Tools for Managing Stress & Anxiety

0:00 Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where we discuss

0:03 science and science-based tools for everyday life I'm Andrew Huberman.

0:10 And I'm a Professor of Neurobiology

0:12 and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

0:15 This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

0:18 It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero

0:22 cost to consumer information about science

0:24 and science-related tools to the general public.

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4:41 Today's episode is going to be all about the science of emotions.

4:46 The first month of the podcast, we talked about sleep and wakefulness.

4:51 Last month, we were talking about neuroplasticity,

4:54 the brain's ability to change in response to experience.

4:57 And this month we're going to talk about these things that we call emotions.

5:03 We're going to decipher what they are, how they work,

5:06 how we can control them when we might not want to control them.

5:11 There are going to be four episodes on emotions.

5:15 And today, we're going to talk in particular

5:18 about something that most often is called stress.

5:22 Now, you might be thinking, "Wait,

5:24 stress isn't an emotion." But stress really lies

5:27 at the heart of whether or not our internal experience is

5:31 matched well or not to our external experience where

5:36 the events that are happening to us and around us.

5:39 And as you'll soon, see those converge

5:42 or combine to create what we call emotions.

5:46 Now, I want to be very clear that we're

5:48 going to talk about the biology of emotions, we're going to talk a little bit

5:52 about some psychological concepts related to emotion,

5:55 and we are definitely going to talk about tools to control

5:58 what we call stress or commonly think of as stress.

6:01 We're also going to clean up some common myths about stress.

6:04 For instance, that stress impairs your immune system.

6:08 That's true in certain contexts.

6:10 And in other contexts,

6:11 stress actually enhances your immune system and makes it function better.

6:15 There is going to be a lot

6:17 of discussion about whether or not our internal state,

6:21 whether or not we are alert or calm is good or bad,

6:24 depending on the circumstances.

6:26 So, where we're headed here is I'd like you to come

6:30 away from today's episode with what I call an organizational logic,

6:34 a framework for thinking about these things that typically

6:38 we just call happy or sad or depressed or anxious.

6:41 And I'm going to make sure that you have tools that are

6:45 grounded in physiology and neuroscience that will allow you to navigate

6:49 this otherwise complex space that we call emotions that will allow you

6:54 to ground yourself better when you're feeling like life is weighing on you,

6:59 where you're kind of being pulled by the currents of life as well as to support

7:04 other people whether or not that's

7:05 in a psychological practice if you're a practitioner,

7:08 or you have clients or children or spouses, really,

7:12 to be able to support other people in your environment better.

7:16 And the tools that I'm going to focus on today range from behavioral tools.

7:21 We will talk about some of the more

7:23 valuable supplementation tools that are out there.

7:26 And we're going to talk a little bit about things like depression,

7:30 PTSD, but we will be devoting entire episodes to things like depression, PTSD,

7:36 and even attention deficit and obsessive compulsive disorder,

7:40 which believe it or not, although this might not surprise many of you,

7:44 have a very strong emotional component.

7:46 It's just not just about compulsive behaviors and intrusive thoughts.

7:50 It's also about the emotional load of being in that state.

7:54 So, I promise that today we're going to clean up a lot of misunderstanding.

7:59 We're going to give you a lot of tools and you're going to learn

8:03 a lot about the biology of how your body and brain work together.

8:08 Because if ever there was a topic that brought

8:11 together the brain and body or mind-body relationship, it's stress and emotions.

8:18 It's also the positive emotions.

8:19 When we feel something, whether or not we're super happy or just

8:23 feeling kind of pleasant or we are feeling stressed,

8:27 anxious, and overwhelmed, it isn't just in our head.

8:30 It's also in our body.

8:32 And as you may recall, the nervous system,

8:35 which includes the brain and the eyes and the spinal cord,

8:38 but also all the connections with the organs

8:40 of the body includes the brain and body.

8:43 And those organs of the body, your gut, and your liver,

8:47 and your spleen, they're also communicating with the brain.

8:52 So, I look forward to a day, in fact,

8:54 when we no longer think about neuroscience as just the brain.

8:57 And many neuroscientists now also think about the body, of course.

9:00 And the brain controls the body,

9:02 but the body is also having a very profound and concrete influence on the brain.

9:08 I think up until recently,

9:10 people would hear about kind of brain-body and always think about mindfulness.

9:15 We're actually not going to talk that much about mindfulness at all today.

9:18 Mindfulness is kind of a vague concept, in fact.

9:21 When you think about mindfulness, it's good to take the opposite.

9:24 What's the opposite of mindfulness?

9:25 Would be mindlessness.

9:26 Well, all of a sudden we're into territory that isn't really easy

9:30 for one person to describe their experience

9:33 or to help others with their experience.

9:35 Today, we're going to talk about objective

9:36 tools that match the brain-body experience or separate

9:41 the brain-body experience in ways that leverage

9:44 your ability to lean into life better,

9:47 to feel better, literally to just feel better about what you're experiencing,

9:51 and believe it or not,

9:53 to be able to control your emotions when that's appropriate.

9:56 This isn't about becoming robotic.

9:58 This isn't about trying not to feel human.

10:00 This is actually about being able to lean into life better

10:04 as a consequence of being able to control some of your inner real estate.

10:08 This nervous system that includes the brain and body

10:10 and how that nervous system is interacting with the outside world.

10:13 So, it's to place you in a greater position of power.

10:16 And so, let's get started in deciphering what is stress, what are emotions,

10:21 and why did I batch stress and emotions into one discussion today?

10:26 Okay.

10:27 So, what is stress?

10:28 We hear all the time that stress is bad.

10:30 We hear people saying they're really stressed out.

10:34 What is stress?

10:35 You've all presumably heard the arguments or the framework that stress

10:41 is this horrible ancient carryover over from times in which

10:45 humans were pursued by animals or other human predators and that whenever

10:50 we feel what we call stress or feel stressed out,

10:54 that it's just this unfortunate invasion of something

10:57 that we no longer need in modern life,

11:00 that this was designed for when we were being attacked

11:02 by bears or tigers or lions or whatever it is.

11:05 And gosh, what an unfortunate thing.

11:08 And we have so many creature comforts nowadays,

11:11 but we have not eliminated this stress.

11:13 Almost as if it was like an organ or a system in our body that was bad for us,

11:17 that we're stuck with just because of the species that we are.

11:21 But first of all, all species experience stress.

11:25 And I think that it's fair to say even though I wasn't there,

11:30 that yes, in fact, throughout our evolutionary history,

11:34 we were vulnerable to animal attack and other human attacks

11:39 on a regular basis up until a point where we started developing

11:43 weapons and structures and fire and other things that allow us

11:46 to protect ourselves better from those animals and invaders of various kinds.

11:50 But it is entirely naive for us to think that in ancient times,

11:57 ancient times being kind of loose term for previous on medieval times,

12:02 100 years ago, 1000 years ago,

12:04 10,000 years ago, of course, there were infidelities, right?

12:07 Partners cheated.

12:09 People died.

12:10 In fact, before the advent of phones, which we're going to talk about today,

12:15 you can imagine that someone might head off on a hunt or to go

12:19 visit a relative and never come back and you would never know why.

12:22 That would be very stressful.

12:23 So, there was psychosocial stress.

12:25 There was the stress of losing loved ones.

12:27 There was the stress of cold, of famine.

12:30 There was the stress probably also of just worry.

12:33 This idea that ancient versions of humans 1000 years ago,

12:38 100 years ago didn't worry,

12:39 I think that is entirely inconsistent with everything we know about

12:43 the structure of the human brain 100 years, 1000 years ago.

12:47 So, all the problems that we're struggling with existed forever.

12:53 It's just that stress at its core is a generalized system.

12:58 It wasn't designed for tigers attacking us or people attacking us.

13:02 It's a system to mobilize other systems in the brain and body.

13:06 That's what stress really is.

13:08 It's designed to be generic.

13:09 And that's the most important thing that I'd like you to understand today,

13:12 is that the system that governs what we call stress is generic.

13:16 It wasn't designed for one thing.

13:20 And that gives it a certain advantage in taking

13:23 over the state of our brain and body, but it also gives you,

13:27 all of us an advantage in controlling it because it's

13:31 based on hard-wired biological mechanisms

13:34 and there are hard-wired biological mechanisms,

13:38 meaning cells and chemicals and pathways and tissues that exist in you right

13:43 now that require no neuroplasticity that allow you to put a brake on stress.

13:49 And so, we're going to talk about those.

13:51 So, you have a system for stress and you

13:53 have a system for distress that are baked into you.

13:56 They were genetically encoded.

13:58 And you were born with them and you still have them now.

14:01 So, if you're alive and listening, you have the capacity to control your stress.

14:06 And today, I'm going to talk about ways that you can control your stress,

14:09 not just by doing some offline practice of meditation

14:13 or breath work or something like that, but real-time tools.

14:16 Tools that allow you to push back on stress when stress hits in real time.

14:21 This is something that my lab works actively

14:23 on in developing and testing these tools and evolving these tools.

14:27 And there are other laboratories that do this as well.

14:31 So, let's talk about the stress response.

14:33 And by doing that, you will understand exactly

14:36 why the tools I'm going to give you work.

14:38 For those of you that are saying, "Wait, I just want the tools.

14:41 Just give me a summary," trust me, if you understand mechanism,

14:45 you are going to be in a far better position to incorporate these tools,

14:49 to teach these tools to others,

14:50 and to modify them as your life circumstances change.

14:54 If you'd like the cheat sheet or you just want the one-page PDF,

14:57 eventually we'll get that stuff out to people,

14:59 but it's really important to understand the underlying mechanism.

15:03 Okay.

15:04 So, what is stress?

15:05 Well, let's just distinguish between stressors,

15:08 which are the things that stress us out,

15:10 and stress, which is the psychological and physiological response to stressors.

15:17 I'm mainly going to talk about stress, which is your response to things.

15:21 Let's be clear about what we already know,

15:23 which is that stressors can be psychological or they can be physical.

15:30 Okay?

15:31 If I put you outside on a cold day without

15:33 a jacket for a very long time, that is stressful.

15:37 If I have you prepare for too many exams at once and you can't

15:41 balance it all with your sleep schedule

15:43 and your other needs for comfort and wellbeing,

15:45 like food, rest, sleep, and social connection, that is stressful.

15:49 So, stress, and as I mentioned before, is generic.

15:52 It doesn't distinguish between physical and emotional stress.

15:58 So, what happens when the stress response hits?

16:00 Let's talk about the immediate or what we call the acute stress response.

16:04 We could also think of this as short-term stress.

16:07 So, you have a collection of neurons.

16:11 They have a name.

16:12 It's called the sympathetic chain ganglia.

16:14 And it has nothing to do with sympathy.

16:15 Sympa means together.

16:18 And there's a group of neurons that start right about

16:21 at your neck and run down to about your navel,

16:24 a little bit lower, and those are called the sympathetic chain ganglia.

16:28 You don't need to memorize that name.

16:30 There will not be a quiz.

16:31 But it's important to know that in the middle of your body,

16:34 you have a chain of neurons that when something stresses us out,

16:38 either in our mind or because something enters

16:40 our environment and we see something that stresses us out,

16:43 that we don't like heights if you're afraid of heights,

16:45 somebody you dislike walks into the room,

16:47 et cetera, that chain of neurons becomes activated like

16:53 a bunch of dominoes falling on all at once.

16:56 It's very fast.

16:59 When that happens, those neurons release a neuromodulator neurochemical

17:04 that I've talked about before on this podcast called acetylcholine.

17:07 They release that at various sites within the body.

17:11 Now, this is important because normally,

17:13 acetylcholine would be used to move muscles.

17:16 Actually, every time we move a muscle, pick up a cup of coffee,

17:18 write with a pen, walk down the street,

17:21 it's spinal neurons connecting to muscle and releasing acetylcholine.

17:25 So, in the brain it's involved in focus

17:27 and it muscles is involved in making muscles twitch.

17:30 But if we were stressed,

17:31 we wouldn't want all our muscles to contract at once because we would just

17:34 be kind of like paralyzed like this in what tonic activation, as it's called.

17:38 We wouldn't want that.

17:39 Something called tetanus, believe it or not.

17:40 because the tetanus toxin will cause that kind of rigor of the entire body.

17:45 You do not want that.

