it from nothing. Had you not decided and done the things, had you not decided to and then done the things, it would not exist. You need to internalize that because you really recognize your own capacity and you can bring that forward.
But I admit that throughout the day, there are many opportunities. that I try to take of like doing the slightly harder thing. This is something that Andy Stumpf also talks about, the slightly harder thing.
Like you see that little piece of thing on the ground, do you pick it up or do you go like, you do it, you do it because it's hard. I confess I'm not that good at that. I hate folding and putting away my clothes.
I absolutely hate it. I would pay any amount of money to have somebody else do it. But occasionally I just like throw, and I.
I don't know what it is. It's like my vice. Sounds so trivial, right?
So I let myself sometimes leave some clothes out. Like I'm human. I'm like in the playfulness of that.
And how hilarious it is that I, for all the other things that I'm able to do that are hard, can't seem to just fold a shirt properly and put it away.
Okay. You know, like, okay. Like, would it be better if I did it?
Yeah. But, and also like. So that again is that thing of pick your masochism, but be thoughtful about it.
I do think that if someone were to watch my podcast or to watch your podcast and watch Goggins and all these people, it could feel overwhelming. Like, oh my goodness, is my life supposed to be all right angles? No, no, no, no, no.
We're human. Yeah. I, you know, I like to think that we're both human.
I know I am. So I am way more human. Yeah.
Well, but you also are 29 years old. I'm 50 years old. So you have more plasticity available.
And I think the, the mental trick that I think is the most important one is you have to see your life as an adventure. You get to write your own story. I like, I really, I, I believe that, um, somebody's listening to this and that for them, it's not about you or me.
It's like, it's about them. And they're out there and they're thinking like, could I do it? I don't know if I could do it.
I will tell you right now, I was that guy. I was in my lab listening to Tim Ferriss podcasts and other podcasts. Like I'm thinking like reading books, hearing about people long before there were podcasts.
And like, I was like, I wanted to be like. These people who built things and strived and did creative things and did things that were outside the box. And I actually had this dorky little list of names.
It's so silly. Of some artists, some musicians, people that some I've met, but many of whom I'll never meet because they've passed. Some scientists and some other people that I wanted to be like in certain ways.
So dorky, right? But I still have that list. And I was like, and now I've actually met a few of the people and some of them are really cool.
No disappointments there. I'm like, oh, that's wild. Like it, I, for lack of a better word, I manifested that, but I didn't manifest it by just sitting in a chair and thinking about it.
I went for it, but I was the person going like, I don't know. I'm like a professor in a lab, but I have these other interests and, you know, but I can't seem to stop seeking out this knowledge and sharing it with people. And I had no concept of having a podcast.
So if you're that person out there, like. Go for it. Because I was that person and you were that person.
Absolutely that person. And don't let the amount of information out there overwhelm you. Just pick your stuff and go.
And don't try and do it all. Just pick. And you, I guarantee, I look forward to the day that someone or several people are sitting down saying, we heard this conversation and we're like, okay, I can be part, I can.
be colleagues with these guys or i can pass them who knows maybe they're gonna come try and take what we've got but you have to work pretty hard if you're gonna but i know you can do it or try um and they're gonna they're gonna have their thing hopefully something different hopefully because i do think that the best work is is non -competitive this is actually important point my friend rick rubin points this out about creative arts i was watching this documentary recently about rock climbing and um i'm not a rock climber but Competition can motivate you from time to time, but it's not going to bring about your most creative work.
You want an individual, unique vision of something. And it can look a lot like a lot of other things. It might even look the same to other people, but that's your vision.
And if you start comparing it to other people, sure, you can borrow and trade things that you think are cool, discard things you don't think are cool. Build your life story. I'm a neuroscientist turned podcaster, still neuroscience professor, whatever, whatever.
You have your story. Everyone has a unique story. And that's what the world wants.
They don't want another one of you or another one of me or another, you know, Stephen Bartlett or Tim Ferriss or Rogan or Lex Ruman. Like those guys are those guys and we're us. Build out the new thing.
It can look a lot like it can still be a podcast or whatever, but build your own beautiful painting of your, of your vision. That's, that would make me happier than anything. If someday somebody wrote and was like, I heard that I went for it.
And every time someone says, well, yeah, but it's hard, but there's a lot of podcasts like, like that should be your answer for it. And just keep going. I mean, you, you're like this, you get excited.
You get excited by looking at other people. You also get excited by challenges as much as I can hear. There are so many people, they're addicted to comfort.
And then there are people like you who are addicted to challenge. Why some people are addicted to comfort and why some people are addicted to challenge? Yeah.
You know, two answers. One is very kind of rigid and I don't know which one is true. One is maybe people have just different mental and physical pain thresholds.
I know when I stub my toe, it hurts and then it stops hurting. So I don't seek out pain, physical pain, but I don't know. So maybe our human species is divided into builders and sustainers.
