Mental Health Toolkit: Tools to Bolster Your Mood & Mental Health

00:00:00.000 | Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.780 | for everyday life.

00:00:09.200 | I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford

00:00:13.760 | School of Medicine.

00:00:14.760 | Today, we are discussing tools for mood and mental health.

00:00:18.520 | I will include tools and resources taken from the guest episode that I did with Dr. Lisa

00:00:23.220 | Feldman Barrett, who is a psychologist and neuroscientist whose laboratory focuses on

00:00:28.860 | mood and emotions.

00:00:30.600 | During that episode, she mentioned several important tools that I do believe everybody

00:00:34.660 | should apply and that indeed I've been applying to my own life and have found to be extremely

00:00:39.020 | beneficial.

00:00:40.320 | I will also highlight some of the specific research articles those tools are based on,

00:00:44.960 | which were not covered in the podcast with Lisa.

00:00:48.440 | I will also discuss tools gleaned from the four-episode series that I did on mental health

00:00:53.040 | with Dr. Paul Conte, who is a medical doctor specializing in psychiatry.

00:00:57.760 | And that episode, as some of you may already know, focused on mental health and the self

00:01:03.040 | as well as relationships.

00:01:04.720 | And it included a deep discussion of what is the self.

00:01:08.200 | We talked about the unconscious mind and the conscious mind.

00:01:11.160 | And we also covered a lot of tools for understanding oneself, both within the context of therapy,

00:01:16.400 | but also within the context of things that one can do alone and that require zero cost.

00:01:22.660 | In addition, we talked about tools for improving relationships.

00:01:25.260 | We talked about first principles of self-care.

00:01:27.160 | So I will provide highlights and takeaways of those tools during today's episode.

00:01:31.360 | And thirdly, I will include tools, what we often refer to as protocols gleaned from some

00:01:36.100 | recent publications, indeed publications that came out as recently as two weeks ago, which

00:01:41.840 | really emphasize specific things that we can all do that again are zero cost that have

00:01:47.220 | been shown in quality peer reviewed research to significantly improve mood and mental health.

00:01:53.580 | For instance, if you are a regular listener of this podcast, you are probably familiar

00:01:58.140 | with my nearly constant reminder that people should view morning sunlight and afternoon

00:02:03.060 | sunlight.

00:02:04.060 | And if you can't to embrace some alternatives, like looking at bright artificial light, although

00:02:08.480 | sunlight is best, well, there was a recent paper published in the journal, nature, mental

00:02:13.140 | health, an excellent journal focusing on not just the positive effects of viewing light

00:02:18.380 | at those times of day and indeed throughout the day, but also the independent and positive

00:02:23.380 | effects of being in darkness for six to eight hours every night.

00:02:28.420 | That's right.

00:02:29.420 | Not only is light during the day correlated with significantly improved mental health

00:02:33.260 | outcomes, but darkness at night that is avoiding lights, not just bright lights, but lights

00:02:39.180 | for up to eight hours at certain periods of your 24 hour circadian cycle has been correlated

00:02:45.240 | with improved mental health outcomes and indeed has been shown to significantly offset certain

00:02:50.900 | negative mental health outcomes.

00:02:53.160 | This is a spectacular study.

00:02:54.860 | Again, it involved an enormous number of research subjects, more than 85,000 research subjects,

00:03:00.380 | and it touches on a large number of actionable protocols that I've distilled down to just

00:03:04.740 | one or two things that all of us can easily do to improve our mood and mental health on

00:03:09.460 | a consistent basis.

00:03:11.220 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching

00:03:14.620 | and research roles at Stanford.

00:03:16.500 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information

00:03:20.600 | about science and science-related tools to the general public.

00:03:24.120 | In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

00:03:28.040 | Our first sponsor is Plunge.

00:03:30.180 | Plunge makes what I believe is the most versatile at-home self-cooling cold plunge for deliberate

00:03:34.860 | cold exposure.

00:03:35.860 | I've covered the topic of deliberate cold exposure several times on this podcast.

00:03:40.100 | Indeed, we did an entire episode about deliberate cold exposure.

00:03:43.580 | And what's very clear from the research literature is that deliberate cold exposure can induce

00:03:48.860 | dramatic positive shifts in so-called catecholamines, that is dopamine, norepinephrine, and epinephrine.

00:03:56.680 | This is a small collection of molecules that are released in the brain and body when we

00:04:00.080 | do deliberate cold exposure and that subjectively lead to greatly enhanced feelings of mood,

00:04:06.040 | alertness, and focus for many hours afterwards.

00:04:09.180 | That's perhaps the best substantiated reason and the most popular reason why people who

00:04:13.580 | get into deliberate cold exposure, no pun intended, continue to do deliberate cold exposure

00:04:18.880 | on a consistent basis.

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00:05:06.160 | Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep.

00:05:09.020 | Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating, and sleep tracking capacity.

00:05:13.500 | Spoken many times before in this podcast about the fact that sleep, that is getting enough

00:05:17.620 | quality sleep on a consistent basis, is the foundation of mental health, physical health,

00:05:22.140 | and performance.

00:05:23.140 | Now, one of the key things to getting the best possible night's sleep is to control

00:05:26.260 | the temperature of your sleeping environment.

00:05:28.260 | That's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature needs to drop

00:05:32.500 | by about one to three degrees.

00:05:34.620 | In order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually

00:05:38.140 | has to increase by about one to three degrees.

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00:06:07.140 | has significantly improved my sleep and therefore my daytime mood, focus, and alertness.

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00:06:27.460 | Today's episode is also brought to us by Waking Up.

00:06:30.460 | Waking Up is a meditation app that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness

00:06:34.940 | trainings, yoga nidra sessions, and NSDR, non-sleep deep rest protocols.

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00:07:12.960 | I love the fact that I can explore different types of meditation to bring about different

00:07:17.460 | levels of understanding about consciousness, but also to place my brain and body into lots

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00:07:38.440 | that yoga nidra and something similar to it called non-sleep deep rest, or NSDR, can greatly

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00:08:01.000 | Okay, let's talk about tools for improving mood and mental health.

00:08:04.360 | I think it goes without saying that these are extremely important topics for everyone,

00:08:10.140 | not just to know about, but in my opinion, also for people to implement.

00:08:15.180 | And the reason is that we are currently in a worldwide mental health crisis.

00:08:19.900 | And while we could debate the reason why we are in a worldwide mental health crisis, it's

00:08:24.160 | very, very clear that mood disorders and challenges with mental health abound.

00:08:29.920 | And of course, there are many different therapies for the treatment of mood disorders and mental

00:08:33.320 | health.

00:08:34.320 | Everything from talk therapy with a psychologist or psychiatrist or social worker, prescription

00:08:40.140 | drug treatments, their nutritional approaches, somatic approaches.

00:08:43.240 | And I want to be clear that I do believe that there's value in all of these approaches.

00:08:48.220 | What tends to matter in terms of what sorts of tools and approaches one adopts includes

00:08:54.800 | both access.

00:08:55.800 | So whether or not people have access to these types of therapies, whether or not they can

00:08:59.160 | afford them on a consistent basis.

00:09:01.080 | And also, of course, the severity of the mood or mental health disorder.

00:09:04.740 | And I'd be remiss, of course, if I didn't make the statement, and I don't say this just

00:09:08.160 | to protect me.

00:09:09.160 | I also say this to protect all of you and those that you know, that if you are concerned

00:09:13.300 | about yourself or somebody else, having a serious mood or mental health disorder, please

00:09:18.280 | do seek out help from a licensed clinical psychologist or psychiatrist or other healthcare

00:09:22.400 | professional who's qualified to help you in that regard.

00:09:26.220 | With that said, we can now have a discussion about tools and protocols for enhancing mood

00:09:29.900 | and mental health that truly apply to everybody regardless of age.

00:09:34.380 | To start off, I want to talk about a fundamental aspect of mood and mental health enhancement

00:09:39.680 | that was discussed both in the guest episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, as well as

00:09:44.020 | in the guest series with Dr. Paul Conte.

00:09:46.840 | And that has to do with what Dr. Paul Conte referred to as the first principles of self-care

00:09:53.460 | or mental health.

00:09:54.460 | The first principles of self-care include, but are not limited to taking excellent care

00:09:59.140 | of one's biology, which of course includes both the mind and the body.

00:10:03.800 | And in order to make this very simple and actionable, I've distilled out what I referred

00:10:08.400 | to as the big six.

00:10:10.420 | I've sometimes referred to these as the six major pillars of health, both mental health

00:10:15.280 | and physical health, as well as performance for that matter.

00:10:18.580 | But if we're going to talk about tools for mood and mental health, we absolutely can't

00:10:23.200 | discard discussions about our biology.

00:10:26.400 | That is, we need to make sure that we're taking care of our normal biological function and

00:10:31.180 | indeed enhancing the production of specific neurotransmitters and neuromodulators that

00:10:37.140 | we are optimizing.

00:10:38.140 | Yes, I use the word optimizing, the function of our so-called autonomic nervous system,

00:10:43.520 | that aspect of our nervous system that's humming in the background all the time, it's operating

00:10:47.360 | unconsciously to regulate our sleep-wake cycles.

00:10:50.840 | It's regulating how well or poorly we react to things.

00:10:55.860 | It's regulating how much dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine, acetylcholine we're producing.

00:11:01.280 | All of this stuff is humming in the background and sets the stage for all the conscious work

00:11:05.960 | that we might put to, for instance, trying to understand what our life narrative is,

00:11:11.780 | what our unconscious mind is doing, what sorts of defenses am I producing, all of the sort

00:11:16.400 | of high-level and directed work that we're going to talk about a little bit later, exists

00:11:20.520 | on a background of autonomic function, of neurotransmitter production, of hormone production,

00:11:27.040 | not just testosterone and estrogen, but things like cortisol, prolactin, and on and on.

00:11:31.540 | So it's important to understand that if our goal is to be in the best possible mood, given

00:11:36.520 | our life circumstances, and to have the best possible mental health, given our life circumstances,

00:11:42.220 | and to improve our mood and mental health consistently over time, that we have to pay

00:11:46.440 | attention to what I'm referring to here as the big six, or the six pillars of mental

00:11:52.240 | health.

00:11:53.240 | And those are, just to list them off, then I'll go into a little bit more detail, sleep,

00:11:58.640 | sunlight, although I'd like to modify sunlight because based on some new data that just came

00:12:03.380 | out a couple of weeks ago, I'd like to now make that second pillar, not sunlight, but

00:12:09.760 | light/dark.

00:12:11.760 | So we could even just think about it as light, when and how much light you get.

00:12:15.480 | But what you'll soon learn is that how much dark you get is also extremely important.

00:12:20.780 | So we've got sleep, light, movement is the third, nutrition, social connection, and stress

00:12:28.200 | control.

00:12:29.200 | Now, these are topics that I've spoken about extensively on previous Huberman Lab Podcast

00:12:33.620 | episodes.

00:12:34.620 | So I don't want to go into a deep dive of each of these six pillars right now, but I

00:12:38.960 | am going to just give you a few highlights of each.

00:12:41.660 | And then of course, we will provide links in the show note captions for which you can

00:12:44.800 | go on the deep dive if you like.

00:12:46.600 | And I also would like to mention that if you ever have questions about specific protocols

00:12:50.480 | or tools, and you're seeking those out or previous episodes, or specific timestamps

00:12:55.360 | of previous episodes of this podcast, you can go to our newly revamped HubermanLab.com

00:13:00.000 | website and put any topic of interest or even several topics of interest into the search

00:13:04.800 | function.

00:13:05.800 | And it will take you to the very specific timestamps and other resources that provide

00:13:09.980 | information on those topics.

00:13:11.880 | So I'm going to go into a few of the key bullet points about each of the six pillars, or what

00:13:16.240 | I also refer to as the big six of self-care and mental health.

00:13:20.280 | Again, this is a necessary list, but it is not sufficient.

00:13:24.520 | Again, necessary to do these things every 24 hours, indeed every 24 hours, if you want

00:13:31.680 | to have the best possible mood and mental health, but it is not sufficient.

00:13:37.120 | That means you still need to do some of the other things that we're going to talk about

00:13:41.280 | in terms of directed approaches at improving mood and mental health.

00:13:45.300 | If you are to "optimize" your mood and mental health, or if you are, let's just say, trying

00:13:50.400 | to constantly improve your mood and mental health.

00:13:53.700 | But these are the necessary, but not sufficient pillars of mental health.

00:13:58.760 | So under the heading of sleep, it's safe to say that most people need between six to eight

00:14:03.100 | hours of sleep per night.

00:14:05.060 | Some people can get away with five.

00:14:06.800 | Some people need as much as nine or 10.

00:14:09.240 | Certainly growing kids, babies, teenagers, and those that are suffering from some sort

00:14:14.700 | of illness are going to need more, as much as nine, 10, maybe even 12 hours of sleep

00:14:19.960 | per night.

00:14:20.960 | However, most people do well to get somewhere between six and eight hours of sleep per night.

00:14:26.080 | You're just going to have to experiment and figure out what's best for you.

00:14:29.780 | Now one thing I heard recently, so I can't claim this as an original idea, but that I

00:14:33.520 | think is a really good way to think about sleep, is that sleep, much like physical fitness,

00:14:39.160 | is something that we have to constantly be working on.

00:14:42.000 | It's not the sort of thing where you can get a great night's sleep one night and then the

00:14:45.040 | next night just kind of let all the protocols go and expect to get a great night's sleep.

00:14:49.440 | You don't have to be neurotic about getting a great night's sleep.

00:14:52.000 | Indeed, I do believe that we should strive to get enough quality sleep as many of the

00:14:56.800 | nights of our life as possible, and if you can't do that, hopefully it's for good reasons.

00:15:00.400 | But of course, things happen in life, raising kids, you have emergencies, all-nighters to

00:15:04.660 | study so you can make sure you get the best possible grade on an exam, et cetera, et cetera.

00:15:08.960 | But we should all strive to get the best quality sleep that we can and as much of it most nights

00:15:14.280 | of our lives.

00:15:15.440 | So it's important to look at sleep as a process that you're going to be working on for the

00:15:19.080 | rest of your life, just like fitness.

00:15:20.960 | And I don't say that to overwhelm you.

00:15:22.360 | I say that so that if on any given night you get a poor night's sleep, you don't stress

00:15:27.100 | that too much, you just get right back on the wagon and you try and get the best possible

00:15:31.580 | night's sleep the next night and the next night and the next night, much like fitness.

00:15:35.920 | There's no 10-week program that's going to transform your physical fitness forever, okay?

00:15:41.720 | Just like there's no sleep program that's going to transform your sleep forever.

00:15:44.720 | It's a daily or rather I should say nightly investment, although some of the things that

00:15:48.360 | are going to positively impact your sleep or perhaps damage your sleep are things that

00:15:52.680 | you do during the daytime, right?

00:15:54.000 | So avoid that caffeine too late in the day, get that morning sunlight and on and on.

00:15:58.000 | But view sleep as something that you're constantly investing in and it is a critical investment

00:16:03.600 | for your mood and mental health.

00:16:05.320 | The other thing that's not often discussed and I really haven't talked about terribly

00:16:08.360 | much on this podcast is the importance of having a fairly consistent sleep routine.

00:16:13.580 | Now I realize that not everybody can get to sleep at the exact same time each night and

00:16:17.900 | wake up at the exact same time each morning and frankly, that's not practical.

00:16:22.100 | I certainly don't do that.

00:16:23.720 | However, what we know from the circadian health literature is that everybody should strive,

00:16:29.260 | again, that's strive, nobody's perfect, but strive to get to sleep at more or less the

00:16:32.600 | same time each night and wake up at more or less the same time each morning.

00:16:37.520 | This turns out to be really important for regulating mood and mental health and indeed

00:16:42.540 | for improving your overall levels of sleep, getting the optimal amounts of slow wave sleep,

00:16:48.080 | AKA deep sleep and rapid eye movement sleep.

00:16:50.800 | And what we know is that ideally you're going to get to sleep within plus or minus one hour

00:16:55.940 | of your regular sleep time.

00:16:57.320 | So if your regular two bed time is 10 o'clock, you're used to getting in bed at 10 o'clock

00:17:01.040 | and falling asleep somewhere around 10 30.

00:17:03.700 | Well then if the next night you fall asleep at 9 30, great, you're still within the plus

00:17:07.840 | or minus one hour.

00:17:09.160 | And if the next night you go to sleep and you don't fall asleep till 11 30, don't sweat

00:17:14.480 | it.

00:17:15.480 | In fact, you're still within that plus or minus one hour.