17:47 When those neurons are activated, acetylcholine is released,

17:50 but there are some other neurons for the aficionados out there.

17:54 They're called the postganglionic neurons.

17:56 Those ones respond to that acetylcholine and then they release epinephrine,

18:00 which is the equivalent to adrenaline.

18:03 So, we have this system where it's very fast whenever we're stressed,

18:07 the core of our body,

18:08 these neurons down the middle of our body release these chemicals and then

18:13 there's adrenaline or epinephrine released at particular

18:16 organs and acts in particular ways.

18:18 We're going down into the weeds here.

18:20 So just stay with me because it's going to make a lot

18:22 of sense and you will appreciate having this knowledge in hand.

18:25 That epinephrine acts in two different ways.

18:30 Some things like the muscles of your legs and your heart

18:34 and other things that need to be active when you're stressed,

18:37 they have a certain kind of receptor which is called the beta receptor.

18:43 And that beta receptor responds to epinephrine and blood vessels dilate.

18:47 They get bigger and blood rushes in to our legs.

18:51 The heart rate speeds up.

18:53 Lots of things happen that get activated.

18:55 And at the same time, that epinephrine activates other receptors

19:00 on certain tissues that we don't need.

19:02 The ones involved in digestion, reproduction,

19:06 and things of that sort that are luxuries for when things are going well,

19:10 not things to pay attention to when we're stressed.

19:13 And that binds to other receptors that contract the blood vessels.

19:17 So, basically the stress response, this is the key phrase here,

19:21 the stress response A, is generic, I said that before, and B,

19:25 it basically pushes certain systems to be

19:28 activated and other systems to not be activated.

19:33 So, the stress response is two-pronged.

19:35 It's a yes for certain things and it's a no,

19:38 you may not right now for other things.

19:40 So, that's the key thing to understand about the stress response.

19:42 That's why your heart speeds up.

19:44 That's why you feel blood in certain organs

19:46 and tissues of your body, but not in others.

19:49 That's why your throat goes dry because it turns out that when you get stressed,

19:54 the salivary glands are shut down.

19:56 There's a lot less blood flow to the neurons that control salivation.

20:01 And so, you're going to start swallowing.

20:02 You feel like your throat is getting dry.

20:04 There are a lot of different effects.

20:05 I'm not going to list them all off, but basically,

20:08 you are activated in ways that support you moving.

20:12 So, that's the third thing.

20:13 It's first of all, it's generic.

20:14 Second of all, the stress response,

20:16 activate certain things and shuts down other features of our body.

20:19 And then it's a sense of agitation that makes you want to move.

20:23 And that's because fundamentally,

20:26 the stress response is just this generic thing that says do something.

20:30 And movement in this case can either be the bias to move in terms of action,

20:35 or it can be the bias to say something.

20:38 When we are stressed,

20:39 we are more likely to say something that probably we shouldn't say.

20:43 We are more likely to move.

20:46 And if you're trying to suppress movement, you'll feel that as a tremor.

20:49 You're going to feel agitated and that's because it was designed to move you.

20:53 So, this is important because if you want to control stress,

20:57 you need to learn how to work with that agitation.

21:02 I'd like to give you a tool at this point,

21:05 because I think if we go any further with a lot more science,

21:09 people are going to begin to wonder if this is just going

21:11 to be a kind of standard university lecture about the stress response.

21:14 I'm going to give you more signs about the stress response,

21:17 but I want to take what we now already know

21:19 about the stress response and use that as a framework

21:24 for thinking about how one might reduce or even

21:28 eliminate the stress response quickly in real time,

21:31 should it arise when we don't want it.

21:34 So, we're taking the podium or we're sitting down at a Zoom call,

21:37 and all of a sudden we're feeling flushed.

21:39 We're feeling like our heart is racing.

21:41 We're feeling a little too alert.

21:43 We're feeling a little worked up and we want to calm down.

21:47 As far as I am aware of, the best tools to reduce stress quickly,

21:55 so-called real-time tools are going to be tools that have

21:59 a direct line to the so-called autonomic nervous system.

22:02 The autonomic nervous system is a name given to the kind

22:06 of general features of alertness or calmness in the body.

22:09 Typically, it means automatic.

22:11 Although we do have some control over it

22:12 at certain what so-called leavers are entry points.

22:16 Here's what doesn't work to control stress.

22:18 Telling yourself to calm down.

22:20 In fact, that tends to just exacerbate stress.

22:23 Telling someone else to calm down also tends to exacerbate their stress.

22:27 If you want to reduce the magnitude of the stress response,

22:31 the best thing you can do is activate the other

22:35 system in the body which is designed for calming and relaxation.

22:39 And that system is called the parasympathetic nervous system.

22:43 Because as I mentioned before,

22:45 the neurons that control stress run from about your neck to your navel.

22:48 The parasympathetic neurons, para just means near,

22:51 exist in, they're some of the cranial nerves.

22:54 So, it's kind of left neck and lower brainstem.

22:57 Kind of back of the brain and in the neck and in the pelvic area.

23:01 And the parasympathetic nervous system is

23:04 really interesting because especially the cranial nerves,

23:07 the ones that are up in the brainstem and in the neck area,

23:11 those have a direct line to various features of your face,

23:16 in particular, the eyes.

23:18 They control things like eye movements, pupil dilation, things of that sort,

23:22 as well as the tongue, the facial muscles, et cetera.

23:25 The parasympathetic nervous system,

23:27 many people don't realize this, is the system

23:29 by which we control the face and the eyes,

23:32 and to some extent, our airway, the trachea.

23:35 And it's these neurons that reside within the pelvic area.

23:40 Now, the neurons within the pelvic area are involved in control of the genitals,

23:45 the bladder, and the rectum.

23:47 And those don't have a direct line.

23:50 You don't have a direct way to control those.

23:52 It actually has to go from brain to spinal cord and then out to those organs.

23:56 Whereas the parasympathetic nervous system has certain entry points

24:00 or what I'll call leavers that will allow you

24:03 to push back on the stress response in real

24:06 time and diminish it and feel more relaxed really quickly.

24:09 So, I'm going to teach you the first tool now, so I don't overwhelm you with all

24:13 this academic knowledge without giving you something useful.

24:15 And the tool that at least to my knowledge

24:19 is the fastest and most thoroughly grounded

24:23 in physiology and neuroscience for calming down in a self-directed

24:28 way is what's called the physiological sigh, S-I-G-H.

24:32 Now, some of you might've heard me talk about this on previous podcasts,

24:35 but I'm going to explain this in the context

24:37 of how respiration in general is used to calm us down.

24:42 And turns out you're all doing this all the time,

24:44 but you are doing it involuntarily.

24:47 And when you stress,

24:48 you tend to forget that you can also activate these systems voluntarily.

24:52 This is an extremely powerful set of techniques that we

24:55 know from scientific studies that are being done in my lab,

24:59 Jack Feldman's lab at UCLA, and others now that are very,

25:03 very useful for reducing your stress response in real time.

25:07 And here's how they work.

25:08 These days, there seems to be a lot of interest in breath work.

25:12 Breath work typically,

25:13 is when you go and you sit down or you lie down and you deliberately breathe

25:17 in a particular way for a series of minutes

25:20 in order to shift your physiology, access some states.

25:22 And it does have some utility that we're going to talk about,

25:25 that is not what I'm talking about now.

25:28 What I'm talking about when I refer to physiological sighs,

25:30 is the very real medical school textbook relationship between the brain,

25:38 the body, and the body as it relates to the breathing apparati,

25:43 meaning the diaphragm and lungs and the heart.

25:46 Let's take the hallmark of the stress response.

25:48 The heart starts beating faster.

25:50 Blood is shuttled to the big muscles of the body to move you away from whatever

25:53 it is the stressor is or just make you feel like you need to move or talk.

25:57 Your face goes flushed, et cetera.

26:00 Heart rate, many of us feel is involuntary.

26:03 Just kind of functions whether or not we're moving fast or moving slow.

26:06 If you think about it,

26:08 it's not really purely autonomic because you can speed up your heart rate

26:11 by running or you can slow it down by slowing down your run.

26:15 You can move to a walk or lie down.

26:17 But that's indirect control.

26:19 There is however, a way in which you can breathe that directly controls

26:23 your heart rate through the interactions between

26:26 the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system.

26:29 Here's how it works.

26:31 When you inhale, so whether or not it's through the nose or through the mouth,

26:36 this skeletal muscle that's inside your body

26:40 called the diaphragm, it moves down.

26:43 And that's because the lungs expand, the diaphragm moves down.

26:47 Your heart actually gets a little bit bigger in that expanded space.

26:50 There's more space for the heart.

26:51 So, not your emotional heart getting bigger.

26:54 I'm talking about your actual physical heart getting a little bit bigger.

26:56 The volume grows.

26:57 And as a consequence,

26:59 whatever blood is in there is now at a lower volume or moving

27:03 a little bit more slowly in that larger volume than it was before you inhaled.

27:10 Okay?

27:11 So more space, heart gets bigger.

27:12 Blood moves more slowly.

27:13 And there's a little group of neurons called the sinoatrial

27:16 node in the heart that registers, believe it or not,

27:20 those neurons pay attention to the rate of blood flow through the heart and send

27:24 a signal up to the brain that blood is moving more slowly through the heart.

27:30 The brain then sends a signal back to the heart to speed the heart up.

27:35 So, what this means is if you want your heart to beat faster,

27:38 inhale longer, inhale more vigorously than your exhales.

27:46 Now, there are a variety of ways that one could do

27:48 that, but it doesn't matter if it's through the nose or through the mouth.

27:51 If your inhales are longer than your exhales, you're speeding up your heart.

27:54 If your inhales are more vigorous,

27:56 so even if your inhales are shorter than your exhales,

27:58 you are speeding up your heart rate.

28:00 Now, the opposite is also true.

28:02 If you want to slow your heart rate down,

28:04 so stress response hits, you want to slow your heart rate down,

28:09 what you want to do is again, capitalize on this relationship between the body,

28:13 meaning the diaphragm and the heart and the brain.

28:15 Here's how it works.

28:16 When you exhale, the diaphragm moves up,

28:20 which makes the heart a little bit smaller.

28:22 It actually gets a little more compact.

28:24 Blood flows more quickly through that compact space

28:27 sort of like just a pipe getting smaller.

28:30 The sinoatrial node registers that blood is going more quickly,

28:33 sends a signal up to the brain.

28:36 And the parasympathetic nervous system,

28:38 some neurons in your brain stem send a signal

28:40 back to the heart to slow the heart down.

28:44 So, if you want to calm down quickly,

28:46 you need to make your exhales longer and or more vigorous than your inhales.

28:53 Now, the reason this is so attractive as a tool

28:56 for controlling stress is that it works in real time.

29:00 This doesn't involve a practice that you have to go

29:02 and sit there and do anything separate from life.

29:05 And we are going to get to emotion.

29:07 Emotions and stress happen in real time.

29:10 And so, while it's wonderful to have a breath work practice

29:12 or to have the opportunity to get a massage or sit

29:15 in a sauna or do whatever it is that you do

29:17 in order to set your stress controls in the right direction,

29:20 having tools that you can reach to in real

29:22 time that require no learning, I mean, I had to teach it to you,

29:25 you had to learn that, but it

29:27 doesn't require any plasticy to activate these pathways.

29:29 So, if you're feeling stressed, you still need to inhale,

29:32 of course, but you need to lengthen your exhales.

29:37 Now, there's a tool that capitalizes on this in a kind of unique way,

29:41 a kind of a twist, which is the physiological sigh.

29:44 The physiological sigh was discovered in the '30s.

29:47 It's now been explored at the neuro-biological level and mechanistically

29:51 in far more detail by Jack Feldman's lab at UCLA.

29:55 Also Mark Krasnow's lab at Stanford.

29:57 And the physiological sigh is something that humans

30:01 and animals do anytime they are about to fall asleep.

30:05 You also do it throughout sleep from time to time when carbon dioxide,

30:09 which we'll talk about in a moment, builds up too much in your system.

30:12 And the physiological sigh is something that people naturally

30:15 start doing when they've been crying and they're trying

30:18 to recover some air or calm down when they've been

30:21 sobbing very hard or when they are in claustrophobic environments.

