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What is happening from a neuroscience perspective as our friendships weaken even as our online followers and friends grow? So, at a neuroscientific level, we have to remember that brain circuits, which of course are always linked to the body, we want to remember that, fortunately, it is now known that the brain and body are interconnected. Five or ten years ago, that wasn't such a widely 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. So when we say brain, I 'm using it more or less as a stand- in for the entire nervous system, including the body. The circuits that are responsible for feelings of
social connection are deeply rooted in our need for security. We could say this about any organism, but humans included, we need two things, I think. We need the feeling of safety and acceptance. And then, if we are going to have a conversation about the kind of higher words like peace, contentment, fulfillment, belonging. I think I borrowed that list, by the way, from the amazing Martha Beck. It's no coincidence that they came to mind, but I believe those four words are fundamental to what we all want and need on an aspirational level. We cannot talk about that without
also talking, I think, about the fact that we have programmed aspects of our nervous system, that is, genetic programs that are written in the script of all our genomes, regardless of color or origin, that are written in our genome and that allow us to breathe without thinking about it, digest food without thinking about it, maintain our heart rate without thinking about it, elevated if necessary, slowed down if necessary, etc. And then there are the programmed circuits that are there to establish bonds with our caregiver during early childhood and with others of our species, and to assess whether there is safety and acceptance from other members of our species. Now, these brain circuits have names and we could talk about them.
Almost all of them have some connection with an area of the brain called the hypothalamus, which is located above the palate, which has many dense accumulations of neurons that we call nuclei, responsible for everything from temperature regulation to feeding, including reproductive behavior, etc. All basic household chores. But connected to those brain areas are brain areas that are associated with evaluating whether one is safe or not. Therefore, we can break down safety and acceptance as follows if we look at it through the lens of neuroscience. Safety is about our ability to predict outcomes. So how do we deal with circuits designed for safety and
acceptance, when you talk about everything you talk about in the Huberman Lab, things I discuss from a perhaps more spiritual perspective of wisdom? These are all difficult things. And safety and acceptance, in general, in our current understanding of those words, feel like comfort and security, easy and simple. And then, suddenly, you start talking about cold water baths, infrared saunas, starting your circadian rhythm in the morning, strength training, all those things that are initially uncomfortable, difficult, and hard to do. I know you've thought about this a lot, but I'm just trying to make that connection: we're programmed for security and acceptance, but then everything that's good for us
seems difficult, at least at first. Yes, that's a great question. The twist in all of this is that the nervous system loves predictability, even if that predictability comes through difficult things. Therefore, I would say that the main theme of the Huberman Lab podcast has been the tools, we call them protocols, to anchor one's physiology in some predictable states. I've never explained it, but that's what it's about Why expose your eyes to sunlight in the morning? Because it wakes you up. I could tell you that it increases cortisol in a positive way first thing in the morning, that it schedules melatonin secretion for later at night, that it helps you sleep at night, and
all of that is true. But it creates a sense of predictability. It lets you know that during the next few hours you will feel more alert and that at night you are likely to be able to fall asleep more easily. In my opinion, people debate whether cold water baths are valuable for fighting inflammation or not, and they are. Whether they are valuable for increasing metabolism or not, probably not to a great extent. But one thing we know for sure is that, if done correctly, they are uncomfortable, but afterward, you have an increase in these three neurochemicals we call catecholamines- dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine- and you feel more energetic and somewhat happy for the next two to four hours. It's a real effect because
those are real chemicals, and they've served that purpose for hundreds of thousands of years in humans, and they'll continue to serve that purpose in humans. Therefore, the cold water bath is not so much about exerting yourself as it is about finding a way to overcome the feeling of stress and then safely overcome the feeling of resistance to entering the water, and then safely increase these neurochemicals that then predictably change your state to be more alert and, at the same time, relaxed and a little happy, if we want to call it that. So, you know, we could list protocol after protocol, right? If you tend to eat at a consistent time,
more or less an hour, regardless of whether you fast or not, you will tend to feel hungry about 15 minutes before those meals. This is a wonderful thing because it increases this predictability. This lends itself to security and acceptance because it allows you to not have to think about a number of other different things. Well, you know, I've been criticized, and rightly so, because there are so many protocols, how could anyone possibly follow them all? And the truth is that many of the protocols are, you know, a buffet, and many of them, such as how to
