The speaker opens up about the challenges faced as a teenager, including lack of skills and uncertainty about the future. Despite these hurdles, there’s a realization of the importance of education and a commitment to self-knowledge and personal growth. The speaker highlights the potential to transform weaknesses into strengths and believes that change is possible through determination and focus.

The discussion then delves into the concept of neuroplasticity and how the brain can be rewired with intentional actions, especially after the age of 25. Traumatic events and positive experiences can both reform neural connections, with an emphasis on the role of neurochemicals like dopamine and epinephrine. The speaker elaborates on the importance of attention, focus, and the creation of stories to facilitate learning and change.

Main takeaways from the video:

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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. neuroplasticity [ˌnʊroʊplæsˈtɪsəti] - (noun) - The brain's ability to change and adapt as a result of experience, especially evident in learning and recovery from brain injuries. - Synonyms: (brain elasticity, neural adaptation, cerebral flexibility)

This is why when we are very interested and focused on something, two of the main requirements for neuroplasticity, we have to be alert and we have to be focused.

2. voracious [vəˈreɪʃəs] - (adjective) - Having an eager approach to an activity, often used to describe someone having an insatiable appetite for something. - Synonyms: (insatiable, avid, eager)

Do I like to learn if I'm interested in something? Do I have a voracious appetite?

3. neurochemical [ˌnʊroʊˈkemɪkəl] - (noun) - Chemical substances that influence the function and communication between neurons in the brain. - Synonyms: (neurotransmitter, neural chemical, synaptic substance)

But what's required is a marked shift in the neurochemical environment under which something happens.

4. catecholamines [ˌkætəˈkoʊlæminz] - (noun) - A class of neurotransmitters that includes dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, contributing to the body's response to stress or fright. - Synonyms: (dopamine, adrenaline, noradrenaline)

What we call the catecholamines. It's three molecules, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, all which cause an increase in alertness.

5. milieu [miːˈljɜː] - (noun) - A person's social environment or background. - Synonyms: (environment, setting, atmosphere)

And that's because as a teen, your body is flooded with hormones and neuromodulators. The amount of meaning that comes from now seemingly trivial events when you're a teenager or adolescent is immense. That song meant so much, and it's because of the neurochemical milieu it creates in you.

6. reverberate [rɪˈvɜrbəˌreɪt] - (verb) - To echo repeatedly, often referring to an effect that continues to be felt. - Synonyms: (resonate, echo, vibrate)

Some dogs and some people have a bit more kind of reverberation in them.

7. asymmetric [ˌeɪsɪˈmetrɪk] - (adjective) - Having parts that do not correspond in size, shape, or arrangement; lacking symmetry. - Synonyms: (uneven, unbalanced, lopsided)

This is why there's an asymmetric influence of fear, as opposed to just interest in terms of what will shift our brain.

8. cognitive load [ˈkɑɡnɪtɪv loʊd] - (noun) - The total amount of mental effort being used in the working memory. - Synonyms: (mental burden, processing demand, cognitive processing)

Stories are very powerful and very dangerous. Stories are the way that humans organize knowledge, by and large.

9. metamorphosis [ˌmetəˈmɔrfəsɪs] - (noun) - A transformation or a major change in a person, thing, or idea. - Synonyms: (transformation, evolution, conversion)

In other words, that the metamorphosis that leads to great music, great poetry, great scientific discovery, podcasts, finance companies...

10. temporal continuity [ˈtɛmpərəl kɒntɪˈnuːɪtiː] - (noun) - An uninterrupted and consistent existence or operation of something over a period. - Synonyms: (ongoing sequence, time consistency, duration)

...a beginning, a middle, and an end. And it has immense meaning as a consequence.

A Complete Guide To Transforming Your Life - Andrew Huberman

I'll tell you, super scary being, like, almost 19 years old. Girlfriend left me. I'm not good at anything. I wasn't good at anything. Not skateboarding, couldn't play an instrument. Everyone in that town surfed. Family? Family. I mean, I didn't. Yeah, I could have gone to the fire service, and that's a wonderful career path. Yeah, I didn't. I didn't have any, like, marketable skills. I couldn't really do anything except I knew my capacity to learn. I've always had a very good memory, and I've always enjoyed learning. So I thought, okay, school seems like a good option. They tell you what you need to know. In fact, at one point, I realized, and I think it was Ryan Holiday that said that, you know, the people who should absolutely not drop out of college are the people who are not doing well, because the real world is a lot harder. In many ways, it's a lot harder than college. In college, they tell you what to do.

I remember taking a class in Greek mythology. You go there, if you sit near the front, you pay attention. You try not to pay attention to anyone else. You sit down, they tell you what you need to know. Now, sometimes it's complicated. You can't keep up. But then they have these things called office hours where you can ask. They have teaching assistants. I mean, the whole thing is set up so that you almost can't fail if you do the required steps. Whereas with skateboarding, it's like I was always getting broke off, as they say. You know, I was always rolling. My left foot snapped again. Nothing. Couldn't do it. There's so much uncertainty in other things. At least with a college education, for me, it was like, okay, I can learn this stuff. And then what I found is when there's a desire to learn, and then you learn, and then you do well. And I started doing very well.