00:17:17.360 | However, if you start getting into a habit of going to bed at vastly different times,

00:17:21.960 | deviating more than or less than one hour from your normal to bedtime, well then you're

00:17:26.560 | going to start to run into issues such as waking up feeling groggy, even if you've got

00:17:31.260 | enough sleep.

00:17:32.260 | So even if you slept the full eight hours that you're used to getting, people who go

00:17:35.380 | to sleep much later than they normally do or much earlier than they normally do start

00:17:38.940 | getting into kind of issues of mood regulation, energy regulation, not just in the morning,

00:17:43.720 | but in the afternoon, likewise, try and wake up at more or less the same time each morning,

00:17:48.120 | plus or minus one hour.

00:17:49.720 | That's really going to help you anchor your overall sleep schedule.

00:17:53.060 | And it's really going to help lead to predictability of your overall levels of energy, mood and

00:17:58.680 | focus throughout the day.

00:18:00.120 | The second pillar in that big six is light.

00:18:03.040 | And I used to refer to this as sunlight, right, I'd say, and I'm going to say it again now,

00:18:07.400 | although I've covered this in a lot more detail.

00:18:09.000 | So again, just hitting the top contour critical elements, try to view sunlight, that is with

00:18:15.400 | your eyes view sunlight as early as possible after waking.

00:18:19.840 | Whenever I say that the most common question I get is what do I do if I wake up before

00:18:22.920 | the sun comes out?

00:18:23.920 | Well, unless you have superpowers that I'm not aware of, you can't make the sun come

00:18:27.480 | out any earlier.

00:18:28.580 | So just flip on artificial lights as needed until the sun comes out and then get outside,

00:18:34.640 | face east in the morning, take off those sunglasses, it's perfectly safe to look at low solar angle

00:18:40.120 | sunlight without sunglasses, providing you're not driving into bright light and you crash,

00:18:44.340 | this kind of thing.

00:18:45.340 | Get outside, look at the sunlight, definitely blink to protect your eyes as needed.

00:18:50.920 | But get that sunlight in your eyes early in the day.

00:18:53.560 | This has myriad positive effects on mood focus and alertness and nighttime sleep later that

00:18:58.800 | night.

00:18:59.840 | And it does so through a number of well-defined biological and endocrine hormonal pathways

00:19:04.140 | that I've discussed on many previous podcast episodes.

00:19:07.560 | And you want to do this for about 10 minutes on non-overcast days and as long as 20 or

00:19:13.080 | 30 minutes on overcast days.

00:19:15.420 | And that highlights the second most common question I get, which is what do I do if there's

00:19:18.900 | no sun where I live?

00:19:20.060 | I live in an area where there's no sunlight.

00:19:22.160 | Look, if you live on planet earth, there's always sunlight.

00:19:25.680 | There might not be very much of it that might be very overcast where you live.

00:19:28.860 | It might seem very dark, but trust me, there's far more photons, light energy coming through

00:19:33.160 | that cloud cover, even in the darkest mornings of winter than there are at night in those

00:19:39.820 | dark winters.

00:19:40.880 | So get that light in your eyes and do it as consistently as possible.

00:19:44.660 | And also do that in the late afternoon and evening.

00:19:47.180 | That's critical for regulating your circadian clock for reasons that I've talked about previously,

00:19:51.760 | but I'll get into in a future podcast, really explaining how those clock oscillators and

00:19:55.360 | mechanisms work, but just to keep it really simple, since this is a toolkit episode for

00:19:59.700 | your mood and mental health, your mood and your mental health will benefit tremendously

00:20:04.860 | from getting morning sunlight in your eyes.

00:20:06.940 | Now, if you need to get more light in your eyes, because indeed there's just not enough

00:20:11.080 | sunlight or you don't have the opportunity to get outside and view sunlight in the morning

00:20:15.640 | for whatever reason, you might invest in getting a bright light source that you can plug in.

00:20:21.560 | You probably want one that's as bright as 10,000 lux.

00:20:24.840 | So that's pretty bright.

00:20:26.440 | Those fall under the category of so-called SAD lamps, S-A-D, seasonal affective disorder

00:20:30.640 | lamps.

00:20:31.640 | And you can purchase those.

00:20:32.640 | They can be somewhat expensive.

00:20:34.240 | You can also opt to get a 900 lux drawing tablet, by the way, I have no financial relationship

00:20:39.160 | to any of these sorts of light sources, but you can find them pretty easily.

00:20:43.120 | And in the case of the 900 lux light tablet, fairly inexpensively online, and you can put

00:20:48.440 | that on your desk or where you have your morning coffee and try and enhance the total amount

00:20:53.080 | of light that you're getting in the morning.

00:20:55.280 | But frankly, nothing is as good as sunlight.

00:20:57.800 | So if you can't get sunlight, you might think about investing in one of those SAD lamps.

00:21:01.760 | And indeed those SAD lamps aren't as good as sunlight, but they are the next best thing

00:21:05.340 | if you really can't get sunlight on a consistent basis.

00:21:08.240 | A few other fine points that I always get asked about, first of all, it is absolutely

00:21:12.240 | okay to wear eyeglasses or contact lenses.

00:21:15.480 | Those sorts of corrective lenses are actually going to focus the light to your retina, which

00:21:18.420 | is where you want it.

00:21:19.800 | However, this whole process of viewing morning sunlight and afternoon light does not, again,

00:21:25.200 | does not work through a window or windshield because windows and windshields filter out

00:21:29.920 | the relevant wavelengths of light that you want to get directly onto your retina, okay?

00:21:33.980 | So that's the reality of it.

00:21:35.840 | In addition, please don't feel that you have to look directly at the sun and certainly

00:21:39.440 | don't stare at the sun.

00:21:41.400 | Never force yourself to look at any light, sunlight or otherwise that's so bright that

00:21:44.720 | it's painful to look at.

00:21:46.500 | So if it's comfortable for you to look directly at the sun and just blink every once in a

00:21:49.920 | while, and you can do that without any pain or discomfort or watering of the eyes, please

00:21:53.800 | do that.

00:21:54.800 | There's a lot of photons into your eyes and they're transmitting that to your brain and

00:21:58.420 | your brain to the rest of your body and on and on.

00:22:00.880 | However, if you find it uncomfortable to look directly at the sun, in that case, what you'll

00:22:04.520 | want to do is offset your gaze to, you know, 10 or 20 degrees, which is nerd speak for

00:22:09.000 | just a little bit to the right or a little bit to the left and get the sunlight into

00:22:13.120 | your eyes indirectly, okay?

00:22:15.620 | And I often also get asked, well, can I stand in the shade while I do this?

00:22:19.280 | What if I have an overhang in my apartment?

00:22:21.660 | The best thing is of course going to be to face directly to the sun and look either directly

00:22:26.040 | at it or slightly offset.

00:22:27.620 | But if you can only get morning sunlight by going out onto your balcony and your balcony

00:22:31.680 | doesn't face east, rather it faces west, you'll still get a lot of photons from the sun reaching

00:22:36.620 | your eyes there.

00:22:37.620 | But ideally you would find some way to look toward the sun first thing in the morning.

00:22:42.980 | I realized that with kids and work and other obligations, this can be challenging, but

00:22:46.900 | it is a challenge worth meeting, meaning don't lose your job or forget to take care of your

00:22:52.320 | kids to do this, but you can bring your kids to do this.

00:22:55.440 | And indeed you should, it sets their circadian rhythms also.

00:22:58.360 | And people often will ask, well, does it work on dogs?

00:23:01.700 | You know, indeed dogs and other animals have these exact same circuits and pathways for

00:23:05.760 | setting their circadian rhythm.

00:23:07.280 | So it's great for them too.

00:23:08.720 | Now there are also clear and documented benefits for mood and mental health to getting bright

00:23:13.240 | light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight throughout the day, as much as you safely

00:23:17.500 | can.

00:23:18.500 | Please don't get sunburned, don't get cataracts by getting too much sunlight, but getting

00:23:22.980 | outdoors and getting sunlight in your eyes during your lunch break or a walk here and

00:23:26.580 | there, or if you have to remain indoors during the day, getting the lights in that environment

00:23:31.740 | as bright as possible, as is safely possible I should say, is known to improve mood and

00:23:37.180 | mental health.

00:23:38.180 | Why?

00:23:39.180 | Because there's a special so-called opsin within the cells of your eyes called melanopsin

00:23:43.960 | that doesn't respond to the same differences in color that are present in sunlight in the

00:23:49.200 | morning and the evening, but rather responds to the overall brightness of light.

00:23:53.640 | So very bright lights, either from artificial sources or ideally from sunlight activate

00:23:58.000 | these cells and these cells project these little wires we call axons into specific parts

00:24:03.200 | of the brain that improve your mood and feelings of wellbeing.

00:24:07.080 | So I can't give you a specific number of five minutes a day or 10 minutes a day.

00:24:12.820 | Just get as much light in your eyes, ideally from sunlight throughout the day, as is safe

00:24:17.260 | for you, meaning where you're not getting sunburned and you're not damaging your retina.

00:24:21.000 | And if you want to know if you're damaging your retina, well, anytime you have to blink

00:24:24.640 | or turn away from light because it's really bright, that's a signal that the light is

00:24:28.260 | too bright.

00:24:29.260 | So while you want to place yourself into bright environments, you don't want to place yourself

00:24:32.480 | into any environment so bright that it's painful to be in.

00:24:35.540 | Okay, so use that as a metric and you should be just fine.

00:24:38.500 | And the last point about light for mood and mental health is a relatively recent theme

00:24:42.780 | that's emerging from the scientific literature and that really was driven home by a recent

00:24:46.820 | study that I mentioned a little bit earlier in the episode.

00:24:49.300 | This is the study published in Nature Mental Health showing that darkness during a particular

00:24:54.260 | stage of your 24 hour cycle, your so-called circadian rhythm is also very beneficial for

00:25:00.780 | mood and mental health.

00:25:02.400 | And it's beneficial for mood and mental health in a way that is independent from light and

00:25:08.180 | from sleep.

00:25:09.180 | Now, what do I mean by that?

00:25:10.180 | Okay, well, there are a number of different ways that this can be examined, but in this

00:25:13.840 | particular study, which I like oh so much, entitled day and night light exposure are

00:25:19.620 | associated with psychiatric disorders and objective light study in more than 85,000

00:25:24.720 | people.

00:25:26.080 | What the researchers did is they analyzed how much light and or dark people were getting

00:25:32.040 | across the 24 hour cycle and correlated that with mental health outcomes, looking at a

00:25:37.220 | range of different mental health challenges, including bipolar disorder, schizophrenia,

00:25:41.300 | depression, PTSD, and much more.

00:25:44.060 | And I'll go into this study in a lot of detail in a future episode, 'cause it's such an important

00:25:48.220 | study with so many gems within it that we should all know about.

00:25:51.260 | But one of the key things from this study is that the positive effects of daytime sunlight

00:25:56.580 | exposure and the positive effects of nighttime dark exposure, that means of course the absence

00:26:03.700 | of light, are independent of one another.

00:26:07.420 | Put differently, making sure that you are in very dim to completely dark environments

00:26:13.580 | for a continuous six to eight hours within every 24 hours circadian cycle is correlated

00:26:20.400 | with much better mental health outcomes.

00:26:23.120 | In other words, we shouldn't just think about the presence of light in the morning and throughout

00:26:28.440 | the day as positive for mental health.

00:26:30.220 | That's all true.

00:26:31.220 | It's absolutely true.

00:26:32.220 | And this study further verifies that, but that's been known for some time, indeed decades

00:26:36.780 | from the scientific research.

00:26:38.500 | And of course it's been known for thousands of years intuitively and subjectively without

00:26:42.820 | detailed scientific measurement.

00:26:45.480 | But in addition to that, this study shows that people who stay in very dim to dark environments

00:26:52.200 | for eight hours every 24 hours, or I should say approximately eight hours in every 24

00:26:58.760 | hour cycle, they benefit from improved mood and mental health outcomes in a way that's

00:27:03.680 | independent of how much light they're getting and independent of how much sleep they are

00:27:08.340 | getting.

00:27:09.340 | The point is this, the time when you wake up, consider that time zero.

00:27:13.300 | And then about, again, you don't have to be super strict about this, about 16 to 24 hours

00:27:19.300 | after that wake-up time, you should be in a very dim to dark environment for that 16

00:27:24.760 | hour to 24 hour period after waking up, okay?

00:27:28.720 | What do I mean by this?

00:27:29.720 | I mean, if you go to sleep at 10 PM and you wake up at 6 AM, well that 10 PM to 6 AM phase

00:27:36.160 | of your circadian cycle, you should be in very dim light or entirely dark environment.

00:27:42.260 | This is a great opportunity to reference another study, which was published in the Proceedings

00:27:46.000 | of the National Academy of Sciences, which shows that even having a small amount of light

00:27:50.740 | in the room, which isn't even that bright, while you're sleeping with eyes closed, can

00:27:55.100 | disrupt morning glucose levels.

00:27:57.880 | So in other words, keep your sleeping environment dark, keep your nighttime environment dim

00:28:03.280 | to the best of your abilities, right?

00:28:06.580 | Certainly go out to dinner every once in a while, go to the movies, go out and have a

00:28:09.260 | party, enjoy yourself, if you have to go to the hospital, God forbid, or you have to tend

00:28:13.160 | to some emergency, do that.

00:28:15.220 | But to the extent that you can control it within the confines of life and its demands,

00:28:20.540 | keep your nighttime environment dim or dark, because that independently of any sunlight

00:28:26.200 | and other bright light that you're viewing during the daytime and afternoon is going

00:28:29.780 | to positively improve your mood and mental health.

00:28:33.520 | Now moving on to the other pillars, and these I'm going to move through a bit more quickly

00:28:37.180 | than I have the previous two, because we've done entire series on these, or I should say

00:28:41.320 | serieses.

00:28:42.320 | Is that how you pronounce it, someone put the plural of serieses in the comments on

00:28:48.380 | YouTube.

00:28:49.460 | The third pillar is movement, and when I say movement, I mean exercise.

00:28:53.340 | As you all know, we should all strive to get anywhere from 180 to 220 minutes of zone two

00:29:00.000 | cardio per week, that's movement that allows you to hold a conversation, but were you to

00:29:05.220 | do it more intensely, or even a bit more intensely, you wouldn't be able to hold that conversation.

00:29:09.800 | In addition, we should do some VO2 max work, we should get our heart rate very high at

00:29:14.220 | least once a week, doing some sort of movement that's safe for you, so that could be running

00:29:17.560 | or cycling or swimming or Pilates, whatever it is for you, getting your heart rate way,

00:29:21.780 | way up is also important, and to do that at least once a week.

00:29:25.980 | But daily movement, either cardiovascular training or resistance training, and it's

00:29:29.700 | very, very clear that we need both, maybe not on the same days, in fact, I split them

00:29:33.860 | to separate days, resistance training done for anywhere from six to 10 sets per muscle

00:29:39.620 | group, either close to or to failure, this could be with weights, it could be with bands,

00:29:44.060 | it could be with machines, all of that was covered in detail in the podcast series that

00:29:48.860 | I did with Dr. Andy Galpin, an exercise physiologist, who's expert in all those areas.

00:29:53.140 | I also did an episode on a foundational fitness protocol that has been distilled into a very

00:29:59.460 | simple three page PDF that you can get for completely zero cost by going to HubermanLab.com

00:30:04.900 | and just put foundational fitness protocol PDF, and you'll be taken to that toolkit.

00:30:08.660 | So all of the details of a weekly exercise routine that involves daily movement, but

00:30:13.700 | also, certainly in my case, includes at least one full day of rest per week, because many

00:30:18.940 | people do indeed need one, maybe even two full days of rest per week.

00:30:23.140 | So that highlights the third pillar, movement, but we know that cardiovascular training and

00:30:27.480 | resistance training aren't just great for our body, they also improve mood and mental

00:30:31.900 | health.

00:30:32.900 | That's so very clear from the research literature, so we can't overlook those in a conversation

00:30:38.200 | about mood and mental health.

00:30:39.920 | Now the fourth pillar is nutrition, and nutrition is a big topic, it's a very barbed wire topic.

00:30:44.960 | If you get involved in this stuff online, you've got your people who believe that carnivore

00:30:50.500 | is better than vegan, you have the people who believe vegan is better than carnivore,

00:30:53.740 | most people are omnivores, you have your seed oil debates, and on and on and on.

00:30:57.380 | We're not going to touch any of that now, indeed, if you want to learn more about nutrition

00:31:02.100 | and what works and what doesn't work for sake of aesthetic changes, weight loss, muscle

00:31:06.140 | gain, et cetera, I would refer you to the guest episode that we did with Dr. Lane Norton,

00:31:11.040 | you can find that again at Hubermanlab.com where we do a deep dive on all the variations

00:31:15.200 | and different nutritional protocols.