30:24 However, the amazing thing about this thing that we call the diaphragm,

30:28 the skeletal muscle,

30:29 is that it's an internal organ that you can control voluntarily,

30:32 unlike your spleen or your heart or your pancreas where you can't just say,

30:37 "Oh, I want to make my pancreas turn out a little more insulin right now.

30:39 I'm just going to do that with my mind directly." You can't do that.

30:42 You can do that by smelling a really good donut or something,

30:45 but you can't just do it directly.

30:46 You can move your diaphragm intentionally, right?

30:50 You can do it anytime you want.

30:51 And it'll run in the background if you're not thinking about it.

30:54 So, this incredible pathway that goes from brain

30:58 to diaphragm through what's called the phrenic nerve, P-H-R-E-N-I-C.

31:02 Phrenic.

31:03 The phrenic nerve innervates the diaphragm.

31:05 You can control anytime you want.

31:07 You can double up your inhales or triple up your inhales.

31:09 You can exhale more than your inhales.

31:12 Whatever you want to do.

31:13 Such an incredible organ.

31:14 And the physiological sigh is something that we do spontaneously.

31:18 But when you're feeling stressed,

31:20 you can do a double inhale, [inhales deeply] [exhales] long exhale.

31:28 Now, I just told you a minute ago that if you inhale more than you exhale,

31:31 you're going to speed the heart rate up,

31:33 which would promote more stress and activation.

31:36 Now I'm telling you to do a double inhale-exhale in order to calm down.

31:40 And the reason is the double inhale-exhale which is the physiological sigh

31:46 takes advantage of the fact that when we do a double inhale,

31:49 even if the second inhale is sneaking in just a tiny bit more air,

31:51 because it's kind of hard to get to deep inhales back to back,

31:54 you do big deep inhale and then another little

31:56 ones sneaking it in, the little sacks in your lungs.

31:59 If you only have the lungs.

32:00 Your lungs are just two big bags,

32:02 but you've got millions of little sacks throughout the lungs that actually

32:05 make the surface area of your lungs as big as a tennis court.

32:08 It's amazing if we were to just spread out.

32:11 Those tend to collapse as we get stressed.

32:14 And carbon dioxide builds up in our bloodstream and that's

32:17 one of the reasons we feel agitated as well.

32:20 So, and it makes us very jittery.

32:22 I mean, there's some other effects of carbon dioxide I don't

32:25 want to get into, but when you do the double inhale-exhale,

32:28 the double inhale reinflates those little sacks of the lungs.

32:31 And then when you do the long exhale,

32:33 that long exhale is now much more effective

32:36 at reading your body and bloodstream of carbon dioxide,

32:40 which relaxes you very quickly.

32:42 My lab in collaboration with David Spiegel's lab,

32:46 David's the Associate Chair of Psychiatry at Stanford,

32:49 are doing a study right now exploring how physiological sighs and other patterns

32:54 of breathing done deliberately can modulate the stress

32:57 response and other things related to emotionality.

32:59 Those work are ongoing.

33:00 I want to be clear those studies aren't done.

33:02 But it's very clear from work in our labs,

33:06 from work in Jack Feldman's lab and others,

33:09 that the physiological sigh is the fastest,

33:12 hardwired way for us to eliminate this stressful

33:16 response in our body quickly in real time.

33:19 And so, I'm excited to give you this tool because I

33:23 think most people have heard that mindfulness and meditation is good,

33:26 exercise is good for us,

33:27 we all need to be getting enough sleep, et cetera, but life happens.

33:30 And when you find yourself in a position where you

33:33 are more alert and activated than you would like to be,

33:36 regardless of whether or not the stressor is relationship-based

33:39 or it's financial or it's physical or anything like

33:44 that, you can look to the physiological sigh because

33:47 it bypasses a very important feature of how we function,

33:51 which is that it's very hard to control the mind with the mind,

33:54 especially when we are in heightened states of activation.

33:59 When you're very alert or very sleepy,

34:01 it is very hard to use these so-called top-down

34:04 mechanisms of intention and gratitude and all these things

34:08 that are really powerful tools when we are

34:11 not super activated and stressed or not super tired.

34:15 But when we are anywhere in the range of very alert and stressed to very sleepy,

34:20 physiological sighs are a powerful way

34:22 of bringing our level of so-called autonomic activation,

34:25 which just means our level of alertness down.

34:28 And so, whether or not it's in line at the bank

34:30 or whether or not you're wearing a mask nowadays or you're not,

34:33 whatever the conditions may be where you're at and your needs,

34:37 when you're feeling stressed,

34:39 the physiological sigh done just one to three times, it will be double inhale,

34:43 exhale, double inhale, exhale maybe just two times will bring

34:47 down your level of stress very, very fast.

34:50 And as far as I know, it's the fastest way to accomplish that.

34:54 An important note about the physiological sigh

34:57 or exhale-emphasized breathing for lowering the stress response.

35:03 Many people worry that their heart rate does not come down fast enough.

35:09 I want to tell you you do not want your heart rate to reduce very fast.

35:13 There's actually something called the vasovagal response,

35:16 where people will stand up or they'll get up in the middle

35:18 of the night to use the bathroom and then all of a sudden,

35:19 they'll collapse, they'll faint.

35:22 That's because the heart rate was reduced too much.

35:24 Some people will see blood or they'll see

35:27 something really troubling and stressful and they'll pass out.

35:30 That's an over-activation or an acceleration of the calming response.

35:35 They're not so stressed that they kind of fall off the cliff of stress.

35:39 They get so stressed that the rebound mechanism

35:41 for calming themselves down goes too high, too fast.

35:45 They calmed down too fast and they collapse and faint.

35:48 And so, be aware that if you're going to use

35:50 the physiological sigh or exhale-emphasized breathing to calm down,

35:54 that your heart rate will take about 20 to 30 seconds to come down to baseline.

35:59 And you may need to repeat the physiological sigh a few times.

36:02 So, that's an important note about the use

36:05 of breathing to control levels of stress.

36:08 The other thing is that when you decide to look to the body to control the mind,

36:15 it does something else that's very powerful.

36:17 When you are stressed in your mind and body, so you're feeling really agitated,

36:21 activated, and worried,

36:23 and you use a tool like the physiological sigh or exhale-emphasized breathing,

36:28 you will notice that then your brain and your mind becomes

36:31 more available for controlling the stress response and reacting to it.

36:34 Which is great because the sweet spot in life is to be,

36:38 provided you're not trying to sleep, is to be alert and calm.

36:41 And so, that's the idea.

36:42 Is to be alert and calm and to bring

36:44 you back into that sort of plane of alertness.

36:48 For those of you that have trouble sleeping or just relaxing through the day,

36:52 the physiological sigh can be repeated for 10, 15 cycles if you like.

36:57 Some people find that it actually puts them to sleep.

36:59 So, if they lie down and they're reading and they do

37:02 too many of these, that actually can put them to sleep.

37:04 And what you'll find is that most breath work protocols,

37:07 the kind of stuff that's done away from real life,

37:09 that you set aside time and decide to do quote unquote,

37:12 breath work, most of that works such that if you're

37:16 doing inhales that are longer and more vigorous than exhales,

37:19 it tends to be activating and alert you.

37:21 If you're doing exhales that are longer and more vigorous than the inhales,

37:24 it tends to put you to sleep.

37:25 And many of the protocols that are out there from laboratories

37:28 and that populate the internet and wellness sites and whatnot,

37:32 if it's exhale-emphasized breathing,

37:34 oftentimes has been used as a tool for trying to teach people to fall asleep.

37:38 Physiological sigh is a little different.

37:39 It's designed to be used in real time.

37:40 Just think of it is just kind of in your kit of things

37:43 that you can do as life happens and as you need to react to life.

37:48 A note about nasal versus mouth breathing,

37:50 there's a plethora of information out there now because of James Nestor's book,

37:54 "Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art," which came out this last year.

37:58 Excellent book.

37:59 As well as "Jaws" which is from Sandra Kahn,

38:02 Paul Ehrlich with a foreword by Jared Diamond and Robert Sapolsky.

38:07 So, a collection of people from Stanford.

38:09 Jared Diamond is not at Stanford, but the rest are.

38:12 And some heavy hitters on that book,

38:13 which is about the benefits of nasal breathing.

38:16 And in many cases, nasal breathing is more

38:18 advantageous than mouth breathing for all sorts of things.

38:20 Cosmetic features of the face,

38:22 especially in kids, warding off infection, et cetera.

38:26 With the physiological sigh,

38:27 the best way to do it would be double inhale through the nose,

38:30 exhale through the mouth.

38:31 But if you can't, and you can only do that through your mouth,

38:33 just do it through your mouth.

38:34 If want to do all through your nose, do it through your nose.

38:38 This anchors back to some underlying neurology or neuroscience.

38:43 So, for those of you that want to know, you have two breathing centers.

38:46 One that's involved in rhythmic breathing for inhales followed by exhales,

38:49 followed by inhales followed by exhales.

38:50 The so-called pre-Botzinger nucleus named after a bottle

38:54 of wine and discovered by Jack Feldman

38:56 at UCLA and a nearby nucleus called the parafacial

38:59 nucleus also discovered by Jack Feldman at UCLA.

39:02 And the parafacial nucleus is involved in any time

39:05 you double up the inhales or double up the exhales.

39:07 It was designed so that you could breathe

39:09 while you're speaking because you can't always go inhale,

39:12 exhale, inhale, exhale when you're speaking.

39:14 So, I tell you this, not to overwhelm you with knowledge,

39:17 but just know that when you double up

39:18 your inhales or you double up your exhales,

39:20 you are activating this parafacial nucleus.

39:22 And it has other cool effects.

39:25 Because it's located near the neurons that control the face,

39:28 it also has a tendency to relax the jaw.

39:30 There's some interplay between the neurons that control

39:33 the speaking stuff and the stuff for your tongue.

39:35 So, all of a sudden, when we do this physiological sigh,

39:38 we tap into neural circuitry that allows us to speak more clearly,

39:42 to control the muscles of the face and jaw.

39:44 Maybe that means not saying certain things when we're stressed,

39:47 and just generally to relax.

39:50 And so, this brings us back

39:52 to the neuroscience of this parasympathetic nervous system.

39:55 This calming system that's been genetically encoded into us that we all have,

40:01 regardless of who our parents are,

40:02 which is that the neurons that control all this stuff,

40:05 the face, the eyes, et cetera, are all working together.

40:09 And that's why when we get stressed,

40:11 it's hard for us to speak or we tend to jitter and these kinds of things.

40:14 Just like all the neurons that cause stress in the center

40:16 of the spinal cord are working together to get our body activated.

40:19 Okay, lot of science today.

40:21 You've now got the physiological sigh as a tool.

40:23 You know the exhale-emphasized breathing will slow your heart

40:26 down and inhale-emphasized breathing will speed your heart up.

40:31 So, let's think about something now.

40:33 Let's think about stress from not whether or not it's acute or chronic,

40:38 whether or not it's good for us or bad for us,

40:40 but on three different timescales.

40:42 Because then we can arrive at what this is all about as it relates to emotions.

40:47 Because trust me, this has everything to do with emotions and whether

40:51 or not you're functioning well emotionally

40:53 or you're not functioning well emotionally,

40:55 whether or not you're coping or not coping.

40:57 So, those are typically psychological terms and psychological discussions.

41:00 We are entering this through the portal of physiology.

41:03 The stuff of medical textbooks.

41:05 And we will arrive at the psychology soon,

41:08 but I really want you to understand the difference

41:10 between the three kinds of stress on three different timescales,

41:14 short-term, medium-term, and long-term,

41:17 and what it's good for and what it's bad for.

41:19 I think we've all heard that stress is bad for us.

41:23 We've seen these pictures intended to frighten us.

41:26 And indeed they are frightening.

41:27 You see the nice really plump brain on the left.

41:30 It says healthy or control.

41:32 And then you see the brain that says stressed

41:34 above it on the right and it's like withered,

41:37 where we see that the hippocampus and area involved in memory is smaller.

41:41 People that are stressed.

41:42 We see that the Alzheimer's brain is made worse by stress.

41:46 That people who have a predisposition to schizophrenia,

41:48 when they get stressed, higher incidence of schizophrenia episodes.

41:52 You hear that addicts will relapse when they're stressed.

41:55 I mean, okay, we get it.

41:57 And it's very important,

41:58 but I think we've all heard now so many times that stress is bad.

