NEVER LACK MOTIVATION AGAIN - Master Dopamine For FOCUS & PRODUCTIVITY | Dr. Andrew Huberman

Dopamine itself is not the reward. It's the build-up to the reward. And the reward has more of a kind of opioid bliss-like property, which itself is not bad if it's endogenous, released from within. But when we can just sit there like the like the rat with no dopamine, gorging ourselves with pleasures, so to speak, what you end up with is somebody who feels really unmotivated, and those pleasures no longer work to tickle those feel-good circuits. And so there's no reason for them to go out and pursue anything. So how do we spike intentionally? You've talked about we can spike testosterone, but I want to know, can we spike dopamine? Mhm. Yeah. So, um and you've done this. So, your example of craving is actually what you crave. You crave the feeling of craving is beautiful because it would what it means is that you don't allow yourself to go so far down the arc of the dopamine trajectory to get to the other source of motivation. So, there are two sources of motivation as it relates to dopamine. And then we can think about tools that we could export from these that are nested in neurology. The first is to do what you do, which is to be able to sense the craving as its own form of pleasure. This has kind of remnants of Carol Dweck's growth mindset that you eventually develop a a pleasure in the seeking and the striving. Has a you know, uh has flavors of a Gog David Goggins type approach where where it seems like it he gets pleasure from the friction itself. And so there are elements of that. You seem to have that as well. But if you can start to identify the craving as its own internally released drug, this thing dopamine, that is a source of motivation, then what you realize is that capturing the reward is wonderful, but attaching dopamine to the reward is actually a little bit dangerous. Attaching Yeah. This this is so Celebrating the win Celebrating the win more than the pursuit, it actually sets you up for failure in the future. And so this gets us right into something called dopamine reward prediction error. And reward prediction error is basically if you expect something to be really great and then it's not quite that great, your dopamine baseline lowers. And now understanding what we know about dopamine, that means that not only did you you feel as if you lost because it wasn't as much a celebration as you thought it would be, but it also means that you're starting from a lower place, meaning you are less motivated. Now, the the simpler way to conceptualize this is I have a colleague at Stanford. She runs the addiction dual diagnosis clinic at Her name is Dr. Anna Lembke. She has a book called Dopamine Nation that's out right now. And she's really described this pleasure-pain balance where anytime you have a bunch of dopamine and you're in pursuit, pursuit, pursuit, after you achieve a win. Now, this could be a business win, a relationship a win of any kind, but inevitably, there's going to be a tipping back of the scale on the pain side. And that pain side is always going to go a little bit higher than the dopamine side. So, this is what you would feel if you pursued a goal like building a big company, here it comes, here it comes, the big sale, and then there's the well, what now? Yeah, the kind of letdown. Now, if you wait, if you simply wait and stop pursuing dopamine for a short while, the scale starts to reset. The problem is a lot of people immediately roll right into the next pursuit. And then what happens is that scale starts to get stuck on the pain side. A little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, and pretty soon no amount of seeking will allow you to experience that craving and motivation. So, what what does this mean in terms of a an actual tool? Well, first of all, if people can do what you do, they're going to be in a much better position in life. Doesn't matter if it's school, sport, relationship, any domain of life. If you can start to register, ah, that craving and that friction and that desire, that almost kind of low level of agitation, sometimes high level of agitation that is that I'm trying to impose my will on the world in a benevolent way, we hope. That's dopamine. It's working with its close cousin, which is epinephrine, which is adrenaline. They are very close cousin. In fact, dopamine manufactures epinephrine. A lot of people don't know this, but adrenaline is actually made from the molecule dopamine. Okay, so those two are hanging out together. It's like crave work, crave work, craven work, craven work, craven work. And then you get the win. And some people allow the big peak in dopamine to be associated with the win. And smart people learn to adjust their celebration internally, right? This is all internal. You could throw the biggest party in the world, but as long as you're kind of in laid-back and looking at this, not letting yourself get manic crazy, you won't necessarily crash as hard. And pretty soon, your system will reset so that you take the day, you clean up the dishes, you relax, you go, "What now? I'm feeling a little low." Well, rather than going out and spiking your dopamine again, just wait. Understand that the scale will reset again. Give yourself a few days where you're going to feel a little kind of underwhelmed. Things aren't going to be as interesting. It's going to be hard to trigger that big release because you just had the the peak. Well, if you adjust that, you relax, you understand there's always a little bit of a postpartum depression. We sometimes hear about postpartum depression, that's a clinical thing, but there's always that kind of hmm, today's not as exciting as a previous days. What What am I going to do with my life? But then, if you let it start ratcheting up again, then what you realize is your capacity to tap into dopamine as a motivator, not just seeking dopamine rewards, that is infinite. And I I can say with with great certainty that this is how you were able to build a big company and sell it, how you've been able to build a successful podcast and sell it, how you constantly seeking because seeking is the reward. And I think for most people, we think of the reward as the finish line. And so, the key is to get to the finish line, step into the end zone, but no end zone dance. It's just like, yep, and now I'm going to go do it again. That's the really the key. That's That's the key to doing it over and over. And when I see big athletes or academics or anyone or musicians and they rise and crash, it's clear they've lost the touch with the motivation-evoked dopamine. And they've lost touch probably cuz it hasn't really been described by the neuroscience community until Anna has started talking about this stuff publicly and I'm just kind of I'm echoing what she's beautifully said, said much better than I am, which is that you should always expect that after a bunch of pleasure, there's going to be that low and then that craving. How do I get back to there again? And the key is you have to walk the staircase again. You don't get to do this as a square wave pull, you know, you don't get to just ascend, ascend, ascend. It's always up, down, up a little bit higher, down, up, you know, it's that's the function. So, um I don't know if that resonates with your experience, but here freaking out. So, you've literally just explained what I will say is the single most important loop if you want to be successful. And you used words attach, right? You You had another one, which was about your I forget the exact word, but you're taking You're inserting yourself consciously into the process. Because what I learned very early on, and I'm so grateful in the same way that you are grateful that your upbringing wasn't perfect, but it ended up giving you uh a frame of reference and insights that have propelled you forward, I'm very grateful that I spent a decade just trying to get rich. That was the stated mission. I would say it every day. Like, I'm here to get rich. I show up to work to get rich. It's about getting rich, rich, rich, rich, rich. And it didn't work. And so, and my wife pulls me aside and she's like, you're now damaging the marriage. Like, you're just so fiendishly focused on the goal that there's nothing is integrated in your life. You're doing something you hate for an end state that may never come. And that was so profound and it shook me so deeply and it suddenly became clear that from a neurological perspective what I wanted was to feel alive. And once I put everything in the pursuit, I'm just interested in can I show up every day and sincerely pursue this thing, which I may never get, but I'm going to honor myself, celebrate myself, big up myself as the Brits would say, for just showing up today and actually trying to make it happen. And one that's way more sustainable and then two, you don't you don't get tricked into thinking that oh, when I get this thing that I'll feel good because it's the craving that makes me feel alive. So it's the state of wanting that is in and of itself the pleasurable act. That's right. And so I began to use the metaphor of I'm going to climb this mountain only to want the next mountain to climb. And once I knew that, well then you have to be totally comfortable dropping back down and starting all over. Now the interesting thing and I don't know if I'm fooling myself or if I have so integrated that trick, but the come down isn't hard for me. So I I think my last day at Quest was a Monday and Tuesday I started Impact Theory. And so that went from I had 3,000 employees, your position matters, you get a lot of deference, uh you've got a privileged parking space. You know what I mean? Like there's there's a lot of things that go into it. And but I didn't none of like my reward system was tied to that. So it was very easy for me to start the next day with there was only seven of us and no one had time for any deference of any kind and I went from having an EA, which you can imagine how amazing that is, to not and you're doing everything for yourself again. But that wasn't a painful thing cuz I was so focused on, all right, cool. This is step one again. And now can can we repeat? Well, it helps if you can expect that there will be a little bit of a dip post win or post whatever. Um that's helpful. There's always a refractory period of any kind, so to speak. Uh if you expect it, that's great because you eliminate the the downside of the reward prediction error. Reward prediction error can also be um conceptualized as I tell you we're going to go this restaurant. I keep building up the food, building up the food. I actually raise the expectation and the requirement that that food be really spectacular. Better off I just tell you it's going to be pretty good, and then you're wowed by it, right? Because if your dopamine was higher in anticipation than the actual food evoked, well, then it makes sense why it would You're always integrating over the dopamine release you had previously. Now, there are a couple of things that you said in there that I wanted uh highlight, which I find so interesting, uh and we can get a little bit um Eastern philosophy mystical here, but tie it back to some real neuroscience, which is You said, you know, that's the juice. The motivation is the juice. You know, the it if you look at Eastern philosophy and they talk about chi, you know, and this you know, what is that? I I I wager that is dopamine. The desire to pursue things and to create more of oneself and uh as a species, whether or not you decide to have kids or not, those circuits all use the one universal currency, dopamine, of wanting more things that are outside the confines of your skin. And that's what's driven forward evolution of individuals and families and cultures and our our species as as a whole. And again, the circuitry's been there for many, many tens, if not hundreds of thousands of years. And so it's And it's highly conserved, and so what that means is that it doesn't matter if it's Bitcoin or Ethereum. It doesn't matter if it's putting rockets on other planets. It doesn't matter if it's building the first automobile. It's the same currency. So, understanding those cycles is really key. The other thing is the element of pain. I think that understanding that pain and pleasure are in this really dynamic balance can also help us with in the following way. Any pain that you feel, the longer day, the less sleep, that that kind of agony that things aren't working, that power outlet doesn't work, or the internet is slow, whatever it is, the amount of pleasure that you will eventually experience is directly relate related, excuse me, to how much pain you experience. So, we know this from actually what nowadays would be considered quite barbaric and unethical experiments where they would give people electrical shocks, and they would measure their response, and then they say, "We're going to increase it. We're going to increase it." Eventually, they get to the point where a slight shock that was previously very painful actually evokes a sense of pleasure. Now, you couldn't do these experiments anymore. These are not the experiments I do in my lab. These are older experiments. But, for instance, and this has been discussed in scientific research papers, giving somebody a like a a 10-minute ice bath, for instance, or even a 3-minute ice bath, where a 1-minute ice bath is quite painful, but there was a study from University of Prague, European Journal of Physiology, showed that after a painful ice bath stimulus, the amount of dopamine release goes up for 2 and 1/2 hours, to 250% above baseline. And that's not because the ice bath itself evokes dopamine release. A lot of people think, "Oh, cold water evokes dopamine release." No, pain evokes dopamine release after the pain is over. Yesterday, I tweaked my back cuz I do this stupid thing every few years, the same stupid thing, and it it's really painful. And then you just remember all the ways in which you can't move around. I was like standing up this morning, I'm like, and just walking is so painful. As the pain has started to dissipate, you get a little bit of a high, right? You get a little bit of a euphoria. That's dopamine, because of the the degree of pain you experienced previously predicts how much pleasure. So, when you start a company down in the dregs, and you're shoveling again, that's beautiful, because that means that the win that you achieve is going to be as good or greater than the one you had previously in your case with Quest. And so, we go back to this example of the person that's not motivated, that can't get off the couch, that's doesn't want to do anything. Well, this is the problem. We Remember the rat experiment? They are effectively the rat with no dopamine, but they can still achieve some sense of pleasure by consuming excess calories, by consuming social media. Look, I'm not judging. I do this stuff, too, right? Scrolling social media. If you've ever scrolled social media and you're like, "I don't even know why I'm doing this. It doesn't really feel that good." And I can remember a time where you'd see something that was just