Latest / Motivation study / Neuroscientist_ How To Change Your Brain (Andrew Huberman)

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Neuroscientist_ How To Change Your Brain (Andrew Huberman) · Motivation study

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  Speaker 1: In the health and optimization space now, there's so many tools, right?
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  Speaker 1: So what we need and what I try and highlight
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  Speaker 1: in the book are principles. High morning cortisol means low
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  Speaker 1: nighttime cortisol, means high nighttime melatonin, means great sleep, means
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  Speaker 1: better days, and so on and so forth. You're essentially
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  Speaker 1: got the gears of the system linking together with that.
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  Speaker 1: In 2026, right, heading into 2027, I think we pretty
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  Speaker 1: well understand the principles.
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  Speaker 2: Of of great mental health, physical health, and performance.
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  Speaker 1: The real question, I think, is how do we resolve
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  Speaker 1: all these tools and contradictions that are out there and
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  Speaker 1: put a structure on them? If somebody wants to learn,
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  Speaker 1: let's just say if you want to learn, you want
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  Speaker 1: to focus and get rid of brain fog, you want
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  Speaker 1: to learn, here are the key steps. You need to focus, obviously,
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  Speaker 1: to learn. To focus, you need to be alert. To
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  Speaker 1: get alert, there are many things you can do. And
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  Speaker 1: I talk about all of them in the book. There
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  Speaker 1: are foundational things like sleep, right? That's going to help
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  Speaker 1: you get alert and focused. But there are also things
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  Speaker 1: like exercise. We all hear that exercise makes our brain better.
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  Speaker 1: It makes us better at learning. Exercise makes you better
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  Speaker 1: at learning for two reasons. One, it increases the catecholamines, dopamine, epinephrine,
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  Speaker 1: and norepinephrine. So in the four to six hours after exercise,
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  Speaker 1: you are more alert and you can focus better. Unless
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  Speaker 1: you exercise to exhaustion. If you have leg day for,
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  Speaker 1: you know, 10 sets of 10 on the squats, followed
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  Speaker 1: by a bunch of hamstring work and et cetera, your
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  Speaker 1: brain's not going to be so good at focusing. But
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  Speaker 1: you're going to come out of that more alert because
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  Speaker 1: you have more adrenaline in your body, more norepinephrine being
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  Speaker 1: released in your brain, and more dopamine being released in
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  Speaker 1: your brain. And dopamine is a critical component for learning, okay? Focus,
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  Speaker 1: then it becomes easier to access. And in your focus,
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  Speaker 1: what are you focusing on? You need to focus on
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  Speaker 1: making errors through genuine attempts to do something. Something physical,
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  Speaker 1: maybe a tennis serve or you're learning billiards, something cognitive,
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  Speaker 1: you're trying to learn a language. The error between what
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  Speaker 1: you currently do and what you're trying to do, the
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  Speaker 1: error is the signal that the neurons, the nerve cells
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  Speaker 1: need to change. It runs through a circuit involving the
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  Speaker 1: cerebellum and a bunch of other things. But that gap
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  Speaker 1: is what the brain tries to close. If you can
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  Speaker 1: do something, there's no reason for your brain to change.
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  Speaker 1: And the agitation you feel from those errors reflects elevated
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  Speaker 1: levels of epinephrine and norepinephrine in the body and brain respectively.
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  Speaker 1: And those literally chemically tag the synapses so that then
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  Speaker 1: at night when you sleep, the synapses rearrange, and you
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  Speaker 1: close the gap between your current ability and the ability
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  Speaker 1: you're striving to achieve. That's how it works. So that's
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  Speaker 1: how you learn. You have to bring yourself to those
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  Speaker 1: points of agitation. I wish I had learned that in
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  Speaker 1: the third grade. I wish they had told me that. Now,
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  Speaker 1: many people find that they are very disciplined about certain things.
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  Speaker 1: They're getting their sets and reps and they're pushed past failure.
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  Speaker 1: They love their video games. They love perhaps mathematics, but
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  Speaker 1: not literature. The things that we are not facile in,
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  Speaker 1: that don't come easy to us, there are two reasons
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  Speaker 1: to do some of that learning at every stage of life.
