Breakups, Sadness, Focus & Rebuilding Yourself - Andrew Huberman (4K)

1. 0:00 – 0:27

   Intro

   1. AHAndrew Huberman0:00

      If we were to look at ourselves through the lens of an experiment, like we would an animal experiment, we'd think that animal is sick. If you saw an animal digging in the corner, looking, looking, looking, looking for a bone, the dog, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, you'd think, "That's really sad." That's us. Right? That's us. I'm pointing at myself intentionally. That's us. (wind blowing)

   2. CWChris Williamson0:22

      Dr. Andrew Huberman, welcome to the show.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman0:24

      Great to be here. It's been a long time coming.

   4. CWChris Williamson0:26

      A very long time coming.

2. 0:27 – 8:32

   Control the Mind with the Body

   1. CWChris Williamson0:27

      What do you mean when you say you cannot control the mind with the mind?

   2. AHAndrew Huberman0:31

      Yeah, that statement really emerges from the fact that if we are in a pretty relaxed state or if we are happy, we generally feel like we can do what we want to do. We can maneuver through our environment. We can make choices that are reasonable. But oftentimes, we're not in relaxed and happy states. That's just part of the human experience, obviously. And there's a fundamental feature to the nervous system, which is this thing they call the autonomic nervous system, which is just fancy nerd speak for the components of your nervous system that raise your levels of alertness or bring them way down. Sometimes we hear fight or flight, rest and digest, but this system governs all that, but a lot more. And basically what happens is when we are at the extremes of the autonomic, what I call seesaw, of very, very alert to the point of being really stressed or panicked or concerned, or if we are very close to sleep and we're drowsy and we're exhausted, at those points along the autonomic nervous system, our thoughts become a bit like a runaway train. You know, if you're very upset, it's hard to talk yourself out of it. If you're stressed, it's hard to think yourself out of it. In fact, you can start doing all sorts of third personing and rationalization. You can call someone, you can text somebody. It's very hard to get yourself out of those states with thinking alone. But the beauty of the autonomic nervous system is that it traverses the brain and the body and it connects to essentially all the organs of the body. And it's a two-way street such that certain behaviors, even certain patterns of breathing, etc., allow us to shift where we are on the autonomic continuum between very, very alert and stressed and very calm, and thereby give our mind a shift also in terms of the kinds of thoughts that we can entertain, the sorts of actions that we can engage in. To make this concrete, if you're very, very stressed, if you're very, very upset, two things happen. One, it's very hard to take your focus off whatever it is that's upsetting you, and if you don't know what's upsetting you, you know, pure anxiety but you don't know why, it's very hard to take your mind off of the feelings of anxiety. In those states of mind, there's another component which is that for whatever reason, and no one really understands why this is, it feels as if the state that you're in will go on forever. Now, when we're in happy, relaxed states, rarely do we think, "Gosh, this is gonna go on forever." And yet when we are in these unfortunate states of mind, we get the idea somehow, it sort of hijacks our perception of time, and we feel like this is never going to stop. If we turn to the body and certain behaviors, let me talk about what those are, we are able to move ourselves along the autonomic continuum and at that point when we've done that successfully, and it's actually quite straightforward to do, we are able to think about things differently. We start to get a sense that the way we feel might not be the way we're gonna feel forever, and it's in those shifts that we start to realize, "Ah, my mind actually is not my best friend at these extremes," but there's a lot more to it. You're only getting the tip of the iceberg in those states. So, that's why I say if you can't control the mind with the mind, look to the body to control the mind.

   3. CWChris Williamson4:04

      How would that be adaptive? How would it be adaptive for us to focus all of our attention onto the anxiety? Is that something that you could see a use for?

   4. AHAndrew Huberman4:11

      Absolutely. So, let's take stress as an example, and this could be stress, panic, anxiety. You know, each one of those has a definition in medical terms, psychological terms, but to be fair, no one really knows how to draw the line in the brain between fear and stress and anxiety. But we can say with certainty that all of those states involve high levels of alertness, high levels of awareness, sometimes for things in our environment and sometimes just for what's going on internally. When we are stressed, anxious, afraid, waking up in the middle of the night, doesn't matter what triggered it, there are a couple basic things that happen to all of us. First of all, our heart rate quickens. That's kind of an obvious one. Fuel from our muscles and our liver is shuttled to particular organs of the body and away from others. In particular, fuel is shuttled towards the big muscles of the body to generate large movements. This is why we quake a bit when we're stressed. The hands will shake. It's preparing us for... We are prepared for movement.

   5. CWChris Williamson5:12

      How does that prepare us for movement?

   6. AHAndrew Huberman5:13

      Um, the shaking actually is the consequence of trying to not move when we are stressed. Basically, this is why taking a walk or a run, you actually feel like you can kind of dispel the stress. You're not actually dispelling the stress. What's happened is, it's like the R- the RPM are getting cranked up. It's like idling it. Erhhhh, right? It's... You know, you could sit there in a parked car and do that, but basically you take the thing out of park and it just wants to go. And so a lot of the times when we're stressed, it's in conditions in which we're trying to remain still, public speaking and a tough argument, you know, at the doctor's office about to get an injection. You know, it depends on what stresses people obviously, but that readiness t- for action is a second component. So, heart rate, readiness for action by way of shuttling glucose and other fuels to the muscles and then away from the reproductive organs, from digestive organs, etc., because that is just not the right time for that.... the, another very, very powerful feature of this response is that our, our pupils of our eyes, the dark parts of our eyes, get big. Now, you might think that that expands your visual field, but actually, the way the optics of the eye work, that narrows the aperture of your visual field. So when you are stressed, you literally are seeing things through a small aperture, soda-straw view of the world, as they say. And under those conditions, you cannot see things in your periphery as well as you c- could prior to being stressed, but you become exquisitely good at measuring small, detailed changes in whatever it is that you happen to be looking at. Now, there's a internal process too, which is that the aperture on your thinking also becomes very, very narrow. So that if, for instance, well, I had this happen the other day (laughs) . I, I heard something very stressful. I couldn't think about anything else, all right? And that might just seem logical, like, of course you can't think about anything else. It's very stressful. You're concerned about this. But my mind wasn't thinking about this particular incident. It was thinking, "If this, then this. Then if that, then that. And that, then that." And so you start, you know, dropping into the future. You start dropping into the past, like, "Oh, God. Why did we do that? Why, wh-" You know? And you start doing all that kind of cycling through things. And of course, there are so many things that can help relax us, meditation, exercise, a nice healthy meal, social connection. But the kind of fifth column of the stress response is that your aperture of vision, your aperture of thinking gets very narrow, and it becomes harder and harder to do the very things that would keep you out of stress. And so this is kind of the, the double-edged sword that is stress. And so all the more reason why, in those moments, if the stress is not desired, 'cause there are moments when stress is desired, you know, you're navigating an emergency, et cetera. But if you don't want to be in that narrow aperture of thinking and vision, et cetera, then you need to find some way to bring your level of autonomic arousal, as it's called, down slightly so that you can start thinking about other possibilities. Or, you know, there are instances, I think everyone's been in this kinda situation, where the thing that's stressing you out is not gonna get resolved today, and you need to sleep. And of course, you know you need to sleep, and then you can't sleep. And then of course, that creates a compounding stress, and now you're stressed about not being able to sleep. And then over the course of the next few days, you, you know, dissolve into a puddle of tears. Um, but fortunately, there are ways out of that kind of self-destruction.

3. 8:32 – 24:16

   Is There a Universal Fear?

   1. AHAndrew Huberman8:32

   2. CWChris Williamson8:32

      You've done a lot of work on fear. That was one of the things that you mentioned before. Is there something that everybody is scared of? 'Cause I've heard the story, the wives' tale, babies are born with, is it fears of heights and loud noises or something? Is there any truth in that or is this something everyone's scared of?

   3. AHAndrew Huberman8:46

      There is. I think the one that, um, everybody who has a healthy nervous system will react quite robustly to is if you start increasing the amount of carbon dioxide that they're breathing and reduce the amount of oxygen that they're taking in. That's terrifying, you know?

   4. CWChris Williamson9:01

      Am I right in thinking there's a, a experiment you can do where it's a single breath and that is pretty reliable at bringing on a, an anxiety attack?

