Andrew Huberman: You Must Control Your Dopamine! The Shocking Truth Behind Cold Showers!

I'll tear up if I talk about it because things were going well in my life and then one day just

rack everything came crashing down and

um and I've learned that friendship is super powerful I had people descending on my home to be with me you know one

day I just like look up and Lex is in the room and they sat with me picked me up and they reminded me who I am and um

you know I have just such immense gratitude for

that Dr Andrew huberman is a world-renowned neuroscientist Stanford professor and podcaster revolutionizing

how we understand the brain and how we can adopt change break bad habits and Achieve Peak Performance growing up I

was scared depressed and Confused my parents split up I was getting in multiple fights found myself locked up

in this residential treatment program and I realized that I need to take control of my life I'm so intrigued by

that because so many people feel stuck in their lives so how does someone even make those life-changing decisions well

there are so many zeroc cost tools that can change your brain we can go through all of them so I want to talk about

dopamine in this graph the dopamine is kind of like a wave pool in every domain of life whether or not it's food

exercise for some people it's work or sex if you push things to the max you're going to feel depleted and UND

stimulated afterwards and you need so much more energy to get the same output and when you're in that dopamine

depleted State typically what people do is they try and access things that are going to reactivate the dopamine

circuitry and all it does is drive them further and further into that trough so how do you fix that so it's hard to exit

but start with this is a sentence I never thought

I'd say in my life um we've just hit 7 million subscribers on YouTube and I want to say a huge thank you to all of

you that show up here every Monday and Thursday to watch our conversations um from the bottom of my heart but also on

behalf of my team who you don't always get to meet there's almost 50 people now behind the dire of a CEO that work to

put this together so from all of us thank you so much um we did a raffle last month and we gave away prizes for

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subscribe today you can be one of those lucky people thank you from the bottom of my heart let's get to the

[Music] conversation Andrew at the very heart of

what you do at the very very heart if I if I looked at all that you've produced and I had to encapsulate it into just

one or two sentences that encapsulates your mission statement what would that be I want to share the beauty and

utility of biology I want people to understand how incredible the human body and brain are

and how even a small understanding of the underlying mechanisms about how we interact with light or temperature

exercise thoughts emotions Etc how that can impact our health in really powerful

ways you have become a cultural phenomenon because of the information that you've

shared in your view why and how has that happened I guess maybe most importantly why has that happened what is it that

you've kind of catered to that was absent in people's understanding of themselves well I think people are

intensely curious about themselves meaning our species why we feel the way

we feel why other people feel and act the way they do and I think most

everybody I like to think is deeply interested in how to be the best version of themselves and I think what I've done

is I've provided a lens into all of that that through biology through Neuroscience in

particular but also I'm a practitioner so since I was pretty young I've been

actively involved in sports and psychology and interested in what one

can do in some cases take things to avoid in order to be the best version of

oneself and so um I'm an academic right I have a laboratory and I'm a tenured

faculty member at Stanford although I should mention that I've shrunk my laboratory considerably in the last year or so but you I've done experiments on

animal models on humans and human clinical trials so I have the understanding and expertise of a of a

research scientist and at the same time I think very deeply about how to

translate the information in these peer-reviewed papers how to translate the information in the fields of science

and medicine into actionable what we call protocols and and I do my best to um distill things down into uh you know

actionable things um but I'm not a big believer in dumbing things down I decided to go the opposite way rather

than give little Snippets um 90c videos we include those but rather I decided to

go for full one to three hour maybe even four hour lectures on a topic because I believe and I'm not the first to say it

that people have um near infinite ability to learn if they are told things

in a way that's clear so believe that people want to understand they can understand and it doesn't require

decorating things in a lot of complicated language sometimes we need to include some complicated language just because that's the way science and

medicine are and that people are willing to learn that and carry that along and once they understand how they work a

little bit better you arm them with a little bit of knowledge then really they're just Off to the Races and the

the rest takes care of itself I may a couple of times today just ask you to explain something to me in more simpler

terms because I don't have any fundamental understanding of of science so um much of my objective is just to if

if is just to be completely honest if I don't understand something because I'm sure there's a lot of people listening that also probably don't understand

something one of the things that was most surprising to me about you was your

background and I think the interesting thing about your background and where you came from and the the struggles you

faced and in contrast to the man that sits in front of me today is it I think it speaks to one of the

fundamental points of curiosity that I have about your work which is it's all well and good knowing

protocols but there's something else required to be able to pursue them now

people say that this is discipline or motivation or whatever it might be but when I looked at your background and

where you've come from it wasn't a straight line there's no there's an element of transformation that's gone on

there there's there's almost the early Andrew huberman who I never would have guessed would have been

the man that is is almost unrecognizable from the man sat in front of me today and then there's the man sat in front of me today and the reason I'm so

fascinated by that is because if I can understand how you went from that hat and hubman to this one it gives me it

liberates me from the excuses that I won't be able to pursue your protocols now yeah well certainly uh there's been

a lot of Adventure and transformation certainly some hardship listen I I'll be

the first to say you know my life has been easier than it has been for others and harder than it has been for others

right so I'm not trying to plant a flag as having had the hardest or the easiest life I only know um what's my experience

right so all I've got is my experience my knowledge and my words uh to convey that but yeah it was not a linear path I

would say the kind of key Milestones along the way and the the the relevant

pieces are for as long as I can remember I've always had an intense curiosity and

an intense desire for adventure um so I want to learn and I want to learn firsthand I also suppose I've

always had an intensity like I I've um been told since I was a young kid you know I I sort of like forward leaning a

little bit uh you know forward Center of mass so to speak um but yeah my

childhood on the one hand was very conventional and and very sweet in the sense that you know I had two parents my

dad's actually a scientist he's a theoretical physicist by training he's Argentine uh but then did his graduate

training in the United States my mother's uh a writer and she was a teacher she didn't work a whole lot when we were kids she was mostly focused on

raising us and my childhood to my memory was marked by you know dinners together at the table I was very very interested

in all things biology in particular fish so all things Aquaria Birds anything you

know tropical birds I I would learn all about them learn about fish I would then lecture about these things in class on

Monday as a way to try the teachers to try and get me to not talk to students around me because I'd be telling them

about it otherwise so I've been giving little lectures since I was a kid and and then I suppose as I matured um so to

speak um you know around adolescence my parents split up it was a very high conflict divorce um and that sent me uh

in the direction of more kind of a Wilder foraging let's call it that I was a bit feral um just the the circumstance

led to situation where I was seeking out Sports and friends for which there wasn't any parental involvement so for

me me the immediate attraction was to skateboarding and punk rock culture and so I was very fortunate that I was drawn

into skateboarding and punkrock culture in the ear late 80s early 90s I'm 49 now or almost 49 and at that time that was a

very nent culture there was no X Games there were no major sponsors that sort of thing and so there were all these not

parentless but rather feral kids some were parentless and I got to be exposed to some incredible skateboarding and I

was not a particularly good skateboarder but certainly had the drive to try and do it I kept hurting myself so that was

actually an important event I kept you know hurting my body trying to push myself to get really good friends of

mine were getting sponsored close friend of mine got picked up as a pro while we were in high school we were traveling

going to contest what you probably may have noticed is there wasn't a lot of attending school so I don't recommend

this to young people stay in school at least at the early stage get that basic education while your brain is still hyper plastic but you know I was exposed

to and fortunately did not partake in a lot of drugs and violence but I saw that I also saw a lot of incredible

skateboarding some of these people went on to um start huge companies and do

incredible things in the realm of action sports so like DC um I know the guys that started that Danny Way call McKay

you know like I knew at that time um I knew of I wasn't close with but you know

Tony Hawk watched his Ascent right he was a few years ahead of me um but I

would attend contest skate and contest so I was in this world where it was all DIY it was all self-created now at some

point I got a girlfriend and um got into other things um and kind of left

skateboarding um thought I might be a firefighter for a little while I was always very physical what age is this um

so I was 16 when I got my first girlfriend and

um I wasn't doing well in skateboarding I kept breaking my foot um people were moving on without me that was just the

nature of it I was in love with her wanted to spend time with her and so I thought well I'm not really doing well

in school I'm not really attending school and I'll need to work and take care of us you know I was really thinking kind of like an adult at that

point terms of what I would do and so I thought I'd get into the fire service so I started trying to strengthen my body I

started doing resistance training keep in mind back then the only people that lifted weights were you know preseason

American football players people going to the military and bodybuilders and I wasn't interested in any of those three

things but I started doing resist resistance training um and realiz realized wow like this is a really

powerful tool I can make my body stronger through work I could I couldn't do a single pull-up when I started I was

always pretty skinny I you know shot up uh a full foot in height but was very

very skinny you know at that point and um within you know a summer I could do pull-ups I could do these things I

thought wow like there's this remarkable relationship between doing physical effort and kind of ability or outcome

and then I also started running a lot for whatever reason I ran cross country my senior year of high school school and

also there I felt like there was a direct relationship between effort and outcome if I ran further then the next

time I could run even further if my lungs burned on a hill run well then the next time I could do that hill without my lungs burning whereas in

skateboarding no matter how hard I seem to try I just couldn't match the level of effort with the outcome so it was

from that point forward that you know 16 years old forward that I made running and resistance training just part of my

regular weekly schedule um what ended up happening was she went off to

college I ended up just basically living in my car or her dorm room while she was

off at college she was a year ahead of me and I realized I wanted to be near her so I eventually I applied to college

and somehow got in by the end of my freshman year I had been getting in

multiple fights so I still had that kind of wildness from the world I was previously in I was getting into

physical altercations I was never into drugs or alcohol that was for forunate I don't have a propensity to be addicted

to those things but my life really wasn't in order and it was really it was actually nearly 30 years ago to the day

it was July 4th 1994 I went to a barbecue I got into an altercation with

a bunch of people that were robbing the house that we were at um and and by the

way there's sort of a little tangent Side Story one of my um friends in college we weren't super close but my

girlfriend at the time had lived with the now wife of Jack Johnson the musician so Jack recalls that party we

have other friends from that party that was kind of a a meaningful day for me because I got into this altercation

everything turned out okay um in the sense that you know we got our belongings back no one was badly hurt

but I remember going back to the place where I was staying at that time and thinking to myself okay this is bad

right um you know like 19 years old or I guess it was just shy of of of 18 I am

not doing well in school my freshman year was a disaster where I went to college I don't think I flunked out but

it it just wasn't really attending class I wasn't doing well I'm getting in physical altercations I'm working at

this little bagel shop delivering bagels and there's nothing wrong with that but it's not much of a future in it for me

um I didn't end up going to the fire service I didn't end up a professional athlete I thought like what am I going

to do with like what am I going to do right because the story of whatever happened to me prior to that was kind of meaningless unless I made

something of myself so that day I actually wrote myself and my parents a letter saying that I was going to turn

my life around and I actually still have this letter my mother still has this letter and what I decided to do was to

take a leave of absence from University I didn't drop out a leave of absence allows you the option to go back I moved

home and I worked so I was a bus boy at a little restaurant in town where I grew

up and I still continue to run and do resistance training you know three times a week each or so and I went to

Community College which is um typically where kids who can't afford to go to university or get to that just stay back

for whatever reason it's a wonderful aspect of the the um educational system in California still and I made learning

and filling my mind with formal rigorous course work-based knowledge my absolute

Mission now I didn't care if I liked it I just it's like I'm going to trust my

ability to learn because I could tell you a lot about tropical fish skateboarding punk rock music a fair amount about physical training at that

point I sought out the right people this has always been something I've been good at is seeking out the right people with knowledge so I got great Knowledge from

the late Mike mener who had trained Darian Yates um I was reading every book I could on physical fitness and

Rehabilitation trying to get my body strong um never wanted to be big you know I was always interested in being

strong and being able to run far and fast that was always a goal like a capability I I've not been one of the um

people to like really care about like hypertrophy that wasn't something that mattered to me if some came along as a

consequence of training great but it was more about a a capability to do things so at that point I just became a

voracious learner I took every bit of energy that I had applied to these other areas and put them into learning math

science art history English literature whatever you know coursework was thrown

at me and then after a year of that went back to University lived alone in a studio apartment and basically for the

remaining portion of University all I did was study work out hang out with my

girlfriend run listen to at that time like early 90s punk rock

music which is still a wonderful genre so mainly like rancid Operation Ivy Bob Dylan Always Love Bob Dylan classical

music when I study and that was it I didn't do anything else and at that

point I started getting straight A people didn't recognize me they're like aren't you the guy from freshman year

that was getting in all these fights I will admit that I wasn't um completely devoid of of uh the typical College um

phenotype once a month I would allow myself to go out to a party and I'd party once a month but stayed away from

drugs was never never my thing and um so drank which you know eventually I

realized wasn't my thing either but I was just completely committed so I

graduated University with honors I went to graduate school did a master's up at

uh UC Berkeley um then did my PhD did my postto at Stanford and then eventually got a Laboratory um first at UC San