42:02 But in that conversation, unfortunately,

42:06 it's eclipsed some of the really positive things

42:09 that stress does for us in the short-term.

42:11 So, stress can be short-term, medium-term, or long-term.

42:14 Long-term stress is indeed bad for all

42:17 the reasons I just mentioned and many others.

42:19 But what's never actually been discussed is what stress

42:22 is so terrific for, positive for in the short-term.

42:26 And I think we tend to overlook the important question,

42:30 which is what is short-term and what is long-term?

42:32 No one ever bothers to tell us what is chronic, what is acute.

42:35 Right?

42:36 Is it five minutes?

42:37 Is it five days?

42:38 Is it for the duration of final exams?

42:39 Or is it for the duration of a senior thesis in college?

42:43 No one actually draws boundaries around this stuff or even general guidelines.

42:48 And so, it's become a bit of a mess,

42:51 frankly, to try and decipher this whole space around stress.

42:54 So, I'm going to try and clean some of this up

42:56 for you based on what we know from the scientific data.

43:00 First of all, acute stress, when the stress response hits,

43:04 that is good for your immune system.

43:07 I know that might be a tough pill to swallow, but it's absolutely true.

43:10 In fact, stress often comes in the form of bacterial or viral infection.

43:17 And the stress response is in part

43:21 organized to combat bacterial and viral infection.

43:24 There are pathways from the same brain centers that activate these neurons

43:29 in your spinal cord to make you feel like you want to move.

43:32 There are other neurons in your brain that activate things like your spleen,

43:37 which will deploy killer cells to go out and scavenge for incoming

43:41 bacteria and viruses and try and eat them up and kill them.

43:45 So, short-term stress and the release

43:49 of adrenaline in particular or epinephrine,

43:51 same thing, adrenaline and epinephrine, is good for combating infection.

43:56 And this to me is just not discussed enough.

43:59 So, that's why I'm discussing it here.

44:01 And it relates to a particular tool that many of you ask about,

44:04 but I don't often get the opportunity

44:06 to talk about in such an appropriate context.

44:09 It's not that it's ever inappropriate to talk about,

44:12 but what I'm about to talk about now is the use of, again,

44:16 respiration breathing to somewhat artificially activate the stress response.

44:23 And that will accomplish two things.

44:25 Okay?

44:26 I'll return to medium and long-term stress,

44:28 but I want to say short-term stress is good because the dilation of the pupils,

44:33 the changes in the optics of the eyes,

44:34 the quickening of the heart rate, the sharpening of your cognition.

44:37 And in fact that short-term stress brings certain elements

44:40 of the brain online that allow you to focus.

44:44 Now, it narrows your focus.

44:45 You're not good at seeing the so-called big picture, but it narrows your focus.

44:49 It allows you to do these, what I call duration path outcome types of analysis.

44:53 It allows you to evaluate your environment, evaluate what you need to do.

44:56 It primes your whole system for better cognition.

44:59 It primes your immune system to combat infection.

45:02 And that all makes sense when you think about that the fact that famine,

45:07 thirst, bacterial infections, viral infections, invaders,

45:11 all of this stuff liberates a response in the body that's designed

45:15 to get you to fight back against whatever stressor that happens to be.

45:19 Psychological, physical, bacterial, viral.

45:22 Again, the stress response is generic.

45:25 The tool takes advantage of the fact that when

45:29 adrenaline is released in the body from the adrenals,

45:34 it has the effect of also liberating a lot

45:37 of these killer cells from the immune organs,

45:40 in particular from the spleen, but from elsewhere as well,

45:43 and interactions with the lymphatic system that combat infection.

45:49 The way this works in the real world is best captured

45:53 by a study that can be mapped back to so-called Wim Hof breathing.

45:59 Now, Wim Hof breathing is so named after the so-called "Iceman," Wim Hof.

46:04 Wim Hof, of course, being this Dutch.

46:06 He, I think he has self-titled Daredevil.

46:09 And indeed he has many, many Guinness Book of World Records

46:12 for things like swimming under icebergs and going

46:15 up Kilimanjaro in his shorts and crossing the desert without water, et cetera.

46:22 Things that are quite dangerous if you don't know what you're doing.

46:26 And Wim obviously survived or I'm telling you he survived.

46:30 But there are two components to a sort of breathing protocol

46:34 that he developed that was based

46:37 also on what's called Tummo breathing, T-U-M-M-O.

46:40 So, before Wim, there was Tummo breathing.

46:42 And many people call this now super oxygenation breathing.

46:46 Although the breath work aficionados will probably say, well,

46:49 it's not super oxygenation because you're also

46:51 blowing an awful lot of carbon dioxide.

46:53 What I'm talking about here, regardless of whether or not it's called Wim Hof,

46:58 Tummo, or super oxygenation, is rapid deliberate breathing.

47:02 So, it's deliberate hyperventilation.

47:05 Why would somebody want to do this?

47:06 Well, deliberate hyperventilation done for maybe 25 cycles.

47:11 So inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale.

47:14 Typically, it's done in through the nose out through the mouth.

47:16 Although sometimes it's just through the mouth.

47:18 If you do that for 15 breaths, 20 breaths, 25 breaths, you will feel very alert.

47:24 People who have anxiety will feel anxious.

47:27 They might even have an anxiety attack.

47:30 However, we need to ask why that kind of breathing feels that way.

47:35 And it's because that pattern of breathing,

47:37 rapid movements of the diaphragm will liberate adrenaline from the adrenals.

47:42 So, it's the release of adrenaline.

47:44 I mentioned that Wim is also called "The Iceman." Well,

47:47 that's because he actually discovered this pattern of breathing, somewhat.

47:52 And again, it maps back to Tummo breathing by going into cold water.

47:57 When you go into cold water,

47:58 that too is a stressor and you liberate adrenaline in response to cold water.

48:02 So, if you get into an ice bath or a cold shower,

48:05 you will immediately release adrenaline from your adrenals.

48:10 Now, there are all sorts of things related to this about

48:12 psychological control and stress thresholds that we'll talk about,

48:15 but I really want people to understand

48:16 that when adrenaline is released in the body,

48:18 you are in a better position to combat infections.

48:22 And so, whether or not you breathe very quickly in these cycles

48:26 of 25 breaths and regardless of what you call it,

48:29 doesn't matter, adrenaline is released.

48:31 If you take a cold shower, adrenaline is released.

48:33 If you go into an ice bath deliberately,

48:36 and even if you do it non-deliberately, adrenaline is released.

48:40 You are mimicking the stress response.

48:43 And that adrenaline serves to suppress or combat incoming infections.

48:49 And this was beautifully shown in a study

48:51 that was published in a very fine journal,

48:53 the "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

48:55 for the US." It's literally called "Proceedings of the National

48:59 Academy of USA" to distinguish it from other

49:02 proceedings of other national academies in other countries.

49:07 The way the experiment went is that people were injected with endotoxin

49:12 or in some cases they were injected with a bacterial wall that mimics infection.

49:19 It gives you a fever.

49:20 It makes you feel nauseous.

49:21 It makes you feel sick.

49:22 It is not pleasant.

49:24 Half of the people did a particular pattern of breathing

49:27 that looked very much like the pattern of breathing

49:29 I described a moment ago of doing 25 deep

49:32 inhales and exhales followed by an exhale holding their breath.

49:36 Then repeating 25 inhales, exhales holding their breath.

49:39 So, this would look something like this, or if you're listening,

49:41 it sounds like [inhaling and exhaling].

49:44 25, 30 times, you'll start feeling heated up.

49:46 You'll start feeling the adrenaline response.

49:48 You're liberating adrenaline in your body.

49:50 Then exhale, hold your breath for 15 seconds and then repeat.

49:54 And then typically, after doing three or four rounds

49:57 of that, they would inhale very deeply and hold their breath.

49:59 Now, I want to emphasize never ever, ever do this anywhere near water.

50:03 People have passed out.

50:05 So-called shallow water blackout.

50:07 People have died.

50:07 Don't do it in the bathtub.

50:08 Don't do it the hot tub.

50:09 Don't do it before swimming.

50:10 Please don't do it anywhere near water.

50:12 Please don't do it at all, unless you get clearance to do it from your doctor

50:15 because there are some pulmonary effects and whatnot.

50:17 And the breath holds should definitely not be done

50:19 by anyone that has glaucoma pressure concerns for the eyes.

50:23 But these repeated cycles of breathing

50:26 that liberate adrenaline allowed the group that did

50:30 that protocol to essentially experience zero

50:33 symptoms from the ejection of this E.

50:36 coli, which is remarkable.

50:37 They had much reduced or no symptoms.

50:39 They didn't feel feverish.

50:41 They didn't feel sick.

50:41 They weren't vomiting, no diarrhea, which is remarkable,

50:44 but makes total sense when you think about

50:46 the fact that the short-term stress response there,

50:49 what's typically called the acute stress response,

50:51 it's designed to combat all stressors.

50:54 In fact, were you to cut yourself very deeply while out on a hike in the woods,

51:00 the other thing that would happen is

51:02 that there would be a rapid inflammation response.

51:06 And we always hear inflammation is bad.

51:08 Inflammation gives us Alzheimer's.

51:10 Inflammation is the worst thing.

51:11 But the swelling is associated,

51:13 the inflammation is associated with the recruitment of things

51:17 like macrophages or microglia if it's a neural tissue.

51:21 Cells in our brain and body whose job is to act

51:25 like little ambulances and rush to that site and clean it up.

51:28 And indeed the inflammation response looks horrible, it sounds horrible,

51:31 but it's a great thing in the short-term.

51:33 You want to have that tissue marked as in trouble

51:39 and you want the body and brain to react to it.

51:41 So, if you're getting peaks in stress from time

51:44 to time throughout your day or throughout your week,

51:46 you are in a better position to combat infection.

51:49 You are any better position to heal your wounds, physical wounds.

51:54 Many great things happen in the stress response.

51:57 Now, of course, the stress response isn't always super intense.

52:00 Sometimes it's milder.

52:01 Sometimes it allows us to just focus on something because we have a deadline.

52:04 That can feel stressful,

52:05 but that's one of the reasons you procrastinators out there,

52:08 people are always asking me what can be done for procrastination?

52:12 What can be done for procrastination is you can understand what's happening,

52:15 which is that you are self-imposing stress because stress acts like a drug.

52:20 It is a powerful nootropic.

52:22 I get asked about nootropics.

52:24 The most powerful nootropic or smart drug is stress.

52:27 It's the concern of failure.

52:29 It's the desire to do well.

52:31 It's the impending deadline.

52:32 It's the, "Oh my gosh, I have to do this thing now or I'm going

52:35 to fail." That is the best nootropic you will ever find.

52:38 That combined with a good night's sleep, which we'll talk about.

52:41 But we spent a whole month on sleep.

52:42 So, I don't want to backtrack too much.

52:44 Okay.

52:45 So, short-term stress, great.

52:47 The key is to be able to turn the stress response off when you're done,

52:52 when you don't want that.

52:54 In fact, let's just really tamp down the relationship

52:57 between the short-term or acute stress response and infection.

53:01 Many of us are familiar with the experience of work, work, work, work, work,

53:04 or taking care of a loved one,

53:05 or stress, stress, stress, stress, then we finally relax.

53:08 Maybe we even go on vacation.

53:09 Like, "Oh, now I'm finally going to get the break." And then we get sick.

53:12 And that's because the adrenaline response crashed

53:15 and your immune system crashed with it.

53:18 So, please understand this.

53:20 Now, many of you might say, "Well, how long?

53:22 Is it two hours?

53:23 Is it three hours?" A lot of you out there that really like specificity,

53:26 it will vary for everybody.

53:29 I would just kind of use a rule of thumb.

53:31 When you are no longer able to achieve good sleep, what good sleep means to you,

53:36 and please see the episodes on sleep if you want more about tools to sleep,

53:40 when you are no longer able to achieve good sleep,

53:43 you are now moving from acute stress to chronic stress.

53:46 You need to be able to turn the stress response off.

53:49 If I have one wish, well, I have many wishes for this lifetime,

53:52 but if I have one wish today that I hope will permeate and spread out there,

53:58 is this idea that we need from a young age, but even as adults and forever,

54:03 we need to learn how to turn off our stress response.

54:05 Physiological sigh is one.