   5. AHAndrew Huberman9:09

      Yeah. If you have people... Uh, please don't do this 'cause again (laughs) you need the right, proper medical staff around. But there, there are great experiments of having people breathe carbon dioxide directly. And it, y- you basically panic. Um, it's terrifying.

   6. CWChris Williamson9:23

      One breath.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman9:23

      Yeah, one big gulp of, of carbon dioxide will make, make you very afraid. It turns out that there are a little group of neurons, of course, neurons are just nerve cells, that, little group of neurons in the brain stem that respond to levels of carbon dioxide in the blood. Turns out the reason we breathe is, of course, to bring in oxygen and then offload carbon dioxide. But we don't have neurons that stimulate breathing for oxygen. We have neurons that sense when carbon dioxide levels get too high, so if you hold your breath (gasps) eventually carbon dioxide levels go up. And then at the moment that they reach a certain threshold, these neurons fire and trigger the gasp reflex. So in that moment, you bring in oxygen and then, of course, you offload some carbon dioxide.

   8. CWChris Williamson10:04

      That's why it's so important to work on CO₂ tolerance, right? For breath work.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman10:08

      Yeah. So free divers, a, a sport I actually don't recommend (laughs) 'cause there's only one way out of that sport, as they say. Um, I have some friends who are free divers, and, and obviously you can do it safely with the right guide and training, et cetera. But it is a very dangerous sport because for most people, when carbon dioxide levels increase in the bloodstream and brain, it triggers this gasp reflex. What free divers train is carbon dioxide tolerance. So they do that a couple of different ways, and again, please don't do this because you actually, is that people have died doing this. Which, so one way is you can do what's called cyclic hyperventilation (breathes rapidly) all right? You do that 25 times or so, and you think, "Oh, you're bringing in a lot of oxygen." You are, but you're also offloading a lot of carbon dioxide, especially if you use forceful exhales. Normally, humans breathe through active inhales (inhales) and passive exhales (exhales) . You just kind, they just sort of dump their air passively. But if you do the cyclic hyperventilation, you're dumping a lot of carbon dioxide. And then if you were to (gasps) hold your breath, what you would find is you could hold your breath for a lot longer. Why? Because your carbon dioxide levels are, are reduced, so you don't have the same impulse to breathe. Now on land, that's a more or less safe thing to do, provided that you can get a good gulp of air once the gasp reflex hits. If you do that before going underwater, cyclic hyperventilation, they call it air packing, and then you go underwater, you're going to be able to, e- excuse me. Cyclic hyperventilation to air pack and then g- go underwater, but your carbon dioxide is then lower, you're going to be able to stay under longer. But this is very dangerous because normally when that carbon dioxide threshold hits, you would pop up to the surface and you'd sort of panic and want to go to the top. Free divers learn to tolerate high levels of carbon dioxide in their bloodstream and stay very, very calm. The way they die is very interesting because it speaks to the physiology. The way they, they die is they'll just be swimming.... feeling completely calm because they're very used to, they've trained up this CO2 tolerance, carbon dioxide tolerance. And when they die, they don't suddenly feel like, "Oh my goodness, I'm running out of air." It's just (fingers snap) lights go black. That's it. They're just blackout. And so they're alive and then they're gone. And so this is why they use spotters, they, you know, they have a line, et cetera. Anytime you hear about somebody, uh, dying doing free diving, it's rarely because they weren't comfortable at a given depth or because they've never been to that depth.

   10. CWChris Williamson12:35

       It's not because their, their gasp reflex has kicked in, it's because their gasp reflex has been so desensitized that it's after the point at which they die.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman12:41

       Precisely. And this, you know, it's sort of like when you hear that, um, eh, skilled parachuters die. Why? Well, because they're so comfortable with so many jumps, they actually forget to pull. There's sometimes, eh, there are many instances in which they're, they're, uh, videoing r- the first time jumpers, right? And they're getting the video for them and they themselves forget to pull because they're so comfortable jumping out of planes. And so as people get more and more advanced in something, there's a, there's a new risk that, that surfaces. Because unless it's very reflexive and they built all, all the protocols in, oftentimes they can overlook the very thing that allowed them to become expert in the first place.

   12. CWChris Williamson13:15

       Why do my palms get sweaty when I watch videos of people climbing up cranes and stuff like that?

   13. AHAndrew Huberman13:21

       (laughs) Okay.

   14. CWChris Williamson13:21

       You know the ones that I mean?

   15. AHAndrew Huberman13:22

       Sure.

   16. CWChris Williamson13:22

       The guy who's got a GoPro is a dude called James Kingston-

   17. AHAndrew Huberman13:24

       Oh, yeah.

   18. CWChris Williamson13:24

       ... from the UK that's a psychopath. He goes up to the highest tr- uh, towers of Dubai, uh, illegally in the middle of the night, and then I watch it on a screen that's only this big and-

   19. AHAndrew Huberman13:36

       Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson13:36

       ... I get this visceral response.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman13:38

       Yeah, well, two things. First of all, I, I can relate. You know, I saw the Free Solo movie with Alex Honnold and you know he lives and it's still scary to watch, right? You actually know the outcome at the beginning. They sort of make it clear that he manages to do this and you're, it's still terrifying. And I think it's for the same reason that those YouTube videos are terrifying, which is that we are so visual as animals. We are so visual. I mean, rodents, even a lot of, uh, carnivore predators are extremely olfactory smell-driven. Humans are incredibly visual. I mean, more than 40% of the human brain has something to do with vision. Visual navigation, eye movements, um, visual perception, color perception, face perception. We have dedicated areas of the brain that are just for perceiving human faces and the ex- micro-expressions of human faces. So it's so highly evolved for us. When we see depth of field that's not, um, parallel to the ground, it is terrifying with good reason because w- you know, what's the universal force that we all experience from the time we're born, is gravity. The first thing you learn is that things fall down, not up (laughs) , right? They, you know, it's, it's like the, the fundamental rule that we come into the, the world with, it's like, eh, day one, even though the baby's kind of flopping around like a potato but can't even hold its head up, eyes are often, you know, the ocular muscles of the eyes are often not very good so babies will kind of, their eyes are rolling back in their head. That generally corrects itself over the n- next few weeks or so. But the feeling of gravity, of them, you know, if they feel like they're being dropped even the tiniest bit, right, they will go wide-eyed. So there's a built-in vestibulo-ocular reflex. So when you see depth of field in the direction of the gravitational pull, you actually get a little bit of activity in your cerebellum, which literally means mini brain, a little area of the brain in the back that actually looks like a little mini brain, if you were looking at the brain. And that, eh, area of the brain is responsible for all the reflexes associated with the falling reflex. It does a lot of other things too. So when you see that depth of field in the direction of gravity, y- th- you have a little micro activity in your brain that you might fall. If you've ever been to a tall bridge or a dam and you go to the edge and, you know, people love to play with this. There's that also that tower in Toronto, they have that big, um-

   22. CWChris Williamson15:57

       Sayers Tower?

   23. AHAndrew Huberman15:58

       Well, the big, no, the big, um, the big tower in Tor- I forget what it is. Maybe it's in Calgary. Goodness, Canadians are gonna hate me.

   24. CWChris Williamson16:04

       Okay.

   25. AHAndrew Huberman16:04

       I love Canadians, but for some reason I can't remember this, but they have one of those glass floors there where you can walk and it's terrifying and you know you're not gonna fall through it, right? Or they tell you, you know, you're not gonna fall through it. But it's terrifying because your body and brain are preparing for this immense fall. So when you see this in video, it's the same thing. I always say, "A picture is worth a thousand words, but a video is worth 10 million pictures." I mean, this is the reason why we're so drawn to things like Instagram scrolling. It's like text, text, te- video, you know, or the, the enormous popularity of TikTok, it's video. Now, the enormous popularity of Twitter still escapes me because that's a different, different (laughs) uh, sort of, uh, cultural gravitational pull. But video and in particular, action that gets us in a kind of a primitive mode, that is an extremely alluring visual image.

   26. CWChris Williamson16:54

       What about emotional fears, like, uh, fear of failure or social disapproval or something? Do they work in a, in a similar way or is there a different part of the brain that's using that?