I don't want to say like people who are just. I don't like the builder taker thing. There's some takers in the world, but most people I think are trying to be good people, most people.
But maybe people have not ever conceptualized themselves in the kind of life adventure builder framework. I think a big test of it is whether or not. When somebody sees somebody else striving and doing well, does it make you feel good or does it make you feel overwhelmed?
When I see somebody striving and doing well, I'm like, yeah. Like I can take some, I don't want to take from them. I can feed off that energy.
It feeds me. That's the right language. It feeds me.
They're going, I'm getting, I'm like, yes. I mean, it's so cool. Like this thing I observed this morning and this conversation fundamentally changed the way that I think about things going forward.
all of which is generative what can i learn from you and i've already learned from you so i'm grateful really i'm not just saying that as a formality or to you know to be kind it was it's just true you it's clear especially for someone at 29 like you have a very um you have a big picture perspective that certainly i didn't have at 29 and um and that uh and great leadership qualities to you you know yeah really i mean you're the host but you have like sort of a there's a calm in you and a and a kindness but also a drive clearly that um that fosters uh real feelings of safety i can say that as your guest because i've been on a number of podcasts where you kind of feel like some someone's trying to pull something i don't get any of that so i appreciate that it's something i i work to cultivate on my own podcast and i don't know because i've only been the host not the guest but that i i'm going to think about some of this more um certainly and then my friend seeing him do this you know incredible act of medicine and science and um just like you know he's at the edge he's at the frontier of science discovering new brain areas using the most modern technologies ai he's also a bioengineer because he's like a phenom and i see that and i go
wow, like I'm inspired to do better. And maybe some people are like, and this is perfectly fine. We'll hear or see things like that and go, cool.
Like I just love watching a great soccer game as a spectator. And I'm not inspired to go do anything with it. I just want to see my team win.
And that's cool too. That's not me, but that's cool. But I see Mezzy and I think like, what's he doing like how does he like what's he doing and uh and how can i i don't think there's anything that special about any one person in history or currently i just think some people just have some have gifts sure and opportunities but i think they just channel their efforts and interesting yeah i i think we I really think we are, you know, it sounds cliche, but I think that we all have the opportunity to build beautiful things in our lives at whatever scale.
And that's, you know, humans at their best. But you know, this has a lot to do with your identity, how you see yourself. And because you see, you think this about yourself, you look at other people as well and you look at other human beings and you think they can do beautiful things as well, right?
But someone out there is listening to you and is feeling like a loser right now. How can that person change his or her identity to start feeling like a winner or start feeling like they can do some of the beautiful things which you just described? Well, it's a verb action.
So, and I want to be clear, I've had hardship. I mean, less than some more than others, but you know, the... Collapse of my family early on in life was very disruptive to me.
And in ways that, I mean, I've moved through, but it's just very, like I hear about your family and I'll be very honest. And there's a bit of like a, I'm super happy for you. I'm delighted.
But there's a little bit of like, I get a little bit of like, man, like that would have been awesome. some small fraction of that now but i had some of that in certain forms for a certain amount of time and then you just go and i was born into a healthy body let's go we got we got work to do here you know so you can't you can't live there right but so i've had some hardships certainly lost for for someone who was not in the military or didn't grow up in the inner city i've lost all three of my scientific colleagues died young my mentors suicide cancer cancer i was very close with all of them in particular the second one a lot of friends die and you learn to just kind of keep going and take those at losses and keep cycling forward in fact there's a protocol for grief you know in my book to deal with grief because most people think it's just anger acceptance and then what is it like there's anger acceptance denial and then eventually you find peace but that's not how grief works at all grief is about the
nervous system thinking there's an action to take around somebody and not being able to complete the call or see them it's this like impulse to oh like your nervous system thinks they're still there and they're not and there's so it's an unfulfilled expectation it's like reaching for food when you're very hungry and it's coming towards your mouth and it disappears that's what grief is like and so you have to go through certain science supported things in order to allow that that circuit to shift into a different framework where it's really about the past but your nervous system is still trying to do this so you know i still deal with some of these things but the person who is like here's this and it's like oh i feel like a loser well you're comparing to the end state of having quote unquote one i'm talking from my position now but there were years where i was had very little money.
You know, as an academic, living in the Bay Area, okay, I wasn't in absolute poverty, but it was really a struggle. It was really a struggle at times. All sorts of challenges of loss and things of that sort.
So there were some dark days in there for sure. I think it boils down to something that I was told and I never articulated it myself, but this is what was going through my head for... year after year after year for decades, which is losers take things that happen to them.
And indeed, sometimes that is, are things that happened to them that they could not control or missteps or errors or losses. And they ruminate on it and they turn those thoughts and those emotions into things that harm themselves or others. Winners take the things that happen to them, good or bad, and they transmute that, sometimes through very hard work that involves talking to oneself, reminding oneself, journaling things out, forcing oneself to make better decisions.
