The Science of Emotions & Relationships

**Andrew D. Huberman** (0:00)
Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
My name is Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink. I've been taking Athletic Greens since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day is that it helps me cover all of my basic nutritional needs. It makes up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, it has probiotics, which are vital for microbiome health. I've done a couple of episodes now on the so-called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interacts with your immune system, with your brain to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body. With Athletic Greens, I get the vitamins I need, the minerals I need, and the probiotics to support my microbiome. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com/huberman and claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs plus a year supply of vitamin D3 K2. There are a ton of data now showing that vitamin D3 is essential for various aspects of our brain and body health. Even if we're getting a lot of sunshine, many of us are still deficient in vitamin D3. And K2 is also important because it regulates things like cardiovascular function, calcium in the body and so on. Again, go to athleticgreens.com/huberman to claim the special offer of the five free travel packs and the year supply of vitamin D3 K2. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means the exact ratios of electrolytes are an element and those are sodium, magnesium and potassium, but it has no sugar. I've talked many times before on this podcast about the key role of hydration and electrolytes for nerve cell function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues and organ systems of the body. If we have sodium, magnesium and potassium present in the proper ratios, all of those cells function properly and all our bodily systems can be optimized. If the electrolytes are not present and if hydration is low, we simply can't think as well as we would otherwise. Our mood is off, hormone systems go off, our ability to get into physical action, to engage in endurance and strength and all sorts of other things is diminished. So with element, you can make sure that you're staying on top of your hydration and that you're getting the proper ratios of electrolytes. If you'd like to try element, you can go to drinkelement.lmnt.com/huberman and you'll get a free element sample pack with your purchase. They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to elementlmnt.com/huberman.
Today's episode is also brought to us by Thesis. Thesis makes what are called nootropics, which means smart drugs. Now, to be honest, I am not a fan of the term nootropics. I don't believe in smart drugs in the sense that I don't believe that there's any one substance or collection of substances that can make us smarter. I do believe, based on science, however, that there are particular neural circuits and brain functions that allow us to be more focused, more alert, access creativity, be more motivated, et cetera. That's just the way that the brain works, different neural circuits for different brain states. Thesis understands this. And as far as I know, they're the first nootropics company to create targeted nootropics for specific outcomes. I've been using Thesis for more than six months now, and I can confidently say that their nootropics have been a total game changer. My go-to formula is the clarity formula, or sometimes I'll use their energy formula before training. To get your own personalized nootropic starter kit, go online to takethesis.com/huberman, take a three-minute quiz, and Thesis will send you four different formulas to try in your first month. That's takethesis.com/huberman, and use the code Huberminute checkout for 10% off your first order. This month, we're talking all about the science of emotions and tools related to the science of emotions. We've talked about the science of stress and resiliency, tools to access more calm, tools to raise your stress threshold to become more resilient. We've talked about motivation and the role of the dopamine system. I'd like to make a couple of announcements about some new resources. The first one is that we have now captioned all the Huberman Lab episodes in English and in Spanish. We were able to do that thanks to your support of our sponsors and on Patreon. So now all of the podcasts have a captioning feature on YouTube and those were done by experts. So while there might be the occasional error, for the most part, they're very precise. We've done that so that people that prefer to consume the content in Spanish or that like to read the content from the English subtitles can do so. And we're going to continue to expand the number of languages that are captioned for the Huberman Lab podcast. So we want to thank you for that resource. It's now available for all episodes. In addition, in previous episodes, I've talked about NSDR or non-sleep deep rest. NSDRs come in a variety of different forms. There's self-hypnosis. I've pointed you to some resources for that previously. There's yoga nidra. NSDR is really about achieving calm quickly and doing that in a self-directed way for many reasons in order to access sleep more readily, in order to de-stress very deeply, in order to replace sleep that you've lost. It also seems to aid neural plasticity. It can enhance the rearrangements of connections in the brain that occur during learning. There's scientific support for that. There's a link in today's episode caption to a new site. This is a YouTube video that was brought free of cost by the folks over at Made For, a company that's been a sponsor of the podcast previously. So this is an NSDR script that doesn't contain any of the intentions or some of the more typical language of yoga nidra. Instead, it's focused purely on the breathing protocols, as well as includes a sort of body scan where you direct your attention to different locations around your body. It has all the core elements of non-sleep deep rest, but is distinct from yoga nidra. I just offer this to you as a resource, if you'd like to use it. It's about 30 minutes long and should be very effective in bringing you into deep states of relaxation for all the reasons I mentioned before. 