The Strange Benefits of Doing One Hard Thing Per Day - Neuroscientist Andrew Huberman

what do you think most people misunderstand about stress yeah the findings that I think are overlooked tremendously are the following experiment um there's an experiment in animals where a rat is given the opportunity to run on a treadmill and rats and and rodents of all kind love kinds love running on treadmills you know there're these interesting um we'll see who catches this fly first yeah I'm ready man the uh I think um you know there's even a study from hoppy hofstra's Lab at at Harvard that showed that if you put a wheel running Wheels in fields that rodents will run there in the middle of the night and run on them that's how insanely uh obsessed with running they're just energetic they want to go there's something rewarding about it for them but in any event it lowers their blood pressure it leads to Inc improvements in a number of metrics that you expect and you see the same thing in humans right who run on a treadmill or run Outdoors or Swim cardiovascular exercise okay well um spolski um and I love to talk about a an experiment where they took two different cages with animals one is running voluntarily but then that running wheel is Tethered to a running wheel in another cage that encloses an animal forces it to run every time the other one runs so forced exercise versus voluntary exercise and the takeaway is very straightforward voluntary exercise leads to all sorts of improvements in health metrics resting heart rate blood pressure blood glucose um resting blood glucose Etc waking blood glucose um the animal that's forced to exercise you see the opposite right right so it's not exercise per se it's something about being forced to exercise is causes um decrements in a number of Health metrics and you see the same thing in humans so what's Wild is my colleague Dr Ali Crum Department of psychology at Stanford um has done these beautiful experiments on mindset and belief these are not Placebo effects and what she's shown in in a just absolutely spectacular way is that if people watch a short video about all the ways in which stress can really diminish your health well then indeed stress diminishes their health whereas if a separate group watches an a factual also 5 minute also factual tutorial on all the ways that stress can enhance performance by harnessing your ability to focus memory formation Etc all which is true that's indeed what you see can I give you my favorite one that I learned about over the last year yes so the Boston Marathon bombing uh 2012 about 10 years ago 2016 maybe anyway Boston Marathon bombing a study was done comparing people who had been at the actual Marathon while the bomb had gone off and people who had watched 90 minutes or more of news coverage about it and the people who watched 90 minutes or more of news coverage about it showed a greater stress response than the people who' literally lived through it interesting interesting yeah the the um the the mindset and belief effects are are absolutely extraordinary and and and very real right I mean I think you know um recently I've been reading and researching a lot about and did a podcast on tenacity and willpower and um there was this idea early on from balme and colleagues that willpower is a limited resource some of ego depletion will depletion um it was controversial um they showed that you know replenishing glucose in between hard tasks could restore willpower they showed that uh was it juries or judges that were low in blood glucose were more likely to give harsher sentences stuff like this yeah it it sort of wicked out to a number of naturalistic situations and it made good sense and then my colleague Carol DW also in the psychology department at Stanford um most famously known for her work on mind growth mindset did an experiment in which they um essentially asked whether or not tenacity and willpower are limited in terms of being a some sort of resource and also whether or not it was somehow linked to glucose availability fuel uh in the brain and body and fact that if people thought or were told that mind that uh excuse me willpower was a limited resource that's indeed what they observed experimentally but that if they were taught or were told that willpower is unlimited and and divorced from glucose levels well then that's exactly what you saw you're saying that learning about ego depletion and believing that willpower is a limited resource is an information Hazard that is self-fulfilling uh potentially now now now now bow Meister you know showed um himself to be you know pretty determined um when and countered the the uh the DW counter by showing that if indeed if there's a hard task followed by a hard task then your beliefs about willpower um Can impact your performance on the second task so D the AKA DW is right but that if you have a hard task hard task and then another hard task so back to back to back tasks or more which is a lot of what life is like well then it seems that the W that the will power is a limited resource and glucose supporting will willpower Theory holds up a bit better what have you come to believe about the difference between willpower and motivation and discipline how how do kind of all of these fit together in your mind yeah so willpower and tenacity um are related to motivation but they're not quite the same I think we should think of motivation as a um as the verb state that moves us from um let's just say apathy to tenacity okay so it's it's it's the verb function that moves us along that Continuum a apathy at one end U tenacity and willpower but strong um exertion of willpower at the