Transcript for: The Science of Stress and Emotions
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
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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
whatever it is that you do in order to set your stress
controls in the right direction, having tools that you
can reach to in real time that require no learning, I mean, I had to teach it to
you, you had to learn that, but it doesn't require any plasticy to activate these pathways. So, if you're feeling stressed, you still need to inhale, of course, but you need to lengthen your exhales. Now, there's a tool
that capitalizes on this in a kind of unique
way, a kind of a twist, which is the physiological sigh. The physiological sigh was
discovered in the '30s. It's now been explored at
the neuro-biological level and mechanistically in far more detail by Jack Feldman's lab at UCLA. Also Mark Krasnow's lab at Stanford. And the physiological sigh
is something that humans and animals do anytime they
are about to fall asleep. You also do it throughout
sleep from time to time when carbon dioxide, which we'll talk about in a moment, builds up too much in your system. And the physiological sigh is something that people naturally start
doing when they've been crying and they're trying to
recover some air or calm down when they've been sobbing very hard or when they are in
claustrophobic environments. However, the amazing
thing about this thing that we call the diaphragm,
the skeletal muscle, is that it's an internal organ that you can control voluntarily, unlike your spleen or your
heart or your pancreas where you can't just say, "Oh,
I want to make my pancreas turn out a little more insulin right now. I'm just going to do that
with my mind directly." You can't do that. You can do that by smelling
a really good donut or something, but you can't just do it directly. You can move your diaphragm
intentionally, right? You can do it anytime you want. And it'll run in the background if you're not thinking about it. So, this incredible pathway that goes from brain to diaphragm through what's called the
phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C. Phrenic. The phrenic nerve
innervates the diaphragm. You can control anytime you want. You can double up your inhales
or triple up your inhales. You can exhale more than your inhales. Whatever you want to do. Such an incredible organ. And the physiological sigh is something that we do spontaneously. But when you're feeling stressed, you can do a double
inhale, [inhales deeply] [exhales] long exhale. Now, I just told you a minute ago that if you inhale more than you exhale, you're going to speed the heart rate up, which would promote more
stress and activation. Now I'm telling you to
do a double inhale-exhale in order to calm down. And the reason is the double inhale-exhale which is the physiological sigh takes advantage of the fact
that when we do a double inhale, even if the second inhale is sneaking in just a tiny bit more air, because it's kind of hard to get
to deep inhales back to back, you do big deep inhale and then another little
ones sneaking it in, the little sacks in your lungs. If you only have the lungs. Your lungs are just two big bags, but you've got millions of little sacks throughout the lungs that
actually make the surface area of your lungs as big as a tennis court. It's amazing if we were
to just spread out. Those tend to collapse as we get stressed. And carbon dioxide builds
up in our bloodstream and that's one of the reasons
we feel agitated as well. So, and it makes us very jittery. I mean, there's some other
effects of carbon dioxide I don't want to get into, but when you do the double inhale-exhale, the double inhale reinflates those little sacks of the lungs. And then when you do the long exhale, that long exhale is
now much more effective at reading your body and
bloodstream of carbon dioxide, which relaxes you very quickly. My lab in collaboration
with David Spiegel's lab, David's the Associate Chair
of Psychiatry at Stanford, are doing a study right now exploring how physiological sighs and other patterns of
breathing done deliberately can modulate the stress response and other things related to emotionality. Those work are ongoing. I want to be clear those
studies aren't done. But it's very clear from work in our labs, from work in Jack
Feldman's lab and others, that the physiological sigh
is the fastest, hardwired way for us to eliminate this
stressful response in our body quickly in real time. And so, I'm excited to give you this tool because I think most people
have heard that mindfulness and meditation is good,
exercise is good for us, we all need to be getting
enough sleep, et cetera, but life happens. And when you find yourself in a position where you are more alert and activated than you would like to be, regardless of whether or not the stressor is relationship-based or it's
financial or it's physical or anything like that, you can look to the physiological sigh because it bypasses a
very important feature of how we function, which is that it's very
hard to control the mind with the mind, especially when we are in
heightened states of activation. When you're very alert or very sleepy, it is very hard to use these
so-called top-down mechanisms of intention and gratitude
and all these things that are really powerful
tools when we are not super activated and
stressed or not super tired. But when we are anywhere in the range of very alert and stressed to very sleepy, physiological sighs are a powerful way of bringing our level of
so-called autonomic activation, which just means our
level of alertness down. And so, whether or not
it's in line at the bank or whether or not you're
wearing a mask nowadays or you're not, whatever the conditions
may be where you're at and your needs, when you're feeling stressed, the physiological sigh done
just one to three times, it will be double inhale, exhale, double inhale, exhale maybe just two times will bring down your level
of stress very, very fast. And as far as I know, it's the fastest way to accomplish that. An important note about
the physiological sigh or exhale-emphasized breathing for lowering the stress response. Many people worry that their heart rate does not come down fast enough. I want to tell you you do
not want your heart rate to reduce very fast. There's actually something
called the vasovagal response, where people will stand up or they'll get up in
the middle of the night to use the bathroom and
then all of a sudden, they'll collapse, they'll faint. That's because the heart
rate was reduced too much. Some people will see blood or they'll see something
really troubling and stressful and they'll pass out. That's an over-activation or an acceleration of
the calming response. They're not so stressed that they kind of fall
off the cliff of stress. They get so stressed that the rebound mechanism
for calming themselves down goes too high, too fast. They calmed down too fast
and they collapse and faint. And so, be aware that if you're going to use the physiological sigh or exhale-emphasized
breathing to calm down, that your heart rate will
take about 20 to 30 seconds to come down to baseline. And you may need to repeat
the physiological sigh a few times. So, that's an important note
about the use of breathing to control levels of stress. The other thing is that when
you decide to look to the body to control the mind, it does something else
that's very powerful. When you are stressed
in your mind and body, so you're feeling really
agitated, activated, and worried, and you use a tool like
the physiological sigh or exhale-emphasized breathing, you will notice that then
your brain and your mind becomes more available for
controlling the stress response and reacting to it. Which is great because the
sweet spot in life is to be, provided you're not trying to sleep, is to be alert and calm. And so, that's the idea. Is to be alert and calm and to bring you back into that
sort of plane of alertness. For those of you that
have trouble sleeping or just relaxing through the day, the physiological sigh can be repeated for 10, 15 cycles if you like. Some people find that it
actually puts them to sleep. So, if they lie down and they're reading and they do too many of these, that actually can put them to sleep. And what you'll find is that
most breath work protocols, the kind of stuff that's
done away from real life, that you set aside time and decide to do quote
unquote, breath work, most of that works such
that if you're doing inhales that are longer and more
vigorous than exhales, it tends to be activating and alert you. If you're doing exhales that are longer and more vigorous than the inhales, it tends to put you to sleep. And many of the protocols
that are out there from laboratories and
that populate the internet and wellness sites and whatnot, if it's exhale-emphasized breathing, oftentimes has been used as a tool for trying to teach people to fall asleep. Physiological sigh is a little different. It's designed to be used in real time. Just think of it is just
