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

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)

Dr. Andrew Huberman, welcome to the show.

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

A very long time coming. What do you mean when you say you cannot control the mind with the mind?

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.