other end um one of the most interesting structures in the entire nervous system is one that gets very little coverage unfortunately um in fact most neuroscientists aren't aware of what its function is and it's called the amcc which is the anterior mid singulate cortex you have one on each side of the brain the name isn't really important but we want to you know to to the credit of the of the structure we should name it the amcc the amcc receives inputs from a lot of interesting brain areas related to reward related to autonomic function so how alert or sleepy we are to prediction to prediction error it's a hub for many many inputs and outputs hormone systems Etc beautiful experiments done by my colleague Joe pesy at Stanford have shown that if you stimulate this brain area tiny little brain area in a human they immediately feel as if some challenge is impending and they're going to meet that challenge it's a forward Center of mass against challenge response this has been seen in independent subjects they do controls where they then tell them they're stimulating but they're not actually stimulating and they're like I don't feel anything you can turn on and off tenacity and willpower so there's literally a hub for this now here's where it gets really interesting I'm going to list off a bunch of peer-reviewed published results in Rapid sequence and I'm happy to uh point out the the um substantiation for this or the references okay individuals that are dieting or resisting some sort of tempting behavior and are successful in doing that the size and activity in their amcc goes up over time and the structure gets bigger dieters who fail flat or downward trajectory of the size and activation of the amcc this can be taken too far individuals with anorexia nervosa the most deadly of all psychiatric disorders where a dep self-deprivation of food activates excessive reward there's this kind of loop of reward their AMC's are significantly greater size than others so there's you know this can be taken too far superagers which is a bit of a misnomer because these individuals are people who maintain healthy cognitive function similar to people in their 20s and 30s into their 70s 80s and 90s their amcc maintains or increases in size into their later years typical agers the size of we always hear that you lose brain mass across your lifespan well most of it is from the amcc and beautifully and this is two of my favorite results that really bring this around to a protocol or a takeaway if people are given an easy task the amcc isn't activated if they're given a hard task in particular a hard task physical or cognitive that they really don't want to do the amcc levels of activity go through the roof and here's what's really cool they gave aging let's you know people AG 60 to 79 the task of adding three hours extra per week of cardiovascular exercise now that's a lot right three 1 hour they call them aerobic classes but getting their heart rate up to about 65 70% of of Maximum so it's getting into like Zone 3ish area yeah people can look up zone three but you nailed it zone three the size of their amcc increased across that six-month protocol and offset the normal age related decline in this in this sprain area in terms of its size the theory that's starting to emerge is that the amcc isn't just about tenacity and willpower to push through hard things that it may actually be related to one's will to live one's will to continue living and I think this is these are some of the most important results by the way I didn't participate in any of the research that I just described I spent a lot of time with that literature but I think it's so important I mean we hear about the amydala the hippocampus the prefrontal cordex all of very important brain structures but um if nothing else hopefully this conversation put the amcc on the map the one that literally could create your will to live is the one that's being overlooked a little bit and and it can be and what's interesting about this structure is that it's involved in generating tenacity and willpower for all things not just for one situation and what's really wonderful I think about the the research literature on this is It's So Clear what we need to do we need to do th let's say like me you you're a person who enjoys weightlifting and you love running I love those two activities well guess what those activities even if they're hard like a hard run that I'm really enjoying or some hard set in the gym not going to increase the size or activity of the amcc people love to over romanticize the utility of those final two reps sure okay pushing to failure great you know running hard till your lungs burn great but if you enjoy that you're not increasing your amount of tenacity and willpower at least according to the research data what's going to do it is doing something what I call Micro sucks or macro sucks you know and so micro sucks could be all the little things that you don't want during to do during the day macros sux could be the larger things but of course you don't want want to do things that are going to damage you psychologically or physically of course of course but everyone I believe would benefit from um picking a few micro sucks what are some of your micro sucks or macro sucks that you could sprinkle throughout the day okay so on a household maintenance level um you know I I maintain a very clean home I I I'm constantly throwing things away as well but there are a few things like once I exceed a certain number of dishes in the sink it becomes this okay I'll I'll load the dishwasher later type thing like a micro suck for me would be like especially if something's