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- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast
where we discuss science
and science-based tools for everyday life
I'm Andrew Huberman.
And I'm a Professor of
Neurobiology and Ophthalmology
at Stanford School of Medicine.
This podcast is separate
from my teaching and
research roles at Stanford.
It is however, part of
my desire and effort
to bring zero cost to consumer
information about science
and science-related tools
to the general public.
In keeping with that theme,
I'd like to thank the
sponsors of today's podcast.
Our first sponsor is InsideTracker.
InsideTracker analyzes your blood and DNA
to give you an accurate assessment
of your health and your biological age.
There are many things about our health
that can only be analyzed
from blood and DNA tests.
I've been getting my blood
assessed for many years now.
And about a year ago, I
switched to InsideTracker.
What I like about InsideTracker
is that you get all this information back
about metabolic factors,
endocrine factors, et cetera,
that are really important to your health.
But unlike a lot of blood tests
where you just get all the
numbers back and it tells you
whether or not things
are high, normal, or low,
InsideTracker also has this really useful
and really easy-to-use dashboard
that takes the information
for your blood and DNA tests
and points you toward particular
behavioral, nutritional,
and other sorts of
protocols that you can use
to get the numbers where you
want them for your health.
If you'd like to try InsideTracker,
you can go to insidetracker.com/huberman
and they will give you 25%
off any of their programs.
Again, their programs allow
you to assess your health
from the inside,
things that you could just never assess
from any kind of test that
didn't involve blood and DNA.
And it also has this
really interesting feature
that it can measure your inner age,
which is based on biology.
Your chronological age, of
course, is very informative
about your health and
where you ought to be
in terms of health
metrics, but people vary.
We know people, of course,
that are in their late
90s who are doing well.
We know people that are in
their 50s who are struggling
or even in their 20s.
So, blood and DNA are the
way to analyze your health.
That's my belief.
That's why I use InsideTracker.
So, go to insidetracker.com/huberman
to get 25% off any of their products
and use "Huberman" at checkout.
Our second sponsor of today's
episode is Helix Sleep.
Helix Sleep makes mattresses and pillows
that are ideally suited to your needs
for the best night's sleep possible.
I switched to using a Helix
mattress and Helix pillow
this last year
and I'm sleeping better
than I ever have before.
The way that Helix mattresses work
and the reason they're different,
is that they are tailored to
your individual sleep style.
Your sleep style can be assessed
by going to their website,
you take a brief two-minute
questionnaire quiz.
Asks you questions like,
do you sleep on your back
or your side or your stomach?
Maybe you don't know
or maybe you move around
a lot during the night.
It also asks you questions
such as do you tend to run hot
or wake up cold, things of that sort.
And then they tailor a particular mattress
to your sleep needs.
For me, I matched to the
so-called Dusk, D-U-S-K mattress.
And I love it.
I sleep better than ever.
And right now, if you
want to try Helix Sleep
you can go to helixsleep.com/huberman.
And if you do that, you'll
get $200 off your order
plus two free pillows.
They also have a great warranty.
They have a 10-year warranty
on their mattresses.
If you don't like the
mattress for any reason,
they'll pick it up for
free from your home.
And they just make the whole
thing really easy to try
and determine whether or
not it's right for you.
So again, it's helixsleep.com/huberman
to get $200 off
and two free pillows on your first order.
Some of you have asked how you
can help support the podcast
in yet other ways, besides
just checking out our sponsors.
We really appreciate the question
and we've set up a Patreon account
at patreon.com/AndrewHuberman
which allows you to donate to the podcast
at a variety of different levels.
We have, for instance, the 5-HTP,
which is in honor of a serotonin.
5-HTP is the name for serotonin
that it allows you to donate $5 per month.
We have the circadian,
which as many of you, of course,
will know is 24-hour day.
So, you can donate $24
a month if you like.
You can also pick any value that you want.
We even have the Costello,
which is $10 a month
which allows you to support the podcast
in honor of Costello.