But there's that one class that I got a B in that I'm still pissed off about. You know, my first year was a disaster, then it was all A's. And then there's this one class in neural development from Ben Reese, and I got a B. And as a consequence, when I went to graduate school, I studied neural development. You know, it's the thing that you don't get the place where you make an error, that you forever carry that signal. I need to get better at that. So I think a lot of it is just having the knowledge of self, right? What did the Oracle say? Know thyself. The knowledge of self. To really think, okay, like, what are my strengths? Do I like to learn if I'm interested in something? Do I have a voracious appetite? Maybe if you're a person with less energy, maybe you're more reflective, or you like to journal, or you need more time to process. I think turning what often appear as weaknesses into strengths is really possible. And then I do think that we are all each endowed with some unique gift.

I really believe in this. It's not mystical for me. I think that we all have some wiring of our brains that's very similar, and we all have some unique wiring based on our genetics and our experience. And I just thought, I'm going to keep paying attention to what fills my body with energy. But if the question is, can a person change? Can you learn new things? Can you unlearn certain patterns? Can you overcome traumas at any age? The answer is absolutely, categorically yes. How? Well, it's very clear that as a child, until about age 25, more or less just passive experience will shape the brain, for better or worse, after about age 25. And again, these are not strict cutoffs. We can change our brain, but what's required is a marked shift in the neurochemical environment under which something happens.

So one of the reasons why any traumatic event will forever be remembered, although, by the way, you can remove some of the emotional load of that trauma, does not have to be traumatic forever, is because when we see or experience something very intense of a fearful nature, there is the release of certain, what we call neuromodulators, things like epinephrine, adrenaline, and other neuromodulators that cause a state shift in our body and brain. And the nervous system recognizes this as unusual. And as a consequence, in the subsequent days, there's reordering of the connections so that the brain can prepare for that event should it happen again.

This is why we have what's called one trial learning. You go to a certain location, something terrible happens there. You will forever associate that location with something terrible. But there are tools, therapy and other tools that can allow the emotional load to be removed from that so that you could go to that location and feel calm, no fear whatsoever. The good news is you can also learn anything you want to learn, provided there's a shift in this neurochemical environment. This is why when we are very interested and focused on something, two of the main requirements for neuroplasticity, we have to be alert and we have to be focused. We can't learn passively as adults.

We can't just play, you know, a lecture about AI and large language models or neuroscience in the room, and then the knowledge doesn't just sink in by osmosis, but if we pay attention, and we're alert when we pay attention, there's a shift in the neurochemicals associated with that attention. What we call the catecholamines. It's three molecules, dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, all which cause an increase in alertness, all which cause an increase in focus, a tightening of our visual field and our auditory field. So, like cones of attention is one way to think about it. And then it sets in motion a bunch of biological processes such that if we get adequate sleep that night, maybe the next night as well, there's reordering of neural connections so that that knowledge, that new experience, is consolidated in your brain. You are forever changed as a consequence of that experience.

So when we hear that the brain is constantly changing, everything that we encounter changes our brain. That's not true. Why would the brain change unless it needed to, right? As a child, the brain is basically a template for change. It's trying to understand the environment and make predictions. And so that's true. neuroplasticity is a cardinal feature of childhood and adolescence and the teen years.

Just think about the music you listened to when you were a teen. No other music will ever have as much significance. And that's because as a teen, your body is flooded with hormones and neuromodulators. The amount of meaning that comes from now seemingly trivial events when you're a teenager or adolescent is immense. That song meant so much, and it's because of the neurochemical milieu it creates in you. But as an adult, it takes a stronger stimulus, as we say.

And if you were to fall in love as an adult or see something, a painting, that just strikes you as just so unbelievable, yes, then you are forever changed. But just going to see a bunch of paintings at the Met doesn't mean that every single one of those paintings is forever stamped into your brain. The nervous system is very efficient in that way. It doesn't change unless it has to, and it always changes if it needs to in order to keep you safe.

This is why there's an asymmetric influence of fear, as opposed to just interest in terms of what will shift our brain. But it's nice to know that love and excitement and appreciation are very strong stimuli for changing the brain. And, you know, I can kind of draw to mind conversations I've had with my good friend Rick Rubin. I'll get accused of name dropping, but I'm very fortunate to be close friends with Rick. And Rick always talks about, you know, how when you just see and experience something and you just have this love for it, it changes the brain. He's not a neuroscientist, but in many ways, he's a neuroscientist.

So, in any case, you absolutely can change your brain, but you have to pay attention to the thing you want to incorporate into your brain. You have to be alert while you do that, and then you absolutely have to go get some rest, because it's during sleep and during meditative states and during rest that the actual rewiring of the brain occurs.

Stories are very powerful and very dangerous. Stories are the way that humans organize knowledge, by and large. Right. We don't tend to organize things into lists. We have these narratives that we call stories because from a young age, we learn things not just by hearing them and seeing them, but they are compartmentalized into narratives that have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Sometimes they have a kind of a crescendo and then a relaxation.

