How to Increase Your Willpower & Tenacity

00:00:00.000 | - Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast,

00:00:02.260 | where we discuss science and science-based tools

00:00:04.900 | for everyday life.

00:00:05.900 | I'm Andrew Huberman,

00:00:10.500 | and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology

00:00:13.540 | at Stanford School of Medicine.

00:00:15.580 | Today, we are discussing how to build tenacity and willpower.

00:00:19.340 | Previous episodes of the Huberman Lab Podcast

00:00:21.380 | have focused on the topic of motivation.

00:00:23.500 | And while motivation and willpower

00:00:25.460 | are linked thematically and mechanistically,

00:00:28.380 | today we are going to discuss tenacity,

00:00:30.420 | that is the willingness to persist under pressure

00:00:33.420 | and resistance of different kinds, and willpower,

00:00:36.800 | which has to do with both the motivation to do things

00:00:39.740 | and the motivation to resist certain things.

00:00:42.700 | Today, you will learn about the psychology and neuroscience

00:00:45.280 | of tenacity and willpower.

00:00:47.060 | And I must tell you, this is a fascinating literature.

00:00:49.680 | In fact, you will learn about a brain structure

00:00:52.020 | that at least to my knowledge,

00:00:53.320 | most neuroscientists are not even aware of.

00:00:56.100 | And yet in researching this episode,

00:00:58.640 | I absolutely fell in love with this brain structure

00:01:01.660 | because of its incredible ability to integrate

00:01:04.360 | the very sorts of information from within

00:01:07.140 | and from outside of you

00:01:08.640 | to harness and build tenacity and willpower.

00:01:11.240 | And indeed, today you will learn research-supported tools

00:01:14.300 | for how to enhance your level of tenacity and willpower

00:01:17.820 | in any circumstance.

00:01:19.540 | Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast

00:01:22.540 | is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

00:01:25.180 | It is, however, part of my desire and effort

00:01:27.280 | to bring zero cost to consumer information about science

00:01:29.820 | and science-related tools to the general public.

00:01:32.520 | In keeping with that theme,

00:01:33.620 | I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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00:03:49.500 | Okay, let's talk about tenacity and willpower

00:03:52.600 | and how to enhance your level of tenacity and willpower.

00:03:55.920 | I will also mention certain cases

00:03:57.540 | where having too much tenacity and willpower

00:04:00.120 | can be problematic for mental health and physical health.

00:04:03.040 | But for most people, I believe that enhancing one's level

00:04:05.600 | of tenacity and willpower would be advantageous.

00:04:08.360 | Now you'll be relieved to know

00:04:09.520 | that while there are a near infinite number

00:04:11.880 | of different circumstances where one would need to draw

00:04:14.040 | on tenacity and willpower in order to succeed,

00:04:17.100 | there is one major mechanism within the brain,

00:04:20.220 | indeed one major mechanism,

00:04:22.440 | by which tenacity and willpower are generated.

00:04:25.240 | And it arrives through the activation

00:04:27.280 | of a particular brain center that is a hub,

00:04:29.840 | that is, it lies at the interface

00:04:31.940 | of many other neural circuits

00:04:33.640 | and has input from all the critical neural circuits

00:04:36.720 | that one would need

00:04:38.000 | in order to generate tenacity and willpower.

00:04:40.920 | Now we are going to return

00:04:42.000 | to that particular neural circuit a little bit later

00:04:44.480 | after we talk about the psychology of willpower,

00:04:47.200 | because in talking about the psychology of willpower,

00:04:49.520 | it will frame up as to why understanding

00:04:51.980 | this one particular brain center or hub of inputs

00:04:55.600 | and outputs from different neural structures

00:04:57.360 | in the brain and body will indeed allow you

00:05:00.240 | to get the most out of the tools

00:05:02.360 | that have been shown in scientific research

00:05:04.160 | to enhance your level of tenacity and willpower.

00:05:06.920 | In other words, understanding the psychology

00:05:08.900 | of tenacity and willpower, while valuable,

00:05:12.520 | if it's coupled with an understanding

00:05:14.040 | of the underlying neural mechanism,

00:05:16.120 | and notice I used the singular, neural mechanism,

00:05:19.320 | not mechanisms for generating tenacity and willpower,

00:05:22.540 | will allow you to use and to tailor the specific protocols

00:05:26.220 | for enhancing tenacity and willpower

00:05:28.140 | to your unique circumstances.

00:05:30.200 | So this is yet another case

00:05:32.000 | where certainly life circumstances vary

00:05:35.100 | from one person to the next.

00:05:36.360 | The need for tenacity and willpower varies tremendously.

00:05:39.500 | For instance, some people may need more tenacity

00:05:42.360 | and willpower in order to engage in certain behaviors.

00:05:45.800 | Others of us might need more tenacity and willpower

00:05:48.320 | in order to resist certain types of behaviors.

00:05:51.440 | Today, you will learn about the brain center

00:05:53.500 | that governs all of that, and then you can frame it

00:05:56.020 | within the psychological understanding

00:05:57.540 | of tenacity and willpower so that you can get the most

00:06:00.020 | out of the protocols that we will discuss.

00:06:01.860 | Let's start by talking about what tenacity

00:06:03.780 | and willpower clearly are, and separating tenacity

00:06:07.100 | and willpower from some other psychological constructs

00:06:10.180 | that they often get confused with,

00:06:12.480 | because this will be important

00:06:13.540 | in understanding exactly what we are trying to build

00:06:16.260 | when we say we want to build tenacity and willpower.

00:06:19.860 | So tenacity and willpower can be distinguished

00:06:22.820 | from habit execution.

00:06:24.780 | Habit execution is what you do anytime you wake up

00:06:27.500 | in the morning, maybe you lie there for a bit,

00:06:29.540 | maybe you get out of bed immediately,

00:06:31.040 | hopefully you get outside and get some sunlight in your eyes,

00:06:33.100 | especially on cloudy days, go brush your teeth,

00:06:35.840 | use the restroom, engage with others in your home

00:06:37.860 | if you live with others, et cetera.

00:06:40.540 | All of those sorts of behaviors,

00:06:42.500 | while on some days can be a bit more challenging,

00:06:45.780 | especially the get out of bed part,

00:06:47.140 | maybe you didn't get a great night's sleep

00:06:48.440 | the night before, for instance,

00:06:50.180 | but all of those sorts of behaviors are behaviors

00:06:52.500 | that you have the neural circuits to generate,

00:06:55.620 | and that typically you can generate

00:06:57.920 | without a lot of willpower required.

00:07:00.740 | Now willpower, sometimes also referred to as tenacity,

00:07:03.620 | grit, or persistence, is a distinctly different phenomenon

00:07:07.340 | than habit execution, because willpower and tenacity require

00:07:11.560 | that we intervene in our own default neural processes,

00:07:15.720 | such as habits or particular patterns of thinking,

00:07:19.060 | and essentially govern ourselves to do or not do

00:07:23.600 | some particular thing, and that process requires effort,

00:07:27.500 | it requires energy, and I think all of us are familiar

00:07:30.500 | with that feeling of effort or energy

00:07:32.700 | that's required in order to engage in a behavior

00:07:34.980 | that we really don't feel like engaging in,

00:07:36.980 | or avoiding a behavior or a thought that by default,

00:07:40.160 | we would naturally just engage in,

00:07:42.460 | and when I talk about energy in this context,

00:07:45.080 | I'm mainly talking about neural energy.

00:07:47.780 | Remember that neurons, nerve cells in your brain and body,

00:07:51.020 | use chemical and electrical signaling

00:07:52.900 | to communicate with one another,

00:07:54.180 | that's what allows you and all of us

00:07:56.020 | to do all the things that we do,

00:07:57.500 | think, feel, move, et cetera.

00:07:59.860 | Now, of course, that chemical and electrical communication

00:08:03.800 | requires fuel sources that indeed come from things

00:08:06.740 | like glucose, ketones, the creatine phosphate system,

00:08:10.380 | multiple fuel systems feed the energetics of the brain,

00:08:14.000 | but ultimately, when I talk about energy

00:08:15.980 | in today's discussion, I'm talking about the energy required

00:08:19.280 | to engage in or to resist in a particular behavior,

00:08:22.180 | and that level of energy can be quite high,

00:08:25.020 | depending on how much resistance we are feeling internally

00:08:27.820 | or externally, right, somebody can be telling us,

00:08:30.800 | you're not going to be able to do this,

00:08:32.500 | you can't do it, and you can say,

00:08:33.500 | no, I have a ton of resolve, I have a ton of tenacity,

00:08:36.140 | willpower, and I'm going to push past all the barriers

00:08:38.780 | that you are setting up for me on the outside.

00:08:41.480 | Oftentimes, all too often, I should say,

00:08:44.940 | we experience resistance from the inside,

00:08:47.680 | where we are feeling like we don't want to do something,

00:08:50.500 | or we really want to do something,

00:08:52.300 | and we are having trouble either engaging in the thing

00:08:54.500 | that we don't want to do, or that we know we should do,

00:08:57.120 | but we just don't feel that level of motivation for,

00:09:00.140 | or we are having a hard time resisting the thing

00:09:02.400 | that's pulling us toward it.

00:09:04.160 | So in that context, it's important for us

00:09:06.000 | not to just distinguish tenacity and willpower

00:09:09.020 | from habit execution, but also draw out a continuum

00:09:13.020 | with tenacity and willpower at their most extreme

00:09:16.220 | on one end of that continuum, and apathy and, yes,

00:09:19.980 | depression on the other end of that continuum.

00:09:22.540 | And we will return to the topic of depression

00:09:24.360 | a little bit later, but I can just cue it up right now

00:09:26.900 | by saying that one of the hallmark features

00:09:28.620 | of major depression is a lack of positive anticipation

00:09:32.820 | about the future that leads to, this is important,

00:09:36.240 | there's a verb tense here, that leads to a much lower

00:09:39.000 | tendency to engage in the specific types of behavior

00:09:41.760 | that would allow one to arrive at a particular new,

00:09:45.620 | different, and positive future.

00:09:47.620 | So I'm deliberately putting apathy and depression

00:09:49.940 | next to one another at one end of the continuum,

00:09:52.520 | and I'm putting grit, persistence, tenacity, and willpower

00:09:56.500 | at the other end of the continuum.

00:09:58.220 | And a little bit later, it will become very clear to you

00:10:00.240 | why I put those particular items on the continuum

00:10:03.300 | as opposed to other psychological constructs

00:10:05.620 | such as motivation, because it turns out that motivation

00:10:08.960 | is what allows you to move up and down that continuum,

00:10:12.220 | but motivation itself as a verb is distinct

00:10:16.420 | from what we call tenacity and willpower,

00:10:19.060 | and motivation itself is distinct

00:10:21.420 | from what we call apathy and depression.

00:10:24.260 | But motivation is the engine or the motor, the verb,

00:10:28.580 | that allows you to move up and down that continuum.

00:10:31.100 | And today you will learn multiple tools

00:10:33.100 | that will allow you to move toward the tenacity

00:10:35.620 | and willpower end of that continuum

00:10:37.460 | by engaging a very specific neural circuit.

00:10:40.460 | Before we get into the discussion of neural circuits,

00:10:43.180 | I'd like to talk about the psychology of willpower.

00:10:46.460 | And this is something that really has been considered

00:10:48.540 | by psychologists for well over a hundred years.

00:10:50.620 | William James wrote about this,

00:10:52.180 | the ancient Greeks wrote about this.

00:10:54.340 | The topic of willpower is certainly not a new one.

00:10:57.260 | And yet the formal study of willpower

00:10:59.340 | in the laboratory context,

00:11:00.720 | that is bringing human subjects into the laboratory

00:11:03.220 | and examining what sorts of conditions

00:11:05.260 | allow them to engage their willpower and tenacity,

00:11:08.180 | what sorts of conditions really sap

00:11:10.980 | or drain their willpower and tenacity.

00:11:13.860 | And of course, parallel experiments done

00:11:16.420 | in what we call preclinical models,

00:11:18.000 | which are animal studies, have revealed to us a lot

00:11:21.140 | about the sorts of conditions

00:11:22.840 | that allow us to generate willpower

00:11:24.780 | and the sorts of conditions that drain our willpower.

00:11:28.180 | Now, if we are to throw our arms around

00:11:30.660 | that entire literature,

00:11:32.460 | there is a big batch of that literature,

00:11:34.620 | not the whole batch,

00:11:36.300 | but there's a big batch of that literature

00:11:38.660 | that believed and still believes

00:11:40.780 | that willpower is a limited resource,

00:11:43.500 | much like fuel in the body or fuel in a car.

00:11:46.420 | Now, the idea of willpower as a limited resource

00:11:49.260 | is certainly not a new idea,

00:11:50.780 | but again, the formal study of willpower

00:11:53.660 | and willpower as a limited resource

00:11:55.820 | really dates back a little over 20, 25 years

00:11:59.100 | when Roy Baumeister and colleagues

00:12:01.500 | started to explore the idea

00:12:03.320 | that of course had been kicked around for years,

00:12:05.580 | that with each additional decision

00:12:08.740 | that we have to engage across the day

00:12:10.480 | and with each additional bout of willpower

00:12:13.180 | that we have to draw on as a resource,

00:12:15.920 | that we would drain this reservoir of willpower

00:12:18.780 | that we all have within us.

00:12:20.640 | Now, Baumeister and colleagues referred to that process

00:12:23.700 | as ego depletion.

00:12:25.520 | Now, when people hear the word ego,

00:12:27.020 | some people think Freud, ego, super ego, id and so forth.

00:12:30.680 | Most people think ego,

00:12:32.280 | like somebody having a big personality

00:12:33.940 | where they think a lot of themselves.

00:12:36.260 | When Baumeister referred to ego depletion,

00:12:38.580 | he was defining ego depletion as a concept of oneself

00:12:43.580 | and a concept of outside challenges

00:12:46.860 | and the degree of effort required

00:12:48.300 | to bridge one's concept of self

00:12:50.340 | and those challenges.

00:12:51.600 | And so ego depletion is really a operational construct

00:12:55.180 | within the field of psychology.

00:12:56.620 | So we don't want to get too distracted by that word ego.

00:12:59.260 | There's a tendency anytime people hear ego,

00:13:01.480 | or they hear narcissism, or if they hear gaslighting,

00:13:03.980 | to immediately assume that they know what that means,

00:13:06.220 | when in fact the formal definitions of those

00:13:08.460 | quite often differ from the way that they're kicked around

00:13:11.020 | on social media, the internet,

00:13:12.300 | and even in a lot of popular writing about psychology.

00:13:15.260 | Okay, so let's just note that ego depletion

00:13:18.780 | is the term that Baumeister used to describe

00:13:22.340 | the ability for our willpower to be depleted

00:13:25.420 | with each successive attempt to engage willpower,

00:13:28.780 | and by extension, our ability to replenish

00:13:32.740 | our degree of willpower if we take a break

00:13:34.780 | from making decisions and engaging our willpower.

00:13:37.300 | But ego depletion itself isn't the focus right now.

00:13:39.780 | The focus right now is whether or not indeed

00:13:42.840 | willpower is a limited resource

00:13:45.200 | and whether or not with each decision that we make

00:13:47.700 | and each effort to either engage in an activity

00:13:50.500 | that we prefer not to, at least in that moment,

00:13:53.680 | and with each attempt to resist a behavior,

00:13:56.700 | thought, et cetera, that is pulling on us,

00:13:59.460 | or that we feel that we want to engage in by default,

00:14:02.500 | either eating the cookie or thinking the thought,

00:14:05.200 | or engaging in a particular type of behavior of any kind,

00:14:09.020 | and we need to resist that,

00:14:10.620 | that it is draining that willpower resource.

00:14:13.380 | Now, before I go any further,

00:14:14.980 | I know that some of you out there are probably aware

00:14:17.740 | that ego depletion and the Baumeister theory

00:14:20.380 | of willpower as a limited resource

00:14:22.460 | has been very contentious, especially in recent years.

00:14:26.100 | And so today, what I'm going to do

00:14:27.580 | is I'm going to first present the Baumeister

00:14:30.300 | and colleagues' work about willpower as a limited resource,

00:14:33.500 | and then I'm going to present

00:14:34.740 | some of the conflicting evidence that Carol Dweck,

00:14:37.140 | my colleague at Stanford School of Medicine,

00:14:38.860 | and researchers elsewhere have carried out meta-analyses

00:14:41.900 | and entirely new experiments, which indeed,

00:14:45.460 | in some cases, contradict the findings of Baumeister,

00:14:48.460 | but more often than not, contradict the conclusions

00:14:51.380 | that Baumeister drew about willpower.

00:14:53.740 | So if we are to understand the psychology

00:14:55.700 | of willpower and tenacity,

00:14:57.540 | it's important that we understand the concepts

00:14:59.540 | of ego depletion and willpower as a limited resource,

00:15:02.800 | even if, after hearing all the evidence,

00:15:05.420 | you decide that willpower is not a limited resource.

00:15:09.060 | And in fact, I'm quite confident

00:15:10.380 | that once you hear about the Baumeister work,

00:15:12.080 | and then you hear about the work of Dweck and others,

00:15:14.120 | which in some ways counters the conclusions of Baumeister,

00:15:17.340 | that you'll have a much firmer

00:15:18.540 | and certainly a much more complete understanding

00:15:20.220 | about what tenacity and willpower are.

00:15:22.380 | And perhaps, and here I'm revealing my own leanings

00:15:25.220 | when having examined the totality of the data,

00:15:28.120 | that tenacity and willpower in some cases

00:15:30.460 | is a limited resource that can be replenished

00:15:33.260 | by engaging particular processes within the body,

00:15:36.700 | that's right, within the body,

00:15:38.440 | but that willpower and tenacity, and most importantly,

00:15:41.100 | how to engage tenacity and willpower,

00:15:43.820 | especially when you have a lot of challenges

00:15:45.880 | in front of you, not just one challenge,

00:15:47.480 | but multiple challenges that need to be carried out

00:15:49.680 | throughout the day, over weeks, over months, et cetera,

00:15:53.080 | that tenacity and willpower can be drawn upon repeatedly

00:15:56.620 | without them being depleted

00:15:58.700 | if you are clear on your beliefs

00:16:01.340 | about tenacity and willpower.

00:16:02.940 | So I realized that what I just brought up

00:16:04.820 | was a controversy about something

00:16:06.080 | that I haven't even discussed yet,

00:16:07.580 | so it might seem like a bit of a swirl of information

00:16:10.160 | for which there's really no context,

00:16:11.900 | but the reason I bring up the controversy

00:16:14.300 | at this stage of our conversation

00:16:16.100 | is that the moment that the words ego depletion,

00:16:19.280 | or willpower is a limited resource, falls out of my mouth,

00:16:22.620 | I can hear those voices out there saying,

00:16:24.580 | "Wait a second, I thought that was all debunked."

00:16:26.680 | And I want to make very clear willpower is a limited resource

00:16:30.280 | and ego depletion have not been debunked,

00:16:32.540 | it's simply a controversial area of psychological research.

00:16:36.140 | And more importantly for today's discussion,

00:16:38.560 | we have to understand the theory of willpower

00:16:41.300 | as a limited resource.

00:16:42.640 | If we are to understand the controversy,

00:16:44.820 | that is the counter argument of what willpower really is,

00:16:47.820 | that comes from other groups.

00:16:48.920 | So I really want to give you both sides of the story

00:16:51.120 | so that when we get to the underlying neural mechanisms

00:16:53.560 | for tenacity and willpower,

00:16:54.840 | and we get to the tools and protocols

00:16:56.820 | for increasing your level of tenacity and willpower

00:16:59.340 | and your flexibility of willpower in different contexts,

00:17:02.620 | that you'll be able to get the most out of those tools

00:17:04.860 | and protocols.

00:17:05.940 | Okay, so let's take a look at the evidence

00:17:07.380 | that willpower is a limited resource.

00:17:09.780 | I think most of us are familiar

00:17:11.280 | with what willpower feels like,

00:17:13.660 | that is what it feels like to be tenacious.

00:17:15.940 | And again, there are two sides to this coin.

00:17:18.340 | There's willpower and tenacity

00:17:20.140 | of the sort of trying to engage in a behavior

00:17:22.940 | when we really don't want to,

00:17:24.700 | or when our impulse is not to engage in that behavior.

00:17:28.660 | And I say when our impulse is not to engage in that behavior

00:17:31.760 | because oftentimes we want to engage in the behavior,

00:17:34.860 | we want to study, we want to learn the instrument,

00:17:37.500 | we want to perform well, we want to exercise,

00:17:39.680 | we want the benefits of all those things.