   27. AHAndrew Huberman17:02

       Yeah, great question. So, um, a few years ago, a post-doc in my lab, who's now a staff scientist, Melis Yilmaz, excuse me, Melis, Dr. Melis Yilmaz-Balban, she has a long name, um, excellent researcher, uh, studies fear, uh, did a very broad scale survey of the general public, thousands and thousands of, of entries, um, created this kind of, uh, cloud of bubbles. The bigger the bubble, the more, eh, the greater number of people that had that fear. We saw some, we saw some interesting things. So heights, certainly public speaking, certainly doctor's office and syringes, certainly. Public speaking fear is very common. Um, social isolation fear is very common. But we also saw some things like dogs. Um, you know, there are a number of people who are afraid of dogs, which is inconceivable to me because I love dogs so much.

   28. CWChris Williamson17:46

       Exactly the same.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman17:47

       Yep. But people, you know, people form these associations whether or not through experience or through indirect experience o- observing others. I think public speaking is one of the greatest, fear of dying. You know, I, it's funny, I don't... it's not funny, but, eh, figure of speech. I never think about dying and being afraid of dying. I think about all the scary things that could happen (laughs) while I'm living. But there are many people who are just-... intrinsically afraid of dying. And so that's, that's a big one. Um, for people that, uh, don't swim, fear of drowning. For people that swim, less so. Um, for people that have some sort of psychiatric disorder, genuine psychiatric disorder, like obsessive-compulsive disorder, which is not just pers- obsessive-compulsive personality, but obsessive-compulsive disorder, fear of the sh- of being discovered and the shame that they have around their obsessions and compulsions. These are v- uh, oh, true OCD is very common, uh-

   30. CWChris Williamson18:39

       Do they all live in the same place? All of these different fears, they're-
4. 24:16 – 29:24

   Studying Fear in David Goggins

   1. CWChris Williamson24:16

      You had David Goggins in the lab to study him for fear. What did you learn from looking at that guy?

   2. AHAndrew Huberman24:22

      (laughs) Yeah, David's, uh, David's great. I always chuckle with David because, you know, the one thing about David is, what you see on social media is actually what you get when you interact with David. We worked long hours one day and I was ... everyone was ready to tap out. This was a bunch of people in, uh, Silicon Valley for a day, you know, doing some workshop-type thing, and he just, he was changing into his running shorts midway. He was gonna run to the airport, and he ran to the airport, as far as I know. I-

   3. CWChris Williamson24:47

      To get his flight.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman24:48

      I believe so, you know?

   5. CWChris Williamson24:50

      (laughs)

   6. AHAndrew Huberman24:50

      Um, but there was this moment of, "Should we continue? Should we take a break?" And he was like, "No, let's keep going, keep going." Um, everything you see and read and hear about David is exactly how he shows up. It's really wonderful. Um, he came to the lab and he did ... y- you know, we have a virtual version of the shark thing, um, which of course is not the same as the real experience, but for people who are afraid of sharks, it's quite scary for them and allows us to study fear. David was ... he's very afraid of sharks, which was sort of, uh, amusing to me given that, as a SEAL, he had to spend a lot of time in water. But, uh, he was first one in, wanted to do the VR, talked about how he didn't like it, but, um, but that's why he did it. You know, constant, uh, testing himself. In fact, I think even though David's quite successful, I think ... and has many, many options of how to spend his time, I believe this is correct, that I think right now he's doing fire jumping. He's, um, fighting fires in the wilderness by zip-lining in or fast-lining in or jumping out of planes. So he's constantly pushing that, uh, that friction lever to create, uh, or build or further build this thing about leaning into friction, and this is a term that isn't really scientific but that I decided to coin because this idea of limbic friction, that when we're very tired and we need to be in action, or when we're very stressed and we need to perform in a more calm and controlled way, there's friction on both sides. Getting out of bed when we're exhausted, hard, very hard often. Leaning into action in a calm and deliberate way when we're freaking out, like going to give a public lecture if one has fear of public speaking, also hard. So this limbic friction, and David just seems to seek what I call limbic friction in every domain of life.

   7. CWChris Williamson26:29

      Is that like exposure therapy for limbic friction then?

   8. AHAndrew Huberman26:32

      Essentially, yeah. I mean, what you're training and improving when you're getting better at dealing with stress is this ability to tolerate high amounts of adrenaline in your body and to think clearly and function. Well, I mean, adrenaline is epinephrine, and just a little bit of physiology, it's released from the adrenals obviously above the kidneys. That gets your body organs amped up and energized. It can't cross the so-called blood-brain barrier. You have a high restriction fence that we call the blood-brain barrier around the brain, keep bad molecules out. Adrenaline therefore is released also within the brain from a little cluster of neurons called lo- locus coeruleus. The name doesn't matter. So when you are stressed, your brain and your body both wake up and that adrenaline hijacks certain systems, narrows your visual focus, et cetera, et cetera. If you look at almost all stress inoculation protocols, cold water, ice bath, cold shower, cyclic hyperventilation, those all do the same thing. They generate a lot of adrenaline release in the brain and a lot of adrenaline release in the body. But it's different if tho- if the adrenaline in the brain and body is evoked by you, that you did it, because under conditions under which you did the ice bath deliberately and now you're wide awake and really, really alert, there's this feeling that you have options. It wasn't done to you, but you can train up an ability to, for instance, think c- clearly and calmly, um, maybe even do some simple math problems in your head, or maybe try and relax while there's all this adrenaline in your system. And that carries over so that when you ... you know, we've all done it, you're driving along and the person in front of you stops short (imitates tires screeching) and you're almost in the accident, right? There's that moment where you could panic or that moment where you could, you know, road rage or that moment where you could freak out, but if you are familiar with the feeling of adrenaline in your brain and body, you navigate that in a, in a calmer way. How? Well, because adrenaline is generic. There's no adrenaline for the car crash, adrenaline for the heights, adrenaline for the, the, uh, the relationship situation. It's all the same. So we can get better, we can raise our stress threshold, as I like to refer to it, and that can be done through cold water or cyclic hyperventilation, ideally not at the same time. But cold water, you know, is a universal stimulus for creating adrenaline release, and there's a big range of cold, not infinite but a big range of cold, in which you can generate adrenaline without harming your tissue, whereas with heat, you get into a very hot environment or very low oxygen environment, you'll also get a lot of adrenaline but you can also suffocate and burn yourself. So this is why cold is used in Navy SEAL screening and training, and this is why I think so many people really like the ice bath and cold showers. It has a bunch of other positive effects, but it is a great trigger for adrenaline.

5. 29:24 – 49:47

   The Neuroscience of Heartbreak

   1. AHAndrew Huberman29:24

   2. CWChris Williamson29:24

      Speaking about relationships, one of the most, uh, common traumas probably that people are going to go through is heartbreak, right? You're going to be in a relationship that you imagine is going to continue forever, maybe when you're 18 or sometimes when you're 48, and then it's going to stop. Have you thought about the neuroscience of what's happening during heartbreak?