Just think about a childhood song of learning. Like the ABCs. They don't teach you the ABCs. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J. They don't do that. What do they do? They give you a song, which is a story. Musicians will understand this inherently. Again, I'm not one, but when I started researching neuroscience of music and the brain came to understand. So it's A, B, C, D, E, F, G, right? The change in the inflections as one does the alphabet as a young kid is the story of the Alphabet.

Now, people might say, okay, what is he talking about? What's happening here is you create variation in terms of batching of ideas so that something has a beginning, a middle, and an end. So if you think, okay, I grew up in this house, and it was really messy, and now I have too much mess. And in order to undo that, there's this kind of, like, hardwired. Right? Dangerous words, hardwired neural circuitry in my brain that I would have to work really, really hard to undo, and I'd have to be scared into being a cleaner person or I'm a tidier person. Whatever it is, that's very dangerous, because there's a beginning to that, a middle to that, and an end to that. And it has immense meaning as a consequence.

One of the most powerful things to understand that neuroplasticity really involves taking an existing story and dismantling some component of it. What could the component be? Well, there's all this stuff, like the Byron Cady work, which says, you know, you take something that you believe as true, and you say, okay, like. Like, I'm an untidy person, and then you counter it. How do I know that? Well, okay, I have this experience. Okay, that's the story. And then you start running counternarratives. You say, I'm. I'm actually a tidy person. And then people say, well, this is silly. You're just lying to yourself, right where they say, is it always true that you're a messy person?

You start challenging this story from different sides. Now, I believe, because I'm a neuroscientist, I'm not a psychologist or in the self-help world, that the brilliance, the kind of unconscious genius of that approach is actually that what one is doing is you're starting to create a new story. You're starting to kind of infuse different questions into the existing neural network. Now, the brain loves questions. Like, the brain, since we're young kids, we're asking questions. And so if you take an existing story and you start challenging it with questions, you're not saying, lie to yourself. You're not suddenly going to say, okay, like, I'm super tidy. You're not, because you're not going to believe that. But if you start challenging why it's that way, or, you know, you've been able to change so many other things, why wouldn't you be able to change that? Well, you say, what's just a habit? I can't do it. You say, well, what's a habit? You start poking and pushing and pushing.

What you eventually arrive at is this kind of. Huh. Actually, there's nothing keeping me from being a tidy person except this kind of fluency of a particular story. What you've done is you've interrupted the fluency of that story. So then when you go to the behavior of, you know, do you set things down all over the place, or do you put them in an orderly fashion? You start interrupting the habit, the fluency of your typical behavior. So I raise this as a way to kind of shine light on essentially what I do in my podcast career, which is, you know, I believe very strongly in the fields of psychology.

I think self-help has some wonderful things to offer. We've got ancient wisdom that goes way back. And when you start to look at things through the lens of biology, you start to see that all of these things actually have merit, and they're just different. Paths to the same outcomes. So, if you wanted to become a tidy person, I would encourage you. Here would be one, let's just say neuroscience supported approach would be to write out one page about what a tidy person you really are. You'll know that's a lie, right? And then to look at it and realize that in many ways, if you just replace tidy with, you know, messy at any location, it'd probably be the exact same story. And so what you're really talking about here is just a default that your nervous system is running.

And if you were to just swap the words, would you feel differently or do differently? On the one hand, you'd say, no, that's kind of trivial. But I bet you the practice of writing it out would forever interrupt your notion of, like, just going to set something down. You'd be like, now you have something to kind of disrupt the habit, because so much of habit disruption that you'll look like some people say, oh, you flicker rubber band on your wrist or something like that. There's nothing special about the rubber band. There's nothing special about the pain on your wrist or that you put a sticky note. We know sticky notes work for about one day. Why don't sticky notes work? Why don't reminders on the mirror work? Because they don't have enough salience. They're not new, they're not different. The nervous system only changes if something is new and different.

So anyway, we could talk a lot about habit formation, but fear works. But so does disrupting the story. How do you disrupt the story? You essentially give the opposite story and you think, well, that's just lying to myself. But neurally, it makes sense, because the nervous system, again, likes to be very economical, likes to do everything with the minimum amount of energetic expenditure. And to change anything requires attention. And attention is expensive. Attention is expensive. And also, I would say, as I'm kind of rambling all this, things are going very well for you, so you actually don't have any reason to tidy your space. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. You outsource it? Yeah. Great. Well, there is incentive for all the folks that feel like they're not tidy enough.

You have two choices. You can either start to be tidy now, or you can be successful enough that you can hire some assistance. And I actually think. I say this in all seriousness, I think that one has to ask, like, where is my attention in neural real estate best devoted. I think about this every day. I mean, we are living in a war of attention. I wake up in the morning, and I can be a consumer or a creator. If I reach for my phone, I'm a consumer. If I go to my journal, I'm a creator. My advice to anyone who wants to be successful in any domain is to do things away from where you broadcast and then take it to that broadcast.

I mean, take your real life to Instagram and be very cautious about taking Instagram to your real life. Does that make sense? If you look at successful people, they're doing things away from the platforms and putting them on the platforms. So I have to be very careful. Then I go into the kitchen. Obviously, I talk to people in my home. But if I pick up the phone and I start making a phone call, it's like, is this call really about moving the needle forward, or is this just kind of like passive use of attention? We have to be so careful nowadays. So, so careful. It's really challenging.