00:17:41.820 | So it's not that we don't want the outcomes

00:17:44.200 | or the rewards of those things.

00:17:45.420 | And in many cases,

00:17:46.680 | it's not that we don't enjoy those activities,

00:17:49.740 | but that for whatever reason,

00:17:51.300 | we are feeling a lack of motivation.

00:17:53.300 | We're drifting down that continuum

00:17:55.180 | toward the more apathetic end of things,

00:17:57.340 | hopefully not all the way to deep depression and apathy,

00:18:00.200 | but we're drifting that way,

00:18:01.420 | or we're not far enough up the continuum,

00:18:03.900 | and we're not engaging enough motivation

00:18:06.500 | to feel like the desire to do something,

00:18:09.820 | either for its own sake or for the rewards

00:18:12.060 | and outcomes of that thing,

00:18:13.260 | are sufficient to allow us to just do that thing.

00:18:16.420 | Hence the Nike slogan, "Just do it,"

00:18:18.500 | which is a wonderful slogan,

00:18:19.940 | except that in the absence of any understanding

00:18:21.980 | about the mechanisms of how we can get ourselves

00:18:24.600 | to just do something, oftentimes it falls short.

00:18:27.620 | And to be honest, anytime I hear about people saying,

00:18:30.780 | "Well, just eliminate the thinking and just do it,"

00:18:33.200 | that is valuable advice until it doesn't work,

00:18:36.840 | because when it doesn't work, it simply doesn't work.

00:18:39.620 | And then you need to rely on other tools and mechanisms,

00:18:42.020 | which are the sort that we will talk about today.

00:18:43.920 | So while I have great respect for the just do it mantra,

00:18:46.980 | when it doesn't work,

00:18:48.380 | it doesn't offer any alternative solutions

00:18:51.520 | to engage tenacity and willpower.

00:18:53.400 | And I do not know anyone on this planet.

00:18:55.900 | I don't care if you're David Goggins or Courtney Dewalter,

00:18:58.340 | there will be days when telling yourself,

00:19:00.540 | "Just do this," or "Just don't do that,"

00:19:03.700 | is not going to be sufficient for you to engage

00:19:06.200 | in the behaviors or resist the behaviors or thoughts

00:19:10.320 | that you need to engage in or resist.

00:19:12.900 | That's just reality.

00:19:14.120 | And we should ask ourselves, why is that reality?

00:19:16.580 | And this is a very important point.

00:19:18.080 | And in fact, really illustrates the first bucket

00:19:20.560 | of tools and protocols for increasing tenacity

00:19:23.240 | and willpower.

00:19:24.080 | And these are the tools and protocols

00:19:26.080 | that I would categorize under the rubric of modulators.

00:19:30.040 | I've talked before on this podcast

00:19:31.280 | about the important distinction

00:19:32.400 | between mediators and modulators.

00:19:34.280 | Mediators are things,

00:19:36.460 | either psychological or biological, et cetera,

00:19:39.260 | that are directly in the mechanisms

00:19:41.360 | that generate some sort of action or emotion.

00:19:44.440 | This could be neurochemicals like dopamine

00:19:46.060 | or serotonin and so on.

00:19:48.240 | Modulators are things that can modulate,

00:19:50.900 | that is, can change our probability of doing something

00:19:54.240 | or not doing something, but they do so indirectly.

00:19:57.040 | And in the context of tools and protocols

00:19:59.580 | to increase our level of tenacity and willpower,

00:20:02.880 | I will be completely remiss if one of the sets of tools,

00:20:05.960 | that is the protocols, for increasing the probability

00:20:09.200 | that we can access high levels of tenacity and willpower

00:20:12.840 | didn't include at least some of these modulators.

00:20:14.880 | So I'm just going to spend about three minutes

00:20:16.680 | on these modulators, because what we know for certain

00:20:20.260 | is that the regions of the brain that generate tenacity,

00:20:24.360 | and again, there is literally a brain hub

00:20:27.040 | for generating willpower and tenacity,

00:20:29.120 | gets strong input from the so-called

00:20:31.680 | autonomic nervous system.

00:20:32.860 | The autonomic nervous system has two major components.

00:20:35.260 | They are referred to as the sympathetic nervous system

00:20:37.180 | and the parasympathetic nervous system.

00:20:38.840 | Keep in mind, because when most people hear the word

00:20:41.680 | sympathetic, they think sympathy, they think emotion,

00:20:44.300 | it has nothing to do with that.

00:20:45.500 | Simpa means together, and the sympathetic arm

00:20:48.840 | of the autonomic nervous system, I know that's a mouthful,

00:20:51.440 | is responsible for generating states of alertness

00:20:54.800 | in our brain and body.

00:20:55.920 | Everything from panic to being alert and calm,

00:20:58.900 | our tendency to move,

00:21:00.360 | or our likelihood of moving under pressure.

00:21:04.080 | It is also responsible for our ability to resist movement

00:21:08.160 | when we need to resist movement,

00:21:10.540 | and therefore it's an active process.

00:21:13.100 | So the sympathetic nervous system

00:21:14.480 | is all the things of action,

00:21:16.960 | and when it is involved in generating inaction,

00:21:20.960 | those are cases where inaction requires energy, okay?

00:21:25.120 | I want to be very clear about this.

00:21:26.240 | The sympathetic nervous system

00:21:27.300 | isn't just about moving our body,

00:21:29.320 | although it has a lot to do with that,

00:21:30.720 | it is also responsible for our ability to resist movement

00:21:34.280 | or thought or emotion when we need to do that,

00:21:37.000 | clamp down on ourselves.

00:21:38.720 | The parasympathetic aspect of our autonomic nervous system

00:21:41.860 | is the one that's sometimes referred to

00:21:43.280 | as the rest and digest neural circuits and chemicals.

00:21:47.080 | And that's true, but there's a lot more to

00:21:50.000 | the parasympathetic component

00:21:51.520 | of the autonomic nervous system.

00:21:53.040 | It's also responsible for falling asleep,

00:21:56.140 | it's responsible for us feeling relaxed,

00:21:59.080 | it is responsible for most of the states of mind and body

00:22:03.180 | in which we are quiescent,

00:22:05.480 | where we don't feel an impulse to move,

00:22:08.200 | or when we have a difficult time getting into action.

00:22:11.840 | So the sympathetic and the parasympathetic aspect

00:22:15.040 | of the autonomic nervous system

00:22:16.200 | are always in a push-pull with one another.

00:22:18.560 | Think of them more or less on a teeter-totter,

00:22:20.680 | when one end goes up, the other end goes down.

00:22:23.080 | They're really in competition with one another,

00:22:25.300 | and it's their balance that reflects how alert

00:22:28.040 | or how sleepy we happen to be.

00:22:30.100 | Now, the reason I'm giving you

00:22:31.240 | this rather geeky nerd-speak nomenclature-filled discussion

00:22:34.640 | about the autonomic nervous system

00:22:36.780 | in the context of willpower,

00:22:38.620 | is that regardless of whether or not you believe willpower

00:22:42.000 | is a limited or an unlimited resource,

00:22:45.200 | we know one thing for sure,

00:22:47.160 | and that's that willpower and tenacity

00:22:49.520 | ride on our current autonomic function.

00:22:53.900 | We can translate that to everyday language

00:22:56.340 | by saying that when we are well-rested,

00:22:59.020 | for instance, when we've been getting great sleep

00:23:01.580 | of sufficient duration the previous night

00:23:04.520 | and the night before that,

00:23:06.220 | our level of tenacity and willpower to engage in things

00:23:09.320 | that we would not ordinarily engage in by default,

00:23:12.340 | and our ability to resist behaviors and thought patterns

00:23:15.440 | that would otherwise be our default behaviors

00:23:18.040 | and thought patterns, is much higher.

00:23:21.520 | Conversely, when we are not getting enough quality sleep

00:23:23.940 | on a regular basis,

00:23:25.680 | our ability to call on tenacity and willpower is diminished.

00:23:29.220 | Now, that series of statements I just made

00:23:31.160 | is clearly going to be a duh for most people,

00:23:34.060 | but it is very important to understand

00:23:36.340 | that when we are sleep-deprived,

00:23:38.660 | when we are in physical pain,

00:23:40.960 | when we are in emotional pain,

00:23:43.600 | and/or when we are distracted,

00:23:46.920 | when we are thinking about something else

00:23:49.380 | aside from what we are trying to engage tenacity

00:23:51.480 | and willpower in order to do or not do,

00:23:53.960 | tenacity and willpower will be diminished.

00:23:56.680 | Now, all of those things together are just a bigger duh.

00:24:00.160 | We all know this.

00:24:01.000 | If you've got a splinter in your foot,

00:24:02.640 | it's really hard to think about

00:24:04.620 | not thinking about something else.

00:24:06.440 | If you are extremely hungry,

00:24:08.280 | or if you had an argument with somebody

00:24:09.840 | that you really care about,

00:24:10.680 | and they said something that was particularly vexing to you,

00:24:13.360 | and it's looping around in your head,

00:24:15.220 | it's going to be very hard to engage in something else

00:24:17.960 | that you need to do because you're going to be distracted.

00:24:21.000 | Likewise, if you're sleep-deprived,

00:24:22.380 | likewise, if you are a bit sick or run down,

00:24:25.560 | or if you're in any kind of physical or emotional pain,

00:24:28.280 | your ability to draw on tenacity and willpower

00:24:31.040 | will be diminished.

00:24:32.760 | So it's an absolute truth

00:24:35.080 | that your ability to generate tenacity and willpower

00:24:38.800 | rides on a reservoir of autonomic function.

00:24:42.480 | And today, we don't really have a way of quantifying

00:24:45.320 | the level of autonomic function or dysfunction

00:24:48.260 | in a very simple way.

00:24:49.520 | It's not like resting heart rate,

00:24:51.040 | although resting heart rate is involved.

00:24:53.040 | For instance, if you haven't slept well for a few nights,

00:24:55.200 | or if you're particularly stressed, over-trained,

00:24:57.660 | you'll wake up in the morning

00:24:58.600 | with a significantly elevated heart rate.

00:25:00.700 | However, there is no simple metric like heart rate

00:25:05.760 | or blood pressure or even cortisol level

00:25:08.120 | that can tell you whether or not

00:25:09.200 | your autonomic function is in balance,

00:25:11.720 | that is the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems

00:25:14.520 | of your autonomic nervous system

00:25:16.080 | are in the best possible balance

00:25:17.860 | to generate tenacity and willpower.

00:25:19.640 | We don't yet have such a metric,

00:25:21.300 | although there are companies

00:25:22.220 | that are starting to develop devices

00:25:24.060 | that hopefully will give us indices

00:25:26.580 | of autonomic function or dysfunction.

00:25:29.180 | But it is important that we acknowledge

00:25:30.880 | that if you're not taking care

00:25:32.380 | of the foundational modulators of tenacity and willpower,

00:25:37.160 | none of the subsequent tools and protocols

00:25:39.140 | that we will discuss

00:25:40.400 | are going to help you that much over time.

00:25:42.440 | You might get tenacity and willpower to engage one day

00:25:45.580 | when you're very sleep deprived,

00:25:46.740 | but it's going to be very difficult

00:25:48.180 | to consistently engage tenacity and willpower.

00:25:50.680 | For that reason, if you have any struggles with sleep,

00:25:54.880 | that is getting enough quality sleep on a regular basis,

00:25:57.120 | please see the zero cost toolkit for sleep

00:25:59.540 | that we've put at hubermanlab.com.

00:26:01.140 | Please also see the perfect your sleep,

00:26:03.100 | master your sleep episodes also at hubermanlab.com.

00:26:06.140 | And please also see the episode with expert guest,

00:26:09.180 | Dr. Matthew Walker, professor of sleep neuroscience

00:26:12.420 | and psychology at University of California, Berkeley.

00:26:15.340 | We just revamped the Huberman Lab website.

00:26:17.700 | So if you go to hubermanlab.com

00:26:19.320 | and you put something like sleep into the search function,

00:26:22.420 | it will take you not just to the toolkit for sleep,

00:26:24.480 | but to the exact timestamps

00:26:26.880 | that will queue up particular topics

00:26:28.380 | and protocols around sleep.

00:26:29.380 | So if you were to put sleep and light,

00:26:30.960 | it would take you to those particular protocols.

00:26:32.620 | If you were to put sleep and magnesium threonate,

00:26:35.260 | it would take you to those particular protocols

00:26:36.840 | and so on and so forth.

00:26:38.140 | I don't want to get too far off topic here

00:26:40.300 | during today's discussion,

00:26:41.300 | but if you're not sleeping well,

00:26:43.100 | and if you're not managing your stress levels well,

00:26:45.900 | it's going to be much harder

00:26:47.500 | for you to engage tenacity and willpower,

00:26:49.700 | regardless of the tools you happen to use.

00:26:51.980 | And those tools could be everything from behavioral tools

00:26:54.100 | to supplements, to prescription drugs.

00:26:55.840 | You need to get those foundational modulators in check.

00:26:58.940 | And there are a lot of zero cost ways to do that

00:27:01.140 | that are all spelled out very clearly

00:27:02.720 | at the resources I just described.

00:27:04.380 | Likewise for stress,

00:27:06.500 | if you're experiencing challenges with stress,

00:27:09.020 | both short-term, medium-term or long-term stress,

00:27:11.440 | if you think you have elevated cortisol levels,

00:27:13.180 | which by the way, may not be the case,

00:27:15.380 | there are a lot of tools for modulating stress in real time,

00:27:18.040 | increasing your stress threshold, et cetera.

00:27:19.680 | Simply go to the kubermanlab.com website

00:27:21.560 | and put in stress threshold tools

00:27:23.620 | or stress real-time tools,

00:27:25.320 | and you'll get a bunch of zero cost tools

00:27:27.540 | that will allow you to do that.

00:27:29.060 | It's also worth mentioning

00:27:30.100 | that when we get to our discussion

00:27:31.380 | about the neuroscience of tenacity and willpower,

00:27:34.720 | that you will understand why autonomic health

00:27:38.100 | and autonomic function is so important

00:27:40.660 | for our ability to engage tenacity and willpower.

00:27:43.880 | I'll just tell you right now,

00:27:44.780 | it's because the neural circuits

00:27:46.220 | of the autonomic nervous system

00:27:47.600 | provide direct and robust input to this hub in the brain,

00:27:52.160 | this brain location that governs our ability

00:27:55.260 | to allocate our mind and body toward particular activities

00:27:59.320 | or to resist particular activities.

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00:28:13.940 | Now, of course, I try to get enough servings

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00:28:59.040 | Okay, so let's think about the Baumeister data

00:29:01.360 | on willpower as a limited resource.

00:29:04.120 | I'm going to briefly describe one of the first studies

00:29:06.980 | that really said to the field,

00:29:08.960 | "Willpower is a limited resource."

00:29:11.260 | But I want to be clear that there are other studies like it,

00:29:14.180 | and they all generally follow the same contour.

00:29:17.400 | And that general contour is as follows.

00:29:20.360 | Baumeister and colleagues,

00:29:21.520 | and now many other laboratories, have done experiments

00:29:24.040 | where they bring human subjects into the laboratory.

00:29:27.240 | And those human subjects have to do something

00:29:30.040 | that requires mental effort or energy, aka willpower.

00:29:34.840 | The classic example of this is you bring people

00:29:37.280 | into the laboratory.

00:29:38.540 | Some of them might actually be dieting or fasted,

00:29:41.240 | although not always.

00:29:42.520 | And there are two platters set out for them.

00:29:45.600 | One platter contains radishes, just plain radishes.

00:29:49.280 | By the way, I hate radishes unless they're pickled radishes.

00:29:52.040 | I don't know why that is.

00:29:52.980 | So these experiments picked my least favorite vegetable.

00:29:55.900 | I love many other vegetables.

00:29:57.460 | I disdain the radish.

00:30:00.300 | That was just a personal editorial.

00:30:02.760 | In any case, the radishes are set out,

00:30:05.160 | and next to them are freshly baked cookies.

00:30:07.520 | And in the room is the wafting aromas

00:30:10.780 | of freshly baked cookies.

00:30:12.520 | So I think it's fair to say that most people,

00:30:15.040 | because of a hardwired tendency to like sugar and fat,

00:30:19.720 | especially when they are combined,

00:30:21.840 | would prefer to eat the cookies versus the radishes.

00:30:25.080 | I know that there are some mutants out there

00:30:27.940 | that are saying, "I like radishes more than cookies."

00:30:29.760 | But look, most people like cookies more than radishes.

00:30:33.120 | The subjects in these studies are divided into two groups.

00:30:36.040 | One group is told you have to resist eating the radishes.

00:30:39.960 | The other group is told you have to resist

00:30:41.920 | eating the cookies.

00:30:43.880 | And then the subjects are observed

00:30:46.120 | during this time, typically.

00:30:48.040 | But this is really not what the experiment is about per se.

00:30:51.880 | This stage of the experiment is really designed

00:30:53.700 | to get people to resist a certain kind of behavior.

00:30:56.600 | And the assumption, again, this is an assumption

00:30:58.960 | 'cause there's no brain recordings here.

00:31:00.380 | No one's in an MRI machine looking at what brain areas

00:31:03.760 | are activated or not activated.

00:31:05.000 | There's no cortisol being measured,

00:31:06.400 | at least not in these early experiments.

00:31:08.400 | These people are either resisting something

00:31:12.280 | that's pretty easy to resist, radishes,

00:31:15.040 | or they are being asked to resist something

00:31:16.900 | that for most people is going to be harder to resist

00:31:19.920 | than resisting radishes,

00:31:21.400 | which is resisting freshly baked cookies.

00:31:24.360 | And that challenge has been made even more difficult

00:31:27.980 | by the wafting aromas of freshly baked cookies in the room.

00:31:32.060 | And in some cases has been made even more difficult

00:31:34.380 | because these people are dieting.

00:31:36.840 | And keep in mind that when you calorie restrict

00:31:40.420 | or when you put yourself on a diet of any kind,

00:31:42.840 | there is a well-established mechanism in the brain

00:31:46.040 | by which the neurons that engage hunger,

00:31:48.000 | especially hunger for fat and sugar,

00:31:50.120 | and that respond to things like aromas and tastes

00:31:52.840 | are heightened, that is their activity levels are heightened,

00:31:56.840 | which means that things that smell really good,

00:32:00.320 | smell really, really good when you're hungry.

00:32:03.500 | Things that ordinarily would taste really good,

00:32:06.300 | taste really, really, really good when you finally eat them.

00:32:10.040 | So the key component of this stage of the experiment

00:32:12.040 | is to engage people's willpower.

00:32:13.820 | The second part of the experiment has all of the subjects

00:32:17.980 | separately engage in another challenging task.

00:32:22.240 | And the challenging task that they are asked to engage in

00:32:25.200 | is to solve a particular puzzle.

00:32:27.080 | And again, different experiments use different puzzles,

00:32:29.320 | different experiments use different contexts,

00:32:31.460 | but the original experiments that Baumeister

00:32:34.280 | and colleagues did had people try and solve a puzzle

00:32:37.560 | that could not be solved.

00:32:39.240 | So it's very, very difficult, in fact, it's impossible.

00:32:42.280 | But the subjects weren't aware of that.

00:32:43.920 | And then what was measured was how long subjects persisted

00:32:48.080 | in trying to solve this impossible to solve puzzle,

00:32:52.080 | depending on whether or not previously

00:32:54.520 | they had to resist the radishes,

00:32:56.840 | which is pretty easy to resist,

00:32:58.440 | or resist the cookies, which is at least harder to resist,

00:33:01.940 | and for some people would be very, very hard to resist.

00:33:05.840 | Now, you can probably already guess

00:33:07.080 | what the outcome of this and similar studies was,

00:33:10.080 | because it birthed this entire belief camp

00:33:12.920 | within the field of psychology,

00:33:14.660 | that willpower is a limited resource.

00:33:16.660 | The outcome was that if people had to resist the cookies,

00:33:20.040 | which is harder to do than resisting the radishes,

00:33:23.600 | that they would persist for less time

00:33:27.560 | when they had to try and solve a puzzle

00:33:29.860 | that unbeknownst to them could not be solved.