54:08 If we're going to activate our stress response intentionally by ice baths,

54:11 cold showers, cyclic hyperoxygenated breathing,

54:14 aka Tummo breathing or Wim Hof breathing,

54:17 we also need to learn how to press the brake.

54:20 Okay?

54:21 So, let's think about the stress system.

54:23 It knows how to activate itself.

54:25 Now we're talking about a way of deliberately

54:27 activating your stress system in order to combat infection.

54:30 I do this from time to time.

54:31 I might feel a tickle in my throat or like I'm getting kind of run down,

54:35 I will do this kind of breathing.

54:37 I do.

54:38 I will take 25 or 30 breaths.

54:40 Exhale, hold my breath.

54:42 25, 30 breaths again, exhale, hold my breath for about 15 seconds.

54:46 25, 30 breaths again, exhale, hold my breath for 25 or 30 seconds.

54:50 Then a big inhale.

54:51 And I hold my breath until I feel the impulse to breathe.

54:54 Again, I feel it's safe for me.

54:56 I've run it by my doctor, so it's fine.

54:58 You should not do this unless it's right for you.

55:00 But I do this.

55:01 Some people like the ice bath.

55:03 I rarely do the ice bath.

55:05 Some people like cold showers.

55:06 I like hot showers.

55:08 So, I take hot showers, but I do this kind of breathing.

55:10 Again, they are all having more

55:12 or less the same effect of increasing adrenaline,

55:16 which allows you to combat the infection

55:19 because you're activating the immune response.

55:21 Okay.

55:22 So, now let's talk about medium-term stress.

55:24 Medium-term stress is going to be stress

55:26 that lasts anywhere from several days to several weeks.

55:31 Okay.

55:32 We might think of that as long-term stress.

55:33 There are times in life when we are just dealing with a lot.

55:36 Okay?

55:37 This particular quarter, I happened to be directing a course,

55:40 I'm doing the lab, I'm doing this.

55:42 I enjoy all these things immensely, but I'm kind of near my threshold.

55:46 I'm near the point where any additional thing,

55:49 like I couldn't log onto a website the other day and it

55:51 felt like the most intense thing in the world at that moment.

55:54 And I kind of laughed at myself.

55:55 Fortunately, I caught it.

55:57 But that typically wouldn't be my response

56:00 under conditions where I wasn't pushed to threshold.

56:02 What is this medium-term stress?

56:03 What is stress threshold?

56:05 Well, stress threshold is actually our ability

56:09 to cognitive re-regulate what's going on in our body.

56:14 So, we all hear so much about we need to unify our mind and body.

56:18 We need to be at one with our mind and body or whatever.

56:21 Now I realize I'm kind of poking fun at some of the new agey language,

56:24 but the reason I poke fun is not because I don't think it has value,

56:27 but it has no specificity.

56:29 What does that mean?

56:30 I mean, I think I'm always in my body.

56:31 I've never fortunately looked across the room and seen

56:34 my arm over there or my leg over there.

56:36 I'm connected to my body.

56:38 There actually is a syndrome where people feel disconnected from their limbs.

56:41 This is a real clinical condition.

56:43 These people actually will seek out amputation.

56:45 They will try and convince doctors to amputate certain portions of their body.

56:49 It's a really terrible thing for people to have.

56:53 And it relates to a change in central maps in the brain, believe it or not.

56:57 Most of us want to keep our limbs, whichever ones we happen to have.

57:02 And most of us feel one in mind and body so much so that when stress hits,

57:06 we feel it in our mind and body.

57:07 A lot of stress inoculation,

57:10 a lot of managing medium-term stress on the timescale

57:14 of weeks or maybe even a couple months,

57:17 so we're not talking about years of stress,

57:20 a lot of that has to do with raising our stress threshold.

57:24 It's about capacity.

57:26 And there are very simple tools,

57:29 excellent tools that will allow us to modulate our capacity for stress.

57:34 And they look a lot like the tools I just described.

57:37 They involve placing oneself deliberately into a situation where

57:42 our adrenaline is increased somewhat not to the extreme.

57:46 And then when we feel flooded with adrenaline, and normally we would panic,

57:52 it's about cognitively, mentally,

57:55 emotionally calming ourselves and being comfortable

57:58 with that response in our body.

58:00 So, unlike trying to unify the mind and body

58:03 and make it all calm or make it all alert,

58:05 this is about dissociating mind and body in a healthy way.

58:09 And what would this look like?

58:10 Well, this is something I actually do as a practice because I mentioned before,

58:15 you can use physiological sighs in real time,

58:16 you can use the cyclic hyperoxygenation breathing to combat

58:21 infection if you're feeling kind of run down.

58:24 And there's also a way in which you can use things like cold showers,

58:29 or if you exercise and you bring your heart rate up very high,

58:32 you kind of go into that high-intensity realm where your heart is beating

58:36 a little bit harder than you're comfortable with and that you're just you feel,

58:41 some people think it's lactic acid.

58:42 No one can agree on this what the burn is,

58:45 whether or not it's lactic acids or it's buildup of hydrogen or whatever.

58:48 I don't want to get into that, but we're all familiar with the intense

58:50 feeling of your muscles kind of burning

58:52 because you're working very hard physically.

58:56 The key in those moments is to learn

58:58 to relax the mind while the body is very activated.

59:02 And what that tends to do,

59:04 there's a limited amount of research on this, but what that tends to do is

59:07 it tends to create a situation where what once felt like a lot feels manageable.

59:13 Okay?

59:14 That you've raised your stress threshold or your stress capacity.

59:17 One way that you can do this, and this is kind of fun,

59:19 if it's approved by your physician and you're able

59:22 to do this, you can bring your heart rate up.

59:24 You can do this through an ice bath if that's your thing or a cold shower

59:28 or cyclic oxygenation breathing or you could sprint

59:30 or you could go hard on the bike, whenever it is that brings your heart rate up.

59:34 And then what you want to do is you want to actually try

59:37 and calm the mind while your body is in this heightened state of activation.

59:41 And the best way that I'm aware to do

59:44 that, again goes back to physiology, not psychology.

59:48 When we are stressed, our pupils dilate.

59:51 The effect of that pupil dilation is to create tunnel vision.

59:54 It literally narrows our view of the visual world.

59:56 We no longer see in Panorama.

59:59 And there's some other effects as well.

1:00:01 But that's because the visual system through this cranial nerve system that I

1:00:05 described before is tethered and is part of this autonomic nervous system.

1:00:10 By deliberately dilating your gaze,

1:00:12 meaning not moving your head and eyes around,

1:00:14 but by deliberately going from tunnel vision to broader panoramic vision,

1:00:20 literally seeing more of your environment all at once.

1:00:22 You don't have to do what I'm doing, which is not blinking.

1:00:24 You're welcome to blink.

1:00:26 But it means deliberately dilating your gaze so

1:00:28 that you can see yourself in the environment you're in.

1:00:31 It creates a calming effect on the mind because it releases

1:00:34 a particular circuit in the brainstem

1:00:36 that's associated with alertness, aka stress.

1:00:40 Now, this is very powerful.

1:00:41 If you're running, for instance, and you're at max capacity or close to it,

1:00:45 or you're kind of hitting like 80,

1:00:48 90% of maximum on the bike and you dilate your gaze,

1:00:51 what you'll find is the mind can relax while the body is in full output.

1:00:55 And this relates to work that in various communities,

1:00:58 people are working with this in the sports community,

1:01:00 military community, et cetera.

1:01:02 But it's a form, not really of stress inoculation,

1:01:05 it's more about raising stress threshold so that the body

1:01:09 is going to continue to be in a high alertness,

1:01:13 high reactivity mode, high output, but the mind is calm.

1:01:17 And so, this isn't about unifying mind and body.

1:01:19 This is actually about using body to bring

1:01:22 up your level of activation, then dissociating,

1:01:25 not the clinical dissociation kind of disorders,

1:01:28 but dissociating the mental or emotional response

1:01:32 from what's going on in your body.

1:01:33 And over time, so if you do this a couple of times,

1:01:36 you don't have to do this every workout,

1:01:38 but if you do this every maybe once a week or so,

1:01:40 you start being comfortable at these higher activation states.

1:01:43 What once felt overwhelming and like a lot of work, now is manageable.

1:01:49 It feels tolerable.

1:01:50 So, that's for navigating medium-term stress.

1:01:53 Now, there are other tools as well, but we don't want to go over 90

1:01:56 minutes because 90 minutes is one old trading cycle.

1:01:58 I was trying to keep these podcasts to one on trading cycle,

1:02:00 in case you haven't noticed, so you can derive maximum benefit from them

1:02:05 based on all trading and cycle principles of learning.

1:02:07 So, I don't want to go into every little bit of this.

1:02:10 And I want to make sure we get to emotions.

1:02:12 But I want to emphasize that these medium-term stressors, of, "Oh,

1:02:17 it's been a hard month, or hard week." Stanford's on the quarter system.

1:02:20 So 10 weeks or semester.

1:02:23 That becomes more manageable when we train ourselves

1:02:27 to be calm of mind when our body is activated.

1:02:31 And if you haven't noticed,

1:02:33 most of the tools I'm describing today are nothing like the sort of, okay,

1:02:37 sit and do meditation.

1:02:38 I'm actively avoiding saying the words NSDR, non-sleep deep rest.

1:02:42 I talked a lot about those tools during the months on sleep and neuroplasticity.

1:02:47 And of course, they are wonderful for replenishing

1:02:49 your ability to lean into effort, to learn to focus.

1:02:53 Please do try and check out NSDR protocol.

1:02:56 See if they're right for you.

1:02:57 The margins for safety, I think are enormous.

1:02:59 You're basically just listening to a script.

1:03:01 We have links to them in previous captions.

1:03:03 I've talked on them on various podcasts before.

1:03:04 We can provide them again.

1:03:06 But today I'm really talking about tools, so you can learn to dance with stress.

1:03:10 To in the short-term,

1:03:12 reduce that stress response a little bit if you feel it's too uncomfortable.

1:03:16 In the medium-term, to be comfortable with these heightened levels

1:03:18 of activation because life is going to continue to come at you.

1:03:21 And we can't pick the stressors,

1:03:24 but we need to be able to function at a higher capacity often.

1:03:28 And then there's long-term stress.

1:03:30 Now, long-term stress is bad.

1:03:32 You do not want adrenaline up in your system for a very long time.

1:03:36 In fact, you ideally,

1:03:38 you would have your stress go up various times throughout the day,

1:03:42 but it would never stay elevated and it would

1:03:45 never prevent you from getting a good night's sleep.

1:03:46 Now, that isn't realistic.

1:03:48 Okay?

1:03:49 I would say for me, three, four nights out of the month, no matter what I do,

1:03:54 I take on too much or something happens in life is life

1:03:57 and I don't get the best night's sleep that I would like to get.

1:04:01 For many of you, it's 30 nights per month.

1:04:03 For some of you, it's zero nights per month.

1:04:05 And congratulations to you zero nights per month people.

1:04:09 If you are managing your sleep really well every night, that is fantastic.

1:04:13 You really want to be able to fall asleep at night,

1:04:16 stay asleep for most of the night.

1:04:17 And if you get up, go back to sleep

1:04:18 for as long as you need to in order to feel rested.

1:04:20 That's what I define as a healthy relationship to sleep.

1:04:23 Check out the episodes on sleep if you want tools to be able to accomplish that.

1:04:26 And we can all accomplish that.

1:04:28 It can be done.

1:04:29 And there are tools to do it.

1:04:30 Zero-cost tools.

1:04:32 Okay, so let's talk about long-term stress.

1:04:35 Earlier, I talked about how breathing can modulate heart rate through

1:04:40 this loop that includes the brain and the parasympathetic nervous system.

1:04:44 I don't think I mentioned this, and I

1:04:46 want to make sure that I mentioned that breathing

1:04:48 controlling heart rate through the sympathetic and parasympathetic

1:04:52 nervous system is the basis of what's called HRV, heart rate variability.

1:04:57 And we know that heart rate variability is good.

1:05:01 You don't want your heart rate chronically elevated or chronically low.

1:05:05 A lot of people think, "Oh,

1:05:06 I want a really nice low heart rate." And indeed, if you're in shape,

1:05:10 the stroke volume of your heart will be greater

1:05:13 and you can have a nice slow heart rate.

1:05:16 Years ago when I was running regularly,

1:05:19 I think my heart rate was down to like 50 or 60 or something like that.