So there's a wonderful researcher at New York University by the name of Emily Balcetis, who talks about how, for goal setting and habit formation, fear setting is often one of the best tools. You spend some time, maybe five minutes or so, thinking about all the terrible things that are going to happen if you don't actually accomplish your goals. Nobody likes to do this, but guess what? It turns out to be pretty darn effective. Really? I know it's really frustrating that this is the case, but again, you know, that has a lot to do with the way that the human brain is wired and likes to rewire itself.

Now, that said, it is important to envision goals, visualizing goals in detail, writing them out, in some cases talking about them, although we can discuss that, why that might not be the best idea in every circumstance can be very beneficial because it's hard to conceive something that you can't imagine. But I think when people hear that visualizing goals or visualizing outcomes is critical, we sometimes forget that we don't always know what the end goal is. Sometimes we have to break this up into milestones. This is where I think Rick Rubin, even though he's not a formally trained scientist, has drawn a lot of interest for his work on creativity, which is, you know, Rick is about largely, you know, sensing the kind of energetic pull of an idea and being able to explore that without too much self-judgment or filtering or thinking about how it's going to be received.

In other words, that the metamorphosis that leads to great music, great poetry, great scientific discovery, podcasts, finance companies that one is building, etcetera, is a series of iterations that occur on the time course of about a day, you know, and so we can't always imagine the end or the end product as the outcome. This is why I said university is easy compared to other goals, because the end is a degree, right? So you pick up your diploma, like, whereas in other areas, it's far more mysterious. Often now, visualization, I think, can be very powerful, but perhaps what's more powerful is to learn the brain and body state that best serves the work you're going to do.

So, for instance, if I'm going to do some writing, and right now I'm working on a book, it's largely done, but I'm writing some bonus chapters, unless I'm hyper-motivated to do that. When I sit down and hyper-focused, I'll spend two, three minutes just closing my eyes, focusing on my breathing. It's meditation of sorts of. But what I tell myself is, if I can't focus on my breathing for two or three minutes, how in the world am I going to focus on writing for two or 3 hours? That sort of thing. The other thing that I want to make sure I don't forget is I mentioned that telling people your goals oftentimes can be useful if it stimulates a little bit of fear. Like you have some accountability.

But we also know that because of the affiliative nature of people, in particular people that support us, there is this danger. A friend of mine who's a cardiologist at UCSF taught me this. He said, you know, be careful who you tell that you're going to start a podcast or write a book, because oftentimes the response will be, oh, yeah, that's great, you absolutely should write a book, or you should do a podcast. And people get a sort of reward from telling people about it, and then they never actually go do it. Whereas I can cite numerous examples of where people were told, you're never gonna be able to do that, you're never gonna be able to be successful in that. And my goodness, those people dig their heels and they show that they can do it.

Now, I get into debates about this with Rick from time to time. It's unclear to me whether or not the energy around trying to prove oneself is detrimental to the outcome. And I sense it is, right, this kind of grinding against, like, take that and take that, as opposed to just doing things out of real love of craft. I think about the way I felt about aquaria and fish as a kid, and it's just like pure delight. That's the word that comes to mind, just delight. I want to learn more about it. I want to do it and tell people about it. That's the wonderful romantic picture of effort and progress and outcomes. But in reality, you probably need both. You need to be able to access some fear and sense of competition, but also delight in craft. You know, like Peter Thiel's book zero to one, as I recall, defines competition as anti-creativity in many ways.

Because through competition, you are, by definition, changing what you're doing in order to outdo somebody else or something else. And so you're morphing your creation in order to kind of overcome something. Whereas if you're just purely thinking about something you want to grow and cultivate, there are none of those barriers. But in the worlds that I've been in science, to a lesser extent, podcasting, and that's a wonderful feature of podcasting, but certainly in science, it is hyper-competitive, right?

Two laboratories working on similar things. People are concerned that if one publishes first, the other will not be able to publish, certainly not in as high quality a journal. And jobs are created through these journal publications. Podcasting is actually a wonderful field because, let's say you and I have the same guest on our podcasts, all it does is raise it in the algorithm. And so I think there's a lot of collegiality and camaraderie in the podcast field that exists in little pockets in science. But science is a brutally competitive field, which doesn't mean it's anti-creative, but in a dream world where there's an infinite amount of money for scientific research, because that would better humanity, in my view, and people didn't have to be competitive about grant dollars or publication, I think we would make far more progress as a species.

So competition fosters outcomes. This is clear in markets, it's clear in a lot of domains, but pure love and delight of craft and creativity, that's definitely the way to go. But in most endeavors, you gotta have both. If sitting next to someone in class and realizing, okay, because this was me back when I'm thinking, okay, I love this topic, but gosh, I want that top mark. I want that top mark on the distribution. Like that's. And like, she and he are really, really good. And I'm gonna, we're gonna study together. But my God, when it comes time for that exam, like going for it, a little bit of competition can, can bring out our best, I think certainly in sport.

