Dr. Andrew Huberman- The Brain Science of High Performance

Professor of Neurobiology at Stanford School of Medicine • Focused on Neuroscience Research & Education • Host of The Huberman Lab Podcast

“Behavior first. Thoughts, feelings and perceptions follow.” Mood follows action

The 5 Phenomena of the Human Brain. 

How the brain operates in 5 steps:

1. Sensations: The ability to detect physical events in the world.

2. Perceptions: Sensations that we are able to recognize and transduce into signals that the brain can understand.

3. Feelings/emotions: How the brain and the body are communicating with one another.

4. Thoughts: The way we organize all the information the brain takes in.

5. Actions: Behaviors.

http://www.hubermanlab.com/

Neuroplasticity. “The machine that is the brain and nervous system is an adaptive machine. It’s not like a car, it’s like a car that changes if you drive on a gravel road to get better at driving on gravel roads. It turns into a Jeep when you’re on a gravel road and it turns into a race car when you’re on a Formula 1 track. That property of neuroplasticity is, without question, the reason why we are the curators of the planet and the species in charge and not some other species.”

Nasal Biome/Breathing to destress 

• There’s new research showing that we have a nasal biome. In that microbiome found in our nose, there is beneficial bacteria called lactobacillus. 
• When we breathe a lot through the nose, the lactobacillus in the nasal biome proliferates and keeps the nasal passage healthy and improves immunity. There’s lots of reasons for you to do the double inhale through the nose and long exhale through the mouth while you are going about your day and find yourself getting stressed. The science in this is that when you double inhale, you inflate and fill the sacs in your lungs with air, and this forces carbon dioxide out of your blood and into the lungs so it can be removed when you breathe out. Breathing in isn’t only about taking in oxygen, it is about responding to the sensors in your brain detecting that carbon dioxide levels have gone up. Stress causes carbon dioxide to spike, and doing the “proper sigh” lowers that CO2 level so that your mind and bodily stress can go down. To the best of my knowledge, this is the fastest way to de-stress.

Super Oxygenated Breathing 

• Breathing in deeply, and then exhaling briefly, and then repeating the deep breath and short exhale about 25 times. By the twenty-fifth time you are going to be tingling and frankly, lots of people aren’t going to feel great at this time. They are going to feel like this is stressing them out. But then you can take a long exhale and just sit there for 15-30 seconds until you feel the impulse to breathe. Don’t force it.
• What happens for most people is that the first round doesn’t feel good, but by the second round you begin to feel alert yet calm and by the third round, they report feeling pretty darn good. However, they also say, and the preliminary results of our ongoing research – that the threshold for stress is raised so that the next time something stressful occurs on the news or in your mind, you are able to stay calm amid the storm.
• This is intentionally stressing yourself out so that you are then better able to deal with stressful situations should they ever arise.
• Wim Hof breathing protocol is essentially 30 of what are called “power breaths” in which you imagine you’re blowing up a balloon.  You inhale through your nose or your mouth and you exhale through your mouth in short powerful bursts with a very steady pace.  I like to place my hands right around my navel when I do this with eyes closed.  You can do this for around 30 times.  You get a little light headed, you get a little tingly as you [intense, rapid breathing].  And then at the very, very end, you fill your lungs to maximum capacity, and then you let the air out and you hold that for as long as you possibly can until you kind of get this gasp reflex.  And you can do multiple rounds of this, but it is fascinating. 

 Understanding Dopamine and Motivation 

• “Mother Nature installed this feel-good chemical called dopamine that is secreted anytime that we’re focused on something outside of the reach of our hands and our own skin. It’s about focusing on things outside of our immediate sphere of experience. …Mother Nature designed a chemical like this because otherwise why would we ever go forage for the food that would give us the reward? Or forage for the mate that would give us the reproductive event? It keeps us motivated. … It’s a beautiful mechanism because it keeps us focused on the external goal and feeling good while we’re en route to that.”