00:33:32.720 | Conversely, if people had to resist something

00:33:35.900 | that was pretty easy to resist,

00:33:38.160 | such as resisting eating radishes,

00:33:40.400 | something that for me would be very, very easy to resist,

00:33:43.840 | well, when they were subsequently faced

00:33:47.240 | with trying to solve a very difficult,

00:33:49.620 | indeed impossible to solve puzzle,

00:33:52.660 | they persisted much longer.

00:33:54.900 | Okay, so put very simply, this study concluded

00:33:57.400 | that if you have to resist one thing

00:33:59.860 | and it's a hard thing to resist,

00:34:01.420 | well, then you have less, air quotes here,

00:34:04.000 | resistance in you, willpower,

00:34:06.280 | to engage in another difficult task subsequently.

00:34:09.220 | Whereas if you had an easy challenge just prior

00:34:11.600 | or no challenge just prior to being faced with a challenge,

00:34:14.640 | such as a very difficult puzzle,

00:34:16.740 | well, then you had more resource,

00:34:18.700 | more willpower to apply to the solving of that puzzle.

00:34:22.100 | So the conclusion that Baumeister and colleagues drew

00:34:24.300 | from those results was that willpower is a limited resource,

00:34:28.160 | but it didn't specify, nor did they specify,

00:34:31.540 | exactly what that limited resource is.

00:34:34.560 | And this was quite an attractive theory

00:34:36.140 | because it jived well with most people's perception

00:34:39.380 | of what willpower and tenacity was for them.

00:34:42.280 | This idea that, yes, there are things that challenge us,

00:34:46.300 | both to do and to resist, but that we can do that.

00:34:49.380 | But when we are asked to do that again and again and again,

00:34:52.880 | while we may build up some capacity

00:34:55.300 | to engage our willpower and tenacity,

00:34:57.660 | and of course there are those rare individuals

00:34:59.380 | that we've heard about and some of us know

00:35:01.700 | that seem to have just a kind of bottomless reservoir

00:35:04.860 | of willpower and tenacity,

00:35:06.580 | most of us have an intuitive understanding

00:35:09.900 | of how hard it is to constantly be in friction with life,

00:35:14.020 | to constantly have to push ourselves to do things

00:35:17.140 | and to resist things.

00:35:18.300 | And that while that capacity can expand and grow

00:35:21.340 | and we can get better at it,

00:35:22.780 | that there does seem to be something,

00:35:24.500 | here just subjectively speaking,

00:35:26.280 | there does seem to be something

00:35:28.100 | about engaging tenacity and willpower that,

00:35:31.460 | yeah, I can feel good, but it also requires effort,

00:35:34.540 | this neural energy that we were talking about.

00:35:36.700 | So that raised the question of,

00:35:38.140 | okay, if willpower is a limited resource,

00:35:40.660 | what exactly is that resource at a physiological level?

00:35:44.460 | So Baumeister and colleagues subsequently went on to explore

00:35:47.500 | what I think is a really interesting and clever idea.

00:35:50.060 | Frankly, I can't confess that I would have thought of this,

00:35:52.940 | but they did.

00:35:53.860 | They said, okay, in some cases people are eating the cookie

00:35:58.780 | and then they're engaging in this very difficult puzzle.

00:36:01.740 | In other cases, they're eating the radish

00:36:03.620 | and engaging in this difficult puzzle.

00:36:04.940 | And of course other experiments

00:36:05.940 | used non-food challenging choices,

00:36:08.460 | but they came up with an idea which was the brain

00:36:12.820 | as one of the most metabolically active organs

00:36:14.900 | in our entire body, if not the most metabolically active

00:36:18.620 | organ in our entire body, requires a lot of fuel.

00:36:21.820 | It requires a lot of glucose.

00:36:23.780 | Now, of course the brain mainly runs on glucose,

00:36:27.580 | but if you're following a ketogenic diet,

00:36:29.420 | your brain will mainly run on ketones.

00:36:32.220 | But for most people who are omnivores

00:36:34.400 | or eating carbohydrates,

00:36:35.980 | glucose is the main and preferred fuel source for neurons,

00:36:39.140 | for nerve cells in your brain and body for that matter.

00:36:42.180 | Baumeister and colleagues raised the hypothesis

00:36:45.060 | that perhaps glucose availability itself

00:36:48.300 | is the resource that's limiting willpower.

00:36:51.180 | And in a whole set of experiments,

00:36:53.520 | they really showed that if people are asked

00:36:57.080 | to do a difficult task, to engage their willpower,

00:36:59.700 | and this could be done by resisting a particular behavior

00:37:02.120 | or by engaging in a particular behavior.

00:37:04.240 | I'll just give you an example

00:37:05.460 | of engaging in a particular behavior

00:37:07.980 | that requires willpower or at least focus and mental energy.

00:37:12.420 | To contrast it with the resisting radishes

00:37:14.500 | versus resisting cookies example that I gave earlier.

00:37:18.420 | One common practice within experiments like this

00:37:21.500 | is to give people a very long passage of words,

00:37:24.540 | so it's a story, and then to give them some sort of rule

00:37:27.340 | about how to edit that passage.

00:37:28.700 | Maybe they have to cross out every third E

00:37:31.800 | or the E's that arrive in the middle of sentences

00:37:34.060 | next to consonants, but not other vowels,

00:37:37.060 | stuff that takes a lot of energy.

00:37:38.880 | So these are do's as opposed to resisting behaviors,

00:37:43.000 | like we were talking about earlier,

00:37:44.080 | resisting the radish, resisting the cookies.

00:37:45.760 | Although in many of these experiments,

00:37:47.120 | there's a command to do something,

00:37:48.520 | cross out certain letter E's in this passage,

00:37:50.840 | but also to resist the reflex to cross out other E's.

00:37:55.720 | And of course, all of this is under time pressure

00:37:57.960 | and oftentimes it's being rewarded or scored.

00:38:00.520 | This is the way that psychology researchers get people

00:38:02.880 | to engage in particular experiments and behaviors

00:38:05.960 | and resist certain things

00:38:07.880 | in the context of a laboratory environment

00:38:09.460 | when those things frankly are kind of boring

00:38:11.020 | and meaningless, they'll pay you more

00:38:13.560 | if you do well at the task.

00:38:15.560 | They'll give you money and then subtract the money

00:38:18.280 | that you're going to get at the end of the experiment

00:38:20.200 | if you make errors and things like that,

00:38:22.640 | and they'll do it under time constraint

00:38:23.840 | as I mentioned earlier.

00:38:24.840 | So there were lots of different conditions for,

00:38:27.800 | again, here, air quotes, draining people's willpower

00:38:30.680 | and tenacity and certainly draining their mental attention.

00:38:34.720 | And then they would have them do another subsequent task.

00:38:38.160 | So in many ways,

00:38:39.000 | this just mirrors the first cookie radish experiment

00:38:42.160 | done by Baumeister and colleagues,

00:38:44.000 | but there was an important intervention

00:38:47.080 | put between the first and the second hard task.

00:38:51.120 | And that intervention was to give one group

00:38:54.760 | a glucose beverage of about 150 calories or so.

00:38:58.060 | So they would drink a glucose beverage

00:39:00.440 | to increase levels of blood glucose,

00:39:03.120 | the preferred fuel source for the brain,

00:39:05.160 | versus giving them an artificially flavored drink

00:39:07.720 | or just water or something that was,

00:39:09.640 | of course, matched for flavor,

00:39:11.220 | but that did not contain any glucose or calories.

00:39:14.560 | Now, this is a clever experimental design

00:39:16.940 | if you think about it,

00:39:18.100 | because at least at a first glance,

00:39:19.720 | the only thing that really seems to be different

00:39:21.680 | is the availability of glucose for the brain.

00:39:24.680 | And you can probably guess

00:39:25.720 | what the outcome of these studies was.

00:39:27.200 | The outcome of these studies

00:39:28.400 | was that when subjects are given glucose

00:39:31.240 | in between a first hard task that required willpower

00:39:34.200 | and a second hard task that required willpower,

00:39:36.280 | and in some experiments,

00:39:37.640 | a third hard task that required willpower,

00:39:40.220 | that their levels of willpower were maintained consistently

00:39:43.440 | from one task to the next,

00:39:45.040 | and in some cases increased from one task to the next

00:39:48.640 | if they had more glucose available

00:39:50.300 | because they drank this glucose drink.

00:39:52.660 | So what's really interesting

00:39:53.720 | and frankly really nice about these studies

00:39:55.840 | is that they attempted to bridge a psychological construct

00:39:58.720 | like tenacity and willpower.

00:40:00.600 | And to test the argument

00:40:02.640 | that willpower is an expendable resource,

00:40:06.160 | and yet it's an expendable resource that is replenishable

00:40:09.480 | by linking that to a physiological variable.

00:40:11.680 | And the physiological variable they linked it to

00:40:13.720 | was glucose availability in the brain.

00:40:16.560 | Now, this set the field of psychology,

00:40:19.600 | and in fact, the field of pop psychology,

00:40:21.860 | that is the discussion about formal findings

00:40:24.400 | in the field of formal psychological research ablaze.

00:40:27.520 | People were so excited about this.

00:40:29.360 | I mean, this set of findings really pointed to the argument

00:40:31.960 | that if you could just keep levels

00:40:33.440 | of brain glucose elevated across your day,

00:40:37.840 | or at least stable across the day,

00:40:40.220 | that you would have more willpower and tenacity,

00:40:42.360 | this thing that humans have been seeking more of

00:40:44.760 | since the beginning of time.

00:40:46.420 | Now, all of that seemed fine and good,

00:40:48.380 | and in fact, a lot of products and courses

00:40:51.400 | were born out of that literature.

00:40:53.660 | People were arguing that you should sip on a glucose drink

00:40:57.080 | while doing any kind of hard task,

00:40:58.800 | that you should sip on glucose drinks between tasks,

00:41:01.760 | that you should be thinking about literally

00:41:04.720 | fuel that you ingest into your body

00:41:06.400 | as fuel for psychological processes within your brain

00:41:09.640 | that would allow you to perform better in work, in school,

00:41:11.960 | in athletics, in relationships,

00:41:13.520 | in all of the domains of life.

00:41:16.420 | But of course, anytime there is a prominence

00:41:19.460 | or a real excitement about a particular finding

00:41:22.080 | in any field of science, but in particular in psychology

00:41:24.760 | where it feels so applicable, as did the Baumeister results,

00:41:29.160 | you are going to get other groups

00:41:30.760 | that are going to try and replicate those findings

00:41:32.840 | and that are going to dig into the findings themselves

00:41:36.480 | and look at the statistics,

00:41:38.040 | look at how well or poorly powered those studies were.

00:41:42.040 | We don't want to get into a full discussion

00:41:43.520 | about powering studies right now,

00:41:45.140 | but powering studies has a lot to do

00:41:47.160 | with addressing the question of whether or not

00:41:49.480 | there were enough subjects in the study

00:41:51.020 | to really draw the conclusions that one drew

00:41:53.920 | or whether or not the statistics fell out as,

00:41:57.040 | yes, there was a significant effect of glucose ingestion

00:41:59.480 | on willpower and tenacity,

00:42:01.220 | but if there weren't enough subjects,

00:42:03.020 | well, then there are other variables

00:42:04.600 | that could potentially explain those results.

00:42:07.440 | So there were a lot of meta-analyses and other studies

00:42:09.980 | trying to replicate the work of Baumeister

00:42:11.960 | and that's where things got controversial.

00:42:14.320 | Now, we can take a step back from all of that controversy.

00:42:16.540 | After all, we don't want to spend too much time

00:42:18.400 | on the controversy itself.

00:42:19.800 | Rather, we want to know what the counter-interpretation

00:42:22.320 | of the Baumeister results was.

00:42:24.260 | And I want to be very clear.

00:42:26.040 | There was no real dispute as to whether or not

00:42:28.160 | Baumeister got the results that he and his colleagues

00:42:31.160 | claimed to have obtained.

00:42:32.680 | They did get those results.

00:42:33.840 | The question really was about the interpretation.

00:42:36.920 | Is willpower a limited resource?

00:42:38.560 | And if it is, is the physiological resource itself

00:42:42.640 | glucose availability to the brain?

00:42:44.840 | So in 2013, a colleague of mine at Stanford,

00:42:48.280 | Dr. Carol Dweck in our department of psychology,

00:42:51.120 | did a study in which she examined this idea

00:42:53.400 | that willpower is a limited resource

00:42:55.480 | and the idea that the resource that's limited

00:42:58.040 | is glucose availability for the brain.

00:43:00.740 | So Dweck and colleagues did an experiment

00:43:02.500 | that in many ways mirrored the overall organization

00:43:05.200 | of the experiments done by Baumeister and colleagues.

00:43:07.660 | There was a difficult task.

00:43:09.440 | In some cases, the difficult task was that crossing out

00:43:11.680 | of particular ease within a passage task

00:43:14.320 | followed by another difficult task.

00:43:16.160 | And the difficult task that came second

00:43:18.940 | was the Stroop task.

00:43:20.100 | This is a task I've talked about before on this podcast,

00:43:22.320 | although some episodes ago.

00:43:23.900 | So those of you that are not familiar with the Stroop task,

00:43:26.220 | the Stroop task is where subjects are presented

00:43:28.800 | with words in different colors

00:43:30.780 | and they are instructed to either read the word,

00:43:34.000 | so to pay attention to the content of the word

00:43:36.520 | or to the color in which the font of the word is written.

00:43:40.360 | This might seem pretty easy to most of you, right?

00:43:42.520 | If I put up a card that says Apple on it

00:43:46.400 | and Apple is written in green,

00:43:48.800 | you probably wouldn't have a hard time

00:43:50.280 | if you had been instructed to tell me

00:43:52.120 | what color is the word written in for you to say green, okay?

00:43:55.620 | But if I were to hold up a card that said red,

00:43:58.200 | but the font is actually in the color green,

00:44:00.480 | it's a little bit harder.

00:44:01.600 | And if I were to then do that for 100 cards or 300 cards

00:44:06.100 | and put you under time pressure,

00:44:07.700 | where you're losing money that you're sure to get

00:44:10.840 | if you make mistakes or you will earn money

00:44:14.360 | at the end of the experiment if you get answers correctly,

00:44:17.400 | well, then you start making more mistakes.

00:44:19.240 | That's just the way these experiments work.

00:44:21.520 | So they did a variation on the Stroop task

00:44:23.780 | that isn't exactly the way I just described it.

00:44:26.340 | And the Stroop task, by the way,

00:44:27.760 | is one that's used to probe prefrontal cortex function,

00:44:30.840 | this area of our brain right behind our foreheads

00:44:33.300 | that is responsible for many things,

00:44:34.900 | but in part is responsible for context and strategy setting

00:44:39.900 | given a particular set of rules.

00:44:42.920 | So if you get onto the bus or get onto the subway

00:44:46.360 | versus walk into a black tie dinner,

00:44:48.860 | the context and rules are very, very different

00:44:51.000 | as to what you would say or not say,

00:44:52.560 | how you would behave, how you address.

00:44:53.960 | Your prefrontal cortex is largely, although not entirely,

00:44:57.160 | is largely responsible for a lot of the context setting

00:44:59.720 | and rule setting from one situation to the next.

00:45:02.240 | And if you think about the Stroop task,

00:45:04.320 | it's really just a context dependent strategy task.

00:45:08.280 | You either have to pay attention to the meaning of the words

00:45:10.940 | or the colors in which those words are written.

00:45:13.520 | And the number of mistakes that you'll make

00:45:14.920 | depends on how much time pressure you're under,

00:45:17.400 | what sorts of neurologic or psychiatric challenges

00:45:19.680 | you might be facing or not facing, so on and so forth.

00:45:21.960 | But it's a very robust task that's existed

00:45:23.960 | in the scientific literature for a long period of time.

00:45:26.240 | So the Dweck experiment, and by the way,

00:45:27.560 | there were actually three experiments in this paper.

00:45:29.360 | I won't go through all of them in detail for sake of time,

00:45:31.400 | but I will provide a link to the paper

00:45:33.000 | in the show note captions.

00:45:34.120 | But the major focus of the study

00:45:35.360 | was to have people engage in one hard task

00:45:37.960 | and then in another hard task,

00:45:39.480 | both of which draw on willpower,

00:45:40.800 | testing the idea that willpower is a limited resource

00:45:43.160 | and then providing some of those subjects

00:45:46.740 | with a glucose rich drink

00:45:49.880 | or other subjects with a drink

00:45:52.720 | that was artificially sweetened.

00:45:54.240 | So it had no glucose, no calories, but tasted.

00:45:57.420 | Yes, they matched them for taste.

00:45:58.880 | I know some of you who don't like artificial sweeteners

00:46:01.260 | are saying those don't taste exactly like a real sugar,

00:46:04.180 | but they managed to match these drinks for taste.

00:46:06.060 | But in one case,

00:46:06.900 | the drink would clearly increase blood glucose.

00:46:08.600 | In the other case, the drink would not raise blood glucose.

00:46:11.380 | So the results of this study are really spectacular

00:46:14.020 | in my mind, because what this study found was that yes,

00:46:18.580 | indeed, ingesting glucose can improve performance

00:46:22.280 | on these multiple challenging willpower requiring tasks.

00:46:27.280 | However, the degree to which the glucose containing drink

00:46:30.540 | could improve performance

00:46:32.320 | depended on whether or not you believed

00:46:35.240 | that willpower was a limited resource

00:46:37.420 | and whether or not you believe that resource was glucose.

00:46:40.960 | In other words, if you hear and believe

00:46:43.580 | that willpower is a limited resource,

00:46:46.120 | well then indeed, with each subsequent task

00:46:49.140 | that you engage in or life event of any kind

00:46:51.440 | that you engage in that requires willpower and tenacity,

00:46:54.600 | you will have less willpower and tenacity to draw on.

00:46:58.780 | Whereas if you believe that willpower and tenacity

00:47:01.500 | are unlimited and in fact are divorced from blood glucose

00:47:05.780 | as the physiological source of willpower and tenacity,

00:47:10.160 | well then you can engage in one challenging task

00:47:12.440 | and another challenging task and another challenging task

00:47:15.240 | without any diminishment in performance.

00:47:18.000 | Now that of course leaves us all in a very tough position

00:47:20.320 | because how are we to decide what to believe

00:47:23.000 | if we know that willpower can be a limited resource

00:47:25.560 | or willpower can not be a limited resource?

00:47:28.320 | Ah, well, the results of the Dweck study,

00:47:30.620 | and by the way, I should share with you

00:47:32.200 | the title of the study.

00:47:33.080 | The title of the study, not surprisingly,

00:47:35.420 | is "Beliefs About Willpower Determine the Impact

00:47:38.480 | of Glucose on Self-Control."

00:47:40.760 | And this was a study published in the proceedings

00:47:42.320 | of the National Academy of Sciences.

00:47:43.560 | Again, I'll provide a link to this study

00:47:45.720 | in the show note captions.

00:47:46.840 | There are three major experiments in this study,

00:47:49.240 | as I mentioned before.

00:47:50.580 | I just gave you the major conclusion of all of them,

00:47:53.520 | sort of woven together.

00:47:55.120 | And if it wasn't clear already,

00:47:57.480 | the major conclusions are that, yes, ingesting glucose

00:48:00.440 | can improve your ability to engage tenacity and willpower,

00:48:04.880 | AKA self-control, from one task to the next,

00:48:08.020 | provided that you believe that glucose

00:48:10.880 | is the limiting resource

00:48:12.520 | for engaging tenacity and willpower.

00:48:14.000 | If you don't believe that,

00:48:15.560 | well, then you can engage tenacity and willpower

00:48:18.640 | without ingesting glucose.

00:48:20.240 | And that's where the artificially flavored drink comes in.

00:48:22.960 | I'll leave it to you to kind of unpack

00:48:24.640 | what that means experimentally.

00:48:26.120 | But it's a very clever experimental design

00:48:28.400 | that Dweck and colleagues came up with,

00:48:29.880 | because it argues that, yes, indeed,

00:48:31.600 | it's hard to do a challenging thing

00:48:33.040 | right after another challenging thing.

00:48:35.060 | But there's no reason to think

00:48:37.200 | that you can't do both of those things

00:48:39.220 | while engaging the utmost tenacity and willpower

00:48:42.480 | if you believe that tenacity and willpower

00:48:44.900 | exist within you as a single mechanism that can be harnessed

00:48:48.780 | and that it's not a single mechanism

00:48:50.820 | that has a reservoir that runs down

00:48:54.140 | as you engage in one hard thing to the next.

