Mark Bell's Power Project - EP. 407 - Your Brain and Your Mind ft. Dr. Andrew Huberman

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

Dr. Andrew Huberman is an award-winning professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University, as well as the founder of the Huberman Lab. His lab focuses on researching brain function and brain regeneration. The lab’s goals are to discover strategies for halting and reversing vision loss in blinding diseases, and understand how visual perceptions and autonomic arousal states are integrated to impact behavioral responses. Subscribe to the Podcast on on Platforms! ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast Support the show by visiting our sponsors! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $99 ➢Icon Meals: http://iconmeals.com/ Use Code "POWERPROJECT" for 10% off ➢Sling Shot: https://markbellslingshot.com/ Enter Discount code, "POWERPROJECT" at checkout and receive 15% off all Sling Shots Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ https://www.facebook.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mbpowerproject ➢ LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/powerproject/ ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject ➢TikTok: http://bit.ly/pptiktok FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell ➢ Snapchat: marksmellybell ➢Mark Bell's Daily Workouts, Nutrition and More: https://www.markbell.com/ Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/ Podcast Produced by Andrew Zaragoza ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Mark Bell's Power Project podcast hosted by Mark Bell, co-hosted by Nseema Iyeng and myself, Andrew Zaragoza. This episode was recorded on July 7th and it is with Dr. Andrew Huberman. Dr. Huberman is a neuroscientist and an associate professor at Stanford University at his own Huberman Labs. He does a lot of research on the brain, a lot of neuroplasticity. He's even doing a lot of stuff with vision and really just everything you can think of when it comes to the brain, a lot of neuroplasticity. He's even doing a lot of stuff with vision and really just everything you can think of when it comes to the brain. And that's pretty much all we talked about

on this podcast. He talked about the difference between the brain and the mind, two things that if you're like me, you hadn't even considered that there was actually a difference there. We talked a lot about neuroplasticity and what people can do moving forward as they age to help not lose that neuroplasticity. I asked him a bunch of questions about nootropics and whether or not they do work. And Mark actually brought up a really cool question in regards to performance enhancing hacks that we can do with our mind right now. Really just an awesome episode. Dr. Huon Ren is just an incredible guest. I know you guys are going to love this episode.

So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy this episode with Dr. Andrew Huberman. Oh, damn. But like my shins were in pain and my back was in pain and I was just mad. Like I wasn't like I was grumpy because I'm like, why am I feeling all of this? This is not good. So, yeah. And it was funny. Like a night of sleep.

Everything went away. Real quick. Where did you go? yeah. And it was funny. Like a night of sleep, everything went away. Real quick. Where did you go? Vegas. Vegas. Las Vegas. City of sin. Mm-hmm.

Hope you didn't do any of that. Nah, nah. Nothing to. No hard drugs. Minimal hard drugs. Nothing to. No hard drugs. No, it was fun.

Light drugs. Light drugs. Soft drugs. Light drugs. No. No no no really didn't do a lot of social distancing going on out there oh tons everyone was keeping six feet apart just like everyone's had their arms spread and they're just kind of going around like this it was funny all the all like the tacky taxi drives and ubers were like yeah we're gonna be shut down next week probably like this is too crazy it was like yeah people don't care out there people were were not caring. So, yeah, they're probably going to shut it down. I think in most places people are just they're too excited and excited.

The sun's out, you know, Fourth of July. People are celebrating. People are out doing their thing and they're just forgetting that there's something going on. Yeah. Yeah. I've been hearing. I don't know if it's legit because i've only been hearing it um from like my mom told me but apparently has has there been like uh has corona been messing

with young people a little bit more than usual not anything i heard of uh anything substantial but okay it's possible i just don't know what to believe in anymore. Apparently, there was a mutation, though. And I read about this where it's a little bit more. It's easier to spread. I've heard that. I've heard that it's airborne now. I heard that the plague is coming back. Just to touch upon this for a second.

The only thing that makes any sense, like when people are talking about masks and social distancing and shelter in place, the only thing that makes sense for anyone, and I think it's the only person that would be able to really talk about it, would be the person in the beginning from when this thing first started, the person in the beginning who said, I don't really know what's going on, so I'm not going anywhere. I'm not interacting with anybody new. I'm going to actually quarantine myself like that.

If you think about it, that's the only thing that really would make any real sense. Anything outside of that is is just a giant guess because we really don't know. I heard today they were talking about the vaccine and they were just saying like how how very rarely vaccines work. Like they don't always they don't really solve a problem. I think they they have a percentage rate maybe in the teens or something like that. And I heard all the way up to about 30 percent. But 30 percent is not very reassuring. Yeah. That's why a lot of people choose not to get a vaccine a lot because these things do mutate. They do move around. It doesn't mean that we shouldn't work towards a vaccine, but I think we got yelled at.

We were doing a workout kind of on the stairs where we normally are out in Bodega Bay, and these people, they put their hands up and they're like, what you're doing is wrong mean it started like just you know yelling at us there's older people you know so i'm like i'm just gonna let them say their piece but somebody in our group was like fuck you like just boom right away and i was like oh great you know and and it went back and forth a little bit but everything was fine but i thought about it afterwards and you know as like, and it went back and forth a little bit, but everything was fine. But I thought about it afterwards. And, you know, as like, I I'm pretty low reaction person. Like I like to kind of think about stuff for a second, but I thought the fuck you, I thought was justified because why are you outwardly coming after us? Right. The other thing is these people are coming

down the stairs and we didn't even start to work workout yet. There was about five or six of us, maybe seven of us. And we were all apart from each other. But that person walked right through all of us. So imagine that someone lights a fire on your street that goes right across the road, right? Like right across the street. You run right down the middle of it and be like, you lighten the street on fire is wrong. And then you're now you're on fire. It's like, what was the point of that? You know, like, why did they walk between us that way with their masks on? You know, they, they could have, if they were angry

or frustrated, they could have voiced their opinion from a further distance, which would have made sense because then they would have been following some of their own logic. Right. But by walking in between all of us, that just didn't make any sense to me. I'm like, that's just as risky as like, you know, not wearing a mask or wearing a mask. And it's just kind of just some ridiculousness going on. There definitely has been some like, I'll just call it, like, mask shaming. Right, right.

You know, after a workout, I went for a walk around the block here. So, it's an industrial area. It's not high traffic area. This truck is coming my way. So, like, I'm walking this way. Yeah. And he makes a very obvious, like, I'm going to pull over, like, almost to, like, I'm going to ask this guy for directions, maybe. Like, that's what I was thinking.

Next thing I know, he, like, gestures to his face. So, he goes like this, covers his face, and then throws his hands up in the air, like, where's your mask? I'm like, there's literally nobody out here. You're in a car. Why would you go through all the trouble of slowing down,ering over to signal like you need to be wearing a mask like i mean they're just strongly recommending that you wear one which doesn't mean that you really have to wear i mean they didn't make it the law they're not trying to you know um but i don't know i don't think the mask does anything. I think if the mask,

I personally just, I think there's evidence. Okay. So if we're just going off of facts, there's evidence and information that masks can be beneficial and there's information that masks can be detrimental and not be safe as well. And then the type of mask that we have access to and the ones that we're using, I don't think they do much of anything. And let's be honest, the one that you have stuffed in the center console of your car, that's not healthy. You know what I mean? The one that you have in your pocket, the one that you're borrowing from another family. I mean, there's just no scenario where I can, that that would be something that would be helpful. Yeah. The, the situation you're talking about, Andrew, that's just kind of stupid. You know,

you're outside, you're taking a walk. No one's around you. Even if people are around you, you're outside. So you can keep that distance. But the place where I will concede wearing masks is in like stores or, or places like that, just because like, it's just much easier to have people in those places be more comfortable when you're just wearing a mask., it's just much easier to have people in those places be more comfortable when you're just wearing a mask. And it's just as simple as putting a mask on in a store. But it's a very definition of virtue signaling though. Don't you think?

Yeah, it is like, it is like, Hey man, yeah, I'm, I'm making you feel better. That's why I'm putting this on.

I don't really want to wear it. You know, I, I, I don't mind putting it on. I don't feel like it's a, it's any big deal. Like, if it's going to help you get through your day, I'll fucking put the thing on.

Yeah. Outside, no one's going to make you put on a mask. Well, now I think Governor Newsom is saying you have to wear them when you work out. Fuck off. Right. Right. I know. Doesn't seem smart.

Workout where? I mean, okay, there are gyms open, but if I'm taking a run outside and like a. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know about outside. I'm not sure. Yeah. I don't know what they did with that. I mean.

Hey, we have a really smart guest on today. I know. I'm excited. Dr. Andrew Huberman from Stanford University. Yeah. He's a neuroscientist and it would be great to talk to him. I mean, he's done a lot of research. He knows a lot about the brain,

and I'd love to kind of dissect the brain with him a little bit and kind of get into the brain and the mind and all these different things. So I think people really need that kind of talk at this time because there's just so many different things going on. I think everything and everyone is being kind of audited and reevaluated. It's a stressful time for a lot of people. And so it'd be cool to just learn the facts of how the brain works. of how the brain works.

And he has some interesting things I've never really heard of before, how there's some like, we'll get into it with him, but like there's some like negative things in your brain that you get like depressed or sad, like when you don't see light at certain times of the day. And I'm just like, I don't know.

It's fascinating. You know, why does that happen? What is our body trying to do? Why do we have anxiety? Why do we get depressed? Why body trying to do? Why do we have anxiety? Why do we get depressed? Why do we get upset? Why do we get triggered? How can we maybe not lose those things forever, but how do we not allow those things to move us in a direction that we really don't want to go into?

because if we know that then maybe we can uh better control the food that we eat and maybe we can better control the decisions that we make the posts that we make the comments that we make maybe we can learn a lot about that but he studies a lot of stuff in particular with the eyes and uh i think he believes that blindness can be cured and all kinds of crazy stuff so yeah i think it's going to be amazing. It's going to be really cool. Cause we've had guests on that have talked about like the, uh, effect of sunlight,

you know, on your mood, your brain, all that type of stuff. And he's gone into that a lot too. So we, I think he, he might echo a lot of things that a lot of guests that we've had on my top

have talked about, but there's a lot of cool stuff. I think we're going to discover from this this one hopefully we can get into it but he also talks a lot about like nootropics and stuff too which i've always been a dork for yeah i know it's funny so like we are packing and stuff and i discovered yeah you are my packing some heat packing some meat. Packing some meat. I just get it. Everybody, dick jokes. You get it.

Hey, we got dick jokes. Are we all on board now? Oh, thank goodness. Our guest just walked in. There we go. We knew we were going to do this. It's all right. Good morning.

Morning. Morning. Great to have you on the show today. Thanks for reschedulinging i'm sorry that last week something came up lab wise i couldn't dodge i apologize that and thanks for being willing to do today of course hey you're a doctor man you're out there trying to save people's lives and saving the world and all that good stuff so we uh we totally understand well appreciate it. I, um, are you guys all up in Sacramento? Yep. I used to, uh, spend a lot of time in SACTO. Awesome. Yeah. It's great to have you on the show today. And, uh, I

wanted to kind of dive into, um, some of what you've been practicing for a long time and some of, uh, what you've been getting into maybe even more recently. So give us maybe just a small background of, you know, kind of where you're coming from and then maybe some stuff that you're getting into a little bit more modern day. Sure. So I don't know if this is what you're referring to, but a little bit of personal background, just real brief. I grew up in the South Bay. So down near Mountain View, California. And and you know, my dad was a scientist, um, is still is a scientist and was really always interested in biology and science. And then in high school got really into skateboarding, soccer, Thai boxing. So definitely spent a lot of time in the kind of sports community, um, mostly skateboarding.

And, um, and then later some martial arts stuff got, uh, very interested in fitness. Uh, when I was in college, um, kind of took a windy path to science myself. I won't go into that whole story, but, um, you know, eventually circle back to academics as my path and decided, you know, working in a lab and trying to figure out how the brain works and physiology of the body and brain, that was going to be my, my livelihood. And so the reason I mentioned the fitness stuff is not just because it's this podcast, but I've had a longstanding interest in behaviors, as well as nutritional practices, as well as supplementation, as well as emerging pharmaceutical

drugs that can augment the human mind and body for purposes of better living, doing, performing, et cetera. So these days, my lab, which is at Stanford School of Medicine in the Department of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology, really centers on two problems. One is I have an active program trying to figure out how to regenerate nerve cells after injury. So this would be like damage to the retina and eye leading to blindness or trying to reverse blindness or halt the progression of blindness. We have a clinical trial on humans doing that. We can talk about that gene therapy, this kind of thing. And then

there's a lot of people in my lab who are working on states of mind and body. So stress, how to leverage stress toward higher performance. Stress, how to, you know, for people that are dealing with severe anxiety, they're just, they're not thinking high performance. They're just trying to go from being back on their heels to flat footed again. So we think about that. We're trying to really define what is stress, map areas of the brain and body and how they interact and how those

can be leveraged to be able to lean into effort for longer periods of time to access, you know, these people talk a lot in the sports community and in the, um, and in the general, now you hear about these sort of like, Oh, we're only working at 10% of our capacity or 40% of our capacity. What does that really mean? Like how would any individual high performing or low performing go about adjusting their behavior and some other lifestyle factors to really be able to leverage the nervous system, the brain and connections with the body in order to do better, feel better, perform better. And that to me as a scientist, that shouldn't be a vague conversation. That should be a very concrete thing, just like you would talk sets reps, right? Just like you would talk anything else.

And so the work I do in my laboratory is geared towards mapping the brain areas, figuring out those protocols. And then I do some consulting work with members of special operations community in the US and some neighboring countries centered around that really aimed at the question of like, how can we leverage the nervous system to build better, long lasting, longer lasting warriors, this kind of thing. Um, and then in the, I do a little bit of work with some athletes, but mainly on an informal basis, you know, people will say like, Hey, what should I be doing? What should I be taking this kind of thing? And I want to be very clear, I'm not an MD, so I don't prescribe anything. I'm a professor, so I profess lots of things.

And so I try not to be long-winded, but it ends up happening anyway. So I just apologize in advance that if you ask me a question, I'll just keep going until you interrupt me most of the time, and I don't mind being interrupted. But I'll strive for clarity. I'll strive for information and actionables. And that's just really where I'm at these days, doing a lot of public education on Instagram and elsewhere opportunities like this. I really welcome. And I'm grateful for, because I feel like we know enough about the brain and nervous system right now that we can teach people a lot and they can do stuff with that. It's not just all going to be inspiration, aspirational stuff, lot and they can do stuff with that. It's not just all going to be inspiration, aspirational stuff,

get after it, just do it. Those are great mantras and they can help us, but I'm more about the how to just do it or how to recover or not just, oh, sleep is really important, but how to sleep better. These kinds of things. And my lab works on all those really. Now I know Elon Musk has shirts and it says occupy Mars. But I think before we land on Mars, we need to land in our own minds. You know, we need to occupy our mind is what I'm seeing maybe an absence of. And people don't have a great understanding of of how the brain works and how the mind works. Can you kind of walk us through? There's some differences. I think people use those things interchangeably, brain and mind and uh they're not necessarily the same thing so can you uh walk us through the differences between your brain and your mind sure so um the important thing

for people to realize is you've got a central nervous system which is your everything inside your skull and your eyes, which are the two pieces of your brain outside your skull. We'll talk about why that's actually really important. Most people don't know this, but the eyes are actually two pieces of brain. They're not connected to the brain. They are central nervous system. And then the spinal cord and, and then those make connections with the organs of the body, everything from your heart to make it be your diaphragm, to make your lungs move, everything. And then the body connects back to the brain. And the mind is generally the word that we use when we want to talk about perception. So like you're sensing things all the time, there's sound waves coming in, there's touch, contact with your chair,

your feet, et cetera. But you're not thinking about all that. But when you direct your attention to a particular thing or location or goal, and that could be a thing inside you, it could be like thinking about how you feel inside, or it could be something outside you. That's when you really start to invoke this concept of the mind. And you're, you're actually, you're not just a series of, you're not just a set of receptors. You're not just a set of receptors. You're a conscious being, so you can direct that attention. And this is important because people misunderstand thoughts. People think thoughts can't be controlled.

Well, sort of yes and sort of no. With your mind, you can introduce a thought. So let's just say right now, you just say, you know what? I'm going to deliberately think right now about what I'm going to eat for lunch. And you can do it, right? It's just like saying me just saying, I'm going to pick up my cup of coffee. I can do it. The asymmetry or the kind of stinger is that thoughts will also happen spontaneously and you can't control those. And so I always say you can always introduce the thought with your mind, but it's hard to suppress thoughts. Very, very hard.