And they take those hard things and they turn them into actions that are supportive and indeed generative for them and for... others in the world. Period.
End of story. Now, those are just words. So the question is how?
Well, the first thing is to acknowledge that both losers and winners have hard thoughts and emotions and feelings of despair. Okay. The shift is not one of, oh, I'm just going to be a winner.
I'm going to take all the hard stuff and just think good thoughts and do good things. No, you literally have to Force that on yourself over and over and over, sometimes multiple times per hour or every five minutes.
But you cannot let yourself attack, self -attack or attack others. You cannot do it. So sometimes the best thing to do is nothing.
You can't get into a generative state. You're focusing on something really hard. Okay, just feel the feelings.
But don't do anything. Don't get up out of your chair. But then eventually you get up out of your chair and you do something.
What you don't do is self -harm or harm others. That could be with words. It could be physically.
It could be by not going to work, not going to school, just smoking weed and playing video games, indulging in porn, saying horrible things to yourself, giving up on the world. the default for many people so you have to ratchet yourself over towards that other side but once you do that you realize oh all of the control is in my mind and there's nothing outside of me that's actually going to teach me that process i mean this is the one danger of anything inspirational is that it comes from the outside and it can be very useful it can be like a rung on a ladder that we can pull ourselves forward on but ultimately you pulled that yourself forward.
And that's the thing to focus on. It was your action that brought you forward. So then you learn how to do it when the rung isn't there.
You set a mental rung. Okay. I'm going to do nothing for five minutes because everything I want to do is just destructive.
I made it five minutes. I'm in the driver's seat at least a little bit. And you just go.
Now this is especially hard to do between the hours of one and 5 AM when you're underslept. Very hard to do when you had alcohol in your system. Very hard to do when you are going through a breakup or a loss.
And when you have multiple stressors. So that's where the tools of learning to turn your mind off. Look, yoga nidra costs nothing but time.
That's where you try it the first time. You can't do it. Try it again.
Keep doing it. You get better. It's a skill.
Like lifting weights or running or writing or playing an instrument. That divergence of, you know. Loser mentality, winner mentality.
It's not calling people loser. It's think verbs. What am I doing that's promoting this like loser mentality?
What am I doing that's promoting winner mentality? And you got to dig yourself out of that hole and no one can do it for you. And help will come when you're headed in the right direction.
And people say, well, when I did that, no one helped me. All right. Maybe you need to go a little bit further.
I, you know, I, I. I do empathize and sympathize with people that feel like they're on their own and there's no one there to help them. But in that case, there's only one way out and that's out.
And just acknowledge that the mind is crazy. It goes crazy places and it wants to drag us down sometimes. And you just don't throw more dirt on top of yourself by...
like giving into that like i think we're talking about being a dreamer being inspired but like be a fighter too like learn to be a fighter like learn to learn to fight yourself that when they say like the the hardest fight is in in your own mind absolutely so start with the basic things learn to meditate for 10 breaths fight the agitation learn to stay in a cold shower for three minutes learn to turn off your thoughts with yoga nidra that's a lot harder than the other two things true so this can all be done.
I know with certainty, it can all be done because I did it. And people say, well, you had certain things available to listen. I didn't, they didn't hand me a PhD.
I had to work for it. They didn't hand me a podcast. I had to work for it.
And yeah, my life's been easier, way easier than it has been for others and way harder than it has been for others. It's all what you make of it is all what you make of it. True.
Do you think at this time when somebody's feeling like this, absolute shit, they are low, there's no connection, there are no people, there's no one to hold their hand and get them out of the shit, right? Do you think what we were talking about earlier, that you should strip away everything, do you think it's the right time to do it?
Should people strip away everything when they are... Strip away everything meaning? Just give up control.
You were saying in the beginning that sometimes it's good to just strip away everything, just have oxygen, just a place to sleep. You were saying something and we started to talk. Yeah, break it down to the absolute basics.
You're here, you're breathing. Awesome, you're doing better than a lot of people. It's not going to feel that good, though.
That alone isn't going to be like, oh, great, I'm breathing. Some people will even think, sadly, that they wish they weren't. Okay.
Well, you're here. So I would advise, and I realized this might sound a little bit loaded, but I would advise if you are really at the bottom of your pit, obviously that you need to seek help, but ask whatever you believe in. Okay.
I believe in God, but whatever you believe in, just acknowledge out loud alone or in your head, if you don't want anyone to hear you. I'm at my end. I can't do this on my own anymore.
Just help me get through the next hour. Just go another hour. Just help me do that.
Just help me. Ask if you want to ask God, do it. If you want to ask the universe, whatever it is, you know, and just stop trying to control every aspect in your mind.
Now, I just got through saying that you have to like pull yourself back over to the right response. But if you truly can't do that, then it's time to give it over and just acknowledge, you know, have a good laugh out loud. It's hard to be human sometimes.
