LIVE EVENT Q&A: Dr. Andrew Huberman at Meridian Hall in Toronto

Andrew D. Huberman (0:00)

Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

Recently, the Huberman Lab hosted a live event at the Meridian Theater in Toronto, Ontario. The event consisted of a lecture entitled The Brain Body Contract, followed by a question and answer session. We wanted to make sure that the question and answer session was available to everybody, regardless of who could attend in person. I also want to make sure to thank the sponsors at that event, which were AG1 and 8 Sleep. 8 Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. One of the key things to getting a great night's sleep is to make sure 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 by about one to three degrees. With 8 Sleep, you can program the temperature of your sleeping environment in the beginning, middle, and end of your night. It has a number of other features like tracking the amount of rapid eye movement and slow wave sleep that you get, things that are essential to really dialing in the perfect night's sleep for you. I've been sleeping on an 8 Sleep mattress cover for well over two years now, and it has greatly improved my sleep. I fall asleep far more quickly, I wake up far less often in the middle of the night, and I wake up feeling far more refreshed than I ever did prior to using an 8 Sleep mattress cover. If you'd like to try 8 Sleep, you can go to 8sleep.com/huberman to save $150 off their Pod 3 cover. 8 Sleep currently ships to the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's 8sleep.com/huberman. AG1 is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking AG1 since 2012, so I'm delighted that they sponsored the live event. The reason I started taking AG1 and the reason I still drink AG1 once or twice a day is that it provides all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is, it provides insurance that I get the proper amounts of those vitamins, minerals, probiotics, and fiber to ensure optimal mental health, physical health, and performance. If you'd like to try AG1, you can go to drinkag1.com/huberman to claim a special offer. They're giving away five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, that's drinkag1.com/huberman to claim that special offer. And now without further ado, the question and answer session from our live event at the Meridian Theatre in Toronto, Ontario.

Okay, what motivated me to do the guest series with Paul Conti? Okay, so first of all, for those of you that don't know, Paul Conti is a psychiatrist. He's a Stanford and Harvard trained psychiatrist. And I wanted to do the series with Paul for several reasons. And we initiated that series. First of all, he's incredibly talented as a clinician. And yet, despite having written an excellent book about trauma, I felt that two things were true for sure. One is that most people won't get the opportunity to work with Paul, sadly. He's time limited. And second, that his expertise is incredibly vast, not just restricted to trauma. Traumas, if understood, can be transmuted into deep sources of knowledge that other people can benefit from. And indeed, what I found in Paul, as I got to know him, is that he has just profound insight into the unconscious mind. And people had long asked me, you know, in and around the podcast, what about the subconscious? What about the unconscious? And I was of the mind that the supercomputer of the human brain is the forebrain. The thinking, planning, context setting, piece right by our forehead. So, you know, it's the reason that we're not the house cats. The house cats are the house cats, and that's the reason we're the curators of the planet. But Paul said, oh no, no, no, no, no, no. No, no, no, no, no, no. The unconscious mind is the supercomputer of the mind. I'm like, well, that sounds great, but how do we understand the unconscious mind? And he has a really biological and psychological and psychiatric understanding of the unconscious. And in that series, he talks about these so-called cupboards that we can look into in order to better understand our unconscious mind in order to allow our unconscious mind to teach us things about ourselves that are useful. And there are three main places where our unconscious teaches us useful things that allow us to be more conscious of the way that our brain is working in useful ways. The first is in these liminal states between waking and sleep. It really does seem to be the case that when, surprise, surprise, we're completely still and we're emerging from or we're dropping into states of reduced autonomic arousal, but our level of thought, if you will, is still active enough that we are aware, maybe even lucid dreams and also in dreams, our unconscious mind uses as I think Jung and Freud pretty well understood, symbols to teach us things, but everything's flipped in there. Gender's flipped, just because you're having a conflict with somebody in your life who's a man, doesn't mean that that person shows up as a man, they could show up as an animal, so species are flipped, the symbols become mish-mashed, but Paul made it very clear that all this can be parsed if you do a certain kind of introspective work, and I thought that would mean a lot of talk therapy, that people would, how are we gonna get people to learn how to do talk therapy by themselves? We wanna keep things as much, you know, independent of cost and things like that, and the practices he started talking about were incredibly simple. Things like mirror work, some of the psychologists in the room will be familiar with this. I thought, mirror work, what is that? And he said, literally, people trying to activate their unconscious, you know, or excuse me, access their unconscious in sleep by a practice of staring into the mirror for some period of time while awake and reflecting on self and aspirations and the idea of the body as a container, all this stuff, even for a kid from Northern California, sound really woo new agey. But here it's scripted by Paul into a formal structure that one can use to parse your own mental health and enhance mental health. So that was the reason for doing the series. And especially the episode on relationships, not just romantic relationships, I found hasn't come out yet incredibly interesting because he talked about how in his clinical experience, all, virtually all the stuff that people pay attention to in relational stuff is are they a narcissist? Are they obsessive? Is this person a musician versus whether or not I'm an accountant? Are we compatible? That none of that stuff predicts anything as well as the balance of these three drives, the aggressive drive, the pleasure drive, and the so-called generative drive. I found it to be fascinating and I'm excited for that episode and the other episodes to come out. But basically because Paul's brilliant and he makes the, what I consider pretty obscure and opaque, very clear and concrete and there are a bunch of worksheets, again, all available at zero cost and none of them requiring that you do therapy with anybody if you choose not to. This is all the kind of work one could do on oneself. And the last thing I'll say about this is, and I should have said this first, is that the primary motivation was we did a series of Dr. Andy Galpin on physical fitness. Why isn't there a series on mental fitness? Right, like what is that? Why do we talk so much about mental health when we're, and it's usually a conversation about mental illness, what people should have tools and practices that are zero cost, I believe, to be able to introspect in a structured way and enhance their mental health. Independent of their level of income. And I think Paul was the guy to do it. And we'll do more of that with other people as well, because no single episode about any topic or series can exhaustively cover any topic. Although Lord knows we will try. Okay, next question. What are the recommended protocols and best practices to enhance emotional resilience and develop effective responses during highly triggering situations? You're asking the wrong guy.