Essentials: The Science of Emotions & Relationships

**Andrew Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to Huberman Lab Essentials, where we revisit past episodes for the most potent and actionable science-based tools for mental health, physical health and performance.
My name is Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. So let's talk about emotions. Emotions are a fascinating and vital aspect of our life experience. It's fair to say that emotions make up most of what we think of as our experience of life. Even the things we do, our behaviors and the places we go and the people we end up encountering in our life, all of that really funnels into our emotional perception of what those things mean, whether or not they made us happy or sad or depressed or lonely or we're awe-inspiring. Now, one thing that is absolutely true is that everyone's perception of emotion is slightly different. Meaning, your idea of happy is very likely different than my idea of what a state of happiness is. And we know this also for color vision, for instance. Even though the cells in your eye and my eye that perceive the color red are identical right down to the genes that they express, we can be certain based on experimental evidence and what are called psychophysical studies, that your idea of the most intense red is going to be very different than my idea of the most intense red. If we were given a selection of 10 different reds and asked which one is most intense, which one looks most red, and that seems crazy. You would think that something as simple as color would be universal and yet it's not. And so we need to agree at the outset that emotions are complicated and yet they are tractable. They can be understood. And today we're going to talk about a lot of tools to understand what emotions are, for you to understand what your emotional states mean and what they don't mean. And in doing that, that will allow you to place value on whether or not you should hold an emotional state as true or not true, whether or not it has meaning or it doesn't, as well as whether or not the emotions of others are important to you in a given context. We're going to talk a lot about development. In fact, we're going to center a lot of our discussion today around infancy and puberty. We're also going to talk about tools for enhancing one's emotional range and for navigating difficult emotional situations. I am not a clinical psychologist. I'm not a therapist, but I do have some background in psychology. And today I'm going to be drawing from the psychology greats, not me, but from the greats of psychology who studied emotion, who studied emotional development and linking that to the neuroscience of emotion. Because nowadays we understand a lot about the chemicals and the hormones and the neural circuits in the brain and body that underlie emotion. So while there's no one single universally true theory of emotion at the intersection of many of the existing theories, there are really some ground truths. I'd like to take a quick break and thank our sponsor, 8 Sleep. 8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. Now I've spoken before on this podcast about the critical need for us to get adequate amounts of quality sleep each night. Now one of the best ways to ensure a great night's sleep is to ensure that the temperature of your sleeping environment is correct. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, your body temperature actually has to drop by about one to three degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, your body temperature actually has to increase about one to three degrees. 8 Sleep makes it very easy to control the temperature of your sleeping environment by allowing you to program the temperature of your mattress cover at the beginning, middle and end of the night. I've been sleeping on an 8 Sleep mattress cover for nearly four years now and it has completely transformed and improved the quality of my sleep. 8 Sleep recently launched their newest generation of the pod cover called the Pod 4 Ultra. The Pod 4 Ultra has improved cooling and heating capacity. I find that very useful because I like to make the bed really cool at the beginning of the night, even colder in the middle of the night and warm as I wake up. That's what gives me the most slow wave sleep and rapid eye movement sleep. It also has a snoring detection that will automatically lift your head a few degrees to improve your airflow and stop your snoring. If you'd like to try an 8 Sleep mattress cover, you can go to 8sleep.com/huberman to access their Black Friday offer right now. With this Black Friday discount, you can save up to $600 on their Pod 4 Ultra. This is 8 Sleep's biggest sale of the year. 8 Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's 8sleep.com/huberman.