In fact, I would just encourage people not even try. But what's cool is you can't have multiple thoughts at once. So as long as you're introducing thoughts just like actions, you're kind of out-competing those spontaneous thoughts. And I think a lot of people feel like a slave to their thoughts. And I mention that because emotions and feelings are really this kind of mixture between the brain and body. We feel emotions in our body, right? I was pretty angry about something yesterday and, you know, I feel it in my body and it makes me want to move. It makes me want to react. Sometimes emotions make us want to collapse. Sometimes they make us want to move, but they're very somatic or of the body. And so we have to remember that feelings were

designed to shift our states of mind to direct certain actions. And that's the last thing, like, you know, the nervous system is designed to move us. And what's cool is that the nervous system, it's working on these conscious levels. Like I can pick up my cup of coffee, I can introduce the thought, I can decide to say something or not say something. But it has these cool, very subconscious modes of action too. And one of the really interesting ones is that it controls our immune system. So when you're stressed, or you're pissed, or you're working hard, or you're doing high intensity training, or you're pissed, or you're working hard, or you're doing high intensity training, provided it doesn't go on for too long, you actually stimulate your immune system to be more active. A lot of people don't know this, but when you're stressed, your immune system

is enhanced. And then that's why if you work, work, work, work, work, and then you stop, you crash and you get sick. This is why ice baths, high intensity breathing, hip type workouts, they actually send signals from the nervous system to the immune organs of the body that deploy killer cells like T cells and B cells that go out and gobble up bacteria and viruses. And so a lot of people are like stress will kill you. Stress will make you sick. Adrenal burnout. Look, you've got enough adrenaline on reserve for two lifetimes. The burnout that people are realistically afraid of is actually a mental burnout. And we can talk about what that is. But when we talk about the mind, we're talking about what you can deliberately

control. So I can tighten my focus and look just at you, Mark. I can shift my attention and look at the curtain behind you where I can dilate it and see you both at the same time. That's deliberate. I can do that or it can run on auto, either one. So it's like an auto driving car that you can take control of at any moment. You mentioned slave to thought or some people believe that they're slaves to their thoughts, right? Especially right now or a few months ago when people were in quarantine and now people like they're potentially going to put people back in quarantine once again. There's been a lot of uptick in terms of just like anxiety, bad, negative thoughts. And sometimes, like you mentioned, people feel that they don't have control over that. Now, I'm curious what your take is on that.

And if an individual does feel that every single day of the week, they just get a flood or an influx of negative thought over and over and over again, what can they do to impact that in another direction? Do they can can they have any, I guess, control or direction as far as those types of thoughts are concerned? Yeah, so it's a great question. And I think it's one that many people are grappling with. So, you know, I think we can introduce these thoughts. We can realize that our mode of thinking isn't healthy or something. But I always say it's very hard to control the mind with the mind. It's really, really hard.

And the reason is, is because it's encased in this skull. And even though my lab and other labs, of course, are figuring out which brain areas do this, and the amygdala is responsible for threat and all this other stuff. Right now, it's very hard to directly manipulate the brain because we don't have little wires in there that we can press little buttons and do that if we did we it would work but right now the best technology that we have that everybody has to control their mind and their thinking especially when they're anxious or in an uncomfortable state is going to be through action and through the body and one of the things i think we're really seeing a tide change is that, you know, in the eighties, it was kind of like the brain and everyone talked

about consciousness. And there was still kind of a remnants from the sixties and seventies that wasn't, we weren't quite sure what it was all about. Then there were a couple of decades, they called actually one of them 2000 to 2000 had the decade of the brain where they were mapping all these brain areas. And I think now it's fair to say, like for the typical person who wants to get their mind in a better place on a consistent basis, or they're feeling back on their heels, they're waking up and they're like, okay, COVID and elections and, you know, racial tensions and a lot of problems and issues, it can feel overwhelming to people. They've got to take, if they want to adjust their mind to be clear and not just overwhelmed,

they've got to take an approach that involves actions of the body. And the one that I'm a big proponent of, and I'm not the only one, of course, is to use respiration and breathing. Now, my orientation toward this is a little bit different than most. First of all, the reason why we want to take control breathing is that we have one skeletal muscle that's an organ. Sorry, we have our muscles, but there's one organ that's skeletal muscle, excuse me, unlike all the rest. So, my heart is cardiac muscle. My spleen, I can't move and control. I can't control my heart directly. If I want to calm down, people talk about the vagus nerve and I can, how do you activate the vagus nerve? Well, you eat a big meal, but that's slow, right? That's

slow. Or you can hold your child or you can do some meditation, super slow. And so when I was first approached by communities that were asking me, you know, how can we get people to modulate their nervous system quickly? I was like, well, the diaphragm is the thing. The diaphragm is skeletal muscle. It's just like a bicep, tricep, quadricep, calf or anything like that. It was designed to work on its own. You don't have to think about it, but you can consciously take control of it because there's a nerve called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C, that's right, phrenic, that connects the diaphragm to the brain and back again. And when you move your diaphragm quickly, so if I breathe quickly, consciously or unconsciously, it sends a signal to the brain that's like, wake up, this is something's going on out here. The body is in action. And when you move that slowly, then the signals of the phrenic nerve literally come in like electricity, because that's what nerves use to communicate. And it's bing, bing, bing. It's like a metronome and the brain starts

to calm. So we know that slow breathing and nasal breathing can definitely calm the mind. And so when people's thoughts are spinning out and they're not doing well, you want to say, slow down, breathe, consciously breathe, but that's not quite good enough for a scientist, right? We want to know how do you breathe exactly. And the cool thing is there's a discovery that was made just in the last two years of a set of neurons that you have. I have, everybody has about 200 neurons that live in the brainstem. Neurons, by the way, for folks out there, it's just a nerve cell, just like liver cell will be liver cell, nerve cell, neuron. So those cells are in the brainstem, and they control a specific pattern of breathing that

was designed over hundreds of thousands of years to calm animals and human beings quickly. It activates the phrenic nerve in a particular way. And the pattern of breathing is a double inhale followed by an extended exhale. So dogs do this right before they go down for a nap. You do this periodically about once every two or three minutes during sleep and people who are put into a high stress environment where their carbon dioxide levels go up start to do this, or they sort of attempt to do this. It looks like this. It looks kind of silly. Anytime you do deliberate breathing on video, but I'll do it because I think it's helpful to see. So it's,

so it's a double inhale followed by an extended exhale. And it's not the same as just doing a big inhale or a big exhale. That second little inhale at the end, what it does is when you inhale, you inflate these little sacs in the lungs, the ovoli of the lungs. And that second inhale brings them to this really rigid form that pulls a little bit of extra carbon dioxide out of the bloodstream so that when you exhale, you offload extra carbon dioxide. Because there's another set of neurons in the brainstem that measure carbon dioxide in the bloodstream, and they are largely responsible for setting your level of stress and anxiety. The important thing for people to realize

is that just one or three of these, what are called physiological size, this is actually in medical textbook. It's a physiological side. Doing two inhales followed by an exhale, then maybe another time will bring the state of stress down faster than anything that I'm aware of by offloading carbon dioxide. And the cool thing is everyone has these neurons. It's like you have to maybe learn it from like how to do it exactly. But you don't, there's no neuroplasticity required. The moment you do this, you're going to start to calm yourself. Now, the heart rate comes down more slowly.

You actually don't want your heart rate to just cliff. That's called brachycardia. And that's why people who see blood, who are freaked out about blood, they pass out. It's because their heart rate went down too quickly. So a lot of people are concerned that when they're feeling stressed or they're anxious, they're like, my heart rate is, we won't come down. It won't come down. It's like, it was designed to taper off a little slow. So physiological sighs are a pattern of breathing that mother nature designed for us to use to calm ourselves and animals use it. They know this. We just, for whatever reason, we think we need to use elaborate breathing protocols. I actually use, you know, obviously, I'm the smallest guy in the room here, the virtual room, but, you know, I've long been looking for tools that would allow me to train more

intensely when it's time to train intensely and to back off either in between sets or, you know, the recovery process, as you guys know better than I do, begins in the workout. You don't want to just go ham the entire time because you're burning off energy that you could apply for deliberate action. We can talk a little bit more about this. It relates to a different brain circuit. But to just make a succinct answer to your question, for people that are stressed, their thoughts are spinning out. Don't try and control your thoughts with your thoughts. That's a failing proposition. And most times it won't work. Just telling someone to calm down is

about the worst thing you can do. Telling yourself to calm down is the worst thing you can do. Pull on a lever, the lever that, you know, that you've got a lever for calm. And that's this diaphragm phrenic nerve connection. Double inhale, exhales are the best way that I'm aware of. And we can measure this in the lab. You can see people and we put people in a high states of stress using virtual reality, claustrophobia, heights, white sharks. We find your pain point and then we give them tools that allow them to learn how to adjust

their nervous system quickly. And other labs have worked on this and published in fine journals, Nature Cell Reports. These are published peer-reviewed articles. And if you want to do a breath practice, like you're a Wim Hofer or Tumor Breathing or you're into the XPT thing, which I think those guys are great, or Brian McKenzie, all great communities,

but that's more about taking five or 10 minutes a day and raising your level of stress, right? So deep breathing, like then offloading all that carbon dioxide and then holding my breath kind of Wim Hof-ish type stuff, which is really tumor breathing. That's about training your nervous system to be comfortable with high levels of adrenaline in it. That's different. That's like an ice bath. That's like, you know, you're going to throw yourself into challenge and learn how to tolerate it. That's very different than what I'm talking about with these double inhale exhales. The double inhale exhales are the kind of thing that I give to, you know, my mom as a tool, or I hand off to somebody who's unlikely

to take on a breathwork practice. Because those breathwork practices are about raising your stress threshold so that your trigger point is higher. And one of the things I blab about this a lot, or I'm doing that right now, is because I feel like people have heard breathwork. But what are we really talking about? Sometimes you need a tool where like you get the troubling text, you're going to pick up your kid or you're dealing with something. You need something right there. You're not going to start like doing deep breathing or you're in conversation. So that's really important to have something like in your kit, you need a real-time tool. And that double inhale, exhale, what's called a physiological side in the textbooks is what I think is most useful. So, don't try and control your mind with

your mind. Control your mind with your body and then your mind will be in a place where you can steer it. So, that's my answer. Dr. Can you explain, like, especially if somebody does have depression or anxiety, it can be confusing and just downright frustrating because nobody wakes up and says, I want to focus on all the negative stuff today. I want to have a bad day. But our brain is essentially designed to focus on the negative. Am I right on that? Can you explain why that is? Yeah, you're absolutely right. And's because you know your nervous system the nervous system sadly is um mainly designed to keep you safe you know so like neuroplasticity

the brain's ability to change in response to experience it it's hard to change your brain if you want to learn a new language and you're older than 25 it's hard if you're 14 and you're listening to this learn a language and learn an're older than 25, it's hard. If you're 14 and you're listening to this, learn a language and learn an instrument, please, because trust me, it's so much harder later. It's so easy when you're young because the young brain is designed to be plastic and to customize itself based on its experience. Once you hit about 25, 28 or so, there's a whole different set of processes related to shifting your brain structure and function.

We talk about what those differences are. There are protocols you can use. They're actually very powerful. The reason why people are mainly fear-focused, threat-focused, et cetera, is that the nervous system's main job is to make sure that you get what you need. It doesn't care if you feel good doing it. It really doesn't. And so being happy, feeling pretty good most of the time takes work and it takes ongoing work. You know, it's sort of like you can think about the body's main function is to supply enough nutrients and fuel. You know, if you just sit there and do nothing, you, you know, you start to, you know, eventually just deteriorate muscles, will atrophy, connective tissue won't be as healthy.

So you have to do work to support your body and your organs and its longevity and function, strength, explosiveness, endurance, all that. You have to do the work. And I think one of the things that's beautiful about the fitness culture is that and it's eventually, you know, spilled over into general culture. You know, I remember when, you know, weightlifting gyms, bodybuilding gyms and yoga studios were like really niche because I'm 45 years old. I remember, you know, you didn't see it except maybe training for football or something, weight rooms. And then now it's like, there are gyms everywhere. People understand your body's not going to work well unless you do the work and the mind and the brain are exactly the same. I think in 10 years, 20 years, we're going to look back and be like, that was crazy.

We thought that if you just kind of lived your life, you'd be okay. But then of course, people were miserable, depressed, anxious. You know, you need to use your nervous system deliberately. And we can, there are a lot of stories that people make up like, oh, before phones and before modern times, we had enough to occupy our attention that we weren't anxious. I don't buy it. I don't buy it. I don't buy it at all. I think that, you know, when we lived in caves, it was stressful. I think we were always worried.

People think about before communications, people used to go off wandering, looking for food, and they might never come back. You didn't know, did they find someone new? Did they find a better village? I mean, there are all sorts of things that the nervous system has designed to detect threat and sense what's going on inside us, sense what's going on on outside us and try and match our inner state to the external landscape. So this is why I think it's so crucial that people start to look at their nervous system, these nerve cells, a as the most important aspect of their body, because it controls everything, physical performance, emotional performance, etc. And really start thinking about, like, if you're unhappy, how do you ratchet in there and start doing the work? What's the work? And unfortunately, a lot of it has been like, passive stuff, what I call passive coping. It's like, I'm going to watch inspirational stories, but then those are great. And I love them. But and they can get you fired up, but they're fleeting, you need them. A lot of times

you want to think about what are active coping. What are the things that are fully within the confines of your skin, including your brain and everything else that you can activate anytime. It's always there for you. And you look at people that have like what I call like true confidence. It's yeah, they need their nutrition. They need their supplements. They need their community. Those are all very powerful levers to feel better and do better. And I engage in those too. But they have the sense that within the confines of their skin, they have a kit of tools as well. And I think that without going too off track, you think about a baby. A baby is born.

We were all babies at one point. And you don't know if you're hungry. You just feel agitated. You're like, you cry. And then someone meets your need. You're like, need a diaper change. You're like, and then they're like that. You weren't like, I need a diaper change. You're like, this is uncomfortable. So mother nature designed this very generic response, which is the adrenaline response or norepinephrine in the brain and adrenaline from the adrenals that makes us uncomfortable. And the first rule we learn when we come into this world is like, when I don't feel good, look outside me, look to my phone, look to the thing.

Now, I don't think we all need to be like in a little container where we want social connection. We can rely on other people. It's awesome. It's important for our human species to be able to connect. It's a big source of support. But if people don't want to be miserable, they need to think about learning how to control the nervous system. Those physiological size are one way. The other way that I would say to shift mood and away from fear using the body is a kind

of unusual one. But I'll share it now so that, um, as you can tell, I'm not just about, I like to think I'm not just about theory. I want people to have practices. They can go to right now, zero cost pre-installed mother nature has the patent.

So, you know, pay her, uh, you know, don't, there's no website to go to pay for this. Basically you can thank her for this.

So there was a discovery made in the 80s that I thought was crazy. There's a woman named Francine Shapiro, who was a psychologist, clinical psychologist, actually down here in Palo Alto. And she realized that when she was walking in the woods or something like that, the story goes that her stress would kind of subside a bit and kind of go, well, taking a walk feels good. But she actually realized that some very traumatic things could be reframed more easily when she was doing that. Now she had the insight to bring to the clinic with her patients, this practice of moving the eyes from side to side, so-called EMDR, eye movement, desensitization, and reprocessing.

Excuse me. It literally looks like this. It looks crazy, but it's moving my eyes side to side, head stationary, not up and down, just side to side. Now, the idea was that if people recalled traumas or just simply did this, that they would feel calmer and happier. And people, you know, I'm a lab, we work on vision, we work on on stress people would ask me about emdr i was like this is crazy like this is the same people that come to me and they're like you know have you ever tried tapping no like you know people will come to me and they're like have you ever tried whatever you know in this like very spa like voice people like have you ever it's amazing and most of the time i'm like yeah yeah, I don't know. Sounds like an amazing example of placebo effect or self-belief or whatever, but I just kind of back away from it. Then two years

ago, I was asked to review a series of papers for excellent journals, neuron cell nature. These are like the Superbowl rings of scientific publishing showing that these lateralized eye movements back and forth, back and forth, actually quiet, suppress the activity of the amygdala, a brain center that's involved in threat detection. And I was like, Oh my God, she might've actually been right. Then another paper, then another paper. Now I have no stake in EMDR. Okay. I'm not involved with it. I don't do it. I don't, you know, but I thought this is wild because these were labs that were studying eye movements. They weren't even studying emotions. So why would I movements like this actually trigger suppression of the amygdala and make

people feel calm and happier? Well, those eye movements are what you do reflexively when you move through an environment through self-generated motion or what we call self-generated optic flow. So walking, running, cycling, any bodily motion where you're moving forward generates this optic flow and your eyes just reflexively do this a little bit and quiet the amygdala. It is very likely that this is mother nature's way of suppressing our fear response when we're moving forward. In other words, sitting there in a chair and being stressed or looking at the news, or thinking about the things that you need to do is way more stressful than forward movement

toward any goal. And so this probably relates to a very ancient system where like, you know, an animal would maybe wake up from sleep and feel thirsty and it would need to move. If it doesn't move, it's not going to get water. So what does it do? It gets this pulse of adrenaline. And now it's, you know, it's whole focus, its whole world, its pupils are dilated, which allows it to look at single things more specifically than others is looking for water. As long as it's moving forward, there's no need to have that fear response, that adrenaline response, because that's costly. And we can talk about why you don't want adrenaline too high for too long. So the beauty of this is that if somebody is feeling too stressed, again, rather than trying

to limit your stress by just thinking, use the nervous system, do physiological size, try these lateralized eye movements for a quick moment. Every, you know, it's true in mice, it's true in monkeys, and it's true in humans that the amygdala starts suppressing its activity. You're literally controlling the fear response through an ancient mechanism. So, I find this fascinating because what we're starting to see, you know, work from my lab, sure, but also I'm here, I'm, I'm gleaning from other labs work as well, is these core elements of the way that we're built that were designed. Yeah. To deal with tigers. And, you know, we always hear the, Oh, you know, you were, we were in caves and we're

being chased by tigers. I actually don't think that happened that often. How many tigers were there really? It was probably more like the daily stressors of, I need food. I got a baby on the way. I don't actually have a baby on the way, but you know, the cave person is like, I've got a baby on the way. I need resources. That's going to be stressful. How do you deal with that stress? You move forward. And so I think much has been made over trying to create mental environments where we're like, yeah, I'm going to go for it. I'm going to go for it. I'm from a scientific perspective. I'm more interested in what allows us to do that on a consistent basis to be, I would say you can be flat footed back on your heels or center of mass forward.