00:31:17.600 | But suffice to say that regardless of whether or not you're vegan, omnivore, carnivore,

00:31:21.840 | or keto or whatever, everybody needs to consume sufficient amounts, but not excess amounts

00:31:28.360 | of quality calories per day.

00:31:30.420 | Now you may do that by intermittent fasting, you may do that by a more traditional meal

00:31:33.640 | scheduling, but everybody's going to need to do that because your body and brain, and

00:31:40.640 | indeed the parts of your body and brain that translate to mood and mental health, require

00:31:46.240 | macronutrients, proteins, fats, and carbohydrates, as well as micronutrients.

00:31:50.500 | So the key takeaway with nutrition is to make it quality nutrition within the bounds of

00:31:55.360 | whatever sort of nutritional program that you're following.

00:31:58.240 | And that means getting most of your food sources from either non-processed or minimally processed

00:32:04.700 | foods.

00:32:05.700 | So these will be foods that you're going to need to prepare or foods that would perish

00:32:09.400 | over time.

00:32:10.780 | These are not the sorts of foods that live in boxes and cans and other packages that

00:32:14.400 | would allow them to live on the shelves forever and ever.

00:32:16.960 | Okay, and as I say that, I know many people are shouting, well, what about rice?

00:32:20.680 | You know, rice can live on the shelf for a long time.

00:32:22.560 | And yes, okay, I consider rice a minimally processed food because of course it can live

00:32:27.500 | on the shelf for a long period of time.

00:32:29.060 | And here, I'm just going to back out of the whole conversation about nutrition at this

00:32:32.520 | point, because as you can probably tell, it's a deep series of rabbit holes that we can

00:32:38.120 | fall into and really get distracted.

00:32:39.720 | The point is, make sure you're getting enough food.

00:32:42.500 | Don't overeat.

00:32:43.500 | We know energy toxicity is a problem for not just body composition, but for mental health.

00:32:48.840 | So you want to get enough calories, but not too few calories.

00:32:52.760 | And you'll want to make sure that you're getting them from quality sources.

00:32:55.700 | And I say that because of course, food is not just the substrate for the cellular repair

00:32:59.780 | and indeed production of tissues in your body.

00:33:03.120 | But it's also the substrate for all the sorts of neurotransmitters, right, which are derived

00:33:07.560 | from amino acid precursors that are derived from food, right?

00:33:11.200 | All of that dopamine stuff and serotonin stuff is derived from amino acids that come from

00:33:15.400 | food sources.

00:33:16.400 | So the link between nutrition and mental health should now be an obvious one.

00:33:20.520 | As we all know, quality nutrition influences, of course, our physical health, but also our

00:33:24.680 | mental health and our cognitive functioning, our memory, our ability to learn new things

00:33:28.780 | and to focus.

00:33:29.920 | And we know that one of the most important features of high quality nutrition is making

00:33:33.700 | sure that we get enough vitamins and minerals from high quality unprocessed or minimally

00:33:38.100 | processed sources, as well as enough probiotics and prebiotics and fiber to support basically

00:33:43.880 | all the cellular functions in our body, including the gut microbiome.

00:33:47.660 | Now I, like most everybody, try to get optimal nutrition from whole foods, ideally, mostly

00:33:53.980 | from minimally processed or non-processed foods.

00:33:56.960 | However, one of the challenges that I and so many other people face is getting enough

00:34:00.460 | servings of high quality fruits and vegetables per day, as well as fiber and probiotics that

00:34:04.960 | often accompany those fruits and vegetables.

00:34:07.280 | That's why way back in 2012, long before I ever had a podcast, I started drinking AG1.

00:34:13.200 | And so I'm delighted that AG1 is sponsoring the Huberman Lab podcast.

00:34:16.820 | The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day is that

00:34:22.020 | it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs.

00:34:24.680 | That is, it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins, minerals,

00:34:29.440 | probiotics, and fiber to ensure optimal mental health, physical health, and performance.

00:34:35.260 | If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer.

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00:34:51.280 | The fifth pillar in the big six is social connection.

00:34:53.940 | And we're going to talk a little bit more about this later in the episode, but let's

00:34:56.960 | just be very brief and specific about this.

00:34:59.400 | We all need to strive to limit the number of social interactions that we feel tax or

00:35:06.560 | even vex us that cause us stress.

00:35:09.040 | This is something that was covered in depth in the episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett,

00:35:13.560 | where she talked about the fact that we don't just have a nervous system that regulates

00:35:17.180 | itself through experience and through our thoughts and our actions.

00:35:21.860 | We are, as a species, interacting with other nervous systems, both of our own species,

00:35:26.860 | other humans, as well as non-human species, dogs and cats, and if you have them, horses

00:35:31.520 | and other animals.

00:35:32.660 | So we need to think about our nervous system as being both regulated from the inside and

00:35:36.360 | through our own actions and choices and thoughts, but also through interaction with other nervous

00:35:41.060 | systems.

00:35:42.060 | And while we don't always have as much control over which social interactions or work interactions

00:35:47.080 | we have to engage in, we should really strive to understand and indeed pay some serious

00:35:53.300 | attention to whether or not certain types of social interactions are what she referred

00:35:58.780 | to as net savings, neutral, or taxing, right?

00:36:04.240 | Certain types of social interactions with certain people or groups of people just make

00:36:07.860 | us feel taxed.

00:36:08.860 | It makes us feel stressed.

00:36:10.580 | It leads to negative affect, that is not good feelings or emotions, and often elevated levels

00:36:18.320 | of autonomic arousal that leave us ruminating and leave us having challenges with sleep.

00:36:22.500 | We really should all strive to limit those interactions to the extent that we can.

00:36:27.340 | On the reverse side of that, as Lisa Feldman Barrett so beautifully pointed out, we also

00:36:32.080 | have the capability to regulate each other's nervous systems in ways that produce savings,

00:36:37.220 | that is, that allow us to feel and indeed cause physiological changes that make us feel

00:36:42.980 | not just happier, not just relaxed, not just happy because we enjoy interacting with somebody

00:36:49.380 | or a group, but that give us a savings, that give us the kind of resources, literally metabolic

00:36:55.540 | and neurochemical resources that make us feel more capable and give us a sense of elevated

00:37:00.060 | mood and improved mental health when we are not engaging with those people.

00:37:04.220 | And this is highly subjective, of course, but you should be able to distinguish.

00:37:07.260 | In fact, I encourage you to spend a little bit of time, maybe even just five or 10 minutes,

00:37:11.600 | thinking about who are the individuals and groups that I interact with that leave me

00:37:16.060 | feeling taxed, that really seem to drain my energy and have me ruminating and in a not

00:37:22.280 | good space when I leave whatever interaction I had with them, this could be a real interaction

00:37:26.460 | or an online interaction.

00:37:27.900 | Indeed, I did this the other day based on Lisa's suggestion, I found it to be tremendously

00:37:32.060 | useful.

00:37:33.060 | And what I did is I decided to, and by the way, this was happening on a run where I was

00:37:37.780 | thinking, a lot of my mind is in a conversation with people that aren't even here.

00:37:42.580 | I was sort of working through a conversation.

00:37:45.540 | I was thinking about what I would say, what I did say, what they said in an interaction

00:37:50.300 | that unfortunately was pretty unpleasant.

00:37:52.500 | It wasn't extremely unpleasant, but it was pretty unpleasant.

00:37:54.840 | And I realized, okay, that is the sort of interaction that I would like to avoid in

00:37:59.060 | the future because it wasn't happening right then, but it was carried forward into a portion

00:38:03.940 | of my day, my morning run that for me is normally very pleasureful and quite sacred to me actually.

00:38:10.180 | So paying some attention to how much of your internal dialogue is with yourself versus

00:38:14.220 | with others and how much of that is positive or negative is extremely beneficial.

00:38:18.220 | And I'm not talking about always just thinking about oneself and not thinking about others.

00:38:22.060 | To the contrary, we also need to think as Lisa pointed out about who are the people

00:38:28.600 | with whom we interact with or observe that lead us to have ongoing dialogue with them

00:38:34.360 | in our mind, or think about those interactions in ways that give us energy, that lead to

00:38:39.020 | energetic savings, literally metabolic savings that we can apply, not just in those interactions,

00:38:44.700 | but in our work endeavors and our solo endeavors, whatever that we're doing when we are away

00:38:48.980 | from those people.

00:38:49.980 | So while this concept of savings or neutral or taxation of our metabolic and our neurochemical

00:38:58.460 | systems might seem a little bit squishy, it is not squishy.

00:39:01.480 | This is a neurobiological concept.

00:39:03.920 | It's also a psychological concept.

00:39:05.520 | And it's one that I'm so glad that Lisa brought up because social connection, social interaction

00:39:10.580 | is so vital to our mood and mental health.

00:39:13.460 | But oftentimes we hear social connection and we think, oh, that means we have to spend

00:39:16.840 | a lot of time with friends.

00:39:17.840 | We have to organize dinner parties.

00:39:19.560 | Well, sure, that's all fine and good if you can do that.

00:39:22.800 | And I do, of course, encourage people to spend time with those that they love, but it's also

00:39:26.840 | important to take a step back and just think a bit, maybe even write out a bit, you know,

00:39:31.300 | who are the groups and sorts of individuals and interactions that really tax you?

00:39:34.820 | Who are the people that you find kind of neutral and what are the individuals and groups that

00:39:38.500 | really provide what Lisa referred to as savings?

00:39:41.440 | That is they tap into the metabolic and neurochemical pathways that lead us to have improved mood

00:39:46.080 | and mental health, not just during those interactions, but away from those interactions as well.

00:39:50.900 | And often pervasively and extremely positively so.

00:39:54.540 | So this is no small deal.

00:39:57.120 | This is a really important aspect of our mental health.

00:40:00.280 | Now the sixth pillar in the big six is stress control.

00:40:04.720 | And the reason it's included is that, look, stress is going to happen.

00:40:10.020 | Life is filled with so-called stressors.

00:40:13.100 | And for a good number of years, in fact, the last 15 years, there's been a lot of debate

00:40:17.020 | in the field of psychology and neuroscience as well.

00:40:19.480 | Whether or not stress is good for us, whether or not stress is bad for us, whether or not

00:40:22.680 | we simply need to reframe stress as good or bad.

00:40:25.420 | And to some extent, all of that is true.

00:40:27.460 | We know that chronic stress is not good for our memory, our immune system, or our health.

00:40:31.660 | We also know that if you understand the reality, which is that stress also allows us to harness

00:40:37.000 | our mental and physical resources to perform better than we would otherwise in certain

00:40:41.580 | circumstances.

00:40:42.780 | And that provided we can get to sleep each night, that perhaps stress isn't so bad and

00:40:46.980 | perhaps is even performance enhancing.

00:40:48.820 | I talked about this in the guest episode with Dr. Ali Krum from the psychology department

00:40:54.660 | at Stanford.

00:40:55.660 | And I've talked about this in other podcasts as well.

00:40:58.220 | And I'm not here to tell you that stress is good for you.

00:41:01.020 | I'm not here to tell you that stress is bad for you.

00:41:02.800 | What I am going to tell you is that it is extremely important that we all have readily

00:41:06.980 | accessible stress management tools that work the first time and every time.

00:41:11.400 | And these fall into two categories.

00:41:12.860 | The first category are real-time tools.

00:41:15.140 | Those tools that you can use to reduce your level of stress in real time.

00:41:18.820 | And the best way that I'm aware of that's grounded in excellent physiology and neuroscience

00:41:24.940 | to reduce your stress in real time is the so-called physiological side.

00:41:28.660 | I did not invent this pattern of breathing.

00:41:30.820 | It's not breath work per se.

00:41:32.720 | This is a pattern of breathing that we all naturally do in our sleep to restore carbon

00:41:36.320 | dioxide and oxygen levels to their proper ratios.

00:41:39.300 | We also do it periodically throughout the day without noticing.

00:41:41.940 | Indeed, we have a defined or specific neural circuit in our brain that extends to our diaphragm

00:41:47.260 | and communicates with aspects of our heart, et cetera, that allow physiological size to

00:41:53.620 | calm us down faster, at least to my knowledge, than any other directed protocol.

00:41:58.860 | And the physiological side, as many of you know, is very simple and straightforward.

00:42:02.780 | Anyone can do this.

00:42:04.120 | You simply do a big inhale through your nose, try and maximize the inflation of your lungs.

00:42:09.740 | And then before you exhale, sneak in another brief inhalation, even if it's just a tiny

00:42:14.660 | micro inhalation to maximally inflate the lungs.

00:42:18.200 | And that has an important effect on the little sacs in the lungs called the avioli of the

00:42:21.580 | lungs.

00:42:22.580 | It's going to open up whatever avioli were collapsed in there.

00:42:26.040 | And then you're going to do a long extended exhale through the mouth.

00:42:30.740 | And typically just one, although sometimes it requires two or three, but just one physiological

00:42:35.820 | side is effective in bringing down one's level of stress significantly enough that you don't

00:42:41.800 | need to do it again.

00:42:42.980 | So this can be done essentially anywhere and by anyone, I suppose probably couldn't do

00:42:47.020 | it if you were underwater or certainly don't do it if you're underwater, but otherwise

00:42:51.240 | it's a very safe and very effective way to calm down and reduce your levels of stress

00:42:55.740 | in real time, maybe before public speaking or in whatever circumstance you feel you need

00:42:59.760 | to calm down in real time.

00:43:01.700 | So I'll demonstrate the physiological side for you here.

00:43:03.940 | I've done this many times before in previous episodes, but for those of you that haven't

00:43:07.880 | heard or seen those episodes, I feel obligated to do it again now.

00:43:12.000 | Okay, so it's a deep inhale through the nose, followed by another brief inhale through the

00:43:15.420 | nose, and then a long exhale through the mouth.

00:43:17.180 | And before you start asking questions about what do I do if I have a deviated septum,

00:43:20.780 | can it be just through the mouth?

00:43:22.180 | Do the first two through the nose, do the third through the mouth.

00:43:25.800 | So it's like this.

00:43:37.240 | And indeed, I feel calmer.

00:43:38.960 | And indeed, if you do it, you will feel calmer.

00:43:41.520 | You'll notice that second inhale through the nose was kind of sharp in the sense that I

00:43:45.320 | had to really push, put some physical effort into making it happen.

00:43:49.200 | And you know, my shoulders jolted upwards.

00:43:51.200 | If you're just listening to this and not watching my shoulders jolted upwards, that second inhale

00:43:55.500 | through the nose is important for a variety of reasons I've talked about elsewhere.

00:43:59.520 | So the physiological side is going to be the go-to protocol for you, again, not invented

00:44:04.440 | by me.

00:44:05.440 | This is not Huberman breathing.

00:44:06.440 | This is a pattern of breathing discovered in the 1930s by physiologists.

00:44:10.700 | It's hardwired into our nervous system, and that's what makes it so great.

00:44:13.560 | It works the first time and it works every time.

00:44:16.460 | So that's, to my knowledge, the best way to control your stress in real time.

00:44:21.640 | Now why is that important for mood and mental health?

00:44:24.520 | Well, as we'll talk about later, if you want to access your so-called generative drive,

00:44:29.260 | a theme that we're going to get into in a bit more detail, this is something that came

00:44:32.200 | up during the series with Dr. Paul Conte, you will learn that stress and anger and negative

00:44:37.580 | emotions, while they can be very motivating, very arousing, they are not going to be good

00:44:43.520 | for your long-term mood and mental health, period.

00:44:47.560 | So having tools to regulate your stress and your levels of anger, your levels of reactivity,

00:44:52.540 | and also to elevate your feelings of agency and control over your life, starting with

00:44:56.660 | agency and control over your physiology, your internal state, is going to be vital.

00:45:01.940 | And what I love about the physiological side is that, of course, it's completely zero cost,

00:45:06.420 | but also there's a dedicated circuit in your brain and body for this particular pattern

00:45:11.620 | of breathing.

00:45:12.620 | We do it spontaneously, but you can do it intentionally, and it works just as well,

00:45:17.120 | if not better, to regulate your levels of stress, that is to bring them down, which

00:45:21.700 | has outsized positive effects on your mood and mental health, not just in the moment,

00:45:25.900 | but it also should improve your confidence that when stress comes, because the world

00:45:31.540 | is filled with stressors, it's not if, it's when, when stress comes that you will have

00:45:35.860 | a physiologically, scientifically supported tool to deal with and reduce that stress.

00:45:41.120 | Now in addition, I do believe it's important for sake of mood and mental health to also

00:45:45.340 | have a tool or a protocol to raise your stress threshold.

