The video discusses the impact of mindset, particularly focusing on stress and its effects on growth. Stress is perceived by certain groups, like the Seal teams, as a positive factor for growth, whereas the broader population may not hold the same belief. However, it's crucial to recognize that growth can also occur through non-stressful means. The video explores the idea that belief and expectation can shape physiological responses, as seen in various studies on stress, gluten intolerance, and gene-related capacity for exercise, suggesting that both psychological and physiological states heavily influence each other.

The video introduces neuroscientific techniques to improve focus and stress management, such as controlling breathing to regulate stress and enhance heart rate variability (HRV). It emphasizes the importance of getting morning sunlight to optimize sleep and wakefulness cycles and suggests breaking down work into ultradian cycles of focus followed by deliberate defocus periods. Furthermore, it discusses the effects of social media on dopamine levels, paralleling its usage with obsessive-compulsive behaviors. Strategies for managing technology use include dopamine detoxing, controlling stimuli exposure, and fostering positive anticipation in relationships.

Please remember to turn on the CC button to view the subtitles.

Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:

1. gravitational [ˌgrævɪˈteɪʃənəl] - (adjective) - Having a strong influence or attraction; relating to gravity. - Synonyms: (attractive, compelling, magnetic)

There's this idea, you know, we have this, and again, there's sort of a gravitational pull of this.

2. limbic [ˈlɪmbɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to a complex system of nerves and networks in the brain, involving parts of the brain concerned with instinct and mood. - Synonyms: (emotional, instinctual, visceral)

Forward center of mass, or, you know, always be in friction. limbic friction.

3. braided [ˈbreɪdɪd] - (adjective) - Interwoven or intertwined in a complex way. - Synonyms: (intertwined, interwoven, entangled)

But that real physiological response is braided in with our expectation and our understanding of what the response ought to be to create the actual response.

4. psychophysiological [ˌsaɪkəʊˌfɪziəˈlɒdʒɪkəl] - (adjective) - Referring to the relationship between psychological and physical processes. - Synonyms: (mind-body, psychosomatic, physiological psychology)

This is a psychophysiological response.

5. epigenetic [ˌɛpɪdʒəˈnetɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to changes in organisms caused by modification of gene expression rather than alteration of the genetic code itself. - Synonyms: (gene-expression, genetic, non-genetic)

A lot these days is being made of epigenetic effects and things, but this is almost in the different direction.

6. sinoatrial [ˌsaɪnəʊˈeɪtriəl] - (adjective) - Referring to the sinoatrial node in the heart that controls the heartbeat. - Synonyms: (cardiac node, heart node, pacemaker)

A signal is sent from a group of neurons on your heart called the sinoatrial node.

7. ultradian [ʌlˈtreɪdiən] - (adjective) - Referring to biological rhythms having a cycle shorter than 24 hours, typically ranging from 90 to 120 minutes. - Synonyms: (short-term cycle, biological rhythm, periodic)

Well, the research literature point to the key importance of so called ultradian cycles.

8. dopaminergic [ˌdəʊpəˌmɪˈnɜːdʒɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to or involving dopamine or its actions. - Synonyms: (dopamine-related, neurotransmitter-related, nerve-stimulating)

So I look at social media as initially being very dopaminergic, driving rewards surprise and excitement.

9. circadian [sɜːˈkeɪdiən] - (adjective) - Relating to biological processes occurring at intervals of about 24 hours. - Synonyms: (daily cycle, biological clock, 24-hour rhythm)

You've all probably heard of circadian cycles or circadian biology.

10. gabaergic [ˌɡæbəˈɜːrdʒɪk] - (adjective) - Relating to or affecting the neurotransmitter GABA, which inhibits or reduces the activity of neurons. - Synonyms: (neuroinhibitory, inhibitive, synaptic)

And as you shut down the prefrontal cortex, that gabaergic suppression of impulses starts to be released

The Most Powerful Mindset for Success - Andrew Huberman

I think the most powerful mindset, at least to me, is one that, again, I learned from Allie Crumb. This is a mindset that in her peer reviewed studies of different populations, it clear exists universally in people in the seal teams, but less so, or is perhaps even absent from the general population. Sadly, the idea that stress grows you, that challenge grows you, but isn't the only way that you can grow, I think is a very powerful mindset.

What do you mean by that? So what they did is she surveyed a bunch of different people, different professions, and asked, what's your view of stress? Do you think it grows you? It diminishes your ability, etcetera. So this isn't giving people information, this is asking them for information. And the only group that said, stress grows you, the more challenged, the better you get, etcetera, the more stress you experience, the more likely you are to succeed. Was this group from the Seal teams. I don't know if they were new recruits or if they had been in a long time, but that was the group.