What allows us to be center of mass forward? What's so easy to say, but it's harder to do. So if you're feeling stressed or defocused and kind of scattered, control your nervous system, bring it down a notch. Try a couple, just maybe five or 10 lateralized eye movements, bringing your nervous system to a state where now you're in forward motion and even better once a day, self-generate optic flow, run, walk, even just simple walking. Even if you're on a walker, you're like disabled, like get that, excuse the language. I know it's not polite, whatever the politically correct language is unable, whatever it is, move forward, just move forward in space.

Don't look at your phone while you're doing it because then you're going to eliminate those, those lateralized eye movements. So anyway, I answered your question again in a very long kind of monologue, but hopefully that explains this circuit in the brain that goes from eye movements to amygdala to suppress the threat response and that people could use to move forward. I'm not aware of too many people putting this into practice in sports just yet. I always say, you know, I don't ever want to tamper with somebody's game. I'm not going to tell a golfer or a sniper how, what to do with their eyes, but I will tell them what to do maybe between so-called reps and sets or between matches or, you know, so these things can be used

anytime and you do need eyes open. So it's not going to work with eyes closed. Um, cause there's a feedback loop from vision that squirts the amygdala. Um, but anyway, I'll pause there. Yeah. I like what you're saying a lot. And, uh, it just kind of reminds me of a quote I heard from a friend of mine. Um, he just says, don't do nothing.

Like, just don't get caught doing nothing. Even if you're relaxing, like you're relaxing, you know, or you're meditating, you know, you have to try to figure out, it might sound overwhelming to somebody, don't get caught doing nothing, basically. But whenever you're occupied, you know, whenever you occupy your mind with something, and there's even research that shows that if you were to be real anxious or upset about something, and you were to work on a puzzle, or you do something like that's going to exercise other parts of your brain, that it can help you calm down as well. So I love a lot of what you're saying. One thing that I do have a question about, though, is why not work on just reframing?

Is it too hard to just reframe stuff? And is it too hard to knock stuff out at interpretation? Because if we knock stuff out at interpretation, then we don't have to really worry about being stressed about it in the first place, such as what you said about somebody having a particular reaction to a lot of blood. And then that could be a, we can agree that maybe that's an irrational response to a large amount of blood flow, but for that person, maybe that's too hard to break down. And maybe that's why you're making some of these other suggestions. Does that sound about right? Absolutely.

I think it is possible to get in there mentally and cognitively and start to reframe and start to adjust. In fact, I think insight is one of the great powers that humans have. You know, if other animals have it, they fail to really implement it. have, you know, if other animals have it, they fail to really implement it in it. Like we're the curators of the planet because whether or not my dog makes plans or not, I'm better at implementing plans than he is. Right. And we're better at tool development. And one of the best technologies we have is this forebrain that allows us to think about our thinking, which is also what gets us in trouble. So, so thinking about your thinking and reframing is very powerful. What I mentioned previously, the physiological size, lateralized eye movements, these are mainly ways of using action to bring yourself from a state of discomfort to enough comfort that then I think you can start to invoke the mind. I see. And I think it's hard to go. It's hard to go from zero to where you want to go. So someone's really back on their heels.

So I always think of like, is my center mass forward and my flat foot in the back of my heels? I know I said that before, but, and I'm lifting that because I have a couple of close friends who were in or are in the special forces community. And, you know, they've got these practices, right? Like wake up and make your bed, the McR thing or like i've done been fortunate enough to do a little bit of work with um david goggins great guy endorsed his book you know david's terrific david's like he's figured this out i don't begin to know his mind as well you know he knows his mind i don't know what goes on in there but from

what he shared with me he's figured out get that center of mass forward no matter what. And he's figured out how to do that. He's really wrapped himself around his own mental process that way. And a lot of other folks managed to do it probably a little differently. So I'm talking about people who are back on their heels. Once you're flat-footed, yeah, be in forward action. And journaling is forward action. Reframing. I spend a lot of time just sitting with my eyes closed and thinking.

I'm in the business of thinking and ideas. We also do experiments, of course. But I find great power and utility in sharing ideas with people that are smarter than me that can then give me feedback and then writing. If you talk about ancient mechanisms, I really writing things out, whether or not you ever go back to it again, is one of the more ancient and powerful forms of taking our thoughts, creating something concrete to reflect on, or just sitting there and really just thinking. Now, there are other cognitive tools that are really powerful

that relate to neurotransmitters and what are called neuromodulators. So, neurotransmitters are the way that neurons talk to one another. Neuromodulators, things like dopamine and serotonin and norepinephrine and acetylcholine in particular, kind of what I call like the four horsemen of brain function, those are powerful because each one makes it more likely that certain types of thoughts and actions will happen and less likely that other thoughts and actions will happen so we kind of step through those and what i'll do is i'll emphasize mental aspects of generating these and controlling those neuromodulators. These are super powerful. First of all, anytime we're in effort, stress, agitation, happy or sad, doesn't matter. We've got noradrenaline and adrenaline pumping

through our system. Our adrenals are releasing it. It's in the brainstem and that's great. It's effort. If you have to drag yourself to something, you're essentially secreting more of that stuff. You're pushing yourself. If you're feeling like a burn in your muscles, you're going, I don't know if the last few reps analogy works, but there's a lot of adrenaline involved. So it's that grinding through. It could be grinding through a day, through a week, through a month, through a year, through a set. It doesn't matter. Through a rep.

That system is what gets us into action. This is why mother nature makes generic systems. So let's say I wake up like I did this morning. I look at the news. Okay. First thing I saw was that TikTok is basically, you know, going to be potentially banned by the state department because it's collecting all this data like goodness. Oh my God. Like security, you know? So you get a little pulse of adrenaline from that. I'm like, oh, do I have an account? Do I, what about my niece and her? You get a pulse and it makes you want to do something.

It makes you want to move or, and, or it dilates your pupils, literally subconsciously dilates the pupils. It puts your mind and your eyes into portrait mode on your phone, you know, portrait mode where I could just see you and everything else gets blurry. That's what noradrenaline does. Makes me very good at tracking individual things. It takes me into a tunnel. Instagram is a great example.

I don't think Instagram is about dopamine at all. People say, oh, dopamine hits from likes. Look, I don't know how most people are wired, but my dopamine hits don't come from likes. You know, sure, I appreciate it. But a dopamine hit, we'll talk about it in a few minutes, a dopamine hit, you feel, and it feels awesome. And it's a superpower. And we'll talk about how to tap into that because it's very valuable. Instagram is more like keeps you in a funnel and a tunnel of like a little box, this big you're in comments and things like that. Especially if you get into

like a little beef with somebody or you're kind of like a little bit of friction, that's adrenaline. It's a great molecule because it moves us through our day. The problem is there's a circuit, and this has been shown now in two studies, in the brainstem that when adrenaline gets too high or noradrenaline, as it's called in the brain, a quit reflex engages. So I've long wondered about this. Like I can't lift, I can't do a 600 pound deadlift yet, but I'm not even close, but I'll just say yet, just because you never know. But so I can't do that. It doesn't matter how much adrenaline, but let's say I had to go out running. There's a point where I stop not because of

injury, but something in my brain makes me stop. I'm like, I've had enough, or I can't continue at this pace. I was doing sprints this weekend. I'm like, and there's something that turns off. I can tolerate the pain. It's not a physical intolerance, but that's the brainstem circuit. And it's essentially measuring noradrenaline. There's a second neuromodulator, dopamine. Dopamine is really interesting because

people always think about dopamine as the reward, like, oh, it's released when you win a match, when you get married, when you mate. That's all true. But most dopamine release is while you're in route or on path to rewards. Dopamine is what's released in your brain anytime you are mentally or physically focused on something that's outside the confines of your skin. I'm going to a restaurant to eat. I'm going to find a mate. I'm going to mate.

I'm going to lift. You're in pursuit of something. And Mother Nature designed this molecule in a very particular way to give us energy to continue along that path. Dopamine is an incredible neuromodulator. It's also released at the point where we have a big reward. But at that point, so let's imagine the team that wins the Superbowl, they're exhausted, but then they win. And what happens? They've got tons of energy. They're jumping all over the place. They got energy for days. Right. And the interesting thing is dopamine pushes down those levels of noradrenaline and makes them raises our threshold for quitting. So you've experienced this before. If you're ever

just like really down in the dumps, things are just terrible with family or with team or with coworkers and someone cracks a joke, all of a sudden you've got levity, you've got room, you've got effort, you've got energy. That couldn't have been a hormonal thing. Hormones work on the, on the timescale of hours to days to weeks. Very few hormones except adrenaline were designed to work quickly. So we'll talk about hormones in a second. But dopamine is released through humor, through any kind of sense or belief that you're on the right track. Okay?

So that animal that's hungry, that gets up or is thirsty and goes and finds and gets a smell. Animals can smell water of a stream. Dopamine gives it energy to move toward that. So you're conserving that noradrenaline. You've got more money in the bank you could spend later. If you're just grinding and you're not bringing in this dopamine system, you're on a depleting schedule. You're not going to be able to work as long, as hard, or as efficiently. So how do you dose dopamine? Well, humor is one. Okay. Humor is very powerful. The other is, and this is not positive self-talk. I am not a believer in positive self-talk. My colleague,

Carol Dweck, who kind of cultivated this idea of growth mindset, it's actually, she deserves credit for that phrase, talks about this positive mindset, uh, positive self-talk, excuse me, is when you are telling yourself something relative to the end goal, you're like, okay, I'm a, I always, um, like to think about like, well, I like boxing so long ago now, you know, the Chris Algieri fight, right. Against Pacquiao and he's losing, he's like badly losing. And he sits down in his corner and his trainer, this guy doesn't come after me, but his trainer's like, you're doing great, Chris, you're doing great. That is positive self-talk. And it is exactly the wrong approach.

If you are failing miserably, you don't tell yourself you're doing well. What you need to do is learn how to trigger dopamine release, which is all internal. Nobody trickles dopamine in their mouth. You need to learn how to trigger dopamine release from the sensation of effort. And from when you hit a milestone, you need to reward yourself for that mentally. It's a subtle thing, but it's powerful. This is not a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step or how do you eat an elephant one bite at a time? you eat an elephant one bite at a time? It's you eat an elephant one bite at a time, but you reward each bite. You're like, each bite has got me on the path. And so when you think about the huge monumental tasks that you have, sometimes across a morning, a day, a month, a year, whatever, and you think about the whole thing all at once, it's

overwhelming and your adrenaline will quickly peter out. The key is to self-dose that dopamine release when you hit milestones. So it's like, okay, I'm going to write 800 words. You write one, two words. You start getting distracted. You're like, I hit two words. I got to put my hand back on the rung. You get a third word.

It's about rewarding the effort process of having your hands on the ladder. You should tell yourself, I hand back on the rung. You get a third word. It's about rewarding the effort process of having your hands on the ladder. You should tell yourself, I'm still on the ladder. I'm still on the ladder. I'm grabbing rungs and I'm going up the ladder. That's what you reward. And so this is definitely using the mind to control neurochemicals to give you more intensity, focus, and time to perform. So the reason this works is because you can't just be in sheer output all the time. And people who are very high performers know how to leverage this. It's quiet. It's often completely covert, but it's the opposite of allowing those negative thoughts in that are depleting. So the key is I have a good buddy from the SEAL teams. He's out

now. So I'm comfortable giving his name because he's doing some really interesting work. His name is Pat Dossett. And he always says, you know, it's about moving the horizon. You got to step that horizon. And when you hit those milestones, you got to self-reward. In fact, I speculate and because I haven't done it, but I speculate that the BUDS screening process, of course, everyone who shows up is gritty and resilient and determined. Some guys even get the Triton tattoo before they go. Everyone believes that they're going to not quit, but a subset of people don't. It's a very small subset. From my understanding and a lot of discussion, I hypothesize, I don't know for a fact that it's this ability to

move the horizon, this ability to self-reward because what you're doing is you're the people who can do that are giving themselves the opportunity to continue to perform. They keep that noradrenaline right below the quit reflex, or they push it back down. They're doing this all the time. They're not just, I quit because everyone says they're not going to quit. But at least in that example, like in Coronado, like 85% plus quit. So it can't just be grit, determination, and resilience. So learn to dose dopamine mentally. You'll get it from extrinsic rewards. If someone comes along, we can do this in teams too. You can give someone a pat on the back or a shoulder and be like, good job. That's amazing what that can do for us. And it's neurochemical. The other chemical system that's really powerful to leverage is serotonin.

Serotonin is mother nature's reward system for all the things that you have and are not outside your immediate experience, meaning you don't have to put much effort to get them. So overlooking serotonin is a foolish mistake and high performers know how to leverage serotonin. When I say high performer, I could be talking about mom, dad, like raising kids, whatever, you know, it's not just about sport. Here's how it works. Mother nature made reward mechanisms that tell our body and brain, you are safe, you have the resources you need, and you can get back out there and work. And so those resources come from gratitude is the simplest one. A gratitude practice does not have to be love and kindness meditation. No disrespect to the hippies who like love and kindness meditation.

But look, I grew up in like skateboarding community, punk rock community. Like if I talk about love and kindness meditation, some of my friends are going to laugh at me and my science friends would five years ago would have been like, that's great. That sounds really squishy. But now we know from studies, brain imaging studies, that people who practice gratitude, who just sit there for a couple minutes and just think, I'm breathing. I have air. I have family. I have food. Maybe your family's difficult, but like you're actually alive enough to be able to engage with those difficult family members. It causes the release of serotonin and serotonin allows the reward systems of the body that keep us still to feel like, okay, I'm replenished. I can lean back into action. So gratitude is one. I love my dog very

much. So I, uh, you know, like appreciating him, he's getting towards the end of his life. So I, uh, you know, like appreciating him, he's getting towards the end of his life. Those, those kind of feel good things that you feel in your body and mind, those reset your immune system. They reset the dopamine system. And so what you really want to do is learn how to go dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, nor adrenaline, serotonin, learn how to sleep, right? Sleep it, you know, learn how to rest, be in gratitude, be in full getting after it phase. And sometimes you're doing this on a timescale of like second to second, minute to minute. And so I always say gratitude is not complacency. Gratitude is the refill of your tank. attitude thing, even just taking a moment to just reflect that you have access to certain resources and that you're lucky, blessed, whatever your internal dialogue is, doesn't really matter.

Whatever language you speak to yourself, that's what's going to work best. And this is so important because when you look at people who are hard driving for years and years and years, and then crash or their relationships crash, they haven't balanced these two reward systems. And so I encourage people to have a practice. I tend to do these things throughout the day in very short microbursts. So like right before I eat, I do, you know, I say a token of gratitude that I have access to resources and I don't know, it makes me feel good and I enjoy my meal, whatever, whatever's going on there, it works. And there's't know, it makes me feel good. And I enjoy my meal, whatever's going on there, it works. And there's data to support that as well. And then the final, I said,

four horsemen of neurotransmitters and remodulators is acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is what allows us to focus. It's what brings that attentional spotlight in like this. And the key thing is, if you want to learn or get better at something, you got to bring that focus in. If you want to relax, you got to dilate that focus. And so I always say, you know, you don't want to spend your whole day with your eyes locked in a little box of any kind. We used to finish a meeting or a gathering with people and you'd walk and you just kind of dilate your gaze now it's immediately and i do this too to my phone little micro relaxations of your visual world where you see the whole room you're in or you see a horizon or you see the parking lot you're

walking through bring that level of acetylcholine back down again and you say well i want to be focused ah but the height of that peak i'm going to be focused. Ah, but the height of that peak, I'm going to sit back here. So it shows the height of that peak of acetylcholine that you can bring your set, your conversation, your learning, whatever it is that you're trying to build, that height of that peak is going to be inversely related to how much you've been able to bring that peak down when you don't need it. In other words, don't spend out all your acetylcholine on trivial little things all day. In between a meeting, take two seconds, maybe 30 seconds, just dilate your gaze, open up your view, try and see a horizon. The best way to do this is just kind of see far into the distance and then go back to work. What you'll notice if you start learning to do these things of toggling back and forth is that when it comes time to sleep at night, or when it comes time to really fully engage, you're going to have much higher levels of engagement and you're going to have much better rest and sleep. That's just the way it works because what you're learning how to do is when I think about it, kind of like a seesaw, I think of like what you're learning to do is

you don't want that hinge in the middle to be too tight. You don't want to be like, go, go, go, go, go. I can't relax. And you don't want to be like, I'm exhausted. You want to be able to ride that hinge across the day. That's what makes you effective. Like when you walk in the gym and I'm making this up because, you know, maybe it's like

some fist bumps and some hellos and stuff, but you know, you're there to do a job and you know, because you're a professional, how to narrow that focus in that regime. Most people get really good at doing this in a one or two regimes of life, but there's great utility to learning how to do this while being with family. Sometimes you want to be at the picnic and you just want to zone out, let it go so that then you can bring it back in. You know, there's a time to disengage and the phone has created an additional problem. So when people say the phone is dopamine, the phone isn't dopamine. What you're getting there, and this is kind of tricky, is you're getting sometimes serotonin. I go on Instagram to see my friends

because I don't see my friends anymore. I'm either in my lab or I'm, you know, in quarantine or whatever it is. I don't see my, so it's social. It's not dopamine. It's serotonin. Now, sometimes there you're getting the adrenaline thing going. It sucks you in and you're playing a game now where you're, you're getting gamed, I should say, where you're getting pulled in down that stress circuit and your eyes are going like this. So it's good to kind of dilate out. And then last thing I'll just mention, sorry, this is becoming a little lecture-like.