   3. AHAndrew Huberman29:47

      You know, we did ... So I've done episodes of our podcast on, uh, love attachment in relationships, uh, which is a fascinating literature, mostly from psychology but also bio- biological literature, um, and that's mostly about people's orientation toward attachment. So they're ... just very quickly, there's the so-called secure attach style. This typically emerges in childhood when there's a very predictable care, um, caregiver caree, uh, relationship between child and most often mother but it can be father too or other caregiver. Just so happens that the classic experiments were done on mothers 'cause this was in the 1970s and there weren't as many, uh-... reversed role, rel- you know, homes, et cetera. There were some, but not as many as there are now. So, that's one style of attachment. The parent leaves, the child gets a little distraught, but then can distract itself doing other things, or just simply do other things 'cause they have a high degree of intrinsic knowledge, not the thought, but intrinsic calm. The autonomic nervous system doesn't feel a need to ramp up because the mom returns. Then there's the so-called insecure attachment styles, and there are a bunch of different ones, but those are the ones where it's really stressful when the parent leaves. It's not clear they're gonna come back and w- when they come back, it's not clear that there's, they're gonna reestablish the bond, the child will feel, uh, supported, et cetera. Here's what's fascinating. Those same neural circuits are repurposed for romantic attachment in adult life. The same circuits, which shouldn't surprise us. I mean, why would the brain throw away valuable circuitry? But this whole Freudian notion that, you know, childhood attachment styles map onto adult attachment styles, that's real. That's physiological. Now, one important point, it's not one-for-one in the sense that, let's say you had a secure attachment to your father. Let's say it's a young, a young girl, and as a baby and a young child, she had a secure attachment to her father and an insecure attachment to her mother. In adulthood, and let's say she's heterosexual, so in adulthood, she prefers men as romantic partners. This girl grows up and you might say, "Well, she had a good relationship to her dad, so she's gonna have a good secure attachment style in her adult heterosexual relationships." Ah, often it's not the case. They will transplant or superimpose the insecure attachment style to the, to the mother onto male relationships, but have great relationships to female friends, for instance. So we have to be a little careful to not map one-for-one. That's important. So all of that is in us, and then you were talking about breakups, and we did an episode on grief, and the way that grief works in the brain and nervous system is that there are three sort of factors that are mapped in our consciousness and our subconscious, and these are space, time, and this notion of closeness, which is attachment. Space and time is very simple. It's where is the person that I love and when will I see them next, right? I mean, if you have a relative that lives overseas and you know they're alive, you're not gonna grieve them. You might really miss them, but you're not gonna grieve them the same way you would if suddenly you get the note, unfortunately, that they passed away. And then attachment is how close you are to them, like how critically you rely on them for internal s- control and support. And that doesn't mean they have to be an immediate caregiver. It could just be like a really good friend, you call them mates over in, in the UK, right? Like a really good friend that just your knowledge of him just makes you feel good. You feel better in the world, you know? As a guy who mostly grew up with, you know, kind of a big pack of male friends, I mean, I feel strongest and happiest and most secure in life when I see something about one of my friends doing well in life. It just makes me feel good. If one of them dies, and unfortunately, yeah, I'm getting to the age where a number of them have died, then y- you feel like all of a sudden like, goodness, like there's a loss internally, right? Okay, that's all sort of obvious, but what's interesting is that the grief process itself is about restructuring this map. This map, think of it like a tripod. It's got three pieces, space, time, and closeness. When someone dies, it's very confusing for the brain because where are they in space? Well, the body is put someplace, maybe it's cremated, maybe it's not. We have notions of a spirit, and that depends on one's orientation, a soul or a spirit, okay? Or if you don't, then you don't, then, then where do they go, right? And then time, when will you see them again? N- there's the never. You'll never see them again and the closeness component remains, and so there's an untethering of this map, and so there's been brain imaging studies, um, beautiful work by, uh, Mary Francis O'Connor at University of Arizona showing that if you look in the brain in people that are in grief from loss of a really strong attachment, the state of brain and body that gets flipped on is a motivational state. It's exactly the same circuitry in the brain that one sees active if someone very hungry is put just outside the wall of some delicious food, or if an animal that really wants to mate, I guess, mate, with animals you call it copulate, they really want to (laughs) copulate with another animal, is put just beyond the wall of that animal but they can smell them. I mean, these are highly motivated desiring states. So grief is a motivated state to r- to bridge the distance in time and space, and yet it's impossible. And so the process of grief is a gradual waning of that motivation and a gradual shift of the memory of the person into some concept, whether or not it's a soul, whether or not it's just the past, whether or not it's their energy, and again, it depends on what the forebrain of that par- ticular person believes, shifts that concept of that person into a place where the brain is comfortable. There's no more autonomic arousal. There's no motivation, and we've all experienced this. If you've had a loss, and I've, I've had a loss, for instance, where my graduate advisor died and I adored her, and every once in a while her daughter will call me from her cell phone and she kept the same number on that ph- uh phone and the name and everything, so every once in a while it'll ring, Barbara Chapman, and I'll reach for the phone and then there's this moment where I'm like, "Oh, goodness." So anyway, I'm going on and on just to color this with example, but when there's a breakup, it's exceedingly hard, especially if the person is young, you know, if you look at suicides after breakups, those are far more common in younger people than they are in older people. Why? Because the relationship represents the whole future. They have no concept that there're, they know there are n- other people, but it sort of feels like the whole world is, is shutting down. So in breakups, what's happened is the person is no longer available in time and space. This is why when someone breaks up, you literally have to let them go, (laughs) right? You know, c- constant pursuing of them is, i- out of context is not healthy. They have a name for that. It's called a stalker. Don't do it. Um, but it's almost as if you have to, the brain has to think that the person is gone in time and space. This has become much harder with social media, right? Because people can check up on people, they can hear from people. In the old days, like when I was growing up, you just like took the phone off the hook or you-... you diverted your attention. Now, we are constantly renewing that the person is still there, and so love and the loss of love and the death grief are virtually identical. It's that motivational state, and this is why it's so hard to not reach out to somebody that you really miss and want back.

   4. CWChris Williamson36:48

      I saw a study last week that, uh, had researchers asking participants to rate emotional and physical pain of a breakup. They found that women tend to be more negatively affected by breakups, reporting high levels of both physical and emotional pain. But while breakups hit women the hardest, they tended to recover more fully. Men, on the other hand, rarely fully recovered. I thought that was very interesting. I wasn't too sure what that meant.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman37:12

      Yeah, it's interesting. Um, it also rings true with my, my experience and my observations. It, I, I think, I mean, this could relate to a number of things, and here I'm painting with a broad brush, right? But, um, you know, how comfortable one is feeling their feelings is ... male or female, is going to strongly dictate how quickly one moves through grief. This is the same thing as trauma. The more willing someone is to feel the full depth and intensity of the feelings that they associate with that trauma, the more quickly they're gonna move through the trauma. Uh, again, I'm lifting from Paul Conti's words, so these aren't mine, but, you know, people use a number of strategies. They use distraction. They use states like, uh, they sublimate to things like anger, um, and avoidance of various kinds in order to not feel the traumatic feelings or not feel the breakup. People will, you know, uh, try and self-soothe with alcohol or try and self-soothe with multiple new partners or whatever it happens to be. It doesn't work. It just extends it because this map of space, time, and closeness needs to be fractured, and the only way to do that is for the brain to have to confront the reality, which is that whether by death or by, by breakup, they are no longer available. It's like the food on the other side of that wall is gone. It's just not there anymore. Uh, or that the food that was accessible, now there's a wall in between, and you will not get through it. And you know, you can see this actually in animal studies that are kind of hard, they're actually very hard to watch. You'll see the animal perseverate, literally damage his own body trying to get through a barrier to something that's highly motivated to see. People do that post-breakup. They usually do that by talking to everybody about the breakup, (laughs) um, which is its own form of perseverating on the motivation. "What did I do? What did I do wrong?" This and that. And some of that analysis is healthy, some of it's not. Now, why would one group be more, uh, let's just say effective at dealing with breakups? It's probably the ability to really feel the full intensity of how sad it is and be able to confront that. And here, a- again, I'm, you know, I'm a male, I've only ever lived in a male body, so all I can tell you is that I think from a very early age, um, there's a, an ability that at least ... I'm sure it transcends to women, too, um, or extends to women, too, but learning to pack down feelings, right? And so when are we really talking about when we're talking about pack down feelings? I'm not a psychologist, but what we learn is top down control for brain to autonomic control. It's the same thing like, "I don't wanna jump off the high dive," or, "I don't wanna do this public speaking, but I'm gonna (inhales sharply) I'm gonna kinda, like, I'm just gonna force myself. I'm gonna David Goggins it," right? Grief is a, is an autonomic state. Uh, we say it has valence, has negative valence, but it's high levels of autonomic arousal with a negative connotation 'cause you can be high levels of autonomic arousal with happiness, right? You can be very alert and aroused and happy, you can be very alert and aroused and sad. It's very alert and aroused and sad, and yet we learn how to tamp that down. What is tamping down? It's reducing our heart rate. It's (inhales) going to work each day, being a functional human being. You know, there's a lot of that, rather than allowing ourselves to, you know, sob uncontrollably into a pillow. Um, some people are better at this. I mean, the late Steve Jobs was a big proponent of scream therapies. He used to go up into the hills behind Stanford. He actually owns a, still owns a property back there. He was really into (imitates screaming) you know, catharsis, cathartic release of internal state that he felt would allow him to, like, return as a happier, nicer person. He was also kind of well-known for screaming at people in the office. So, he obviously had a lot pent up inside. Um, so I think the better that we can lean into the emotional states that we fear the most, but in a controlled way where we're not harming ourselves or other people, the better. The more that we try and avoid that and we try and sublimate or just, you know, and I've done this, so I'm speaking from experience. You know, I would use the anger or the sadness from an experience to just work 10, 10 times longer, 10 times harder to just get that much more focus. You're taking that autonomic arousal, that narrow aperture and that energy, and you're putting it onto something that moves your life forward. So, in some cases that's good 'cause you still need to function and give, but it can give you the il- uh, here, I'll just say, it c- it gave me the illusion that I was working through something because you get all the accoutrements and rewards of hard work, but what you don't do is remap that space, time, closeness map, and then you find, I guarantee you find yourself five or 10 years later wondering why you're so exhausted or why certain things in life aren't going well. And it's because w- when they say you haven't dealt with the loss, you never actually allowed yourself to feel the feelings. But once you do, (imitates valve releasing) it's like a valve, it releases.