I would add to that. That, yes, if you adopt the mindset that stress grows you, you're going to be much better off. But also that stress is not the only way to grow in life. Right. There's this idea, you know, we have this, and again, there's sort of a gravitational pull of this. Like, stress grows? Yes. You know, forward center of mass, or, you know, always be in friction. limbic friction. limbic friction.

How about a more expansive or nuanced version of that? Might be stress grows you. So if you're under stress, you're back on your heels from something, you think, okay, how can I get flat footed or even forward center of mass? You tell yourself, stress grows me. Stress grows me. Stress grows me. But that doesn't mean stress is the only thing that will grow you. Right. Learning to cycle between periods of hard work and deep, what I call non destructive, deliberate reset. Right. That's what really works over time.

I can attest to that. You know, people who just really go out and tie one on in order to recover, you can only get away with that for a few years before your body and mind start to give out. Right. So find non destructive ways to reset and also adopt the mindset that stress grows you and adopt the mindset that there are other ways to grow that don't involve stress. And I think you're set up to have a pretty fantastic life. That's my simple view of the way these things work.

One of the best books that I've read this year is the expectation effect by David Robson. So, he is a science writer from the UK, and he looked at a whole bunch of studies. The placebo effect, which everybody's familiar with, right? There is a particular expectation that an outcome is going to come from some sort of medication, and lo and behold, that outcome manifests. He found this across pretty much every area of anything that you care to care about.

So my two favorite studies from this. So interesting. He realized that gluten intolerance, self report gluten intolerance, has increased from 3% to 30% in ten years. This is why there's so many gluten free options on the menu. They've got 30% of the population to serve. Yeah. So people need it. And he was wondering, well, what is it? Human biology hasn't changed that much. Is it maybe that the foods have changed and people are responding to that? Or is it maybe some sort of expectation? Because the type of news stories that are hearing about gluten and about how bad it is for us and inflammation and all this sort of stuff, maybe it's that and people are expecting it.

So they brought people into a lab, they sit them down. These people do and do not have self reported gluten intolerances. And they give everybody the same meal. They tell everybody in the room that it's got gluten in it. It's got no gluten in it. After a while, people who don't have a gluten intolerance, biologically, who haven't eaten gluten, have diarrhea, they have hives, they're breaking out in inflammation, they're having to run at the bathroom. Okay, well, that's kind of interesting.

He did another. Another story that he spoke about Vo two max tests that they were looking at. Apparently there's a particular genetic mutation that allows people to blow off CO2 and upregulate oxygen in a better way. They brought people in, even numbers of people that did and did not have this genetic trait split them into two random groups. So there was a mix of both do and do not have the trait in each. First group was told, you've got the right genetic trait, you should be really, really good at this. Second group was told, sorry, you don't have it, you shouldn't be too good.

No surprise, perhaps, at the group that was told that they did, they ended up performing better. But when they actually looked at what was happening in the physiology of these people, they found that the people who didn't have the genetic mutation, but were told that they did had a lower overall lactate threshold. They had a lower overall heart rate. They were blowing off CO2 more effectively, and up regulating oxygen better than the people who did have the genetic mutation but were told that they didn't.

So he coined this term. That said, your expectations are even more powerful than your genes. That's a remarkable example. And I think that, you know, a lot these days is being made of epigenetic effects and things, but this is almost in the different direction. This is a psychophysiological response. I find this kind of thing, to be honest. Among the more fascinating and interesting aspects of neuroscience, if not the most interesting lately, those examples are tremendous.

So I can't count those at all with anything more spectacular. The work of Doctor Aliyah Crumb at Stanford. She runs the Stanford mind body lab, and she's done simple experiments, but they're really elegant. Instructing people, one group, all about the terrible effects of stress destroys your immune system, et cetera, et cetera. Other people telling them also true things, but all the positive effects of stress. It sharpens your ability to function. You can remember things better, et cetera, et cetera. You see exactly what you are told, basically.

Now, you can't lie to people. You can't tell them things that aren't true. It's just about the subset of information that you get, dictates the response you get. And perhaps the most dramatic was they gave two different groups of people, and then they actually each got the opposite condition, too. A milkshake. One group is told, this milkshake is very high calorie. It contains a lot of fat and sugar, etcetera. Another group is told, the milkshake they're getting is very low calorie. It's very nutrient sparse, et cetera. Then they measure hunger. So how long it takes for them to get hungry again after ingesting it.