I prefer dialogue, but I'll just, because I want to make sure I say this. The hormones associated with serotonin are mainly oxytocin. Okay. This is the, it makes you kind of calmer, want to stay still, helps you sleep in extreme forms. It's prolactin, which is really around like, forget your goals. It's all about the babies. That's what prolactin is for.

It's like, forget, you know, you saw some people get kind of softer when they have babies. That's actually, males actually have a prolactin release associated with having new kids in the house or new babies. It's through the nose. It's a pheromone effect. Dopamine and testosterone, they are best buddies. They hang out like this. And the reason when dopamine levels are high, testosterone levels are able to remain high. Testosterone is, we all know, gives a kind of buoyancy to the nervous system. It allows you to be more in that center of mass forward kind of mode, right? Serotonin is what we need to do in order to not ever be back on our heels, to remain somewhere between flat-footed and forward motion. Hormones are the modulators that modulate the neuromodulators.

This is why a brief period of competition is a great way to release dopamine and testosterone. We know this. Duncan French, actually, he's head of the UFC Training Center, did his graduate be showing this. If you go into a high adrenaline mode for 10 to 30 minutes, there's an associated testosterone increase. Keep that up for, you know, 40 days and you're going to see a depletion, right? Unless you're really careful about your rest. So anyway, sorry to run long on that, but I've been excited to have this conversation,

especially because you guys have the fitness background. I know you know, you know, you speak the language of hormones and neurotransmitters and the mind element to this stuff has just, I think it's, it's been something that's been kind of lacking. And I just hope that, you know, people start to realize that their fitness ability, their, all their goal-driven ability, it relies on also having these periods of rest and learning how to be a good rester, a good sleeper. You got to learn to be a good sleeper. I get a little irritated when people are like, I can't sleep. I can't sleep. What do you do? Are you good? Do you train relaxation? Or people say, I think I have ADD. I'm like, do you train focus? Because you can train focus by just focusing on a point on the

wall for one minute today, minute and five seconds tomorrow, five minutes. And you don't have to do it for an hour, but you're training your brain to focus. People are like, they think that they deserve focus. Like, do I deserve a 600 pound deadlift? No, I haven't done the work. So why should somebody deserve focus? So anyway, can you go into, cause we've had a lot of people on this podcast talk about sleep. So I mean, in, in terms of the way you look at it, cause I feel like there's probably going to be things that you can, a ton of things that you're going to add to that conversation. How, cause I know people who are like, ah, I can't sleep at night or only get like four hours

of sleep or I wake up multiple times a night and they're trying to do all the things like, you know, getting rid of blue light and all these things, but it's not working. What are ways that people can become better sleepers? Yeah, great question. So my lab is working on this and there's a lab in Denmark that's done some really great work on this. I really want to give them credit as well. There's a practice. It has a goofy name, but we've stripped away all the goofiness of it and just taken the physiology out. There's a practice that's out there called Yoga Nidra, N-I-D-R-A, which involves just lying down and you listen to a script. You can find these scripts on YouTube.

I can send you guys the ones that I like. Some of them, it's like a British voice. Some it's a woman's voice. Sometimes you have to pick a voice that works for you. And it basically has you do 10 minutes of kind of like a body scan where you're focusing on different parts of your body and you're using breathing to relax yourself. It's some long exhale breathing. The beauty of this practice is twofold. First of all, it trains you to activate your so-called parasympathetic nervous system. The relaxation arm of the autonomic nervous system teaches you to self-relax. Okay. So that's useful because most people don't know how to do that. It allows you to fall asleep faster. It allows you to stay asleep better. And the cool thing is, so this lab in Denmark showed that it replenishes levels of dopamine in this area of

the brain called the basal ganglia, which are involved in motor commands. So when it resets the brain, so to speak, using very coarse language, but it kind of resets your brain. The fun thing for us in our lab was that we started to see that it puts the brain into states that are very similar to sleep, even though you're awake. So with all due respect to the great sleep researchers out there, I fundamentally disagree that you can't replace sleep that you've lost. First of all, there's no sleep bank. There's no like counter or timer. I think about it, and this came to me because you can imagine in like first responder communities, special operations communities, sleep is sometimes, it's not dictated.

You know, those guys are sometimes on the vampire shift, right? So you can't really negotiate with it that well. But having practices that allow you to access states of mind that then allow you to be in sharper mental and focus and physical output are powerful. Yoga Nidra is a good example one. And I'd be happy to send you guys a script that we could post someplace of the one that we use in our lab. It involves lying down, long exhale breathing. You want to direct just enough of your attention so that you keep somebody engaged. The problem with pure meditation, where it's just kind of like third eye meditation, is the mind drifts. You got to give people something to hold on to, just enough. But then all of a sudden, what you find is the brain starts

going to really deep states of relaxation. And if you do this for a few days in a row, what you find is you start dropping really close to sleep. Sometimes you even think you're asleep, but at the end, it says, okay, you can open your eyes and people kind of open their eyes. It's a little bit like hypnosis. And just to be clear, hypnosis is very powerful. I have a colleague, David Spiegel, in the Department of Psychiatry at Stanford, who's a world expert in clinical hypnosis. Similar, bringing people into a deep state of relaxation. I think everybody should have a 10 minute a day practice like this. It's also great if you wake up in the middle of the night and you can't fall back asleep, it can help

you fall back asleep. So have a practice to get better at sleeping if you're not a great sleeper. The other thing is that I'm really a big fan of for sleep is like, let's understand what wakes us up from sleep. The number one reason for waking up from sleep is you have to urinate, you have to go to the bathroom. That is because, and this isn't glamorous neuroscience, but it's factual. I teach neuroanatomy to graduate medical students and graduate students. There is a direct nerve connection from the bladder to the brainstem, reticular activating system. So when the bladder is full, it makes you alert, wakes you up.

So people should be tapering in their water intake off later in the day. We, yes, we want to be hydrated, but limit most of your drinking water. I'm not going to talk about your other drinking and that's up to you to early in the day. Okay. So obviously you don't want to be dehydrated, but if your sleep is a priority, you can't afford to be too thirsty or too full of water in the middle of the night. as a priority, you can't afford to be too thirsty or too full of water in the middle of the night. So that's an important one. The other thing is see morning light, getting sunlight. You don't have to see the sunrise, but see light within an hour of waking does something really powerful. You have a natural cortisol pulse that that triggers, that sets your tone of wakefulness

for the entire day. And then 16 hours after that, it starts to taper off and you get your pulse of melatonin, natural pulse of melatonin, which will induce sleep. Now, a lot of people who have trouble staying asleep, they have plenty of melatonin, but they're not staying asleep. And that's probably because they're not seeing the evening light. You also want to see light right about the time the sun goes down. There's two studies now that shows that that really anchors all these hormones in the right way. Remember, hormones are working on the timescale of hours, days, and weeks. So cortisol is kind of like, be alert. It promotes acetylcholine, noradrenaline throughout the day. It's kind of like dopamine.

Then it tapers down. Then that melatonin pulse, boom. And now you've got serotonin, the stuff that slow-wave sleep for recovery and for brain plasticity. But having that practice of 10 minutes a day where you just chill out is really good. The other thing is just have a period of chilling out. Maybe that's on your phone. That's fine. But even better, just deliberately decompress. Even better, elevate your feet.

Why do you sleep on the plane and get off the plane? You slept four or five hours and you feel like garbage. You sleep four or five hours in a bed, you feel much better. Well, brain perfusion. They've done studies now at Stanford and elsewhere showing that if the placement of the head relative to the feet dictates how much, if my head is here, I'm not perfusing as much just by, you know, like mechanics and fluid, not perfusing the brain as much, not clearing out as much of the debris that accumulates in sleep, especially in areas of the brain, like the hypothalamus,

the control kind of core functions like anxiety. So sleep with your feet slightly elevated or during the day, if you're going to kick back and look at your phone or read a book or do nothing, elevate your feet a little bit, get them above your heart. And you're, and you're going to kick back and look at your phone or read a book or do nothing, elevate your feet a little bit, get them above your heart. And you're, and you're going to feel replenished when you stand up. Some people like I have an inversion table just because I like those things. It's kind of just fun to hang upside down. That's taken it a little bit to the extreme, but I do use it for that reason. I just figure, you know, drop a bunch of fluid into my brain and then slosh it out and, you

know, get back to work. But, you know, that's a little bit, you don't need to do that. So you can get better at sleeping. And then I would be remiss if I didn't talk about supplementation. Look, if you're doing all the behaviors and it should always be behaviors first, but there are supplements that can make you a much better sleeper. And I want to be very clear. I don't have a supplement company. So this is just, I want to refer everybody to examine.com. Great website. You can put in any supplement. It's got the human effect matrix with links to studies. It'll tell you if it was done in postmenopausal women, or it was done in prepubescent kids, like it was mice. You can get all the nitty gritty there, but three supplements

in particular have radically transformed my sleep, just speaking from my own experience, not my lab's work. And it's what I recommend to people if they're doing a lot of other things well and they're having trouble sleeping. First one is magnesium threonate, T-H-R-E-O-N-A-T-E. It's a form of magnesium that acts as a little bit of a sedative and it promotes promote slow wave sleep it it which is the really deep restorative sleep a cocktail of magnesium 3 and a i think it's like 366 milligrams of elemental but then 2000 of the kind of you can look at but basically i don't want to recommend brands because that gets dicey and then it's i want to stay unbiased but it's all basically the same as far as I can tell. The companies will probably say different. But the other one is theanine, T-H-E-A-N-I-N-E.

You're seeing theanine now showing up in coffee and in energy drinks because it removes jitters. The reason it removes jitters is that, and it acts as a sedative, is it promotes the release of GABA, which is a neurotransmitter that kind of shuts down the forebrain. So people have a hard time turning off their thinking. That can be helpful because in order to fall asleep, you got to turn off your thinking. Again, I recommend behaviors like yoginidra first, but if you're going to go to supplementation, theanine is good. 100 to 200 milligrams, maybe 300 milligrams. If you're a sleepwalker or you have really vivid dreams, back off on the theanine because it'll get you like spooky, crazy, fun, wild dreams. But if you are a sleepwalker, that's not good. And then the third one is a supplement that hardly anyone knows about, but it's really an interesting one called apigenin, A-P-I-G-E-N-I-N. It's actually a

derivative of chamomile and it acts as a sedative. Great for men. It's actually a potent estrogen inhibitor, but not great for women. It's a potent estrogen inhibitor. So just 50 milligrams of that in that cocktail is great. Now, all of these fortunately are very inexpensive and easy to find. And I just want to put a box around it that's not what my lab works on this is stuff that i've been involved in researching a bit and my own experience and again i think supplements should be the you know i would say there's behavior which includes mindset but like not like mother nature installed technology work those first then there's nutrition gotta have your nutrition right then there's those first. Then there's nutrition. Got to have your nutrition right.

Then there's supplementation. And then there's drugs. And always best if you can work up that staircase, stopping where you need to stop based on your lifestyle issues and that kind of thing. So I think a lot of people jump in here. They're like, Ambien. And I do not recommend supplementing melatonin. For those of you who are testosterone conscious, melatonin's primary role is not to make you sleepy. Its primary role is to suppress puberty during development through suppression of GNRH,

gonadotropin releasing hormone. So it's what keeps kids from going into puberty. They have tonically high melatonin and it's what keeps kids from going into puberty. They have tonically high melatonin and it's also what makes them sleep a lot. So people are taking a lot of melatonin, are taking hyper physiological doses of a, of a hormone legally, right? Unlike other hormones, you can just go buy melatonin, which is weird, but okay. But it's suppressing the, basically the androgen axis. And in women, it's suppressing the basically the androgen axis. And in women, it's suppressing the estrogen axis. And people come at me a lot when I say this, they're like, well,

it's mostly mouse studies. Okay. Like take your melatonin. That's up to you. But I don't think it's a good idea. And Matt Walker, who wrote, why would we sleep would also say that melatonin, I think I'm quoting him correctly. Forgive me if I'm not Matt, that it helps you fall asleep, but not stay asleep. So that's kind of the kit around sleep that I think I'm quoting him correctly. Forgive me if I'm not, Matt, that it helps you fall asleep but not stay asleep. So that's kind of the kit around sleep that I think can help. And becoming a better sleeper is a great skill to focus on because I do think you want to stay off your phone in the middle of the night. Don't wake up and start looking at your phone.

There's so many studies now, two in particular, that show that it suppresses dopamine release for the following two days. Like it triggers a kind of active depression and that dopamine now that hopefully i've drawn a box around it also is like you want to protect and enhance and nourish your dopamine that and how to activate it you don't want anything pushing back on it do you um have any information about anything in particular you can do to get stronger? Because we've talked about the central nervous system. We touched upon it a little bit, and I figured who better to ask than somebody like yourself. I mean, you know, if you're saying the eyes are kind of an extension of the central nervous system and of the brain, is there things we can do with our eyes that would maybe perhaps, uh, enhance

performance in a sport or something like that? Yeah, that's a great question. So this is really getting out into the, um, like the outer margins of the stuff that I'm doing, um, these days. And so I'm happy to talk about it. I just want to, uh, you know, highlight it as, you know, you know, highlighted as, you know, speculative slash work in progress. Yeah. So, so this is interesting. You know, there's some, there's some practices that have been used mainly in Eastern countries about using, so the visual system and the vestibular system, we know this as fact are very tightly linked. So it works like this. So this is pitch, yaw, and roll for the pilots out there.

They recognize that. Pitch, yaw, and roll. When you move your head or you walk through space, things are moving around on your retina, but you don't experience them as blurry like you would if you took a picture on your phone and moved your phone. You experience them as stationary. them as blurry like you would if you took a picture on your phone and moved your phone you experience them as stationary because when you move your head like this or like this or like this there's signals that are sent to your balance system of your inner ears you've got little stones that either roll forward roll like this or roll like this believe it or not and those

are registering you've got like a little gyroscope in your in your inner ear and it's linked to your eyes so that every time I move my head, like immediately the visual image is stationary. I see it as crisp because it's literally making a little tiny eye movement. It's forcing an involuntary eye movement that's making sure that the visual image is stationary. Now, why is this relevant? Well, once you start to understand the visual system and the balance system are linked, there are these interesting portals through which they interact. And one of the ones that people in the strength community and sprinting community have used

is before they'll do an exercise where they want to increase range of motion, this is not strength. They'll stand stationary and they'll literally move their eyes to the corners of their periphery, up, down, far corners of their periphery, extending their visual gaze. That sends signals to the vestibular system, which sends signals to the cerebellum, which is where your motor programs are memorized. So when you reach down to grab a bar to deadlift, that's a motor program that's not stored in your hippocampus, that's stored in your cerebellum, your motor programs. And what they figured out is that range of motion

is greater after they do these really extended eye movements. Why? Because the cerebellum communicates with the spindles in the muscles and connective tissues and joints that allows joints to move further in space because you are looking further in visual space. If you're cramming your vision into a little box like this, your range of motion and your ability to recruit muscle fibers is more restricted too. It sounds crazy, but it's a real thing.

So one could imagine playing with this, hitting threshold in a lift and then expanding gaze if the limitation is based on an inability to recruit musculature that is involved in range of motion. Now, I think failure at a particular point in a set is unlikely to be a range of motion issue. It's probably going to be a motor unit recruitment issue. So how can you recruit more motor units and do this through strength? It's probably going to be the opposite. It's going to be by bringing that visual focus in more narrow. Now, there are old, I love digging through ancient literature and kind of pulling out practices that then we can put some modern science to. There is this idea, you know, that the myth of the Cyclops, like one eye, like in the middle of its head, the Cyclops, one of the elements of the myth of the Cyclops is that with that unitary focus and one eye, that there was enormous strength, inability to see possibility, but enormous strength. vision was actually restricted to a more narrow point and looking at lift efficiency or recruitment

of motor units. I have not seen that study. Maybe we should tee up that study at some point. But when you, I mean, you hit on it exactly, Mark, when you think about that the eyes are a guidance system for the rest of the brain to drive focus and tap into these neuromodulators, of the brain to drive focus and tap into these neuromodulators like acetylcholine and dopamine and norepinephrine, then it doesn't seem so crazy that you would use vision as a portal to manipulate the rest of the nervous system. And of course, deliberate lifts are the reflection of nervous system engagement. So I think there's room for exploration there. Maybe you guys would want to run some experiments. We could do some fun ones with VR because in VR, I can slap the goggles on you and I can have you still see what you're doing and I can dilate or change your gaze in real time and I control it, right? Or we

control it. So that might be a fun experiment that we could do. And I do talk to the folks over at Stanford Athletics. That might be a fun little platform to set up because if you think about narrowing your focus, but then it kind of snaps wide, that's, that's different than if I'm controlling it experimentally, that's the utility of science. So I would encourage not just getting that kind of, you know, people call eye of the tiger or whatever. I think I have a cyclops, like, you know, like really narrowing in that gaze and going, but as you hit, like, I would love to see, for instance, dilation of gaze, focus of gaze, dilation of gaze, focus of gaze while moving through the set. That might be interesting too. And I think ultimately when you look at recovery, I think this is slightly separate, but I think of recovery as beginning the second that you

end that set for the next set, obviously. And physiological size, dilation of gaze are going to be quick ways to bring your nervous system down to a state of more parasympathetic activation. You're no longer spending out dopamine and acetylcholine at the same rate. So I don't know. You guys are the experts in this. I would love to get feedback if you start to play with this at all. I can say personally, my last rep of every set is a physiological side.