organize your workspace or when you travel due to time zone differences, depend on each person whether they want to follow them or not. And, of course, they are all optional. Well, this is not a law. Well, the idea, however, is that through some simple basic behaviors-seeing sunlight, taking a short walk after eating, getting some afternoon sunlight, dimming the lights in the evening, you know, these are the basics-eating at more or less consistent meal times, and consuming mostly unprocessed or minimally processed foods for the majority of your food intake, whether you're vegan, vegetarian, or not, you'll feel much, much better. And part of the improvement is feeling more
alert and energetic during waking hours and sleeping better at night, which in turn leads to feeling better overall and therefore frees up energy for things like sending that morning text message. So I'm really glad you mentioned it because I think people hear, "Oh, God, something else to do." But if you think about it that way, it's going to be self-limiting. But if you think of it as each of these things taking a minimal amount of time, and you can do the walking and sunbathing in the morning combined, and maybe if you skip a day, it's not a big deal. No problem. These are slow integration systems Your system will recover perfectly, but if you maintain it consistently
, you will feel much better, have more energy, and be able to think about what you would like to do within your creative life, to finally dedicate yourself to it with total freedom and peace of mind. You will have time and energy to think about what you would like to do in terms of relationships or friendships, or to develop these aspects of life. Therefore, it was never the intention for people to do so many things that they had no time for friendship, children, or relationships, or for their entire family or relationship to be centered around these protocols.
Rather, they are designed to be integrated into everyday life, and sometimes when people experience weak points, such as attention problems or depression, or have a particular creative project, and want to take advantage of open monitoring meditation, for example, which is very different, as you know much better than I do, from other forms of meditation, then they can access those specific tools. But I don't want to romanticize antiquity , but there was much more predictability in some areas of life in ancient times. Assuming people lived in small villages, there was much more predictability, but there was also a lack of predictability. Someone might go out hunting or gathering
, and if they don't return, we could assume they will never come back. And then, two nights later, I could come back and say, "That was close." Or return with a great harvest. We don't know how it happened, but we can be sure that the same neural circuits that were responsible for stress and insecurity, and therefore vigilance, back then, are very much alive in our brains now. So again, the protocols are designed to. Think of it like putting ingredients in the refrigerator. You do n't know what you're going to cook, but you have many more options available when you know that all the basic macronutrients are covered.
Everything is covered. And then you can start thinking about what you would cook. On the other hand, if you ever arrive late to the city, get to your Airbnb or hotel, see like three or four things and a terrible frying pan and think: "Well, now you have to be creative and adapt." We 've all taken the unhealthy option because it was the only one. Or we fasted because it was the healthiest option. Therefore, I think what we mean here is that the human brain, like all animals , all animals, needs to know where it is going to sleep that night. In other words, a dog enters a new environment and tries to figure out where it belongs. It's all a matter of space.
Talk to any expert dog trainer and they'll tell you it's all about negotiating space. Can they touch you? Can they not touch you? Can they be near you? Do they have to stay away? Can they enter all the rooms? You know, you see little kids looking for food in an environment, however noisy or quiet it may be, trying to figure things out like, "What can I do here? What can't I do here?" Sometimes we are put to the test. As adults, we do exactly the same thing. We need to know where we are. We need to orient ourselves in space and time, and then we need to know what I have at my disposal. Where am I going to
spend the night? It's one of the most fundamental questions we ask ourselves every day, unless you know where you're going to spend the night, you don't ask it and you have mental space to dedicate to other things. Therefore, what we are really talking about here is framing the fundamental and extremely basic impulses of the human brain in search of safety and acceptance. And then, at the other extreme, there are those aspirations that we all seek, right? These notions of connection, purpose, fulfillment, and peace. Again, I borrow from Martha's beautiful list because I think it's essential And it captures most, if not all, of what we all seek. But I think, as you know, we get
very caught up in how to achieve goal A or B, how to write the book, how to make money, how to grow a social media account, and we forget that at the center of it all is our relationship with our environment, with our inner landscape and with others, and it always comes down to safety and acceptance. And when we feel uncomfortable, when we feel that we didn't do things right or that others didn't do them right for us or to us, it always comes down to those two things. Yes. Yes, you 've reminded me of a question I often ask people: what's your most repeated thought? Because when I was analyzing the research on thinking, the idea was that not only do we have many thoughts every day, but many of the