kind of in your kit of things that you can do as life happens and as you need to react to life. A note about nasal versus mouth breathing, there's a plethora of
information out there now because of James Nestor's book, "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art," which came out this last year. Excellent book. As well as "Jaws" which is
from Sandra Kahn, Paul Ehrlich with a foreword by Jared
Diamond and Robert Sapolsky. So, a collection of people from Stanford. Jared Diamond is not at
Stanford, but the rest are. And some heavy hitters on that book, which is about the benefits
of nasal breathing. And in many cases, nasal
breathing is more advantageous than mouth breathing
for all sorts of things. Cosmetic features of the
face, especially in kids, warding off infection, et cetera. With the physiological
sigh, the best way to do it would be double inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth. But if you can't, and you can only do
that through your mouth, just do it through your mouth. If want to do all through your
nose, do it through your nose. This anchors back to
some underlying neurology or neuroscience. So, for those of you that want to know, you have two breathing centers. One that's involved in rhythmic breathing for inhales followed by exhales, followed by inhales followed by exhales. The so-called pre-Botzinger nucleus named after a bottle of wine and discovered by Jack Feldman at UCLA and a nearby nucleus called
the parafacial nucleus also discovered by Jack Feldman at UCLA. And the parafacial nucleus is involved in any time you double up the inhales or double up the exhales. It was designed so that you could breathe while you're speaking because you can't always
go inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale when you're speaking. So, I tell you this, not to
overwhelm you with knowledge, but just know that when
you double up your inhales or you double up your exhales, you are activating this
parafacial nucleus. And it has other cool effects. Because it's located near the
neurons that control the face, it also has a tendency to relax the jaw. There's some interplay between the neurons that control the speaking stuff and the stuff for your tongue. So, all of a sudden, when we
do this physiological sigh, we tap into neural
circuitry that allows us to speak more clearly, to control the muscles
of the face and jaw. Maybe that means not saying certain things when we're stressed, and just generally to relax. And so, this brings us
back to the neuroscience of this parasympathetic nervous system. This calming system that's been
genetically encoded into us that we all have, regardless
of who our parents are, which is that the neurons
that control all this stuff, the face, the eyes, et cetera, are all working together. And that's why when we get stressed, it's hard for us to speak
or we tend to jitter and these kinds of things. Just like all the
neurons that cause stress in the center of the spinal
cord are working together to get our body activated. Okay, lot of science today. You've now got the
physiological sigh as a tool. You know the exhale-emphasized breathing will slow your heart down and inhale-emphasized breathing
will speed your heart up. So, let's think about something now. Let's think about stress
from not whether or not it's acute or chronic, whether or not it's good
for us or bad for us, but on three different timescales. Because then we can arrive
at what this is all about as it relates to emotions. Because trust me, this has
everything to do with emotions and whether or not you're
functioning well emotionally or you're not functioning
well emotionally, whether or not you're
coping or not coping. So, those are typically
psychological terms and psychological discussions. We are entering this through
the portal of physiology. The stuff of medical textbooks. And we will arrive at the psychology soon, but I really want you to
understand the difference between the three kinds of stress on three different timescales, short-term, medium-term, and long-term, and what it's good for
and what it's bad for. I think we've all heard
that stress is bad for us. We've seen these pictures
intended to frighten us. And indeed they are frightening. You see the nice really
plump brain on the left. It says healthy or control. And then you see the
brain that says stressed above it on the right
and it's like withered, where we see that the hippocampus and area involved in memory is smaller. People that are stressed. We see that the Alzheimer's
brain is made worse by stress. That people who have a
predisposition to schizophrenia, when they get stressed, higher incidence of
schizophrenia episodes. You hear that addicts will
relapse when they're stressed. I mean, okay, we get it. And it's very important, but I think we've all
heard now so many times that stress is bad. But in that conversation, unfortunately, it's eclipsed some of the
really positive things that stress does for us in the short-term. So, stress can be short-term,
medium-term, or long-term. Long-term stress is indeed bad for all the reasons I just
mentioned and many others. But what's never actually been discussed is what stress is so terrific for, positive for in the short-term. And I think we tend to overlook
the important question, which is what is short-term
and what is long-term? No one ever bothers to
tell us what is chronic, what is acute. Right? Is it five minutes? Is it five days? Is it for the duration of final exams? Or is it for the duration of
a senior thesis in college? No one actually draws
boundaries around this stuff or even general guidelines. And so, it's become a
bit of a mess, frankly, to try and decipher this
whole space around stress. So, I'm going to try and
clean some of this up for you based on what we know
from the scientific data. First of all, acute stress, when the stress response hits, that is good for your immune system. I know that might be a
tough pill to swallow, but it's absolutely true. In fact, stress often comes
in the form of bacterial or viral infection. And the stress response
is in part organized to combat bacterial and viral infection. There are pathways from
the same brain centers that activate these
neurons in your spinal cord to make you feel like you want to move. There are other neurons in your brain that activate things like your spleen, which will deploy killer cells to go out and scavenge for incoming
bacteria and viruses and try and eat them up and kill them. So, short-term stress and the release of adrenaline
in particular or epinephrine, same thing, adrenaline and epinephrine, is good for combating infection. And this to me is just
not discussed enough. So, that's why I'm discussing it here. And it relates to a particular tool that many of you ask about, but I don't often get the
opportunity to talk about in such an appropriate context. It's not that it's ever
inappropriate to talk about, but what I'm about to talk
about now is the use of, again, respiration breathing to somewhat artificially
activate the stress response. And that will accomplish two things. Okay? I'll return to medium
and long-term stress, but I want to say
short-term stress is good because the dilation of the pupils, the changes in the optics of the eyes, the quickening of the heart rate, the sharpening of your cognition. And in fact that short-term stress brings certain elements
of the brain online that allow you to focus. Now, it narrows your focus. You're not good at seeing
the so-called big picture, but it narrows your focus. It allows you to do these, what I call duration path
outcome types of analysis. It allows you to evaluate
your environment, evaluate what you need to do. It primes your whole system
for better cognition. It primes your immune
system to combat infection. And that all makes sense when you think about that the fact that famine, thirst, bacterial infections,
viral infections, invaders, all of this stuff liberates
a response in the body that's designed to get you to fight back against whatever stressor
that happens to be. Psychological, physical, bacterial, viral. Again, the stress response is generic. The tool takes advantage of the fact that when adrenaline
is released in the body from the adrenals, it has the effect of also liberating a lot of these killer cells
from the immune organs, in particular from the spleen, but from elsewhere as well, and interactions with the lymphatic system that combat infection. The way this works in the
real world is best captured by a study that can be mapped back to so-called Wim Hof breathing. Now, Wim Hof breathing is so named after the so-called "Iceman," Wim Hof. Wim Hof, of course, being this Dutch. He, I think he has self-titled Daredevil. And indeed he has many, many
Guinness Book of World Records for things like swimming under icebergs and going up Kilimanjaro in his shorts and crossing the desert