1:05:23 That's great.

1:05:23 But, and now it's higher than that because I'm running a little bit less.

1:05:27 But everyone needs to determine what's right for them.

1:05:30 But you don't really want your heart

1:05:32 rate to be chronically low or chronically high.

1:05:35 Both are bad.

1:05:35 We know that chronic stress, elevated stress and especially in the so-called

1:05:41 type A personalities creates heart disease,

1:05:44 the leading killer of for in most, every country, but in particular in the US.

1:05:49 Because of the way that adrenaline impacts

1:05:52 those blood vessels or constricting some and dilating others,

1:05:57 it's just that kind of hypertension, chronic hypertension is just bad.

1:06:01 And so, chronic stress truly is bad.

1:06:03 I want to really make that clear because I emphasized

1:06:06 a lot of what some of the positive effects of stress.

1:06:09 But you want to be able to tamp down your stress in real time.

1:06:14 You also want to be able to modulate your stress

1:06:16 and your emotional relationship to stress in the body in the medium-term,

1:06:20 but by no means do you want to be stressed out all the time,

1:06:23 chronically for months and months and months and years on end.

1:06:27 The best tools, the best mechanisms that we know

1:06:32 to modulate long-term stress might surprise you a little bit.

1:06:36 First of all, there are going to be the things that don't surprise you,

1:06:40 which is everyone knows getting regular exercise,

1:06:42 getting good sleep, using real-time tools

1:06:45 to try and tamp down the stress response,

1:06:47 et cetera, that's all going to be really useful.

1:06:51 The data really points to the fact that social connection and certain types

1:06:57 of social connection in particular are what

1:07:00 are going to mitigate or reduce long-term stress.

1:07:04 And this is a particularly important issue nowadays where

1:07:07 we have all these proxies or surrogates for social connection.

1:07:11 We're online and texting with people a lot, so we can feel connected.

1:07:15 Like the plane's about to take off and everyone's texting each

1:07:18 other whether or not they have fear of flying or not.

1:07:20 They're like, "Okay, see you.

1:07:22 Love you.

1:07:22 Hate you." Whatever it is that they're trying to communicate to people.

1:07:27 Then plane lands, every phone's out, "See you.

1:07:30 Love you.

1:07:31 Hate you." Let's hope it's fewer hate yous.

1:07:33 But everyone has this kind of need to stay connected to one another.

1:07:35 Humans are incredibly social creatures.

1:07:38 Now, there is a way to look at this whole business of social connection,

1:07:41 not from just the kind of wishy-washy new agey perspective.

1:07:45 And I want to point out that sometimes I'll say wishy-washy new agey.

1:07:49 I have nothing against that.

1:07:51 I just, my goal here is always to put scientific data and some neurochemistry

1:07:56 on things so that for those of you that are into wishy-washy new agey stuff,

1:08:01 you also can arm yourself with some arguments

1:08:04 for those of the members of your family and your life that maybe aren't so tuned

1:08:09 into the typical language around those practices like,

1:08:12 "Oh, connection is really key.

1:08:13 We all get oxytocin." Actually, did you know that connection between

1:08:17 individuals rarely causes the release of oxytocin?

1:08:20 Oxytocin is released in very particular circumstances like post-orgasm,

1:08:24 baby and mother milk let down.

1:08:29 It's associated with kind of really intense kinds

1:08:31 of pair bonding things of mother and child.

1:08:34 Also father and child, but especially mother and child,

1:08:36 because its relationship to the lactation system.

1:08:39 Couples post-sex.

1:08:41 These kinds of things that reflect deep kind of layers of our biology.

1:08:46 And oxytocin is not just released when we walk in and pat the dog

1:08:51 on the head or we see somebody and we give them a hug and, "Hi,

1:08:54 great to see you," fist bump.

1:08:56 That's not a situation for oxytocin.

1:08:58 The way to think about social connection and how it can mitigate some

1:09:02 of the long-term effects of stress is

1:09:05 really through the systems of neuromodulation like serotonin,

1:09:09 and through blocking certain things that are really

1:09:14 bad for us when we feel socially isolated.

1:09:16 Things like Taqi Kynan.

1:09:17 So, let me explain what these are.

1:09:18 Serotonin again, is a neuromodulator.

1:09:21 Neuromodulators are a little bit like playlists in the brain.

1:09:23 They tend to amplify or bias the likelihood that certain brain circuits

1:09:27 and body circuits are going to be activated and that others will not.

1:09:31 Serotonin generally, and I realize I'm speaking very generally here,

1:09:36 but it generally gives us feelings of wellbeing.

1:09:38 At very high levels, it makes us feel blissed and it tends to make

1:09:41 us feel like we have enough in our immediate environment.

1:09:44 This is why some of the side effects of antidepressants that elevate serotonin,

1:09:48 and actually can help a lot of people with depressive symptoms.

1:09:51 But the side effects associated with drugs

1:09:54 that increase serotonin tend to be reduced affect.

1:09:57 They tend to kind of blunt affect

1:09:59 or make people feel like their libido is lower.

1:10:03 Desire goes down because the body has so

1:10:06 much serotonin and the brain has so much serotonin,

1:10:08 that one feels like they have enough.

1:10:10 But serotonin, pharmacology aside or taking

1:10:14 antidepressants aside a topic for another time,

1:10:18 serotonin tends to make us feel good.

1:10:20 When we see somebody that we recognize and trust,

1:10:22 serotonin is released in the brain.

1:10:25 And that has certain positive effects on the immune

1:10:28 system and on other systems of neural repair

1:10:32 and synopsis and things that really reinforce connections

1:10:34 in the brain and prevent that long-term withering of connections.

1:10:38 So, serotonin is tied to social connection.

1:10:41 Now, social connection can take many forms.

1:10:43 As many of you know, I am very attached to my dog.

1:10:46 I hope he's attached to me.

1:10:48 He's asleep most of the time.

1:10:49 So, I don't know.

1:10:50 And even if he was awake, I don't really know what I would ask him.

1:10:52 But he seems more or less to be attached to me as well.

1:10:56 And there's no scientific evidence that it has to be human-human attachment.

1:11:02 I do have attachments to humans as well.

1:11:05 But you can have attachments to other people.

1:11:08 Some of those can be romantic attachments.

1:11:10 They could be familial attachments that are non-romantic, friendship,

1:11:13 pets, even attachments to things that just delight us.

1:11:18 One of the things that really can mitigate against the long-term

1:11:22 negative effects of chronic long-term stress isn't just having fun.

1:11:27 We hear all this stuff,

1:11:28 "You need to play and have fun." That can be a little bit of a tough concept,

1:11:31 especially for the hard driving people or people that are stressed,

1:11:34 but having a sense of delight,

1:11:36 a sense of really enjoying something that you see and engage in, witness,

1:11:41 or participate in, that is associated with the serotonin system.

1:11:46 And certainly, play is one of those things.

1:11:48 Social connection of various forms.

1:11:49 Those are things to invest in.

1:11:51 Some people might say, "Well, nobody wants to be my friend," or, "Nobody wants

1:11:55 to engage socially anymore." I'll be the first to admit,

1:11:59 social connection and friendship and relationships of all kinds

1:12:01 to animals or humans or inanimate objects takes work.

1:12:05 It takes investment.

1:12:06 It takes time in not needing everything to be exactly the way you want it to be.

1:12:11 I have a friend who struggles with this and oftentimes the conversations

1:12:15 just circle back to the fact that when you want social connection,

1:12:19 you often have to be more flexible.

1:12:21 You have to eat on other people's schedules.

1:12:22 Sometimes you have to eat things you don't necessarily want to eat the most

1:12:25 in that moment or stay up a little later or wake up a little earlier.

1:12:28 Social connection is something that we work for, but it is incredibly powerful.

1:12:33 I want to, of course,

1:12:34 tip my heart to, it's only appropriate to call him the great Robert Sapolsky,

1:12:39 my colleague who I'm unfortunate to know at Stanford.

1:12:43 Of course, he has talked about this quite a lot.

1:12:44 So, I want to acknowledge Robert's incredible work and discussions around this.

1:12:48 You can look up those materials online and his wonderful books.

1:12:52 But primates, and we are primates, we are social species.

1:12:56 And as Robert has said many times before, never before in any primate history,

1:13:02 but in particular in human history have we interacted with so many

1:13:06 strangers at a distance when we are not really connected to them.

1:13:09 So, finding just a few people,

1:13:12 even one or an animal or something that you delight in, believe it or not,

1:13:17 has very positive effects on mitigating this long-term stress on improving

1:13:23 various aspects of our life as it relates to stress and emotionality.

1:13:28 So, that's the social connection part.

1:13:29 The other thing is the social isolation that goes

1:13:32 too long is associated in everything from flies,

1:13:34 believe it or not, to mice and humans with this molecule of Taqi Kynan.

1:13:39 Taqi Kynan is a molecule that makes us more fearful,

1:13:44 paranoid, and impairs our immune system.

1:13:48 And so, Taqi Kynan is like this internal punishment signal.

1:13:51 It's like our body and our brain telling us,

1:13:53 "You're not spending enough time with people that you really trust.

1:13:56 You're not spending time doing things that you really enjoy." And I

1:14:00 often think about Taqi Kynan for myself because I'm pretty hard driving.

1:14:03 I have a lot of pursuits.

1:14:03 I also have a lot of wonderful people

1:14:05 and an incredibly wonderful bulldog in my life,

1:14:08 but there are times when I can be so

1:14:11 goal-directed and so in motion and trying to accomplish everything,

1:14:14 that I sometimes forget about Taqi Kynan.

1:14:18 And I like to remind myself so much so that I

1:14:20 actually have a little post-it above my desk that says,

1:14:22 "Taqi Kynan," to remind me that Taqi Kynan is this very sinister

1:14:26 molecule that starts being secreted when we are not socially connected enough.

1:14:31 And this is why long meals with friends or family where there are,

1:14:35 we'll talk about phones in a moment,

1:14:36 but where there's no intrusions, or even if there are,

1:14:39 just feeling like we are connected suppresses Taqi Kynan.

1:14:43 And Taqi Kynan is something you really want to avoid because chronic isolation,

1:14:47 chronically high Taqi Kynan that's associated

1:14:51 with long-term stress really depletes so many good

1:14:54 functions of our brain and body

1:14:56 and promote so many bad ones including irritability, paranoia, fear, et cetera.

1:15:01 That is really something to avoid.

1:15:03 And so, I want to highlight Taqi Kynan as something to avoid.

1:15:06 I don't want to completely disregard oxytocin.

1:15:09 It's just, the oxytocin has been built up a lot

1:15:11 in the media and really serotonin works on much faster timescales.

1:15:15 Now, how do you know if you're making serotonin?

1:15:17 And you don't know in the moment, but you can learn if you pay attention

1:15:21 to kind of recognize these feelings of comfort, trust, bliss, delight.

1:15:25 And those are not weak terms.

1:15:28 Those are not associated just with psychological terms.

1:15:31 They are every bit as physiological as the movement

1:15:35 of your muscles or the secretion of adrenaline.

1:15:38 And many people focus now on gratitude.

1:15:41 Gratitude is a little bit subjective.

1:15:43 And here we're moving from some objective to kind of subjective things,

1:15:46 but recognizing, and in particular,

1:15:48 writing down things that you're thankful for, however small, they may seem,

1:15:53 does seem to have a positive effect on the serotonin system.

1:15:57 Now, there are a plethora of things that will also

1:16:00 impact wellbeing and allow you to modulate your long-term stress.

1:16:04 Reduce the likelihood that you'll engage in long-term stress.

1:16:07 And we don't have time to go into all these, but of course,

1:16:09 finding the diet and nutrition that's right for you,

1:16:11 the exercise schedule that's right for you, the sleep schedule, all that.

1:16:15 But do not underemphasize the social connection part, please.

1:16:20 As well, there are some compounds that are not antidepressants.

1:16:25 Although if you need antidepressants, then a clinician prescribes them to you.

1:16:28 Please follow their advice if that's what is right for you.

1:16:32 There are compounds that are not prescription

1:16:35 compounds that can modulate the stress system.

1:16:38 And sometimes because of the way that life is,

1:16:40 we just don't have the opportunity to control

1:16:43 life and to control our response to stress.

1:16:45 And at least for myself, I can only talk about my own experience,

1:16:48 I found it useful in times of chronic stress to start modulating

1:16:52 some of the neurochemistry related to the stress response in order to help.