00:45:50.580 | That is to increase your capacity to deal with life stressors without them feeling so

00:45:55.700 | stressful.

00:45:56.700 | And there are a number of different ways to do this, but they all center around elevating

00:45:59.440 | your levels of adrenaline, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, noradrenaline, those are the

00:46:04.780 | same thing, just they have multiple names, forgive me.

00:46:07.040 | I didn't give the same two things, four names, so don't blame me, blame the other scientists

00:46:10.820 | that did it.

00:46:12.380 | The point is, there are several ways that you can self-induce elevations of noradrenaline

00:46:19.340 | and adrenaline, and then to learn to anchor your mind and your thinking to stay calm in

00:46:25.740 | those elevated adrenaline states as a practice for when stressors hit you in the outside

00:46:30.620 | world and your adrenaline and noradrenaline spike.

00:46:34.020 | Now one of the best ways to do this, because it works the first time and every time and

00:46:39.340 | is also zero cost, in fact, it will save you money, is to put yourself in a cold shower

00:46:45.620 | or other deliberate cold exposure environment, but most everyone has access to a cold shower.

00:46:51.440 | Not everyone, but most people.

00:46:53.300 | And of course, by turning off the heat, you're going to reduce heating costs, right?

00:46:56.740 | Your water bill.

00:46:57.840 | So getting into a cold shower for a minute or so to elevate your levels of adrenaline

00:47:03.100 | and learning to either use your breathing, you could do physiological size, or to distract

00:47:08.140 | yourself, or whatever tools and approaches you need to be able to stay calm while you

00:47:14.180 | have elevated levels of adrenaline in your body.

00:47:16.340 | And the reason deliberate cold exposure works so well to do this is that it is pretty non-negotiable.

00:47:23.020 | Even if you really love cold showers or cold plunges or things of that sort, you're still

00:47:27.640 | going to get that elevated adrenaline and noradrenaline.

00:47:31.420 | It's pretty much non-negotiable.

00:47:33.780 | You know, for the first 10 or 15 seconds that you get into a cold plunge or a cold shower,

00:47:37.240 | you should fully expect yourself to feel stressed and for your breathing to accelerate.

00:47:41.580 | And then your goal is to try and anchor or control your breathing in that stressful environment.

00:47:46.000 | The reason for doing this is that it's a practice.

00:47:48.500 | It's a practice that's going to translate to a better ability to manage your internal

00:47:52.860 | state and therefore your thinking, your cognition, and your ability to make good decisions under

00:47:57.820 | stress.

00:47:58.820 | It's not about becoming untouched by stress.

00:48:02.320 | It's about being able to better navigate stress.

00:48:04.980 | Indeed, I think of this as analogous to driving in fog, something that I had to learn to do

00:48:09.820 | because I grew up in the Bay Area and it can be very foggy there sometimes.

00:48:13.540 | And of course you don't learn to drive in fog the first day you learn how to drive,

00:48:16.820 | but the first time you hit heavy fog driving where you can only see one reflector in front

00:48:20.980 | of you at a time, it is truly stressful, right?

00:48:23.800 | You don't know if you're going to come up on another vehicle in an instant, which of

00:48:27.720 | course can happen.

00:48:28.720 | So you have to adjust a number of things.

00:48:30.400 | You have to learn how to do that.

00:48:31.740 | And while I would never elect to drive in fog, learning to drive in fog teaches you

00:48:36.640 | how to be comfortable driving in different weather environments.

00:48:39.180 | Same thing with driving in a rainstorm or for you East coasters from the Northeast, learning

00:48:43.080 | how to drive in a snowstorm.

00:48:44.440 | You would never elect to do that, but once you do it a few times, you feel more comfortable

00:48:48.660 | in those extreme conditions.

00:48:49.960 | So that's really what raising your stress threshold is all about.

00:48:52.820 | Of course, do it safely, do it under conditions in which you're not going to get hurt or anyone

00:48:57.340 | else will get hurt, but learning how to do this can be extremely beneficial.

00:49:00.820 | And of course, deliberate cold exposure isn't the only way, but frankly, it's the most reliable

00:49:05.860 | way and it's the most versatile way to do that because you can do it in your shower

00:49:09.580 | or in a cold plunge at home so you can practice these things.

00:49:12.980 | Again, safety first, always make sure you're not exposing yourself to cold to the extent

00:49:17.700 | that you're going to damage yourself mentally or physically, but it's a great practice.

00:49:21.820 | And you could probably think of other ways to spike your adrenaline that was safe.

00:49:25.600 | And of course, life will spike your adrenaline.

00:49:28.260 | So you can also use real life as your, you know, your stress inoculation tool.

00:49:33.460 | And we all have to do that anyway.

00:49:35.140 | What I'm suggesting is that you adopt a real time tool, physiological size, and that you

00:49:39.840 | adopt at least one offline tool that you do anywhere from one to three, maybe seven days

00:49:44.420 | a week, but at least one day a week that you put yourself into a cold shower, deliberate

00:49:48.300 | cold exposure, not for sake of increasing metabolism or anything else, but really just

00:49:52.460 | to learn how to calm yourself and maintain clear cognition when stress hits because indeed,

00:49:59.460 | stress is going to hit.

00:50:00.780 | So that's the big six for improving mood and mental health.

00:50:04.420 | And the big six apply.

00:50:05.820 | That is, they are the cornerstone for mood and mental health, regardless of who you are,

00:50:10.320 | regardless of your age, regardless of whether or not you're dealing with an acute or a severe

00:50:14.780 | mood or mental health disorder, or you find yourself to be reasonably healthy with respect

00:50:19.600 | to mood and mental health, and you simply want your mood and mental health to be stable

00:50:23.900 | and or improve over time.

00:50:26.220 | Now, the reason why the big six, those six pillars are so important for mood and mental

00:50:31.580 | health, and indeed form a critical component of what Dr. Paul Conte referred to as the

00:50:37.020 | first principles of self-care, is that those six pillars establish a milieu, that is an

00:50:43.740 | environment of neurochemicals, including neuromodulators such as dopamine, serotonin, epinephrine,

00:50:50.100 | norepinephrine, acetylcholine, and other neurochemicals as well, as well as hormones, testosterone,

00:50:55.700 | estrogen, prolactin, cortisol, and immune molecules, and on and on that lead to a high

00:51:03.140 | degree of predictability in your brain and nervous system.

00:51:07.060 | Now, what do I mean by that?

00:51:08.420 | Why would predictability be such a key component of mood and mental health?

00:51:12.680 | Is it really just about knowing that you're going to feel energized in the early part

00:51:15.980 | of the day and tired at the end of the day?

00:51:17.860 | Now, that might be part of it, but that's not the major takeaway.

00:51:21.360 | The major takeaway is that as Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett so aptly pointed out, your brain and

00:51:27.240 | indeed your entire nervous system has a couple of major jobs, you know, it has the job of

00:51:31.920 | regulating your breathing and your heart rate, et cetera.

00:51:35.040 | It also has the job of regulating your thinking and your planning and your memory.

00:51:39.040 | Those are the jobs of the brain and nervous system that we normally hear about.

00:51:42.840 | But if we think about the more macro jobs that the brain has, the key function of the

00:51:47.640 | brain, certainly the parts of the brain that are more recently evolved, the ones involved

00:51:52.520 | in thinking and planning, et cetera, are really involved in generating predictions, predictions

00:51:58.400 | about what's going to happen next and whether or not you're going to be prepared for what's

00:52:02.520 | going to happen next.

00:52:03.520 | And indeed, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett also beautifully illustrated this model of the

00:52:08.720 | brain as regulating a brain body budget and moods and a related topic, which she called

00:52:15.700 | affect.

00:52:16.700 | Okay, I'll explain what affect is in a moment, setting the stage for being able to better

00:52:22.020 | predict what's going to happen next and therefore regulating your mood in the moment.

00:52:28.820 | Let's just take a moment and explore that statement in a little bit more detail.

00:52:32.720 | Essentially what she was saying and what I'm now again saying is that your brain and body

00:52:36.920 | go through different states.

00:52:38.760 | Your state at a given moment can be labeled as your affect.

00:52:42.340 | Your affect includes a lot of different things, including levels of autonomic arousal, levels

00:52:46.840 | of hormones, levels of transmitters, all of that stuff, but it falls under the umbrella

00:52:51.440 | of affect.

00:52:53.200 | Affect essentially sets the stage for particular emotions to be more likely or less likely

00:52:59.680 | to emerge.

00:53:00.680 | So emotion and affect aren't the same thing.

00:53:03.260 | Affect is a bit more general and sort of undergirds the possibility of having certain moods like

00:53:08.600 | feeling elated, happy or sad or depressed.

00:53:12.640 | It really sets the general stage for different types of specific emotions, even highly specific

00:53:18.820 | emotions.

00:53:19.820 | So in that way, when you're taking care of the big six, when you're tending to these

00:53:24.400 | six pillars on a regular basis, and I should point out that we really want to tend to those

00:53:29.240 | six pillars every single day or every single 24 hours, we really need to make those a regular

00:53:35.220 | investment to the extent that we can.

00:53:38.100 | When we do that, we create a neurochemical and a neural milieu that allows the brain

00:53:44.600 | to be in a better predictive state.

00:53:47.260 | It allows the brain to give rise to certain affects spelled AFF ECTS.

00:53:54.480 | So affects that lead to certain emotions being more or less likely to occur.

00:54:00.400 | Put very simply, when we're tending to those six pillars on a regular basis, we feel better

00:54:05.480 | more generally, and therefore the emotions that we tend to have under different conditions,

00:54:11.020 | even conditions of a difficult interaction with a coworker or with a family member, tend

00:54:15.720 | to be more positive than if we are not tending to those six pillars.

00:54:20.000 | Now in some sense, that's sort of a duh statement.

00:54:22.620 | For instance, if you're sleep deprived, if you're not fed well, like you haven't eaten

00:54:26.400 | in a few hours, of course, you're going to be more irritable, you're going to be more

00:54:30.200 | reactive, you are going to be more emotionally labile.

00:54:33.580 | But sleep and nutrition are just two of those six core pillars.

00:54:37.300 | When we talk about those core pillars and the necessity for tending to them on a regular

00:54:41.780 | every 24 hour basis, what we're really talking about is creating a milieu within our brain

00:54:46.780 | and nervous system that allows the nervous system to do what it does best.

00:54:50.780 | And in fact, what its main job is to do, which is to predict what's going to happen next.

00:54:55.820 | Because as Lisa Feldman Barrett pointed out, emotions are really context dependent states

00:55:01.320 | that allow us to navigate not just our present circumstances, but they are our nervous system

00:55:07.320 | and brain's best guess about the circumstances that we are soon going to encounter.

00:55:12.400 | Now I don't offer you all of that as kind of a bunch of, you know, a tangled mess of

00:55:16.840 | nerd speak to confuse you.

00:55:18.260 | What I'm saying is that by tending to those six core pillars, you are shifting the likely

00:55:23.880 | affects that you will experience and therefore the likely emotions that you experience.

00:55:28.020 | So you're biasing your whole system towards more positive affect and more positive emotions,

00:55:33.560 | regardless of what your life circumstances happen to be and the stressors that you encounter.

00:55:38.140 | And indeed, you also are including that six pillar of stress control.

00:55:42.860 | So when those stressors arrive, you will be better able to navigate them.

00:55:47.220 | Now this view of emotion regulation of mood and mental health is certainly not a novel

00:55:52.920 | concept.

00:55:53.920 | People have talked about the physiological regulation of mood from the time of William

00:55:56.700 | James and even earlier, you know, it's been a long standing question, for instance, or

00:56:00.480 | debate in psychology and philosophy, you know, do we feel anxiety in our body and then label

00:56:05.120 | it as anxiety or do we feel anxiety in our mind and then our body follows?

00:56:09.760 | That's been a long standing debate and frankly, there's evidence on both sides, which leads

00:56:13.780 | me to the conclusion, I think most neurobiologists and psychologists at the conclusion that those

00:56:18.040 | things are interrelated in a way that we can't really dissociate them completely at any level,

00:56:22.960 | right?

00:56:23.960 | If your brain goes up and you start breathing faster, you know, if I were to induce that

00:56:27.000 | state in you, you'd probably interpret that as feeling anxious.

00:56:30.700 | In addition to that, something can make you anxious before your heart rate and breathing

00:56:34.160 | increases and then your heart rate and breathing increases.

00:56:36.220 | So no need to tease those apart.

00:56:38.480 | But if you think about the brain in large part as a prediction machine and your brain

00:56:43.120 | as a metabolic regulator, it's trying to decide which organs need resources, how much resource

00:56:48.500 | can I dedicate to thinking, to creativity, to enjoying social interaction, to paying

00:56:54.020 | attention to what somebody else is saying as opposed to what's going on inside my body.

00:56:57.500 | All of those major functions of the brain as they relate to affect and emotions are

00:57:01.880 | going to be best supported.

00:57:04.080 | That is biased toward positive mood, positive affect, positive emotions, and therefore positive

00:57:11.760 | mental health outcomes when we're tending to those six pillars.

00:57:15.340 | Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett referred to that whole process as the brain regulating a brain

00:57:19.660 | body budget.

00:57:21.280 | And she had beautiful analogies for that budget.

00:57:23.080 | And that's what led to the description of social interactions as either generating savings

00:57:27.840 | or being neutral or generating a taxed feeling, literally taxing that brain body budget.

00:57:32.920 | And I love that concept and it's one that you can keep in mind.

00:57:35.860 | And indeed, we can inject a lot of specificity into this whole process of improving mood

00:57:40.780 | and mental health through specific protocols.

00:57:43.460 | If you simply remember, if you make a daily investment in the six core pillars, you are

00:57:49.380 | building up that brain body budget.

00:57:51.920 | You will have more energetic resources to spend on whatever life circumstances come

00:57:57.740 | your way.

00:57:58.740 | Now, before we move into a discussion about protocols for how to better understand your

00:58:02.880 | life narrative to enhance your sense of self and confidence and things of that theme, I

00:58:08.780 | briefly want to mention that of course there are known tools out there in the medical community

00:58:14.800 | and psychological community for improving mood and mental health.

00:58:18.860 | And while there are a variety of tools, one of the main tools of the psychiatrist is prescription

00:58:25.880 | drugs that target specific neuromodulator systems in the brain and body.

00:58:30.620 | For instance, SSRI, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or atypical antidepressants that

00:58:37.940 | target the dopamine and epinephrine systems such as well butrin, piperone, or other types

00:58:43.540 | of antidepressants.

00:58:44.740 | Or for instance, nowadays there's a lot of growing excitement about clinical trials using

00:58:51.140 | relatively high dosages of psilocybin, which by the way, closely mimics the chemical serotonin.

00:58:58.980 | That's right, psilocybin, which is converted to psilocin in the brain.

00:59:03.100 | If you look at it chemically, it looks very much like serotonin, although it has distinct

00:59:07.220 | effects from serotonin.

00:59:08.380 | I talked about psilocybin and what's being done in terms of the clinical trials, safety

00:59:12.500 | considerations, I talked about the potential hazard considerations and where the legality

00:59:16.780 | and all of that is going in that episode if you want to check that out.

00:59:20.300 | But the reason I'm taking a moment to mention these drugs, things like SSRIs, Prozac, Zoloft,

00:59:25.260 | Citalopram, Wellbutrin, psilocybin, and so on, is that all of them target specific neuromodulator

00:59:32.660 | systems in the brain and body, and at the same time, it's fairly clear that mood disorders

00:59:39.260 | such as major depression are not necessarily deficits in things like serotonin or dopamine.

00:59:45.180 | They can be, but most often they are not.

00:59:48.460 | So why are such drugs prescribed for mood disorders and for mental health disorders?

00:59:53.420 | Well, because if specific neuromodulators like serotonin, dopamine, or epinephrine are

00:59:58.580 | dramatically increased above baseline, that affords the brain the ability to rewire itself.

01:00:05.480 | Really the way to think about SSRIs or atypical antidepressants or psilocybin for the treatment

01:00:11.780 | of major depression is really to think about them as chemical tools to open or access neuroplasticity.

01:00:21.340 | And that's why it's oh so important that those drugs be combined with talk therapy where

01:00:25.620 | people are actively working through the sources, the real life sources and the historical sources,

01:00:30.460 | maybe even the trauma-based sources of their depression.

01:00:33.580 | And I mention this because there's a lot of debate nowadays as to whether or not these

01:00:38.180 | drugs are useful, whether or not the side effect profiles justify their use, whether

01:00:42.340 | or not they are applicable to young populations.

01:00:46.940 | There's a lot of debate about this, and certainly in the case of the psychedelics, there's a

01:00:51.380 | lot, a lot of debate because this is a newly emerging area and there's still not a lot

01:00:56.440 | of data, although it's starting to increase over time.

