Andrew Huberman: You Must Control Your Dopamine! The Shocking Truth About Cold Showers!

Andrew D. Huberman (0:00)

I'll tear up if I talk about it, because things were going well in my life, and then one day, just frack, everything came crashing down.

And I've learned that friendship is super powerful. I had people descending on my home to be with me. One day, I just like look up, and Lex is in the room, and they sat with me, picked me up, and they reminded me who I am. And, you know, I have just such immense gratitude for that. Dr. Andrew Huberman is a world-renowned neuroscientist, Stanford professor and podcaster, revolutionizing how we understand the brain, and how we can adopt change, break bad habits, and achieve peak performance. Growing up, I was scared, depressed, and confused. My parents split up. I was getting in multiple fights. I found myself locked up in this residential treatment program, and I realized that I need to take control of my life.

Steven Bartlett (1:00)

I'm so intrigued by that because so many people feel stuck in their lives. So how does someone even make those life-changing decisions?

Andrew D. Huberman (1:06)

Well, there are so many zero-cost tools that can change your brain. We can go through all of them.

Steven Bartlett (1:11)

So, I want to talk about dopamine in this graph.

Andrew D. Huberman (1:14)

The dopamine is kind of like a wave pool. In every domain of life, whether or not it's food, exercise, for some people it's work or sex, if you push things to the max, you're going to feel depleted and understimulated afterwards, and you need so much more energy to get the same output. And when you're in that dopamine depleted state, typically what people do is they try and access things that are going to reactivate the dopamine circuitry, and all it does is drive them further and further into that trauma.

Steven Bartlett (1:41)

So, how do you fix that?

Andrew D. Huberman (1:42)

So, it's hard to exit, but you start with...

Steven Bartlett (1:51)

Andrew, at the very heart of what you do, at the very, very heart, if I looked at all that you've produced and I had to encapsulate it into just one or two sentences that encapsulates your mission statement, what would that be?

Andrew D. Huberman (2:06)

I want to share the beauty and utility of biology. I want people to understand how incredible the human body and brain are and how even a small understanding of the underlying mechanisms, about how we interact with light or temperature, exercise, thoughts, emotions, et cetera, how that can impact our health in really powerful ways.

Steven Bartlett (2:31)

You have become a cultural phenomenon because of the information that you've shared. In your view, why and how has that happened? I guess maybe most importantly, why has that happened? What is it that you've kind of catered to that was absent in people's understanding of themselves?

Andrew D. Huberman (2:48)

Well, I think people are intensely curious about themselves, meaning our species, why we feel the way we feel, why other people feel and act the way they do. And I think most everybody, I like to think, is deeply interested in how to be the best version of themselves. And I think what I've done is I've provided a lens into all of that through biology, through neuroscience in particular.

But also, I'm a practitioner. So since I was pretty young, I've been actively involved in sports and psychology and interested in what one can do, in some cases take things to avoid in order to be the best version of oneself. And so I'm an academic, right? I have a laboratory and I'm a tenured faculty member at Stanford. Although I should mention that I've shrunk my laboratory considerably in the last year or so, but I've done experiments on animal models, on humans and human clinical trials. So I have the understanding and expertise of a research scientist. And at the same time, I think very deeply about how to translate the information in these peer reviewed papers, how to translate the information in the fields of science and medicine into actionable, what we call protocols. And I do my best to distill things down into, you know, actionable things. But I'm not a big believer in dumbing things down. I decided to go the opposite way. Rather than give little snippets, 90-second videos, we include those, but rather I decided to go for full one to three hour, maybe even four hour lectures on a topic because I believe, and I'm not the first to say it, that people have near infinite ability to learn if they are told things in a way that's clear. So I believe that people want to understand, they can understand, and it doesn't require decorating things in a lot of complicated language. Sometimes we need to include some complicated language just because that's the way science and medicine are, and that people are willing to learn that and carry that along. And once they understand how they work a little bit better, you arm them with a little bit of knowledge, then really they're just off to the races and the rest takes care of itself.