so cool or you'd you'd see something online. I remember this when TED Talks first came out. I was like, "This is amazing. These are some You know, at least some of them are really smart people sharing really cool insights." And then now that there are like a gazillion TED Talks, I remember spending a winter in my office at when I was a junior professor cleaning my office finally and binging TED Talks in the background thinking, "This is a good use of my time." Pretty soon, they all sucked to me. I was like, "This isn't good." So, what you need to do is stop watching TED Talks for a while, wait, and then they become interesting again. And that's this pain-pleasure balance. And so, for people that aren't feeling motivated, the problem is they're not motivated, but they're getting just enough or excess sustenance. So, they're getting the little mild hits of opia- it becomes an opioid system. And if you think about the opioid drugs as opposed to dopamine dopaminergic drugs. Dopaminergic drugs make people rabid for everything, you know, drugs of abuse like cocaine and amphetamine make people incredibly outward-directed. All right, they hardly notice anything except what they want more of. More more more more more. It's very it's bad cuz those drugs trigger so much dopamine release that they become the reward. It's very circular. The only the drug can give that much dopamine. Nothing they could pursue would give them as much dopamine as the drug itself. So, there's that and then there's the kind of opioid-like effects of constantly indulging oneself with social media or with video games or with um with food or with anything to the point where it no longer evokes the motivation and craving. And this is really the new evolution of the understanding of of dopamine in neuro in neuroscience, which is that dopamine itself is not the reward. It's the build-up to the reward. And the reward has more of a kind of opioid-bliss-like property, which itself is not bad if it's endogenous, released from within. But, when we can just sit there like the like the rat with no dopamine, gorging ourselves with pleasures, so to speak, what you end up with is somebody that feels really unmotivated. And those pleasures no longer work to tickle those feel-good circuits. And so, there's no reason for them to go out and pursue anything. And that's a pretty dark picture. So, the the keys are to pursue rewards, but understand that the pursuit is actually the reward if you want to have repeated wins, okay? You the celebration has to be less than the pursuit. And that's hard for some people to do. They you know that they it's got to be that your celebration is slightly less dopaminergic. It can be very reflective. You can be in gratitude. Those are other neurotransmitter systems, but you don't want to be on that high as you celebrate the win. You want to be trickling out your dopamine regularly until you pursue things. And then just understand there will always be a crash of pain. And the more pain you experience, the more dopamine you can achieve if you get back on the avenue of pursuit. Yeah, this gets into unintended consequences of modernity. And so, we're living through this time where we, you know, going back to that flag that we planted of these unintended consequences of oh, I can make myself smell good. Oh, I can, you know, watch the coolest video. Oh, like Tik Tok. Dude, I don't have an addicted personality. That's the first thing where I'll lose an hour and be like, what the [ __ ] did I just do? Well, that's the the problem is not pleasures. The problem is that pleasure experienced without prior requirement for pursuit Yes. is terrible for us. It's terrible for us as individuals, it's terrible for us as as groups and I I have great confidence in the human species to work this out, but we are finding now and we are going to increasingly find that those who will be successful, young or old, are going to be those people who can create their own internal buffers. They're going to be able to control their relationship to pleasures because the proximity to pleasures and the availability is the problem. If you look at the increase in uh use of uh drugs of abuse or prescription medication, which at least at the first pass deliver pleasure, pain relief, all the whole issue with the opioid crisis and and dopaminergic drugs like Ritalin, Adderall, you know, there is sometimes is a clinical need, but tons of people are taking those recreationally now or to study. Huge dopamine increases are what those cause. That is a problem. That's a serious problem because it creates a cycle where you you need more of that specific thing. I always say addiction is a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. God, that's such a good definition. And, you know, and I don't like to comment too much on enlightenment cuz, you know, I don't really know what that is as a neurobiologist, but a good life, we could say, is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure. And even better is a good life is a progressive expansion of the things that bring you pleasure and includes pleasure through motivation and hard work. And understanding this pain-pleasure balance whereby if you experience pain and you can continue to be in that friction and and exert effort, the rewards are that much greater when they arrive. And so, I think that if you look at any drug of abuse or any situation where somebody isn't motivated or thinks Now, they may have clinically diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, but a lot of what people think is ADHD, it turns out, is people just over-consuming dopamine from various sources. And then and also the context within a a TikTok feed is the context switches insane. The brain has never seen First of all, this is the first time in human evolution that we wrote with our thumbs, but that's a pretty benign shift. And then the other shift is normally you walk from one room to another or from a field into the trees or from a hut into or a house or whatever it is, but now you can get 10,000 context switches in that 30 minutes of scrolling on Instagram or TikTok. And so it's all about self-regulation. We are going to select for the people that can self-regulate. And so then people say, "Well, how do you self-regulate? How do kids self-regulate?" Well, this is my hope and one of the reasons I've gotten excited about public education and teaching neuroscience is that this is a place where knowledge of knowledge actually can allow oneself to intervene. When you think, "I'm feeling low. I don't feel good. Nothing really feels good. Am I depressed?" Maybe, but maybe you're just you've saturated the dopamine circuits. You're now in the play pain part of things. What do you do? Well, you have to stop. You need You need to replenish dopamine. You need to stop engaging with this behavior and then your pleasure for it will come back. But you have to constantly control the hinge. It's not just about being back and forth on the seesaw. You have to make sure the hinge doesn't get stuck in pain or in pleasure. So it's a it's a dynamic process being a a human being. It's not easy. And remember these circuits didn't evolve for this purpose. They They evolved primarily for making more of ourselves. That's why they're so closely tied to the reproductive circuits and that's why it was interesting and very relevant that you said that your desire to have sex with your wife is one of the most powerful feelings and it kind of as a from a neurochemical perspective, it wicks out into all these other pursuits, right? Those other pursuits aren't about sex per se, but it's the same molecule. So the feeling is the same. It's just that some people For some people the amplitude of that dopamine sig- signal for craving sex is very high. For some people, that's lower and it's higher for video games. You know, whatever you lean into and and you think about often in these pursuits will start to reshape these circuits cuz these dopaminergic circuits are tied to everything. Uh you know, there are examples of people getting addicted to the most incredible things. There are also examples of people getting very good but not addicted to chess, for instance. It's all the same general set of mechanisms. Yeah, you talked earlier about um the the knowledge of knowledge and that was the big breakthrough for me at the darkest period of my life. I happened to grab a book. We talked about this briefly in our first interview. I happened to grab a book that talked about neuroplasticity and they were hypothesizing maybe this is a thing and that gave me hope because I could imagine what was going on in my brain. And once I can visualize it, then I feel like I can insert myself into it. It's why I've gotten so interested in health, why I'm so interested in neuroscience is for me, if I were sliding towards depression, I would do exactly what you're saying. I would assess that and be like, "Okay, wait a second. I know that I can insert conscious control. I know that this is a biological experience and I'm I'm obsessed with that idea that you're having a biological experience and to me, like there's some people that see the way the magic trick is done and it loses the magic. Then for other people, it's like you see that it's This is somebody that's spent 30,000 hours learning how to move their hands so that you don't notice that they just moved the coin, you know, from this hand to this hand. It's it blows me away. I love I love magic. Uh before the pandemic, a a friend took me up to the Magic Castle here in Hollywood and there's some incredible stuff going on. Magic is actually really cool. We could uh just as a from a neuroscience perspective, magic, it's all about um creating gaps in your perception. That's obvious, right? And when that happens, because the the brain is so accustomed to the laws of physics, like objects fall down not up, etc. When that happens, it clearly triggers the surprise circuitry. And that itself, that feeling of delight and surprise, is absolutely tied also to these dopamine dopamine circuits. though that that doesn't send us into like terror. Like the people depends on the magic depends on the magic trick. I when I went there, there was this crazy trick that the guy did. He took out cards and I it was invited up to sit next to him. I signed my name on a card. Mhm. I took the card. I took the card. I tore it up. I put it in my pocket. And at the end of the show, we went through a series of things. At the end of the show, he took off his shoe and presented the card to me with the signature intact and the card intact. And that was my signature. So, he clearly created gaps of perception. Um but at some point as adults, I think as long as we know the context is right, then we can we can do this. All right, my friend. I have a big announcement. My incredible and talented wife, Lisa, is about to launch her new book, Radical Confidence. In it, she has managed to perfectly capture the process of how to go from feeling lost and insecure to taking control of your life and doing amazing things despite feeling fear, sometimes a lot of fear. Now, let me tell you, nobody knows Lisa better than me. But when I read Radical Confidence for the first time and heard her describe what it was like for her to go from having these big, exciting dreams as a kid to then as an adult scheduling her life around the TV shows that she wanted to watch, or how lonely and isolated she felt instead of pursuing her dreams, it was brutal for me. I would never say though that it was worth it for her to go through all of that just so that she could write something down that allows others to avoid it. But I will say that at least she was able to capture the strategies that she used to break out of that rut, find her voice, and begin doing incredible things despite her insecurities and fears that she wasn't going to be good enough to achieve great things. So, while it hurts me to know the dark place that Lisa went through, I really am excited for people who are going through something similar right now to read this book. Radical Confidence is an instruction manual for how to become the hero of your own life even when you're scared to death. Look, I know better than just about anybody how easy it is to get off track in life or to just not have yet found your calling. And it's even easier for people to feel so insecure and unprepared that they don't even want to pursue the things that they want. But, what Lisa shows people in Radical Confidence is that the radical part is that you can accomplish extraordinary things even when you feel fear. That's what Radical Confidence is. Being afraid and unsure and having a toolkit that allows you to still make massive progress. Pre-order your copy today because if you act now, you can claim the bonuses that Lisa has created for you at radicalconfidence.com. They're only available if you pre-order, so act now. Then, once you've done that, we'll get back to today's episode. All right, guys. Read the book and get ready to be the hero of your own life. Peace out. One thing that um you've talked about that I think is uh along these lines. Be interesting to see if if they feel as related to you when you know so much about it, but for me at a a high level, these feel very related. Talked about somebody gets in a car accident. Uh acetylcholine, if I'm not mistaken, is releases a [ __ ] pay attention to this. Pay attention right now. And it it basically responds to peaks and valleys. So, something really bad happens or something really good happens, it's present, you begin to hardwire um the association of whatever emotion is with that thing. And so, if you have something a traumatic event or whatever and you now see something is very negative, you can actually flip that by getting in a state where you're secreting acetylcholine again and now in a positive, right? So that you can feel good about that thing. So how do people take that take control of that process? So if you've been in a car accident and you now have this negative association with driving, how do you grab a hold of the production of acetylcholine? How do you reframe? Yeah, so uh it's great you're mentioning acetylcholine. So acetylcholine is the neurochemical that we want to think about anytime we're talking about neural plasticity, and in particular attention, high attentional states. So everyone knows that the brain is very plastic early in life. So from birth until about age 25, you can learn so much, for better or for worse. I always say the downside is that early in life you're you have less control over your life circumstances, but your brain is very plastic. So there's a, you know, dark and light to that. Later in life you have a lot more control generally over your life circumstances, but the brain becomes less plastic. However, we know, based on Nobel Prize-winning work and recent work in addition to that, that the neuromodulator acetylcholine is secreted when we pay attention to something very specific. It acts as sort of a spotlight in the brain, making certain synapses, the connections between neurons, more active and more likely to be active again than others. So when