thoughts we have are repetitive And going back to your point about protocols, I feel that the reason we have repeated thoughts is because we haven't yet created a protocol to help us make that thought disappear. Therefore, if you create a protocol like "I know where I'm going to sleep tonight," you will no longer have that thought of where I'm going to sleep tonight. And today we might be asking ourselves something very different because we already know where to sleep, but we might be thinking: "How am I going to pay that bill? How am I going to deal with that problem at home? What should I tell my child?" You know, whatever it is, right? We all have different challenges; each of us has a
different set of problems that we are struggling with or dealing with. And since we haven't created a protocol, we keep asking ourselves that question. And that question then generates panic, anxiety, and stress, and could eventually lead to burnout if someone keeps pushing that thought and doesn't create a protocol. I love the idea of people creating a protocol that ties into their most repeated thoughts instead of having to think, "Oh my God, I have to do 25 things." It's like: "Okay, no , what is it that's keeping you up at night? Or what is causing you the most anxiety And try to solve it. It's like running out of milk and going to buy some. You don't say, "I have to buy another 25 things." You simply fill the part of the
refrigerator that is empty. Does that align with.? Yes of course. I love what we're combining time and time again: the fundamental, practical elements of security with these aspirational things. You know, I firmly believe that physiology drives mental states. They also work in reverse. Emotional states drive physiology. It's bidirectional, of course. One of the reasons I've been so emphatic about breathing protocols is that my lab published a clinical trial on this in collaboration with David Spiegel from our Department of Psychiatry, which could basically be summarized as follows. If you emphasize the exhalations, you tend to calm down. In other words, you make them longer, more intentional, and more abundant.
Normally, we inhale actively and exhale passively. Other species do it the other way around, some other species. If you deliberately emphasize your exhalations, their duration, intensity, or simply actively control your exhalation, your heart rate slows down. When we emphasize inhalations, we don't necessarily have to hyperventilate or do Tummo breathing or anything like that. We could, but those breathing methods tend to increase our state of arousal and emphasize inhalations both by virtue of vigor, duration, or simply by paying more conscious attention to them. And there's a reason for this. It's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. It is a real phenomenon that links the heart, the vagus nerve, the diaphragm, and the
lungs. It's a beautiful mechanism. When I think too much at night and want to fall asleep, I start taking long breaths out of my mouth. Sometimes I fall asleep. I know because I wake up a while later and realize that it's working again. Sometimes it doesn't work so well, does it? One of the questions I get asked most often is how to turn off repetitive thoughts. It's a kind of skill because, frankly, repetitive thoughts usually have an adaptive purpose, but we can get stuck in them, right? Or they can remain stuck within us. I do n't know what it is, but one of the reasons I believe so strongly in people
practicing yoga nidra, which, as you know, and I must say I know I've upset some people to a certain extent by coining something very similar, non-sleep deep rest or NSDR, is that I want to make it very clear that I have the utmost respect for yoga nidra as an ancient practice. Neither yoga nidra, of course, nor NSDR were something I developed. It's just that NSDR is a little different in that it removes intentions and tends to involve a little less chakra linking and things like that than yoga nidra does. There was no specific purpose in mind behind its design, except to be able to adapt it to the laboratory context. Okay, so what do we know about.? Let's simply call it by its original name, yoga nidra.
The goal is to remain awake, to be aware while deliberately relaxing the body. It's a very useful practice. It's similar to meditation in some ways. It could be called meditation, but it has some distinctive benefits. Firstly, a nice study that was done in Denmark, at a medical school in Copenhagen, showed that people who practice yoga nidra get a 60% increase in baseline dopamine levels in the basal ganglia, an area of the brain associated with preparing for movement and holding it. Therefore, it can essentially be considered a practice that changes the brain's neurochemicals and restores mental and physical vigor. This is how I conceive of yoga nidra. It's kind of like sleeping. There are some studies
underway, including some I'm planning with Dr. Matt Walker at Berkeley, one of the world's foremost sleep researchers, that are going to explore whether small pockets of the brain are actually asleep or in REM sleep-like states during yoga nidra. If you think about rapid eye movement sleep, as a very relevant fact, it is a state in which the brain is very active and the body is completely still, very similar to yoga nidra. Okay, active brain, still body. Now, what makes Yoga Nidra unique is that there is an instruction in Nidra, if it is traditional, that speaks of going from thinking and doing to being and feeling.
