Neuroscientist Reveals How To Stop Feeling Lazy & Unmotivated | Dr. Andrew Huberman EP 729

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation show. Today's episode is all about unlocking the power of your mind. Having a growth mindset is one of the most crucial decisions you can make in your life. Mental toughness can allow you to respond instead of react, to be in control instead of out of control, and give you the endurance you need to follow your dreams. The body has a huge and profound influence on our mind. And the reason is that we often talk about the brain and we think the brain, the brain, the brain. The brain is important, but the brain and the spinal cord, which makes up what we call the central nervous system, are extensively connected with the body.

0:51And the body is extensively connected with the brain and spinal cord. Every organ in our body, our heart, our diaphragm, our lungs, our spleen, our liver, all of it is, as we say, innervated. If we were to just dissolve away everything except the nervous system, if we had a human nervous system splayed out here on the table in front of us, it would look like a human being. There have been thousands of years of debates about what's the mind, what's the brain, etc., the mind-body problem, all that. I think it's fair to say that states of mind include the brain, the activity of the brain, and the body.

1:27Those two things coordinate the brain and the body and have a sort of what I call a contract. The brain does really five things. We have sensation. We're constantly being bombarded with sound waves and light and smells and things. And that stuff is ongoing, and you can't negotiate that. Then there's perception, which is which sensations you are paying attention to. The perceptions are where your attention is, which sensations you're attending to. And then you have thoughts. And thoughts get a little complicated for us to parse because they are a little bit abstract. But thoughts are a combination of our perception, whatever it is we're attending to.

2:05And they have context, memory. They're tapped into our memory systems. And then there are feelings slash emotions. And this is where it really starts to get abstract and kind of hazy and where there's still a lot of debate. Because for instance, if I ask you how you're feeling and you say, I feel, most people say, I feel good. Well, what does that mean? I mean, that's not a feeling. Emotions are a real thing. And they certainly, perhaps more than anything else, recruit the brain and the body. When we feel depressed, we occupy certain postures. We feel it in our gut. We feel it in our limbs. We can feel fatigue.

2:44We can feel anxious. And so the emotions are really where you capture that brain-body contract and relationship very, very intensely. And then the fifth thing is actions. And what I love about actions and behaviors is they are very concrete. You're writing with your pen now. I'm speaking. I'm moving my hands. You can measure those things. You can analyze them. We know exactly what the neural pathways are. The reason I like to talk about states and the reason we study states in my lab is that states have two properties that are easy to study somewhat compared to emotions. States tend to have a beginning, a middle, and an end, whereas emotions, it's sort of like they're more in combination.

3:22States are more like the primary colors from which you get all the emotions. The other thing is that they have an intensity that we can measure. You can have a state of being very alert or very drowsy or asleep. Throughout the day and throughout the year, we're confronted with different things. The mind plays an important role in interpreting whether or not it's overwhelming or tolerable. cortisol is a stress hormone so you have your adrenal glands which are right above your kidneys and your lower back they release adrenaline which is also called epinephrine and adrenaline is what makes you feel agitated what's you you know if you're calm you're walking along you look at your phone and there's a troubling text message you immediately have focus energy and alertness and it recruits a set of neurons that live right in the core of your body they then send a signal out to your body and all of a sudden you feel like you want to move these states of mind when when someone's upset, they recruit their entire being, their way of being.

4:17For instance, if you're angry, upset, or stressed, your pupils dilate. This is subconscious. As a consequence of that, you view the world in portrait mode where the thing that's upsetting you is in sharper focus and everything else is blurry. So you actually see the world differently. In addition to that, your perception of time is now faster so that things outside you seem to be moving more slowly in comparison to how you feel inside. Stress is very misunderstood because people think of stress as this ancient carryover that's very unfortunate. It kind of gets lumped with depression, like, oh, this is just a flaw in our design or something.

4:56But actually, stress is wonderful. It actually activates our immune system. You don't want stress on all the time. Sleep is really important, et cetera. But that stress response combats infection because it recruits immune cells. it's very hard to control the mind just using thinking it's very hard to talk oneself out of an emotional state and so one of the reasons why i mentioned that sensation perception feeling thought and action before is that the actions are very concrete and because of this reciprocal relationship between the brain and body brain connects to body body connects to brain we know that when the mind isn't where we want it to be, we need to use the body to intervene.