Arousal from fear/anxiety/stress 

• Our neural architecture is designed to detect threats, keep us safe, and lead to adaptive outcomes through paralysis and anxiety. Fear and anxiety in fact it was designed to mobilize you.  So the way to think about anxiety and fear is that they’re really just one component of arousal.  You can be dead, you can be in a coma.  No one wants that.  You can be drowsy, you can be asleep, you can be alert and focused, or you can be alert and really hyped up, or you can be kind of fearful and panicking.  And so you know you’ve got these different states of arousal.  And if you think about it, if I were to deprive most people for 24 hours, they’re going to get pretty agitated. That agitation is designed to get you to go look for food.  Loneliness, or the sensation of being sad, wasn’t designed to get you to think about how pathetic your life is or to disappear into the caverns of the internet.  It was designed to get you to go find a mate.
• These things that we think of as negative emotions were designed to leverage your behavior.  Think about after a Thanksgiving meal or a large meal.  What you want to do?  You want to lie on the couch and rest and sleep.
• If you start to think about arousal, and fear, and anxiety as tools that biology uses to leverage your behavior toward or away from different things, then you start to realize that a lot of the brain has basically been wired to get you to do things based on your internal states rather than to feel great all the time.

Amygdala Hijacking

• Where the media (or external factor) will use inflammatory rhetoric or specific forms of imagery to trigger our emotional brain before our logical brain has a chance to step in and identify that we are indeed being manipulated.  politics for example, what the media is doing to people.  And it’s very interesting how if you can get to that fear response first, a lot of times you can affect change in people that normally their logic would be able to override.

Epinephrine “It triggers a quitting reflex.”

Finding Meaning 

• “We have the conscious capacity as humans to self-dose these dopamine rewards in very subjective ways, and I think that’s where meaning comes in. I think of the famous examples of Viktor Frankl or Nelson Mandela, horrible circumstances, super-challenging, but they found internal mechanisms to allow them to push through and not just to survive it but to emerge in a sense of real thriving in the face of adversity. People that push through adversity … they learn how to self-dose the dopamine rewards.”

The Letdown Factor

• Reward prediction error is where an individual feels a letdown after an anticipated outcome. “The amount of dopamine that you get prior to reaching the final goal has to be less than the amount of dopamine that you get when you reach the goal. … You need the dopamine that arrives at the finish line to be greater than the dopamine that you had en route to that.”

How Friends and Family Affect Our Brains

• “There are a set of chemicals like serotonin and oxytocin that are involved in generating a sense of well-being and reward for things not beyond our reach and that lie in the future or outside of us, but that are within our immediate sphere of existence. These are designed to be released when we hold next-of-kin, when we see close friends, sometimes even when we look at objects that hold meaning for us. They tend to be heartwarming because they trigger activation of some of the neural-circuits that link the gut and brain and they create a sense of warmth in the torso.”

The Importance of Gratitude 

• “Gratitude practices are immensely powerful. … Gratitude should not be confused with complacency.”
• “PET (Positron Emission Tomography) studies support the idea that a period of stillness each day, anywhere from 5 to 10 minutes of physical stillness, combined with some gratitude, creates a neuro chemical signature in us that involves dopamine release as well as serotonin and oxytocin release. It’s kind of like MDMA or ecstasy is designed to do.”

Stress and Coronavirus 

• “Some people are feeling overwhelmed and exhausted and that’s because we’re doing a lot more what’s called ‘serial processing’ every day. It used to be you’d get up, you’d brush your teeth, you’d check your phone, you’d tackle your day. Now, you need to think about whether or not you can touch a door handle, how you’re going to get groceries. There’s a lot more planning … we’re thinking a lot harder about stuff that we just didn’t have to think about before.”
• “We are in deep, deep, deep modes of uncertainty. The brain wants to figure out 3 things: Duration, path, and outcome. … The nervous system is working 100x or 1000x for most people trying to figure out what’s going to happen next and what can I do in order to control my own behavior to navigate through this?

The Next Generation 

“Kids are in a heightened state of neuroplasticity. They are building in such resilience from this. They’re going to come out of this with the capacity to sit in a house for a month or more without engaging in a lot of their normal pleasures, and that’s what they’re going to bring to their adult jobs, their college experiences. I think we are going to grow from this.”