Take your passion, take your circumstance, and pick a craft and just document stuff. And so, in many ways, like what happened at Embarcadero, what happened in skateboarding? And I always love punk rock music and going to shows. I have no musical talent, and I didn't suck at skateboarding, but I wasn't going to go anywhere with it. But the, what I saw was if you love something and you want to learn as much as possible about it and you love the culture around it, you do have to learn how to sort out the untoward elements. Don't get yourself into trouble, but you take that energy. And I just took it to academics.

I remember realizing when I got to graduate school, I found a wonderful lab to work in with a wonderful woman named Barbara Chapman. Unfortunately, she passed away. And at the time she said, listen, I'm going to have a couple kids, but we have grants. You can. So she said, I'm going to have a couple kids, so I'm going to be very busy, but we have grants, and here's the lab. She said, don't burn the lab down. Don't hurt yourself, but just do experiments, have fun. And I realized, I was like, this is the best. And I had so much energy, and I thought, I never have to go home.

So I lived there a lot of the time, brush my teeth in the sink there, work out at the gym, gun shower, come back. And I remember people saying, you're gonna burn out. What are you doing? And I'm like, what are you talking about? And I would work 80, sometimes 100 hours a week. I was so happy. And I realized, like, this is the exact same feeling. I'm just taking my interest and I'm just pouring myself into it. I did that when I was a graduate student. I did it when I was a postdoc.

And actually, when I was a postdoc, I started writing some music articles for Thrasher magazine. I've always kept some little tie to the skateboarding industry that way just to make some extra cash. And then when I was a junior professor, I had to really pour myself just into the laboratory, but I still worked out. And I guess the point is that earlier you and I were talking about if you have, and I'm borrowing this phrase from one of my heroes, Martha Beck, who's a wonderful person and teacher, such wisdom. And she calls it an interest-based attention. Some people might call it ADHD, but have you ever noticed that even people, and we know this from the scientific literature, people, kids, adults with ADHD, when they're so-called ADHD, when they are doing something they really love, they're like a laser, they're not going to peel off that. Their attention is like level eleven out of ten.

So I took that energy that I've always had and for fish, for tropical birds, skateboarding, punk rock music. Eventually it was biology, and I just went, okay, here are my chips. I'm all in. All in. But the goal has always been and remains to take what I learn and share it, because the real joy in doing anything, for me anyway, is the ability to share in that knowledge or in that experience.

And so those early years were really choppy and really dangerous, you know, frankly. But then when I started a laboratory and decided, hey, I'm going to study human stress, let's go get VR of stressful circumstances. And my friend Michael Muller, who's a very accomplished portrait photographer in Hollywood and also takes photos of great white sharks out of cages. He said to me, oh, you know, your VR stimulus in your lab. I mean, here's what he told me. He's like, it sucks. He said, it sucks. It doesn't look real. It's all CGI. It's not scary at all. How about we go film some great white sharks down in Guadalupe Island, and we leave the cage?

And the young Andrew was like, okay, so got dive certified, went and did it one year, stayed in the cage, went the next year, exited the cage. I'm not recommending people live this way. I'm not. Because I had an air failure at depth the second year, while I was in the cage, I bailed out. I made it, I lived. But it was super scary, and it was not an experience I want to repeat. And I realized, you know, that's the line.

Like, I, you know, the great Oliver Sacks, another hero of mine, British trained neurologist and author, he wrote, was basically what became the script for awakenings and things like that. There's a quote about him that resonates a lot of. And the quote, I think, is an early teacher of his said, Oliver will go far, provided he does not go too far. And so you have to be careful, right?

These adventures leaving school, you can't be haphazard about it. So if you look at the broad arc, it's highly non linear, but there's a common thread through all of it, which is this desire to learn curiosity, desire to share intensity. And when I'm involved in any one thing, and I recommend that if people are involved in any one thing, if it's podcasting or sport or video games or math or AI or program, whatever it is, skateboarding, whatever it is, that you can't be haphazard in that world because forward progress even if you change things over time, is the consequence of taking that inherent uniqueness that we each have and whatever level of intensity we have, and making sure that you do take steps forward.

And there are. What I've learned is, as a child, as an adolescent, and as an adult, there are all these traps along the way, there are all these shoots down to failure and destruction, and you have to be very, very thoughtful, and so you can't be reckless.

Do you believe in burnout? If so, what would be a recommendation protocol? Relinquish burnout once it's already occurred? This is a very interesting question. You know, we don't quite know what burnout is, and it can come from a combination of things. And typically, burnout comes not during the stress period, but several months afterwards. You know that the adrenals, you know, these two little nuggets above our kidneys and our lower back, are capable of driving so much neural energy in us that we can do all sorts of things for a very long time, even in the absence of food, as long as we have water and salt.

You know that the adrenals, because they kick out adrenaline and cortisol, and, by the way, are involved in salt appetite. There's a reason for that, because you need that. The adrenals can keep us going, and there is no such thing as true adrenal burnout because the adrenals don't burn out. You've got enough adrenaline in your adrenals for two lifetimes. But there is an adrenal insufficiency syndrome.

So that's a real thing. It's rare, but it exists. But burnout seems to be, in my mind, more related to psychological burnout. And I'm not a psychologist, but I'm a fan of the poet David White, and he has this beautiful poem that is either entitled or somehow includes the word wholeheartedness. I think that where we recover ourselves is by relating to and engaging with things and people that we wholeheartedly enjoy, even if that is simply relaxation or gardening or drawing or maybe just doing nothing for a bit. I think burnout is very real, and I think burnout has pushed through the filter of what we've been talking about earlier in the evening is when we are not getting periodic experiences, if you will, of delight or experience excitement or a sense of meaning.