5:41To what extent does our subjective narrative, the story we tell ourselves actually mean something for the body? The old narrative, meaning a few 10 years ago, was that if you're feeling depressed, just smile. Well, if that worked, we would have a lot less depression than we see out there. The The reason I call it a brain-body contract early on is that the brain and the body are constantly in dialogue. The idea that when we're depressed we tend to be in more defensive type postures, when we're feeling good we tend to be in more relaxed and extended postures, all true. But it does not mean that just by occupying the extended posture that I'm going to completely shift the mind.

6:20There are two ways that you can shift your brain state quickly. You mentioned one already which is respiration or breathing. And the reason is there's a direct connection from the brain to an organ in our body called the diaphragm, which is skeletal muscle. And it's unlike other organs like the heart or the spleen or the liver, because it's actually made up of what's called striated muscle, just like a bicep, tricep, or quadricep. It can be voluntarily controlled. So one of the reasons why breathing is such a powerful tool for shifting one's state is that A, it's always available. The other thing is that breathing controls our level of alertness very dramatically.

6:56So the faster you breathe, generally, the more alert you are. The slower you breathe, the more calm you're going to be. You know, when you look at states of stress, I mean, cold water is one way to do it. Intense, the breathing that they do, that sort of Wim Hof breathing is also classically called tumor breathing. It's kind of the opposite of the physiological side that I described, the double inhale, exhale, because it's not designed to reduce stress. It's actually designed to increase your level of alertness. and it's interesting because a lot of people find great relief from stress by doing this tummo type Wim Hof intense breathing once a day so intense breathing like tummo breathing or ice baths or cold showers or intense exercise like you know high intensity interval training type stuff teaches the mind to be comfortable in these higher stress states where in other words it teaches people to be comfortable when they have a lot of adrenaline in their body but stress inoculation is not about not getting stressed it's actually about divorcing the mind-body relationship a bit so that you're calm in the mind when your body is very amplified yeah so if you've ever done tumulti breathing or you've done a cold shower the goal is to get the adrenaline release and then calm your mind and then calm your mind there is one way in which subjective thought and deliberate thought is very powerful over states of mind and body to answer your question can you think your way out of the ice bath being cold thoughts happen spontaneously all the time they're popping up like a poorly filtered internet connection but thoughts can also be deliberately introduced i can say just decide to write your name and you're you can do that i'm going to decide right and you can do it so that's a deliberate thought which says that you can introduce thoughts so i think it's very hard to control negative thoughts directly by trying to suppress them.

8:45Generally, they tend to just want to continue to geyser up all the time, but we can introduce a positive thought. Neuroplasticity, which is the brain's ability to change in response to experience and is the main way in which we go from deliberate action, duration path, outcome stuff to reflexive action and thought. That process has two parts. One is the trigger, which is in adults is triggered by focus and attention and even a heightened state of agitation. The more frustrated you feel, the more you're actually triggering learning and saying, this is important. This is what people need to understand.

9:18That deliberate thought, deliberate action, writing the book, doing the workout you don't want to do, whatever it is, having the conversation, it's supposed to feel hard. It's supposed to feel hard, but you should subjectively reward it so that you get better at doing that. The mental strain you feel when you're learning something is the trigger for neuroplasticity, for your brain to change. And the goal of neuroplasticity is to make things reflexive so you don't have to think about them. And then the second part is deep relaxation, meditation, forms of deep relaxation, deep sleep, like slow wave sleep.

9:48That's when the connections between neurons called synapses actually get stronger. That's when the connections that you don't want get removed. And that's also in certain cases where you get new neurons actually born in your brain. So these deep relaxation states, even if we're wide awake still, allow the nervous system to reset so that it can get back into action. So for the go-getters, if you want to have a long career, you want to high-perform your whole career, you need to alternate rest and effort. You need to reward effort with rest. A hero in this, two heroes actually, is I would say Richard Feynman, the great physicist who had a very playful attitude about learning.

10:32That's one thing that I really should illustrate. If you are in frustration and strain, A sense of play is great because in play you have focus, you have intention and alertness, and it keeps you light enough that there's that dopamine release. Dopamine is released in play for a reason because kids and animals, young animals and young children, learn social interactions through play. Our body is pretty fascinating. It's really fascinating. The human species was given this tremendous gift of neuroplasticity, the ability to change ourselves and be better in deliberate ways. And my definition of greatness is anyone that's making that effort, even in a tiny way, just to take this incredible machinery that we were given, this nervous system, and to leverage it toward being better, feeling better, and showing up better for other people.

11:24I really believe that's why we're here. I am so excited for you to finish the rest of your day strong. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to click the link in the description and it'll take you to the full episode of my other show, The School of Greatness. Make sure to come back tomorrow for another episode of The Daily Motivation Show.