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  Speaker 1: One is it enriches us. We often find that the
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  Speaker 1: things that are hardest to learn that we then learn
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  Speaker 1: are the most satisfying. This is the effort that precedes
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  Speaker 1: dopamine is far more reinforcing than when just dopamine comes in.
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  Speaker 1: Talk to anybody, anyone, and their life experience, if they've
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  Speaker 1: had a life, will Say something like, oh yeah, everything
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  Speaker 1: was going great until this big thing. Then I overcame
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  Speaker 1: that big thing. And that was really the thing that
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  Speaker 1: taught me that I'm capable of even bigger things, right?
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  Speaker 1: People say, is it crossword puzzles? If you love doing
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  Speaker 1: crossword puzzles, guess what, my friend? They're not going to
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  Speaker 1: help keep your brain young. You got to do the
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  Speaker 1: hard puzzles. You know, if they're easy for you, then
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  Speaker 1: it's not going to help.
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  Speaker 2: You like chess? Play Go. You like checkers? Learn chess.
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  Speaker 1: Because I talk about behavioral tools. I would say 80%
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  Speaker 1: of behavioral tools. And then there's a lot of discussion
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  Speaker 1: about pharmacology and supplements, about the pros and cons of
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  Speaker 1: everything from nicotine to amphetamines and on and on. But
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  Speaker 1: multiple times I mentioned, I think that, you know, nowadays
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  Speaker 1: it seems like the, are we over-optimizing becomes a big question.
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  Speaker 2: I think it's an important question. I mean, to me,
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  Speaker 2: optimization is just taking the, like, What do you got today?
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  Speaker 1: What's on your plate today? And how do you feel
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  Speaker 1: best and do best in that context? And this brings
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  Speaker 1: me back to something that I failed to say earlier,
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  Speaker 1: which is that top-down versus bottom-up dynamic tension. Morning cortisol high,
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  Speaker 1: nighttime cortisol low, physiological size, etc. All of those things
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  Speaker 1: put you in the best position, put these circuits in
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  Speaker 1: the best possible position for you to have a more
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  Speaker 1: adaptive lifestyle. less reactive life, right? To be more aware
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  Speaker 1: of the goodness in life and less reactive to the
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  Speaker 1: BS that you have no control over, this kind of thing.
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  Speaker 1: To be less prone to impulse and more prone to
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  Speaker 1: focusing on what really motivates you, the people that you
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  Speaker 1: love and doing the right things in accordance with that.
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  Speaker 1: So I think that one of the most important questions
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  Speaker 1: that we should all ask ourselves anytime we want to
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  Speaker 1: learn or we want to relax or we want to
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  Speaker 1: sleep is ask ourselves, you know, where are we on
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  Speaker 1: this continuum of alertness and sleep? As a culture, we
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  Speaker 1: spent a lot of time thinking about kind of the
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  Speaker 1: core things like get a good night's sleep, because obviously
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  Speaker 1: the way I think about sleep and rest is when
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  Speaker 1: you're not getting enough work and it's different from everybody
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  Speaker 1: for everybody. But if you're not getting enough sleep on
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  Speaker 1: a regular basis or you're just too stressed out, it's
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  Speaker 1: like the hinge on that seesaw is loose. So it's like, yeah,
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  Speaker 1: you're up, you're down, you're all over the place. And
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  Speaker 1: so There's some foundational practices of sleep, hydration, exercise, social connection,
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  Speaker 1: good nutrition, whatever that means for the individual that put
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  Speaker 1: you in a place to be able to manage things
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  Speaker 1: really well. But what we've been talking about up until
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  Speaker 1: now are these what I call real-time tools. You know,
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  Speaker 1: I love the ice bath. I've done TUMO breathing. I
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  Speaker 1: still do it. I really believe it in its virtues.
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  Speaker 1: There's some good science about how it helps activate the
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  Speaker 1: immune system, all these.
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  Speaker 2: Other great things.