Diego excellent Neuroscience program eventually was recruited to Stanford uh with tenure and all along maintaining

physical fitness in the background focusing very heavily on doing primary research meaning making discoveries in

neuroscience and Publishing papers and then in 2019 I decided to start posting science

on Instagram just really nerdy stuff um no protocols just telling people about

sunlight and the relationship to the eye dopamine and ex I just enjoyed talking about it just like I did when I was a

little kid telling people about tropical fish and in 2020 my plan was to release a book so I

got a I a PR guy his name is Rob Moore he's now a close friend of mine and we

were talking about how we would I don't know maybe go on podcast or do something of that sort when the book came out and

then the pandemic hit and I said you know what let's pause the book and he said well just maybe go on podcast so

that year 2020 I went on I think somewhere between 20 and 30 podcasts no

book no website no nothing just like talking science and delighted in that

and then January 2021 I got a little place um in a little uh

kind of Canyon region of Los Angeles a little sabatical like uh Retreat and um

set up some cameras my Bulldog Costello there Rob Moore became my podcast producer and on January 1st more or less

we launched the hubman Lab podcast where now I still just blab about stuff that I

find interesting and that I think can be useful to people so that's the kind of um that's the arc and as I tell all this

I also just want to make sure that people know that it sounds like this magnificent Arc but along the way there

were absolutely times when I thought oh my like what am I going to do like this is working but this isn't working and my

life at times became very lopsided I focused mainly on work and research um you know I'm 49 years old now I've had

some wonderful relationships across my life but I opted to delay on marriage

and family as a way to uh well it wasn't the intention but as a way to really

just continue to pour my energy into the things that I was most passionate about so there's always sacrifice there were

you know sadly I've lost a lot of friends along the way to some to drugs and alcohol suicide depression and so on

um others to just unfortunate consequences or age but the um I think

the major themes have been I just simply can't pull myself off

a desire to learn and Adventure through a particular space and then once I learn things and as I learn things I can't

seem to help but just tell everybody about it you know provided there's somebody there to listen then I'm eager

to share what what I learn it's funny in life how some of the most traumatic

things that happened to us and Trauma is such a subjective thing so what's trauma for me is not for Francis enanu who I've

heard his story and you know walking out of Africa and jumping over Bob wire and walking across the Sahara Desert is an

amazing I just can't you know it's like I hear he's a very nice guy as well he's exceptionally nice he's a wonderful individual but I'm I'm really interested

in how our traumatic experiences end up um dragging us in whatever shape in life

dragging us or making us driven that it's almost two sides of the same coin sometimes but I just wanted to zoom back

in on when you were younger um because I was reading about at sort of 14 15 years old you were put into a residential

treatment program I was so one day in school and by the way I wasn't in school

much and if I was there I was the kid with the hoodie on it his head on the table you know just kind of like sleeping or drawing or um I was not

tuned into to what I should have been tuned into um I was looking back I think I was depressed I was sad I was confused

by the fracture of my family and listen um divorce and family reorganization can

take place without all that unfortunately this was a very complicated situation um and maybe it

was also puberty combined with General confusion about life um those things um combined to you

know put me a state that I think looking back I was I was scared depressed and Confused like a lot of young people

happen to be at that age so a number of things happened um I was getting into

trouble uh I wasn't attending school I was Trent a lot um and yeah one day they

came to like get me they basically called me into the office office I was sitting there um talking to the school

counselor it wasn't my first time doing that and then some other people showed up there and I started to realize like

uhoh I think I know what this is um which was they were going to take me away um now the exact stimulus for all

this whether or not a friend I think I know who it was had been concerned about me and had intervened or whether or not

it was purely from the parent side isn't clear to me still I have my theories they have theirs um but in any event I

soon after found myself in a residential treatment program and um it was

interesting because it was the first time that I had ever had my freedom taken away from me you know that was an

experience like doors go locked and you're like whoa you know like what is it my freedom taken away well you're locked you're locked in a treatment

program basically you know these were all kids that were delinquent or had problems of various sorts so you're on a

hallway with a bunch of other kids um you know you're staying there at night you're not leaving you're not free to

walk to leave and they make you do group therapy you have to do one-on-one therapy um you have an hour to exercise

outside you're not leaving the the grounds yeah this is a like a combination of like if you were to just

sort of merge in your mind like Youth detention and Hospital right that's kind of the the the the unity of these now

kids there and they and we were kids right um and there was a there was a unit of much younger kids and there was

a unit of people much older than us and I'll never forget what they said one of the counselors there said to us listen

the kids over there the younger ones and the adults over

there they're crazy you guys you're not crazy you just have problems and I'll

never forget one of the kids that was in there with me goes yeah but that's exactly what they're telling the people in the other two in the other two units

so pretty quickly I realized like this place is is problematic and I was scared I won't forget like my my roommate who

turned out to be a very kind person but he looked like Richard Ramirez the nightstalker and he had a cutting

problem and he was like a scary looking guy but as I got to know him I realized

that he um was just a a kid with a lot of problems different than mine but a

lot of problems so you're in there with kids with severe drug issues with um

some were suicidal some weren't some had aggression issues um it was a co-ed unit

during during the day obviously you're you're housed you know it was boys with boys girls with girls um and after about

2 3 days I realized okay the only way out of here is to do the work so it did

the work I sat down and I started for the first time really talking about what was going on for me and listening you

can learn a lot in those places by listening to what's going on for other people and I realized that a lot of what was going on internally for me had to do

with the fact that you know know you know I mean what do we need we we basically need safety and acceptance at

some level you know from from parents we also need guard rails and at that time I was lacking all three um and I think you

know my inherent intensity and I'm a pretty um I'm not an emotional person in

the sense that I don't emote easily um but I'm a very feeling person I feel a

lot I don't know how other people perceive me but I feel a lot and um I think what was happening in my

family unit at that time felt devastating and um I missed my sister

she was off off in college she had gone off to college I've always been really close with my sister and and really

because this was like late well this was late 80s early 90s I also didn't know

many people from homes without you know a mom and dad this kind of thing and I

had been exposed to a lot already you know that one of the beautiful things about skateboarding at least back then it's different now is that it was

completely self-organized so whenever I could I would get a ride with a friend or take the bus up to San Francisco

there was this now famous SL Infamous scene the embarked arrow Plaza called

EMB was this kind of self-organized place you have these in major cities elsewhere there was love

park in Philadelphia you Washington Square Park in New York and back then I learned a lot from the older it was

mostly guys then now there's more women in skateboarding girls and women in skateboarding and they rip they're so good but

um back then it was mostly guys and so I learned all sorts of things there some of which you know was far too young to

learn I got basically a street education um from kids that weren't

going to school and who were just like living this Wild free life and I do want to be clear that even though there were

let's call them untour elements there was also a an incredible beauty and like you know my friend Jake

Rosenberg started going up there as well he had his own challenges that I only learned about later um and he brought a

video camera High eight video he started filming the now like just like truly

iconic videos of Mike Caroll these names will mean things to Henry Sanchez like Mark Gonzalez like so he just started

filming all this and then he made the first Plan B videos and he made the waiting for lightning documentary about

Danny Way like jumping the Great Wall of China and our friend Mike Bach who's the photographer for the huberman Lab

podcast of all things who became one of the most iconic Action Sports portrait photographers was a kid who basically

drove out from Michigan I don't even know if he graduated high school something he probably did and then he

slept in the clothing Stacks at the Gap Store hung out in EMB barad arrow and took photos and those photos and those

videos that Mike and Jacob and other people took are now iconic in skateboarding and so I was also exposed

to this incredible world of DIY like like take your passion take your circumstance

and pick a craft and just document stuff and so in many ways like what happened

at EMB barad AA what happened in skateboarding and I always love punk rock music and going to shows I have no musical talent and I I didn't suck at

skateboarding but I wasn't going to go anywhere with it but the what I saw was if you love something and you want to

learn as much as possible about it and you love the culture around it you do have to learn how to sort out the unored

elements don't get yourself into trouble but you take that energy and I just took

it to academics I remember realizing when I got to graduate school I found a wonderful lab to work in with a

wonderful woman named Barbara Chapman unfortunately she passed away and at the

time she said listen I'm going to have a couple kids but we have grants you can so she said I'm going to have a couple kids so I'm going to be very busy but we

have grants and here's the lab she said don't burn the lab down don't hurt yourself but just do experiments have fun and I realized I was like this is

the best and I had so much energy and I thought I never have to go home so I lived there a lot of the time brush my

teeth in the sink there work out at the gym gun shower come back and I remember people saying you're going to burn out

what are you doing and I'm like what are you talking about and I would work 80 sometimes 100 hours a week I was so

happy and I realized like this is the exact same feeling I'm just taking my interest and I'm just pouring myself

into I did that when I was a graduate student I did it when I was a postto and actually when I was a postto I started

writing some music um articles for Thrasher magazine I've always kept some little tie to the skateboarding industry

that way just to make some extra cash and then when I was a junior Professor I had to really pour myself just into the

laboratory but it still worked out and I guess the point is that you know earlier

you and I were talking about if you have and I'm borrowing in this phrase from one of my heroes Martha Beck um who's a

wonderful person and teacher as such wisdom and she calls it a um interest based attention system some people might

call it ADHD but have you ever noticed that even people and we know this from the scientific literature people kids

adults with ADHD when they're so-called ADHD when they are doing something they

really love they're like a laser they're not going to peel off that their attention is like level 11 out of 10 so

I took that energy that I've always had in me for fish for tropical birds

skateboarding punk rock music eventually it was biology and I just went okay here are my chips I'm all in all in but the

goal has always been and remains to take what I learn and share it because the

real joy in doing anything for me anyway is the ability to share in that

knowledge or in that experience and so um those early years were really choppy

and really dangerous you know frankly but then when I started a laboratory and

decided hey I'm going to study human stress let's go get VR of stressful

circumstances and my friend Michael Mueller who's a very accomplished portrait photographer in Hollywood and

also takes photos of great white sharks out of cages he said to me oh you know

your VR stimulus in your lab um here's what he told me he he's like it sucks he said it sucks it doesn't look real it's

all CGI it's not scary at all how about we you know go film some great white

sharks down in Guadalupe Island and we leave the cage and you know the the young Andrew was like okay so got dive

certified went and did it one year stayed in the cage went the next year exited the cage I'm not recommending

people live this way I'm not because I had an air failure at depth the second year while I was in the cage I bailed

out I made it I lived but it was super scary and it was not an experience I

want to repeat and I realized you know that's the line like I you know the

great Oliver Sachs Another Hero Of Mine British train neurologist and and author he wrote uh was basically what became

the script for Awakenings and things like that um there's a quote about him that

resonates a lot and the quote I think is I you know uh an early teacher of his

said Oliver will go far provided he does not go too far and so you know you have

to be careful right these Adventures leaving school doing you can't be halfhazard about it so if you look at

the broad Arc it's highly nonlinear but there's a Common Thread through all of it which is this desire to learn

curiosity Des to share intensity and when I'm involved in any

one thing and I recommend that if people are involved in any one thing if it's podcasting or sport or video games or

math or AI or program whatever it is skateboarding whatever it is that you

can't be halfhazard in that world because forward progress even if

you change things over time is the consequence of taking that inherent uniqueness that we each have and

whatever level of intensity we have and making sure that you you know do take steps forward and there are what I've

learned is as a child as an adolescent and as an adult there are all these traps along the way they're all these

shoots down to failure and destruction and you have to be very very thoughtful

and so you can't be Reckless I'm really compelled as well by the letter you sent to your

parents yeah they they must have been very surprised that letter was written in a house on a little Street in a

little town called IA Vista on pado street where I'd essentially been squatting for the summer with my feret

that was the I tell you that because that was the picture I had a ferret her name was Iris that my first girlfriend who had left me by then because she was

smart because I had nothing going on um we were me and Iris were living

together I didn't even have a bed in the place I thought well why pay rent you know like no one in like where I grown

up with all these like like Riff Raff kids now the town to be clear the town I grew up in pal Alto now is known as like

one of the wealthiest places that time it was like kind of upper middle class but when I say like Riff Raff kids I mean like the people that congregated

around skateboarding in the late 80s early 90s were the kind of like parentless fer feral types so I learned

a lot I learned I can sleep mummy style anywhere in a car in a van in a corner so like why pay rent that summer I'd

have more money to keep and save if I just like got a pillow and a couple blankets and a sleeping bag and this

little place I was living there with my feret and I came back from that fight on July 4th and I thought okay like this is

it and I think it was by the end of the weekend I had written out this letter that said essentially the following it said look I

don't know why you guys decided to just fracture

everything I understood why my parents didn't want to be together they were incompatible by the way they're both

happily married now to wonderful people for many years so there there's a happy ending there but at the time I was very

confused it wasn't that that I needed them to be together but the level of friction in their separation was just

like it I felt like a lot of it fell on me and and there are reasons for that

but I basically forgave them I basically said listen I forgive you um I realized

that I need to take control of my life I was 18 so I'm a fall baby so it was like I was almost

