Dr. Paul Conti: How to Understand & Assess 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 first in a four-episode series all about mental health. The expert guest for this series is Dr. Paul Conti. Dr. Paul Conti is a medical doctor and psychiatrist who completed his medical training at Stanford University School of Medicine, and then went on to become Chief Resident of Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. He then went on to found the Pacific Premier Group, which is a collection of psychiatrists and therapists who are expert in treating all types of psychiatric disorders and life stressors. Across the four episodes of this series on mental health, Dr. Conti teaches us about the structure of our own minds and how to think about our own minds as a way to enhance our mental health. He explains how our subconscious mind and our conscious mind interact to drive our emotions, our decision-making, and our behavior. And while any series about mental health requires that from time to time we discuss personality disorders and psychiatric challenges, the main discussion in today's episode, and in fact all four episodes in this series, are about what it means to be mentally healthy and how to build one's mental health through specific practices, either done alone or with a therapist. Today's episode addresses several key questions as well as provides protocols for you to address questions about your own mental health. For instance, you will learn what constitutes the most mentally healthy version of yourself. You will learn to assess and indeed you will learn protocols for addressing levels of anxiety, levels of your confidence, how to think about your beliefs and internal narratives, how to think about your self-talk and restructure your self-talk. We discuss common challenges such as overthinking, we talk about the role of defense mechanisms and other aspects of the conscious and unconscious mind interactions that can lead us toward or away from the healthiest versions of ourselves. You'll notice that during the first five minutes or so of today's discussion, Dr. Conti describes a framework of what he refers to as the structure of self and the function of self, and he describes several pillars for understanding what those are. I'd like to highlight that while that short portion of our discussion does bring up a number of terms that are likely to be novel to you, they certainly were novel to me, that as our conversation proceeds, you will really come to appreciate just how simple and yet powerful that framework is. It will help you understand, for instance, the relationship between your conscious mind and your subconscious mind in ways that you can really apply toward enhancing your mental health. In addition to that, Dr. Conti has generously provided a few PDFs which illustrate that framework for you and that are available completely zero cost by going to the links in the show note captions. So you have the option to download those PDFs and to look them over, either prior to or during or perhaps after you listen to these four podcast episodes. As a final note before beginning today's discussion, I just want to emphasize my sentiment, which I'm confident will soon be your sentiment as well, which is that Dr. Paul Conti shares with us immensely powerful tools for enhancing mental health that, at least to my knowledge, have never been shared publicly before. In fact, as somebody who has done more than three decades of therapy, I've never before been exposed to a conversation about the structure of the mind and the subconscious mind as well as tools and protocols for enhancing mental health as powerful as these. For me, the information was absolutely transformative in terms of reshaping my thought patterns, my emotional patterns, and indeed several of my behavioral patterns, and I'm confident that the information that you'll glean from today's episode and throughout the series will be positively transformative for you as well. 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 how to understand and assess your level of mental health with Dr. Paul Conti. Dr. Paul Conti, welcome.