Dr. Paul Conti: Tools and Protocols for 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 marks the fourth episode in our four-episode series with Dr. Paul Conti about mental health. Today's episode deals with the topic of self-care. We hear the phrase self-care a lot nowadays, but rarely if ever is self-care precisely defined. For instance, is self-care about pampering oneself? Is it about self-acceptance? Is self-care about just making sure we get enough sleep and enough exercise and have healthy relationships? Well, it turns out that, yes indeed, adequate self-care is about all of those things, but true self-care, the topic of today's episode, is about far more as it relates to our mental health. True self-care is also about constructing a life narrative in which we frame our past, our present, and future in a way that allows us to see what's gone wrong, what's gone right, and the best path to navigate forward. So in many ways, true self-care is really about fostering a sense of self-awareness, and doing so within the context of a framework that is known to work. And today, Dr. Paul Conti shares with us exactly how to do that. He also touches on some of the things that if not properly understood and processed can inhibit our ability to take excellent care of ourselves, including how to properly process traumatic experiences, something that he is expert in, among many other topics as well. He also touches on some of the things that can potentially serve as barriers to excellent self-care, including traumatic experiences, and explains how to frame those traumatic experiences so that we can best move forward. He also shares with us various practices that include therapy, but also practices that we can carry out on our own, such as specific forms of meditation, journaling, and other ways of examining the self and fostering better self-care toward our mental health. As I mentioned before, this is the fourth episode in our four-episode series all about mental health. I realize that perhaps not everyone has had the opportunity yet to listen to the previous three episodes in this series. If you haven't, it certainly won't prevent you from gleaning important information and protocols from today's episode, but I do encourage you at some point to try and listen to all four episodes in this series, because at some level, they are interwoven at the level of concepts and of practices. I'd also like to highlight that Dr. Paul Conti has generously provided some simple diagrams that can help you navigate today's material and the material in the other episodes. They are available as zero-cost PDFs by simply going to the show note captions, where you can view them or download them. 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 all online. Now, I've been doing therapy for more than 30 years, and while I confess that initially I was forced to do that therapy as a condition for being let back into high school, over time, I learned that therapy is a tremendously valuable practice. In fact, I consider doing regular weekly therapy as just as important as doing regular physical exercise in order to improve one's health. The beauty of BetterHelp is that it makes it extremely easy to find a therapist that's excellent for you, and we can define an excellent therapist as somebody who's going to give you a lot of support, but in an objective way, as well as somebody with whom you can have excellent rapport and that can help you arrive at positively transformative insights that you wouldn't have otherwise had. And with BetterHelp, they make it convenient so that it's matched to your schedule and the other aspects of your life. If you'd like to try BetterHelp, go to betterhelp.com/huberman to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's betterhelp, 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.