They also look at insulin, and they also look at Ghrelin, this hormone that is secreted, um, as you get, essentially makes you hungry. It's associated with hunger. There are other things, too, but you see exactly what you would expect, which is that people that get the nutrient dense milkshake are satisfied for longer. Their ghrelin is suppressed, and their insulin is higher. You see the opposite in the group that had the so called low calorie shake. Turns out it's the exact same milkshake.

This is remarkable, right? Because this is not simply the placebo effect. I think it's the placebo effect plus the expectation effect, plus a real physiological effect. What you describe as well. And the way that Allie, the way she describes it, is that any event causes a real physiological response. But that real physiological response is braided in with our expectation and our understanding of what the response ought to be to create the actual response.

So it's sort of real plus perceived equals your reality. An ability to control your levels of stress in real time is extremely powerful. It turns out you can do this using physiology and neuroscience. Your breathing can directly impact your heart rate and your level of stress or calm. Here's how it works. When you inhale, your diaphragm moves down. This creates more space in your thoracic cavity, and your heart actually gets a little bit bigger. As a consequence, the rate of blood flow through that larger heart volume slows down.

A signal is sent from a group of neurons on your heart called the sinoatrial node. That signal goes up to the brain, and your brain sends a signal to speed the heart up. In other words, inhaling speeds your heart rate up. The opposite is true as well. When you exhale, your diaphragm moves, your heart gets a little bit smaller because there's a little bit less space in your thoracic cavity. As a consequence, blood flows more quickly through that smaller volume. The sinoatrial node registers that and sends a signal to your brain.

And the brain sends a signal to slow the heart down. So, in other words, inhaling speeds your heart rate up. Exhaling slows your heart rate down. So if you want to speed up your heart rate and be more alert, inhale more, or make those inhales more vigorous. More intense. If you want to calm down, you can do that quickly by making your exhales slightly longer than your inhales or making them more vigorous. This doesn't require any breath work. This is something that you can do in real time.

And that's what's called respiratory sinus arrhythmia. That's the technical phrase. It's also the basis of what's called heart rate variability, or HRv. But all you need to remember is inhaling deeper and longer will speed your heart rate up. Exhaling longer and more intensely will slow your heart rate down and will allow you to calm down in real time.

I wake up in the morning and I want to reach for my phone, but I know that even if I were to crank up the brightness on that phone screen, it's not bright enough to trigger that cortisol spike. And for me to be at my most alert and focused throughout the day and to optimize my sleep at night. So what I do is I get out of bed and I go outside, and if it's a bright, clear day and the sun is low in the sky, or the sun is, you know, starting to get overhead, what we call low solar angle, then I know I'm getting outside at the right time.

If there's cloud cover and I can't see the sun, I also know I'm doing a good thing, because it turns out, especially on cloudy days, you want to get outside and get as much light energy or photons in your eyes. But let's say it's a very clear day and I can see where the sun is. I do not need to stare directly into the sun if it's very low in the sky. I might do that because it's not going to be very painful to my eyes. However, if the sun is a little bit brighter and a little bit higher in the sky, sometimes it can be painful to look at.

So the way to get this sunlight viewing early in the day is to look toward the sun. If it's too bright to look at directly, well, then don't do that. You just look toward it, but not directly at it. It's absolutely fine to blink. In fact, I encourage you to blink whenever you feel the impulse to blink. Never look at any light, sunlight or otherwise, that's so bright that it's painful to look at because you can damage your eyes.

But for this morning sunlight viewing, best to not wear sunglasses. That's right, to not wear sunglasses. At least for this morning sunlight viewing, it is absolutely fine to wear eyeglasses or contact lenses, so called corrective lenses. In fact, those will serve you well in this practice or this tool, because they will focus the light onto your neural retina and onto those melanopsin intrinsically photosensitive ganglion cells. If your eyeglasses or contact lenses have uv protection, that's okay.

There's so many different wavelengths of light coming from the sun, and they are bright enough that they will trigger the mechanisms that you want triggered at this early time of day. So try and get outside, ideally within the first five minutes of waking, or maybe it's 15 minutes, but certainly within the first hour after waking.

I want to share with you three critical things about this tool of morning sunlight viewing. First of all, this is not some woo biology thing. This is grounded in the core of our physiology. There are literally hundreds, if not thousands, of quality peer reviewed papers showing that light viewing early in the day is the most powerful stimulus for wakefulness throughout the day. And it has a powerful positive impact on your ability to fall and stay asleep at night.