01:01:00.160 | But the key point here is that all of these drugs have the potential to work in some people,

01:01:06.020 | not others.

01:01:07.020 | Some people, they simply don't work for and they cause more problems than solutions they

01:01:11.380 | solve, but they tend to work by increasing the propensity for neuroplasticity by changing

01:01:19.180 | the neuromodulator milieu in the brain.

01:01:22.680 | And this is an important point when thinking about tools for enhancing mood and mental

01:01:25.820 | health, that when we think about tools for enhancing mood and mental health, and next

01:01:31.900 | of course, we're going to talk about the tools that are specifically designed to target a

01:01:36.580 | specific aspect of one's life story or concept of self.

01:01:41.180 | All of that is always operating on a backdrop of two things, that overall neurochemical

01:01:46.660 | milieu and autonomic function that the six pillars relate to and support if we're tending

01:01:51.480 | to those.

01:01:52.480 | But any improvement in mood and mental health that's going to be significant, it's going

01:01:55.980 | to be noticeable, and it's going to be stable, it's going to be pervasive over time, is going

01:02:00.580 | to require that some degree of neuroplasticity, some degree of neural rewiring occur.

01:02:06.140 | So I'm not bringing up the topic of these particular drug tools to say that they are

01:02:09.760 | the best way to improve mood and mental health.

01:02:11.740 | I'm certainly not saying that.

01:02:12.920 | They are but one way to potentially improve mood and mental health.

01:02:17.140 | And if they are going to work, they always work best when done in concert with talk therapy

01:02:22.280 | because they are opening the opportunity for neuroplasticity, but then that neuroplasticity

01:02:26.040 | has to be directed toward a particular end point.

01:02:29.200 | There has to be specific work that's being done by the individual or ideally the individual

01:02:35.040 | with an expert trained clinically certified therapist or psychologist or psychiatrist

01:02:42.320 | in order to make sure that the neuroplastic changes that occur lead to longstanding improvements

01:02:47.400 | in mood and mental health over time.

01:02:49.220 | Indeed, the drugs that I just described were originally designed as tools to allow people

01:02:55.480 | to access changes within their brain that would then allow them to enhance mood and

01:03:00.280 | mental health, but not have to rely on the drugs themselves for improved mood and mental

01:03:05.280 | health.

01:03:06.280 | And along those lines, I'm sure some of you out there are thinking about the supplement

01:03:10.560 | based or nutrition based approaches to enhancing these neuromodulators.

01:03:14.240 | And indeed, while they don't have the same potency as things like Wellbutrin and SSRIs

01:03:18.600 | at increasing things like dopamine and serotonin respectively, there is a growing number of

01:03:22.680 | people out there that are relying on daily supplementation with anywhere from one to

01:03:26.880 | three grams of L-tyrosine, you know, amino acid precursor to dopamine combined with often,

01:03:32.680 | you know, 300 to 600 milligrams of alpha GPC as a way to enhance dopamine and acetylcholine

01:03:39.800 | and to set the stage for elevated levels of neuroplasticity.

01:03:43.560 | But it's very important to point out that the amino acid precursors to the various neuromodulators

01:03:49.060 | like L-tyrosine, like L-tryptophan, so L-tyrosine precursor to dopamine, L-tryptophan precursor

01:03:55.020 | to serotonin, and so on, that those don't have the same degree of potency that is ability

01:04:01.440 | to enhance those neuromodulators.

01:04:03.240 | And so the extent to which they enrich the possibility for neuroplasticity still remains

01:04:08.240 | somewhat obscure.

01:04:09.240 | There haven't been clinical trials on that yet, at least not clinical trials that I am

01:04:13.380 | aware of.

01:04:14.420 | So I mentioned all of that stuff about drugs, whether or not it's psychedelics, or whether

01:04:17.740 | or not it's prescription antidepressants, or whether or not people are using a supplement

01:04:21.880 | based amino acid based protocol for increasing certain neuromodulators, I feel is important

01:04:28.340 | to mention all of that because well, first of all, it's quite prominent out there, certainly

01:04:32.320 | in the case of prescription antidepressants, and there's growing prominence and use of

01:04:37.720 | relatively high dose psilocybin, again, always in done with support talk therapy, this is

01:04:43.600 | done in a legal setting, I said legal, not illegal, a legal setting with a board certified

01:04:50.560 | therapist, this is being done on university campuses within research labs.

01:04:54.680 | And of course, I acknowledge that there are people who are using these compounds outside

01:04:58.560 | the realm of the university clinical study environment.

01:05:01.340 | So I mentioned these chemicals, not because I'm pointing to them as the path to improved

01:05:06.140 | mood and mental health, they can be but they aren't always and as I mentioned before, they

01:05:10.540 | can sometimes cause problems that lead people to wish that they hadn't taken them or to

01:05:15.220 | decide to not take them any further decision that absolutely has to be made with a healthcare

01:05:18.820 | professional who's well certified to do that.

01:05:21.220 | But I'm mentioning these tools, because I want you to understand if they work, why they

01:05:27.600 | work.

01:05:28.600 | And one key point that was really emphasized by Dr. Paul Conte, who, as I mentioned before,

01:05:33.260 | as a psychiatrist, so he uses pharmacology in his practice, although he uses other non

01:05:37.260 | pharmacologic tools as well, is that these pharmacologic tools are never to be viewed

01:05:42.320 | as the be all end all of enhancing mood and mental health, they are but one path to improving

01:05:47.560 | mood and mental health, and indeed should be viewed as a path to getting people who

01:05:52.180 | are otherwise unable to engage in those six core pillars, those first principles of mental

01:05:57.120 | health to be able to do those things on a regular basis.

01:06:00.080 | And then perhaps, based on a discussion with their clinician, these people could come off

01:06:05.680 | those pharmacologic agents, maybe yes, maybe no, it depends on the individual, it depends

01:06:10.080 | on the circumstances.

01:06:11.360 | But those core six pillars, those first principles of mental health that include but are not

01:06:16.500 | limited to those core six pillars are absolutely essential.

01:06:21.760 | There's no drug that can replace those core six pillars.

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01:07:26.640 | Okay, so setting aside the core six pillars, let's now talk about other tools for mood

01:07:30.800 | and mental health that center around really what we more typically think of when we think

01:07:36.860 | of mood and mental health, which is emotions.

01:07:39.080 | When Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett was a guest on the podcast, she said something that was

01:07:44.500 | really incredible.

01:07:45.940 | And it's something that's strongly grounded in excellent scientific data, which is the

01:07:50.660 | more specificity that we can put to labeling our emotions, the better off we're going to

01:07:56.500 | be in terms of our overall mental health.

01:07:59.060 | Let me restate that.

01:08:01.140 | The more specific language that we can put to our own internal emotions, even if that

01:08:07.340 | language is just to ourselves in our own internal narrative, we don't even have to speak out

01:08:11.860 | what those labels are, the better that we're going to feel over time.

01:08:17.540 | And indeed this effect can be quite rapid, and indeed Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett has done

01:08:22.220 | research on this very specific topic.

01:08:24.580 | It's something that's referred to as emotional granularity.

01:08:28.100 | So while some of us move through life with a sort of what I call emojification of emotions,

01:08:34.980 | you know, you get your happy face, happy, your sad face, sad, you know, you're angry,

01:08:39.820 | depressed, anxious.

01:08:41.620 | Those are labels for emotional states, or you could think of them as affects or emotions.

01:08:46.420 | I think of them as emotions, but they're not very specific.

01:08:49.140 | They're pretty broad bins.

01:08:50.620 | We say sad or depressed or super depressed or super sad, anxious, panic.

01:08:56.340 | And we think of that as nuance, but it's not very nuanced.

01:08:59.860 | And Lisa's laboratory and other laboratories have explored two things.

01:09:04.340 | First, if people are asked to or encouraged to put more granularity, more specificity

01:09:08.820 | on what they're feeling, then it seems that their levels of emotional processing are better

01:09:13.940 | overall.

01:09:14.940 | How does that translate to emotions?

01:09:15.940 | Well, it translates to better overall feelings of well-being when one is placing more specificity

01:09:23.940 | on positive emotions.

01:09:27.340 | And the flip side is also true.

01:09:28.940 | So this is important to know.

01:09:30.660 | If one places more specificity on negative emotions, it also can enhance one's kind of

01:09:36.700 | experience of those negative emotions.

01:09:39.540 | Now that means that this is a two-sided blade, all right?

01:09:42.800 | This isn't always a good thing.

01:09:44.500 | And if one is thinking about protocols for improving mood and mental health, the data

01:09:48.440 | make very clear that adding more specificity to our positive emotions in terms of the language

01:09:54.980 | we use, but also just the depth with which we process and think about those positive

01:09:59.180 | experiences can be very beneficial for us.

01:10:02.140 | So there are two studies that I'd like to highlight that relate to this.

01:10:05.140 | The first is entitled Effective Self-Monitoring Through Experience Sampling on Emotion Differentiation

01:10:10.320 | in Depression.

01:10:12.500 | And the second study is entitled Emotional Granularity Increases with Intensive Ambulatory

01:10:17.420 | Assessment.

01:10:19.540 | Methodological and individual factors influence how much.

01:10:22.500 | Now each of these studies focus on something slightly different.

01:10:25.140 | The first study was mainly focused on people who have depression and they were cued several,

01:10:30.620 | if not many times per day, to just think about and report on their emotional state.

01:10:36.340 | And that was done in order to get people to place more granularity, more specificity on

01:10:41.300 | what they're feeling, but also simply to tap into how they're feeling on a more regular

01:10:45.120 | basis throughout the day.

01:10:46.540 | The second study, which is one that included Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barre as an author, was slightly

01:10:51.360 | different because it focused on non-depressed individuals and it cued them to touch into

01:10:56.240 | their emotions more times per day.

01:10:58.220 | And it also included some physiological measurements and one in particular that we're going to

01:11:02.980 | talk about in some detail.

01:11:04.660 | Now I don't have time to go into all the details of these studies, I may do that in a future

01:11:08.700 | podcast episode, but the key takeaways are very important for all of us to know, which

01:11:12.420 | are, first of all, the more often that you can ask yourself, "What am I really feeling

01:11:19.820 | right now?

01:11:20.820 | How do I feel?"

01:11:21.820 | And, and this is so critical, the more that you force yourself to not use broad labels

01:11:29.560 | or simply valence labels, valence labels are good or okay or bad, and instead understand

01:11:37.460 | that good is not an emotion, okay is not an emotion, bad is not an emotion, but rather

01:11:43.940 | saying, "I feel curious, but a little anxious," if that happens to be the case, or "I feel

01:11:49.380 | bored, but also a little bit in positive anticipation about what's going to happen tomorrow."

01:11:57.380 | Things of that sort, putting more nuance and specificity on your emotions, but also touching

01:12:03.300 | into or thinking about your own emotional states more times per day, clearly has positive

01:12:08.980 | outcomes for mood and mental health.

01:12:11.300 | And the reasons for that are incredibly interesting, and this is something everybody should understand.

01:12:15.840 | Why would it be that putting more specificity on what we're feeling, so perhaps just in

01:12:20.540 | our own heads, like thinking, "Okay, how do I feel right now?"

01:12:22.780 | Like if I were to do that right now, I'd say, "I feel energized and happy."

01:12:29.300 | I do, I really enjoy doing what I'm doing.

01:12:31.220 | So I wouldn't say I'm like off the charts in awe or elation, but I'm very happy and

01:12:36.660 | I feel energized.

01:12:37.660 | Earlier today, I was feeling a little bit fatigued and a little bit confused because

01:12:43.900 | I was trying to sort out something and it wasn't making sense to me.

01:12:48.020 | So assessments like that, which can be told to somebody else or that we just hold internally,

01:12:54.240 | done repeatedly throughout the day, anywhere from three to six times throughout the day,

01:12:58.180 | just periodically pinging ourselves, maybe you set an alarm or maybe you just decide

01:13:01.660 | to every once in a while, maybe every time you go into an elevator or every time you

01:13:06.220 | go up a flight of stairs, you just ask yourself, "Yeah, how do I feel right now?"

01:13:09.780 | And thinking about that for a moment, and you don't have to write it down, although

01:13:12.940 | I suppose you could, but it turns out that just that practice can really enhance our

01:13:18.180 | so-called emotional granularity that can enhance our positive emotions and affect.

01:13:23.760 | And in addition, it provides us a better sensitivity to better understand those negative emotions,

01:13:30.760 | which sounds like it might be a bad thing, but those negative emotions have information

01:13:34.740 | in them, right?

01:13:35.840 | This is one thing that's often lost in those broad categorizations of anxious or sad or

01:13:41.200 | depressed.

01:13:42.200 | And keep in mind, of course, that some people are genuinely clinically depressed and that

01:13:44.780 | needs to be taken extremely seriously, just like some people are genuinely clinically

01:13:48.680 | anxious and that needs to be taken seriously.

01:13:51.440 | But most of us, when we throw out the words depressed, angry, sad, we're not using enough

01:13:56.780 | nuance and it doesn't really apply to our internal states or the circumstances that

01:14:01.020 | we're in, and as a consequence, we suffer.

01:14:03.980 | It's not just about communicating our emotions, we suffer because the data say that the more

01:14:08.720 | nuanced, the more emotional granularity that we have, the richer is our experience of the

01:14:14.580 | positive aspects of life and the more effectively we can navigate the negative aspects of life,

01:14:22.820 | right?

01:14:23.820 | Again, negative emotions perhaps isn't the best way to even describe negative emotions

01:14:28.340 | because that label negative implies that we should avoid it.

01:14:31.020 | And in fact, those negative emotions provide a lot of information about perhaps social

01:14:35.860 | interactions that we should seek to avoid in the future and so on and so forth.

01:14:40.220 | Now, one of the most interesting things about this whole process of increasing emotional

01:14:44.980 | granularity and touching in several times per day into how we feel, something that's

01:14:49.300 | completely zero cost, takes just a moment to do, that we can get much better at over

01:14:53.620 | time, that was clearly seen in these studies that people get much better at doing this,

01:14:57.000 | it becomes more facile for them very quickly, is that it correlates with improvements in

01:15:02.860 | physiological metrics that relate to overall improvements in mood and mental health.

01:15:08.700 | And the specific physiological metric that I'm referring to is so-called vagal tone.

01:15:14.540 | Some of you have perhaps heard of the vagus nerve, it's the 10th cranial nerve, it's an

01:15:18.780 | extensive peripheral nerve that goes out of the brain, kind of at the level of the neck,

01:15:25.360 | it's one of the cranial nerves that extends to essentially all the organs of the body,

01:15:29.780 | the heart, the lungs, et cetera, but it's a two-way street.

01:15:32.260 | It's a super highway of nerves out of the brain and into the body, and it's a super

01:15:35.680 | highway of nerves back from the bodily organs to the brain, and it's involved in regulating

01:15:42.720 | a lot of so-called autonomic function, so how fast our heart rate is, how fast our breathing

01:15:47.560 | is, rates of digestion, and all of that weaves together to create those things that we call

01:15:52.600 | affect, our internal states.

01:15:55.500 | So without going into a ton of detail about the vagus nerve, there's something that's

01:15:59.460 | called cardiac vagal control.

01:16:02.520 | Cardiac vagal control is the extent to which that vagus nerve can impact your heart rate

01:16:07.820 | and your overall feelings of calm or alertness.

01:16:11.700 | Now, the simple way to think about this is more commonly referred to as heart rate variability.

01:16:17.940 | Heart rate variability is simply the distance between your heartbeats, or rather the time

01:16:22.020 | between your heartbeats, which we know if those timings between your heartbeats are

01:16:26.960 | somewhat variable, that is correlated with positive physical and mental health outcomes.

01:16:34.000 | One of the ways that you can increase heart rate variability is to get regular cardiovascular

01:16:37.920 | exercise as well as doing resistance exercise, and no surprise, getting sufficient amounts

01:16:44.240 | of quality sleep each night is also going to be very beneficial for heart rate variability.

01:16:48.940 | Now, exercise and sleep, of course, are wonderful, but it turns out that there's also a very

01:16:54.100 | rapid way to increase heart rate variability by activating the vagal innervation of the

01:17:00.080 | heart and the way that the heart and some other circuits within the so-called brainstem

01:17:05.040 | interact, and that's through something called respiratory sinus arrhythmia.

01:17:10.720 | Respiratory sinus arrhythmia can be summarized very simply by saying when you inhale, you

01:17:17.060 | speed your heart rate up, and when you exhale, you slow your heart rate down.

01:17:23.240 | And it's that exhale slowing your heart rate down that's mediated by the vagus nerve.