19 I'm you know 18 years old old 19 years old and I need to do something

with my life and the only way I'm going to do that is by getting super focused

and super organized so I somehow had the the idea to externalize this and then I

wrote essentially the same letter to myself and then I just as my girlfriend

who eventually got back together with me that was interesting as soon as I started working hard in school I'll never forget what she said we're still

friendly she's married with her own family and they have a a beautiful family but every once in a while I'll hear from her and I will never forget

what she said to me about a year later when I was just absolutely rabid about learning she said um you know you've

become a monster and I was like a monster and she's like yeah a monster of

learning and class and getting up early and you tuck your shirt in like I got into this whole thing of like dressing

the opposite of everyone else that lived in that little town it's a little beach toown everyone wore flip-flops rode beach cruisers at that time it was like

baggy shorts long t-shirts and I start tucking in my shirt a belt I would get like all like you know like cleaned up

and i' and I'd go to class and people like what is wrong with this guy I just wanted to go completely Against the

Grain and just be as disciplined and organized as possible and I basically

was parenting myself and I think that this is something that I learned how to do early on I love my parents but I

learned how to mother and father myself and that was powerful it was like I was a young guy um but let's face it you

know at 19 you're young but you're not that young in the sense that if you

screw up you know if you you know I don't know I had friends who got into

drunk driving stuff a friend of ours was killed in a drunk driving accident um I wasn't real close with him but I knew

him real well this guy Phil sha great skateboarder was killed because someone drove drunk he wasn't driving drunk dead

bunch of people dead are in jail so you know when you're 18 or older like the consequences go super super linear you

know shift um where small mistakes can lead to really bad outcomes so yeah I

just kind of scruffed myself and was like let's do this and you know here I am I'm so intrigued by that because in

that moment you have I think a moment in which a lot of people are searching for in their lives where you have a you have

a decision to do it differently and I've always wondered what it takes for someone to get there and is it something

that you can accelerate towards like is there if I'm laying on the couch right now and I'm feeling that is there

something I can do to get me there or do I need more pain feel year for you I'll

tell you super scary being like almost 19 years old girlfriend left me I'm not

good at anything I wasn't good at anything not skateboarding couldn't play an instrument everyone in that town

surfed um family family I mean I didn't yeah I could have gone to the fire

service and that's a wonderful career path um yeah I didn't I didn't have any like

Market skills I couldn't really do anything except I knew my capacity to learn I've always had a very good memory

and I've always enjoyed learning so I thought okay School seems like a good option they tell you what you need to

know in fact at one point I realized and I think it was Ryan Holliday that said that you know the people who should

absolutely not drop out of college are the people who are not doing well

because the real world is a lot harder in many ways it's a lot harder than College in college they tell they tell

you what to do I remember taking a class in Greek mythology you go there if you sit near the front you pay attention you

try not to pay attention to anyone else you sit down they tell you what you need to know now sometimes it's complicated

you can't keep up but then they have these things called office hours where you can ask they have teaching assistance I mean the whole thing is set

up so that you almost can't fail if you do the required steps whereas with

skateboarding it's like I was always getting broke off as they say you know I was always rolling my left foot snapped

again uh nothing nothing couldn't do it um there's so much uncertainty in other

things at least with a college education for me it was like okay I can I can

learn this stuff and then what I found is when there's a desire to learn and then you learn and then you do well and

I started doing very well um and but there's that one class that I got a B

plus in that I'm still pissed off about you know my first year was a disaster then it was all LA and then there's this

one class in neural development from Ben Reese and

I got a B+ and as a consequence when I went to graduate school I studied neural

development you know it's the thing that you don't get the the place where you make an error that you forever carry that signal I need to get better at that

so I think a lot of it is just having the the knowledge of self right what did

the Oracle say know thyself the knowledge of self to really think okay like what are my strengths do I like to

learn if I'm interested in something do I have a voracious appetite maybe if you're a person with less energy um

maybe uh you're more reflective or you like to journal or you need more time to process I think turning what often

appear as weaknesses into strengths is really possible and then I do think that we are all each endowed with some unique

gift I really believe in this um it's not mystical for me I think that we all have some wiring of our brains that's

very similar and we all have some unique WI iring based on our genetics and our experience and I just thought I'm going

to keep paying attention to what fills my body with energy one of the most

inspiring and I think liberating things that I've heard in your work is this idea of neuroplasticity because if

you're if the brain can physiologically change based on what I'm doing then it means that who I am now my identity that

60 that 19-year-old who's sleeping in the mummy thing with the ferret isn't who I always have to be I can literally

change um we've spoken a little bit around like what causes the motivation to actually change but knowing that there's a my

brain will actually change those two things are really inspiring for me because it means that whatever rut I'm

stuck in isn't necessarily a permanent one now you said that the motivation to change comes from Fear well in my case

it took a a fear circumstance fear of becoming a permanent failure yeah to

motivate immense change and um uh that was that circumstance I I do believe

however that the best work our most creative and best work comes from a love

of craft but sometimes in order to find what you truly love you have to be

scared into setting off on a path to find it and um yeah and and and that

goes for relationships too sometimes to find the right relationship um or

relationships it could be friendships romantic relationships Etc one has to be like deathly afraid of having to

remain in the the relationship that you're in enough to leave so neuroplasticity is absolutely real um it

actually worked out that my scientific great-grandparents two guys David huil

and Torsten weasel won the Nobel Prize for no for neuroplasticity now they weren't the people who discovered it it

had actually been described for centuries people understood that young kids can learn more easily than adults

can but David and tor won the Nobel Prize for essentially formalizing the

and discovering the principles of neuroplasticity how it works and then some years later mainly one guy by the

name of Mike merenik but there were others that worked with him discovered that neuroplasticity is actually a

feature of the nervous system the brain throughout our entire lifespan the rules change a little bit in terms of how you

rewire your brain but if the question is can a person change can you learn new

thing can you unlearn certain patterns can you overcome traumas at any age the

answer is absolutely categorically yes how well

it's very clear that as a child until about age 25 more or less just passive

experience will shape the brain for better or worse after about age 25 and

again these are not strict cutoffs we can change our brain but what's required is a market shift in the

neuro chemical environment under which something happens so one of the reasons

why any traumatic event will forever be remembered although by the way you can remove some of the emotional load of

that trauma does not have to be traumatic forever is because when we see or

experience something very intense of a fearful nature there is the release of

certain what we call neuromodulators things like epinephrine adrenaline and other neuromodulators that cause a St

shift in our body and brain and the nervous system recognizes this as

unusual and as a consequence in the subsequent days there's reordering of the connections so that the brain can

prepare for that event should it happen again this is why we have what's called one trial learning you go to a certain

location something terrible happens there you will forever associate that location with something terrible but

there are tools therapy and other tools that can allow the emotional load to be

removed from that so that you could go to that location and feel calm no fear whatsoever the good news is you can also

learn anything you want to learn provided there's a shift in this neurochemical environment this is why

when we are very interested and focused on something two of the main requirements for neuroplasticity we have

to be alert and we have to be focused we can't learn passively as adults we can't just play um you know a a lecture about

Ai and large language models or neuroscience in the room and then it just the knowledge doesn't just sink in

by osmosis but if we pay attention and we're alert when we pay attention there's a shift in the

neurochemicals associated with that attention what we call the catac colomines it's three molecules dopamine

epinephrine and norepinephrine all which cause an increase in alertness all which cause an increase in focus a tightening

of our visual field and our auditory field so like cones of attention is one way to think about it and then it sets

in motion a bunch of biolog iCal processes such that if we get adequate sleep that night maybe the next night as

well there's reordering of neural connection so that that knowledge that new experience is Consolidated in your

brain you are forever changed as a consequence of that experience so when we hear that the brain is constantly

changing everything that we encounter changes our brain that's not true why would the brain change unless it needed

to right as a child the brain is basically a template for change it's it's trying to understand the

environment and make predictions and so that's true neuroplasticity is is a

cardinal feature of of childhood and Adolescence and the teen years just think about the music you listened to

when you were a teen no other music will ever have as much significance and that's because as a teen your body is

flooded with hormones and neuromodulators that the amount of meaning that comes from now seemingly

trivial events when you're a teenager or adolescent is immense that song meant so much and it's because of the

neurochemical meu it creates in you you but as an adult it takes a stronger stimulus as we say and if you were to

fall in love as an adult or see something a painting that just strikes

you as just so unbelievable yes then you are forever changed but just going to see a bunch of

paintings at the Met doesn't mean that every single one of those paintings is forever stamped into your brain the the

nervous system is very um efficient in that way it doesn't change unless it has

to and it always Chang es if it needs to in order to keep you safe this is why

there's an asymmetric influence of fear as opposed to um just interest in terms

of what will shift our brain but it's nice to know that love and excitement

and appreciation are very strong stimula for changing the brain and um you know I

can kind of draw to mind conversations I've had with my good friend Rick Rubin

I'll get accused of name dropping but I'm very fortunate to be close friends with Rick and Rick always talks about

you know how when you just see and experience something and you just have this love for it it changes the brain

he's not a neuroscientist but in many ways he's a neuroscientist so in any case you absolutely can change your

brain but you have to pay attention to the thing you want to incorporate into

your brain you have to be alert while you do that and then you absolutely have to go get some rest because it's during

sleep and during meditative States and during rest that the actual rewiring of the brain occurs there's a phrase that

you can't teach an old dog new tricks and I think as we get older and older we become stubborn in part because we're

very comfortable with the way things are and routine and whatever but also I think we start to believe in this idea

that we can't change and that in in and of itself makes it harder to change are you telling me that you can teach an old

dog new tricks yeah I'm so glad you brought this up um let's just destroy

that myth now you abs absolutely can teach an old dog or human New Tricks we

know this in fact there's studies incredible studies that were done down at the sulk Institute in San Diego

showing that even in people who are very old right these are people in their

80s and 90s you know the human lifespan probably maximum human lifespan as we understand it is probably about 120

years more or less but most people don't make it to 100 but so 80 or 90 is pretty old mhm there's still addition of new

neurons occurring these people who were unfortunately dying of terminal cancer I

believe but other causes agreed to take a a die that actually gets incorporated into new neurons and then after they

died their brains were um you know looked at under the microscope and there

was the addition of new neurons even at late age now I want to be very clear that most of learning is not the

addition of new neurons at least not in humans but from everything we know about neuroscience

it's clear that doesn't matter if you're 90 years old 70 years old 50 years old

if you want to learn you can learn and that learning occurs through neuroplasticity which is the reordering

of neural connections strengthening of certain connections weakening of others and in some rare cases the addition of

new neurons but Brain Change is absolutely real at every stage of life I

also wonder about habit formation so you said there that some of the more sort of startling stimuluses like fear are great

ways and and obsessive sort of deep focus are great ways to start forming these new Behavior patterns but if I

want to break a habit because there's habits I've got in my life that I've kind of just told myself are who I am

and accordingly I've just kind of accepted them well you've been very successful so yeah but even we' all

there's all thing thank you but there's many things I'd still I've just accepted it's part of who I am some of those come

from my childhood so one of them is that I grew up in a very disorganized home where like the doors inside my house had holes in them and our house there was

like some rooms that looked like a hoarder lived there just piles and piles of stuff to the roof um house de

demolished in many respects like the back of the garden was six foot high it was it was mess so I've grown up with

mess and I'm therefore still pretty messy today and it's something I've always wanted to defeat but I just

sometimes I tell myself well it you know it was hard wide into me when I was a kid and it it is just who I am and a lot

of people go around saying that they've just kind of identified with and accepted a certain bad habit is part of

who they are well I will say that some of the most brilliant people I know had

terribly messy offices and they were very internally organized people was

kind of interesting they were like a laser beam in their ability to kind of sort through mess they didn't see the

mess in fact my postto adviser who also sadly passed away an incredible Human by

the name of Ben Baris used to walk into his office and there'd just be piles of stuff everywhere and I'd say Ben I I

think we should clean your office and he'd say don't touch anything because if you move anything I won't know where it is and I said how could you possibly

know where anything is right now and he say I know where everything is and so I think some people also by growing up in

or being in that environment also maintain an uncanny ability to find

things whereas I'm the sort of person where I can't do any work until everything is cleared away and so um I

see myself as on the weaker side of this ability um but to your question I

think stories are very powerful and very dangerous stories are the way that

humans organize knowledge by and large right we don't tend to organize things into lists we have these narratives that

we call stories because from a young age we learn things not just by hearing them

and seeing them but they are compartmentalized into narratives that

have a beginning a middle in an end sometimes they have a uh kind of a crescendo and then a relaxation just

think about a childhood song of learning like the ABCs they don't teach you the ABCs A B CDE E F G H I J right they

don't do that what do they do they give you a song which is a story musicians will understand this inherently again

