Dr. Andrew Huberman: How to Turn Off Brain Stress Using True Connection.

[00:00:00]So, at the neuroscience level, we have to remember that the brain circuitry, which of course is always linked to the body. We want to remember brain body are fortunately now understood to be interconnected. 5 years ago, 10 years ago, that wasn't so much an accepted idea. But the nervous system, the brain, the spinal cord, and all the connections to the body and back to the brain and spinal cord are bidirectional and highly interconnected.

[00:00:23]So, when we say brain, I'm more or less using that as a proxy for whole nervous system including body. The circuits that are responsible for feelings of social connectedness are deeply, deeply rooted in our need for safety. We could say this about any organism, but humans included need two things, I believe. We need the feeling of safety and acceptance. And so, if we are to have a conversation about the kind of loftier um words like peace, contentment, fulfillment, belonging. I think I borrowed that list, by the way, from the incredible Martha Beck. So, it's not a coincidence that those rattled off uh my mind. But I feel like those four words are are so critical to what we all want and what we all need at an aspirational level.

[00:01:12]We can't have a discussion about those without also, I believe, having a discussion about the fact that we have hardwired aspects of our nervous system.

[00:01:21]Meaning, genetic programs that are written into the script of all our genomes, regardless of color, regardless of background, that are just scripted into our genome that allow us to breathe without thinking about it, digest food without thinking about it, keep our heart rate going without thinking about it, elevated if it needs to be, slowed down if it needs to be, et cetera. And then hardwired circuitry that is there for bonding with our caretaker during early infancy and bonding with others of our species and evaluating whether there is safety and acceptance from the other members of our species.

[00:01:57]Now, these brain circuits have names and we could get into that. They almost all have some connectedness to an area of the brain called the hypothalamus, which sits above the roof of your mouth, which has many, many dense collections of neurons we call nuclei responsible for everything from temperature regulation to feeding to reproductive behavior and on and on. All the basic kind of housekeeping things. But, connected to the those brain areas are brain areas that are associated with evaluating whether one is safe or not. So, safety and acceptance then we can break down in the following way if we look at it through this neuroscience lens.

[00:02:32]Safety is really about the ability to predict outcomes. Okay? And the brain, after being responsible for all these housekeeping functions, heart rate, etc., is largely a predictive organ. It wants to understand what's going to happen next to the extent that it can then free up mental real estate, neural real estate to work on creative projects or to build things or to imagine things, right?

[00:02:55]There's no creativity, there's no building in the absence of safety. Then it just becomes survival. So, the kind of older discussion, meaning in the '80s, '90s, and early 2000s, the discussion about the nervous system was we would hear about higher brain order functions and limbic functions, right?

[00:03:11]We would hear about kind of primitive lizard brain and more evolved brain. And all of that is frankly true, it remains true, and that language is perfectly fine. But, I think if we are to think about safety and acceptance, we say, "What is safety about?" Safety is about being able to predict outcomes.

[00:03:26]When we are in the company of people or we know we have people available to us should we need something, food, maybe we need a monetary loan, maybe we need a word of encouragement, maybe we need somebody to bounce ideas off of, whatever it is that constitutes safety for us, it's highly subjective, highly individual, well, then when those circuits can quiet down, it's as if, you know, that they can finally quiet down and say we have enough so safeties so that then we can start to explore iterating what we have in terms of new jobs, new creative ideas, new art, new you know, take a walk with somebody you care about, right? Those are not the sorts of things you do when you feel that you are under siege.

[00:04:07]>> Mhm.

[00:04:07]>> Either real siege, physical siege, or emotional siege. Okay, then acceptance gets a little bit trickier to sort of pinpoint in the brain.

[00:04:15]Acceptance likely dovetails neurologically with this these brain circuits for safety.

[00:04:22]Because acceptance is really about, well, given the range of expressions that we have, our range of humor, our range of political beliefs, our range of um behaviors, can I predict that these safety mechanisms will still be there?

[00:04:37]These people will still be there? These things will still be there? Will they turn on me? Will they honor me, right?

[00:04:43]Will they Will they laugh with my jokes or will they decide they don't want to talk to me anymore because of my jokes?