01:17:28.320 | Now there's a more thorough description of that, which I'll just give you now, and it's

01:17:32.140 | not that lengthy, so here's how it goes.

01:17:35.020 | When you inhale, your diaphragm actually moves down, and as a consequence, your heart actually

01:17:42.460 | gets a little bigger, has a little more space.

01:17:45.180 | As a consequence, the fluid in your heart moves a little more slowly per unit volume,

01:17:49.940 | and there's a neural signal to speed the heart up, conversely, when you exhale, the diaphragm

01:17:55.120 | moves up, that means there's a little less space for the heart in the general area where

01:17:59.320 | it's sitting, so the heart gets a little bit smaller, a little more compact, that means

01:18:02.360 | that the fluid in your heart is moving more quickly through that smaller space, and there's

01:18:07.100 | a neural signal mediated by the vagus to slow the heart down, so that's why inhales speed

01:18:12.100 | your heart up, and exhales slow your heart down.

01:18:15.620 | That is the basis of so-called RSA, or respiratory sinus arrhythmia.

01:18:20.900 | Now what does any of that have to do with the granularity of language that we place

01:18:26.580 | on our emotions?

01:18:27.660 | Well, it turns out there's several studies showing that when people place more descriptive

01:18:34.240 | granularity on their emotions, that is correlated with, okay, it's not causal, but it's correlated

01:18:39.240 | with improvements in respiratory sinus arrhythmia, which we know correlate with improvements

01:18:44.880 | in heart rate variability, indeed, it's one of the major bases for heart rate variability,

01:18:50.040 | which we know is correlated with not just positive physical health outcomes, but positive

01:18:55.480 | mental health outcomes, including lower levels of anxiety, improved sleep, and overall levels

01:19:00.360 | of mood.

01:19:01.360 | This is a topic that I'm very familiar with, because last year, my laboratory at Stanford

01:19:05.960 | University School of Medicine, in collaboration with a colleague of mine, Dr. David Spiegel,

01:19:10.800 | our associate chair of psychiatry, also at Stanford University School of Medicine, published

01:19:15.480 | a clinical trial in Cell Reports Medicine, showing that there's a particular pattern

01:19:19.980 | of breathing that people can do for just five minutes per day, that is effective in significantly

01:19:27.100 | improving various metrics related to mood, and reducing anxiety, and also improving sleep,

01:19:35.980 | although I should say the protocol I'm about to describe, didn't uniformly improve all

01:19:41.140 | of those metrics, it had a bigger effect on some versus others, I'll provide a link to

01:19:45.180 | that study in the show note captions, but if you're wondering what this protocol is

01:19:49.500 | that people did for five minutes a day that allowed them to, by the way, pervasively improve

01:19:54.000 | their mood, so it wasn't just their mood while they were doing this five minute a day protocol,

01:19:58.340 | it was improvements in mood around the clock, essentially, as well as improvements in other

01:20:03.440 | physiological metrics and other aspects of those six core pillars, it was that physiological

01:20:09.640 | side that we talked about earlier, although in this case, we didn't have people do just

01:20:13.680 | one physiological side, we had people set aside five minutes per day, so set a timer

01:20:18.460 | for five minutes, they could sit or lie down, they could do it any time of day, and we just

01:20:24.440 | had them repeat that physiological side for a duration of five minutes total, so that

01:20:29.700 | they would do two inhales through the nose, and then a full exhale to lungs empty through

01:20:34.560 | the mouth, then they would do it again, and then they would do it again, and again until

01:20:38.360 | those five minutes were completed, again, the outcome of that clinical trial was that

01:20:43.700 | that particular pattern of breathing, which we called cyclic physiological sighing for

01:20:47.980 | five minutes per day, again, done any time of day, had the most positive outcomes in

01:20:54.260 | terms of improving mood and mental health and autonomic function, those things related

01:20:58.340 | to sleep and heart rate variability, so that's a very simple, very minimal time investment,

01:21:04.100 | zero cost tool that anyone can use that, again, improves various metrics of physical health,

01:21:10.260 | but also improves metrics of mental health, and it ties right back in with what was observed

01:21:16.240 | in the work by Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett, exploring how putting more word label emotional granularity

01:21:25.620 | on one's emotional states positively impact our physiological state, and the fact that

01:21:30.280 | thinking about our emotions more frequently throughout the day and deliberately putting

01:21:34.980 | more label granularity on those emotions frequently throughout the day is correlated with this

01:21:41.720 | improvement in respiratory sinus arrhythmia and heart rate variability, the fact that

01:21:46.860 | these things all relate to one another should not surprise us, because indeed, there's a

01:21:51.420 | previous paper, this is a quite extensive review, actually, it's a very nice review.

01:21:56.020 | It's one that I encourage anyone who's interested in these topics to explore, especially psychologists

01:22:00.460 | who might have a interest in physiology or psychiatrists are simply people who are interested

01:22:04.900 | in mind body stuff.

01:22:07.080 | This is a review published in 2017 in the journal biological psychology entitled cardiac

01:22:11.940 | vagal control as a marker of emotion regulation in healthy adults a review and again, it's

01:22:17.180 | a really wonderful literature review of the peer reviewed primary research, which really

01:22:22.700 | establishes that this thing, vagal tone, our ability to kind of put the brakes on our autonomic

01:22:29.800 | nervous system and slow our heart rate down deliberately through our breathing, and perhaps

01:22:34.000 | even just by stopping and reflecting on what our emotional states are, is really beneficial

01:22:39.560 | for our overall mood and mental health.

01:22:41.500 | And I want to highlight bold and underline that word overall, because it's not just the

01:22:46.860 | case that people experience elevated mood and mental health in the moments where they

01:22:50.340 | stop and go, Oh, how am I feeling?

01:22:52.180 | Oh, you know, am I feeling bored or agitated?

01:22:56.000 | Do I feel particularly excited?

01:22:58.140 | Sure, that can have some impact on physiological metrics and mood and mental health.

01:23:03.440 | But in all of these studies, the outcome seems to be that people's overall levels of mood

01:23:08.620 | and mental health are enhanced, not just while they're thinking about their emotions or doing

01:23:12.480 | this five minute a day cyclic sign, but around the clock, which is really terrific, because

01:23:17.120 | I think that's what most all of us want, which is improved mood and mental health, not just

01:23:21.160 | in the moments when we do a practice or in the few minutes afterwards, but 24 hours a

01:23:26.300 | day.

01:23:27.300 | I suppose we might segment out sleep during which you know, hopefully we're having great

01:23:30.680 | dreams as opposed to other kinds of dreams.

01:23:33.240 | But the point is, everyone, I have to imagine would like to feel better and have elevated

01:23:39.320 | mood and mental health during the times when they're awake, and indeed, these sorts of

01:23:43.280 | protocols have been shown to do that, or so say the scientific data.

01:23:47.960 | Now we are going to discuss the tools for enhancing mood and mental health gleaned from

01:23:52.120 | the four episode guest series with Dr. Paul Conte, who is a medical doctor specializing

01:23:56.880 | in psychiatry.

01:23:58.480 | He also has particular expertise in trauma.

01:24:01.080 | However, the four episode guest series that we did with Dr. Conte was really about exploring

01:24:05.700 | the self, as well as tools and protocols for not just gaining a better understanding of

01:24:11.160 | oneself, but also for gaining a better understanding and tools for relating to others, aka relationships.

01:24:18.220 | Thread through the series was a model of the mind and how it works to create everything

01:24:22.480 | from feelings, thoughts to behaviors that Dr. Paul Conte described as an iceberg model.

01:24:28.800 | I perhaps should refer you to the fact that he actually drew out this model and we provided

01:24:33.900 | it as a zero cost PDF in the show note captions for every single one of those episodes in

01:24:39.000 | that four episode series.

01:24:40.800 | We also provide a link to this model in the show note captions for this tools episode.

01:24:46.120 | The model is called the iceberg model, and as the name suggests, it resembles an iceberg

01:24:50.720 | in which the vast majority of our mind's processing occurs below our conscious awareness in our

01:24:57.040 | unconscious mind.

01:24:58.080 | So that's the portion of the iceberg that resides below the surface.

01:25:01.480 | Whereas the portion of our mental processing that we are aware of resides above the water

01:25:06.220 | surface, the so-called conscious mind.

01:25:08.340 | So a key aspect of the iceberg model is that the unconscious mind is responsible for the

01:25:13.360 | vast majority of our feelings, thoughts and behaviors, but that we are not aware of how

01:25:18.400 | this unconscious mind is doing that.

01:25:20.820 | And by extension, the tools and protocols that Dr. Conte described largely deal with

01:25:25.820 | going into the unconscious and figuring out how the unconscious processing is influencing

01:25:31.020 | our conscious processing both in healthy and in unhealthy ways.

01:25:35.140 | And when we say in healthy and unhealthy ways, we're largely referring to the presence of

01:25:39.540 | defenses.

01:25:40.540 | So some of you have perhaps heard of defenses before.

01:25:43.300 | Some defenses can indeed be healthy and others are unhealthy.

01:25:47.060 | There are defenses such as projection, sublimation, denial.

01:25:51.940 | And during the course of that four episode series, Dr. Conte explains how projections

01:25:55.660 | are not always bad for us.

01:25:57.260 | Indeed, they can protect us from panic, from severe trauma, but they also can create difficulties

01:26:04.140 | in processing our own understanding of self and of our life experiences in ways that can

01:26:08.920 | actually be damaging to us.

01:26:10.780 | So a key takeaway from that four episode series is to understand and acknowledge that your

01:26:15.780 | unconscious mind is driving much of what you feel, think and do.

01:26:20.100 | However, by doing structured exploration of the self, and we'll talk about how to do that,

01:26:25.540 | one can gain better understanding of how that unconscious processing is influencing what

01:26:30.100 | you think, feel, believe and do.

01:26:33.060 | So once you accept the important role of the unconscious mind, and you make the decision

01:26:37.100 | that you want to better understand how your unconscious mind and conscious mind are in

01:26:40.800 | this constant dialogue, and how you can have that dialogue better serve you.

01:26:45.220 | There are a series of actionable tools that you can do that will allow you to better understand

01:26:50.020 | yourself and how you relate to others.

01:26:52.860 | And the first of these tools is to really understand your self concept.

01:26:57.140 | Now of course, most all of us know our own name, rarely do we ever forget that name.

01:27:02.180 | We have some concept of where we're from, who our parents are, what our present and

01:27:06.860 | future goals might be, where we've succeeded, where we failed in life, and on and on.

01:27:11.700 | But the self concept goes far beyond that sort of CV list, or our biography of self.

01:27:17.740 | Indeed, the self concept has a lot to do with our self confidence, our feelings of ability,

01:27:23.900 | both to overcome challenges, but also our ability to serve the world that we're in,

01:27:29.140 | and our ability to change ourselves over time.

01:27:31.660 | Now, of course, the degree to which somebody might have confidence or less confidence,

01:27:36.220 | or the degree to which somebody feels that they can exert influence on their environment

01:27:39.800 | and their goals is, of course going to vary based on their personal history.

01:27:44.420 | But as Dr. Conti explained, even independent of all that, if one puts in some work to better

01:27:50.180 | understand their self concept, to really get a clear picture of oneself, from that one

01:27:56.320 | can develop more agency with which to pursue one's aspirations, and to reach their goals.

01:28:02.360 | And the key concept here is one that's particularly powerful for both exploring and building up

01:28:07.900 | one's concept of self.

01:28:09.780 | And that's to consciously and deliberately build a life narrative.

01:28:13.220 | Now a simple way to do this that can be very effective is to create a series of folders

01:28:18.700 | or documents.

01:28:19.700 | It could even be a stack of papers.

01:28:21.220 | I prefer to do this in electronic form.

01:28:23.780 | And I confess that even before learning about this tool from Dr. Conti, I had initiated

01:28:28.040 | doing this tool starting back in 2015.

01:28:31.580 | And it's fairly straightforward, but as I mentioned before, it can be very powerful.

01:28:35.940 | And it simply consists of building out separate folders or pieces of paper, and this could

01:28:40.580 | be done electronically or on real world paper with paper and pen or paper and pencil.

01:28:46.000 | And essentially what you do is you're going to divide your life history into some regular

01:28:51.020 | increments.

01:28:52.020 | So for me, the way that I did this is I created a folder on my laptop that I actually called

01:28:57.020 | lifetime.

01:28:58.020 | So that's the title of the main folder.

01:28:59.100 | And then within that folder, I have a series of folders, each of which spans a particular

01:29:03.840 | phase of my life.

01:29:04.840 | So zero to five years of age, six to 10 years of age, 11 to 15 years of age, and so on and

01:29:10.560 | so forth.

01:29:11.560 | Now I'm 48 years old, so I have folders that extend to age 50 currently, although I will

01:29:16.700 | add folders going forward very soon.

01:29:19.320 | And the idea here is that for each of those folders, you're going to place a single word

01:29:23.160 | document into that folder.

01:29:25.440 | And then on that word document, you're not going to journal.

01:29:28.880 | You're not going to do any sort of extensive writing.

01:29:31.500 | Rather, you're simply going to put down bullet points with titles.

01:29:36.420 | It could be one or two sentences, but typically it's just a few words describing some of the

01:29:40.380 | key milestone events that you remember from that particular phase of your life.

01:29:45.140 | So just for sake of example, I'll read off some of the things that are included in the

01:29:48.480 | folders for my particular lifetime narrative.

01:29:51.900 | But of course, this relates to my lifetime narrative.

01:29:54.180 | You should, of course, put the milestones and key bullet points that relate to your

01:29:57.940 | lifetime narrative.

01:29:58.980 | But again, just to give you a sense of the sorts of things that made it into this folder

01:30:02.840 | in my six years old to 11 year old folder on that document, I put where I was living

01:30:09.180 | at that time, the city I was living at, the school that I went to.

01:30:12.120 | I put a couple of teachers names, teachers that had a particular influence on me, a particular

01:30:17.600 | summer camp experience that was not a traumatic experience, by the way, it was a happy experience.

01:30:23.040 | But for me, it turned out to be a very transformative one.

01:30:26.260 | And then there are a couple other things in there that are just recollections of childhood

01:30:29.980 | friends names, okay?

01:30:31.580 | So seemingly mundane information perhaps, but it looks more or less like a biography

01:30:36.320 | and yet other folders.

01:30:38.260 | So for instance, the folder that spans from 25 to 30 years of age is the time that I was

01:30:44.860 | in graduate school.

01:30:45.860 | So it includes a note about graduate school, a note about particular hobbies that I was

01:30:49.580 | interested in, in addition to my scientific research at the time, a couple of key relationships,

01:30:54.260 | a couple of key relationship challenges, as well as some things that at that time I was

01:30:58.680 | processing about prior years, in particular, my teen years in high school.

01:31:03.380 | Now the key thing here is that whatever goes into these folders is what's important to

01:31:07.140 | you.

01:31:08.140 | It could be positive events, it could be negative events, it could be events that for whatever

01:31:12.120 | reason you remember and keep surfacing in your mind, that you think might be interesting

01:31:16.940 | or important at some later time or that you're concerned you might forget.

01:31:20.340 | In fact, that might be a really good metric for whether or not you include something in

01:31:23.820 | these folders or not.

01:31:24.820 | If there's something that you want to make sure that you never forget, but that you think

01:31:28.900 | you might forget, I would encourage you to put it onto that Word document and put it

01:31:32.260 | into that particular folder.

01:31:34.060 | Again, this isn't about creating a coherent life story, this is about creating a series

01:31:39.280 | of segments of small collections of key life events, positive, negative, neutral, inspiring,

01:31:46.260 | basically anything that was salient for you at that particular time.

01:31:50.160 | And of course, if you want to put reflections about those particular events into that Word

01:31:54.160 | document, you're more than welcome to do that.

01:31:56.480 | But the basis of this self-concept developing exercise is just that, it's to develop a historical

01:32:03.780 | sense of yourself.

01:32:05.440 | Of course, bringing you up to present day, where you will continue to add things to whatever

01:32:09.900 | Word document goes into that particular folder for the age you happen to be now.

01:32:14.020 | Now for some of you, this kind of autobiographical bullet pointing might seem like it's just

01:32:18.900 | that, some attempt to build or write an autobiography, but it's very important to remember that these

01:32:24.760 | folders are for you.

01:32:26.180 | These folders are not about writing a book about your life history, although if you decide

01:32:29.960 | to do that with these folders at some point down the line, that sounds great, but that's

01:32:35.320 | not the goal here.

01:32:36.620 | The goal is for you to build a structured narrative representation of events that were

01:32:41.740 | key in your life.

01:32:43.600 | And as described in the series with Dr. Conti, this goes way beyond just understanding your

01:32:48.540 | past.