I'm not one but when I started researching Neuroscience of Music in the brain came to understand so it's a b c d

e f g right the change in the inflection

as one does the alphabet as a young kid is the story of the alphabet now people might say okay what is he talking about

what's happening here is you create variation in terms of batching of ideas

so that something has a beginning a middle and an end so if you think okay I grew up in this house and it was really

messy and now I have too much mess and in order to undo that there's this kind of like hardwired right dangerous words

hardwired neural circuitry in my brain that I would have to work really really hard undo and I'd have to be scared into

being a cleaner person or you know I'm a tidier person whatever it is that's very dangerous because there's a beginning to

that a middle to that and an end to that and it has immense meaning as a consequence one of the most powerful

things is to understand that neuroplasticity really involves taking an existing story and dismantling some

component of it what could the component be well there's all this stuff like the Byron Katie work which says you know you

you take something that you believe as true and you say okay like uh like I'm an untidy person and then you counter it

how do I know that well okay I have this experience okay that's the story then you start running counter narratives you

say I'm uh I'm uh actually a tidy person and then people say well this is silly

you're just lying to yourself right where they say is it always true that you're a messy person you start challenging this story from different

sides now I believe as because I'm a neuroscientist I'm not um in I'm not a

psychologist or in the self-help world that the Brilliance the kind of unconscious Genius of that approach is

actually that what one is doing is you're starting to create a new story you're starting to kind of Infuse

different questions into the existing neural network now the brain loves questions like the the brain since we're

we're young kids we're asking questions and so if you take an existing story and you start challenging it with questions

you're not saying lie to yourself you're not suddenly going to say okay like I'm super tidy you're not because you're not going to believe that but if you start

challenging why it's that way or you know you've been able to change so many other things why you wouldn't you be

able to change that you say it's just a habit I can't do it you say well what's a habit and you start poking and pushing and pushing what you eventually arrive

at is this kind of huh actually there's nothing keeping me from being a tidy

person except this kind of fluency of a particular story what you've done is you've interrupted the fluency of that

story so then when you go to the behavior of you know do you set things down all over the place or do you put them in an orderly fashion you start

interrupting the Habit the fluency of your typical Behavior so I raised this

as a as a way um to kind of shine light on essentially what I do in my podcast

career which is you know we I I believe very strongly in the fields of psychology I think self-help has some

wonderful things to offer we've got ancient wisdom that goes way back and when you start to look at things through the lens of biology you start to see

that all of these things actually have Merit and they're just different paths to the same outcomes so if you want to

become a tidy person I would encourage you here would be one let's just say Neuroscience supported approach would be

to write out one page about what a tidy person you really are you'll know that's

a lie right and then to look at it and

realize that in many ways if you just replac tidy with you know messy at any

location it'd probably be the exact same story and so what you're really talking about here is just a def fault that your

nervous system is running and if you were to just swap the words would you feel differently or do differently on

the one hand you'd say no that's kind of trivial but I bet you the practice of writing it out would forever interrupt your notion of like just going to set

something down you be like ah now you have something to kind of disrupt The Habit because so much of habit disruption that you'll look like some

people say oh you flick a a you know rubber band on your wrist or something like that there's nothing special about

the rubber band there's nothing special about the pain on your wrist or the you put a sticky note we know sticky notes work for about one day why don't sticky

notes work why don't reminders on the mirror work because they don't have enough salience they're not new they're

not different the nervous system only changes if something is new and different so anyway we could talk a lot about habit formation but fear works but

so does disrupting the story how do you disrupt the story you essentially give the opposite story and

you think well that's just lying to myself but neurally it makes sense because the nervous system again likes

to be very economical likes to do everything with the minimum amount of uh energetic expenditure and to change

anything requires attention and attention is expensive attention is expensive and also I would say as I'm

kind of rambling all this things are going very well for you so you actually don't have any reason to

tidy your space I have PA now and another PA and I have a cleaner so it's do you know what I mean the yeah you Outsource it yeah great well there is

incentive for all the folks that feel like they're not um tidy enough you have two choices you can either start to be tidy now or you can be successful enough

that you can hire some assistants and I actually think I say this in with in all seriousness I think that one has to ask

like where is my attention in neural real estate best devoted I think about this every day I mean we are living in a

war of attention I wake up in the morning and I can be a consumer or a Creator if I reach for my phone I'm a

consumer if I go to my journal I'm a creator

my advice to anyone who wants to be successful in any domain is to do things

away from where you broadcast and then take it to that broadcast I mean take

your real life to Instagram and be very cautious about taking Instagram to your

real life does that make sense if you look at successful people they're doing things away from the platforms and putting them on the platforms yeah so I

have to be very careful then I go into the kitchen obviously I talk to people in my home

um but if I pick up the phone and I start making a phone call it's like is

this call really about moving the needle forward or is this just kind of like passive use of of

attention we have to be so careful nowadays so so careful it's really challenging on that point of focus and

attention and thinking back to when you were 19 years old one of the things people ask me a lot and I guess it's a bit of a debate in the self-help world

is from a neuroscience perspective is manifestation and this idea of like

visualization visualizing who I want to become and you know where I'm going is there any Neuroscience to support that

that works there is um and I'm not trying to be negative but I'll start

with the negative counter example for which there is evidence and it's less often discussed so there's a wonderful

researcher at New York University by the name of Emily baltis who talks about how

for goal setting and habit formation fear setting is of often one of the best

tools you spend some time maybe five minutes or so thinking about all the terrible things that are going to happen

if you don't actually accomplish your goals nobody likes to do this but guess what it turns out to be pretty darn

effective really I know it's really frustrating that this is the case but again you know that has a lot to do with

the way that the human brain is is wired and and likes to rewire itself now that said it is important to Envision

goals visualizing goals in detail um writing them out in some cases talking

about them although we can discuss that um why that might not be the best idea in every circumstance and could be very

beneficial because it's hard to conceive something that you can't imagine but I

think when people hear that visualizing goals or visualizing outcomes is critical we sometimes forget that we

don't always know what the end goal is sometimes we have to break this up into Milestones this is where I think uh Rick

Rubin even though he's not a formally trained scientist um has drawn a lot of interest for his

work on creativity which is you know Rick is about largely you know sensing

the kind of energetic pull of an idea and being able to explore that without too much self- judgment or filtering or

thinking about how it's going to be received in other words that the metamorphosis that leads to great music

great poetry great scientific discovery podcasts finance companies that one is

building Etc is a series of iterations that occur on the time course of about a day you know and so we can't always

imagine the end or the end product as the outcome this is why I said University is easy compared to other

goals because the end is a degree right say you pick up your diploma like

whereas in other areas it's far more mysterious often now visualization I

think can be very powerful but perhaps what's more powerful is to learn the

brain and body state that best serves the work you're going to do so for

instance if I'm going to do some writing and right now I'm working on a book it's largely done but I'm writing some bonus

chapters unless I'm hyper motivated to do that when I sit down and hyperfocused

I'll spend two three minutes just closing my eyes focusing on my breathing

it's meditation of sorts but what I tell myself is if I can't focus on my breathing for two or three minutes how in the world am I going to focus on

writing for two or three hours that sort of thing the other thing that I want to

make sure I don't forget is I mentioned that telling people your goals often times can be useful if it stimulates a

little bit of fear like you have some accountability but we also know that

because of the affiliative nature of people in particular people that support

us there is this danger uh a friend of mine who's a cardiologist at UCSF taught

me this he said you know be careful who you tell that you're going to start a podcast or write a book because

oftentimes the response will be oh yeah that's great you absolutely should write a book or you should do a podcast and

people get a sort of reward from telling people about it and then they never actually go do it whereas I can cite

numerous examples of where people were told you're never going to be able to do that you're never going to be able to be

successful in that and my goodness those people dig their heels and they show

that they can do it now I get into debates about this with Rick from time to time it's a you know it's unclear to

me whether or not the energy around trying to prove oneself is detrimental to the outcome and I sense it is right this

kind of grinding against like take that and take that as opposed to just doing things out of real love of craft I think

about the way I felt about Aquaria and fish as a kid and it's just like pure delight that's the word that comes to

mind just Delight I want to learn more about it I want to do it and tell people about it that's the wonderful romantic picture

of effort and progress and outcomes but in reality you probably need both you

need to be able to access some fear and sense of competition but also Delight in

craft you know like Peter Teal's book 0o to one as I recall defines competition

as anti-cre creativity in many ways because through competition You Are by

definition changing what you're doing in order to outdo somebody else or something else and so you're morphing

your Creation in order to kind of overcome something something whereas if

you're just purely thinking about something you want to grow and cultivate they're none of those barriers but in

the worlds that I've been in science to a lesser extent podcasting and that's a

wonderful feature of podcasting but certainly in science it is hyperco competitive right two Laboratories

working on similar things people are concerned that if one publishes first the other will not be able to publish

certainly not in as high quality a journal and jobs are created through these Journal Publications podcasting is

actually a wonderful field um because let's say you and I have the same guest on our podcast all it does is raise it

in the algorithm it's not like you know and and it's such a and so I think there's a lot of um collegiality and

camaraderie in the podcast field that um exists in little pockets in science but

um science is a brutally competitive field which doesn't mean it's anti- creative but in a dream world where

there's infinite amount of money for scientific research because that would better Humanity in my in my view um and

people didn't have to be competitive about Grant dollars or publication I think we would make far more progress as

a species so competition Fosters outcomes this is clear in

markets it's clear in a lot of domains but pure love and Delight of craft and

creativity that's definitely the way to go but in most Endeavors you got to have both if sitting next to someone in class

and realizing okay because this was me back when I'm thinking okay I I love this topic but gosh I want that Top Mark

I want that top mark on the distribution like that's and and like she and he are really really good and I'm GNA we're

going to study together but my god when it comes time for that exam like I'm going for it a little bit of competition

can can bring out our our best I think um certainly in sport but when it comes to creative Endeavors that are really

about our own unique contribution I mean you could tell me more about this in business because you're you're I don't

you know I have a company but I'm not a business person but I I always feel like competition can bring out more energy

but not more creativity yeah and I think a big point I was thinking as you were talking was

just about how much you let that new energy that comes from competition distract you and this is It's the

distraction that can destroy you because if Apple are going this way and they're building this product without the

keyboard and without the stylus and that's they've got their Vision than they see Samsung doing over there something over there and if they if they

divert from their own mission and their own first principles towards what someone else are doing then that's when it can become destructive but if it

means that they see Samsung doing something and they speed up and invest more in their Vision then it's okay I think that's and it is this dichotomy

between competition does drive better outcomes for everybody that's competing but at the same time um yeah it can harm

you if it distracts you in a fundamental way it's kind of how I think about it even with podcasting like you know um as

you were saying there's so many podcast is doing so many amazing things like I I look at your podcast and I learn from it

but I know in my cor we all know I'm never going to be Andrew huberman and I'll never be you and I'll never be a

Joe R I'll never be a Lex and I admire your podcast very much and Joe's and Lex's I think it's we each have our own

unique style that we bring to it Chris Williamson you know um

it's been a lot of fun to see the unique flavors of podcasts crop up and how

similar that is to the world I grew up in in skateboard in the observations of from the music industry that I saw

firsthand or that you know Rick has passed along you know in the end I think

any creative Endeavor is really about and here I don't want to sound mysterious or woo it's about the energy

that we bring it's about taking our life history and bringing it to that thing in

whatever form we don't even need to tell people our life history taking our unique wiring and bringing it to that

thing and we can again look at things through the lens of biology and say well what are we talking talking about when

we're talking about energy what is this energy thing that people are talking about um and I think it largely boils

down to these catamin the dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine cocktail that is setting the brain into a mode of

attention of motivation we now know dopamine is more about motivation to seek rewards as opposed to feeling of

pleasure or reward there's a lot to be said about that and keep in mind that these three neurochemicals

dopamine norepinephrine and epinephrine have been the neurochemical cocktail by which humans and other

mammals have set and pursued goals for hundreds of thousands of years so we

don't have like a unique system a unique neurochemical system for seeking out of mates versus food versus creating

shelter versus creating technology and whole societies and it's not just these three

neurochemicals certainly there are other things involves acetal choline and you know a bunch of other things neuroplasticity for that matter but it's

clearly the case that the currency that the brain has set around getting us into forward Center of mass as I say to like

