Best Tools for Managing Stress & Addiction | Ryan Soave & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | at the heart of addiction, but also at the heart of a challenged life, challenged in the ways that

00:00:09.360 | life shouldn't be challenging, is this lack of distress tolerance. And I have a question about

00:00:14.340 | distress tolerance specifically. What can we do to increase our distress tolerance? Like what

00:00:20.000 | practices? Maybe we just have to experience distress to know how to navigate distress.

00:00:25.520 | Well, we're going to experience distress. We experience it all the time. And I think

00:00:29.940 | it's, and you may be able to articulate this even better than I can, but, you know, I think we need

00:00:35.580 | to look at stress, right? Not all stress is bad. We need stress. We need stress to move around in this

00:00:40.420 | chair. I need to be able to walk around. My muscles need to tense and I need that stress.

00:00:47.860 | Was it Hans Selye's work around eustress and distress? We're going to experience distress.

00:00:52.680 | And it's not about avoiding distress. It's, you know, how are we going to walk through that distress?

00:00:58.100 | And so I like to break practices down into a couple of different ways. So proactive and reactive.

00:01:02.860 | Proactive are going to be things that we schedule, you know, I'm going to do, you talked about yoga

00:01:08.620 | nidra. We can talk about that a little bit more. You call it a non-sleep, deep rest, other forms of

00:01:13.000 | mindfulness and meditation that actually allow us to raise capacity in our, our nervous system.

00:01:17.580 | going to therapy, coaching, being involved in a community, doing physical exercise. These are

00:01:25.120 | things that we're going to schedule going into the cold plunge, which does allow us to experience

00:01:30.160 | something and stay a little bit longer. And it gives us, you know, it's so many, it's, we have one at

00:01:36.140 | home and when friends come over to use it, it's so funny because I think the first time they're going

00:01:39.520 | to do it. And I know you've had a lot of people, we actually, I was at your home a couple of years

00:01:44.260 | ago and there was a guy who was doing it for the first time. And he's like a big, I don't remember

00:01:48.220 | this, but he's like a big athletic guy. And he, he was freaking out, getting into, terrified. Right.

00:01:53.080 | And it's just cold water. There's no, it can't, I mean, it could hurt you if you're in there for

00:01:58.140 | however long to get hypothermia, but it's not going to hurt you. So having practices like that that allow

00:02:03.720 | us to move through that level of fear can translate to fear or distress can translate when it, it comes

00:02:11.040 | in real time for something that we, that I know I can walk through this. Yeah. Because adrenaline is

00:02:15.900 | ubiquitous in stressful circumstances, which is just a bunch of science nerd speak for the stress

00:02:22.300 | response is always an increase in autonomic arousal or alertness, a shrinking of the visual

00:02:27.700 | field, an increase in heart rate, a tendency to move. People will say, but I freeze actually the

00:02:33.040 | freezing response. This is kind of interesting. My lab studied this. Lindsay Soleil published a paper

00:02:37.440 | in nature about this in 2018. She was a graduate student in my lab. The freezing response is an active

00:02:45.540 | behavior. Oh yeah. Trying to hide from, from an intruder in your home, in the closet, you're trying not to

00:02:51.660 | move. So people think, Oh, you know, people freeze under stress. No, the freezing response is an active

00:02:56.600 | response. You know, the adrenaline dump is sometimes called is, is what essentially creates the freeze

00:03:02.460 | response. It's why people can't remember things when they get up on stage, if they have a fear of public

00:03:06.140 | public speaking. Um, and I was going to, uh, I forgot to mention in the cold plunge, cold water is a highly

00:03:12.080 | reliable way to elicit an adrenaline response. Yeah. It's just a great training for this feels

00:03:20.220 | uncomfortable. I want to get out, but I'm going to learn to control my thinking in this uncomfortable

00:03:26.120 | circumstance. Yeah. So that would fit into the proactive, right? So that's something that you can

00:03:31.620 | proactively start to be able to manage that adrenaline as you're, as you're telling me in,

00:03:36.320 | in the body, right? You're, we're able to manage those feelings because what is it come down to is

00:03:40.960 | it's a, it's a, these sensations in our body that we're experiencing that feel really uncomfortable.