Okay, so, as neuroscientists, let's take a step back and say: "Okay, thinking has a lot to do with anticipating the future. It could be about thinking about the past. It could be about thinking about things that are happening now." But it is a process that depends heavily on the forebrain. To do is to generate action in the basal ganglia, retain the action and also the circuits of the forebrain. Yes, I should also mention the prefrontal cortical circuits Now, being and feeling, this starts to sound a bit like, in quotes, softer language, but there is nothing soft about this language because if we analyze it from the perspective of neuroscience, we say: "Okay, what is it really about?" It is about moving from exteroception, from monitoring
the external world beyond the confines of our skin, to monitoring the internal world within the confines of our skin. And there is something magical about changing our perception to interoception, from our skin inwards, in the sense that it makes us stop thinking Whereas when we monitor the external world, for reasons that are logical but a little harder to explain, it's more about anticipating things, trying to figure out what goes with what, what is separate from what. The moment we reach the level of our skin and inwards, we know what is what and what is separate from what. It's just us, looking inward. It's as if there were only one thing. We rarely think, "Well, here's my brain and here's my leg." Now, Yoga Nidra
guides us through that. And so, what it does is bring all our cognition into this interoceptive mode, and then, boom!, we are in this mode of being and feeling. Therefore, I do not believe that being and feeling prevents thinking. I think of it as bringing thought down to the level of our sensations, of our body I believe Yoga Nidra is perhaps the most powerful practice for learning to turn off thoughts. Therefore, when one steps away from the research literature and says, " Well, what do we know for sure about Yoga Nidra and NSDR?", we know that this can be done for 10, 20, 30 minutes or an hour. We know that it can very reliably improve levels of alertness
, cognition, and vigor after Nidra. We know that it largely restores dopamine levels in the basal ganglia. We know that the brain enters small spaces of sleep-like states. This needs to be explored further. And we know that it mimics rapid eye movement sleep. And we know that people who practice it find it easier to fall back asleep if they need to, and develop much stronger autonomic regulation powers, their ability to release stress if they need to. If there was ever one practice I wished every human being on the planet would do, other than going outside and gazing at the sunlight in the morning, it would be Yoga Nidra. And of course, this has existed for thousands of years and,
unfortunately, it has not achieved the worldwide acceptance that I believe it deserves. And going back to Yoga Nidra, I can say personally, from the point of view of my personal practice, that I had surgery two years ago and suffered so much physical pain during the first month of recovery that the only way to fall asleep was through Yoga Nidra, because the thoughts about pain, stress, and possible damage or whatever were so intense that this state could only be reduced through Yoga Nidra. And when I have jet lag and travel the world, yoga nidra is my preferred option to disconnect in a new country when I think, "Wow, I'm going to be up all night. Will I make it to work tomorrow?" Yoga nidra allows me to completely eliminate those
thoughts and allow myself to fall asleep. That's why I use it all the time and I couldn't encourage you to do it. I'm so glad you're sharing this and helping people understand the science behind it because yes, these ancestral practices make sense, but nowadays they need a new language and a new interpretation. Yes, yoga nidra has a lot of similarity to rapid eye movement sleep. As far as we know, it's not exactly the same brain state, but the similarity is that the mind is alert and the body is still. Which is exactly what happens during rapid eye movement sleep. And we know that rapid eye movement sleep is essential for the formation of memories, to decouple, you know, the negative emotions from the experiences of the previous day. It is
usually more enriching in the last hours of the night, so for me, yoga nidra is the practice I should do when I wake up in the morning, but I don't feel completely rested. I do between 10 and 30 minutes of that. And then, in the afternoon, instead of a nap, I do nidra and sometimes I fall asleep, I admit it. And if I wake up in the middle of the night, nidra is my solution. I think that an active mind and a still body is a very interesting and frankly unusual state, unless we are in rapid eye movement sleep Most people, until they try it, cannot truly appreciate the immense value it brings, but the
beautiful thing is that it works the first time and it works every time. Our mutual friend Rick Rubin, we are both lucky enough to know him and spend some time with him, and Rick has a practice that he does. I know because I went to visit him last summer. And he would just sit there with his eyes closed and his body very still. And at one point I asked him, "What are you doing?" And he said, "Well, I'm thinking." And I said, "What's the benefit of doing this?" You know, and he said, " Well, I come up with ideas this way." And I thought, "Oh, that's interesting." And immediately the bell rang. I had a guest on my podcast. In fact, he was the first guest on my podcast, a professor named Dr. Karl Deisseroth. He is a