   6. CWChris Williamson41:51

      You hear musicians say that the most recent album was shit because I didn't have any heartbreak to work through.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman41:58

      (laughs) Right.

   8. CWChris Williamson41:58

      And i- it is strange how people, uh, it's a difficult thing to parse because a little bit of it is kind of like alchemy, right? A little bit of it is kind of like turning something that's terrible into something that's useful and beautiful. It's fuel. But you're right, it, it is a, it's a, uh, hiding away from what it is that you actually need to do, from the work that you need to do, and in a world which is a meritocracy where people want success and status and accolade and fame, and you go, "Well, enemies and revenge and bitterness, resentment..."... pretty good motivators.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman42:36

      Yeah.

   10. CWChris Williamson42:36

       Maybe I could use some of that.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman42:37

       Yeah.

   12. CWChris Williamson42:37

       Maybe I should go out of my way to try and put myself into positions where this motivates me and, uh, working out w- where that falls on the ledger is, is a difficult one.

   13. AHAndrew Huberman42:46

       It is. And I think, uh, it depends on life stage and it depends on how one is gonna work it out. I mean, the, the narrative around the shark dive, I mean, even w- as I say it now, sev- that was 2017, was the second dive. When I think about all that, I think, like, "That was crazy." I was out there studying fear and I almost as the professor who died studying fear. It was-

   14. CWChris Williamson43:02

       (laughs)

   15. AHAndrew Huberman43:02

       It would've been a terrible end to the story. Um, what was I doing? Don't do this, don't do this. But, you know, there are times in our life where we feel compelled to take on certain challenges for whatever reason. Uh, there's a phrase that doesn't exist in the scientific literature, but it captures two, um, components of physiology that are absolutely factual. Earlier, we talked about limbic friction. Um, as it relates to creative process and sublimation of anger and sadness and creating things from bad events, books, music, et cetera, um, the, the words that come to mind are li- limbic resonance. The, human beings resonate with these extreme states. You know, there aren't many great albums written about a good day walking on a Sunday in the park. Like, it's kinda boring. I mean, there's that, that beautiful painting, Sunday in the Park with George. But, and I'll be honest, it's beautiful, but it's also kinda boring. You can look at the details of it for a while. People like intensity. The Scream is a, you know, people can look at that for a long time and it speaks to the psychosis of the artist, et cetera. You know, people don't generally bond through passive relaxed states, unless they've also been through a lot together, right? I mean, even think about, uh, the, we could talk about this separately if you want, but all of us are here because of the autonomic seesawing that is the reproductive act. It goes from highly aroused-

   16. CWChris Williamson44:18

       Is that how you refer to it in your lab?

   17. AHAndrew Huberman44:20

       You know how scientists-

   18. CWChris Williamson44:21

       Autonomic seesawering?

   19. AHAndrew Huberman44:22

       It is. It's very interesting that the arousal process is one of increase in autonomic arousal in order to get true arousal, but then not so much that it inhibits arousal. Then mating behavior, and then the, the orgasm response in males and females is highly what we call sympathetic, not emotionally sym- it can be, I suppose, em- emotionally sympathetic, but from a pure physiology standpoint, it's a activation, hyperactivation of the stress system, even though it has positive valence. And then, there's a very quick rebound to the so-called parasympathetic arm of the autonomic nervous system, this deep relaxation which we don't really know why, I wasn't consulted at design phase, but we think that that post-coital bliss and, is, and the kind of relaxing, the desire to not run around a bunch more, for most people, was to exchange odorant molecules to increase pair bonding. And even if people aren't trying to pair bond, because people don't always just mate to reproduce, but that, uh, some of the molecules that are released in each of the two individuals, oxytocin being the main one, give people a sense of kind of post-coital bliss and, and it's a very calm one that creates opportunity for bonding and discussion, this is all like pillow talk. There are other forms of pillow talk too.

   20. CWChris Williamson45:34

       It's called post-nut clarity, Andrew.

   21. AHAndrew Huberman45:36

       (laughs) Well, but for women it might be-

   22. CWChris Williamson45:37

       (laughs)

   23. AHAndrew Huberman45:37

       ... something different, right? Of course, a different, different name. I only speak in the language of physiology. But for both men and women, this happens. It creates this little orb of closeness that is both physiological and, but neurochemical too. So, what we can say for sure is that whether or not it was in vivo or in a dish, we are all here because two parents, right? A male and a female, unless you're a condor, where two females can produce a baby. This has now been pr- shown, right? But as far as we know, where a male and a female reproduce because they each went through this arc of arousal, not too high, arousal, extreme stress, relaxation. That happened, separately or together, 'cause in vitro could be, uh, fertilization could be separate. So the test of whether or not we get to reproduce is actually the ability to, to, assuming that people are doing this, uh, together and not through, uh, in vitro fertilization, is a test of whether or not people can coordinate their autonomic nervous systems. Now, there are ways around that and to override it, but by and large, that's the way humans evolved and the way all other animals evolved. Now, limbic resonance is n- a good way, I think, to describe that process. But that carries over to other things too. An album about an extreme loss, a song or a poem about extreme loss brings the reader or the listener into a limbic state that's very similar or approximates what the creator experienced, right? The person who created that art or that poetry. And in the same way, if something's about a lot of anger, you know, if you like loud, fast music or something like that, it's an extreme state. It has a gravitational pull to it. There's l- again, I'm using this language, limbic resonance. Rarely if ever do human beings bond through nothing. They bond through shared experience. And you think of what makes people feel close? Well, there are a couple things. And this has to, everything to do with time perception. Typically, when there's a high degree of limbic resonance, it means that the molecule dopamine was increased substantially over baseline at some point. Dopamine is almost always discussed in terms of pleasure, but it's the molecule of motivation, drive, and to some extent, reward. It tends to narrow our visual focus. And believe it or not, dopamine is the molecule from which adrenaline is manufactured. Biochemically, you get adrenaline from dopamine. So these two act as close cousins to put us into the states of motivation and have energy to pursue things. When dopamine is very present in our system, or if you're in the company of someone else and there's a lot of dopamine, two things happen. First of all, you're very m- motivated, narrowing your focus. That's one. The other is that the way that you perceive time is quite a bit different. For instance, if you ever had an amazingly exciting day, just tons of things. Maybe you meet someone new, you're having the best time. I mean, just think, falling in love and the f- the most incredible date that you can imagine how it begins and how it ends, it just feels incredible. It all feels like it went by very, very fast. And yet when you look back on that day, it seems like so much happened. Now, think about it-... opposite situation. You go to the doctor's office and you're sitting in the doctor's lobby, and you're waiting and you're waiting, and there's no phone reception so you can't scroll Instagram. You're waiting and you're waiting. It's incredibly boring. It's a very low dopamine state. It feels like it goes on forever, and yet when you look back, nothing really happened. So dopamine changes our perception of time, and in terms of developing human bonds, this is w- well-established that if two people, for instance, go three different places in a given day, they tend to feel like they know each other far better than if they stayed in one place even for a longer period of time.

   24. CWChris Williamson49:14

       Did you know that pickup artists were weaponizing this about 15 years ago?