00:48:57.060 | Now, this is very important

00:48:59.080 | because we are about to transition

00:49:00.480 | into our discussion of the physiological,

00:49:02.600 | that is the neural underpinnings of tenacity and willpower,

00:49:06.620 | which, as it turns out, is one major set of brain circuits.

00:49:11.260 | Now, there could be others that are yet to be discovered,

00:49:13.920 | but we know that there is one major set of brain circuits,

00:49:16.740 | in particular, one brain area, believe it or not,

00:49:20.140 | that an entire collection of more than two dozen studies

00:49:22.900 | really points to as the seat,

00:49:25.140 | the origin of what we call tenacity and willpower.

00:49:28.260 | But before we transition to that

00:49:29.760 | and the tools and protocols

00:49:31.420 | that that physiological neural understanding

00:49:34.020 | set forth for us to all use and apply,

00:49:37.080 | I'd be remiss if I didn't mention

00:49:38.940 | that Baumeister wasn't about to hear these results

00:49:42.420 | from Dweck and colleagues and just say,

00:49:44.340 | okay, willpower is not a limited resource.

00:49:46.980 | It's not blood glucose.

00:49:47.980 | It's all what you believe about willpower.

00:49:49.740 | It's all what you believe about blood glucose.

00:49:52.500 | Rather, Baumeister himself went back to the lab

00:49:56.020 | and did subsequent experiments

00:49:58.500 | that in some ways, not all, counter the Dweck results.

00:50:01.860 | So I'm not trying to confuse anybody,

00:50:03.540 | but I wouldn't be doing my job

00:50:04.640 | if I didn't give you both sides of the story.

00:50:06.740 | Now, the good news is that the tools and protocols

00:50:08.560 | that we are going to arrive at

00:50:10.260 | work regardless of which psychological camp

00:50:13.060 | you happen to be in, the Baumeister camp or the Dweck camp.

00:50:15.940 | Now, I don't want to give the impression

00:50:16.980 | that these are warring camps,

00:50:18.260 | and I also don't want to give the impression

00:50:19.940 | that these are the only two camps of thought

00:50:21.880 | and experimentation within the field

00:50:24.140 | of tenacity and willpower.

00:50:25.260 | There are many groups working on these subjects.

00:50:28.300 | Indeed, there have been meta-analyses

00:50:30.980 | that have confirmed the major theories of Baumeister

00:50:33.480 | and there are meta-analyses

00:50:34.900 | that have refuted the major findings of Baumeister.

00:50:39.320 | I will provide links in the show note captions

00:50:41.260 | to a couple examples of each

00:50:42.700 | so that you have those to peruse if you like.

00:50:44.620 | But let's discuss for a moment what Baumeister found

00:50:46.920 | when they went back and re-researched,

00:50:49.580 | I think that's a word, re-researched the idea

00:50:52.100 | that willpower is a limited resource

00:50:54.220 | and that glucose is that limiting resource.

00:50:56.940 | Baumeister and colleagues looked at the Dweck data

00:51:00.020 | and said, okay, fine, the data looked great,

00:51:02.660 | except for the fact that in real life

00:51:04.940 | and in many previous experiments

00:51:06.320 | that they and others had done,

00:51:08.440 | it wasn't just two hard challenges back to back,

00:51:11.580 | but often two or three or four.

00:51:14.760 | And what Baumeister and others found

00:51:16.920 | was that when subjects are presented

00:51:18.440 | not with just two challenges back to back,

00:51:21.740 | but three or more challenges,

00:51:23.440 | so back to back to back to back,

00:51:25.120 | challenges that have to engage a lot of neural energy,

00:51:28.020 | a lot of willpower, tenacity,

00:51:29.620 | resistance to do certain things,

00:51:31.540 | and effort to engage in certain kinds of behaviors

00:51:34.880 | and cognitive processes,

00:51:36.580 | that when subjects had glucose available to them

00:51:40.900 | in the brain by way of ingesting these glucose drinks,

00:51:43.580 | sipping those in between the tasks,

00:51:45.380 | sometimes even during the tasks,

00:51:47.140 | that their performance,

00:51:48.300 | that is their willpower and tenacity

00:51:50.300 | to engage in challenges,

00:51:52.700 | was maintained across those multiple challenges.

00:51:56.140 | And they conceded that one's belief about willpower

00:51:58.720 | could indeed dictate whether or not willpower

00:52:01.660 | was or was not a limited resource,

00:52:03.560 | and whether glucose would or would not

00:52:06.320 | enhance one's ability to engage willpower.

00:52:08.920 | But they argued that if one confronts

00:52:12.500 | multiple challenging circumstances,

00:52:14.880 | as is very naturalistic, as we say,

00:52:17.740 | it's very typical of everyday real life,

00:52:20.460 | then the availability of glucose during and between tasks,

00:52:24.360 | the ability for the brain to engage

00:52:27.000 | in its external environment

00:52:28.360 | and take reads of its internal environment,

00:52:31.700 | how we feel inside relative to what's expected of us,

00:52:35.980 | was very valuable in allowing people to engage this thing

00:52:39.640 | that psychologically we described

00:52:41.300 | as tenacity and willpower.

00:52:43.380 | I'd like to just take a brief break

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00:54:01.400 | Let's talk about the physiology of tenacity and willpower.

00:54:04.620 | And I assure you that the conversation

00:54:06.520 | we are about to have is not going to be

00:54:08.600 | just a bunch of nomenclature and mechanistic understanding

00:54:11.660 | of the origins of tenacity and willpower.

00:54:13.640 | Rather, it argues that tenacity and willpower

00:54:17.740 | have a unified source.

00:54:19.820 | That is a specific set of brain areas that when active,

00:54:23.780 | engage that feeling of tenacity and willpower

00:54:26.740 | regardless of what we are confronted with,

00:54:29.680 | regardless of whether or not we are trying to engage

00:54:31.680 | in something that reflexively

00:54:33.400 | we wouldn't otherwise want to engage in,

00:54:36.060 | and regardless of whether or not we are confronted

00:54:38.380 | with something that we have to resist.

00:54:39.960 | And to me, that's extremely reassuring.

00:54:42.420 | Because whether or not you believe that blood glucose

00:54:44.280 | is the limiting resource for willpower,

00:54:46.640 | whether or not you believe that your beliefs about willpower

00:54:49.560 | and blood glucose impact your level of willpower,

00:54:52.640 | what we know for sure is that there's a single set

00:54:55.320 | of brain circuits.

00:54:56.620 | Indeed, there's a single brain area

00:54:59.300 | that seems to be able to largely,

00:55:01.260 | if not entirely explain this phenomenon

00:55:03.800 | that we call tenacity and willpower.

00:55:06.320 | And that should be reassuring because what it means

00:55:08.860 | is that tenacity and willpower is the reflection

00:55:12.360 | of a neural circuit function that is a skill.

00:55:16.740 | It's an expression of something that we all have within us.

00:55:19.440 | We all have this particular brain area.

00:55:22.100 | And quite excitingly, this is the third point,

00:55:25.080 | this brain area is highly subject to plasticity.

00:55:27.980 | There are specific things that we can do,

00:55:30.280 | and there are specific mindsets that we can adopt

00:55:33.080 | that allow us to increase the activity

00:55:35.560 | of this particular brain area,

00:55:37.120 | indeed to increase the size of this particular brain area

00:55:40.040 | so that we can call on tenacity and willpower,

00:55:42.680 | not just in one circumstance like school,

00:55:45.480 | or musical learning, or athletic endeavors,

00:55:48.800 | or relationship endeavors,

00:55:50.400 | but rather that we can call on this brain area

00:55:52.880 | in the context of any and all circumstances

00:55:55.840 | where willpower and tenacity are required.

00:55:58.420 | Now, we talk about neuroscience a lot on this podcast,

00:56:01.160 | but it's not often that I point to a particular brain area

00:56:04.480 | and can confidently say this particular brain area

00:56:08.240 | has an absolutely integral role

00:56:11.320 | in something as kind of high level psychological

00:56:14.660 | as tenacity and willpower.

00:56:16.280 | But today we can do that.

00:56:17.680 | And that's because there's a collection

00:56:19.420 | of more than two dozen studies

00:56:21.240 | that point to one particular brain area.

00:56:23.660 | And of course, it's connections with other brain areas

00:56:26.140 | because no single brain area operates in isolation.

00:56:29.200 | Every brain area is operating in the context

00:56:31.240 | of neural circuits, other brain areas

00:56:33.120 | that it receives inputs from

00:56:34.840 | and gives inputs to and so on.

00:56:37.640 | But this one particular brain area

00:56:39.720 | really does seem to underlie

00:56:42.220 | what we call tenacity and willpower.

00:56:44.080 | And we know that through several lines of evidence.

00:56:46.640 | First of all, I'll tell you the name of the brain area,

00:56:48.820 | although the name itself isn't going to tell you much

00:56:50.820 | unless you're a neuroscientist or anatomist.

00:56:52.700 | So I'll give a little bit of background about it.

00:56:55.440 | The name of the brain area

00:56:56.820 | is the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

00:57:00.120 | The anterior mid-singulate cortex

00:57:02.240 | is part of a larger brain area called the cingulate cortex.

00:57:06.080 | And in humans versus animals,

00:57:08.020 | it goes by slightly different names, unfortunately.

00:57:10.620 | It's just one of the consequences of different researchers

00:57:13.320 | in different labs calling the same thing different things.

00:57:15.480 | It'd be really frustrating, but we'll make it very simple

00:57:18.300 | because today we will refer to this area

00:57:21.240 | as the anterior mid-singulate cortex,

00:57:23.620 | which is a subdivision of a larger brain area

00:57:27.120 | simply called the cingulate cortex.

00:57:28.860 | The anterior mid-singulate cortex

00:57:31.040 | resides in the frontal lobes.

00:57:32.800 | So it's behind your forehead,

00:57:34.040 | although that doesn't tell you anything

00:57:35.340 | because all of your brain is behind your forehead

00:57:37.000 | if you think about it.

00:57:38.420 | And it's about a third of the way back

00:57:41.740 | toward the back of your head.

00:57:43.400 | And you actually have two of these structures,

00:57:45.560 | two anterior mid-singulate cortices,

00:57:48.560 | one on each side of the brain,

00:57:50.360 | and they receive a lot of inputs

00:57:52.260 | from a lot of different areas.

00:57:53.680 | And we'll talk about what those areas are

00:57:55.020 | because this is extremely important

00:57:56.540 | when thinking about the different psychological

00:57:59.140 | and physiological resources that you can draw upon

00:58:02.160 | to engage tenacity and willpower.

00:58:04.180 | But for the time being,

00:58:05.780 | let me just go through the evidence

00:58:07.440 | and kind of list format of why we feel so confident

00:58:11.620 | that the anterior mid-singulate cortex

00:58:13.900 | is such a vital hub for engaging tenacity and willpower.

00:58:17.660 | For each of these points that I'm about to make,

00:58:21.380 | there is indeed at least one,

00:58:23.120 | if not several quality peer-reviewed studies in humans.

00:58:26.680 | So there's a lot of data from animals,

00:58:28.900 | both rodents and primate models, et cetera,

00:58:31.720 | that we're not talking about today,

00:58:33.400 | but I should mention all of which supports the human data

00:58:36.580 | and vice versa.

00:58:38.260 | The data I'm going to describe now come from humans

00:58:41.460 | and from a variety of different types of studies.

00:58:43.980 | So there are a lot of different ways

00:58:45.140 | that one can consider if a brain area is implicated

00:58:48.300 | in a given psychological or physiological phenomenon

00:58:51.020 | like motivation or sadness or visual perception.

00:58:55.200 | And those include, for instance,

00:58:57.340 | if a brain area is active during a given phenomenon.

00:59:01.060 | So one way to explore this is to put

00:59:03.100 | literally wire electrodes down below the skull,

00:59:05.420 | record the electric activity of neurons

00:59:07.420 | and assess whether or not the electrical activity

00:59:09.100 | of those neurons changes when a person is, say,

00:59:12.060 | viewing faces or feeling a particular way,

00:59:14.700 | like feeling tenacious or feeling bored

00:59:16.860 | or feeling aggressive and so on.

00:59:18.980 | Another way of assessing a particular brain area's role

00:59:21.780 | in a given physiological or psychological phenomenon

00:59:24.700 | is in individuals where that particular brain area

00:59:27.180 | is injured, you might expect that a particular phenomenon,

00:59:30.820 | like willpower, like the ability to perceive faces,

00:59:35.180 | is present or absent, whether or not it's exacerbated

00:59:38.640 | or whether or not it's diminished.

00:59:40.580 | Other ways of assessing whether or not

00:59:41.880 | a given brain area is involved in a given phenomenon

00:59:44.440 | is whether or not that brain area literally changes size,

00:59:47.460 | whether or not it changes in volume

00:59:50.020 | over the course of some sort of training.

00:59:51.960 | So for instance, if somebody is not able

00:59:54.500 | to play a musical instrument, such as myself,

00:59:56.900 | and then I or a subject in one of these experiments

01:00:00.340 | learns a musical instrument and the volume,

01:00:03.620 | the size of the particular brain area is assessed

01:00:06.840 | across the learning or simply before and after

01:00:09.660 | that musical learning, and it grows,

01:00:11.860 | or perhaps even if it shrinks or changes shape,

01:00:14.160 | one might determine that it is somehow,

01:00:16.860 | somehow involved in the process

01:00:18.940 | of learning a musical instrument.

01:00:20.060 | You couldn't unequivocally conclude that,

01:00:22.000 | but along with other types of evidence,

01:00:24.260 | one could perhaps conclude that.

01:00:26.860 | So that's just a partial list of ways

01:00:28.380 | to assess brain area function.

01:00:29.700 | Other ways include assessing what other areas

01:00:33.700 | a given brain area gets input from.

01:00:35.060 | So for instance, in the case of the anterior

01:00:37.000 | mid-singulate cortex, we will soon discuss the fact

01:00:39.440 | that it gets robust input from the autonomic nervous system,

01:00:42.740 | which you already learned about.

01:00:44.560 | It gets robust input from reward systems of the brain,

01:00:47.500 | such as the dopamine and serotonin-based reward systems

01:00:50.580 | of the brain, and it gets robust input from the context

01:00:54.400 | and strategy setting areas of the brain as well,

01:00:57.800 | and many other different brain areas.

01:01:00.080 | So there's a structural logic as to why

01:01:02.560 | the anterior mid-singulate cortex would be involved

01:01:05.240 | in tenacity and willpower.

01:01:06.720 | But no single anatomical or physiological

01:01:09.280 | or lesion-based finding is as compelling

01:01:12.520 | as when we consider all of the results

01:01:14.600 | about the anterior mid-singulate cortex together

01:01:17.200 | and side by side.

01:01:18.580 | So for instance, recordings by neural imaging

01:01:23.120 | of the anterior mid-singulate cortex in an unbiased way,

01:01:26.560 | meaning people are put into a brain scanner

01:01:28.400 | and brain activity is examined en masse,

01:01:30.920 | all of the brain areas are looked at,

01:01:33.520 | and people are presented with either a hard task

01:01:36.480 | or an easy task, revealed that the anterior mid-singulate

01:01:40.000 | cortex shows elevated levels of activity

01:01:42.940 | in the hard versus the easy task.

01:01:46.140 | And again, I want to point out that the researchers

01:01:48.000 | were not looking for that result,

01:01:49.400 | they simply observed that result.

01:01:51.400 | In addition, if people who exhibit high levels

01:01:53.640 | of academic performance across many different subjects

01:01:56.560 | are put into a brain scanner that evaluates

01:01:59.120 | so-called resting state connectivity, so no task,

01:02:02.160 | but simply levels of activity in different brain areas

01:02:04.520 | that occur spontaneously, so they're just sitting

01:02:06.460 | in the scanner looking at a blank screen,

01:02:09.240 | the resting or spontaneous levels of activity

01:02:11.820 | in the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:02:14.600 | of high-achieving individuals is higher

01:02:17.520 | relative to those of lower-achieving individuals.

01:02:21.680 | In addition, people that have lesions or disruptions

01:02:25.600 | of anterior mid-singulate cortical function

01:02:28.480 | show increased apathy and depression and reduce levels

01:02:31.800 | of tenacity and motivation across the board,

01:02:34.200 | regardless of what domain of life one is asking about,

01:02:37.840 | whether or not it's athletic or academic, et cetera.

01:02:40.760 | Indeed, successful dieters show elevated, spontaneous,

01:02:45.240 | and what's called evoked levels of activity

01:02:47.600 | in the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:02:49.480 | So spontaneous, again, just at rest,

01:02:51.240 | they have higher levels of activity

01:02:53.080 | in the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:02:55.120 | And for those that are presented with food

01:02:58.480 | and they have to resist that food,

01:03:00.840 | and they have to resist the smell of that food

01:03:02.760 | and the potential taste of that food,

01:03:04.340 | the activity of the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:03:06.320 | goes up even further, especially in those individuals

01:03:09.380 | who can resist, that is, who can engage willpower

01:03:13.240 | to not eat the delicious food item.

01:03:16.400 | Conversely, individuals that have failed

01:03:18.520 | to exert sufficient willpower to lose their desired weight,

01:03:22.040 | and this was for medical reasons related

01:03:24.080 | to trying to achieve medical health,

01:03:26.780 | as well as people who are obese

01:03:29.960 | seem to have diminished levels of activity

01:03:32.520 | in the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:03:34.740 | In addition, people who are depressed,

01:03:38.320 | who express a lot of apathy,

01:03:40.520 | and here we're talking about clinically diagnosed

01:03:42.740 | major depression, show reduced levels of activity

01:03:45.240 | in the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:03:47.440 | Humans that express a lot of what's called

01:03:49.000 | learned helplessness, that is, they've adopted the belief

01:03:51.760 | and the actions associated with the belief

01:03:53.640 | that no matter what they do,

01:03:54.640 | the outcomes are not going to be what they desire,

01:03:56.820 | express lower levels of neural activity

01:03:58.540 | in the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:04:00.780 | So you can see this list goes on and on,

01:04:02.520 | but it in fact gets even more interesting.

01:04:05.680 | Remember earlier, I mentioned that successful dieters

01:04:08.720 | have elevated levels of neural activity

01:04:10.600 | in the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:04:12.920 | Now that might seem like a good thing,

01:04:14.500 | and indeed it can be a good thing,

01:04:16.420 | but there's a pathologic condition associated with dieting

01:04:19.280 | and one's ability to engage willpower and resist food,

01:04:22.760 | and that's in the case of eating disorders

01:04:24.480 | such as anorexia nervosa.

01:04:26.640 | Now I've done a Huberman Lab podcast solo episode

01:04:28.920 | about anorexia nervosa,

01:04:30.680 | and on that podcast I made the point

01:04:32.080 | that I'll make again now,

01:04:32.960 | which is that anorexia nervosa is the most deadly

01:04:36.440 | of all the psychiatric conditions,

01:04:38.380 | leading to death in a very large percentage

01:04:40.960 | of people that have it.

01:04:42.200 | Now, fortunately, there are treatments

01:04:43.480 | and more emerging all the time,

01:04:45.020 | but it's a very serious psychological

01:04:47.920 | and physiological condition that is extremely deadly.

01:04:51.860 | Individuals with anorexia nervosa

01:04:54.200 | exhibit heightened levels of activity

01:04:56.360 | in their anterior mid-singulate cortex,

01:04:58.160 | both at rest and when presented with food.

01:05:00.600 | And I don't want to go on a full tangent about anorexia

01:05:03.080 | because we covered anorexia

01:05:04.660 | on the previous podcast episode about anorexia,

01:05:07.520 | which by the way, you can find at HubermanLab.com,

01:05:09.420 | simply search anorexia or eating disorders

01:05:12.100 | within the search function.

01:05:13.740 | But one of the clear symptoms of anorexia nervosa

01:05:18.600 | is that the reward pathways of the brain,

01:05:21.080 | which we know feed into, that is send direct connections

01:05:25.240 | to the anterior mid-singulate cortex,

01:05:28.380 | seem to be activated under conditions

01:05:30.700 | in which people with anorexia avoid food

01:05:34.740 | as opposed to eat food.

01:05:36.080 | And then there's a very interesting and positive literature

01:05:38.840 | about so-called super-agers.

01:05:40.960 | So what we know for sure is that as people age,

01:05:43.800 | in particular between the ages of 60 and 90,

01:05:47.600 | there's a reduction in the size of many brain areas,

01:05:50.440 | but the anterior mid-singulate cortex in particular,

01:05:53.400 | unless certain things are done to offset that,

01:05:55.360 | we are going to talk about

01:05:56.200 | what those particular things are in just a few minutes.