physician and a doctor. He is possibly the best bioengineer in the world in the field of neuroscience. He is also a psychiatrist, so he sees patients. And she has also raised five children. It's one of those phenomena. His wife is a neurologist at Stanford. He is an extraordinary person, a very profound thinker And I was talking to him on the podcast and he told me that he has a practice where at night, after his children have gone to sleep, he sits at the table or on the sofa, completely immobilizes his body and forces himself to think in complete sentences for about an hour. And I thought, "Wow, that's a tremendously unusual practice." And I said, "What's it about?" And he said,
"Well, that's how I structure my ideas." That's where I get new ideas. "Well, Karl's doing that, Rick 's doing that. You start looking back in history, and you discover that Einstein had a walking practice that he would then do. My father's a theoretical physicist, so that's where I learned this, but presumably this is verifiable. I'm sure someone will tell me it's not true, but enough people have told me that I'm inclined to at least describe it. He would walk, then stop and allow his thoughts to continue as if they were in motion. Active mind, still body, and then he would repeat. So, this is a very unusual state of mind that I think has real value, and we know that in sleep, REM sleep and associated dreams are where we find many novel solutions
to difficult problems of the day. You know, I'm giving a very strong vote to the league of reasonable people, which I hope is everyone, right? I do n't want to sound too sentimental, but maybe I've been a bit too emotional lately, but it really hurts me how many fights I see that I know won't accomplish anything. It's not going to." Solving the problem for neither side, right? I guess at 49 I feel old enough to say this, as if I still have hope. But obviously that's not a solution. I think when we really delve into the neuroscience of self-understanding, when people truly begin to grasp that the human brain is a
magnificent machine and organ, but that it has limitations, and we can begin to understand our own limitations- that it can take us so far, but no further-and that we can rely on healthy collective thinking to overcome these divisions, I think that's when we will finally evolve as a species. Truly. When we begin to be able to step outside our own brains and our groupthink so that we can actually arrive at solutions, because we often only think in terms of compromise and conflict, which are essential things to think about, but ultimately, understanding the limits of our cognition and how emotion drives cognition is really how we're going to be able to develop our beliefs about what's possible. And, by the way, that's not meant to be just a
bunch of aspirational words. It's more like a possibility. Real. If we could have the self-reflection to understand that we know certain things, we believe certain things, but that this neural architecture we call the brain is limited in the extent to which it can see the future and make the best decisions for everyone. We operate thinking that, but that's not how it works. And, of course, we can't expect one individual to solve the problem for everyone. Now , will it be AI? I don't know. That implies a lot of trust in AI. And these large language models are trained in many ways, in the same way that a neural network trains itself, the way a young brain develops and makes sense of the world. So, I don't have
any immediate solution. What I do have is some neuroscience knowledge that, at least for me, was new and that most neuroscientists are unaware of, but I think this is one of the most important discoveries in the last 100 years of neuroscience. It's a set of studies on an area of the brain called the anterior medial cingulate cortex. Almost no one has heard of this brain area, including many neuroscientists. Doctors Neurosurgeons know where it is. If you talk to a neuroscientist, unless they teach neuroanatomy, as I do, most don't know where it is in the brain. And most didn't know what it was doing, because it hadn't been explored. Then, a colleague of mine at
Stanford Medical School named Joe Parvizi did an incredible study where he was performing neurosurgery and stimulating different areas of the brain as a way to try to find the location where he needed to perform the surgery. And he stumbled upon an area called the anterior medial cingulate cortex that, if he stimulated it with an electrode in people who were awake during neurosurgery, they said they felt like there was some conflict pressing on them. Someone even described it as, "I feel like I'm driving into a storm, but I feel prepared." "I can do it." Others reported a different set of words, but the words essentially converged around the same set of subjective experiences, which are: "I feel
challenged, but I can do it." It's kind of a forward center of mass. And then, other studies, separate labs, found that in people who take on a new, challenging practice, their anterior medial cingulate cortex increases in volume. In other people who fail to successfully engage in a habitually challenging activity, the anterior medial cingulate cortex doesn't increase in volume in the same way. So, it's a very interesting brain structure, and I would say there are about a dozen quality studies in humans, several in animal models, but many in humans that point to the anterior medial cingulate cortex as a brain region associated with the feeling of tenacity and willpower to follow through.