you hear that song that you love so much and it moves you and you feel dopamine being pulsed into your body, that's a real thing. You're actually getting dopamine secretion. You've formed that deep association with that. And acetylcholine draws your attention to that, and that song is essentially wired in a very indelible way into your nervous system. At multiple You can probably even with certain songs, you can feel your body start to energize because, of course, the brain through connections with your muscles controls your body. So for things that are traumatic or negative, what we're really talking about is neural plasticity that's focused on unlearning. And most of the therapies for this, whether or not it's EMDR, eye movement desensitization reprocessing, or it's traditional psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, or it's somatic embodied release, big you know, Kundalini breathing type what, almost all of those are designed to do something, which is to bring the person, or you bring yourself, into a state of heightened alertness, right? You can't do this stuff when you're sort of half asleep. Heightened alertness, and then focusing your attention on the traumatic or negative event. This is the way that it works. And then pairing that with something new. You know, traditionally this was done with things like NLP or in talk therapy, where people would feel the relation the positive relationship with the therapist. That was kind of the main rationale in association with this very traumatic, sometimes even, you know, shameful type events. And the idea is that you would you would simultaneously have those two experiences, the negative one and the feeling of safety, and you would rewire those circuitries. I actually believe that can work, but it can take a lot of times. It can take a lot of visits to the therapist, which is not to say it's bad, it's just not everyone has access to those resources. Things like eye movement desensitization reprocessing, simply moving the eyes laterally while recounting these negative events. The woman who devised this figured out that somehow when people recount these traumatic experiences, when they're doing these lateralized eye movements, not vertical eye movements, they somehow separate out the negative emotions. And I thought for years, people would ask me about this stuff, Tom, and I thought this is ridiculous. First of all, I'm a vision scientist, and I work on stress. It's like there's no way. And then I really ate my words, because four papers, two in humans, two in mice, and then a fifth paper published in Nature, which is kind of our Super Bowl of scientific publishing, showed that these lateralized eye movements quiet the amygdala. They actually suppress activation of this threat detection center in the amygdala. Why would that be true? Ah, so this is really where it gets cool. Turns out because of when the way that we view the visual world when we move through space, when our head moves or when we walk and things flow past us, that these lateralized eye movements are what happens when you move forward in space, when you're walking, when you're moving forward towards something. And that suppresses activation of the amygdala. Now, you say why? Well, okay, so then 2018 my laboratory did an experiment, there was actually a graduate student in my laboratory where we're looking at fear. In this case, we were looking at fear to big looming objects that either trigger freezing or running and hiding. There's a brain area that's in your brain and my brain that mice also have that triggers a third option, not run and hide, not freeze, but forward confrontation. This is the No, I'm going to fight. I'm going to move forward in the face of adversity. This is the growth mindset. I'm going to lean into friction. And it turns out that this circuit is linked to the dopamine reward pathway. When we move forward in the face of a threat, and obviously we want to do this in healthy, adaptive ways, we suppress activity of the amygdala through physical action of moving forward, and there's a signal sent to the areas of the brain that control dopamine reward. Those reward centers then trigger the release of dopamine to reward forward effort in the face of stress or threat. So, when you hear about people saying, "Look, take some physical action when you're feeling exhausted. Take some forward physical action when you're feeling overwhelmed by this traumatic experience." Now, that could be in the form of a walk, in the Now, this therapist, she figured out with EMDR, because you can't take people walking around for therapy sessions, she figured out that these lateralized eye movements are what trigger suppression of the amygdala, and it makes perfect sense because the amygdala, this threat detection center in our brain, it doesn't connect to the limbs. So, how does it know if you're moving forward? Well, because the eyes are moving. You have these reflexive eye movements that move anytime you're moving through space. So, to make this a little more succinct, it's really forward movement action, pushing yourself across that threshold, not only rewards you, but it suppresses activity of the fear centers in the brain. And these are ancient hardwired mechanisms. These aren't hacks. These are things that mother nature installed in us. So, I love this more than you can possibly imagine. Uh this is so interesting. Um one of the things that I've heard talked about I think is really powerful is that overcoming a fear isn't about um diminishing the fear response. It's about making more robust a sense of being brave in the face of that fear. Um so, moving forward to translate it to, you know, like you say, if you if your brain is meant to interpret stimuli, what at a stimulus level what is that thing that's going to trigger the response? Talk about the the I don't know if it was mice or rats. I think it was rats. Where you force them to fight and they're like in a tube and you like that that study to me tied with what you just said is insanely powerful, especially for people who've allowed themselves to become paralyzed by, you know, fear or whatever. Forward movement, provided it doesn't endanger you or kill you, is absolutely the remedy for fear stress and all and at least in the clinical literature to these sort of trauma events, you know, that that people carry with them for many years. Of course, trauma needs to be dealt with hopefully with a professional, but we can all apply these mechanisms and these neurochemical reward schedules. So, the the study that you're referring to is a beautiful one. Um there's a classic study where researchers, not my lab, put two rats or you could do this with mice, into a tube and the tendency is for them to try and push one or the other one out. One always wins and pushes the other one out. We call the one that got pushed out the loser, the one that pushed them out the winner. Here are the interesting things about this. First of all, the winner will tend to win with other in other battles, even though these are just pushing battles, more because it simply won the time before. The loser, by losing, will tend to lose. And so people say, "Oh, well that explains a lot about society, etc." Well, here's where it gets really interesting. You can even take a mouse or a rat and push it from behind and make it the winner. And then on subsequent trials where you're not pushing it, it will tend to win more often. So, the win doesn't even have to come from itself. So, last year, there was a very important paper published about this where a set of researchers just said, "Well, what is it? Like, what is this winning circuit and this losing circuit? Enough with the demonstration that this happens. Like, what's happening on? What's under the hood?" And so, they went into the brain and they identified a brain area which is part of the frontal cortex, the area that we typically think about planning, action, executive function, all the kind of high-level stuff. And what they discovered was this brain area is more active in the winner than in the loser. In fact, they could take the loser and over stimulate this area and turn the losers into winners. Now, it gets even more ridiculous than that. If you quiet this brain area, winners become losers. Okay? And And if you take a winner and let's say at this tube battle and you put them into let's say a cold environment with a bunch of other mice and you have just a warm corner, mice don't like to be cold, and you say, "Who gets the warm corner?" Right? Who gets the luxury spot? It's always the winner. So, it even breaks down at the level of social interactions. And so, you say, "Okay, all right. Now we know that this brain area, it's this it's this one area of the frontal cortex, but what's it actually doing, right? Okay, what's it actually tran- what how can we translate this? Turns out this brain area that's responsible and required for winning in this series of experiments is actually driving up the level of activation, what you and I would call agitation or stress, to the point where that animal is more likely to move forward. It's simply taking stress, which is wired into us in order to make us feel agitated, instead of suppressing us. You know, instead of saying, "You know what? I'm just going to sit here. I'm overwhelmed. I'm not going to do it. I'm just going to move into action." So, there's a circuit for winning. There's a the same circuit when it's hypoactive, not active enough, is what causes losing in these competitive scenarios. And similarly, there's a circuit for quitting. There's an a norepinephrine circuit in the brainstem. This was published in the last couple years, showing that when animals or people are in constant effort, eventually that level of norepinephrine gets so high that it triggers a circuit that shuts down the motor control over the limbs, and you just say, "That's it. I give up. I'm done." So, these mechanisms were hardwired into us. We all have them. Whether or not it's from evolution, Mother Nature, God, the universe, it is is irrelevant to the discussion that these circuits exist in everybody. And I think it's a select few people who really understand that forward action is what drives these circuits. It's the ability to take that agitation, stress, agitation, increase our focus, and they bias us for movement. And nature wanted that. They want us to move forward in the face of challenge, not to be quiescent. We weren't sitting around battling tigers and saber-toothed tigers all the time. More likely, we were in caves, and we were getting hungry, and we had to go out and search for things. Agitation and stress were designed to get us up and move us. And when we try and fight that too much, and we try and quiet that stress, that actually can be problematic. You have to decide, are you going to try and quiet stress or are you going to actually lean into action? That's critical choice point for everybody who's experienced anything negative or positive for that matter. Dude, that that is so useful in terms of getting people to understand how to get themselves out of it. And this goes back to this notion that um your thoughts are ultimately a choice. Like you get to decide what you think about. And when you understand that you're living in this your environment and that there are things like simply moving forward is going to make you feel entirely different that you're being essentially manipulated by evolution, by nature, however you want to think about it, to get you agitated enough to go out and do the things you need to do, but that it has this just feedback loop of how it makes you feel about yourself that winning begets winning and losing begets losing. But it's it it isn't like at some sort of grand intangible level that it's happening at the level of neurochemistry, that there are regions of the brain that are designed for this. So, how can somebody begin to turn the things around in their life? Cuz I know one thing that people really struggle with is they have this negative voice in their head that's just playing this loop. And so, even if they understand the mechanisms, some part of them is going to discount it, right? Because it's like, well, you're just trying to say that because you think you can manipulate neurochemistry, but you you're a loser. Like you just fall night and that's what's playing in their head. How do people go in and and really take the reins of that process so that they can start winning? Yeah, great question. So, you know, I'm never going to argue that we can subjectively control all of our experience cuz there's some things that just genuinely suck, right? And when they And it's important to And it's important to register those those not so great events or terrible events because they can drive us also. You know, we can be driven from a place of anger, frustration, and and, you know, revenge or we can be driven from a place of, you know, love, gratitude, and etc. I I'm not here to judge which one is better or worse, but the nervous system doesn't distinguish between them. So, if you're the kind of person that needs to, you know, kind of budge yourself into something, great. If you're the kind of person that wants to do things from more of a warm, fuzzy feeling, that's fine, too. What I will say is this. The ability to tap into this dopamine reward system, which is activated anytime you're in pursuit of something that's outside the boundaries of your skin and literally the boundaries of your body, as well as the reward system, the serotonin oxytocin system, which is really about the things that are contained within your own body and immediate experience, things like gratitude and, you know, touch and comfort and things like that with loved ones. The ability to tap into both is crucial. Now, you said something really important, which was, well, negative thoughts. Negative thoughts, what to do? I don't believe that it's very easy to suppress negative thoughts. However, when you realize that thoughts can be deliberately introduced, you can start replacing negative thoughts with new types of thoughts. So, you can always add something in, but when people start to realize that thoughts are very much like physical actions of reaching and picking up a glass of water or taking a jog around the block or typing an email perfectly. This is something I sometimes do cuz I'm I you know, I struggle to do a perfect email. Not all my emails are perfect, but when I do one, I make sure that I I complete it and I think, okay, it's possible. It's not because the email being perfect is so important, it's because I want to remind myself that my thoughts and my actions are essentially the same. The nervous system can organize thoughts. So, for somebody that's struggling, you know, we have these examples like, oh, they were really back on their heels or they were so depleted, no money, and all this stuff. What are they going to We We have so many examples like that, but in trying to make it actionable, it's really about saying, yep, that's all true, but I'm going to introduce a thought which is, I made it through today. I I made it through today and that's actually worth