And here we're starting to drift into kind of abstract. You know, not everyone gets to do a job that they delight in. Certainly there were years where I didn't delight in the sorts of things I had to do for certain jobs, but finding some areas of life that create those neural energy states that carry forward, that wick out into other aspects of what we're doing. And I don't know if I made this point clear enough, but those moments of really feeling excited about something in a way that really lights you up in particular, are not just about that moment and seeking out more of those moments, but in the way that it lifts our nervous system, the way it carries us forward and allows us to do the other things that we have to do, which, frankly, sometimes can be not as exciting or even drudgery.

So if you've burnt out. I know the feeling. I have burnt out before, and I encourage a combination of rest, but also exploration of things that can evoke that kind of internal excitement or sense of meaning. And one has to be a bit of a forager in order to do that. Try new things, and that can be difficult. But burnout is real, and I encourage you to take it seriously because unfortunately, typically what follows burnout is depression, and then things can really run ashore.

What types of food do you try to eat every day and why? Oh, I love to eat. I do. I love to eat. I even like the mere act of chewing so much. So it just. Yeah, that's why I buy those Persian cucumbers. You just munch on those things all the time. I tend to eat according to how alert or asleep I want to be. It violates a few kind of popular thoughts about nutrition, but that's what I do generally. For me, I like water, caffeine early in the day, and eat sometime around eleven or noon. I'm not really strict about these things.

If I'm hungry, I'll have a plate of eggs in the morning or something, or a handful of macadamias. By the way, the macadamias down in Australia are awesome. They're so good. In the states, they, like, infuse them with all these palm kernel oils and stuff. And so when I first tasted the ones, and they always taste good, but I'm not gonna get into the seed oil debate. I think of better ways to hang myself, like, with this microphone cord. It's just like, you know, I don't. I guess I do sort of avoid the seed oils, but, you know, I feel best. I love them. Oh, the macadamias. Told you. Always find my way back.

The macadamias down here taste as if they've been infused with all sorts of stuff. But then you look at the packaging and it's just like, macadamia and salt. I don't know what is so good. The coffee down here is amazing. I don't know why it tastes so good. So good. The produce. I mean, basically, I eat, like, you guys gals. That's what I do. That's what I do. I basically eat meat and eggs and fruit and vegetables. And I do, like, rice and oatmeal. And, like, there are people on social media tell you, like, oatmeal is gonna kill you. And I'm like, if oatmeal were gonna kill me, I'd be dead. I eat so much oatmeal. But that's not to say that some people feel better if they don't eat oatmeal.

I kind of find the nutrition debates to be kind of, like, funny. They're so non scientific. They're funny. But I also know that, and here I have a theory, that when you eat most of your foods from unprocessed or minimally processed sources, something magical happens. Not only are you, let's say, eating healthier foods, quote unquote, but we should define healthier foods for which they're macronutrients. Proteins, fats, and carbohydrates also. And calories tend to be matched pretty well with high micronutrient content. Something that doesn't exist in highly processed foods, right, but probably also better for the planet, but which is great. I'm not being planet's important. We want to keep that around.

But the other thing is that neurally, when you eat foods as their main ingredients, which is not, say, you can't have a soup or a stew or a salad every once in a while, but closer to their original form. And I do cook my meat, unlike other people on the Internet. There's the guy eating chicken raw for like 28 days. I was in the barber shop the other day. They're like, what about the raw chicken guy? And I was like, not a good idea like that. So when you eat foods in their kind of basic state, the brain can associate the taste with the macronutrient and amino acid content and micronutrient content. And we know that the gut is sensing a lot of that unconsciously, subconsciously, we know this through neural pathways.

Beautiful work being done by people here in Australia and in the states and elsewhere about the signaling for the gut is actually tasting the food, or it's measuring the amount of amino acids, fatty acids, etcetera. And so when you eat foods in their kind of more original form, non-processed or minimally processed, clear that the brain starts to develop a more specific intuition or appetite for what you need. You start to know, oh, like, I need some fat or I need some protein, or you start to crave the things according to what's actually in them. And highly processed foods and rich combinations of foods don't allow you to do that.

So. And that hasn't really been explored. There's a little bit of work that's coming out on this by Dana Small at Yale and Kevin Hall elsewhere, but we're sort of starting to get there. So this is why I believe when people go on these elimination diets where they're like, I'm only eating meat, like the lion diet or whatever, like Costello meat only. And like that, they, many of those people, quote, unquote, feel better, I think, because they're starting to form a relationship with the nutrient content of the food, the caloric content and the taste in a way that after that, they, like, see a cracker and they're like, no, they can reset the neural circuits around appetite and all of this stuff.

But for me, because I'm an omnivore, like a normal person, and sorry, no disrespect to the carnivores, I just kind of like the blood drinking, like, liver chomping, like, come on. Like the. I'm gonna catch a bullet or like a, you know, someone's gonna bone at me. So I fear them more than I fear the vegans. It'll just be like a bunch of, you know, the vegans will attack you online, but in person they'll just, like, hit you with a parsley. So it's not as, you know, the, the, um. I'm gonna get myself in trouble.