It's very interconnected with the dopamine reward system-very connected, frankly, with many different brain areas. It's a hub for many inputs and outputs. So, what do we know about the medial cingulate cortex? Previous? Cortex? Perhaps the most interesting thing of all is that this is the area of the brain that seems to maintain its size and even increase in size in so- called super-elders. Super-elders are people who maintain their cognition later in life. These are people who do not experience the normal age-related cognitive decline Aside from Alzheimer's-type dementia, everyone develops less working memory-the
ability to hold ideas in mind for short periods-as they age. Super-elders seem to overcome all of that. And they live longer. So, you could say, "Well, this is a case of reverse causality." They live longer, so they have a larger brain area called the anterior medial cingulate cortex. "We don't really know the direction of causality. It could just be a correlation. But it all gets very interesting when you start to connect willpower, acceptance of new things, learning, neuroplasticity, and lifespan. And it may be that this perfect quadruple represents what we consider the will to live associated with intense curiosity and a desire to contribute new ideas and ways of thinking. And these feed back into our feelings
about how we might get a reward-an internal reward, with dopamine, of course, being the universal reward currency-as a means to keep going. What does this mean? It means that I believe everyone can become a better human being by taking on challenges. What's a challenge that can grow the anterior medial cingulate cortex? Well, unfortunately, it's a challenge you don't want to take part in. So, if you love running, this isn't going to work for you. If you love endurance training, this isn't going to work for you. If you don't want to meditate in the morning and you do 5 or Ten minutes of meditation, and then you simply improve the activation of your anterior medial cingulate cortex. So it's not just about doing difficult things, but about overcoming
resistance. And the reason I'm bringing this up now, rather than in a discussion about how to be more tenacious or have more willpower, is that it will. Okay, we know that when the anterior medial cingulate cortex enlarges, it translates to many different areas of challenge, not just the area where you challenged it. But, really, what we're saying is, are we willing to do , as you said, the most challenging thing, which is something you don't enjoy doing? It's not something that excites you. If you actually enjoy the challenge, then it's no longer a challenge, right? If you're.
I always remember a training and conditioning coach used to tell me something like, "Jay, if you're sitting in the cold bath just to rack up minutes, you can tell someone how long you've been sitting there." "He goes," so that means it wasn't difficult beyond a certain point. "He said, 'You should get out once it's easy because it's not having the effect you want it to have.' That's right. It's no longer an adaptive stimulus Correct. Yes. Can I offer an alternative protocol? People always ask me how cold the cold shower or cold water immersion should be and how long they should stay in. And it's very variable depending on the person, the time of day. Obviously, just do what's
safe, right? So, don't soak so long that you might, you know, have a cardiovascular effect, which isn't good. But, actually, it's very simple. If you want to translate to the real world in the best way, you ask yourself right before you go in, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do I want to not go in? And I would say if it's 5 out of 10, well, that's a wall. If it's at any of the five, that 's a wall you have to overcome. So, you go in. And then, at some point, you'll have the desire to get out. That 's the second wall." Maybe it will hit in 5 seconds, maybe it will hit in 20 seconds. That's the second wall. So, what I would do is count the walls. What are the, quote-unquote, walls? The walls are waves of adrenaline that are released in your body.
And sometimes they're very close together, these waves, and sometimes they're farther apart Now, of course, at some point you get numb and then you don't feel them anymore. We don't recommend that. But if you're thinking to yourself, "God, I really don't want to go in today," that wall is a very high wall. Well, going in for 15 or 20 seconds is going to accomplish something significant for this anterior medial cingulate cortex. It's going to accomplish something significant for the adrenaline release that you're going to experience. Now, it's not so much about the temperature. I mean, obviously, temperature plays a role, but it's your subjective relationship to the whole thing. For example, if you expose yourself to the cold at
night when you're tired, it's a very different experience than you would have in the morning after going for a run. and get too hot. So I ca n't say 45°F for 90 seconds. Although, if you want to start there, that's fine as long as it's safe for you. But, as you watch those walls of adrenaline rush assail you, so to speak, pay attention to how they feel. That's what you'll recognize outside the ice bath in a difficult conversation. That's what I mean. Yes. It's not that you can become so resilient that your adrenaline system stops working. Correct. It's that you learn to recognize the state of having adrenaline in your system and to stay calm. And actually, this happened to me the other day.