celebrating at a micro level. So, if you can give yourself dopamine rewards in small increments, right? You're not trying to celebrate that you made it through one day. Sometimes that's a huge feat, but most of the time you just want to dose yourself with a little bit of that internal release of dopamine. You start rewarding incremental steps. And if there's anything that your listeners could take away from this whole thing about dopamine and reward schedules and being in movement, it's reward incremental steps. In particular, incremental steps that are about forward action. So, maybe that's writing an email. Maybe that's um maybe that's that run around the block. Maybe that's something much grander for you. As you get better at things, right? The stairs get further and further away from one another cuz you've achieved more success. And so, they tend to be you have to take the rungs on the ladder further apart, so to speak. That's a time when you really need to implement not only the dopamine rewards, but also those serotonin and oxytocin rewards, etc. So, to make it actionable, I would say, remember, don't spend so much time trying to suppress negative thoughts. If you need trauma therapy, pursue that with a professional. But if you have negative thoughts, just remember I can also introduce positive thoughts the same way I can control running around the block. Positive thoughts are the equivalent of forward physical action. And if you reward them internally, you buffer yourself against the quitting circuit, this norepinephrine circuit we were talking about before. You are building a stronger version of yourself completely between your own ears. And some people say, "Well, that's silly." It's like you're saying, "Oh, I'm going to jump up and down reward myself for doing nothing." No, you're building the neural circuits that reward that you can control self-reward. And in doing that, you can push through days and weeks of effort consistently. I don't mean necessarily all-nighters, but you can push and push and push. You know, my career is one that was made over two decades. It wasn't We had our our big, you know, peaks, and we had a lot of valleys. But learning to control these rewards is absolutely key. And I know you've done this, too, Tom. It's like, you know, it the huge wins are great, but it's really about rewarding these increments so you can keep going another 30, another 40 years, 50 years, 100 years, if that's how long, you know, if David Sinclair has his way, you know, um we'll live 100 more years, all of us. So. Yeah, if people if people learn to tie things to the process, then they've got a real shot. Um the the the success is not guaranteed, but the struggle is, right? So, if you are able to get to the point where you get excited about the learning process, you get excited about trying something even if you fail, that if you can associate in your own mind that I feel better about who I am because I tried this thing, um then it begins to stack because even the failures become something that you learn, and so you actually have made some progress because you took action, because you tried something. And now, understanding, you know, some of the brain mechanisms around it, it it really gets super powerful. One thing about dopamine that I just want to make sure I uh mention, and it based on something you said earlier, is that one interesting question about the brain is we is just asking the question, you know, how do we segment time? How do we How do you know that this podcast has obviously has a beginning and a middle and an end, but, you know, how do we segment time? And so, there've been some beautiful experiments done recently showing that, uh for instance, if you're watching a a sports game, regardless of whether or not your team scores, like let's say basketball goes down court, let's say they miss the three-pointer, and then that, you know, it's a close game, there's a little blip of dopamine that says that was one segment of time. And so, dopamine is a big way in which we segment time. The other way are blinks. Believe it or not, What? Yeah, that every time we blink, there's a paper published in Current Biology, every time we blink, we reset our perception of time. I understand more, I guess, than the dopamine. Why would dopamine be involved in time? Perfect question. Turns out that the frequency of blinking is set by the level baseline level of dopamine in the brain. Yes. So, when people are wide-eyed with excitement and they're and they're just they're not blinking very often that or someone is on a drug that kicks out a lot of dopamine, they hardly ever blink, their pupils are huge. They are they are actually not segmenting time in the normal fashion. Oh. And so, much of your life in retrospect is segmented by those peaks in dopamine. They those mark key events in your life. When you met your wife uh they're they're all the segments of your life are are noted by peaks in dopamine or the way that you happen to conceptualize dopamine. And so, also people who are depressed are often very focused on the past. They rumin- naturally they default to ruminating on the past. When you adjust people's dopamine levels to healthy levels, they start becoming more forward-thinking and more present. And so, there's this relationship between blinking and time perception, dopamine and blinking, how you conceptualize time has a lot to do with these peaks in dopamine and when they occur. And this is a big deal because we're you know, 2020 was a rough year for most people. 2021's feeling a little better, but we don't really know where we are in this whole arc of everything that's happening. There's a lot of uncertainty. Yeah. The dopamine peaks and the frequency of those dopamine peaks have everything to do with how we carve up our experience of time. And anyone who spent a lot of time in deep meditation starts to develop a kind of intuitive internal representation of the fact that time is very fluid in this way. When we say time is fluid, what we mean is the secretion of dopamine in these pulses is very fluid. They are under control of our of what's happening externally, but also how you conceptualize your life. Like, where are you in your life? Are you know, hopefully we'll if David Sinclair has his way and hopefully he will, we will all live to be you know, more than 100 years old. Hopefully in good vitality. So, this is the more esoteric aspect of dopamine. before we move off the time thing, let me ask you. So, there was a period in my life, I'll peg it at about 2 years, where for whatever reason, I It could have been 6 hours since I last looked at a clock, I would be within 3 minutes of what time it was. And my wife found it hilarious, and so she'd be like, "What time is it?" And I'm like, "Oh, it's 4:58." And she'd look at it. It was so weird that it like made my radar is like, "Oh my god, I have like this special power." And then it went away. And now I can probably get you within 15 minutes, but like, uh it was really eerie. Is Is there Does that make a prediction or of round like a consistency of dopamine release or something? Yeah, you nailed it. It's the consistency. That's an internal It's an interval timer, as we say. So, when people's dopamine is low, they tend to overestimate. Okay? And when people's dopamine is high, they tend to underestimate time. Now, it is true that dopamine, when it's released, is a little bit of a stimulant in the system because of the way it works with epinephrine. How finely you slice time is very dependent on dopamine and your internal level of autonomic arousal. A really good example would be you're really excited about something or you're really stressed about something, doesn't matter. Dopamine is elevated in excitement, but norepinephrine, epinephrine tend to be elevated anytime we're agitated or or excited. Just imagine you need to catch a flight, you're in line at the security, and the person in front of you seems like they're going really, really slowly. Your frame rate is faster. You're just carving up time more finely. People who are in car accidents and then they report everything being in slow motion, your frame rate is is smaller. You're You're essentially getting You're taking larger time bins. And this is why, let's say you wake up and you're really tired or you just you're kind of out of it, and you look and it's like text messages and emails and all this stuff, the world seems like it's going by really, really fast. Dopamine is what is the is the dynamic process by dopamine release I should say is the dynamic process by which you adjust time perception. So, if you had a very keen perception of the passage of time right down to the minute or so, that suggests very regular intervals of dopamine release. And that's probably tied to outside events that are below your conscious awareness. But, uh dopamine releases I I sort of not to make this uh PG-13 or R-rated, but if we go back to the example of sex, sex and sleep are the two times when space and time have a very fluid type relationship. It's very hard to conceive space and time in sleep. That's actually the nature of sleep is we do the long blink, no joke. We close the shutters, stop bringing in external information. And in sleep, space and time are very fluid, right? Things can happen very fast or very slow. Slow motion, you can be flying and there's a lot of, you know, some of it is dreaming, but space and time are very fluid. In wakefulness, space and time are very anchored by physical events in the world, but our perception of those is dynamically regulated by how much dopamine is in our system. So, it's beginning to sound like dopamine does everything, but it's really associated with motivation, craving, and time interval keeping. And so, I would be willing to bet that your pulses of dopamine were very regular. Just like drops. So interesting. So, we do a lot of things. Who knows what I was doing at that period if it had to do anything just that I'm getting older and so it starts to disrupt itself. Who knows, but what are some things? So, one thing I've heard you talk about which I find really interesting when I think about all the things that we're doing that are disrupting things, all these unintended consequences of modern behavior, I am truly glad that cell phones, the internet, and pornography did not exist when I was younger because I don't know if at 14 I could have been disciplined enough if I had access to that. And what like when you think about the things that we're doing right now that are sort of the that have maybe the most grand unintended consequences, where do you land? Yeah, on the time scale of 24 hours, one of the the huge mistakes that we all make, and I'm I've said this many times, so people have heard me say this before, forgive me, but it turns out it's still true. Uh getting too much bright light exposure from the hours of 10:00 p.m. until 4:00 a.m. unless you have to work shift work, which is a unique case. That bright light exposure between 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m., even if you adjust the colors of the lights, you still need to get everything really, really dim because it actually blocks the release of dopamine through a pathway that involves the structure called the habenula. The habenula was a kind of cryptic structure in the brain for a long time, but now we know there's a punishment signal in the brain. You get neurochemically punished for viewing bright light at those hours. Why how how would that be wired in? We'd never be able to expose ourselves to bright light. Uh so, that's a great question. So, firelight won't do that. Moonlight's fine. Candles, lights that are dim or not in your environment. that? So, the the the pathway to the habenula and then to these dopamine reducing circuits are the pain pathway that we were referring to earlier. It's a generic pathway through which lots of different types of signals and stimuli and events can punish us internally. [ __ ] this is so good, dude. So, I'm going to call this the rich kid effect. Like there and you mentioned hard work earlier. Mhm. There is a reason, I think, that children of wealthy parents end up imploding because there is a an evolutionary, the punishment pathway, evolutionary thing that's going on that says you didn't have to work hard for the things that you own, and because from I need you to go hunt and gather and face a saber-tooth tiger, I have to reward you for doing hard things and punish you for not doing hard things. Well, and you know, in the case of the the the generic model of the of the spoiled rich kid, it they actually can't access dopamine. Uh remember that that uh movie from the '80s? It was a a uh it was called like The Toy or something with Richard if this [ __ ] says toy, I'm going to have a seizure. Yes, I remember. Richard Pryor in that movie and that the kid has everything and he's the he's the epitome of the spoiled brat. All the toys, all the cars, all the things. Now, we see this with people who actually go from rags to riches and then bathe in all their the luxuries they didn't have as a child. These are often the athletes that don't go on to perform well again. Um these are people that crash because of other dopamine-seeking behaviors. You know, I'm not going to call out names, but there are far too many examples of these. And I don't call out names mostly because we are all capable of this. We all would like to think that, oh, if I had all that money or if I had all that success, I would really be a good human being and I wouldn't do those things. Anyone, any human being that is immersed in these dopamine circuits too much or who gets too much pleasure without having to pursue it first and really work and it and actually experience pain-pleasure ratcheting back and forth along that climb cuz it wasn't just dopamine like this for you. It was probably pain-pleasure, pain-pleasure, pain-pleasure, pain-pleasure, right? They're always proportional to one another. So, anyone that does that it has a tremendously hard time accessing pleasure. They can't do that and and we often think about the extremes of addiction and those are really severe, but we also have to think about the more subtle forms of something we really love but indulging in it just a little too often so that it no longer has that edge. You know, if there have been really good studies of people who jump out of airplanes with parachutes. You know, I I'm sure it's a lot of fun. It looks like a thrill, but people do it over and over and over again often die doing other things. They often become drug addicts because it's a huge Oh, yeah. Yeah, a lot of that. And you know, there there are a lot of examples of this. I mean, you can get addicted to anything. The key is to regulate that behavior. So, you asked what you know, what should people do? Well, certainly I'm trying this now, and I have some good examples, some young people I know and work with are taking breaks from not just social media, but no cell phone whatsoever. I'm actually trying it an odd experiment, which is for the first hour of every day, no phone. Mostly because I think of your 25 no-goes? Yes, I have a