1:16:57 Now, if a doctor prescribes you prednisone

1:16:59 or prescribes you some other hormone or something,

1:17:03 that's important, but what I'm talking about now are non-prescription things.

1:17:07 You should check out examine.com,

1:17:10 this free website which will allow you to put in any supplement and evaluate

1:17:14 that supplement with they provide links

1:17:15 in the so-called human effect matrix to PubMed.

1:17:18 It tells you the exact subjects they were done in.

1:17:21 It was a post-menopausal women.

1:17:22 Was it kids?

1:17:23 Was it normal adults?

1:17:24 Was it people with autism, et cetera.

1:17:27 Check out that site for any and all supplements you're considering or taking.

1:17:30 I highly recommend it.

1:17:32 I've no relationship to them.

1:17:33 I just think it's a wonderful

1:17:34 site that's curated all this important information.

1:17:37 But some of these compounds are effective enough.

1:17:41 They can kind of take the edge off.

1:17:43 And I'll use them periodically myself.

1:17:46 And so, I just thought I'd mentioned them since

1:17:47 there a number of you that are interested in them.

1:17:48 The three I want to focus on and one that I

1:17:50 think you need to be cautious about that I've mentioned before,

1:17:54 include ashwagandha, funny name, but that's what's it's called,

1:17:59 L-theanine or theanine it's often called, and melatonin.

1:18:03 Let's talk about melatonin first.

1:18:04 Melatonin I talked about during the month on sleep.

1:18:06 Melatonin is a hormone secreted from the pineal

1:18:10 in direct relationship to how much darkness you are in.

1:18:12 Not emotional darkness.

1:18:14 But light suppresses melatonin.

1:18:16 Melatonin helps you fall asleep.

1:18:17 It doesn't help you stay asleep.

1:18:19 I personally do not recommend supplementing melatonin

1:18:23 because it's supplemented typically at very high levels.

1:18:28 One to three milligrams or even more that is an outrageously high dose.

1:18:32 It's super, super physiological compared to what you normally would make.

1:18:36 It also has a number of potentially negative

1:18:38 effects on the reproductive access and hormones there.

1:18:42 Some people can take it without problems.

1:18:44 If you like it and that's your thing, fine.

1:18:46 I just want to cue to the fact that there can be issues.

1:18:48 You should check on examine.com.

1:18:49 Talk to your doctor, especially in kids,

1:18:51 because melatonin suppresses the puberty response in a number of species.

1:18:55 Enough about the negative things in melatonin except

1:18:58 that people who take too much melatonin chronically,

1:19:02 oftentimes when they're taking it to sleep or for whatever reason,

1:19:05 yes, it can reduce anxiety and stress,

1:19:08 but it also can reduce the output of the adrenals

1:19:11 to the point where it can become problematic.

1:19:13 Now, a note about adrenal burnout.

1:19:16 There is actually no such thing as adrenal burnout under normal conditions.

1:19:21 The adrenals have enough adrenaline to support

1:19:24 200 years of stress for better, for worse.

1:19:28 The concept of adrenal burnout has origins in the work of Nobel Prize winner,

1:19:33 Hans Selye, who actually discovered what

1:19:36 he called the general adaptation syndrome.

1:19:38 He discovered a lot of things about stress.

1:19:39 He did some phenomenal work that turned out to be true.

1:19:43 That we have stressors.

1:19:44 There's something called distress.

1:19:46 He talked about eustress, which is positive stress.

1:19:47 Eustress has never really caught on in the kind of more general discussion.

1:19:52 But he had this theory that if stress went on long enough,

1:19:56 that you would eventually reach a phase called exhaustion.

1:19:59 And that turned out to be wrong.

1:20:03 Although many of you may feel exhausted after chronic stress,

1:20:05 there isn't really a physiological exhaustion that happens.

1:20:08 And that eventually got picked up and ran with the general public.

1:20:12 And they talk about adrenal burnout.

1:20:14 Too much coffee, adrenal burnout.

1:20:15 You hear all this stuff.

1:20:16 There is no such thing as adrenal burnout.

1:20:18 The adrenals don't burn out.

1:20:20 There is something, however, called adrenal insufficiency syndrome,

1:20:23 which is a real physiological problem where some people

1:20:26 have very impaired adrenals and they can't produce adrenaline.

1:20:29 And melatonin taken at very high levels for periods

1:20:32 of time that are too long can cause suppression

1:20:35 of the cortisol and epinephrine released from the adrenals

1:20:37 and can create a kind of pseudo adrenal insufficiency syndrome.

1:20:43 So, be aware of melatonin for that reason.

1:20:47 Please, I'm trying, I alone can't get rid of the phrase adrenal burnout.

1:20:52 I'm not trying to give a hard time to anyone who feels burnt out or exhausted,

1:20:57 but it is for other reasons.

1:20:59 It is not because of the adrenals are burnt out.

1:21:01 Unless you happen to have adrenal insufficiency syndrome.

1:21:03 So, I'm not a fan of melatonin for a lot of reasons.

1:21:06 Now I've mentioned several.

1:21:07 The other is L-theanine.

1:21:08 I've talked about L-theanine, which provided it's safe for you,

1:21:12 can be taken 100 milligrams or 200 milligrams

1:21:15 about 30 minutes or 60 minutes before sleep.

1:21:17 It can enhance the transition to sleep and depth of sleep for many people.

1:21:21 It increases GABA, this inhibitory neurotransmitter in the brain.

1:21:24 It tends to turn off our forebrain a little bit or reduce the activity

1:21:28 of our kind of thinking systems and ruminating systems help people fall asleep.

1:21:32 That's for sleep.

1:21:33 But theanine has also been shown for people that are chronically

1:21:37 anxious or chronically stressed to, if you look at the studies,

1:21:40 I have a large collection of studies in front of me right now,

1:21:42 if you want to see those links,

1:21:43 I know if you want those, go to examine.com, put in theanine.

1:21:46 They linked, for instance, it is known to significantly increase relaxation.

1:21:50 There are four studies listed there with PubMed links.

1:21:52 It is known to have a minor effect on anxiety,

1:21:55 but eight studies have shown that.

1:21:57 Which I think is a fairly large set of studies.

1:22:00 Some of them in great journals.

1:22:02 It also can reduce task completion anxiety.

1:22:05 So, anxiety related to task completion.

1:22:08 Not good for the procrastinators perhaps,

1:22:09 but for those of you that are chronically stressed.

1:22:11 It can increase attention a little bit,

1:22:12 it can reduce blood pressure a little bit, improve sleep quality, et cetera.

1:22:17 It definitely has a notable effect on stress, two studies in particular,

1:22:21 that it can notably reduce the effects of stress.

1:22:24 So, there's a lot there.

1:22:26 It also has effects on insomnia, on some blood lipid profiles.

1:22:29 And so, go to examine.com and check it out.

1:22:32 But this is one reason why I supplement theanine for sleep.

1:22:35 But if I'm feeling like I've been under a lot of stress and I'm not

1:22:38 managing my stress very well with the short-term

1:22:41 and medium-term tools that I talked about earlier,

1:22:43 I might start taking a little bit of theanine especially in the late afternoon,

1:22:46 which is when I tend to start to feel like I

1:22:49 haven't gotten enough done and the day is kind of carrying on.

1:22:52 And so, you can blunt the response to stress a little bit,

1:22:54 which is why a lot of companies are now putting theanine into energy drinks.

1:22:59 I am not a big fan of most energy drinks.

1:23:02 Most of them have taurine, which I know some of you wrote to me and said, "Oh,

1:23:05 taurine is great for all these reasons." Taurine also has effects

1:23:08 on the microvasculature that at least for me, were not good.

1:23:11 It cause bursting of microvasculature in my sclera, in my eyes,

1:23:14 which is why I'm not a fan of any

1:23:16 energy drink that has taurine or taurine generally.

1:23:20 But that's just me.

1:23:21 You have to decide for you.

1:23:22 I'm sure in the comment section,

1:23:23 there'll be a couple of taurinesters out there that will say,

1:23:25 "But I love taurine." Great.

1:23:27 Keep the taurine companies in business.

1:23:29 But it's not for me.

1:23:30 And I'd like people to know that it may or may not be for them.

1:23:33 The other supplement that can be very useful is ashwagandha.

1:23:37 Ashwagandha is known to lower anxiety and cortisol.

1:23:41 There is six, there are, excuse me,

1:23:44 six studies that collectively show reductions in cortisol,

1:23:47 which is cortisol is typically associated with waking

1:23:50 up in the morning, which is good.

1:23:51 That's a healthy, brief cortisol bump that goes away provided you're getting

1:23:54 your light at the right time of days at correct times of day,

1:23:58 like morning and evening.

1:24:00 But you don't want cortisol chronically elevated.

1:24:02 That's associated with all the bad stuff about stress.

1:24:05 There's a very strong effect of ashwagandha.

1:24:09 You can find dosages at examine.com.

1:24:12 They report in across six studies,

1:24:15 14.5 to 27.9 reduction in cortisol in otherwise healthy,

1:24:20 but stressed individuals.

1:24:22 Now, I don't know about kids.

1:24:23 You have to look at what it says on various supplements.

1:24:26 Most things here are being done in adults.

1:24:28 So, please check carefully.

1:24:30 But this is great.

1:24:31 I mean, the opportunity for me anyway,

1:24:33 to be able to take something that can help me reduce my cortisol

1:24:37 so that I don't get some of the long-term effects of stress.

1:24:39 And I'm not going to take ashwagandha year round.

1:24:41 I would only do this if I was feeling

1:24:43 like I wasn't managing my short and medium-term stress well.

1:24:46 So, I don't take it on a regular basis.

1:24:47 I do take it when I'm in these times when things are particularly stressful.

1:24:52 It has their five other studies that show reduced stress.

1:24:57 So, that's not cortisol measurements,

1:24:59 but things like fatigue, cognitive impairment, et cetera.

1:25:03 It does lower total cholesterol,

1:25:05 which may or may not be good or bad for you up to 10%.

1:25:09 So, some people don't want their cholesterol lowered.

1:25:11 Some people might.

1:25:13 Cholesterol, we'll talk about this in a month on hormones,

1:25:16 but cholesterol is the molecule from which testosterone

1:25:18 and estrogen and cortisol for that matter are synthesized.

1:25:21 So, you don't want to get your cholesterol so low,

1:25:23 then there are all sorts of negative effects,

1:25:25 but you don't want it too high either.

1:25:27 Mild effects in good clinical studies on reducing depression,

1:25:31 probably associated with the effects on stress and some other things as well.

1:25:35 So, ashwagandha is something I use from time to time.

1:25:39 It's kind of interesting.

1:25:40 L-theanine, I rarely will use those during the daytime,

1:25:44 except under conditions where I'm feeling chronically stressed.

1:25:47 So, check out the human effect matrix on examine.com.

1:25:50 Again, a phenomenal website.

1:25:52 I think I've sent them a few emails before.

1:25:54 That's the only exchanges I've ever had with them.

1:25:56 But I just think it's wonderful that they put together this resource.

1:25:59 Otherwise we'd be stuck mining PubMed.

1:26:01 They've collated the papers from PubMed with links to PubMed.

1:26:05 So, terrific resource.

1:26:07 So, social connection and some supplementation.

1:26:10 Of course, diet, exercise, sleep for long-term stress.

1:26:14 And now we're finally in a position to talk about

1:26:18 what we have set out to do from the beginning,

1:26:21 which is spend the month on emotions.

1:26:24 It was very important that we discuss stress

1:26:27 and we discuss in the context of short, medium, and long-term stress.

1:26:30 That we discuss tools for short-term, medium-term, and long-term control.

1:26:36 I don't really want to say mitigation of stress.

1:26:38 Stress is going to happen.

1:26:39 But our ability to modulate and control stress

1:26:42 in real time offline using tools such as respiration,

1:26:46 using tools such as dilation of gaze,

1:26:48 using tools like social connection, maybe some supplements,

1:26:50 certainly take care of your sleep and nutrition and exercise.

1:26:56 Again, tons of resources and information in the sleep episodes.

1:27:00 So, you can look there.

1:27:01 We will do a month on hormones, on exercise, et cetera.