Suffering from an inability to control states of mind 

• A lot of people out there suffering from an inability to control their states of mind, and also there is great potential for people who aren’t suffering to be able to create and perform and do better things once we can understand how those states come about- that’s an interesting way of putting it suffering because they can control or state of mind that that is the case.
• If you see somebody who’s in a state of depression or you see somebody who’s in a state of flow and creativity, you can be pretty sure that that’s reflecting the activity of neurons in the brain.

Sensation 

• Sensation is non-negotiable. It’s Happening all the time. Sound Waves are coming in. Your feet are in contact with your shoes or the floor. That’s all happening.And you can’t control it because we have sensors, things in our eye, our tongue or nose or skin or years that take physical events in the universe. 

Perception

• Photons of light, sound waves touch. You know, physical pressure on the skin. And it transforms that into one language. And the language is the language of electricity of neurons. Now, perception is the next thing that the brain does.And perception is all about which sensations we are conscious of. So if I say, the contact of your hands with the table, now you’re conscious of it. That’s just your perceptual window. It’s like a spotlight. It just goes straight to your hands. So there’s sensation, perception. And then there are these things we call emotions which are brain body states.They tend to make us either want to get up and move or stay still. They tend to make us think this is a good place for me to be at mentally or physically or I Want to shift this. And then there are thoughts which we could discuss in detail, if you want, which kind of arise spontaneously. They’re kind of running in the background all the time, like Pop-Up Windows on a badly filtered, an Internet connection. But We can also deliberately think. Like I can say that the pad of paper to my right is yellow. Can decide that in the same way I can do the fifth thing, which is an action. So you’ve got sensations, perceptions, feelings, slash emotions, thoughts and actions. And all five of those include the brain and the body.

If I’m suddenly stressed for whatever reason, my perceptual window is going to shift. My Eyes are literally going to change their focus. My world will become more like portrait mode.I’ll see you and everything else will become blurry when I’m Calm. Asha panoramic vision. 

• Your internal state of alertness or sleepiness impacts all this. And in sleep, which is the opposite extreme of stress.I’m not in relation to anything else and not perceiving anything. I’m sensing things non-negotiable. I’m not having real thoughts. But the thoughts are kind of disoriented in space and time and behaviors.
• The portal to changing the brain is these high urgency, high attentional states, followed by rest and just keep going, toggling back and forth and back and forth. 
• You cannot strive for a life of total relaxation because you’re not going to get shit done. There’s nothing there. It’s not the active state of the human mind. It doesn’t thrive under those conditions. But We’re also concerned about stress and we’re so concerned about the pressures of weather. You know, you’re in some sort of a competitive environment or a job that you’re involved in that requires an immense amount of your focus and your attention. We’re all striving for that state where you like a monk in a lotus position, not doing anything. Now, that seems terrible to me because it’s divorced from everything we know about competition winning in the brain. Yeah, there’s a cool set of experiments that I think you might especially appreciate given your background in martial arts, which is called the tube test, 

Tube Test

• Data from humans make it very clear: wins preceded by effort result in significant increases in testosterone. Wins not preceded by direct effort do not. (True for all people & across domains: physical, cognitive, etc. (although physical effort has its own impact too of course). & yes, the effort must be related to the win. This all should be of consideration when thinking about what to spend your time on, why wins sometimes (but not always) amplify wins in subsequent challenges and generally, how the mind and body interact to yield & register “success”.
• Where they take two rats or two mice and put them in a tube, simulates male mice, but also female mice. And they start fighting for position in that one mouse, pushing the other mouse out or rat. Inevitably, that one is the winner, the one they get pushed out the loser. We know that statistically, if you put those mice back into another tube test, even with another mouse, the winner has a higher probability of winning and the loser has a higher probability of losing. 
• Even if you push the winner from behind. So you take a loser and you stop to push it from behind with a stick and it wins. Even if it doesn’t win on its own effort, it becomes a winner.
• And so they figured out that there is a specific area, the frontal cortex, that becomes more active in the winner and less active in the loser. So much so that if you shut down that brain area, the winner suddenly becomes a loser. You increase activity in the loser, it Becomes the winner. So you ask yourself, what in the world is this brain activity or brain area doing? It turns out it’s taking the feeling of stress and arousal, which both of them are experiencing. It’s a battle and it converts it to more steps of forward movement per unit time. It’s just forward movement. And so one animal is feeling stressed and is pausing more or is backing up the other animals feeling the same level of stress and is moving forward just physically. And it’s wild because you can even take an arena, make it really cold, which mice don’t like, put a warm heat lamp in the corner and the animal, that one at the tube test gets the warm spot every single time. 