[00:04:48]These kinds of things. Now, what I'm trying to not do here and at the same time do is to put a neuroscience lens onto the these two things of safety and acceptance. But if we were to just take a step back and say, what do we know to absolutely be true? Well, safety and acceptance, belonging, peace, contentment, etc., come from a variety of sources.

[00:05:09]Certainly in our early relationship with our caretakers, these circuits form that are basically all about resonance with the caretaker. Um Allan Schore here UCLA has done beautiful work on this. I think the book's title is called right brain psychotherapy. And it's really about how the bonding of infant and typically mother, but how the the word caretaker, the bonding of infant and I'll just say mother as since that's the more typical scenario, there's actually a lot of synchronization of brain networks early on such that one's physical and mental state reflects the other and so on. And so from the very earliest stages that we come into the world, we are resonating with other people. Call it energy if you want, call it emotions, it's neurochemical. Yes, it involves oxytocin, but a whole lot else. In other words, we leave infancy and childhood and adolescence, if we have a healthy upbringing, with a sense of predictability. Someone can be there and then not be there. They're accessible if we need them, etc. Now, that sort of relationship, that connectivity between humans and safety and acceptance in those relationships has been explored extensively. I think we've all seen the image of the mother and child and the and the brain imaging and seeing some sort of collaborative activation of their brain networks.

[00:06:20]That's been explored extensively and it's beautiful work and we could always use more of that sort of work. What's been explored far less is the safety and acceptance that occurs between romantic pairs, although there are laboratories starting to do that, having people, for instance, look at the face of their significant other, angry, sad, etc., while in brain scanners, even scanning of two individuals separately at the same time, those sorts of things. Far less has been done on this notion of friendship. But I think in this day and age, when well, it seems like everything is more complicated, but I'm sure they've been saying that for for decades if not hundreds of thousands of years.

[00:06:57]What do we know about friendship?

[00:06:59]Friendship is one of the most reliable sources of predictability there that exists within human interactions. Why?

[00:07:05]Because you can have many, many friends and you don't have to break up with one friend to have another friend. When you were when we're little, they say, "Who's your best friend?" And maybe then you could only have one, but pretty soon we realized that we can have many great friends and many best friends. And I consider you one of those. Like we're growing our friendship, but there's no sense of trade-off, even though of course time is always a trade-off. In fact, you were at a gathering at my home with many other friends, right? That these things can be collaborative.

[00:07:32]Typically in romantic relationships, while there are exceptions to this, it's typically a pairing, right? So, there are clearly brain networks that are overlapping with the brain networks associated with parent-child or child-caretaker relationships and romantic relationships that involve the generation of safety and acceptance among friends. The major difference, however, is that friends throughout history, even when people lived in small villages, tended to be dispersed by greater distances. And so, when we hear about the loneliness crisis, are we hearing about a crisis of lack of connectivity with our parents? Maybe.

[00:08:11]With our siblings? Possible. With romantic others? That's a whole domain into itself. You cover a lot of that and the challenges associated with finding and building healthy romantic relationship. But what we know for sure, based on extensive research now, is that there's a real dearth of close friendships for many, many people. Not just in the US, but abroad as well. Now, we could make an argument that it's by virtue of smartphones, but I don't think we want to go there just yet. I think Jonathan Haidt's doing a beautiful job exploring those ideas and he's far better equipped to to kind of pinpoint the relationships, causal or otherwise, than I am.

[00:08:48]But here's what we know for sure. With friends, we can both hope for and expect safety and acceptance by virtue of having lots of different kinds of friends. Um friends with whom we play sports, friends with whom we just hang out, friends with whom we don't really talk too much at all, and friends with whom we drop into deep conversation with.

[00:09:07]So, one of the things that I personally have found to be immensely beneficial in my own life and for which it's clearly had an outsized positive effect relative to the time required, is a simple good morning text that comes on a reliable schedule, meaning every single morning.

[00:09:25]Now, this might sound almost trivial, but when I wake up in the morning, I either receive or send a good morning text to Right now, there about three people in that kind of collection.

[00:09:37]They're not talking to each other. But if I don't receive that text by noon, it activates something in me. It's not a ton of anxiety, but it activates something. Are they okay? What's going on with them? You know, it isn't why aren't they checking up on me? I assume something's come up. But the simple receivable of a text from somebody saying good morning, I think has both ancient and modern significance. Ancient in the sense that one of the first things that everyone experienced when we lived in small villages because that's essentially how we evolved, was to see faces of other what biologists call conspecifics, other, you know, and other same non-conspecific people, like people that could be romantic partners or family members or people we were going to work with. We saw faces first thing in the morning.