   25. AHAndrew Huberman49:19

       Oh, no. It doesn't surprise me, but I'm, I'm sorry to hear it. (laughs)

   26. CWChris Williamson49:21

       It was common-held wisdom in the pickup artist community that you were supposed to have a three-location date to manipulate precisely this to make the girl feel like you had progressed further down the maturation process of, of spending time together.

   27. AHAndrew Huberman49:35

       Surely there have to be female pickup artists too.

   28. CWChris Williamson49:38

       Uh, yeah, although I feel like their job's probably easier.

   29. AHAndrew Huberman49:42

       I can't comment on that.

   30. CWChris Williamson49:43

       (laughs)
6. 49:47 – 1:00:31

   How Triggering Are Our Phones?

   1. CWChris Williamson49:47

      how, just how triggering are our phones when it comes to dopamine?

   2. AHAndrew Huberman49:51

      Okay, great question. Uh, we often hear that, you know, that social media is getting dopamine hit after dopamine hit. When we first get on social media after a wa- for the first time or after a long period of time, the amount of dopamine that's released we think is quite substantial. It's novel. Remember, dopamine is about novelty, surprise, and the sense that we are on some exciting track. That's what dopamine's really about. It puts us into states of readiness, anticipation, looking, seeking, et cetera, almost always for things outside the confines of our skin. Uh, just to contrast it maybe for a bit f- more of a future discussion, serotonin does the opposite. When there's a lot of serotonin in our brain and body, typically it makes us feel satisfied, sated, more quiescent, comfortable with what we have in our own immediate sphere and within us, right? The comfort of a good meal, the food you have. Dopamine is about go, go, go. If you look at somebody who's, uh, high on cocaine or methamphetamine, it's all about pursuit 'cause that's a very dopaminergic drug. You look at somebody who's taking a drug, and I'm not suggesting people do this, but it really ramps up serotonin. Let's say a selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor, Prozac, Zoloft, et cetera. The side effects of those drugs if the dosages are too high, lack of appetite, lack of libido, kind of meh about life, you know? And then so they'll adjust the dose down. That's because those are serotonergic drugs. So in, in general, when we are in pursuit of things, dopamine is, is quite high. So now you have to remind me of your question 'cause I've set up the dopamine-serotonin, uh, parallel.

   3. CWChris Williamson51:22

      Cellphones.

   4. AHAndrew Huberman51:22

      Ah, cellphones, yes. Um, forgive me. So the thing about cellphones is when you first get on there and you haven't been, let's say you're f- it, no Wi-Fi on the flight or something, and you land, it can actually be quite stimulating. You get a lot of dopamine. "Oh, there's this. Oh, there's that." But very quickly, when you're scrolling on social media, you're no longer getting the novelty, but you're continuing to do it, and you almost don't know why you're doing it. At that point, it shifts over to something that's a bit more like an obsessive-compulsive behavior where, th- we can define an obsessive-compulsive behavior where the obsession leads to a compulsion. So the obsession is a thought. The compulsion is a behavior. But the acting out of the compulsion merely serves to increase the obsession, right? This is very different than being obsessed with food or obsessed with cleanliness.

   5. CWChris Williamson52:09

      There's no payoff.

   6. AHAndrew Huberman52:10

      Right, exactly. There's no anxiety relief by carrying out the compulsion. With OCD behaviors, like scrolling social media, the dopamine quickly wanes, and then you find that you're just sort of, and we've all been there. You're scrolling and thinking, "Why am I doing this? This isn't that interesting. That isn't, this isn't that interesting." Now, the algorithms for social media are very clever, and I don't want to demonize it. I, you know, provide a lot of, a lot of my life is spent on, you know, on social media now. But in, the algorithms that they've incorporated function on the m- the most powerful way to keep people doing a behavior, or an animal for that matter, is intermittent random reward, a random intermittent reward, that you don't know when you're gonna hit the jackpot. So you're scrolling, you're scrolling, and then you see something. Typically, it's very high, what, you know, in nerd speak, we'd say signal to noise. So if you're reading some interesting things, this came out in the news, this came out, and then it's all of a sudden a riot or a person that is jump- is BASE jumping off a building. Or, um, you know, for people that are, are scrolling looking at bodies or something like that, uh, live bodies. Uh, hopefully, people aren't looking at, uh, dead bodies. But, look, if something's very tragic, then that has this gravitational pull, and then you, what happens is you start getting the system working for that next dopamine hit that you don't know when it's gonna come. It's just like gambling. So I look at social media as initially being very dopaminergic, driving rewards, surprise, and excitement, but very quickly transitioning to something more like OCD and the kinds of behaviors where it looks, if you, if we were to look at ourselves through the lens of an experiment, like we would an animal experiment, we'd think that animal is sick. If you saw an animal digging in the corner, looking, looking, looking, looking for a bone, the dog, the looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, you'd think, "That's really sad." That's us, right? That's us. I'm pointing at myself intentionally. That's us. So we have to learn to self-regulate the amount of time, but that doesn't have to be a process of, you know, scruffing ourselves and saying, "Don't do it. Don't do it." Think about it in terms of the positive. The more time away from something, the more positively reinforcing it will be when you return, and that, just to sort of superimpose this onto the relationship conversation, you know, many of us are fortunate to have partners that we love spending a lot of time with. It's also good to miss that person every once in a while. Now, that might be an hour for some people, apart of no communication. It might be a week. Everyone varies on this, on this spectrum. But the idea of missing someone is that positive anticipation, that kind of pain, right? It's a motivational state, and then when you see them, it's all the richer. So you can imagine that the, these dopamine circuits can be used to more successfully navigate a number of different things, and, you know, a lot of couples completely quash the excitement and the pleasure of being together, not just physical pleasure, but just pleasure of being together because they just...... spend too much damn time together.

   7. CWChris Williamson55:03

      Too much familiarity.

   8. AHAndrew Huberman55:03

      Or they're texting all the time, right? Or they're, y- you know, and, and this whole thing around texting has become a really interesting test of dopamine expectation. There's this thing called dopamine reward prediction error. If you think the reward is coming and it doesn't, you drop below baseline levels of dopamine.

   9. CWChris Williamson55:20

      That's why you should never tell someone that this restaurant's gonna be the best restaurant you've ever been to in your life.

   10. AHAndrew Huberman55:23

       Exactly. I made the mistake of telling my girlfriend on the way here, I want her to read this book. I'm like, "This is an amazing book. You should read it." And I caught myself, and I thought, "Damn it, I'm actually detracting from how good she's going to experience the book as."

   11. CWChris Williamson55:36

       Tell her it was terrible.

   12. AHAndrew Huberman55:37

       Oh, yeah. Oh, uh, it's r- it's really good though. This is the problem.

   13. CWChris Williamson55:39

       (laughs)

   14. AHAndrew Huberman55:39

       It's h- it's hard to do. So, um, I think the key is to, uh, to leverage dopamine reward prediction error in the best way. It's the surprise that, you know, if you take kids driving home from school and suddenly pull into the ice cream shop, they're gonna be so ecstatic. But if you tell them you're gonna go to the ice cream shop and it's closed, huge drop below baseline.

   15. CWChris Williamson56:00

       Does that mean if you tell them that you're going to the ice cream shop and it's open, that's less than not telling them that you're going to the ice cream shop and it's a surprise?

   16. AHAndrew Huberman56:07

       Correct. It's a, it's a, they literally tear out into maxim... Surprise is the maximum dopamine release, then successful completion of the mission so (laughs) as it were, is the next, and then unsuccessful would be the lowest.

   17. CWChris Williamson56:19

       Is there not an argument to be made that you would be able to, uh, drag out the amount of time that dopamine is released for because of the anticipation?