We had a paper a few years ago identifying the area in the brain that actually leads to forward movement and rewards it with a dopamine reward. This is a paper we published in Nature, the area. The brain is interesting only because it map exactly to that brain area that Robert Heath found. People like to stimulate frustration and anger. 

So frustration and anger were designed to get us to move forward adaptively.

And I bet you that every forward step or the perception that you have an advantage over the other guy or gal. Leads to a dopamine increase, lowers that norepinephrine and allows them to keep moving forward, they get energy. They it’s you know, it’s not gassing at the level of, you know, can’t breathe. They’re gassing at the level of conditioning. It’s something’s happening neurally. So as a society right now, we are stressed and this is not the time to back off going to the lotus position and people come at me sometimes.

• We were endowed with this amazing neurology that allows us to do this. We did it in famine.We did this with foreign invaders. We did this with animals and storms, and we did this.And here we are. We’ve got severe challenges. But forward movement balanced by rest is the solution that worked for us for tens of thousands of years. 
• That’s an uncomfortable reality for a lot of people that the struggle is good. There’s benefits to it, particularly if you’re looking for growth and also if you’re looking for stimulation and a sense of meaning. 
• I think people, for whatever reason, are hardwired to try to figure things out, try to get better at things and to have a purpose. And a lot of times the purpose that they feel other than family and loved ones and friends and things along those lines, there’s a purpose of success in their chosen field, success in whatever endeavor, even if it’s a hobby, you know, whatever the thing is that they obsession. That’s what gives people this sense of meaning of.
• Our reward systems are not designed for things that are just good for us. They’re designed for things that optimize the progression of our species, but they’re also they will grab onto and ratchet into any behavior that makes us feel good. 

The nervous system is designed to orchestrate all the processes in the body, not just thinking and not just behavior and really can be divided into five things. 

1. Sensation is really bound or restricted by the receptors in the body. So receptors in the eye that perceive photons light energy for sip receptors in the skin that perceive pressure touch receptors smell taste, peering, etcetera and the interesting thing about sensation and the fact that the nervous system needs to pay attention to sensation is it’s non-negotiable. The nervous system of humans is designed to extract physical phenomena from the universe that are non-negotiable photons of light. I can’t see in the infrared with my eyes and I can’t see ultraviolet light with my eyes. I can’t perceive that because I don’t have the receptors for it. So, you know other animals can perceive some of those things but that leads us to the next thing which is perception, 
2. Perception is which sensations you are paying attention to so all the time you’re sensing things like right now your feet are sensing the contact with your shoes, but you’re not not thinking about until I say that then you shift your perception. Perception is negotiable. You can control that because I just said shoes and you thought about your feet and there you are. Then there are feelings.
3. Feelings can be a little bit nebulous. But feelings are a link between our emotions and generally invoke the body sensations in the body and concepts in the mind of what those Sensations are.
4. Thoughts, thoughts happen spontaneously like a web browser that’s constantly giving you pop-ups but thoughts can also be deliberate so you and I can decide right now that we’re going to think about a plan for something, we’re going to think about what’s going on in the world. so thoughts happen spontaneously and they can be deliberate and then the final thing is behaviors and action. 
5. Behaviors & Actions– The nervous system is responsible for sensation perception feelings thoughts and behaviors.

The nervous system is trying to accomplish one thing which is to take perceptions of the outside world and merge those with perceptions of the inside world into what we call interoception and to link those in a way that’s operating on our environment in the appropriate way. 