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. So today we're going to visit those ground truths. We're going to talk about the tools that emerge from them. And we're going to talk about some absolutely wild and wacky experiments that people are doing out there right now that I don't necessarily recommend you do of inhaling different types of hormones and trying to get attached more quickly. You're actually going to do some experiential stuff today if you like. There's some things that you can do in real time while listening to the podcast in order to tap in to some of the mechanisms that I'll be referring to. So today's going to be very interactive in a way that previous podcast episodes have not. If we want to understand emotions, we have to look at where emotions first develop. In fact, this is a critical central theme if you want to understand brain science and psychology. There's a rule in neuroanatomy because if you look at 50 different brains of humans or you compare the brains of dogs and humans, there are a lot of differences. Certain things are the same, but certain things are different. And the rule that every good neuroanatomist knows is that if you want to understand what a part of the brain does, you have to address two questions. First, you have to know what connections does that brain area make? What is it connected to? Where does it get inputs from and where does it send inputs? So for instance, if there's an area of the brain that gets direct input from the neurons in the nose, you can be pretty certain that it has some role in analyzing smell, in measuring something about odors or analyzing something about odors. Now, if it also gets input from the eye, you can also conclude that it gets input from the visual system, that it cares about light and photons. This is sort of obvious. And yet you need to know that connectivity and you need to know what's called the developmental origin of that structure. You need to know where it was early in development because things move around a lot as the brain develops. The brain, of course, is this more or less squishy thing floating around in some liquid that's stuffed inside your skull. And as a consequence, things move around a lot. They are not always in the same place in two different species or two individuals of the same species. So you have to know where they started out because where they started out informs what they do as well. And when we're talking about emotions, we cannot point to one area of the brain. We can't say that's the area of the brain that's responsible for emotions. There is this so-called limbic system that has been linked to emotions in various ways. We're going to talk about that today. But the limbic system is just one component of the inputs to create emotions. It's not the place for emotions. You can't go in and lesion one location in the brain and eliminate emotions entirely. It just doesn't work that way. So first of all, we have to ask, what are the circuits for emotion? What are the brain areas for emotion? And nowadays, there's a lot of debate about this. For years, it was thought that there might be circuits, meaning connections in the brain that generate the feeling of being happy or circuits that generate the feeling of being sad, et cetera. That's been challenged. In fact, Lisa Feldman Barrett has been the person who's really challenged this head on and has very good evidence for the fact that such circuits probably don't exist. And yet I think there's good evidence for circuits in the brain, such as limbic circuits and other circuits that shift our overall states or our overall level of alertness or calmness or whether or not they bias us toward viewing the outside world or paying more attention to what's going on inside our bodies. If none of this makes sense right now, I promise it will make sense soon. But the important thing to understand is that emotions do arise in the brain and body. They arise because there are specific connections between specific areas in the brain and body. And if we want to understand how emotions work, we have to look how emotions are built. And they are built during infancy, adolescence and puberty. And then it continues into adulthood, but the groundwork is laid down early in development when we are small children. So let's think about what happens to a baby that comes into the world. A baby comes into the world. You were born into this world without really any understanding of the things around you. Now, there are two ways that you can interact with the world, and you're always doing them more or less to some degree at the same time. Those are interoception, paying attention to what's going on inside you, what you feel internally, and exteroception, paying attention to what's going on outside you. Hold that in mind, please, because the fact that you're both intercepting and exterocepting is true for your entire life, and it sets the foundation for understanding emotions. It's absolutely critical. As an infant, you didn't have any knowledge of what you needed. You didn't understand hunger, you didn't understand toys when you first came into the world, you didn't understand cold or heat or any of that. When you needed something, you experienced that as anxiety. You would feel an increase in alertness if you had to use the bathroom. You would feel an increase in alertness if you were hungry. And you would vocalize, you would cry out, you would act agitated, you might coo, you might do a number of different things, but all you knew was what you were feeling internally. And then your caregiver, whoever that might have been, would respond to that. So you would feel some agitation. A caregiver would come and make a decision. Oh, you need food and give you milk or change your diaper or wrap you in a blanket if you were cold. But they didn't know if you were cold. They could just assume that you were cold. So this is actually really important to understand that a baby, when you were a baby and when I was a baby, we didn't have any sense of the outside world except that it responded to our acts of anxiety, essentially. Now, this isn't Freudian theory, right? There are components of it that