It's beautiful. It's great. But it can be really hard to be human.
It can be really tough. We're a weird species. We got this amazing prefrontal cortex.
We can do amazing things with it, but sometimes it loops back on us and it flagellates us and we're like, I can't break out of this. That's when it's time to say, okay, I can't. So I'm going to give this process, just like help me go another hour.
And I guarantee you'll get there. And I have my thoughts about why that might work. None of them fall within the realm of science.
So it's not really worth me going into because it's not my expertise, but I've never seen this fail. But once you're back on slightly solid ground, now you got to get to work because the universe only, whatever, God, the universe, whatever you believe in only rewards effort or the effort to engage in effort. You don't, we've been gifted life.
We can relax, we can enjoy, but we don't get to We don't get to waste it. And we really, we were here.
I mean, maybe that's what the acknowledging that we're alive and breathing piece is about. Like, don't take it for granted. Like, I do think that we're rewarded for any amount of effort that we put in.
Any amount. Maybe not in getting the thing we thought we were going to get, but in the recognition that we can pursue things. So I believe in this very strongly because I've been at the bottom of that pit and wondering what in the world.
But the good news is if you hit the bottom of that pit and you get out a few times, the next time you hit it, you go, I'll get out the next time. Yeah. And then you go, well, this feels a little longer than the last time or a lot longer.
You will get out. You do. People have suffered incredible challenges and they got out and created amazing things.
And there's this weird law of the universe that I don't quite understand. maybe it's a dopaminergic thing but the depth of that pit oftentimes is the mirror image of the height of the thing that you're going to accomplish i don't know how that works but you later you're going to find yourself at a peak and you should remember and go yeah got out got out went back in went back in got out now i'm here and i'm going to savor it a little bit more Because that's, I think, also us being tested.
Are you going to savor it? You're going to appreciate it? You're going to share it?
Because then we can build on it. But otherwise, you might not end up in the pit, but you kind of drop back down again. But if you take good care, you can stay at a high level for a long time.
True. You know, I want to change gear a little bit and just talk about two, three last things. Sure.
Which is, one is, have you ever studied immigrants by any chance? Well, my father is a first generation immigrant to the United States. So I haven't studied them specifically, but, you know.
Like immigrants consistently seem to outperform the, you know, native people in anywhere, any part of the world, right? Oh, yeah. Especially the children of native people.
Exactly. Oh, yeah. In America, every day we hear about.
stories of immigrants who are just killing it everywhere you look at the top position they're just immigrants of the kids of immigrants right why and how great question and I think it's because they look around and they see opportunity everywhere else somebody sees neutral or negative I think it's this fighter mentality it's a there's a there's some there's something here that people who've been here a long time don't appreciate or they do but there's stuff wide open you know my high school girlfriend her father had a um like a i think he had like a seventh grade education he'd been a taxi driver and a few things he had worked from a young age because he was very poor he moved to the bay area and he carried hundreds of keys on his key ring because he early on bought uh properties in the south bay bay area when no one was interested in these areas And he did all the maintenance himself.
And they did very well for themselves because then this thing called Silicon Valley happened and then property became very useful. And then next thing you know, his daughters had horses and, you know, all this stuff. But he was a hardworking guy and first generation immigrant.
I think he saw opportunity. He was like, I think to his mind, why would he pay anyone to do the maintenance? First of all, I don't think he could afford it at first, but he had the skills.
Next thing you know, he's the guy. owning huge swaths of land and property in the South Bay area, Silicon Valley, which is extremely lucrative. But he did it through sheer sweat.
So I think there's just this idea like there's something here that there's resources that others aren't taking because they think it's every day. It's like, what good is that place? What good is this school?
What is like, it's around you. We attenuate to things around us. And I think that, and you also can see, this isn't always true, but many times multi -generational families where there's a lot of wealth you know you have kids that don't do well or your kids the kids are just you know too many resources can be tough too yeah it's a tricky balance so i think that the immigrant mentality is one of seeing opportunity and taking opportunity and it's on a backdrop of people who are not looking at that environment in the same way they they attenuate i mean this is a weird thing about the human brain is we we habituate to a certain level of caloric intake, to a certain level of freedom and ease and peace.
So this is why self -imposed friction is very valuable, especially if you come from a family where there is not a lot of hardship. I mean, it's impressive. You've self -imposed hardship through a vision of yourself and what you can create for the world.
Many people can't do that. They feel ease. I mean, look, everyone loves a good foot rub and a big meal and a...
great night's sleep and all the rest. But some of the most unhappy people I know are people that never strive for anything. In fact, the most unhappy people I know of my peer group were the ones whose parents gave them just enough money so that they never really had to push themselves.
And they're the ones with a lot of depression, a lot of issues of self -worth, a lot of, yeah, you got to, It's good to have your head held underwater for a short while so you can appreciate oxygen when you come up. So to speak, so to speak.