00:03:45.600 | And we might be able to sense them a little earlier. Right. If we have some training, I just want to throw

00:03:50.140 | in one little science tidbit, as long as we're talking about using cold as a way to manage, um,

00:03:55.280 | distress tolerance is that the first 15 to 20 seconds after the adrenaline response hits and it

00:04:02.880 | hits very fast, your forebrain, which is involved in all your contextual decision-making and clean,

00:04:08.420 | clear strategies of what best to do is essentially shut down for about 20 seconds. If you can make it

00:04:14.660 | 20 seconds, you have a far better chance of not doing something really stupid and doing something

00:04:20.780 | that's very adaptive. Right. Now there may be circumstances where you don't have 20 seconds,

00:04:25.280 | but if under stress and riding out that 20 seconds is, uh, generally going to be a very adaptive

00:04:36.720 | approach because then your forebrain comes back, quote unquote, online, and you could really start to

00:04:40.780 | make strategic decisions based on those particular circumstances. And so that's, what's happening when

00:04:45.780 | we get, uh, experienced, people say get triggered by something that's, uh, uncomfortable for us.

00:04:52.220 | Right. Uh, you really, uh, you, you, you get a text message from your boss or your partner that says,

00:04:59.400 | we need to talk later. Right. A lot of people, I don't know about you, but when I get, we need to talk

00:05:03.740 | later, it's not my favorite text in the world to get. Right. So someone might get that text and then

00:05:09.720 | they immediately go into like their perception or their beliefs or their kind of narrative about what that

00:05:15.520 | means. I'm going to be rejected. This is going to be disappointing. It's going to be really hard.

00:05:19.020 | And those perceptions or beliefs are coming out of their past. So now sitting there looking at a text

00:05:24.920 | message, which is really just a, a neutral it's, it's all events are neutral. We bring the meaning

00:05:30.400 | to them and we want to bring meaning to them, but it's just words on a, a screen. And we don't even

00:05:36.400 | know what it means yet. You're looking at those and you're not even in the present that more you're

00:05:40.880 | in the past. And we're never really out of the present. People say, get present.

00:05:45.260 | That's the only place we live. It's what, where are we oriented?

00:05:48.100 | Past, present, or future.

00:05:49.580 | Yeah. Right. In this moment, now that I'm going into this narrative from all the other times that

00:05:54.020 | I was, let's say I'm making up that I'm being rejected or I'm not going to get what I want.

00:05:57.640 | Now I'm oriented to the past. So I'm, we could say I'm disoriented in that moment.

00:06:02.960 | Or to the future, you're anticipating what might be said, what's going to happen.

00:06:06.060 | You're out of the moment.

00:06:07.480 | But I would say that the anticipation is still something that's coming out of what we've experienced

00:06:13.400 | before. Right. And then from there we go into an automatic reaction and it's like a fight

00:06:18.680 | or flight response. It might not seem like that because we don't, we might not be thinking I'm

00:06:22.580 | going to die from this, but if, you know, we might be thinking I'm not going to be okay.

00:06:27.400 | And what is, I'm not going to be okay. That gets carried out and it's triggered in the body.

00:06:30.960 | I would say in the same way as I'm at threat. I'm at, I'm in danger. And this is where we're

00:06:36.080 | confusing discomfort. Cause even if I am going to be not going to get the answer I want, or I'm going

00:06:41.380 | to be abandoned, it's not life threatening. It's not actually threatening. It's the, it's perceived

00:06:48.720 | threat, but I respond to that perceived threat as if it's actual threat. And I might respond by

00:06:54.960 | kind of going after the person, like I need to know right now being obsessive about it. I might

00:07:01.280 | respond by withdrawing completely and, and, and hiding from it, but it, it, it creates this cycle

00:07:06.440 | of kind of, uh, uh, uh, an automatic reaction to things that doesn't allow me to build tolerance

00:07:14.240 | for that, that stressor, right? The, the solution to that is first be aware that that's,

00:07:20.360 | that's happening. And once you're aware that that happens and it happens to us all the time,

00:07:25.320 | once I recognize that I'm in this cycle below to, to, to find a way to stop, to intervene on that,

00:07:32.120 | to take a break from it, it might be just those 20 seconds. It might be something that, uh, it might

00:07:37.600 | be taking a few breaths. It might be walking away from it. Can I interject something there? Because