So this is really the foundational power tool for ensuring a great night's sleep and for feeling more awake during the day. Second of all, if you wake up before the sun is out, you can and probably should flip on artificial lights in your internal home environment or apartment or wherever you happen to live. If your goal is to be awake, if you wake up at four in the morning and you need to be awake, well then turn on artificial lights once the sun is out.

However, once the sun has risen, then you still want to get outside and view sunlight. Some of you will wake up before the sun comes out. And if you're asking whether or not turning on artificial lights can replace sunlight at those hours, unfortunately, the answer is no. Unless you have a very special light. We'll talk about what kind of light the bright artificial lights in your home environment are not, I repeat, are not going to be sufficiently bright to turn on the cortisol mechanism and the other wake up mechanisms that you need early in the day.

The diabolical twist, however, is that those lights in your home or apartment, or even on your phone are bright enough to disrupt your sleep if you look at them too late at night or in the middle of the night. So there's this asymmetry in our retinal, our eye biology and in our brain's biology, whereby early in the day, right around waking, you need a lot of light, a lot of photons, a lot of light energy. And artificial lights generally just won't accomplish what you need them to accomplish. But at night, even a little bit of artificial light can really mess up your so called circadian, your 24 hours clocks, and all these mechanisms that we're talking about.

So if you wake up before the sun is out and it's still dark, please turn on as many bright artificial lights as you possibly can or need, but then get outside once the sun is out. On cloud, cloudy days, you especially need to get outside. I repeat, on cloudy days, overcast days, you especially need to get outside and get sunlight. You just need to get more of it.

Now, how much light and how much light viewing do you need? This is going to vary depending on person and place, literally where you live on earth, whether or not there's a lot of tree cover, whether or not you're somebody who has sensitive eyes or less sensitive eyes. It's really impossible for me to give an absolute prescriptive, but we can give some general guidelines in general on a clear day, meaning no cloud cover or minimal cloud cover. You want to get this sunlight exposure to your eyes for about five minutes or so. It could be three minutes one day, could be seven minutes the next day, about five minutes.

On a day where there's cloud cover. So the sun is just peeking through the clouds or it's more dense cloud cover. You want to get about ten minutes of sunlight exposure to your eyes early in the day. And on days that are really densely overcast or maybe even a rainy, you're going to want to get as much as 20 or 30 minutes of sunlight exposure. Another key thing is do not forget about, just don't try and get this sunlight exposure through a car or a window.

Whether or not it's tinted or otherwise, it takes far too long. It's simply not going to trigger the relevant mechanisms. You would be standing there all day trying to get enough light into your eyes from the morning sunlight, and by then the sun will have already moved from low solar angle to overhead and it simply won't work for all sorts of mechanisms related to your circadian rhythm functions. So just don't try and do it through a windshield, sunglasses or a window. It's just not going to work.

Get outside. If the weather is really bad or for whatever reason, safety reasons, you cannot get outside, well then I suppose try and get near a window. That would be the last, last resort. But you really want to get outside to get the sunlight exposure.

A question I often get is how long should I try to focus? Well, the research literature point to the key importance of so called ultradian cycles. You've all probably heard of circadian cycles or circadian biology. Circa the day. circadian is about 24 hours. Cycle. Well, our brain and body operate within that day or within each and every day, I should say with 90 minutes ultra DN cycles.

So my suggestion would be anytime you're going to sit down and try and focus, you're going to try and do a focused bout of physical exercise or skill learning or musical learning, or maybe you're even just having a conversation. Maybe you're a therapist or you're attending therapy or a class. How long should it be? And the ideal duration is about 90 minutes. Not exactly 90 minutes, but we can reliably say 90 minutes or less.

It doesn't have to be the full 90 minutes. But trying to push yourself to be able to drop into 2 hours of focus or 3 hours of focus while possible, is not really in line with what we know about the underlying biology. Everything from our sleep states or the different stages of sleep and our waking states is divided into these 90 minutes cycles, or so called ultradian cycles. So what I like to do is set a timer for 90 minutes. I acknowledge and accept the fact that under most conditions, unless I'm really pressed for a deadline and I'm optimally caffeinated, etcetera, the first five to ten minutes of that 90 minutes are a transition time.

It's like the warm up for focus. But I do include it in that 90 minutes, and then I really try and drop into doing focused mental work or learning of some sort. Again, this could be physical as well, motor skill learning, or I think we're running or lifting weights, etcetera, and really try and drop into that across the full 90 minutes. Again, accepting the fact, okay, it's not just an idea. The fact that occasionally our focus will flicker, it will jump out of focus.