   18. AHAndrew Huberman56:27

       Yeah. So, well, and people do this in relationship quite a lot, right? Anticipation is the kind of ultimate fuel of the courting dance, right? I mean, this is also... But b- one has to be very careful because whether or not it's from the male f- side or the female side or whatever variation thereof, th- (laughs) there's a... You only get so many reward prediction errors before people start to predict or associate low dopamine with somebody or some experience. In other words, if you (laughs) you know, I- I'll use an example, uh, not from my own life, but if you say, you know, "We're going to Costa Rica on vacation," and then you say, "Listen, I, I have to work," they might understand, but that's a letdown. It's a dopamine reward prediction error in the direction of lower dopamine. They might recover from it, they might not, but most people recover from it. If you do that two or three times, what ends up happening, you can d- s- model this beautifully, and they've seen this experimentally in animals and humans. Then you say, "Okay, we're really going (laughs) to Costa Rica this time," and you think, well, the surprise is gonna be that you actually go. The amount of dopamine that's released for posi- uh, for successful completion of the initial goal is far lower than it ever would've been. So you can only cry wolf s- uh, I suppose that's not the right way to put it. You can only, um, create positive anticipation so many times and then create a letdown before completion that the pro- delivery of the promise has very little impact. And so you have to be very careful with one's words. Better to say nothing than to let somebody down, uh, for sure in the context of human relationship. And, you know, this plays out in some, um, less perhaps, uh, amusing ways where, you know, you look at people who are successful in life and you always hear, "Success builds success." And it's absolutely true. Like when students come to my lab and they do a PhD thesis, it's very important for me to get them onto a research track quickly that they're going to experience some success because if they spend four years and then it fails, that's, uh, devastating, and then they have to start over again. Same thing with kids. I mean, getting some success early on, even if it's low bar success, really does build up one's positive anticipation, uh, and ability to perform well in the future because dopamine gives energy, remember it's the precursor to adrenaline, and the sense that the world is predictable. Now, this can go a wrong way too, and I see this a lot with the idea that everyone gets a blue ribbon. This is terrible too because if everyone is rewarded, every child is rewarded regardless of how well they performed, if they're all rewarded to the same level, you actually flatten the dopamine curve. And so in that sense, yes, everyone might feel r- you know, celebrated, but you actually are lowering motivation for the given activity. Uh, this has a whole l- landscape of, of research, uh, in back of it related to intrinsic versus extrinsic reward. The strongest motivation is always gonna be intrinsic motivation. If you reward kids or adults for something too many times, even if they like that activity, the c- the propensity to do that activity will be reduced. But if you reward without effort or without success, that is devastating for a nervous system. In fact, I've gone on record, and I'll say it again and again and again, which is that dopamine that arrives without prior effort destroys people. This is, uh, this is drugs. This is, uh, you know, this is things like, uh, cocaine and amphetamine. It's high levels of dopamine with no effort. Okay, they had to buy it. They had to find it. They did whatever it, but there's no, there's no physical effort or mental effort involved in getting the dopamine peak. This is why hard work followed by reward, great. Working hard on a relationship and then it gets better, there's a breakthrough, whatever it is, that is powerfully positive. Dopamine that just arrives because you say, "Oh, you're here, so you get reward," terrible. And this is why rewarding every little positive thing that a child does with, you know, their favorite thing eventually diminishes the value of that thing and diminishes their ability to get motivated on their own. It's a very, very powerful system. One has to be very, very careful how one leverages it.

7. 1:00:31 – 1:12:22

   Effectiveness of Dopamine Detoxing

   1. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:31

   2. CWChris Williamson1:00:31

      What are your thoughts on dopamine detoxing? Is that legit? Does it work?

   3. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:34

      Well, up until about six months ago, I would've said no. Um, but my colleague, Anna Lembke, who has been-

   4. CWChris Williamson1:00:39

      She's been on the show. Yeah, she's great.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:40

      Oh, f- fantastic. Um, I have such admiration and respect for her.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:00:44

      She's great.

   7. AHAndrew Huberman1:00:44

      Yeah. You know, uh, just a brief anecdote. I was... I directed a neuroanatomy course for the medical students at Stanford. I should've known who Anna was and then one day, she came in to give a lecture on dopamine and addiction, and my first thought was, "Oh, my goodness, you know, I have to get her on the podcast and have to g-" I want her talking to the world because it's such powerful knowledge. So if people haven't heard that episode, all right, go listen to Chris talking to Dr. Anna Lembke. I'm gonna listen too. I've listened to all her podcasts that I k- was aware of, but again, we were talking about it's hard to, sometimes hard to find podcasts. So I'm gonna listen to that. Um, cannot listen to her enough times. You know, the...... the dopamine, you asked earlier about the arc of dopamine and how long it lasts. The, the, one of the t- key takeaways from that book, uh, Dopamine Nation, that I've incorporated in my own life is that there are certain activities, like cold water, that create long-lasting arcs of dopamine. Those can be very useful for putting us into long-lasting motivational states. So, um, these are not big peaks and troughs. These are the pain of the cold water, followed by this long, long arc of dopamine. Wonderful, it's, uh, kind of an antidepressant, positive motivator, natural stimulus. I always say, if you don't have access to an ice bath, cold showers, yes, will work. If you have a shower that doesn't get cold enough, keep in mind that the original study showing this dopamine increase had people get into 60-degree water, which is not that cold, 60 degree Fahrenheit, for 45 minutes to an hour. So, your water bill might go up. But you could just draw a kind of cool bath and get in that up to the neck. So, 'cause I realize there are sometimes some cost barriers to people. They, not everyone has an ice bath.

   8. MHMary Harrington1:02:18

      No. Dopamine detoxing.

   9. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:20

      Yeah. So, dopamine detoxing is something that y- uh, apparently today, my, uh, short-term working memory is off. I, I swear I can't-

   10. MHMary Harrington1:02:27

       Well, you have a mate. Get that in you.

   11. AHAndrew Huberman1:02:28

       I can't think of any, uh, I, I'm caffeinated. I can't think of any, um, uh, pharmacologic reason for it. But, uh, no excuses. Um, so dopamine detox, I would've thought, was not something real. Um, it seemed kind of silly to me, actually. Um, and I'll tell you why it seems silly and why it still seems silly, but why it may have some utility. But then, Anna, Dr. Anna Lembke, told me that it actually can be quite useful to take some time and space away from social media, certainly from any addictive drugs, that's the treatment for addiction, and restore those dopamine levels to baseline. Now, the way that dopamine detoxing was initially described in the Bay Area, where it seemed to b- a lot of tech types were talking about it, was in terms of, I heard something like, "Oh, people aren't even looking at other peoples' faces." You know, they're really kind of living this, like, monkish lifestyle and, like, no food of, that they really enjoy, no anything. That, to me, seems kind of crazy and kind of extreme. I mean, I can understand not ingesting a lot of highly palatable foods, you know, eating somewhat blander foods. I can understand not, um, certainly not doing any prescription drugs or taking some time off from caffeine. Caffeine increases dopamine receptors, which makes the caff-, the dopamine that's available more powerful at evoking the dopamine response. I can understand avoiding certain substances and behaviors, but the idea that you weren't gonna look people in the eye because there's gonna be too much dopamine, I mean, I guess it depends on who you're looking in the eye and how much their look positively arouses you. But the fact of the matter is that that's not ... i- that's not a very rational way to think about dopamine detox. But staying out of, you know, high intensity, um, highly rewarding activities I think could be useful in terms of reestablishing that dopamine balance. And everything we know from Anna's work is that dopamine, you know, if you drive those dopaminergic states too long, addictive drugs, et cetera, people can do this with sex, food, drugs, gambling, uh, social media, all sorts of things, um, pornography. The, you know, what ends up happening is the amount of dopamine that's released over time goes down and down and down and down and pretty much is traversing into the territory of pain. And then, people, again, are back to this thing where, you know, they're scrolling internet porn eight, nine, te- times or hours a day and then they're wondering, like, why this isn't effective for them anymore whereas it was before.

   12. MHMary Harrington1:04:44

       And there's an additional issue with pornography, which is not often discussed, which is that, remember, guys in particular, the brain is a learning prediction machine. And if ... I'm not trying to say that all pornography is bad, but there are good data to support the idea that if your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex, it is not necessarily going to carry over to the ability to get aroused when you're one-on-one with somebody else. Right? The, uh, especially young kids who are consuming a lot of pornography, the brain is learning, uh, sexual arousal to other people having sex. So, you're gonna program yourself into being a voyeur?

   13. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:24

       Or, yeah, or just create challenges in, in sexual interactions with, uh, you know, with, with peers, yeah, with a, with a real partner. Right?

   14. MHMary Harrington1:05:32

       Mary Harrington has the three laws of porno-dynamics and the second law of porno-dynamics is the Law of Fapentropy, and it says that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more intense over time. And I think that this is sort of speaking to that ever, ever, sort of escalating amount of, um, the wildness that you need to watch in order to get an ever-decreasing stimulus that comes back.