I set down the weight and then I do that because I'm trying to teach. I use the weight room as a platform to teach my nervous system how to go through these oscillations deliberately. I don't want to just be a slave to whatever reflex nervous system how to go through these oscillations deliberately. I don't want to just be a slave to whatever reflexive breathing I've got going. Anyway, I'm speculating there. But if you end up putting, maybe soon you'll be going in the gym with blinders on like a horse, but who knows? What about colors?

Anything with colors? So this is interesting. So very good data that bright light of all kinds, but in particular blue light between the hours, 11 PM and 4 PM suppress that dopamine circuit through a brain area called the habanula weird brain area. Not good. Just stay off the damn phone in the middle of the night. If you need to do a yoga nidra or something, then fall back to sleep. Fine. Read a book. If you absolutely need to look at your phone because you work in the middle of the night or you really can't sleep and Netflix helps you get back to sleep, really dim it down really low. Blue blockers, optional. I think it's more about

the brightness of light. I used to say I didn't believe in any of this red light stuff. I wasn't a big fan, but there's some data that just came out of University College London from a guy's lab who I know well and respect. He kind of surprised me. I thought he was kind of out of the business. red light early in the day, um, things, I guess there are companies that make them, but I don't think they were using those in particular, just red light can, um, really can increase mitochondrial function in the eyes and potentially, um, hold off vision loss and enhance vision. Um, that's still early days. I don't have anything to do with that research, but I'm very intrigued by that. I don't know how I feel about all the light on the skin type thing. Colors, like the idea that pink calms you and other colors, I think that's been mostly dispelled. I don't think that there's a lot there. I mean, let's think about what we know works. Anything that can induce low levels of stress

will give you focus. So why are smelling salts so effective? Smelling salts are ammonia. Ammonia is a toxin. You breathe that in and you do two things. Your system goes, poison. The amygdala, that's what it does. It's not like it's poison. And all of a sudden, it's like, oh my goodness.

You get this pulse of adrenaline that sharpens your focus. It wakes you up. And incidentally, it triggers that double inhale, exhale. So it's like, and it's like your system tries to calm itself and it's kind of in that way. So that's why guys go, and then they're like, and then they're like, and then they kind of go, you know, beast mode on whatever it is they're doing, which when you're doing competition lists or you're really working for PRs makes total sense. There's a mental equivalent of that that's very individual. I'm not aware of any specific colors. We know that things like songs are really good anchors. I am always a little bit surprised when I see guys yelling and screaming because they're spending norepinephrine. I don't know what your

practice is for you guys. Um, but there's a, there's probably a psych up mode that involves spending adrenaline, you know? And I think about it like, um, you can see this a lot with like open chain movements versus closed chain movements. There are some movements in the gym that give you energy. Have you noticed that you do them and you're like, and then there are other ones that deplete you in particular jumping, jumping, or like anything where you're throwing energy out. Now in Qigong type language, it's like energy and energy out. This is just nervous system. When you're closed chain, energy out. This is just nervous system. When you're closed chain, you're activating motor units to be more active, right? To be more active. When you're open chain movements,

you're activating motor units to be less active afterwards. And I think people that are more skilled and versed in muscle physiology than I am understand this. Like you've got central pattern generators. So when you get into repetitive movements that are closed chain, you're building energy into the nervous system and increasing contractile ability. If I throw a medicine ball 20 times and I'm throwing it across the room, I'm literally training my, excuse me, I'm training my motor neurons, which control the muscles, to release energy and relax because that's the movement. So I think that in the world of strength and speed and explosiveness and all this, I think there are definitely people who are thinking about this, but the nervous system element hasn't been leveraged to its full capacity yet. If anyone wants to reach out and have discussions about this, I'd be happy to do it. Maybe we should think up some fun experiments that we could do.

I think there's a huge depth of opportunity there. And the reason the discussion hasn't really happened, to be honest, is because until very recently, most of the stuff I described today was just not known, wasn't published, or there were these little scant articles here and there, or sat in common sense like, yeah, don't drink too much water before you go to bed, duh. But then everyone's hydrating like crazy and waking up in the middle of the night now. And so technology tends to take us into new territories, and then we realize that,, well, we got to make some adjustments and kind of come back. So anyway. Cool. Um, go ahead. You mentioned, uh, acetylcholine earlier and my ears perk up cause I'm such a nerd for nootropics and stuff. Um, so my question, um, is could we take a precursor like alpha-GPC that hopefully can convert to acetylcholine

later? If we can do that orally, how much do we need to actually take to actually feel something from it? Okay, great question. So, we did not talk about supplements to promote the four horsemen of the nervous system, but they are out there. I'll repeat it. I'm not a doctor. I'm a professor. Check with your doctor. I don't want you guys or me getting in any trouble. These are neuromodulators. They work. They will shift your state of mind. Let's talk about dopamine first. You can go out and buy L-Dopa, mucunipurines. Go to your health food store, you can get dopamine. It's a bad idea. Why is it a bad idea? This is a bad idea, the same reason cocaine is a bad idea. It's so close to the actual molecule

that you're trying to promote that you're training your nervous system to only release that molecule under very narrow sets of conditions. This is why cocaine leads to so many problems is because pretty soon it becomes the only thing that can trigger dopamine release. And then pursuit of cocaine becomes the only thing. And pretty soon people are in that vicious loop. Okay. For most people, right? That's, that's the way it works. Same with amphetamine for noradrenaline and dopamine, amphetamine, methamphetamine, noradrenaline and dopamine. Those are the pathways that triggers. However, if you work back to the precursors, so you mentioned precursors, that's where it starts to get interesting. L-tyrosine is the precursor in the dopamine synthesis pathway. Where do you get L-tyrosine? Well, red meat is a rich source of L-tyrosine, certain nuts, choline for acetylcholine. No surprise that those

molecules are involved in those pathways. You can make up an evolutionary biology story about why that would be so, but let's just skip the just so story and say, well, this is the reason why red meat, in particular red meat, not white meats, but red meats, promote a sort of pro-aggression, pro-outward-facing mindset. Now, that's not true if you eat three ribeyes, because anytime your gut is full, you're going to send a signal that's a rest and digest signal just based on volume of food in the gut. But let's say you want to make more acetylcholine and dopamine. Well, maybe Charles Poliquin wasn't so crazy with the whole meat, not breakfast, or maybe you take it a step further and you fast until 10 or 11 a.m. because fasting releases adrenaline, right? Because it puts you in a mode of agitation and movement. And then you're doing sort of low-carb-ish meat nut during the day. And then as you transition to night, if it's in your protocol and you're not pure carnivore or keto, you're eating things that promote serotonin release like turkey.

Tryptophan is the precursor for serotonin, right? So short answer, if you want to increase dopamine, L-tyrosine, the range of 500 to 1,000 milligrams is very powerful at increasing dopamine. You will feel it. It's like, and you're going to feel awesome. You're going to really, really have an energy and enthusiasm you didn't have otherwise. Now, if you have issues with mania or anti, or you're taking antidepressants, don't go near it, please. Because it's essentially

like an antidepressant, like Wellbutrin. The antidepressant Wellbutrin was created as a dopamine agonist. It makes people a little agitated, but it was created because Prozac, which is a serotonin agonist, was making people too calm. They weren't hungry. Their sex drive was gone because remember, serotonin makes you feel like you got everything you need. So L-tyrosine can promote dopamine release. I would much rather see people do nothing or take L-tyrosine than see people taking L-macunipurines, which is L-DOPA. But for acetylcholine, choline and alpha-GPC are the precursors. So nuts, choline, alpha-GPC, those will increase acetylcholine. And two meaningful

changes can combine with the right mindset and action can have a really positive effect. So I have a good friend, he's a physician and he always says, look, better living through chemistry still requires better living. So there's no single pill that's obviously that's going to send you down the right path, but you know, these are things that can help steer. Serotonin, people take 5-HP. They're like, Oh, you know, this became popular in the nineties when the whole rave culture and people were taking ecstasy. And then they were like, they were depleted in serotonin and they would take five HTP, very dangerous thing to get into regularly. Frankly, um, five HTP is so close to the serotonin that

you can start to really disrupt the serotonin pathways. And they're involved in a lot of important things you don't want to tinker with. If you want to adjust serotonin levels, it's going to be high complex carbohydrates, white meats, in particular Turkey. And if you're going to supplement, it could be L-tryptophan or it could be something like, um, the theanine magnesium stack that we talked about earlier. So precursors work. And just like with hormone augmentation, I guess now not so

controversial topic, you can take testosterone cypionate. I'm obviously not making that recommendation, but people certainly do that. If that's up to them. I don't judge. Or people can take growth hormone or they can take secretagogues. Secretagogues work upstream from those hormone pathways. Every doctor, every athlete knows, every human knows the further you are from the actual molecule that you're trying to create, the further up that pathway you are, the better off you're going to be because you're not going to get down on regulation. So the same logic that you could see in the kind of performance enhancing drugs community, you start to see in the neurotransmitter enhancing community. And it's going to be very interesting in the Olympics coming up.

Sprinters have long abused, I don't want to say abused because it's like, again, I don't judge, have long used tools to increase dopamine and acetylcholine because the sprint is one on who gets out the blocks first. So they've been doing this for a very long time because it's all about hearing the gun, especially since now you don't get multiple defaults, hearing the gun and getting out the blocks fast. And that is 100% focus and reaction time. Old sprinters retire because they lose that ability and they use precursors, rampant use of precursors, which I think, you know, fine with me, rampant use of precursors to stimulate nerve transmission and focus. And it's choline alpha GPC L-tyrosine.

How about, you know, recommendation for a podcaster? I've tried pretty much everything from the racetam family. I've tried a theanine that seems to work for me pretty well to get rid of like the pregame jitters. But do you yourself take anything before like a presentation? Um, or like, would you recommend a certain nootropic for, uh, formulating better sentences and just kind of

being a better, you know, talker? Yeah. Um, yeah, I get, I basically get paid to think and talk, you know, but, uh, yeah, you can tell that talking thing is, yeah, I done a little bit of it, but the, here's the deal with new tropics. I'm going to lose some friends by saying this, but let's look at, let's just do it. I'll answer by analogy. Let's say that I want to get more physically fit. Well, there's strength, there's explosiveness, there's mobility, there's, uh, you know, flexibility. I mean, I feel bad cause I'm Kelly Starrett would like correct, would add five more of these. I know you guys are friends

of Kelly and yeah, it's great guy. Love, love Kelly. And what, you know, he and Juliet are doing is awesome. Um, there's all these dimensions to it, right? And then you say, like, nootropic, they just call a smart drug. It's almost like the equivalent of like fit drug. And what we need to think about is, where are we struggling? Is it focus? Is it task switching? Is it creativity? Are we struggling with task implementation? You know, these are each different states of mind. And so when I look at most nootropics, excuse me, maybe I need some, when I take a look at most nootropics, I just kind of gasp. It would be like the equivalent of like a weight gainer combined with like, you know, a bunch of like fat burners combined with a bunch of like, it's just the,

it's the kitchen sink. And it's just like, what state of mind are we trying to achieve? So I don't know you well enough to say, but I would say that my guess is you have certain attributes that make you powerful at, let's say, task implementation or strategy development, but maybe task switching is harder. I don't know. I'm not basing on any interaction here. So right now there's no drug, there's no supplement that can support those specific modes of action. I think I would start by saying, okay, is it lack of focus that really is the problem? In which case, maybe the acetylcholine pathway is the one to tickle. focus that really is the problem, in which case maybe the acetylcholine pathway is the one to tickle. And then maybe also develop a practice of learning to focus better through a behavioral

practice. Obviously, supporting sleep is going to get your ability to focus much better because you need that rest. Quickest way to pull apart somebody's brain is just sleep deprived. And that's the reason they use that at BUDS.vation, cold exposure to non-lethal approaches to pulling human nervous systems apart. You turn grown men into confused children. Most of them, not all of them, obviously the guys that get through are the guys that can regulate their nervous system under those conditions. So what I would say is, um, and again, I'll lose some friends on this. I'm not a fan of the racetams. I think it's too intense. I think it's just, it's setting and you're tinkering with neural circuitry that we don't

fully understand yet. I say low doses of caffeine, maybe put theanine in there if you need to take the edge off a bit. Sometimes if your brain is kind of monkey mind, as they call it, sometimes bringing more noise into the system, a song on repeat, a metronome in the background is good. I'll be honest. Most people struggle with focus because of the phone, my practice for the phone. I have two practices. First, I try and keep it away from me upside down. That doesn't work. I'll turn it off. So I guess I have

four practices. If that doesn't work, I'll put it in a safe and lock it. And if that doesn't work. I'll turn it off. So I guess I have four practices. If that doesn't work, I'll put it in a, in a safe and lock it. And if that doesn't work and this has happened to me, I've literally thrown the phone up on the roof. I'm like, I'll get it at the end of the day. Because I mean, your ability to perform well in any endeavor is going to be proportional to your ability to focus. And we're carrying around an active distractor and the distractors are amazing. and we're carrying around an active distractor. And the distractors are amazing. I mean, think about the stuff that can come to you through that phone. It's working all the aspects of your nervous system,

biology, primitive and evolved to distract you. And it's fair. It is totally, I know this isn't the answer you were looking for, but it is totally within bounds to decide that you're going to eliminate the major distractor. It's literally like having a little, I don't even want to say a little kid. Cause it could be like having pick your, pick your poison, pick your favorite distractor. It's like having that

pulling on your ankle all day long. And it's a beautiful tool, but we have to be aware of what that is. And I think everyone's mind is now going to what that distractor is. And we know, I mean, it's like primitive biology is the best distractor. So I would say work the supplements if it makes sense to you, but I would definitely invoke a behavioral practice as well. And I would say, if you want a tool, which is a tool that I think we were going to go here, but one of the most powerful things we can do to learn how to speak is in scientific language, you learn how to make simple declarative sentences. I didn't really do that too much today. I kind of interjected in

myself a lot, woven in a lot of different elements, tangents and things like that. But one of the most clear and precise forms of language is simple declarative sentences. And that takes effort. But if you can do that, it doesn't matter how quickly you communicate. In fact, it doesn't matter how much chatter you do. You guys are actually very effective at this. I noticed this. It's always the big calm guys in the room. Simple declarative sentences will get you much further in communication than will like tangents and stories and things like that and i i my default is a little bit more tangent but i've been i also wanted to take this opportunity this you know 90 minutes or so

to cram in as much information as i could because there's a limited opportunity. I wanted to ask this because you mentioned it a little bit earlier in the episode, how neuroplasticity, you know, you're not, your brain isn't as, I'd say, plastic or you can't change certain pathways as easily past the age of 25 to 28. And when you're a kid, it's much easier to learn new things, much easier to pick up new ideas and learn about them, right? And that worries a lot of people, including myself. So I was curious, what practices can people take or things that they can be doing day to day that can allow them to learn new things, get rid of bad pathways or bad habits and form new ones that are going to be of more benefit to them if they're older? Yeah, great question. So we now know that neuroplasticity is the consequence of two

steps in a process. And this is non-childhood plasticity. Child plasticity, the whole brain is set up for plasticity. So the best thing we can do is try and ensure good experiences for them and diverse range of experiences. And, um, obviously trying to avoid trauma and these kinds of things. If people have traumas, that's a separate issue, like getting through trauma. Um, that's probably a whole other podcast discussion, um, ways of purging trauma. There are everything from holotropic breathing to psychotherapy to psychedelics, right? There's a ton of categories to go down. For adults, the two steps of the process of plasticity are extreme focus and extreme rest. And the rest does not have to be sleep.

So the actual rewiring of brain circuitry occurs during sleep and non-sleep rest. There's a beautiful study just published on this that 20 minute naps or deliberate deep compression after a learning episode just tuning out can enhance the plasticity process speed it up etc now extreme focus is hard no one should beat up on themselves if their mind drifts and comes back. Everyone does that. I think some people think that they aren't focusing and that certain people can just focus in a tunnel all the time. We have an obsession with flow. And I'm friends with Steven Kotler and I always tease him like, this concept of flow is so attractive.