without water, et cetera. Things that are quite dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. And Wim obviously survived or
I'm telling you he survived. But there are two components
to a sort of breathing protocol that he developed that was based also on what's called Tummo
breathing, T-U-M-M-O. So, before Wim, there was Tummo breathing. And many people call this now
super oxygenation breathing. Although the breath work
aficionados will probably say, well, it's not super oxygenation because you're also blowing an
awful lot of carbon dioxide. What I'm talking about here, regardless of whether or not
it's called Wim Hof, Tummo, or super oxygenation, is
rapid deliberate breathing. So, it's deliberate hyperventilation. Why would somebody want to do this? Well, deliberate hyperventilation
done for maybe 25 cycles. So inhale, exhale, inhale,
exhale, inhale, exhale. Typically, it's done in through the nose out through the mouth. Although sometimes it's
just through the mouth. If you do that for 15 breaths,
20 breaths, 25 breaths, you will feel very alert. People who have anxiety will feel anxious. They might even have an anxiety attack. However, we need to ask why that kind of breathing feels that way. And it's because that
pattern of breathing, rapid movements of the diaphragm will liberate adrenaline
from the adrenals. So, it's the release of adrenaline. I mentioned that Wim is
also called "The Iceman." Well, that's because
he actually discovered this pattern of breathing, somewhat. And again, it maps back to Tummo breathing by going into cold water. When you go into cold water,
that too is a stressor and you liberate adrenaline
in response to cold water. So, if you get into an
ice bath or a cold shower, you will immediately release
adrenaline from your adrenals. Now, there are all sorts
of things related to this about psychological control and stress thresholds
that we'll talk about, but I really want people to understand that when adrenaline is
released in the body, you are in a better position
to combat infections. And so, whether or not
you breathe very quickly in these cycles of 25 breaths and regardless of what you
call it, doesn't matter, adrenaline is released. If you take a cold shower,
adrenaline is released. If you go into an ice bath deliberately, and even if you do it non-deliberately, adrenaline is released. You are mimicking the stress response. And that adrenaline serves to suppress or combat incoming infections. And this was beautifully shown in a study that was published in a very fine journal, the "Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences for the US." It's literally called "Proceedings of the
National Academy of USA" to distinguish it from other proceedings of other national academies
in other countries. The way the experiment went
is that people were injected with endotoxin or in some
cases they were injected with a bacterial wall
that mimics infection. It gives you a fever. It makes you feel nauseous. It makes you feel sick. It is not pleasant. Half of the people did a
particular pattern of breathing that looked very much like
the pattern of breathing I described a moment ago
of doing 25 deep inhales and exhales followed by an
exhale holding their breath. Then repeating 25 inhales,
exhales holding their breath. So, this would look something like this, or if you're listening, it sounds like [inhaling and exhaling]. 25, 30 times, you'll
start feeling heated up. You'll start feeling
the adrenaline response. You're liberating adrenaline in your body. Then exhale, hold your
breath for 15 seconds and then repeat. And then typically, after doing three or four rounds of that, they would inhale very
deeply and hold their breath. Now, I want to emphasize
never ever, ever do this anywhere near water. People have passed out. So-called shallow water blackout. People have died. Don't do it in the bathtub. Don't do it the hot tub. Don't do it before swimming. Please don't do it anywhere near water. Please don't do it at all, unless you get clearance
to do it from your doctor because there are some
pulmonary effects and whatnot. And the breath holds should
definitely not be done by anyone that has glaucoma
pressure concerns for the eyes. But these repeated cycles of breathing that liberate adrenaline allowed the group that did that protocol to essentially experience zero symptoms from the ejection of this E.
coli, which is remarkable. They had much reduced or no symptoms. They didn't feel feverish. They didn't feel sick. They weren't vomiting, no
diarrhea, which is remarkable, but makes total sense when
you think about the fact that the short-term stress response there, what's typically called
the acute stress response, it's designed to combat all stressors. In fact, were you to
cut yourself very deeply while out on a hike in the woods, the other thing that would happen is that there would be a
rapid inflammation response. And we always hear inflammation is bad. Inflammation gives us Alzheimer's. Inflammation is the worst thing. But the swelling is associated, the inflammation is associated
with the recruitment of things like macrophages or microglia if it's a neural tissue. Cells in our brain and body whose job is to act like little ambulances and rush to that site and clean it up. And indeed the inflammation
response looks horrible, it sounds horrible, but it's a great thing in the short-term. You want to have that
tissue marked as in trouble and you want the body
and brain to react to it. So, if you're getting peaks in stress from time to time throughout your day or throughout your week, you are in a better position
to combat infection. You are any better position
to heal your wounds, physical wounds. Many great things happen
in the stress response. Now, of course, the stress response isn't always super intense. Sometimes it's milder. Sometimes it allows us to
just focus on something because we have a deadline. That can feel stressful, but that's one of the reasons
you procrastinators out there, people are always asking me what can be done for procrastination? What can be done for procrastination is you can understand what's happening, which is that you are self-imposing stress because stress acts like a drug. It is a powerful nootropic. I get asked about nootropics. The most powerful nootropic
or smart drug is stress. It's the concern of failure. It's the desire to do well. It's the impending deadline. It's the, "Oh my gosh, I
have to do this thing now or I'm going to fail." That is the best nootropic
you will ever find. That combined with a good night's sleep, which we'll talk about. But we spent a whole month on sleep. So, I don't want to backtrack too much. Okay. So, short-term stress, great. The key is to be able to
turn the stress response off when you're done, when
you don't want that. In fact, let's just really tamp down the relationship between the short-term or acute stress response and infection. Many of us are familiar
with the experience of work, work, work, work, work, or taking care of a loved one, or stress, stress, stress,
stress, then we finally relax. Maybe we even go on vacation. Like, "Oh, now I'm finally
going to get the break." And then we get sick. And that's because the
adrenaline response crashed and your immune system crashed with it. So, please understand this. Now, many of you might
say, "Well, how long? Is it two hours? Is it three hours?" A lot of you out there that
really like specificity, it will vary for everybody. I would just kind of use a rule of thumb. When you are no longer
able to achieve good sleep, what good sleep means to you, and please see the episodes on sleep if you want more about tools to sleep, when you are no longer
able to achieve good sleep, you are now moving from acute
stress to chronic stress. You need to be able to turn
the stress response off. If I have one wish, well, I have many wishes
for this lifetime, but if I have one wish today
that I hope will permeate and spread out there, is this idea that we
need from a young age, but even as adults and forever, we need to learn how to turn
off our stress response. Physiological sigh is one. If we're going to activate our
stress response intentionally by ice baths, cold showers, cyclic hyperoxygenated
breathing, aka Tummo breathing or Wim Hof breathing, we also need to learn
how to press the brake. Okay? So, let's think about the stress system. It knows how to activate itself. Now we're talking about a way of deliberately activating
your stress system in order to combat infection. I do this from time to time. I might feel a tickle in my throat or like I'm getting kind of run down, I will do this kind of breathing. I do. I will take 25 or 30 breaths. Exhale, hold my breath. 25, 30 breaths again, exhale, hold my breath
for about 15 seconds. 25, 30 breaths again, exhale, hold my breath
for 25 or 30 seconds. Then a big inhale. And I hold my breath until I
feel the impulse to breathe. Again, I feel it's safe for me. I've run it by my doctor, so it's fine. You should not do this