00:07:42.320 | one thing that stemmed out of a prior conversation we had is I think, you know, these aspirational,

00:07:48.800 | um, responses of, okay, like the, the stressor hits, I'm going to take a pause. I'm going to create the

00:07:55.920 | gap between stimulus and response that, you know, was it Viktor Frankl or something like that referred

00:08:00.580 | to? It sounds wonderful, but in real time, everything's very hard. It's very, everything's

00:08:05.780 | different. And so, uh, you know, what can we do to prepare? What are the things I like this notion of

00:08:10.640 | proactive tools that, that we can schedule, um, cold plunge being one of them. We'll talk about yoga,

00:08:16.300 | nidra and some other things, but, um, but one of the things that I've learned is that there are

00:08:23.060 | sensations in the body that come about and it will be different for different people, but there are

00:08:27.960 | sensations in my body that come about very fast because the adrenaline response is fast. And the

00:08:33.200 | more that I pay attention to those, the more I'm able to pick up on them at, at earlier stages of the,

00:08:40.080 | the stress response, kind of like seeing a big wave coming from further out. And the, the yogis

00:08:45.040 | talked about this. I learned about this also from you that like to, in meditation, we can start to

00:08:50.500 | see the quote, it's mystical language, but that like the subtle ripples of our perception. Whereas when

00:08:56.500 | we're going through life and we're just kind of around, it's like being on a train and we're just

00:09:00.100 | seeing stuff go by all the time. I think that the concept is, is stilling leads to seeing.

00:09:03.900 | I love that. The more that we can still the mind, the easier we can see what's actually happening

00:09:09.740 | versus what we perceive as happening. So what you say is so true that it is hard. If the first step is

00:09:18.880 | to, to, after we recognize that this is something that happening is to stop when we're in the middle

00:09:23.080 | of response. How do we stop? Um, something that I work with the people and I actually heard you talk

00:09:30.540 | about in a, in a different way that I really appreciated in, uh, one of your essentials podcasts

00:09:35.340 | where, you know, in that moment, when we're in that reaction, you know, the, the, the, the sympathetic

00:09:41.820 | nervous system has been activated. The solution though, is not to deactivate the sympathetic. It's

00:09:48.760 | to activate the parasympathetic. So our practices and tools that I think are the most beneficial is

00:09:57.200 | how do we activate the parasympathetic? A great question to ask ourselves once we recognize that

00:10:05.020 | we're in some sort of stress response, I like to tell people to ask is, am I, or is anybody around me

00:10:12.940 | in immediate physical danger? And if the answer is no, first off, if I can ask that question,

00:10:18.320 | it's probably the answer is no, but most of the things that we experience every day are

00:10:22.740 | not life-threatening. Actually, probably the thing that we experience every day that's most

00:10:26.760 | life-threatening, that doesn't bother most of us is driving in a car, right? And we were hurtling

00:10:30.900 | down the road and just trusting that someone's not going to cross over that other line, but that

00:10:37.860 | won't scare us. But, you know, uh, getting someone that you're in a, uh, a committed relationship

00:10:44.940 | with or that you're emotionally attached to that says something you don't like might throw you into

00:10:49.040 | a spiral. I mean, it speaks to the unbelievably powerful aspect of, of human connection. Yeah.

00:10:55.520 | I mean, likewise with the earlier example of the kid in video games, we think about this kid

00:11:00.520 | and the video game as like the, the only players in the interaction, but to take a video game away

00:11:08.300 | from a kid is to also remove him from his social context. We know that social isolation is one of

00:11:13.680 | the most, um, potent stressors for, for any mammal, especially humans.

00:11:18.920 | I mean, from what I've read in, you know, tribes would basically shame someone out of it. If

00:11:23.580 | they did something really terrible, you know, they would send them out of the tribe and that was like

00:11:26.920 | death, you know, they only survive together. Now we can live alone because of, you know, technology

00:11:35.280 | and human advancement, but like serve, like live physically alone, but you know, we're not at the

00:11:42.540 | top of the food chain, really. You know, if we were out in the, in the jungle or back when we were,

00:11:47.540 | uh, nomadic and we still have that within us that we need that connection. We need that.

00:11:53.880 | Thank you.

00:12:00.880 | you

Best Tools for Managing Stress & Addiction | Ryan Soave & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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