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  Speaker 1: But the ability to adjust in real time is what
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  Speaker 1: it's about. Cause that's, I think where real confidence comes from.
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  Speaker 2: Like you do a lot of public speaking.
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  Speaker 1: I do a lot of public speaking and there's still
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  Speaker 1: days where I'll show up and I'm, you know, all
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  Speaker 1: of a sudden like I'll feel my cheeks getting flush.
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  Speaker 2: I'm like, what's going on? I have to be able
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  Speaker 2: to adjust in real time.
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  Speaker 1: It's not sufficient to be like, Oh, you know, I'm
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  Speaker 1: going to go meditate for an hour or what did
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  Speaker 1: I do wrong the day before? And this is what it's, it's,
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  Speaker 1: it's a lot like driving a car. Everyone should know
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  Speaker 1: how to manage their internal real estate, their mind and
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  Speaker 1: their body with do's and don'ts of physical practices of
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  Speaker 1: just practices that don't involve ingesting anything, it also puts
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  Speaker 1: you in a position to better navigate those extreme states.
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  Speaker 2: The person who.
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  Speaker 1: Decides to dabble with nicotine, not by smoking, but taking
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  Speaker 1: nicotine for focus, if you can't handle and manage your
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  Speaker 1: mind in a very alert state, it's just going to
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  Speaker 1: make things worse. You'll think that you're in a tunnel
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  Speaker 1: of focus, but you actually are in a tunnel of
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  Speaker 1: high stress and nothing good comes out of that. Whereas
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  Speaker 1: if you've already mastered what it is to be really
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  Speaker 1: alert and focused, and you want to take that to
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  Speaker 1: the next level and you're an adult and it's, you know,
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  Speaker 1: appropriate for you and your health status, then you're going
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  Speaker 1: to get that much more out of it. And whereas
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  Speaker 1: I think a lot of people look first to like,
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  Speaker 1: what's the.
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  Speaker 2: Thing I can take? And it's like, well, the thing
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  Speaker 2: you can take.
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  Speaker 1: Is master your sleep-wake cycle, master your moment to moment
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  Speaker 1: kind of autonomic regulation, this calm down, get more alert
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  Speaker 1: And do it with some breathing. Or if you like
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  Speaker 1: the ice bath, do that. Or if you want to
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  Speaker 1: run up a steep hill and then see how quickly
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  Speaker 1: you can calm yourself down using double inhale, exhale type sighing,
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  Speaker 1: that's cool. There's a huge play space that you don't
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  Speaker 1: need to take anything. And then once you feel like
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  Speaker 1: you're working well there, well then, sure, maybe it's appropriate
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  Speaker 1: to go down the avenue of supplementation or other things.
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  Speaker 1: when people are confronted with an anxiety provoking scenario, in
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  Speaker 1: our case, we do this with virtual reality because we
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  Speaker 1: need to do it in the laboratory. We find that
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  Speaker 1: we find their pain point essentially. And by pain point,
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  Speaker 1: I don't mean extreme fear. I mean, the thing that
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  Speaker 1: can raise their autonomic arousal that has them in a
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  Speaker 1: mode of considering different options and trying to figure out
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  Speaker 1: what is strategic and what they're capable of in that
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  Speaker 1: moment could be heights, could be confrontation with a predator animal.
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  Speaker 1: It varies by person to people, but everyone has their
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  Speaker 1: pain point. Even, uh, Even Navy SEALs that we brought
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  Speaker 1: to the laboratory or other people from the special operations community,
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  Speaker 1: they all, each and everyone has their pain point. What
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  Speaker 1: they do in response to that pain point is really
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  Speaker 1: what's interesting. And what we found was that the pause
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  Speaker 1: or freeze response certainly was associated with autonomic arousal, with
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  Speaker 1: stress and anxiety. We measure this in the brain and body.