01:05:59.180 | But there's a particular category of humans

01:06:02.000 | that's alive now and that live a very long time.

01:06:05.400 | These are the people that stand the greatest chance

01:06:07.200 | of becoming centenarians and many of them are centenarians,

01:06:10.040 | so-called super-agers,

01:06:11.620 | but also within the category of super-agers

01:06:15.360 | are people who are 60 years old or more,

01:06:19.080 | because not all of them have reached 80, 90 yet,

01:06:21.600 | and have the cognition of 40-year-olds, 30-year-olds,

01:06:25.560 | and often even of people in their mid-20s.

01:06:28.520 | Now, there are a lot of things that are different

01:06:30.260 | about these super-agers.

01:06:31.480 | Super-agers in the sense that they are maintaining

01:06:34.520 | very youthful levels of cognition.

01:06:37.200 | But one of the things that's become very apparent

01:06:39.260 | from the neuroimaging data

01:06:41.280 | is that super-agers maintain a volume,

01:06:43.680 | a size of the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:06:47.320 | that is significantly greater than their age-matched cohorts.

01:06:50.960 | So the exciting thing is that there are many,

01:06:52.780 | many lines of evidence pointing to the fact

01:06:55.080 | that the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:06:57.560 | at least has something to do with our ability

01:07:00.840 | to generate tenacity and willpower,

01:07:03.080 | and that it, when active, moves us up that continuum

01:07:07.660 | away from apathy and depression

01:07:10.000 | toward states of being able to engage in

01:07:12.820 | or resist particular types of behaviors.

01:07:15.280 | So what I just described is a bunch of neuroimaging,

01:07:17.880 | structural volume data, blood uptake data, lesion studies,

01:07:22.880 | and so on and so forth.

01:07:25.140 | But we can simplify all of that and, in fact,

01:07:28.560 | address something that perhaps I should have said earlier,

01:07:31.040 | which is that when we're talking about tenacity

01:07:33.200 | and willpower, we're really talking about

01:07:35.360 | one of two things.

01:07:36.480 | We are either talking about that sense within us

01:07:40.000 | that has us saying, "I will, no matter what you tell me,

01:07:44.880 | no matter what you put in front of me,

01:07:46.580 | no matter what is rolled my way, I will blank."

01:07:50.820 | Now, the other expression of tenacity and willpower

01:07:54.760 | is that within us, within you, within me,

01:07:59.200 | when tenacity and willpower are active,

01:08:02.240 | we have that sense within us, that feeling in our body

01:08:06.140 | and that thought pattern, AKA feeling in our brain,

01:08:10.560 | that no matter what you say, no matter what you do,

01:08:14.400 | no matter what you put in front of me, I won't.

01:08:17.600 | So really willpower is either an expression of I will,

01:08:21.480 | or I absolutely will, is perhaps a better way to state it,

01:08:25.100 | or I absolutely won't.

01:08:27.600 | Now, that might seem like just a simple,

01:08:29.200 | subjective reordering of a bunch of physiological data

01:08:32.320 | and psychology studies, but it's not.

01:08:35.000 | It's actually far more important for us to understand this

01:08:37.420 | I absolutely will and I absolutely won't aspect of willpower

01:08:42.680 | because if indeed there is a single brain area

01:08:47.160 | that can govern willpower, and willpower is not one,

01:08:51.700 | but is at least two things, the sense of I absolutely will,

01:08:55.880 | no matter what you say, do, et cetera,

01:08:57.960 | or I absolutely won't, no matter what you say, do, et cetera,

01:09:01.280 | well, then this brain area can't be a simple switch.

01:09:04.660 | It can't be willpower on, willpower off,

01:09:07.480 | willpower on, willpower off.

01:09:10.240 | It can't be absolute, as we say.

01:09:12.300 | It must be graded.

01:09:13.660 | It must have levels.

01:09:14.840 | So it's more like a slider on a light switch

01:09:17.740 | than an on versus off light switch.

01:09:20.700 | In addition to that, if there is truly one brain area

01:09:24.440 | that plays a critical role in generating tenacity

01:09:27.700 | and willpower, and tenacity and willpower

01:09:31.120 | is something that's required from us

01:09:33.120 | in a lot of different contexts where we have to say,

01:09:36.680 | I absolutely will, yes, this.

01:09:38.320 | I absolutely won't, no, that.

01:09:39.840 | I absolutely will also, yes, this, et cetera, et cetera,

01:09:43.580 | because life is complex.

01:09:44.600 | Even just the simple thing of say dieting

01:09:47.260 | or trying to get a particular degree

01:09:49.380 | or trying to navigate even a simple illness,

01:09:52.940 | like I'm going to get through this week

01:09:54.460 | despite feeling lousy.

01:09:55.600 | I'm going to take good care of myself.

01:09:57.900 | All of these things in some sense

01:09:59.460 | require tenacity and willpower.

01:10:01.180 | And the behaviors we need to engage in

01:10:02.780 | and avoid engaging in is very dynamic,

01:10:05.680 | depending not just on who we are

01:10:07.580 | and what we're trying to do or not do,

01:10:08.980 | but also where we are that day, that moment.

01:10:11.640 | Well, that means that the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:10:16.200 | also needs access to information about context.

01:10:19.980 | It needs to understand what's rewarding or non-rewarding

01:10:23.300 | in the context of what we're trying to accomplish,

01:10:25.020 | not just what feels good in the moment.

01:10:27.100 | Now, fortunately, there've been a number of studies

01:10:30.500 | exploring not just the activity levels

01:10:32.420 | of the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:10:33.940 | or the size of the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:10:36.460 | and the various conditions we talked about before,

01:10:38.040 | depression, obesity, successful dieters,

01:10:40.780 | successful students, successful athletes, et cetera,

01:10:43.580 | but a lot of anatomical tracing studies,

01:10:46.140 | both from fixed, that is from dead brain tissue,

01:10:48.800 | so post-mortem brain tissue in humans,

01:10:51.460 | but also nowadays there are certain types of neuroimaging,

01:10:56.100 | particularly something called diffusion tensor imaging

01:10:59.160 | that allows one to examine the flow of information

01:11:01.820 | in and out of different brain areas

01:11:03.420 | through so-called white matter tracts.

01:11:06.020 | Tracks, meaning T-R-A-C-T-S, tracts.

01:11:09.860 | So these are the wires that connect neurons

01:11:11.520 | are called axons, and those axons are in sheaths

01:11:15.440 | with a fatty substance called myelin,

01:11:17.200 | and that in sheathment with myelin allows them

01:11:19.240 | to transmit information very quickly.

01:11:21.820 | You'll see where I'm going with all this in just a moment.

01:11:24.200 | And what we know is that the anterior mid-singulate cortex,

01:11:28.080 | again, of which you have one on each side of the brain,

01:11:30.320 | about a third of the way back from your forehead

01:11:32.480 | to the back of your brain, approximately,

01:11:34.100 | right above the so-called corpus callosum,

01:11:36.640 | this very robust collection of white matter tracts

01:11:40.460 | that connects the two sides of the brain,

01:11:42.100 | well, it gets input and sends input

01:11:45.200 | to a number of different brain areas,

01:11:46.760 | including but not limited to the following.

01:11:49.220 | Autonomic centers that control, for instance,

01:11:52.880 | cardiovascular function,

01:11:54.120 | increases or decreases in heart rate.

01:11:56.340 | Respiration, how fast and how deeply you breathe,

01:11:59.320 | or how shallowly and slowly you breathe.

01:12:01.920 | Immune system, inputs and outputs with the spleen,

01:12:05.800 | not directly, but through a couple of different stations

01:12:09.340 | with the very organs in your body

01:12:11.480 | that can release B cells and T cells,

01:12:13.900 | and immune molecules that can combat bacterial, viral,

01:12:16.660 | and fungal infections, and that can repair physical wounds.

01:12:20.380 | And it communicates with the endocrine system,

01:12:23.140 | with the systems of the brain and body that release,

01:12:25.540 | for instance, estrogen and testosterone,

01:12:28.100 | which by the way, are present in both males and females.

01:12:30.820 | And on a previous episode of the Huberman Lab Podcast

01:12:33.140 | with Robert Sapolsky as my guest,

01:12:35.520 | we talked about, for instance, the role of testosterone,

01:12:39.040 | and many people think,

01:12:40.020 | oh, testosterone is all about aggression,

01:12:42.140 | testosterone is all about attack,

01:12:44.280 | testosterone is all about mating,

01:12:45.600 | that is completely false.

01:12:46.640 | While it can be involved in those different processes,

01:12:50.480 | what Dr. Sapolsky and I discussed

01:12:52.100 | is that one of the major functions of testosterone

01:12:54.660 | in the brain is to make effort feel good.

01:12:58.780 | And you can see, and we'll talk a little bit more

01:13:00.920 | about how that links up very directly

01:13:02.580 | with this concept of tenacity and willpower.

01:13:04.980 | So the first point is that the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:13:07.900 | is in direct communication

01:13:10.020 | with all of the areas of the brain

01:13:12.940 | and through a couple of other stations, the body,

01:13:16.620 | that modulate our sense of tenacity and willpower,

01:13:19.420 | which we talked about earlier, the need for sleep,

01:13:21.740 | the need for pain or lack of pain,

01:13:25.900 | or emotional comfort or discomfort

01:13:29.020 | to modulate our level of tenacity and willpower.

01:13:32.340 | The anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:13:33.620 | is also directly linked up with premotor centers.

01:13:37.300 | These are the centers of the brain

01:13:38.800 | that organize particular patterns of behavior,

01:13:41.720 | and indeed that can suppress particular patterns of behavior.

01:13:45.160 | As I tell you that, you're probably filling in the blanks.

01:13:47.220 | This is engaging in a behavior or resisting a behavior.

01:13:50.920 | The anterior mid-singulate cortex is also directly wired in

01:13:54.060 | with the reward pathways of the brain.

01:13:55.840 | It can trigger the release of dopamine.

01:13:58.400 | It can also respond to the release of dopamine,

01:14:01.340 | and that dopamine release could be generated behaviorally.

01:14:03.500 | It could be generated through some sort of food reward.

01:14:07.220 | It could be pharmacologic.

01:14:08.840 | There are a number of different ways

01:14:09.900 | that the dopamine system can communicate

01:14:11.620 | with the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:14:13.580 | The point here is that it is in direct communication

01:14:16.300 | with the anterior mid-singulate cortex,

01:14:18.100 | and the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:14:19.960 | is in direct communication with the dopamine system.

01:14:22.620 | And what I just gave you is, frankly,

01:14:24.300 | just a partial list of the different areas of the brain

01:14:26.920 | that are communicating robustly

01:14:28.300 | with the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:14:30.300 | It gets information about interoception,

01:14:32.140 | our readout of how we feel in our body.

01:14:34.180 | It also has robust inputs and outputs

01:14:36.700 | with the areas of the brain

01:14:38.060 | that are associated with exteroception,

01:14:39.780 | our perception of what is out around us.

01:14:42.040 | So all of that provides a logical basis

01:14:43.900 | for the neuroimaging data, the lesion data,

01:14:46.460 | the volumetric data that we talked about a few minutes ago

01:14:48.940 | in the context of depression, anxiety,

01:14:50.820 | high performance, anorexia, and so on.

01:14:53.900 | But one of the most important arguments

01:14:56.540 | that's ever been made

01:14:57.380 | in favor of the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:14:59.700 | being a major seat for tenacity and willpower

01:15:04.620 | comes from Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett,

01:15:06.780 | who is soon to be a guest on the Huberman Lab Podcast.

01:15:09.220 | We've actually recorded that episode already,

01:15:11.180 | and it should be out very soon.

01:15:13.100 | Lisa's laboratory is well-known for pioneering research

01:15:16.300 | on emotion and affect.

01:15:18.200 | I strongly encourage you to listen to that episode

01:15:20.060 | once it comes out.

01:15:21.500 | And it was actually Lisa herself

01:15:23.220 | that cued me to the importance

01:15:25.340 | of the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:15:27.180 | And Lisa and colleagues

01:15:28.140 | have written several spectacular reviews

01:15:30.780 | about the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:15:32.740 | and its role in tenacity and motivation.

01:15:34.780 | I will provide links to a few of those

01:15:36.940 | in the show note captions.

01:15:38.780 | The one that I'm particularly excited about,

01:15:40.660 | the one that I've spent now an immense amount of time with

01:15:44.280 | is entitled "The Tenacious Brain,

01:15:45.900 | How the Anterior Mid-singulate Cortex

01:15:47.700 | Contributes to Achieving Goals."

01:15:49.620 | So if you have a background in biology,

01:15:51.500 | even if you don't,

01:15:52.420 | I think you'll find that review to be very interesting.

01:15:54.660 | And it further substantiates

01:15:56.260 | a lot of the points that I made a few moments ago

01:15:58.300 | about the different scenarios and types of individuals

01:16:00.960 | that seem to be able to engage

01:16:02.160 | their anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:16:04.060 | under different conditions

01:16:05.260 | and to a greater or lesser extent than others.

01:16:07.780 | So hats off to Lisa for cuing me

01:16:10.340 | to this incredibly interesting brain structure.

01:16:12.120 | I had known that it existed,

01:16:14.180 | after all I teach neuroanatomy,

01:16:15.580 | to medical students at Stanford,

01:16:17.300 | and I taught neuroanatomy for many, many years,

01:16:19.680 | but I don't think enough people,

01:16:20.860 | and indeed very few professional neuroscientists

01:16:22.760 | could tell you what the anterior mid-singulate cortex does,

01:16:25.100 | but it has this apparently incredible function

01:16:27.660 | in generating tenacity and motivation.

01:16:30.100 | Along those lines,

01:16:30.940 | one of the most incredible and important studies

01:16:33.540 | about the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:16:35.300 | and its capacity to generate

01:16:37.060 | feelings of tenacity and willpower

01:16:39.540 | comes from one of my colleagues at Stanford, Joe Parvizi,

01:16:43.020 | who essentially went into human beings

01:16:46.540 | who needed brain surgery for other reasons

01:16:49.300 | and stimulated particular brain areas

01:16:52.780 | with a very high degree of precision.

01:16:55.580 | The title of the paper that I'm referring to

01:16:57.180 | was published in 2013 in the journal Neuron,

01:16:59.380 | Cell Press Journal, excellent journal,

01:17:02.020 | and it's entitled "The Will to Persevere

01:17:03.960 | Induced by Electrical Stimulation

01:17:05.640 | of the Human Singulate Gyrus."

01:17:07.540 | Now you'll notice the title said human singulate gyrus,

01:17:09.980 | not anterior mid-singulate gyrus,

01:17:12.220 | but because they had electrodes

01:17:14.760 | and a stimulation technique that would allow them

01:17:16.740 | to stimulate in very small regions,

01:17:19.720 | extending as little as five millimeters,

01:17:22.900 | but no more, away from the stimulation site,

01:17:25.360 | they were able to march their stimulation

01:17:27.980 | around different subregions of the singulate gyrus of humans

01:17:32.240 | while those people were awake,

01:17:34.420 | and then ask those people, "How do you feel?

01:17:37.300 | What are you experiencing in this moment?"

01:17:39.100 | In addition to that, they were recording

01:17:40.960 | various autonomic parameters from those people,

01:17:42.980 | so heart rate, breathing,

01:17:44.960 | in addition to brainwave activity.

01:17:47.140 | So what the subjects report

01:17:48.420 | when their anterior mid-singulate cortex was stimulated

01:17:51.680 | is that, in their words, something was about to happen.

01:17:55.540 | They felt as if there was some sort of pressure upon them

01:17:58.640 | from the outside, not physical pressure,

01:18:00.640 | but that something was about to happen.

01:18:02.060 | In fact, one of the subjects described the sensation as,

01:18:05.180 | "It's as if there's a storm off in the distance,

01:18:07.800 | but I know I need to go into the storm,

01:18:10.560 | and I know I can make it through the storm."

01:18:13.400 | Another subject described the experience

01:18:15.720 | of having their anterior mid-singulate cortex stimulated

01:18:18.760 | as, "Okay, something not necessarily good is going to happen,

01:18:23.760 | but I know that I need to marshal resources and resist,

01:18:27.760 | and I'm confident that I can push through."

01:18:30.040 | Now, because Parvizi and colleagues are excellent scientists,

01:18:34.200 | they, of course, did control experiments

01:18:35.800 | where they would tell the person,

01:18:36.820 | "Okay, we're stimulating that same brain area

01:18:39.240 | that a moment ago you told me created this feeling

01:18:42.080 | of some pressure upon you that you have to resist,

01:18:44.940 | some sense of fight or urgency to push back."

01:18:47.440 | But in reality, during certain control conditions,

01:18:49.720 | they were not stimulating those brain areas,

01:18:52.000 | and the subjects then reported,

01:18:54.400 | "Mm, I don't feel like anything's about to happen.

01:18:57.580 | Yeah, I don't feel anything at all."

01:18:59.560 | In other words, it was the stimulation

01:19:01.720 | of the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:19:03.280 | and only the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:19:06.240 | that created the sensation within people

01:19:09.160 | that there was something to resist,

01:19:10.560 | that there was something putting pressure on them,

01:19:12.560 | again, not physical pressure, but psychological pressure,

01:19:14.960 | and that they were going to have to marshal resources

01:19:17.520 | in order to push back upon.

01:19:18.560 | In fact, they reported feeling as if

01:19:20.880 | their body was getting ready to do something.

01:19:23.240 | One subject said something along the lines of,

01:19:25.620 | "I feel like I'm about to do something.

01:19:27.200 | I'm about to go someplace or do something

01:19:29.140 | to resist this foreboding sense that's now coming over me."

01:19:32.680 | So this is very interesting, and of course,

01:19:34.620 | is in line with all of the data that we discussed before

01:19:37.840 | about neural activity patterns, both spontaneous and evoked,

01:19:41.680 | about brain volume changes

01:19:43.360 | and the anterior mid-singulate cortex, so on and so forth.

01:19:46.520 | And it really points to the idea

01:19:48.360 | that the anterior mid-singulate cortex is a hub,

01:19:52.640 | a hub that receives information

01:19:54.220 | from a diversity of brain areas

01:19:56.080 | that we talked about a few minutes ago,

01:19:57.480 | and that generates a particular sense within us

01:20:00.920 | that we are going to be forward center of mass,

01:20:03.520 | that we are going to resist something,

01:20:06.220 | and that perhaps we are going to move or act

01:20:08.820 | in some particular way, or,

01:20:10.760 | as we've been discussing all along,

01:20:12.280 | resist action in some particular way,

01:20:14.420 | but that it requires that we marshal resources,

01:20:17.500 | which takes us back, of course,

01:20:19.240 | to the studies of Baumeister and indeed of Dweck,

01:20:23.000 | where they explored willpower as a limited resource,

01:20:26.220 | perhaps glucose, perhaps as that limited resource.

01:20:29.740 | Beliefs about willpower and glucose,

01:20:32.740 | probably with a high degree of certainty,

01:20:35.020 | are going to be involved there too.

01:20:36.580 | But regardless of that controversy,

01:20:38.500 | it's clear that there's an energy required.

01:20:41.300 | There's an activation state of engagement or resistance

01:20:46.040 | to a particular behavior or thought pattern

01:20:49.520 | that we all associate

01:20:51.280 | with this phenomenon of tenacity and willpower.

01:20:53.920 | And in a kind of miraculous way,

01:20:55.980 | as a neuroscientist, we're generally taught nowadays

01:20:59.100 | that individual brain areas don't really trigger

01:21:02.380 | individual functions and perceptions of the brain.

01:21:04.360 | There are a few exceptions to that.

01:21:05.620 | You know, you have a fusiform face area

01:21:07.220 | that really does seem to be involved

01:21:08.960 | in the perception of faces.

01:21:10.160 | And when lesioned, you can't recognize faces.

01:21:11.900 | But outside of just a few limited contexts,

01:21:15.060 | it's very rare that one comes across a literature

01:21:19.300 | that across all of the studies involved

01:21:23.240 | point to a single brain structure and its networks

01:21:26.500 | as giving rise to something as complex

01:21:28.340 | and flexible as tenacity and willpower.

01:21:31.400 | But in the case of the anterior mid-singulate cortex,

01:21:34.100 | it really does seem to meet those criteria

01:21:36.340 | as the brain hub responsible for tenacity and willpower.