This idea, there's this space where everything's working great. I would say flow is when everything's going the way you want it to. And it is a real and interesting and meaningful state of mind. And I'm doing some work with Steven and those guys to try and tap into it a little bit more and figure out what the science is. But don't chase flow. Chase intense focus and then intense relaxation. The intense focus should last as long as you can maintain intense focus,

plus a little bit more. I say plus a little bit more time because that's going to encourage plasticity of the focusing system itself, and you'll get better at it. Work done by my colleague at Stanford who's now retired, but beautiful work that still stands, a guy named Eric Knudsen, showed that under conditions of high attention, literally because of acetylcholine and short bouts of intense effort and learning can promote the plasticity process in adulthood best. And that's because of the neuromodulators that creates acetylcholine access, kind of like a highlighter pen for the synapses that need to change. Those changes occur later in these periods

of rest and deep sleep, mainly slow wave sleep. So for people wearing whoop or aura, and you're looking at your sleep, the proportion of deep sleep, slow wave sleep is the thing to pay attention to. So I think that having a plasticity practice that's geared around learning specific things is way more important and more scientifically grounded than just having like plasticity. People talk about plasticity. They're like, bro, I'm microdosing psilocybin for 30 days. I'm like, why? And they're like, I want plasticity. I'm like, cool. What are you trying to change? And they're like, huh? I'm like, they're just plasticity. That's crazy

and potentially dangerous. That experiment was run in the sixties. Okay. That's called changing your brain without a specific end goal in mind. It's called opening up the opportunity for plasticity without directing it down a particular path. Now I am, first of all, I can't, the legality is still an issue, right? Cause these things are illegal. So I'm obviously not going to encourage people to use them, but psychedelics do hold some First of all, the legality is still an issue, right? Because these things are illegal. So I'm obviously not going to encourage people to use them. But psychedelics do hold some interesting therapeutic potential. There are labs looking at this.

There are clinical trials. But all of those are geared towards specific endpoints. So am I going to give people a hard time for taking psilocybin? No, it's not my job. I'm not a cop. I'm a scientist. However, I think people need to think about what is it I'm trying to change. Am I trying to learn a language? Am I trying to be more empathic? Am I trying to be more focused? Am I trying to like eliminate some negative self-talk or even better, am I

trying to build in some growth mindset? So what is it that they're doing? And if you're going to use a pharmaceutical regime, understand that that opens the plasticity window, but there is nothing that's going to occur during that sitting. I don't care who the shaman is. I don't care what it is that's going to happen in that bubble that is as important as the tail and everything that happens for the three or four weeks afterward. Okay. So if people are going to hit this with a pharmaceutical or a drug approach, understand the plasticity doesn't happen then. You think it does because it's some sort of peak experience. Plasticity occurs in the days and weeks of sleep afterward. approach. I think for most people, especially kids, right, or young adults, you still have some plasticity. Tap into that plasticity through focused bouts of extreme effort, incrementally extending that effort, and then learning to relax. So it kind of goes back to

the theme we talked about earlier, learning to focus, learning to dial out that focus. And it works. When you talk to people in really high-performing, high-consequence communities, they all have a mantra of crawl, walk, run. They understand crawl, walk, run. Everybody wants that. I'm not saying you were asking this, but I'm just kind of like reading into the dialogue I hear out there in the world. Everybody wants that trampoline. It's going to trampoline them up to the 15th floor. And it's like, uh-uh, Everybody wants that trampoline. It's going to trampoline them up to the 15th floor.

And it's like, it's a staircase. That 15th floor that you trampoline to is imaginary. There is no trampoline. You'll, you come crashing back down and there, it's not to say there isn't some utility to these things, but the staircase is the key. And the cool thing about the staircase approach to plasticity or the staircase approach to making any of the kinds of changes we talked about today about focus, sleep, self-reward, et cetera, is early on the stairs are set further apart. But because of plasticity, as you get better at the process, the stairs start to become shorter and in between. And pretty soon

it does become easier to run that. I kind of think of it like a spiral staircase. But early on, it's always going to be more of a struggle. And I think most people don't get past that first five or ten stairs because they don't know how to use self-reward. They're looking outward. They're like that infant, like, eh, it's uncomfortable. And they're looking elsewhere, and they're not working these neural circuits that are deep within them that are built for this kind of thing. So I don't mean to be vague about it. I could say crossword puzzles. I could say learning games. But I think whatever you put your mind to, it should be specific. And you want to dig in hard and then relax. Dig in hard and then relax. one or two sessions today. We can learn from kids though. An element of play is powerful. It play keeps that norepinephrine dopamine balance just right. So if you can approach learning an instrument as an adult, as like, all right, maybe your dream is to be on stage someday.

Maybe it's just to not sound terrible, but the idea is like, it's playful. You're going to be able to work with it. The famous scientist and physicist, Nobel prize winner, Richard Feynman. This is a guy who learned how to paint in his late sixties. He learned a bongo drum in his sixties. He was kind of wild, man. He liked bongo drum naked on the roof of Caltech. Nowadays I get you fired, but he was kind of a wild one, but he had this sense of play. And I think he used it as a way to kind of not go over that edge where it was like, damn it, I'm not getting it. It was like kind of fun. You know, you can keep that going. And I think that we should, we should all invoke a little bit of play in our,

in our mindset and our orientation toward learning, because a lot of people are dead at the gate because they're like, I got to do this thing. I need to learn. I don't get dementia or whatever. Like you're, you spent out all your norepinephrine. You don't have any room to learn or to focus. You mentioned previously in the podcast, you mentioned some of the different parts of the brain and you mentioned them with their scientific names. Are you aware, you know, does someone like Einstein, Tesla, Jeff Bezos, Martin Luther King, Neil deGrasse Tyson, do any of these people have like, are you aware they have some extra thing that we're unaware of that we don't have? Do they have something that we don't currently have access to for ourselves? That's a really interesting question.

So I haven't seen the scans, but there are people who have looked at Einstein's brain. Some people say more glia, more of the support cells. Look, Einstein had absence seizures. He was probably a little bit on the Asperger's autism spectrum. He was able to, he used to walk along, absence seizures, walking along and all of a sudden, my screen's not frozen. You just, he would just drift. You would just go off into thought. Okay. Nowadays we'd be like, the guy's a tweaker. Like what's go, what's going on with this guy? He's, he's weird. People who are creative tend to exist in kind of a different

space time regime than most people. Right. If you talk to somebody who's a really creative musician or like, have you ever seen an interview with Bob Dylan or like, you know, I'm not, I was about to name someone else's name in the fitness community. There's some people who are definitely weird and they tend to be lateral thinkers. They're not, they can't make simple declarative sentences. They can't structure their can't make simple declarative sentences. They can't structure their thinking. And that's an asset to them because they are paid for integrating information in new ways that most people haven't occurred to people. People who take psychedelics, it's the same.

People take a lot of psychedelics. They get this kind of fluid space time thing. In fact, they do what's called clang associations. psychedelics, they get this kind of fluid space time thing. In fact, they do what's called clang associations, clang associations. I say like, um, those are cool headphones, tones, bones. My dog's got big bones. And you go like, how'd we get there? And it's just by the sound of the words actually. So it's random except by the sound and the definition of psychosis. There's a fine line between creativity and psychosis, because the psychosis is literally ascribing meaning, giving meaning to things that don't have meaning. Right? So if I suddenly say, hey, you know, that picture behind you guys,

it's talking to me, you guys can be like, okay, this guy's crazy, right? So we have rules that we all obey. And some people break those rules just enough that they're able to tap into something. But those people who are hyper creative usually have someone else to handle the implementation part, right? Musicians who are very creative have people who handle all the other stuff. This is why I always caution people about going too far down one chemical path. Whereas other people, you can imagine, and I know some people like this from the tech community who are very, very functional, multi-billionaires, done very well at a young age, and they are hyper-linear, hyper-linear. And that's the world they live in, like this. It's like A, then B, then C, then D. Their ability to focus is outrageous. And generally in business, you're going to find that people, as long as they don't offend anyone to the point where the HR department that fires them, scientists, engineers,

people in tech are going to be, people in finance are going to be very good at linear operations. Okay. I don't know Bezos. Obviously what he's created is incredible. My guess is his brain has engaged and has some predisposition, but then he obviously worked the plasticity down that pathway. Elon's an interesting and important example because it's obvious he has a very linear ability, but he also thinks really outside the box. Very playful too. Very playful. Like a little kid. And so he's unique.

I think there's a reason why we hold him in such high regard. And so I can't speak to any one particular brain region. What I do know is that people tend to chase things that they shouldn't chase. So in my observation, we are all born with some slight leaning of our nervous system toward an enhanced ability to focus or an enhanced ability for lateral thinking and these kinds of things. And sure, experience will play a role. Lord knows probably early drug taking played a role for some of these folks, not the ones we've talked about. I don't know what they've done or they haven't done, but I do think that we are going to see our best progress and we're going to slot in in the best way when we think, you know what? I might not be the most lateral thinker. That might be something I want

to work on, but I've got to, if you happen to have a superpower of focus, lean harder into that. It's sort of like my bulldog Costello, he's 90 pounds, huge head. And he was clipped at six months. He's never going to be a greyhound. You could get them to run, but he is built to tug things with his head and neck. That's basically what he's good at. And you can see the joy and how good, I mean, he'll hang from a rope for a half an hour, blood dripping out and like, doesn't care, loves it. But he has to walk more than, you know, half a mile.

And he's like, looks like he's in pain. And I think we obviously want to round ourselves out, but some people are just, their nervous system, just like their body is better suited for certain things. You're going to get injured less physically, injured less mentally going down those paths. I think we, you know, I'm not in charge, but I think we could all do ourselves a favor by saying, you know what? Like, I personally, I'm good at establishing connections between fields and people. That's sort of where I love and I thrive. I'm like, oh, there's an element of this community that maps very well in an element of that community.

And I've had fun doing that in my career and in my social life and that kind of thing. Other people are hyperlinear and that's where teams really come into play. And that's where finding teammates that can occupy those sort of like a little bit lopsided in the brain areas that you're not like super linear, super creative, great at task implementation, great at strategy development. And then you work together and you agree on a common goal. That's where you really see the company thrive. together and you agree on a common goal, that's where you really see the company thrive, right? So whatever it is that these high-level CEOs and creatives are best at, unlike a scientific laboratory, like in science and especially physics, Feynman, Gelman, and Einstein, all they need was a pad of paper and a pen, just them. They could do experiments in the bathtub if they wanted to. In a laboratory where you need people to do work that's very plug and chug, you need a different

collection of people. So everyone, I think, should look at what am I exceptionally good at? And where could I lean my efforts harder there? And then how do I build a team that can help support me where I'm less good? So I'm not saying don't work a creative mind if you want to be more creative. But I do think we have these predispositions. And I think we inherit them from our parents. And I think there's evidence that some of our brain cells are more inherited from mom and some from dad. And it's a mix. And it's called genomic imprinting. It's very interesting. And I don't believe in fighting an uphill battle on that. I think we should lean into where we have some natural talents. Now I do weight training, even though I got small joints. So it doesn't mean I don't want to be strong. It's just,

I'm not going to be a power. I'm not going to go into powerlifting competition. I'm just not six foot one to 20 at small joints. I'm better suited to run. And so I accept that. Now, could you get me to the point where I can deadlift 600 pounds? Maybe. It's a question of how far I'm going to have to take my physiology away from its baseline in order to do that. Whereas, you know, I think I could sprint the 800 pretty well if I put the work in. So anyway, people have to decide. I love that. That's great. Yeah. You know, you mentioned something about, um, leaning into leaning into your strengths. Right. Um, and I think one thing, you know, when, when individuals, especially as you get older, uh, people have a, and everybody has a problem

leaning into the things that are difficult or leaning into stress and to, to get better at anything, you know, especially anything new, you're going to have to get comfortable with that discomfort and the difficulty and the confusion. You have to just be okay with being there for a bit, whether it be a long time or a short period of time to be able to improve. Um, uh, how can people get better at that? Is that just something that if you're, you know, if you were younger and you did a lot of difficult things, okay, you're better at as an adult and it's easier for you. And, or, you know, if you didn't do much of that when you're younger and you're an adult, is it something that it's just going to be super difficult for you to be able to lean into stress? I love this question. I think that,

because it really gets to what I call operational definitions. An operational definition is a definition of something we can all agree on. And then from that, it spools out specific actions. It's like progressive overload, right? It's just there are other elements of getting stronger, but progressive overload is kind of at the core of that. So what we're really talking about here, put an operational succinct definition on an answer to your question would be learn to tolerate adrenaline release, acute adrenaline release. It translates. Why does, why do I know that that will translate to any aspect of life? Well, because there's only adrenaline release.

There's like a hard conversation where I get feedback that I don't like adrenaline release, sitting in an ice bath, adrenaline release, cold shower, adrenaline release. One, I get this buddy of mine, um, credit Pat again from the SEAL teams. He's like, we were talking about this and he's like, yeah, we should try this thing. It's called the hour of pain. I was like, well, that sounds weird. And he's like, he's like, no, they basically, you sit down in a contorted position and you have to hold that for an hour without moving. It's like, wow, cost-free, totally sadistic, masochistic, excuse me. Um, and, but interesting, like to what extent can we tolerate a conformational discomfort and just be with that and learn to be comfortable being uncomfortable? People throw around these phrases, be comfortable being uncomfortable, grit, resilience, operational definition.

You need a practice to build that. Anyone can learn that. The reason cold water is great is provided it's not super cold. It's unlikely to damage you. Whereas heat, like in the sauna, you sit in the 220. It's like there are moments where you're like, you can actually damage yourself with heat. Cold, you have to go very cold to damage yourself. You can do it, of course.

So cost-free ways are cold shower. I think most people, if they're really novices, should start with super oxygenated breathing. So 25 or 30 breaths. By the 25th or 30th, you're going to be tingly, uncomfortable, not pleasant. Offload the air in a big, long exhale. sit and hold and just your breath for about 10, 15 seconds and just be comfortable. Learn to be comfortable with adrenaline in your system. The reason I like that is you could at 15 seconds, you can pull the release valve if you really can't take it right at some people can learn to push in harder, right? So then ice, you know, cold showers, ice baths, they have physiological effects that are useful, brown fat stimulation, et cetera. But here we're talking just about the psychological effects. In fact, I think Kelly Starrett, they posted something that there's like the cold and ice might not actually be the great tool that everyone thinks it is for inflammation. I guess

you probably know a lot more about that than I do. But in terms of psychological tool, it's a great psychological tool. Unlikely to physically harm you. Don't combine the breathing with the cold water, please. People have drowned doing that. Do those separately. Then you could think about, well, maybe I'll do a five-minute or hour, the so-called hour of pain that Pat was referring to. Maybe just sit there in a position that sucks and just see how long you can

hold it and learn to tolerate. So these are all cost-free, direct ways of learning how to tolerate adrenaline in your system. And I think that we can look to any number of those. I mean, in military stress inoculation, they have people screaming in people's faces, slogging through the mud, sleep deprivation, cold water, lots of, and it's chronic and ongoing. Most people, they're looking for a slight uptick in their stress threshold. I do think as a culture, COVID is showing us, regardless of how you feel about viruses and masks and all this stuff, the whole situation is showing us just how low our threshold is for adrenaline. And it was a really unique

situation because humans, especially Americans, we love to fight back. Like adrenaline makes us want to move. So we're like, all right, let's get after it. And the response that we were being asked to deliver was to stay still, which is really hard. And even people who have high levels of stress tolerance, who are from like proactive communities, you try and put them in a cage for too long, and they do not like it. So I think learning how to be still in discomfort is as important as learning how to be proactive. Both are forms of proactive coping. Stillness, sometimes we look at as passive coping, but the pause response when you have high levels of adrenaline, A, can save your life, definitely can stave off bad decisions. Most of the time we say the wrong thing or do the wrong

thing because we acted not because I would say you rarely get in trouble for what you don't say. Sometimes you get in trouble for what you don't say, but very rarely. And so learning how to suppress that while you have adrenaline in your system is great. My colleague, David Spiegel, who I mentioned before, has a great saying. It's not just about the physiological state you go into. It's about how you got there and whether or not you had anything to do with it. So if you trigger me and I just sort of sit there and I'm like, okay, I'm like, I'm going to just deal with this different effect than if I trigger me and I hold it there. Right. One is a kind of a real life practice. The other is a real life example.

The other is kind of a practice like training. And so I feel like life is the competition. When I can't control forces coming at me, that's real life. But the time in my day where I'm in control of my behavior completely, breathing exercise or ice bath. Personally, I'm not crazy about the ice bath because I don't like dumping the ice. Maybe I should get one. But the breathing stuff I do and this hour of pain thing, like sounds really interesting. And I, I not heard of it until recently, but these are all things that we could adopt and anyone could adopt. I think, I think we can use social media as a form of training, you know, get on there and don't be triggered, get on there and try to figure out a way to not have your emotions and feelings

waver with the wind, you know, just try to hold steady, like go on there for three minutes at a time and see how long it is before you, uh, overreact or, or end up getting involved in, uh, something that you probably shouldn't be getting involved with. Yeah, that's a great idea. I actually, um, I really liked that recently. I've noticed that, well, you know, my phone has started to infiltrate my workouts and those workouts were really my time to decompress and just focus on just being with my practice and with my mind. And so I actually, now I, it's so sad that it's come to this, but I actually look to

the workout as an opportunity to train suppressing my now reflexive reach for things. I mean, for the phone, I mean, it's incredible, right? The brain wants to offload behaviors to reflex and that social media now has us in full reflex. We wake up and we grab it and we're on it. Like, I don't actually think, Oh, I want to look at my phone. I don't want, I'm going to go back to email or Instagram. I just do it. And that means they got me. And I think, you know, as long as we're talking, you know, you guys are a group of very physically strong individuals and we're talking about mental strength is really about the ability to intervene in those reflexes. It's about the ability to tolerate high levels of adrenaline. And when you look to communities where you look at elite special forces, those guys are not adrenaline junkies.