01:32:49.540 | This is really about understanding past.

01:32:51.340 | It's about understanding yourself at present and indeed it threads into your goals and

01:32:55.660 | aspirations for the future.

01:32:57.660 | An important thing to understand about this tool or protocol is that it also has a incredible

01:33:03.540 | ability to anchor you in your perception of the passage of time.

01:33:08.560 | Some of us track the passage of time better than others, both within the day and across

01:33:12.360 | days and years and so forth.

01:33:14.320 | But this exercise in particular is very good at allowing you to see, you know, how much

01:33:18.880 | time you devoted at a given stage of your life to a given endeavor, whether or not you're

01:33:23.040 | stuck in patterns whereby you're still engaging in certain types of things professionally

01:33:27.760 | or relationship wise or in any other number of different ways that have you in a pattern

01:33:35.080 | that may or may not be serving you well.

01:33:37.360 | I want to emphasize again that this exercise is not about goal setting.

01:33:41.720 | It's about your ability to build a structured narrative pattern from which you can look

01:33:47.320 | at it and then make a determination as to whether or not, you know, you feel that you're

01:33:51.660 | currently on the right path for you.

01:33:53.940 | But it's not about projecting forward as to what your goals are.

01:33:57.680 | We'll soon talk about that.

01:33:58.760 | We'll talk about goals and aspirations in a moment.

01:34:01.180 | This is really about better understanding what led you up to the place that you are

01:34:05.560 | now.

01:34:06.560 | And it really helps you pinpoint the key work that you need to do in terms of exploring

01:34:10.040 | your unconscious and conscious mind using some tools that we're going to get into subsequently.

01:34:14.640 | So there's really no strict rules about how to do this exactly, except that I do encourage

01:34:18.960 | you to make those increments across your lifespan manageable.

01:34:21.840 | I wouldn't suggest doing it one for every year.

01:34:24.720 | I wouldn't suggest a folder, one for every 10 years.

01:34:27.600 | I think a three to five year increments seem like a more reasonable and tractable way to

01:34:32.080 | go about this.

01:34:33.140 | So that's one of the sorts of tools that Dr. Conti referred to as to how to build up one's

01:34:38.340 | self-concept, which directly relates to things such as our confidence, our ability to track

01:34:43.880 | our own behavior, understand some of our motivations, both conscious and unconscious.

01:34:48.100 | But of course, that practice is mainly a conscious exercise.

01:34:51.540 | It's really not tapping directly into the unconscious in any kind of direct way as far

01:34:56.140 | as we know.

01:34:57.180 | Now we can contrast that with the tools and protocols that are designed to tap into the

01:35:00.600 | unconscious mind.

01:35:02.060 | And of course, there are a number of different ways to do this that were discussed in that

01:35:05.480 | four episode series with Dr. Conti.

01:35:07.720 | But one of the most powerful ways to do this is by thinking about and indeed sometimes

01:35:12.800 | writing about or even analyzing one's dreams.

01:35:16.120 | Now dream analysis is something for which you can find a lot of books out there.

01:35:19.440 | There are a lot of theories.

01:35:20.660 | There's also a lot of argument that perhaps dream analysis, which has roots in Freudian

01:35:24.020 | psychology as well as other traditions, is perhaps not accurate.

01:35:29.000 | I don't think we want to consider whether or not dream analysis is accurate.

01:35:32.480 | Rather, I think we should just acknowledge that when we are dreaming, in particular the

01:35:37.200 | dreams that we have toward the later part of our night, which are the dreams associated

01:35:41.300 | with rapid eye movement sleep, that tend to be very emotionally laden dreams as compared

01:35:46.160 | to the dreams that we have earlier in the night, well, when we consider the content

01:35:50.500 | of those dreams, even if we're not trying to interpret them, it's very clear that those

01:35:54.260 | dreams reflect the unconscious mind controlling more of our internal dialogue or what we are

01:36:00.900 | experiencing at that time.

01:36:02.740 | Whereas when we are awake, our conscious mind tends to take over more of the narrative,

01:36:06.740 | the internal narrative, and the control of our feelings, thoughts, and behaviors.

01:36:10.340 | But as I mentioned before, the unconscious mind is always exerting an influence regardless

01:36:14.520 | of whether or not we are asleep or awake.

01:36:16.860 | With that said, one way to explore the unconscious mind and to begin to get a better understanding

01:36:21.500 | about how it might be influencing our waking states and behaviors is to actually record

01:36:27.680 | and think about one's dreams.

01:36:29.720 | Now of course, some people remember their dreams on a regular basis.

01:36:33.120 | Other people don't.

01:36:34.480 | Some people actually believe that they don't dream.

01:36:37.700 | Studies out of sleep laboratories at Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, and elsewhere

01:36:41.460 | all generally agree that everybody dreams, but not everybody remembers their dreams.

01:36:46.660 | So if you're interested in tapping into an understanding of what your dreams are telling

01:36:51.960 | you, which is basically a way of saying what your unconscious mind or dialogue consists

01:36:58.400 | of, I highly recommend putting a journal, so this would be any kind of paper and pen

01:37:04.460 | or paper and pencil type journal.

01:37:05.980 | And the idea is this, if you wake up and you can remember your dream, write down a few

01:37:13.200 | key bullet points from that dream.

01:37:14.920 | If you feel you can write out the dream in a very kind of linear narrative, this happened

01:37:18.980 | and that happened and this happened and that happened, great.

01:37:21.020 | But most people find that their memory of their dream is rather fragmentary.

01:37:26.160 | Other people can't remember their dream, or at least they wake up, they feel like they

01:37:31.580 | were having a dream, but they can't remember all of it or key components of it.

01:37:35.580 | And for that, I suggest that you try keeping your body completely still and closing your

01:37:40.420 | eyes once again.

01:37:41.860 | We don't quite understand why this is, but when you look at the literature on dream recollection,

01:37:47.460 | it seems that by keeping one's body completely still with eyes closed, we have better access

01:37:54.040 | to whatever the contents of the dream that just occurred were, okay?

01:37:58.240 | So if you wake up and you can't remember your dreams, try lying still for a few minutes

01:38:02.940 | and keeping your eyes closed and seeing whether or not that helps surface the content of that

01:38:07.300 | dream.

01:38:08.300 | Other people find that they get up, they get out of bed, and then sometime in the middle

01:38:11.780 | of the morning, maybe even later in the day, the contents of a dream will just come to

01:38:15.580 | them.

01:38:16.580 | Well, if that happens, great.

01:38:17.580 | I also highly recommend that you have a way to write down the contents of that dream.

01:38:21.980 | Now what you're looking for when you do this sort of tool or protocol, I encourage you

01:38:25.760 | to be wary of any immediate interpretation of, for instance, okay, animals in a dream

01:38:30.500 | mean children, although they could, you know, there's not a lot of science that really supports

01:38:35.080 | that as a firm statement.

01:38:36.780 | And of course there are books out there and podcasts and a ton of information trying to

01:38:40.740 | help you interpret your dreams.

01:38:42.100 | And while some of that can be fun and not all of it is entirely useless, the goal here

01:38:46.000 | is not to interpret your dreams.

01:38:47.700 | The goal here is to start recording some of the key takeaways, maybe even the entire narrative

01:38:52.700 | of the dreams that you have just prior to waking as a way to try and understand some

01:38:57.160 | of the themes that are occurring and recurring in the dialogue that exists within your unconscious

01:39:03.700 | mind.

01:39:04.700 | So a key aspect of this tool is that you're not going to take any one dream as an enormously

01:39:10.020 | informative dream.

01:39:11.220 | It might be, but more important in this particular tool is to write down the themes of a particular

01:39:16.860 | dream and then see whether or not those particular themes resurface again and again across different

01:39:22.680 | nights or across different dreams.

01:39:25.280 | The idea here is that things that are repeating thematically will show up as different components

01:39:31.580 | in different dreams, but that by keeping a dream journal, you can start to identify some

01:39:37.340 | of these patterns that are occurring from one dream to the next, as opposed to having

01:39:41.620 | the same dream over and over.

01:39:43.480 | But the point here is that you can explore the contents and the themes, that's really

01:39:47.080 | the most important word here, the themes of your unconscious mind that is occurring if

01:39:52.240 | you start thinking about what's recurring during your dreams, because dreams are a time

01:39:56.340 | when your unconscious mind is dominating the narrative within your mind and brain.

01:40:01.340 | Now for those of you that dream a lot and remember your dreams, as well as for those

01:40:05.020 | of you that do not, I would also encourage you to explore the contents of your thinking,

01:40:11.060 | that is thinking about your thinking during so-called liminal states.

01:40:15.660 | And the liminal state during which this can be particularly useful is right upon waking.

01:40:20.220 | So this is different than thinking about what you were dreaming about.

01:40:23.500 | This is about keeping your eyes closed and body still.

01:40:26.820 | We do think that that's important for doing this well, because once you start moving your

01:40:29.940 | body, you open your eyes and you start bringing in sensory experience for that day, your mind

01:40:34.300 | dramatically shifts towards conscious processing.

01:40:36.800 | But in that liminal state between sleeping and awake, when you wake up and you're a little

01:40:41.700 | sleepy, maybe you don't want to get out of bed, this happens to me all too often, try

01:40:46.000 | closing your eyes and remaining perfectly still for maybe one to three minutes, maybe

01:40:50.160 | five minutes, and just pay attention to where your mind goes.

01:40:54.400 | Now you might fall back asleep, be mindful of that, depending on what you need to do

01:40:57.680 | that morning, but a lot of people will find that their mind goes into this place that's

01:41:03.940 | neither sleep nor awake, right?

01:41:05.880 | This is a state that very much resembles the state people achieve in things like yoga nidra,

01:41:10.300 | yoga sleep, or in non-sleep deep rest, although it tends to be more dominated by the unconscious

01:41:16.060 | mind, a little bit more sleep-like.

01:41:18.140 | Now some people find this practice to be difficult because they're the sort of people that wake

01:41:22.160 | up and they're just immediately ready to go.

01:41:24.940 | Most people, however, myself included, find that when they wake up, the mind isn't completely

01:41:29.480 | alert yet.

01:41:30.480 | And you can use that period, again, just maybe two or three minutes, maybe five minutes,

01:41:35.620 | to start to pay attention to the contents of your thinking, see whether or not your

01:41:40.740 | thinking migrates from something related to work or to relationship or to self or to something

01:41:48.860 | you want to do or something that you're anxious about and so on and so on.

01:41:53.800 | And here too, you'll want to write this down.

01:41:55.560 | So this is very much like the dream journaling we just talked about, but it's slightly easier

01:42:00.000 | for most people to access, especially people who have a hard time remembering their dreams.

01:42:05.040 | And again, it's an opportunity to access some of the contents of your unconscious mind,

01:42:10.000 | to learn to look at and see what's going on in your unconscious mind in a way that's very

01:42:15.820 | difficult if not impossible to do, unless you're working with somebody who's very good

01:42:20.180 | at accessing the unconscious, such as a skilled psychiatrist or psychoanalyst.

01:42:25.320 | And in that way, allowing you to do introspective work, which is not structured in terms of

01:42:31.220 | thinking, trying to think about like, what do I want, what's going on?

01:42:35.000 | Why did they do that?

01:42:36.000 | Why did I react that way?

01:42:37.240 | Nothing like that.

01:42:38.240 | You're simply observing your mind and seeing what's geysering up from the unconscious.

01:42:43.360 | That is, you're getting a portal into that portion of the iceberg that resides below

01:42:49.020 | the surface of the water.

01:42:50.500 | The next set of tools for exploring the self, self-concept, et cetera, from that four episode

01:42:55.600 | series with Dr. Conti is journaling.

01:42:58.080 | I'm going to do an entire episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast about journaling.

01:43:01.600 | And there are a lot of different kinds of journaling.

01:43:03.660 | And fortunately, there are a lot of great peer reviewed studies about the power of journaling

01:43:07.720 | for processing all sorts of things like emotional states, trauma, et cetera.

01:43:11.880 | There are basically two categories of journaling that are very useful to carry out on a consistent

01:43:17.000 | basis.

01:43:18.000 | And when I say consistent basis, that could mean every day, or it could mean three times

01:43:21.060 | a week.

01:43:22.060 | It could even be once a week.

01:43:23.060 | There are really no hard and fast rules about this.

01:43:25.360 | But when we think about journaling, there are really two main styles of journaling.

01:43:29.060 | One is going to be free associative journaling.

01:43:31.080 | Sometimes people talk about this as a data dump, right?

01:43:34.700 | Typically people will talk about the data dump as the morning notes, which is when you

01:43:39.060 | wake up in the morning, you know, you've got a lot on your mind.

01:43:41.360 | You can't organize your mind.

01:43:42.800 | People who have a hard time structuring their thinking and behavior often find this very

01:43:47.040 | useful, which is to, you know, take out a journal or a piece of paper.

01:43:50.280 | Again, this is just for you.

01:43:51.560 | It's important that you realize and really make sure that you're the only person that's

01:43:56.680 | going to see these notes because a lot of people get into self-monitoring when they're

01:44:00.280 | doing their journaling.

01:44:01.280 | They're thinking about, well, how's this going to look?

01:44:03.240 | Is my handwriting okay?

01:44:04.240 | How's my punctuation?

01:44:05.240 | What are people going to think?

01:44:06.400 | Is this going to be a good book or not a good, but listen, none of this journaling that we're

01:44:10.040 | referring to is about your book or your autobiography.

01:44:14.320 | This is really just for you.

01:44:16.280 | This is an exploration of yourself that's designed to help you enhance your concept.

01:44:20.700 | That is your understanding of self and indeed translates to better confidence, better understanding

01:44:26.880 | of your goals and aspirations, better understanding of your unhealthy patterns and defenses and

01:44:31.800 | on and on.

01:44:32.880 | And so again, the two styles of journaling are free association.

01:44:36.600 | So we literally just write down any thing that comes to mind or that you feel like writing

01:44:40.720 | down within a given period of time.

01:44:42.700 | For most people, 10 minutes is ample time to do that.

01:44:46.240 | For some people, five will be enough and for some who have the time, maybe 30 minutes.

01:44:51.200 | But for me, and I think for most people out there, anywhere from five to 10 minutes of

01:44:55.460 | this data dump, free association, it could be your anxieties, what you're thinking about,

01:44:59.280 | what you're anxious about, really could be about anything that comes to mind.

01:45:03.480 | And this free association process can be very useful for clearing out the clutter, so to

01:45:09.440 | speak.

01:45:10.440 | The other style of journaling that's equally useful, but for different reasons is structured

01:45:14.740 | journaling, to have a goal for a given entry on a given day.

01:45:19.440 | And again, this could be done in the morning, afternoon or night.

01:45:21.840 | And the idea would be that you would set an intention and by intention, I mean a specific

01:45:27.280 | topic that you're going to restrict your writing to.

01:45:30.280 | And that writing should be about self, in particular goals and aspirations.

01:45:35.600 | What you've wanted in the past, yes, but also what you want at present, what you might want

01:45:41.920 | in the future for yourself.

01:45:43.680 | These could of course be material things, but in general, this is more about aspirations

01:45:49.260 | of things that you would like to accomplish or generate.

01:45:52.620 | And the key word there is generate.

01:45:54.220 | And if you listen to the four episode series with Dr. Conti, he talked about three drives

01:45:59.960 | that exist in all of us.

01:46:01.560 | These three drives are the aggressive drive, the pleasure drive and the generative drive.

01:46:07.260 | And we don't need to go into a lengthy description about these drives right now, if you're curious

01:46:11.060 | about them and what they represent and how they can be in balance or out of balance and

01:46:16.300 | how that serves us or doesn't serve us, please check out that four episode series with Dr.

01:46:20.380 | Conti because he goes into that in a fair amount of detail and also in an actionable

01:46:25.560 | way.

01:46:26.560 | But the key thing here is that we're generative.

01:46:29.240 | One of the things that I asked Dr. Conti at the outset and throughout the entire series

01:46:33.540 | was what is mental health?

01:46:36.240 | We talk about physical health and we have some idea of what that represents, healthy

01:46:39.720 | blood pressure, the ability to do certain forms of physical movement, cognitive abilities.

01:46:44.760 | I asked him, how can we define mental health?

01:46:47.580 | And his answer was very straightforward and very powerful.

01:46:50.260 | He said, what we all need to aspire to is to be in states that is in the verb actions

01:46:56.500 | of agency and gratitude for as much of our waking life as possible.

01:47:01.580 | Now that sounds great, right?