And then a big part of being able to focus is to go back to focusing. The way I'd like you to conceptualize this, perhaps, is that arrowhead suddenly getting very, very broad, that you're focusing on many things, or that arrow shifts to a different location in the room. The key is to be able to shift it back and to narrow it once again. And that's an active process. So much so that it requires a lot of metabolic energy.

Your brain is the chief consumer of metabolic energy. The calories that you consume is so called basal metabolic rate. Most of that isn't related to movement or heartbeat or breathing. It's related to brain function. Your brain is a glutton with respect to caloric need.

So understand that at the end of 90 minutes, or maybe even after 45 minutes, you might feel rather tired or even exhausted. And it's very, very important that after about a focus, that you take at least ten minutes, and ideally as long as 30 minutes and go through what I call deliberate defocus. You really want to focus on somewhat menial tasks or things that really don't require a ton of your concentration. This is starting to become a little bit of a movement out there in the kind of pop psychology and optimization world. This idea of not looking at your phone as you walk down the hall to the bathroom, certainly not looking at your phone in the bathroom.

And I should mention, by the way, this is a particular annoyance of mine. Have you noticed that wait times for restrooms in public places has increased substantially in the last ten years? The reason for that is not digestive. Okay? It's not the gut microbiome. It might be the gut microbiome, but chances are it's because people are on their phones in the bathroom. So you're doing yourself and everybody else a favor by staying off your phone in the restroom, staying off your phone while walking down the hall. Try and give yourself some time to deliberately decompress, to let your mental states idle, to not be focused on any one thing.

That period of idling is essential for your ability to focus, much in the same way that rest between sets of resistance training or rest between exercise is vital to being able to focus and perform during the actual sets or during the actual bouts of running or cycling or whatever your particular form of exercise might be. So deliberate decompression is key. And I know this is hard because we're all being drawn in by the incredible rich array of sensory information available on our phones and other devices. But I can't emphasize this enough. Our ability to focus is not just related to what happens during the entry and movement through those focus bouts, but after those focus bouts, we really need to deliberately decompress.

And of course, the ultimate decompress, the time in which we are not directing our thinking and our action is during sleep. And so it's no wonder, or I should say it holds together logically that that deep, long lasting duration of not controlling where our mind is at is in fact the ultimate form of restoration, even if we have very intense dreams.

The thing about cell phones is when you first get on there and you have, let's say, you're no wifi on the flight or something, and you land, it can actually be quite stimulating. You get a lot of dopamine. Oh, there's this. Oh, there's that. But very quickly, when you're scrolling on social media, you're no longer getting the novelty, but you're continuing to do it. You almost don't know why you're doing it. At that point, it shifts over to something that's a bit more like an obsessive compulsive behavior, where we can define an obsessive compulsive behavior, where the obsession leads to a compulsion. So the obsession is a thought, the compulsion is a behavior, but the acting out of the compulsion merely serves to increase the obsession.

Right. This is very different than being obsessed with food or obsessed with cleanliness. There's no payoff. Right? Exactly. There's no anxiety relief by carrying out the compulsion with OCD behaviors like scrolling social media, the dopamine quickly wanes and then you find that you're just sort of. And we've all been there, you're scrolling, why am I doing this? This isn't that interesting. That isn't. This isn't that interesting.

Now, the algorithms for social media are very clever, and I don't want to demonize it. I, you know, provide a lot of. A lot of my life is spent on, you know, on social media now. But in the algorithms that they've incorporated function on, the most powerful way to keep people doing a behavior, or an animal, for that matter, is intermittent random reward or random intermittent reward that you don't know when you're going to hit the jackpot. So you're scrolling, you're scrolling and then you see something. Typically, it's very high.

What, you know, in nerd speak, we'd say signal to noise. So if you're reading some interesting things, this came out in the news, this came out, and then it's all of a sudden a riot or a person that is jump is base jumping off a building or, you know, for people that are scrolling, looking at bodies or something like that, live bodies, hopefully people aren't looking at dead bodies. But look, if something's very tragic, then that has this gravitational pull, and then what happens is you start getting the system working for that next dopamine hit that you don't know when it's going to come. It's just like gambling.

So I look at social media as initially being very dopaminergic, driving rewards surprise and excitement, but very quickly transitioning to something more like OCD and the kinds of behaviors where it looks. If you. If we were to look at ourselves through the lens of an experiment, like we would an animal experiment, we think that animal is sick. If you saw an animal digging in the corner, looking, looking, looking, looking for a bone, the dog is looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, looking, you'd think, that's really sad. That's us, right? That's us.