• So what I mean by that so if I’m feeling anxious and I’m in a very calm environment, I’m going to perceive that rapid heart rate and kind of feeling of agitation in my body as inappropriate for the moment, right and my goal then as an organism is to adjust my level of what they call autonomic arousal or alertness down. If I’m at a great Party, or I’m at a wedding or it’s a celebration or I’m at a protest or you know, then I might feel that my level of alertness is appropriate for my environment. So the nervous system is in this constant dynamic interaction with the outside world and trying to figure that out one way and that this can be kind of conceptualize. There’s an emerging idea. That’s kind of interesting about 

Impatience

• impatience is when your internal sort of metronome ticking, tick, tick is not matched well to the external environment. There are other times when you’re feeling like you’re metronome is tick tick tick and you’ve got a million things coming at you through email or text. You got a bunch of things and you’re feeling overwhelmed and tired.There’s nothing right or wrong. It’s just your body and your brain trying to say what’s going on in the outside world. How well matched am I to it?
  If you think about some of the the sort of core practices of mindfulness and self-regulation of like focusing on breathing or focusing on on you know state of mind a lot of that is trying to bring more awareness to your internal state, but what our brain is normally doing when our eyes are open and we’re interacting the world is we’re constantly trying to update our internal state to match external demands of the world
  Mother Nature has designed a system and a series of systems.
  • Let’s just take agitation and stress for one if an animal or a human is very thirsty. You feel kind of agitating my get up and get a drink of water. If you’re very thirsty. It can put you into a state. Panic if you’re extremely thirsty and water is a limited resource, you might even resort to violence to get it or negotiation of some sort that you wouldn’t if you were calmer so that stress and agitation were designed to actually mobilize the body to take us in a direction of something that’s adaptive.
  • You can see these kind of core elements of what the brain and nervous system do sensation, perception, feeling, thought and action and this constant challenge of trying to match our internal state to the general state of the outside world and you start to see that the sensations that we call stress or impatience or calm are really the result of that those attempts that the nervous system is trying to perform.
• The nervous system can change in response to experience. 
  • Neural plasticity is really that it’s the brain’s ability to modify itself in response to experience and I think it’s important to understand that from birth to about age 20 I’ve the brain is extremely malleable in a kind of almost passive way where kids are exposed to things in the brain is just wiring up. The brain is designed to adjust itself in order to be in concert with its surroundings and to optimize that just the way we describe them in like a way that a child can learn a language very quickly or three languages guitar or something. Yeah without an accent, you know, three languages without accent. It’s remarkable to try and do that after age 25. It’s very challenging and so The brain is basically designed to be customized in the early part of life and then to implement those algorithms and that circuitry for the rest of your life.
  • To change the brain in adulthood you need to bring FOCUS to a perception of something that’s happening during the learning process. 
    • When you do something and think about it very intensely, acetylcholine is released from the basileus at the precise neurons that we’re involved in that behavior. *It marks those for change during sleep or during deep rest later. 
    • So for people that want to change their brain, the power of focus is really the entry point and the ability to access deep rest and sleep because most people don’t realize this but neuroplasticity is triggered by intense Focus, but neuroplasticity occurs during deep sleep and rest
      • The brain wants to pass as much of what it does off to reflexive behavior as possible
        • The brain loves to be able to just do things without much energy- pick up coffee cups, drink, walk and talk and do things 
        • when we decide to focus. The brain switches on a set of circuits then brings them to the front.
    • DURATION, PATH & OUTCOME
      • It’s why we’re so exhausted in 2020 because of Covid 19. We’re constantly having to pay attention to this. Normally we can just move through life and not analyze everything. 
      • It almost has a feeling of underlying agitation and frustration and that’s because the circuits that turn on before acetylcholine are of the stress system. So when we’re deciding we’re going to learn something and really dig in norepinephrine, which is adrenaline is secreted in the brain stem and in the body and it brings about a state of alertness then our attention, which is mostly a diffuse light is brought to a particular duration path an outcome analysis. This would be thinking about what somebody is saying,