unless it's right for you. But I do this. Some people like the ice bath. I rarely do the ice bath. Some people like cold showers. I like hot showers. So, I take hot showers, but
I do this kind of breathing. Again, they are all having
more or less the same effect of increasing adrenaline, which allows you to combat the infection because you're activating
the immune response. Okay. So, now let's talk about
medium-term stress. Medium-term stress is going to be stress that lasts anywhere from
several days to several weeks. Okay. We might think of that
as long-term stress. There are times in life when
we are just dealing with a lot. Okay? This particular quarter, I happened to be directing
a course, I'm doing the lab, I'm doing this. I enjoy all these things immensely, but I'm kind of near my threshold. I'm near the point where
any additional thing, like I couldn't log onto
a website the other day and it felt like the most
intense thing in the world at that moment. And I kind of laughed at myself. Fortunately, I caught it. But that typically wouldn't be my response under conditions where I
wasn't pushed to threshold. What is this medium-term stress? What is stress threshold? Well, stress threshold
is actually our ability to cognitive re-regulate
what's going on in our body. So, we all hear so much about
we need to unify our mind and body. We need to be at one with our
mind and body or whatever. Now I realize I'm kind of poking fun at some of the new agey language, but the reason I poke fun is not because I don't think it has value, but it has no specificity. What does that mean? I mean, I think I'm always in my body. I've never fortunately
looked across the room and seen my arm over there
or my leg over there. I'm connected to my body. There actually is a syndrome
where people feel disconnected from their limbs. This is a real clinical condition. These people actually
will seek out amputation. They will try and convince doctors to amputate certain
portions of their body. It's a really terrible
thing for people to have. And it relates to a change
in central maps in the brain, believe it or not. Most of us want to keep our limbs, whichever ones we happen to have. And most of us feel one in mind and body so much so that when stress hits, we feel it in our mind and body. A lot of stress inoculation, a lot of managing medium-term stress on the timescale of weeks or
maybe even a couple months, so we're not talking
about years of stress, a lot of that has to do with
raising our stress threshold. It's about capacity. And there are very simple
tools, excellent tools that will allow us to modulate
our capacity for stress. And they look a lot like
the tools I just described. They involve placing oneself deliberately into a situation where our
adrenaline is increased somewhat not to the extreme. And then when we feel
flooded with adrenaline, and normally we would panic, it's about cognitively,
mentally, emotionally calming ourselves and being comfortable with that response in our body. So, unlike trying to
unify the mind and body and make it all calm or make it all alert, this is about dissociating
mind and body in a healthy way. And what would this look like? Well, this is something I
actually do as a practice because I mentioned before, you can use physiological
sighs in real time, you can use the cyclic
hyperoxygenation breathing to combat infection if you're
feeling kind of run down. And there's also a way in which you can use
things like cold showers, or if you exercise and you bring your
heart rate up very high, you kind of go into that
high-intensity realm where your heart is
beating a little bit harder than you're comfortable with
and that you're just you feel, some people think it's lactic acid. No one can agree on this what the burn is, whether or not it's lactic acids or it's buildup of hydrogen or whatever. I don't want to get into
that, but we're all familiar with the intense feeling of
your muscles kind of burning because you're working
very hard physically. The key in those moments is
to learn to relax the mind while the body is very activated. And what that tends to do, there's a limited amount
of research on this, but what that tends to do is
it tends to create a situation where what once felt like
a lot feels manageable. Okay? That you've raised your stress threshold or your stress capacity. One way that you can do this, and this is kind of fun, if it's approved by your physician and you're able to do this, you can bring your heart rate up. You can do this through an
ice bath if that's your thing or a cold shower or cyclic
oxygenation breathing or you could sprint or you
could go hard on the bike, whenever it is that
brings your heart rate up. And then what you want to do is you want to actually
try and calm the mind while your body is in this
heightened state of activation. And the best way that
I'm aware to do that, again goes back to
physiology, not psychology. When we are stressed, our pupils dilate. The effect of that pupil dilation is to create tunnel vision. It literally narrows our
view of the visual world. We no longer see in Panorama. And there's some other effects as well. But that's because the visual system through this cranial nerve
system that I described before is tethered and is part of
this autonomic nervous system. By deliberately dilating your gaze, meaning not moving your
head and eyes around, but by deliberately
going from tunnel vision to broader panoramic vision, literally seeing more of
your environment all at once. You don't have to do what I'm
doing, which is not blinking. You're welcome to blink. But it means deliberately
dilating your gaze so that you can see yourself
in the environment you're in. It creates a calming effect on the mind because it releases a particular
circuit in the brainstem that's associated with
alertness, aka stress. Now, this is very powerful. If you're running, for instance,
and you're at max capacity or close to it, or you're kind of hitting like
80, 90% of maximum on the bike and you dilate your gaze, what you'll find is the mind can relax while the body is in full output. And this relates to work
that in various communities, people are working with this
in the sports community, military community, et cetera. But it's a form, not really
of stress inoculation, it's more about raising stress threshold so that the body is going to continue to be in a high alertness,
high reactivity mode, high output, but the mind is calm. And so, this isn't about
unifying mind and body. This is actually about using body to bring up your level of activation, then dissociating, not the clinical dissociation
kind of disorders, but dissociating the mental
or emotional response from what's going on in your body. And over time, so if you
do this a couple of times, you don't have to do this every workout, but if you do this every
maybe once a week or so, you start being comfortable at these higher activation states. What once felt overwhelming
and like a lot of work, now is manageable. It feels tolerable. So, that's for navigating
medium-term stress. Now, there are other tools as well, but we don't want to go over 90 minutes because 90 minutes is
one old trading cycle. I was trying to keep these
podcasts to one on trading cycle, in case you haven't noticed, so you can derive
maximum benefit from them based on all trading and
cycle principles of learning. So, I don't want to go into
every little bit of this. And I want to make sure
we get to emotions. But I want to emphasize that
these medium-term stressors, of, "Oh, it's been a hard
month, or hard week." Stanford's on the quarter system. So 10 weeks or semester. That becomes more manageable
when we train ourselves to be calm of mind when
our body is activated. And if you haven't noticed, most of the tools I'm describing today are nothing like the sort of,
okay, sit and do meditation. I'm actively avoiding
saying the words NSDR, non-sleep deep rest. I talked a lot about those tools during the months on
sleep and neuroplasticity. And of course, they are wonderful for replenishing your
ability to lean into effort, to learn to focus. Please do try and check out NSDR protocol. See if they're right for you. The margins for safety,
I think are enormous. You're basically just
listening to a script. We have links to them
in previous captions. I've talked on them on
various podcasts before. We can provide them again. But today I'm really talking about tools, so you can learn to dance with stress. To in the short-term,
reduce that stress response a little bit if you feel
it's too uncomfortable. In the medium-term, to be comfortable with these
heightened levels of activation because life is going to
continue to come at you. And we can't pick the stressors, but we need to be able to function at a higher capacity often. And then there's long-term stress. Now, long-term stress is bad. You do not want adrenaline
up in your system for a very long time. In fact, you ideally, you