I'm pointing at myself intentionally. That's us. So we have to learn to self regulate the amount of time. But that doesn't have to be a process of, you know, scruffing ourselves and saying, don't do it, don't do it. Think about it in terms of the positive. The more time away from something, the more positively reinforcing it will be when you return.

And that just to sort of superimpose this onto the relationship conversation, you know, many of us are fortunate to have partners that we love spending a lot of time with. It's also good to miss that person every once in a while. Now, that might be an hour for some people apart of no communication. It might be a week. Everyone varies on this, on the spectrum, but the idea of missing someone is that positive anticipation, that kind of pain, right? It's a motivational state, and then when you see them, it's all the richer.

So dopamine detox, I would have thought, was not something real. It seemed kind of silly to me, actually. And I'll tell you why it seems silly, why it still seems silly, but why it may have some utility. But then Ana, Doctor Anna Lemke told me that it actually can be quite useful to take some time and space away from social media, certainly from any addictive drugs. That's the treatment for addiction, and restore those dopamine levels to baseline.

Now, the way that dopamine detoxing was initially described in the Bay area, where seemed a lot of tech types were talking about it was in terms of, I heard something like, oh, people aren't even looking at other people, people's faces. You know, they're really kind of living this, like, monkish lifestyle, like no food that they really enjoy, no anything. That, to me, seems kind of crazy and kind of extreme. I mean, I can understand not ingesting a lot of highly palatable foods, you know, eating some blander foods. I can understand not, certainly not doing any prescription drugs or taking some time off from caffeine.

Caffeine increases dopamine receptors, which makes the caffeine, the dopamine that's available, more powerful at evoking the dopamine response. I can understand avoiding certain substances and behaviors, but the idea that you weren't going to look people in the eye because it was going to be too much dopamine, I mean, I guess it depends on who you're looking in the eye and how much their look positively arouses you. But the fact of the matter is that that's not a very rational way to think about dopamine detox.

But staying out of high intensity, highly rewarding activities, I think could be useful in terms of reestablishing that dopamine balance. And everything we know from Ana's work is that dopamine, you know, if you drive those dopaminergic states too long, addictive drugs, etcetera, people can do this with sex, food, drugs, gambling, social media, all sorts of things. Pornography, you know, what ends up happening is the amount of dopamine that's released over time goes down and down and down and down, and pretty much is reversing into the territory of pain. And then people, again, are back to this thing where they're scrolling Internet porn eight, nine times or hours a day, and then they're wondering why this isn't effective for them anymore, whereas it was before.

And there's additional issue with pornography, which is not often discussed, which is that, remember guys in particular, the brain is a learning prediction machine. And if. I'm not trying to say that all pornography is bad, but there are good data to support the idea that if your brain learns to be aroused by watching other people have sex, it is not necessarily going to carry over to the ability to get aroused when you're one on one with somebody else. Right. Especially young kids who are consuming a lot of pornography. The brain is learning sexual arousal to other people habits.

So you're going to program yourself into being a voyeur. Yeah. Or just create challenges in sexual interactions with, you know, with peers, with a. With a real partner. Mary Harrington has the three laws of porno dynamics, and the second law of porno dynamics is the law of fape entropy. It says that whatever you start out wanking to will get progressively more intense over time.

And I think that this is sort of speaking to that ever, ever sort of escalating amount of the wildness that you need to watch in order to get an ever decreasing stimulus that comes back. Yeah. And, you know, here I'm approaching this only through the lens of biology, right? I'm not a, you know, I'm not a psychologist and I'm certainly not political in it in any way. At least I have ideas about politics, but I just don't discuss them publicly. But the idea here is that, you know, I'm not saying pornography as a stimulus is bad or good.

What I'm saying is it in its availability and its extreme forms, it's a very potent stimulus and very potent stimuli of any kind, extremely palatable food, extreme pornography, extreme experiences like bungee cord jumping, those set a threshold for dopamine release. And Anna will tell you that, and I'm sure she did, that the higher the dopamine peak, the bigger the drop afterwards. And it's not that you drop to baseline, you drop below baseline.

So again, it's not, these things aren't good or bad, they just have to be controlled in a way, because when people are pursuing dopamine peaks over and over and over and they aren't getting them typically, it's because they've been pursuing that activity far too often. The key thing here is that, and this is the beauty of the dopamine system. Just like the stress system is generic, the fear system is generic. It's designed for a bunch of different scenarios. The motivation system is also generic. It can be to achieve the next lamppost as a milestone, or it can be 5 miles as the next milestone.