The fact that he's 10 years old,
that he eats 10 pounds of food a day,
and the fact that he takes
10 one-hour naps per day
on average.
So again, that's
patreon.com/AndrewHuberman
if you'd like to support
the podcast that way.
Today's episode is going to be all about
the science of emotions.
The first month of the podcast,
we talked about sleep and wakefulness.
Last month, we were talking
about neuroplasticity,
the brain's ability to change
in response to experience.
And this month we're going to talk
about these things that we call emotions.
We're going to decipher what
they are, how they work,
how we can control them
when we might not want to control them.
There are going to be
four episodes on emotions.
And today, we're going
to talk in particular
about something that most
often is called stress.
Now, you might be thinking,
"Wait, stress isn't an emotion."
But stress really lies at
the heart of whether or not
our internal experience
is matched well or not
to our external experience
where the events
that are happening to us and around us.
And as you'll soon, see
those converge or combine
to create what we call emotions.
Now, I want to be very clear
that we're going to talk
about the biology of emotions,
we're going to talk a little bit
about some psychological
concepts related to emotion,
and we are definitely going to talk
about tools to control what we call stress
or commonly think of as stress.
We're also going to clean up
some common myths about stress.
For instance, that stress
impairs your immune system.
That's true in certain contexts.
And in other contexts,
stress actually enhances
your immune system
and makes it function better.
There is going to be a lot of discussion
about whether or not our internal state,
whether or not we are alert
or calm is good or bad,
depending on the circumstances.
So, where we're headed here
is I'd like you to come
away from today's episode
with what I call an organizational logic,
a framework for thinking
about these things
that typically we just call happy or sad
or depressed or anxious.
And I'm going to make
sure that you have tools
that are grounded in
physiology and neuroscience
that will allow you to navigate
this otherwise complex space
that we call emotions
that will allow you to
ground yourself better
when you're feeling like
life is weighing on you,
where you're kind of being
pulled by the currents of life
as well as to support other people
whether or not that's in
a psychological practice
if you're a practitioner, or
you have clients or children
or spouses, really, to be
able to support other people
in your environment better.
And the tools that I'm
going to focus on today
range from behavioral tools.
We will talk about some
of the more valuable
supplementation tools that are out there.
And we're going to talk a little bit
about things like depression, PTSD,
but we will be devoting entire episodes
to things like depression,
PTSD, and even attention deficit
and obsessive compulsive disorder,
which believe it or not,
although this might not
surprise many of you,
have a very strong emotional component.
It's just not just about
compulsive behaviors
and intrusive thoughts.
It's also about the emotional
load of being in that state.
So, I promise that today
we're going to clean up
a lot of misunderstanding.
We're going to give you a lot of tools
and you're going to learn a lot
about the biology of how your
body and brain work together.
Because if ever there was a topic
that brought together the brain and body
or mind-body relationship,
it's stress and emotions.
It's also the positive emotions.
When we feel something,
whether or not we're super happy
or just feeling kind of pleasant
or we are feeling stressed,
anxious, and overwhelmed,
it isn't just in our head.
It's also in our body.
And as you may recall, the nervous system,
which includes the brain and
the eyes and the spinal cord,
but also all the connections
with the organs of the body
includes the brain and body.
And those organs of the body,
your gut, and your liver, and your spleen,
they're also communicating with the brain.
So, I look forward to a day, in fact,
when we no longer think about neuroscience
as just the brain.
And many neuroscientists now
also think about the body, of course.
And the brain controls the body,
but the body is also
having a very profound
and concrete influence on the brain.
I think up until recently,
people would hear
about kind of brain-body and
always think about mindfulness.
We're actually not going to talk
that much about mindfulness at all today.
Mindfulness is kind of a
vague concept, in fact.
When you think about mindfulness,
it's good to take the opposite.
What's the opposite of mindfulness?
Would be mindlessness.
Well, all of a sudden we're into territory
that isn't really easy for one person
to describe their experience
or to help others with their experience.