[00:10:22]And we know with certainty because there's a ton of beautiful work, mainly from Nancy Kanwisher's laboratory at MIT, a brilliant researcher, as well as a woman named Doris Tsao, who now is at Berkeley, was at Caltech, that there's an immense amount of neural real estate devoted to the processing of faces, not just facial expressions, but human faces in particular. Now, monkeys have the same brain area for monkey faces. So, this is not an area that's just designed to see eyes, nose, and mouth. It's a brain area that has neural real estate that responds specifically to the faces of other humans in humans. And there's a whole lot to talk about how it's connected with areas of the brain involved in emotion and emotion regulation, etc. But the simple act of sending a good morning text to one person and receiving that back, perhaps exchanging a note or two about what's your plan for the day, doesn't have to be an extensive back and forth, but the same person or persons consistently, I've experienced in my own life in times both good and bad and kind of neutral, that it has this outsized positive effect. And I don't think that's because, you know, I was lacking social interaction. My life is very full. I have a very busy business life. I can go online and see faces, but when we go online and see a familiar influencer or a familiar political figure or a familiar even family member, yes, they're there, and I think there's great power to that, but they aren't there specifically to see us. Although, as creators, we know that we are there to see our audience and for them to see us. That's a real thing, but it's it's quite different to have this this exchange, this reciprocity.

[00:12:00]And I really believe that if there was one thing that we could each and all do to better our lives, no matter how busy our social schedule or our at-home environments, is to have at least one, but probably one to three, depending on your bandwidth, one to three friends that every single morning when you wake up, you text them and they text you back. Just a simple good morning. Why?

[00:12:21]Because it's the reliability. It's this notion of expectation being fulfilled.

[00:12:27]It's not a huge expectation. And this brings us back to safety and acceptance.

[00:12:32]Right? No one's going to text us good morning if they don't accept us, if they dismiss us. And the safety is in the predictability of the interaction. Now, for people that walk to the corner and they see the barista and they get their coffee or they see their neighbor, etc., the importance of saying hello to people on the street, this is something that's really fallen away these days. Depends on where you live, but people are very much in their phones. People are very much afraid, frankly, of how they will be reacted to if they were to reach out to somebody that they don't know. These basic human interactions take us back hundreds, if not thousands, maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands of years.

[00:13:05]And if I were to put my money on any experiment, it would be that there is dedicated neural machinery for these sorts of practices. And while social media has wonderful contributions and significance to make in the well-being of our lives, I truly believe that, I am absolutely certain that these simple practices, just as morning sunlight can profoundly affect our daytime mood, focus, and alertness, and nighttime sleep, I think these simple practices of saying good morning by text each morning to the same person or people and receiving a text back sets something on the shelf like, "Okay, we're good to move forward through the day."

[00:13:44]>> Yeah, two things came to mind as you were speaking. Your habit of the text every morning makes me feel like you're getting to write a story with someone and for someone. And so there's this sense of someone knows my story.

[00:13:59]And now it's not like, "Oh, I speak to you once a month and we're catching up on everything that happened." And you're missing the nuance and the texture and the detail. It's like, "I'm getting to log my story in every day." Which means I really feel this person knows me and I know them. So now when we do get together this weekend to break bread, I don't have to do that in between small talk. They're already aware and now we're just almost connecting all the dots as opposed to I'm now using my time with you to plot all the dots. So there's that sense of like story exchange which I think is so important.

[00:14:34]I find that that my friends who've known me the longest, but the ones that I also consistently text every day, they're the ones that I feel understand the tapestry of my life and I know theirs. And so now you're not just looking at dots on a wall, you look you're connecting the dots in that meeting which I think is I don't know. I'd love to hear how that works out from a neuroscience perspective. But the second thing you that I was reminded by as you were speaking was I feel like writing down, I always encourage a lot of my clients to do this, to write down a list of emotions they'd like to experience with people.

[00:15:10]So it could be things like adventure, discovery, comfort, humor, love, whatever it may be. Just write down a list. And then for each one, write down the name of a different person ideally that fulfills that need in your life.