are embedded in Freudian theory, but all developmental psychologists agree that babies lack the ability to make cognitive sense of the outside world. But in this feeling of anxiety and registering one's own internal state and then crying out to the outside world, either through crying or subtle vocalizations or even just cooing, making some noise, we start to develop a relationship with the outside world in which our internal states, our shifts in anxiety, start to drive requests and people come and respond to those requests, hopefully. And the reason I say hopefully is that we've all heard, presumably, about these cases of neglect. There are a lot of cases where if you neglect a baby, you neglect an adolescent or a teenager, development doesn't go well. And we'll touch on some of those, but those are really extreme cases. They're sort of like the parallel to experiments that are often done in the laboratory with animals, where you've probably heard of these enriched environments where they'll give mice a bunch of toys and they'll give them some different foods every once in a while and they'll house them together with other mice. And what you find is that the animals, they will say, oh, you know, their brain is thicker and their neurons have more branches to them and all that. But that's really comparing deprivation with normalcy. What we want to center on today instead is what happens when things go well and why things might not go well in certain circumstances is interesting, but to me, not as interesting as what healthy emotional development looks like. And if you haven't achieved healthy emotional development, what can be done as an intervention at later times in order to rescue that? So the baby, you as a baby, you're flopping around there in your crib, you're getting care where you need it and when you need it, presumably. And this gets to the basis of what emotions are about, which emotions are really about forming bonds and being able to predict things in the world. That's really what emotions are about. Whether or not the baby feels angry or happy or sad, we don't know. We can guess, but we don't know. In fact, most of the time, we don't even know how we feel, let alone how other people feel. And that's true for adults. So if I ask you how you feel right now, I don't know that you could tell me in any kind of rich language that I would say, oh, I really understand. If you said you were very, very depressed or very, very happy, I'd have some sense because of how extreme that is, but I don't know that I would really know. And I don't think you know how I feel right now either. I could be furious right now or I could be very happy. You don't have any idea. Now, of course, we have these things called expressions, our pupils dilate. There are various cues of how people feel. We're going to talk about those cues, but you really don't know. And at this point, I actually just want to pause and mention a really interesting tool that is trying to address this question of what are emotions and what do they consist of that you can use if you like. This is an app. I didn't develop it. I don't have any relationship to them, but the app was developed by people at Yale, by groups at Yale who do research. And it's called Mood Meter. And it's actually quite interesting. I think it's either free or it's 99 cents. Again, no business relationship to them. But what they're trying to do is put more nuance, more subtlety on our words and our language for emotions and be able to allow you to predict how you're going to feel in the future. And it's actually quite interesting. I'm on the app right now, and I know you can't see this, but it's called Mood Meter. And you can find it on Apple or Android. And you go into it and it asks you, it says to me, hi, Andrew, how are you right now? And I click the little tab that says, I feel, and I can either pick high energy and unpleasant, high energy and pleasant, low energy, unpleasant, or low energy, pleasant. And I would say right now, I feel high energy, pleasant. So I just revealed to you how I feel. So I click on that, and then it gives you a gallery of colors, and you just move your finger to the location where you think it matches most. And as you do that, little words pop up. I know some people are listening to this on audio only. So say motivated, cheerful, inspired. I would say, I'm feeling right now cheerful. So you click that, and then you just go to the next window, and it just says, what are you doing? And this feels like play to me, but I'm going to call it work. And then that's it. And then what it does is it basically starts to collect data on you. You're giving it information, and it starts to link that to other features that you allow it access to. If you like, and it starts helping you be able to predict how you're going to feel at different times a day. It's actually quite accurate in certain ways, quite interesting. And it points to a couple of really interesting features, which is that we don't really have enough language to describe all the emotional states. And yet there's some core truths to what makes up an emotion. And I want to review that twice during today's podcast, because this can really help people, kids and adults, understand better what they're feeling and why, and when best to engage in certain activities, and thankfully, when best to avoid certain activities too. So the way this works is the following. You need to ask yourself at any point, you could do this right now if you like, what's your level of autonomic arousal? Autonomic arousal is just the continuum, the range of alert to calm. So if you're in a panic right now, you are like 10 out of 10 on the arousal scale. If you're asleep, you're probably not comprehending what I'm saying, although maybe a little bit, but let's say you're very drowsy, you might be at a one or a two. So you always have to ask, where are you on the arousal scale? And then there's this other axis, this other question, which is what we call valence. Now valence is of value. Do you feel good or bad? I would say I feel pretty good right now. On a scale of one to 10, I'm like a, I don't know, I feel like a seven. Got a good night's sleep last night. Had a good walk with Costello this