Envision something explore nope not down there this way ah there's a scent here

and trade out an actual scent for you know oh there's something interesting here there's someone interesting here

and like exploring that no that's a dead path too C theack turn around go oh and

then connecting these nodes of progress what's progress ah there's kind of another surge of these catacol amines

which sets us in forward Center of mass you know I don't want to oversimplify

the biology but when we talk about energy um for instance taking time to

rest at night sleep taking time to maybe meditate a few minutes or do this

practice that I'm a huge fan of nonsleep deep rest which is kind of a body scan deep relaxation long

exhales it's a practice very similar to an ancient practice called Yoga Nidra which has been practiced for thousands

of years it's a kind of pseudo sleep and we know from a really nice study that

nsdr non-sleep deep rest AKA Yoga Nidra can increase the Baseline levels of

dopamine in a brain area called the basil ganglia which is for Action generation and also

withholding action by about 60% from Baseline just a a short period of doing this practice can re kind of re dopamine

levels to a considerable extent it's a remarkable study and there others like it so what does that mean well it means

that in rest we build up this capacity to be forward Center of mass when we

emerge from rest that's why I think we have to sleep every 24 hours this is why

practices where we deliberately calm ourselves and still ourselves allow us to be more forward Center of mass

mentally and physically afterwards it's kind of a duh when we hear it we kind of go oh duh of course rest action rest

action but there's a lot more to it if you start exploring the layers you start realizing that excitement for things um

versus burnout what's burnout it's just trying to be forward Center of mass for too long

it's you know misuse of our dopamine circuitry it's you know ignoring the

fact that these catamin and dopamine in particular they are not infinite in

their availability right there's a reservoir of them that can be depleted but it can be rep replenished as well

and one of the best analogies for this um was actually explained to me by a guy named Dr Kyle Gillette he does some

online work as a as a um public facing physician Endocrinology in particular and he said but dopamine it's kind of

like a wave pool you have this Reservoir that can allow you to pursue things or scroll the internet or build businesses

whatever it is if you are really forward Center of mass very intensely you start generating these waves and if you get

big waves of dopamine and they crash out of the pool you start depleting the reservoir so when I think about drugs of

abuse Like Cocaine which leads to huge surges in dopamine or um amphetamines

huge surges and dopamine what do we know about huge surges and dopamine well after those huge surges you drop below

your initial Baseline to a state in which the same thing doesn't feel as

good anymore you need so much more energy to get the same output that's what this is right that's what this is

so I'll put this on the screen for anyone yeah so my colleague at Stanford Dr an ly who runs our dual diagnosis

addiction clinic and wrote the wonderful book dopamine Nation described this best you know it's sort of like a seesaw but

what whereby you get a big peak in dopamine let's say from a drug of abuse Like Cocaine people on cocaine it's all

about ideas and what's next they're not like hey let's just kick back it's all about what's they in fact they have a million ideas per second most of them

are terrible ideas but they're very forward Center of mass motivated and then when the drug wears off they feel

very low and very depressed the dopamine is actually depleted below Baseline people that work excessively right we

all have different abilities to work out but people that work excessively and abuse stimulants in order to do that

achieve these Peaks is that like so what would be the an everyday example of that

working excessively do you mean like a pre-workout or something what you mean yeah I'm not anti- pre-workout listen I

love to be well rested hydrated have a nice pre-workout drink maybe even a

little shot of espresso listen to some music and have an incredible leg day workout it's an amazing feeling right

but if you do that every single time you start stacking all these catac colomine release inducing drugs okay so you're

getting adrenaline you're getting epinephrine which is adrenaline excuse me you're getting adrenaline you're getting noradrenaline also called

norepinephrine you're getting dopamine release you're highly motivated you're in that state that everyone is seeking

and you try and do that seven days a week you're not going to do it and then you wonder why the afternoon you're just completely cooked and you can't do any

cognitive work well your dopamine and other things have crashed below Baseline so I think it's important to understand

that being as I'm calling it Forward Center of mass like really kind of

motivated and pursuing goals is great but most of the time we're probably best

off just coming off the gas pedal just a little bit to maintain that ability to

continue to be forward Center of mass the same thing is true for stress we hear stress is bad well stress is bad

but it also sharpens your ability to learn it creates energy it actually boosts your immune system in the short term I

say tolerate as much stress as you can provided you still behave like a

kind person right don't say or do things that are unkind and make sure that you still get great sleep at night most

people stress stress stress stress stress run around and then they can't sleep at night and then the next day they're depleted but a little bit of

stress is healthy life is stressed things are stressful but again you're going to be in your best state of mind

if you're calm and alert alert and calm is the is the magic recipe and the ability to sleep at night if you want to

take a bunch of pre-workout and you want to listen to some loud music and have a great crushit workout great but you

should probably also be able to train without all of that if you're somebody who loves new goals and you you know

you're very excited about travel and this and that great but do you have to layer in 50 things and then you're

sitting around at home and you're wondering why you're so bored when you're back home and why life is so depressing and you need more travel more

stimulation in every domain of life we see whether or not it's food or exercise

or stimulants or sex or media if you push things to the max you're going to

feel depleted and UND stimulated afterwards and this trough below Baseline as Anna lmy taught us with

dopamine nation that trough is a state that can last a long time and it's how long it's

proportional to how high that Peak and dopamine was not how long but how high that Peak and dopamine was and when

you're in that trough that dopamine depleted State typically what people do is they try and go out or access things

that are going to reactivate the dopamine circuitry and all it does is drive them further and further and

longer and longer into that trough what's needed is a period of waiting of nonindulgent in any of these excesses

that allows them to return to Baseline we know this from drugs of abuse it takes more and more drug to try and get

what turns out to be less and less of a high most all addiction most all compulsive Behavior can be cured

essentially through a period of abstinence lasting somewhere between 30 and 60 days which to somebody who's

highly motivated to seek that thing or do that thing sounds like an absolute horror but that is highly effective so

for some people it's work and stimulants you know and number of people taking Aderall and work work work work work I

hear from these people all the time typically they are from the tech and finance world they're like why am I burnt out well you've been blasting

these catac colomine regulated circuits for years you need to just except you're

going to feel a little low for a week then you're going to feel a little less low then you're going to come back to Baseline and then and only then can you

really get back into like full forward Center of mass but at that point you can introduce you know I I do think there is

a clinical use case for certain ADHD meds which are amphetamine there are certain people that need those meds

other people have driven themselves into this dopamine trough and so they're seeking out anything and everything to

get them out of that trough when really what they need to do is stay away from all that stuff and just wait just wait

go on holiday or something go on holiday try and find reward in smaller things um

you know this is why dogs are wonderful in simpler things and if that sounds heavy and dull to you chances are you're

a bit in the dopamine uh loop um I've been in these Loops before they're hard

to exit but once you exit them you look back on them you go what was I thinking well you were in a different state

you're kind of a different animal when you're in Pursuit I think this is so unbelievably important because it really

helps people to understand why they do what they do and before doing the research on you coming here today and

before understanding some of this stuff I thought dopamine was I don't know it was this thing that came in these hits

maybe and if I did something I got ahead of it then I returned to Baseline if I did something again stimulating I got

ahead of it then I returned to Baseline but what actually is happening is I'm doing something that's stimulating in

some way I'm getting this huge Peak then I'm crashing below Baseline for a while and when I'm below Baseline I'm that's

when I'm most likely to want to do something that's going to give me a hit again that's right and when I saw that it reminded me of the CGI monitor the

continuous glucose monitor that I wore because it was a very similar pattern if I had a lot of sugar had a big peak then

I crashed below my Baseline right that's a great observation it's the Perfect Analogy Perfect Analogy because these

regulatory systems are all about trying to Reg maintain homeostasis we all hear about we learn about homeostasis like

the desire for balance the the the human body and human physiology is actually geared more towards something called

allostasis which involves kind of stress modulation but without getting into too many details you know these are Dynamic

systems meaning brain systems that are designed to allow us to overcome

challenges if need be right this is why I always push back on the idea that you know stress crashes your immune system

you know what crashes your immune system being very very stressed working a lot a lot caretaking for someone else and then

stopping you always get sick when you stop yeah why because actually stress activates the immune system makes sense

that it would do that evolutionarily right and then when we rest boom our

immune system kind of relaxes a little bit and then we succumb to that that you know the bacteria or virus

so what does it mean it means that we should probably learn to modulate it's like driving a car anytime we feel that

we're headed toward or in a peak State we should probably kind of like lean back off that state just a tiny bit just

a tiny bit especially if that Peak state is coming by way of pharmacology or some extreme circumstance just back off a

little bit maybe a lot okay so when we do that we learn to master the

transition States between these what I'm referring to as forward Cent of mass flat-footed or back on my heels it's a

term I learned from a former Navy SEAL operator he said with anything in life you can either be back on your heels

like really challenged flat-footed kind of like calm and and forward or forward Center of mass like Full Tilt I think

most people would do very well to learn to master the transition States between waking and going to sleep right many

people can't fall asleep many people just kind of can't turn it off you can

learn how to do that by doing things like non-sleep deep rest some long exhale breathing simple self-directed

zeroc cost tools that help adjust your autonomic nervous system to be more what we call parasympathetic more rest and

digest just long exhales might not work the first time but over time these become very effective tools to

self-direct the shift from forward Center of Mass to Flat footage just kind of laying back back on your heels and

there you go you're off to sleep when you wake up in the morning some people are just depleted maybe you didn't sleep enough but learning to get forward

Center of mass shouldn't require you know excess caffeine and stimulants and

super loud music and uh you know a shocking text or email ideally you can transition pretty quickly into being

forward Center of mass but not Full Tilt forward Center of mass and why do I say this I think for anyone who seeks to be

successful in any domain academics business creative Endeavors whatever if you want to have a long Arc life and a

long Arc career you really strive to control these transition States and when

I say control all it really takes is paying attention to them and paying attention to the fact that yes some

people just have inherently more energy they can do every single workout at Max output then shower they're talking in

the gym then they're off to the some people are like that some people like myself if I give a 100% to Something in

the morning by the afternoon I'm a little bit depleted so I require a 10 or 20 minute non-sleep deep rest or a nap

or just some quiet long exhale breathing maybe a little bit of caffeine which I'm drinking now I mean there's nothing wrong with healthy stimulants provided

they're consumed moderation maybe an energy drink those can be great too for some people and then you know really

going like Full Tilt focusing one's attention and then afterwards taking a few moments just moments to downshift I

think we hear so much about the power of meditation or non-sleep deep bre or ice baths what do what do cold plunges and

cold showers do they stimulate the release of what the catacol amines dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine long

duration release that's why it's useful in my opinion for all the debate about delate cold exposure does it increase

metabolism does it not the answer seems to be probably not much but it's absolutely clear that it causes a huge

increase in Adrenaline dopamine and norepinephrine that are very longlasting

and that makes you feel great especially when you get out of the cold and I think that's the value of it it also saves you

on your heating bill like you don't have to have a cold plunge you take a cold shower nobody likes it but the point is you get out and you feel different it's

a state shift so that's great but you don't want to do it to excess because

then you know for instance people always say how long should I go in the cold plung or cold shower and I say do it the

minimum amount so that you get the effect that you're seeking which is to be more alert and motivated I have a friend he did 30 minutes for some reason

naked he said I did 30 minutes naked in the coal plunge and then I got sick and I'm feeling really low and I'm like because you did 30 minutes I mean I

don't know about the naked part what that had to do with it you had to throw that in there he's kind of an extreme guy

and I said how about 1 minute how about 30 seconds how about don't even pay

attention to the time just get in and stay in as long as until you want to get

out and then push through that barrier and then get out that might be a minute might be three minutes you know protect

yourself be safe but just learn to overcome some Challenge and then get out you know we have this fixation that more

is better and more is not better you want the minimal effective dose maybe a

little bit more because we don't know where minimal is people say how many sets in the gym is it you know now it's like all about the volume hypertrophy or

like I've always fairly low recovery quotient so for me I like to do a couple warm-ups a few hard sets two or three

hard sets another exercise two or three hard sets that's it for that muscle group move on people always say well

volume is where it's okay great but when I do 16 to 20 sets per week per muscle group I'll tell you I I'm depleted it

doesn't work for me and I sort of um well just be honest I kind of chuckle at

the exercise scientists who say well this is the way it is in this study great that's not how it works for me and

even though I'm a scientist and I trust data I also trust my own experience and no one's going to tell me that it's