They are masterful at controlling the kinds of mechanisms that we've been talking about today. And of course, they do it in the regime they do it. Some of them do it better or worse in other domains of life, but it absolutely translates. It absolutely translates. Great to have on the show today. We appreciate your time. We've been going out of here for a while. So where can people find you? Yeah. Huberman Lab, H-U-B-E-R-M-A-N-L-A-B. On Instagram, I teach little snippets about all this kind of stuff and more. Um, I've been doing a bunch of

posts recently on neural plasticity in particular, and then I'll pivot. I sometimes host people on there, other scientists who I think should be heard from who are hidden in their laboratories. I try and yank them out of their laboratories a bit. Um, and then if you want to know more about the actual science and the read the papers, They're all available as PDFs on the hubermanlab.com website, which is through Stanford. And then from time to time, we do studies that now we do remotely. So we've got a bunch of people right now wearing whoop bands, about 125 people out there in the community. We provide the whoop bands and we're measuring sleep and so forth as people adopt different breathing practices.

So from time to time on Instagram, I'll announce those studies. That one's closed. But the cool thing is we pay you. So there's no ask here. If you want to participate, we pay you or we provide a useful piece of tech that you get to keep this kind of thing. So check on Instagram now and again. That's probably the best way to find me. And I'm pretty good about answering direct messages. Sometimes I fall off into other lab related things

for a couple of weeks and I do try and get back to them. But yeah, that's how to find me. And since you said it, I'll say it as well. Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate the opportunity. Public education means very much to me. You guys paid for this, meaning your taxpayer dollars pay for the science that I and other researchers do. And so it's important to me that that science is translated to various communities out there. Podcasts like yours and this one in particular are really an optimal venue for that. So I really do appreciate you guys. And Seema, did you have one more question? I think I might've cut you off there at the end. Well, now I don't think I remember. Thanks again for your time. Just a real quick, before we drop off, what do you do for training? You did mention a little bit of running. You do anything and you'd mentioned hitting the gym a little bit here and

there. Anything in particular that you do with your fitness? Yeah. I like to think I take it seriously. I'm 45 in September. I've been training since I was about 15. My regime right now is very standardized. So Sunday I do a run that doubles as a leg workout. So some days it's like five or six miles of hill running. I

live in Oakland. And so up in the Piedmont Hills or, you know, I might throw on a weight vest. I basically want my legs sore and my calves sore the next day. And I want to work my cardiovascular system hard. I always take Mondays off and work and just really dig into the week. And then during the week, I commit to doing one, this is gonna sound kind of lame for the more nuanced out there, but one upper body workout. So it's going to be like weighted chins, weighted dips. I might throw in a few other things, but it's going to be, and then I do a lower, a proper leg workout during the week. And then Fridays are off Saturdays. Let's call it what it is. It's a vanity workout. I'll do some curls and some,

you know, neck work. Cause I don't have the big neck that my bulldog and you guys have naturally. And I, my neck work actually is very important for two reasons that are a little bit counterintuitive. I think one is, is obvious. I I've, um, I think it saved my life several times. I fell off a roof once doing some construction, walked away from it. I, you know, when I used to box, you just learn like neck work is life insurance. The other one is neck work. The neck actually harbors a lot of androgen receptors and neck and androgen receptors. And I've always had a low voice when I was a kid, they called me froggy. I just like talking like a kid froggy on the little rascals. But I actually feel like my neck work changes the way that I hold my head on my body and adjust all my posture. I don't like I do spine work and lower spine work,

all deadlift and that kind of thing. But I think you can tell when somebody doesn't train their neck or they don't have a naturally strong neck because their head isn't on their body. Right. And these are usually the people that are talking to me about shoulder stuff and back stuff. So for me, the network is really like an anchor point for all sorts of things. Um, how being comfortable working for long periods of time, you know, with my correct posture and that kind of thing. So, yeah. And then, um, so I'm training four times a week. that kind of thing. So yeah. And then, um, so I'm training four times a week. Those are generally an hour long max. Um, and in general, uh, I try and get like two or three really good rest days in there. And, uh, look, my scientific career, uh, I'm very pleased at where it's gone, has gone where it's gone in large part because I had a very regimented physical practice that

I could count on. I mean, I'm not the smartest guy in the room in any venue, certainly not at Stanford, but I can outwork most people. Um, and mostly by focus. And I learned that training with the weights training running. And I think the gym is the beautiful, um beautiful anvil to shape ourselves, not just physically, but mentally. And I'm so grateful to have a weight training practice. I daydream about being able to pull the kind of weights that you guys pull and that Kelly pulls and whatnot. But maybe someday you'll give me some pointers. I'd love to get a workout in someday, if ever you were willing. Yeah, for sure.

We'll have to get together. I love what you said early in the podcast about walking. You know, we're huge proponents of walking and I recommend that to people all the time. We talk about just doing a 10 minute walk or whatever amount of minutes you can devote towards walking and trying to get a couple of men each day. It's I think beyond what it does for your body, which it's helpful to your body, but I think what it does for your body, which it's helpful to your body. But I think what it does for our mind is, uh, is super powerful. Yeah. Big, big proponent of walking. I should make, I do some swims these early morning when I'm in Los Angeles, I'll do these early morning cold water swims. One of the guys, the former SEAL team guy, those guys love the cold water. I think

about sharks the whole time. Um, it's, it's high adrenaline the whole time for me, but you know, swimming is also pretty nice, but up here in Northern California, as you guys know, you know, you go out to ocean beach, you're basically offering yourself as a snack. I'm not really interested in that. So, uh, lakes and pools, if you do it. Thanks again for your time. Enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you, sir. Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you guys. Appreciate you.

Man, some awesomeness right there. Yeah. I wanted to get some verification, you know, on somebody that actually studies the brain just to make sure that we're not losing out and that we didn't miss like that. Uh, some of these other smart people and people that have been really successful over the years, they don't have a leg up on us. They don't have an extra thing going on in their head that we don't have access to. We all have the access to it. And maybe they have some different brain chemistry, but I'm sure it was developed and worked for and worked towards over a long period of time. I like his way of giving you actionable things to do though. Like not,

not just giving us big concepts, but tangible things. Yeah, exactly. Like remember that morning that we were here podcasting, I think it was last week. And you mentioned thinking about gratitude, right?

You know, just writing out things you're grateful for. And then I wrote down four things I was grateful for and immediately boom, I was just like feeling much, much better. That's one big, simple thing. Some great things

like that like even just um anytime you have any sort of loss of any kind you can do this with anything but i always just think of injury just because we're meatheads and we're thinking about the gym but i get asked a lot of questions somebody's like i tore my hamstring what do i do i hurt my knee really bad and i was i had a good habit of running now i'm screwed and it's like well just write down three or four things that you can do you know just just shift gears could you um could you still go to the gym and with a bad knee could you still go to the gym and train your upper body you know could you what could you shift into uh what opportunities is this uh maybe this is bringing a new opportunity for you. Maybe you can start reading more because you are out of the gym because you just don't feel good enough to even, it's just not in the cards for you to even get there. But anytime you have any sort of loss, even if it's as tragic as having a death, you can think, wow, that was really brutal.

It's going to be tough. You can think about the things that you loved about that person. Something I've done is you just think about the attributes that the person had that were great. And then you can think, I'm going to pay tribute to that person by, you know how you have that friend, like even just without them saying anything, when you see him, you just start kind of giggling and laughing. You know, maybe it's someone like that that passed on. And you can say, you know what, I'm going to figure out how to maybe share some of that with people. I'm going to figure out how to have some

of that live on with me. And it's like, some of these practices are great because it can boom, it can just, just all of a sudden shift your mind just in seconds. It's hard though. You know, it is hard because you're like, I think sometimes we want to be mad. Andrew was kind of pointing out how we don't really wake up and like, I'm going to be depressed. I'm going to be mad that we don't have that mindset. But if we don't have that mindset, then why, you know, why do we do some of the things that we do?

It seems completely irrational. Like if in SEMA, if you were to tell me, man, I really struggle on social media, man, people have been blowing me up saying all kinds of mean negative things. And, and I had a camera in your home and I saw the first thing that you did is reach for your phone. And there you are scrolling through social media. I'd be like, dude, what are you, what are you insane? Like, well, you know, what's going on here. But I think maybe there's some stuff going on in our subconscious, uh, that is maybe for some reason, I don't know what the reason on here, but I think maybe there's some stuff going on in our subconscious that is maybe for some reason, I don't know what the reason would be, but maybe for some reason we are kind of poking around looking for that stuff. Yeah, that's why I asked him the question because

I wanted him to point out the fact that, yeah, there is something in our mind that is kind of actively searching for the negative. It wasn't always somebody posting something negative about you on social media. It was like, oh shit, are there any, you know, venomous snakes around me? You know, it's just like everything, you know, you'll see positive comments. Cool, cool, cool. You see that one negative and you focus on that one negative because we're kind of designed to focus on something that's going to cause harm to us. So what he was talking about, like,

yeah, we're designed to like, you know, to focus on that sort of thing for survival. And unfortunately it's carried over into social media. So for somebody that is this, like, you know,

we'll keep going with that same scenario where in sema's like reaching for his phone right away it's because like you're kind of like designed to do that sort of thing um however it's just not meant to be for social media so maybe you can do what he was talking about like doing a what you can call it like pulling a different lever to put some of that energy into something else like a 10 minute walk or uh doing that i thing i'm gonna mess with that i have to think about you know try to think about things in in some logical reasonable ways so um we talked to a guy who studies the mind right now that same guy who is researching how to maybe ward off being blind, that same guy, his colleagues and people of his stature are being picked off and they're being paid to work for Facebook. They're being paid to work for Instagram. They're being paid to work for some of these major companies, and they're really trying to play into your psyche.

So we have to just understand what we're up against. And I think it's okay to sometimes just admit, say, I don't know what the hell that is that we're up against. I actually think that the amount of time and the amount of money devoted to those things are too great for me to figure out how to beat at the moment. those things are too great for me to figure out how to beat at the moment, I'm going to take a little break from social media or I'm just going to try to figure out a way to be on it less, maybe delete it from my phone for a while or just you have to have some sort of strategy against it because it is it can be highly addictive. That's what they're that's what they're designed to do I heard that the Trump campaign last time around they did 66,000 iterations of a similar advertisement

trying to get you with different and this is nothing against any particular political party this has nothing to do with it it's just something I heard this is just the way that advertising works and this is just the way this is the way that you win quote quote unquote, win, right? But they changed the colors, they changed the font, they changed, I'm not sure exactly what the advertisement was.

I'm not sure if they, I'm sure they changed like the words and the music and so on. People are scared of AI and people are like, when is it coming? When is it coming? people are scared of AI and people are like, when is it coming? When is it coming? It's already here. It's already here. It's called social media and it's fighting against you every single day. Now, you can figure out a way to go with it, but you have to be in a good positive head space to do that.

You have to be what I would call ahead. You know, if you're ahead in life, if you are someone who sold a business and you're doing really well financially, kids are healthy, family's healthy, you own a home, you're good, man. Like you probably don't, even though those people aren't always happy, it's going to be easier to deal with something like social media. But let's say you're 20. You don't want to go to college. You never did good in high school. You feel like you don't have a skill set. You feel like you don't have anything to offer the world. You're single. Like you can't find a chick. You can't figure it. You just, you're just having a hell of a time figuring shit out. Well, now you're on social media and you're getting the ever-living shit beat out of you every single day because the multi-billion dollar industry,

it's not designed to crush you. No one's really trying to hurt you, I don't think. But there's a lot of hurtful, harmful things to be aware of that are on there that just make our world a lot more complicated. And it's a fix that you'll never get fixed because that's what it's designed to do. It's designed to give you some of what you need need but not all of what you need every single time yeah and if anybody out there like when i when i ask any of our guests about nootropics it's sometimes hard for me to escape the person who i used to be when i was really into it you, somebody who I wasn't necessarily the most regimented person when it came to my fitness. I was in a different like state of mind. So, like I was a little bit more depressed. Well, sorry, I was depressed. And so, I was always seeking out something to try to

like take the magic pill, take the limitless pill, try some like shortcut to just be happy and smile. like shortcut to just be happy and smile um once other aspects of my life got better all of a sudden i stopped needing i stopped searching for you know these pills or these different compounds i remember like i wanted to try psilocybin mushrooms for so freaking long because i was depressed and you shouldn't feel you shouldn't feel bad about the question that you're asking everyone asks the question that you're asking every single day. It's just that yours happens to be wrapped up into a supplement. Yeah. Everyone's trying to be happy.

Right. And so, well, my thing is that I'm trying to get at is like once I realized that like it's a lot more than just that. So, like I don't want somebody to hear this and be like, oh, shit, we didn't really get a good answer. don't want somebody to hear this and be like oh shit we didn't really get a good answer it's like no you you really we got enough a freaking phenomenal answer because it's just it's not just one thing it's it's a combination of you know your living habits uh your daily routines if you want to go that route too but you know i just remember being like so like i gotta figure out this compound and what i was gonna say before he joined, uh, the podcast was I had like a counter counter, uh, top full of all these compounds that I had been collecting for years. Imagine Mark, like your, uh, your, um, R and D room, right?

Just shit everywhere. So I'm like, Oh, I forgot about all this stuff. And I'm looking at it, thinking how much money I spent on in like high hopes I had for it. And I'm like, I don't need any of this. And it just all went straight into the trash. I'm still into it. But now I'm realizing like, oh, wait, going for a walk is way better. Working out, lifting, becoming a better person outside of focusing on trying to get like a compound to do the work for me. So that's just something I wanted to lay out there in case anybody else got excited for the nootropic topic and then all of a sudden kind of were left with just, you know, exercise,

eat right, sleep. Yeah, you can look at it as he mentioned like a nootropic is walking in the forest almost, you know, right? Oh, heck yeah. Kind of sounded that way or exercise or just doing something for yourselves. The person I was referring to that had that quote is Dave Spitz from Cal Strength. He said that's a message that he shares with his athletes all the time. He just says, never do nothing, which is, I think, something that he picked up from

like his dad or something like that. But it's kind of a great quote. But then you're also like, man, that puts a lot of pressure on me, but it's not really about pressure. It's just about, you know, try to make some good use of your time. And when you find yourself doing nothing ish which I guess would be like just nothing useful towards your goals, even rest and recovery can be useful towards your goals. And even some like TV watching can be useful towards your goals. And even some like TV watching can be useful towards your goals, probably. And even being on social media can be a little bit useful. But like, can we just be more reasonable with it? You know, are we over doing it? What I was talking about earlier about the kind of runaway AI is that, you know, YouTube has it, Instagram has it, Facebook has it.

It's it already self populates. I think that maybe we don't understand that. It's already keeping track of what all three of us are doing on social media, where we're going, what we're liking, what we're commenting on. It's learning every single thing that it can about us. And so you should just be aware of that. Someone's following every move that you make. And so you should just be aware of that. Someone's following every move that you make. I don't really, I personally am not worried from a privacy standpoint, as some people might be worried about private information. I don't really care or see all that much on how, I don't know at the moment how it can be used against me, but I guess we'll find out, you know, as we continue to move forward, how it can be used against me but i guess we'll find out you know as we continue to move forward how it will be and i don't mean like some sort of weird public thing is revealed what i mean is like how the system of social media or how those things will use it against you i mean at the moment it's really just to try to sell you on more stuff you know trying to sell you on more stuff. But what if it's just trying to, like, let's say that it recognizes that my political views are a certain way.

And then it just doesn't even show me the other side. You know, it only shows me from this one vantage point. It's kind of how it is right now, though. Right. I know. I know. That's what I'm saying. Like, it's already this way. And so now I can't have

perspective on the other side. I don't hear the other side of the story. It's the CNN Fox type thing. So I just find it all to be really interesting. And when we talk to a neuroscientist talking about the brain and how know gain some control over the mind it's tough it's tough to control it because everything is like kind of shifting you in a particular direction it's like a it's like a stream it's trying to you know get you to flow a certain way and you're like no i don't want to really go that way but it's like well you

gotta you know quote unquote swim upstream it's going to be really difficult well think about this man the neuroscientist either puts his phone in a safe or he threw throws his phone on the roof roof like throws his phone on the freaking roof like that that that just kind of shows how like how dangerous this thing can be unless you learn how to control it but on the note of relaxation, I do like how he mentioned the intense focus and then the intense relaxation, you know, especially as, as an adult,

um, it makes a lot of sense. It's like, you know, even though we all want to be moving forward all the time, there does come a time where you should just like, okay, after you've gotten a lot of work done or after you've done something super

productive, allow yourself a little bit of time to decompress so that you can do it again. I think a lot of high performing people probably needed to hear that part of it because I have some friends who are like, they're always at it, but they're always also super stressed. And when they do relax, they look at it as a negative rather than it being a positive. So that in itself was a really good thing you said. And then also the melatonin thing i'm so happy he said that me too because i have a lot of friends that take melatonin i'm like don't take melatonin and i don't sound so crazy yeah and also because it's like a sedate sedative you know you don't really get full-on restful sleep i think that might be right but what he said about the

yeah nope no no more nope yeah not that i take it, but I used to in the past just to try to get better sleep. But that's fucking crazy. What he said about the nootropics, too, I think was dead on. And this happens with supplements all across the board. Somebody hears a key word, and now that key word is so publicized. When you make a supplement, you're a little bit forced to have that in there. when you make a supplement, you're a little bit forced to have that in there. You know, if you have a, I don't know, a particular collagen something or other,

now you have to have it, you know, be, you know, a particular way and have a particular other stuff in it. Like they say that you absorb collagen better with vitamin C, you know. So, boom, that's one study got kicked up. It doesn't matter how many studies there are on it. The information's out there. Dr. Oz said it. And now it's like, you better have it in your supplement because it's a, it's a hot button topic and it just doesn't make sense for you to not have it in there.