Today, we're going to
talk about objective tools
that match the brain-body experience
or separate the brain-body experience
in ways that leverage your
ability to lean into life better,
to feel better, literally
to just feel better
about what you're experiencing,
and believe it or not, to be
able to control your emotions
when that's appropriate.
This isn't about becoming robotic.
This isn't about trying not to feel human.
This is actually about being
able to lean into life better
as a consequence of being able to control
some of your inner real estate.
This nervous system that
includes the brain and body
and how that nervous system is interacting
with the outside world.
So, it's to place you in a
greater position of power.
And so, let's get started in
deciphering what is stress,
what are emotions, and why did
I batch stress and emotions
into one discussion today?
Okay.
So, what is stress?
We hear all the time that stress is bad.
We hear people saying
they're really stressed out.
What is stress?
You've all presumably heard
the arguments or the framework
that stress is this horrible
ancient carryover over
from times in which humans
were pursued by animals
or other human predators
and that whenever we
feel what we call stress
or feel stressed out,
that it's just this unfortunate
invasion of something
that we no longer need in modern life,
that this was designed for
when we were being attacked
by bears or tigers or
lions or whatever it is.
And gosh, what an unfortunate thing.
And we have so many
creature comforts nowadays,
but we have not eliminated this stress.
Almost as if it was like an
organ or a system in our body
that was bad for us, that we're stuck with
just because of the species that we are.
But first of all, all
species experience stress.
And I think that it's fair to say
even though I wasn't there,
that yes, in fact, throughout
our evolutionary history,
we were vulnerable to animal attack
and other human attacks on a regular basis
up until a point where we
started developing weapons
and structures and fire and other things
that allow us to protect ourselves better
from those animals and
invaders of various kinds.
But it is entirely naive for us to think
that in ancient times,
ancient times being kind of loose term
for previous on medieval times,
100 years ago, 1000 years
ago, 10,000 years ago,
of course, there were infidelities, right?
Partners cheated.
People died.
In fact, before the advent of phones,
which we're going to talk about today,
you can imagine that someone
might head off on a hunt
or to go visit a relative
and never come back
and you would never know why.
That would be very stressful.
So, there was psychosocial stress.
There was the stress of losing loved ones.
There was the stress of cold, of famine.
There was the stress
probably also of just worry.
This idea that ancient versions of humans
1000 years ago, 100
years ago didn't worry,
I think that is entirely inconsistent
with everything we know
about the structure
of the human brain 100
years, 1000 years ago.
So, all the problems that
we're struggling with
existed forever.
It's just that stress at its
core is a generalized system.
It wasn't designed for tigers attacking us
or people attacking us.
It's a system to mobilize
other systems in the brain
and body.
That's what stress really is.
It's designed to be generic.
And that's the most important thing
that I'd like you to understand today,
is that the system that
governs what we call stress
is generic.
It wasn't designed for one thing.
And that gives it a certain advantage
in taking over the state
of our brain and body,
but it also gives you, all of us
an advantage in controlling it
because it's based on
hard-wired biological mechanisms
and there are hard-wired
biological mechanisms,
meaning cells and chemicals
and pathways and tissues
that exist in you right now
that require no neuroplasticity
that allow you to put a brake on stress.
And so, we're going to talk about those.
So, you have a system for stress
and you have a system for
distress that are baked into you.
They were genetically encoded.
And you were born with them
and you still have them now.
So, if you're alive and listening,
you have the capacity
to control your stress.
And today, I'm going to talk about ways
that you can control your stress,
not just by doing some
offline practice of meditation
or breath work or something like that,
but real-time tools.
Tools that allow you
to push back on stress
when stress hits in real time.
This is something that
my lab works actively on
in developing and testing these tools
and evolving these tools.
And there are other laboratories
that do this as well.
So, let's talk about the stress response.
And by doing that, you
will understand exactly why
the tools I'm going to give you work.
For those of you that are saying,
"Wait, I just want the tools.
Just give me a summary,"
trust me, if you understand mechanism,
you are going to be in
a far better position
to incorporate these tools, to
teach these tools to others,
and to modify them as your
life circumstances change.