Placebo because it's what's worked for me so I think that you have to find what your capabilities are and I do think if

you look at dog breeds of which I'm obsessed by if you go to a dog show which everyone should go to a dog show

once but don't watch the show go behind the show where you see all the different dog breeds what you'll see is what I saw

the first time I did that you have dogs where wagging their tail all the time they're super excited they're alert you

can see their eyes right they're just brigh eyed you can see the Great Danes

they're super still and then my favorite breed and the reason I own them is the Bulldog the essence of economy of effort

they don't even lift their head off the ground you walk over you pet them they'll like look up at you they might wink very still animals very powerful

but very still animals now I'm not wired like that as you're probably getting the impression I have a little bit more spontaneous movement Etc so I need a lot

of mental and physical stimulation in order to be happy in order to feel fulfilled so for me there was a lot of

work and I still do a lot of work in order to learn how to downshift take it down become a good sleeper become a good

resetter reset myself during the middle of the day with things like non-sleep deep rest which for me has been one of

the most powerful tools or long exhale breathing to just bring myself down other people they tend to have a little

bit less energy than life demands of them so they need to do a bit more cold shower a little bit more caffeine but

then those people probably need a little bit more rest they're like the Bulldogs of life I think even though we're all

the same species just like dogs there's a lot of variation there so you have to know thyself as the Oracle said

understanding a little bit about the catac colam means understanding that certain things like exercise deliberate

cold exposure stimulants like caffeine and prescription drugs like Aderall Etc

powerfully caused the release of these catacol amines dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine leading to Big increases

in energy and focus but then always always always there's a cost a trough that follows accept that relax through

it then return to Baseline and then go forward or avoid those things altogether

I'm not telling people what to do obviously the prescription drug thing in particular can be you know problematic for some people even addictive and

certainly I'm not a fan of drugs of abuse Like Cocaine amphetamine absolutely categorically never done them

never will and then other people who tend to Veer toward you know being

hyperactivated a lot of spontaneous movement these people tend to be a little bit thinner a little bit leaner or just have a ton of Natural Energy um

these people should really learn to incorporate more kind of what I would call calming and relaxing practices

maybe a bit more sauna than C plunge maybe don't crank the sauna to 220 you know I find myself doing that

I'm like just relax like enjoy the sauna and so I think the key to a good life

and a productive life is again to learn to master the TR transition States understand some of the biology and to

really know yourself not just your natural tendency more Bulldog like

versus you know uh I don't know pit bulls always have their tail going a lot of spontaneous movement uh there other breeds as well but also know that on any

given day you may be more or less rested you might be more or less depleted from life experience and kind of recognize

where you're at and figure out what's optimal for that day in fact I forget who the guy is he's on Instagram and

there are a lot of self-help account then there are a lot of self-help accounts out there but one of the best things that um I've heard recently and I

try and incorporate in uh into my life in fact it's in my notebook is when I wake up in the morning I sort of take

stock of where I am in terms of how rested I am I certainly take stock of what I need to do that day and then I

ask what's something that I can do to make my life that day and the life of

others better sometimes that means rest a little bit more sometimes that means push a little bit

more sometimes that means call a relative that you haven't spoken to but thinking about how to make things better

on the time scale of a day for oneself and for others I think is what's manageable and it's what's realistic and

it takes this whole concept of protocols and biohacking and prescription drugs and supplements and workouts and it and

it brings a real world perspective to it so I think we're living in the um in the time of kind of um almost avatars of

these different things like I think about David goggin who I know well well at from the perspective of cooworker

Right Where I consider him a friend but we've never hung out outside of the work context but I first met David back in

2016 and I'll tell you he's always that way at least when I've interacted with him

he's always been you know forward Center of mass it was late in the day on a work

this was a thing in Silicon Valley was down in San Jose um Santa Clara San Jose area in I believe it was 2016 and we had

been working all day in this part of this consult for this company and in the afternoon you know there was like do we

take a break or do we push he's like no we push we're going to do this and I thought whoa like this guy's intense and

he was changing because he was going to run to the airport but not run to the airport in an Uber or drive to the

airport he meant run to the airport and he did so you know he's forward Center

Mass he clearly has the energy or he's found the energy can you train that can you raise your sort of Baseline dopamine

level um or are they two separate questions it's a great question I don't

know that we have the answer I think you can if you become more economical about

whatever dopamine or other neurochemicals you happen to Harbor inside we know there's a lot of genetic

and individual variation to these things you know there's a joke among parents right like how they come out is how they

stay like the the Mellow kid the Mellow baby that didn't cry much the happy baby Remains the happy person you know there

are circumstances that can alter that versus the fussy baby that's always fussy as even as an adult you know

parents talk this way but parents say all sorts of things um but you know I know people for instance like Rick Rubin

for for instance who is very high energy but very calm it's

part of Rick's magic he knows how to regulate and control his energy he has this uncanny capacity to get near things

in particular um art music and to experience them really feel them but not

get absorbed by it not feel at least to my my knowledge depleted by it some

people get kind of absorbed by things and then depleted is this like the introvert extrovert conversation as well

because two people can be in the same room and I I mean I'm I consider myself to be a bit of an extrovert sorry introvert where if I stand in a room for

two to three hours doing small talk I I the way I describe it it's like my brain feels fried mhm whereas my assistant

Sophie it's like you've poured fuel into her yeah I I similar to you and um I

have an ex-girlfriend Who Loved parties she would just get so much energy from parties and I like certain parties but I

like the the small conversation I might have at a party is um so that resonates with me I think we can

shift well to answer the introvert extrovert question I do think that some people get

energy from social interactions other people less so but I know people who are quite quiet who like social interactions

they're just more an observer in those interactions as opposed to a participant the introvert extrovert thing also at

least my understanding of the science is that it depends a bit on how quickly you fill up with social engagement like I I

like a good party but after a couple hours I'm like done you know and other people they can just go go go go go go

they get more energy from it I think you know we think of goggin as kind of an

iconic example because he is of somebody who is capable of pushing himself regardless of what the internal

narratives might might be that's my sense having spoken to him about it on my podcast and observed him on social

media and other podcasts some people like jao willink embody the don't even

think about it you do it because it's 4:30 in the morning and at 4:30 in the morning you work out like don't think do

um whereas when I think of David I think of many things but in particular about overcoming the voice in the mind that's

trying to pull you down and defeating that in fact having multiple representations of Self in the brain

which is a fascinating thing unto itself and then when I think about Rick I think you know Rick is I iconic in my mind for

his sense of creativity his ability to sense what is truly new and unique he

has incredible taste right to really be able to sense like this is new and different and exciting and he seems to

understand without trying to seek what people are going to like what people inevitably love so that's his one of his

many superpowers and everyone has their superpower those are just so extremes I

think of Lex Friedman as somebody who is so thoughtful and I mean I don't think

people really understand just how hard Lex thinks about the tragedies of the world the darkness in the world but also

the love that's in the world I mean he really like hyper affiliates with what's

happening in his mind and he's able to really like absorb himself in that and you can feel like his his like he gets

right up next to the fire like right up next to these things and I think he

represents the kind of iconic example of an explorer who will look anywhere even

if people are going to give him a hard time for it but I think mostly people celebrate him for it you know so I think

you know different people have different lens lenses on life and different capacities I think if one wants to

increase their Baseline level of dopamine I think it's important to regulate those Peaks and troughs I'm not

a believer in like never having Peaks and dopamine a great wedding party like I've been to some weddings where we just

like partied all night or great concerts I'm actually a huge fan it's kind of a a

genre of music I don't know much about but I've always loved that band James do you know the band we are James oh it's

so good okay I'm gonna lose Punk points for saying this but best live shows ever

just the best live shows I've ever seen and I know there are and I and I know there are a lot of different ideas about

best live shows based on genres of music I just it's like the best party you've ever been to and I get a lift in energy

that lasts two three days from that I don't consume any substances at those shows they happen very seldom but when

I've gone for two or three days I feel like a changed person it's a marked shift in neurochemical state and I don't

feel a trough afterwards so I want to be very clear there's certain things like celebrations con

they seem to give us these big surges in neurochemicals but they don't leave us depleted and I'm very intrigued by these

experiences because when I look to some examples I have some friends who've been very successful in the tech sector and

finance sector they make a lot of money and I always worry about them afterwards inevitably they end up depressed not

knowing what they want to do so I always encourage them to keep working in fact the happiest people in Tech and finance

are the ones that keep working even after they get rich so the people I see who are very happy

are the people who take stock of their natural levels of energy curiosity

motivation you know we could say dopamine but that's kind of a surrogate for a bunch of other things and it's

incomplete right there are other chemicals involved but for sake of conversation we could say dopamine

catamin epinephrine and they sort of know what they're capable of on a consistent basis I think one of the best

pieces of advice that I ever got was from a neurologist by the name of bob Knight when I was a graduate student he said figure out how much work you can do

over the course of the next four to five years on a consistent basis because it's going to change as you get older might

not even go down so for instance I know that I can work a good solid 12 hours a

day that's me 12 hours a day five maybe six days a week but I like one full day

off per week I I just like that typically it's Sunday for me I'll do some exercise and some other things but

if I try and go 15 hours a day or 12 hours a day seven days a week I'm going

to run a ground for other people they need to work less and now some people will say okay but do you have kids and

this and that I'm not saying what work means it could be career it could be family or both but I'm not somebody who

has an infinite amount of energy but I have a lot of energy if you have less energy you can do things like try and

get great sleep try and eat as well as you possibly can you may have to do more to get more energy but sort of have to

accept your own um kind of basic line State and I think I certainly know many

people who are like mellower calmer have quote unquote less energy they're just more efficient with that energy they

place it correctly they're not wasting their energy I know people that can scroll Instagram all the time talk about

what's going on on Twitter watch three podcasts program and do a million things and like they're fine so I think we have

to know where our groove is and that we can deviate from that about 15 to 20%

but anything more stream than that we're going to end up in trouble I think a lot of the reason why people are curious

about dopamine is because ultimately they want to be more productive or effective at some goal they have in

their life so it might be building a business it could be some it could be a podcast whatever so taking everything you know about dopamine and how it works

if you were giving me advice on how I could be a better entrepreneur podcaster whatever um the first thing I got from

you was really about this idea of transitioning between states and also allowing time for my reserves to

replenish after a high dopamine activity MH um is there anything else that I should be thinking about yeah so we

could um operationalize this in a very clear way get enough sleep for you for

some people it's six hours for some people it's eight hours I'd like to dispel the myth even though my friend Matt Walker will probably get upset at

me for saying this not everyone needs eight or nine hours of sleep okay I got six last night okay I actually went to

bed at midnight last night oh excuse me I got 6 hours and 45 minutes last night I went to bed at midnight which is kind of late for me woke up at

6:45 but get enough sleep if you wake up in the morning and you can't get more sleep for whatever reason can't fall

back asleep or you have to get out of bed if you do not feel rested I recommend doing a 10 or 20 minute

non-sleep deep rest or yoga NRA protocol they are available zero cost on YouTube you could put nsdr my name if you want

to listen to me do one you could put nsdr Kelly boy does wonderful yoga nras

she has a very pleasant voice if you prefer a female voice there's some wonderful yoga nras by a woman named

commy Desai anyway these are all zeroc cost scripts that are available on YouTube what is that so um so non-sleep

deep bre simar you did one today I did one today on the way here okay yeah

here's what we know it does replenishes Baseline levels of dopamine in the basil ganglia prepares you for Action both

mental and physical action can indeed help offset some of the sleep that maybe

you didn't get but you needed we know that the brain goes into a kind of pseudo sleep in this state and there's

also some evidence that Yoga Nidra and similar practices can improve rates of learning okay so that's sort of the the

benefits what is it it involves what most people will call meditation but it's different than meditation you lie

down you could do it SE seated as well but you lie down eyes closed and you do long exhale

breathing when we exhale we actually slow our heart rate down I could talk about how this is it this is through

respiratory sinus arhythmia this is a relationship between the vagus nerve and

the beating of the heart but in any case when we inhale our heart actually speeds

up its beats slightly and when we exhale it slows down its beats slightly so it involves a lot of long exhale breathing

it involves a body scan where you deliberately relax different aspects of

your body so first your feet then your legs then your hands it's sort of a body scan of sorts with long exhale breathing

and it takes you into a state that's pseudo sleep you're somewhere between sleep and awake now the beauty of nsdr

and Yoga Nidra is that part of the instruction at the beginning is to stay awake now if you fall asleep it's okay

just make sure you set an alarm if you have to go to work or do something else but by staying awake while being very

relaxed it seems that the nervous system can continue to stay in a sleep-like state enough that you replenish some of

these neurochemicals that prepare you for cognitive and physical action now there are 10-minute ndrs there are 20-

minute ndrs there are even hourlong yoga nras and things of that sort so it depends on how much time you have before

you need to get up so if you sleep well the night before you wake up after 6 eight hours and you're ready to go boom

go but if you're not I highly recommend doing a 10 20 or 30 minute nstr practice

you will find that you will be far more rested you will feel far more mentally

and physically vigorous when you emerge from that it's remarkable and Matt Walker's laboratory and I are gearing up

to do some studies on this to figure out exactly what's happening is the brain really going into sleep or is it

something you know entirely different we don't quite know yet in any event it most certainly works and soon we'll know

the exact mechanism in the brain but this dopamine re but this reupping of dopamine is very very clear from the

existing studies so what are you doing there you're essentially filling the reservoir

for the day of activities okay then I recommend hydration which has a profound

effect on energy levels so 16 to 32 ounces of water people debate drink out of plastic