01:21:40.200 | Now, a key idea that Dr. Feldman Barrett has contributed

01:21:43.360 | to studies of the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:21:45.940 | as a structure that helps us generate

01:21:48.920 | what we call tenacity and willpower

01:21:50.420 | to help us achieve different types of goals

01:21:53.580 | is this idea of allostasis.

01:21:56.040 | Most of you have perhaps heard of homeostasis,

01:21:59.060 | which is the idea that all of our cells, all of our organs,

01:22:01.720 | indeed our entire body and psychology

01:22:04.440 | are always seeking homeostasis,

01:22:06.200 | the perfect balance of sleep and activity,

01:22:09.740 | of food and burning fuels, of oxygen and carbon dioxide,

01:22:14.740 | and so on and so forth.

01:22:16.000 | And while homeostasis certainly exists

01:22:18.180 | and is a valid phenomenon,

01:22:19.280 | there's also a concept that we hear far less about,

01:22:21.960 | but that is equally important,

01:22:23.300 | which is the concept of allostasis.

01:22:25.420 | Allostasis is the idea that much of what our brain

01:22:29.140 | and body need to do, but especially our brain,

01:22:31.940 | is to allocate, right, allostasis,

01:22:34.260 | to allocate resources to particular functions

01:22:37.260 | depending on our motivational goals

01:22:38.980 | and the challenges upon us.

01:22:41.060 | And in every way, what we understand about the structure

01:22:43.860 | and function of the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:22:46.640 | is that it is doing just that.

01:22:48.900 | It is deciding how much glucose

01:22:51.160 | should a given brain area consume,

01:22:53.880 | perhaps a brain area that's involved in visual perception

01:22:56.200 | because you're involved in a motivational task

01:22:58.700 | where in order to succeed,

01:23:00.260 | you need to pay careful visual attention

01:23:02.200 | to particular things.

01:23:03.040 | Or you're involved in a task

01:23:04.860 | where you have to listen to particular things.

01:23:07.080 | Or perhaps you are involved in a physical foot race

01:23:10.460 | where you don't want to allocate a lot of energy

01:23:13.660 | towards thinking about your stride or your step,

01:23:15.420 | unless that's necessary,

01:23:16.620 | and you actually want to shut down your brain activity

01:23:18.700 | as much as possible,

01:23:19.580 | except for the brain areas that are required

01:23:21.960 | to get you to continue to run.

01:23:24.280 | In that sense, the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:23:27.460 | as a sort of a dial on how much fuel is consumed,

01:23:31.960 | not by the brain and body as a whole,

01:23:34.460 | but by individual brain and body parts,

01:23:37.300 | meets all the criteria of what you would want

01:23:39.640 | for a brain area that controls things

01:23:41.700 | like tenacity and willpower.

01:23:42.940 | Because even for those individuals

01:23:45.460 | who seem to just have an endless supply

01:23:47.740 | of tenacity and willpower,

01:23:49.640 | they too have to go into habitual behavior.

01:23:52.280 | They can't simply lean into every aspect of life

01:23:55.920 | with the kind of resistance from outside

01:23:58.640 | and the resistance against those outside forces,

01:24:01.040 | or even resistance to internal forces,

01:24:03.140 | voices in their head, et cetera, on a constant basis.

01:24:06.120 | They still need to sleep.

01:24:07.480 | They still need to be functional

01:24:09.460 | in that expression of tenacity and willpower.

01:24:11.900 | They need to be able to strategy switch,

01:24:14.000 | and they need to be able to come off the gas, as we say.

01:24:17.840 | Not because tenacity and willpower

01:24:19.280 | are necessarily a limited resource,

01:24:21.480 | but because for so many aspects of life,

01:24:24.020 | engaging tenacity and willpower is not advantageous.

01:24:27.640 | Hence the example I gave earlier about eating disorders,

01:24:30.520 | where an apparently hardwired function of our brain

01:24:34.220 | to be able to generate some sort of reward

01:24:36.620 | for resisting a given behavior goes too far

01:24:40.260 | and then can actually threaten one's own health

01:24:42.480 | or even life.

01:24:43.320 | So the concept of allostatic load, allostatic balance,

01:24:46.940 | and allostatic function is something that we get into

01:24:49.080 | in a fair amount of detail in the discussion

01:24:50.620 | with Dr. Feldman Barrett in that episode,

01:24:52.660 | which is coming out soon.

01:24:53.960 | But in the meantime,

01:24:55.220 | if you were to think about the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:24:57.640 | as having a single function,

01:24:59.600 | the function that Dr. Feldman Barrett has ascribed to it

01:25:02.420 | as controlling how much energy different brain

01:25:04.840 | and body areas should get in a given context,

01:25:07.840 | well, that makes a lot of sense to me.

01:25:09.400 | And I think it's the one that best describes

01:25:11.940 | all of the functional data, indeed includes or jives

01:25:15.160 | with all the anatomical data

01:25:17.040 | about the anterior mid-singulate cortex as well.

01:25:19.500 | One of the really important twists in all of this

01:25:21.760 | is that the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:25:25.140 | is not just sitting there to allocate

01:25:28.440 | and dole out different amounts of energy

01:25:30.560 | and activation to different brain areas.

01:25:32.680 | It is also receiving input from both the brain and body.

01:25:36.760 | And in sort of a beautiful twist on the whole story

01:25:39.760 | of what the anterior mid-singulate cortex does,

01:25:43.040 | we know that when we move our body,

01:25:45.420 | we are activating the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:25:48.920 | And we know that when we move our body,

01:25:51.200 | because we in some way forced ourselves

01:25:53.880 | or encouraged ourselves to do it,

01:25:55.600 | we activate the anterior mid-singulate cortex more.

01:25:58.960 | Similarly, and because the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:26:01.520 | is so flexible in the different contexts

01:26:03.500 | in which it can be activated,

01:26:05.980 | if we are simply reading or we are listening to something

01:26:09.820 | that we're supposed to learn

01:26:10.800 | or trying to learn a piece of music

01:26:12.620 | or trying to do anything for that matter,

01:26:15.120 | the anterior mid-singulate cortex, yes, will be activated,

01:26:18.700 | but that its levels of activation are far greater

01:26:21.700 | when we experience a lot of resistance

01:26:24.100 | that we have to overcome.

01:26:25.260 | Remember the earlier result, and by the way,

01:26:26.820 | I'll provide a link in the show note captions

01:26:29.060 | to this particular study or set of studies.

01:26:30.940 | There are about two, one really spectacular one

01:26:33.420 | and a couple of others

01:26:34.300 | that tangentially points to the same finding,

01:26:38.020 | that when people engage in a hard task, not an easy task,

01:26:41.340 | but a hard task,

01:26:42.500 | that the anterior mid-singulate cortex activity is elevated.

01:26:45.760 | So the way to think about the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:26:49.140 | is that it's not just sitting there as a hub

01:26:51.740 | that you reach into and activate,

01:26:54.780 | it's also receiving inputs that can activate it.

01:26:59.080 | And that's what allows us to now talk about the tools

01:27:01.400 | and protocols that don't just allow us

01:27:03.460 | to engage our anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:27:06.320 | and access more tenacity and willpower,

01:27:08.880 | but that allow us to exercise,

01:27:11.540 | not necessarily in the context of physical exercise,

01:27:14.000 | although it could be that too,

01:27:15.200 | but to exercise our anterior mid-singulate cortices ability

01:27:19.620 | to engage not just in that challenging context,

01:27:22.180 | but in other challenging contexts as well.

01:27:24.300 | In fact, I'll just tell you right now

01:27:27.020 | that studies in non-human primates

01:27:28.940 | and to a limited extent in humans,

01:27:30.560 | but here we think there's a strong analog

01:27:32.380 | between the non-human primate data and the human data.

01:27:35.260 | The anterior mid-singulate cortex is chock-a-block

01:27:38.220 | full of the expression of molecules such as chemkinase II,

01:27:42.420 | receptors to various neurotrophins,

01:27:45.000 | particular types of NMDA and methyl deaspartate receptors,

01:27:49.660 | all of which, if none of those names mean anything to you,

01:27:52.280 | just know that all of them refer to different aspects of,

01:27:56.640 | and a capacity for synaptic plasticity,

01:27:59.460 | which is the ability for connections in the brain to change.

01:28:02.080 | They can get stronger,

01:28:03.300 | you can actually grow new connections.

01:28:05.080 | In other words, the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:28:07.600 | can be built up as a structure

01:28:10.100 | to engage tenacity and willpower

01:28:11.920 | by activating it through one or a limited number

01:28:15.320 | of different types of behaviors,

01:28:16.620 | meaning engagement in behaviors

01:28:18.360 | that frankly we would rather not engage in,

01:28:21.020 | as well as not engaging in behaviors

01:28:24.200 | that reflexively we really want to,

01:28:25.980 | that we're sort of drawn to engage in.

01:28:28.060 | Both of those contexts, the I absolutely will,

01:28:31.020 | even though frankly I don't want to,

01:28:32.720 | or you're telling me I can't,

01:28:34.060 | as well as the I absolutely won't,

01:28:36.020 | even though you're tempting me to do that,

01:28:37.900 | or that's tempting me to do that,

01:28:39.060 | or even I'm tempted to do that,

01:28:41.440 | that buildup of the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:28:44.480 | has extensive carryover into other domains of life

01:28:47.300 | because it's the same structure

01:28:49.340 | that is then used for other types of behaviors

01:28:52.620 | and learning that require tenacity and willpower.

01:28:55.420 | So that's incredibly reassuring.

01:28:56.900 | In fact, it's downright exciting

01:28:59.260 | because as I mentioned earlier,

01:29:01.500 | while there are a near infinite number

01:29:03.500 | of different circumstances

01:29:04.580 | where we each and all need tenacity and willpower,

01:29:07.460 | it seems that there's a very generic mechanism

01:29:10.020 | for generating tenacity and willpower.

01:29:12.720 | And that means that if we can build up our capacity

01:29:16.220 | for tenacity and willpower

01:29:17.360 | by engaging particular types of behaviors

01:29:19.320 | and resisting particular types of behaviors,

01:29:21.900 | well, then it's going to carry over in a very functional way

01:29:25.460 | to the other aspects of life that we find challenging

01:29:28.340 | and that we may find challenging in the future.

01:29:30.740 | Okay, so by now, I like to think that I've convinced you,

01:29:33.800 | because frankly, the data are very convincing,

01:29:36.180 | that the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:29:37.760 | is a vital hub within your brain

01:29:39.980 | for allocating energy and resources

01:29:42.280 | to generating tenacity and willpower.

01:29:45.100 | And perhaps it's taken you a lot of tenacity and willpower

01:29:47.820 | to get this far through the episode,

01:29:49.760 | waiting with bated breath,

01:29:50.860 | presumably to learn how exactly you can improve

01:29:54.880 | the functioning of your anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:29:57.580 | Now, fortunately, there are published peer-reviewed data

01:30:00.200 | that explain how to do that.

01:30:02.020 | In fact, there's a study that was published in 2006

01:30:04.880 | by Colum and colleagues,

01:30:07.720 | entitled "aerobic exercise training increases brain volume

01:30:11.060 | in aging humans."

01:30:12.640 | And before you go run off, literally,

01:30:14.720 | and engage in cardiovascular exercise,

01:30:16.780 | I'm just going to describe to you the contour of this study

01:30:19.760 | and what specifically was done

01:30:21.720 | so that you can best implement the best protocols

01:30:24.740 | for your particular circumstances.

01:30:27.080 | This was a study exploring why and how

01:30:32.080 | certain brain areas and brain volume

01:30:34.660 | generally decreases as we age.

01:30:36.760 | It's well known, as I mentioned earlier,

01:30:38.500 | that individuals aged really 50 and older,

01:30:41.400 | and maybe as early as 30 and older,

01:30:44.280 | experience a decrease in brain volume

01:30:46.540 | with particular brain areas shrinking faster than others.

01:30:49.440 | But of course, there are other people

01:30:51.520 | that include the super-agers that we talked about earlier,

01:30:54.220 | and many, many other people who are not super-agers

01:30:56.520 | who don't experience the same decrease in brain volume.

01:30:58.780 | So why is it that they maintain the same brain size

01:31:02.260 | that they did when they were younger,

01:31:03.340 | or undergo less decrease in brain size?

01:31:05.860 | That's what the researchers for this study

01:31:08.660 | were initially interested in understanding,

01:31:11.240 | and they did come to some really interesting conclusions

01:31:13.500 | about that, but they also came to some interesting

01:31:15.900 | conclusions that relate to today's discussion

01:31:17.760 | on tenacity and willpower.

01:31:19.120 | This study involved having individuals

01:31:22.040 | who were 60 to 79 years old,

01:31:24.640 | divided into one of two groups.

01:31:26.360 | One group did cardiovascular exercise,

01:31:29.400 | the other group did more calisthenics/

01:31:32.580 | stretching type exercise.

01:31:34.380 | Both groups did one hour of exercise three times per week.

01:31:38.840 | The group that did cardiovascular training

01:31:41.500 | initially started off by doing,

01:31:43.400 | and by the way, they just simply called it aerobic training,

01:31:46.140 | but this could be rowing on the rower,

01:31:49.380 | this could be running, this could be cycling.

01:31:52.140 | I think for sake of understanding

01:31:54.060 | application of tools and protocols,

01:31:55.980 | you would want to pick any kind of activity

01:31:58.100 | that you could do consistently without injuring yourself.

01:32:00.800 | That's what's really important.

01:32:01.800 | And that gets your heart rate elevated.

01:32:04.360 | They started off these individuals

01:32:06.760 | with relatively low intensity cardiovascular exercise

01:32:10.300 | for that hour, getting their heart rate up to about 50%

01:32:14.160 | of their maximum heart rate,

01:32:16.080 | but very quickly had those individuals

01:32:17.560 | increase the intensity

01:32:18.640 | of those cardiovascular training sessions.

01:32:20.140 | So they were doing, again, three one hour sessions per week,

01:32:23.720 | getting their heart rate up to about 75%

01:32:26.900 | of their maximum heart rate.

01:32:28.180 | Sometimes a little less, 60%, sometimes a little bit more,

01:32:31.160 | but in that general range.

01:32:32.760 | So for those of you that think about

01:32:34.340 | different zones of cardio,

01:32:36.020 | this is probably in the area of zone three,

01:32:39.180 | not quite zone two cardio, maybe zone three cardio,

01:32:42.060 | so where one can not carry out a conversation very easily,

01:32:45.900 | but where one is not completely gasping for air

01:32:48.920 | as one would if they went to their maximum heart rate

01:32:51.820 | or near maximum heart rate.

01:32:52.860 | Okay, so three one hour episodes

01:32:54.880 | of cardiovascular training per week

01:32:56.820 | at a moderately high intensity.

01:32:59.340 | The other group simply doing calisthenics and stretching

01:33:02.400 | for the equivalent amount of time.

01:33:03.680 | And they had another group within the study

01:33:06.160 | that were much younger

01:33:08.200 | that did similar activities or no activity

01:33:11.520 | simply as a control for the brain imaging data.

01:33:14.460 | Now I'm summarizing the study with a fairly broad brush,

01:33:16.640 | both for sake of time,

01:33:18.060 | and of course I'll provide a link

01:33:19.340 | to the study in the show no captions

01:33:21.440 | so you can access it and peruse in more detail if you like,

01:33:24.100 | but I wouldn't be talking about this study

01:33:26.460 | if it were simply a study about cardiovascular training

01:33:29.260 | and brain volume.

01:33:30.660 | I'm talking about this study

01:33:31.540 | because the specific brain areas that maintained

01:33:35.420 | or in some cases increased in volume

01:33:37.780 | as a consequence of doing these three hours per week

01:33:40.660 | of moderate intensity cardiovascular training included,

01:33:45.260 | of course, the anterior mid cingulate cortex.

01:33:47.900 | That was actually the primary location

01:33:49.640 | in which the maintenance of brain volume was observed.

01:33:53.020 | And in some cases increases in brain volume were observed.

01:33:56.340 | This is a group of people

01:33:57.820 | who normally would be losing volume size

01:34:01.860 | of their anterior mid cingulate cortex,

01:34:03.860 | but for which three hours a week

01:34:05.800 | of moderate intensity cardiovascular training

01:34:07.980 | maintained the volume,

01:34:09.860 | the size of that anterior mid cingulate cortex,

01:34:11.980 | and in some cases increased the volume,

01:34:14.600 | the size of anterior mid cingulate cortex.

01:34:16.780 | And they also observed a maintenance or increase

01:34:19.660 | in the size of the anterior white matter tracts.

01:34:22.300 | Remember T-R-A-C-T-S, I didn't spell that out before

01:34:25.460 | just to spell it out for fun,

01:34:27.220 | although that is the sort of thing that I would probably do.

01:34:30.180 | Those white matter tracts are the communication routes

01:34:34.220 | by which different brain areas communicate.

01:34:36.780 | And this anterior white matter tract

01:34:38.780 | that maintained size in the people

01:34:41.180 | that did cardiovascular training,

01:34:43.460 | as compared to those that simply did

01:34:45.200 | the calisthenics training and stretching,

01:34:47.760 | is the very white matter tracts

01:34:49.060 | that connects the two sides of the brain,

01:34:50.920 | the frontal lobes,

01:34:52.300 | that allows the anterior mid cingulate cortex

01:34:55.120 | on one side of the brain

01:34:55.960 | and the anterior mid cingulate cortex

01:34:57.160 | on the other side of the brain,

01:34:58.000 | as well as other brain structures

01:34:59.340 | to communicate with one another.

01:35:01.060 | So this is really spectacular.

01:35:02.340 | I mean, the authors of the study

01:35:03.980 | didn't embark on the study to find or even look for

01:35:07.980 | increases or maintenance

01:35:09.300 | in the volume of the anterior mid cingulate cortex

01:35:12.260 | and the communication routes

01:35:14.200 | in and out of the anterior mid cingulate cortex.

01:35:16.420 | It just so happened that cardiovascular training

01:35:18.500 | done three times per week

01:35:20.060 | for an hour at a time at moderate intensity

01:35:22.220 | increased the size of the anterior mid cingulate cortex.

01:35:25.740 | And as I mentioned, the white matter tracts,

01:35:27.840 | which allow information to go in and out

01:35:29.760 | of the anterior mid cingulate cortex.

01:35:32.060 | Now, we should all be asking ourselves,

01:35:33.360 | why would that be the case?

01:35:34.700 | I mean, somebody gets on a stationary bike and pedals

01:35:37.420 | or goes out on a road bike or runs.

01:35:39.560 | You know, is there something inherent

01:35:41.580 | to running or cycling or rowing or swimming

01:35:44.520 | or an aerobics class, dancing, et cetera,

01:35:47.220 | that gets the heart rate up

01:35:48.640 | that directly feeds into the anterior mid cingulate cortex?

01:35:51.600 | After all, is the anterior mid cingulate cortex

01:35:53.580 | responsible for generating the activity of running

01:35:56.260 | or cycling or swimming?

01:35:57.200 | No.

01:35:58.100 | Rather, the interpretation is that in order to engage

01:36:01.640 | in this one hour, three times per week set of sessions

01:36:06.060 | of cardiovascular training, they had to allocate resources.

01:36:09.300 | They had to get up out of a chair.

01:36:10.760 | They had to get off the couch.

01:36:12.860 | They had to say no to other potential obligations,

01:36:16.920 | social engagements, meals, et cetera,

01:36:18.520 | and get to these exercise classes or sessions

01:36:21.740 | that they did with others or alone.

01:36:23.620 | Now, an interesting and in fact important aspect

01:36:25.860 | of the study is that the compliance

01:36:27.760 | with this three hours per week of cardiovascular training

01:36:30.220 | was very high.

01:36:31.060 | 85% of individuals engaged in these sessions

01:36:33.680 | across the six month period of the study.

01:36:36.600 | I should have mentioned that earlier.

01:36:37.920 | The study was carried out over the course of six months.

01:36:41.340 | They did not have the opportunity to do neuroimaging

01:36:44.220 | after say a week or two weeks.

01:36:46.140 | So they imaged these people's brains before

01:36:48.000 | and they imaged these people's brains

01:36:49.140 | after the six month period.

01:36:51.820 | It's anybody's guess as to whether or not

01:36:53.280 | they would have observed the same

01:36:54.360 | or maybe even greater increases

01:36:56.060 | at the one month interval, et cetera.

01:36:57.620 | We simply don't know.