I'm not being literal there. Yeah, you go. Do you think that changes your brain from the inside?
Does it wire something? Does the neurology or the chemistry inside my brain changes if I go through certain hardships in my life? Absolutely.
What's so important for people to understand about the brain is that as much as it learns facts, it learns algorithms. It learns friction, I got out of friction. Or in some cases, friction, it crushed me.
So now you need to teach it a new contingency. You need to teach it a new algorithm. So you need those.
That's why I said like shorten the horizon. You need some small wins so we can learn. Oh, that's what a win looks like.
I made it an hour, but people who have, who are dealing with something or thinking like, ah, I can't get out of this mindset. Well, you got out of it long enough to say that sentence. If you shorten the horizon, then they can do a little longer and a little longer and a little longer.
This is why the cold water thing, the exercise thing. um constructing your days the way that we're talking about you start doing those things and you realize that you are in more control than you think but some people are very plagued by a very um punishing destructive inner voice and that's a tough one we gotta learn to turn that one off or you know the goggins approach he listens to criticism of himself while he runs he's learned to channel it into this kind of fu response you know i don't want to live there but me neither but i I've known David a long time, actually.
I met him first time in 2016 before he had a book or anything else. And he was always super driven. And knowing his story a bit, I think he had to figure out a way because the voice in his head was so destructive.
He had to turn it into a different version of himself. acknowledge that it came from the outside and create this whole new version of himself he has multiple people in there all him he's very you know psychologically healthy i do believe that um but he has to do the like no no no to these certain voices and like the only voice i'm going to listen to is the one that's going to pull me forward and that's a that's a battle i don't think any of us would want to live in but david is special because of what he's done but what he's trying to tell people i do believe is that they can do it too but they have to change their frame they can't expect those voices to turn off i think you and i are probably i don't know i've never been in your head i don't i stay out of people's heads but um speculating about david but i i don't live with that voice in my head i don't live with universal you're perfect you're loving yours all this stuff you're loved i but I don't live with a punishing voice in my head.
And that's got to be very hard. So I want to acknowledge that's got to be hard, but you got to turn the volume down on that one or crank it up to 10 and fight it the whole way through. But you learn the algorithm of how to do it.
You know, all of these things, which we talked about regulation in terms, in particular terms, it's going to get harder because of technology. Yeah. Do you think so?
Like, you know, every technology, if I have to make it specific, like how they made one part of our life more difficult. Let's say memory became more difficult since we had phones. Navigation became difficult since we had Google Maps.
And now maybe thinking is going to be difficult because of AI. We trade. Yes, I agree that we trade skills for convenience.
We don't cook because we can order DoorDash. Love DoorDash. A few years ago, I didn't order food much, but now it's clearly the much more efficient and even economical way to go.
Much of the time. But I know how to cook if I need to. With thinking, I think we need to just be careful.
I don't eat junk food DoorDash every day. I also cook some meals. I think I use ChatGPT to self -test myself on material.
generate a self -test about this it's a great way to self -test um i think ai is going to really positively transform the world i really do but i'm born and raised in silicon valley and i've seen the way that people get fear of job replacement it happens a bit you know a few years ago was the learn to code thing and then now you don't really need to know how to code i think there's still some value in knowing how to code but you get the point um i think all technologies do this they point out our most vulnerable and our most generative sides and we just have to be very careful i think with the phone practice putting it into a lockbox or if you don't need a lockbox into a drawer for a few hours and doing some focused work per day and coming back to it just practice if you can't do that you have what's called a problem do it and you'll feel better you might be anxious when you are away from it but learn to ride that out and don't i I think part of it is that humans don't like to be controlled.
Deep down, we don't like to be controlled. So if you recognize you're being controlled, now you stand a chance to fight back. I mean, humans fighting back is the story of human evolution.
Humans being too cold and fighting back against being cold is what allowed them to, you know, fire electricity and so forth. being too warm has allowed them to build air conditioning and ice and refrigerators so you know wanting to get places more quickly to see like telephones that pick any example the the friction point is where and this is a theme that seems to be coming up again and again today you have to get right up to that friction point oh you wasted three hours on social media doing nothing i think you can learn on social media and you can be entertained but three hours okay now you really feel bad about yourself that's a friction point great set a rule you get an hour 20 i have social media on a separate phone so i have an older phone has instagram and x that phone is either with me or if it's becoming a problem for me it goes into a supermax prison lock box you can buy one for like 15 bucks program it in you cannot open it you cannot open it and just leave it in there for like when i go in for a workout i know the hardest part is not hopping on my phone during the rest periods so i lock it in there for two hours i can't even get it out you just have to enforce you have to self -enforce now the good news for people who are striving is that now more than ever goggin says this is easier to get ahead
You read a book, nobody does that. You read a book, it's still enriching. You listen to a book, you listen to a podcast start to finish.