or don't drink out of plastic do you have to purify your water Etc you know listen it depends on budget and interest

and level of paranoia I drink a filtered water I tend to drink out of ceramic or

glass but I am somebody who will occasionally drink out of a plastic water bottle I'm I'm not neurotic about

that sort of thing but look if you are fine and we could all do well to limit the amount of plastic was in the oceans

so there you go hydrate then some people like myself do

very well to get some exercise and sunlight ideally simultaneously but

certainly get some sunlight and exercise prior to caffeine some people do some people don't okay I

also understand and totally support people who just want their coffee or tea first thing in the morning there's no

rule that says that you can't do that but for me what I would do is I'd get up use the restroom if you need to hydrate

and then get some bright light in your eyes ideally from sunlight first thing in the morning why well there's a whole

story about circadian biology here that I could tell you but I've done that many times before suffice to say that getting

bright light ideally from sunlight in your eyes even through cloud cover so if you're in the UK even through cloud

cover increases the amount of cortisol release in your brain and body markedly that is a good healthy increase

in cortisol that is associ iated with the transition to waking up so we know that bright light in the morning

especially from sunlight increases daytime mood focus and alertness and it will improve your sleep later that night

can I ask then because I woke up in a hotel this morning and because of you I now think about sunlight a lot so I woke

up and I have a balcony in the hotel but I can't see the sun because the sun is on the other side of the hotel right so

you're west facing in the morning and it's coming up in the East so here's the ideal circumstance you go outside you

take your sunglasses off eyeglasses in contact are fine even if they have UV protection you face East it's a clear

morning the sun is there maybe it's even Rising across the Horizon and you watch

it for 5 10 minutes and then you go back inside and carry about your day here's the realistic situation you wake up

you're in a hotel or an apartment you've got things to do your phone is on Etc what do you do get out onto the balcony

get some natural light the ambient light as we say is still far brighter outside even on an overcast day than it would be

indoors with the brightest possible overhead lights now there are Seasonal

effective disorder lights so-called sad lights that are designed to generate 10,000 lucks or more and simulate

sunlight there is really no simulation for sunlight but those special lights are a special circumstance here's what I

know for sure and everyone will agree that it's much brighter outside even on an overcast morning than it is at night

okay you can see even on an overcast day typically without a flashlight that tells you there's a lot of photons a lot

of light energy outside so the best thing to do is just get outside especially on overcast days and get some

ambient light in your eyes when I say view morning sunlight as soon as possible after waking up two questions

always emerge first is what happens if I wake up before the sun comes out well listen unless you have powers that I'm not aware of you're going to have to

wait for the sun to come out okay I just don't have any way to make it rise any faster for you so and if you do please

like email me and let me know how that's done but the point here is that on an

overcast day or even if you're not looking in the direction that the sun happens to be rising you're still

getting sunlight the photon energy is what arrives at your eyes eventually

triggers activation of cells in the neural retina this pie crust like tissue that lines the back of your eyes and

signals to your brain it's time to wake up so when I say view morning sunlight a lot of people think they need to see the

sunrise across the sunset I don't mean you need to see the Sun as an object you need to see the light emitting from the

Sun and even on overcast days that there now on a densely overcast day in the thick of winter in the UK or Scandinavia

it can be quite dark even in the morning and throughout the day in that case you'll really want to strive to get some

bright artificial light exposure in the morning and throughout the day as well but this business of getting sunlight we

can put light in capital letters not necessarily seeing the Sun as an object but getting sunlight in your eyes early in the day increases that cortisol Peak

and its duration this is great for your immune system it great for alertness

and when we hear cortisol normally people think bad oh cortisol is bad no cortisol is terrific you need cortisol

trust me people who have deficits in cortisol production or regulation have all sorts of problems we're talking

about getting a healthy big increase in cortisol early in the day that carries your energy until the evening and then

the cortisol drops off what about shift workers shift workers God bless them

they're essential for so much of what we do and consume and need so we have to be grateful to them they fortunately are in

a very compromised Health State often they have digestive issues mood issues it's a real problem and it's very

dependent on the particular shift the worst case scenario for them is the swing shift where they're working days

then they're working nights on the order of you know three days on three days off Etc it's terrible we know that Health

outcomes for shift workers are so much worse we know that a few things can help for instance regular meal and exercise

times okay we know that red light and here I'm not talking about red light therapy I'm talking about working under

lights that are a bit more um red shifted long wavelength shifted as we say as opposed to bright fluorescent

lights can help reduce some of the cortisol release associated with shift work that occurs at the wrong times this

is a pretty nuanced topic um that again depends on the shift um ideally one

doesn't work shifts their entire life if you absolutely have to do shift work go

to your boss tell them I said this try and stay on the same schedule even if it's a nocturnal schedule which is the

most unhealthy schedule try and stay on the same schedule for at least two weeks before shifting back to another schedule

if you're somebody who's required to stay up until 3: in the morning and then sleep until 11:00 a.m. does that mean

that viewing morning sunlight your morning at 11:30 a.m. is not useful no it's still useful try and keep things as

regular as possible that's my advice but for people who are on a typical what we call dial daytime active as opposed to

nocturnal nighttime active schedule this business of hydration sunlight movement even if it's skipping

rope for five minutes or jogging in place or just swinging one's arms or getting a little walk in in the morning

immensely beneficial if you can do a full workout first thing in the morning great if you don't have time for that until later in

the day I'll be the first to say exercise when you can do it consistently so if you know don't think that if you

don't work out in the morning that you shouldn't do it later we know everybody for sake of longevity and immediate I

guess what we call Health span and lifespan and well-being for that matter should be doing at least two or three

days per week of resistance training of some sort is true for men women and

cardiovascular training in order to ensure healthy neuromuscular connections brain health heart health this is just

very very clear if you do that early in the day fine if you do that on your lunch hour fine if you do that in the

evening fine just make sure whatever you do in order to get that P workout whatever caffeine or pre-workout that you're taking doesn't inhibit your

ability to get a great night's sleep because sleep is the ultimate restorative it's what really is the

foundation of mental health and physical health and I can say if you want to be because this question started off what

can you do to be you know have the best dopamine system the best energy the best

creativity As you move through your day notice your energy levels

eat well certainly I believe that people should eat mostly nonprocessed or

minimally processed foods that's very clear regardless of whether or not you're vegan vegetarian omnivore or carnivore and eat amounts and foods that

allow you to have sufficient mental energy so for me that largely means high

quality protein and fibrous vegetables and fruit throughout the day what's your

Vice any carbohydrate with melted parmesan cheese so thin crust pizza

pasta with with parmesan cheesee especially if there's like a Diet Coke nearby or oh goodness I can just consume

consume consume it just very hard for me to hit my threshold with those things this is a slight tangent but I will return to this dopamine conversation

it's it's it's related but when you have that thin crust pizza or that whatever

food that spikes your dopamine for me I got a bit of a sweet tooth so that's my advice carrot cake or something like that oh yeah carrot cake is good

especially if the ratio of Theo of the frosting to the Cake part is set right it's too much Frost or too much cake

yeah exactly um no go but if it's just the right ratio so if I I had that

carrot cake yesterday which no one knows about I kept it to myself but does that mean that I'm more likely with the

understanding of dopamine to want carrot cake again tomorrow the day after because I've got into a bit of a carrot cake cycle because I think everybody

when they think about their relationship with sugar understands that if they just laid off sugar for like three or four weeks the craving seemed to die down

yeah it's an interesting question I don't think we have the exact cancer some would argue that we should have

more of a kind of balanced relationship with food whereby if we really crave something that we should allow ourselves

it provided it's not some addictive substance or something you don't addicts relapsing um here we're talking about

food we're not talking about drugs of abuse Etc um but is food not addictive in the same way well food can be very

compulsive I think some people are addicted to food um I you know I Define

addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure we could probably attach to that you know

the classic definition of addiction is where continued consumption or um

engagement in a given activity is actually maladapted for your life right I mean if you have four pieces of carrot

cake this week I doubt given the shape that you're in it's going to shorten your life you might not feel great but

it's not going to shorten your life you're certainly not going to like lose your income um like somebody who's a

gambling addict would um this kind of thing you're not going to throw your life away or go rob somebody in order to

get that carrot cake although but but is it doing that that and I'm pointing now at the dopamine wave thing am I having a

dopamine crash you are and Anna lmy describes this best um and you can do this experiment it's kind of a fun

experiment for you chocolate lovers abstain from chocolate for say a week

and then pick your favorite chocolate and take a little piece of that chocolate and put it in your mouth and

taste it and of course it will taste delicious it'll taste wonderful but if you notice very quickly your brain

shifts to a sense of wanting more not so much savoring the chocolate that you're

eating but wanting more and you're thinking about well how much am I going to take I'm going take this Square oh that other Square next to it broke off a

little bit guess I got to eat that one too so that's the dopamine system in action and then what happens is you eat

half the chocolate thing and you go oh I don't feel that good about it but I kind of want more anyway why well you're in

that dopamine trough the same amount of something is giving you diminishing returns what's the way to make that

chocolate take taste absolutely fantastic again abstain now there's also

an interesting phenomenon and this is why I said I can't be exactly sure how to answer your question accurately that

is I have several friends just by way of example who reached their 40s quite

overweight 50s quite overweight 30 to 60 pounds overweight and they'd come to me and they'd say I want to lose weight

every single one of them has been highly successful in rapidly losing that weight and keeping it off the following way and

I'm not a nutritionist I say you can eat meat fish eggs chicken fruit and

vegetables and that's it and drink water and caffeine and don't consume calories and Beverages and every single one of

them lost 30 60 pounds and has kept it off now Lane Norton and I who are

friends and colleagues in the health space he'll say well they created a caloric deficit and so they lost weight

I'd say absolutely I would also say and I think Lane would probably agree although there's no randomized control

trial to prove this that in eating that way mostly whole unprocessed or minimally processed

foods they did several things as well one is you start to learn the relationship between how something

tastes its caloric value its micronutrient and macronutrient value

what do I mean when you eat a steak like let's say a 12 ounce Ribeye if that's in your nutrition plan meaning you allow

yourself red meat let's say you eat that you taste it it's very Savory hopefully

it tastes really good if it's cooked properly it's a great cut and your brain learns the relationship between steak

and calories and nutrients and amino acids there's this whole amino acid forging hypothesis of nutrition then you

eat fruit you taste the fruit you actually taste it now this is Far and Away different than if you're consuming hogy sandwiches and hamburgers and

cheeseburgers there's something about removing the bread there's something about removing removing the pasta there's something about removing those

foods that I believe has nothing to do with those Foods being bad in fact I love bread and pasta high quality bread

and pasta and I do consume those but I'm not trying to lose weight nor gain weight when people eat that way meat

fish eggs chicken fruits and vegetables and nothing else for a couple of months what every single one of them says is

well then we had this party and you know the kids were having birthday cake so I decided to allow myself a slice of cake

they ate it and it tastes did disgusting to them or they in some cases threw up

or they just felt like it was gross whatever positive Association they had with it before it no longer

exists and then they get right back on their let's call it diet and they continue along their way and they're

very relieved to learn that they actually enjoy healthy foods I think that we can rewire in fact we know that

you can rewire your association between nutritive value Taste of food calories and micronutrients and so when I hear

about these highly restrictive elimination diets where people do only meat which frankly does not seem healthy

to me I think some Fiber from other sources is good although I'm sure Paul saladino will come after me probably

with a drumstick or something Jord or Jord whatever Jordan's doing seems to be working for Jordan so I'm not goingon to

argue people should do as they will but you know um I'm an omnivore and enjoy that but I think when people do

elimination type diets the more important thing is that they're learning this association between taste and

calories that seems to really work for them and the pleasure of eating certain foods and really dropping into the the

quality and the taste of that food When We crave a food and it's kind of an Indulgence food like chocolate or carrot

cake or something it's more along this dopamine uh transition from Peak to

trough now when I I love steak my dad's Argentine I'm half Argentine so I love a great beef chizo or like a you know like