[00:15:26]Because often I feel like we put a lot of pressure on our romantic partners or one person in our life to be all these things. And the truth is no matter how phenomenal anyone is or how much they love us, they just can't be that. And so if you have hey, I would reach out to this friend when I want some adventure because they love it too. If I want to see a sports game, this is the person I reach out to. And then do the same in the opposite way which one of those do you fulfill for your friends? What emotions do you help other people create? And I feel like if you look at friendship as a spectrum as this broad set of connection points rather than like this is my best friend as you were saying or this is my number one friend and we get away from hierarchy and we move more into a spectrum, I feel like that mixed in with the text today starts creating a much more healthier network of what connection means as well. It's also not just the same person doing the same thing every week.

[00:16:26]>> Yeah, I love the uh the idea that by staying in contact regularly, we don't have to get caught up and that then we can just drop into what's most meaningful on that particular day and maybe even have more available to us to have a new experience, right? As opposed to just catching up. And then of course there are those friends that we catch up with and it feels like it was just yesterday.

[00:16:49]>> Definitely.

[00:16:49]>> But I'd be willing to bet that those were people that you spent a lot of day-to-day time activity with. You knew them from university or you you spent a lot of time just in the kind of everyday shared experience for a while and then when you see each other again, it's like being right back there. The neuroscience of this hasn't been explored nearly enough. But given that our very own Surgeon General highlighted the loneliness crisis as one of the major crises in the world today, I think that in terms of simple solutions to big important problems, developing more connectivity with people through simple practices, and again, we're talking about a text here. I mean, I will be the first to say that if you can hop on a phone call or you can get on a you know, a video chat with somebody, that would certainly be better, but many people just don't have time for that.

[00:17:38]>> So, in terms of spending time with people in in a deeper and richer way, you know, get getting the the drop-in time as it were. I love that you mentioned adventure. I'm almost 49. I turn 49 in just over a month, and um I would say that the first 49 years of my life have been marked by a real thirst for adventure, a ton of curiosity. Now, I really feel myself entering a completely different season of my life. I'm sort of hoping this would eventually happen. Um in part because um you know, I took some some kind of dangerous turns, you know, I took risks with my with my life at points where I didn't really intend to do that, but you know, you seek enough adventure, you're going to you're going to find adventure, and you have to be quite careful. I have friends with whom I had tons of adventure, and then now the adventures are are far more uh docile and and quiet. Um and of course, um the internal adventure is real as well.

[00:18:33]I think that friends with whom we can just be one version of ourselves are wonderful. Friends with whom we can be all versions of ourself is uh especially wonderful. That's the acceptance piece.

[00:18:48]Uh typically, I think we look more for that in romantic relationship. This notion of just like safety and acceptance being hallmarks of of healthy romantic relationship. I think those are also the hallmarks of healthy friendship. It's just that with friendship, we can be a bit more segmented in terms of the number of different aspects of self that we need um safety and acceptance with.

[00:19:06]>> Yeah.

[00:19:07]>> Um I think with friendship also, you know, I I found it to be the case that really knowing what's going on with people has become a little little bit more difficult. There's this There's this kind of odd thing, right? Where we're we're more interconnected in terms of availability of communication, but we're less aware of what's really going on for people. In fact, on the way here, I had a call with a with a friend and their headset was making a lot of noise.

[00:19:31]And so, um we agreed uh they said, "Hey, how about I just turn mute mine and for the next 2 minutes I'm not kidding. This is how they This is what they said. Um they said, "Just tell me like what's what's on your heart?" Or what's in your heart? Hopefully it wasn't on your heart. What's in your heart? And I I was like, "Oh, wow, that's tough, you know, that's tough." I mean, I I okay. And I and I know that they're listening and then but it's very silent on the other end and I'm kind of speaking into a vacuum there um because they're not hearing anything.

[00:20:02]And then had maybe just 2 minutes before we curled up the hill because of the reception in uh the area that we're in.