The, um, I'm an omnivore like most people. And the. And so for me, between 11:00 a.m. and 08:00 p.m. is typically when I eat, but sometimes I eat at nine. I didn't eat before this because I don't like to eat right before I do this sort of thing. So I'll eat a meal before I go to sleep tonight. I'm not super strict about this stuff. I'm not super, super, super strict, but in general, it's some sort of intermittent ish fasting thing. And it tends to be meat and fish and eggs and parmesan cheese and coffee and oranges and cucumbers and lettuce and food, like food and pasta.

And I suppose that having done that for so many years, I do adjust it. Like, if I do a hard resistance training workout, I'll eat a few more starchy carbohydrates to replenish glycogen. But I tend to avoid extremes with all that stuff. And I love a great slice of pizza, and I've sort of lost my taste for sweets, but occasionally I'll do that. And I love vegetables, like croissants and things of that sort. But, you know, all kidding aside, you know, I do try and eat pretty healthy every day.

What are your top health and fitness style recommendations for someone who has a busy lifestyle? This is a great question. And, you know, I get accused a lot. I get accused a lot of things, but, you know, one of them is, well, no one can do all this stuff, but we talked about it earlier. We do the best with what we have and the time we have. Try and get some bright sunlight, even through cloud cover. Especially through cloud cover. Every day I try and dim the lights or, you know, get under red light. Not red light panel, necessarily, but just put in, like, red party light.

I've done that this whole trip when we traveled in the evening. Just. It's just a red light bulb. There's not fancy. So the red light bulb screws in this little pedestal, turns that on, all the other lights go off, and then makes for a nice, easy taper into sleep. Because you know that the blue, the blue and bright fluorescent lights, the short wavelength light really is activating for the nervous system, especially late in the day. So light is a big one for me. Try and get a few walks in. I think if you were going to exercise just two days a week, it's very clear that those two days per week should include some resistance training exercise, and then maybe follow up with some easy cardiovascular training or something like that. Hopefully, one could get out in about maybe three days or exercise sometimes not outside. One can only exercise indoors maybe three days per week.

So I don't think it takes a ton of time necessarily, but that might even be excessive. So with a busy lifestyle, I think it's those little carve-outs of five or ten minute walk. When we had Andy Galpin on the podcast and did a series. And by the way, Andy's launching his own podcast through our podcast channel, which is which Rob and I started. He's got the Perform podcast with Andy Yalpin.

He talked a little bit about these exercise snacks. These are actually pretty cool in the sense that if you just take 60 seconds and do, you know, like a near all out, you'll run up the stairs. But be careful or jumping jacks for a minute as fast as you can. That raises heart rate in a way and adjusts your physiology in a way that really does carry over to better performance, including even things like VO2 max in other endeavors. So it's probably not the case that that's all you should do. But even small bouts of exercise can be very, very valuable. So that's reassuring.

And then I am a huge fan of non-sleep deep rest, aka yoga nidra, which means yoga sleep, which is just lying there as we talked about before. But it's slightly different than what we were talking about for creativity, lying there and deliberately inducing, using your mind to a deeply relax the different muscles of your body, stay calm, long, exhale, breathing, this kind of thing. There's a ten minute NSDR with my voice on YouTube that you can simply find and at zero cost. There are many with other voices, female voices, etcetera that you can find on YouTube as well.

And if you don't like those, we're soon to release on our Heroine Lab Clips channel a number of different meditations and NSDeM. Again, all zero cost of ten minute 20 minutes, 30 minutes. I would say that for limiting stress, improving sleep and restoring mental and physical vigor, NSDR is perhaps the best tool out there. And again, I didn't create it. I simply took yoga Nidra. I started calling it NSDR. And by the way, I was aware that I was going to upset some people when I did that.

I was not trying to appropriate anything, I promise. The problem was I would talk about yoga Nidra and studies of yoga Nidra showing that it replenishes dopamine in the basal ganglia, can restore mental and physical vigor. And then people would back away from me slowly, like yoga. I don't want to do yoga. And I'm like, no, no, this is yoga sleep. You don't actually move. And they're like, wow, that sounds pretty different. And I'm like, I know it sounds different. I go on and on. And then I just decided to call it non-sleep deep rest. And when you call something what it is or what it can accomplish, you move away from nomenclature. And I have very mixed feelings about renaming things. But I figure as long as I don't call it like the Huberman protocol, at least I'm distancing myself from it. And it's a zero cost protocol.

So non-sleep deep rest is valuable for restoring mental and physical vigor. It can potentially help offset sleep that you didn't get. It can help you fall back asleep at night, during the middle of the night. It can help you get better at falling asleep if you do it during the day. I did it for 20 minutes, minutes just prior to coming out here. I always do that prior to any event or thing that requires a lot of focus, this kind of thing. Otherwise, the jokes I tell are really just not okay. So I do think it's quite valuable and it's something to explore.