bunch of no-goes. Right, so we have circuitry in the brain uh related to the so-called basal ganglia, and we have go activating, you know, think gas pedal, and then we have there's a lot of no-go circuitry. And learning how to keep that no-go, don't circuitry, as we could call it, uh tuned up is very important. And so, many times throughout the day, but I try and get 25 a day where I actively refrain from doing something that I impulsively want to do. Could be looking at my phone, but it could even be something trivial. Like, I want to walk to the kitchen and get a glass of water. So, I'm actively engaging in self den- in in denial, not cognitive denial, probably that too, but how would I know? Um but, in action-based denial. So, restricting my behavior in some way as a way of keeping these dopamine circuits tuned up. Also, not looking at my phone first thing in the morning for an hour because knowing what we now know about the second phase of sleep and REM sleep being more predominant in the second wave of sleep, and the fact that you're working through a lot of emotional and logistical contingencies, you're reshaping your brain in sleep. That's when neuroplasticity occurs, during sleep. It's triggered in wakefulness, but it actually takes place in sleep, especially that second half of sleep. When you wake up in the morning, you are in a perfect position to what I call receive the download of all the work that your neural circuitry has been doing the night before. But, if you immediately go to a sensory experience, especially a rich sensory experience of stuff scrolling by, you're actually missing the information that you processed at night. And even more importantly, that second half of the night during REM sleep is when the emotional weight of things start becomes let's say you put it on the shelf properly. Things that are important to emotional emotionally register get put in one shelf. Things that were like the comment you got on Twitter that was triggering doesn't seem like such a big deal after a good night's sleep. And that's because that second half of sleep is actually when you re-experience these things, but your body can't secrete adrenaline. It's kind of an internal form of therapy or even trauma therapy. And that's why people who don't get that sleep are very, you know, they're easily agitated. They feel like the world is crushing down on them. So, when I wake up in the morning, I want to receive ideas that I want to learn from my learning. And if you take in new information, you are not in a position to do that. And 60 minutes is a tough one. So, I give myself two no-gos for the 60-minute block if I can do it. And I'll tell you a lot of mornings I fail, Tom. I don't do it. Interesting. I found that shocking, but I heard you say that in another interview and I was like Well, I mean, I'm human, you know, there are mornings where um I get enticed or worse worse, I find myself reflexively picking up the phone without having made the conscious decision. And that's when I realize that you know, we are all deep in this process and I think uh we have to regulate it. The The experiment I'd like to do, maybe you'll do this with me as a challenge cuz a challenge is always good, is in the new year I actually want to take every odd waking hour of the day off the phone. So, even hours of the day as long as it's waking, I'm willing to have it on and work with it. But odd hours, just turn it off no matter what. I don't know if this will destroy most of the relationships in my life, but but it just to see, can I do it on a rigidly externally imposed schedule? Because if you think about most of the growth in life comes from these rigidly externally imposed schedules and we hate them. But they are where we learn restraint. Dude, this is so important. I don't know if I hate them anymore. So, people will often ask like how I do this, that, or the other. Whatever it is. Like, Tom, how do you So, I work 93 hours a week. That's like my average. That's your average. So, Tom, why do you work 93 hours every week? And the answer is because 93 are joyful and 94 wouldn't. And when I start working more than that, it usually means that I'm juggling so many things that my brain seems to be using sleep as a way to track some of them or something. So, I find myself waking up a lot. Now, I have a trick that allows me to fall back asleep very fast, but it's still not as restful as just sleeping through the night. What's the trick if you don't mind me interrupting? I don't at all. So, I have two pairs of AirPod headphones. And I put them in and I put them on a a fiction book. And I turn the volume down such that if I don't put a little bit of pressure on my ear, I can't make out what they're saying. So, as soon as I drift off, the pressure releases and I can still hear that noise is being made, but I can't track it. And so, I'm usually out probably in about 3 minutes. Wow. That that changed my life in terms of when I get stressed, I can still fall back asleep. Such a great skill. And just reflecting on what you use, that murmur in the background and this kind of low level I can't quite detect it is actually the way that your brain detects things as you're falling asleep. So, I wonder if you've triggered your circuit to run in reverse where you actually can send yourself back under. What what it makes me think is that I can't process the problems and listen to a story at the same time. And so, my brain clicks over into story mode and it's like, oh, we're digesting this story. I I'm getting input. So, because I'm getting input, because it's story, my brain lets go of I I to solve problems. And then that allows me to fall right back asleep. That's great. Such a great skill. And waking up in the middle of the night from time to time to use the bathroom is is actually quite normal. Um and some people are really obsessed by the fact, "Oh no, I woke up." And then they get triggered. But I learned this last year um that the peak in our alertness is actually about 90 minutes before our natural bedtime. And a lot of people they, you know, they reach the point in the evening where they're ready to go to sleep and then they feel all this, you know, excitement and surge of energy and they think, "Oh no, I'm not going to be able to fall asleep." But that's actually a natural surge that's followed by a dip. A lot of people also have the trouble of waking up in the middle of the night and wondering why they can't fall back asleep. This is dreadfully hard for a lot of people. that for years. Yeah. And one of the solutions is to go to bed earlier because it means that your melatonin is starting to get released early in the evening. And so we all have the natural ability to push to stay late stay up later if we really need to. This has obvious adaptive utility. But some people might who should go to bed quote unquote should go to bed at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. they're pushing to 11:00 or 12:00 and then their melatonin signal's starting to drop off. Now they can't fall asleep. Or they're waking up at 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning and they're they're in trouble. But it sounds like you've hit the right schedule. 93 hours is impressive output. Yeah. That's a lot of years of making an obscene amount of mistakes. And to close the loop on so people how do you accomplish XYZ? And the answer is partly rules. So you have to be obsessed with your goal, right? So for me that's all obsessions start with a goal. What do you want? Is that thing exciting and honorable? Assuming it's exciting and honorable, there's ways to like create feedback loops which is largely what we've been talking about today about attaching the dopaminergic response specifically to the pursuit of that thing rather than the having it. And by to because I'm so excited and because I so believe in the reality of my goals that I actually could have them and that having them would be awesome, I can create rules in my life and then I really stick to those rules. So, once I'm very careful about what rules I put in place because I have to believe that they will actually lead me to this goal that's really exciting for me. But, if I believe it, then I can put them in and then also part of my identity is that I'm the type of person that when I set a rule I follow it. So, I can create this loop of like feeling good about myself and the thing that I'm pursuing, but it really works and I'm shocked how few people have the kind of rule that you're talking about in the new year to say, "Hey, I'm only going to do odd hours, there's no phone." Yeah, well, and like I said, I'm not perfect I'm not as disciplined as you are about my no-goes. I try. I actually find that tabulating is is kind of fun. Mhm. Um, it's also fun to get really triggering comments and and to not close the dopamine loop for them. I think if people understood um the dopamine reward prediction error that we could end all the um amplifying comment battles online because what happens is if someone takes a a jab at you of any kind, there's actually an open dopamine loop waiting for you to respond and any response actually gives them that that dopamine response of success. It's a little bit of a It's like scoring a three-pointer. And the no response actually drops their dopamine below baseline. And it that's its own form of retaliation and I have to be careful cuz I don't want to encourage people to retaliate, but any anything that short-circuits the kind of madness of getting pulled into some online battle that's totally meaningless. It's taking people away from other powerful good things that they could do in the world. You know, it we've been talking mainly about dopamine and its scheduling and about the fact that it can be attached to anything. I think many people find it hard to subjectively attach dopamine to something they don't want to do. This is something that if we'd spoken a year ago, I would have I my answer would have been a little bit different to the question of how do you get motivated? Well, one way to do that is if you are good at subjectively attaching dopamine to the pursuit. Just knowing, okay, I really am hungry for this. I'm just going to I'm going to tell myself that, you know, making, you know, making it 1% of the way is a success and then I'm going to keep going and I'm going to keep ratcheting on. And that's great if you can do that. But for people that can't do that, understanding this relationship with the pleasure-pain balance can be more powerful. Just understanding the more friction and pain that you experience, the greater the dopamine reward you will get later and that serves as its own amplifier of the whole process of pursuing more dopamine. And then the other aspect of it is that anytime that we're leaning into action, it you know, it has the the possibility of being an amplifying process or a depleting process. And the key to that is making sure that you're balancing the dopamine and epinephrine systems. You know, epinephrine being this molecule of universal currency of energy output. Could be out of hate or could be out of love. Epinephrine doesn't care. And actually dopamine doesn't care. None of these systems care about us. They just work underneath our sub underneath our conscious control. But when you start to understand that hitting the gas pedal is great, but hitting the gas pedal and then coming off the gas pedal a little bit, we can kind of sit in more relaxed RPM, actually allows you to go much further. I think that people leaning into action is terrific. I always say you can either be back on your heels, flat-footed, or forward center of mass. The best situation is actually to be right upright, but just know that you can be forward center of mass at any point. And, you know, the to take it back to sex and reproduction because it's a salient example, the arc of of sex is very interesting. When cuz when you think about autonomic arousal, it turns out that the the arousal stage of sex actually involves release of dopamine, but is what we call parasympathetic dominant. It's actually has to be relaxed enough in order to occur. Okay? Everyone can read between the lines on this. Orgasm is actually a I don't want to say full-blown. It's a It's a It is a sympathetic nervous system driven response. It's identical to the stress system. It's driven by the same neural circuits as stress. That's so weird. And then what comes afterward? The parasympathetic system goes back up again. It's that deep relaxation. So, why do I say this? Not to talk about sex to be you know, to to to serve as a highlighter, but rather our species arrived here because of this dance between arousal and relaxation, arousal and relaxation. And one thing we can say for sure about every human being that's alive now is that their parents, at least once, mastered this dance Mhm. of relaxed, but not and excited, but not too excited, then really excited, and then relaxed. That dance was mastered by all of our parents, and that's what delivered us here to some extent. And so, I what this means is that all the neural circuits from the ones that led to our conception to the ones that lead to us pursuing goals have this balance. There's almost like a like a seesaw, right? There's activation and calm, activation and calm. And it's that dynamic process that's important to master in every endeavor. So, we use sex as an example, but in pursuit of goals, you have to learn how to pursue short-term goals, and like the goals within the day, make a cup of coffee, and go and long-term goals. And when I said dopamine is what's setting the your time perception, it's an interval timer. What you're saying is it's like the two marshmallow experiment done at Stanford, def- defer the dopamine, and actually, if you can, turn the waiting into the dopamine, and then you can extend out the reward for, you know, waiting for the second marshmallow 15 minutes later, etc., etc. And there are many, many examples of this in the psychology and neuroscience literature. And I would say finally, in 2020, we finally as a field got a clear idea of how dopamine is really working. Because before it was all about work, dopamine hit, right? Sex gives you a dopamine hit. The internet gives you a dopamine hit. What we didn't realize is that repeated engagement with these things leads to dopamine depletion. And that the pain and pleasure balance is always at work. Hello, my friend. You know that I believe success requires you to see failure as the ultimate learning tool. Success requires you to be disciplined and gritty, and to never, ever quit on your dreams. I say all of that because one thing is certain, the road to achieving your goal is not smooth or linear. I wish it was, but it's not. It's going to be bumpy, sometimes scary. Some days you'll take two steps forward and slide 10 steps back. And that's why success also requires you to know how to pull yourself out of a rut and get unstuck fast. Life is short. You can't be messing around with your goals. You've got to make progress every single day. So, I've pulled a class from Impact Theory University called how to get unstuck, which you can watch for free