You get to control that. And it's. So it's completely arbitrary, right? I mean, one of the most brilliant things that was ever said to me by an extremely skilled psychoanalyst is so simple, and yet I do think it's the most fundamental thing to understanding oneself, is that it's all internal. Right? If you finish a marathon in first place, no one comes along and drips dopamine in your ear, you self generate that.

It's all internal. It's all about your internal representation. Now, that doesn't mean that there aren't good and bad events in life, but the fact of the matter is that if you set the next milestone as just outside the distance of what you're comfortable with and you make it there, if you allow yourself a moment to register that win, you get energy to do to then set the next milestone and achieve it. That energy is dopamine converted into epinephrine, into adrenaline.

When people drink, no matter who you are, initially, there's that shutting down of those prefrontal cortical circuits. There's a gradual shutting down of the circuits that control memory. But then people divide into these two bins, and these two bins are the people who, after more than a couple of drinks, start to feel sedated, and the people who, after more than a few drinks, do not start to feel sedated.

Now, of course, there's going to be differences created by how quickly people are drinking, whether or not they're combining different types of alcohol, the types of alcohol, etcetera. But in general, that can predict whether or not you're somebody who has a predisposition for alcoholism or not. One also very interesting finding is that alcohol changes the relationship between what's called the hypothalamus and the pituitary, pituitary gland and the adrenals.

Now, the hypothalamus is a small collection of neurons about the size of a large gumball, sits above the roof of your mouth, and it houses neurons that are responsible for some incredible aspects of our behavior and our mindset. Things like rage, things like sex drive, things like temperature regulation, very primitive functions, including appetite, thirst, etcetera. Alcohol, because it can go anywhere in the brain, remember, it's water and fat soluble, has effects on the hypothalamus. The hypothalamus normally provides very specific signals to what's called the pituitary gland. This is a little gland that actually sticks out of the brain, but it receives instructions from the hypothalamus.

And then the pituitary releases hormones into the bloodstream that go and talk to your adrenals. Your adrenal glands sit right above your kidneys in your lower back, and the adrenals release, as the name suggests, adrenaline, also called epinephrine, and also a molecule called cortisol, which is involved in the kind of longer term stress response, has some healthy effects, too, on the immune system. Okay, so the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis. I know that's a mouthful.

You don't need to remember the names, but the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis maintains your physiological balance of what you perceive as stressful and what you don't perceive as stressful. People who drink regularly. So this, again, could be just one or two drinks per night, or it could be somebody that drinks just on Fridays or just on Saturdays or maybe just on the weekend. Two to four drinks. Well, those people experience changes in their hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis that result in more cortisol, more of this so called stress hormone being released at baseline when they are not drinking.

This is really important. People who drink. A and when I say a bit, I don't mean one or two sips or even a glass of wine every once in a while. I mean, again, people that are maybe having one drink a night with dinner and maybe on the weekend, a few more. Can I offer a bunch of different patterns to explain how it could also be two or three drinks on Friday or six drinks only on Saturday?

Well, all of those groups experience increases in cortisol release from their adrenal glands when they are not drinking. And as a consequence, they feel more stressed and more anxiety when they aren't drinking. This is a seldom talked about effect of alcohol, because so often we hear about the immediate effects of alcohol, and we've been talking about some of those effects. Effects like reducing the amount of stress.

I mean, how many times have we heard somebody say, oh, I need a drink? And then they have a drink, and they're like, calm down. Now they can shake off the thoughts about the day's work. They can start to think about things in a maybe more grounded or rational way, or at least they believe that, or they can somehow just relax themselves.

Well, while that very well may be true, that it can relax them when they are not drinking, that level of cortisol that's released at baseline has increased substantially. Again, this relates to a defined neural circuit between brain and body, and it has to do with the ratio of cortisol to some of the other hormones involved in the stress response. We'll provide a reference to the study that describes how all of this works for those of you that really want to delve into it.

But let's go back to this issue of those who are prone to alcoholism versus those who are not. Remember, there are people who have genetic variants that, meaning genes that they inherited from their parents, that make it more likely that they will become alcoholics. But there are also people who drink often, who start to experience this increase in alertness the longer they drink across the night. Part of that effect, we think, is because of changes in this hypothalamic, pituitary adrenal axis.