would have your stress go up various times throughout the day, but it would never stay elevated and it would never prevent you from getting a good night's sleep. Now, that isn't realistic. Okay? I would say for me, three,
four nights out of the month, no matter what I do, I take on too much or something happens in life is life and I don't get the best night's sleep that I would like to get. For many of you, it's 30 nights per month. For some of you, it's
zero nights per month. And congratulations to you
zero nights per month people. If you are managing your
sleep really well every night, that is fantastic. You really want to be able
to fall asleep at night, stay asleep for most of the night. And if you get up, go back to sleep for as long as you need to
in order to feel rested. That's what I define as a
healthy relationship to sleep. Check out the episodes on sleep if you want tools to be
able to accomplish that. And we can all accomplish that. It can be done. And there are tools to do it. Zero-cost tools. Okay, so let's talk
about long-term stress. Earlier, I talked about how breathing can modulate heart rate through this loop that includes the brain and the parasympathetic nervous system. I don't think I mentioned this, and I want to make sure that I mentioned that breathing controlling heart rate through the sympathetic and
parasympathetic nervous system is the basis of what's called
HRV, heart rate variability. And we know that heart
rate variability is good. You don't want your heart
rate chronically elevated or chronically low. A lot of people think, "Oh, I want a really nice low heart rate." And indeed, if you're in shape, the stroke volume of your
heart will be greater and you can have a nice slow heart rate. Years ago when I was running regularly, I think my heart rate
was down to like 50 or 60 or something like that. That's great. But, and now it's higher than that because I'm running a little bit less. But everyone needs to determine
what's right for them. But you don't really want your heart rate to be chronically low or chronically high. Both are bad. We know that chronic
stress, elevated stress and especially in the
so-called type A personalities creates heart disease, the leading killer of for
in most, every country, but in particular in the US. Because of the way that adrenaline impacts those blood vessels
or constricting some and dilating others, it's just that kind of hypertension, chronic hypertension is just bad. And so, chronic stress truly is bad. I want to really make that clear because I emphasized a lot of what some of the
positive effects of stress. But you want to be able to tamp down your stress in real time. You also want to be able
to modulate your stress and your emotional relationship
to stress in the body in the medium-term, but by no means do you
want to be stressed out all the time, chronically for
months and months and months and years on end. The best tools, the best mechanisms that we know to modulate long-term stress might surprise you a little bit. First of all, there are
going to be the things that don't surprise you, which is everyone knows
getting regular exercise, getting good sleep, using real-time tools to try and tamp down the
stress response, et cetera, that's all going to be really useful. The data really points to the
fact that social connection and certain types of social
connection in particular are what are going to mitigate
or reduce long-term stress. And this is a particularly
important issue nowadays where we have all these proxies or surrogates for social connection. We're online and texting
with people a lot, so we can feel connected. Like the plane's about to take off and everyone's texting each other whether or not they have
fear of flying or not. They're like, "Okay, see you. Love you. Hate you." Whatever it is that they're
trying to communicate to people. Then plane lands, every phone's out, "See you. Love you. Hate you." Let's hope it's fewer hate yous. But everyone has this kind of need to stay connected to one another. Humans are incredibly social creatures. Now, there is a way to look at this whole business
of social connection, not from just the kind of
wishy-washy new agey perspective. And I want to point out
that sometimes I'll say wishy-washy new agey. I have nothing against that. I just, my goal here is
always to put scientific data and some neurochemistry on
things so that for those of you that are into wishy-washy new agey stuff, you also can arm yourself
with some arguments for those of the members of
your family and your life that maybe aren't so tuned
into the typical language around those practices like,
"Oh, connection is really key. We all get oxytocin." Actually, did you know that
connection between individuals rarely causes the release of oxytocin? Oxytocin is released in very
particular circumstances like post-orgasm, baby
and mother milk let down. It's associated with
kind of really intense kinds of pair bonding
things of mother and child. Also father and child, but
especially mother and child, because its relationship
to the lactation system. Couples post-sex. These kinds of things that reflect deep kind of layers of our biology. And oxytocin is not just
released when we walk in and pat the dog on the head or we see somebody and
we give them a hug and, "Hi, great to see you," fist bump. That's not a situation for oxytocin. The way to think about social connection and how it can mitigate some of the long-term effects of stress is really through the
systems of neuromodulation like serotonin, and through blocking certain things that are really bad for us
when we feel socially isolated. Things like Taqi Kynan. So, let me explain what these are. Serotonin again, is a neuromodulator. Neuromodulators are a little bit like playlists in the brain. They tend to amplify
or bias the likelihood that certain brain
circuits and body circuits are going to be activated
and that others will not. Serotonin generally, and I realize I'm speaking
very generally here, but it generally gives
us feelings of wellbeing. At very high levels, it makes us feel blissed
and it tends to make us feel like we have enough in
our immediate environment. This is why some of the side
effects of antidepressants that elevate serotonin, and actually can help a lot of people with depressive symptoms. But the side effects associated with drugs that increase serotonin
tend to be reduced affect. They tend to kind of blunt affect or make people feel like
their libido is lower. Desire goes down because the
body has so much serotonin and the brain has so much serotonin, that one feels like they have enough. But serotonin, pharmacology aside or taking antidepressants
aside a topic for another time, serotonin tends to make us feel good. When we see somebody that
we recognize and trust, serotonin is released in the brain. And that has certain positive
effects on the immune system and on other systems of
neural repair and synopsis and things that really reinforce
connections in the brain and prevent that long-term
withering of connections. So, serotonin is tied
to social connection. Now, social connection
can take many forms. As many of you know, I am
very attached to my dog. I hope he's attached to me. He's asleep most of the time. So, I don't know. And even if he was awake, I don't really know what I would ask him. But he seems more or less to
be attached to me as well. And there's no scientific evidence that it has to be human-human attachment. I do have attachments to humans as well. But you can have
attachments to other people. Some of those can be romantic attachments. They could be familial
attachments that are non-romantic, friendship, pets, even
attachments to things that just delight us. One of the things that really can mitigate against the long-term negative effects of chronic long-term stress
isn't just having fun. We hear all this stuff, "You
need to play and have fun." That can be a little
bit of a tough concept, especially for the hard driving people or people that are stressed, but having a sense of delight, a sense of really enjoying
something that you see and engage in, witness, or participate in, that is associated with
the serotonin system. And certainly, play is
one of those things. Social connection of various forms. Those are things to invest in. Some people might say, "Well,
nobody wants to be my friend," or, "Nobody wants to
engage socially anymore." I'll be the first to admit,
social connection and friendship and relationships of all
kinds to animals or humans or inanimate objects takes work. It takes investment. It takes time in not needing everything to be exactly the way you want it to be. I have a friend who struggles with this and oftentimes the
conversations just circle back to the fact that when you
want social connection, you often have to be more flexible. You have to eat on other
people's schedules. Sometimes you have to eat things you don't necessarily want to
eat the most in that moment or stay up a little later
or wake up a little earlier. Social connection is
