Dr. Paul Conti: How to Improve Your Mental Health | Huberman Lab Guest Series

(rock music) Welcome to the Huberman Lab Guest Series, where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode marks the second episode in our four-episode series with Dr. Paul Conti about mental health. The first episode in the series dealt with how to understand and assess your level of mental health. Today's episode is about how to improve your mental health. I do want to emphasize that you do not need to have heard or seen the first episode in order to understand or glean important information from today's episode about how to improve your mental health. But I do encourage you to go and listen to the first episode at some point if you have not already. Today's episode deals with several topics important to all of us, as well as protocols to improve one's mental health. For instance, you will learn how to guide yourself through a process of self-inquiry in which you address certain key questions about your drives, your level of aggressive drive, pleasure drive, and the so-called generative drive. These are essential things to understand about oneself if you want to guide yourself toward your aspirations and if you want to understand how your subconscious processing is influencing your thoughts, and your behaviors, and your feelings in ways that sometimes serve your aspirations and in other ways that can hinder your aspirations. Dr. Conti shares with us a way of assessing our internal narratives as well as a way of creating a constructive self-awareness and an understanding of where those narratives and that self-awareness stem from in our childhood so that we can navigate forward with the greatest sense of agency. We also talk about how to move past common hindrances to improving one's mental health, such as overcoming intrusive thoughts. And perhaps most importantly, today's episode provides information and protocols that anyone can use to cultivate their generative drive, which is a hallmark of mental health. Just a reminder that Dr. Paul Conti has generously provided a few diagrams that we include as PDFs in the show note captions. They are completely zero cost to access and they can help you understand some of the material that was discussed in the first episode of this series as well as the current episode about how to improve your mental health. And while those simple PDF diagrams are certainly not necessary in order to understand the material in today's discussion or in the other discussions of this series, many people find them useful. So I encourage you to check out those links in the show note captions. Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero-cost-to-consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is BetterHelp. BetterHelp offers professional therapy with a licensed therapist carried out online. I personally have been doing weekly therapy for more than 30 years. And while that weekly therapy was initiated not by my own request, it was in fact a requirement for me to, uh, remain in high school, over time I really came to appreciate just how valuable doing quality therapy is. In fact, I look at doing quality therapy much in the same way that I look at going to the gym or doing cardiovascular training such as running as ways to enhance my physical health. I see therapy as a vital way to enhance one's mental health. The beauty of BetterHelp is that they make it very easy to find an excellent therapist. An excellent therapist can be defined as somebody who is going to be very supportive of you in an objective way, with whom you have excellent rapport with, and who can help you arrive at key insights that you wouldn't have otherwise been able to find. And because BetterHelp Therapy is conducted entirely online, it's extremely convenient and easy to incorporate into the rest of your life. So if you're interested in BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, spelled H-E-L-P, .com/huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up. Waking Up is a meditation app that offers dozens of guided meditation sessions, mindfulness trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and more. By now, there's an abundance of data showing that even short daily meditations can greatly improve our mood, reduce anxiety, improve our ability to focus, and can improve our memory. And while there are many different forms of meditation, most people find it difficult to find and stick to a meditation practice in a way that is most beneficial for them. The Waking Up app makes it extremely easy to learn how to meditate and to carry out your daily meditation practice in a way that's going to be most effective and efficient for you. It includes a variety of different types of meditations of different duration, as well as things like yoga nidra, which place the brain and body into a sort of pseudo sleep that allows you to emerge feeling incredibly mentally refreshed. In fact, the science around yoga nidra is really impressive, showing that after a yoga nidra session, levels of dopamine in certain areas of the brain are enhanced by up to 60%, which places the brain and body into a state of enhanced readiness for mental work and for physical work. Another thing I really like about the Waking Up app is that it provides a 30-day introduction course. So for those of you that have not meditated before or are getting back to a meditation practice, that's fantastic. Or if you're somebody who's already a skilled and regular meditator, Waking Up has more advanced meditations and yoga nidra sessions for you as well. If you'd like to try the Waking Up app, you can go to wakingup.com/huberman and access a free 30-day trial. Again, that's wakingup.com/huberman. And now for my discussion about mental health with Dr. Paul Conti. Dr. Conti, welcome back. Thank you. In the first episode of this series, you laid out for us in a very structured way, you know, what true mental health looks like, essentially what we should all be aspiring to. And you touched on these themes of agency and gratitude as, uh, verb states, really ways of being in the world- Yes. ... that allow everybody to have some sense of well-being, to have some sense of themselves in a way that is kind to themselves and to others, and really to feel good and do good in their life. And I- And without question, this is what people want.You also spelled out for us these two pillars: the structure of self and the function of self that consist of a number of different things that, from which geyser up, or kind of, you know, give rise to these feelings of empowerment, humility, agency, and gratitude, and reminded us several times that when we are challenged, when we're not doing as well as we would like, that we need to look back to the structure of self and the function of self and ask specific questions in order to arrive or re-arrive at this sense of agency and gratitude.