      • If you want to change your brain, bring about the most intense concentration you can and then later bring the least amount of concentration of that thing. 
  • You can change the brain as robustly as a child as fast provided the focus is there and it’s all contingent on acetylcholine molecules coming from the nucleus. 
    • The right approach is to bring as much Focus to a behavior or to a thought or two an action pattern and there has to be a sense of urgency.
    • If there isn’t an incentive, it just isn’t going to happen. So the circuits in the brain that mother nature setup are designed to be anchored to a real need and people always say to me. Well should I do something out of love and a real desire to learn or should it be out of fear either one works. The sense of urgency is just acetyl choline.
    • It’s norepinephrine. That’s all it is. It doesn’t the brain doesn’t have a recognition of whether or not something is pleasure for not until later. Once you start accomplishing your goal the reward systems like dopamine start kicking in
    • The early stages of hard work and focus are going to feel like agitation stress and confusion because that’s the norepinephrine and adrenaline system kicking in. None of us would expect to walk into the gym and do our PR lift or you know performers go do something without warming up. The brain also needs to warm up and start to hone in which circuits are going to be active and it’s unreasonable for us to think we can make this happen automatically.
  • We need to accept that there’s a period of agitation and stress that accompanies the dropping into these highly concentrated states now in terms of the reward that accompanies the feeling (Flow)
• Mother Nature’s hardwired ancient system in all animals including humans to put us on the right path. A lot of people talk about dopamine as this thing that you get when you do something you set out to do, but dopamines main role is to be released anytime you achieve a milestone or you think you’re on the right path and when the dopamine system is Tethered to a particular pattern.
  • It’s like a baby feeling agitation because it’s hungry. Once it smells the mom it gets slightly rewarded, then it gets the milk and dopamine is released and that creates a feedback that you’re on the right path (milestone hit more dopamine released). 
  • Dopamine- This is why alcohol and drug abuse is a behavioral addiction, it created a cyclical feedback loop. Addiction becomes “a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure” 
  • Mother Nature is designed to continue the behaviors where dopamine is released (it’s triggering when we’re on the right path for food/water). 
  • And so people think of the dopamine system as this kind of catch-all for reward. Oh you get likes on Instagram and it makes you feel good. That’s not really how it works. And the important thing to understand is when you start getting a convergence of norepinephrine so that level of agitation duration path, outcome acetylcholine and dopamine now you’re starting to wire in the behaviors that make people really good at certain things
  • For any of us success in any endeavor is very closely related to how much Focus we can bring to that endeavor and the reward system you start to realize is entirely internal no one’s coming along and cramming dopamine in your ear or dripping it in your brain. It’s all internal.
• Growth Mindset – Carol Dweck 
  • It’s the idea that we can change.The discovery of growth mindset was of these kids that actually really enjoyed doing problem sets that they knew they couldn’t get right, but for them, they would get a dopamine release from just focusing on the problem. They like doing puzzles. They couldn’t get right. It sounds crazy, but it Inevitably those kids are very good at puzzles and very good at math
  • Neuroscience lens on growth mindset would be that the agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning of something and when you’re trying to lean into it, you can’t focus is just a recognized gate you have to pass through that gate to get to the focus component. And then if you can reward the effort process you really start to feel joy and low levels of excitement in the effort. Us that’s that buffering of adrenaline that’s that feeling like yes. I’ve got a lot of adrenaline in my system, but I’m on the right path. It feels good to walk up this hill so to speak and when you start to bring those neural circuits together, you really start to create a whole set of circuits that are designed to be exported to any Behavior you want
• The circuits that Mother Nature has designed are incredibly generic so that we could adapt to whatever it is that we need to do.
  Anyone who’s done something in an athletic discipline knows this, but unfortunately, there’s a Obsession with the idea that it’s all supposed to feel good and it does feel good. But there’s a whole staircase in which it feels kind of lousy.
  What you’re talking about is falling in love with the process like you have to push this gate open which might require more effort than you’re comfortable with
• You can’t control negative thoughts, traumatic thoughts, bad thoughts trying to suppress those is futile if there’s one message I can send people it’s just don’t even work at that but work at the process of introducing thoughts as almost like you would introduce actions because we can introduce thoughts