something that we work for, but it is incredibly powerful. I want to, of course, tip my heart to, it's only appropriate to call
him the great Robert Sapolsky, my colleague who I'm
unfortunate to know at Stanford. Of course, he has talked
about this quite a lot. So, I want to acknowledge
Robert's incredible work and discussions around this. You can look up those materials online and his wonderful books. But primates, and we are
primates, we are social species. And as Robert has said many times before, never before in any primate history, but in particular in human history have we interacted with so
many strangers at a distance when we are not really connected to them. So, finding just a few
people, even one or an animal or something that you delight in, believe it or not, has
very positive effects on mitigating this long-term stress on improving various aspects of our life as it relates to stress and emotionality. So, that's the social connection part. The other thing is the social
isolation that goes too long is associated in everything
from flies, believe it or not, to mice and humans with
this molecule of Taqi Kynan. Taqi Kynan is a molecule
that makes us more fearful, paranoid, and impairs our immune system. And so, Taqi Kynan is like this
internal punishment signal. It's like our body and
our brain telling us, "You're not spending enough time with people that you really trust. You're not spending time doing things that you really enjoy." And I often think about
Taqi Kynan for myself because I'm pretty hard driving. I have a lot of pursuits. I also have a lot of wonderful people and an incredibly wonderful
bulldog in my life, but there are times when
I can be so goal-directed and so in motion and trying
to accomplish everything, that I sometimes forget about Taqi Kynan. And I like to remind myself so much so that I actually have a
little post-it above my desk that says, "Taqi Kynan," to
remind me that Taqi Kynan is this very sinister molecule
that starts being secreted when we are not socially connected enough. And this is why long meals
with friends or family where there are, we'll talk about phones in a moment, but where there's no intrusions, or even if there are, just
feeling like we are connected suppresses Taqi Kynan. And Taqi Kynan is something
you really want to avoid because chronic isolation,
chronically high Taqi Kynan that's associated with long-term stress really depletes so many good
functions of our brain and body and promote so many bad
ones including irritability, paranoia, fear, et cetera. That is really something to avoid. And so, I want to highlight Taqi Kynan as something to avoid. I don't want to completely
disregard oxytocin. It's just, the oxytocin has
been built up a lot in the media and really serotonin works
on much faster timescales. Now, how do you know if
you're making serotonin? And you don't know in the moment, but you can learn if you pay attention to kind of recognize these feelings of comfort, trust, bliss, delight. And those are not weak terms. Those are not associated just
with psychological terms. They are every bit as physiological as the movement of your muscles or the secretion of adrenaline. And many people focus now on gratitude. Gratitude is a little bit subjective. And here we're moving from some objective to kind of subjective things, but recognizing, and in particular, writing down things that
you're thankful for, however small, they may seem, does seem to have a positive
effect on the serotonin system. Now, there are a plethora of things that will also impact wellbeing and allow you to modulate
your long-term stress. Reduce the likelihood that you'll engage in long-term stress. And we don't have time
to go into all these, but of course, finding
the diet and nutrition that's right for you, the exercise schedule
that's right for you, the sleep schedule, all that. But do not underemphasize the social connection part, please. As well, there are some compounds that are not antidepressants. Although if you need antidepressants, then a clinician prescribes them to you. Please follow their advice if
that's what is right for you. There are compounds that are
not prescription compounds that can modulate the stress system. And sometimes because
of the way that life is, we just don't have the
opportunity to control life and to control our response to stress. And at least for myself, I can only talk about my own experience, I found it useful in
times of chronic stress to start modulating some
of the neurochemistry related to the stress
response in order to help. Now, if a doctor prescribes you prednisone or prescribes you some
other hormone or something, that's important, but what I'm talking about now
are non-prescription things. You should check out examine.com, this free website which will allow you to put in any supplement
and evaluate that supplement with they provide links in the
so-called human effect matrix to PubMed. It tells you the exact
subjects they were done in. It was a post-menopausal women. Was it kids? Was it normal adults? Was it people with autism, et cetera. Check out that site for
any and all supplements you're considering or taking. I highly recommend it. I've no relationship to them. I just think it's a wonderful site that's curated all this
important information. But some of these compounds
are effective enough. They can kind of take the edge off. And I'll use them periodically myself. And so, I just thought I'd mentioned them since there a number of you
that are interested in them. The three I want to focus on and one that I think you
need to be cautious about that I've mentioned before, include ashwagandha, funny name, but that's what's it's called, L-theanine or theanine it's
often called, and melatonin. Let's talk about melatonin first. Melatonin I talked about
during the month on sleep. Melatonin is a hormone
secreted from the pineal in direct relationship to
how much darkness you are in. Not emotional darkness. But light suppresses melatonin. Melatonin helps you fall asleep. It doesn't help you stay asleep. I personally do not recommend
supplementing melatonin because it's supplemented
typically at very high levels. One to three milligrams or even more that is an outrageously high dose. It's super, super physiological compared to what you normally would make. It also has a number of
potentially negative effects on the reproductive
access and hormones there. Some people can take it without problems. If you like it and
that's your thing, fine. I just want to cue to the
fact that there can be issues. You should check on examine.com. Talk to your doctor, especially in kids, because melatonin suppresses
the puberty response in a number of species. Enough about the negative
things in melatonin except that people who take
too much melatonin chronically, oftentimes when they're taking it to sleep or for whatever reason, yes, it can reduce anxiety and stress, but it also can reduce
the output of the adrenals to the point where it
can become problematic. Now, a note about adrenal burnout. There is actually no such
thing as adrenal burnout under normal conditions. The adrenals have enough adrenaline to support 200 years of
stress for better, for worse. The concept of adrenal burnout has origins in the work of Nobel
Prize winner, Hans Selye, who actually discovered what he called the general
adaptation syndrome. He discovered a lot of
things about stress. He did some phenomenal work
that turned out to be true. That we have stressors. There's something called distress. He talked about eustress,
which is positive stress. Eustress has never really caught on in the kind of more general discussion. But he had this theory that
if stress went on long enough, that you would eventually reach
a phase called exhaustion. And that turned out to be wrong. Although many of you may feel exhausted after chronic stress, there isn't really a physiological
exhaustion that happens. And that eventually got picked up and ran with the general public. And they talk about adrenal burnout. Too much coffee, adrenal burnout. You hear all this stuff. There is no such thing as adrenal burnout. The adrenals don't burn out. There is something, however, called adrenal insufficiency syndrome, which is a real physiological problem where some people have
very impaired adrenals and they can't produce adrenaline. And melatonin taken at very high levels for periods of time that are too long can cause suppression of the cortisol and epinephrine released from the adrenals and can create a kind of pseudo adrenal insufficiency syndrome. So, be aware of melatonin for that reason. Please, I'm trying, I alone can't get rid of
the phrase adrenal burnout. I'm not trying to give a hard time to anyone who feels
burnt out or exhausted, but it is for other reasons. It is not because of the
adrenals are burnt out. Unless you happen to have
adrenal insufficiency syndrome. So, I'm not a fan of melatonin
for a lot of reasons. Now I've mentioned several. The other is L-theanine. I've talked about L-theanine, which provided it's safe for you, can be taken 100 milligrams