Yesterday I had a very difficult conversation, something first thing in the morning. It was like, wait, what? Really? A misunderstanding, a difficult conversation, and I remember there we were, our voices rising. We weren't shouting, but it was like it had been a quiet morning up until that point. And you could feel the energy in the room rising. And I was saying to myself, well, how am I doing? And I thought, oh, this is like a wall in the Thing. And I said, and I said, because we have this language in our home, I said, uh, I feel like there's a wall of adrenaline hitting us. Well, then we both started laughing. And then we went back to what we were doing, and then we calmed down. But noticing those walls of adrenaline and
realizing that when we're in those adrenaline-filled states, our cognition changes. We do n't have the solutions we had 5 minutes ago. So, learning to observe how those things happen in the cold plunge, in the cold shower, in an intense run or whatever, but cold seems to be the universal stressor for everyone, is very valuable. More than timing, you know, 15 minutes or 5 minutes in the cold plunge. And some days it's 15 seconds, sometimes it's 30. And for someone who's learning to plunge into cold water, it's like, hey, can you even get close to the thing or get into it? And I think that has real value. Yeah. So, In any case, I said the translation to real life, because I think what's happened is that we're dealing with so many
everyday things with so much pain that pain creates more pain for ourselves, for others, and we never end up with it, or we create this endless cycle and loop for ourselves and others where we remain in the pain. And what we all say is, what does it take? Just as we have to learn to sit in that cold, regulate ourselves, and adapt, what does it take to sit in the pain outside the bathtub, regulate ourselves, rise to a place of peace, and then respond, and then join, and as you said, the league of reasonable people? I think we all aspire to that. I think when I hear that, I think we all say, "I think I'm a reasonable person." I think most of us would say that. It lives in all of us, and it's a brain state that requires certain things to
achieve on a regular basis. I mean, there are some people who are maybe outside the margins for whom participation in the league of reasonable people is Impossible, but even as I say that, you know, one thing I've tried to do as I've gotten older is limit cynicism. You know, in my home growing up, there were a lot of emotions, concepts, and beautiful things that I was exposed to thanks to the wonderful people my parents were. They had flaws like everyone else, but one of the things I really tried to shed as I got older was cynicism. It's one of the things my sister and I talk about a lot. For example, being cynical has never done anyone any good. You can be critical and insightful, but cynicism accomplishes nothing but
separating us from each other. Yes. That's my belief. And I'm not trying to encourage people to be soft in a way that's dangerous for them. Like I said, be insightful. You know, security is important, but cynicism, I don't know what it is. It's like an ego-fueled negativity that implies you're better than other people, but in reality, it's usually the opposite. It usually stems from a place of deep insecurity. Right? It's a very dismissive stance. And then, I almost caught myself a second ago saying, "Oh, you know, " kind of making a joke about what a cynical joke is. Well, there are probably people who can't. Actually, I think we're all
capable of accessing this reasonable characteristic within ourselves. But it involves a state of calm, a sense of security, and, well, I guess, you know, everything I'm going to say today is intertwined with a kind of hope and aspiration. Yes. You know, I've reached a point where I feel like if I don't say it now, when am I going to say it? I want to thank you for joining me today and for being so open and vulnerable and giving me your space and energy. And I'm glad you feel safe and open enough to do that because it goes back to everything we've talked about today. We all want to feel safe and accepted, but to do that, we want all parts of ourselves to be accepted.
Otherwise, we can't truly feel safe. So, if only a part of me is accepted, I don't feel safe. And if I only feel safe sharing a part of myself, then I'm not truly accepted. And so, I think everything we've talked about today comes full circle beautifully. And thank you for making me feel safe and accepted. Thank you for feeling safe and accepted. And I hope everyone listening and watching today will focus on doing that for themselves and for the people they love. That would be a beautiful ripple effect of this show- that people will be distracted and create that space for the people in their lives. So, thank you, friend.
Well, thank you very much. Thank you for having me. And, uh, like I said, I'm a huge fan of what you do and who you are. And you know, and thank you for the kind words. If this clip has given you value and you'd like to see more, this next video has been specially chosen for you based on your viewing habits. I hope you enjoy it. And if you do, please subscribe to the channel so we can continue to bring you fantastic conversations.