  You can SELF REWARD the EFFORT PROCESS 
  • If you can recognize agitation, stress and confusion as an entry point to where you want to go. Just this mental recognition can allow you to achieve things more easily. 
  • Next reward yourself when you achieve any type of MILESTONE. You’re running a long distance and you make it to the next street corner, register it as a win. Dopamine gets released and actually surpasses the adrenaline and that gives you more energy to run. 
• Why do humans quit?
  • Every time we exert effort a certain amount of noradrenaline is released and at some point enough adrenaline is released and the cognitive deliberate control overrides and shuts down the motor circuitry and we quit. BUT the thing that can restore those levels (add more gas) is dopamine. It makes sense because our species had to move against very challenging things in nature. It’s like being a horrible family dinner or vacation where everyone is miserable and then someone cracks a joke and the entire place erupts in a sense of relief. A great example is a sports team in a championship game. The final minutes they’re so exhausted they can barely move but once they win, dopamine is released and they’re jumping all over the place. 
  • The ability to push through pain points is something that we can export to other aspects of life because it’s the same neuro chemicals involved. 
  • When we get to a difficult point where we’re feeling lousy and want to quit you can reframe it mentally that “I’m still on the ladder holding on, I know that much I can keep making it”. You can get a psychological pump up from this. It’s a neuro chemical thing- It’s dopamine suppressing norepinephrine and saying you’re on the right path, you can keep going. It’s a permission to keep going and we grant that permission ourselves. No one grants that permission to us. 
  • Another misconception that we want to dissolve is this idea that external rewards can actually propel us down a long path of success in high performance. External rewards are NOT a sustainable fuel source. 
    • Stanford study on kids who loved to draw at recess. They started giving them gold stars for drawing and when they did and then stopped giving the stars the kids stopped drawing. 
    • We have to be very cautious about how much of our internal dopamine we attach to external rewards if we want to continue to grow and pursue and focus and work hard if you just want to get to place in cash in then fine, but most people find themselves in a pretty miserable place because their dopamine was so attached to external rewards they need more. the why has to be deeper than that.
• Set goals inside of the larger goal and self reward each one of those so they essentially have an infinite amount of energy to pursue those goals. Goals, they have an infinite amount of focus to pursue those pills. You see this most in the Special Operations community and people that are selected essentially for this process.
  SEAL Teams selection process
  • Everyone shows up fit and motivated that they will not quit but it’s a system where the only way you don’t make it is if you quit. Being gritty and resilient is not enough because everyone is. They’re quitting because they can’t manage the neurotransmitters and the people that get through had an internal process by which they could reward themselves for doing something that might have just looked trivial to everybody else but it gave them more gas and more energy.
  • The SEALS who made it through did it by attaching a sense of meaning they did it by micro slicing the day or slicing the day into a series of meals that they just need to get to and then rewarding themselves for getting to that next Milestone.
• David Goggins
  • He uses Behavior as the way to shift sensation perception feelings and thoughts. He understands how to run that program in the right direction. Whereas most people when they don’t like what they feel they start negotiating sensation, which will never work. They start trying to control their perception, which is hard right there. Like I’m not Going to think about that or I’ll think about it differently very hard to control the mind with the mind. So he just goes immediately because action forward immediately
  • he’s tapped into this neural plasticity process through the door through the portal of agitation and stress. He figured out that this is the Holy Grail of Neuroscience. How can I modify my brain? You modify it by placing yourself into discomfort and using that as a propeller to move you into action.
  • If you change your behavior, then generally your thoughts, your feelings and your perceptions change. Everyone tries to come at it from the other end, but he’s figured out through whatever process led him there and incredible life circumstances how to run it in this direction of behavior first. Not only is forward action rewarded at a neuro chemical level which then sets you up for more forward action, but the highest level of agitation and stress was associated with moving forward. We always think well if I just calm myself enough, I’ll be able to move forward right but it’s the exact opposite. People who are paralyzed in fear or that have a hard time initiating, sometimes the key is to raise the level of stress and agitation. This is why deadlines are so effective and feared.