[00:20:09]As you know, it's always complicated. Um to just get feedback. It was very interesting. Like I realized that I felt close to them before, but just the notion that they would ask me that. How do I feel? Not what's going on lately, not, you know, am I feeling good or bad like evaluation of of feelings, but just like what's going on. And I stumbled a bit at first, but I can realize in in in saying it now like I'm quite moved by the fact that they would ask that of all things as opposed to like what's going on, what's your next podcast about, coming to visit, that sort of thing. And so, like I'm taking a lot of cues these days from people that uh make me feel very seen and accepted. You're one of them. I must say like I don't just say that cuz we're in front of these microphones and sitting here. Like you and I have been in touch a lot lately through good times and hard times and and and a lot of different things.

[00:20:58]It's It's not um a coincidence though that that I think that we're here because I and talking about this because I I that ultimately the questions that we ask of the people we care about are just as important as reminding them that we're there because when we ask a question like [snorts] you know, what's in your heart? What we're really saying is you know, like what's really going on for you as opposed to like what's the next podcast about? Which is an interesting question to me, but you know, so I you know, this is more your territory than mine, >> [laughter] >> but I think in the end I think it comes back to the safety and acceptance.

[00:21:33]Simple behaviors like a good morning check-in and then asking questions that might feel a little bit challenging for the other person to answer at first, but that really show a depth of care and interest that um go beyond just kind of like narrative and and storytelling. And I think one thing that I'm also very eager about these days is breaking down some of the um traditional stereotypes like, you know, for anyone that's listening to this and goes, oh, you know, I didn't you know, men don't talk that way or something. It's like, actually they do. Um they do and if given the chance, they will open up about things that perhaps they hadn't even thought about. And I confess I'm one of those people. Maybe it was my Y chromosome got in the way of me thinking like, wait, what do you want me to talk about what's in my heart? Hey, actually that's a really great question. Thank you. And so I think this brings us back to these early circuits that are all about safety and acceptance that are all about being able to predict things and basically to say, okay, I don't have to be vigilant. That's really what safety is about. It's about turning off the neural circuits for vigilance.

[00:22:38]When we turn off the neural circuits for vigilance, we can start to direct our neural circuits, vision, auditory, whatever, thoughts towards an awareness of things that are both inside us and around us that keep us in that calm state. I mean, vigilance is associated with stress.

[00:22:52]Stress is associated with a narrowing of the visual field, a narrowing of the auditory fields. I'll just use this analogy because my sister and I last um last summer, we always go to New York for our birthdays together. We went and saw what the Harry Potter play.

[00:23:07]>> Oh, it's so good.

[00:23:08]>> Okay. Right. And >> I saw it in New York, too. It's so good.

[00:23:10]>> it's wild. I mean, the effects are so unbelievable. She's a big Harry Potter fan. I'm not. But but okay.

[00:23:16]But just just spectacular effects. It was just so wild. I couldn't believe it.

[00:23:20]But there's this library in in the in the play where it's it's a magic library where when one of the books is taken out about a particular subject, the books around it actually morph and change to reflect the same subject material.

[00:23:34]And when I saw that, I immediately said, "That's how the brain works." The way the brain works is a kind of pseudo hypnosis. Hypnosis is about context and context setting and narrowing of context.

[00:23:44]All of us have such a wealth of historical, present, and future thinking cognition in our brains.

[00:23:50]But when we get anchored to a particular emotional state or topic, what ends up happening is that the the available topics around it change in reference to how stressed we are. When we are stressed, all the topics, all the books on the shelf around that stress are about that thing and how to solve it.

[00:24:07]And actually, this is why stress enhances our memory for solving that the things that can help us solve that particular issue. But guess what is given up? All the other distantly or not so distantly related topics that lend themselves to creativity, to thinking about novel combinations of things. This is why our friend Rick Rubin, I think, is such a um spectacularly creative individual because he spends a lot of time putting his brain and body into a state in which he can remain in contact with these other related or seemingly unrelated topics.

[00:24:43]Whereas when we're in a stressed mode, when we have to problem solve, when we are in visual vigilance, excuse me, we absolutely narrow our cognitive fields, our visual fields, our auditory fields.

[00:24:54]We limit what what think is possible.

[00:24:56]And so I think great friendships, to bring it back to it, great relationships of all kinds have enough safety and acceptance in them that we can make our way through the practical constraints of the relationship in the day, the week, and the year, but that there's also a sense of creativity, that there are new elements allowed to be brought in because there's enough safety and acceptance that we can turn down those vigilant circuits.