You have good relationship to your phone and social media. You're like moving into the winner category just by virtue of what you're not doing. It's still hard, but it's never been easier to move ahead.
Now, to me, it doesn't feel good to move ahead because others are dropping behind. I'm not that guy, but. I'm going to continue to go.
And your generation is going to continue to build things. I think the opportunities are greater than ever for people to build businesses and lives. I think a lot of it does have to do with not being purely consumer.
And I think the simple question you should ask yourself, am I a consumer or a creator in this moment? Spend some time being a creator every day. You're going to be okay.
If you're purely a consumer every day. It's tough. I mean, if you put outside your entire life to watch world cup, like I see people getting really excited, but I get it.
You know, my dad's Argentine. He's not into soccer, but like people love world cup and they're not that into their jobs sometimes. And they, they, you know, but if you're going to be purely a consumer, you're going to end up in a place where you are spent out.
So you have to, you have to fight some of these internal reflexes to just be a consumer. I used to say this. And I've been saying this, I think six, seven years now, become the producer of the thing that you consume the most.
That's like the easiest way for you to start working on something. Yes. Yes.
I love that. Perfect. Yes.
As a scientist, I was like, I love these papers. I want to do research in this area. I'm going to do science and publish papers in that area.
Podcasts. I love these podcasts. I love these themes.
I'm going to do my own version of something like that, but different. Create it. And I'm probably on the second act of my career.
I don't know what the third act will be, but I'm going to do something else. It'll be related to what I'm doing. I don't know what it is.
I truly have no idea. Will you get into entrepreneurship, building something? yeah yeah i could see myself doing that um i don't know or maybe something really in the creative arts or something like that but i don't have any musical talent i can draw somewhat but i don't know it'll come to me i've called it in like something's gonna happen where i'll naturally veer that way but uh for the time being we're waiting for it we're waiting for it yeah it'll come it'll come in in time You know, you have, you studied brain, you study brain, you have almost answers for like everything, right?
You know, at least everything about what goes on in the brain. But I was listening to one of your, one of your podcasts or one of the clips that I saw that you struggled with romantic relationship, right? I have.
Things are good now. Yeah, now things are good. It took some time.
Yeah. So you struggled with it. What's about love that...
All the information in the world about neuroscience also cannot understand. Oh, so much. My goodness.
I would say I know, to be fair, I would say I know a lot because I spent a lot of time studying it and researching it directly. Like there's something fundamentally different. from just like learning something in a textbook to like actually putting your hands in brains cutting brain standing brains recording neurons electrically and you you know spending a lot of time in that landscape so i i wouldn't by no stretch do i think i understand everything that's known about the brain i know a lot i understand a lot of it um and we certainly don't know everything as a field about the brain there's still tons to discover so just to be clear i mean romantic love is one of those things where when i said i've struggled with relationships I didn't struggle with the love part.
I struggled with the not making always the best choices about romantic partners. It's not putting the blame on them just and being caught up in the feelings and then being disappointed and the letdown. And I think that what I've learned is love can be a bit of a drug.
I don't want to. take away from it because it's also a beautiful feature of life that is not drug -like right and it can be very sustaining you know um it was odd for me to see that there were certain areas of my life like my romantic relationships where things were not working out in the long run as well as i had hoped and whereas my friendships my career my relationship to my biological family my pets you know all that just flourishing and flourishing like what what's going on like you know and I think for me, the real key, this was just for me, was to just slow down, to really focus on the friendship component first and really take the time to get to know, to really take the time to get to know someone and to really build the friendship.
Because I would remain friends with people that I dated and we were on good terms, but it's different. I think that...
for people that feel love in a big way it's so easy there's a whole script that comes from that okay so you do that and then you move in together and then you or maybe you don't do do they still do arranged marriages in india yeah yeah it's common yeah is it less common now it's still very common that's but the numbers is significantly reducing but still very common and as i understand the outcomes in terms of long -term uh like I don't want to say prognosis, sounds like a disease, that long -term success is very high, right?
Yeah. So maybe we're just going about it all wrong in the West, you know, but I... found that I was like, oh, like I'd fallen really in love with people and I still have wonderful feelings about them and not all of them.
I've had some challenging relationships and some better ones, but I'm on great terms with, with a lot of my exes and they're married and in some cases not, and, um, still think about them and communicate from time to time, you know, uh, with tremendous, um, kindness and, and it's great. I think it's just a matter of slowing things down and building that real deep trust that this could because you are in some sense trusting this person with your life.