If you'd like the cheat sheet
or you just want the one-page PDF,
eventually we'll get
that stuff out to people,
but it's really important to understand
the underlying mechanism.
Okay.
So, what is stress?
Well, let's just distinguish
between stressors,
which are the things that stress us out,
and stress, which is the psychological
and physiological response to stressors.
I'm mainly going to talk about stress,
which is your response to things.
Let's be clear about what we already know,
which is that stressors
can be psychological
or they can be physical.
Okay?
If I put you outside on a
cold day without a jacket
for a very long time,
that is stressful.
If I have you prepare for
too many exams at once
and you can't balance it
all with your sleep schedule
and your other needs for
comfort and wellbeing,
like food, rest, sleep,
and social connection,
that is stressful.
So, stress, and as I
mentioned before, is generic.
It doesn't distinguish
between physical and emotional stress.
So, what happens when
the stress response hits?
Let's talk about the immediate
or what we call the acute stress response.
We could also think of
this as short-term stress.
So, you have a collection of neurons.
They have a name.
It's called the sympathetic chain ganglia.
And it has nothing to do with sympathy.
Sympa means together.
And there's a group of neurons
that start right about at your neck
and run down to about your
navel, a little bit lower,
and those are called the
sympathetic chain ganglia.
You don't need to memorize that name.
There will not be a quiz.
But it's important to know that
in the middle of your body,
you have a chain of neurons
that when something stresses us out,
either in our mind
or because something
enters our environment
and we see something that stresses us out,
that we don't like heights
if you're afraid of heights,
somebody you dislike walks
into the room, et cetera,
that chain of neurons becomes activated
like a bunch of dominoes
falling on all at once.
It's very fast.
When that happens,
those neurons release a
neuromodulator neurochemical
that I've talked about
before on this podcast
called acetylcholine.
They release that at various
sites within the body.
Now, this is important because normally,
acetylcholine would be
used to move muscles.
Actually, every time we move a muscle,
pick up a cup of coffee, write with a pen,
walk down the street,
it's spinal neurons connecting to muscle
and releasing acetylcholine.
So, in the brain it's involved in focus
and it muscles is involved
in making muscles twitch.
But if we were stressed,
we wouldn't want all our
muscles to contract at once
because we would just be kind
of like paralyzed like this
in what tonic activation, as it's called.
We wouldn't want that.
Something called tetanus,
believe it or not.
because the tetanus toxin
will cause that kind of rigor
of the entire body.
You do not want that.
When those neurons are activated,
acetylcholine is released,
but there are some other neurons
for the aficionados out there.
They're called the postganglionic neurons.
Those ones respond to that acetylcholine
and then they release epinephrine,
which is the equivalent to adrenaline.
So, we have this system
where it's very fast
whenever we're stressed,
the core of our body,
these neurons down the middle of our body
release these chemicals
and then there's adrenaline or epinephrine
released at particular organs
and acts in particular ways.
We're going down into the weeds here.
So just stay with me because
it's going to make a lot of sense
and you will appreciate
having this knowledge in hand.
That epinephrine acts
in two different ways.
Some things like the muscles
of your legs and your heart
and other things that need to be active
when you're stressed,
they have a certain kind of receptor
which is called the beta receptor.
And that beta receptor
responds to epinephrine
and blood vessels dilate.
They get bigger and blood
rushes in to our legs.
The heart rate speeds up.
Lots of things happen that get activated.
And at the same time,
that epinephrine activates other receptors
on certain tissues that we don't need.
The ones involved in
digestion, reproduction,
and things of that sort that are luxuries
for when things are going well,
not things to pay attention
to when we're stressed.
And that binds to other receptors
that contract the blood vessels.
So, basically the stress response,
this is the key phrase here,
the stress response A, is
generic, I said that before,
and B, it basically pushes
certain systems to be activated
and other systems to not be activated.
So, the stress response is two-pronged.
It's a yes for certain things
and it's a no, you may not
right now for other things.
So, that's the key thing to understand
about the stress response.