Our buddy, Joel Green, he was telling me, he's like, man, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these supplements, sometimes you can just have like one thing in there or sometimes two things in there. But he's like, who's going to really just buy, you know, an amino acid? He's like, they're not going to buy the amino acid from like a brand name company. They're going to buy it from like a bulk company and get it for cheaper. And then it doesn't have all the fancy, you know, bottles. But you could still get a tremendous result. I mean, there's a lot of people that do what you're talking about, Andrew, where they got

all these supplements around their house that they can kind of utilize one single scoop of something in a coffee. He was mentioning theanine and things of that nature. And they have a great impact. You don't necessarily need to have 75 things together, but somebody heard that 5-HTP is where it's at, and so then they look at your nootropic, and they're like, that's not in there. This one's garbage.

I need to go to the next one because the next one has 87 things in it. Yeah. Yeah, theanine is pretty awesome. It almost, when you have caffeine and theanine, it kind of feels like Mind Bullet, except not as like uplifting, but that's kind of the similar thing. So, that way you guys have an idea what it actually feels like. Like I'm not, I'm just interested in it. I'm not like messing around with like, I used to like make my own capsules and do all kinds of fun stuff with white powders that looked very questionable if you were to walk into my house a couple of years ago. But I really do like his answer for that question that you asked, just because, I mean, I think that's, that's more so of a powerful answer than, oh yeah, this, this, and this is amazing because it just, just shows that you don't have to have a reliance on some type of outside substance to be able to get the result that you're looking for. Yeah.

And an unbiased, you know, person, right? Like that's so hard to find these days. So, to have somebody like that and then what you said, like he's a neuroscientist and he's telling you, don't mess with your phone. It'd be like you telling somebody like, oh, you need to, I don't know, whatever, you need to stretch before you work out. It's like, well, he kind of knows what he's talking about. If there's somebody you're going to listen to, it's going to be this guy.

One thing I didn't really agree 100% with him on was when he said it's hard to control the mind with the mind, I actually am a huge believer in that. I think that's really important because I think the opposite of that is even harder, you know, dealing with irrational thought process and not learning, not learning the skill and the art of how to control your thoughts with other thoughts, I think is a disastrous thing not to really pursue aggressively. I think I would love to see that to be taught like universally, you know, like, like in school or something.

But my son and I have been talking a lot about like societal stuff and he's just, it's crazy. The shit that the kid knows, I don't know where he knows it from or how he knows it, but it's just mind boggling. But, you know, we used to just have an environment where we had a lot less people. You know, now there's millions of people and you interact with, even if you're a person

that like doesn't have a big media following or something like that, you still kind of are interacting with thousands of people. Whereas, you know, maybe thousands of years ago, maybe at the most, maybe you dealt with 100 people. Maybe at some point you dealt with 200 people, but it was probably a lot, it's probably a lot less, right? And I guess my point in that is that if you had 100 people or 200 people, it would probably be easier to share information and to say, like, this is the information that we believe in. Here's our

strategy for hunting. Here's our strategy on how to deal with stress. Here's how we deal with that guy sleeping with that guy's wife, you know, like, and it might be easier to have for not everyone to interpret everything the exact same way, but just for it to be maybe a little closer to a similar principle. But now it's really, really hard. I mean, even if you were to try to teach people that they have control over the thoughts that they think that not even just the things that pop in your head, you don't always have control over those things, but you have control over how you proceed from there. And you have the opportunity to filter that all out.

I don't know why somebody wouldn't want somebody else to know that information, but there would be somebody that wouldn't want someone to know that information. And that's how we end up with war. And that's how we end up with a lot of misunderstanding. And that's how we, but just imagine if that was taught universally. You know, for me, like I decided to delete Instagram, it's not on my phone anymore, right? That's not the point of practicing some of the stuff that I practice. Practicing some of the stuff that I practice, it's to be able to handle and take on more stuff, not to get rid of other things. But the reason why I took it away is just because it's a distraction. It just consumed too much time.

I just care about it too much. Like even when I'm going to make a post, it might take me 20 or 30 minutes to formulate like a good post because I wanted to, quote unquote, do a good job. And so that was really the decision of like, I can't afford to spend my time here. I got too many other things I'm responsible for. So this needs to just go. And it took a while to be able to to be able to do that. But now I feel now it feels amazing.

But that's my experience. And that's for me. That's not necessarily, I don't think everyone needs to delete their social media. But I do think everyone needs to kind of review how they're treating social media and just maybe try to learn and have a better understanding of it. And if you don't feel like you have any control over it, then I would suggest that you delete it maybe just for a period of time and just ask yourself, you know, do the Kelly Sturette thing. Do the test retest. You know, Kelly Sturette, he'll do a stretch on his hip and he'll do a test retest. Is it better or is it worse? Try it. You know, try to, if you just say, I'm going to stay off it for today, you're probably not going to know, try to, if you just say, I'm going to stay off it for today,

you're probably not going to be very successful. But if you just don't have it on there, you'll end up phantom looking at your phone a bunch of times and then you'll be like, oh yeah, I don't have that shit on here. And it'll start to break the habit of even looking at your phone as much. So it's been helpful to me and it might be something that might help somebody listening. Cal Newport has this book called digital minimalism. I've talked about it months ago, but same exact thing that you just mentioned. Um, there are certain people who can get away with just like, you know, screen timing it, maybe just deleting it off the phone. And then, um, some people just like, yeah, they get rid of it altogether for like a month, come back to it, not using it nearly as much. And I think that's a great tactic to use,

especially if you find yourself going on at all. Like, like, like you said, when you try to stop using it, there'll be a moment during the day where you'll be working, you'll be working, you'll go on your phone and then somehow you're on, you're like, shit, how'd this happen? That's happened to me so many times. Like it, it, it literally just does work that way. But I mean, even if you like, if you're someone who uses it for business, right, maybe you could just delete the app at the times you're not using it. So you just don't go on the app when it comes to wasting time, you know, you're going to post something. Okay. Plan that out, download it, take some time, download it, post to get rid of it again. That's a great thing to do.

Yeah. And even when it comes to I think our food could be similar. You know, we we tell you guys to try to set up your environment the best you can. But the things that we teach here on this podcast are not so that you you can't have cereal in your house ever. You know, like we try to teach stuff on here so that you learn how good it feels to feel good. You learn how good it feels to start to have the body that you want, start to be able to lift the weights that you want. And when you do those things, you just recognize that the Twinkies or the donuts or whatever,

cookies that maybe somebody baked cookies in your house. They're just not as important to you anymore. They're still there. You still smell them and still maybe you want to eat them here and there. But your just overall viewpoint on them is different. You're not like, oh, I just cannot have them in the house ever. You can have them around. You can go to family functions when they're there and you could

choose not to eat them and that's ultimately what you're working towards but you also know that it's a trap for you to purchase these things yourself and to have them in abundance have a like why would you take a thing of m&ms and and put them you know in a bowl on your calendar like you just to me that's that's that's the kind of the Instagram trick is like, you know that it's there, you know that it's there all the time for you to look at. And if you find yourself just, I would just suggest you find yourself going down a negative pathway where you're starting to feel that it's becoming a little bit more on the negative side than it is on the positive side, I would just reevaluate it.

Yeah, you'll end up picking off a couple m&ms every time you walk by it and then you'll stop for a little while yeah i can't do it still i still just can't have that stuff i did have uh it's peanut butter cup something something halo top ice cream oh it was pretty good it was incredible like so uh family function everyone got ice cream i'm like, family function, everyone got ice cream. I'm like, well, sorry, we got ice cream for everyone. And while we were there, I'm like, I'm going to grab a Halo Top. You know, it's freaking hot.

I want to enjoy it. 330 calories for the whole pint. I love that they put it, like, very obviously, like, this whole thing is 330, you know, calories. It tasted incredible. I thought it was going to taste like slightly flavored ice. I got some news. Uh-oh. Breyers did the same thing.

Yeah, they made pints. Breyers ice cream. They made pints that have like 300-something calories. Oh, shit. Damn, and that's a legit ice cream. That's what I'm talking about. I've never tried it, so if someone tries it, and they're like, I think it's like shit.

I don't know anything about it, but I saw that they made a fitness-y one, I guess, or a health-conscious ice cream. If there's anyone who knows how to do ice cream, it's Breyers. They ain't bad. They ain't bad. Yeah, this Halo Top one gets my seal of approval for sure. It's hella good. Yeah, there's a couple brands out there that have been trying for a while, but it hasn't been easy.

It's like, it just doesn't taste like ice cream a lot of times yeah creamy consistency yeah yeah and i can't remember who or what we had talked about it before i remember it i think it was either on a podcast or after a podcast and we were talking about uh just uh like tea like iced tea and how like people like it has no flavor it tastes like nothing but if you had that like when you're like a caveman or something you'd be like holy shit this is incredible so the same thing with like something like halo topper this new ice cream is like if you can somehow delete your experience with like previous ice cream and realize like this is the shit now like

you'd enjoy it a lot more you know what's hard get? It's hard to get soft serve ice cream these days. Because the machines always have. Yeah, that too. The soft serve stuff that you can get is usually frozen yogurt. And my niece the other day, she was saying, I can't remember what the first thing was

that she said to her favorite, but the second thing that she said was frozen. She's like, I love that. And I love frozen yogurt. I said, frozen yogurt? I was like, frozen yogurt over ice cream she goes yeah i like frozen yogurt a lot i said i said this can't be true yeah i was like i have to take you i was like have you had soft serve ice cream she's like i don't think so she's like i think the only soft serve ice cream i've had is just frozen yogurt.

And I was like, this is terrible. You are a very deprived and misled child. We need to fix this. You sure you want to ruin her? I know. I know. She'll just be living underneath the thing. So what is McDonald's ice cream?

Is that soft serve? Yeah, it's soft serve. It's ice cream-esque. It's close enough. Yeah. That shit's good. Yeah. That shit's good. Yeah. I love that you were a former fat guy because when you told me to freeze or put yogurt with protein mixed in the freezer for at least half an hour,

I was like, man, I don't know. I can't wait. I put it in there before I ate dinner so that way like i could chill and then have my dessert after and wow it changes the whole experience to have that in the freezer it's like a greek yogurt yeah yeah greek yogurt with the slingshot protein it turns it turns it into kind of like ice cream very much like ice cream yeah it's really really good as you can tell it works with the low fat one it works with the regular full fat one. It works either way. I've been doing it with like the zero fat.

A little salt, a little cinnamon. Yes. A little bit of salt. I haven't tried cinnamon. I have over salted on accident. Didn't enjoy it. I fucked up. If you over salted, it starts to taste like caramel or something like that.

It gets kind of weird. It does get weird. I'm going to go buy some Fage. I used to call it Fage. I'm going to buy some Fage. Fage. Get at it. Yeah, it says it on the side.

Fage. Like it says stretched out, right? Dang. Okay. What you guys got for today? You got some training today, Andrew? So my back has still been an issue. He wants a rub down.

I do need a rub down um now i can't think uh so hard to think with all that blood in your penis i know all the blood flows and he's got nothing left oh man i came in earlier and i did some some elevated farmer carries with the kabuki strength trap bar and the wagon wheels did that a bunch of times just to try to get something feeling right in my back did some core work and then you know some bicep work because that's what i wanted to do so i did that but i'm still hoping to do something else later awesome yeah just i just need to like i've

been doing yoga almost every day i've been doing a lot of walking and it's gotten better it's gotten to the point where like if i take a misstep i won't collapse but it's still been just a pain in my back like it's it's a being a bitch that was the thing that happened during quarantine um it was actually towards the end of quarantine when we opened up the gym here back again just coming off a bench from doing uh dumbbells like i just i came up and i i didn't stay tight that's the worst it's just like so it's a weird thing that you're not expecting and i i tried to just like oh wow that that hurt and i tried to fight through it like as in like no like you're fine and when i went to stand up like i couldn't take

the next step like it was like oh fuck i did it again so since then it's it's been really bad but i'm working on it i'm not ignoring it anymore i'm not you know trying to fight through it or i'm just like i said doing a lot of stretching a lot of yoga which has been a lot of fun because i've i've learned new stretches that like affect, affect the area, whereas before I didn't. And, you know, just laying down on my back and, like, pushing down on my, like, thighs, I can actually, like, get some decompression to where, like, my back can even pop. And, like, sometimes it pops on the left side. Sometimes it pops on the right side. So, in my head, I'm imagining, like, oh, it was out of alignment on that side.

So now we're good to go. So it's been a good experience kind of saying like I don't care what weights I'm going to be lifting anymore. I'm just going to focus on trying to feel better. Cool. Yeah. Good way to do it. Did you have any rules when you were in Vegas for your food or even leading up to it? Do you have any concerns on anything to do with your food or you just ate whatever?

Nothing leading up to it. Day one, I think we only had one meal. I was like, dinner. I think we only had dinner on day one. So you did some fasting? Yeah, Holsteins. And then day two, we had Chick--fil-a then we had a dinner um but we didn't sleep much didn't sleep much at all and like i don't know if you caught it

before the podcast but man that was crazy the pain i was in just from not sleeping and just walking around was it's like damn this is bad the way you wake up you wake up like you're a thousand years old when you don't sleep when my feet touch the ground i was like why do my feet hurt so much i was like hobbling around but then one night one good night to sleep back here we were good uh drink a bit which was having drink like that much in a while but it was okay it was okay we were gonna have some fun but didn't get too crazy um but yeah it was was it just you too or did you guys go just us too nice yeah we we planned it super last minute we tried to message all all my homies and they were just like oh no i can't go can't go but hold on like okay well it's just gonna be us too and it was fun we saw a lot of nice things

went to a few places um i guess i didn't have signal that day or something it was cool it was a really fun trip you know it was pretty awesome i had some fun it's kind of fun just to eat whatever and have a couple drinks and just sort of like uh be a little bit free with the diet but you said you walked a lot you walked a lot yeah yeah 30 000 steps day two um and then day one it was like 20 something thousand steps it was a lot of walking so and we saw some people and they weren't um well peace i don't care they weren't disabled or anything but they were using these carts to ride around we were just like what what are they doing and then by the third day we were like i see they they they were playing the game because they knew how much they were going to be walking but

i'd still much rather walk around vegas than ever use one of those car things to get myself around it reminds me of um who was talking about it just completely couldn't remember but they went to like disneyland and they had to rent out the scooters and stuff because they couldn't walk the entire time fuck i can't remember who i think it might have been sean and wayne i think yeah it. It was, yeah. Why? Well, years ago, they were more out of shape, I guess. They were just... Oh. I think, well, Sean, his back was really jacked up. Yeah.

But yeah, I think he was just too fat to walk around. And that just reminds me of Wally. Yeah, I know, right? Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think one of their goals was like, when we go back, we're not renting those fucking scooters anymore. We're going to walk.

And they did. So that's pretty cool. That's awesome. But yeah. Take us on out of here, Andrew. Thank you, everybody, for checking out today's episode. Sincerely appreciate it. Please make sure you're following the podcast at Mark Biles Power Project on Instagram at MB Power Project on Twitter.

We're still on TikTok unless everybody deletes it. Then we'll peace out as well. Did that really happen? Yeah, it seems like it's going to happen. My Instagram is at IamAndrewZ. And Seema, where are you at? And Seema YingYang on Instagram and YouTube and Seema YingYang on Twitter. Mark?

What happened to TikTok? Just they've been collecting data and like it's not one of those like rumors. Well, I mean, it's all rumors but like uh coders can pull up like you know the code and they can show exactly like what it's tracking and like it's very obvious and then of course there was a whole thing about how they blocked uh black lives matter hashtags and stuff like that and you know push uh more fair-skinned people to the for you page versus you know anybody that was black or of color and so it's just kind of two things kind of spiraled and now uh government whoever is saying

that they're going to actually they could potentially ban it from the united states so that's wow yeah yeah that's weird that is's crazy. It's like Japanese or Chinese? Chinese. Chinese, yeah. Because I believe in India it's already blocked. I think I maybe misspoke there, but I know somewhere it just recently got banned. Those damn TikToks. I wonder what the reason for it to be banned here would be.

This collection of data, I guess they... Yeah, privacy. Yeah, they did something. Maybe that, you know, all that stuff's weird. Cause like you really just got to click like, yes.

Like it's like an agreement, right? Like on, you don't read the 50 page agreement. Nah, you know, you're reading that stuff. It's all strange. I don't know where we're heading,

man. Things are getting crazy. Hopefully not back into quarantine. Yeah. That could be possible too. All right. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never. Yeah, that could be possible, too. All right. Strength is never weakness. Weakness is never strength.

I'm at Mark Smelly Bell. Catch you guys later.