I love red meat but I don't eat two ribe eyes I eat one and I'm good and so I

think that there's something very sading about high nutritive quality food that includes fruits and vegetables and the vegans have their choices and the

vegetarians have their choices and so so much of what we think about when we think about dopamine and food is yes

highly processed foods candy packaged Goods cookies chips they drive this

craving for more but people don't actually enjoy them that much they just

require them or at least they think they require them so I encourage anyone who feels addicted to those foods to take a

you know healthy approach you know consume enough calories don't go on a crash diet but try eating really high

quality unprocessed or minimally processed foods for just a couple of weeks at first it's murder they just

can't do it and then inevitably they call me and they say I feel so much better and I don't even want that stuff

anymore it's interesting how that then correlates with your own motivation and I it's we fly out here to do this

podcast and we come out sometimes for two weeks three weeks sometimes even four weeks weeks and we all eat the same

thing pretty much throughout the day for those four weeks so it's almost a dietary intervention for me because when

we finish recording my food is going to be there and I know what it's going to be it's going to be basically a salad with meat in it certain vegetables Etc

and so it becomes this like intervention going to La is this dietary intervention what happens is when I come here and

have that salad every day with various different meats and various different vegetables every day is my motivation to

go to the gym for some reason improves MH my sleep end up improving and it's like my that one sort of dietary

intervention has this really Downstream impact on everything else I get in the I get in the best shape of my life I'm motivated I feel good I drive along it

might also be the sunshine out here but and I just I I think people don't realize that even as you say a week or

two having that dietary intervention intervention cutting out the crap can

have such a big reframing on your perception of food how you experience it and now I'm excited about the bloody

salad yeah it's wild how healthy foods become more attractive us the more we consume them and the more we avoid

unhealthy Foods I think also a lot of people don't know how great you can feel getting some morning sunlike great sleep

eating nutritious food and once they do once they experience that lift and energy and mood it's kind of addictive

in its own right now I also think it's important to not be too restrictive right you know around the holidays or

something I I mean I love a great slice of pie like I do these things I think if one gets enough movement then you're

fine um you know if nothing else this whole um kind of trend toward the use of

these glp1 glucagonlike peptide Agonist like OIC and monjaro if it's taught us anything it's that people are obese

because they consume too many calories they just ingest too much relative to their activity levels and here in

particular in the United States people are walking and moving far less most people get no regular exercise and they

consume about 3,500 calories per day on average so they're just on a steady weight increase for most of their life

more activity less food intake is fairly easy to accomplish if you do just a few subtle things so there are these levers

these major levers like eating better as you said meat and salads I mean it's one of the most satiating meals you can have

I also find that if I consume fewer carbohydrates during the day this is just me it runs countercurrent to most

everything you'll read out there but I like to fast essentially until about 11 or noon just cuz I'm not hungry I like

to exercise in the morning but then I'll have a lunch that is some meat some salad maybe starch like a bowl of

oatmeal or rice but not a whole lot and then toward evening my final meal you know dinner which is around 7 or 8:00

p.m. generally includes a few more starches and a little less protein and I sleep best that way some people it's the

opposite they like a big bowl of oatmeal and just a couple of eggs in the morning and you know and some nuts in the afternoon and then they like a big steak

for dinner you know I think everybody's slightly different some people are just naturally have more energy I think about

Joo willink I mean the guy has so much energy and I think it's not a

coincidence that he works out at 4:30 in the morning I think that if you work out early in the day you often have more

energy throughout the day I find if I get my workout done before 9:00 a.m. I have more energy all day long however if

I work out mid morning late morning pretty sleepy in the afternoon everybody's different is there like a

physiological rationale for that there probably is you know as our body temperature rises in the morning we are

waking up so when we exercise we accelerate that transition toward being more alert now in the afternoon when our

body temperature typically Peaks after that is usually when we get a bit sleepy typically after lunch people get sleepy

sometimes because of the volume of food they they've eaten most often it's because they've hit that temperature peak in the early afternoon and we know

that as body temperature drops 1 to 3 degrees in the evening and night time that's when we fall asleep in fact in

order to fall asleep your body temperature actually has to drop by about 1 to 3° this is why you know

sticking a foot out of the you know the comforter or if you have a cooling mattress which some people require

because they run hot or keeping the room cool facilitates falling asleep although it's not completely the case so I should

mention the best scenario would be cool room with warm blankets to fall asleep

and then toward morning sort of a warmer environment we actually get a little bit more rapid eye movement sleep dream

sleep elaborate dream sleep toward morning so you can get really nuanced in this stuff all the biohackers know this

but you know basically if you work out early in the day you know before 8 or

9:00 a.m. it's going to accelerate that increase in body temperature and you'll feel more alert there's also this beautiful phenomenon in circadian

biology called entrainment whereby let's say you're not a morning person you hate mornings if you force yourself to get up

and exercise at say 6: a.m. for three days in a row by the fourth day you'll naturally start waking up around that

time because the circadian clock of the brain we call the supermatic nucleus the

main inputs that drive when you're alert and when you want to be asleep are sunlight exposure to the eyes this is

the whole basis for that morning sunlight exposure physical activity when you eat and social engagement and there

could be a whole discussion about this but suffice to say that if you start getting some Morning Light some exercise maybe even before the sun comes out some

caffeine hydration and then a meal in the early part of the day your body will start to anticipate all of those

activities and even if you're a so-called Night Owl you'll start to shift your clock toward being an early

riser and lo and behold around 10 or 11:00 p.m. you'll start to notice you're getting sleepy and you just have to have

the discipline to turn off the phone put in the other room and go to sleep I I wonder that I do wonder if I'm a night

hour because of bad habits or because of some kind of biology typically people fall into one

of three categories and it is genetically determined of you can be a morning person a more typical would be

somebody who goes to sleep somewhere between 10:30 and midnight wakes up between 6:00 and 8:00 a.m. and then the

night owls who like to stay up till 1: or 2 in the morning wake up around you know 10: or 11:00 a.m. it changes with

age I'm a bit of a weirdo in the sense that I like to do most of my mental and

physical work between 6:00 a.m. and noon then I'm not super effective in the afternoon my brain doesn't work so well

I can take care of some little things unless I offset that and then between 6:00 p.m and midnight I'm alert

again I don't know maybe it's my Argentine Roots who knows so so given it's the afternoon now and I knew that

we were going to be podcasting what I did is I did indeed get up at 6:45 a.m. I did a bunch of work this morning for

the podcast some other things and then on the way here I did a non-sleep deep rest I listened to that for about 10

minutes I kind of sensed I was somewhere in sleep I don't quite recall and then when we arrived I'm a little bit groggy

a little bit of hydration a little bit of caffeine and I feel completely alert so you can learn to offset these troughs

and energy I think that at every stage of life meaning for every 5-year block of life you can kind of predict what the best

schedule for you would be so when you're a baby you slept all the time that's your best schedule when you were an adolescent it was different I have a

niece she's 17 and I went and stayed with my sister recently and it was unbelievable she went to bed at 10:30 at

night probably fell asleep at midnight because she was on her iPad with her friends she would wake up the next day

at noon it's summertime get up say hello get a glass of water go back to sleep

and sleep for another hour and that's exactly what she should be doing why because she's growing right she's a she's youth in youth in your 30s it

might be a different schedule in your 40s a different schedule and then of course kids come along and they force the schedule so I would say whatever

stage of life you're in you probably know what the best schedule is for you and you just have to work with the

realities of life but if you can adhere to that knowing okay you have a peak in energy in focus at this hour or peeking

energy in focus at that hour by all means do it I mean Rick Ruben shared um when he came on my podcast that his best

day is to transition slowly into the day take a walk outside in the sun in the morning slowly into the day and then he

does his work really his main focused work in the afternoon and in the evening some people are more night shifted some

people are more morning shifted I tend to get my best ideas I think right before I go to sleep which is annoying

because there's this temptation to go to my laptop and begin writing and begin working do you write them

down yes yeah I write down little cues and then team will know because it's useful when I'm on this time frame

because my team in the UK are getting my my memos at 7 a.m. there right but they

don't know that I'm it's like midnight or 1: a.m. here I'm so glad you mentioned this I think for people who are interested in having a great life a

great career it's very important to have a mode of capture so for me um it's this

notebook and it's not just blank pages in front of me I promise these are just like little little things that come to mind um it doesn't matter what's here

um and I place them into the notebook and then at the end of each week or so or if I'm on a plane I'll start to look

back and see you know what are the ideas that feel sticky like oh there's something there there's like a concept there I'm actually thinking about doing

a a a drawing book to teach neuroscience at some point I'm also very interested

in animals so I was listing out this is very um embarrassing but the different

animals that I feel I embodied at different stages of my life and where I'm at now because of the different

energies and is very personal right like the sense that it's not going to mean much in the kind of classic Neuroscience

sense but I think having a mode of capture for these thoughts that spontaneously arise out of our

unconscious mind I mean that's what's happening when you're falling asleep your conscious mind which is involved in

thinking and planning and organizing knowledge is starting to Tire those prefrontal cortex circuits are starting

to tire and your unconscious mind which is the main driver of all your ideas and so much of what you you are about as an

individual are starting to geyser to the surface this is why in dreams even though it occurs in symbols

we are playing with different ideas and ordering of different ideas this is not Freudian okay this is not just yungi and

psychology we had an expert in this you know Dr Paul kti did a mental health series on our podcast and he said you

know the bulk of your brain activity besides the stuff that's just regulating breathing and heart rate and digestion

Etc is really devoted to this unconscious processing it's taking events from your childhood plans that

you have that you don't even know yet that aren't aware of yet

experiences that are happening today and and looking at those from different perspectives and offering those to you

in in what in dreams what are dreams in stories in narratives that are really disrupted in space and time A lot can

happen in a short period of time then you're in a different room dreams are very distorted in terms of their representation but when you're falling

asleep you're in that pseudo awake state obviously where you're thinking planning

and action parts of your brain your logical mind is turned off and these ideas are geysering to the surface and

this is why sometimes people have their best ideas in the shower while walking when they're not trying to have ideas

and you can seeed this by writing down a few things before you go to sleep you can think you know like wondering what

to do next year don't know okay maybe it's that vague does that mean you'll have a dream

that solves it that night maybe probably not but chances are if you pay attention to you know during the day you'll be

walking along or for some reason this always happens to me when I'm um uh

urinating I don't know why I don't know why like I go like I don't know maybe it's because I'm relaxed like I go especially if I'm in nature and I'm

hiking I'll go like take a take a pee behind a tree and I I be like oh I have an idea I don't know why it is I think

it's because I'm not thinking about doing anything except you know I'm taking a leak behind a tree I guess this

is very forthcoming for me to admit this but you know some people stay in the shower other people while they're running one thing that I think is really

use useful for coming up with ideas I seem to be mentioning Rick a lot today but um one thing I observed when I spent

time with Rick is he has a kind of a practice although he's never said this formally where he'll be very still with

his eyes closed and I thought maybe he's meditating maybe he's um sleeping and it

turns out he told me that his mind is very active in that time even though his

body is very still now that sparked something in me because I have a guest or had a guest on my podcast by the name

of Carl diero he's one of The Luminaries in the field of Neuroscience and one of the best bioengineers in the world he's

also a psychiatrist a brilliant guy and when he came on my podcast he said that he has a practice every night after he

puts his five kids to sleep he's one of these hyperproductive people where he sits down and He makes himself stay as

completely still as possible and forces himself to think in complete sentences

and I thought this is interesting because it was also reported or purported that Einstein would take walks

and then occasionally just stop and let his mind continue in thinking while he stopped his body and

when you start looking back through history of Science History of Music Etc you'll find that there are these hyper

creative hyperproductive people that have a practice of making their body completely still and their mind very

active not meditation where you're trying to just focus on your breathing but they're actually actively thinking

while keeping their body very still now I find that fascinating I also find it fascinating that some people for

instance myself if I take a long run which I do every Sunday I make it a point to run for 60 to 90 minutes every

Sunday not fast but I just go go go go go inevitably during those runs I come

up with some of my best ideas it's a it puts my brain into a state where I can things geyser up from my unconscious

mind and so that state of mind is one in which the body is very active and I'm

not trying to think about anything so you have these two inverse States one is body still mind active the other is body

active mind kind of freerunning kind of just like spooling out when I'm running I'm not thinking about anything and then

ideas spring to the surface in the Neuroscience of creativity we know that there's a meditation practice that's

been studied called open monitoring meditation most typical meditation is

you sit or lie down close your eyes maybe Lotus position maybe not and you concentrate on your breathing you bring

your attention constantly back to your third eye center work from Wendy Suzuki's laboratory at NYU has shown

just 10 to 13 minutes of that practice every day can improve memory in particular working memory which is your

ability to keep thoughts online lower stress and other benefits there's a

different form of meditation which is open monitoring meditation where you sit or lie down close your eyes and you

actually are paying attention to everything around you you focus your attention there in the room there in the room there in the room or you just let

it all all just kind of sift over you you're not actually focusing on your breathing and that practice of open

monitoring meditation is associated with improved creative capacity now improved

creative capacity in air quotes is something that's measured in a laboratory so synthesis of new ideas

Creative Solutions to a puzzle Etc we're not talking about writing great works of music but in a laboratory you only have

so many things that you can sample or measure typically in undergraduate students so I I'm kind of just you know

talk ing all of this out there as a means for people you who are interested in improving their creativity or

exploring creativity to not just wait not just wait have a mode of capture

write things down or maybe jot them into your phone or voice memos maybe do open monitoring meditation maybe sit and

force yourself to think in complete sentences with your body still maybe go for a long run or walk where you're

bored you're not listening to anything and see what comes up I think everyone does this differently but if you're able