That's why your heart speeds up.
That's why you feel
blood in certain organs
and tissues of your
body, but not in others.
That's why your throat goes dry
because it turns out that
when you get stressed,
the salivary glands are shut down.
There's a lot less blood flow
to the neurons that control salivation.
And so, you're going to start swallowing.
You feel like your throat is getting dry.
There are a lot of different effects.
I'm not going to list them
all off, but basically,
you are activated in ways
that support you moving.
So, that's the third thing.
It's first of all, it's generic.
Second of all, the stress
response, activate certain things
and shuts down other features of our body.
And then it's a sense of agitation
that makes you want to move.
And that's because fundamentally,
the stress response is
just this generic thing
that says do something.
And movement in this case
can either be the bias
to move in terms of action,
or it can be the bias to say something.
When we are stressed, we are
more likely to say something
that probably we shouldn't say.
We are more likely to move.
And if you're trying to suppress movement,
you'll feel that as a tremor.
You're going to feel agitated
and that's because it
was designed to move you.
So, this is important because
if you want to control stress,
you need to learn how to
work with that agitation.
I'd like to give you a tool at this point,
because I think if we go any further
with a lot more science,
people are going to begin to
wonder if this is just going to be
a kind of standard university lecture
about the stress response.
I'm going to give you more
signs about the stress response,
but I want to take what
we now already know
about the stress response
and use that as a framework
for thinking about
how one might reduce or even
eliminate the stress response
quickly in real time, should
it arise when we don't want it.
So, we're taking the podium
or we're sitting down at a Zoom call,
and all of a sudden we're feeling flushed.
We're feeling like our heart is racing.
We're feeling a little too alert.
We're feeling a little worked
up and we want to calm down.
As far as I am aware of,
the best tools to reduce stress quickly,
so-called real-time tools
are going to be tools
that have a direct line
to the so-called autonomic nervous system.
The autonomic nervous
system is a name given
to the kind of general
features of alertness
or calmness in the body.
Typically, it means automatic.
Although we do have some control over it
at certain what so-called
leavers are entry points.
Here's what doesn't
work to control stress.
Telling yourself to calm down.
In fact, that tends to
just exacerbate stress.
Telling someone else to calm down
also tends to exacerbate their stress.
If you want to reduce the
magnitude of the stress response,
the best thing you can do is activate
the other system in the body
which is designed for
calming and relaxation.
And that system is called
the parasympathetic nervous system.
Because as I mentioned before,
the neurons that control stress
run from about your neck to your navel.
The parasympathetic neurons,
para just means near,
exist in, they're some
of the cranial nerves.
So, it's kind of left
neck and lower brainstem.
Kind of back of the brain and in the neck
and in the pelvic area.
And the parasympathetic nervous
system is really interesting
because especially the cranial nerves,
the ones that are up in the
brainstem and in the neck area,
those have a direct line to
various features of your face,
in particular, the eyes.
They control things like eye
movements, pupil dilation,
things of that sort,
as well as the tongue, the
facial muscles, et cetera.
The parasympathetic nervous system,
many people don't realize this,
is the system by which we
control the face and the eyes,
and to some extent, our
airway, the trachea.
And it's these neurons that
reside within the pelvic area.
Now, the neurons within the pelvic area
are involved in control of
the genitals, the bladder,
and the rectum.
And those don't have a direct line.
You don't have a direct
way to control those.
It actually has to go
from brain to spinal cord
and then out to those organs.
Whereas the parasympathetic nervous system
has certain entry points
or what I'll call leavers
that will allow you to push
back on the stress response
in real time and diminish it
and feel more relaxed really quickly.
So, I'm going to teach
you the first tool now,
so I don't overwhelm you with
all this academic knowledge
without giving you something useful.
And the tool that at least to
my knowledge is the fastest
and most thoroughly grounded
in physiology and neuroscience
for calming down in a self-directed way
is what's called the
physiological sigh, S-I-G-H.