morning. I'm fed, I'm hydrated. I feel good, so I'm like a seven. So I'm alert and I feel pretty good. And then there's a third thing, which is how much we are interocepting and how much we are exterocepting, all right? So how much our attention is focused internally on what we're feeling and how much it's focused externally. And this is always going to be in a dynamic balance. So for instance, if you're really, really stressed, oftentimes that puts you in a position to be really in touch with what's going on in your body. If you start having a lot of somatic, a lot of bodily sensations, like your heart is beating so fast that you can't ignore it, then you're really strongly interoceptive. But also sometimes you're really stressed because someone's stressing you out or somebody sends you a text message or makes a comment about a YouTube thing you posted or something and you're really triggered by it. That never happens to me. But if it does happen to you, then you're exteroceptive. So there are these three things, how alert or sleepy you are, that's one. How good or bad you feel, that's two. And then whether or not most of your attention is directed outward or whether or not it's directed inward. And much of what we call emotions are made up by those three things. And so let's return now to development, but tuck that away and just kind of think about it. Alert versus asleep, good versus bad, and focused internally or focused externally. Because when I looked at the whole of all the theories of emotion that were out there, there were a lot of different components to them, but they all seem to center back to these same three features in some way or to some degree or another. And it can be very powerful to understand and look at your emotions through that lens. So let's return to the infant. There's the baby in the crib. It's mostly interocepting. As caregivers bring it what it needs, you hope, milk, diaper changes, et cetera, a warm blanket if it's cold, pull off the blanket when the baby's fussing and it's too warm because babies get too warm also. It starts to exterocept. Excuse me, I misspoke. I want to be very clear. It starts to exterocept. The baby starts to look into the outside world and start making predictions. It starts wondering how much it needs to cry or predicting, well, if I cry like a little bit, then mom comes over and I get my milk. Or if I cry a lot, mom doesn't come over and give me milk, so I need to really scream at the top of my head. Okay, so babies are starting to evaluate and do all this, but they're not doing it consciously. They're doing this strategically in order to relieve anxiety. And I won't propose that that's what we do into adulthood, but a lot of what we do in adulthood is when we feel something, we start exterocepting. Some people are much better at just sitting as a container and just interocepting and paying attention to what they're feeling internally. But most people do a little bit of a balance of both. We don't feel good, so we look for an item of food that might make us feel better. We're feeling anxious heading into the dentist or something like that, so we text somebody. We do this almost reflexively. It's not always conscious. So infants do this and we continue to do this. We start to now balance our interoceptive and exteroceptive focus, our looking inward and looking outward. And as we do that, we're starting to figure out what gets our needs met. Remember, emotions are really there to form bonds and to make predictions. And so our needs are going to be met to some degree or not. Sometimes, sadly, there is neglect. Sometimes, people don't show up for us the way that we would like. And in general, our responses to that have to do with whether or not we predict whether or not they would or not. When we expect something and it doesn't happen, it's a big letdown. That was the discussion about dopamine last episode. So the many theories of emotion, the triune brain theory that you have a primitive and evolved brain, something that's a little bit on shaky ground these days, the idea that Darwin proposed that there are these universal expressions of emotions. The work of Helen Fisher on love, that you have circuits in the brain for lust, circuits in the brain for love and circuits in the brain for long-term bonds, as well as the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett saying that emotions are contextual, that they have a social component. And I'll be talking more about this, but the work of Alan Shor, a clinical psychologist and researcher at UCLA about right brain, left brain and its role in emotional development. And all of them have strong elements of this idea of paying attention to what's going on inward and outward. As a young creature, an infant and young toddler, you were mainly focused inward and you started to understand what was going on outward as a way of predicting what would bring you relief, what would remove your anxiety. And that's where the fundamental rules of your experience, your emotional experience were laid down. Now I realize that's a lot of information and it's somewhat of an academic talk, but there were two tools in there that I just want to highlight. One is the mood meter app. If you're interested in it, can give you some insight into the different kinds of nuance within emotions and allow you to actually predict emotional states. If you want to try that, you might find that interesting. The other one is this idea that there are three axes to emotion, three continuum that interact, the level of alertness and calmness, how good or bad you feel, and whether or not you're mainly focused inward or outward, because those are going to form a useful toolkit for the information going forward. So now let's talk about what kind of baby you were, because that actually informs your emotionality now. These are classic, they're actually famous experiments done by Bowlby and Ainsworth. Anyone that studied psychology or has taken a psychology class might have learned about this. This is this classic experiment of what was called the strange situation task in which, and I'm describing it very coarsely here, I realize, but a mother and child come into the laboratory. Yes, this has now also been done with fathers.