with the link on your screen or by clicking below. When you join me for that free preview of that workshop from Impact Theory University, I'm going to teach you my strategy for how to understand exactly where you need to be going, how to identify the obstacle that's blocking you, and the best way to make the most progress towards that goal, and keep your momentum. Right, click that link and let's get to work. All right, I'll see you on the inside. I'm super interested in something you said, which is ultimately our thoughts are a choice. I'd love to start with that. I'd love to start with your sort of, I think, really insightful definition about what a growth mindset really is. Yeah, well, first of all, Carol's a wonderful colleague and friend, and so we've been doing a bit of work on the neuroscience of growth mindset among other states of mind. So, you know, what the study of neuroscience is really about what the nervous system does, and amazingly enough, the nervous system is responsible for everything that happens to us from the time that we're born until the time we die. But, that really boils down to only five things. The nervous system has the responsibility of sensation, so sensing the physical events in the environment. We have these so-called receptors in the eyes, in the ears, in the nose, in the mouth, on the skin, that take physical entities in the in the universe that are real, fixed, non-negotiable things, like sound waves and photons of light, and chemicals in the environment traveling that make it into our nose and things like that, and convert those into the second thing, which is perceptions. So, the nervous system's responsibility is to take those sensations, which are non-negotiable, and perceive certain ones and not others. So, for instance, right now, until I say, you know, what's the sensation of your feet contacting the floor or the bottoms of your shoes, you weren't thinking about it, but those pressure receptors were being engaged the entire time. So, your perception is like a window or a spotlight that's very much linked to attention. Then there are motions, often called feelings. And those are really designed to push us down particular avenues of perception, and the next thing, which are thoughts. Okay, so we've got sensation, perception, feelings, and then there are thoughts, which really have a lot to do with what we're perceiving and the way we're organizing those perceptions. What they mean, and generally that's put into the context of what we already know, or memories. And then, the fifth thing is behaviors or actions. And of course neurons are responsible for generating actions and there really two kinds of actions. They're the actions that you generate reflexively like your breathing and your heart rate right now are largely reflexive or you could decide control of your respiration and be make it voluntary, right? And not just reflexive. So those five things, sensations, perceptions, feelings, thoughts and actions really encompass all of our life experience and that's from the very mundane of getting up in the morning and brushing your teeth to the most awe-inspiring uh goal-motivated uh pinnacle moments of your life. The nervous system, not the immune system, not the digestive system, all of which are important, but the nervous system meaning the brain, spinal cord and the connections with the body and the connections from the body back to the brain and spinal cord are responsible for all of that. And as a just a final point, the nervous system is also responsible for telling the immune system, something that's very relevant right now in this COVID pandemic, when to be active. You know, we don't often think about the immune system as governed by anything, but it's actually governed by the nervous system. Yeah, one thing that I find really interesting is the way that the in in fact it'll be interesting to hear your take on this. So I think of the brain as basically creating a virtual reality environment that we're engaging in. Now it's a very usable virtual environment that I can walk around without bumping into too much [ __ ] Like you said, I can translate um you know, the things that are floating around in the air into a sense of smell um and I can navigate the world based on what I see and hear and smell and taste and all of that stuff, but at the end of the day it really is all happening uh in this enclosed dark skull and the brain itself doesn't ever actually interact with light, it doesn't interact with sound waves. It's all an interpretation of that um which I find really interesting and I find it really interesting the way that that plays out into our lives. How do you think about that as somebody who um is is literally lifting a brain out of somebody's, I would assume, deceased uh head. You know, there you have such a tactile um relationship with the brain. Yeah, so you said something really important, which is that, you know, we're essentially just this collection of cells and yet everything is organized in this almost video game virtual reality-like version of the world. So, the way that neuroscientists think about these sorts of things nowadays is in the following way, that you're absolutely right, Tom. Everything about life experience is an abstraction. And the brain has a language. It's creating an abstract representation of everything that's out there in the world. Everything. And that might seem sort of obvious to some of your listeners, but when you think about it, that's perhaps one of the most interesting and profound features of life in general, the galaxies, any organism, because somehow your abstractions and my abstractions and the abstractions of the brains of all your listeners are able to converge on some common meaning, at least in many cases, about what these words mean or what um different events in the natural world mean. Now, objects fall down, they don't generally fall up. So, there are some rules that we learn very early on that are obvious, right? But there's some other rules that are less obvious that come about when we start thinking about things like growth mindset and what's rewarding, what is punishing, what it means to lean in hard to a problem or what creativity is. But I I want to just mention there's one exception to all this, which is very interesting and it happens to be the one that my lab works on, so I am biased in this regard. But there's one piece of your brain that is outside your skull. In fact, you have two. Every The rest of your central nervous system is inside your skull and spinal cord, except lining the back of your eye is the neural retina, which is three cell layers thick, meaning it's about as thick as a credit card. And the neural retina is not attached to the brain. It is brain. The cells in in the neural retina were deliberately placed during development. They got pushed out of the skull and deliberately to sense light events in the environment, and not just the shapes of things and what's moving around out there, but fundamentally to tell the rest of the brain and nervous system when to be alert and when to be asleep based on how much light is in the environment and the quality of that light. So, viewing morning sunlight around the time of sunrise, as well as evening sunlight around the time of sunset, not just at sunrise and sunset, but near those times, a couple hours on either side, is fundamental for instructing the brain, a special collection of neurons right above the roof of the mouth, which then instructs all the cells of the body when to be active. It's sort of like you're a factory and you need your digestion to work on a particular schedule and you need your spleen to work on another schedule. And it's morning light and evening light in particular, and the cells that do this, they pay attention not to blue light. Everyone's kind of obsessed with blue light as it relates to this stuff. Wrong. That's only half the equation. It's the It's the contrast between yellow light and blue light. So, in the morning and at sunset, yellows are getting brighter. Watch a sunrise or uh sometime or a sunset and blues are getting darker and that contrast is relayed to the brain. You don't perceive it. Even blind people can transmit this information into the brain and it and it says, "Make a cortisol pulse early in the day to give you active, you know, energy and agitate your body to go be active." And then it times the onset of the melatonin pulse in the evening, which is going to put you to sleep. And so, when we think about the brain and the nervous system being isolated, it is isolated, but it's a as much as it's a machine and a collection of cells, they need to work together and they need to know when to be active. And so, it's viewing of morning sunlight in particular and evening sunlight in particular that anchors everything that goes on from the top of your skull to the bottom of your feet in terms of this basic thing of when to be alert and when to be asleep. And screens, but not just screens and not just blue light, making their way into the hours of say 11:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. do just the opposite. They There was a paper published in Cell, a very an excellent journal, showing that bright light activation between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. sends a signal from the eye to a brain structure called the habenula. The name doesn't matter, but it kicks off a disappointment circuit. It starts suppressing dopamine. And the habenula is linked to the pancreas, right? The brain-body connection, and starts dysregulating blood sugar. So, the the key Why does it Why does it trigger disappointment? Yeah, so this is very interesting. So, every circuit in the brain has a push and a pull. So, we have a reward system for viewing light at the particular times of day, which are morning and evening and during the day, and avoiding bright lights in the middle of the night. But, there's a punishment signal, literally, a puni- a chemical punishment signal whereby dopamine, which is this feel-good molecule that's essential for things like growth mindset and pursuit of goals and well-being of all sorts, is suppressed when human beings or animals view bright light in the middle of this dark phase of their circadian cycle, which is between 11:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. approximately. And so, nature does this. It creates rewards for doing the right things that move you in the direction of general adaptation and wellness, and it punishes you. Mother nature is kind of a a double-edged sword. She's very benevolent when she wants to be, but if you don't obey her rules, she punishes you, too. And so, you have circuits in the brain that are pro-depressive. And this light viewing in the from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. is a kicks off a pro-depressive circuit. And there are real a good segway. I want to get into some of the other things that are pro-depressive as well. But before we do that, one one thing that um I really want to anchor us to is what you were saying you're saying that people have an oversimplified view of what a growth mindset is. You were just talking about that in relationship to dopamine. Um give us your sort of brief nutshell version of what a growth mindset really is. Yeah. So Carol and I have had a lot of discussions about this idea of yet. I'm not there yet, but that I can't get there. That's the whole principle behind growth mindset. However, when you the the discovery of growth mindset is worth thinking about. So Carol's discovery was these kids that for whatever reason you know like doing math problems even though they knew they couldn't get the answers right. These were sure fail problems. So it's the same kind of people that like doing puzzles. And these kids not surprisingly go on to do phenomenally well in a number of different areas of ac- academic pursuit. You know, but what's interesting about growth mindset is that it seems like there's some attachment of the reward systems of the brain to the action or the pursuit of a goal, not just achieving a goal. And when we step back and we look at what that really entails at a neurochemical level, we have reward systems in the brain. They generally fall into two categories. They're reward systems that make you feel really good with kind of the here and now and everything that's within the confines of your skin and the things you already have. You know, love of your dog, love of your spouse, gratitude for all the things you happen to have. And that and those are generally governed by the release of molecules like serotonin and oxytocin. Okay? But then there's another reward system, which is the one that drove a lot of human evolution, which is the dopamine reward system. Now dopamine is a very misunderstood molecule. It's often talked about only in the context of reward. Like I'm going to work to this goal, I'm going to build my company, I'm going to, you know, get tenure as a professor, whatever it is, and you reach it and you get this dopamine reward. And indeed, that's true. But what's often not discussed is that dopamine is secreted en route to rewards, while you pursue rewards. Now, the ability to tap into that system, to subjectively amplify that pathway of reward in pursuit of goals, is an absolute game-changer when it comes to things like anything challenging that of long duration or uncertainty or getting through this COVID, you know, pandemic situation. The But the amazing thing is, remember, the brain only does five things, and we get to decide which of those sensations and perceptions have relevance and which ones don't, or which ones are attached to a goal and which ones aren't. So, growth mindset, in its purest form, is the attachment of these reward systems to the effort process, to the friction process, and not just to obtaining a reward. And just as a kind of final point to that, there's a very, um, well-known body of literature in neuroscience, at least among neuroscientists, that talks about something called reward prediction error. And it says, if you can dose the dopamine subjectively as you go through the pursuit of something, and then have a lot of dopamine when you reach that thing, it's very likely that you're going to reinforce that circuit. There will be neural plasticity, and that circuit will become stronger. So, the next time you will revisit those sets of behaviors. The opposite can happen, too, where you're in real anticipation of something, this is going to be great, this is going to be great, this is going to be great, and then you reach that goal and it's kind of underwhelming. And that generally triggers this this circuit that I referred to earlier, this kind of disappointment or depr- pro-depressive circuit. So, dopamine is involved in reward, but it's also involved in the pursuit of rewards. And so, as you reach a milestone, or as you tell yourself I'm on the right track, this friction I'm feeling, this late night, this early morning, this hard conversation with somebody that doesn't feel good, I'm going to tell myself this is for a larger purpose. That's that subjective insertion, that abstraction that