01:47:02.580 | A sense of agency, the ability to exert influence over our internal state and affect the world

01:47:07.480 | around us in positive ways, positive relationships, reach our goals, as well as gratitude, being

01:47:12.020 | grateful for the opportunities that we've been afforded, even grateful perhaps for some

01:47:15.760 | of the challenges that we've been afforded or that were selected for us that we had no

01:47:19.740 | control over and carrying that agency and gratitude forward because it gives rise to

01:47:25.700 | a sense of peace, contentment, and delight.

01:47:28.380 | So all of that sounds wonderful, right?

01:47:30.500 | Be in agency and gratitude as a verb states, experience peace, contentment, and delight.

01:47:35.520 | So Dr. Conti acknowledged, and we spent a good amount of time discussing the fact that

01:47:39.320 | doesn't happen just because we decide we want to.

01:47:41.880 | In fact, agency and gratitude, peace, contentment, and delight, guys are up from a whole set

01:47:47.760 | of other processes that we have to engage in on a regular basis.

01:47:51.700 | And that really gets us back to those three drives.

01:47:54.580 | He talked about how people tend to have more or less aggressive drive, not just aggression

01:47:59.380 | in terms of violence, although some people do have that, but in terms of their determination

01:48:03.940 | and their sort of leaning into friction, even seeking out a friction.

01:48:08.040 | People are on a continuum with respect to the aggressive drive.

01:48:10.760 | He also talked about the pleasure drive and the fact that people are on a continuum of

01:48:15.160 | the desire for pleasure to either be a hedonist or somebody who really avoids pleasure and

01:48:21.120 | kind of restricts pleasure from oneself.

01:48:22.960 | And again, that these things can slide around depending on our life circumstances, our age,

01:48:27.600 | et cetera, but that it's very important that we have a sense of where we are on that continuum

01:48:33.800 | of an aggressive drive and a pleasure drive and that, and here's the most important thing,

01:48:40.040 | that our aggressive drive and pleasure drive never outsize our generative drive.

01:48:45.500 | And that engaging our generative drive is really the hallmark of mental health that

01:48:49.700 | leads to that sense of agency and gratitude, peace, contentment, and delight.

01:48:54.580 | And he defined the generative drive in the following way.

01:48:57.780 | He said, "The generative drive is our desire to create, build, and contribute to the world

01:49:01.660 | in meaningful ways and appreciate the process to get there.

01:49:05.560 | It is the core feature of our mental health."

01:49:08.360 | So if you want to learn more about the various drives and how they interact and how to access

01:49:11.760 | more generative drive, again, that's all contained in the four-episode series with Dr. Conte.

01:49:17.260 | But taking us back to the tools and takeaways from that four-episode series, the process

01:49:22.120 | of journaling in free association mode or the process of journaling in a conscious structured

01:49:27.320 | way is really about trying to access the generative drive and to build up that generative drive.

01:49:34.620 | And one of the key things about conscious journaling is that it affords us the opportunity

01:49:39.180 | in a way that's not going to be seen by anybody else to really think about what our goals

01:49:44.440 | and aspirations are.

01:49:46.100 | Now you might say, "I can't even think about my goals and aspirations.

01:49:49.780 | I don't know what I want."

01:49:50.780 | Well, that's fine.

01:49:51.780 | Then you should journal about that.

01:49:53.300 | Remember, most people have some sense of what they would like, but most people are simply

01:49:58.700 | not comfortable with writing those things out or even thinking about them.

01:50:02.980 | And if you reflect on that, how could it ever be that you would achieve those goals and

01:50:06.700 | aspirations if you're not even feeling comfortable enough to think about them or write about

01:50:12.140 | them?

01:50:13.140 | And so the process of thinking about and writing about your goals and aspirations is perhaps

01:50:18.220 | one of the key first steps towards being able to actualize those goals and aspirations.

01:50:24.080 | And for some people, this might be very easy to do.

01:50:26.360 | You can simply write down and say, "I want to be married by this age, and I want to make

01:50:30.200 | X amount of money, and I want to live here or there."

01:50:32.660 | And certainly those sorts of goals and aspirations are perfectly valid for this type of exercise,

01:50:37.700 | but so are the sorts of goals and aspirations that relate to feeling states.

01:50:41.420 | Like, "Yeah, I would like to feel part of a community.

01:50:44.260 | I would like to feel like an active contributor to a community."

01:50:48.280 | And then the essential thing is to really flesh out the detail around those goals and

01:50:51.780 | aspirations.

01:50:52.780 | You know, what size community?

01:50:54.620 | Where do you see yourself fitting into this community?

01:50:56.580 | Are you doing this alongside other people or by yourself?

01:50:59.300 | In other words, to really get comfortable thinking about what your goals and aspirations

01:51:03.780 | are, again, completely from the perspective of self and that you are going to be the only

01:51:08.380 | person to see this particular document.

01:51:11.260 | Now I will be the first to admit that the exercise that I just described, not the free

01:51:15.540 | association journaling, but the structured journaling of goals and aspirations, I and

01:51:20.580 | many people find to be difficult to initiate.

01:51:24.400 | Difficult to initiate because there seems to be a bit of internal anxiety and friction

01:51:28.180 | around doing it.

01:51:29.180 | There seems to be something that keeps many, not all, but many people from feeling as if

01:51:33.760 | they are even allowed to think about their goals and aspirations because many people

01:51:39.140 | default to, "Well, then, you know, I'll just be disappointed 'cause it's not gonna work

01:51:42.700 | out.

01:51:43.700 | I don't wanna think about what I want because then I'll just be more disappointed."

01:51:46.740 | And that particular frame of mind was actually discussed in the series with Dr. Conti.

01:51:51.100 | And he convinced me, and he's the expert, that the opposite is actually true.

01:51:57.460 | When we are able to overcome some of our anxiety and really think about in a dedicated way,

01:52:02.000 | what we would like to create for ourselves in our lives, both present and future.

01:52:05.900 | And keeping in mind our events of past, because we always carry that life narrative forward,

01:52:11.140 | then we are in a far better place to actualize those goals and aspirations.

01:52:15.380 | And he explained a variety of reasons why that's the case in his clinical observations

01:52:19.100 | and some of the other observations that really support that statement.

01:52:22.420 | So I highly encourage you to think about embracing a process of journaling.

01:52:25.940 | Again, you don't have to do this every day.

01:52:27.720 | The journaling and the dream analysis take a little bit more time, but they are oh so

01:52:31.540 | valuable for better understanding oneself concept, and they really thread forward into

01:52:37.180 | real everyday actions that can positively enrich your mood and mental health.

01:52:42.200 | Now any description of science-based tools for mood and mental health will be incomplete

01:52:46.520 | without including some tools related to processing of traumas.

01:52:50.440 | Now the processing of traumas is something that, especially in the case of major traumas

01:52:55.420 | or repeated traumas, really should be carried out in concert with an expert-trained clinician.

01:53:01.720 | That is a psychologist or psychiatrist who's trained in helping people work through traumas.

01:53:07.620 | However, even if you're working with somebody who's expert in processing trauma, there are

01:53:12.200 | specific tools that you can use on your own to accelerate that process.

01:53:18.000 | And for people who are working through what are sometimes called more minor traumas, these

01:53:22.040 | are sometimes called big T, big traumas, and little T, little traumas.

01:53:25.660 | However, that nomenclature doesn't take into account the fact that most of us can probably

01:53:31.080 | tell what the big traumas are for ourselves and for others, but sometimes it's hard to

01:53:35.140 | tell whether or not those small traumas, the little T traumas, actually are big T traumas.

01:53:39.800 | So this is one of the major reasons why working with a licensed professional is really going

01:53:44.020 | to be advantageous and in many cases necessary to work through trauma.

01:53:48.140 | That said, the self-directed protocols for working through trauma have a lot to do with

01:53:54.320 | how we think about, but more importantly at times, how we talk about those traumas.

01:54:00.460 | And Dr. Paul Conte talked about this, not so much in the four episode series with us,

01:54:04.340 | but in a particular podcast episode that he did with Dr. Peter Attia, who some of you

01:54:09.300 | are perhaps familiar with for his incredible podcast, The Drive, but also for his excellent

01:54:14.520 | book, Outlive, which deals with healthspan and lifespan or longevity.

01:54:18.960 | Now in that particular conversation with Dr. Conte and Dr. Attia, Dr. Conte emphasized

01:54:24.640 | the fact that one of the ways that we hold ourselves back and indeed can exacerbate the

01:54:30.660 | negative consequences of trauma are the ways in which we modify our language to describe

01:54:36.320 | those traumas.

01:54:37.560 | And what he said, which is so important, is that oftentimes we don't allow ourselves to

01:54:43.400 | use language that's as big as is necessary to explain that trauma and the impact of that

01:54:49.840 | trauma on us and on others.

01:54:52.200 | In fact, many people start to relegate their language to more passable in a given sentence

01:54:59.080 | or passable in a given conversation.

01:55:01.400 | Now what we're not talking about here is the idea that, okay, screaming at somebody else

01:55:05.840 | about your trauma or using a lot of four letter words is necessarily the best way to process

01:55:10.780 | that trauma verbally.

01:55:12.080 | However, we are talking about allowing oneself, either in spoken form or in written form,

01:55:17.860 | to really allow the magnitude of a given trauma to be expressed with a fair degree of intensity

01:55:24.920 | and language that can capture at least some of what that trauma represented for us or

01:55:30.720 | for others.

01:55:31.720 | Now, as Dr. Conte pointed out, all too often we do the opposite.

01:55:36.080 | What ends up happening is people will experience some sort of trauma, either major or minor,

01:55:41.280 | maybe single or repeated trauma.

01:55:43.600 | And rather than being comfortable talking about it, rather than using language that

01:55:47.940 | captures at least some of the magnitude of that trauma for them, people start to talk

01:55:53.000 | about that trauma less frequently.

01:55:56.320 | They start to distract themselves to think about other things instead of talking about

01:56:00.600 | or thinking about that trauma.

01:56:02.440 | And what happens is that trauma roots into our unconscious mind and starts to impact

01:56:07.340 | us in negative ways.

01:56:09.480 | Now those negative ways include increases in anxiety, disruptions in sleep.

01:56:14.640 | In fact, one of the common ways in which trauma manifests in disruptions in sleep by way of

01:56:19.080 | rooting into our unconscious is that people wake up at 2.30 or 3 o'clock in the morning,

01:56:25.420 | let's just say after several hours of being asleep, and immediately they're thinking about

01:56:29.440 | that thing that happened and they're upset about it.

01:56:32.200 | The idea is that when we push those traumas down, when we don't talk about them with people

01:56:36.400 | that we trust, when we don't have a way to consciously process those traumas using language

01:56:42.160 | that at least partially matches the magnitude of the impact of those traumas for us, well

01:56:48.320 | then those traumas impact our unconscious mind in ways that lead our unconscious mind

01:56:53.200 | to literally wake us up in the middle of the night and remind us of that thing.

01:56:57.080 | It's as if it's being thrown back in our face over and over.

01:57:00.140 | Also sometimes traumas will root their way down into our unconscious and then they will

01:57:04.280 | resurface in the mode of compulsive or obsessive thinking about that thing or perhaps other

01:57:10.920 | things.

01:57:11.920 | Again, the unconscious mind has a interesting and complicated number of different ways that

01:57:16.920 | it defends us in ways that it can create denial, distraction, that we might get hyper-focused

01:57:23.780 | on work as a way to not think about the trauma or hyper-focused on some details in our environment

01:57:29.420 | and just really trying to focus on that because it's much easier to process and handle that

01:57:33.720 | than these traumas.

01:57:34.960 | Again, the processing of trauma is a whole landscape into itself that actually was beautifully

01:57:40.920 | described in terms of how it arises within us and how to process traumas in a really

01:57:47.240 | structured way in a just fabulous book that was written by Dr. Conti called "The Invisible

01:57:52.560 | Epidemic, How Trauma Works and How We Can Heal From It."

01:57:56.000 | In that book, Dr. Conti explains a number of different ways that we can do self-directed

01:57:59.640 | work as well as work with licensed professionals to process traumas and help us move through

01:58:04.480 | those traumas so that they are not negatively impacting us going forward.

01:58:08.640 | So I really encourage anyone that's trying to process traumas from the past and/or present

01:58:12.600 | to check out Dr. Conti's book because it's a spectacular resource.

01:58:16.420 | But in terms of the tools related to processing trauma that we're talking about right now,

01:58:20.200 | I think this point about really making sure that we allow ourselves to verbally process

01:58:27.620 | and emotionally process that trauma in a way that there's room for using language that

01:58:33.460 | captures some of the magnitude of that trauma and how it impacted us and others is going

01:58:38.820 | to be very important.

01:58:40.600 | Because otherwise, what ends up happening is that we tend to adopt feelings of guilt

01:58:45.680 | and shame around those traumas simply by not talking about them, by having them go inward.

01:58:51.320 | And then they start to negatively impact our unconscious mind, and then our unconscious

01:58:55.400 | mind tries to throw them up to the surface for our conscious mind to recognize by waking

01:58:59.320 | us up from sleep, and in some cases, by leveraging those unhealthy defenses, things like denial,

01:59:05.340 | things like the overindulgence in alcohol, overindulgence of drugs, ways to distract

01:59:10.780 | ourselves, as well as projection and sublimation and the other types of defenses that Dr. Conti

01:59:16.720 | talked about in the four-episode series.

01:59:18.960 | Again, those defenses are not necessarily good or bad.

01:59:22.640 | It depends on the circumstances.

01:59:24.520 | The unconscious mind is not trying to harm us.

01:59:27.280 | Your unconscious mind is part of you, it is you, but of course it is you acting in concert

01:59:33.080 | with your conscious mind.

01:59:34.320 | And so really the tools and protocols from the four-episode series with Dr. Conti are

01:59:38.960 | aimed at helping you feel and access more sense of agency and gratitude on a regular

01:59:44.840 | basis, more peace, contentment, and delight, and doing so by touching into those different

01:59:51.720 | drives, understanding what they are, the aggressive drive, the pleasure drive, and really making

01:59:56.040 | sure that your generative drive, again, I love this description of the generative drive

02:00:00.000 | so much so that I'm going to read it again, because this is really what it means to be

02:00:03.740 | mentally healthy.

02:00:05.200 | Again, the generative drive is our desire to create, build, and contribute to the world

02:00:09.560 | in a meaningful way and appreciate the process to get there.

02:00:12.880 | It is the core feature of our mental health.

02:00:15.680 | So being able to access that generative drive on a regular basis is really what this thing

02:00:20.320 | that we call mental health is all about.

02:00:23.100 | And the tools that I just described, of course, can be combined with in any number of different

02:00:27.440 | ways with the tools that I described gleaned largely from the episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett.

02:00:32.720 | And so what you now have is a kit of tools and protocols for improving mood and mental

02:00:37.780 | health, some of which are grounded in that core six.

02:00:40.800 | The first principles of self-care are always going to be getting your physiology right

02:00:46.280 | so that your psychology can be right.

02:00:49.000 | As well, of course, you want to emphasize tools and protocols that build up your psychological

02:00:54.140 | processes and concept of self.

02:00:56.320 | That's what the tools from the Conti series that we just described are all about.

02:01:00.560 | And then the tools from the episode with Dr. Lisa Feldman-Barrett sort of bridge the two

02:01:05.000 | because she talked about both the physiological and the psychological tools that really represent

02:01:10.280 | ways to enhance our mood and mental health.

02:01:12.620 | And so by threading these three things together, I believe it really arms us with the greatest

02:01:17.500 | degree of optimism and capacity to take control of this thing that we call our mood and emotions

02:01:23.000 | and to, of course, allow ourselves to feel the negative things we need to feel, but then

02:01:26.940 | process them in healthy ways and to exist as much as is reasonably possible in generally

02:01:32.600 | optimistic upbeat states that allow us to engage our generative drive.

02:01:38.600 | And although we covered a lot of tools during this episode, again, I want to emphasize that

02:01:43.440 | the idea isn't to necessarily do all of them all at once.

02:01:46.480 | You just pick one or two and start to implement them on a regular basis.

02:01:50.060 | And by implementing those, there's no reason to think that you would be significantly eating

02:01:53.820 | into the other demands on your time, because ultimately the whole purpose of having elevated

02:01:58.840 | mood and mental health is so that you can have better relationship to yourself and better

02:02:02.740 | relationship to others and to the world around you.

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02:02:36.960 | Not so much on today's episode, but on many previous episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast,

02:02:41.300 | we discussed supplements.

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02:03:33.340 | Toolkits are brief PDFs that describe in bullet point form tools for, for instance, enhancing

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02:03:55.960 | Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion, all about science-based tools

02:04:00.260 | for enhancing mood and mental health.

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Mental Health Toolkit: Tools to Bolster Your Mood & Mental Health

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