Essentials: Tools for Managing Stress & Anxiety

**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. I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode is going to be all about the science of emotions. And today, we're going to talk in particular about something that most often is called stress. You might be thinking, wait, stress isn't an emotion, but stress really lies at the heart of whether or not our internal experience is matched well or not to our external experience or the events that are happening to us and around us. And as you'll soon see, those converge or combine to create what we call emotions. I'd like you to come away from today's episode with what I call an organizational logic, a framework for thinking about these things that typically we just call happy or sad or depressed or anxious. And I'm going to make sure that you have tools that are grounded in physiology and neuroscience that will allow you to navigate this otherwise complex space that we call emotions that will allow you to ground yourself better when you're feeling like life is weighing on you or you're kind of being pulled by the currents of life as well as to support other people, whether or not that's in a psychological practice, if you're a practitioner or you have clients or children or spouses, really to be able to support other people in your environment better. And as you may recall, the nervous system, which includes the brain and the eyes and the spinal cord, but also all the connections with the organs of the body includes the brain and body. And those organs of the body, your gut and your liver and your spleen, they're also communicating with the brain. So I look forward to a day, in fact, when we no longer think about neuroscience as just the brain. And many neuroscientists now also think about the body, of course, the brain controls the body, but the body is also having a very profound and concrete influence on the brain. Today, we're going to talk about objective tools that match the brain body experience or separate the brain body experience in ways that leverage your ability to lean into life better, to feel better, literally to just feel better about what you're experiencing. And believe it or not, to be able to control your emotions when that's appropriate. Okay, so what is stress? We hear all the time that stress is bad. We hear people saying they're really stressed out. What is stress?
Stress at its core is a generalized system. It wasn't designed for tigers attacking us or people attacking us. It's a system to mobilize other systems in the brain and body. It wasn't designed for one thing. And that gives it a certain advantage in taking over the state of our brain and body, but it also gives you, all of us, an advantage in controlling it because it's based on hardwired biological mechanisms and there are hardwired biological mechanisms, meaning cells and chemicals and pathways and tissues that exist in you right now that require no neural plasticity that allow you to put a break on stress. And so we're going to talk about those. So let's talk about the stress response. And by doing that, you will understand exactly why the tools I'm going to give you work. For those of you that are saying wait, I just want the tools, just give me a summary. Trust me, if you understand mechanism, you are going to be in a far better position to incorporate these tools, to teach these tools to others and to modify them as your life circumstances change. Let's be clear about what we already know, which is that stressors can be psychological or they can be physical. If I put you outside on a cold day without a jacket for a very long time, that is stressful. If I have you prepare for too many exams at once and you can't balance it all with your sleep schedule and your other needs for comfort and wellbeing like food, rest, sleep and social connection, that is stressful. So what happens when the stress response hits? Let's talk about the immediate or what we call the acute stress response. We could also think of this as a short-term stress. So you have a collection of neurons that start right about at your neck and run down to about your navel, a little bit lower. And those are called the sympathetic chain ganglia. When something stresses us out, either in our mind or because something enters our environment, that chain of neurons becomes activated like a bunch of dominoes falling all at once. It's very fast. When those neurons are activated, acetylcholine is released, but there's some other neurons for the aficionados out there. They're called the post-ganglionic neurons. Those ones respond to that acetylcholine, and then they release epinephrine, which is the equivalent to adrenaline. So we have this system where very fast, whenever we're stressed, the core of our body, these neurons down the middle of our body, release these chemicals, and then there's adrenaline or epinephrine released at particular organs and acts in particular ways. Some things like the muscles of your legs and your heart and other things that need to be active when you're stressed, they have a certain kind of receptor, which is called the beta receptor. And that beta receptor responds to epinephrine and blood vessels dilate. They get bigger and blood rushes in to our legs. The heart rate speeds up. Lots of things happen that get activated. And at the same time, that epinephrine activates other receptors on certain tissues that we don't need, the ones involved in digestion, reproduction, and things of that sort that are luxuries for when things are going well, not things to pay attention to when we're stressed. So the stress response is two-pronged. It's a yes for certain things, and it's a no, you may not right now for other things. That's why you feel blood in certain organs and tissues of your body, but not in others. But basically, you are activated in ways that support you moving. And that's because fundamentally the stress response is just this generic thing that says, do something. You're going to feel agitated, and that's because it was designed to move you. So this is important because if you want to control stress, you need to learn how to work with that agitation.