So alcohol is kind of a double hit in this sense. It's causing changes in our brain circuitry and neurochemistry that, at the time in which we're inebriated, are detrimental. And it's causing changes in neural circuitry that persist long past the time in which we're experiencing the feeling of being tipsy or drunk now. Again, I don't want to demonize alcohol. I'm not saying, oh, you know, if you have a glass of wine now and again, or you drink a beer now and again or even have, you know, a mixed drink now and again or a shot, that that's necessarily terrible for you. I certainly do not want that to be the message.

What I'm saying is that if people are ingesting alcohol chronically, even if it's not every night, there are well recognized changes in neural circuits. There are well recognized changes in neurochemistry within the brain, and there are well recognized changes in the brain to body stress system that generally point in three directions. Increased stress when people are not drinking, diminished mood and feelings of well being when people are not drinking. And, as you'll soon learn, changes in the neural circuitry that cause people to want to drink even more in order to get just back to baseline or the place that they were in terms of their stress modulation and in terms of their feelings of mood before. Before they ever started drinking in the first place.

So, again, I don't want to demonize alcohol, but I do want to emphasize that there are long term plastic changes, meaning changes in neural circuitry and hormone circuitry that across a period of several months and certainly across a period of years, of the sorts of drinking patterns I described, which I think for most people are going to sound like pretty typical, right?

I mean, nothing that I described so far was about drinking a case a night, or about binging on alcohol in the way that we often hear about it in the news. These are pretty common patterns of alcohol consumption. I mean, all you have to do is board a transatlantic flight or actually go to an airport on a Sunday afternoon in a sunny area of the US, and people are having 3456 beers, etcetera.

Again, personal choice is personal choice. I'm not telling you what to do, but it's very clear that those sorts of drinking patterns are changing neural circuitry, and they're changing hormone circuitry. And I'd love to be able to tell you that they're changing them for the better, but they simply are not. They're actually changing them for the worse. And worse is defined as making people less resilient to stress, higher levels of baseline stress, and lower mood overall.

So what happens when alcohol gets into the brain that makes us feel tipsy or drunk, and in some people, makes people feel really especially energized and happy? Well, alcohol is indiscriminate in terms of which brain areas it goes to. Again, it doesn't bind to particular receptors, but it does seem to have a propensity or an affinity for particular brain areas that are involved in certain kinds of thinking and behavior. So one of the first things that happens is that there's a slight, at least after the first drink or second drink, there's a slight suppression in the activity of neurons in the prefrontal cortex.

This is an area of your neocortex that's involved in thinking and planning, and perhaps above all, in suppression of impulsive behavior. So if you go to a party and they're serving alcohol and people are consuming drinks, what you'll notice is that a few minutes into that party, the volume of people's voices will increase. And that's because people are simply not paying attention to their voice modulation. As other people start speaking more loudly, other people are speaking more loudly.

We've all had this experience, right, of going to a party, and then you step outside for a moment, you go, oh, my goodness, I was shouting. You come over the next day, you got a sore throat. Might be that you picked up some sort of bug, some virus or something, but oftentimes it's just the fact you've been shouting all night just to be heard. Because as the prefrontal cortex shuts down, people stop modulating their level of speech quite as much. Also notice that people start gesticulating more.

People will start standing up and sitting down more. They'll start walking around more. If there's music on, people might spontaneously start dancing. All of this is because these areas of the prefrontal cortex normally are providing what's called top down inhibition. They are releasing a neurotransmitter called Gaba onto various parts of the brain.

They're involved in impulsive motor behavior and thought patterns. And as you shut down the prefrontal cortex, that gabaergic suppression of impulses starts to be released. So people will say things that they want to say without so much forethought about what they're saying, or they might do things that they want to do without really thinking it through quite as much, or they might not even remember thinking it through at all. Or experience, I should say, thinking it through it all.

We haven't talked about blacking out yet and the effects of alcohol on memory, but as long as we're there, I'll just tell you that alcohol has a very strong effect in suppressing the neural networks that are involved in memory formation and storage. This is why oftentimes, we forget the events of a night out if we've been drinking. One of the more important things to know about the effects of alcohol in the brain is this disruption in top down inhibition, but also that areas of the brain that are involved in flexible behavior sort of considering different options.

Like, I could do a, or I could do b, I could say this to them, or I could say that I could say it in that way, or I could say it in this way. This might be a little more tactful. Those brain areas basically shut down entirely, and people just tend to say what they want to say. So the key thing to understand is that when people drink, the prefrontal cortex and top down inhibition is diminished. That is, habitual behavior, and impulsive behavior starts to increase.

Now, what's interesting is this is true in the short term, so after people have one or two, maybe three or four drinks. But it's also true that the more often that people drink, there are changes in the very circuits that underlie habitual and impulsive behavior.

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