we're talking about earlier. And when you start releasing dopamine to those kinds of things, there's essentially no limit on the number of things you can do or the energy to do them. So, just as a last last point about dopamine, when we're in effort, we're always secreting adrenaline. We're always in pursuit and it's draining, it's tiring. Dopamine has this beautiful capacity to buffer adrenaline. And you know this, you've experienced this before because if you've ever been working really, really hard, maybe your team is depleted, everything's just a mess and somebody cracks a joke, and all of a sudden, in an instant, it's like everything's reframed. That couldn't have been hormonal. Hormones work on that on the schedule of like hours to days to weeks. It had to be neurochemical. It absolutely had to be neurochemical and that neurochemical is dopamine. Dude, what you just described is literally the scientific breakdown of how you turn your life around. I I would just tell people that that subjective insertion is one of the most powerful concepts I have ever heard in neuroscience. You're the only one I've ever heard articulate it that succinctly. Now, you talk a lot about meaning. Walk me through like the how we assign meaning, how we leverage the reward and punishment to to really get us in a situation where we can push through something other people might not be able to push through. Yeah. So, when you start thinking about things like growth mindset in terms of how they convert to neurochemical signatures, it leads us to this place of, "Okay, if it's all subjective, then, you know, if I just say, 'Look, I'm going to stand up out of my chair and and that's going to feel amazing.' Is that going to work?" Well, no. It depends on the meaning that I attach to something. And this and this subjective part can be a little tricky and a little bit hard for people. So, I want to try and lay it out in a in a concrete way so that if they want to apply this, they can. Um, incidentally, or not so incidentally, I should say, when you look at communities of very high performers, and I'm fortunate enough to do some consulting with some people from special forces communities and so forth, they're very good, as are you, at attaching a reward to specific behaviors in subjective ways. So, growth mindset and these dopamine rewards that we subjectively apply are not about saying, "Oh, you know, I had a terrible day. I performed poorly, but you know what, it's great. I just feel great anyway." It's not about that. It's not about attaching your sense of reward to the ultimate goal. It's about attaching your sense of reward to the fact that you're making action steps that are generally in the right direction. The more you can reward the effort process, the better off you are at building these kinds of neural circuits and these kind of tendencies to be able to lean into anything challenging over essentially any duration. So, how does this work? Like, how would somebody do this, right? Well, keeping in mind that adrenaline and epinephrine are all great for getting us into action. This is Mother Nature's way of chemically making us feel kind of agitated. Remember, stress was designed to agitate us to move us away from things and toward things. But, realizing that that's a a limited resource, that eventually that same chemical is what makes you have a negative mindset, it feels painful, it's the burn in your body, it's uncomfortable. And realizing that dopamine can push back on that neurochemically. It can suppress those sensations of wanting to quit. You say, "Well, then how do I get this dopamine to work for me before I hit a goal?" Because not every day is going to be a real win. There's some days, I mean, I know from my science career, there were days that were really hard. Experiments didn't work, papers got rejected, and yet, you know, I've spent two decades or more just drilling on and drilling on, and it's been a sheer pleasure at times. But, there's been, you know, some pain points along the way. So, what is this process really about and how would somebody implement these dopamine and epinephrine type neurochemical events in their own life? Well, we all know the example of like wanting to run a marathon. I've never run a marathon, but um that'd be a nice goal to have. Let's say tomorrow morning I set my shoes near the door. Now, a lot of people have talked about this. Day one, you set your shoes near the door. Day two, you go out the door. Day three, you run around the block. Day four, but the key thing is not just to go through the actions, but when you hit each one of those self-designated milestones, the milestones that you're setting out for yourself, you have to pause for a moment and tell yourself, "I'm heading in the right direction. I haven't run the marathon yet, but this is the foundation upon which I'm going to lay another foundation upon which I'm going to lay another foundation." And those little pulses of dopamine allow you to get that action step without the depletion that it would normally bring. Otherwise, you're It's like you're spending money. This is like replenishing this bank account that you have, and it's a neural bank account. And so, dopamine is the is the thing that you can control the dosing of. And so, if you say, "Today, it's my shoes at the door, but tomorrow, it's around the block, and that's it. But that's in the direction I want to go." What you do is you now get those two events, plus the next day, the mile-long run, and so forth, without it depleting you. It actually builds this capacity to build more reward. And this is what you've done. This is what people from elite special forces can do. They know how to make small, simple physical steps in the real world that allow them to build on these reward circuitries, but they don't get delusional about how they're doing. They they They know they keep the end in mind, but they get very micro. They move the horizon in very close. And so, if you can move the horizon to something you know you can complete, and you reward that, you essentially are where you were before. You're just as strong, if not stronger, but you're heading in the direction you need to go. You're not depleting, you're not spending out anything. And it feels a little weird because none of us like to reward things that aren't external, but the ability to control these internal reward schedules is everything. For people to um make use of every tool that they have at their at their disposal, something that you've talked about that I've always been really interested in at the periphery, but never have um dove into it enough is hypnosis. Mhm. When people think of hypnosis, I think they think of stage hypnosis. What's the real deal? Why is it useful and and how do people actually use it? Yeah. So, um I'm really glad you asked about this. So, I have a colleague, his name is David Spiegel in our Department of Psychiatry at Stanford, and he and I have a collaboration going now looking at how respiration or breathing can be used to shift the brain into different states. And um I've talked to David about this, and so I'm sort of borrowing from his words here, so I want to be fair that these are from those conversations. So, hypnosis inevitably involves relaxing the nervous system, taking the nervous system into states that are more like sleep. Now, what I mean by that is in high alert states, where you're talking and planning and in action and stress in particular, the brain is very linear. It's saying, "Okay, if this, then this. If then that and that." This is why we tend to be forward thinking when we're when we're stressed. We tend to be not in our immediate experience, but really kind of forward thinking. So, clinical hypnosis involves going into a state of deeper relaxation so that our analysis of space and time, meaning the way that the brain is perceiving events, is slightly dismantled so that it's a little bit dream-like. And then the hypnotist, and this could be by listening to a script or listening to a hypnotherapist, starts to narrow our context, take our thoughts, if you will, it down a particular path. And that path could be one of stress reduction or uh smoking cessation. Um hypnosis is incidentally is very good for treatment of smoking cessation or for feelings of well-being or confronting traumas. So what it is is it's really opening up the window for neural plasticity, which is of course the brain's ability to change in response to experience. To trigger neural plasticity, you have to have focus, especially as an adult. You need acetylcholine released, but high levels of attention, acetylcholine and norepinephrine together. Norepinephrine to create that sense of urgency and acetylcholine to bring that spotlight of focus in really really tight. That triggers plasticity, but the actual it marks certain synapses in the brain for change, but the actual changes in the synapses, the rewiring, okay? That happens during states of sleep and deep rest. So this is why when you're trying to learn a motor skill, you go and you go and your tennis serve is not happening, it's not happening, you take a break, you come back and you nail it. You're like, "Wait, what happened?" Well, you need time to set those circuits in motion and allow them to do to the rewiring, the sort of adaptation. Hypnosis seems to capture both the high attentional state and the deep relaxation at the same time. It's this very unusual state of mind where you're neither asleep nor awake and in tight focus or narrow focus. And it's very clear that it leads to these rapid changes in behavior because you're rewiring the brain. And the reason you're able to rewire the brain so quickly is because you're getting the trigger event, the focus, and you're also getting the relaxation event simultaneously. And so it's much faster than separating out the learning trigger from the actual rewiring of the brain. My lab has a deep interest and David Spiegel's lab has a deep interest now in using respiration or breathing to shift our state to either heighten states of focus and alertness to open up neural plasticity, right? There are going to be lots of ways to access these states. you give me some examples? Like what are we doing very specifically? Breathwork I find incredibly interesting. Changed my life through meditation just shifting my breathing to diaphragmatic breathing was no joke. It changed my life. It changed my relationship to anxiety, my feeling of being able to control my state as it started to spiral. So I'd be very curious to know what type of breathing are we talking about here? Yeah, so I'm really glad you mentioned the diaphragm. Diaphragm of course being this muscle inside of all of us, at least all mammals, that works all the time to move our lungs because all the cells in our body need oxygen of course we got to get rid of carbon dioxide. It does that but it's done reflexively but we can also take voluntary control over it. I want to just mention about the diaphragm why it's so important for what were the state changes is that a lot of people talk about the vagus nerve and all this stuff. The vagus and these connections between the brain and this vagus nerve or the gut is what gets activated when you're really full and you eat a big meal and you feel relaxed. Those are great but it's very slow. The diaphragm is skeletal muscle just like your bicep, just like your tricep, just like your quadricep. It is the only internal organ except maybe a couple muscles in your throat that are actually skeletal muscle meaning it was designed to be voluntarily moved. And the diaphragm isn't just designed to move your lungs. It also sends a signal through the so called phrenic nerve back to the brain to inform your brain about the status of your body. So when you breathe fast deliberately, the reason you feel kind of an elevated sense of alertness is because yeah, there are chemicals secreted but mostly because the phrenic nerve is firing off. It's telling you, "Hey, the body's moving. We're really running now." even though you're stationary in a chair if you're doing breathing. Or if you're breathing very slowly and rhythmically, right? Box type breathing or you know, slow slow breathing, your diaphragm is telling your brain, "Hey, we're calm. We're good." and you calm down very quickly on the order of seconds. And so once you start tapping into this you start realizing, "Okay, movement of the body was designed to inform the brain of where to be, not just the brain telling the body." And how does the body communicate with the brain? Through the phrenic nerve from the diaphragm. So, my lab is really pursuing two questions, and this is still being worked out, so I just want to highlight that it's still in progress. But, certain patterns of breathing will calm you very much like entering a hypnotic state. And so, you have a subset of neurons in your brainstem that are responsible for sighing. Is it You have a subset of neurons in your brainstem responsible for for coughing, subset of neurons responsible for laughter, and a subset of neurons in your brainstem for sighing. This was a paper published in nature. This is a real thing. These neurons are every so often, and your dog does this, too. You inhale twice, and then you exhale long. Now, that double inhale, best done through the nose on the inhales, and then long exhale through the mouth, activates these sigh neurons that trigger the so-called calming reflex, the parasympathetic arm of the nervous system. So, we have a hardwired mechanism, a set of neurons connection to the diaphragm, and back again from the diaphragm to the brain, that was designed to activate calm. And when people ask me, "How should I breathe to calm myself down?" I would say, "Double inhale through the nose followed by exhales." Two or three of those will reset your autonomic nervous system faster than any other mechanism we're aware of, because it's really capitalizing on a set of neural circuits. Now, once you're calm, you say, "Well, how do I get into plasticity states?" There you want to go the other direction. That's going to be inhaling a lot more than you exhale. You're going to be driving in more oxygen than you are breathing out, generally carbon dioxide, and that will lead to states that are kind of more elevated. This is typical of things like Tummo breathing, Wim Hof breathing, Kundalini breathing. And when people enter those states, their whole world changes because it off the frontal cortex. It really This is why sometimes people pass out or they feel like they want to get up and move. You know, you get some odd behavior when you're doing this kind of thing. So, the key is if you want to access states of heightened plasticity. Let's say you want to learn faster or you want to be more um you want to bring more out of some physical training that you're doing. The key is to apply those principles. First, you need to focus. You need to bring yourself to that heightened state of alertness. You can breathe to do that. So, this would be super oxygenated breathing. Then you want to drop into a state of calm and you do that by these a couple maybe two or three rounds of inhale inhale