Now, some of you might've
heard me talk about this
on previous podcasts,
but I'm going to explain
this in the context
of how respiration in general
is used to calm us down.
And turns out you're all
doing this all the time,
but you are doing it involuntarily.
And when you stress, you tend to forget
that you can also activate
these systems voluntarily.
This is an extremely
powerful set of techniques
that we know from scientific studies
that are being done in my lab,
Jack Feldman's lab at UCLA,
and others now that are very, very useful
for reducing your stress
response in real time.
And here's how they work.
These days, there seems
to be a lot of interest
in breath work.
Breath work typically, is
when you go and you sit down
or you lie down and you
deliberately breathe
in a particular way
for a series of minutes
in order to shift your
physiology, access some states.
And it does have some utility
that we're going to talk about,
that is not what I'm talking about now.
What I'm talking about when I
refer to physiological sighs,
is the very real medical
school textbook relationship
between the brain, the body,
and the body as it relates
to the breathing apparati,
meaning the diaphragm
and lungs and the heart.
Let's take the hallmark
of the stress response.
The heart starts beating faster.
Blood is shuttled to the
big muscles of the body
to move you away from
whatever it is the stressor is
or just make you feel like
you need to move or talk.
Your face goes flushed, et cetera.
Heart rate, many of us
feel is involuntary.
Just kind of functions whether
or not we're moving fast
or moving slow.
If you think about it, it's
not really purely autonomic
because you can speed up
your heart rate by running
or you can slow it down
by slowing down your run.
You can move to a walk or lie down.
But that's indirect control.
There is however, a way
in which you can breathe
that directly controls your heart rate
through the interactions
between the sympathetic
and the parasympathetic nervous system.
Here's how it works.
When you inhale,
so whether or not it's through the nose
or through the mouth,
this skeletal muscle
that's inside your body
called the diaphragm, it moves down.
And that's because the lungs expand,
the diaphragm moves down.
Your heart actually
gets a little bit bigger
in that expanded space.
There's more space for the heart.
So, not your emotional
heart getting bigger.
I'm talking about your
actual physical heart
getting a little bit bigger.
The volume grows.
And as a consequence,
whatever blood is in there
is now at a lower volume or
moving a little bit more slowly
in that larger volume than
it was before you inhaled.
Okay?
So more space, heart gets bigger.
Blood moves more slowly.
And there's a little group of neurons
called the sinoatrial node
in the heart that registers,
believe it or not,
those neurons pay attention
to the rate of blood
flow through the heart
and send a signal up to the brain
that blood is moving more
slowly through the heart.
The brain then sends a
signal back to the heart
to speed the heart up.
So, what this means is
if you want your heart to beat faster,
inhale longer, inhale more
vigorously than your exhales.
Now, there are a variety of
ways that one could do that,
but it doesn't matter
if it's through the nose
or through the mouth.
If your inhales are
longer than your exhales,
you're speeding up your heart.
If your inhales are more vigorous,
so even if your inhales are
shorter than your exhales,
you are speeding up your heart rate.
Now, the opposite is also true.
If you want to slow your heart rate down,
so stress response hits,
you want to slow your heart rate down,
what you want to do is again,
capitalize on this
relationship between the body,
meaning the diaphragm and
the heart and the brain.
Here's how it works.
When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up,
which makes the heart
a little bit smaller.
It actually gets a little more compact.
Blood flows more quickly
through that compact space
sort of like just a pipe getting smaller.
The sinoatrial node registers
that blood is going more quickly,
sends a signal up to the brain.
And the parasympathetic nervous system,
some neurons in your
brain stem send a signal
back to the heart to slow the heart down.
So, if you want to calm down quickly,
you need to make your exhales longer
and or more vigorous than your inhales.
Now, the reason this is so attractive
as a tool for controlling stress
is that it works in real time.
This doesn't involve a
practice that you have to go
and sit there and do
anything separate from life.
And we are going to get to emotion.
Emotions and stress happen in real time.
And so, while it's wonderful
to have a breath work practice
or to have the opportunity
to get a massage
or sit in a sauna or do