01:36:59.220 | There's a great cost, both energetic and financial

01:37:01.580 | to doing these kinds of studies.

01:37:03.040 | So they looked at a six month period.

01:37:04.800 | But setting all of that aside,

01:37:07.980 | this is a very important study

01:37:09.440 | in the context of today's discussion.

01:37:11.000 | Because what it means is that if we acknowledge

01:37:13.880 | that the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:37:15.440 | and the volume of anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:37:18.420 | is related to one's ability to generate tenacity

01:37:21.060 | and willpower for any number of different endeavors,

01:37:24.700 | well, then having access to a tool or a protocol

01:37:27.920 | that can increase the size

01:37:29.860 | of one's anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:37:31.920 | is going to be extremely valuable.

01:37:34.200 | So what's the takeaway from this study?

01:37:35.900 | The takeaway from the study is not necessarily

01:37:37.980 | that you should be doing three one hour bouts

01:37:40.620 | of cardiovascular training per week for six months

01:37:43.620 | to maintain or increase the size

01:37:45.220 | of your anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:37:47.800 | I do think that's the case

01:37:49.240 | if you're not already doing sufficient amounts

01:37:51.620 | of cardiovascular training.

01:37:52.680 | And what constitutes sufficient amounts?

01:37:54.760 | Well, I think there's general agreement now,

01:37:56.760 | both between the material that I've covered

01:37:59.160 | in our foundational fitness protocol

01:38:00.700 | and in the series on exercise physiology

01:38:02.460 | with Dr. Andy Galpin

01:38:03.500 | and in various discussions with Dr. Peter Attia.

01:38:07.060 | The general agreement is that everyone should be getting

01:38:09.100 | somewhere between 150 to 200 minutes

01:38:11.500 | of so-called zone two low intensity

01:38:13.480 | cardiovascular exercise per week.

01:38:15.660 | But the results of this study really point

01:38:17.660 | to the idea that we should all be doing perhaps three hours,

01:38:21.700 | but certainly we should all be doing some form

01:38:24.400 | of physical exercise.

01:38:26.840 | But for any of us that are interested

01:38:28.180 | in increasing tenacity and willpower across domains,

01:38:31.920 | both for cognitive and physical endeavors,

01:38:34.040 | emotional endeavors too, for that matter,

01:38:37.140 | that we should be engaging in some exercise.

01:38:39.460 | And again, we're going to talk about cognitive exercise

01:38:42.260 | in a moment, but that we should be engaging

01:38:43.840 | in some exercise that we are not already doing.

01:38:47.600 | Now that of course will lead many people to think, wait,

01:38:50.100 | I'm already doing 200 minutes per week of zone two cardio.

01:38:52.960 | How can I add three hours more of cardio?

01:38:55.120 | That's not what I'm saying.

01:38:56.060 | What's important to understand about this whole discussion

01:38:58.840 | about tenacity and willpower is that the ability

01:39:01.720 | to engage the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:39:04.300 | and to build up its volume literally

01:39:06.400 | and increase its activity relies on one critical feature,

01:39:10.720 | which is that you have to be in some degree of resistance,

01:39:14.300 | some lack of desire, or I should say lack of reflexive desire

01:39:19.300 | or ability to engage in that behavior, okay?

01:39:22.300 | This is super important if you're thinking about tools

01:39:24.440 | and protocols to increase your level of tenacity

01:39:26.580 | and willpower.

01:39:27.420 | If for instance, you love cold showers and ice baths,

01:39:31.420 | well then it's very unlikely that taking cold showers

01:39:36.100 | or getting into an ice bath is going to increase your level

01:39:38.580 | of tenacity and willpower further.

01:39:40.080 | It might reinforce the tenacity and willpower

01:39:41.800 | that you've already built,

01:39:42.940 | but it's not going to increase it further.

01:39:45.000 | You need to add something or subtract something

01:39:46.920 | that makes it harder, not easier,

01:39:48.840 | to engage in or resist a behavior.

01:39:50.680 | Okay, I want to be really clear about this.

01:39:52.340 | In the study that I just described

01:39:53.540 | from Colom and colleagues,

01:39:55.000 | they took individuals that were not exercising prior

01:39:58.000 | to the study, and those people had to therefore

01:40:00.720 | generate significant amounts of motivation

01:40:04.000 | in order to regularly engage in these three one-hour

01:40:07.640 | per week episodes of cardiovascular training, okay?

01:40:10.960 | Now, the fact that there was no comparable increase

01:40:15.280 | in the volume of the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:40:18.160 | or anterior white matter tracts in the group

01:40:20.600 | that did the calisthenics and stretching is also important

01:40:23.440 | because it implies that activities that are easier

01:40:25.460 | to carry out, that don't get the heart rate elevated as much,

01:40:28.680 | are not going to create changes in this brain structure

01:40:32.280 | that is associated with tenacity and willpower.

01:40:35.480 | And there's a nice confirmation of that in the study,

01:40:37.720 | in fact, because they observed, as one would expect,

01:40:40.820 | a significant increase in VO2 max in the individuals

01:40:44.400 | that were assigned to the group

01:40:45.380 | that did cardiovascular training,

01:40:46.560 | but they did not observe a significant increase in VO2 max

01:40:49.860 | in the individuals that did three one-hour-per-week sessions

01:40:52.820 | of calisthenics and stretching across the six-month period.

01:40:56.720 | Okay, so the important point here is

01:40:59.680 | if you're already doing, let's say, an hour a week

01:41:03.400 | of moderate to high-intensity cardiovascular training,

01:41:06.140 | or resistance training for that matter,

01:41:07.760 | you're going to need to add something

01:41:09.980 | in order to get further activation

01:41:12.240 | of this brain hub for tenacity and willpower.

01:41:15.520 | And of course, the idea here,

01:41:17.200 | or else we wouldn't be talking about it,

01:41:18.360 | is that that activation and that increase in volume

01:41:20.440 | in the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:41:21.720 | would then be applicable to other endeavors,

01:41:25.200 | for instance, academics,

01:41:27.080 | or some aspect of your professional life

01:41:29.360 | or relationship life,

01:41:30.640 | that you can build up tenacity and willpower

01:41:33.680 | as a capacity within you,

01:41:35.900 | or we should say within your anterior mid-singulate cortices,

01:41:39.280 | but that the route to activating

01:41:41.480 | and increasing the robustness

01:41:42.960 | of your anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:41:44.360 | requires that you engage in something

01:41:46.400 | that you don't really want to do,

01:41:47.560 | and certainly not something

01:41:48.520 | that you're regularly engaging in already.

01:41:51.040 | Remember, way back at the beginning of today's episode,

01:41:53.200 | we compared willpower and tenacity to habit execution, right?

01:41:57.060 | Well, this is a simple case

01:41:59.100 | where if you're already doing something,

01:42:00.720 | simply continuing to do it

01:42:02.120 | might maintain what you've already got,

01:42:03.560 | but it's not going to further build up

01:42:05.320 | your tenacity and willpower.

01:42:07.160 | So along those lines,

01:42:08.460 | I don't want you to simply take

01:42:10.340 | the three one-hour cardiovascular sessions per week protocol

01:42:14.080 | that they use within this study

01:42:15.640 | and expect it to increase your levels

01:42:17.440 | of tenacity and willpower,

01:42:18.640 | unless, of course, you're currently only doing one hour

01:42:22.440 | of cardiovascular training

01:42:23.720 | at moderate to high intensity per week,

01:42:25.960 | in which case increasing to two hours

01:42:27.760 | may very well increase your anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:42:30.380 | and overall level of tenacity and willpower,

01:42:32.740 | and certainly doing three hours per week

01:42:35.240 | would be expected to do it even further.

01:42:37.520 | And I should mention that we can extrapolate from this study

01:42:40.920 | in a meaningful way, I think in a grounded way,

01:42:43.580 | that's related to mechanism and say,

01:42:45.520 | well, if you, for instance, like me,

01:42:48.940 | can't play a musical instrument

01:42:50.380 | or are not bilingual in language,

01:42:53.440 | that taking on the challenge,

01:42:57.340 | if indeed it's a challenge,

01:42:58.340 | and for me it would be a challenge perhaps for you as well,

01:43:00.160 | to learn an instrument as an adult

01:43:02.140 | or to learn a second or maybe a third language.

01:43:04.600 | If that's challenging,

01:43:05.620 | and in fact that's something that you're resisting doing,

01:43:07.620 | well, then great.

01:43:08.660 | It's going to provide an even greater opportunity

01:43:11.100 | to engage the activity of the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:43:14.460 | Remember that study that showed that hard tasks,

01:43:17.580 | hard challenges are what activate

01:43:19.340 | the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:43:20.720 | Easy challenges don't, okay?

01:43:23.260 | Habits that are reflexive simply do not.

01:43:26.020 | So you have to pick something hard.

01:43:27.700 | You have to pick something that's either physically

01:43:29.980 | and/or psychologically hard.

01:43:31.180 | And of course, we want to highlight the fact

01:43:32.460 | that you never want to engage in anything physical

01:43:34.300 | or cognitive, emotional, or otherwise

01:43:36.460 | that is psychologically or physically damaging to you, right?

01:43:39.240 | Because this is something that you're going to want

01:43:40.580 | to maintain or carry out for some period of time.

01:43:44.060 | Now, along those lines,

01:43:46.160 | we could imagine a huge number of different protocols

01:43:50.700 | that one could engage in,

01:43:51.860 | but I think there are a couple of key things

01:43:54.260 | that extend across all of those opportunities.

01:43:56.660 | First of all, it's clear now based on our understanding

01:43:59.900 | of the anatomical inputs to the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:44:04.060 | that while exercise is great,

01:44:06.040 | and certainly movement to the body

01:44:08.220 | when we don't want to move our body,

01:44:10.740 | AKA running, AKA weightlifting,

01:44:13.580 | AKA learning a new skill like dancing or gymnastics

01:44:17.660 | or something of that sort,

01:44:19.260 | is going to engage this hub for tenacity and willpower,

01:44:22.420 | the anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:44:24.420 | But there are a number of other opportunities to do that.

01:44:27.460 | And we can think of those in a kind of playful context,

01:44:29.860 | but one that is both playful

01:44:31.500 | and highly functional and applicable.

01:44:33.460 | So for instance, if you already resistance train

01:44:37.380 | and you're doing what we now generally agree as a field

01:44:40.980 | is the minimum of six hard working sets per muscle group

01:44:44.380 | per week in order to maintain

01:44:45.640 | or build muscle size and strength.

01:44:48.240 | Some of you don't want to build muscle size,

01:44:49.700 | but everyone should be trying to maintain muscle strength.

01:44:51.700 | There's a very high correlation,

01:44:53.520 | we now know, between muscle strength and cognitive function,

01:44:57.460 | especially as one gets past 40 years of age,

01:45:00.140 | but even younger.

01:45:01.560 | So maintaining neuromuscular function and strength

01:45:04.900 | is very, very important,

01:45:05.780 | even if you don't want to increase muscle size,

01:45:07.240 | you can learn how to do that, by the way.

01:45:09.060 | We have zero cost protocols,

01:45:10.660 | they're all listed out by going to hubramanelab.com,

01:45:12.940 | check out the series I did with Dr. Andy Galpin,

01:45:14.840 | check out the key toolkit takeaways from that series,

01:45:17.760 | also available at hubramanelab.com,

01:45:19.760 | just put exercise protocols into the search function.

01:45:23.480 | But let's say you're already resistance training,

01:45:26.000 | you're already doing cardiovascular training,

01:45:27.840 | what can you do to build up your tenacity and willpower

01:45:30.860 | for application in not just that endeavor,

01:45:33.300 | but other endeavors?

01:45:34.340 | Well, pick something that you don't want to do.

01:45:37.080 | These are what I call, in a very non-scientific way,

01:45:39.620 | micro sucks.

01:45:41.080 | These things suck, but they suck a little bit,

01:45:44.000 | and they're safe, right?

01:45:45.500 | You have to pick things that are safe for you,

01:45:47.920 | but they suck enough that they require some effort,

01:45:51.460 | they require getting over some friction,

01:45:53.460 | engaging in something that you don't reflexively want to do.

01:45:56.320 | So for instance, that might be one extra set

01:45:58.860 | at the end of a round of three to five sets

01:46:01.480 | of a given exercise.

01:46:03.500 | Or it could be, for instance, 100 jumping jacks

01:46:06.280 | at the end of what you consider a hard run.

01:46:09.080 | It could be, for instance,

01:46:10.380 | finishing out that language lesson

01:46:12.080 | and then deciding to do five minutes of sitting still,

01:46:16.300 | thinking about the material that you learned

01:46:18.280 | when you so desperately want to just jump on your phone.

01:46:21.000 | Pick circumstances where the degree of resistance

01:46:23.960 | is very high, where the degree of impulse

01:46:26.200 | to do something else than the thing that you know

01:46:28.960 | you need to do is very high,

01:46:30.680 | and then start applying those on a regular basis.

01:46:33.760 | It could be after every workout.

01:46:35.120 | It could be in the middle of the workout.

01:46:36.340 | For instance, some people have a really hard time

01:46:38.500 | not looking at their phone during a workout.

01:46:40.340 | I like to listen to podcasts or music during a workout,

01:46:42.920 | but I really try and resist text messaging

01:46:45.120 | and reading email and things of that sort while working out.

01:46:48.120 | So the harder that becomes, the more I think about it

01:46:51.640 | and the more I resist it,

01:46:53.600 | the more presumably activation

01:46:56.280 | of the anterior mid-singulate cortex I'm getting

01:46:58.120 | and that you would get as well.

01:46:59.340 | So these little micro sucks,

01:47:00.600 | like, ah, it sucks not to look at the phone right now.

01:47:02.480 | It sucks to do 100 jumping jacks at the end of a run.

01:47:05.500 | Of course, if you're excited

01:47:06.340 | due to the 100 jumping jacks at the end of the run,

01:47:08.400 | that's not going to be a good avenue into activating

01:47:11.320 | and increasing the volume

01:47:12.520 | of your anterior mid-singulate cortex.

01:47:14.300 | Everything we've talked about up until now

01:47:15.900 | supports the statement I just made.

01:47:17.240 | Easy tasks, desirable tasks, don't do it.

01:47:20.020 | It's the thing you don't want to do.

01:47:21.880 | So imparting these little micro sucks can be very useful.

01:47:24.600 | You'll have to think about what particular micro sucks

01:47:27.200 | you incorporate into your exercise routines,

01:47:29.240 | your cognitive routines, and your daily routines,

01:47:30.960 | and how often.

01:47:32.000 | I don't think you need to go completely berserk on this,

01:47:34.000 | doing them all day long,

01:47:35.660 | but keep in mind that these are the sorts of behaviors

01:47:38.680 | and resistance of behaviors,

01:47:41.600 | because again, certain micro sucks might be,

01:47:43.900 | if you're somebody who practices intermittent fasting,

01:47:47.320 | we don't want to send you into the realm of eating disorder,

01:47:50.160 | but maybe you really do wait an extra 15 minutes

01:47:53.300 | before your usual first mealtime,

01:47:54.940 | which for me would really suck.

01:47:56.400 | That might even move from micro suck into macro suck,

01:47:59.340 | 'cause I like to eat when I'm hungry,

01:48:01.080 | but waiting a few extra minutes for no other reason

01:48:03.880 | than allowing oneself to activate

01:48:06.920 | that anterior mid-singulate cortex circuitry

01:48:09.520 | would be one way to try and build up

01:48:12.600 | one's tenacity and willpower.

01:48:13.920 | So at some level, this should all seem pretty logical.

01:48:17.040 | It actually doesn't even require a firm understanding

01:48:19.960 | of the underlying neuroscience for it to make sense, right?

01:48:23.840 | You want to do something, you resist doing it.

01:48:25.560 | That's building up tenacity and willpower.

01:48:27.300 | You don't really want to do something, you do it.

01:48:28.940 | That's building up tenacity and willpower.

01:48:30.660 | Well, I do believe, in fact,

01:48:32.840 | there's a lot of data to support the fact

01:48:35.300 | that our understanding of the mechanisms

01:48:38.040 | underneath things like tenacity and willpower

01:48:40.420 | can be very advantageous when trying to carry out

01:48:44.800 | these different types of behaviors

01:48:46.400 | to increase tenacity and willpower.

01:48:48.120 | Why?

01:48:49.040 | Well, today we learned that there's a huge variety

01:48:51.660 | of contexts in which one can activate

01:48:54.040 | the anterior mid-singulate cortex,

01:48:55.280 | which means that it's not cardiovascular exercise per se.

01:48:59.480 | It's not resisting the cookie per se, right?

01:49:02.460 | It's not waiting 15 more minutes to eat

01:49:05.380 | or making sure that you sit still

01:49:07.880 | and don't look at your phone at the end of a learning bout

01:49:10.000 | and really think about what you learned a little bit more.

01:49:11.960 | Even though it really, really sucks to do that,

01:49:14.240 | it's really hard, it creates a lot of agitation.

01:49:16.600 | It's not about any one of those protocols, if you will,

01:49:20.360 | per se, rather it's about deliberate engagement

01:49:23.080 | in the behaviors that we least want to do

01:49:24.880 | in a given moment.

01:49:26.620 | Or if you're trying to build up willpower and tenacity

01:49:30.680 | to not engage in certain types of behaviors,

01:49:34.280 | it's about our ability to suppress behavioral action.

01:49:38.440 | Now, I do want to highlight the potential hazards

01:49:41.120 | of this type of approach to building up tenacity

01:49:43.860 | and willpower and indeed to life.

01:49:45.400 | And we can call on the earlier example of eating disorders

01:49:48.740 | as a very salient one, right?

01:49:51.220 | There is a way in which all of this can run amok

01:49:54.120 | and we can get so heavily into stoicism,

01:49:56.380 | we can get so heavily into the idea

01:49:58.000 | of building up tenacity and willpower,

01:49:59.980 | that it takes us into realms that are unhealthy for us

01:50:02.840 | psychologically, emotionally, and or physically.

01:50:06.440 | And that's certainly not the goal here.

01:50:08.120 | And I certainly don't want to motivate

01:50:10.920 | that type of behavior or resistance of behavior.

01:50:13.520 | We should all be seeking a relationship with life

01:50:15.800 | and with goals, et cetera.

01:50:17.640 | That involves, yes, I believe some degree

01:50:20.440 | of activating tenacity and willpower,

01:50:22.240 | really finding that fight within us

01:50:24.600 | that Parvizi and colleagues found

01:50:26.120 | when they stimulated the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:50:28.240 | of people, right?

01:50:29.080 | All of a sudden they're like, yeah, I'm driving into a storm

01:50:31.300 | or there's something about to happen

01:50:33.000 | and I'm going to have to resist.

01:50:34.120 | I'm either going to have to do something

01:50:35.240 | or resist doing something,

01:50:36.180 | but there's something activated inside of me.

01:50:37.660 | I think it's very important that we are all able

01:50:40.020 | to garner those resources and to activate those states

01:50:42.920 | within us voluntarily.

01:50:44.060 | But I also know from experience and from observing others,

01:50:47.260 | and indeed from the literature

01:50:48.740 | on the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:50:50.200 | as it relates to eating disorders

01:50:51.540 | and other aspects of neurologic and psychiatric challenges,

01:50:55.700 | is that we also need to learn how to turn that off.

01:50:58.640 | With that said, the little micro sucks that we discussed,

01:51:02.040 | the addition of a hundred jumping jacks

01:51:03.340 | at the end of a cardiovascular training session

01:51:05.200 | when you would much rather just shower up and go home.

01:51:08.600 | Getting into the cold shower or cold plunge

01:51:11.480 | when you absolutely don't want to do it,

01:51:13.660 | well, provided you can do it safely,

01:51:15.640 | that's going to be the best time to do it

01:51:17.300 | if your goal is to build up tenacity and willpower,

01:51:19.560 | to say nothing else of the known benefits

01:51:21.220 | of things like deliberate cold exposure

01:51:22.680 | and exercise like jumping jacks, et cetera.

01:51:25.500 | There are also entire landscapes of life

01:51:27.760 | and academics and sport that afford us the opportunity

01:51:30.720 | to build up tenacity and willpower.

01:51:32.360 | I, for instance, can recall taking my so-called

01:51:34.120 | qualifying exams in graduate school

01:51:35.800 | where they ask you questions until you say, I don't know,

01:51:39.640 | until you don't know the answer.

01:51:40.800 | It's just like that puzzle in the Baumeister study.