1:27:05 But let's talk about emotions because in subsequent episodes,

1:27:09 we're going to talk about OCD, we're going to talk about depression,

1:27:13 we're going to talk about mania,

1:27:14 we're going to be talking about dopamine and all sorts of things.

1:27:17 But at the core of emotions is this question, what is an emotion?

1:27:23 Well, it's complex.

1:27:24 There isn't a single brain area for any

1:27:26 one of these things that we call emotions.

1:27:29 My framework, and I think the modern science,

1:27:31 both psychology and neuroscience is pretty well-aligned

1:27:37 with what Lisa Feldman Barrett has taught about.

1:27:41 Now, Lisa's at Northeastern University.

1:27:43 She runs a big lab there.

1:27:44 She's a world expert in emotion.

1:27:46 She's written two books that are really wonderful.

1:27:48 One is "How Emotions Are Made," which was her first book.

1:27:51 The second one is "Seven and a Half Facts

1:27:54 About the Brain." It's a wonderful book as well.

1:27:56 It came out more recently.

1:27:58 I hosted Lisa on an Instagram live once.

1:28:00 Maybe we'll get her here on the podcast if we're lucky.

1:28:03 We don't agree on everything about the neuroscience of emotions,

1:28:06 but I subscribed to most everything that I've heard Lisa say.

1:28:11 In particular, the fact that emotions are context-dependent.

1:28:15 There's a cultural dependence, et cetera.

1:28:17 I look at things mainly through the lens

1:28:19 of physiology and neuroscience and kind of low-level circuitry.

1:28:23 And one way to think about emotions that I

1:28:26 think is consistent and I think Lisa would generally approve,

1:28:28 I can't speak for her, but I would

1:28:30 hope she would generally approve of this description,

1:28:31 is that when our internal state of stress or calm matches

1:28:36 the demands on us or is mismatched from the demands on us,

1:28:41 we tend to interpret those as good or bad.

1:28:44 Let me give you an example.

1:28:46 If I am feeling very anxious, very stressed inside,

1:28:51 and I have a lot to do, that doesn't feel good,

1:28:55 but it's really no different than if I'm very tired

1:28:59 and I have a lot to do because there's this mismatch.

1:29:01 I'm not in the right internal state, my internal state is incorrect rather,

1:29:06 to meet the demands that are being placed upon me.

1:29:08 So, in both cases, whether I'm too tired or I'm

1:29:11 too stressed to do what I need to do,

1:29:13 the valence, meaning the value that I assigned to that is I don't feel good.

1:29:18 It's not a good situation and I don't feel good.

1:29:20 Now, I might call it stressed, I might call it anxious, I might call it worried,

1:29:24 I might call it a number of things, but it's not good.

1:29:26 However, when I'm tired and I want to fall asleep,

1:29:31 well then I feel good because that's what the demand is.

1:29:33 I need to go to sleep and I'm tired.

1:29:35 If I'm wide awake and I need to fall asleep, then that's not good.

1:29:38 And then the brain tends to go down

1:29:41 the direction of interpreting the situation as a bad one.

1:29:44 So, while the discussion around emotions is far more

1:29:47 nuanced and more elaborate than this, one way to think

1:29:51 about your relationship to emotions is whether or not

1:29:53 your internal state is matching the demands that are upon you.

1:29:57 So, in that way, we don't really place so much

1:30:01 value on whether or not we're feeling alert or sleepy.

1:30:03 We only place value on whether or not that alertness

1:30:06 whether or not it's full-blown stress or not or our sleepiness,

1:30:09 whether or not we're falling asleep or just a little bit drowsy,

1:30:13 whether or not that matches the conditions that we face.

1:30:16 And it's a useful framework to have.

1:30:18 And it's the reason in part why I spent this last hour

1:30:21 and a half or so talking about stress and how to control stress.

1:30:25 One reason we did that is because I think it's a valuable opportunity to learn

1:30:29 some tools and understand stress and really learn how to take control of stress,

1:30:32 which I think we could all benefit from doing regardless of age.

1:30:36 The other reason is that when you start to understand

1:30:38 that you have this kind of see-saw system in your body,

1:30:40 this autonomic nervous system that takes you

1:30:42 from alert and calm to stressed to full-blown panic, it has that capacity,

1:30:48 or from sleepy and drowsy to passing out tired to God forbid,

1:30:54 let's hope never, but a coma, right?

1:30:57 That you're basically on this see-saw all the time.

1:31:00 And where you are on that see-saw of alertness or calmness positions

1:31:04 you to be in better reaction to the demands that you face.

1:31:10 Whether or not the thing that you face is a need

1:31:12 to fall asleep or to listen quietly and not react.

1:31:15 You now know, for instance, that if your job is to take feedback,

1:31:19 when maybe you're going in for a job evaluation

1:31:21 or you're in a relationship where there was a call

1:31:25 for a discussion and somebody needs to talk to you

1:31:27 about something and we need to talk about something,

1:31:29 you're going to there you're like, "Goodness,

1:31:30 this is going to be rough." Learning to reduce that stress response a little

1:31:35 bit so that you are in a position to hear the information better,

1:31:39 and remember, from a previous episode, if you close your eyes,

1:31:42 you'll be able to actually focus on the information better.

1:31:44 There's your permission to not look someone directly in the eye when they

1:31:47 talk to you if you really want to hear what they have to say.

1:31:49 You will be able to modulate that stress response and lean into life better.

1:31:55 You will be able to react to things

1:31:57 in a more effective way and to not be reactive.

1:32:01 And this is really one of the important things to me anyway,

1:32:04 is that so much of the language around psychology,

1:32:07 which I think is a wonderful field,

1:32:09 but pop psychology in particular is be responsive, not reactive.

1:32:13 Well, great.

1:32:14 But then how does one do that?

1:32:15 Well, one does that by modulating their short-term stress response in real time.

1:32:19 Not by saying, "Hold on, I need to meditate.

1:32:21 Hold on, I need a massage and then I can

1:32:23 have this conversation." By modulating the reactivity in real time.

1:32:27 How does one, for instance, be mindful?

1:32:30 Which is a beautiful concept, but how are you mindful?

1:32:33 Well, I don't know, when I'm moving through my day,

1:32:34 a lot of times I'm just trying to get things done.

1:32:37 And as soon as I start monitoring and seeing

1:32:40 what I'm doing and kind of third-personing what I'm doing,

1:32:43 it actually takes me out of the effectiveness and experience of what I'm doing.

1:32:45 So for me, sometimes that mindfulness, that observer,

1:32:48 as they call it, is something that doesn't help me.

1:32:51 It actually hinders me.

1:32:52 What's important to me is to be able to work

1:32:54 and focus and then to be able to disengage.

1:32:56 To be able to do a non-sleep depressed

1:32:58 or to be able to still fall asleep even though I've

1:33:00 been working hard until 9:30 to put my head down

1:33:03 at 10 o'clock and be out cold sleeping by 10:02.

1:33:08 That's possible if you can learn to control this stress response.

1:33:12 And to do that, we can't use the mind to control.

1:33:14 The mind, we need tools.

1:33:16 And so, a lot of the people being grumpy or anxious or depressed,

1:33:21 a lot of that, provided it's not

1:33:24 for some underlying neurochemical reason that's chronic,

1:33:26 a lot of that come from being poorly rested, from overworked,

1:33:30 from feeling like the world is bearing down on us.

1:33:33 And so, rather than take a subjective view

1:33:35 of this, I take the view of objective physiology.

1:33:39 What can we do that's anchored to these neuronal systems in our body,

1:33:43 in our brain, in our eyes, in our diaphragm, et cetera,

1:33:45 and look to those as tools leavers that we can pull on and push and maneuver

1:33:49 through life in a way where we start to feel like we have some agency.

1:33:53 We actually have some real control

1:33:54 because we're controlling the internal landscape.

1:33:57 So, I think that ought to set the stage for where we're headed next,

1:34:00 which is to talk about all the things

1:34:02 that you normally think of when you think of emotions,

1:34:05 like happiness, like awe, like joy.

1:34:07 And we will get into some of that.

1:34:09 But all of that rests firmly on the foundation

1:34:13 of this thing we call the autonomic nervous system.

1:34:15 This stress modulation.

1:34:16 This calming modulation system.

1:34:19 And again, whether or not you're activated or you're calm is not good or bad,

1:34:24 it depends on the situation.

1:34:25 Certainly, when you want to fall asleep, being activated isn't good.

1:34:28 When you have work to do, being activated is great.

1:34:30 So, I hope today you were able to take

1:34:34 a slightly different view of this thing that we call stress.

1:34:37 Not just see it as evil, but see it as powerful and useful in certain contexts.

1:34:41 Great for us in certain contexts and problematic in other contexts.

1:34:45 And as well to think about the various tools

1:34:47 that I've presented that can allow you to adjust

1:34:51 and modulate your internal levels of alertness or calmness

1:34:55 so that you can lean more effectively into life,

1:34:57 which includes sleep and social connection and the work you have to do.

1:35:01 And of course, acknowledges that the events in the world are beyond our control.

1:35:06 What's in our control is how we react to them.

1:35:08 Something that's commonly said in the wellness

1:35:11 and self-help and psychology world,

1:35:13 but for which there often aren't as many concrete tools

1:35:17 that we can really look to and trust in real time.

1:35:20 And of course, there are other tools out there.

1:35:21 As always, I'll say it, I strive to be accurate, but I'll never be exhaustive.

1:35:27 I might have exhausted you.

1:35:28 I might've cured your insomnia with this discussion today,

1:35:32 but in all seriousness, my goal is to bring you tools and information

1:35:35 so that you can manage better through life.

1:35:38 So, thanks so much.

1:35:40 I very much want to thank all of you for your support for the podcast.

1:35:43 It's really been wonderful.

1:35:45 If you've subscribed to the podcast on YouTube,

1:35:48 Apple, or Spotify, or maybe even all three, terrific.

1:35:51 If you haven't, please do subscribe on YouTube, Apple,

1:35:54 or Spotify, or maybe even all three, which would be wonderful.

1:35:58 On Apple, you can leave a five-star review if you

1:36:01 think we deserve that as well as a comment reviewing us.

1:36:05 If you have suggestions,

1:36:06 if you have questions regarding the content of the podcast

1:36:10 or things that you'd like us to cover in the future,

1:36:11 please put those in the comment section on YouTube as well.

1:36:16 If you could recommend the podcast to friends, family members,

1:36:19 coworkers, that you think would benefit from the information,

1:36:22 maybe even send them the links if you like, that's tremendously helpful.

1:36:26 Today, as in previous episodes,

1:36:28 I've touched on some things as they relate to supplementation.

1:36:32 As always, I always cover a lot of tools that are

1:36:34 zero-cost tools that don't involve ingesting anything at all, behavioral tools.

1:36:39 But I mentioned some supplements that I particularly find useful.

1:36:44 With supplements, it's a complicated landscape,

1:36:46 often because many supplement companies don't put in the bottle

1:36:50 what they say is in the particular product.

1:36:54 We've partnered with Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E,

1:36:58 because Thorne is a supplement company that we

1:37:01 know to have the highest levels of stringency.

1:37:03 It's used by the Mayo Clinic.

1:37:05 It's used by all the major sports organizations for that particular

1:37:08 reason and because their quality standards are exceptionally high.

1:37:11 If you'd like to try any supplements and see the ones that I take,

1:37:15 you can go to Thorne, thorne.com/u/huberman.

1:37:22 And if you do that, you'll get 20% off anything that's listed there

1:37:26 on my page as well as any of the supplements that Thorne sells.

1:37:30 So that's Thorne, thorne.com/u/huberman to get

1:37:38 20% off anything that Thorne sells.

1:37:40 In addition, if you want to follow us

1:37:42 on Twitter we're there @hubermanlab or an Instagram @hubermanlab.

1:37:46 I also do some content on "Huberman Lab," a little neuroscience posts.

1:37:49 Some are reposts of clips from the podcast.

1:37:51 Others are unique content that you won't find on the podcast.

1:37:55 So you can follow us @hubermanlab.

1:37:57 Also, if you like check out our Patreon, patreon.com/AndrewHuberman.

1:38:02 And most of all, and as always, really appreciate your time and attention today.

1:38:07 I hope you practice some of the tools if they're right for you.

1:38:10 I hope you think hard about stress and how you can control your stress.

1:38:14 And above all, as always, thank you for your interest in science.

1:38:19 [upbeat music]