Yeah. Right. I mean, it's a little bit of an extreme statement, but there's no other, perhaps besides children, level of investment like that where, you know, this person can really hurt you.
by virtue of what they say what they do and so you're handing them a very powerful um i don't say a weapon because it sounds so cynical you're giving them a lot of power when have you felt the most powerless in your life well that's a great question you ask hard questions my friend um three times the first time was when my parents split and my whole focus at that time was not on that it was on wanting to make it in this like skateboarding career and i kept getting hurt and i wasn't very good this is kind of like the not so secret secret i i talk a lot about that time and i'm always clear to point out like i was not going to be one of the like guys that turned pro i had friends turning pro i just i don't know my body wasn't mature enough yet i didn't have the spring and the strength yet you really need a lot of that and i didn't have that then later i got stronger but i moved on to other things um And I felt really alone, like what's going to happen with my life?
Because my home life was like, and that was a mess in school. And then it just started spiraling. And that's when things got really bad and got myself in all sorts of bad situations for a long time and then dug myself out.
So that was one time. The second time was when my graduate advisor died because we were so close and my undergraduate advisor had. killed himself in a very dramatic way at a particular time that was really hard.
And when my graduate advisor, when she died, she was very much like a mother to me, very maternal. I know that sounds a little bit like, well, you were, she was just your graduate advisor, but I really loved and trusted her. I knew her family.
I know her daughter, one of them is a neuroscientist now. I remember when she was pregnant with her daughters, I was friends with her husband. They were like family to me.
I remember feeling like, like. what is this? And then when my third advisor died, I thought like, I'm cursed.
Like, what is this? Because in science, your scientific advisors do a lot for you. They help you a lot, but they're also just a pillars of stability that you can call and talk to.
So I thought, okay, I have this family history, biological family history. And now my academic parents, I'm like an academic orphan, literally. But then I realized I can do whatever I want.
But this time, unlike when I was younger, I'm not going to take that. I can do whatever I want because my parents are out of like back then they weren't dead, but out of the picture, I'm not going to be self -destructive.
I'm going to start this podcast thing. And I don't have an advisor to tell me, Hey, this isn't a good idea. I'm the adult now.
Unlike when I was 14, I'm like, I'm the adult in my life. And granted I was in my forties, but I didn't in science, there's this long term decades long thing where advisors help their, their underlings. And it's a big thing.
So I was like, I don't have anyone. This is not rebellion, but I'm totally free, totally free.
I'm going to look into my heart. What do I want to do? I'm going to build something that is about science, but also health and wellness.
And I got a lot of support, but a lot of people probably thinking like, what is that thing? And a lot of people now, you know, some have come around, some haven't honestly, I don't care. Like, I just hope they're happy doing what they're doing.
So that was the second time. And I transmuted that into goodness. This was the first time my life got really choppy early on, really bad.
And then the third time was, you know, I think a few years back, I had poured my heart and soul into a relationship. And it was the wrong relationship. But I really did pour my heart and soul into it.
And then when I realized that there were serious issues that I just couldn't resolve for them. I, I had to move on and it was a very, it was a messy, messy thing. And I remember thinking, gosh, like being misunderstood about that is, is really hard because look, I think they were doing the best they could.
I was doing the best I could with what we had at that time. And I think that's the hardest part. You know, earlier we were talking about public life and criticism.
I don't mind it either. It's being, but being misunderstood is very challenging. Yeah.
And I had to do some real soul searching and I, and then I realized that. I was having all these challenging thoughts, but then all around me was this amazing thing. I've got this podcast.
I've got an amazing podcast team. I'm in great relationship with my parents who are in their eighties and are healthy. Thank God.
My sister who I love, my niece who I love, my friends. I have, you know, a relationship came into my life and like amazing friends and opportunities. And all of a sudden I realized I'm like, I'm sitting in the promised land and I'm thinking about like, this thing and how it relates to these old things that didn't work out and i thought and i'm just like that's it it was the time it was i had to think about certain things but then it was also time to just like flick it off like a piece of lint i'm done with all that let's go and ever since then everything's been healthy and great and so i do think there's sometimes when it's as easy as that where you just you shut the door you know the whole burn the boats mentality like i'm just not going to allow myself to to spiral And I hope that was the last one, but I'm human.
So it'd probably come again. Listen, lately, I think a lot. I mean, it sounds like you're close with your parents too.
As challenging as it's been in the past, I'm bracing myself for my parents passing, even though hopefully it's a long time from now. By all accounts, they seem healthy, but it's gonna be hard to like not be able to call them. And my mom probably will say, well, you don't call enough as it is.
But I think about her a lot and we do talk. But that's life and you can't live braced in fear of what's to come or what could happen. Then you're like that person that we were trying to talk to earlier.
You just got to protect your heart, but move forward and live life. And I do say this and I mean it. God forbid I were to drop dead walking out of this podcast.
I'm good. I'm good. I've done my will.
That was actually a very good exercise for me. It's kind of strange to think about mortality. We don't like to think about it.
To go, I could die. What would I want to make sure happened for people? What do I want to make sure people knew about how I felt about them?
Every podcast I go on is an opportunity to learn and to teach. Every time I can perhaps help somebody. I don't want to die, but I'm okay.