01:51:43.360 | They're taking you to the point

01:51:44.400 | where you basically can't win.

01:51:46.640 | And that turns out to be a very important lesson

01:51:49.400 | that extends beyond the information

01:51:51.160 | that they're asking you about.

01:51:52.120 | And of course, every student at the end

01:51:53.500 | of their qualifying exam runs off

01:51:54.800 | and figures out the answer to the question

01:51:56.240 | that they couldn't get the right answer to.

01:51:58.920 | Sometimes there is a right answer.

01:52:00.080 | Sometimes they're not.

01:52:00.920 | If the committee is pretty diabolical,

01:52:02.380 | they'll give you an impossible to answer question

01:52:04.360 | 'cause there's no answer.

01:52:06.520 | But the point being that whether or not it's in martial arts,

01:52:09.800 | whether or not it's in sports,

01:52:10.700 | whether or not it's in music,

01:52:11.620 | whether or not it's in academics,

01:52:12.620 | whether or not it's in relating to others,

01:52:15.120 | there is some value to getting to that point

01:52:17.740 | where you can't solve the puzzle.

01:52:20.000 | And I think that's an important message

01:52:21.360 | for us to understand and maybe to incorporate

01:52:22.940 | into our tools and protocols

01:52:24.240 | that there are some endeavors that have no endpoint, right?

01:52:28.400 | There's no winning, there's no finish line.

01:52:30.140 | And those type of endeavors are extremely important,

01:52:34.240 | extremely important for continually building up

01:52:38.300 | our tenacity and willpower.

01:52:40.820 | So much so that we can even take

01:52:43.020 | a somewhat 3000 mile view from the top down

01:52:47.920 | onto everything we've talked about today

01:52:49.720 | and think about those super agers.

01:52:52.620 | Those super agers that somehow are able to maintain

01:52:55.280 | the cognitive function of a much younger person.

01:52:58.240 | And if you look at the data on super agers

01:53:00.860 | and people similar to them,

01:53:02.040 | you'll find are always engaged in some activity

01:53:05.160 | that's hard for them.

01:53:06.080 | They're always trying to learn something

01:53:07.280 | and they have a sort of playfulness about it,

01:53:09.180 | but they seek out those friction points,

01:53:11.760 | both resistance of certain behaviors, right?

01:53:14.780 | Trying to not do certain things,

01:53:16.240 | but perhaps more often doing certain things,

01:53:19.480 | learning a new skill, learning pottery, learning music,

01:53:24.460 | placing themselves into novel environments

01:53:26.320 | that are a little uncomfortable or a lot uncomfortable

01:53:28.420 | provided that it's safe.

01:53:30.280 | So from that standpoint, one could even entertain the idea

01:53:33.200 | that because these people are living much longer

01:53:35.700 | than everybody else, in addition to maintaining

01:53:37.880 | the cognitive function of much younger individuals,

01:53:40.840 | that perhaps the intermidsingulate cortex

01:53:43.460 | in its ability to allocate resources

01:53:47.120 | to different parts of our brain and body

01:53:49.160 | to meet certain motivational goals

01:53:51.520 | is actually associated with this thing

01:53:53.400 | that we call the will to live.

01:53:55.300 | Now, the concept of the will to live

01:53:57.460 | is certainly getting a little bit squishy

01:53:59.700 | for scientists like me who, yes,

01:54:02.880 | I'm happy to entertain discussions

01:54:04.480 | that relate to psychological constructs

01:54:06.460 | such as tenacity and willpower,

01:54:07.980 | but as you've probably noticed,

01:54:09.760 | I'm very comfortable with and very excited about the idea

01:54:12.540 | that, okay, maybe it's related somehow

01:54:14.820 | to brain energetics and glucose, maybe not.

01:54:17.720 | Certainly I'm on board the idea

01:54:19.220 | that beliefs impact our physiology

01:54:20.800 | and physiology impacts our beliefs,

01:54:22.620 | ala Dr. Ali Krum, who was a guest on this podcast previously

01:54:26.240 | talked about belief and mindset effects,

01:54:27.800 | which are very powerful.

01:54:28.920 | They change our physiology literally

01:54:30.600 | and the Dweck data that we talked about today.

01:54:33.420 | But of course also that there are brain areas

01:54:36.040 | and circuits that underlie these things

01:54:37.680 | that we call tenacity and willpower.

01:54:39.760 | So when we get into a discussion

01:54:41.080 | about tenacity and willpower and then find ourselves,

01:54:43.300 | as we are now, talking about the will to live,

01:54:46.540 | I don't think it's going too far to say

01:54:48.900 | that when one looks at the data on longevity,

01:54:51.440 | both physical and psychological longevity,

01:54:54.920 | it's very clear that there are

01:54:55.880 | underlying physiological explanations,

01:54:58.560 | not the least of which is likely to be the maintenance

01:55:01.800 | if not growth over the lifespan

01:55:03.900 | of this anterior mid-singulate cortex,

01:55:05.980 | but also that the people that are achieving that

01:55:08.780 | are continually forging in their environment.

01:55:11.940 | They're continually looking for new environments.

01:55:14.440 | They're continually exploring.

01:55:16.260 | They are not becoming complacent.

01:55:17.840 | They are not becoming sedentary.

01:55:19.480 | They're not existing down at that end of the continuum

01:55:22.200 | that we call apathy and depression,

01:55:24.040 | but that they're not existing down there

01:55:26.340 | and they are existing up toward the end of the continuum

01:55:29.380 | that we call tenacity and willpower

01:55:32.780 | and engaging motivation to get there,

01:55:35.180 | motivation, again, as a verb,

01:55:37.300 | but in doing that, that they're reinforcing

01:55:39.780 | the very circuits that give rise to tenacity and willpower.

01:55:43.080 | This is what, in engineering terms,

01:55:44.660 | is referred to as a closed loop.

01:55:46.420 | It's like you do A, which leads to B,

01:55:49.420 | which leads to C, which feeds back onto A

01:55:52.180 | and it makes A that much more likely to occur.

01:55:54.340 | It's like turning the little a into a capital A

01:55:56.700 | and then turning into a boldface capital underline A,

01:55:59.580 | you know, the buildup of neural circuits.

01:56:01.460 | So while today we focused a lot on an individual brain area,

01:56:04.260 | anterior mid-singulate cortex,

01:56:06.460 | and in many ways I presented it

01:56:08.380 | as if it's the be-all end-all of tenacity and willpower,

01:56:11.260 | it is not the be-all end-all of tenacity and willpower.

01:56:14.700 | It's our ability to engage the anterior mid-singulate cortex

01:56:18.820 | that allows us to express tenacity and willpower.

01:56:22.500 | But in this closed loop fashion,

01:56:25.180 | it's our ability to express tenacity and willpower

01:56:27.780 | that then feeds back onto that circuit

01:56:29.780 | and makes it more robust and more likely

01:56:32.140 | to be accessible in the future

01:56:33.300 | when we encounter something that we don't want to do

01:56:35.740 | or that we have to resist very strongly

01:56:37.660 | in order to not engage in some sort of behavior

01:56:40.200 | or thought pattern.

01:56:41.340 | So the big takeaway is that

01:56:42.420 | if you want to increase your tenacity and willpower,

01:56:44.600 | you absolutely can.

01:56:46.220 | You can do that by triggering activation

01:56:48.700 | of this incredible hub within the brain,

01:56:51.240 | the anterior mid-singulate cortex,

01:56:53.040 | for which there is now a very large amount of evidence,

01:56:56.760 | is at least central to the whole process

01:56:59.200 | of generating tenacity and willpower,

01:57:00.680 | the I absolutely will do that,

01:57:03.160 | and the no, I absolutely won't do that.

01:57:05.760 | It's the resistance hub.

01:57:07.440 | It's the thing that's allocating resources

01:57:10.120 | to do the thing that we don't want to do

01:57:13.100 | or that someone's trying to prevent us from doing.

01:57:15.620 | It's also the brain area that's allowing us

01:57:17.680 | to resist doing the thing that we want to do

01:57:19.900 | or that someone else wants to do

01:57:21.720 | when we decide that's not good for us.

01:57:23.960 | We can really be certain based on the psychology literature,

01:57:27.120 | based on the neuroscience literature,

01:57:28.760 | and really based on this beautiful literature

01:57:30.840 | that's now emerging that includes the column study,

01:57:34.020 | but some other studies as well

01:57:35.320 | that perhaps we'll talk about in a future episode,

01:57:37.760 | that we really can build up our capacity

01:57:40.040 | for tenacity and willpower.

01:57:41.320 | It's a real thing.

01:57:42.680 | And as a final point to this,

01:57:44.560 | and indeed as a final protocol,

01:57:47.560 | I was very excited to look into the early release

01:57:50.600 | of peer-reviewed papers out from Neuron just this last week,

01:57:54.400 | and to see that there was a study,

01:57:56.280 | albeit in a preclinical model, in an animal model,

01:57:59.960 | that explored what is called stress relief

01:58:03.660 | as a natural resilience mechanism.

01:58:05.600 | And I won't go into this study in full detail,

01:58:07.580 | especially not now,

01:58:08.420 | laid into a slightly long episode such as this one.

01:58:11.880 | But what the study showed is that

01:58:13.660 | when an animal is in a state of despair or ahedonia,

01:58:17.160 | a lack of pleasure, when it's under stress,

01:58:20.080 | and then that stress is removed, there's a sense of reward.

01:58:24.520 | There's a sense of wellbeing

01:58:26.920 | that accompanies that release of stress.

01:58:28.920 | And that's pretty obvious.

01:58:31.100 | That's something that we've known about for a very long time.

01:58:33.560 | But what's interesting about this study,

01:58:34.860 | and they actually talk about this

01:58:36.240 | in terms of its applicability potentially to humans,

01:58:39.520 | is that when we are able to withstand a stress,

01:58:43.200 | maybe that stress is school,

01:58:44.200 | maybe that stress is a particular relationship.

01:58:45.900 | Again, you never want to do these things

01:58:47.260 | in a way that's unhealthy or dangerous,

01:58:49.800 | but when we are able to do that,

01:58:51.820 | the relief that we feel afterwards

01:58:53.560 | is its own form of reward

01:58:55.960 | that serves to reinforce that whole process

01:58:58.560 | of tenacity and willpower that got us through the stressor.

01:59:01.760 | And an interesting thing about this study

01:59:03.820 | is that they went on to compound that reward.

01:59:07.160 | They showed that rewarding oneself

01:59:08.680 | for having gotten through a stressful episode

01:59:11.400 | actually serves to increase the capacity

01:59:14.760 | to get through stressful episodes in the future.

01:59:17.340 | In other words,

01:59:18.180 | if you decide to develop certain tools and protocols

01:59:19.980 | to increase your levels of tenacity and willpower,

01:59:22.220 | which frankly, I hope that you will at least consider,

01:59:26.040 | again, provided you do it safely,

01:59:27.940 | this seems like a very good thing to do for all of us,

01:59:29.960 | especially as we age, and guess what?

01:59:32.180 | We're all aging from the time we're born.

01:59:34.240 | If you decide to do that,

01:59:37.840 | pick something that's challenging, overcome that challenge.

01:59:40.940 | Again, this could be the requirement

01:59:42.040 | to engage in a particular behavior when you don't want to,

01:59:44.160 | or to resist a particular behavior

01:59:45.800 | that you would otherwise want to engage in.

01:59:48.540 | But also when you've successfully completed that resistance,

01:59:52.860 | when you've engaged that tenacity and willpower,

01:59:54.740 | and you've activated that anterior mid-singulate cortex,

01:59:57.660 | well then occasionally, not always,

01:59:59.940 | but occasionally providing yourself

02:00:01.400 | with a reward of something that you like,

02:00:03.700 | and here it's highly subjective.

02:00:04.980 | You'll just have to pick something that you like,

02:00:06.340 | again, something that's hopefully health promoting,

02:00:09.080 | not health diminishing,

02:00:10.660 | can serve to further reinforce the behavior

02:00:13.540 | that you just engaged in,

02:00:14.680 | which was to increase your tenacity and willpower.

02:00:18.420 | And if you listen to the episodes

02:00:19.740 | that I've done on dopamine motivation and drive,

02:00:22.220 | or on dopamine more generally,

02:00:24.740 | you will know that I am not a fan of rewarding oneself

02:00:29.620 | for wins or for engaging tenacity or willpower

02:00:32.460 | for that matter on a regular basis, or certainly every time.

02:00:35.220 | This is the sort of thing that just randomly,

02:00:37.020 | every once in a while, when you've done the hard thing,

02:00:39.380 | or if you've resisted the thing that was pulling on you,

02:00:42.780 | that you should reward yourself,

02:00:44.220 | but of course, reward yourself in healthy and safe ways.

02:00:47.640 | For those of you that are interested in learning more

02:00:49.380 | about how to reward the actions of tenacity and willpower,

02:00:53.040 | I'll provide a link to the recently published paper in Neuron

02:00:56.160 | in the show note captions.

02:00:57.880 | I will also be doing a toolkit episode

02:01:00.240 | that relates to what we covered today,

02:01:02.000 | as well as some additional tools

02:01:03.940 | gleaned from other papers and resources

02:01:06.080 | in the not too distant future.

02:01:07.660 | Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

02:01:09.720 | all about tenacity and willpower.

02:01:12.020 | We talked about the idea gleaned from research

02:01:15.560 | in the field of psychology

02:01:17.020 | that tenacity and willpower are limited resources.

02:01:20.020 | And that perhaps, again,

02:01:21.180 | perhaps they relate to this concept of ego depletion

02:01:25.220 | that relates to this idea that what is depleted

02:01:29.220 | or what's limited in our ability to engage tenacity

02:01:32.220 | and willpower somehow relates to brain energetics

02:01:35.100 | and fuel consumption, namely glucose.

02:01:37.580 | I also talked about the conflicting data

02:01:39.940 | that argues that if we believe tenacity and willpower

02:01:43.380 | are limited and that glucose is the thing that limits them,

02:01:48.060 | well, then that's exactly what happens.

02:01:50.460 | So I talked about that controversy

02:01:51.900 | and some of the data that actually reconcile

02:01:54.140 | a bit of the differences there.

02:01:55.500 | So in the absence of new data,

02:01:57.000 | you'll have to decide for yourself what you believe

02:01:59.000 | about tenacity and willpower.

02:02:00.380 | However, it's very important to acknowledge

02:02:02.860 | the universal truth,

02:02:03.780 | which is that our tenacity and willpower

02:02:06.460 | rides on the tide of autonomic function.

02:02:09.320 | That is, when we are sleep deprived,

02:02:11.700 | when we are in pain, when we are in emotional pain,

02:02:14.660 | or when we are distracted,

02:02:16.380 | our tenacity and willpower is diminished,

02:02:18.860 | which calls upon all of us to make sure

02:02:21.220 | that we're taking care of our autonomic functions

02:02:23.020 | through viewing morning sunlight, getting sufficient sleep,

02:02:25.260 | adequate nutrition, social connections,

02:02:26.860 | things that I've covered extensively on previous episodes.

02:02:29.420 | Then we talked about the neural underpinnings

02:02:31.480 | of tenacity and willpower

02:02:32.700 | and this absolutely incredible brain structure

02:02:35.160 | that we'll call a hub

02:02:36.220 | because it's not operating in isolation,

02:02:38.340 | but rather it's getting inputs

02:02:39.440 | from lots of different brain areas

02:02:40.680 | relate to reward, executive function, autonomic function,

02:02:44.260 | motor planning, goal-seeking, et cetera,

02:02:47.660 | that we call the anterior mid-singulate cortex,

02:02:49.620 | this phenomenally interesting brain area

02:02:52.680 | that seems to be able to generate this thing

02:02:54.920 | that we call tenacity and willpower,

02:02:56.500 | and that when we engage or express tenacity and willpower

02:03:00.520 | by doing the thing that we least want to do,

02:03:03.020 | by not doing the thing that we most want to do

02:03:05.520 | in a given moment,

02:03:06.580 | that we actually can build up

02:03:08.300 | our anterior mid-singulate cortex

02:03:11.340 | and thereby build up our future capacity

02:03:14.700 | to engage the anterior mid-singulate cortex

02:03:16.940 | when we need to call on tenacity and willpower.

02:03:19.740 | And then we talked about some of the peer-reviewed data

02:03:21.940 | that shows how that actually can be done,

02:03:24.600 | where these individuals who were not previously exercising

02:03:27.740 | did a challenging three one-hour sessions per week

02:03:31.620 | of cardiovascular training

02:03:32.580 | and indeed their anterior mid-singulate cortex

02:03:34.540 | and the connections to and away from it

02:03:36.460 | increased in a way that set them apart

02:03:38.940 | from their age-related cohorts.

02:03:41.320 | That is, their brains stayed younger,

02:03:43.860 | maybe even got younger,

02:03:45.360 | whereas those that did not do the hard thing, right,

02:03:47.740 | that didn't engage tenacity and willpower

02:03:49.640 | did not experience the same effect.

02:03:51.540 | And then we talked about how those data could be extended

02:03:53.380 | into a number of different realms,

02:03:55.300 | such as cognitive learning, learning languages,

02:03:57.400 | learning math, learning art, learning

02:03:59.360 | any number of different things,

02:04:01.400 | or in the physical realm,

02:04:03.100 | engaging in certain types of exercise

02:04:05.860 | that one is not already engaging in,

02:04:07.980 | adding in a little bit of additional exercise,

02:04:09.980 | specifically at a time in which you least want to do that,

02:04:13.420 | or extending your fasting period

02:04:16.680 | if that's something that you're doing

02:04:18.320 | and that you can do helpfully,

02:04:20.500 | simply because it allows you to exercise

02:04:22.900 | your anterior mid-singulate cortex,

02:04:24.460 | aka tenacity and willpower.

02:04:26.620 | And of course, we highlighted that all of that

02:04:28.340 | needs to be done in the context of psychological

02:04:30.260 | and physical safety.

02:04:31.560 | We don't want anyone to do things

02:04:32.720 | that are going to be physically damaging to themselves,

02:04:34.920 | but if one simply takes the stance of,

02:04:36.680 | okay, what's something that I can do in a moment

02:04:39.420 | that will allow me to build up tenacity and willpower?

02:04:41.540 | Well, it's going to be the thing

02:04:42.680 | that I least want to do in that moment,

02:04:44.340 | or the thing that I least want to resist doing

02:04:45.840 | in that moment,

02:04:46.780 | to periodically add in those little,

02:04:48.540 | what I refer to as micro-sucks,

02:04:50.340 | a very non-scientific, frankly, non-psychological term,

02:04:54.180 | but I think we all understand what it means,

02:04:55.860 | little things that we don't want to do,

02:04:57.240 | but that if we do them,

02:04:58.900 | you can be sure that you're activating

02:05:00.920 | the inter-mid-singulate cortex,

02:05:02.580 | and thereby increasing the probability,

02:05:05.740 | the likelihood that you can access tenacity and willpower

02:05:09.360 | more readily in the future.

02:05:10.900 | So what I've done today is explain the scientific studies

02:05:13.780 | in the realm of psychology and neuroscience

02:05:16.660 | that explain what tenacity and willpower are,

02:05:19.460 | and what allows us to build up

02:05:20.960 | our tenacity and willpower over time.

02:05:23.380 | And then it's really up to all of us,

02:05:25.980 | to you and to me and everybody else,

02:05:27.800 | to figure out in which particular domains

02:05:30.000 | and with which frequency

02:05:31.620 | we're going to decide to build up our tenacity and willpower.

02:05:35.520 | So it's clear that tenacity and willpower

02:05:37.700 | are not just resources that we need to call upon

02:05:39.900 | from time to time in order to overcome things,

02:05:42.740 | but then indeed calling on our ability

02:05:45.080 | and building up our ability for tenacity and willpower

02:05:47.980 | can allow us a much richer enjoyment of life,

02:05:50.540 | and perhaps can even extend our life

02:05:53.140 | by engaging the will to live.

02:05:55.060 | Thank you for joining me for today's discussion

02:05:56.820 | about the science of tenacity and willpower,

02:05:59.020 | and tools and protocols to increase one's ability

02:06:01.860 | to access tenacity and willpower.

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02:07:45.320 | Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion

02:07:47.780 | about tenacity and willpower.

02:07:49.900 | And last, but certainly not least,

02:07:52.160 | thank you for your interest in science.

02:07:54.100 | (upbeat music)

02:07:56.680 | (upbeat music)

How to Increase Your Willpower & Tenacity | Huberman Lab Podcast

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