been in there for a while and it's kind of gross and you gotta like work through it and of course I try and put each dish away as as I you know dirty them up but um so little things the things like that the I really don't want to deal with that right now that's the kind of thing those harder tasks where you have to breach some barrier some resistance to put it into you know Steven pressfield language or um our friend David gogins right you know this idea that one has to callous the mind I mean it David said that right he's probably got an hypertrophied amcc that's bigger than most people's probably and and the the beauty of having a a an amcc that's highly you know available for Activation is that you know through the micro and the macro sucks of the day you you have this thing it's like an engine that you can devote to other things so then you can devote the amcc to other endeavors I have this thing I called email anxiety and it's when my unread inbox reaches three figures or more and that's when it just it kind of follows me around like a poltergeist throughout the day and that that absolutely that's probably a macro suck you know to get through that it's probably three to four hours a lot of it scheduling when's this guest coming on I need to speak to this partner we go blah blah blah um so yeah I feel that um what else subjective right I mean what's a what sucks is subc some else might love Yeah someone might and and I think that um you know you've talked a lot on your show with various guests about you know when we're in too much comfort uh are we're not meeting our goals I love deadlines for that reason um I I love deadlines I love pressure I think I think Parkinson's LW is as close to a thermodynamic of productivity as we can get do you know what I mean like when you have a deadline you will meet it right if you do not have a deadline you will Manana Manana until forever that's right and some people I think um pre-load the deadline by procrastinating and then that's what you know gets their activation energy to a level where they can they can engage so I've started thinking about this a lot lately you know I love running but it's interesting I I like to finish at my driveway and I live on a hill and um actually this morning I was out for a run and the gate at the end of the Colac is my sort of designated stop point so it actually sucked to do the last you know 20 meters um this morning so there I probably got a little bit of amcc activation because everything was the number of negotiations I went through when I turned up my street at the end of this run whether or not I was going to run this extra 20 M was ridiculous I mean the brain you know struggling to not do this extra 20 MERS it was so silly so it's got to it's got to hurt a little bit again you don't want to damage yourself but I think in the context of um for instance cognitive learning getting to the point where you finish something and then forcing yourself to do one little extra bit there at the end so you know I I I'm not looking for any credit for it but I want to be very clear that the scientific literature doesn't call these things micros sucks I call them micro sucks um and I S put that out there just to make it U clear as to what we're referring to do you know bear I don't in Austin he's a athlete and suppl Y yeah yeah yeah like a hybrid athlete a larger guy but he runs really fast does bodybuilding shows does powerlifting also runs to be clear I know that large guys run fast but um typically they don't run uh fast for 20 miles correct and he does that's accurate um he his little uh catchphrase is go one more and it's interesting what you're saying here is it's not just about the completion of the thing that you're doing because a lot of the time the thing that you choose to do even the thing that's difficult is done under your own valtion don't get me wrong if you do a difficult crossfit workout Fran whatever 2159 of thrusters and pull-ups it is aw it's hell right there's literally a name for what your throat feels like once you finish called Fran cof that people get from having taken their heart rate as high as spasing um that taste of metal in the back of your throat but what what people are doing there although they're doing something that's difficult it's like Val difficult and it's within their domain of enjoyment and what you're saying here is that we're looking to just push ourselves a little bit past that it's like an unnecessary amount of Challenge and I think that go one more makes quite a nice uh reminder for us with the micro sucker the macro sucker let's push ourselves just a little bit beyond where we would have got our sense of satisfaction because presumably you get the dopamine I've completed the task [ __ ] yeah and then it's like and then I do just that tiny little bit more to to bring we'll get back to talking to Andrew in one it but first I need to tell you about mudwater mudwater is a coffee alternative that tastes like chai and cacao had a baby it's got four functional mushrooms and with only a fraction the caffeine as a cup of coffee you will get all of the natural energy without the Jitters or crash each ingredient was added for a purpose cacao and chai for a hint of coffee and hot chocolate likee flavor Lion's man for Focus ceps to promote Natural Energy and both Chara and re sheet to support a healthy immune system plus it's Whole 30 approved 100% USDA organic certified non-GMO gluten-free vegan and kosher so if you are looking for a delicious alternative to your morning coffee this is a great place to start right now you can get $20 off your 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