While I'm getting more sleep. Now, I neglected sleep for many years to and at least 15 years of getting just five or so. Am I doomed or can I offset this past damage? You can offset the past damage. One of the things that's really wonderful about the brain and body is that it can compensate. You know, there's certain things that I get asked a lot. I don't know why I get this question a lot, but people say, you know, I smoked meth for years and then can I get my neurons back? Like, well, you know, it's neurotoxic.

But the fact that you're asking the question is reassuring, you know, so don't start. But if you did, you know, I mean, you can always do better than you're doing, and you certainly can do better than you did in your past, or at least that's what they tell me. So really, when it comes to sleep deprivation, you know, I spent many all nighters. I wouldn't talk about sleep so much if I didn't have challenges with sleep. I mean, for a long time, I slept like a bulldog. I would sleep anywhere, anytime. By the way, folks, if you ever walk down the street and you see a bulldog and you stop, you'll notice they always stop. They always seem so friendly. They always stop.

They always stop. And they look up at you and you pet them and you're like, the reason they seem to like you so much is because they love to stop. I own one. They're all about the stopping. It's all. It's not you. It's about the stopping. Anyway, the. The goal is not necessarily to sleep as much as a bulldog, actually, it's the only animal. See? Can't help myself. It's the only animal for which there's a genetically induced apnea. Their brachycephalic, which means they have a short snout.

They. All those folds, you know. You know why the folds are there? The folds are there because they have a genetic mutation. They bred out the pain receptors in the face because they used to, like, have them like they would bull bait. They bite on the face of the bull. They kill all the pain. They bred out the pain receptors give them a floppy face, short snout, English bulldog. Thank you for the specificity. A biologist loves the specificity. The Frenchies are pretty cool. The Frenchies are pretty cool. They have a little more kick in them. Right. The bulldogs, a little less. And Costello was a bulldog mastiff, so he was more or less like a sea turtle, you know, just slow movement, stopping, and he's going forward and you can move aside.

Or in fact, Costello was so mellow that when he would lie down on the floor, I had one of those, you know, kind of robot vacuums, things we called a Roomba in our country. It would come up to his face and he would just. And it would bounce off his nose, and he wouldn't even take the opportunity to blink. It's. The bulldog is sort of the essence of economy of effort. And actually, if you look at people, people resemble different dog breeds. I spent a lot of time thinking about this.

Some dogs and some people have a bit more kind of reverberation in them. They've got a higher rpm all the time. All the time. All the time. And then they're the Bulldogs, right? Rick Rubin? Right. There are these people that are just more still. And we look at these people that are more still and think, well, there probably isn't that much going on in there, but now we know from the Rick thing and the Carl thing that they're thinking a lot. But in the case of Costello, they don't get much done. You know, I, maybe Costello wanted to get things done, but if he woke up on New Year's Day and said, all right, 50 rabbits this year, he never actually achieved that.

But listen, the point is, some of us sleep like bulldogs. Some of us tend to go to sleep and wake up in the middle of the night. I'm one of those people. Go to sleep 4 hours, wake up. I hate it. But I figured out that non-sleep deep breaths or yoga Nidra has taught me how to fall back asleep really quickly, and I can recover some sleep by having gotten through non-sleep, deep rest. Some people are waking up in the middle of the night because they don't have their sleep timing. Right.

We have a series on sleep coming out soon with the great Matt Walker record, a six-episode series with Matt, and he talks about something. I take no credit for this. This is Matt's acronym. Q q R T. Quality, quantity, regularity and timing. You want to pay attention to the amount of sleep. Some people need six, some people need eight. If you only got seven for years and you're reading that, you need eight or else you'll. Dementia.

Please don't worry about it. It is simply not the case. Some people need less, some people need more. This varies across the lifespan. Then there's the quality. How much of that sleep is continuous? Did you drink caffeine in the afternoon or alcohol in the evening, in which case the quality will be diminished. The regularity is very interesting. Going to sleep more or less five nights a week at least. Going to sleep more or less at the same time every night, plus or minus an hour, it's fine on the weekends.

I'm not just saying that so you don't all leave at once or a third of you leave. Some people do best by going to bed at eight or 09:00 p.m. and waking up at three or four in the morning. And that's where you would feel best. In fact, if you're somebody that wakes up at three or four in the morning, you might be going to sleep too late. And you have this intrinsic chronotype, as it's called, and you can shift your clock a bit later. But most people want to go to bed sometime between 10:00 p.m. and midnight. Wake up sometime between 06:00 a.m. and 08:00 a.m. and there's great variation there, too.

But you know, qqrt. So think about the quality, the quantity, the regularity, and the timing. Once you dial those in, everything is much, much better. So much so that even if you're not getting enough sleep, as long as you're going to bed at more or less the same time each night, you'll, you'll fare better. So if you didn't do any of this stuff for years, like I didn't have when I was in graduate school, etcetera, I. Don't despair. Don't despair.

It's very clear that the brain can recover. And I wouldn't waste a single moment thinking about what you didn't do. Also, my time machine's broken. Your time machine is broken. I realize that doesn't create a lot of comfort, but it's unlikely that you did substantial damage. Unlikely you did substantial damage unless you did that your whole life. And we're talking about a conversation that's happening lately in life, but even then, more sleep would be better.

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