   15. AHAndrew Huberman1:05:55

       Yeah. And, you know, here, I'm, I'm approaching this only through the lens of biology, right? I'm not a, a, you know, I'm not a psychologist and I'm certainly not, um, political in a- in any way. At least not a- I have ideas about politics, but I just don't discuss them publicly. But the, but the idea here is that, you know, I'm not saying pornography as a stimulus is bad or good. What I'm saying is, it, in its availability and its extreme forms, it's a very potent stimulus. And very potent stimuli of any kind, extremely palatable food, extreme pornography, um, extreme experiences, like bungee cord jumping, those set a threshold for dopamine release. And, uh, Anna will tell you that, and I'm sure she did, that the higher the dopamine peak, the bigger the drop afterwards. And it's not that you drop to baseline. You drop below baseline. So, again, it's not g- these things aren't good or bad. They just have to be controlled, in a way, because when people are pursuing dopamine peaks over and over and over, and they f- aren't getting them, typically, it, it's because they've been pursuing that activity far too often.

   16. MHMary Harrington1:07:03

       And you're saying, perhaps take a break from that and then maybe uh, uh, an ability for yourself, your system, to reset?

   17. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:09

       Right.

   18. MHMary Harrington1:07:10

       Yeah.

   19. AHAndrew Huberman1:07:10

       Yeah. I mean, in theory, all the things that we're talking about with pornography could be superimposed onto food or could be superimposed onto real sex, right? Um, that, one also has to be cautious there, right? But-... the cycling back and forth between dopamine and low dopamine states, dopamine fasting as it were, but maybe just low dopamine states, these are natural rhythms that exist in the nervous system. We have to remember what the dopaminergic system is there for. I'll say it again, I wasn't consulted at the design phase but we know as a, as a generic form of motivation and pursuit, you can imagine the human or the animal that's hungry or thirsty. It needs energy to go pursue the thing. So the idea that you have to eat in order to get energy, that's true. You need energy in order to get the thing to eat. So our nervous system has energy also. That's dopamine and epinephrine. Yes, we use glucose and glycogen, et cetera when we're pursuing things, but the idea here is you're pursuing something and then either by smell or by sight, you think you on the right track. So you go down that track, then, "Ah, there it is." You know, you get some berries or you get, you know, let's get prehistoric about this, or you get to kill the prey and eat it, and then it gives you energy to continue this pursuit or to reproduce. I mean, there's a reason why humans and other animals seek out reproduction is that every, every species but certainly humans have two innate desires built into them. Whether or not they decide to actualize this or not, is the desire to protect young and make more of its own species. Every successful species does that, even if people don't have children, in general people care about children th- because they, of what they represent. Very few people dislike children. I mean, there are a few mutants out there that dislike children but you always worry about those kinds of people. Yeah.

   20. CWChris Williamson1:08:51

       You were talking earlier on about the fact that dopamine can be released when you set yourself a little goal and then achieve it. And one of the ways that you encourage your grad students is to give them a little bit of reward earlier on so that it keeps them motivated. Is this the same mentality that works during an endurance event when you want to say, "I'm just going to get myself to the next lamppost." Or, "I just got to get myself to that hill over there." Is that the same dynamic?

   21. AHAndrew Huberman1:09:14

       Yeah. Um, we can call it milestoning. You just set some milestone. And the key thing here is that ... And this is the beauty of the dopamine system, be- just like the stress system is generic, the fear system is generic, it's designed for a bunch of different scenarios. The motivation system is also generic. It can be to achieve the next lamppost as a milestone or it can be five miles is the next milestone. You get to control that. And it, so it's completely arbitrary, right? I mean in, i- one of the most brilliant things that was ever said to me about an extremely skilled psychoanalyst is so simple and yet I do think it's the most fundamental thing to understanding oneself is that it's all internal, right? If you finish a marathon in first place, no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear. You self generate that. It's all internal. It's all about your internal representation. Now that doesn't mean that there aren't good and bad events in life, but the fact of the matter is, that if you set the next milestone as just outside the distance of what you're comfortable with and you make it there, if you allow yourself a moment to register that win, you get energy to do ... to then set the next milestone and achieve it. That energy is dopamine converted into epinephrine, into adrenaline. And this is why you hear these incredible heroic stories. Like, I mean, I think the movie, sorry, I, I hate to say it but the movie was less good than the book. But, like, Lone Survivor, the Marcus Luttrell story, and the ... Actually I think today or yesterday might be the anniversary of Operation Redwing. So all those guys sadly died except Marcus. And, you know, he ... In the movie he's sort of, it's like fast forward to where he ... I don't want to give it away but where he basically is the lone survivor. But in the book, it's crazy, I mean the guy dragged himself on elbows and knees for miles and miles and miles, right? You know, th- that kind of ability where you hear about people walking on stubs to, you know, these incredible feats of human, um, endurance and willingness to persist. I ... Those people were able to do that not because of glycogen or they drank their goo or whatever the triathletes are always using. It's because of nervous system adr- energy. The ability to continue to manufacture adrenaline and keep going and the, and the extent to which that can continue is ... No one will ever know. I do believe that humans have a tremendous capacity to endure and persist but that few human beings actually know how to tap into that system except under conditions of extreme survival. And you also hear from really good physicians, ones that aren't into woo biology or woo psychology at all, that to some extent, yes, there are people that unfortunately die in their battle against cancer no matter what, but that the d- the desire to continue living is a powerful force in and of itself. There may be spiritual components, there may ... uh, I, that's not the business I'm in, uh, you know, so and how ... I don't know the experiment I would do to test it but almost certainly setting of milestones and the ability to generate dopamine and adrenaline is what allows people to persist and live longer. There's no question about that.

8. 1:12:22 – 1:21:40

   The Expectation Effect

   1. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:22

   2. CWChris Williamson1:12:22

      One of the best books I've read this year is The Expectation Effect by David Robson.

   3. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:26

      I do need to read this.

   4. CWChris Williamson1:12:26

      So he is a science writer from the UK and he looked at a whole bunch of studies, the placebo effect, which everybody's familiar with, right? There is a particular expectation that an outcome is going to come from some sort of medication and lo and behold that outcome manifests. He found this across pretty much every area of anything that you care to care about. So my two favorite studies from this, so, so interesting. He realized that, uh, gluten intolerance, self-reported gluten intolerance has increased from 3% to 30% in 10 years.

   5. AHAndrew Huberman1:12:58

      This is the, why there's so many gluten-free options on the menu.

   6. CWChris Williamson1:13:01

      Prest- they've got 30% of the population to serve yet, so people need it. And he was wondering, well, wha- what is it? H- how ... Human biology hasn't changed that much. Is it maybe that the foods have changed and people are responding to that? Or is it maybe some sort of expectation because the, uh, type of news stories they're hearing about gluten and about how bad it is for us and inflammation and all this sort of stuff, maybe it's that and people are expecting it. So they brought people into a, a lab and they sit them down. These people do and do not have, uh, self-reported gluten intolerances.... and they give everybody the same meal. They tell everybody in the room that it's got gluten in it, it's got no gluten in it. After a while, people who don't have a gluten intolerance biologically, who haven't eaten gluten, have diarrhea, they have hives, they're breaking out in inflammation, they're having to run to the bathroom. Okay, well, that, that, that's kind of interesting. They did another, uh, another, uh, story that he spoke about, VO2 max tests that they were looking at. Apparently, there's a particular genetic mutation that allows people to blow off CO2 and upregulate oxygen in a better way. Uh, they brought people in, even numbers of people that did and did not have this genetic trait, split them into two random groups, so there was a mix of both do and do not have the trait in each. First group was told, "You've got the right genetic trait. You should be really, really good at this." Second group was told, "Oh, sorry, you don't have it. You shouldn't be too good." Sh- no surprise perhaps that the group that was told that they did, they ended up performing better. But when they actually looked at what was happening in the physiology of these people, they found that the people who didn't have the genetic mutation but were told that they did had a lower overall lactate threshold, they had a lower overall heart rate, they were blowing off CO2 more effectively and upregulating oxygen better than the people who did have the genetic mutation but were told that they didn't. So, he coined this term that said, your expectations are even more powerful than your genes.

Episode duration: 2:39:01