or 200 milligrams about 30 minutes or 60
minutes before sleep. It can enhance the transition to sleep and depth of sleep for many people. It increases GABA, this inhibitory
neurotransmitter in the brain. It tends to turn off our
forebrain a little bit or reduce the activity of
our kind of thinking systems and ruminating systems
help people fall asleep. That's for sleep. But theanine has also been shown for people that are chronically anxious or chronically stressed to, if you look at the studies, I have a large collection of studies in front of me right now, if you want to see those links, I know if you want
those, go to examine.com, put in theanine. They linked, for instance, it is known to significantly increase relaxation. There are four studies listed
there with PubMed links. It is known to have a
minor effect on anxiety, but eight studies have shown that. Which I think is a fairly
large set of studies. Some of them in great journals. It also can reduce task
completion anxiety. So, anxiety related to task completion. Not good for the procrastinators perhaps, but for those of you that
are chronically stressed. It can increase attention a little bit, it can reduce blood pressure a little bit, improve sleep quality, et cetera. It definitely has a
notable effect on stress, two studies in particular, that it can notably reduce
the effects of stress. So, there's a lot there. It also has effects on insomnia, on some blood lipid profiles. And so, go to examine.com
and check it out. But this is one reason why I
supplement theanine for sleep. But if I'm feeling like I've
been under a lot of stress and I'm not managing my stress
very well with the short-term and medium-term tools that
I talked about earlier, I might start taking a
little bit of theanine especially in the late afternoon, which is when I tend to start to feel like I haven't gotten enough done and the day is kind of carrying on. And so, you can blunt the
response to stress a little bit, which is why a lot of companies are now putting theanine
into energy drinks. I am not a big fan of most energy drinks. Most of them have taurine, which I know some of you
wrote to me and said, "Oh, taurine is great
for all these reasons." Taurine also has effects
on the microvasculature that at least for me, were not good. It cause bursting of
microvasculature in my sclera, in my eyes, which is why I'm
not a fan of any energy drink that has taurine or taurine generally. But that's just me. You have to decide for you. I'm sure in the comment section, there'll be a couple of
taurinesters out there that will say, "But I love taurine." Great. Keep the taurine companies in business. But it's not for me. And I'd like people to know that it may or may not be for them. The other supplement that can
be very useful is ashwagandha. Ashwagandha is known to
lower anxiety and cortisol. There is six, there are,
excuse me, six studies that collectively show
reductions in cortisol, which is cortisol is typically associated with waking up in the
morning, which is good. That's a healthy, brief
cortisol bump that goes away provided you're getting your
light at the right time of days at correct times of day,
like morning and evening. But you don't want cortisol
chronically elevated. That's associated with all
the bad stuff about stress. There's a very strong
effect of ashwagandha. You can find dosages at examine.com. They report in across six
studies, 14.5 to 27.9 reduction in cortisol in otherwise healthy,
but stressed individuals. Now, I don't know about kids. You have to look at what it
says on various supplements. Most things here are being done in adults. So, please check carefully. But this is great. I mean, the opportunity for me anyway, to be able to take something that can help me reduce my cortisol so that I don't get some of the
long-term effects of stress. And I'm not going to take
ashwagandha year round. I would only do this if I was feeling like I wasn't managing my short
and medium-term stress well. So, I don't take it on a regular basis. I do take it when I'm in these times when things are particularly stressful. It has their five other studies
that show reduced stress. So, that's not cortisol measurements, but things like fatigue,
cognitive impairment, et cetera. It does lower total cholesterol, which may or may not be good
or bad for you up to 10%. So, some people don't want
their cholesterol lowered. Some people might. Cholesterol, we'll talk about
this in a month on hormones, but cholesterol is the molecule
from which testosterone and estrogen and cortisol for
that matter are synthesized. So, you don't want to get
your cholesterol so low, then there are all sorts
of negative effects, but you don't want it too high either. Mild effects in good clinical studies on reducing depression, probably associated with
the effects on stress and some other things as well. So, ashwagandha is something
I use from time to time. It's kind of interesting. L-theanine, I rarely will
use those during the daytime, except under conditions where I'm feeling chronically stressed. So, check out the human
effect matrix on examine.com. Again, a phenomenal website. I think I've sent them
a few emails before. That's the only exchanges
I've ever had with them. But I just think it's wonderful that they put together this resource. Otherwise we'd be stuck mining PubMed. They've collated the papers from PubMed with links to PubMed. So, terrific resource. So, social connection
and some supplementation. Of course, diet, exercise,
sleep for long-term stress. And now we're finally in
a position to talk about what we have set out to
do from the beginning, which is spend the month on emotions. It was very important
that we discuss stress and we discuss in the
context of short, medium, and long-term stress. That we discuss tools for
short-term, medium-term, and long-term control. I don't really want to
say mitigation of stress. Stress is going to happen. But our ability to modulate
and control stress in real time offline using tools such as respiration, using tools such as dilation of gaze, using tools like social
connection, maybe some supplements, certainly take care of your sleep and nutrition and exercise. Again, tons of resources and information in the sleep episodes. So, you can look there. We will do a month on hormones,
on exercise, et cetera. But let's talk about emotions because in subsequent episodes, we're going to talk about OCD, we're going to talk about depression, we're going to talk about mania, we're going to be talking about dopamine and all sorts of things. But at the core of
emotions is this question, what is an emotion? Well, it's complex. There isn't a single brain area
for any one of these things that we call emotions. My framework, and I
think the modern science, both psychology and neuroscience
is pretty well-aligned with what Lisa Feldman
Barrett has taught about. Now, Lisa's at Northeastern University. She runs a big lab there. She's a world expert in emotion. She's written two books
that are really wonderful. One is "How Emotions Are Made,"
which was her first book. The second one is "Seven and
a Half Facts About the Brain." It's a wonderful book as well. It came out more recently. I hosted Lisa on an Instagram live once. Maybe we'll get her here on
the podcast if we're lucky. We don't agree on everything about the neuroscience of emotions, but I subscribed to most everything that I've heard Lisa say. In particular, the fact that
emotions are context-dependent. There's a cultural dependence, et cetera. I look at things mainly through the lens of
physiology and neuroscience and kind of low-level circuitry. And one way to think about emotions that I think is consistent and I think Lisa would generally approve, I can't speak for her, but I would hope she
would generally approve of this description, is that when our internal
state of stress or calm matches the demands on us or is mismatched from the demands on us, we tend to interpret those as good or bad. Let me give you an example. If I am feeling very anxious,
very stressed inside, and I have a lot to do, that doesn't feel good, but
it's really no different than if I'm very tired
and I have a lot to do because there's this mismatch. I'm not in the right internal state, my internal state is incorrect rather, to meet the demands that
are being placed upon me. So, in both cases, whether I'm too tired or I'm too stressed to
do what I need to do, the valence, meaning the
value that I assigned to that is I don't feel good. It's not a good situation
and I don't feel good. Now, I might call it stressed,
I might call it anxious, I might call it worried, I might
call it a number of things, but it's not good. However, when I'm tired
and I want to fall asleep, well then I feel good because
that's what the demand is. I need to go to sleep and I'm tired. If I'm wide awake and
I need to fall asleep, then that's not good. And then the brain tends
to go down the direction of interpreting the