exhale inhale inhale exhale and then now your brain is in a state we believe this is still again being worked out in a in labs like mine and David's that then you're in a state for heightened learning because you're in a state where neurochemicals like acetylcholine are going to be at levels that are higher than they typically would be. Things like noradrenaline slightly higher than they typically would be, but not in a discombobulated way, in a very regulated way. And the cool thing is you're regulating them. So, you could argue, you know, earlier we were talking about subjective emotions and thoughts and you know, all these things, but one thing that's absolutely concrete is breathing. I always think of physical exercise, movement, writing, whatever, singing, dancing, talking. Those are physical actions in the universe. Then you have thoughts and somewhere in between those is controlling your respiration. Once you can control everything that's within the confines of your skull and skin, once you can really control that relationship, that brain-body relationship, you start to realize that relationship is a lot like any other relationship to forward action. It's just all happening within the confines of my body. So, it's heightened states of focus followed by states of relaxation that are going to prime your nervous system for learning and plasticity just like hypnosis. Human beings have evolved tons of technologies uh and currencies. Bitcoin, Ethereum uh are not topics I know a lot of about, but when you think about dollar, euro, Bitcoin, Ethereum, you think about wins and losses in sport, in life, in relationship, in anything, something in your brain and body has to keep track of that. Did you win? Did you lose? What's a let down? What's a celebration? And I think one of the most important findings in the last few years in neuroscience is that while the molecule dopamine is associated with reward, it's more about motivation and craving. There's a really classic experiment now that people use to demonstrate this. Take two rats and the rats independently, separate cages, can lever press for food. Uh or they can access food. There's a little bit of dopamine that's released anytime they get some food. So, we always thought that food, uh like many other rewards, uh like food, sex, warmth when you're cold, cool when you're too warm, is triggering the release of dopamine. But someone had the good idea to deplete dopamine in one of those animals. And then what you find is that the animal without dopamine still enjoys food. Still enjoys other pleasures. So, dopamine's not really involved in the enjoyment of those pleasures. It's involved in motivation because if you make the animal have to move just one rat's length, believe it or not, to get to that lever, the animal with dopamine will work to go get that thing. It will work through some effort to go get the reward. Whereas the animal, or it turns out the human without much dopamine, can still experience pleasure. They can sit on their couch and cram their face with pleasure-inducing calories or what have you. Watch pleasure-inducing things on the television, but they have very little motivation to go pursue things that will deliver them pleasure. So, when I say dopamine is the universal currency of everything, what I mean is it's driving the motivation to develop new currencies. When somebody can sit back and say, uh, I'll just throw this number out. Let's say somebody has 100,000 Bitcoins, which presumably now is worth a good good amount. Certainly more than it was a few years ago. The way they can register whether or not they are in a position of wealth or not has everything to do with the the number they see on the screen or in their Bitcoin wallet. But, that number is converted into a chemical signal that has everything to do with how much you had previously. So, that So, we could talk about the so-called reward prediction error. How good you feel with an experience has everything to do with how much you had previously. And dopamine itself is what's driving the human species to create these new technologies. And so, while we think of currencies as the goal, it's actually what's really driven the forward evolution of our our species has been the desire to go seek things beyond the confines of our skin. And when I say the common currency is dopamine, what I mean is the molecule dopamine, when secreted in the brain, makes us pursue things, build things, create things, makes us want new things that we don't currently already have. And so, it has a lot of dimensions to it, but rather than think about dopamine as a signal for reward, like a dopamine hit, we classically think and talk about it, it's more accurate really to think about dopamine as driving motivation and craving to go seek rewards. That's the rat experiment. And it's a way of tabulating where we are in our life. Are we doing well or are we doing poorly? And that happens on very short time scales. Like, do you wake up feeling good? Or do you wake up feeling kind of low? Or on long time scales. If you're halfway through a long degree or you're halfway through your life, how are you doing? How do you gauge that? Well, it has everything to do with how much dopamine you were releasing in the previous days and weeks and years. So, you're always comparing and all of this is subconscious. But, what's cool is that once you make these processes conscious, once you understand a little bit about how dopamine is released and how it changes our perspective and our behavior, then you can actually work with it. So, it's one of the um instances where knowledge of knowledge actually turns out to be a really useful tool. Dude, that's crazy to me. So, one of the things that I get hit up about all the time is people feel stuck. And as you like really push on them to to figure out why they feel stuck, they'll be like, "Yeah, I want to do that. And but I just, you know, I can't get out of bed or I don't have the energy to pursue it or whatever." And you get into this common thing that people say in mindset, and I really believe it, but I find it far more interesting when you're talking about it from a neurochemical standpoint, which is you just don't want it badly enough. And when I think about my own life, I sometimes worry that I'm either more malleable than other people or that I have a greater ability to manipulate my dopamine release or whatever because I'm very good at building desire. And I like the way that desire feels. Now, when you use the word hunger, I think people get confused cuz I actually don't enjoy being hungry for food. I find that totally unpleasurable. However, being hungry for sex, I find incredibly I feel alive. I feel focused. I feel energized. I feel aggressive. It's complex, for sure. But, I find that feeling incred- the act of wanting something in the future in in that kind or in business, in trying to build something. I feel In fact, woof, that's an interesting insight into my own self about I like to build. And do we know so we dopamine is the neurochemistry of the pursuit of making sure that I have the energy to go? But, do we know how we can spike that? Well, first of all, it's clear to me based on your description that you've tapped into these channels that release dopamine because craving and wanting, whether or not it's sex or or money or connection or anything, all right, is that's the the primary trigger for dopamine release. Yeah, now sex and reproduction makes the most sense from the perspective of evolution. Uh I mean, any species, every species has tends to have two primary goals. One, protect its young and second, make more of itself, usually in reverse order, right? So, even for people that don't want children, I mean, you might not or people of course not everyone is having sex just to reproduce, but at a primordial level, that's what those circuits are there for. So, every species, in particular mammalian species where there's a lot of parenting and caretaking of the young tries to take make more of itself. And everything that you see like maternal aggression, which is a powerful circuit that's gets activated after females of any species, in particular mammals, give birth, they will fight to the death and they gain superhuman strength in order to protect their young. That's a there's a known circuit for that in the brain that gets activated once a female has offspring. And it's robust. That's so interesting, man. Like, have you read the book The Female Brain? I have not. Oh my god. So, lost a lot of points by No, no, no, but you're one, it'll be super interesting cuz you'll know if she's on the right track from a neuroscience perspective. I remember reading the book, at the time I thought I was going to have kids. And I remember thinking, whoa. Like, this book chronicles what happens to a woman's brain and how things change, and I was like, when you have kids, man, you are inviting a neurochemical change in your significant other that is going to play itself out in a very real way. And I'd be lying if I said that wasn't one of the things, one of the many things, but one of the things that I factored into not having kids. Interesting. Uh and then the same with menopause. That it's this really dramatic sort of reorganizing might not be the right word, but that it it has real implications in the way that the person moves. Just as the decline of testosterone has in men. Well, in the on a um on the positive side, uh during pregnancy the woman's hippocampus, her brain area associated with memory and retention of information, it goes through a period in which it gets worse for certain types of information, but then achieves superior levels of working memory once the babies arrive. Because there are a lot of things to manage. So, this makes sense. This is true in rodents. This is true in humans. And then in terms of the uh biology of the father, we now know that when because typically parents have uh you know, does seem like one spouse always does more than the other. Um but even in the most uh evenly divided households, uh the there's usually some co-parenting of some sort, but that the father has a big increase in the hormone prolactin when the mother is expecting. And the prolactin lays down body fat. It prepares for sleepless nights. For women, it it sparks um the circuitry for milk letdown for for nursing. Um so, the dad bod has a lot to do with prolactin. This is true in in birds, in small mammals, and in humans. And this is now been There was a paper published in nature on on humans specifically about this. And when you think about the relationship between dopamine and prolactin, it's it's interesting and it takes us back to this motivation and craving that that you were describing earlier, which is that dopamine and prolactin work in in opposite fashion. So, the the most salient example of this is sex and reproduction, where anticipation of sex and reproduction greatly increases dopamine. But post reproductive post sex it doesn't have to be for reproduction, there's a spark in prolactin in the the The the spike, excuse me, in prolactin. and that spike in prolactin is actually what sets the refractory period during which he can't mate again. So, it sets a period of quiescence to keep men and it's for pair bonding, for the exchange of chemicals through the nose, through the through the skin, and through the sweat. Mainly through odor. Uh the we could talk about pheromones if you want, but that's a topic that's somewhat controversial. The the actual identity of pheromones in humans has not been identified, but there are pheromone effects in humans. in that people don't agree what's really happening. Well, okay. So, there's this culture of biologists that have clearly identified pheromone effects in other in non-humans and non-human primates. But, whether or not those are uh the classic definition of a pheromone effect is that it's subconscious, that you can't actually detect the smell. However, we know that smells themselves, conscious detection of them can evoke very robust physiological responses. One of one example that you just stay in this arena of of of thought is that a guy by the name of Noam Sobel, who's at the Weizmann Institute, he used to be at Berkeley. He has a lab over in Israel. It's amazing works on olfaction, smell. And they he discovered that the scent of women's tears causes a dramatic and significant reduction in testosterone in men. What? Absolutely. And this was published, if anyone wants to go look it up, it was published in Science magazine. You know, it we You can smell tears? we have you know, the Super Bowl of publishing in science is Science, Nature, and Cell. Those are the three top journals. This is published in Science magazine, very stringent. Uh the smell of tears. Now, it's subconscious at some level. Woah. other thing that if we were going to kind of play around in this hormones and behavior interactions between humans, um there some really interesting examples. So, for instance, men will rate the smell of a woman's skin or sweat or the perception of her face as more beautiful during the pre-ovulatory phase of her menstrual cycle. That pre-ovulatory phase is associated with a number of different changes in hormones. Okay? Just that smell will increase testosterone in a male. And oral contraception in the female, when women taking oral contraception, it adjust their hormones such that men no longer detect this change in a in how attractive women are. Doesn't mean they find them unattractive, but it means they don't find them increasingly attractive during this certain period of the of their of their menstrual cycle. So, we are constantly signaling back and forth through hormones. In fact, we met over there and shook hands because we've been tested for COVID and the rest. We shook hands and what happened and what happens within 30 seconds of any human being contacting one another is they shake hands and then they wipe their the chemicals of the other person on their face or body. Noam's lab has also shown this. And so, we are constantly signaling through through chemical exchange. Sometimes it's subconscious and those are the so-called pheromone effects. Sometimes it's low levels of odors that are beneath our conscious detection. And sometimes it's outright, "Wow, this person smells really, really good." Or, "They look particularly good today." Often times that's tied to the their period in which they are ovulating in their menstrual cycle. So, I want to plant a flag here about all the things that we do that are messing with these mechanisms, like cologne or deodorant. Or oral contraception, of which I'm not saying is Pornography, like all those things. has served a great role in for certain people. Some people might say it was This is an ethical discussion. Is it good? Is it bad? But, um either way, it is having an effect. So, to remove I only look at things through the lens of biology, not through the lens of of whether or not we should or shouldn't do things. love it. Doing the work changes our story about the work. And I think it's just so much more reliable and so much easier to love what you do than it is to do what you love.