I'm okay. Every time I hit turbulence, I go, I've tried to take myself to the edge, but not off the edge my entire life. And it's a great place to live because whether or not I die at 50 or 90 or 110 or somewhere in there, like I'm good.
I really am. I really have made my peace with it. And so, in part because I get these amazing opportunities to connect to your audience and to you.
Thank you. We're glad you did this. Thank you so much.
Here's a last one -line question that we ask every guest. Sure, I'll give it to one line. What's the cost of being Andrew Huberman?
The cost?
Oh man, it's all love. It's all upside these days, which is not to say I don't have difficulties.
Okay, I'll actually answer your question.
I experience emotions very intensely. I think I got that from my mother. And I'm also very ambitious.
And I have a vision of the world that I want to help contribute to creating. And holding those two things inside can be challenging. and sometimes can be downright agony because i want to help every single person i want to drop into every single emotion but i can't because i've got work to do i've got to keep the bigger picture in mind and the hard work is thankfully these days is not about staying out of the deep trenches i've moved past that it's about trying to stay in a mode of action and striving, but also peace.
And so for me, that just comes from gratitude, a relationship to God and prayer. And sometimes it's really hard. I'm like everybody.
Sometimes I feel like I'm trying to run fast with my shoelaces tied.
but I'm going to keep going. That's all I can do. It's all I've ever done.
So the cost is, because you're so ambitious, you can't help every loved one around you, even though you feel very intensely about them. Yeah. It's fine.
My girlfriend knows this about me. If someone stops me on the street, for instance, it's like, oh, I like your podcast. I go, what's your name?
I actually want to know their name. What do you do? They'll ask me a question like, i i'm not playing a role when i do my podcast and they just popped a microphone in front of me i've always been that way and um and yet i can't have the deep dive conversation with everybody so that's why i podcast to get out to as many people as possible so sometimes the pain is that um that i can't shake every hand and meet every person truly i know it sounds like some sort of pr line but it's true um i think everybody has a light inside and i can feel that when i meet them i can like feel it i don't think i'm looking for it i just shows up sometimes it's different or brighter to different contour but i can like feel and and i would i want to connect with people so as a public person behind a microphone or on a stage you realize this that you're connecting kind of out like this and it's coming back and um i just have to appreciate that and sometimes that's a bit of work but i feel very very blessed very very blessed to have this opportunity you're a special individual i have to say i can i get a very good sense of people and um certain domains of life i wasn't so good at that but in the professional realm and certainly across the table in podcasting i can like i'm sure you i know you have this skill too you can like feel somebody's genuine heart and their mind clearly you have a very sharp mind and you're very driven but um
You're like, you're not doing this for kicks and you're not doing this for money. You're doing this cause you love it. And, uh, your heart really comes through in it and your mind and you're throwing everything you've gotten to it.
I love that. Like you're all in and, uh, you made me feel very comfortable as a guest in a way that, um, is not easy to do and that I wasn't resisting, but, um, really want to say thank you. You've created a wonderful thing and, uh, I feel very lucky to have this opportunity.
Thank you so much. It means a lot that this is coming out of you. Like it means a lot.
Thank you so much. Thank you. I appreciate your time and everything.
And thank you for doing this on a very busy day. Oh, well, right back at you. We are colleagues and...
Hopefully we'll become friends. Absolutely. Do many more conversations on podcast and off podcast.
I'd also someday like to visit India. I'll buy my own ticket there. But I've always been intrigued.
You tell me when. Let me host you. Okay.
You, we will. That'd be fun. You're going to lose your mind.
I'm going to. Okay, perfect. Done.
You just, you tell me what are your dates. Let me design everything for you. And you'll love it.
Okay. Let us do it. All right, you're on.
Done. Okay. I'm excited.
You should do it.
I'll see you the next time. Until then, keep figuring out.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The cold open does not start with cortisol or discipline. It starts with a man describing how to move your eyes behind closed eyelids until your brain forgets where your body is, and then it cuts to the bet he is really making: over five to ten years, the person who can switch off beats the person who can only push.
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A neuroconditioning specialist breaks down mental conditioning into four trainable moves: know what you want, believe you'll get it, guard what you let in, and rehearse the future you're building toward.
A researcher who studied drug addiction, and quit nicotine herself, breaks the habit loop into four stages and gives the exact sequence for interrupting each one.
Ed Mylett's own problem-solving framework, stress-tested against four archive clips: Tony Robbins on why fear is physical, a world champion barrel racer's 2% chance to live, Amy Purdy's second fight to walk, and Dean Graziosi's hardest six months.
A neuroconditioning specialist argues that most journaling only reflects on the past, and reframes writing as a daily rehearsal tool that trains the brain to notice a future it hasn't lived yet.
A personal trainer turned business owner argues that content creation beats the stock market as an investment, because unlike the S&P 500, you can rig the odds.
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