situation as a bad one. So, while the discussion around
emotions is far more nuanced and more elaborate than this, one way to think about your
relationship to emotions is whether or not your internal state is matching the demands that are upon you. So, in that way, we don't
really place so much value on whether or not we're
feeling alert or sleepy. We only place value on
whether or not that alertness whether or not it's
full-blown stress or not or our sleepiness, whether
or not we're falling asleep or just a little bit drowsy, whether or not that matches
the conditions that we face. And it's a useful framework to have. And it's the reason in part why I spent this last
hour and a half or so talking about stress and
how to control stress. One reason we did that is because I think it's
a valuable opportunity to learn some tools and understand stress and really learn how to
take control of stress, which I think we could all benefit from doing regardless of age. The other reason is that
when you start to understand that you have this kind of
see-saw system in your body, this autonomic nervous
system that takes you from alert and calm to
stressed to full-blown panic, it has that capacity, or from sleepy and drowsy
to passing out tired to God forbid, let's hope
never, but a coma, right? That you're basically on
this see-saw all the time. And where you are on that
see-saw of alertness or calmness positions you to be in better reaction to the demands that you face. Whether or not the thing that you face is a need to fall asleep or to
listen quietly and not react. You now know, for instance, that if your job is to take feedback, when maybe you're going
in for a job evaluation or you're in a relationship where there was a call for a discussion and somebody needs to talk
to you about something and we need to talk about something, you're going to there you're like, "Goodness, this is going to be rough." Learning to reduce that
stress response a little bit so that you are in a position to hear the information better, and remember, from a previous episode, if you close your eyes, you'll be able to actually
focus on the information better. There's your permission to
not look someone directly in the eye when they talk to you if you really want to hear
what they have to say. You will be able to modulate
that stress response and lean into life better. You will be able to react to
things in a more effective way and to not be reactive. And this is really one of the
important things to me anyway, is that so much of the
language around psychology, which I think is a wonderful field, but pop psychology in
particular is be responsive, not reactive. Well, great. But then how does one do that? Well, one does that by modulating their short-term
stress response in real time. Not by saying, "Hold
on, I need to meditate. Hold on, I need a massage and then I can have this conversation." By modulating the reactivity in real time. How does one, for instance, be mindful? Which is a beautiful concept,
but how are you mindful? Well, I don't know, when
I'm moving through my day, a lot of times I'm just
trying to get things done. And as soon as I start monitoring
and seeing what I'm doing and kind of third-personing
what I'm doing, it actually takes me
out of the effectiveness and experience of what I'm doing. So for me, sometimes that mindfulness, that observer, as they call it, is something that doesn't help me. It actually hinders me. What's important to me is
to be able to work and focus and then to be able to disengage. To be able to do a non-sleep depressed or to be able to still fall asleep even though I've been
working hard until 9:30 to put my head down at 10 o'clock and be out cold sleeping by 10:02. That's possible if you can learn to control this stress response. And to do that, we can't
use the mind to control. The mind, we need tools. And so, a lot of the people being grumpy or anxious or depressed, a lot of that, provided it's not for some
underlying neurochemical reason that's chronic, a lot of that come from
being poorly rested, from overworked, from
feeling like the world is bearing down on us. And so, rather than take
a subjective view of this, I take the view of objective physiology. What can we do that's anchored
to these neuronal systems in our body, in our brain, in our eyes, in our diaphragm, et cetera, and look to those as tools leavers that we can pull on and push and maneuver through life in a way where we start to feel
like we have some agency. We actually have some real control because we're controlling
the internal landscape. So, I think that ought to set the stage for where we're headed next, which is to talk about all the things that you normally think of
when you think of emotions, like happiness, like awe, like joy. And we will get into some of that. But all of that rests
firmly on the foundation of this thing we call the
autonomic nervous system. This stress modulation. This calming modulation system. And again, whether or not
you're activated or you're calm is not good or bad, it
depends on the situation. Certainly, when you want to fall asleep, being activated isn't good. When you have work to do,
being activated is great. So, I hope today you were able to take a slightly different view of
this thing that we call stress. Not just see it as evil,
but see it as powerful and useful in certain contexts. Great for us in certain contexts and problematic in other contexts. And as well to think
about the various tools that I've presented that
can allow you to adjust and modulate your internal
levels of alertness or calmness so that you can lean more
effectively into life, which includes sleep and social connection and the work you have to do. And of course, acknowledges
that the events in the world are beyond our control. What's in our control
is how we react to them. Something that's commonly said
in the wellness and self-help and psychology world, but for which there often
aren't as many concrete tools that we can really look
to and trust in real time. And of course, there are
other tools out there. As always, I'll say it,
I strive to be accurate, but I'll never be exhaustive. I might have exhausted you. I might've cured your insomnia
with this discussion today, but in all seriousness, my goal is to bring you
tools and information so that you can manage
better through life. So, thanks so much. I very much want to thank all of you for your support for the podcast. It's really been wonderful. If you've subscribed to the podcast on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify, or maybe even all three, terrific. If you haven't, please do subscribe on YouTube, Apple, or Spotify,
or maybe even all three, which would be wonderful. On Apple, you can leave a five-star review if you think we deserve that as well as a comment reviewing us. If you have suggestions, if you have questions regarding
the content of the podcast or things that you'd like
us to cover in the future, please put those in the comment
section on YouTube as well. If you could recommend
the podcast to friends, family members, coworkers,
that you think would benefit from the information, maybe even send them
the links if you like, that's tremendously helpful. Today, as in previous episodes,
I've touched on some things as they relate to supplementation. As always, I always cover a lot of tools that are zero-cost tools that don't involve
ingesting anything at all, behavioral tools. But I mentioned some supplements that I particularly find useful. With supplements, it's
a complicated landscape, often because many supplement companies don't put in the bottle what they say is in
the particular product. We've partnered with Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E, because Thorne is a supplement company that we know to have the
highest levels of stringency. It's used by the Mayo Clinic. It's used by all the
major sports organizations for that particular reason and because their quality
standards are exceptionally high. If you'd like to try any supplements and see the ones that I
take, you can go to Thorne, thorne.com/u/huberman. And if you do that, you'll get 20% off anything
that's listed there on my page as well as any of the
supplements that Thorne sells. So that's Thorne, thorne.com/u/huberman to get 20% off anything that Thorne sells. In addition, if you want
to follow us on Twitter we're there @hubermanlab or
an Instagram @hubermanlab. I also do some content on "Huberman Lab," a little neuroscience posts. Some are reposts of
clips from the podcast. Others are unique content that you won't find on the podcast. So you can follow us @hubermanlab. Also, if you like check out our Patreon, patreon.com/AndrewHuberman. And most of all, and as always, really appreciate your
time and attention today. I hope you practice some of the tools if they're right for you. I hope you think hard about stress and how you can control your stress. And above all, as always, thank you for your interest in science. [upbeat music]