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  Speaker 1: And then we found that there were a subset of
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  Speaker 1: individuals and animals in the parallel animal work that would
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  Speaker 1: confront a fear of not necessarily reflexively, but after some consideration,
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  Speaker 1: they would lean into the challenge, essentially confront the thing
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  Speaker 1: that was making them feel anxious. And it turned out
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  Speaker 1: that that response, surprisingly, was associated with the highest levels
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  Speaker 1: of autonomic arousal. The insula took on essentially a change
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  Speaker 1: in its activity patterns, this gamma pattern. The heart rate increased,
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  Speaker 1: breathing increased, sweating increased. So these are all the marks
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  Speaker 1: of an anxiety attack, but here if you were to
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  Speaker 1: just look at the behavior of the person or the animal,
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  Speaker 1: what you'd find is that they were marching forward toward
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  Speaker 1: their fear.
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  Speaker 2: One reason to.
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  Speaker 1: Suppress the somatic response, the bodily response, is that tends
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  Speaker 1: to be a unitary interpretation, meaning at this moment I
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  Speaker 1: feel alert but calm, so I feel good, but I'm
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  Speaker 1: guessing there's a lot of signals coming from the body,
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  Speaker 1: and in fact there are to my brain, but I
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  Speaker 1: tend to just say, I feel pretty good. Those tend
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  Speaker 1: to be very kind of, um, bend responses and they're
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  Speaker 1: fairly generic. You know, I guess we can look to
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  Speaker 1: some of our podcasting, um, colleagues like the, the Jocko
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  Speaker 1: Willinks or the, the David Goggins, you know, who are, um,
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  Speaker 1: either forcing themselves, uh, or are somehow up at 4.30
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  Speaker 1: in the morning and pushing through that what I call
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  Speaker 1: limbic friction. The limbic system is saying, I'm tired or
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  Speaker 1: I'm anxious and going against that. So there's literally a
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  Speaker 1: required suppression of the bodily response in order to imagine
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  Speaker 1: how we would feel when we complete this. If we
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  Speaker 1: want to be very concrete, we should probably focus on actions.
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  Speaker 1: And I'll use fitness as an example because it translates
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  Speaker 1: to everybody, whereas people's circumstances differ. Let's say somebody really
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  Speaker 1: wants to take on a fitness routine. they hate running
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  Speaker 1: or they want to lose weight in a, in a
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  Speaker 1: healthy way, this kind of thing.
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  Speaker 2: So we've all heard the example.
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  Speaker 1: Well, you put your shoes by the door on day one,
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  Speaker 1: day two, you put them on day three, you go
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  Speaker 1: out the door day four, you walk around the block
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  Speaker 1: and then, you know, and then eventually like they're running marathons.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, great.
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  Speaker 1: But to sustain that behavior or even to make the
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  Speaker 1: behavior pleasurable and to give you energy, the key is
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  Speaker 1: to subjectively reward those steps. So it's not going to be,
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  Speaker 1: let's say I go out and I run a mile,
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  Speaker 1: And my goal is to run 10 miles in a
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  Speaker 1: few weeks. The key is as you're in the strain
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  Speaker 1: of that mile, the hard part, you want to tell yourself,
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  Speaker 1: this is the good part. This is the part that
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  Speaker 1: gives me energy. And I'll be very surprised if people
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  Speaker 1: don't actually feel like they could continue further.
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  Speaker 2: So it's a journey of a thousand miles.
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  Speaker 1: Starts with singles is made up of, you know, single steps,
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  Speaker 1: but the key is to reward the harder steps, not
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  Speaker 1: the easier ones and not the ones where you get
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  Speaker 1: the thing that you want, find the wall and push
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  Speaker 1: a little bit further through that wall and reward that process.
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  Speaker 2: Um, in fact, I'm not telling people do anything.
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  Speaker 1: I'm just saying that there's our biology is primarily for
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  Speaker 1: taking us through these adventures of arousal and relaxation. Waking
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  Speaker 1: up in the morning is an exercise in, in autonomic arousal.
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  Speaker 1: Cortisol hits when you wake up, boom. Can you do
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  Speaker 1: that without losing your mind and thought and obsession? Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Can you put your head down at night and fall
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  Speaker 1: asleep without losing your mind in the previous day's events?
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  Speaker 2: These are skills that we have to cultivate.